The Paladin's Odyssey (The Windows of Heaven) (50 page)

T’

Qinna watched U’Sumi peer outside the pressurized glass window of the
astra
,
a fixed-wing flying vehicle that was all sparrow-falcon angles and curves. She leaned in close to him, only partly to see the distant map-like ground drift by below
them
. They sat on the starboard side of the cabin, just forward of a huge golden swept wing.

I still don’t understand him,
she thought, as she felt the gentle motion of his breathing and wished she could stay pressed against his chest forever. His words still burned in her ears.
“I want no virgin!
I’ll have you or no one. If you go to them, I will kill whoever touches you first and bring this whole bloody journey to an end!”

What could she say to that?
He says he wants no virgin, yet he treats me as if I’ve kept myself all my life for him alone. Such love exists only in fables and yet this is real
—
more real than anything I’ve ever seen before.

“U’Sumi?” She turned from the window and looked up into his dark blue eyes.

He smiled.
“You need me to scoot over some more?”

“No. This is perfect. It’s just I’m afraid it’s too perfect.”

“What do you mean?”

The muted roar of the giant tail engines forced T’Qinna to speak louder than she normally would have thought polite, but nobody else could possibly hear her. Yafutu sat with A’Nu-Ahki on the other side of the cabin. Assurim soldiers in gold and red
dress
uniforms stationed themselves in front and behind.

“I’m afraid of when we return to your people.”

“Why?”

“I might do something to embarrass you. I don’t know how to act in front of them.”

“You’ll be fine. Pahp and my Mahm will teach you what you need to know. The villagers might be a problem, but who cares what they think! Nobody who really
matters
will give us any trouble.”

T’Qinna wished she could share his confidence. “Do I have the Mark of Qayin?”
There! I’ve said it!

“What?”

Her eyes began to flood. “My skin patterns
;
I heard what your father said in Nhod. I’m a daughter of the murderer Qayin. The Seer said that E’Yahavah gave him a mark, and that he was the father of the mottled peoples—those people who fed their children to the wurm.” She looked away from him back out the window.

U’Sumi gently touched her chin and guided her face back toward his. “He said something else too
:
that I’m also descended from Qayin on my mother’s side. I won’t lie to you. There’s
a lot of
ignorant
guess
ing
among my people about what the Mark of Qayin really was. Our family thinks it had to do only with Qayin as an individual and not with his offspring. This is the most logical
take on it
because he fathered many pale-skinned and red-skinned folks as well as the spotted tribes. These Assurim are even more ignorant and obnoxious than the people in Akh’Uzan—don’t listen to them.”

“I’m still afraid I’ll end up hurting you.”

“Do you not want to be my wife when the time comes?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“E’Yahavah’s changing us both to prepare us for the dark years ahead. Don’t be afraid. I don’t know how, but I know things are gonna be okay. I love you—even if you do something embarrassing—it won’t matter near as much as my love for you. I’m probably going to be the embarrassing one in this arrangement, anyway. Stands to reason
;
I’m the ma
n
.”

T’Qinna quickly glanced across the cabin and saw that A’Nu-Ahki and Yafutu were busy staring out the window on the other side. She quickly kissed U’Sumi full on the lips and sat back up in her seat.

Taanyx lay on the aisle next to them, her claws dug into the camel hair carpet. The feline still tolerated her muzzle and leash, but thrashed her tail and made her eyes wild with an irritable growl for freedom and solid ground. T’Qinna reached her left hand down and stroked behind the cat’s ear in calming circles—whether to quiet the sphinx or her own pounding heart, she was not sure.

After awhile she leaned over U’Sumi again, this time
actually
to get a good look at the lands below.

“Where do you think we are now?” she asked him.

They had been in the air almost three hours. Two wide rivers met at a T-shaped junction, the cap of which ran east to west
beneath them. Dead ahead to the south lay a sprawling metropolis of stone pyramids and shimmering gold canals like a playland of children’s sand castles by the beach, all soon to be washed away in the tide.

“I’d guess we just crossed the apex of the Hiddekhel Delta,” he answered. “That city ahead of us on the horizon must be Assur’Ayur. Assuri, who was one of Seti’s older brothers, founded the place. It was once a great vassal of Seti’s confederation, but we lost it after the Zhri’Nikkor War. They all caved in to the Watcher Samyaza, whose cult swallowed up the whole region. It’s a place I really wish we could avoid.”

T

he astra began to descend until the earth lost its map-like quality and took on that of a field filled with model toys like the Tacticon’s old collection U’Sumi so fondly remembered. Home—if they ever managed to reach it again—would be an empty place without Lumekki and Iyapeti.

The flying machine touched down on a long kapar block strip that paralleled vast plazas with fountains, courtyards, markets, and palaces. It ended before the gates of a pyramid
complex
larger than any U’Sumi had yet seen in all his travels—even at Psydonis.

Gold overlaid t
he pyramid’s crystal sharp precision-cut blocks
—
enough to buy an entire kingdom with king and subjects as slaves. Not even the merchant-priests of Khavilakki, the land of gold and jewels, could boast such opulence. It was the Samyaza Cult’s only center to survive the reparations imposed by Tubaal-qayin Dumuzi after the Century War.

The
astra’s
engines unleashed a blast furnace outside U’Sumi’s window, curling the air into heat wraiths in a powerful reversal of thrust that rapidly slowed the vehicle down
, yanking
U’Sumi and T’Qinna forward against their safety straps. Taanyx yowled between her muzzled teeth, her claws dug into the carpet. The pyramid loomed closer—now visible only through the portholes on the cabin’s opposite side.
Large as that was h
owever,
only
what U’Sumi saw arrayed on the broad pavement out
side
his own window squeezed an involuntarily noise from his throat.

Hundreds
of flying astra chariots, each ready to take its own titan “demigod” into some soon-approaching battle
,
parked in
rows stretch
ing
before Samyaza’s Temple as far as the eye could see. A low plaza reached out from the pyramid
complex into
the gigantic air fleet’s service pavement.

U’Sumi’s astra taxied in a loop to this structure and came to a stop.

The captain of the sky-lord guards stood and motioned for A’Nu-Ahki’s people to follow him out a hatchway that opened just aft of the pilot’s bubble. The outside air hit U’Sumi like a balmy sledgehammer as soon as he stepped free of the temperature-controlled cabin and descended the narrow ladder. A row of soldiers on either side directed them
through
the plaza,
past
some colored fountains, and
up
several
ramps,
toward
the palace.

Beyond the fountains, a curious throng of tanned children and ‘tween-agers watched, all painted in stylized eye shades and decorated with gold hieroglyph talismans that hung from identical blue thong garments. The boys
,
shaved bald
except
for one black royal lock, looked effeminate in this unisex dress. The girls simply pouted
a
jaded sultriness at the new visitors. They seemed dreadfully out-of-place to U’Sumi, given that the society just outside their Temple complex
severely
punish
ed
women who ventured
out of
their own homes merely for lack of a face veil.

U’Sumi had noted an exception to this rule for spotted female slaves back at the bridge village, during the day spent waiting on the
astra
. This
was
fortunate and unfortunate for T’Qinna
;
good
in
that she
faced no
punish
ment
for
showing her face
publicly; bad that it meant she was “open game” for unwanted sexual advances. Her only likely protection would be U’Sumi’s fists, as the vendors back at the village had refused to sell him a veil for her. Apparently
,
“spotted bynts” were not to “put on airs.” It remained to be seen how th
at
double-standard would play out here.

The strange children gave no hopeful clue. U’Sumi felt their eyes—particularly those of the girls—swarm all over him like hungry ants.
He
even began to itch under his clothes, though probably this was only from the beads of sweat now erupting from his pores.

The palace arch looked even less welcoming.

Once inside the dark glass doors of the great stone building, the humidity diminished. The temperature change should have been refreshing. Instead, a clammy chill seeped into U’Sumi’s
bones like a focused night draft. The shadow that had fallen on him at the bridge village’s ziggurat now screeched from the darkened halls like cicadas in his ears. Something lived here that did not belong to this world
—
something
ancient and deranged.

The
ornate
religiously-themed decor, had he seen it anywhere else, might have seemed tasteful, even beautiful—the incense, fragrant and soothing. Here they were none of these things. Rather, the hangings and sculptures depicting familiar stories like Atum’s Walk in Aeden, the Temptation of Ish’Hakka, and Qayin’s murder of Heh’Bul, all bore a garish quality that—for all their exquisite correctness of form—only seemed to parody what they portrayed. An odor of mold and rotting flesh somehow permeated the place—a decay that no amount of incense could mask.

“We meet again.”

The woman’s shrill croak
came
from the shadows of a curtained dais at the far end of the darkened audience chamber.

A’Nu-Ahki’s party stepped toward the
platform
. T
heir feet
tapp
ed
maddened echoes, while
captive twisted
-
light
faces
seemed to
cry
silently up at them from distorted reflections in the glassy floor. The soldiers kept pace on either side
of them
with fearful eyes flashing below
their
ceremonial gold hauberks.

“That is close enough,” commanded the voice on the shrouded dais.

The curtain slid open to reveal an ancient woman with long
,
stringy hair dyed to a dull black. The heavily painted skin of her face
,
stretched by so many cosmetic surgeries
, prevented her from moving
her lips
with much expression
. Purple-rimmed eyes were craters of exhaustion surrounding tiny glass pits of vortex clarity. She rose from her throne, trying to thrust out limp desiccated breasts as if she could still make them stand firm and full again by sheer force of will. Her gnarled hand slid down a bony hip
in
unconscious parody of the seductiveness she seemed unaware that she had lost ages ago.

“A’Nu-Ahki, son of Q’Enukki,” she crooned as if to herself, “you have much gall to simply come marching into our lands. Yet I am glad to see that you have finally arrived after all these decades.”