Dawn Apocalypse Rising (The Windows of Heaven Book 1)

by K. G. Powderly Jr.

  “You got in late last night,” Nu said at last. “What’s the news?”

  The old Tacticon grunted. “Same story—a futile attrition strategy. No movement, no change, just bigger cannons, and casualty counts. You’d think the commanders would learn after more than a century that they can’t hope to bleed each other dry. E’Yahavah made the earth’s resources too rich for that. I told Dumuzi, for instance, that they couldn’t possibly wear each other down simply because the breeding life of a single married couple can last over five hundred years—that’s not even factoring in polygamy!”

  Nu’s eyes narrowed. “The sons of Uzaaz’El and Samyaza are like three-hundred-cubit-tall giants eating the world’s resources. Then when that isn’t enough, they gobble up generations of men for dessert! You’d think the maths were simple enough for these supposedly semi-divine geniuses!”

  Lumekki said, “Fortunately the giants aren’t really so huge—except in peoples’ minds, and in the stupid marching songs of their troops!”

  Nu peered down into the mists, and felt their chill tendrils seeping over the land like clammy fingers. They smothered the morning’s hope before the sun could fully rise. “With the Samyazas using the same industrial prefabrication techniques as Bab’Tubila, things can keep going like this indefinitely, can’t they? Both sides have the resources.”

  His father laid a hand on his shoulder. “Not indefinitely, Son. But for a long while yet—Assuri may have the method down, but it can’t build Meldur up to Bab’Tubila’s production capacity quickly enough to keep up forever. Not unless something radical happens to change the balance of power. That’s one thing we have going for us.”

  “Listen to us! We’re talking like this is really our war.”

  Lumekki said, “It may not be our war, but it affects our ability to do the work Iyared entrusted to us.”

  Nu gazed off into space. “Just what work would that be exactly?”

  Silence.

  The eyes of both men locked onto something that moved over the hills on the southern horizon.

  “What’s that?” Nu said; pointing at what he had first taken to be low-laying clouds forming over the forest mists.

  “I don’t know. But they’re not clouds.”

  Minutes passed, as things focused. A’Nu-Ahki had long ago thought he was incapable of shock from anything more this war had. He was wrong.

  Arcs of blood-red fire creased the eastward sides of the floating behemoths—for so they appeared to be; fleets of great elongated eggs, each with four stubby appendages on their undersides, two in front, and two aft. They approached with confident ease as they bludgeoned through the lifting dawn clouds, first in silence, then with a rattling drone, as they got closer.

  The sun rose to color what appeared to be great airships in golds, reds, and blues—the colors of Samyaza’s standard. Fiery serpentine seraf Watchers and gold leonine Kherubim with bows of lightning drawn in anger stretched across the rounded fronts of the approaching sky-boats. They swarmed over the valley in groups of four, in diamond flight formations. Nu noticed that their tails had crossed vertical and horizontal fins, with cords that pulled rudders left or right, up or down. The four pods on each ship all held some form of rotary fan engine—the source of the rattling drone noise.

  Nu asked, “What keeps them up?”

  “Lighter-than-air gas!” Lumekki said over the growing hum. “They must have found a fast, controllable way of extracting the lighter-than-air gas in huge quantity—probably by passing quickfire through water! But according to our chemists it’s dangerously explosive!”

  “Explosive or no, it looks like they’ve broken the stalemate.”

  As the fleets approached the farmland and villages, huge bay doors opened in the bottom of each craft.

  “This isn’t good,” A’Nu-Ahki whispered, as one of the floating colossi veered their way.

  “I should have never retired the platoon up here! Quick, help me get that cannon the Emperor gave you as a wedding gift out of the wall shed!”

  “It can’t be angled up high enough!”

  “We might be able to rig something—all we’ll need is one hit if that thing’s filled with the lighter-than-air gas. It’ll go up like a small sun!”

  Giant grenades resembling flower pods at the monastery’s distance began to drop from the slits underneath the airships as they over-flew the villages and farmlands. A hundred or so tumbled from each vessel, screaming demons making playful somersaults toward helpless targets below. They struck with a crackling staccato that outdid Nu’s imagination of the fiery World-end. Green Akh’Uzan became a maelstrom of flame and swirling black smoke within minutes.

  The airship that had detached to attack the monastery rattled nearer.

  A’Nu-Ahki helped his father drag out the cannon and position it between wall buttresses. They placed a couple of kapar stone blocks beneath the forward wheels to increase elevation angle, and locked the carriage brakes. Lumekki returned to the wall shed, and re-emerged with a bag of powder packets in one arm, and two old-fashioned round shot.

  “We’ve only got twenty rounds in there. Keep feeding them to me,” he said to Nu. “The good news is that one hit is all we’ll need.”

  “You already said that. What’s the bad news?”

  Lumekki shrugged. “It usually takes more than twenty rounds to bracket a moving target that’s higher than you are.”

  The flying machine slowed, and seemed to be trying to gain altitude. Nu wondered if maybe its pilots saw a danger of being unable to escape the blast radius of their own bombs against the monastery’s higher elevation.

  Nu peeked over the parapet again as his father jostled the cannon to what he must have figured the best angle and azimuth for their first shot.

  The nearest village of Akh’Uzan, by the tackle smithy and markets, had become a cauldron of flame. Smoke from the ruins threw sparking tendrils out into the surrounding meadows and woodlands in hundreds of panicky flame-spiders. Fields burned out of control, while farm workers ran like ants to flee the spreading inferno. A few houses escaped damage—usually the most secluded ones. However, if the fires continued to burn, these too would be in danger.

  A’Nu-Ahki looked up again at the approaching airship.

  On closer inspection, the flying machine did not seem to be very sturdy. Its skin appeared to be nothing more than a varnished cloth stretched over a light frame, probably made of reeds or wood, which buckled in the mountain breeze. It began to look as if the ship itself might be growing more difficult to handle the closer it flew into Mount N’Zar’s thermal currents.

  “How soon before it’s in range?”

  “Another minute or so,” Lumekki said, as he squatted down and squinted at the cannon’s aiming combs. He seemed to be making some hard calculations, so Nu left him alone after that.

  The turret door swung open. Na’Amiha rushed out, followed by Muhet’Usalaq, and Mamu.

  Nu’s grandmother, on seeing the airships and the fires in the valley, buried her face in her husband’s arms and began to shriek.

  Na’Amiha ran to Nu as if he could actually protect her.

  “What are they?” she shouted, as she grabbed his hand, and pulled his arm over her shoulder like a shawl. Her nails bit into his wrist.

  Nu let her sink into the crook of his arm, and replied, “Samyazas have broken the stalemate by teaching men to fly!”

  Na’Amiha said, “Surprised it hasn’t happened before now.” She let up on his wrist some. “Unless the Assurim dreamed them up on their own; some of Lumekkor’s machines have nothing to do with Uzaaz’El.”

  “Yeah, but Assuri has always been backwards in such things. They tend to copy rather than invent.”

  Lumekki said, “I think it’s in range!”

  A’Nu-Ahki looked back at the airship. It now clearly showed signs of trouble in the wind currents. As it rose, a gust from the west at a higher thermal layer pushed it steadily toward Mount N’Zar. The rudders cocked hard dors
al and hard-a-port to steer it away from the treacherous rocks that overlooked the monastery. Peaks spiked away southward before bending east toward the Haunted Lands Pass. Even the vessel’s fan-engines rotated now to add extra thrust against the breeze to escape them.

  The higher the air-leviathan went, the stronger the wind became, until all its power worked just to maintain station-keeping. To do that, the ship came about to a lengthwise profile, parallel to the south rampart that held the gun—a target aspect larger than Lumekki could have hoped.

  The cannon fired.

  The barrel recoiled in its carriage slide, as the shot screeched away. It reached the top of its arc, level with the airship, but fell short.

  “Up elevation angle by two degrees and more powder!” the Tacticon said to himself. He then rushed to the shed, and returned with a wooden slat, which he tried to wedge under the cannon.

  Nu broke away from Na’Amiha to lift the carriage, careful not to sear his hands on the hot barrel.

  The floating monstrosity angled closer, despite its inability to pull forward and away from the mountain.

  Lumekki adjusted the gun’s position, and roughed out a new firing solution. The airship continued to wrestle the thermal currents.

  Nu figured the wind must be unnaturally strong to hold back four huge engines. He smiled, while ‘Miha pushed her way back under his arm.

  The wind’s strength did not behave unnaturally as much as it did providentially. He quietly gave thanks, and squeezed his wife’s shoulder.

  Lumekki unleashed another round.

  This shot tagged one of the ship’s forward fan blades to shatter the engine pod without striking the upper bladder that held the lighter-than-air gas. The force absorbed by even this grazing impact sent the vehicle into a wobble that revealed the tiny pilot’s cabin on its underside, between its forward engine-mounts, for the first time. It took almost a minute for the pilots to stabilize their craft, during which time Lumekki fired a third volley that missed several cubits right of target.

  The airship could ill afford the power lost from its missing fan. It began falter in its battle with the wind, and drift now toward the rocky crags.

  Lumekki fired two more missed shots before the air currents pushed the airship too far left, beyond the azimuth allowed by the rampart’s fighting port. They watched the craft struggle for another fifteen minutes, first as it tried to drop out of the thermal layer, then by tacking southward. Neither move did more than prolong the inevitable.

  A’Nu-Ahki’s father had not overstated the effect of an impact on a flying machine held aloft by the lighter-than-air gas. It bounced lightly into the cliff face and teetered back out about forty cubits before collapsing into a roll of flame that consumed its fragile infrastructure like melting cobwebs. Staccato explosions shot from the tumbling fireball as its bomb load cooked-off and blew part of the mountainside down on top of the wreckage, which extinguished the fires as quickly as they had erupted.

  The rest of Samyaza’s air fleet had by this time heaved to, and retreated over the southern hills.

  When Nu gazed over the devastation of Akh’Uzan, he was glad the cannon had not directly hit the airship as planned. The ensuing fire would have enveloped the wooded hills around his fortress home.

  He caught his breath, and tightened his hold on ‘Miha before his muscles started to quake uncontrollably. She melted into his embrace with a satisfied sigh, seemingly unaware he was simply clutching her so he wouldn’t collapse into a post-stress panic attack like those he had often experienced after the kind of hunt back at Salaam-Surupag when men had died under his command. Emzara had intuitively understood the shaking. Na’Amiha just seemed content to huddle with him in destruction’s aftermath—as if he had actually done something to protect her.

  Nu’s illusion of the war’s distance was forever shattered. He decided to let his wife keep whatever illusions she had about his embrace. All the rules had just changed.

  Although El-N’Lil, the Divine Wind of E’Yahavah, had blown protection across A’Nu-Ahki’s family fortress, uneasiness remained, along with barely concealed tremors and silent thanksgivings.

  He knew that the fire from the sky would soon be back.

  A’

  Nu-Ahki set up the Akh’Uzan field hospital tent outside the ruins of the nearest village, under a canopy of gigantic redwood trees, to keep it camouflaged from the air.

  Three times a week the flying death returned. The airships did not always strike the same targets, but they kept the region in continual turmoil.

  The Valley of Seers had grown wealthy for over a century as the breadbasket of Tubaal-qayin Dumuzi’s southeastern front. By its largess, the Dynasty of Steel had been able to keep Samyaza bottled in the lower Gihunu Valley, away from Khavilakki and the Near Kush headlands. Now payback from the enemy had arrived in full.

  Twice more, air units had detached from their main fleet to attack the monastery fortress, each time using more ships. Both times, the Divine Wind, El-N’Lil, returned to send the fragile bombers into N’Zar’s jagged teeth, one on top of another. Lumekki no longer even felt the need to man his cannon, as the enemy soon gave up on attacking Q’Enukki’s Retreat.

  Not so the farms and villages.

  Over two hundred people had died in the fire storms so far, and almost twice as many lay with severe burns or lost limbs across the field hospital’s dirt floor—more than half of them children. A’Nu-Ahki learned not to eat in the morning because the stench of charred flesh would only bring his breakfast back up on him.

  Mamu and Na’Amiha had taken to scouring the meadows for wild aloe plants because they had to harvest Nu’s entire medicinal crop in a single week to treat all the burn victims. Bathing vats lined one side of the enclosure to contain the worst cases. Amomun lotus water, steeped, then cooled to lukewarm, continually had to be poured in and drained to regulate body temperatures and keep the victims hydrated. Most people burned this badly did not live long anyway.

  Nu’s greatest fear was not that the airships would discover their infirmary and destroy it, but that his opiate pain powders would run out, and that the groans and weeping would turn instead into shrieks while he debrided the dead tissue from the burns.

  Mountain birds sang madly over the dead and dying. Nu paused to rinse his bloody hands and stretch. The sudden urge to dash from the tent and never return wore itself down to his grabbing a seat on a barrel by the flaps to catch a little of the deceptively sweet outside air.

  A woman about half Nu’s age with half her face burned away lay on a blanket nearby, repeatedly counting her fingers aloud to herself. He recognized the other half of her face as belonging to one of the women rescued from the pens at Salaam-Surupag a hundred years ago.

  “One, two, three, four, five…” she switched hands, “…six, seven, eight, nine, ten… not enough—there’s never enough! One, two, three…”

  “Make her shut up!” A priest demanded of Nu.

  The local Keeper of the Altar lay on a linen sheet next to the counting woman. He glared up at A’Nu-Ahki as if he had power over the woman to make her speak or be still.

  “One, two, three, four…”

  “Make her be silent!” said the Priest, who no longer had any legs. “How can anybody offer a proper prayer with her constant noise? It’s disrespectful to the Divine Name!”

  Nu slid down off his seat, and squatted next to the woman so he could look into her eyes and get her attention.

  “Why do you keep counting your fingers?” He said to her softly.

  Her glazed eyes met his, and seemed to peer right through him. “I don’t have enough fingers. I try to make sure they’re all there, but I’m missing too many.”

  A’Nu-Ahki gently clasped both of her hands in his. “Look, you have five fingers on each hand—just like me.”

  She jerked her head back and forth, and shouted, “No! You don’t understand! I’m trying to keep track! At Salaam-Surupag, I had sixteen children, and I couldn’t k
eep them together in the rush! I tried to count their heads as we moved beyond the gates. Then the armies attacked! I saw twelve of them killed, and the others… who knows? They were my first fertile cycle. Yesterday fire rained down from heaven, and the eight children from my new cycle all burned! I’m trying to count heads, but I don’t have enough fingers. I never have enough, and their screaming never stops!”

  She laughed like one of the mad song birds outside.

  “I’m sorry.”

  She looked up at him, suddenly more lucid. “They say you have the seer’s gift, though my husband calls you a heretic for ‘marrying that whore of Qayin,’ as he puts it. Me, I’m not so quick to judge. But tell me, why does E’Yahavah hate me? I’m a reasonable woman—I understand that bad things happen in life. After Salaam-Surupag, I didn’t even blame him or curse heaven as many did. But twice? If you’re a seer, surely you have insight?”

  A’Nu-Ahki stared at her, wanting to avert his eyes to avoid the question, and the wretchedness. Instead, he locked them onto hers. I owe her that much, since any possible answer must seem trite and empty.

  “E’Yahavah does not hate you.”

  She laughed, blowing half-clotted blood from her nose. “Where does he hide then? Where’s his power and protection for the Seer Clan?”

  “I lost my family, too, at Salaam-Surupag. There’s no magic shield for us against mortality and suffering—no special power to sidestep pain.”

  She relaxed her head back into the rolled clothes she used for a pillow. “Then what good is trusting him if there’s no power? He’s just another broken hope that doesn’t work in the real world. What good is it?”

  A’Nu-Ahki hated that he knew what to say to her. He hated even more that his conscience wouldn’t allow him to not say it, and that he had to say it to himself as much as to her. “It isn’t about what works, but about what’s true. I find it unsatisfying too sometimes, but there it is.”

  “What good is truth if it doesn’t work?”