The Paladin's Odyssey (The Windows of Heaven) (47 page)

All of existence seemed to freeze for several seconds, during which U’Sumi could not tell who was who and what came from what. His mind and heart froze so that all he could do was to listen to the
tomb-like
inner silence. When the spell passed, it seemed as though life moved on in another direction.

The former guide
guzzle
d some
of his grain spirits
and
called to A’Nu-Ahki.

“Ay Yava man! Look down hill. You
see.
No big Yava in sky! Wurms’ll come, eat the little stick-bones, an’ nothin’ll happen to stop it. It’ll go on forever and ever because there’s nobody really up there!”

A’Nu-Ahki spoke, his words like some dark incantation; “This is the Day of the Dragon. Man gave him the steward’s scepter in Aeden’s Orchard at dawn
. T
hen E’Yahavah cursed the
outer world with a
torment
to
match man’s inner
one
. Now dusk approaches quickly. The Basilisk’s dominion is incomplete and unstable. The children will die today, but it will not go on forever and ever. The growing terror and violence is not a sign of the Basilisk’s power, but of his weakness! Devils rule by terror because they can’t endure the scrutiny of love, truth, and reason.”

“Same old riddles to me, Yava-man!” Dragon-breath laughed, as he tossed the skin over to Blood-fang.

However,
they were not riddles to U’Sumi. His father’s words gave him a light in the darkness,
a voice in his tomb-like inner silence,
a way to sanity-check what he saw and felt.

A horde of tiny eyes glinted from the growing darkness around the torch-lit circle. The basilisk pack skittered cautiously nearer to the man-light, snapping hungrily from the shadows to test the safety of their surroundings.

The village drums banged louder, desperately mask
ing
the
terrified
wail
s
of the children in the ring. The basilisks got braver with each trial lunge. U’Sumi could see them more clearly as they exposed themselves to the fire glow—little red wurms—hardly even as large as the children who stumbled over each other in their chains to avoid them.

Gheri-boy said,
“It gets funner now!”
He
swiped the
liquor
skin back from
Stench
and tried to compete with the older men in their drinking.

T’Qinna buried her face hard into U’Sumi’s shoulder, while he stroked her hair. A’Nu-Ahki continued to clutch the sides of his mantle.

The bolder wurms scrambled onto their meal, attaching themselves to their thrashing victims with bird-of-prey talons
,
and ripping them open with scimitar toe claws and striking jaws.

A’Nu-Ahki shouted,
“Here is the Basilisk’s plan for all of us!
Destroy the children! One way or another
;
destroy the children! Drag us through the poisoned mud of our own twisted desires
,
and
then laugh as we destroy our own hope for the future!”

Gheri-boy and the other Corsairs glared at him.

Blood-fang barked,
“Shut dung-eating mouth, Old Man!”

A’Nu-Ahki ignored him. “It starts in place
s
like Akh’Uzan—where my own ‘wester-man palace’ is! My own people comfortably hold the truth about E’Yahavah
with arrogance in their own knowledge! They reduce it to
a
cultural taboo, or a set of rituals, until the taboos and rituals become the only reality they know. They set standards for their children that they themselves don’t even live up to! Yet they pretend to live up to them and then wonder why their children rebel against them in frustration.”

“Quiet!” Blood-fang shouted. His once-recessed eyes now bulged from his flattened head as if some pressure inside would blast them clear out.

Dragon-breath drawled,
“Let’im ramble
;
a
in’t nobody to listen.”

Nevertheless,
U’Sumi heard
,
and it was enough. Understanding suddenly broke through to his afflicted mind: To
E’Yahavah it made little difference how
people destroyed their
children. Those who destroyed them were equally guilty because the end of the progression was equally terrible.

Until now, there had always been a void in U’Sumi’s understanding of
W
orld-end.
H
e had
either
subtly questioned
E’Yahavah’s love, or else blindly and boldly accepted the need for a “universal
destruction
,” with the bigoted assumptions that went with any blindly accepted idea, no matter how correct. Yet now he saw something else—
his
own attempt
s
to escape from reason and from the pain that reckoning with the truth inevitably brings.

In the leaping, circling basilisks and the trapped shrieking children, U’Sumi saw things for what they were. Humanity’s self-government
without
E’Yahavah
had become a decrepit house about to implode on itself. The cultural, ethical,
intellectual,
and
spiritual
foundations of
all
that kept life sane
had
eroded
so badly that within a few short decades all the world would
break down into
a giant Desolation of Nhod
,
to be eventually
peopled by the likes of the Qingu
or the Corsairs
.
Both
individual dignity and dying communities would finish their slow rot under the ghost-lights of
power—
mad
Watchers
lost in their own delusions
.

Either that or some
super—
capable, equally devil-maddened tyrant bent on being the functional god of the world would
expand
to fill the spiritual vacuum. Everyone would love him in the
despairing
glow of his lying lights, even as he seized such total control over everything that life would become
equally
intolerable
for all
. Advancing technology in the hands of an ambitious few would give
this
monster ability to locate and crush even the smallest dissent.

If Samyaza’s Assuri, Psydonu’s Aztlan, and a Lumekkor under the shadow of Uggu and Avarnon-Set were each dominions where freedom to walk with E’Yahavah
—indeed, any individual freedom whatsoever—
was
virtually crushed, then what would it be like under a global regime where even these competing forces no longer existed to keep each other in check? What would happen in a world where
the Basilisk’s pawns united into one indulgent
,
all-encompassing, all-consuming empire?

U’Sumi suddenly understood that there was a certain momentum to ideas and events in human history. After a certain point that only E’Yahavah really knew, what was done could not be undone
or redirected
,
only annihilated so that a new process could begin. Only E’Yahavah had the authority, wisdom, and power to demolish and rebuild on such a scale. Kings, sages, and priests often tried to usurp that prerogative, sometimes with the best of intentions, but always to
the most
ruinous results.

The oracles of truth had been entrusted to U’Sumi’s people—the foundations of family, order, love, life, civilization, and sanity.
But the sons of Seti had failed. Whether E’Yahavah
shared
blame
for entrusting such fragile foundations to an incompetent clan of human beings was not U’Sumi’s place to judge, much as part of him wanted badly to do so.

Then it dawned on him.

How could people have any real choice without
having
some
real
control over how to build on those foundations—or whether to build on them at all
or
hide them from future generations? How could the choices of individuals, tribes, and nations have meaning unless
E’Yahavah had truly entrusted
those foundations
to individuals, tribes, and nations
?
What part of reality was exempt from the workings of cause-and-effect—from responsibility?

It wasn’t
E’Yahavah’s
haphazard, blind, or heavy-handed oversight at all! It’s us! It’s always been us all along!

The
whirlwind of implications unwound into U’Sumi’s mind—like the expanding cause-and-effect of every choice ever made, unraveling with information and energy loss toward chaos and eventual heat-death in the outer void.
Except
that
E’Yahavah had placed limits on human choice and had imposed an even greater underlying order onto things before creating other beings capable of real choice—and thus capable of real
good and
evil.
U’Sumi saw how even Dragon-breath was used unknowingly to speak the very words of E’Yahavah by saying, “Not today, my friend.”

T
he end of the Great Curse unfold
ed
below
them
. It also became clear to
U’Sumi
that just after
E’Yahavah had issued
th
at
Curse
some two thousand years ago
,
all people
had
still enjoyed the same access to the foundations of sanity, civilization, and opportunity born of the
Promised Seed
.
However, not everyone had built
on those foundations to preserve them for their children.
Human selfishness and carelessness had introduced i
nequities into the system. Equality of
opportunity and
access to truth at the beginning could never guarantee
an
equality of
end—
results
.

Not then
,
and not now.

Any long-term continuity of love, civilization, truth, and moral sanity required U’Sumi to accept that E’Yahavah must have had his reasons for entrusting these oracles in hope to fallen men—and that the Divine Name didn’t owe U’Sumi the son of A’Nu-Ahki any explanations. A man
must
simply trust the character of his Creator to be good, despite a
n
environment where
contrary
arguments
seemed plausible
—even in a world where dragons could shred little children and lick up the blood.

U’Sumi saw with razor clarity the terrible bottom line in that writhing circle of screeching and blood down the hill. E’Yahavah had given to humanity what humanity had first c
hosen for itself—autonomy from D
ivine restraint at any cost. The worship of power and pleasure led, either directly or by proxy, to a religion that fed children to
wurms
as the eventual endgame. Understanding brought no comfort, just an ability to process his horror in the big picture. The nightmares would
still
haunt him the rest of his life.

A’Nu-Ahki continued to speak over the laughter and the screams, further arming U’Sumi’s thoughts against Shadow-mind’s on-going assault.

“
…
In Khavilakki, and now Sa-utar, E’Yahavah’s truth is mislabeled as myth
and opinion,
with empty ceremonies that once had meaning. P
riests tell p
eople to follow their own easily warped consciences with mere fables to support them! Religion and morality remain, but
with
no living relationship to Creator, nor any intellectual foundation. History
is
suppressed and rewritten. People can only tumble off such an eroding base into the void!”

Shadow-mind
suggested to
U’Sumi how inappropriate and silly his father sounded philosophizing
during the dismem
-
berment of
little children right beneath their eyes.

“Only an impotent fool could do such a thing! If life has any dignity, wouldn’t a respectful silence be much more appropriate?”

The point felt compelling. For a moment
,
U’Sumi almost agreed.

“
…
I might be powerless to stop this, but I can still take a stab at how you all see it!” A’Nu-Ahki blasted away at
Shadow-mind
with the only weapon left to him.

“Stab away, Yava-man!” Dragon-breath laughed, as he chugged more grain spirits
,
then belched.