Somewhither: A Tale of the Unwithering Realm

by John C. Wright

  Finally, with a ghastly effort, I rolled and slithered over the edge, then smashed face-first into the stones with a disgusting splorch of blood. Pure comedy gold.

  I raised my head and looked around. There were some iron tools and wooden masks on the walls. Light came from small, fist-sized holes in the stone through which thin air softly whistled. To one side was a workbench, and to the other, two openings in the floor, like twins to the one I had climbed out from. Ahead of me was an archway leading to a crawlspace or corridor for short people. There was no other exit. I guess tall people were supposed to use the Moebius coils rimming the floor openings.

  Daylight came through these gold-rimmed openings. I raised myself on one arm, and saw, sure enough, that one of the other two hanging cages had no wooden floor and a good number of the wall spikes were broken. My old cell.

  Abby had backed away from me, and was now sitting in a corner between a workbench and the archway leading out, with her arms wrapped about her knees, and her sickle-and-chain retracted and clenched tightly in her gloves. She was shivering. Well, it was below freezing in here. My spreading pool of blood was already beginning to turn into thick red slush.

  I squinted. The workbench she was next to had chains and manacles running over a windlass. It was a torture rack.

  This room was a torture chamber, where you would work over any prisoners you fished up out of their hanging birdcages underneath, and then toss them back down when you were done. There was even a crane affixed to the ceiling with a boom-arm for lowering and raising the prisoners. I don’t know what the masks on the wall were for. Decoration?

  I lay in a heap on the stone floor. I was free. I was out. Today was my Big Bang, and a whole new universe was brought into being, a universe of freedom. I was also too weak to stand, but I was not too weak to laugh and laugh with joy.

  Chapter Thirteen: Born of the Forever Nature

  1. Abomination

  She was silent until I was done laughing. Best not to interrupt the madman, I suppose.

  “Okay, She-Monkey, talk. Why didn’t the Moebius gate turn on when I climbed over the rim? Who sent you and what is going on here?”

  Abby said in a voice of awe, “How can you move your arms and legs? How can you breathe? Why is there still blood — it should have run out hours ago.”

  “I don’t know. Mind over matter. A violation of the law of conservation of blood. Why not ask the Scarecrow how the Tin Woodman can be alive?”

  “I don’t understand what you are saying.”

  “I am saying I do not know. The extra blood is being created out of nowhere. My lungs are moving even though the muscles connected to my diaphragm cannot possibly be working. My gouged-out eyeball ungouged itself, and now it is working again, but my vision is cramped and blurry in that eye. I cannot die and I heal a lot faster than I should, but not fast enough. Your head dipshit in the daffy hat, Enmeduranki, he said today they would torture my …”

  She was startled. “You met the Lord High Astrologer? Himself?”

  “What? You want his autograph? He said it was today! Today! It may have already happened. Torture hooks. Trained rapist-beasts. What kind of sick world has things like that? I’ve got to stop it, got to find out where ….”

  I rose to my feet, felt so much pain that I went blind for a second, and hitting my head on the floor woke me back up. I was lucky I had not fallen over the other way, because I would have toppled into the cell and out the bottom hole of the airy oubliette again.

  Now I was lying with my cheek pressed against the stone, and I felt the tickle of blood oozing out from me, warm on my cheek.

  While I was prone, through my one good eye, I saw her tiptoeing toward the archway leading out of the chamber. “Where are you going?”

  She hesitated. “Well, since you are free now, and you are a murdering abomination from a hell-world ruled by demons, I thought it would be … nice … if I left you to commit your … actions … against any mortals who might fall into your clutches …. Uh, hands …”

  “I am a nice abomination. Kindhearted. Housebroken. Kid friendly. Trust me. In my civilian identity, back before this place, I am a Boy Scout. Troop Two. Second to none…”

  “… and my mission was to rescue Master Ussushibu. I don’t wish to trouble you…”

  “I said I would help you!” I groaned. And maybe there was a little uncouth language in there too, sort of like Gash darn it! I flocking said I would flapping help you! except using words other than gash, darn, flock or flap.

  “But in return you got to help me!” I shrieked at her. “You got to!” My voice sounded kind of gross and sticky. Even I didn’t like hearing me.

  She started inching back. Not that I blame her. “Um. I’d like to help, except … I have this task I am supposed to do. It’s a mission … my very first mission! It’s really important that I do it right, and not get killed by an abomination. The Big Man made me promise.” I did not know if Big Man was a name or a title. The words my ear heard were Rom Baro. “And …um … real people’s lives are at stake, not freaks like you, so…”

  “Hold it!” My fingers clawed feebly at the stones while blood and some black grimy substance drooled from my teeth. I am pretty sure I was not a pretty picture. “For the love of God, wait! The Astrologers cannot foretell your actions, right?” She was somehow invisible to them, because otherwise their soldiers would have been swarming into the chamber five minutes ago.

  “I have been laved in the laver.”

  “So while you are near me, you act like a cloaking device? What is the range?”

  I was wondering if the alarm bells in some horoscope radar station downstairs would suddenly ring if she slipped out of my sight. I resisted the impulse to crawl after her, dragging my unwound guts, since the sight of that might make her panic. Panic more.

  The little grinning monkey girl inched another inch backward. “It doesn’t work like that.”

  “How does it work?”

  She spoke more calmly. “The Astrologers can only cast horoscopes for those born once under the stars. I am born twice. It is your world-nature the stars see, for stars govern the world. I have done an act by my forever-nature, which is from the foreverness.”

  “Clear as mud. Now explain the explanation.”

  She spoke as if she were reciting a lesson at school. “Everything follows its nature. But the forever-born have two natures: higher and lower. If I act by the higher nature, that is timeless. It is above the circles where the stars count time. But if I act as my old nature prompts, that is star-governed. Only pure acts are purely hidden. That is why I saved you. You have only a lower nature. If you stay here, quite still, and do no acts of your lower abomination nature, it will be … perhaps … an hour or more … before they catch you again.”

  And she ducked around the corner and was gone.

  2. Enchantment

  So I shouted after her. I did not bother keeping the desperation out of my voice, because I was desperate.

  “They are going to torture her! You have to find her! I don’t care about me! Just save her!

  There was more than that, but that was the gist of it, and my eyes started to sting because I was weeping. I had not realized I had closed my eyes — or maybe I passed out for a second, it was one of those days — until I opened my eyes again and saw her black shoes that looked like they were made of duct tape. Her feet were big compared to the size of her legs.

  Abanshaddi said softly, “There is someone … you … want saved? How can this be?”

  “I want you to find her, and if she is in a cage, get her out. First, they are going to do something medical to her, to make her nerves less able to resist pain, and then…”

  “My mother was killed by the tormentors,” she said in a dry, matter-of-fact way. “A type of death called Two Boats. My lord Sharapumakash-simtu performed the deed and was rewarded with an Ovation.”

  I actually flinched at the name. Sharapu meant to dye red. It also meant to to
rment with fire, to chastise, to scorch, to blister. Makash meant Slaughter-Bench. The name was Slaughterbench Dyed Red. And that was the nicest of the several possible interpretations.

  His title simtu meant the person who puts a brand or ownership-mark on you. She was talking about her master, her owner.

  “So he ordered you to come here…” The fear that I was being toyed with, that everything was just another psychological trick, flooded my brain.

  She said quickly, “Not he! I was stolen from him long ago by the Wandering Folk, and even his knowledge of the outlandish stars did not suffice to foretell the deed.” There was a note of joy in her voice when she added, “I sometimes read of the women and children Master Slaughterbench would have had me kill by stealth by this date, in my darkened horoscope. His foretelling, now, will never come to pass.”

  “He is an Astrologer? You don’t have to call him ‘Master’ any longer.”

  She nodded. “My mother told me that the water of the mupasshu-h’ washes all such marks away, and prevents new marks from being branded.” The word mupasshu meant washerman or cleaner. Mupasshu-h’ was a title. The Washerman. “And the Big Man says I am free like him, like his people, like all the caravan. But at times I forget to forget my old ways of speaking. Lord Astute Starmage is an Astrologer of the Chamber of Twoscore Never-Extinguished Candles. He is of the High Ones.”

  “Small world! I met him.”

  She nodded. “Of course.”

  “Why ‘of course’?”

  “You are an abomination. Such is his purview. He deals with outlandish horoscopes. Lord Slaughterbench is his Death Name. It is told only to those over whom he is given the power of life and death. No one tells one of your kind his Death Name. You cannot die.”

  “We don’t have Death Names where I am from. Your world is sick, and I would like to get her and me out of it as soon as possible, and you too, if you want to come!”

  She shrank back. “To the hell world of the Abominations? I do not want to go there, thank you. That is not a good fate.”

  “I live in a world different and finer than the one I was born in. I don’t even remember that one.”

  Abby said, “This one you seek?”

  “Her name is Penelope.”

  “Cunning Face. Is she from your world?” I noticed that when Abanshaddi said Penelope’s name, I could hear the original meaning in Greek in my head.

  I had had a lot of time to puzzle over the answer to that particular question while I was in the cell. “No.”

  “Can you describe her?”

  “Five foot three’n eyes of green, has anybody seen my gal? She is very brave and very blonde and built like a … well, never mind that. She has a talking falcon and she sails around the world and she is famous and glamorous and she knows how to shut Moebius gates with a broomstick. Boy, that sounds weird when I say it that way.”

  “Your beloved!” There was a squeal of girlish joy in her voice.

  “She is not really, uh—Heck with it. Yup. My beloved. She does not yet know it. Or know that I am alive. Or know my name. But she gets most of the letters right when she asks me to do some menial chore around the grounds.”

  “You are her boy-servant?” Her voice was bubbling with curiosity.

  “Hey! Man-servant! My official title is Employee of the Month for June.”

  “Then she is an enchantress! You are bewitched.”

  “Um—noooo, she is not an enchantress, it is merely that—” I thought about how pretty her blond hair was, and how shapely her figure, how red her lips and how green her eyes, and I compared it in my mind with how much I actually knew about her, and how often we had actually spoken. What did I actually know about her? Where she was born? Her favorite song?

  And so I had a rare moment of honesty and said, “Um. Yeah. You got that one right. Enchanted, bewitched. That is me.”

  “Master Ussushibu is elevated, and surely he knows how to snap the threads of her spell-weaving.” Abby had come over to the bloody slab of ground chuck I was using for a body at the moment, and squatted down. “If we find him, he will free you.”

  “No, no. I think Penny has just the normal magic girls her age, and, uh, looks happen to have, not magic like your filthy Astrologers. The kind of magic guys less shallow than me are immune to. That kind of magic.”

  Her big eyes behind her monkey lenses blinked at me. “I still think it is very sweet.”

  “You are a born romantic. But enchanting or not, pretty or not, I still want to save her. Heck, I’d want to save my worst enemy’s ugliest dog from vermin like the crazy magicians that run your world.”

  The monkey mask nodded in agreement. “I would even save a deathless abomination from the horror-land of Cainem from them.”

  “Thanks. Hey—what was that? Never mind. Look, I help you and you help me. Deal?”

  “You wish me to bargain with you? To make a covenant?”

  “Yep. Shake hands. Well, since my hand is kind of … uh … we can wave at each other, and that is our solemn oath.”

  Abanshaddi said in a voice of wonder, “I have never made a covenant before.”

  “We’ll be a team,” I said. “Blood-brothers. Blood brother and sister. We rescue your Master Ossifrage, and my Penny. It’s agreed!”

  She shyly put her hand toward mine, but I did not want to gross her out, so I did not shake it.

  3. Immensities

  “Very well,” she said, hopping eagerly to her feet. “Where is she?”

  “What? Why are you asking me, little sister? I don’t know anything about this stupid tower.”

  She sighed, and squatted down again, waiting for me to talk. She had a strange way of squatting: her footsoles were flat on the ground, and her knobby knees nearly bumping her chin.

  “So,” I groaned, “What are the options? Where might she be?”

  The little monkey face tilted as if the face behind it were deep in thought. “If she is to be tormented, they might send her to the Tormentor’s Furlong.”

  The word she actually used for ‘furlong’ was qaqqaru, which simply meant ‘immensity’. The magic spell or law-of-nature-gone-weird or whatever it was that allowed me to understand her like a native did not give me a numerical equivalent. But I did get a sense, or a hunch, that she meant the kind of distance a bowshot could cover, not a day’s march. And from the context, I assume she meant vertical distance: an immense climb, not an immense hike.

  So I said, “The hanging gardens. They are placed about a furlong apart from each other aren’t they? Each vertical section of the tower is what you are calling a furlong?”

  She giggled.

  “What did I say? What’s funny?”

  “I have never heard them called hanging gardens before. It’s a perfectly good name for them! The plants do dangle over the parapets, after all. Yes, each droopy dangling garden is exactly one furlong above the next.”

  From the embarrassed sound of the giggle, I guessed that hanging or dangle was a play on words of some sort, or maybe a naughty double entendre.

  “What do you call the hanging gardens?” I asked.

  “Kakkabillilkiritu.” Groves of the star-gods.

  Their furlongs were more than a thousand feet tall. I did not ask why the place Penny was caged was called the Tormentor’s Furlong. I was picturing in my head a place the size of the Empire State Building, with every room occupied by professional torturers.

  “Okay, let’s go! I think I can manage to crawl…”

  “Or, if she is young and fair, she may be sent to the Harem-Keeper’s Furlong.”

  The picture in my head was now something more like the Playboy Mansion, except the size of the Empire State Building.

  “Uh. That might be a nicer place to start looking.”

  “And if she is an enchantress, to prevent her from weaving charms or cutting runes or whistling for the wind, she might be in the Blue Silence Furlong, where outsider magic is contravened.”

  “Where is she more l
ikely to be?”

  “I do not know the likelihood.”

  “How many places could she be?”

  “More than I can count. There are holding cells and slave pens, and which one she is in depends on whether she is to be shipped or sold. It depends on which of the Tower holds her.”

  “Which what of the Tower?”

  “Which authority.”

  “How many are there? I thought you had a Dark Lord. That freak wearing a coffee pot on his head.”

  “Well… there is the navy and sky-navy, the infantry and auxiliaries and the cavalry, and the horse cavalry, elephant cavalry, whale cavalry and necro-cavalry depending on whether the steeds are alive; these all have separate captains. There is the military police, the espionage police, the secret police, the more secret police who watch the secret police…”

  “Oh.”

  “And… the officers of the watch, and the shore patrol, the air patrol, and the serpent-women authority. The serpent-women govern their own kind, and have their own police. And each of the Magicians, Astrologers, or Chaldaeans of the grandmaster rank has a personal guard for his household or fraternity.”

  “Oh.”

  “And then there is the exarchs, the suburban guard, civic guard, lower tower guard, higher tower guard, star guard, the judiciary bailiffs, the murderer brigades. And then there are retainers of the various noble families, and high-ranking diviners of many other orders, such as cephalonomancers. They all have the right to keep prisoners and enact tortures.”

  “Oh.”

  “Not to mention that engineering and architectural guild-masters have their own men at arms, sheriffs, and tormentors. And…” she drew another breath.

  “Please stop now.”