Dawn Apocalypse Rising (The Windows of Heaven Book 1)

by K. G. Powderly Jr.

  “What do you think?”

  “Why should the Samyazas talk to us? They went berserk when E’Yahavah rejected Uzaaz’El’s plea for clemency through Q’Enukki. Nothing’s changed. It’s not like we can bend the will of heaven for them.”

  “Maybe it has nothing to do with that.”

  “Well, if it’s a negotiated peace they want, I hardly think they would call on us to mediate. We have more reason to hate them than anybody! I think it’s a trap.”

  “To what end? Whoever goes will be under armed escort.”

  “An assassination plot cares nothing for a melee,” said the Tacticon with a dismissing wave of his hand.

  “So they assassinate one of us—what does that buy them?”

  “Nothing. But they’re religious fanatics! They don’t think rationally about these things. For all we know they might be convinced that any blood shed from Q’Enukki will purchase Aeden’s bliss for whoever can pull it off. Remember Regati.”

  Nu was dubious about his father’s reasoning, but did not want to countermand him. “I’m going to notify Pahpi,” he said. “Whatever’s going on, the only way for us to find out is for one of us to go. I intend to leave in the morning, if the Zaqen permits.”

  S

  tench from the unburied dead filled the air long before A’Nu-Ahki came within sight of the battle front hunkered down less than a week’s mounted journey south of Akh’Uzan. The fortified arc stretched from the foothills north of enemy-occupied Ayarak, southwestward, all the way to the Central Sea, just east of the Great Havens. It had effectively kept Samyaza’s forces bottled up in the Gihunu Valley, and away from the prizes of Near Kush and Khavilakki, which had been the invader’s original objectives.

  Nu’s military escort broke free of the foliage on top of the rise where Tubaal-qayin’s artillery engines rested. A clear view of the ghastly no-man’s land between the fortified trenches assailed his eyes with an undiluted taste of the war of attrition that had dragged on now for seven decades.

  The pocked landscape of mud and exposed corpses attracted carrion dragons from out of the patches of nearby jungle, along with croaking hordes of web-winged amphipteres and gryphons, which swooped down to snag whatever remained from the dragons. Bones, long ago picked clean, littered the bleak strip where fresher dead lacked, ever churned up by the plowing millipede treads of charging Behemoth machines.

  The lieutenant who had escorted A’Nu-Ahki most of the way from Akh’Uzan had them all dismount before proceeding down the hill to the command bunker.

  “Thunder-pikes and hand-cannons have been used by both sides since early on. You can easily get picked off even at this distance,” said the young officer, who doubtless thought that Nu’s lack of technological sophistication warranted such explanation.

  He shouldered his own weapon when he dismounted, making it more visible to A’Nu-Ahki. It looked much like a short metallic spear, but with a wider butt handle, and a hollowed steel staff below the offset blade tip. The device fired small metal projectiles by means of chemical explosive pellets from a chamber inside the shaft, like a miniature cannon with a breech load.

  The Officer smiled as he held the thunder-pike out for A’Nu-Ahki’s closer inspection. “The Samyazas sometimes still use spears and swords during their charges, but they’ve caught up with us pretty well—they always have ranged pikers covering their melees at a distance to conserve whatever modern weapons they’ve either captured or copied from us.”

  Nu instantly knew the young officer blustered from the obsolete military paradigm in which the war had started—probably before he was even born. Age and experience told A’Nu-Ahki a different story.

  “They must ‘conserve’ pretty well for the front to have stalled here for over seventy years,” Nu said, with a wry arch of his eyebrows that instantly shut the lieutenant up.

  The path to the command bunker wound about halfway down the copse behind a combination of well placed rocks and soil berms. The lieutenant ushered A’Nu-Ahki past the guards at the bottom of the trail, and into the close darkness inside.

  “Greetings,” said a tired familiar voice.

  Nu’s eyes adjusted to the gloom. “I’ve come at your request.”

  Tubaal-qayin Dumuzi stepped into a shaft of light from the half-opened door. “I appreciate your quick response.” He looked grimy—not at all like the Emperor of nearly a fifth of the world’s entire land mass.

  “Do you know what they want?”

  Tubaal-qayin shrugged. “I’d hoped you might have an idea. Ivvayi and Ayyaho themselves just arrived, with Isha’Tahar from Assur’Ayur Temple. Something big must be up for Samyaza’s First Wife to join her two eldest sons all the way out here. From what I understand, they massacred many of your kinsmen long before Salaam-Surupag, so I don’t imagine they’re expecting to get any fair hearing from you. Maybe they have something you want, and want to bargain. My hope is that you’ll put in a good word, and try to get a feel for any possibility of peace talks.”

  Nu thought for the first time in years about his unaccounted-for daughters last seen alive in these titan’s hands. He could not imagine how they could be of any political worth in a parley with Tubaal-qayin Dumuzi.

  “I’ll try for peace talks, but I don’t have anything to bargain with.”

  The little Emperor twitched his shoulders in what, to him, must have been a conciliatory gesture. “Sorry. I’m just baffled by this.”

  And this is a revelation? Nu fumed to himself. “I guess there’s only one way to find out what’s up. We might as well be done with it. Just how much negotiating leverage are you willing to give me if they want to talk?”

  “They can go back to their pre-war borders unmolested. Anything else you need to confer with me.”

  “Understood.”

  Tubaal-qayin summoned his chief signalman. “Send up the truce flags. Let them know the delegate has arrived.”

  Q

  ueen Isha’Tahar, First Wife of Samyaza the Watcher, had lost little of her renowned dark beauty over the centuries, though it had taken on a marked severity in middle age. It was no secret that, soon after birthing the twin titans, she began drinking concubine’s root to preserve her looks, and prevent the conception of further children. Superstition told how she had ascended into heaven by Samyaza’s leave and granted immortality. Nu figured that particular superstition wouldn’t last much longer.

  Her two sons stood nearly a man’s height taller than A’Nu-Ahki. Inhuman exoskeletal armor ridged their faces and creased the skin of their bare arms and chests like bronzed facets on a pair of human armadillos. A ring of sharpened horns encircled their cranial regions, growing right from their flattened skulls and making any form of helm redundant. They waited in no-man’s land, bones piled at heavily shod feet like scraps from their latest meal. Stories had them eating whole roasted camels in a single meal, though Nu figured such tales were likely apocryphal.

  Their mother sat in a bier on the shoulders of four giant guards of similar appearance, minus the horns.

  A’Nu-Ahki, Tubaal-qayin, and the Emperor’s titan escorts halted about twenty paces in front of them. Avarnon-Set was part of the Dumuzi’s retinue—Nu felt the wolf-headed creature’s baleful eyes burn into his back.

  Nu found it anticlimactic to see Avarnon-Set’s face unveiled for the first time. Old Urugim’s description now seemed morbidly over-blown—all Nu saw was a hairy, disfigured parody of a man. At certain angles, the Titan’s face appeared to have an ape-like quality and his pointed ears vaguely resembled those of a wolven-hound—if one waxed melodramatic. The creature’s eyes were all-black, however—the most formidable thing about him—except maybe for his size.

  The old terror that had frozen Nu back in Sa-utar so long ago was gone. For some reason, Old Dog-face just didn’t seem that formidable any more. Nu wondered if he had somehow grown or if the Beast had just shrunk.

  He put it from his mind.

  For a moment, the truce parties faced one anot
her in silence, each trying to read their opponents. Nu could make nothing from the unhuman faces of Samyaza’s sons, at first. Yet buried beneath the layered composure of Isha’Tahar squirmed the restless shadow of a fleetingly visible fear.

  Samyaza’s wife said, “Which of you is the Son of Q’Enukki?”

  A’Nu-Ahki stepped forward. “I am.”

  She gazed down upon him with cool, half shut eyes once used to ensnare men, and those supposed to be more than men. “Thank you for coming. You know both my sons and we know the Emperor of the North and his adviser, Avarnon-Set, so I think we can dispense with any further pleasantries. We are here because certain rumors disturb my god-husband—rumors based on prophecies that originate with the Seer, Q’Enukki, whom Uzaaz’El once consorted with to curry divine favor.”

  Tubaal-qayin turned puzzled eyes to A’Nu-Ahki, but said nothing.

  Avarnon-Set did not seem the least bit surprised by her statement—or if he was, he did not allow it to show. Nu simply tried to pretend that the former envoy was not there. While fear had diminished, distraction had not.

  “Do not be so surprised,” Isha’Tahar said to the Emperor. “Your Power was once my husband’s lieutenant and they were both answerable to higher Powers than even themselves before they came to Earth.”

  “They still are,” A’Nu-Ahki added, hoping to rattle both Avarnon-Set and the Queen’s sons just a little. “They still are, and it terrifies them.”

  “Perhaps,” the Queen said. “Or if it does not, then maybe it should.”

  Her response stunned A’Nu-Ahki, but he did not let it show.

  Tubaal-qayin demanded, “What is this about?”

  “Be assured, good ‘Shepherd,’ it is not about you,” said the Woman.

  Nu asked, “Which prophecies concern Samyaza so?”

  She stared past him off into the battlefield, a tear breaking as a clear acid-crystal jewel from her left eye. “The ones he destroyed at Regati in his madness. The being named Metatron, who comes from the presence of E’Yahavah El-N’Lil, bade him to seek out a son of Q’Enukki who would tell of the coming Edict of Desolation. This Metatron refused to leave his former estate when Samyaza came down to redeem us. Yet they were once close.

  “Metatron warned my god-husband that the end of the world is rushing at us from out of the heavens. At the same time, my sons Ivvayi and Ayyaho—demigods both—also had dreams.

  “‘Vayi saw a Watcher come down upon a flat stone with a chisel, and inscribe upon it the ideogram of the Divine Name. His brother dreamed of a large beautiful orchard, like that of Aeden, planted with all kinds of trees. In the orchard were Watchers, and in their hands, axes with which they cut down all of the trees but one. When they awoke, my sons told their visions to their father in the Temple, and he informed them of Metatron’s warning. We come for an interpretation of this matter, and to see if there is any way of averting this catastrophe.”

  A’Nu-Ahki said, “I have at least two daughters, captured at Salaam-Surupag. I would have them returned to me.”

  Tubaal-qayin interrupted them. “You’ve put this war on hold over a religious superstition?”

  The Queen said, “If you were sensitive to the Alter-world, and not so dependent on your machines, you would not accuse us of superstition!”

  “I don’t see any hesitation on your part in copying my genius and sending out your own machines to fight!”

  “Please, let me handle this, Emperor,” Nu said, stepping between the two heads of state.

  The Metalsmith-king folded his arms and scowled, but nodded for the Seer to continue.

  “What are your daughter’s names?” asked the Queen. “I will see what can be done.”

  “Problem is that my son, who saw them alive and captive, died trying to tell us about it. He was never able to say which of my girls he saw alive. Many girls died that day and we could not identify all the dead. They could be any of four names—Uranna, Bethara, Tylurnis, and Zhavra,” Nu said. “I should think my help is worth the return of all the female captives of Salaam-Surupag. After all, it’s the end of the world we’re talking about.”

  “Many of them have been married and assimilated. It will take time to track them down across all of Assuri.”

  “I will show my good faith by starting to replace the scrolls you have lost and by summarizing them for you verbally now, if you wish. It is also my hope that we can perhaps start talking peace.”

  One of the horned sons shouted, “We are not here to parley!”

  “Peace, ‘Vayi!” hissed his mother like some gryndel pack matriarch. Then to Nu she said, “While it is beyond my stature as a woman to mingle in affairs of war, I can see how this has become a battle of attrition that serves neither of us. I will bring the matter up with my god-husband, but I can promise no answer from him one way or the other.”

  A’Nu-Ahki said, “Since the end of the world is upon us, does it not make sense that we should turn our hearts to E’Yahavah and to peace?”

  Isha’Tahar nodded, and seemed momentarily, for all her authority, to be a creature trapped and in pain. “I would tend to think so. I want nothing more than to escape the divine displeasure that is upon us.”

  “Since this is so, I will seek the Great God to interpret the dreams of your sons for you here and now. I will return with the books of my Ancestor in three week’s time—I need to have my monastery presses run new copies, for nobody has requested any in a long while.”

  The Queen seemed pleased. “I, in turn, will send for those captive women from Salaam-Surupag who are willing to come—though I cannot promise to find them all. I shall also raise the question of peace—though I will not push my divine husband if he is disagreeable.”

  “I can ask no more.”

  The first titan, Ivvayi, stepped forward, and stooped down before the Seer until they met at eye level. “Tell me what my vision is,” he commanded in a throaty snarl. Smoldering red eyes glowed with biochemical fire-fly light, while his breath stank of ale and rotten camel flesh.

  A’Nu-Ahki no longer feared the demonic strength that reached out to smother him. It seemed that Avarnon-Set was not the only giant to have lost that power over him. Whether from E’Yahavah’s gift, or the weird deference the titans all gave him since his reputation as the gryndel killer, or from a little of both, he did not know. He opted to believe a divine gift gave him calm clarity to gaze into this creature’s face, and to read what he saw.

  Although alien in so many ways, Samyaza’s hybrid son seemed trapped by a very human, almost child-like fear. For a moment, it caused Nu to wonder if the Nae-fil actually had the capacity to trust E’Yahavah, and cast himself on the promise of the genuine Seed.

  “Your dream shows a heavenly Watcher descending upon a flat stone. He carries a chisel, and writes on the stone the ideogram-glyph of the Divine Name. This is because both Metatron’s warning to your father, and your brother’s dream about the orchard, are set in stone by E’Yahavah and immovable. A’Nu shall destroy the entire world, except for a tiny remnant. The earth is bloodstained. Your father, with the other Watchers that fell with him, perverted life’s natural order, while men eagerly follow them.”

  The Giant stood and balled his fists. “I could crush you!”

  A’Nu-Ahki fixed his eyes upon those of the Creature, and answered, “You can do nothing to me unless my Master gives your master permission to let you—and that’s not likely to happen. Besides, haven’t you already tried to stamp out these words at Regati and Salaam-Surupag? Did not such madness bring Metatron down to you, and make this journey necessary?”

  The second son of Samyaza stepped in front of his brother, and knelt down on one knee before the Seer to meet A’Nu-Ahki’s eyes. “Please, what of my dream? I had no part in how I came to be on this earth and I for one can regret many things I have done here. Are you saying there is no hope at all for us, no matter what we choose?”

  The question struck Nu at the very foundation of all he believed about the Nae-
fillim. Had he not feared the integrity of his own lineage for many decades in nearly the same way? Hesitation clutched his tongue.

  “Please.” Ayyaho’s eyes softened. “I really need to know.”

  Nu’s answer spilled out in half-coagulated lumps, taking on more fluency only as he went on; “You … are born … as man, from the womb … of woman. Blood flows through you and a heart beats. You think, you dream, and can make choices to do good or evil. Yet forces drive you toward evils that you enjoy too much to resist seriously—so far. There is something else in you that is not of man—a darkness that moves you and holds you. Those that conceived and raised you did much to desecrate and contort the Image of E’Yahavah in you, but they cannot destroy it. So yes, there is hope for you.”

  Ayyaho’s eyes did not flame with rage as Nu had expected. “How do you know the Image is not destroyed?”

  Nu answered softly, “Because you still share in the Great Curse—that you are doomed to someday return to dust. Thus it is possible also for you to share Man’s hope—but, I’m sorry to say, only with great difficulty.”

  “Man’s hope?”

  “Yes. The hope based on the genuine Seed of Promise, which you must publicly renounce all claims to being. In addition, you must make sacrifice for and turn away from your sorceries, sexual deviations, and war atrocities. If you call upon E’Yahavah, and humble yourself before him to be instructed in his ways, and love him with a true heart, you can find not only hope but security.”

  The Creature nodded as if truly considering it. “Hope and security.”

  Nu continued, “Your dream’s meaning is plain. The orchard is the world. The trees are all the families of humankind. World-end comes as the Holy Watchers with their axes to chop down all the trees of the orchard but one. The father of Q’Enukki, Iyared of Sa-utar, prophesied over me that I would be the last tree—my house would be the remnant to survive.