The Lord of the Black Land

by John C. Wright

  So I did not ask. Escalators were reserved for the better people.

  We emerged onto a vast balcony overlooking a dark internal well. It was not the same as I had been in before. Even though Pally and I and the cat were the only living things at this altitude, this wharf was larger, better lit, and more lavishly outfitted than the unclean servants’ path. Before us was a cloverleaf of horizontal strips woven into and around three great vertical roads of living metal, and everything was lit with lanterns of stained glass. Overhead, this cloverleaf was being brooded over by man-headed statues of winged bulls: huge empty-eyed masks of shining gold hung in the gloom, dimly lit by jeweled lanterns, their square beards hanging like sails.

  I stared uneasily up at the Mount-Rushmore-sized frowns, blind eyes like agates. “Pally, I don’t think I am allowed to use this stream-path. I might be new here, but I think I am considered unclean. An abomination. Wouldn’t want to get you and In-Sin in trouble.”

  “Boy, if you were unclean, your master would not let you tote around a Twilight Wand, and surely would not be sending you to the Lower Luminous Observation Furlong. That is Officer’s Country.” He did not say ‘Officer’s Country’ but that was the gist. Off-limits, verboten, no-go. What he literally said was qashduit-kibsedu which meant for sacred feet alone.

  It turned out we were not exactly alone. Pally strolled over to where three seven-foot-tall headless monsters stood on a gold platform in front of a lectern. I thought the monsters were statues because they were not in pressure suits, but one of them turned around when Pally spoke.

  2. Blemmyae

  It was so large and so hideous that my reflexes made me jerk like a puppet on a string, and I found myself with the flail overhead, held more like you are supposed to hold a katana than a flail, and the three arms of the weapon were jarred into spinning by the jolt. I was lucky I did not brain myself.

  The thing had two huge eyeballs instead of nipples built into his chest. (I know it was a ‘he’ because his eyes were not protruding.) His mouth was a shark-toothed zipper cutting across his abdomen, and his navel would have been that indent beneath the nose, if he had had a nose.

  (In case you are wondering, that indent is called a philtrum. I learned that from a book about the ancient Chinese martial art of striking sensitive points on the face. Don’t let anyone tell you reading does not broaden the mind.)

  He did have a goatee or a soul-patch that formed a triangle down his belly slope between his lower lip and blending into his pubic hairs. When he bowed to Pally, I saw the creature had a blowhole like a dolphin’s between his shoulder blades, but no head and no neck.

  Let me stress that these guys were not just seven feet tall. There are basketball players taller than that back on Earth. That is not what made them monstrous. They were seven feet tall at the shoulder, and broad and thick and squat to match. Call it three or four feet broad at the shoulder, arms thicker than my legs, knotted with muscles like a blacksmith, and longer than an ape’s. Their legs were thicker than those of a hippopotamus, mere columns of muscle, but they were bow-legged, and walked with their toes turned out in a slouch. The flesh was leathery and thick like the hide of an elephant.

  I didn’t hear what Pally said to him, and I could not understand what he said back. His voice came from his blowhole, and his language was slurps and burps without consonants, with the occasional sneeze for emphasis. The monster turned toward me, and held up a glass lens the size of a china saucer in one hand. This hand he held like he was about to say the Pledge of Allegiance. It was a moment before I realized that was a monocle: he was holding it before his left pectoral eyeball, but somehow he did not look as elegant as Rich Uncle Pennybags from the Monopoly game.

  Rich Uncle (let us call him) inspected me through his eyeglass for a moment, saw me ready to do battle, laughed a gush of truly gruesome laughter from his stomach-mouth, sneered with his whole left side of his belly, and then turned away.

  A second headless monster, this one hairy all over and with a beard like a kilt running from waist to knee, and looking more apish than mannish, bowed, took a metal tablet the size of a tombstone from the lectern, and cradled it in his arm under a lamp. This second headless guy was evidently the living desk of the first one, because he stood just holding the tablet there while first headless guy with the monocle tapped the surface of the tablet with a stylus. The tablet looked heavy, but the first headless guy just took his sweet time about it. What a jerk.

  The tablet was covered with columns of cuneiform. The surface clattered like a row of dominoes falling and the cuneiforms changed and changed again each time the stylus tapped one spot or another on the reading surface. I am not sure whether to call it a touch-sensitive screen, or a computer monitor, an adding machine, or just a book written on thin sheets like Venetian blinds, or what. I was not close enough to see what was making the inscriptions move.

  The metal of the tablet face was bright, like Abby’s chain, and may have been the same expanding and contracting metal.

  I could see there were five columns on the tablet, and the first one stopped while the other four were still scrolling or moving, and then the second one stopped, and so on. It was like seeing a slot machine grind to a halt.

  Headless Rich Uncle read something to Pally, and the two of them argued a bit, and both of them pulled out folds of colored paper inscribed with horoscopes, and pointed and gestured and snarled. From the Pally side of the conversation, I could tell they were arguing whether putting me on the descending wayship was part of their planned fate for the day.

  Eventually, they reached a compromise: Headless Rich Uncle called over Headless Guy Number Three, who had been standing there like a corpse until that moment. Rich Uncle and Pally looked over Number Three’s papers for a few minutes, then barked at him and pointed toward me.

  He walked toward me. Headless Guy Number Three wore twin bandoliers crossed over his chest, so it looked like he was wearing a raccoon mask, sort of, because the belts crossed between his eyes.

  I assume Headless Guy Number Three was this world’s equivalent of a yakuza or a punk rocker, because he had a pierced bellybutton, or maybe it was a pierced lip, with a gold knickknack hanging from it.

  On his spine was a tattoo of a ship atop a mountain, and beneath, a man and a boy with their arms around each other, a grapevine growing up between them. Stormclouds were on his shoulderblades, and grape-leaf patterns around his waist.

  Headless Guy Number Three also was armed. His rings pierced through his shoulder bones to which his bandoliers were strapped. This prevented the bandoliers from slipping off his neckless shoulders. Slung across the flat surface of his shoulders in a tube of leather you could call either a holster or a hat, he carried a Jules Verne-style raygun, with a barrel of brass and a muzzle of crystal.

  Headless Number Two, the apish one with a kilt of whiskers, now walked over to where countless glass rowboats were set against a line of statues, and, like I had seen Abby do, he studied the faces carefully, selected a boat, and hauled it over. Unlike Abby, he used a handtruck or wheelbarrow to help with the hauling. This rowboat was wider in diameter than the ones I’d seen before, and longer, more like a yacht.

  Pallishabdu wandered back over, and clicked the switch on his chest to turn his speaking tube back on. “Well, nice meeting you, boy,” he said to me. “Sorry you don’t have your papers on you, since I’d like to have seen what becomes of you. There is a little SNAFU here—” (the word he used was nuchxutu, which literally meant a fit of the hiccups, but the tone of voice of world-weary disgust he used to say it in, showed he really meant an expected institutional foul-up, what Dad called a clusterfoxtrot) “— because nothing from this Furlong is allowed into Officer’s Country like the Lower Luminous Observation Furlong. And the Furlong above that is the Upper Luminous, and no one goes there. Fortunately, the one above that is called Saffron Empty Wind Furlong, and it is all blacksmiths and bellmakers for a guild long extinct, because no one uses alveromancy
any more. Saffron Wind is also used for a waystation, or temporary troop billets, because the main accelerators are there.

  “The Station Master’s tablet mentions a back stairway where there was one of those family-wide infanticide-suicides where the mom on a holy day kills all her own children starting with the youngest…”

  (Yes, they had a single word for a mother killing herself and her entire family during a holiday. Hamhattapars’h. It’s like the Eskimos having one hundred eighty different words for snow. Except if something dark and evil and sadistic and sick fell from northern clouds rather than snowflakes, making glaciers and icebergs and permafrost. The Dark Tower was the Arctic Icecap of evil.)

  “… and it looks like no priests ever got around to performing a rite, so those stairs are not marked as blessed soles of blessed feet only, but the Tablet does not have them down as off limits either. You just have to count the steps in the stairway. Three thousand, one hundred fifty two. Got that? Think you can handle that?”

  “Uh…”

  “Kaqqudu Nakasu here will lead you to the top of the stairway.” He gestured to the headless monster with the brass raygun, the one with the yakuza full-back tattoo.

  “What is he?”

  “The Host of the Sternophthalmoi, who peer from the breastbone, but we call them Blemmyae or Blems, for short. They’re Hamitic, and born of Abtuat, Cush and Sabtah, and they be Man-eaters. We look and smell like honey-scalded trout with garnish to them. Don’t offer him your hand, or he’ll snap it off and snack on it.”

  “We can’t talk to each other.”

  “Yeah, well, you two should have thought of that before you went and got born as barbarians on tongue-confused worlds. I’d go with you myself, but…” He shrugged. “… not in my work horoscope for today. Fate is fated.”

  “Am I mentioned in his horoscope?” I asked. “I mean Entirely Headless Nick over here.”

  Pally boxed my ear, just as casually as you’d slap a bug. It hurt, but not compared to what I had been through just today. “Don’t be disrespectful. He’s freeborn. His duty-name is Kaqqudu Nakasu. Say the name!”

  “Cockwad-doo Knack Ass You. Got it.”

  “Groin of the fertility god, what an accent you have!” And he turned off his speaking tube, stepped close, and pulled my head down next to one of the portholes of his helmet. “And, boy, don’t play word games, because all we Ur-folk know what all words mean. You won’t be laughing when they drive a heated spike through your tongue. I’m letting you know because you seem like a nice punk. You don’t wipe your hole with your eating hand, see? Or you end up with a bad taste in your mouth and none to blame. Don’t make your fate harder than your stars already have.”

  “Yes, sir. Sorry, sir.”

  He let go of me and turned his speaking horn back on.

  (I decided, based on the fact that he was helping me and that I was surrounded by humanoid cannibalistic horrors muscled like King Kongs, not to punch him in the gut nor kick him in the groin. Forgiveness is a virtue, especially when you are behind enemy lines trying to pass yourself off as one of them.)

  He said, “No, you’re not in his papers, but the wording could be taken one way or the other, so we can sling this chamberpot from the catapult, and see if it falls on the right hut, eh? That’s an old saying. It means you don’t really know what your horoscope means until you live through it, so might as well try.” His ‘old saying’ said something to me about how the people in the world’s one tower maintained their dominion over the people in the world’s one city underneath.

  “I am very grateful for your help, sir,” I said, rubbing my ear, which stung rather badly.

  “Don’t take it hard,” he said. “I’m doing you a favor. See, these Blemmyae, they’d rather bite your face off as see you hoist buttocks and kiss toe, so it won’t do to have them irked, because they’re not as those what loves a groveling spine underfoot. I tell ya, I don’t like much doing work at this height with such as them playing lord-o’-the-keep and swaggering, but you can see why the Lord of Magicians set them here.”

  I said, “Well…I can see they don’t need pressure suits.”

  He laughed. “Pressure suits! What a word.”

  “What are they called?”

  “Nahlapt-Aqarapas-bet.” (Armor for when breath is but rare and precious gasps.)

  “Poetical way of saying it,” I grunted.

  I could not see his face inside his diving suit helmet, but his voice betrayed a smile. “The One Speech has all the virtues of all confused tongues of the outer worlds piled up, and then some! It is more poetical, clear, logical, more precise; everything is better. It’s an easy tongue to pick up, and your life is a lot easier once you can ken the jabber of barbarians, and make them understand you.”

  “Wait—if anyone learns your language, he can understand all languages? How is that possible?”

  He turned his gloves palm up, since he could not shrug in his diving suit. “Just the way it is. The father of all languages has authority over the young ones, I s’pose. Anyway, the Blemmy’s ain’t stationed here just because they can take the thin air, but to cordon off the abandoned levels.”

  “Abandoned?”

  “Not every immensity is occupied by folk like us, creatures of flesh and blood. Many an immensity be haunted by creatures who manifest from the twilight, or powers called up and can’t be put down again. The nicest ones are the ghosts of women who died in childbirth before their child’s horoscope was drawn, so they couldn’t see to their wee ones as they ought. The power of love lets them linger in the living world as shadows, to help their lost children in time of need, or grandchildren. They give jewels of gold or fine rarities to their descendants, but by dawn the gifts turn to dead leaves or owl pellets.”

  “Is that real, or just a story?”

  He gave another palms-up shrug. “Some say one thing, some say another. There are worse things than shadows of weeping mothers in the abandoned furlongs. Little babies with empty bodies and empty eyes possessed by airy watchers, or secret police who misplaced their bodies when they detached their heads, and now the heads just drift the empty miles of hallway like balloons. More dangerous are the living creatures, such as man-eating snow-apes; or escaped blood-quaffers; or gypsies with worms in their lungs who live in the airtight sacks of giant spiders, forever climbing or descending.

  “Less than one part in one hundred of the Great Tower is occupied, or so I heard it said,” he continued. “Most of the stuff above the atmosphere is just miles of cable and empty space. Near the crown is all the storehouses, lighthouses, launch stations, or arsenals. The Lord of Magicians allows the vermin to inhabit the abandoned areas so that slaves with no papers won’t think of climbing upper-ward to flee the officers.” He said this last part with heavy emphasis.

  “Speaking of which, what if an officer stops me, and finds I have no papers?”

  Pally said, “Well, if it’s in your horoscope to be stopped, there is no point trying to avoid it, ’cause that will only make it worse. And if it is not in the horoscope, why worry? The whoremaster don’t scream if the harlot don’t.” (I still did not know what that meant, but it was evidently a popular phrase with him.) “In any case, this week, probably everyone’ll be too busy to look your way. The traffic is really heavy right now, what with the new mobilization lamps all lit for the next war effort. Victory in the Stars! Victory under the Stars! You been to a pep rally yet?”

  “A what?” I thought I had heard wrong.

  “Pep rally. To cheer the troops. That should have been explained to you during orientation, the day you get butt-branded with your mark. When you first came.”

  “Orientation. Um. Slept through it.”

  “Wonder how you managed that standing up, because no one sits down on butt-branding day. Anyway, for rallies, they pass out free almonds and grog, and any scheduled beatings or scourging for that day cancelled. Bastinado, too! Not postponed, mind you! Worthwhile to bribe an Astrologer to predict whe
n the dates fall, if you have anything to bribe anyone with. Like a pretty sister.”

  He tilted his suit back, so that he could look up. I saw that the lanterns had been lit in the far distance of the overhead shaft.

  Pally could read their meaning, for he said, “You are in luck! Must be a planet smiling on you. There is a wayship descending through this shaft. Should be here in less than an hour.”

  He did not seem to be in a hurry to rush back to his job of cleaning toilets under high-altitude conditions, so I asked him about the troop ships. “Who is attacking where and why?”

  Pally clapped his leathery gloves together, rubbing them as if over an imaginary fire. “It seems this world where the men with iron magic come from, technomancers with thundersticks, just decided to open a twilight gate with technomancy, and, of course, what is the first thing through but the First Conquest squadrons? Little spears and then big wayships. It’s not an important world, but it’s been at low ylem-tide for an age of time, unreachable, with no twilight paths in, even though they could get their exorcist-assassins and ostiaries out, so the Magicians had to wait for the natives to develop the twilight art themselves.

  “Heard the place has ties to the Golden City, so pulling on one thread will unwind the whole skein, or so the newspapers say. I haven’t read the victory issue with the gold cover, even though it is hanging everywhere. I am one of those folk who don’t read ahead more’n a few days in the newspapers, ’cause I like to be surprised for what’s coming.”

  Yes, he literally said news-paper: Nyar-bussurt-essu papyrus-of-reports-new.

  “Except for big events, of course, royal weddings or royal funerals, earthquakes — there you have to get ready long ahead of time. I read those newspapers ten years ahead. Wish the censors would tell us little people what they tell the nobles.”