The Paladin's Odyssey (The Windows of Heaven) (42 page)

U’Sumi slowly lowered his sword after a quick glance over his shoulder showed his father doing likewise. Neither dropped them, however.

A’Nu-Ahki said, “Peace.
”

One of the savages
made a croaking
laugh, his large black V-shaped head wreathed in spike-stiff dirty yellow fuzz. “Peeees sez ee! Killa killa from iz landz does ee! Girly killa Qingu girly vit hissy featha-stick!”

U’Sumi surmised that the little savages must have rushed the ship, and that it had escaped, since they carried no spoils or prisoners.
Thank you E’Yahavah; please let T’Qinna and Yafutu be well
…

“We’re sorry about that,” A’Nu-Ahki said to the Speaker. “But our ‘girly’ would not have used the feather-stick unless you first used sticks of your own—like these.” He gently nudge
d
the closest spear away. “My name is A’Nu-Ahki, but my friends call me Nu. You may call me Nu. By what name may I call you?”

The Speaker seemed puzzled. “Name? I Qingu! I big cunsort uv Tiamtu! Tiamtu iz mudda, Tiamtu iz luvva, Tiamtu is big Laaady-girl!”

U’Sumi noticed that a couple of the Qingu spearmen were female. He nodded toward
one of the women and asked, “L
ike this laady-girl?”

The Speaker shrieked
and
slapped the woman U’Sumi had looked at, while the others pressed their javelins in closer. “She not Laaady-girl—only Tiamtu iz Laaady-girl! She nothing—just girly-girl!”

As if to prove his point, the Speaker ran the poor woman through her stomach with his spear, pinning her to a soft-wooded vine frond. She gurgled and twitched for several eternal seconds, heaved dark blood, then slumped with her glazed eyes open like a fish.

It
all
happened so fast, so unexpectedly, that U’Sumi had
n
o
time even to raise his sword. The sharpened bone-tipped spears jabbed under his arms, at his middle, in warning. Only now did he pray for his battle-dance to come, though under a sense of profound shame for not having thought of it before then
,
and because his own words had set things off.
How could I have known the little devil would do that?

Shadow-mind
answered him from the murky depths;
“He’s a little devil—what
do
you expect
from devils
?”

A’Nu-Ahki roared,
“That wasn’t necessary!”

“Big wurds! Vaht iz ‘nesti-ssssery?’ No uze big wurds! Name? Nesti-ssssery? Big wurds! Not need! I be Qingu! We be Qingu! If you not Qingu, you be Tiamtu food! Tiamtu sumday eat da whole world!”

Two of the Qingu detached from the circle of spears and produced serrated
seashell knives and bone scrapers
. U’Sumi gagged as they indifferently butchered their impaled comrade. He almost retched, but the rest of the mob nudged him and his father on through the trees, leaving the two to their grisly work.

He still gripped his sword, but even the slightest attempt to lift it brought spear pricks. The Qingu seemed to fear the shiny metal—perhaps had never before seen metal—and did
n
o
t seem to know what to do about it, or what would result from trying to separate it from U’Sumi’s arm. It may even have been that the little trolls thought the swords were part of h
is
and his father’s arms in some way
;
how could one tell with people so alien that they didn’t even know that individuals had names?

That was fine with U’Sumi. Let them get used to the idea that they were in control of the game. Why they had
n
o
t tried to disarm him and his father might be beyond him, but he wouldn’t complain about good fortune.

After plodding over the moving forest floor for almost an hour, they entered a clearing with one face toward the ocean, on the right. U’Sumi was sure it was on the same side of the floating island as the
Amirdu,
though a peninsula or two of vegetation might make doubling back along the shore difficult. A village of sorts filled the clearing—mostly open tents made of giant leaves—with only one crude wooden lean-to structure in the middle.

The Speaker led his prisoners toward the lean-to, as an orange light rose over the misty
woods
from which
they had just emerged. U’Sumi felt rather than saw the Watcher disk, which
hung silently overhead at his back. His head began to hurt, as fire-fly specks began to swirl before his eyes like hundreds of cavorting stars. Other Qingu came out from under the trees, their dull green eyes entranced by the lights.

Under the lean-to
,
a worm-eaten idol of wood and bone in the form of a short-necked leviathan sat on a stand made of oddly-shaped human skulls. The fire-fly lights seemed to spiral in on the ratty sculpture in a way that increased U’Sumi’s disorientation.

An even chugging sound approached from the ocean side of the clearing. U’Sumi
recognized
the comforting engines of the
Amirdu
, though the ship was still far off, invisible beyond the trees. It did nothing to raise his hopes. How could the small vessel put in for a friendly passenger pick-up?

The Qingu—especially their Speaker—seemed not to hear it.

“Tiamtu, big Laaady-Girl! Bringa bringa food food to da mudda, da luvva, who eat
s
da whole world!”

The Qingu all began a guttural chant, as the spearmen
drove
U’Sumi and his father back from the lean-to idol, toward the ocean—this time drawing blood with their prods; fresh blood U’Sumi knew would attract leviathans to him better even than the smell of his own mounting
terror
.

Y

afutu Ursunabi steered
Amirdu
around the jungle point, revolutions at full and not caring. Below, he heard T’Qinna’s cat howling and scraping across the deck. For over an hour now, something from the bottomless deep had relentlessly bumped against the hull, driving the ship as if it was some terrified animal into a hidden snare somewhere ahead. First, it slammed into the port side, then the starboard
, inboard of the nacelle
. Each time, Taanyx scrambled away from the thump, unable to embed her claws in the polished teak-wood deck.

Not even full speed could escape it.

“I just left them! I just left them!” T’Qinna kept crying at him.

Yafutu had tried to comfort her, after she had likewise held him close to console him after she had inexplicably blown up at him. All the while, he kept an eye and an arm on the flying bridge helm wheel, though. He had no hard feelings about her outburst.
She’s a girl, after all, and girls ha
ve
their mystifying fury.
They were
like the sea itself that way
;
no sense being offended at the waves
, his father would have said.

As the engines roared on, it seemed somehow that T’Qinna’s strength had slowly bled into him, leaving her deserted, trembling, and gibbering with a kind of madness. He poured every bit of that power into
Amirdu
, though he had no idea what was below them, nor what it drove them to. Then he saw the gap in the jungle off the port bow and the strange orange light inside it, nestled just below the surrounding tree-line.

The Qingu demon-trolls danced and shrieked beneath the glow
,
Underworld’s
tortured damned, while they forced the two larger figures of the Seer-King and U’Sumi to the water’s edge. Yafutu saw the hungry shapes swimming in the foam below them, but even if he hadn’t seen them, it wouldn’t have mattered. Leviathan
spawn
ed
beneath the Floating Lands.

It took several minutes of speeding toward the Qingu glow-disk for Yafutu to realize that the relentless pounding against the hull had stopped.

“Lady!” he called, “I need you to secure two life-floats to a line to toss to the men when I tell you!”

T’Qinna snapped free of her funk and—bypassing the ladder—vaulted herself over the aft bridge railing to land in a cat-like crouch on the main deck. She tore a couple
of
floats free of their holders, whipped lines around them, and tied them fast to a cleat between the leviathan-barricades on the port beam.

Yafutu returned his attention to the helm in time to see the ocean heave a monstrous water dome in front of them. It exploded into a mountain of spray and a growing pillar of howling foam.

T

he Qingu’s chant reached inside
U’Sumi
and grabbed that
fear
as a caged creature
,
goading
it
toward
the surface,
just
as
the
ravenous
monsters he knew even now sw
a
m
up
ward
beneath
them
,
hidden
only
by the
giant
vine mat. Higher and higher
boiled the torment
, until the shriekers danced around him and somehow even within him, riding his panic upward
as
a black churning bubble from the bottomless deeps.

The tiny spearmen prodded U’Sumi and his father to
the edge of the floating land
—
where a ribbon of giant vine slalomed out
over the deep—
a
foaming rapacious sea with huge
moving
shadows just below its surface. Fins broke
the waves
, sloshing app
endages of monsters from the A
byss
u
that
roil
ed
below
them
like
a mass of
enormous
maggots
with spiked teeth
.

“Have faith, Son,” his father said, as they
stumbled at
the brink.

U’Sumi looked at him as if he were a
lunatic
,
and instantly regretted it. He wanted to say something, but knew the air in his lungs would instantly form into a howl
of madness
if he tried to say anything at all.

In the distance
,
the tiny silhouette of
Amirdu
rounded a point and carved the water toward them at full speed.
Now that’s a laugh!

A watery explosion like one of the massive projectiles from Aztlan’s great ironclads
hit
s
omewhere off to U’Sumi’s right. He looked that
direction
, but saw only a
n enormous
pillar of foam. Then a growing shadow swept toward him out of the sky, narrowly missing him and his father, to land with a thunderous whump in the clearing behind
them
.