The Paladin's Odyssey (The Windows of Heaven) Read Free

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