Somewhither: A Tale of the Unwithering Realm

by John C. Wright

  The monkey mask seemed to grin at me. “You are so odd. I know what a submersible is. The first one was made three thousand years ago at the instructions of the stars by Enki-Kilalu, the father of shipwrights. Most of the areas of twilight manifest far below the waves, beyond the continental shelf, in the deep, where sunlight will not disturb them. Yes, the lampwood acts like a periscope.”

  “How did you turn it on? Thought waves? Yikes!”

  I looked down at my crotch. The wooden inset into the mask was only the skull, teeth and jawbones, so that what had been an image of a living person in pain was now more like a skull.

  It made me flinch and hit my head again. Three bumps in three minutes.

  “Who builds their darned ceilings so low?! Is everyone a shrimp in this crapsacktastical world?” (This time, I actually did say darned, since I didn’t want the child to pick up any bad language from me. Or, rather, any more bad language. I was not living up to all points of the Boy Scout law, particularly the part about being courteous and clean.)

  The space in which she stood and I crouched was circular with a flat ceiling, with low archways leading out. In the center was a set of what looked like meathooks hanging from chains. Between the archways were little statues the size of lawn-gnomes of chimerical creatures that looked like bat-winged bulls with the heads of gape-mouthed vultures: Ugliest griffins ever. The floor was dusty, and our light did not carry far.

  She unpinned one of her glowing wooden pins and held it near the floor. I could see where the dust had been disturbed. I was not as good as Foster Hidden at tracking game, but I could see the tiny, precise footprints of Abanshaddi’s slippers.

  The trail led to one of the archways.

  5. Empty Chambers

  We went by a crooked path, going through one chamber after another, never in a straight line.

  The place was like the worst parts of a haunted house and the attic of a crazy murderer who collected body parts.

  There was a room full of skulls, each one with a tiny brass label screwed into its forehead. Another room had nothing in it but a hole in the floor and smoke-stains on the ceiling above it. Another had a miniature guillotine and a neatly packed collection of skeletal hands.

  One room was a warehouse, filled with boxes shaped like small coffins for children. The boxes were not nailed shut. Instead of nails, clamps or staples of the living metal held the boards together, and one of the clamps silently opened when I put my hand on a box.

  In another room was a thing that looked like a transparent bathtub stained with blood with iron sheets or clamps that could be lowered over it, and a table that could have been an altar-stone or a control panel. There was a ticking in that room, but I could not see where it came from.

  In another, there was nothing but a tall brass horn which came out of a hump in the floorstones. The horn was facing us when we entered the chamber. I looked behind me when we left by another archway, and saw that the horn had turned to face us again, making no noise.

  In one of the bigger rooms we passed through, we came to a wide place, larger than a ballroom floor, where the ceiling was too high to see. Something like a ball of luminous mist floated far above, or was suspended. We passed through that chamber at a run. The misty light terrified Abby for some reason, although she would not tell me anything about it.

  I had been repeating prayers to myself under my breath to help track the time. I calculated that we had been moving deeper inside, toward the axis of the Dark Tower, for about fifteen minutes.

  “I hate this place. Who collects mummified hands, or coffins filled with children?”

  “It is to despoil the bodies, and render them unclean, to make their ghosts angrier, hence easier to provoke by necromancy.”

  Lovely. I wish I knew whether to accept her words at face value or dismiss it as superstition. I said, “A body should be disposed of respectfully.”

  She nodded toward my fist. “If you fear the dead, toss away that baton. It is made from the cuttlebone of a sea-behemoth.”

  “So?”

  “It is bad luck.”

  “It’s unlucky to believe in bad luck.”

  “Cuttlebone absorbs the suffering of ghosts, which is why tormentors prefer it.”

  “If I toss away this club, then I want my sword back. It belonged to my grandfather.”

  “If your sword has a fate, this would also be recorded when your gear was taken. The Astrologers write down everything. Does your sword have a fate?”

  “Uh. I don’t know. How do you tell?”

  “Well…is your sword a he or a she?” She actually said namsar or namsatur, sword or swordette?

  “I am not sure.”

  “Your own sword and you are not sure?” Abby’s voice held a note of disapproval.

  I said, “Well, the sooner we get back to this records room and check the records, the sooner we can read the file on me, and on Master Ossifrage, and find out where Penny is. Is there a quick way down? You did not climb all this way. Is there an elevator? An elevator is a cart or chariot like a bucket pulled on a winch…”

  “I know what such things are. For an abomination, you speak very stupidly. Yes. Of course I did not climb here. There is a river-way of living metal that runs up the spine of the Dark Tower, as well as lesser stream-roads used by servants, high slaves, low slaves and the like. One is a smaller stream-path used to carry refuse, medical waste, walking shadows, death-effigies, or mummies, or other abominations.”

  “How long does it take to descend, using that method?”

  “There should be no living things above Memorial Immensity of the Lost and Sacred Kings of the High Necropolis. Below that? Depending on traffic loads, an hour or two.”

  I gritted my teeth. Some intuition told me it was too soon to relax.

  “Let’s shake a leg,” I said.

  “Is that the same as rolling?”

  But she picked up the pace.

  6. Vertical Firmament

  Finally, we reached a larger corridor, and this opened into a wide space. The ceiling overhead soared out of sight, and I saw curving ribs like flying buttresses bracing the vast acreage of walls. These curving supports were radiating out from a series of circular stone balconies, one above the next above the next. It went up endlessly, lines of perspective disappearing at a vanishing point hidden by a distant cluster of jewel-like lamps and lanterns as dim as faraway stars.

  In the midst of the chamber, directly below the balconies, was a well that dropped down infinitely. Or, rather, what I thought was the chamber floor was the floor of a circular balcony hanging over a vast abyss.

  It was still very gloomy in here, but there were small holes admitting sunlight, and the dusty beams stretched across the wide space as lightly as the Gothic arches and braces.

  On the walls near us there were panels of gold inscribed with cuneiforms, and niches along the walls containing king-faced bulls, and each face had different features. Above each man-bull was a circle of lapis lazuli surrounded by zodiacs and inset with diamonds. I was baffled to see the same arrows and wiggles representing Sagittarius and Aquarius as you can see in any cheap daily newspaper in our world. Those signs must be older than I thought, if they predated the division point of history between the two timelines.

  Below each horoscope was one or more rowboats made of what looked like blue glass. The rowboats had sliding shells or panels that could cover them, and they were standing upright on their sterns. I did not see what prevented them from falling over. In the gloom, they looked like headstones.

  “What’s this?” I asked.

  “The stream-path of the unclean,” she said. And she raised her hand, and her wood cloak pins and my wooden crotch-mask went dark.

  Only then, as my eyes adjusted, did I see three vertical ribbons of metal, large as four-lane highways, hanging in midair with no support, stretching from infinitely above to infinitely below, passing through the stone rings held at the axis of this chamber, which I realized was no
t a chamber at all, but the platform of a train station shaped like a chimney. It was like looking at a subway station turned on its side, if the subway had been designed by the architects who built Notre Dame in Paris.

  The shape and proportions of the circle of floor surrounding nothing looked so much like my bottomless cage where I had just been confined, but on a titanic scale. I could not shake the image in my heart of an empire where whole nations and peoples and worlds were as strictly enchained and as brutally treated as I had been. The true magnitude of this Dark Tower’s shadow, and the true extent of its terrible reach, became clear to me at that moment.

  My feet were a little unsteady as I stepped toward the drop (there was no railing). I peered down.

  I saw something as vast as the night sky rolled into a tube and propped upright: a column of air forty thousand feet tall, higher than most commercial aircraft fly, surrounded by seven miles and more of dark metal, dark brick, and threads of gold made tiny in the distance. Windows, lanterns, balconies were like distant stars, garden plots and lit greenhouses were like the nonexistent seas of the Moon or the imaginary canals of Mars, and internal airship traffic crossing the well of empty air were like tiny fishes glimpsed at the bottom of the sea.

  Chapter Fifteen: Rational Animals

  1. Down the Living Metal Way

  Abby looked carefully from face to square-bearded face of the man-headed bulls, until she found one she apparently liked. She stepped forward and started wrestling with the glass rowboat standing under the gaze of the man-headed statue.

  Abby had her arms wrapped partly around the boat, and was grunting and puffing, and the prow wobbled slightly. Her motions were so tentative and awkward that for a moment I did not realize she was trying to manhandle the glass rowboat across the platform, or, rather girlhandle it.

  It began to tilt, threatening to collapse on her, and I stepped forward, plucked the rowboat up out of her hands, and tucked it with a grunt under one arm. It was not a little rowboat, but I have pretty big arms.

  “Where to?” I asked. “And, next time, ask for help.”

  The little monkey-mask face grinned at me, but the little girl’s voice from behind it was quivering. “It is not right for you to bear burdens for me. I am untouchable.”

  “Well, since you rescued me from that midair version of Hell I was in, acting in my authority as temporary Ostiary for the Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon, I, Ilya Muromets, Life Scout of Troop Two, Bobcat Patrol, officially decree, ordain and establish, now and forever, that you are touchable, so help me God! And if any man should dispute me, he shall face the peril of my sword just as soon as I get it back. Troop Two! Second to none!

  Strangely enough, she did not seem impressed.

  “Is this real, what you are saying, or is it make-believe?”

  Since I was sort of kidding but deadly serious at the same time, I was not sure what to say. When I did not answer right away, her shoulders drooped a bit, and she walked towards the dizzying brink of the platform.

  A tongue of metal like the plank from which pirates throw captives to the sharks hung out into the middle of the air: there was a hollow or slot fitted to receive the keel of the rowboat, and a block-and-tackle arrangement leading to a brass ring the size of a dinner plate, which dangled in midair on a yardarm. It looked for all the world like the brass ring you are supposed to catch with your finger on the merry-go-round, or maybe those rings dangling from threads that jousters at the Renaissance Fair try to spear on their lances.

  She did not have to tell me what to do. I have seen old Cowboy movies, including ones where you hang a mailbag on a hook for the mail-train to pick up as it chugs by at high speed without stopping. I set the rowboat in position, snapped the chains into the corresponding D-rings set about the rowboat, and removed the chocks from the windlass.

  When we were both settled in the rowboat, I pushed the ring to which all the chains led out on its rotating arm to a position hanging over the bottomless drop. Then we pulled the sliding panels over our heads, so that the rowboat now looked more like a soda bottle or maybe an artillery shell, with us crouched inside. The hull was semitransparent so we had a stomach-wrenching view of the endless drop into which we would fall, should a chain break or the ring slip.

  Abby pulled a leather wallet out from her belt pouch, unfolded it, and took out what looked like a mummified hand, which she placed carefully in the bilge near the prow. The glass of the boat immediately grew cloudy where it was resting.

  “What is that for?” I asked.

  “The horoscopes controlling today’s stream-path traffic cannot see me, nor you when your acts rest atop my acts, so no hook of living metal will emerge from the wayship to seize us and carry us down. But the vessels are purified, and dead flesh is impure, so the living metal will always take away corpses or mummies found on this path, even if unforeseen.”

  Kerruxsaru is the word I am translating as ‘wayship.’ I could have said ‘walking ship’ or ‘ship that walked by three thousand ways.’ The word literally meant an argosy that sailed as easily on earth and mountain, cloud and void as on the sea. These were the things I have been calling freight-trains or invasion machines: the king-sized Moebius coils. Apparently, the Dark Tower used them for everything.

  At that moment, a set of gold prisms looking just like the invasion machines I had seen earlier, if perhaps slightly smaller, came sliding noiselessly down the nearest highway-sized ribbon of vertical living metal. Imagine a windowless and silent freight train that was triangular in cross section rather than square, and then imagine it hanging vertically from its caboose.

  Before I could blink, a huge hook unfolded from the bowsprit of the wayship, snatched us off the plank, and dangled us in midair at forty thousand feet, rattling around like two rats in a Coke bottle. And down we sped.

  I put my arms around the little girl to protect her from getting jarred or bruised. And she writhed uncomfortably, and I shouted in terror from the vertigo of the sudden fall, so I guess she thought I was clinging to her for protection, even though I am built like a linebacker and she was built like an underfed chicken in pint-size.

  The bowsprit-hook of living metal twisted and banged against a flat hull-segment of gold, where we clung. Magic? Magnetics? Velcro? Your guess is as good as mine. The rowboat settled into place. We found ourselves held to the golden hull of one of the wayships, stacked like cordwood along with dozens of other bullet-shaped rowboat-sized containers.

  We were falling swiftly, and came into an area where the lamps were brighter. Now I saw that there were other golden wayships above us or below or to either side, some crowded with glass rowboats clinging to their hulls like remora clinging to a shark, some with larger containers, and others bare of cargo. Here and there on the ribbon, like motorcyclists threading through a convoy of eighteen-wheelers, were rowboat-sized or yacht-sized bullets of blue glass traveling by themselves.

  You are probably seeing in your mind’s eye traffic on a highway. That is not a bad picture, but remove any visible drivers and passengers, plate over all the car windows, put it through a tunnel of darkness guarded by gold monuments, shut off all the headlights and taillights, and in your mind’s ear, you should be hearing no noise aside from the whistle of wind. Machines roar and clang and stink, and well-tuned machines purr, but all this traffic was as silent as a caravan of ghosts falling toward the core of the world.

  The whole thing looked like a vertical conveyer belt, but it was not: the surface of the road-sized vertical ribbon, seen up close, looked like a hairy carpet made of zillions of tiny centipede legs, which rippled in hypnotic and silent waves of motion. It was made of the living metal, and it certainly writhed like it was alive. I wonder if each tiny hair were passing all these loads from one to the next, sort of like the way a crowd surfer who throws himself into a mosh pit is passed from hand to hand, no one dancer ever bearing his whole weight.

  The other two vertical ribbons must have be
en local or express tracks, because after a moment, we came to a spot where the three ribbons were connected by a horizontal series of ramps as baffling as any cloverleaf our highway engineers back on Earth ever erected. The wayship curved to follow the living metal road through a horizontal slant to reach an on ramp. We crossed a narrower thread of metal to a faster-moving ribbon, the express.

  There was considerable jostling as we were slung at high speed from a straight vertical fall to a sideways circular slide to a second straight vertical faster-speed fall, so I put my arms around Abby again and let the hull of the rowboat slam me, not her.

  2. Untouchable

  “This sucks!” I said. “In my world, you step into a car the size of a closet, and push a button with a number on it, and go up or down without any discomfort. And there is soft, annoying music playing in the background.”

  Abby squirmed uncomfortably. Her voice issued from somewhere in my armpit. “Comforts adorn the stream-paths for the high slaves, freeborn, and nobles. Where we are now, this stream-path, is for lepers and mummies, kinslayers and Unclean folk. Do your people really play music for them in your world?”

  “Yeah. We have a special kind of music for the Unclean folk. It’s called heavy metal. But even for freight, this glass rowboat thingie is not a very elegant engineering solution. And does everyone have to carry around a dead man’s hand?”

  She said, “I was raised by a corpse-handling family. You are not to touch me.”

  “Oh, sorry,” I said and let her go. She kind of slid out of my hands into the stern of the boat, which was acting as the floor now. She probably thought I was a child molester or something. “Look, I did not mean to invade your personal space, I thought you might get slapped against the hull if…”

  She said, “When we find Master Ossifrage, he can cleanse you.”