Drool oozed from a toothless mouth, from which hung the bloody stump of the sucker-tube like a mangled tongue. Below the double shoulders curled an atrophied body with a pair of little gray baby-like feet that stuck up and wiggled in the air, useless vestigial appendages. To support the atrophied body and massive head, a system of curled fleshy lobes sprouted like brain coral from where the tail-bone should have ended. This divided on either side into the tentacles. Five tentacles on each side wormed forward of the creature into flexible sheaths—the “feelers” U’Sumi had seen outside.
The massive head turned to face him when he jostled into the cabin. It knew he was there somehow.
U’Sumi then saw another screen of compound eye facets above the two folded lobes on either side.
The little mouth made an expression that might have been a smile. The forward arm closest to U’Sumi reached for a large, red-lit tile above the main control panel. In the split second before it made contact, U’Sumi read the glyph silhouetted by the button’s bloody glow.
The ideogram read self-kill—suicide!
His grandfather had said that an Elyo would destroy itself rather than allow anybody to sift through its wreckage. U’Sumi grabbed the hand, and used his sword blade to slice it off. Its bones were somehow spongy, as if held firm more by internal fluid pressure than by outer hardness.
The Beast roared and squirmed in its seat, swinging its other available arm across to battle the avenging sword. U’Sumi hacked it to bits, all the while yelling at the top of his lungs. Then he swung on the head and jabbed at its vestigial feet with his dagger. He drove his sword in underneath the wire bundles that sprouted from the eye-sockets, but found the skull harder than the limb bones had been.
The misshapen creature bellowed and thrashed, refusing to die, while its vehicle spun out of control. A sharp turn tossed U’Sumi sideways, opposite the way he had entered.
By now, the ganglia growing from its right “brain coral” lobe made it back around the turret drive housing, flying whips into the forward compartment. A coil gripped one of U’Sumi’s legs, while another snaked around his sword arm. Flailing wildly with his dagger, he severed the tentacle that held his other wrist. He managed to free his arm, but another tendril yanked the sword away. The strand around his leg pulled him away from the grotesque head, toward the gathering constrictors in the right-side passage.
Thanking E’Yahavah for all those seemingly useless sit-ups his grandfather had made him do during training, U’Sumi sat up and buried his dagger in the pink worm-snake. The ganglion released just as the vehicle swiveled to a stop and threw him forward against the controls.
Before another tentacle could drag him into its mechanized snake hole, U’Sumi dove on the head and buried his dagger into the tiny left ear beneath its bulging cranium. Repeatedly he struck, with each stab going a little deeper. At first, the Elyo struggled, but by the fourth jab, U’Sumi had given it enough brain damage to make the creature droop, still and silent, forever. The ganglia continued to flop around, but only by reflex.
U’Sumi retreated to the left cockpit entrance and sat down on the hatch coaming to catch his breath. The air was a little less putrid there.
“What now?” he said aloud to himself.
He knew the question would take on a series of unthinkable implications as it sunk in. Right now, he had no energy for those.
After some time, a sudden clank against the vehicle caused him to notice that the muffled explosions, which all along had penetrated from the outside, had stopped. A mechanical whirring came from just behind him, by the dead man’s niche. Blinding daylight flooded in from that direction. U’Sumi crouched with his dagger clamped in his right hand, ready to spring.
A terrified voice with a thick Aztlan brogue said, “Lord Typhunu, why do ya not respond?”
Several clicks echoed in the silence of the stilled machinery. U’Sumi recognized the cocking of hand-cannons and understood his situation.
“Your Typhunu is dead by my blade! I’m armed only with a dagger, so don’t fire on me as I come out. I’ll move slow and show my hands first.”
Amazed muttering washed over those outside.
Finally, a commanding voice said, “Very well, come forth as you have said. You are now prisoner of war to the Aztlan Consortium.”
U’Sumi did as promised, shielding his eyes from the sun with his hands only after giving his captors the satisfaction of seeing that they were empty. He had left his dagger near the hatch coaming, buried in the flesh of the Elyo’s left tentacle lobe.
The commanding voice came from a man only about a standard generation older than U’Sumi. He seemed to regard his captive with the respectful eyes one warrior might have for the great deeds of another. There seemed to be little love lost in the enemy officer for Typhunu.
“You have done what no one dreamed possible,” he said. “I’m almost sorry to have to take you prisoner. I’d rather have the privilege of putting down a few bowls of ale with you while you told me how you did it.”
Aren’t you just a nice little soldier—ready to drinking-buddy me to death and all! “Sorry, I don’t drink ale, just a little wine,” U’Sumi said.
“All right, wine then. What unit did you serve?”
“Akh’Uzan Regiment; Clan of the Seer.”
The Soldier did another double-take. “Why does that not surprise me? We have special orders for prisoners taken from your regiment.”
“Can I ask what they are?”
“No, but I’ll tell you anyway. We’re to send you back to Aztlan, to the Tower at the Top of the World itself. Psydonu and the Northern High Priestess have specifically asked about your people. I have no idea why you have attracted the attention of such high dignitaries.”
“Who else from my regiment survived?”
“Aside from those few who escaped, only one other; he’s wounded, and was unconscious last I saw. It looks like he might not pull through.”
“May I see him?”
The soldier laughed. “For a prisoner, you sure make a lot of demands. Not to worry; I’m taking you to the holding pen now, where you can see him all you want.”
Just then, a howl grew to fill the air from the east. Both men paused and looked up to see a cloud of astras streaking toward them.
“Down!” U’Sumi’s captor yelled, shoving him in front of himself toward a row of trenches.
The sky support Avarnon-Set had pulled back the day before arrived too late to help the troops, but not too late to initiate a counter-attack forming in the hills to the north. Both U’Sumi and his captor fell into the trench just as staccato chain cannon fire trailed them in from above. Ear bleeding whistles screeched all around, as bomb pods streaked to earth and exploded—violent shooting stars that left miniature versions of the great Crater Umara in the Desolation of Nhod.
As the air strike continued, another soldier dropped into the hole with a relayed order for U’Sumi’s captor. “Tacticon has ordered us to pull back to this morning’s line! The enemy has a large column in the highlands formed to cut us off at the narrow point between the mountains and the sea!”
U’Sumi’s guard nodded. “Have the regular prisoners rounded up to feed the Agents of Judgment. I’ll see to the two specials.”
The runner took off down the trench.
U’Sumi’s captor pulled him in the opposite direction, toward what had been a small sub-altern’s platoon command bunker. A few soldiers inside guarded an unconscious man bound on the dirt floor.
U’Sumi’s eyes adjusted to the light, and then his heart almost stopped.
The man on the ground was his father.
THE PALADIN’S ODYSSEY | 367
Can you draw out Leviathan with a fish hook? Or press down his tongue with a cord? Can you put a rope in his nose? Or pierce his jaw with a hook? …Can you fill his skin with harpoons, or his head with fishing spears? Lay your hand on him; remember the battle; you will not do it again…. Who can strip off his outer armor? Who can come
within his double mail? Who can open the doors of his face? Around his teeth there is terror. His strong scales are his pride, shut up as with a tight seal. One is so near to another, that no air can come between them. They are joined one to another; they clasp each other and cannot be separated. His sneezes flash forth light, and his eyes are like the eyelids of the morning. Out of his mouth go burning torches; Sparks of fire leap forth. Out of his nostrils smoke goes forth, as from a boiling pot and burning rushes. His breath kindles coals, and a flame goes forth from his mouth. In his neck lodges strength, and dismay leaps before him. The folds of his flesh are joined together, firm on him and immovable…. When he raises himself up, the mighty fear; because of the crashing they are bewildered. The sword that reaches him cannot avail; nor the spear, the dart, or the javelin. He regards iron as straw, bronze as rotten wood. The arrow cannot make him flee…. His underparts are like sharp potsherds; he spreads out like a threshing sledge on the mire. He makes the depths boil like a pot…. Behind him he makes a wake to shine; one would think the deep to be grey haired. Nothing on earth is like him, one made without fear. He looks on everything that is high; and is king over all the sons of pride.
—Job 41:1-34
NASB (abridged)
THE PALADIN’S ODYSSEY | 367
6
The Song of Tiamatu
F
or U’Sumi and his father, the death march southwest to the coastal city of Akko, then westward across occupied Southern Lumekkor, ended at the Haven of The Twins on the northern outlet of the Great Central Channel. There they went aboard a huge Consortium ironclad that steamed north, up the western edge of the Yawam Tsafuni—the sea dividing Aztlan to the west from Northern Lumekkor in the east, until it opened into the Polar Ocean.
U’Sumi had wondered why their captors had not simply crossed the channel into central Aztlan, to continue north by land. Then he overheard sailors speak of a recent Aztlantim naval victory off the Ardis headlands that had cleared the Yawam Tsafuni of enemy warships, except for a “small nest of sea vipers” at a base they called “Monitor Point.”
U’Sumi thanked E’Yahavah. Going by sea had doubtless saved his father’s life. A’Nu-Ahki had barely made it to “The Twins” with his infected wounds and his body dehydrated by fever. Soon after they had gotten under way, he faded into unconsciousness in their cell within the ironclad’s brig.
Harsh steel bulkheads closed them in with a twisted pipe-lined overhead, the lair of some metallic octopus that waited, hungrily entwined above, to finish its captive prey. The place vibrated in a sickly artificial light that flickered on and off at irregular intervals. The stench of salt, sweat, and mildew permeated the sultry air. Oily grit coated every surface, from musty bunks to metal deck and sparse furniture. U’Sumi was alone, except for his near dead father and a bunch of sailors who came into the brig regularly just to stare at him creepily through the bars and call him feminine pet names.
With nothing to do but wait, grief finally had time for its assault.
E’Yahavah had answered U’Sumi’s plea to defeat the Elyo, but for what?
Aztlan’s armies still advanced into Balimar. Soon they would cross the Straits into Seti. Once that happened, the entire region would collapse. With A’Nu’s Comforter a dying prisoner, how could the visions come true?
Maybe this was it. Maybe everybody in the world was wrong. It was not logically possible for everyone holding differing views to be right, but logic allowed the potential for everyone to be wrong. Maybe this was the beginning of World-end; a slow, agonizing war in which the entire human race would simply exterminate itself in an orgy of blood!
What of Muhet’Usalaq’s promise? Iyapeti and Lumekki were dead. U’Sumi was not sure if he had gotten that across to his half-coherent father during the long march. Only one thing was certain: Each minute steamed them further away from his father’s calling—the people of E’Yahavah’s Comfort, the cask of Atum-Ra, and A’Nu-Ahki’s prophetic charge to somehow take them all into a new land after the world’s end.
Could E’Yahavah have taken U’Sumi’s father from Akh’Uzan to allow one of the other Seer Clan elders to finish Q’Enukki’s Work? Would Henumil, Nestrigati (if he somehow escaped), or some other contender—hopefully not Belkrini—complete the work of A’Nu’s Comforter? U’Sumi recalled his rebuttal to Iyapeti, back when they were just school boys. “They go out of their way to ignore Iyared’s Prophecy about Pahp and about a dozen other independent ancient references. Pahp is the Comforter sent by E’Yahavah A’Nu but nobody seems to want to deal with that!”
Such a replacement of “Comforters” didn’t seem honest given the plain words of the prophecies. Had we misinterpreted the Seers somehow? They seemed straightforward enough—my father is both the “Comforter from A’Nu” and the “one who would be left” to carry the Remnant to safety. There appeared to be no room for any other to fill those roles. Iyared had left none on his deathbed. Could the prophecies have failed?
It suddenly struck U’Sumi that each of the Akh’Uzan visionaries considered themselves faithful to those very same prophecies. Each had even contrived interpretations that finished A’Nu-Ahki’s role as Comforter with his Comet Vision of seventy years ago and which saw Akh’Uzan as Iyared’s “land of safety.” Despite the fanaticism or fallacious logic shown by some of these recent “seers,” U’Sumi had to admit that even those who claimed his father had gone apostate by marrying his mother were not otherwise evil men. They lived otherwise moral lives—at least as far as could be seen.
U’Sumi had seen so much death so rapidly—the slaughter of both good and evil men alike. The implications staggered his very core beliefs. Both good and evil men alike!
The impact hit as an almost physical blow that shattered his internal world in a catastrophic ethical and emotional holocaust that suddenly went visual. Hysteria consumed him in engulfing waves of flame and water.
“They’re all going to die, aren’t they? Billions upon billions of them, all at once; screaming and crying as they fall into the swirling abyss!”
Images of fire and water roared around and through him, carrying a cavalcade of terrified faces burned or drowned, bloated, and charred. They shrieked and gagged in concert to a massive torrent of ocean, ice, and flame.
Somebody shook him until the noisy spectacle slipped away in a black vapor that left his ears ringing and pin-prick lights in his eyes.
“What’s da matter wit you, lad?” said the sailor on guard duty. He grasped U’Sumi roughly by the shoulders, concern on his stubbly face.
U’Sumi came around slowly. “Sorry. Just remembered something in a dream that happened to me on the battlefield,” he lied.
“But you’s awake, boy. Does you dream whiles you’re awake?”
“I’m sorry—it was an awful time,” U’Sumi said, hoping the big sailor would buy it. Yeah, an awful time—just what in Underworld do you think that dream was about, anyway, little Phoenix boy?
“They says you kill an Agent of Judgment with only a knife.”
“That’s right.”
“You gut right to get screamy then.”
U’Sumi smiled without meaning to. “Thanks.”
The guard closed the cell door behind himself after backing out.
I have a right to get screamy? The specter of World-end has hung over my entire life! I’ve never once gotten “screamy” before now. Is this really what it will be like?
He stood and gripped the bars of his cell, while inside he careened helplessly toward a black mass that threatened to shatter his sanity into a million tortured shards upon impact. Falling—endless falling—or was it just the motion of the ship? The more he tried to sort things out the more tangled they became, until all he could do was shove it back and try to forget—just as he hyperventilated to keep his bile down. And like the bile, he knew he couldn’t keep the painful questions down forever. The persistent unseen rocking would bring them all up again eventually.
U’Sumi ground hi
s teeth and willed himself to emotional steel. The soldiers, the visionaries, the Zaqenar, fathers, mothers, even the children of the world, suddenly lost their humanity. They became mere cockroaches—filthy manipulative vermin in human form. That was what they had to be to deserve such a terrible fate! It was the only way to see them and still make sense of it. Why else would E’Yahavah destroy them? The only alternative he could see was too unthinkable.
Nevertheless, on a wave from hidden deeps in the blackest recess of his psyche, that shadow-mind alternative voiced itself in his thoughts.
“What if E’Yahavah El-N’Lil is really the Basilisk of Evil and your father has been fooled? What if these are all just nice normal people caught in a terrible situation—people who make mistakes just like you do?”
U’Sumi shook, unable to form a coherent response.
“Think about it! You know those people aren’t roaches! They are created in the genuine E’Yahavah’s image. You’ve been trained to approach things logically, what’s the only rational alternative?”
He screamed wildly, pulling at his tousled black curls. “I won’t believe that! It makes no sense!”
Yet it made perfect sense, especially in that filthy brig.
“What makes no sense?” asked the guard, who really had a look in his eyes of genuine concern.
“See—he’s not a bad man.”
U’Sumi felt the Shadow-mind pause when he met the guard’s eyes. Then he looked down at his father tossing in fever.
“It makes no sense that if the High Priestess and the top titan want to see my father that you should let him die on the floor with no medicine!” U’Sumi shouted, more from relief at an opportunity to change subjects than from thinking on his feet. “I need to see the captain! Trust me, if this man dies on your watch, you won’t be a happy sailor!”
The Paladin's Odyssey (The Windows of Heaven) Page 10
