A Broken Paradise (The Windows of Heaven Book 3) (8 page)

She nodded, relieved—until the Fear began laughing like crows in the background noise of her mind.
Maybe it was chatter from the campfire.

Khumi kissed her again and Tiva responded with a willingness born from reassurance. The inner crows sank into her depths, with one final taunt:
“
How is all this not just another kind of scary?”

Let me begin by observing first of all, that nine thousand was the sum of years which had elapsed since the war which was said to have taken place between those who dwelt outside the Pillars of Heracles and all who dwelt within them; this war I am going to describe. Of the combatants on the one side, the city of Athens was reported to have been the leader and to have fought out the war; the combatants on the other side were commanded by the kings of Atlantis, which, as I was saying, was an island greater in extent than Libya and Asia, and when afterwards sunk by an earthquake, became an impassable barrier of mud to voyagers sailing from hence to any part of the ocean.

—Plato,
Critias

Armistice

Tarbet’s stomach did flip-flops to the gentle motion of the giant ironclad’s deck. The peace pounded out by the gathering of titans in the ship’s enormous, gold-gilded, red velvet cushioned salon had taken on the murmur of his growling belly.
Surely, the Great War itself was not so tumultuous.
He grimaced at the sour reflux eruption halfway up his esophagus.

Fortunately,
for Tarbet, Lumekkor had broken Aztlan’s Polar Fleet. The threat of invasion to Thulae had halted Psydonu’s other fleet at the Straits of Kush and brought the titans of both sides to the negotiating table.

Huge blond At’Lahazh, son of Psydonu, pounded the round bar stand at the center of the salon with his
six-fingered hand and snarled something terse at the exquisitely sculpted Uggu of Lumekkor.

W
olf-headed Avarnon-Set and dark, glassy-eyed Psydonu of Aztlan seemed to exchange pleasantries off to one side
.

How had Psydonu kept his Setiim ancestry secret for so long?
Tarbet wondered. He marveled at the perfection of the western titan’s rich red-earth skin, so like his own. Yet there was something disturbing about the giant’s eyes—they seemed a bit too far apart, somehow dull, and wild in some twisted dichotomy to his jolly demeanor. It both elated and distressed Tarbet to think that this giant and he were distant cousins.

“Look at them,” said a tired voice standing next to him.

Tarbet turned to see Tubaal-qayin V ‘Dumuzi,’ the Shepherd-Emperor of Lumekkor, at his elbow. The potentate of nearly a fifth of the world seemed more thin and sickly than Tarbet had remembered him. Never a large man, Tubaal-qayin could ill afford the weight loss.

Tarbet bowed.
“You look well, Majesty.”

“No, I don’t. And they all know it.” The Dumuzi grunted, nodding toward the titans.

“Lord?”

“They act like a bunch of carrion wurms, tearing up rotting chunks of the world for themselves to devour later on, at their leisure.”

The Shepherd’s words startled Tarbet. He had never known the man to be a pessimist. Then he noticed how Tubaal-qayin Dumuzi was, like himself, shunted to the sidelines of the proceedings.

It struck him then that the only other naturally-born human in the salon was Pandura, the Priestess of Northern Aztlan. She
, too, hung in the background, as if listening and watching like some insect queen waiting for the right season to rebuild her hive. Tarbet allowed his mind to wander back to the wild trysts he’d had with her back at Ayar Adi’in, before Aztlan had broken away from Lumekkor, and the two Temples had divided from each other.
I could never resist her. Why is she here, and not her Lumekkorim counterparts from Temples Ardis and Ayar Adi’In?

“They stand like an army of bronz
ed pillars around that table,” Dumuzi mused aloud, as he gestured back at the titans. “How and when did they seize the machinery of so much power so completely?”

“What do you mean, Lord?”

“You might as well stop calling me that, Tarbet. I’m as much a vassal to them now as you ever were to me—if not in title, then in practice. Or haven’t you noticed?”

“Surely you jest,” Tarbet said diplomatically, while deep down in the discreet confines of his inner thoughts
, he agreed with him.
Why haven’t I noticed it before?

The Emperor grinned like a
drying corpse. “Yes, of course I do.”

The only way Tarbet could have felt more awkward would have been at the table with the titans.
What am I doing here? Why was I even asked? I’m not the Archon yet, and my father is the youngest to hold the Chair since Atum-Ra, when the world was young! Rakhau could still rule Seti for another two hundred and fifty years or more.

“You don’t know why you’re here, do you?” Tubaal-qayin Dumuzi stated more than asked, as if he had just read Tarbet’s thoughts. Even the armistice discussions lulled a bit, as if the titans themselves wanted to hear Tarbet’s response. Something cold in the very air hung over the salon. The mournful wail of a distant sea dragon seeped in on the breeze from outside.

Tarbet stiffened. “As next in line for the Archonate of Sa-utar, I’m a direct descendant of Seti the Great—more than Psydonu over there.”

“True. But why should that win you standing room on the Armistice Ship? Forgive my indelicacy
for bringing it up, but your ancestor ruled half the world over a thousand years ago; you, on the other hand, stand to inherit a paltry few city-states squeezed together on a snaking tract of ground between powerful empires that need you only as caretaker for a washed-up buffer state. Speaking as one fading figurehead to another, hasn’t it worried you that they give you this much attention? It should, you know.”

“Why? Is it not an honor to be included?”

Tubaal-qayin Dumuzi laughed with a noncommittal shrug. “If you say so.”

Yet the bleary eyes and weary words of the Emperor had gotten under Tarbet’s skin. “Please, Lord, enlighten your slow-witted servant. What are you hinting at?”

“I’m related by marriage to one of your seers, remember?” Tubaal-qayin lifted a goblet of wine from the tray of a passing steward and gulped it down in one long swallow. “Maybe he’s actually rubbed off some of his power on me, because I think I can predict your future pretty well.”

Tarbet found the reminder distasteful, but he said, “I’m listening.”

“First come the grand designs.” Tubaal-qayin Dumuzi’s eyes stared off into space as if he was remembering. “Uggu, or maybe Avarnon-Set in your case, will inflame your imagination with all sorts of titan-sized political—or perhaps in your case, religious—schemes. It won’t matter much in the end what these are, but they will be grand, and they will promise the most intoxicating opportunities. And they will come at a time when the world needs them most—that’s important to remember…”

Tarbet w
anted to escape Dumuzi the Shepherd’s company, but could not think of a way to do so diplomatically.

“…Then will come the favors and the debts—their favors and your debts. The Powers behind them are real
, and will work untold wonders for your benefit—things you would never think to ask for yourself, and many things that you would…”

“Are you saying they are evil?”

Tubaal-qayin twitched his scrawny shoulders in another nervous shrug. “Depends on how you define
evil
. Many good things will get done. Many will live better lives. The rich get richer, and the poor don’t mind being poor so much because they are fed and entertained—nothing wrong with that; is there? I didn’t think so. In some ways I still don’t.”

“Then what is the debt? Are they Dragon worshipers or something? Are you saying that I must sell my soul?”

“Dragon worshipers,” the Dumuzi chuckled. “You Setiim have such a rustic way of putting things. Worried about your soul, are you?”

Tarbet blanched. “It’s just that the hard-line seers among my people have insisted for some time that the titans—regardless of their political alignment—are universally sons of demons. And they mean that in its most literal sense—hardly a sense that an intelligent man could take seriously. For a moment I thought you were saying…”

Tubaal-qayin interrupted with a wan smile. “Maybe I was saying.”

Tarbet pretended to chuckle at the joke that was not a joke. He waited for the Dumuzi to clear the air.

The Emperor seemed to think better of leaving the conversation to hang there. “Of course I don’t mean
demons
in the sense that your rustic philosophers do. Still, if you knew what they had my Guild working on…”

“Some new marvel of quickfire
and steel?”

Tubaal-qayin appeared for a moment to be nothing more than a thinly bearded skull covered in stretched skin. “The Fire of the Gods,” he whispered, “but don’t say you heard it from me.”

The Dumuzi turned and exited the salon before Tarbet could ask for further explanation.

Tarbet would have tried to piece together the Emperor’s enigma, but he noticed Pandura circling the salon his way. Their eyes met
, and he thought he saw the same green fire there that he remembered sharing with her briefly so long ago. His motion sickness instantly vanished.

“Darling Tarbet,” she greeted him with a smirk.

Pandura’s blonde, red-streaked hair enshrouded her head like a halo of flame.
Now there’s the fire of the gods for you!
He smiled to himself, and allowed his eyes to dance across the liquid fit of her two-piece uniform.

“My dear, you light up this room. May whatever gods we worship be thanked that our peoples are no longer at war.”

“A silly titan thing,” she said with a roll of her jade eyes.

“How have you been?”

“Too much Temple business and research; I swear I had more fun as a novice working the courts!”

“I know. I remember.” He smiled suggestively at her.

“So you do. But isn’t your wife on board?”

Tarbet did not allow the image of Spulpa’s sponge-eruption body hunched over her seasickness bucket to disturb his view of Pandura’s implied offer. “She has elected to remain in her cabin for the duration.”

“What might your courtiers think?”

“My courtiers think what I pay them to think.”

“Bold as ever—just the way I used to like you.” Her eyes lost some of their insect queen chill and took on a more playful glow.

“How soon will they be finished for the day?” he asked, nodding toward the titans.

“They could go for hours. But what do they need us for anyway?”

“What indeed?”

lmost a week later, the self-propelled sedan coach trundled along the new kapar
-
paved highway over the grasslands between the Setiim port of Hadumar and the inland Archonic capitol of Sa-utar.

Spulpa whined,
“You were with that priestess, weren’t you?”

Tarbet said,
“We had diplomatic meetings. We are both, after all, spiritual leaders of our respective peoples. She wants to negotiate for limited access to the shrines of Paru’Ainu.”

“
Bastard! Some spiritual leader you are! Off to the secret rooms with every Temple tramp from here to Balimar you go, with never a thought to your own respectability or to me…”

Tarbet tuned her out.

He stroked his smooth-shaven chin, and recalled his pillow talk with Pandura—a conversation almost as disturbing as the one with Tubaal-qayin, and yet infinitely more pleasant than listening to Spulpa’s moaning.

Ironically, Pandura turned out to be just as manipulative in her own way as his
wife was, only easier on the eyes.
I wonder? Do all women share that trait? Or do I somehow attract only that type?
That question stirred memories he preferred not to revisit. He re-focused on Pandura.

The Priestess had blatantly tried to convert him into accepting Psydonu’s claim of being the promised Monster Slayer.
The little nymph never used to allow religion to usurp the mood in the old days
—
just the compulsory closing rite whispered under her breath. Fanaticism simply does not become you, my sphinx.
However, something else bothered him more than Pandura’s new-found devotion.

It was possible to make a
reasonable case that her claims represented just the sort of nonsense that Q’Enukki the Seer had predicted the titans
would try—or more precisely, another in a series of developments over the past three hundred years that could be construed that way.

Still, are there no other more reasonable ways to construe them? It’s one thing to concede that the
titans might be a small step toward the fulfillment of the Woman’s Seed prophecy, it’s quite another to latch on to one particular titan as the completed work.

Tarbet had chosen his words carefully in response to Pandura’s pillow proselytizing. “While my mind remains more open, my people would never accept Psydonu as their Seed exclusively. There are simply too many academic and emotional religious difficulties.”

“Now, Tarbet, darling, what could be so difficult about it with you to lead the way for them?”

Not even I’m so vain as to let her stroke my ego that easily.

“You overestimate my abilities,” he had told her. “The foremost difficulty would be the undisputed descent of the Seed Line, up until Archon Iyared. Multiple lines of prophecy establish it up to that point. No Orthodox sage would even entertain an alternate genealogy. Then there’s the dispute over whether or not Iyared really had the authority to split the Archonate from the Seed Line
the way he did. Some hold that he had such power. Others, like me, hold that he didn’t.”

She had kissed his neck
and said, “But it’s all so confusing. With Psydonu’s claim, you could simplify things and show yourself able to rise above the partisan bickering with a bold, unifying third option. Simplicity and the perception of having the moral high ground—people love leaders like that! It’s a win/win for everyone!”

“I wish you were right about my people. Unfortunately, most would not see your option as ‘unifying.’ A growing number believe that the Seed Line
actually stayed with the Archonate, despite Iyared’s dying wishes, thus putting me next on that tree. I know I’m hardly a Monster Killer. But my grandfather strengthened this position when he excommunicated the line of Q’Enukki—the other contender—altogether. Yet even many who reject Q’Enukki’s hokum prophecies object that my grandfather overstepped his archonic authority in an even more egregious way than Iyared, by excommunicating his descendants.”

“But wouldn’t the Psydonu Option avoid such conflicts altogether?”

Tarbet had shrugged. “If it were just about politics, maybe; but there’s the academic question of how to understand prophetic language. Even if we put aside the current disputes over the true line of the Woman’s Seed, your Psydonu still has the problem of being descended from a branch of Seti’s family that never had any claim whatsoever to either the Archonate or the Promised Line. Frankly, I don’t put that much stock in the jangling mouths of sacred scholars and historians, but many of my people still do.”

Pandura had seemed to take it in stride. “That’s too bad. It’ll make both our jobs more difficult in the
long run. History should serve the Now.”

“I agree with you there.”

They had parted again as rather more than just friends.

How I do love the subtle arts of diplomacy!
Tarbet smiled, as he remembered their last night together.

The rancid croaking of his wife grew shrill.

“…Are you even listening to me?”

“Of course I am, dear.”