“Several weeks ago, one of our patrols east of Salaam-Surupag shot down a courier aerodrone carrying the latest code machine from Samyaza’s high command. Though the courier died, the pilot survived the crash. We flew him, and the machine, out from a secret drone field we have up in the mountains nearby. We placed into the wreck a smashed model of an earlier decoder and arranged for the crash site to appear far more destructive than it had actually been. We also replaced the pilot with a body flown in from another drone crash before we simulated a fuel fire in the wreckage.
“When we interrogated the pilot, we found that his mother had been a woman captured at the sacking of Salaam-Surupag. The young man was most cooperative, and volunteered all sorts of information about enemy drone engineering and movements, little of which turned out remarkable. He also informed us that his mother, and indeed many of the captured women from Salaam-Surupag, were still alive and settled at Samyaza’s chief Temple-run industrial city of Iglat-Meldur.”
Lumekki asked, “Can you verify his story?”
The Dumuzi’s Master Assassin, who also served as an intelligence adviser, said, “To some degree, yes. We’ve had information for two decades that many of the women from Salaam-Surupag were settled in Meldur…”
“Why didn’t you tell us?” Nu said. Visions of his lost daughters flooded his heart like angry ghosts for the first time in many years.
“We didn’t think you had a need to know…” the Master Assassin tried to explain.
“Need to know!”
Reactions and counter-reactions across the table began to fly out of control. Tubaal-qayin raised his arm for silence, and somehow regained command of the proceedings. He suddenly seemed far more in touch with things than Nu had ever given him credit for being.
“It can be argued fairly that this information could have been shared with the Seer Clan,” said the Emperor. “But would this intelligence have been actionable for you? We would have risked the compromise of several important intelligence sources simply to provide you with information that might have been nice for you to know, but impossible for you to respond to.”
Lumekki nodded, apparently able to see Tubaal-qayin’s position. Nu also saw, but felt less sanguine about it than his father seemed.
Muhet’Usalaq spoke for the first time. “So why tell us now?”
Tubaal-qayin folded his hands on the table in front of him. “We have here an opportunity to establish an intelligence network inside Samyaza’s chief industrial city. The pilot confirmed our suspicion that many of the wounded Assurim veterans of the Salaam-Surupag Invasion have since settled at Meldur, and taken work in its Temple factories. Many of your women have been kept as concubines by these men, and by the disabled titans that led them, to compensate for their injuries.”
The room seemed to turn purple for Nu, as he pictured his twin daughters ‘Ranna and ‘Nissa struggling against the obscene pawing of…
Lumekki said, “So what do you want from us?”
The Emperor looked down at his folded hands. “None of the women from Salaam-Surupag have any reason to trust my operatives. I understand your people actually suspected that I would be the invader of your city and that the Samyazas took you quite by surprise…”
“You want one of us to go there,” Nu concluded aloud.
“To sum it up, yes. But I will not force you against Iyared’s Oath.”
“Though not to rescue our people,” Nu said.
Tubaal-qayin nodded. “No. We need them to stay put for now.”
“Then why should we do it?”
“There will be a treaty of repatriation when the war ends. Assuri will owe huge reparations not only to us, but to your people as well. I will insist that repatriation be a part of that.”
“You assume Lumekkor can break a stalemate that’s lasted a century and a half.” Lumekki said. “Yet your own strategy of attrition has set up this self-sustaining slaughter!” By now, it seemed a useless litany even to Nu.
“Only if all things continue unchanged,” said Tubaal-qayin.
“What is going to change?” Nu asked, staring into “the Shepherd’s” eyes to see if so much as a twitch there would reveal a lie in his response.
“I can’t talk about that. But things are changing. When the time is right, a properly placed network of operatives could hamstring Samyaza’s industrial capacity long enough for us to exploit a major offensive along several fronts. There are also other factions involved. That’s all I can say.”
No twitch, no lies; at least none for the moment.
Tubaal-qayin Dumuzi added, “What if the mother of this pilot knows the fate of your daughters, A’Nu-Ahki?”
“What do you care about my daughters?”
“Frankly, my war plans don’t even consider them. But I’m not a heartless monster, as some of your local religious propaganda paints me.”
“Our press prints only the books of Q’Enukki, and that piece of nonsense about how I killed the gryndel,” Nu replied.
“Then another press operates in Akh’Uzan in your Zaqen’s name.”
A’Nu-Ahki exchanged glances with his two sires.
Muhet’Usalaq spoke again. “Thank you for bringing this to my attention. Be assured that I have not authorized such a thing. It will stop.”
“That is good to know,” said the Dumuzi. “I didn’t really think you had. The scrolls say some pretty rancid things about the Royal Aunt, and your grandson here too—something about the ‘heresy of a false Comforter’ —whatever that means.”
Nu looked at both his father and grandfather. Muhet’Usalaq nodded to him ever so slightly.
“I’ll go to Meldur,” A’Nu-Ahki said. “How do I get there?”
Nu’s sudden confidence wilted when Tubaal-qayin told him.
T
he Firedrake multi-terrain light armored chariot had an extended fuel range enhanced by additional tanks attached to its outer covering. These sat beneath a façade of flexible plates and ringlets that camouflaged the vehicle as a large spike-tail dragon to passing aerodrones. Not that there were many of those around. Neither Lumekkor nor Assuri had aircraft with fuel ranges to sortie across the Haunted Lands of Southern Aeden and back. Intelligence had the Southern Watcher’s fleet of obsolete “Samyaza Gas Bag” airships patrolling the mountains on Assuri’s western border, however.
Except for the heat and constant weaving through dense foliage, the amphibious millipede-tracked vehicle made travel through the Haunted Lands almost comfortable. Not enough to take away the shadow that hung over the place, but enough so Nu could leave much of the vigilance to others, and sleep most of the way. Dragons still ruled here, if only over the heart.
The Firedrake carried enough firepower to kill a large gryndel at close range—as Nu had seen it do with its hidden aft tail cannon. The ease with which it had done so gave him little comfort. For one, the gun was only for ground targets; it could not be elevated against their real threat—airships. Only the aero-cannon under the spike-tail decoy could take on those; but if it came to that, it meant that their insertion mission was already a failure. Secondly, the tail cannon’s use on the gryndel only heightened Nu’s sense that he traveled with men doomed by a suicidally blind over-confidence.
The monster had stalked them since the river—a gryndel matriarch as large as any Nu had ever seen. The driver had intentionally slowed to let their stalker catch up. Had it lunged just right, the huge wurm could have torn much of the Firedrake’s facade off in its teeth—including the rear gun-port and false tail—cannon and all.
The Guild mechanic had cackled like an idiot when he fired into the gryndel’s howling mouth. The Dragon Queen’s massive head and throat—which had filled Nu’s childhood nightmares and adult hunting patrols with such terror—rippled and bulged for a rolling half-second before it exploded like a wet, meaty joke. Its legs, body, and tail walked on for several discombobulated steps, unaware that the head was gone. Then it fell over, just a ludicrous load of collapsing slo
p to feed smaller carrion wurms.
Nu had no love of gryndels. What disturbed him was how these men made everything seem like a twisted joke. He had no patience with the shallow traditionalism that had eroded the Dragon-slayer Order—at least as it had degenerated in Akh’Uzan under the watch of such as Tarkuni and Henumil—from a noble line of paladin sages to a glorified jousting club that resented anything or anyone that encouraged depth of thought, ethics, or humility. Yet Nu’s present traveling companions had lost even that veneer.
He sensed that these Guild men and Dumuzi’s “Assassins” would find it equally comical to mutilate something that was as much a symbol of good as the Dragon had been of evil. It made no difference to them, either in form or substance. They just liked to blow up anything big and alive that would do a raggedy death-dance for them as it went down or flew apart.
Relative safety and lack of desire for such companionship was not why A’Nu-Ahki found it easy to sleep so much of the way, however.
The Firedrake had started out about a week ago from a temporary fueling depot not far from the Gihunu River campsite where Nu had met his father after his previous trek through the Haunted Lands a century and a half ago. Tubaal-qayin’s Guild had been testing a new kind of armored chariot there that ran on distilled oil from the resinous glakka tree. Nu discovered at the fueling station that Lumekkor was slowly building its capability to traverse the wide dragon-infested Gihunu River valley with tracked vehicles; someday hoping to strike Samyaza’s naturally protected heartland.
The Firedrake still ran on grain spirits however, which burned too quickly, with too little released energy for such ambitious operations—at least according to the Guild mechanic Nu had briefly befriended at the camp. There A’Nu-Ahki had learned that Guild mages and mechanics were so proud of their machines that he could easily get them to talk about them.
They even called them by feminine pet names, like women in their own shared metallic harem. Squat, hard, and ugly girls with the tempers of gryndel matriarchs, Nu thought. One day such careless bragging will be their undoing. His written debrief to the Prime Zaqen would be an epic at least, worth all the trouble in itself.
Two vehicles had set out; one loaded with extra grain spirit fuel to extend the range of the other, which carried A’Nu-Ahki and a team of two Guild drivers, a mechanic, and six Imperial Assassins. They parted company with tanker Firedrake two days before, to await their return. They had killed the gryndel matriarch the following day. Except for briefings and necessary interaction, Nu kept to the very back of the vehicle, tucked under the tail cannon, between the water and food stores.
He tried to collate his observations for his future report, but found his mind wandering instead. He thought of the captive women in Assuri, so long destitute even of his regular prayers, and melted with shame.
What will I say to them after all these decades? He wondered, as the diffused green light slipped in through the firing slits from the thinning forest highlands outside. Will they understand what happened? How will I even be able to look them in the eye and tell them that I must leave them in bondage still for years longer? Maybe I am just a false Comforter.
Nu’s eyes closed again as the images came unbidden. The darkness only made them clearer—girls being raped and abused, then left to care for multitudes of bastard children in fortressed bordellos. Filth, squalor, and misery—how many bastards could they have born in one hundred and fifty years? If his daughters drew the resting half of their fertility cycle first, as their mother had, the number might not be as many. On the other hand, maybe some of the soldiers had been decent enough to take them as wives or concubines. Tubaal-qayin had said as much.
They had looked so much like Emza—especially ‘Ranna and ‘Nissa! Is that why I try not to think of them anymore? Is that why my prayers for them turn to soggy pulp in my mouth?
“You have not given up on me. More to the point, I have not given up on you,” said that long absent Voice that was not just an inner voice.
“No,” Nu whispered to himself, “But except for the Firefall, I’ve lived in comfortable insignificance, and grown weary even of the one thing I could still do for them. What does that make me? Certainly not a Comforter from A’Nu—or anyone else for that matter.”
Inner silence.
“I thought as much.”
Nu fluffed his pack, turned on his side, and went back to sleep.
S
ub-Altern Inguska of the Assurim Demigod Corps tugged on the sleeve of the pilot next to him in the flying ship’s wheel house. He had to shout to make himself heard over the droning engines. “I thought I saw something down there. Swing about!”
The pilot spun the wheel and slowly brought the lighter-than-air monstrosity into a circular flight pattern. They were far enough west of the mountain range not to worry about inversion turbulence.
Inguska lifted the telescope to his eye again to try to re-establish contact with what he thought he had seen. Something large moved through the high brush—probably just a behemoth—though they usually stayed down in the swamps at that time of year. Whatever it was, carved a swath through the greenery that seemed just a tad too straight for an oversized snake-necked, battering-ram-tailed cow looking to sample the highland flora.
“There!” Inguska pointed down to the left. The creature crossed through a break in the foliage.
The pilot laughed. “It’s just a stray spike-tail.”
“Its movement doesn’t seem right,” said the sub-altern, who adjusted his spy-glass to squeeze more magnification from its lenses. “The tail doesn’t swing from side to side.”
“So?”
Inguska said, “I grew up on the Northern March, near the eaves of Wyverna Wood! I saw many spike-tails and even killed me a few that stomped my father’s sugar cane. When they run, their tails sway to the rhythm of their hind legs. That one is moving like a wyverna is chasing it, but its tail just drags. I can’t see the legs so well in the undergrowth.”
The pilot swung the airship around one more time. “Maybe a wyverna is chasing it and already got a bite in at the meaty part. It could be wounded so the tail doesn’t swing.”
“I don’t see a wyverna.”
“I think the boredom of border watch is getting to you. You want to be where the giants are.”
Inguska wanted to shout about the divinity in his bloodline. Instead, he pointed out to the starboard aerial cannon mount on the outside deck that surrounded the pilot’s shack. “Let me take a shot at it to make sure!”
The pilot, who was a full Altern in command of the craft, shook his head. “Not today, ‘Guska. We have to make it back through the pass before the dusk winds with enough fuel to reach the Southern Fortress. We’ll come back tomorrow and see if we can pick it up again. I’ll even let you fire the light cannon at it for practice—though it’s just a dragon.”
Inguska scowled as the great airship heaved about on a south-easterly heading for the mountains.
T
he Firedrake stopped in a small gorge up in the foothills of the mountain range that divided the Haunted Lands from Western Assuri. A few hundred cubits higher was a seldom-used pass. The armored carrier could take them no farther and still have enough fuel to return to the waiting tanker deep in the lowland jungle behind them.
The drivers had followed a well-worn behemoth migration trail up to the heights. The gigantic long-necked herbivores came up from the swamps once a year to the more sparsely wooded foothills to calve and nurture their young on highland shrubbery, where fewer large predators roamed.
They had spotted a “Samyaza gas bag” yesterday that circled them a couple times at high altitude before moving on. The Guild mechanic had squeezed into the quadruple mount, rotating anti-drone cannon array on the Firedrake’s roof, just in case they had to jettison their camouflage plates and open fire. Fortunately, the airship had moved on.
Even so, the Imperial Assassins took no chances. The first thing they did when the vehicle slid to
a stop was jump out and pop up a green and brown net awning over the Firedrake to help hide it from the patrolling airships. One of them also ran back to the nearest stand of trees, grabbed a fallen branch, and started to brush away the last of their tread marks.
Nu emerged from the cramped vehicle just as the assassins finished tying down the last of the camouflage net. His ears still rang with the drone of the Firedrake’s engines, so he rubbed them to make it stop.
He realized something was wrong when the hum grew louder.
S
ub-Altern Inguska shouted for the second day in a row, “There!”
“What? I don’t see anything,” said the pilot.
“Take her down to about a hundred cubits. I’ll show you!”
The pilot shook his head, but he threw the latches to bleed off some lighter-than-air gas and decrease their altitude. The dials for the pressurized tanks showed almost three-quarters full, so it would not hurt to indulge his excitable young partner. It might even break the monotony of sentry patrol.
“Look at the furrow now!” Inguska handed the pilot his glass.
“Yeah, I see what you mean,” the pilot said, after several seconds of sweeping the ground with the telescope.
“That is definitely the print of a millipede tread chariot.”
The pilot’s head snapped up as he handed the telescope back to the sub-altern. “Get on the oracle to the gods. Let’s see where this leads.”
“G
et down!”
One of the assassins tackled A’Nu-Ahki and pushed him into a swath of brush next to the shrouded Firedrake.
Another crawled back into the vehicle in case he had to blow the “dragon-hide charges” that would jettison the spike-tail camouflage to open a firing field for the anti-drone weapons.
The airship emerged from behind the last stand of trees down slope, flying lower even than those that had tried to attack Q’Enukki’s Retreat during the Firefall Raids. It rose like a fiery moon, so near that Nu could make out two men in its gondola—one inside the wheelhouse and another on a narrow railed platform surrounding the cabin. The one on the platform used a spy-glass. Fortunately, the sun was getting low on the western horizon, which made the shadows in the small canyon long and distorted.
Dawn Apocalypse Rising (The Windows of Heaven Book 1) Page 20
