A Broken Paradise (The Windows of Heaven Book 3) (31 page)

All sons of shame in a land that’s aflame!

Yes, rooting in the slop!

While pretending that they’re walking out on top

Rooting in the sludge!

While denying that their hands
’re stained with blood!

When the song ended, Tiva stood first to give it a wobbling ovation. That was when she saw Kernui, opposite the fire, also standing and cheering.

Everything became a bubbly mire of shapes and sounds. Tsuli and Moon-chaser led her over to meet the singer. Kernui circled their way from the other side of the roaring flames. Farsa also appeared out of nowhere.

“Tiva,” echoed Moon-chaser, “this is Varkun. Watch out—even though you’re married, he’s still a bit of a lady’s man.”

Again
, she felt the singer’s eyes on her, and shuddered. He lifted her hand to kiss it as Moon-chaser had done long ago, only his lips were cold.

He released her when Farsa pushed in between them. Moon-chaser’s sister kissed Varkun savagely on the mouth, as if to declare him off limits. The singer seemed to accept this with an apologetic shrug. Tiva had never seen her friend so agitated. Farsa just giggled impishly, and clung to the stranger like an amorous tree sloth as though nothing had happened.

Tiva gave them both a dirty look, but said nothing.

Everybody talked as if in some strange dialect
that Tiva could not follow. She heard several fights break out in the background—something Moon-chaser and the other Zakes usually broke up quick. This time the scuffling grew until several knots formed around the combatants. Moon-chaser just kept chatting with Varkun and the others, oblivious.

Tiva immediately stopped drinking, fearful that she might not be able to leave if things got too rough. That did not halt the increasing power of the mushrooms, however.
This is getting bad!

“First your disgust at Farsa’s pleasure
, now you look down your nose at a little wild fun?”
said the long absent inner voice of Pahn.
“The forest’s a wild place, Tiva. Don’t start going all Lit on me now.”

Oh, great! Where have you been?
Tiva hadn’t heard from the sprite since her incident up at the Wisdom Tree. She hadn’t wanted to. News of the mass suicides and flying disks in Akh’Uzan that same night had spooked her.

She turned from the others, and bumped into Kernui, who blocked her way. Her heart froze when he answered her unspoken question, “I’ve been away to make preparation. Tonight comes your full awakening.”

Her shocked mind understood for a cold second before her heart dared. T’Qinna and the odd suicides had caused her to doubt herself, Pahn, and her friends. Nevertheless, Tiva had still found it difficult to admit to herself that maybe U’Sumi’s wife could be completely right, and not simply out at one extreme in a range of possibilities. The suicides might have been a mere coincidence.

“Why the deception?” Tiva asked him as her body began to go limp and fall into his arms.

Kernui-Pahn said, “I wanted you.”

The musicians began to play again, while dancers collided in a barely choreographed brawl around the bonfire. Kernui-Pahn held her with her head tilted upward. Tiva saw sparkling lights above the trees, while the cacophony increased. She seemed strangely detached from the terror she knew she felt on some hazy distant level. She glanced back down at the musical mayhem to avoid his eyes.

One of the dancers picked up a Lit boy, who stood with a skin of
dragonfire
at the edge of the ring, and casually hurled him into the fire. The skin burst, and flammable liquid spattered all over him while he tumbled out of the circle, engulfed in flames, shrieking amid howls of laughter from the crowd. One of the other dancers nonchalantly rolled him with his foot, past the Kissy Boys, down into the waterfall pool.

Tiva wanted to break free of Kernui’s arms, and rush down into the pool to help the unfortunate
boy, but now the world spun in gyroscopic precession. After a moment, she noticed that he came up from the pool with only mild burns. Rescued only by the speed with which the second dancer had rolled him into the water and the cover of his Lit-styled clothing over so much of his body, the little fool actually laughed it off, and grabbed another dragonfire skin!

Everything spun faster into a vortex of colors, as the music and dance grew more clamorous. The lights above the trees coalesced into a single shining disk of blue metallic flame, under which stood Varkun with his red cloak turned royal purple in the sapphire glow.

Suddenly Kernui’s arms around Tiva were no longer flesh-toned but polypy, gray, and phosphorescent. She dared not look up at his face, but scrolled her eyes around at the mob and the musicians.

Varkun raised his arms to the brilliant disk, and shouted something in a coarse, unknown tongue. Tiva heard a squeak escape her throat when again the music and dance instantly stopped.

She felt herself carried through the midst of the silent mob toward the terrifying minstrel of Under-world. At Varkun’s feet lay Farsa and Tsulia, both in some kind of trance. On either side of him stood two glowing gray men with huge eyes—obsidian portals into a gibbering madness where voices pressed into Tiva’s head. Those eyes penetrated her soul with cold insect hunger, as the scratchy voices called others of their kind to swarm and feed. Tiva still would not look up at what had been Kernui, but everything came together, as she fell helplessly to the ground by her two girl friends.

Now that it was too late, she finally admitted to herself what was happening. A’Nu-Ahki had described the Watchers to her and Khumi when he had spoken of his own encounter with Samyaza. Had she not also been reading of them in Q’Enukki’s scroll? And T’Qinna—
oh E’Yahavah, why didn’t I listen to T’Qinna?
She knows this stuff!

The gray one that had carried her now stepped around overhead so she could no longer avoid
looking at his face. He stooped down, and laid his hand on her forehead gently. His mouth never moved, but Tiva could hear him speak. The familiarity of his voice made her shake from the inside.

“I have come to take you as
one of my wives, little forest nymph. Do not worry. I have faces and forms more appealing to you than this one.”

The blank gray face of the creature morphed into Kernui—except that his eyes remained black as the shrieking void.

Tiva wailed—a long cry of Under-world’s damned that stretched from deep inside her chest, and echoed far off into the forest night.

She had never connected before how both Kernui and Pahn spoke
with the same voice—one in her head, the other outside.

Yet Pahn’s voice had always carried a haunting similarity to one other, even before Kernui
came. Somehow, she had never quite been able to place it. Nor had she thought about placing it, until now that it came across to her in its undisguised clarity:
The Creature had the same mage-like voice that used to possess Yargat when he spoke to her during “counseling” sessions inside the Shrine.

The ‘medical examination’ to which abductees are said to be subjected, often accompanied by sadistic sexual manipulation, is reminiscent of the medieval tales of encounters with demons. It makes no sense in a sophisticated or technical framework: any intelligent being equipped with the scientific marvels that UFOs possess would be in a position to achieve any of these alleged scientific objectives in a shorter time and with fewer risks.

—
Dr. Jaques Vallee

Confrontations
, p. 13

1
4

Union

The hearth danced in tongues of fire that seemed to keep time with the lyre and pipes. T’Qinna and U’Sumi played accompaniment to the evening worship song of Q’Enukki’s Retreat, lilting strings, dark and majestic, with tubular cyclones of sound that pierced the outer shadows with swordsman strokes. Interludes of dust-dry monophonic chant croaked from old Muhet’Usalaq, or sometimes a more melodious A’Nu-Ahki. The younger folk received the wisdom-cry of ancients, their heavy tones sonorous, sad, and grand.

It seemed strange that news of Kunyari’s Colossus should fade so
quickly to the back of A’Nu-Ahki’s thoughts. He had planned tonight to teach on its prophetic significance—Colossus destroyed with World-end Obelisks unscathed—the divine message was unmistakable, a little too unmistakable perhaps. What more could he possibly add that even the most hardened skeptic did not already know deep down inside?

Instead
, Nu let U’Sumi and T’Qinna’s music soar his heart into the heavenlies—where the interpretation of prophetic omens was always a moot point. It was enough that a new generation would venerate E’Yahavah
in their own language—from their own hearts, in their own music—even if it were only a generation of four.

The Colossus news only underscored
for him that he had wept long enough for his world. His children would be the patriarchs and matriarchs of a new and hopefully better age, free of the oppressive decay and violence of dying civilizations. They would have a clean slate, informed by the elder wisdom, hopefully free of the infected pride and prejudice that had deformed so many otherwise good patriarchal traditions.

Nu smiled at his son and daughter-in-law. Then a new thought sobered him like a battle-axe to the skull:
Do you seriously believe they are not already developing new prides and prejudices of their own?

A’Nu-Ahki suddenly felt the
five-hundred-year gulf between himself and his sons like a gaping wound. He almost quivered to a sob when U’Sumi and T’Qinna returned his smile, their eyes so open and teachable—so unprepared for what lay ahead
. No! I will not go there today! Now we must
draw warmth from above, and from each other, against the World-end night!

Darkness had fallen outside by the time U’Sumi and T’Qinna put up their instruments. Everyone looked to A’Nu-Ahki with anticipation.

They look to me for nearly everything now. After all these centuries, I still don’t understand how I’m supposed to comfort them—yet somehow I do.
Perhaps if I had understood and acted earlier, there would be more people in this hall looking back at me than my own children.
He put aside the encroaching despair, and panned across the chamber to return their collective gazes. He sensed fleetingly that someone was missing.

Muhet’Usalaq’s sharp eyes squinted out at him from a sheath of heavily tufted white brows. His dried apple face and hoary beard waited in the silence after the music, as though sensing
an approaching storm.

A’Nu-Ahki glanced down at his father. Lumekki hardly seemed aware at all of his surroundings, imprisoned in his wheeled chair behind cloudy eyes, with a face that hung limp on one side.

The Old Soldier’s isolation however, was not as complete as it appeared. He communicated only in scribbled half sentences through a trembling hand on a wax tablet. The head wound sustained at the Battle of Balimar Straits had left him paralyzed on one side, and from the waist down. Despite this, his mind was alert. A’Nu-Ahki had learned to tune his ears for the sound of a scratching stylus. Tonight, Lumekki’s writing hand seemed unusually agitated. It did not reach for the wax tablet in his lap pouch, however.

Nu looked questioningly to his wife when he saw his father’s good hand shaking.
Na’Amiha had developed a remarkable rapport with the Old Tacticon. She sat with a towel next to the wheeled chair, and periodically wiped the drool from Lumekki’s lips. Somehow, she managed this without drawing attention. Nu smiled at the irony. If anyone else tried to wipe him that way, Lumekki would grunt and growl as an outraged bear. In whatever wordless language they shared, she had spared the dignity of this once great army officer in a way Nu wished he could emulate.

Perhaps
, he thought, it was that Na’Amiha had earned the Old Soldier’s respect long before the crippling wound. It was no small thing to marry into the Seer Clan from the House of Tubaal-qayin.

Nu sighed
, and wished again that the rest of Akh’Uzan would assess her on her merits instead of on where she came from.

A’Nu-Ahki moved his eyes to Iyapeti and his young wife. When he saw Sutara, he realized who was missing.

Sutara’s mother, Galkuna, was in the process of moving up to Q’Enukki’s Retreat after what everyone hoped would be a temporary falling out with her husband. She had carted the last of her things up to the monastery earlier that day.

A’Nu-Ahki asked his daughter-in-law,
“Didn’t your mother say she’d be here tonight?”

“Yes,” Sutara said, “She should be here by now. I’m getting scared. There’s too much noise up Grove Hollow way. It’s different from their usual racket, less music, and more screaming. It gave me the chills when I went out to the gate to watch for her
, earlier.”

Na’Amiha
said, “Do you think Khumi and Tiva are okay?”

“I left Khumi at the
drydock an hour ago,” Iyapeti answered. “He said he was working late. He didn’t look well—rather worried and tense.”

T’Qinna almost whispered,
“That means Tiva’s alone.”

Sutara turned to her sister-in-law. “Normally
, I’d say that Tiva can take care of herself. But things are different out there tonight.”

U’Sumi asked his father,
“Should we go up to check on her?”

Nu paused before answering, asking silently for E’Yahavah’s wisdom.
“No,” he said, “at least not yet. I feel in my spirit the need to focus on Tiva tonight. I’ve been under the weight of it for years. The trouble she’s in now won’t go away by our physically going up there in strength of arms. We have another, more effective way to fight, and it’s past time we got down to it.”

A’Nu-Ahki fell to his knees, and began to call out to E’Yahavah.