Somewhither: A Tale of the Unwithering Realm

by John C. Wright

  Yellow-eyed guy could still see, however, at least well enough to recover his dropped weapons, because one arrow hit me in the throat and then another in the temple. I'll tell you, it feels weird when you can feel a cold wooden rod right in your brain. I did not hear his bowstring snap, though, because the roar from the machine room was too great.

  I could not get the multi-branching spear out of my chest, and my legs were still being stabbed and tangled by the burning chain-bolo, but the two-ended spear thing was in my hands, and I whipped it through the air toward his last known position. I did not know where the door was, or where he was, and any noise he made was covered by the uproar. In the chaos of noise, I heard screaming, and I was sure that this was the sound of Abby, and then Ossifrage getting shot, and a few arrows into the huge mouth and huge eyes of Nakasu would probably do him in.

  We had lost. I kept swinging the hot chain wildly because I think a man is supposed to keep fighting after it is hopeless, and I swung high enough that I would not brain Abby if I connected with her, in the dark, by mistake.

  Another arrow hit me, and I stepped toward the source, swinging. At that moment I stumbled across the stone-covered coffin. The red glint from the hot weapons stopped, and they became cool and limp. Some trace of life-destroying vapor must be hovering around the coffin, and it drained the vital force from the metal.

  I had an arrow through my skull and several mortal wounds at that moment, so it would have been a really awkward time for my power to fail me. I scrambled back out of range before Cold Guy’s magic BO drained my magic oomph from me, and before my get-out-of-death-free card could be rejected by the credit agency.

  The octopus chain around my ankles was gone, and I had dropped the writhing two-ended spear-snake.

  But the Coldness also affected the many-branched spear in my chest. I could feel it moving slowly as barbs folded back into the shaft. It started to heat up again when I scrambled away from the coffin. So it was stunned, not dead. I yanked it out of my chest with pain that seemed remarkably distant and uninteresting, and felt beneath my burnt hands the many-branching spear begin to throb back to life.

  Sound suddenly returned like deafness cured by miracle, and this was how I knew someone had shut the doors again.

  So I heard the bowstring sing this time. The arrow hit me, and that was enough. The chamber was not so very big. I threw the spear in a line parallel to the shaft of the arrow that just struck me. I doubt I could have hit the target with a normal spear under those conditions, but Cunning Metal-weapons seemed to know how to curve into their targets. I heard the scream of the yellow-eyed man, and his sobbing, and the beginning of what must have been a prayer begging the spear not to unfold. Then I heard the ringing noise of fishhooks and barbs and branches erupting out of the spearhead and into every vital organ. The sound of it was truly appalling.

  I laughed aloud.

  Abby spoke in the darkness, “Freedman Nakasu, only your eyes can pierce this gloom. Gather us to the corpse pit. Master Ossifrage, levitate us, please. We must flee this room before the darkness clears.”

  The noise returned with a clash and a roar, so I assume the crab-shaped walking tank, or a group of other troops, had shoved aside whatever huge weight Nakasu had placed before the doors to wedge them shut.

  But by that time, we were floating down and down.

  My eyesight returned. We were hanging in vast and empty space outside the tower, with moonlit clouds below us, elfin and silvery, and stars above, and cold wind all around. To one side, a black and many-angled wall, lit only by a crawling fire of dark blue light, rose from endlessly below us, reaching to endlessly above. Among the stars, shining with rainbow light, I could see the disks of two or three Moebius coils flaming, eating vast golden wayships, no doubt on their way toward Earth.

  Abby stood on nothing in mid air, and dangled her needle from a thread. She pointed. “The Chamber of Fated Rarities is there.”

  Chapter Twenty-Four: Of Words and Worlds

  1. Among the Hanging Gardens

  We passed over an immense wall with crenellations as large as houses, and passed under the grim, blind faces of kings and crowned beasts as large as Mount Rushmore’s. We landed skydiver style (legs slightly bent to absorb the shock) on a pavement of onyx, in the shadow and spray of a silver-basined fountain.

  Nakasu hit the ground before I did, and turned, and lifted his massive arms, and helped Abby down to the ground like a ballet dancer catching a ballerina. We stood in a balcony garden broader than an eight-lane superhighway, that was covered with vines of grape and ivy, groves of orange and lemon trees, rosebushes and boxwood hedges, orchids and azaleas, ponds of lilies, little flowing streams, and the strange beauty of unknown flowers half-hidden in the gloom.

  The air pressure here was higher than it was outside the balcony: I had the weird feeling I had just passed through some sort of unseen and unfelt force-field that formed a greenhouse roof over the balcony.

  We were no longer at the height jetliners fly, but we were still higher than any Earthly mountain. Because the wall behind us was as far above the pavement as the Great Wall of China was above the ground, the dizzying vista of the wide nocturnal world beyond was blocked out. Standing between the infinite height of the Dark Tower to one side and the balcony wall to the other was like standing at the bottom of a green canyon. It was kind of cozy.

  About a hundred feet above us were some archer slits, if archers were titans shooting ballistae. I mean the windows were very tall and not very wide. Lampwood light was streaming in beams out from the windows.

  Ossifrage walked up through the air to the windows and peered in carefully. He shrank back from the window and walked back down, and whispered in Hebrew. More of my studies were coming back to me so I did not need Abby to translate: “Many are within, searching, both masters garbed as the Chaldaeans who watch the stars, and hunting apes who sniff the ground. With them is a fell spirit of the underworld, and dragoons with Tommy-guns. We must abide until they depart.”

  He did not actually say Tommy-gun. He said eqdah’ — which I thought meant sparkle. When I asked Abby to translate this, she called it Ariru-Kippa-tup-psalt-birqu which means round-drum-magazine thunder-weapon. Easier to say Tommy-gun.

  Ossifrage wafted us to a perch not far away, this one a little shelf only ten acres or so in width, and covered with cherry trees and statues of stork-winged nymphs. We had a clear view of the windows and settled down to watch.

  We chatted a bit to kill some time.

  2. Killing Time

  I asked Abby, “About the Chamber of Fated Rare Steak or whatever? I thought it was a room where the Dark Tower keeps captured enemy magic items? You know, Thor’s Hammer, Space Ghost’s Power Bands, Lamont Cranston’s mystic girosol, Batgirl’s Snugly-fitting Utility Garterbelt? What makes you think the guards will leave?”

  Abby spoke with Ossifrage. He said, “They are the hunters, not the watchmen.”

  (I needed Abby’s help to translate that, because the shade of difference between words for a soldier looking for someone and a soldier guarding something was too subtle for my vocabulary.)

  I said, “Don’t they guard this place like Fort Knox?”

  Abby said, “The day and hour when a theft would be foretold, the troops would be posted there, or else go to the house of the thief a week and a day beforehand and deliver him to the tormentors, who would play him to death using the wheel, the horse, or using the claws or hooks or currycombs, or the chair, or the helm or the tunic of red-hot iron, or scourging with divers fashions of scorpions or braids of ….”

  I interrupted gently. (I did not want to be rude, and I realize full well she had to live in this damned world, but that did not mean I did not get seasick hearing about it.) “But you could steal something? Because your future is hidden, right?”

  Abby said, “Thievishness is a thing of the lower nature, so the lower spirits who rule this world of sorrows would behold and foretell.”

  “
But I can get my own back, right? My grandpa’s sword?”

  And when she assured me that I could, I asked, “Why can’t we just rush the guys inside and kill them?”

  Abby said, “The Master says they have with them a Kubu Ardanan.” Kubu was an ambiguous word; it meant a foetus, a stillborn child, a premature baby, or a demon. Ardananu meant a specter or doppelganger, a ghost who took the form of a living man.

  I said, “We are afraid of a demon preemie? Like a small child? Why not just punt it?”

  Abby said, “You would be safe. For us, it is very fearful. The child is possessed of a Watcher.”

  “What is that? Something like a Beholder? Ten lesser eyes on eyestalks? The big central eye has an anti-magic ray?”

  With Abby’s help, Ossifrage told me: “A Watcher is an Enochian. A Watcher is a spirit who was once a craftsman of the world, but fell in love with the fair daughters of Man and carried them to high places and outraged them. Watchers fathered the mighty giants who won great renown of old. These same spirits rose in mutiny when it was told in Heaven that flood waters would overwhelm the Earth, and they sought to protect all they had made as well as their monstrous children.”

  “That doesn’t necessarily sound like he is a bad guy….”

  Abby said, “The Watcher commands — what did you say of it? — an anti-magic ray.”

  “I was just kidding,” I said. “I am tired of these monsters actually being real. Why do all these creatures work for the Dark Tower anyhow?”

  Abby passed that to Ossifrage. His eyes narrowed and his face grew grim. She said, “He says the Chaldaeans and magicians know the future. They can force all things to their will. They are restrained from nothing….”

  “… they have imagined to do. Yeah, yeah, I get it.”

  “The Watchers are shadowmages, for their art is to make worlds out of ylem, and the twilight serves them,” said Abby. “Master Ossifrage’s art fails in the twilight, even as yours is made more strong. The flesh and bones of men fail if the twilight thickens into the Enduring Dark.”

  Ossifrage held up his hand, forefinger out, and wiggled his thumb, doing a perfect imitation of a child playing pistol, and said something that had the word bang-bang in it.

  Abby said, “The twilight stops the thunder-noise weapons of the technomancers.”

  “Are there really dragoons in there? Men from my world? Working for them?”

  Ossifrage said, “Almaany mearahim.” Or something like that.

  Abby said, “German Troglodytes.”

  I was not sure I heard right. “Troglodytes?”

  “Cave-dwellers,” said Abby. “Because their weapons have made all the surface world a desert, their farmsteads are under domes, and their cities are under ground. Your scholars call them Catoudaei. They call themselves the Vrilya.”

  “Whose scholars? My scholars?”

  “Hesiod is an author who existed in your branch of history, did he not? The aeon where the Catoudaei rule, called Ashkinaz, is adjacent to yours. They are technomancers who control a telluric current called the virile force, or vril, which allows them to look into the past, to exchange thoughts through light beams, and to concoct food from lifeless minerals. Wands or flutes of the virile metal shed influence to invigorate the sick, cure maladies, grant clearness of thought. Chimneys and battle-towers of the same material likewise can reach across a thousand miles and induce convulsions in legions and large crowds, engender confusion, cast plagues and pestilences, induce misery, provoke earthquakes, ignite volcanoes, or reduce field and forest instantly to ash.

  “The Catoudaei have land-ironclads larger than cities,” she continued, “that can trample towns under many metal legs, and flying disks that soar without noise to their fortresses on the moon. The Catoudaei kill all lesser races of men, and breed their women like livestock, and it is forbidden on their world to fall in love. Their guns are not chemical like yours, but are powered by virile force.”

  Small wonder Enmeduranki had been unimpressed by my Earth. I felt obscurely cheated. Where were our moon-forts?

  I said, “It might be my imagination, Abby, but you sound as if you like this aeon, whatever it is.”

  She wagged her forefinger once, sharply, in her world’s version of a headshake. I noticed how unconsciously imperious even her smallest gestures were. “Ashkinaz. It is not liking, but sorrow. For a time, I did not know where my mother was from, and I may never speak to my father again. Her name was Luisa. I thought it sounded like an Ashkinazi name.”

  That was a little too sad for me to talk about at the moment. I cleared my throat and pointed at the window. “About their virile-powered firearms: The golden flail could produce twilight that would knock out their Tommy-guns, right?”

  She said, “But the same twilight would strengthen the Watcher. They are the fathers of the Nephilim. They assisted in all lesser things to fill the void of the world before the count of days and stars. Who knows what they can craft?”

  3. Nomothete

  Here was something I had been puzzling about. “How does that work, anyway? Does twilight stop inventions made after a certain date, so you just take a gizmo like that flail and twiddle the dials to A.D. 900, and woompf, instant Dark Ages? Or does it have to do with the complexity of the chemical reactions, or what? I mean, gunpowder igniting is pretty simple, chemically speaking, compared to something like what goes on in a human brain. So how come the Babbage machines and clocks operate in this place, or zeppelins, but not radio?”

  Abby repeated my question to Ossifrage and Nakasu. She translated their answers back to me.

  Ossifrage explained it (I am using the term loosely) in this way. “It is by the will of the Holy One, He whose name is Mighty. The darkness is without form, and void, so the works of men must fail in the twilight, because their form is less. High magic, which is celestial, is quelled by the twilight, but Shadow magic, which is chthonic, grows stronger, for it relies on formlessness to do its work; and in the light of The Archangel, the Shadow magic quails and High magic is strengthened.”

  Nakasu explained it (I am using the term loosely) in another way. “Each aeon has a different master language, and the words define the powers of nature. The twilight abolishes the distinction of words, and robs the power of nature of gunpowder, which is from your aeon only, but cannot rob the brain, for that nature is in all aeons. Clockworks work by simple mechanics, and these are the same in all aeons. Only the things where sages and magicians of different worlds differ will the twilight smother.”

  I said to Nakasu, through Abby, “Do you mean scientists made different discoveries in each parallel version of history? How come their discoveries do not match? Aren’t the laws of nature the same in all parallel versions of time? If George Washington was a plumber in one world rather than a planter, why would that change Newton’s Laws of gravity?”

  Nakasu: “The sages of different worlds do not discover different discoveries. They make different things by the differences of the tongues. Each language exists in some form on each world, but for each turn of the great wheel of fate, only one tongue is the master tongue for that aeon.”

  I made a noise like “Huhn?” which Abby translated by saying, “Ilya says your explanation is clear, but, alas, his comprehension is less than perfect, Freedman.”

  Which goes to show that anyone who does a lot of translating between languages picks up a diplomatic bent.

  Of course, I noticed that she was more polite to him than to me, because in her eyes I was a lower rank: abominations and slaves are below freed monsters and ex-slaves. Sorry if I sound a little sensitive to this, but even though she was rebelling against this world, she still automatically bought into its assumptions.

  Nakasu launched into his explanation: “Four were the sons who survived the Flood. From Shem, all the Semitic Languages of Asia Minor—” he pointed at Ossifrage “—create the nature of Cabalism, which is the names of the Lamassu and other messengers within the Tree of Life. Each of the many
worlds in that branch knows a different form of Cabalism. From Iapetus, all the Japhetic Languages spring—” he pointed at me “—Alchemy and the related arts are European. Geometry, Gramarye, Tellurics, Galvanics and Fulgration, Nucleonics and Helionics and Solar Arts, Chemistry and Alchemy, Golemics, Aeropathy, Ballistics and Gunnery and all the arts of thunder weapons. But from Ham, the eldest sons above the others, comes the arts greatest above the others, which is Necromancy, the art of Africa”—he pointed his thumb between his eyes—“each differing for each Hamitic language. The Pharaohs raise their kings, the Berber raise the Jinn, the Giants of Bashan absorb the unquiet shades of their fathers slain in the Deluge, and therefore grow to their immense size. My people torment the ghosts of our fathers, and this allows us to disregard the shape of Man and the form of God. The fourth son is Janus, who instructed Nimrod, and by his art and star-craftiness learned how to construct this Tower, and to make it utterly dark. In this cursed world the original language is preserved, and their art is Astrology.”

  I said, “Are you talking about Noah’s Flood? That’s just a story.”

  “No. I speak of the Flood of Ut-Napishtim, which the Serpents call the Flood of Vaivasvata.”

  “The geologists on my world proved a worldwide flood never happened. Is this event before or after our timelines split off from each other?”

  Nakasu and Ossifrage discussed this question through Abby. The two of them agreed that the magicians called geologists on my world must have potent magic indeed, if they could retroactively abolish the shadow of the Great Flood from the book of time.

  “Father Nicholas Steno won’t be pleased to hear himself called a magician,” I snorted.

  Ossifrage, who could never keep his hands still when he talked, tapped my knee, and (with Abby’s help) told me, “Each power comes because of the names of the namers, and this changes the nature of those things in man’s dominion.”