Somewhither: A Tale of the Unwithering Realm

by John C. Wright

  “Were it not for me being on duty, three thousand years might have gone by ere some other breathing man walked this hall. Taskmaster sends me up to clean the Y-valve for the abattoir. The Walking Shadows of the Black Land still have to perform bull-sacrifices even though their priests are no longer alive, and you have to flush the blood using the Ninety-Score Gallon Wide-Mouth Aries-Aligned cistern at the top of this Furlong. Can’t use the one that feeds the Grove of the Star-Gods, obviously, for fear of cross-influence and pollution. So the magician reads the horoscope of another magician who has not been born yet, and found a day when he was reading horoscopes nearer the future—piggyback technique, they call it. And they saw that this valve would clog and form a backup, and introduce rot into the structural support four hundred years from now, so the gang foreman decided it had to be cleaned now, during the triple conjunction of Mercury. But it seems the wide-mouth cistern has the narrow piss-hole. That’s as they built them then, back during the last opposition of Saturn and Jupiter, when Peshgaldaramash was the Great King and Great Prince of the Heavens. Great Prince but a whoreson of an engineer, so says I, and I fret not who hears me say. Can’t use a proper snake and pressure to unclot those old valves, or you blow out the wash-vent. So the Taskmaster, just to gnaw our guts, sends me up here with a swathing-brush made of gorse. Gorse! Fit for whisks, but not a Y-valve job. Not boar-hair, like a real brush! And no extenders either worth the corpse-molester’s curse. I end up using my caulking pole as an extender! Can you believe it! Says I, strap a concubine wig to the helm of the Taskmaster, and use him for the S-bend swathing brush, eh! That will add flex to your spine-bones, eh? Well, if the harlot won’t talk, neither will the whoremaster, says I, but if the harlot won’t scream, go home to your wife. I say what I say, says I!” And he laughed at his own joke. I made laughing noises, just to play along and be polite.

  We passed through a wooden airlock with hatches of brass, and into some chambers beyond, cramped as a ship’s cabin, which held normal pressure.

  He found me enough tepid water in a bucket and a sea-sponge that I could swab the blood and goo off myself, and gave me a horn of perfumed oil to anoint myself and a little metal tool called a strigil to scrape off the sweat and dirt. It amused him that, like a baby, I did not know how to use simple bath things, and he called a serving man over to wash my hair and scrape my back, but I decided it would just be ungrateful to be embarrassed.

  Pally gave me a long and white mantle with a hood to throw over myself, and a thing like a linen baby diaper to wear under that. He apologized, and said he would have given me a proper low-slave uniform, but he could not imagine any seamstress made anything in my size.

  Then a gong rang, and we ate from a pot. Fish stew soaked in pepper and hot pepper.

  The cooking was done over a coal-burning Franklin stove, but one where the chimney pipe led to a cylinder that trapped the smokes and ashes and transmuted them to oxygen. The cylinder was painted with pantomime clowns in blue and silver, done in that same delicate and frivolous decoration style as Abby’s mask. I asked Pally about it: he said it was Galvanic Alchemy from the aeon of Brennus.

  There were two other men in the chambers, but they crouched, and kept their eyes down, and, when not washing or dressing me, they bowed and stayed out of our way. Like Pallishabdu, they were olive-skinned with large, dark almond-shaped eyes, thick red lips, big hooked noses, shorter than me. Unlike him, they were beardless.

  Pallishabdu did not introduce me to them. They were furniture.

  But he did introduce me to his cat, named In-Sin, Eyes-like-the-Moon, an ugly old tom missing one ear, who was more regal than the Pharaoh I’d just met, and condescended to let me scratch his chin and feed him morsels from my fish stew.

  Since that stew was the best thing I had tasted since before I fell headfirst into a Moebius coil, it took me superhuman effort not to yank the cat up by the tail and play combination hammertoss and handball off the nearest wall, but instead to feed it and make nice.

  Look: cats don’t hunt, and they don’t fetch, cannot scare burglars and they cannot bring you your pipe and slippers and newspaper while pouring you a frosty cold beer from the icebox, okay?

  But I warmed up to In-Sin after a bit. The old tom seemed just the right kind of folk to hang around with Pallishabdu, and you could not live with a dog in this submarine-like room, lit with wooden sticks and no windows.

  When it was time to walk me to the wayship station, Pallishabdu carried the cat around in a pressurized box, complete with oxygen bottle, and you just can’t treat dogs that way. The two serving men suited him up and gave me a wallet of raisins, prunes and lemon-soaked dried apple slices, and a ball of hard cheese coated in wax. I shook hands with one of them, and they both flinched and scurried back out of the way. Never saw them again, never found out their names. They had kind of a puffiness to their skin. I wonder if they were eunuchs.

  We climbed up about a zillion stairs, and I was going to ask Pallishabdu why his people had not invented the escalator, when I saw a ramp in the distance, moving between square columns decorated in gold. The ramp was holding a sarcophagus, with an honor guard in diving suits adorned with gold medallions, and slaves in jackal-masks holding ostrich plumes on golden wands above the coffin. The procession was not walking, for the ramp was made of living metal, and it carried them along, and they glided up into the overhead gloom and out of sight.

  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 betwee
n 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? O
r 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.”