A Broken Paradise (The Windows of Heaven Book 3) (36 page)

ggu and Avarnon-Set stood atop a promontory somewhere in the sub-polar regions of Northern Lumekkor, and watched the gentle ocean waves dancing in the brooding twilight. The titans overshadowed the small bluff like dark bronze sentinels on a shore of barren moors. The setting sun of evening shone at a real time of just three hours past noon. It was the Autumnal Equinox, that beginning of long winter chill in the North Country, when temperatures dipped so low that the dews turned to frost, and when, on the shortened days that the warmer south breezes failed to blow northward, even water froze into thin layers of glass.

An island jutted from the sea, just on the horizon. The two titans, along with their military escorts,
fixed their attention on the tiny piece of land. Guild mages and their acolytes fussed over the glowing glyphs that covered a hastily erected metal obelisk a few paces behind the observers.

“Where in Under-world is he, and why should we be waiting for him anyway?” Uggu said
, arms folded.

Avarnon-Set bared a fang.
“Be patient, Brother. Tarbet has been in my close counsels; he knew something of this even before most of our arch-straticons. I sent the guard down to fetch him.”

Uggu growled.

Minutes later, a lone figure wrapped in a blanket drifted across the lichen-coated moor from the tent caravan, toward the obelisk.

“Forgive me, my Lords!” the Archon said, as he trotted to their sides. “This endless sunset has got my natural timepiece all turned around—I overslept from my nap
—my most sincere apologies.”

“It happens even to titans,” said Avarnon-Set with a gleam in his eye that Uggu
figured would disembowel, rather than pardon, if acted on.

Uggu returned his gaze out to sea.
Get on with it!

“The Visitation will begin in a few minutes,” informed one of Avarnon-Set’s mages. “I ask my Lords to don these special masks.”

They each took a stylized mask from one of the acolytes, and placed them over their heads. Uggu felt eerily as though he were donning a black hood for his own execution. Then they all turned their eyes out to sea again.

Tarbet said, “I can’t see a thing!”

“You will soon,” Avarnon-Set replied. “Signal the Visitation,” he commanded the obelisk mages.

Several seconds passed with every eye riveted to where they knew the little island to be, although none of them could actually see it through the heavy glass tinting in the eye-holes of their masks. One of the acolytes counted aloud from over by the obelisk. When he reached the designated number, a great flash, almost blinding even through the face-wear, stretched out in a flattened disk across the northern horizon.

A fireball consumed the island in billowing rolls, growing dimmer as it climbed, and spread into a gigantic mushroom. Its deadly beauty transfixed Uggu, who saw roiling flame flowers sprout and unfurl toward the heavens. No sound accompanied the Visitation until several seconds later, when a hot wind sand-blasted the Giant’s exposed arms and lower legs with scalding droplets of ocean water. Fire gryndels drove the observers back from the edge of their lookout, until Uggu felt his arm hairs singe and curl in the heat.

The shock wave bowled over the acolytes by the obelisk
as if they were helpless tumbleweeds, sprawling them some fifty paces across the wavering moor. Uggu had to brace his legs to keep himself from also going over. Several others did the same.

Tarbet screamed to Avarnon-Set, as soon as his voice was audible over the howl,
“By the Ten Heavens, what have you done?”

The wolf-headed giant threw his head back and roared with hacksaw laughter, a blackened silhouette against the lurid light. “
It’s a sacrifice with the Fire of the Gods, good Archon—the Fire of the Gods!”

Uggu wished he could see the Archon’s face through his eye shield.

hen the light dimmed, they removed their masks to see a huge mushroom of fire and smoke spreading above the Place of Visitation—more red and orange now, and tolerable to the eyes. The air became equatorial.

Tarbet’s arms and legs quivered to hold his loin muscles together. Then he noticed to his horror that the island where the Visitation arrived had disappeared. In its place, a gigantic wave moved toward them, a swelling black pustule of floating dead fish. The Archon screamed as it crashed its infected foam most of the way up onto the obelisk hill. Some of their campsite in the moors below washed away, as the ocean swarmed inland on either side of them.

For a moment
, Tarbet thought the ocean would trap them all on an island, or that the fabled World-end of water had somehow been unleashed, despite all the prophetic and engineering experts who said that it could never literally happen. Then he noticed the return ebb of gray froth, and the retreat of the waters like the removal of a black shawl.

“This is the fire of your gods?” Tarbet shrieked. “Do you now call down the powers of heaven at your whim?”

Avarnon-Set said, “I told you this would be formidable.”

“But do we have the wisdom to
use the very fire of the heavens?”

“The push toward divinity is inexorable, my dear Archon. If we are to be
elevated, as your seers imply, then we must start to embrace divine prerogatives and tools. We have manipulated creation codes in both crude and complex ways for centuries. Now we must control the elements.”

Tarbet saw the terrible mushroom of fading fire reflected in the watery pools of the Titan’s black pearl eyes, and shuddered.

rom far out in space, Q’Enukki could see what Tarbet could not.

Although he was still a ways off beyond Tiamatu, the flash near Earth’s North Pole drew the Seer’s attention away from the nearby comet. Earth seemed to grow, as his enhanced vision focused in on its tiny sphere.

Q’Enukki saw sudden changes in an adjacent fault line deep beneath the sea, after the giant mushroom cloud spread out over the Polar Ocean like a massive tumor of flame. A dense basaltic pipe formation
, with its top end on the island test site, penetrated the continental edge all the way to the Earth’s mantle. It lay hidden there since the dawn of creation.

Diamonds and other rare crystals
, formed by intense mantle heat and pressure, had risen along this gigantic rod-like plug in the Earth’s crust, between the ocean floor plate and the continental craton. Unfortunately, none of the Guild surveyors had discovered the island’s geological oddity, which happened to sit at the edge of one of the thinnest, most pressure-sensitive, spots on the planet. Had the surveyors noticed the diamonds under the surface, they surely would have chosen another site for the “Visitation,” and brought in miners—instead of magi specializing in elemental particles.

Hairline fractures in the Earth’s crust grew out from the pipe—a perfect conductor of shock waves—on either side of the Visitation blast. Nothing dangerous in themselves, these cracks could hardly accommodate a razor or even a hair in most places, were they visible to stick such things in
to. While they usually did not pierce all the way through the crust, they did cut along the continental and oceanic plates in some of the thinnest regions. A growing fracture snaked beneath the sea that divided Psydonu’s Shield from Lumekkor. Another cut its way under the Pole, then south, along the floor of the Great Outer Ocean, east of the Nhoddic Coast.

As long as nothing disturbed the mantle to accelerate the growth of these cracks, little would happen of any consequence—as long as nothing disturbed the mantle too much. Yet even without such a disturbance, the shock itself aggravated several lines of crustal weakness that slowly wound along paths of least resistance across the Northern Hemisphere.

In minutes, the micro-fissure beneath
Yawam Tsafuni
reached the Great Channel between Middle Aztlan and Southern Lumekkor. Its growth slowed north of Far Kush, under the Hydra Gulf, where a thickening of the continental plate would have forced it either southwestward or east. The hairline fracture stopped before it could divert in either direction, however. Its expansion quietly ceased, along with that of the other tiny cracks in the planet’s crust.

For now.

And said
the
lord God to Noah, ‘Time for every man comes before me; for the earth is filled
with
iniquity by means of them. And behold, I lay them waste, and the earth. Make then for yourself an ark from [wood four-cornered]! Nested
compartments
you shall make… And I, behold, I bring the cataclysm of water upon the earth to lay waste all flesh in which is a breath of life underneath the heaven. And as much as might be upon the earth shall come to an end. And I will establish my covenant with you.’

—
Genesis 6:13-14 & 17-18

(Septuagint in English)

16

Drydock and Floodhaven

The concentrated tar stench inside the tight stateroom compartment burned Tiva’s throat as she tried to apply the smoking hot goop to the bulkhead.

She had taken
over T’Qinna’s duties at the shipyard, but could never replace her sister-in-law’s sorely-missed experience and charm. So many layers of grief had so quickly consumed any joy from the miraculous day of Tiva’s rescue that she had determined long ago to quietly make the best of it, and never mention that day again, lest anyone beside herself should notice something she found painfully apparent. Tiva needed no one to remind her how wretched a trade she was for the likes of T’Qinna and Galkuna, not simply around the shipyard, but as a human being.

Khumi’s wife
tried to be useful, but always felt dwarfed by the others, no matter how diligent her efforts. She frequently cried herself to sleep over it, but only after Khumi snored. This he always did seconds after a form of “intimacy” that seemed more like securing the drydock’s kapar application equipment than it did lovemaking—often without a word or even a kiss for her. Any way she viewed it, Tiva’s life around the shipyard had quickly deteriorated without T’Qinna. Each day brought new reminders of how, during the years she had spent indolently up at Grove Hollow, the others had enlarged themselves to face the very end of their world.

Days
had turned into weeks, weeks to months, and months into years. Tiva wondered when she would experience the inner strength and sense of belonging she saw in the others, but which now felt to her like something ever-so-briefly dangled before her eyes at the very beginning, and then snatched away. It wasn’t that she didn’t ask E’Yahavah desperately for strength to be like them. A wounded childlike trust that such strength must someday come to her was all she really had. Yet that trust came marbled with stringers of fear and doubt that she could never quite dislodge.

W
ords of encouragement from A’Nu-Ahki or Na’Amiha during worship times kept her from giving up, though sometimes just barely. Everything else seemed to suggest that the Curse of Henumil had followed her right through Grove Hollow, and still somehow dogged her steps even at Q’Enukki’s Retreat. Only now, her desires were not such selfish ones—she wanted to contribute! She really wanted to be a good wife to her husband!

T
he others never treated her badly—they did anything but—except Khumi. As always, the one heart that mattered most was the one who gave affection in only the most meager measure—sometimes not at all.

“I’ve shown you how to spread that sealant three times!” Khumi shouted, snatch
ing the soggy applicator brush from Tiva’s clumsy hand.

“I’m sorry! It lumps up before I can get it all onto the bulkhead!” The tears started.

“That’s because you move like a snail—here!” Khumi quickly cleaned the brush, stirred the hot sealant pot, re-dipped, and spread the piney tar across the wall in fluid strokes—exactly as Tiva had tried her best to do for hours. Then he glared at her and shook his head. “You might as well just clean yourself up and go home. You’re no good to me here. Maybe Mahm can put you to work with supper or something.”

Tiva left the ship
through the cargo bay, humiliated—again. None of the others saw. If they had, they would have jumped to her defense—as always—which was even more humiliating.

Tiva washed her arms in wood spirits, and trudged back up to Q’Enukki’s Retreat bone tired, and full of doubts
like malignant tumors. It was dark by the time she reached the monastery-fortress where she traipsed into the common hall to see if she could help set the table, but found it already done. Instead, she halted at the arch, and stared over at the wheeled chair stationed by the fire with its back turned to the great door.

Tiva approached quietly, not wanting to startle Lumekki from behind. She circled the chair to take a seat near the firewood holder.

“You’re home!” called a slurred voice from the wheeled chair.

Tiva jumped,
and then turned.

T’Qinna waved tiredly, a
crooked smile on half her face. The other half—the side with a now barely visible scar from where the hand-cannon had grazed her temple and fractured her skull—drooped, one eye gazing blankly off into space.

Tiva cried,
“You’re out of bed!”

“I’ve nappthed long enough.”

Only then did Tiva see the sphinx curled at her sister-in-law’s feet.

“You’ve been awake
on most days,” Tiva said, as she crouched to hug U’Sumi’s wife.

“Yeah, buth I figruredth enough wa
th enough.”

“Can you walk?”

“Thsome.” T’Qinna coughed, and seemed to fight with her own voice. “If I think about it, and talk slow, I can even sound like I haven’t been tanking ale up at the Hollow.”

They both laughed.

Tiva pulled a stool over and sat down. “The years have been hard at the shipyard without you.”

T’Qinna wiggled her feet, which woke Taanyx up with a yawn. “I think I’ll be able to do some work soon. I moved my toes for the firthst time this afternoon. I just moved them and moved them, and moved them.
I scared poor Mahm out of her wits when I met her in the hall, pulling myself along the wall. She wanted to run down to the drydock, but I thsaid I’d rather surprithe everybody. I can’t wait for U’Thumi to get home.”

“He’ll be
wildly go to—we all will! I’ve missed our talks.”

T’Qinna made a
nother lopsided grin. “We still talked.”

“But not at work. Not like before. Sometimes you’ve only seemed half with us.”

“More with than you think. I know you’ve had a hard time adjusting to the routine.”

Tiva sniffed. “I see you’re back to reading minds again.”

“What’sth the matter?”

“Nothing, now that you’re getting better.”

T’Qinna’s good eye squinted. “Thsomething’s wrong—I can tell.”

Tiva looked around to make sure nobody else could hear. “
There’s something more than just the Khumi stuff, but I’ve been afraid to face it. What if you feared that someone you respected had done something horrible to help you a lot, but at another person’s expense—without you knowing, or asking him to? What if that something had made life better for you, but it was so terrible that you couldn’t bear to know it, yet you couldn’t bear to go on not knowing?”

“I’d thsay you’d have to
confront this person, and make thure of the truth,” answered T’Qinna. “It would be the only way to heal and move on.”