The Tides of Nemesis (The Windows of Heaven Book 4)

by K. G. Powderly Jr.

  She felt the presence when she stumbled into the second deck hayloft. Something madly familiar almost made her shrug off what she saw inside the feed bay. T’Qinna’s emotions did not react at first to what a Temple childhood had trained her to dismiss as mundane and innocuous. Even after many decades of better training, she still almost felt a sense of normality over what huddled behind the hay bales.

  It’s just Sutara chanting through a power crystal. For a moment, the past fifty years vanished, and her sister-in-law seemed to be just another priestess doing one of the ordinary things priestesses do—priestesses did!

  The fog lifted. A power crystal—a second level gate to Leviathan here, in the seed ship’s very heart! How?

  Sutara didn’t see her. Dull brown hair fell over eyes focused inward.

  T’Qinna steeled herself against the rage she knew would fly out at her the moment she interrupted Suta’s trance.

  “Grief must run its course toward healing, my sister, but the way of the crystal is the way to madness.”

  Sutara looked up, eyes ablaze. “I told you not to meddle with me!”

  T’Qinna stepped around the hay bales, and blocked the only exit from the bay. “Call it what you will, and hate me if you must, but I’m not going to let that thing you’re talking to go unchallenged!”

  “W-what are you talking about?” Sutara stuttered, as if thrown off-guard by T’Qinna’s knowledge that she had indeed been having a two-way conversation through the glistening amulet.

  “The power crystal.”

  Sutara glanced down at the large jewel and its gold incantation glyphs around the setting. “It was my mother’s, and then my father’s. And it’s called a prayer stone. I’m just praying to E’Yahavah. Sure, it’s a different way to pray, but it comforts me.”

  “Does it?” T’Qinna asked, unable to keep the skeptical tone from her voice. She understood this form of “prayer” all too well. Similar techniques in Aztlan had dulled her reason and conscience to monstrous evils.

  “Yes—is that so bad? Am I a terrible person because I want to believe in a gentle E’Yahavah that doesn’t kill and destroy?”

  T’Qinna stepped closer, and this time did not wilt. “Yes, Suta, it is that bad. Because you can put your E’Yahavah away under your skirt when you’re through with him, and he’ll only say what you want to hear, because he’s not real! He’s just a conjuror’s game—a reflection of your own thoughts—or worse, the Enemy’s voice manipulating grief against you.”

  “It’s my father! He understands me!”

  T’Qinna wanted to back down out of pity’s sake, but that would be doing Suta the worst kind of injustice. “Your father is dead. This thing is trapping you in a web, keeping you from the truth you must face. The voices behind it pretend to ‘understand,’ while they deaden your will, and leave you a spiritual cripple. How do you think our first mother got taken in Aeden?”

  “Leave me alone!” Sutara shrieked. “None of you understand!”

  The bucking deck fell away beneath them at the crash of a transverse tidal wave. The prayer crystal flew from Sutara’s grip across the hay-strewn deck. T’Qinna fell on top of it before the ship righted itself. She snatched it, and scrambled from the bay toward the forward quarters.

  Sutara tore off after her.

  Nu grabbed at his foot and moaned. The broadside wave had thrown him from his chair by the stateroom hearth, into the stone masonry around the opening. Fortunately, the cinder screen held.

  ‘Miha helped him up with her good hand. “I told you, no dancing.”

  “Mix me another opiate, will ya? This thing is killing me!”

  “Too soon. You had some only two hours ago. Don’t be such a baby! Look at me—my hand’s crushed, and I’m already off the stuff.”

  “Who’s the healer, me, or you? You don’t have to put your weight on your hand while the floor jumps either! Now fetch me the tonic!”

  Na’Amiha pinched his fuzzy cheek and cooed, “Fetch it yourself. I can let you have a cup of mulled wine, but no opiate for another two hours.”

  “Oh all right,” he said, while she poured him the bowl.

  A’Nu-Ahki drank it down, closed his eyes, and grimaced. Thoughts and voices, turbulent as the waves, railed in the screeching winds. It took him a moment to realize that he still saw the cabin around him through his shut eyelids. The vision took him by surprise; even more because of how grouchy, medicated, and earth-bound he felt.

  A great wind blasted Barque of Aeons, driving it taut on its drogue line. Shadows aboard the ship dissolved into breaking vapors before a terrible cyclone that whipped through the ventilation slits, and stirred up every loose object in a searching flurry. Hot snake-things writhed when the cold breath touched them. One by one, their fires cooled and flickered out.

  All, except one.

  The largest of the shadowy intruders coiled itself around Sutara’s neck and chest, choking life and warmth out of her, to offset the chill of the wind. The creature’s open mouth stretched over the top of her head, devouring her whole as a snake would. Nu saw the contours of her face pressed through the oiled skin of its gullet, screaming in airless panic.

  He gripped the arms of his chair in the sudden intensity of his warfare, and his own ill preparedness. “Get off of her!” he roared at the serpent-thing. “This is the Covering Ship! You have no place here!”

  The creature in the vision seemed to ignore him.

  The stateroom door flew open, and T’Qinna fell inside with a draft of icy air, and a crack of thunder. Nu opened his eyes to find that the wind was no mere vision. The transverse blast drove against the forward wind foil, broadside, as it canted the deck hard over onto a steep starboard list.

  Behind T’Qinna, scraps of cloth and floor dust whipped through the galley like maddened ghosts. The storm howled through the ventilation loft slits, and slowly became a human wail. Sutara flew across the galley outside, walnut hair beating her face like air-driven thongs. She tackled T’Qinna at the doorway, and both girls tumbled across Nu’s stateroom.

  Sutara rolled on top of T’Qinna, and flailed at her with open-handed nail-clawed blows. “Give it back! Give it back, you priestess-whore!”

  Na’Amiha anchored herself above them in an instant. Nu watched in amazement as his wife, oblivious to the pain in her hand, swung down and picked Sutara up under the arms, and hurled her bodily onto the divan as if she were still a child. Sutara made to strike back, but the older woman reared up, and stared her down with a ferocity Nu had never seen in her before.

  “Don’t move from that bed! And you!” She faced T’Qinna, “Get off the deck, and sit by the fire place, next to your father-in-law!”

  Sutara sank into the pillows. Cold eyes froze her brittle face.

  T’Qinna scrambled to Nu, and thrust a crystal amulet at him. “This is what’s twisting Sutara’s mind!” She dropped it into his lap.

  Nu held the crystal up to the firelight, and peered into its matrix. After what he judged time enough to build suspense in the others, he finally said, “It seems a harmless and beautiful thing; and I suppose by itself it is.”

  Sutara said, “That’s what I tried to tell her!”

  A’Nu-Ahki raised an eyebrow at her, and answered, “I said, ‘by itself.’ But that’s not what we have here, is it?”

  Suta hung her head.

  ‘Miha asked, “Shall I fetch the others?”

  Nu still looked to Sutara. “What do you think, Sutara? Should we get the others, and be exposed to the benefits and risks of involving them?”

  The women all quizzed him with their eyes. ‘Miha shut the door she had started to open.

  “What do you mean?” Sutara asked; her face a ghastly white.

  He shrugged, “I mean that if we call the others, we might resolve this thing and start healing wounds. On the other hand, we also risk exposure to well-intended, clumsy platitudes, ignorant jibes masquerading as insight, and a shallow zeal covering decades of hurt in a sickly-swe
et poison-candy shell of sacred words that maybe mean well, but misapply to your situation.”

  T’Qinna’s green eyes flared.

  Sutara’s eyes were those of a dead fish. “I don’t know. I just want it all to end.” She twirled a mousy lock of hair around her finger.

  Nu smiled. “There, child, we stand on common ground.” Then he turned to T’Qinna, and said, “You have been shown much, and I appreciate your willingness to act. But impatience can create barriers to the very goals you seek. Still, I admire your courage.” Then back to Sutara, “So what shall it be? Do we call the others?”

  Iyapeti’s wife looked down. “I don’t know. It’s your ship.”

  Nu saw the serpent around her neck again in a vision. It still tried to choke her, but with weakening grip. He silently called on E’Yahavah for Suta to see clearly, as she made up her mind, while he questioned the wisdom of exposing her to the others. As the silent tension hung longer, Nu began to pray she would decide to keep them out. Yet it was a choice he sensed E’Yahavah wanted her to make for herself, so he kept silent.

  T’Qinna’s emerald eyes softened. “We could talk discreetly, and call the others later. There’s no need to makes things more difficult for Suta than they already are.”

  Sutara looked up with huge dead eyes. “Let’s do it that way.”

  A’Nu-Ahki nodded. “I have asked for the power of E’Yahavah in your behalf, Sutara. Light to see through an enemy who would take advantage of you in your grief—a grief and anger that anybody in your position would feel. Do you know what is happening here?”

  Sutara’s face seemed to struggle with itself, as her eyes seemed almost to flicker between animation and the dead fish gaze. The cold death of indifference took hold. “I was praying.”

  “Yes, but to what?”

  She tried to respond, but the words fumbled in her mouth.

  “Did you think you were really speaking to E’Yahavah?”

  Sutara glanced away from him. “Y-yes. It was E’Ya-Yahavah. He came to me in the prayer stone, warm and beautiful. He understood me!”

  “But he spoke through this sorcerer’s charm?”

  Sutara’s lips trembled. “He p-paid attention to me, and said I could see him as I liked. He made me feel warm all over. He became my father!”

  “And you were angry at me.”

  “Yes. Why shouldn’t I be?”

  “I don’t blame you for your anger. You prayed hard for your father, and what happened to him was deeply traumatic for you.”

  Sutara glared up at him. “Don’t patronize me! I’m not stupid!”

  He hung his head. “I don’t mean to patronize you.”

  Sutara became maddeningly quiet for a long time, eyes blank again.

  Nu took a deep breath. “Do you still think you were speaking to E’Yahavah with this crystal? Please don’t fear to answer honestly.”

  A shadow seemed to pass over her face, as if trying to stifle the intermittent softening in her eyes. “No—I mean I want to believe I was, but my mind won’t let me anymore. It doesn’t add up.”

  He smiled. “You’re right. You’re not stupid—or blind. E’Yahavah breathed into us the ability to reason, partly to keep faith from decaying into superstition. The Basilisk would erase any distinction between the two. But your eyes have light. Genuine faith leads to sound reason, and reason guards a genuine faith. Separate the two, and worlds decay and die.”

  “But the stone was so real,” Sutara said. “And I can’t feel things the way I used to. This was not what I expected. I can’t just stop the anger!”

  “Of course the stone felt real. You would not have been enticed by anything less. As for your anger, you will have to learn to put it away—though I, for one, would completely understand if it took time. E’Yahavah wants to show you how real he is. Not as a destroyer, but as a father who shows wrath only at extreme provocation. These are extreme days. You must be willing to trade shadow for substance, error for truth, delusion for reality, with all the pluses and minuses that come with that reality. You have to accept E’Yahavah for who he is and what he stands for.”

  Sutara looked squarely into Nu’s eyes for the first time since their voyage began. “Why did E’Yahavah work so powerfully to save Tiva, but let my mother get cut up like that? I pleaded just as hard for my father as anyone did for Tiva, and so did you—I remember that now!”

  “I know you did, child. I wish I could answer that for you.”

  Sutara’s tears seemed to cleanse the air. “I loved my Pahpa! I’m outraged—I’m not sure whether at you, E’Yahavah, or just at the way my father chose to be! It hurts, but I’ll take reality. I promise. What choice do I have? Just don’t expect me to pretend everything’s okay now—it’s not! But no more prayer stone. You can also tell Tiva I’m sorry for how I treated her.”

  A’Nu-Ahki said, “What of Tiva?”

  Sutara shook her head. “She really didn’t tell you, did she?”

  “Tell us what?” ‘Miha asked.

  Sutara didn’t seem to hear. “Does that make her a fool or a martyr?”

  A’Nu-Ahki stretched out his hand. “Well, whatever you did to Tiva, you’ll have to make that right with her yourself. As for me, I owe you an apology for the way I responded to your grief. It wasn’t intentional, but in the final days, I got callused to those outside. Sometimes it showed in how I spoke…”

  Sutara held up her hand. “My father chose his path. I choose to forgive you both—somehow. But please don’t look for warmth in my eyes. I can’t give what isn’t there. I don’t have it for anyone right now. You both did what you thought right.”

  Nu said, “I can ask no more.”

  But T’Qinna could. “What about the prayer stone?”

  “Oh that,” Sutara said. “Just drop it down the latrine. I don’t want to touch it again.”

  The evidence for great ages is thought to be found in the rock and fossil records of the earth's crust. These are interpreted by the principle of uniformitarianism, that “the present is the key to the past.” Since geologic processes happen slowly today, they argue, the extensive rock and fossil records must have taken great lengths of time to form.

  However, a flood of the proportions described in Genesis would have resulted in vast amounts of erosion and redepositing of sediments, fossilization of plants and animals, volcanism, and redistribution of radioisotopes. If one denies the global flood as a historic event, he might use the Grand Canyon/ Colorado River system to “prove” great ages, when, in reality, the Canyon demonstrates flooding processes with rates, scales, and intensities eclipsing anything observed today. Thus the misunderstood evidence of old ages, is actually strong evidence for the Flood.

  —John D. Morris Ph.D.

  The Global Flood of Noah’s Day

  12

  Soundings

  It only seemed a few minutes since Q’Enukki had lost sight of the tormented Earth. The transparent star-gate-creature swung the fabric of space around itself so that those inside its transit node seemed to orbit the sun in a wide arc. They now re-approached the Nemesis Fragments’ trailing asteroid swarm, as its stragglers tumbled past the bleeding planet.

  “How much time will have passed for my children since we left them?” Q’Enukki asked Samuille.

  “Many weeks.”

  “Much can happen in many weeks.”

  Earth grew—its face a smoky mirror in the reflected light of the solar orb. Before Q’Enukki’s enhanced eyes, great tectonic plates ground into each other, forcing up the beginnings of huge mountain chains beneath the waves. Large, irregular basins formed around the cooling fissure zones, where the magmas hardened more fully, contracted, and sank. Waters began to draw away from emerging new continents for the first time. Sheet erosions scraped the uppermost sedimentary layers off into the great trenches with increased speed. Still, no land peeked above the endless sea.

  As he approached, Q’Enukki again located his seed ship. Waves from the collision of the future A
rabian Plate into the northern continent had driven the vessel northwest again, toward the zigzagging rift, over what would one day become the Red Sea. By now, the eruption on that branch of the mid-oceanic rift system had died, allowing Barque of Aeons to cross into the “calm” of the trapped deeps in the forming Eastern Mediterranean basin. There it picked up the outer flows of the great northern cyclonic, which turned it eastward again, to complete a gigantic ovoid.

  The gate-creature seemed to swing into high orbit at great speed, as it again became possible to observe the tactical situation aboard the ship. Q’Enukki was relieved to find that the intruders had weakened, though he could not tell yet if Samuille’s forces had extracted them or not. Outside in the storms, a large host of them swirled like seething vipers around the Guardian escorts, waiting for the waters to depart.

  They would not wait long to strike again.

  The winds increased to a maddening howl outside. U’Sumi plopped down at the mess deck table, and stared at his food with disgust. The ship rose and fell in stomach-churning convulsions that no amount of time could get his digestion used to. He had lost too much weight from a frame never large to begin with. His hands shook, and their once rich brown skin now had the sallow complexion of old parchment. The others looked no better.

  “You’d better eat that,” T’Qinna said, pointing at his pile of lumpy brown bean mush with her spoon. “You look terrible, and I’m not going to get stuck doing your chores when you collapse from malnutrition.”

  He would have growled back at her, but his father rapped the table with an earthen wine bowl, and called for every one’s attention.

  The Old Man’s speech leaked from his mouth half-slurred, “It has been nearly five months since E’Yahavah shut us in. Since then, we have seen no evidence that the waters are decreasing at all, although the rains have mostly stopped. Daily soundings since we were first able to touch bottom with the cord suggest that we have been traveling over hilly terrain, with a depth range of about twelve to eight hundred cubits. Today the plumb weight hit bottom at six-hundred and forty.”