A Broken Paradise (The Windows of Heaven Book 3) (23 page)

The degree of sophistication of different groups of animists varies widely from place to place and time to time. In most all cases, however, the dominant motivation of animistic religions is that of fear.

—
Henry M. Morris

The Long War Against God

10

Guides

The pipers blasted the clearing with raging melodies hung across wild percussion like flayed carcasses twitching over a sacrificial blaze of sound. Dancers leaped around the bonfire, twirling heat demons in the red satin night that landed with shrieks of laughter.

Tiva sat on a log with Khumi, Moon-chaser, and Farsa
, watching the dance. They passed a skin of
dragonfire
, and waited for the mushrooms they had just eaten to lift them into another realm.

“Why don’t you ever dance
anymore?” Tiva asked her husband. She hadn’t meant it to, but the disappointment came through in her voice.

Khumi seemed distracted—even bored. The change in him had been gradual—but not so gradual that nobody noticed.

“Yeah,” Farsa said, “you hardly ever stomp the moss like before.”

Khumi answered,
“Just tired, I guess—long hours and stuff. It’s not just woodwork, you know—lots of engineering and calculations, on top of the sweaty jobs. I even have to study new stuff I’ve never done before.”

Moon-chaser laughed. “All I see down there’s a bunch’a holes.”

“Gotta start somewhere.”

Farsa’s brother smirked.
“Yeah, but you’ve been starting for years.”

“Do you really want to know about the holes?”

“No.”

“Then why bring them up?”

Moon-chaser held up his hands as if to ward off an attack. “Touchy! I’m just making small talk.”

“Yeah, small talk,” Khumi muttered under his breath.

Tiva was sorry she had brought up his dancing. She just missed it. He used to dance for her specially. Now he was too tired to bother.

Not that she was
ungrateful for his job; good pay and the project’s nearness to home had made life a lot easier on them. She had her house in the maple tree—now almost finished—enough for them to live in, and entertain guests in, anyway. Besides, in the years since the drydock construction began, her husband had never once broached the subject of moving back to Q’Enukki’s Retreat, and deserting their friends at the Hollow.

Still, Khumi would
not dance any more, and Tiva was sure that much of the time he just tolerated their nights with the Hollowers. In the long run, the trade-off defeated the whole purpose of living up there.

The dancers began to take on that extra dose of color that told Tiva her seers’ buttons had kicked in. She turned to Khumi, and hoped to see her forest sprite come to life again. Instead
, he looked yellow and drawn, with sunken eyes that didn’t even reflect the firelight naturally. For a moment, he seemed to shrivel into a skull. She shuddered, and averted her face.

The music began to take on a life of its own. It carried her downcast eyes back to the dancers. They resembled black cutouts of contorted stick people on the strings of some epileptic puppet-master.

“This is going to be a Lit baggage night—I can tell,” she grumbled to herself.

iva strolled down the hillside trail below the monastery a few days later, Khumi’s lunch inside a covered basket perched on top of her head. The forest seemed abnormally quiet, as though some brooding force hovered overhead to stifle the movement of animals, and even the very air. She reached up to steady the basket, and turned her head. The path back up to Q’Enukki’s Retreat was empty.

She
continued on her way, as always, diverting down the side path toward the Immigrant’s Quarter to avoid the Shrine, and the possibility of bumping into Yargat. The unnerving stillness became a brooding presence.

A twig snapped behind her.

Tiva nearly lost the basket as she swung around at the sound.

Again
, the trail was deserted.

Tiva quickened her pace to get through the last stand of trees.

When the woods ended, she could see the construction site in the open alluvial plain of the other brook, which flowed down from the Haunted Lands Pass. She circled through the immigrant sector so she could avoid the original Seer Clan settlement, cutting west of it, and across the brook at a shallow ford. That way, she only risked meeting Henumil on one of his frantic runs between his house and the Dragon-slayer lodge on the West End.

She approached the half-finished system of gigantic culverts, water breaks, and empty
, earthen-work diversion channels from the northwest, climbing the gentle slope of the plain to regain the altitude she had lost by circling the Old Village.

A’Nu-Ahki had brought an entire kapar
foundry in from Bab’Tubila, and erected it just south of the main drydock basin. Already it poured out thousands of skels of the self-hardening plastic rock a day to trowel over the earth works, and seal together the cut stones that firmed up the channel sides. Huge piles of gray pumice and yellow sulfur sat by the plant, along with great vats of purified natron for hardening catalyst.

Nearby, a resin distillery pumped smoke, as it reduced glakka tree and conifer resins to a piney tar—ingredients for the variety of watertight pavement cements used as moldable artificial stone or a shell-like caulk. Hired laborers shoveled earth, operated the distillery, and the plant, or surveyed the landscape for new channel excavations.

While nobody in Akh’Uzan had really responded to A’Nu-Ahki’s call, any more than they had during his final visit to Sa-utar, years back, few would refuse decent-waged jobs.
Say what you like about the Old Man, he at least pays his workers generously,
Tiva thought. For a moment, she pitied him that nobody took him seriously. She shook it off.
What did he expect?

She found Khumi with his brother—the one they had once thought dead in the Aztlan War—at the edge of the main
drydock basin. Both men pointed and gesticulated, laughed at seemingly regular intervals, and looked utterly wrapped up in their little man-brained construction work talk.

“Hello, Tiva!” U’Sumi said, who first noticed her approach.

Lean, taller than Khumi, with the same curly black hair and tan skin, U’Sumi seemed more approachable to Tiva than her husband’s other family.

She smiled and waved politely.

“Ah, food!” Her husband grunted, lifting the basket from her head without even a greeting. Only after he had stuffed two of her honey wafers into his mouth did he deign to notice her.

So it has begun—
she brooded with downcast eyes—
that life-long spiral where I slowly rot like a dead body from lover, to bed toy, to house slave, to fat-thighed matron. Soon come the maggots—squalling brats that cling like thorns, until finally I’ll scurry through the centuries, a sagging image of my own mother, trapped in the very life I tried to escape!

U’Sumi said,
“Tiva, you’re lucky to have such a handy husband.” His smile was anxious, as if he wanted desperately to impress her somehow. She knew it wasn’t a sexual thing; U’Sumi was utterly devoted to his exotic foreign bride with the Mark of Qayin blazoned across her forehead.

I make them all nervous,
she realized.
Good! If they’re off balance, then at least I have that much control!

“Yes. Lucky,” Tiva replied.

“I mean, if it wasn’t for him we’d be weeks behind.”

“Gooo oonf!” Khumi said with half-chewed honey wafer ready to erupt from his mouth like the head of a giant pimple.

“No, I mean it! I’ve got to face facts. ‘Peti and I show more zeal than skill, and right now we need the skill. Just think what we could be doing if Yafutu had lived.” U’Sumi referred to the young companion that had died at the end of his wartime journeys. “Between his nautical experience and Khumi’s building supervision, we’d have this ship up in five years tops—well, all right, maybe ten or twelve.”

Tiva nodded with feigned interest. She still liked U’Sumi better than Iyapeti. His mysterious bride fascinated her, with those skin markings, and that eerie sphinx cat.
What secrets do those two share? How has this mottled stranger from the end of the earth been able to break from the carefree wildness of her own people to the strict life of a Seer Clan wife? Why would she even want to? Or does something twisted go on behind the walls of Q’Enukki’s Retreat after all, as Henumil always said?

Tiva referred to her father now by his name
. It made it less painful, when forced to think about him, not to think of him as
Father
.

No,
she decided on second thought.
If something perverted was going on, they’d all be more
like Yargat and Henumil—the tense silences, the sterile, affection-free hugs, and those rare smiles that never reached the eyes. Khumi’s family talks too freely, and laughs too easily. Whatever else might be wrong with them, at least they’re nice to each other most of the time, and to me—even Iyapeti in his own clumsy way. Weird thing is he and Khumi seemed to have patched things up at least enough to work together. That could never have happened in Henumil’s house.

Khumi finished wolfing down the wafers and cheese, belched,
and then set his brother straight.

“It’s not me
, half as much as the economy. Pahp hires workers even from Grove Hollow. The valley people may complain about the shipyard being an eyesore, but we give work to lots of otherwise idle people. We’ve also boosted a sagging local market for construction and wood products at a time when demand for resinous wood has dropped off because of cheaper substitutes in Lumekkor. The saw mill downriver can’t afford to pass up such a business boom no matter how much Henumil kicks and screams. A lot works for us to put us ahead of schedule. I can’t take credit.”

Tiva’s skin crawled.
“A lot works for us!” He’s identifying with this insanity, not just getting a wage from it!

U’Sumi grinned, and slapped his younger brother on the shoulder.
“Take the humble road if you want, ‘Umi, but you make a great foreman. You know how to motivate those Hollowers into putting out good work.”

Tiva fumed at this.
So now our friends are mere laborers to exploit! Making a good wage is one thing, Khumi, but we can’t let ourselves get sucked in by the same mind control the Lit sects all use—the same prison I grew up in—people to be used up and tossed out…

“You know, we can’t expect to stay ahead of schedule much longer anyway,” Khumi said.

“How’s that?”

“Stoning the teak and cedar for the keel and framing’ll take several years.
The timber men are only cutting Pahp’s grove now for the deck planking, which will also need to be hardened. I don’t have the nautical experience of your young friend from the West, but I’ve ciphered it out. I even checked my figures by mail with that nautical engineer Mahm used to know in Bab’Tubila—I got his answer yesterday. We need to petrify at least a forty milli-cubit shell into the keel beams—that takes a lot of crystallizer-gel, and about seven years curing underground in the kiln-berms.”

“Seven years? That gnaws!”

Tiva smiled.
U’Sumi talking Hollow-speak! Now I’ve heard it all!

“If we don’t petrify the beams at least that much, the keel will sag, and
we’ll take on water faster than it can be pumped out. The hull planks won’t need so thick a shell, since they’ll hold their shape by mortises and tenons, not just by the rib framing. The frames and prefabricated sections need to harden at least six years. We’re that far from even laying the keel.”

U’Sumi
’s face drooped. “I had no idea it would take that long.”

“Don’t worry. There’s still plenty to do. These culverts must divert a savage mountain run-off. The
drydock basin needs to fill evenly. We can’t risk getting underway until we know we won’t run aground or be smashed against rocks lower down. I played in the stream a lot, making models—remember when you and ‘Peti thought I was just building mud castles to waste time?”

It pleasantly surprised Tiva to watch U’Sumi’s eyes glaze over the way her’s always did whenever Khumi really got going.

“According to that engineer, we need to anchor heavy-duty capstans deep into the pavement and bedrock. They’ll be needed for the lines to hold the ship steady over the dock basin, until the waters are deep enough to support at least three times our draft—that’s the part of the ship’s hull that’s below the water line. We’ll also need to make a drydock housing, with lanyards and cranes almost as big and complex as the ship…”

Tiva almost laughed as Khumi’s talk passed what she called “gibber-monkey speed,” and U’Sumi’s eyes reached their shutdown point.

“The lanyards should be mobile on some kind of steel rail system that arches overhead, and connects to the dock housing on both sides—I’ve already started the drawings. Once the main decks and the ship’s covering are in, we can dismantle the upper lanyards, and use the cranes to remove them, so they don’t come crashing down on us when the waters come…”

Tiva’s amusement stopped so suddenly that she felt herself hurled forward by the momentum.
Khumi said, ‘When
the waters come’
—
not ‘if’ they come! He’s thinking like them! He really thinks it’s coming!

A
terrible little voice rattled up from somewhere dark inside her; “
Should that surprise you, when buried deep down, you think so too?”

Tiva quickly excused herself, explaining that she had cleaning to do.

Once beyond the culverts, she ran uphill all the way home without stopping. All she could think of was what the “savage mountain run-off” would do to her little piece of Aeden.