The Paladin's Odyssey (The Windows of Heaven)

by Powderly Jr. , K. G.

  “Oh, I know,” Psydonu admitted with a friendly chuckle, “but it’s the next best thing. And when all’s said and done, it might as well be Underworld.”

  They stood in a subterranean vault filled with every form of torture instrument imaginable. The tormented eyes of over a hundred chained men and women gazed, pleading toward the Giant, though few dared cry for any relief. Some actually inflicted pain on themselves with various instruments, yelling out sins for which they were presumably guilty.

  The nearest self-mutilators crawled across a device labeled “The Swords of Chastisement”—a bridge of widely-spaced blades set, sharp side up, over a pit of hot coals. The eyes of those doomed to this, glazed from deep shock, were bloodshot marbles; except one poor fat man who had collapsed until the blades embedded into his flab. He hoarsely shrieked falsetto ravings as he slowly roasted alive.

  Psydonu spoke as a proud child presenting gifts to a parent he wanted to impress. “These are my own personal damned. Each is guilty of specific sins for which I have devised specific punishments. They’re physical representatives of many counterparts in the duality of Underworld. That woman over there is an extraordinarily shameless adulteress—I ought to know…” He chuckled, as he blew her a kiss from his hand.

  “Shut up!” A’Nu-Ahki balled his fists, as if ready to strike the Giant, despite the fact that his best blow could hardly have reached the height of Psydonu’s jaw with any force left.

  Psydonu sniffed. “Oh. Sorry. I thought maybe a seer of El-N’Lil might appreciate viewing a foretaste of divine judgment on the wicked; I did hear you say the world is ending soon, did I not?”

  “Judgment belongs to E’Yahavah—not you, nor the Watchers! He doesn’t enjoy it; though, in your case, he might make an exception! You will not escape what you mock in this parody of a tragedy too deep for your comprehension!”

  “Mock?” The Giant sounded genuinely hurt. “This is art at its most sincere and visceral! It’s not mockery for the Divine Seed to explore his divine rights! I can’t grow without expressing my creativity! I’m the Artist here!”

  U’Sumi gazed long and hard at those pain-twisted faces. They were the same faces he had seen in his vision of World-end. Shadow-mind rose again, full force, amid the acrid smells of that smoking pit.

  “He takes no pleasure in judgment? It is upon the seers’ visions of Underworld that Psydonu modeled this place! Do any of the sins these people are guilty of warrant such monstrous cruelty? What if E’Yahavah is the tyrant, and the Basilisk a misunderstood liberator?”

  “What are you going to do with us?” U’Sumi demanded, trying to control his trembling at the unthinkable words screaming in his head.

  The Titan smiled with a shrug. “I know this will sound rather silly, but almost nothing at all. You’ll join Pandura at Epymetu’s Temple City, where we’ll obtain our test samples. She may have a few experiments to run, but she is under instruction not to kill you or harm you—if possible. After that, we may even let you go.”

  The High Priestess smiled at U’Sumi again, and ran a hand over the smooth curve of her hip. Her green mantis eyes flickered with feral hunger. “Believe me, harming you is the last thing I have in mind, young paladin.”

  U’Sumi looked away. Since her arrival, he had come to fear Pandura more than the Titan or even the Elyo, although he could not figure out why.

  Psydonu let out a long hiss that echoed throughout the cavern. “It’s a shame you did not choose to endorse me in your reality, A’Nu-Ahki—we’d have made a glorious team! But you see I really am the Seed. I am my own father and thus I have created myself, even as the cosmos has created itself to bring forth both gods and men to think its emerging thoughts. Thus, there is no lasting reality unless I speak it into existence.”

  “That’s shear madness!”

  The Titan folded his arms and looked up. “Only in your reality, with only your long-winded words to back it up. Take some advice; less is more. People don’t like to be dragged through chains of difficult questions and analysis. They want to feel! I give them that! My words have creative power! They are easy words repeated daily to almost half the world. When I embody High Psydonu, I also embody E’Yahavah and all other deities. It doesn’t matter if that’s logically impossible! Now what really happened just now is that the Seer of Akh’Uzan has confirmed my claim, so I’m now giving you a tour of my secrets.”

  U’Sumi said, “But that’s not what happened at all.”

  “Oh my dear young friend, you just don’t understand. Reality exists only in the mind. Shared reality is what separates us from the beasts—that ability to exist in a collective consciousness of common social narratives and images. When the collective consciousness of an old narrative vanishes, the substance of its reality dies with it. Here, let me show you how this is so.”

  Psydonu stepped over to a periscope mechanism that hung down from the vaulted ceiling. He pulled it to face level and peered into the eyepiece with a satisfied sigh. Then he handed the scope down to U’Sumi.

  “Take a look, young seer.”

  U’Sumi pulled the implement down to his own height and almost gagged. He saw thousands of contorted bodies in the sealed audience chamber above, some still twitching. Green mist shrouded the floor in spectral fingers that spider-crawled between twisted limbs down the many seat rows. Blood dribbled from every mouth and nose on waxed-madness faces. They bore the same glazed eyes they had shown in life, but with the added torment of sudden betrayal and panic in them.

  “What have you done?” A’Nu-Ahki shouted, who pushed his son away from the periscope and then himself came away equally aghast.

  Psydonu stepped over to a glowing glass orb near the periscope and began to tap on a panel of small rectangles labeled with ideograph letters. “You see, my friends, I now speak into existence a new reality,” he said.

  A color picture formed in the smoky orb. Adoring crowds again filled the great audience chamber above. U’Sumi saw himself, his father, and Pandura up on the dais with the mad titan, as happened only minutes before.

  The Giant said, “Now here’s what really happened…”

  In the orb’s picture, a voice sounding like A’Nu-Ahki’s proclaimed the claims of Psydonu true. Then a blinding light filled the circular court, along with the voices of an unearthly chorus. When the brilliance dissolved, the crowds were gone. Only the four people on the dais remained.

  U’Sumi immediately noticed that something else had changed as well. His own form wore the dark red cloak the titan guards issued him on the day Psydonu had separated him from his father, not the purple one he wore now. Pandura’s image also seemed out of synchronization with the lighting in the chamber, which angled differently from the glass parts of the dome than just before the engulfing flash had snatched away the crowds.

  U’Sumi said, “You somehow changed the codes of this picture-record with your differential calculating engine. Your details are off. Three weeks ago the sun was angled differently than just now.”

  Psydonu’s congenial smile fell from his face. “You are too smart for your own good, Little Brother.”

  A’Nu-Ahki said, “It doesn’t take much wit to see through such a wild lie. Your own people will see through it even if they can’t figure out how you changed the orb picture.”

  The Giant shook his head. “Not at all; once you leave here, you will only be a pudgy little self-anointed prophet with a crazy story about the doings at Thulae. If you try to tell it in Aztlan, my devoted children will never believe you, even if they don’t try to re-educate your apostasy. Indeed, no one in this world will take you seriously because the reality my words create is solid and believable, reduced to simple, easily remembered slogans that are reinforced by endless repetition from many independent sources.

  “Once my pet leviathans are fed on the bodies above, and those of the clean-up workers, no trace will remain of the old false reality of your mad seer’s dream. News of my confirmation and the taking into heaven of an enti
re crowd so blessed to witness that sacred moment will spread by orb long before you even make it out of these caverns with Pandura. It will be like the Ascension of Q’Enukki all over again, only a thousand times more glorious! The rocketry is even now going off over the dome. So, dear friends, I thank you for your confirmation.”

  “Your days are counted,” A’Nu-Ahki said, “forty-eight years.”

  Psydonu’s chin lifted, while he waved off the notion with a sweep of his hand. “I don’t receive that negative thought at all. In fact, I have only positive images of complete victory. Now, if you will excuse me, I will leave you in the capable hands of our dear Pandura. I have a gryndel to slay and I think I’d like a few minutes alone to practice my head crushing technique.”

  U’Sumi turned to the High Priestess, who leveled an automatic hand-cannon at them with what U’Sumi recognized as one of those new slot-load mechanisms that allowed the weapon to spray a stream of over forty pellets in two seconds. At that range, she did not need to be a good aim.

  “As the good Giant has said, we do not want to hurt either of you. But if I have to, I can still hurt one of you and keep my tissue samples good for several days on ice. Psydonu will understand.”

  A

  smooth stone road ran from Thulae at the Top of the World, south-southeast, along the mountains of Psydonu’s Shield, to the Rahabim Straits, which connected the seas of Yawam Rahabim and Yawam Tsafuni.

  Pandura, A’Nu-Ahki, and U’Sumi rode in a large self-propelled sedan coach at high speed, which covered what would have been a three week journey on foot in just over a couple days. The High Priestess had two coachmen, who traded off driving, so that few stops were needed except to take on the coach’s grain spirit fuel. They had the road virtually to themselves since, as in Lumekkor, only divinity, royalty, elite military units, and Temple authorities used such vehicles.

  The coach contained its own toilet facilities and galley. A neophyte priestess slightly younger than U’Sumi prepared all their meals. She attracted U’Sumi’s attention immediately because her milky skin bore the natural bilateral dark pigmentation spot patterns of the Far Eastern tribes in Nhod. He had never seen a spotted person before.

  Most people in Akh’Uzan spoke derisively of the “savage spotted people” because they were early descendants of Qayin the Murderer. Many lore-masters claimed that the “the Mark of Qayin,” spoken of in early history texts, was their skin patterns—although none of the Archons, nor Q’Enukki, had ever taught such a thing.

  A’Nu-Ahki had always rejected such fables, pointing out that most of Qayin’s descendants were mono-toned in their skin pigmentation. Still, U’Sumi had somehow expected them to appear monstrous and ape-like. The young Nhoddic priestess was none of these things. Her skin markings spiraled in elegant patterns, and though her head seemed a little larger than average, she carried it attractively with poise and grace. However, it struck him as odd that she should live so far west.

  The awkward part of the journey was the sleeping arrangements—the cabin had only one divan across its back end, large enough for two or three people. The drivers had a shelf in front and the neophyte her cubby beneath the foodstuffs. U’Sumi and his father slept sitting up at the galley table with their heads down. The High Priestess expressed an odd mixture of amusement and insult at this. U’Sumi didn’t sleep much.

  When they reached the Rahabi Straits, a boat waited to take them across to Epymetu’s Temple City. There, terraced layers of white rectangular buildings rose from stone wharfs, up a seaside bluff capped in rich greenery that surrounded an acropolis of minarets with a huge ziggurat complex.

  The neophyte girl joined them, with Pandura, on the launch, but the drivers stayed with the coach. In the sea air, under a rose-gold late afternoon sky, U’Sumi first noticed how the young priestess stared at him. She made him uncomfortable almost as much as Pandura. Her silent invitations could not have been more obvious, though he sensed no deliberate malevolence in her—something impossible to say of the High Priestess.

  The neophyte’s eyes flickered with leaf-green luster. When she momentarily turned her head into the breeze, the gentle air caught her hair and caressed it around her face, which brought out the same red and gold streaks as in Pandura’s, only on a background of rich dark brown. This, with the curvature of her not quite fully developed body, told him she could even be the High Priestess’ daughter—perhaps by some Far-Eastern father.

  Only now did U’Sumi notice how the middle of her forehead bore a grouping of spots that looked to him like the paw print of a tiny sphinx-cat. The bilaterally symmetrical markings of red, tan, and ebony—almost like spirals of leopard spots the size of gems along the sides of her face, neck, arms, legs, and bare midriff—all came together at the print on her forehead. When she smiled, their eyes met for the first time.

  U’Sumi turned away, angry with himself for having stared at her.

  “I am Pyra T’Qinna—T’Qinna is my proper name and Pyra the name the Temple gave me because my element is fire,” she said over the launch engine’s roar. Her accent was musical.

  He kept his face turned away, trying to ignore her.

  “If I’ve offended you, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to,” she said after a time, when he refused to answer.

  To his mortification, U’Sumi heard his father answer her for him. “Don’t mind him. His manners aren’t what they used to be. Nor does he share his thoughts so freely these days. Please excuse him. He has seen much war and many deaths.”

  That stung!

  “Of course,” the young priestess answered graciously.

  U’Sumi sneaked a look her way. He expected to see a jaded replica of Pandura roll her eyes. He saw alarming warmth instead.

  The boat came to a private wharf in a grotto separated from the main port to the southwest by a tall stretch of rocky headland.

  A large striped sphinx sat at the end of the pier, gazing out at them. It was so still and regal that U’Sumi at first thought it was a colored statue. When the launch reached dock, however, the creature moved to the head of the plank. It stopped there expectantly, as if to wait for its master.

  When Pyra disembarked, she threw her arms around the sphinx’s neck, and said, “Taanyx, I’ve missed you!”

  The cat growled and purred, rubbing its head with great affection against the young priestess’s neck and shoulder. U’Sumi watched, fascinated, until his father had to nudge him up the plank from behind.

  “This is Taanyx,” said the girl, when she noticed U’Sumi’s interest. “She and I are sisters of the hunt.”

  “Nice animal,” he said, trying to keep his voice from squeaking or thundering. He could only imagine what it meant to be a “sister of the hunt.”

  “Mind your schedule, darling,” Pandura said as she passed.

  Soldiers also lined the pier.

  Pyra asked the High Priestess, “Can I visit the guests later?”

  “You’re a priestess now. You may visit whomever you like as long as you’re available for paying worshipers at your appointed times.”

  “Where can I find them?”

  “They’ll be in the cells beneath the Court of Beasts—where all live specimens are kept. Don’t keep them too busy. I’ll need to collect my own samples for the sacred research.”

  U’Sumi had just about warmed up to the idea of a visit from Pyra until he heard that.

  THE PALADIN’S ODYSSEY | 367

  “Down to Enosh,” he replied, “They were created in the image and likeness of God. But thereafter, the generations having become corrupt, centaurs came into being.”

  Four things changed in the days of Enosh son of Seth: …men’s faces turned ape-like; and (the divine image having departed from human beings), demons became free to work their will upon them.

  —Rabbi Jeremiah ben Eleazar

  A Jewish scholar of the 2nd century AD

  THE PALADIN’S ODYSSEY | 367

  9

  Priestess

  T
>
  he shimmering pearlescence of its surfaces did nothing to make the dungeon any less of a tomb smothered in perfumed failure to mask its death odor. Outside, a great underground warehouse of the same finish housed a menagerie of animals in cages of pearly rod or pens of quickfire-charmed copper netting. The sliding door of the bare cell had a tiny glass window. Strange lights embedded in the ceiling hurt U’Sumi’s head until he could do nothing but pace like a caged sphinx. His father had settled into a contented recline, as if oblivious to such irritants.

  After a while, U’Sumi also tried adjusting his attitude. He sat down against the back wall, with his face to the door.

  He must have dozed, for he awoke to a lonesome melody that echoed through the glossy chambers in a watery lilt. A girl’s voice, willowy and sad, sang in harmony to a weeping lyre.

  Her skin as soft as silken sheets

  Heart a flinty stone, The kisses of a paladin Will leave her still alone

  A-lone! She whispers her dark song

  In the fortress of her heart A-lone! The blackness takes her there,

  While worlds explode apart…

  She stopped suddenly. U’Sumi had made a shuffle when he got up to go the door. His father had made it there ahead of him.

  A’Nu-Ahki said through the small window, “Please go on, your song is so—heartfelt and exquisitely played.”

  “Remember me?” the singer asked.

  “Pyra T’Qinna, was it not?”

  “That’s right. I come down here to sing to the animals—not that I think you’re animals.” She giggled altogether too loudly.

  “We might as well be!” U’Sumi growled, who suddenly wanted to keep her off-guard if only to maintain some illusion of control.

  “I’m sorry.”

  U’Sumi tried to believe that she didn’t mean it.

  Her voice cracked. “I wish I had more power around here—I’d have you in a suite worthy of two seers. I understand you don’t follow the gods of Lumekkor. I can’t see why they’re treating you this way.”