Somewhither: A Tale of the Unwithering Realm

by John C. Wright

  “If you can conquer my world so easily, why do you need my help?”

  He did not answer.

  I said, this time louder, “If the Dark Tower knows so much, how come you are here asking me questions?”

  Again, no answer.

  “As I left Earth, I saw one of your Invasion Machines fall out of the sky toward the sea. Now, I don’t know how long I was in the Bog Between the Worlds, but I guess a few hours, maybe a day. I am guessing that in that time, you opened a Moebius gate, pushed through a bunch of barges crammed with bowmen, and maybe some of your freaky-deakies with weird superpowers, and that the USS Nimitz stood twenty miles away, over the visible horizon, and dropped shells on you the size of Volkswagens, after hosing you down with napalm dropped from supersonic stealth fighters zipping by so high you did not see them either, and lighting your invasion up like so many charcoal briquettes. How is my guess? Is that about what happened?”

  Above his veil, I saw his watery eyes crinkled like a grandfather smiling. He spoke in a slow voice, “Your guess is as far from what happened as is the highest star from a grain of sand at the bottom of the deepest sea.”

  “There is no way you can beat us!”

  “Youth, have you met any of the host that quaffs blood like wine? The Cold Ones? In their own aeon, any man they fix with their eye is beguiled. They were as proud of their invincible power as you are of yours, for there were none of their world who could stand against them. But they did not know their fate. They did not know their future.

  “From the sea-gate we launched a heavier wayship into low Earth orbit, where neither lightning can strike nor wild wind disturb. The Moebius coil can also be used as a casement as well as a portcullis, and our Astrologers have gathered the visions of your stars and wandering stars as they shine on your world, and hence can estimate the influences.”

  I said, “Conquering an entire world is impossible! The logistics alone make it absurd. Do you Bronze-Age barbarians have any idea how many people live on my —”

  He interrupted me, “Counting the birthdates from the star positions, we calculate over seven billion individuals living on your globe.”

  I stood there with my mouth hanging open.

  Enmeduranki ignored me and continued blandly, “It strains even our abilities to cast all the horoscopes for every soul, but our actuarial calculation engines have made a preliminary map of those nations whose founding took place on recognizable nativity dates — yes, we can forecast the fates of tribes and peoples and states as well as of children. A skeleton of your world’s future is already known to the Great Council of Chaldaeans and Magicians. We will know more as our clerks complete their mathematic routines and the great engines meditate.

  “We know that only the English-speaking nations have highly trained military forces capable of action on a global scale. The others cannot reach our orbital position.

  “For pacification, the policy of the Great King demands one warrior for every ten thousand slaves, which requires a mere seven million men under arms for your world. And less, of course, depending on how many of your cities we raze and how many of your croplands we reduce, burn, and salt.

  “But seven million is as nothing, I have the manpower of many worlds, many aeons, on which to call, including worlds much more crowded than your own.

  “A technological world is far more fragile than an agrarian one, and can be reduced merely by destroying its ships and roads and complexities of machinery — without fuel for your mechanisms, how many days can your great cities survive with only those foods grown within walking distance, in amounts carried by horse and cart?”

  “We have radar, and submarines, and jet aircraft, and intercontinental thermonuclear warheads. We have satellites that —” And then I stopped, astonished at my own stupidity.

  He waved his hand in the air with the same gesture you’d use to brush a fly away. “You have satellites, but we read the rising and setting of planets, their motions in retrograde and prograde, conjunctions superior and inferior, triunes and oppositions. Child, we rule worlds who also command weapons as fearsome as yours, and their warriors can make the sky dark with terror, rendering the whole world bright with fire from pole to pole. I have said to you, your weapons and works are nothing to us: And I never lie.”

  I spread my hands. “Fine. You know the future. You know everything. Why talk to me? Why ask me any questions at all?”

  “I have answered. What I am fated to speak to you, I speak.”

  “Then what are you afraid of from my world, if you are not afraid of our thermonuclear intercontinental ballistic missiles?”

  “We fear nothing. The stars foretold that you are fated to answer certain questions. Have you Exorcists on your world? Have you Warlocks of the Ylem on your world? Have you Doorkeepers on your world or Doorwardens of the One-sided Circle?”

  His word for doorkeeper was babusippur and for doorwarden was babukanniksippur. For a moment I did not catch the implications of the words until I said them again in my head as two words. The first was Door Warlock. The second word, Doorwarden, meant someone who shut a gate by magic. Literally it meant Door-sealing Warlock. One-sided Circle or Istensehpgishur was their word for what the Professor called a Moebius coil.

  He was talking about the Ostiaries of the Knights Templar. He was talking about my dad.

  That was not what creeped me out. I expected him to know about the Templars. Dad told me these people were his enemy, the ones who stopped him from finding Mom.

  What creeped me out was his asking about exorcists. His word sagamahu meant not only an exorcist, but a sorcerer, a magician, an incantatory priest. With a shock, it came to me that my world did have incantatory priests. He does not have a very good singing voice, but Father Flannery chants the words at every Mass. Did priests perform exorcisms any longer? Or was that just in horror movies? Did Father Flannery know the rites and prayers for casting out demons? It stood to reason that he did. They must learn something useful at seminary.

  Oddly, I was more afraid for Father Flannery than for my dad. He talked to me at Mom’s funeral, and afterward. I loved him. That these freaks should be hunting that harmless, absentminded old man made my heart burn.

  I folded my arms again. “How does your future-seeing power work, again, exactly? You cannot foresee these exorcists and doorwardens, as you call them, or otherwise you would not ask about them. And the ylemsippur, the shadowmages?” Then I remembered that I had been called a shadowmage, too, because the Oobleck obeyed me.

  In the little strip of face below his crown and above his veil, I saw the thin vertical line of a frown appear between his eyebrows. The thimble was getting warmer. I was not sure about exorcists, but there was one thing shadowmages and ostiaries had in common.

  “You cannot see and foretell what happens in the Sea of Uncreation between worlds!” I said. “There are no stars there, nothing has a nature. That means when a warlock or wise man walks through the twilight, you lose track of him. Right? That means whatever I did in the twilight was hidden from you, every moment your gate was open. So you do not know how the twilight gates you flung into my world were destroyed, or how I got here to your world. Come on. ‘Fess up. You never lie. Tell me if I guessed right.”

  His thin and weary voice grew strong and cold like iron when he answered me. “Your world has a small and secretive group of ostiaries, men who sail the twilight shallows of the ocean of Uncreation, and slip into other aeons as if by dreaming. They do not have engines like ours, which open the gates of twilight upon command as we can. They have a dim and uncertain knowledge of the greater universe. The man you call Father found you abandoned by the mother who bore you in the aeon we call Cainem — she had wearied of nursing you, and since you need no nourishment to live, threw you over her shoulder into a pit. The Host of the Undying Ones, having eaten the fruits of the gods, know no word nor thought of affection, duty, or fellowship as we who eat the bread of Earth know, we whose children perish without mat
ernal love. Only if there are ostiaries in your adopted homeland could you have been brought to dwell there. You were not born in a world which has such engines and machines and works as the technomancers contrive. Have I guessed aright?”

  His word kalbanusipur-le’u meant literally a magician skilled in the making of siege-engines. It was their word for scientist, but they thought science was wizardry. Technomancer is the closest word I can coin to express the idea.

  I said: “Tell me, Crazy Freak Man in the Coffee Pot Hat, why you don’t just ask your stars to answer your question, if they know what is going to happen, everything I say, everything you will say back? Oh, wait, you told me: you do not want to have happen to you what happened to Oedipus. Because the stars punish you by cursing you if you defy them. Have I guessed right?”

  That was the first thing I said that got a reaction from him. It was small, just a rustle of his robes, a tremble in his gloves, but it was something.

  Something that annoyed him, that is. He made a small motion of his hand. A spear jumped out of the wall and hit me in the face.

  7. My Horoscope

  The point of the spear did not pierce my brain, because I saw the silent motion from the corner of my eye, and I jerked my head to one side, but it caught my ear and tore it from my head, and a long bleeding strip of flesh was dangling past my face, and the force of the blow knocked me off my feet, and I was rolling toward the open hole leading to the long fall.

  I really wish I could have kept my cool and stood there like The Fonz or John Wayne with a curl to my lip and a look on my face like I was saying ‘whatever’ when he struck me, but no. I was hurt, and scared of falling, so I screamed like a girl. I am not going to make any excuses — the fear came suddenly upon me like a mad tiger falling onto Mowgli out of a tree branch, okay?

  Enmeduranki said in his weary, bored, sad little voice, “It is now time for me to tell you part of your horoscope. In three days' time, when Mercury enters the double conjunction with Venus and Mars beholding, we shall take to the place of torment the girl you love, the sea-witch born under the sign of Pisces.”

  That kind of snapped me out of my hysteria, just because it was so weird, that I was trying to make sense of what he said, and so I forget that I was scared and missing an ear. Holding the side of my head with both hands, I stood and backed away from the cloud-filled hole.

  Take Penny? My mine was blank. Somewhere wandering in that blankness was the thought that she was not in this dimension, this aeon, and therefore she was safe from this creepy little Dark lord no matter what.

  He must have seen my disbelief on my face, or maybe in my horoscope, because he explained in a soft voice, “She was captured not long ago. She created some preliminary difficulties but we have overcome them. She will be put to the torment in three days time.

  “As for her horoscope, it now reads as follows: her body will be adjusted by our torture-physicians so that the pains inflicted will be of severity greater than mortals can normally bear. We will force her to eat human flesh and other unclean meats to pollute her body. We will have our trained beasts ravish her, and this will remove her witchcraft without the danger of witch-pregnancy, as well as pollute her with uncleanness.

  “Once this is done we will bring your living head before her. We will place her on the iron bed, and insert the iron hooks according to the ancient practices with exquisite slowness, and introduce chemical or electric trauma by those hooks into her arteries and nerves, or heat or cold; or by means of many threads connected to those hooks as anchor-points to contort her form by strappado, squassation, picquet, murgha stances, or by compression, torque or rack, and so dislocate her fair limbs—meanwhile your eyelids will be cut away and your head nailed in place, so that you will be unable to look away from her pain.

  “Your world only in recent years has begun to make a scientific and sophisticated study of torment. We are a thousand years in advance of this, and have used whole worlds as testing grounds to refine our techniques, with billions of test subjects.

  “Therefore, and at the appointed time, your will shall break; and to save her from further pain, you will vow to serve us, and bow to the stars and worship them. I will not tell you that appointed time, because you would resist for longer if you knew it.

  “You were placed in this cage and allowed to leap from it at any time, to show you in a way you cannot deny, even in your heart, that there is truly no hope of escape. The Dark Tower knows and foreknows all things, and there is no escape for any of us.

  “Now, because I have said these words in this order at this time, your hope is gone, and you know the beginning of the truth that destroys the souls of men: but soon you shall see all. Therefore, when you swear, you will swear fully.”

  8. Desolation

  At his words, a sense of desolation was in me.

  It was true. I believed him, and there was no room left for disbelief.

  Everything in this cage, the spiked walls, the easy escape exit offered by suicidal leaps, the shining lampwood platform, the thin atmosphere, the starvation, the isolation, everything was part of a practiced and calculated routine to them. The Dark Tower knew how to break the spirit of an Undying One, a Lalilummutillut. Me.

  Likewise, they had conquered worlds before. From the first moment of squirting Moebius coil blueprints through a microscopic wormhole to the deployment of orbital gateways from which they could drop paratroopers on the ground beneath, this unhappy, tired-eyed Dark Lord and his endless slave armies had the whole thing down to an art.

  It did not matter. He would not be here unless he wanted something from me. Whatever that was, he would not get it, not from me, not today.

  I rose to my knees and looked up at him.

  9. Fears

  Enmeduranki said, “Tell me of your world. We fear none of your weapons. Two things we fear. Ostiarianism is one of them, that your people know the art of sailing the twilight. The other is horoscopy. Do you have horoscopists on your world?”

  “I am a Libra,” I said. “Libras don’t believe in astrology.”

  He stiffened as if I had struck his funny bone. “How do you know the name of Zibanitu, the constellation of the balance? That knowledge is secret!”

  I smiled my most annoying smile, one I developed and practiced on my bullying older brothers during years of sibling rivalry. “You’ve read in your horoscope that you never learn the answer to that question, haven’t you? No—” I looked carefully at his eyes. He did not look bored. “No, it’s more than that. You’ve reached the end of your predictions!”

  He raised his black glove to his black face-veil, as if trying to stroke his hidden beard with his hidden fingers, but he did not answer. I suppose a man who never fibs just never answers when he does not want to speak truthfully.

  “You pored over your horoscopes, figuring out, one word at a time, every word I would say,” I pressed on. “But when you reached the point in the story where you tell me that in three days you will torture this girl, you figured there was no point in calculating the rest. You saved it, like a kid saving himself a tiny bit of candy, because you are trapped in a cage just like mine, just as terrible as mine, and you want to talk to another human being as terribly as I do. You want to talk to a live human being, not the soulless automatons you think human beings are. You endured that entire conversation just to get to this point, where you don’t know what I am going to say. Have I guessed right?”

  His eyes narrowed. He made another small gesture. Two of the spikes from the walls of the cage turned into spears and impaled me right through my chest and abdomen. I did not die and could still breathe, but I was in a lot of pain.

  The pain of spears passing through my body was insignificant compared to the pain of falling and breaking all my bones and rupturing all my organs. I ignored this minor pain and kept speaking.

  “So you are not insane, Emmy-Drinky. May I call you Emmy-Drinky, Your Most High Royal Bigwankership? Your name is too long and stupid for me to
say. Not insane, but you wish you were, because you figured out that you are a slave. Your masters, these things you call stars, communicate their orders to you by star-patterns and signs, and when you read your horoscopes, you are just decoding messages that contain the orders you must obey. All the astrologers figure this out eventually, and when that happens, your masters order them thrown out a window of this nice high tower, because you are not allowed to tell anyone that you are a slave. Have I guessed right?”

  This time, I did weird him out. I spoke so normally and so calmly with these big freakish spears jammed through my flesh, that fear entered his eyes.

  I realized what that fear meant.

  Sure, his people knew about people like me. They knew what planet I was from. But he, himself, Enmeduranki the Master of All Magicians, he did not own a television and did not watch horror movies, and he was the Dark Lord of this place, with lots of desk work, and so he probably never went to torture chambers and battlefields.

  He had heard about Undying Ones before, but he never looked into the eyes of one, and saw him bleeding from huge gaping wounds that would kill a mortal man a dozen times over, talking like it meant nothing. The difference between being a military historian and being a battlefield veteran was in his eyes.

  I laughed at him.

  He knew the future, did he? Knew everything? He had read about everything, seen it in a chart or something. He had not seen it in person.

  Enmeduranki said, “How — how can you live — how can you be alive like that? Surely it hurts?” He was not bored now. There was astonishment in his voice.

  I said, “Answer my question, and I will answer yours.”