Somewhither: A Tale of the Unwithering Realm

by John C. Wright

  Without a word, Abby got out her burnificating sickle-blade, jammed the coppery point into the clamps holding shut the secret panel to the stairway out of here, and heated the sucker up to deep fat fry.

  With a shriek of anger, the living metal clasps released the panel, and when I shouted that the cylinder seal needed to unlock it was missing, Nakasu kicked the panel in two, and the dark stair lay opened before us. I was thinking of going up, since it was the way we came, but Nakasu took the lefthand path and went down the spiral stairs.

  I said, “If we all jump, can Ossifrage catch us?”

  Abby said, “I think it is too narrow. We will be battered against the sides.”

  The wooden ornaments on Abby’s cloak lit up with flickering yellow light, and we pounded down the stairs, our shadows like giants swaying dizzily behind us along the curving walls and slanting roof-vaults overhead.

  As we fled, we heard the noise of wolf claws behind us.

  2. Down the Haunted Stair

  Down we fled. In a short time, Nakasu and I had pulled a landing or two ahead of Abby and Ossifrage, who called breathlessly for us to wait up. When they caught up, I slung Abby across my back in a fireman’s carry and Nakasu pulled Ossifrage atop his — what do you call the upper part of a headless monster, anyway? — his shoulderline.

  The noise of the wolves hesitated at the threshold above and behind us—I don’t know why, but maybe they were afraid the stairs were cursed—and this gave us a few precious minutes to descend, while they gathered their nerve, or confirmed their orders, or something.

  I had been in this cursed stairwell half an hour ago, further up than my present location. This time I could see it. There was a waist-high line of graffiti of ugly, angular blood-red glyphs running all along the righthand wall as the stairs turned and turned again, and I could not shake the feeling that these were magic runes of some sort, meant to hold back whatever curse was afflicting this forbidden stairway.

  There were baskets held shut with chains that we jogged past every now and again on a landing, and once when I looked back up behind me, I saw a disembodied head of a dark-skinned long-haired face hanging quite silently above the basket behind us, and tears ran down the cheeks. It was a freaky sight, but we were kind of in a hurry, so I did not stop to inquire.

  To the left was a spiral brass rail overlooking an endless well.

  Then the whining of the wolves turned to howls, and a sudden glare of lights above, the shout of men’s voices, startled me. I was staring upward when Nakasu grabbed me from behind and tossed me headfirst over the railing. Abby was gone. Nakasu had plucked her neatly off my back and was holding her in one hand.

  I fell. I had been falling a lot lately. Since I was getting less and ever less afraid of pain and wounds, to me it was like a ride at the fair. I looked around slowly. Looking down, I saw tiny lights moving slowly.

  Looking up, silhouetted against the lamps and energy gun-flares of the soldiers high above, I saw Nakasu, with Abby’s little feet sticking out of the side of his mouth. I was horrified only a moment, until I realized what he was doing. He had understood what she had said about being battered against the sides.

  When his body caromed off the side of the metal railing, or struck a projection in that narrow well down which we dropped, he curled into a ball, and his thick, tough rhino-hide absorbed the blow. She was covered in spit, and how she was breathing I did not know, but she was not being battered to death. On second thought, I know how she was breathing, because she had a porcelain monkey mask.

  Ossifrage, head downward, was hanging behind and above us, waving his hands in small, delicate gestures, his wide hems of his camel-hair coat flapping like wings around him.

  Behind and above him, I saw men in bronze helmets, looking downward. I saw the lights of lamps and then the brighter lights of their energy weapons.

  I put out my hands, slapping the walls of the stairwell sliding by. This slowed my motion and made me tumble, but Ossifrage must have seen, despite the darkness and gloom, what I was trying to do, because air swirled around me, and then I was behind and above the whole group.

  My white mantle was a big hunk of fabric, and I am sure it messed up the aim of the soldiers.

  Shockingly hot lances of fire struck my back, but none of them, at that range, passed all the way through me, and the mortals underneath me were not hit. I was a little surprised that the pain made me black out.

  I thought I was tougher than that.

  3. Above the Cistern Lake

  I woke groaning. “What the heck is the point of being unable to die, if a little bit of pain can make you faint anyway? What a stupid, stupid superpower. Why can’t I have flight, or super-eating, or a talking bird?” I groped around for the shortsword I had been carrying, but it was gone.

  “Hush!” That was Ossifrage. The word ‘hush’ is apparently the same in all languages.

  I sat up, dizzy, and immediately wished I had not. We were on top of a curving leathery surface that, for a moment, I thought was a whale or living thing. It looked like a whale in barding, because there was chainmail covering the hide in places, as well as thick armor plates in other places. Then, in the half-darkness, I saw wires fore and aft, and ailerons and rudders painted with designs of severe and angular winged bulls.

  I stood unsteadily. The plates underfoot had a little give to them, so it was like walking on a trampoline. I was on the upper surface, the slippery upper surface, of a Babylonian airship at least ten times bigger than any zeppelin ever manufactured on Earth: an eight thousand-foot-long monster.

  The airship was an ironclad, with enough lift to bear the weight of a corset of armored plates along her rigid airframe, and mail between the joints. She had gunnery platforms and observation nests spaced around the frame’s equator, and these protruded far enough away from the ship that I could glimpse them from my position, despite the curve of the gas envelope on which I stood. I saw reflections of fore and aft lanterns, as well as running lights port and starboard. I think I could hear a flute playing a tune of two repeating notes, or maybe that was just the whistle of some sort of machinery.

  There was a flare of light from below. A searchlight mounted on a long brass arm somewhere on the zeppelin gondola below us was moving a disk of light across the balconies of a vast inner well-space where we were. We were still inside the Dark Tower, but it must have been nearly hollow at this point in its height, because we were in a vertical cylinder bigger than any astrodome I ever stood under.

  As the searchlight played across the vast walls around us, I saw cities, one above the next, each one hollow like a doughnut, so that its central park or agora was merely air. Lower, far below us, like ring upon concentric ring of constellations, I saw the glowing lights of torches and candles and lampwood gleaming through the windows and balconies of the lower cities. The cities here near the ceiling were dark and empty.

  Large as the airship on which I was precariously perched might be, the diameter of this inner world made it no more than a large fish in the ocean of air. In the distance, I saw lights against the gloom, or torpedo-shapes against the city lights, which indicated where other airships were gliding serenely through the windlessness. Far away, I saw lines upon lines of slave teams hauling on guy ropes to tow an airship into what seemed a hangar door, but the silver light shining through the door was moonlight, and that airship was bucking and struggling in a wind from outside the tower.

  I saw silvery threads like waterfalls running down several of the flora-covered balconies of the lit cities. I grabbed a guy line and inched down the smooth curve of the blimp housing. I could not see what was directly below us, but underfoot I saw very distant lights. These were running lights that showed boats and ships were crossing the face of some gigantic cistern that formed the floor of that titanic inner chasm. I could smell the water, and hear the flat echoes of the waves, like the sound you hear in a swimming pool. You could call it a big cistern or a very small inland sea.

 
I looked up. A ceiling was above us, for the circle cast by the searchlight of the zeppelin we rode played over it: it was a concave of dark metal, wide as the sky, or, at least, the sky on a small planet. There were hatches and holes and mouths of pipes and chimneys poking down from that domed firmament of metal.

  The huge size of this place still was freaking me out. Unsteadily, guy wire in hand, I crept back up the slippery leather curve of the upper gasbag to where my friends were grouped. Whether I was wobbly from vertigo or awe or terror, I am not sure.

  4. Simple Explanation

  I was glad to see Abby was alright. She looked only slightly moist with monster spit. Nakasu had a terrible set of bruises, a black eye that ran along his pectoral muscle, and a bleeding lip that dribbled a line of blood down his hip, but when I asked him how he was (he knew what I was saying from my tone of voice) he thumped himself on the chest between the eyes, and raised his arms overhead like a weightlifter, fists almost touching, flexing his huge muscles in his meaty arms, and grinning a horrific shark-tooth grin.

  In the gloom, I did not see the pool of blood until I slipped on it. I was sliding across the upper curve of the lifting body when Abby, or perhaps her weapon acting on its own (how wise was it?) sent a coil of coppery chain quick as a rattlesnake snaking around my shoulders, and pulled me back to safety.

  “This is my blood, isn’t it?” I felt around my big white mantle, now torn and burnt, and found a wound or two that had not closed yet. I said a Hail Mary and a Paternoster, and cleared my mind, and drew all the blood and goo back into the wounds. It tickled as it flowed up my legs. I pushed the wounds shut with my fingers and they closed like Ziploc bags. “Why do I get the gross-looking power?”

  Ossifrage shushed me again. Abby explained in a whisper. “Speak softly. The air crew does not know we are here.”

  I lowered my voice. “Where is here?”

  Abby said, “The stairwell had no bottom. We fell into the Threefold Immensity of the Upper Noncommissioned Married Officers’ Quarters, above the Fifth Cistern. Ossifrage created an updraft, and guided us to land here.”

  Just then, as the circle from the searchlight swept back over the dome, Nakasu pointed and muttered something in his nose-snort language.

  She said, “The cynocephali have put their heads through the hole through which we fell. They are peering down, but their eyes are weaker than the Freedman’s.” (She meant Nakasu.) “He says they are confused, and have lost the scent.”

  I said, “And your needle?” Wild Eyes, I hoped, had programmed the magic needle to find our next target.

  She said, “The Chamber of Fated Rarities is above us not by far. When the hunt dies down, Ossifrage will summon a lightness to levitate us across to the highest dormitory there…” She pointed at the balcony of houses and temples and walled gardens I had called a city, but I suppose, in this world, only the One City deserved that name. “It is called Tragic Memories Forgotten. It has no lights, and seems empty. I will coax the needle to find a servants’ path, or a corpse-path, where none will hinder us walking up. We have not many steps to retrace.”

  There was something weighing on my mind, “Is killing people automatically something of a lower nature? What if it is in a good cause, dammit? And do the Astrologers as of right now know where we are and what we are going to do next, or do they somehow get to have already had known our fate, last week, last month, last year, whenever? I still do not see how it is logically possible to be unpredictable one minute and then predictable the next!”

  Abby said, “It is simple. You know how inversion paradoxes influence the readings of horoscopes such that the horoscope itself is fated, including any misinterpretations?”

  “Uh….”

  “Well, this is the reverse of that, operating by celestial rather than astral rules. The stars will occlude gaps in the fate record, but the record will not show it, because the occlusion itself is occluded. There is no way to tell the difference between a blank space, an ellipsis, or merely an uneventful day. The Astrologers cannot predict where an unpredictable event will fall — it is called a cloud— but they will know, and will have always known and predicted events beyond the cloud. Simple.”

  “Uh. If that is simple, what is complicated? No, never mind. If they knew I was going to fight the Panotii, why didn’t they send more reinforcements?”

  “They did. The reinforcements gave chase. The cynocephali.”

  “Why not send the doggies in before the battle? If they knew the outcome?”

  She shrugged. I could barely see her in the gloom, and her wooden cloak pins, at the moment, were dark. “The horoscope probably did not predict the cynocephali arriving before the Panotii retired. The Astrologers fear to curse themselves.”

  “They did not know the outcome of the fight, and so therefore sent reinforcements? But that must mean we entered another cloud the moment the fight ended. Ahh…” I felt stupid. We were all following Abby with her needle, going where she pointed, stopping when she stopped. She was the foreverborn in the group, and she had not killed anyone during the combat. If the Astrologers could not predict which way her footsteps led, they could not predict us following in them. The moment we fled, we had dropped off their radar.

  I clapped my hands to my head. “OH! I am so stupid! I could stop them from following me through their predict-o-vision if I had just picked up my tablet! That held all the files on me, right? Unless they made duplicates, or unless they re-do all their calculations, I could have…”

  Nakasu with a grunt and a big hip-to-hip grin opened his mouth, which was the size of a car trunk, lifted his tongue, put his huge hand in his mouth, rummaged around in his cheek, and lo and behold, he pulled out the bronze tablet. It was covered with spit, but it was mine: I recognized where the living-metal locks had been scalded apart by Abby’s wise-metal tool.

  With a flourish, the headless hulk offered the dripping brass tablet to me, smirking. “You don’t speak English,” I said. “But you were just waiting for me to realize I am an idiot. How did you guess?”

  But I realized that, in this world, the one thing every man must have always thought and dreamt about, is finding out every last thing the Astrologers knew of him, not just what the Astrologers saw fit to tell.

  Nakasu said something in his language, patted me on the head, and thumped me on the chest.

  Abby said, “He says…”

  “I know,” I said. “I am not using my skullbag because my chest ain’t got no brains in them. He and I are beginning to understand each other, language barrier or not.” Since he was sitting down, I threw a friendly arm around his shoulders, but with no neck on him, it was like putting your elbow on top of a chest of drawers. “Nakasu,” I said to him. “Since the back of your throat should be against your spine, how can your mouth hold things that, geometrically speaking, are too big to actually fit inside you?”

  I hefted the tablet in my hand. “If I pitch this over the side, will they predict the fall and recover it?”

  “Not if I do it,” she said.

  I handed her the tablet, and she bent over it with her sickle weapon, and pried loose one of the Venetian blind slats with something written in cuneiform on it.

  “What is that?”

  She said, “Your name. In case we get separated again, I will use the Remembering Needle.”

  Ossifrage said something in Hebrew. Abby said to me, “He wants to know why you do not read it, and at least discover what it is the enemy expects you to do?”

  “Toss it,” I said.

  She whirled it like a discus thrower, and it did not fly that far, but bounced once on the curve of the gasbag, went over the edge of the airship, and flipped end-over-end into the dark air below.

  I said, “Tell Ossifrage I don’t believe in astrology. Besides, the stars might be able to track my movements better if they know I know what they predicted. If I don’t know, I think my chance of doing the right thing, predictable or not, goes up.”

  And I d
id not say it to him, but the reason I wanted the damned thing thrown away was because I had a dread of it in the pit of my stomach.

  5. Black Magic

  I remember as a kid seeing a Twilight Zone show once where William Shatner in a diner gets addicted to a little devil-faced fortune-telling machine with a bobble head, just because it keeps telling him fortunes that were accurate. He was addicted to it. Just like cocaine. I don’t know how old I was when I saw it. I don’t think I was old enough to get the concept that one actor could play two parts. The idea that Captain Kirk, of all people, could be victimized by his own weakness offended my sense of the rightness of the world.

  But I do remember how old I was when Wizard of Oz came on television. It was years earlier. I was four. I was so terrified of the green-faced witch that I would cry and hide in my mother’s lap. That was back when I was small enough to crawl into her lap, back when I had a mother. I understood that the cruel and cackling witch could kill the sobbing and frightened little girl merely by turning an hourglass upside-down. I understood that this was black magic. It was unseen and unstoppable and unnatural. Against magic, neither the brains of the Scarecrow, nor the teeth of the Lion, nor the glittering ax of the Tin Man, could avail in the least.

  So even at four years old I understood something Foster and my teenage friends from later in my life, the ones who toyed with Ouija boards or fooled around with tarot cards, simply did not get. Magic is not something from our world; it is not healthy, it is not meant for human beings.

  The gleaming tablet with all its intricate and detailed predictions about me and my life caught the light of dormitory balcony windows as it fell past the inhabited floors, making a little glittering parabola of gold against the velvet blackness arcing toward the dark water so far below.