The Paladin's Odyssey (The Windows of Heaven) (3 page)

The passions aroused during the religious wars were only the consequence of intellectual debates. It was Calvin versus the rabble, not one drunken trooper against another. When the Spirit is aroused—each time it is aroused—it sheds blood, without knowing it or troubling about it. The bloodshed takes place on a lower level. Neither Diderot, nor St. Paul, nor Calvin, nor Marx, nor the rabble, nor Confucius thought of bloodshed. But in the last analysis the Spirit walks on human feet. Then it is blind and it devastates. It turns to emotion on the lower level, and then there is shooting.

—
Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Wartime Writings

THE PALADIN’S ODYSSEY
|
367

Titan

“F

ire!”
The Zealot
in the
stone
amphitheater
bellowed,
h
is skinny hands flailed upward, dried twig fingers each a wavering tongue of flame. “Fire shall consume you from the heavens, and from the cracks of Underworld! The flab of this overfed people
is
grease to fuel the flames! The vision of Belkrini, son of Tarkuni, son of Urugim, the son of Q’Enukki the Seer! It is sure
—
written
by the hand of E’Yahavah
A
’
Nu! There is no quenching
…
”

U’Sumi
sat many circles up from the center-stage rostrum and
only half-listened to the self-parodying
fanatic
.
The low pass of some titan’s flying chariot broke his thoughts and made a more interesting object for his attention.
It hardly mattered what this particular would-be seer actually rant
ed
about, anyway
. They all played the same song on slightly different instruments—
and
there was no shortage of instruments.

The chariot
of
glass and flame vanished somewhere behind
the cupped hollow of the amphitheatre, leaving only the shrieking Zealot
.

U’Sumi curled his lips into a mirthless smirk.
He muttered under his breath what he
wanted to
shout
:
“
Come on, Belkrini, your eyes can bug out farther than that. I’m disappointed in you
!
And that pious trembling of your voice
just
isn’t jiggling our livers the way it usually does. I should be ready to hurl my morning flat-cakes by now.
You’re so off your game!
”

“Water quenches fire!” a newcomer said—a tall
,
handsome man of rich dark skin
and
ocean blue eyes—who strode down to the center of the amphitheater toward the podium. Those in the crowd
who
had not yet found seats made way for him. Even the gold
en
afternoon sky seemed to move for him with a gust of wind to ruffle the humid air.

This second speaker had once been a student of U’Sumi’s father
. He
was now U’Sumi’s own chief instructor at the Akh’Uzan Boy’s Academy.
“
At least Nestrigati half knows what he’s talking about.
”

U’Sumi realized
s
adly
that this was
no
t saying much in a valley where the chief domestic product appeared to be “mystical knowledge”
for which
nobody seemed to
have
any practical use.
Who am I kidding?
He
thought
.
Old Nesti’s every bit as drunk on his own
speculations
as these other clowns—worse
,
since I have to study under him! I only give his ideas
some
credit because they’re based
mostly
on my father’s.

Belkrini shouted; his bulging eyes ready to burn his challenger to divine ash. “You would challenge the revelation of E’Yahavah
El-N’Lil
,
the
Divine Wind
? What viper out of the Haunted Lands is this?”

Nestrigati said,
“At least I traveled through the Haunted Lands with Muhet’Usalaq and your father, at Urugim’s summons
.
You, as I recall, refused to obey your ancestor’s sacred call.”

The whole amphitheater broke into laughter.

“W
ho traveled with whom and where
means nothing! There are those who went on that journey who have since betrayed the Work by marrying into spiritual whoredom! A bastard offspring of that unholy union sits in this audience!”
Belkrini stabbed his finger at U’Sumi who half expected flames to shoot from it. “That wurm’s whelp is a botch on this valley every bit as much as if he were Watcher’s spawn
! T
here’s reason to believe that a fallen Watcher’s blood runs in his veins!”

U’Sumi froze to his stone seat. He had not even been aware that Belkrini would
know
who he was, much less be able to spot him in a crowd from almost a hundred paces. He wanted to get up and bolt from the open-air lecture theater, to bolt from the entire valley
,
to go anywhere just to escape life under the deceptively
fair
skies of Akh’Uzan!

The eyes of a whole community turned now on U’Sumi. He began to fear they might
actually
attack him.

Nestrigati yelled,
“Don’t try to cover your own weak argument by raising a lynch mob against an innocent boy
, Belkrini
!
Y
our interpretation of the
Sky Sign tables
is sloppy and deliberately overlooks the obvious
;
that the Breaker’s Sword cleaved across the head of
Leviathan
…
”

“Whose fins touch the Fire River! The Sword swept past the Fire River with the tip of its blade, as a pointing stick is used by an instructor!”

“
At one point
; w
hile the full blade carved across
Leviathan’s
head for many days!”

Their argument described the course of a g
iant
comet that had moved across the sky almost seventy years ago. The dispute lay over the prophetic significance of where it had touched the constellations along its orbital path. Everybody seated in the amphitheater agreed that the comet had signaled the approach of a prophetically foretold global disaster known as
World-end
. What they were trying to settle—what many similar informal Seer Clan convocations had been trying to settle for a generation now—was just what kind of an end the world would meet
and what to do about it
.

Although U’Sumi’s fathers had given up on the convocations years ago, U’Sumi still liked to sit in on them
some
time
s
to see if anything new had entered the popular debate. He usually left the amphitheater mildly amused or mildly irritated.
He n
ever before
had
to flee for fear of his safety.

He used Nestrigati’s diversion to scramble from his seat and escape up the steps
to the back. He
look
ed
only at his feet.

U’Sumi nearly made it over the outer rim when he bumped square into the mid-section of a
n enormous onlooker standing on the upper crescent
.

The Giant gazed down at the comic-opera bickering and almost seemed for a moment not to notice the impact against his own body.

U’Sumi’s breath left him.

“You see what I have to put up with?” A delicate male voice near the Giant spoke with
a
condescension
mostly
reserved for the feeble-minded.

The Giant, however, no longer listened. Instead, he peered down from a great height at U’Sumi, who stood
quaking
at his feet.

The Titan clasped the young man’s tunic, yanked him up off the
pavement
with one hand, and laughed deeply. “What have we here?”

That hand could have crushed the back of U’Sumi’s skull between its thumb and fingers. The face,
almost
inhumanly large and statuesque, bore an aquiline nose, with deep brown eyes the size of small oranges. Teeth
fashioned to porcelain perfection glimmered like flattened pearls in the afternoon sun. U’Sumi hung in limbo; his body and soul limp and speechless before the visage of a god come to Earth.

“Well?” the Titan
said.

“M-M-My ap-p-pologies, good sir. I—I did not mean to run into you!” U’Sumi
replied
, who only now noticed the bodyguards with their hand-cannons drawn against him. He also saw
the
aerodrone
that had just flown over the amphitheater
parked in the old abandoned military field behind the men, with another entourage of soldiers to guard it. He had never been so close to one of the odd flying contraptions or seen one on the ground. It was much larger than expected—they looked like toys when they flew overhead—like his grandfather’s wooden models.

The Giant lowered him back to his feet. “I’ll let it pass if you can give us information on a certain seer who lives in this region.”

“We already have all the information we need. He’s married to the Royal Aunt, by the Ten Heavens,” said the Giant’s companion, who bore the crest of the Archon’s family line on a thin gold circlet
he
wor
e
about his high brown forehead.

Even U’Sumi knew what that symbol meant. The man wearing it was the Archon-in-Waiting—the Appointed Successor to
the Archon of Seti
. If being heir to the likes of Rakhau the son of Kunyari
did
no
t weigh nearly as much as it once
might have
, the
circlet’s wearer
was still the second most important political and religious leader among U’Sumi’s people.
Why is he in
a
rustic
outpost like
Akh’Uzan?

U’Sumi
’s curiosity outflanked his fear
. In a loose-knit nation reduced to being a mere buffer state between the Empire of Lumekkor and the pseudo-theocracy of Assuri, High Family dignitaries clawed after every scrap of dwindling prestige like scavenger wurms over a carcass. It was fodder for endless scandals
, but perhaps unavoidable given the political mechanics of washed-up “buffer states
.
”

The City-S
tates of Seti had nominal jurisdiction over the Valley of Akh’Uzan, which U’Sumi’s people
had resettled
almost two hundred and seventy years ago. The
circlet’s
wearer seemed far too young for such a high office as Archon-in-Waiting—younger even than U’Sumi’s father. With a non-traditional clean-shaven face and painted eyes, the man had
an
illusion of greater youth still. U’Sumi would not have believed him to be even a first tier zaqen if not for the circlet’s crest.

The Titan told the Archon’s heir,
“I’ll
decide
need of
information.
”

U’Sumi had stepped back from the Giant and noticed that he wore the
faceted
lightly armored dress tunic of a
high
-
ranking army officer of the Lumekkor Imperium.

The Giant looked down at U’Sumi again. “What’s your name, boy?”

“U’Sumi, Great One.” He left out his lineage to maintain anonymity.

“Either that’s a dead black snake or a crude prince’s braid hanging out the side of your head, boy. You’re no mongrel
;
what’s your pedigree?”

“I am son of A’Nu-Ahki the Seer, son of Q’Enukki.”

“Tiamatu smiles upon us, Tarbet! The very son of your
W
orld-end
seer i
s drawn to kiss the power center of my navel like a lodestone. Do you doubt the forces that work for those of us born of the gods?”

The word picture revolted U’Sumi,
al
though the youth’s head only reached belly-level on the Giant.

Tarbet—the Archon-in-Waiting—
grinned
a sycophant’s grin. “It would seem a remarkable feat, Lord Uggu.”

“It is life for those of us in tune with the universal resonance.”

U’Sumi said,
“May I go now?”

Uggu said,
“Take us to your father
and tell me about him as we walk. Don’t be afraid. I mean him no harm. We come to consult with him.”

This bit of news only slightly alleviated U’Sumi’s fears.

Tarbet said,
“What useful information do you expect to get from the man’s son?
He’ll only praise his father like a god!”

“My father is no idol!”

Tarbet laughed. “A figure of speech, boy. Mind how you talk to me.”

U’Sumi glared at him
,
and then went on to answer the Giant Uggu’s question
:
“My father is not like those two you saw down in the amphitheater. For one thing, he doesn’t yell
much
,
and he has little use for theatrics
when he’s teaching or giving prophecy
…
”