The Lord of the Black Land

by John C. Wright

  I was puzzled. He was not moving fast enough to be running, and anyway there were troops ahead of him beyond those doors. Nonetheless, I decided to trust him, and walked away from him and over to the story-and-a-half-tall door.

  The twelve soldiers stood still as statues. Their expressions were hidden by their fanciful faceplates. They just watched us walking away. Maybe they were waiting to see what we would do. Maybe they were waiting for orders. I was waiting for both, I guess.

  Peacock mask spoke in a cajoling, hearty voice: “You’ve had your fun while your star blinked, and you got away from your horoscope for a while, eh? But that’s done, and your horoscope is back, and the stars will guide your every footstep from now on.”

  When I got to the door I suddenly realized why I was here. I could not see Nakasu from this position, but I heard the groan of hinges and the clang of metal. So I found the door ring, and pulled the heavy leaves to. There was a bar on this side which lowered into place when I turned a crank shaped like a flower. It was not made of living metal, and, of course, the door was meant to be barred from this side, for defense of the vast gold door inscribed with the eighteen-pointed star behind me. When my bar fell into place, it made the same clang as I had just heard down the other branch of the corridor.

  Peacock mask was saying in a louder, harder voice: “Don’t get any crazy ideas, and don’t make it worse…”

  I turned around and started walking toward him. Nakasu, coming from the other corridor, fell into step next to me, matching his longer strides to mine, so that we approached at the same speed.

  Peacock mask would not shut up. He just kept talking, “… and I can have a word with the Inflictors to see your scourging will only leave you with lashmarks you can brag about to your doxies and ale-mates. My offer is generous!”

  I felt my cheeks pull back with the kind of a smile you only smile when you start to get really mad.

  “I am so going to kick your sorry butt.” I announced loudly.

  Peacock mask tilted his head. “Decurion. What is that, Frisnian? English?”

  One of the men in the rear said, “Technomancer world, sir! Look out for his jetpack and explodey-boom weapons!”

  Nakasu tapped my shoulder and pointed at the flail, and pantomimed a screw-unscrew gesture.

  I twisted at the ruby rings along the bottom of the staff, but nothing happened. Nakasu tore the flail from my grasp, made a quick adjustment, giving the lowest ring a half-turn, and the one above that a full turn. Darkness began to seep from the flail, and a shimmer like you see above a pavement on a hot day. He handed it back to me with a condescending grin all along his belly.

  Peacock mask barked, “Winter constellations rear! Summer, fore! Death-lanterns ready!”

  The men formed a musket line, rear rank resting their weapons on hooks in their pikes meant for this, the front rank kneeling, pikes tilted toward us. The rear brought out brass Jules Verne rayguns that looked very different from the steam-powered hot nail gun I had been shot with earlier. These were shorter, only about a forearm long, and looked like brass telescopes. The breech held a gem. At the command, the gems all lit up with blinding, phosphorescent light.

  Nakasu picked up the pace, and was jogging. This was like seeing an elephant jog. I swear the floor trembled. I sidled a little to the left so I would not brain him (or, in his case, shoulder him) when I started swinging the flail. The three golden arms were whirling like bicycle spokes around my head, a glittering orbit. A dark cloud began to spread from me.

  “Fire!”

  By that point, the cloud was pretty dark, and spread from wall to wall. The energy beams looked as bright and dangerous as lightning bolts until they entered the cloud. The lantern stuff, when it touched the cloud, seemed to thicken and slow in a freakish fashion, and curve and drip and drop to the floor in shining pools that shrank. The darkness was just eating it.

  Peacock mask shouted, “Pikes! Light ’em up!”

  The men flourished their pole-arms, and the wooden shafts began to shine with an eye-searing blue-white light, a light that drove back the twilight. My circle of smoke shrank suddenly.

  Peacock mask shouted, “La! We might as well get some fun out of an unexpected event. How’s it feel to fight not knowing the result, eh? Like being a kid again! One of you might win a gold medallion this day, or a golden girl!”

  One voice said, “B-but — we don’t know what will — !”

  The fear in his voice made me start laughing and laughing like a maniac. Nervous laughter, I guess.

  Nakasu roared like a lion and charged. I sprinted, bellowing.

  And they panicked, two of them throwing down their pikes.

  Ugly, crazy laughter was bursting out of me. I was immortal and Nakasu was a man-eating monster as big as a hippo. And there were only ten of them, because two had broken ranks and were fleeing!

  We plowed into the line, and it broke, so five men were to our right, and five to our left. Victory seemed near.

  And then it was not so near.

  Keep in mind, a line of ten pikemen, even a panicked line, is not something two abominations, even a nice abomination like me, can really hope to outnumber or outmatch. In addition to numbers, they also had reach, which means they got to hit us before we hit them. Also, they had armor, and we didn’t. In movies and stuff, whoever is more courageous and impetuous always wins, or the heroes have special powers. Well, we two abominations were special, but we were not winning.

  I am pretty sure I managed to brain one of them (at least, my flail clanged loudly off his decorated helmet) before two others hooked me under my knees to throw me on my back, and a third soldier speared me through the guts, pinning me to the floor, and a fourth stepped forward with a battle cry, and swung his poleax down in a powerful overhead swing toward my favorite neck. I could not raise my flail haft to block it, because the officer in the peacock helm was standing on my arm.

  Nakasu’s hide was thick enough to turn the first two spears that broke against him, but his momentum and strength were not enough to bring any of the pikemen into his grasp: three of them staved him off with broken pikestaffs while a fourth one belabored the huge target of his vast face, forcing Nakasu to cross his arms over his chest. When Nakasu roared, someone thrust a spear into his mouth.

  Nakasu snapped the pikestaff in half with his monster teeth and spit the pikehead out. But he was lumbering back and puking blood. Had his tongue been cut, or was he disemboweled? I didn’t know if the wound was mortal, because I did not know where his organs were. It suddenly seemed to me as if he perhaps was not as well designed as a human being for combat. I mean, if he ever got a breastplate for armor, it would have looked like a hockey mask, and have holes in it for his eyes and stuff.

  With a huge sweep of his arm, Nakasu knocked aside the guy who was trying to decapitate me, so the pikehead broke my collarbone instead, and chopped halfway through my right shoulder. I lost sensation in that arm (the one the peacock-masked officer was standing on) and my flail slipped from my grasp.

  Nakasu had just saved my life! I felt a rush of such gratitude at that moment that made me ashamed of my earlier snorting at his odor.

  But, no. Then I realized that, if I could not die, the strong bond of emotion people are supposed to feel when they fight shoulder to shoulder with comrades in arms would be denied to me. Why feel grateful when someone saves your life if your life cannot be lost? This being unkillable would warp my psychology into something nonhuman if I were not careful.

  The officer in the peacock mask raised a pistol, a shortened version of the lantern-powered brass raygun, and sent a line of blazing fire into and through my chest. I am sure he hit my heart, because of the enormous spray of blood, but at this point I thought of my heart and lungs as my least vulnerable spots, because when you fight an immortal, you want to break his limbs and prevent him from moving.

  Of course, come to think of it, since it was impossible for me to be alive at all, why could I not move a broke
n limb?

  It was as if all my rage flooded into my numb right arm. I could dimly feel the broken ends of my collar bone grinding together, but I saw my arm flex and twist and rise up and grab the officer’s foot by its spurs, and yank him off his feet.

  I tried to rise, but four or five pikemen pierced me and leaned on their pikes. I was helpless as a butterfly pinned to a board. They held me down and clubbed and chopped me over the head and chest and shoulders, and at least one leg got chopped neatly through. Note to self: being unkillable does not mean you are invulnerable.

  I heard the Peacock say, “Chop the head off the abomination! I have heard they can still feel pain in their cut limbs when they are dismembered. Let’s have some fun, eh?”

  Because I was flat on my back, I saw something no one else was looking at. Remember I said that there was an oriel window above the big three-story-tall golden doors? I saw a man with flowing white hair and beard step through the oriel window and onto the balcony. In his hand he was carrying a shepherd’s crook.

  He looked down at me. Because he was not dressed in armor, and did not have the almond eyes and thick red lips of an Ur-man, I shouted to him for help.

  His stern expression did not relax an inch, but he nodded briefly. He stepped up on the balcony rail with remarkable agility, as if drawn aloft on invisible wires.

  And then he stepped on nothing.

  With no pause and no hesitation, his hair and beard floating and flowing about him, the stranger’s feet left the railing. He walked out onto the emptiness as if he were walking on an invisible floor.

  Gravity was just not paying attention to this guy today, I figured.

  2. A Walk in the Air

  Don’t think this shepherd was thin and frail because his hair was white: think of a weightlifter or boxer. When I say his beard and hair were flowing, I mean he looked like he was underwater, and his hair was like a cloud streaming back from his harsh face. Like Charlton Heston playing Moses in a Cecil B. DeMille movie, except dressed more shabbily. He was garbed in a toga or coat of camel hair, and his belt was a hank of rope. His calloused feet were bare.

  He gazed down with eyes as hard and cold as outer space, and raised his crook in a gesture like that of a conductor readying the orchestra for the first thunderous opening chords of Beethoven’s Fifth. He closed his eyes as if in concentration, and thrust the crosier.

  And the soldiers in their gold armor, screaming, were plucked up in midair as neatly as Dorothy’s house in Kansas, and whirled up and up, ten then twenty then thirty feet in the air. The half-score of men spun like a swirl of autumn leaves, shouting hysterically, bouncing off the walls and each other. Their pikes swirled and spun and fell through the air like straw in the wind. But there was no wind.

  The effect, whatever it was, was not affecting me. Nakasu climbed heavily to his elephant-feet, and stood blinking. The flow of blood from his mouth was less, just a trickle running down his hip and thigh, and he stood with his arms akimbo, wiping the corner of his mouth. His pectoral muscle flexed as he squinted, but whether he was annoyed or in pain or amazed at our sudden rescue, I could not say.

  I used my left arm to push my severed right arm back into its stump (and, no, I had not noticed when it got detached) concentrated a moment to rejoin the limbs, and then used it to point upward at the white-haired Moses wannabe. (My other limbs and organs were not all together at this point. I looked like the Scarecrow of Oz after his battle with flying monkeys.) Nakasu had to lean back to look up, like the Tim Burton version of Batman—one disadvantage of having no head, I suppose.

  The shepherd standing in midair spoke like Moses, too. His was a booming voice, ringing with authority, that filled the corridor and echoed off the far wall. It sounded like Hebrew, a language I had studied, but I did not have my lexicon with me.

  He was evidently addressing the captain in the peacock-mask helm, who answered with a stream of abuse and insult I understood, but I won’t bother to repeat here. Evidently swearwords in every aeon of the multiverse are pretty much the same: excretion, fornication, blasphemy, you get the picture.

  The shepherd guy gestured again with his crook, and the spinning stopped, and the men simply hung in midair, puppets on unseen threads.

  The captain gained control of himself. Even though his voice shook with terror, his words were words of defiance, “The Dark Tower has been father and mother to me, and the stars have granted me shelter, garb, viand and wine, and name and rank and power: I will not break faith, but die obedient to her laws. Which of you, my men, will call upon this outlandish abomination to save his life? Who here will betray?”

  The shepherd spoke again. It was a few syllables: harsh, cold, and final. It was a death sentence. I could have told that from the tone of voice even without recognizing any words.

  One of the men answered, “We will fall: the Dark Tower will forever stand.”

  The men all roared their agreement. It made me sick to my stomach, since they were cheering for their own deaths, but I cannot fault them their loyalty. It was magnificent, in a way.

  The captain gave his men the order to fire. The shepherd did not give them the chance to obey. A falling body falls really rapidly. You always think that if someone were falling off a cliff or through a trapdoor in a gallows, and you were standing right next to him, you could put out your hand fast enough to save him, but you’d be wrong. It is too quick.

  The soldiers had been hanging near the ceiling, which was forty feet off the deck or higher. An Olympic platform dive is thirty-three feet. So the ten soldiers were ten feet or more higher than that, and they fell onto the marble floor rather than into water.

  They made quite a noise when they hit, but it was more of a crunching splatter than a splash. I'd seen a lot of horrible things by then, but that was certainly up there.

  Then the shepherd guy walked down from midair as if he was walking down an invisible flight of stairs.

  He reached the floor and stood among the mess and splatter of broken bodies and shattered armor. A voice cried out, followed by a second one. “Kill us!” and “Don’t let the Masters know!” and I heard one of them say something about his wife and children.

  The shepherd stooped.

  I saw the sapara I’d taken from Sergeant Crowmeat resting on the bloody floor. I recognized it because it was not covered in ornate fretwork. It must have fallen out of my scabbard during the brawl. The shepherd picked the weapon up off the floor and started moving among the broken bodies.

  Anyone who was still moving or groaning or begging, the white haired man would kneel next to him, and chop at his neck in one swift stroke. Remember the blade was shaped like a cleaver, short and heavy, with the inner curve being the business edge. He held the sword like it was a hatchet, and struck with the same finesse you might see a boy who had not achieved his Tote and Chip badge would use to hew firewood. This man was not a soldier, but he was not letting that stop him. He had the same look on his face I often saw on my father. I wondered what grim and regrettable business Dad did.

  By the time he was done, his sword arm was red up to the elbow, and the crooked brass sword was dripping, leaving a little trail of red drops behind him on the marble floor. He came walking back toward Nakasu and me, this time with his feet on the floor. He had tucked his beard under his coat so that there were not so many stains on it.

  3. When in Rome

  I should have stopped him. I wish I had. I could have. He was an old man.

  I thought about it at the time, but, first, the enemy had not surrendered when asked; second, I had no way to take prisoners or give them medical care; third, I wanted them to die while begging and sobbing, the bastards, even though it made me sick to my stomach to hear the meat-chopping noises, and I wanted to be tough enough to enjoy the sight, even though I was not; fourth, I did not know how to talk to the guy; fifth, it wasn’t my world. Maybe this was the way things were done here.

  That was what I thought at the time. You see, I thought th
e rules of decency and honor were not necessarily the same in every situation, in all worlds, in every aeon.

  I did not think it for sure. I just thought maybe.

  And that maybe was enough to stop me.

  I had seen one too many Star Trek shows where morons from Star Fleet are supposed to respect the customs of all the backward savages of space, I had read too many sci-fi stories about how it is hunky-dory for Martians to practice cannibalism, and every hero for courtesy’s sake is supposed to abide by whatever rules the locals of the land he happens to be passing through happen to pass on to him, especially if the locals have fun rules like temple prostitution and wife-swapping.

  Sure, I sort of knew that the script writers oh-so-conveniently never let Star Fleet officers come across Hindus burning widows or Phoenicians sacrificing maidens or Nigerians performing ritual female genital mutilation on little girls without anesthesia. And if the local custom required our snarky sci-fi hero to pleasure the wife of his Eskimo host, she was always willing, young, buxom, disease-free, and never smelled of rancid whale blubber. So in the front of my mind, I knew the morals of these little Aesop fables were bogus as a three-dollar bill.

  You think something as frivolous as a TV show or a cartoon or a science fiction paperback doesn’t affect your thinking? It does. You just don’t notice. In the back of your mind, in that half-asleep corner where your imagination stows all the things you heard on television which only television people believe, there will be no images of any show named Star Civilization vividly showing you that barbarism is barbaric.

  All you will find in the back of your mind is a little voice of scorn, saying maybe you are wrong to be too sure, wrong to judge, wrong to think, wrong to act.

  And during your time of testing, during the one and only time you might need to have absolute faith in your ability to know the difference between right and wrong, the time when you only have a few moments to make up your mind, that maybe will be in your mind. And maybe you’ll freeze up.