Free A Broken Paradise (The Windows of Heaven Book 3) by K.G. Powderly Jr.

motion sickness instantly vanished.
    “Darling Tarbet,” she greeted him with a smirk.
    Pandura’s blonde, red-streaked hair enshrouded her head like a halo of flame. Now there’s the fire of the gods for you! He smiled to himself, and allowed his eyes to dance across the liquid fit of her two-piece uniform.
    “My dear, you light up this room. May whatever gods we worship be thanked that our peoples are no longer at war.”
    “A silly titan thing,” she said with a roll of her jade eyes.
    “How have you been?”
    “Too much Temple business and research; I swear I had more fun as a novice working the courts!”
    “I know. I remember.” He smiled suggestively at her.
    “So you do. But isn’t your wife on board?”
    Tarbet did not allow the image of Spulpa’s sponge-eruption body hunched over her seasickness bucket to disturb his view of Pandura’s implied offer. “She has elected to remain in her cabin for the duration.”
    “What might your courtiers think?”
    “My courtiers think what I pay them to think.”
    “Bold as ever—just the way I used to like you.” Her eyes lost some of their insect queen chill and took on a more playful glow.
    “How soon will they be finished for the day?” he asked, nodding toward the titans.
    “They could go for hours. But what do they need us for anyway?”
    “What indeed?”

A
    lmost a week later, the self-propelled sedan coach trundled along the new kapar - paved highway over the grasslands between the Setiim port of Hadumar and the inland Archonic capitol of Sa-utar.
    Spulpa whined, “You were with that priestess, weren’t you?”
    Tarbet said, “We had diplomatic meetings. We are both, after all, spiritual leaders of our respective peoples. She wants to negotiate for limited access to the shrines of Paru’Ainu.”
    “ Bastard! Some spiritual leader you are! Off to the secret rooms with every Temple tramp from here to Balimar you go, with never a thought to your own respectability or to me…”
    Tarbet tuned her out.
    He stroked his smooth-shaven chin, and recalled his pillow talk with Pandura—a conversation almost as disturbing as the one with Tubaal-qayin, and yet infinitely more pleasant than listening to Spulpa’s moaning.
    Ironically, Pandura turned out to be just as manipulative in her own way as his wife was, only easier on the eyes. I wonder? Do all women share that trait? Or do I somehow attract only that type? That question stirred memories he preferred not to revisit. He re-focused on Pandura.
    The Priestess had blatantly tried to convert him into accepting Psydonu’s claim of being the promised Monster Slayer. The little nymph never used to allow religion to usurp the mood in the old days — just the compulsory closing rite whispered under her breath. Fanaticism simply does not become you, my sphinx. However, something else bothered him more than Pandura’s new-found devotion.
    It was possible to make a reasonable case that her claims represented just the sort of nonsense that Q’Enukki the Seer had predicted the titans would try—or more precisely, another in a series of developments over the past three hundred years that could be construed that way.
    Still, are there no other more reasonable ways to construe them? It’s one thing to concede that the titans might be a small step toward the fulfillment of the Woman’s Seed prophecy, it’s quite another to latch on to one particular titan as the completed work.
    Tarbet had chosen his words carefully in response to Pandura’s pillow proselytizing. “While my mind remains more open, my people would never accept Psydonu as their Seed exclusively. There are simply too many academic and emotional religious difficulties.”
    “Now, Tarbet, darling, what could be so difficult about it with you to lead the way for them?”
    Not even I’m so vain as to let her stroke my ego that easily.
    “You overestimate my abilities,” he had told her. “The foremost difficulty would be the undisputed