The Lord of the Black Land (Unwithering Realm Book 3)

by John C. Wright

I whispered to Qall, “Through the kitchen. Run for it.”

  He shook his head. “I hear someone coming that way already.” It was true. There were footsteps in the kitchen. These were bare feet rather than boots, which meant servants rather than soldiers, but it was just as bad for us if someone who could call for armed men saw us as if armed men saw us.

  I sprinted over to the panel, and Qall pointed, and I found the keyhole behind a sliding ornament no bigger than a silver dollar. The end of the cylinder fit nicely into the slot, and the lock pulled the cylinder into itself and out of my startled fingers, as if it were a boy with no table manners slurping a noodle into his mouth. The secret panel opened, as smoothly as you please.

  Qall crowded into the narrow passageway right behind me. He shoved the panel shut, and it clicked again, locking, and the little cylinder seal popped out of its hole on this side of the door, and Qall snatched it up, and handed it to me. (The hole on this side covered itself with a tab the size of a silver dollar.)

  It was dark in here, until Qall found a stick of lampwood in a bracket and touched it to a marble plate set in the ceiling, where it clung as if magnetized. We heard the cries of horror and alarm as the body was discovered, and then more voices and more men came running into the officers’ mess.

  Then one querulous old man’s voice was shouting above the rest, “Unexpected event! His death was years away! Cordon off the area. No one goes in or out! The irregularity of the horoscopes will have to be looked into, and everyone here—you too, lieutenant, sir!—will need to get his horoscopes recast from blank tablets. No complaining! Call everyone up here, guards at the door, turnkeys in the holding cell, everyone!”

  Qall and I retreated on tiptoe down the passageway until we were out of earshot. It was dark here, and there seemed to be no marble plaques to which to touch the lampwood stick. Abby seemed to have the knack of getting them to glow just by looking at them, but maybe Qall did not.

  I said, “There goes your chance to sneak out of here carrying the body.”

  He chuckled. “No such, sir. Nary one of them is much likely to touch a corpse. I need but to show my nose, and they will grab it and pull me fro to do the toting. No one looks at such as me.”

  “I’ll always look on you with favor,” I said, “And remember you in my prayers. You saved me from capture and torture, and that may save my girlfriend from rape and torture and death as well. It’s like ripples coming out of a pebble falling in a pond. Let me shake your hand. I am not ashamed to touch you.”

  Solemnly, we shook hands. He cringed only a little.

  Qall said, “You’re an abomination, ain’t you? I saw Sergeant Sakrumash put his sapara right into you.”

  “Is that his name? Sakrumash?” I hate to admit it, but I felt kind of queasy, knowing his name. He seemed more like a real person and less like a target.

  Qall laughed. “His name is Sergeant Crowmeat now. Are you a walking shadow or somewhat? Small wonder you deem me fit to touch…”

  “In my land, I am the son of the Knight of the Temple. But no one in my land is higher or lower than anyone else. All men are equal and none are called unclean or abominable. I’d be honored to shake hands with you,” I said.

  “Thank’ee,” he said, gulping. “Your words are like the words of a god.”

  I hefted the cylinder seal in my hand. “I suppose we only have a little while before someone else of the same rank as Crowmeat uses a seal just like this one to open the door and walk in here. And I think you are right that looting the body may have made an event the stars can foretell, if I understand how this crazy world works, which I don’t. So I have to use my Boy Scout powers and do a good turn, and fast, to make the stars blind again. Some saintly act. Something I can do quick, in the next minute or two. Such as—”

  I groaned and clutched my head. Because a thought just occurred to me, and the thought was so clear and so bright that it may as well have been a magic telepath broadcasting the idea right into my brain.

  “Oh, Lordy lord! Please not that; anything but that…” I groaned. “What a stupid idea…”

  “What is it?” Qall asked, voice quivering.

  “I think I have to rescue the monster who betrayed me and put me here.”

  “Eh? I heard tha’ not right, did I?”

  “You did. There is no one guarding the cells right now. You said this seal is the sergeant’s key for everything. Will it open the holding cells? If you drag bodies out from there, you know where it is. I need to save my non-girlfriend, but this should only take a moment, and if I don’t do a good deed, the star-gods will see me and I’ll get caught again. This is the best deed I can think of.”

  “Best? You be a madman, no? He’s a Blem. I saw when he was brought in. He’ll eat you.”

  “I be a madman, yes! So you think the Astrologers will predict me doing this?”

  Cylinder Seal and Cylindrical Cell

  1. Abarimon

  The jail cells were barrels, too small to stand upright in, made of iron set into the deck and covered with a grate. There were catwalks, planks set over the barrels where guards could walk. The bottoms of the barrels had an inch or so of accumulated dried and hard-packed sewage and bones from their previous owners. The casual sadism of the arrangement sickened me. The smell did too.

  As predicted, there was no guard in sight. The emergency of an unexpected and unhoroscoped event had quarantined all of them elsewhere in the guard station.

  There was one other prisoner held in a half-buried barrel aside from the Blemmyae. He was black-skinned and green-eyed, which I guess is a combination we don’t often see on Earth. His hair was a silky black tangle that hung before his eyes, and when he stared up at me through the tangle, it was like looking into twin pools of water gathered in winter beneath a thorny bush. The drained and aching emptiness in the eyes was the same I had seen in the face of Enmeduranki.

  I stooped and fitted the cylinder scroll to the lock. The grate came loose, and I flung it open with a loud and echoing clatter.

  The man did not get up. I lowered my hand to him, to help him up, but he did not take it, or even look at it.

  He spoke without raising his head. The man’s language was like a silver waterfall, rippling. Qall said, “He says he will not be fooled by another trick.”

  I had said the same thing to Abby when she had rescued me. Maybe it is just a rule of human psychology that we cannot be rescued unless we ask first, because we won’t believe it if it is a free gift.

  Qall said softly, “They told to him his horoscope. He knows when the magistrate will see him, what the scribes and doctors of the law will say, and what the sentence will be, the method of execution and the hour of his death. It is a particular cruelty, since the prisoner will try to struggle against his fate in the short time remaining, and in so doing, will bring further curses on himself and his kindred.”

  “What is he in for?” I asked.

  The man muttered something. Qall said, “It is a forethought-crime.”

  “A what?”

  “The crime is foreknown, but not yet committed.”

  “Wait. What? You lock people up here because they might do something? What kind of nuthouse is this?”

  Qall ducked his head. “Since the time of the current Great King, Anshargal, the masters were kind enough to wait until the season when the crime was predicted, so that the years of work beforehand would be extracted from the felon-to-be. The previous Great King, Meskianggasher, had a different policy, and all felons-to-be were killed at birth by midwives. The people left over were so few in number that the army was too small to wage war. The pyramids of little skulls can still be seen, many rows of them, leading up to the Gate called Harmonious Decimation of Justice.”

  I felt another headache coming on. By God, but I hated this world. They had drained all the hope out of this man, so much so that he would not even come out of his death row jail cell when the door was opened wide. Is a man without hope even really a man?

/>   Angrily, I grabbed the guy by the hair and under one armpit, and hauled him bodily up out of the poop-smeared pit. He did not struggle or complain. When I let go, he just collapsed where he fell, like a ragdoll.

  “Stand up!” I shouted at him. “Get to your f — Uh!”

  His legs ended. They had cut his feet off, and I was roughhousing a cripple.

  I saw his leg bending forward, and for a moment I thought they had broken and dislocated his knees.

  Then I saw that his legs were like a dog’s leg, with the kneecap to the rear, and his feet were still there. He was one of those folk as I had seen on the embarkation landing, whose feet were on backward, heel to the front, toes trailing behind. I had merely been looking at him from the front, and had not seen his rearward pointing toes.

  I said to Qall, “What is he?”

  The little ex-untouchable wagged his head in a sort of shrug. “Hard to say without his collar. Messenger, I reckon. Too bulky to be in sports.”

  “No, I mean his race.”

  “He is a man. All men are men. All are One. All serve the—”

  “No, no. I mean his, um, host.”

  Qall said, “He is an Abarimon, descended from Aram through Gath. Run as fast as jaguars. Faster. They breathe a special air comes only from their valley and choke on our air. The doctors have to fix them like gypsies, put a worm in their lungs, so they can breathe normal-like.”

  But he was not going to run away from his masters, not going to breathe the air of freedom.

  Qall said, “I hear they take scalps as neckerchiefs, and the more they get, bigger they look in each other’s eyes, so their chiefs have whole coats of man hair. Only the night-eyed Albanians be safe of them, on account of being born egg-bald.”

  I turned my face away from him, glad I did not know his name, or his background, or anything. I did not want him to seem real to me, and if you know someone’s name, he seems real.

  2. Sternophthalmos

  I walked over to the Blemmyae’s cell and looked down. Qall did not follow me, not willing to come so close. “Master!” Qall said urgently, “This is a monster! An abomination! No matter what he promises, he is not true of tongue, as we Ur-folk must be, and he will speak crookedly! Do not believe him!”

  “I don’t believe him, so I am not going to ask him. I am going to believe in him. That is a different thing.”

  The Blemmyae, Kaqqudu Nakasu, sat looking up at me with a sardonic expression on his chest. His eyeballs in his pectoral muscles were as large as softballs, and even with his lids at a sneering half-mast, they caught and reflected more light than a cat’s eye. So it looked like two half-moons shining in the gloom of the hellish little hole.

  He farted a few words in his blowhole-noise language.

  “What is he saying?” I asked.

  “He wonders whether to cook you or eat you raw. He says you are a skullbag, and so the volume of your brains are smaller than his, which fill his chest.”

  That distracted me. “Then where does he keep his lungs?”

  “In his stomach, right behind his mouth.”

  “Then where does he keep his—oh, never mind. Ask him whether he’s ever heard of the foreverborn.”

  “You need not ask him, master: We are warned against them every seven days during Moon Goddess Day assembly, and there are songs and posters and brightly colored papers and everything. The foreverborn water changes your nature, and makes you unnatural. Everyone has heard of them.”

  “In that case, tell him I am going to release him, and we are going to have a talk.”

  I did not wait for an answer, but stopped and worked the lock and flung open the grate. It fell open with a noise like the clash of cymbals, echoing and clanging, while Qall was repeating my words.

  The monster rose and stretched, and even standing hip-deep in the cell, he seemed gigantic, and his arms like pillars. He twisted left and right, cracking his knuckles and flexing his spine.

  In one pounce he was up on the catwalk with me, taller than I was, despite having no head.

  He reached his massive hand for my throat.

  I gritted my teeth in a teensy smile, because this time the lummox was not grabbing me from behind. Bigger than me or not, I was not taken by surprise, so I politely ducked under his foot-long hand, rapping the back of his wrist just hard enough with the staff of my flail so that his grip went past my cheek by an inch and missed me.

  Knack Ace You had a puzzled look on his chest, like when you are sure you swatted a fly and you still see it buzzing. He was bigger and tougher than me, but I was betting he did not have a dad who made him do four hours PT a day since age eight.

  He reached out again, but I stepped back, moved to one side, and struck him on the shoulder with my free hand, hard enough to send him stumbling. The catwalk, you see, was too narrow for a big guy like him, and walking on top of barrels covered with grates or uncovered was not the best footing for a melee. Besides, he had not set his feet right. Being cramped in a little space like that had not left him in shape to put up a real fight.

  So he hopped, his huge arms windmilling widely, and fell to one knee, and the noise of the clatter was deafening. He had fallen in such a way as to give himself a poke in his chest-eye with his own kneecap when he stumbled. He had no eyebrows to raise, but he could crook his shoulders in the same sort of expression. With a gesture that looked like a man brushing his shirt, he wiped his eyes.

  Knack hooted at me.

  Qall said, “He says that he will kill you quickly, unlike the Dark Tower, who will kill you slowly.”

  I laughed a laugh of pure joy and pure mockery.

  Knack twitched in surprise. No doubt this was not the reaction he expected from someone he considered to be lunchmeat.

  I said, “Tell him I cannot be killed. If he ate my flesh, my flesh would grow and gather together, ripping out of his guts to come back to me. I am Lalilummutillut.”

  He understood that last word. The look on the vast face was now one of mingled wonder and fear, as if I had just taken off a mask to reveal something dizzyingly abnormal seething underneath.

  I squatted down on the catwalk, elbows on my knees, and stared at his monster-sized eyeballs, wondering if there was a heart behind and between them.

  Prompted by an intuition, I said to Qall, “Ask him what that tattoo on his spine means.”

  Knack stood up slowly, spread his huge arms, turned his back to me, and now he spoke in a deeper voice, something like a human language, and the words boomed from the immense mouth in his stomach.

  I swear he said the word Uhuru, which is a word that means Freedom in Swahili, which is where Gene Roddenberry picked the name for the radio operator on the starship Enterprise. See how much useful information you can pick up from reading Star Trek books?

  Qall said, “His people speak of small things through their noses, and of great things through their mouths.”

  “So what great things is he saying?”

  Qall shuddered. “Greatly evil! It is a bad story.”

  “Tell me anyway.”

  “After the world-flood, Ut-Napishtim came down from Mount Nisir where the great vessel had lodged fast. He sacrificed a sheep and offered incense at a ziggurat where he placed fourteen sacrificial vessels and poured reeds, cedar, and myrtle into the fire. There was a feast.”

  “That does not sound so bad,” I commented.

  “After the festival, his first son, whom the stars call Ngushur but mortal men call Am or Ham, gave him the first wine of the reborn world and made him to become drunk, and he saw his father unclothed. The first son mocked the father and boasted, and told what he had seen to his brothers with much scorn, saying he was above his father, therefore above all living things. Ut-Napishtim was commanded by sun and wind and star to punish Am and reduce him from the kingship to servitude, that Am would serve his brothers rather than rule over them, and his children after.

  “But Ut-Napishtim in his shame defied sun and wind and star, and r
efused to curse his son.

  “The blessing that grants to Man a godlike form and likeness was therefore withdrawn, and the children of Am were cast out from the law which orders that each shall bear after his own kind: for this reason, many prodigies and monstrous races were born among the children of Am. As human nature departed, they obtained the custom of tearing the flesh of men, like beasts do.

  “Am begat Cush begat Sabtah begat Ab-Tuat. Ab-Tuat of Kish coupled with the goddess Menhit of the Massacres one day when she appeared to him as a lioness: and she consumed him. But as blood price, she brought forth a get of monsters mightier than the others. This race arose and slew the other monsters, and trampled the whole-born men into servitude.

  “To this day, the tradition is kept among the Blemmyae, in honor of the crime that made their race strong enough to conquer the wholesome men, and they eat man-flesh like the lioness their mother. It is said among them that human necks are for collars, and heads for beheading, and so free men do not have need of them. The rules of chastity that bind other men, the sons of Ab-Tuat do not follow: and they call this unnatural disorder by the names freedom and liberation. In this, they follow the Mossynoeci, who tattoo themselves likewise, and couple in the street without shame, like swine.”

  “Wow. Is there any world out there that is not totally sick? Hold it! Don’t translate that!”

  Too late. Qall repeated my words to Knack, who smiled and boomed out a short answer from his neck-nose.

  Qall said, “He says that many worlds are sick with evil. There is one he has heard of where the mothers, countless in number, kill their own young in the womb.”

  My first impulse was to point out that I was not old enough to vote, and whatever my world did, I was not responsible for. Of course, I suppose the same might be true of him and his world.

  Instead I said only, “Tell him that all men are sinners, all worlds are fallen. You are proud that you are free born, but the Dark Tower tells you what you will do tomorrow, and the next day, and the next. Do you know the death-dates of your children not yet born? How are you free?”