Somewhither: A Tale of the Unwithering Realm

by John C. Wright

  A bald man with strange yellowish-gray eyes like the eyes of a night-hunting animal turned his head to look at us. He wore a narrow black fur cap and a fierce black moustache. He was dressed in a striking costume of black sable adorned with braids of tiny gold bells, and the recurved bow of horn that was tucked through his sash was as crooked as the scimitar next to it. He was smoking a long clay pipe, the first tobacco I had seen in this world.

  The bald man, without taking his yellow eyes from us, lowered his head to speak to something hunched next to him, a creature also bald, but one I would never mistake for a man. The creature was barefoot and wrapped in the leathery cloak of his featherless glider wings, with empty pits where his eyes once had been. His skin was bio-luminescent like glow-in-the-dark moss growing on a corpse. It was a Damishikaruyizbu, one of the Host who Quaffs Blood Like Wine.

  Now I saw what the clerks at the bottom of the machines were gathering up. Tablets of coppery metal.

  Every single tablet, each time it was moved, even if it was only moved from a conveyer belt to a metal box, was picked up by three men, unlocked from its place before the move and when it was set down again, locked in place with a twist of a cylinder seal.

  By the scores and hundreds, tablets were being checked, listed, stamped, stacked, and placed in carts and then shelved in smaller racks placed (in turn) into larger racks, which were then lifted on cranes to pallets on the floor or buckets dangling from the ceiling and moved to a big cloverleaf made of the black living metal: the fountainhead of a stream-path. A dozen paths radiated out from the fountainhead like railways from a roundhouse. Here sat a trio of traffic-control officers in a tower who raised and lowered flags to direct the cargo. The racks of tablets were carried on these stream-paths away from this workfloor either up ramps to high doors, or through the skylights into the dark chambers above, or down through wells gaping in the floor.

  Each were the same kind of tablet I had thrown from the blimp. Horoscopes.

  10. Beyond the Corpse Door

  The double doors closed behind us. The Architects of the Dark Tower must have had some supernaturally perfect system for insulating sound, because the pandemonium of clanging cut off like a break in the soundtrack. Silence exploded. I wiggled my forefingers in my both ears, wondering if yawning helped with ears ringing, or if that was only for pressure changes in an airplane.

  The chamber was round and richly appointed, but solemn, like a funeral home, with a black marble floor beneath a blue dome. A circle of square stone pillars or stele, dark with cuneiform, ringed the room. Two wands of lampwood standing to either side of the double doors shed light when Abby nodded at them.

  Opposite the double doors was an elaborate gold shrine to some fish-tailed vulture-faced god. In the middle of the floor like an old friend was the now-familiar sight of a pit with no railing and no bottom. I could hear the moan of the wind against the sides of the Tower far above and far below coming through the dark opening.

  I spoke aloud. “Those were Babbage machines. Differential Engines. Hundreds of them.”

  Abby smiled and nodded. “As you can see, the magicians are hardly barbarians.”

  “Well, I have more computer power in my cellphone then your magicians have in that whole room. Let me tell you about a company called Texas Instruments…”

  She said politely, “I am sure your technomancers are very accomplished. All the rumors speak of your flying rocket packs and boomsticks. But fulgration—what did you call it? Cellphone Instruments. Your art will not work in that chamber, because it is too near the sources of twilight.”

  “Yeah, and guns don’t fire,” I said. “I remember. Why is that, by the way?”

  “I don’t know,” she said, “We are close now. Here is the pit where corpses are thrown. It empties to a waste-gate, so we are near the curtain wall. If Master Ossifrage can lower us down this shaft and then raise us up one immensity, we can reach the Fated Rarity Chamber immediately. The needle shows it is right overhead, and close. Once there, I will call again the winged monster.”

  “And wring her neck and force her to tell us why she sent us there, rather than straight to wherever Penny is being kept? I am all for that.”

  “I am sure her reason is sound.”

  “But if you whistle again, the Panotii, the big-eared guys, will hear again.”

  “Ah!” she said, “Should I not call? I spoke of this to Master Ossifrage while you slept. He says all the Panotii throughout the tower heard your words with Izi of Izan. They know you spared him.”

  “So he thinks they may spare us, out of gratitude?”

  “Oh, no. He thinks they will be doubly bent on revenge. He warns me not to call the winged monster, as she is a familiar spirit, and a walking shadow.”

  “He is a good judge of character. I don’t like Wild Eyes much neither. But let’s say we ignore his sound advice and call her anyway. What then?”

  Abby pulled out a small brass tag with cuneiform written on it. For a moment, I thought it was the metal slat she had pulled from my tablet, the one with my name on it. “If your mistress is in the Harem Furlong, that is but a thousand feet straight down, at the water level of the Fifth Cistern. Not far from the High Officers’ dormitories. What will be required to free her, I do not know. We—”

  Her eyes behind the veil of dangling hem she still was wearing before her face grew wide and slack with fear. Abby trembled.

  Something was coming slowly, deliberately, up through the mouth of the pit where corpses were thrown.

  Chapter Twenty-Three: Fury in the Funerary House

  1. Cruorbibitor

  It felt like someone had just opened the door of a walk-in freezer. Over the rim of the corpse pit came the bald and eyeless head of the Cold One who had seen us pass through the chamber.

  Abby said, “Noble sir, this place is unclean, hence unworthy to receive one of your host.”

  With only his head above the rim, he laughed, and wisps of white fog escaped his lips. I noticed he had fangs like a snake. “Yours is wholesomer than springtide compared to mine, the Cruorbibitors, the most abominable of all abominations, the deadliest of all the death-givers enslaved to the Tower Dark.”

  He answered her in the Ur language, but used his own Latin word for his own race: cruor bibitor. Cruor did not mean blood, it meant spilled blood, shed blood. Bibitor did not mean drink, it meant to drink like a drunkard, a tippler, a wine-bibber.

  He smiled and spoke in a soft, slithering voice, “I wondered why an untouchable would walk before a coffin from which came no smell of corpse, no trace of death-essence. Did you think to deceive me? Even blind, I am not dull to the world. I wondered as well why a member of the Host that Seeks in Vain for Death, trembling and burning with an abundance of life, delicious life, life and to spare, would be walking behind a funeral bell, when custom does not allow his kind near dead bodies?”

  He clambered up the side, his thin arms and legs looking spiderish, the long flap of skin running between his ankles and wrists shedding a pale light from its underside, and a sickening smell. He was naked and had no sexual organs, merely scar tissue at his crotch.

  I backed up. “This guy is kryptonite to me. Anyone here got some Vroom in his hat he can unload on this sucker?”

  My tone of voice must have been enough to tell him what was up, because Ossifrage, without a second of hesitation, raised an arm, and the Cold One was flung up in the air and straight down the corpse hole.

  But with a flap of his leathery wings the pale creature shot up and out again in a moment. Ossifrage turned to me and spread his hands, shrugging. His power was not telekinesis, so he could not bend spoons with his brain, or choke mouthy space-colonels, it was levitation, which was not much use against a man with wings.

  But in this case it was enough, because by the time the Cold One came back up again Nakasu had lumbered across the room, loomed over the hole, and hit the Cold One with the empty coffin he was still carrying. It was smaller than a normal coffi
n, but it was still a big wooden box too heavy for a normal man to pick up, and it slammed the Cold One right across the middle of his body like Babe Ruth swatting a homer.

  The Cold One hit the far wall so hard that he bounced. But the same way they seemed to be immune to sword blows, the Cold Ones seemed to be immune to being smashed by big wooden boxes too heavy for a normal man to pick up.

  The Cold One leaped on Nakasu’s chest-face and wrapped cold arms and legs snakelike around the giant’s body; and Nakasu merely opened his mouth and chomped on the Cold One’s leg. But it was like chewing a rubber band. The Cold One seemed to be proof against shark teeth as he was proof against swords and heavy boxes.

  The Cold One lowered his head to Nakasu’s shoulder and snapped his fangs shut. It looked like he was instinctively trying to bite a neck, but of course Nakasu had no neck. Then the Cold One tried to drive his fangs into Nakasu’s collarbone, but the rhino hide was too thick to pierce.

  Nakasu did not seem to be able to harm the creature, and the Cold One began breathing out a fog of life-absorbing white mist. Impatiently, Nakasu pulled the Cold One off his face, yanking the writhing pale body back with one hand, and pulling the clinging hands and feet away with his other. Then he stuffed the Cold One into the coffin, slammed the lid, and sat on it.

  I don’t know what kind of wood the box was made of, but it must have been airtight, or, at least, magic-tight, because the life-absorbing cold did not escape from the box.

  Abby threw her weapon. It flew around the box Nakasu sat on, orbiting it and wrapping it in copper cunning-metal chain, and then, trailing its chain, came back to her hand. (I should mention the coffin had little brass legs like a bathtub, so the chain could slide under it, no problem). The coffin lid strained and the copper chain whined as the thing inside struggled to get out.

  Nakasu stood. There were marble pillars or steles in this chamber, big and square and covered with angular writing. Nakasu cracked one in half with his fist, and two huge fragments fell to either side. He put his shoulders to one fragment and heaved. But the marble rectangle was too big even for him to lift unaided. Ossifrage pointed at the marble mass and lofted it in midair. It still had inertia, even though it did not have weight, and so Nakasu had some trouble getting it across the chamber, but he maneuvered it above the coffin, and nodded at Ossifrage, who lowered it slowly. The coffin creaked and complained as the weight came down on it. The huge square pillar now sat on the coffin lid, and Abby retracted her chain.

  But that was only half the fight.

  2. Arimaspians and Himantopedes

  I was not completely useless in this combat because the frontal assault was not the only assault. There came an attack from behind. A deafening roar of noise entered the room when the corpse door was kicked open.

  I had no sword and no spear, but I think I mentioned there were wands of lampwood in stands by the door, and I yanked one up. Half the light in the room went away when I plucked the wand out of its stone stand.

  I assumed the staff-fighting form called tenchijin, which I like to call Babe Ruth stance, because you hold the wand like a baseball bat, tip pointing straight up, except closer to your body than you hold a bat, with your elbows not so high. In movies you see the stunt men swing the wand around like a baton in the hands of a drum majorette. Don’t get me wrong, there is nothing wrong with getting some angular momentum, but you just want to hit the guy fast and hard, preferably with the tip rather than the midpoint, and preferably while he is within staff-range but beyond arm’s length.

  Like I said, the double doors burst open. I was only in position to kick one of the leaves shut again. Two guys came in at once, so I kicked the door into the guy on the left.

  The guy on the right was the yellow-eyed bald guy in a sable fur coat, and he had his bow bent and arrow nocked, but the bow went flying out of his hands when I cracked my wand into his leading wrist and followed through with an upward strike alongside his jaw. I connected and he fell to his knees, and the black cap he wore went sailing off. I did not make the stroke correctly, because broken bits of his skull did not go sailing off.

  Meanwhile, the guy on the left must have been off-balance, because when the door swung back again and nearly hit me, he was falling on his face. He was an Abarimon kid about fourteen years old with his feet on backward. As he fell prone, I brought the tip of my stick down onto the back of his head as hard as I could, using a two-handed overhand stroke as if I were John Henry driving a railroad spike.

  In the movies, people get hit on the head and fall unconscious. In real life, blows like that give you brain damage, internal skull-bleeding or sudden death, or all three. I am assuming this was a young and eager kid, full of beans, and because he was super fast on his feet, he got to the door first to win the glory of being the first in the room. The noise from the machines in the room beyond was too great for me to hear whether I broke his skull.

  The guy behind Baldy was human-sized, and while he had only one eye, it was in the center of his head. A cyclopes, not a pirate. And he was also the first guy I had seen in this tower of short folks who was eye-level with me.

  He had a weird cone-shaped helmet with one eyehole in the middle above a vertical mouth slit, so his helm-face looked like an upside-down exclamation point. He must have come originally from a cold climate, because his brigandine was a parka sewn with copper rings. His weapon was made of cunning metal, and it was a freakish self-elongating spear.

  The spear snapped open like a telescope, and the spearhead went into my chest, and then forks and barbs folded out of the sides of the spearhead, and then all the branches of the spear sizzled and burst into red-hot heat that made my mantle catch on fire. I stiffened in shock and he breathed a sigh of relief, sure I was dead.

  Whereupon I drove the point of my wand right into the helmet’s faceplate, trying to hit the eyehole. Whether I hit the eye or not, the stroke sent him tumbling backward, and I drove the point of the wand into his neckpiece as hard as I could.

  His hands dropped the spear-thing. The spear-thing was too full of fishhooks for me to pull it out, and the weight was pulling on my ribcage.

  And behind him were two more one-eyed soldiers in conical helmets and fur brigandines. One of them held a weird two-ended spear that uncoiled like a snake, lashing through the air whiplike and trying to get me in the face. The other threw a many-armed chain which ignited in midair, and it fell like a red-hot octopus all over me, and tried to snare me around the knees and ankles.

  Behind the one-eyed man was a line of four of those one-legged men with feet large as parasols I had seen a moment ago, and legs that looked like boneless snakes. (I wondered later if they were a halfway version or evolutionary side-branch of the huge snake-bodied warriors I had seen being deployed.) These one-footed guys were bowmen. The four had asymmetrical bows of bamboo, like you might see a samurai use, and the arrows were a yard long and smeared with poison. They were sitting on their buttocks, each man with his one huge round foot up before him like a shield, and each man had a metal plate affixed to the sole of his boot (or whatever you call a saucer-shaped footgear that could double as a trashcan lid). They tilted down their feet, shot a flight of arrows into me, and raised their feet again, dipping their arrowheads carefully into small lacquered pots. They also carried small bucklers strapped to their heads like sugegasa or coolie hats, and they tilted their heads forward between shots.

  I ducked behind the half-closed door, but now there were too many arrows sticking into me, and living anacondas made of red-hot metal digging into me and stabbing into my chest cavity, for me to fight. I had to drop the wand and grab the metal spear-snake that was trying to wrap my face in burning copper. I managed to get it off me, and hold it at arm’s length, but I could not let go of it, as both ends had blades that kept trying to jab me. The palms of my hands were charbroiled like two hamburger patties.

  I also had to fight the sensation of poison I could feel flaming in my veins. My power was not automat
ic: I had to be in the right state of mind, prayerful or za-zen, or both. Not easy to do when you are in combat, murdering and being murdered.

  3. Nyctalope

  All this happened faster than you can say Saint Michael the Archangel Defend Us in Battle. The door was kicked in just as Nakasu and Ossifrage had hauled the huge marble fragment atop the coffin containing the Cold One. Now Nakasu grunted at Ossifrage, and he hefted the other half of the square pillar, also too heavy for him to lift, and sent it spinning as lightly through the air as a pizza-man tossing a circle of dough. Ossifrage let the giant marble pillar’s weight return when it zoomed through the door, crushing the men, one-legged or one-eyed, into bloody paste like bugs.

  There were reinforcements behind them: I had been fighting only the front two ranks, but I never got a good look at the rear guard: only a glimpse of glittering spears, helmets, and weapons that burned with red flame or blazed blue-white. There was some sort of metal thing on legs looming up behind them all, a walking tank or giant crab in barding, but whether it was alive or dead or undead, and what it could fire or what it could do, I never found out, and I am glad of that.

  What saved me from finding out was that the yellow-eyed bald man in black, who was still on his knees, insane as this sounds, took a moment to pull his clay pipe from beneath his fur coat, and a pinch of tobacco, reach, touch the pinch against one of the links of the red-hot metal chain trying to rape me, stick it in the bowl of his pipe, and puff it to light.

  He stood up, cheeks all puffed out, and smiled at me.

  And night came out of his mouth.

  I do not mean a dark gas or smoke from a pellet came out of him: and it did not look like the blurry dimness of the twilight effect. Nor was I blind, because I could still see the red-hot links of the cunning metal weapons eating into my chest and mugging my face and burning my legs. But it was black in here, black as the inside of a paint can, and not a brightly colored paint either. The roaring of machines outside filled my ears and night filled my eyes.