Somewhither: A Tale of the Unwithering Realm

by John C. Wright

  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 the 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.

  I froze up.

  Oh, and my sixth reason was this: I was too scared of the guy, and, yes, too impressed, to leap up and wrestle the cruel bright blade out of his red-dripping hand, as he leaned on his shepherd’s staff in the other. I thought he was cool, a real badass.

  And, seven: He had just pulled the soldiers off me who were chopping me up. I was grateful.

  And, eight: what if I annoyed him and he just flung me out the window using the same antigravity he had used on a squad of men? I might not die, but I sure was not going to find Penny or save anyone.

  And, nine: I was still pulling myself back one piece at a time into myself. What was I supposed to do? Take my severed foot and wing it through the air at him like a boomerang?

  The fact that I heard one or two actually asking him to do it rather than not to do it did not cut any mustard with me one way or the other. Helping someone commit suicide was still murder. I think I knew why the ones who begged for death were begging, though, but I was not sure.

  4. Back Together

  I had pulled myself back together, pressing my leg stump against my severed limb until it sort of schlorpfed back into one piece. There was not even a scar. My fingers were all broken where they had been smashed under a metal boot, but I found I could simply make a fist and straighten it, and there was a popping, cracking noise as all the little delicate bones in my hand slipped back into place.

  My friend Foster had been in a finger cast for months back when he was younger, and had fallen out of a tree and broken a finger and sprained a wrist. Months. He had been really bitter about it, too, because we had been doing some project involving painting sets for the school play, and he fancied himself a bit of an artist, and now he could not hold a brush. He could not hold a bow, and it was not until next summer that he got his archery merit badge (which he got easily, since he was the best shot in the troop, or in the Jamboree). And here I was with a hand that had been mashed to bits, and I just shook it off.

  The golden flail was not far, and I grabbed it, and used it as a walking stick to pull myself to my feet. My reconnected leg was tingling with pins and needles, as if I had slept on it wrong. Long John Silver and Captain Ahab had to go through life hopping on one foot, not to mention Cap’n Bill from Oz. I almost felt guilty for my good luck. Just experimentally, I reached my hand toward the pool of blood, my blood, that I was standing in, and I cleared my mind and concentrated.

  The red liquid rippled, and then moved, and then swarmed up my legs like a little waterfall going in reverse. Of course, I could not absorb it through my pores, and I did not want to take the stuff into my mouth or in through (ew!) any other orifice, and I was not in the mood to find something to cut myself with to make an opening. So for the moment, I just let this huge bloodstain cling to me.

/>   I looked at Nakasu. “I want a less gross superpower, OK?”

  He had no idea what I was saying, so he gestured toward the Moses guy and snorted something through the blowhole between his shoulders.

  The shepherd strode to us, and stood. There was something majestic in the way he walked, and something totally creepy in the way he just let his arm and short sword drip next to him. He regarded us with a gaze stern and dignified, and spoke a few words in his language.

  I turned to Nakasu, saying, “You know, I don’t understand him or you, so any of us could be saying anything. My first question is about eating people. Is it true we taste like pork?”

  Nakasu said something to me with his mouth, his voice like a rumble of rocks. So I assume he was speaking of something significant. The white-beard turned toward me, and spoke rapidly in Hebrew, too quickly for me to catch.

  He pointed at my groin and then pointed at my face. I was not sure what that meant, but the tone of voice made it sound like a question.

  I said, “I bet you are saying to yourself about now, gee, I sure wish I had left some of those soldiers alive, because none of us savvy each other’s lingo, right?”

  I moved over to the main doors, but a yank on the big rings showed that they were locked from the inside.

  I banged on the doors. They were so thick that the noise was like pounding a wall.

  “Say, buddy, could you float back over inside here, and open these doors?”

  I turned back toward Whitebeard. I am not sure what they pantomimed to each other while my back was turned, but it must have been a dirty gesture, because Nakasu had picked up a broken pikestaff. Moses, his hair once more a cloud and his camel-hair robe flapping weightlessly about him, was standing in midair, flourishing his bloody sapara-sword, with his other hand upraised, muscles standing out in his arm, the shepherd’s staff in his hand pointed upward as if he were about to shut off the flow of gravity again.

  They were facing each other, about to commit some sort of mayhem, so I decided to step between them, holding my arms up. I kept speaking in a soothing tone of voice.

  “I am hoping this is the right place to find records to find where they are keeping the girl who is not my girlfriend. I really need her. Need to save her, I mean.” I'm afraid I may have rambled on a bit more after that, but keep in mind that I was drunk on the intoxicating combination of pain and victory.

  The Moses guy turned his icy gaze toward me. “Abanshaddi …?”

  I stared at him, speechless. I sound smarter that way.

  Abby’s voice came from behind the door. “He says he must save his mistress, the girl who is not his friend, whom he admires for her fame. He says she has really large udders, large as watermelons, like two zeppelins in a race crossing the finish line as a tie. He smote his friend on the mouth for saying so, but in his heart he agreed. He also says he is glad I am not here to listen to him.”

  Whatever I said, it sounded a lot worse translated into Ur. Nakasu crossed his arms over his mouth, suppressing a laugh, and the white-bearded man tried not to smile, which made the crags of his face looked microscopically less harsh and forbidding.

  I sighed, wishing the old man would throw me out the window right about then, and a hole would open up in the ground so I could fall into that mass of Uncreation that was supposed to be eating away at the core of this planet. But I said: “Um … hold it. I know who you are. You’re Master Sooey.”

  He raised an eyebrow.

  I slowly said to him. “Sooey ewe so you use sushi boo ray-you —did I get it right?” and pointed at him.

  He nodded but corrected my barbaric pronunciation. “Re’u. Sua’u-su’u-ussushibu-re’u.”

  Of course I should have recognized him right away. I mean, how many people can there be who have the power of levitation? It was Master Ossifrage.

  Then he said in Hebrew, clearly and slowly enough that I could catch the words: “In the tongue, I am called Shepherd-of-Heaven Dove Ossifrage.” Raboni Shamayim Yonah Perec.

  You can see how easy it is to lose the nuances of things like names even with magical language translation: Sky and heaven are two different words for the same thing in English, master and shepherd and pastor are the same in Hebrew, pigeon and dove and bird were the same word in the Ursprache.

  I turned to Nakasu. “Knack, this is Pastor Jonah Breakbone. Call him Ossifrage. He is a friend of the child who saved me. She is behind the door. Her name is Abanshaddi, which means Mountain Rock.”

  Ussushibu or Ossifrage or Jonah Perec or whatever-his-name said, “Evenhar.” (Which I think is a pretty sweet sounding. That was Abby’s name in Hebrew.)

  I said, “Like Aragorn of the Rangers of the North, she has many names, including She-Monkey and Trust-in-Hope. Pastor Jonah, this is my friendly man-eating monstrosity Nakasu. I don’t remember his first name, but it sounds like Cockle-doodle-do without the doodle.”

  “Khaqqudu Nakasu,” the Blemmyae spoke the words with his lower, shark-toothed belly mouth and pointed between his eyes with his thumb. “Irtuamarillut.” And because this last was in the Ur Language, we all understood the word: the Host of Chest-eyed Folk.

  I pounded on the door. “Abby, can you unlock this from your side? Or ask Pastor Ossifrage to waft us up to the balcony?”

  Wafting turned out to be easier than unlocking. The sensation of falling up is just like the sensation of falling down, except, you know, it looks like someone flipped the upside down for the rightside up.

  Boy, I could have used this guy on the rock-climbing fight with the dog-headed were-poodles. In through the transom window we flew, and landed as lightly as the down of a thistle.

  “Why can't I have a Way Cool power like that?” I said aloud to no one in particular. I concentrated on forcing my skin cells to absorb the bloodstains, and when I did that, it made those patches of skin itch abominably. Gross.

  5. Archive of the Conniving Stars

  Inside, the chamber was lit with wooden chandeliers made of fragrant, polished wood. They held no candles. Instead the glowing sticks and beams were woven into shapes larger than wagon wheels, and more intricate than Celtic crosses. Hanging just above them from the rafters, golden shields like mirrors cast their light down onto the shelves of black living metal. High above were tall, narrow windows without glass that opened upon a bitterly cold realm of stars, with silver clouds far underfoot. All had shutters of black metal, but there was no obvious mechanism to close them.

  The tablets themselves were made of copper living metal, and there were dozens and dozens in each rack, and dozens of racks. I had already described how the copper tablet leaves of the book the Blemmyae had consulted were like Venetian blinds. Now that I saw them closely, I could tell each tablet was perhaps fifty or a hundred paper-thin sheets of metal foil, impressed into some sort of moving metal matrix which allowed each page’s letters to flip to the surface one line at a time.

  Between the shelves were jars of carved solid diamond filled with wine or water, square dark statues of winged beings, phoenixes and winged fishes and cloud-dragons and other chimerae standing before the library shelves and desks. There were also two dead bodies that I saw, heads shattered like raw eggs dropped on a sidewalk, killed as dead as Aeschylus. By their armor, I assumed they were the pair who had fled from the fight. How they got inside this hall without opening the main doors I don’t know. There must have been a side door or servant’s entrance. They evidently ran into the flying shepherd. They had their swords in their hands, so I assume they died in a fair fight. Nakasu licked his stomach with a tongue the size of an anaconda, and stepped over toward the fresh meat.

  There was a girl standing there whose height and skinny shape I recognized, even though her face was strange to me. She had her copper sickle and chain in-hand. She was no longer dressed in her ninja poncho, but had on some dull dress with a border of floral frills, and a hairpiece of frills, which I assumed was some sort of cleaning maid’s outfit. It was two sizes too big for her, and th
e belt went twice around her boyish waist. Probably something she had picked up, the better to sneak around in.

  Her face was triangular, with high cheeks and a pointy chin, full lips and very large eyes. Her skin was dusky olive, and her eyebrows and lashes very dark, and her eyes sparkled with precocious intelligence.

  If you saw her on Earth, you would think she was Spanish. Her ears looked big and fragile and like they were sticking out too far from her head, perhaps because her jet-black hair was drawn back so tight.

  Actually, you’d think she was a Spanish queen, since her spine was so straight and her gaze so regal. Apparently being raised by Lord Ersu had never beaten her early years out of her. She had the face of one born to command.

  I was a little shocked. She was younger than I thought. I revised my estimate downward from fourteen to twelve or so. At first I wondered how the people she worked for, the one she called the Big Man, could bear to send her into danger. But she had been trained since age seven to be an assassin, and not by them, so maybe the danger was within what she could bear. In my heart, I fervidly prayed Lord Ersu to be damned and sent alive to hell.

  “Abby, do me a favor,” I said. “And tell Knack the Headless wonder not to munch on the dead bodies. They deserve a Christian burial, or whatever you people do here. Throw people out of upper airlocks and watch them burn up in re-entry heat, was that it?”

  She asked Nakasu not to eat the dead people, and he answered with a short blat of noise from his blowhole. “He says it will cover the evidence. And you are not to command him, as he is your elder in years.”

  I heaved a loud sigh, and turned toward Pastor Ossifrage. “You are the one here who looks like Moses. Use your Old Testament Fu on him.”

  He must have guessed the gist of my comment, because he looked surprised, and said something in Hebrew too rapidly for me to catch.

  Abby said, “Ussushibu asks why you have compassion on the empty bodies of the enemy once fallen. They are uncircumcised. Their breath is gone from them.”