The Paladin's Odyssey (The Windows of Heaven) (45 page)

“What do you mean
;
‘at first?’”

“The Zhri’Nikkor War broke out between the unsanctioned slave-trading factions from what was then Seti-controlled Assuri, the Lumekkorim slavers
,
and the independent Nhoddic slave-traders we now call the Corsairs. The Seer Clan did not know that Archon Maha’Lahl-aey’El was secretly funding Lumekkorim interests in the slave industry for fear of an unlikely war from the north, all under the guise of relief
to
the poor. But we knew something was wrong
;
that the war against the slave traders was being waged half-heartedly by politicians rather than by
arch-straticons
.

“This double-dealing undercut Seti’s ‘official’ war to stamp out the slave trade altogether in Assuri and Zhri’Nikkor and to protect the Gate of the Rising Sun. It ended with the slave traders irreversibly strengthened on all sides and the loss not only of Seti’s Far East outposts, but Assuri itself. It also ended with unrestrained systematic oppression of the Nhoddic Tribes.”

Dragon-breath
turned and wagged his obscenely long tongue at them, making
wheezy chuckles. “You ast, girly, you ast!”

T’Qinna straightened herself on the saddle. “I did. The truth is best, even when it’s terrible. No illusions.”

U’Sumi reached forward and touched T’Qinna’s shoulder in admiration. He wanted to say something empathetic. All he came out with was, “I can’t imagine what it must be like for parents to watch their children grow old and die in less than a century, while they themselves stay young and healthy to live on in grief.” He instantly realized that he’d probably just made her feel worse. She didn’t pull away from his hand
,
though.

A’Nu-Ahki just shook his head. “This
,
too
,
is the legacy of Nhod.”

T

he switchbacks wove through the lower mountains as A’Nu-Ahki’s party descended to the desert floor. Two days passed from the summit to the place where the trail emptied onto the gray sands. A land of living death sprawled before them, dotted with sparse
,
thorny vegetation
,
and stunted scrub trees that reached up to the bronze sky like the mummified hands of half-buried giants.

The salt works of Dragon-breath’s uncle lay at the head of the valley. As they approached the small tent community, U’Sumi saw parties of living skeletons led in and out of the compound by well-fed soldiers that marched them back and forth to the pits.

One of the salt holes became visible when the unicorns rounded the last bend in the road before it descended into the settlement. Malnourished men, women, and children dug through the caustic sand with red, swollen hands. Their bellies, distended from hunger and toxemia, made them look like human beetles that crawled up and down the sides of the pit.

Mottled faces stared up at the passing unicorns with sunken, yellow eyes.
Blistering chemical burns marred their
near-naked
bodies, leaving scars and festering fly-filled sores.
U’Sumi turned away helplessly
when the stench from the worker
s
assailed his nostrils
. Shadow-mind rose from his private abyss,
even more
strengthened for U’Sumi having deluded himself into thinking that he had actually defeated it beneath the Setting Sun
Gate
,
and that it had finally been de-fanged by his deliverance from the Qingu.

Down in the center of the
nomad
compound, a well-furnished tent shaped like a squared U straddled a heavily guarded stockpile of barrels and foodstuffs. In a pen next to the structure, fat-fleshed sheep and goats bleated with mocking content, fed on imported grain by a lean, pale-skinned youth.

A pudgy middle-aged man emerged from the tent’s center flap. He hailed A’Nu-Ahki’s unicorns. “Ay, Dragon-breath, what’choo doing picking up southies?” he asked
,
curling his upper lip.

Their guide said, “They don’t be southies, Uncle-Sarv. I
thinks they herd from wester-lands. Girl half-spotty in back
,
but west
y
by speech. Elder say he’s got message.”

“Message?” Uncle-Sarv said, as if A’Nu-Ahki
were not
even there.

“’Nuf words to do pass and cross waste.” Dragon-breath’s enormous jaw line curled into a broken toothed grin.

Uncle-Sarv said, “Go stable yer ‘corns. I’ll take the guests.”

U’Sumi and Yafutu helped T’Qinna and A’Nu-Ahki dismount, while the Nhoddic Chieftain regarded them sourly. Unlike his nephew, “Uncle-Sarv” had unspotted pale skin, like the people
s
of Lumekkor and Y’Raddu.

A’Nu-Ahki hobbled to his host and introduced himself and his party.

The chubby Nomad responded in like form, departing from his heavy accent. “I’m called Sarvin Angrost, Trustee to the Northern Sector by the Lord of Y’Raddu at Q’Unukku. Who sends me a message?”

A’Nu-Ahki smiled disarmingly. “Actually, as I tried to explain to your nephew the other day, my message is not for you only.”

Angrost said,
“Who sends?”

A’Nu-Ahki’s eyes hardened to blue steel. “E’Yahavah, the Great God and Judge, who created the Ten Heavens and the Earth; who once smote this land in his anger against a
single
murderer.
He sends.
”

The Salt Miner did not
seem to expect
this answer. Nor did he look pleased by it. “Yava?” he said.

“That’s right. E’Yahavah
has commissioned me to warn of the approaching
W
orld-end. Are you familiar with that term?’”

“No. But Yava I know!”

“Then please allow me to explain
…
”

“No, let me s’plain to you!” Sarvin interrupted. “Yava, to the short-lifer spotty-man, is arch sky demon who curses ground with stinging poison. Look about! Your
W
orld
-
end is now something worse than this? Short-lifer spotties sacrifice their children to ole Basilisk, who they think protects’em from Yava. Samyaza worshipers with red skin like you come up from Assuri and speak Yava to short-lifers too. The ones who follow them always kill many people before they get killed themselves
either
by my soldiers, the Corsairs, or the Iya’Baalim nomads!”

“I’m not here to incite violence.”

“Doesn’t matter what yer here for! Violence comes!” Sarvin said. Then his tone softened slightly. “Now I try to make peace with red men always, but they act like Yava-demons, always
shrieking, jumping up and down, an’ telling short-lifer spotties to revolt, while they beg for gold. You seem more reasonable’n them, wester-man, so try to make peace with me.”

A’Nu-Ahki said,
“I want there to be peace
.
”

“Then don’t say Yava to spotties.”

“Perhaps if I called him ‘the Great God’ generically
…
”

“Just don’t say nothing!” roared the Salt Miner. Then again, in a more conciliatory tone, “They’re not like white and red-brown man, or even spotties with normal life span, like my brother’s son, Dragon-breath. They be half animal. You only be wasting time
.
Now I will make peace with you like this
:
I send you off with water provision to the western mountains. My guards escort you to beyond the Bitter Cup, follow my orders, and keep you out of trouble on way. Dragon-breath takes you to where it is you go. You must make peace by keeping mouth shut to spotties.”

“I don’t think I can agree to that.”

Sarvin Angrost’s eyes bulged like angry sores. “I’m not askin’, I’m telling! No Yava talk! You leave me tomorrow!”

T

he days stretched on, long and bumpy. U’Sumi’s eyes stung from the alkaline dust the unicorns
kicked
up
into the
acrid
wind
s
. Along the way, he had seen many shanty compounds as
bad as or
worse off than Sarvin Angrost’s. Commonly they passed human skeletons strewn along the beaten roadside and twice had happened upon public exterminations
of
“aged” mottled people with Short-lifer’s Syndrome
,
who were actually not much older chronologically than U’Sumi was.

P
rematurely aged and decrepit bodies had earned
such people
the status of “surplus population” with their land managers. Mercenaries herded them around great pits then mowed them down in rows with chattering bursts of chain cannon fire.
Nobody even tried
to hide the camps, or wall them in. Where in the waterless wastes could an escapee go?
U’Sumi instinctively wanted to pull out his own weapon and open up on the mercenaries, but there were far too many of them.

All the endless days of plodding gave U’Sumi time to contemplate in a thought-environment as toxic to contemplation as the caustic grit was to his lungs. He had felt like he could defeat
anything after the battle with the Elyo
,
and especially beneath the Gates of the Setting Sun. And if a battle
were
too many worlds beyond him, as on the Floating Lands, then the whales and porpoises of
E’Yahavah
would come. Now Shadow-mind reasserted itself with the realization that there were no whales and porpoises in the desert—only dragons. The inner fire of his battle frenzy
had somehow deserted him.

The road bent around a third extermination
hole
that
emerg
ed when they rounded a hill. Stick-figure people again lined a vast pit, dull and exhausted from a life of hopeless toil. Once the chain cannons stopped chattering, younger—still useful—spotted tribesman went down into the piles of tangled limbs and snaking entrails to retrieve the valuable projectiles and other baubles before
their masters
forced
them
to
cover
the holes.

Dragon-breath said with a huge yawn,
“Short-life spotties breed like mice and rabbits
.
You’d think they’d never have the push for so much tent-sport in a land like this.”

T’Qinna’s glare was more caustic than Nhod’s frequent dust-devils. “They’re your own people, you
gryndel
-mouthed ape!”

Dragon-breath roared back at her, showing U’Sumi that she’d gotten under
his
skin for the first time. “They not my folk! I
seen a hundred and ninety suns and I still be in my prime! You look at them old gray stick-bones—they eighty, ninety years old tops! They not my blood!”

“All men are of one blood,” U’Sumi said firmly.
There it is,
he mused,
my glorious assault on the thickest darkness yet
—
six small words.
But in the caustic
sands,
they were all he had.