The Paladin's Odyssey (The Windows of Heaven) (43 page)

The living island reared up beneath him and catapulted him into the air out over the sea. U’Sumi gripped his sword like a baby’s security blanket. Even after hit
ting
the water
,
he
mindlessly
clutched at
the hilt
as he sank into the blackness.

Something cold and living brushed against him from beneath
,
and all he knew was that it wasn’t his father.
He made to fend off whatever it was with the sword, but found himself unable to swing, only to jab a little in the direction of the tip.

Then he heard something like laughter out of the deep.

A

horrendous concussion made the sea
itself
jump
beneath the deck;
not from something hitting the hull, but transmitted through the water. The largest oceanic dragon Yafutu had ever seen flew up from the pillar of foam. He expected it to turn on his small ship, but it did not. Instead, the great fish-lizard nightmare completely left the water with its head and tail down, as if some vast hammer had struck it right in the heart from below. The beast did a twisting arc toward the clearing where the Qingu danced and wailed.

When the pillar of water fell away, Yafutu saw something even more terrible.

U’

Sumi expected gigantic teeth to impale him at any moment as he dropped through the watery gloom.
He opened his stinging eyes, but the surface shown only as a distant shimmer—far too distant.
His sword tip pointed upward to catch the growing light.
An enormous
black
shape swam past him, knocking
Phoenix Fire
from his grip
.

H
e felt something smooth beneath his feet, gently lifting him back toward the surface. The laughter of the deep
grew louder, but it
was not
cold and
mocking,
rather
joyful
and hot-blooded
.

His lungs ached for air.
Then h
e looked down.

The lifting smoothness beneath him had a huge squinting eye.

Y

afutu watched a
n enormous bottle-nosed head jab skyward with wild eyes and a smiling jaw studded with triangular teeth.
Amirdu
, hoary Father of Toothed Whales
,
and Porpoises, Keeper of the Abyssu where water and fire clashed beneath the world, leaped from the ocean with battle-maddened laughter. Its horizontal tail flukes slammed the sea with a noise even louder than that which had sent
Leviathan
flying.
For even the Queen over the Sons of Pride must flee before the ocean’s Father of Joy
—as the old Outrigger hymn said—
until the world’s end, when the lands and seas are all changed.

Mortally wounded, Queen
Tiamatu
landed on top of the Qingu-land, catapulting the Seer King and his son high into the air. They hit the water apart from each other, but no leviathans touched them. Instead, Yafutu saw every Ursunabi-cherished
Whale-tooth-sage
prophecy unfold before his eyes. Schools of porpoises, the sons and daughters of
Amirdu
the Wise, circled the splash-points where U’Sumi and his father had hit the waves. He aimed the ship at a zone roughly halfway between those points.

He gave one last look at the shore. The Qingu’s ghost-light had vanished and those demon-trolls not crushed by
Leviathan’s
death throes threw themselves shrieking into the waves in a
suicidal charge. The sea dragons made short work of them before they too cowered into the deeps.

“Prepare to heave the floats!” Yafutu cried to T’Qinna, as he desperately searched for two human heads to breach the
troubled
dark waters.
He did not need to search long.

A’Nu-Ahki, then U’Sumi, both bobbed to the surface, each pulled along by a joyful porpoise.
Just like Teel was a happy porpoise.
Yafutu wept as he pulled abeam of the survivors and T’Qinna toss
ed
the floats.

A

little over three months after leaving the port below the Gate of the Setting Sun, they sighted true land along the horizon dead ahead.

The coconuts, plus a large haul of water-fruit they had harvested from a small uninhabited floating island about a week after “
Amirdu
had killed
Tiamatu
”—as Yafutu insisted had happened—provided just enough drinking water to survive the remainder of the voyage.

A’Nu-Ahki joined U’Sumi in the wheelhouse and gazed at the darkened strip in front of them. “The question is,” he said, “are we looking at Nhod, or the Island of the Corsairs? If the latter, we could be in worse trouble than before. The Gate of the Rising Sun used to be there, twenty-three degrees latitude north of the Equator. Corsairs slaughtered the caretakers there
during
the Zhri’Nikkor War and took the ruins as their own. They’re much stronger now than they were back then.”

THE PALADIN’S ODYSSEY
|
367

And Cain went out from the presence of the Lord, and dwelt in the land of Nod, on the east of Eden.

—
Genesis
4:16 (KJV)

THE PALADIN’S ODYSSEY
|
367

Desolation

T

he long ribbon of land—real land with bedrock—drew closer.

U’Sumi said,
“Too bad we
have no charts for the Far East.
”

“We don’t need charts,” announced Yafutu, who had scrambled down from the flying bridge holding one of his odd navigation devices. It was a small calculating engine of finely calibrated differential gears, with a lodestone compass and mechanical timepiece. “We’re much farther north than twenty-three degrees latitude. I’ve made a fix on our longitude. We’d’ve hit the Corsair Island days ago if we were that far south.”

“We’d better continue north by northwest along the coast then,” said A’Nu-Ahki. “If my geography serves me, the eastern shores of Outer Nhod run pretty straight into a closed gulf.”

Three days later
,
they hailed a tiny fishing boat to discover that the small port city of Kai-yin in Coastal Nhod
laid
only another day’s journey along the seaboard at their current heading. They put into harbor there at dusk on the following day.

D

uring the long voyage, U’Sumi had watched his father comfort Yafutu over the loss of his family, while explaining to
him the purpose of what had become their circumnavigation of the globe. U’Sumi had also taught the boy much about history and prophecy, confirming for him that the “
Amirdu
Incident” was indeed a mighty sign, but not the end of the Cosmic Battle. The boy accepted this seamlessly enough.

Nevertheless, the obvious answer to the question of what now to do with the boat brought about a great deal of hesitation on everyone’s part.
The
Amirdu
had
provided the only life
Yafutu
had ever known
.
Surely
,
he was far from finished grieving over his family. His last tie to his parents lay roped to the pier in Kai-yin’s shanty harbor—a poor facility for the repairs it needed.

Sunset fell over the distant mountains that overlooked the seaport. On their second day ashore, Yafutu approached A’Nu-Ahki and U’Sumi, as they rested at the stern after a long day of making what repairs they could on the out-rig nacelle. An earnest look creased his face.

“I want to sell the
Amirdu
. It’ll price well even as a fixer-upper.”

U’Sumi and A’Nu-Ahki stared at him with amazement.

U’Sumi asked,
“Are you sure?”

“Yabo. What else can I do? It’s the end of the world
,
and even if it wasn’t, my world ended back in that cave. Sailing across the Great Ocean has given me the chance to say goodbye. To see the Mighty Prophecy of
Amirdu
fulfilled in my lifetime, with my own eyes, is like life from the dead. Everything
is
changed! I know where my father stowed the deed scroll and all
;
it’s just that I’ve never done any business stuff before. I need an adult to act as my—what is the word?”

“Trustee,” A’Nu-Ahki said.

“Yabo.”

U’Sumi’s father stood and placed his hand upon Yafutu’s head, as if about to impart a family blessing.

“I will do better than that,” the Seer said. “Yafutu of the Outrigger Fleet-house Ursunabi, I take you to be my adopted son, with all rights and privileges of lineage granted to the Seer Clan. In the eyes of E’Yahavah
,
and of man,
you
shall in no way differ from a son of my own blood. This I swear to you and all present by the Divine Name.”

Tears streamed down the boy’s face at this unexpected show of acceptance into the innermost sanctum of family. He threw his arms around A’Nu-Ahki
, and stayed there
for a long time.

T

he following week, having made what repairs they could to the ship, they began the serious work of unloading and finding a buyer for the
Amirdu
. T’Qinna and Yafutu stayed at the pier with Taanyx and Shell-head, while U’Sumi and his father set out for the market square.

Kai-yin
was
squalid
and
muggy
,
its single-story mud brick buildings mostly decayed heaps with crumbled facing, missing walls, and dried seaweed laid over sticks for roofing. Many were deserted.

Prostitutes swarmed like flies, without the religious pretext or sanitary conditions of the Temple
s
in Aztlan or Lumekkor. U’Sumi and A’Nu-Ahki could not turn a corner without
encountering
knots of gaudily dressed women and boys who made frantic obscene gestures at themselves while they clutched at
passersby
. Their terrorized eyes made U’Sumi wonder if they
labored
under some
unusually
cruel form of quota system enforced by hidden taskmasters in the dark rotting buildings.

It seems the world is badly rotted at both edges
and its core
, he thought, remembering the little naked girl on the earth’s other
side
, whose brothers doubtless still s
old
her body.
Shadow-mind
somehow belched from somewhere far below. U’Sumi ignored it—after the caves beneath the Gates of the Setting Sun and the Qingu,
Shadow-mind
was
almost
nothing.

Most of Kai-yin’s prostitutes were mottle-skinned—their faces, bared arms
,
and midriffs speckled with natural symmetrical patterns
similar to
those of T’Qinna. Yet there any resemblance ended. Many had misshapen,
elongated
heads
,
while others had a conical rounding to the back of the cranium that bulged to a soft point. A few reminded U’Sumi of the odd V-shaped heads of the Qingu, only these were larger and of lighter skin with darker spots.
S
and fleas
covered all of them equally, as if to make things fair
.

The market district contrasted to the rest of the small seaport
;
its buildings kept in somewhat better repair and
its
prostitutes a little more
knowledgeable o
f
personal hygiene.
Some
comparatively wealthy merchants held sway here. It was among these that A’Nu-Ahki hoped to find a buyer.

U’Sumi said,
“The sooner we can get out of this place, the better!
After the Qingu, these people look almost sane, but the name
Kai-yin
still sounds too much like Qayin the Murderer to be a coincidence.”

“Don’t be so eager. We’ve yet to cross the Desolation of Nhod.”

“It can’t be any worse than this place.”

A’Nu-Ahki glanced at his son with eyes that chided such naiveté. “Don’t bet on it. You’re right about one thing, though. The historians at Sa-utar believe this city may have gotten its name from a corruption of
Qayin
. Probably the name
Qingu
is an even more remote distortion of it as well.”

“Old Qayin sure got around.”

His father nodded with a smile. “The falling star,
Umara
, landed just over those mountains to the west. It contaminated the soil all around here with a poisoned dust few plants can endure. This town survives in some semblance of order only because it draws
its
sustenance from the sea and trade. Umara made Nhod into one of the few true desert zones on Earth.”

“So E’Yahavah punished Qayin the farmer by cursing the ground for him special—and for everyone after too.
T
his whole place
reeks
!”

A’Nu-Ahki quickened his pace. “Cause and effect
—
E’Yahavah
forced
Qayin to wander,
but it often came about by the mechanism of Qayin’s
own arrogance. He went north into better lands, where he built the first city. Then his children there overthrew him and cast him back into the crater wastes because of his cruelty to his first wife. That soil today
must
support far more than one
nomad
and his tiny coven of concubine daughters. Outcasts and drifters make their home in Nhod, preying off each other with no rule of law. It’s a land where only the scavenging wurm is king.”

W

ith proceeds from the sale of the
Amirdu
, A’Nu-Ahki and Yafutu bought a second unicorn to carry the array of supplies and dried foodstuffs for the long journey ahead. They also hired a guide to take them across the
southern arm of the
Kharir Umara
,
or Mountains of Bitterness
,
and through the Desolation, west to the Ufratsia range. From there, they planned to
cut into Northern Assuri along the hidden passes that only the mottled people and the nomad Iya’Baalim tribes knew.

The buyer of the boat also threw in a few weapons; a rapid-fire rotary hand-cannon with two rolls of “finger clips”—ammunition ringlets of ten rounds apiece—a short broadsword for Yafutu, and a scimitar for A’Nu-Ahki, who had dropped his in the ocean when he was thrown from the Qingu float-island. The Nhoddic Trader assured them
of
the hardware
’s necessity
when he
discovered
they
wanted outfitting for a trek
inland into Nhod. U’Sumi taught T’Qinna how to shoot more than just arrows after that.

Two weeks after putting ashore at Kai-yin, they set off up the Uqid River valley, which descended from the mountain pass out of the Desolation.

U’Sumi could not say he liked their guide—a scar-faced mottled rogu
e by the name of Dragon-breath—
who
mumbled coarsely to himself and often startled them with a hyena-like laugh for no apparent reason. They would have tried the journey without a scout, except that would have forced them to go many weeks farther south,
in
to the gap between Nhod and Ufratsia.
That detour would also have taken them through Corsair country.