The Darkest Tower

by John C. Wright

  “The men and mages, scholars and warlords from the feast gathered about me, staring down. They debated who should walk with me with his hand on mine to see I did not flee, and the debate turned dark with acrimony. No one was willing to go, because his action would be unforeseen and the stars would curse him. The higher Astrologers commanded Lord Astute to take me, because he had called them fools. And in that moment he grabbed me cruelly by the hair, so I must scurry along with my head held at his belt, and he whispered his death name in my ear.

  “And because no one foreknew our footsteps, he took me not to the Inquirers, but to the pens where his janissaries were kept, and he said I was to be trained and drilled with weapons of many sorts, so that I could assassinate such women and children whose deaths would please him. I was to be a deadliest dagger hidden in his hand because my crimes could never be foretold nor foreseen.

  “My mother perished in torture. She was tied between two transparent boats, one above the other with head and feet protruding, and set in the hot sun in a fetid pool, while honey and sweet cream were forced down her throat, and coated her limbs. The space between the boats soon was filled with her diarrhea. Wasps and stinging ants and other vile insects were gathered by the sun’s heat into her dung, and multiplied, and entered at her bowels. Her wounds turned putrid and rotted while the insects ate her alive. But she was not allowed to die of hunger and thirst, as this would have been too swift. While she endured, each day for an hour I was placed in a small cage above the pool to watch. I was beaten when I showed no pain on my face and did not cry out to her, because Master Slaughterbench wished for a favorable notice from those courtiers and rumor-criers whose business it is to critique and comment on the cleverness and artistry of torment.

  “You see, she had broken the highest and oldest of all our laws. She had washed me as a child with the secret rite of the Washerman, which comes from the far world that was her home. At that time, I was a second-born, a foreverborn, immune from the stars, but since I had never done a perfectly sinless act, never shown compassion, the washing waited seven years to wash me clean.

  “And no matter her pain, I knew her death would carry her to the bright lands above the stars, where they have no power, and she would be beyond their reach forever.”

  5. Large, Wide, Glorious Place

  I wanted her to remove her mask to wipe her tears, but she consulted a dial from her pouch, and said the air was not yet thick enough to sustain her.

  I talked with her for a time about her mother’s death. Never mind what we said. It’s private. We prayed together, and were silent together for a while.

  The eerie sights of the Dark Tower, temples and strange brass machines, or balconies and empty windows slid past silently as we descended, level after level.

  A while later I broke the silence with a question. I was still puzzled about how their system—heck, how their whole universe—could be made to work. “If she knew, Joy knew, knew for sure, that she would get a beating for sneaking out with you, why did she do it? Or why not just do it on another day?”

  Abby said, “Perhaps before that hour came, she had vowed not to go, and suffer whatever curse befell. Perhaps not. At that hour, the lure of mischief was stronger than the threat of a caning. Is it not the same with your people? You come from the world that killed the One God when he visited you. Do not your people know the One God sees all, judges all, and no one escapes his grasp, or outruns the reach of his arm?”

  “Well, not everyone on my world believes in God.”

  She said, “I speak not of men in madhouses. What of those that have seen and know? Do they never break the law, knowing the judge is inescapable? So it is with us and the star-gods.”

  “Even so, what was the temptation? Just to see things? Well, never mind. I guess I understand that impulse all too well.”

  Abby said, “There’s a song about the daughter of a magician who trades uniforms with her maidservant to sneak down to see her lover, a bold captain of dragoons, and she gets caught when the police lamps light up. She ends up on the hooks, watching him die, and he has rat cages affixed to his face and flesh. It is very sad. Joy and I heard that song, and wanted to dress up and find ourselves lost in some large, wide, glorious place where our every step was not painted on the floor before we took it, if only for an hour.” She sighed wistfully. “The Hebrew slaves sing it. They have all the best songs.”

  “What the who? Who sings it?”

  “The Sons of Abraham. They became the slaves to toil upon the Tower when Nimrod defeated Abraham in battle on the Philistine Way below Mount Megiddo. Abraham refused to bow and worship Semiramis, the Queen, and pay her honors due a goddess.”

  I would have asked her more, but at that moment, a half-hairless dog-faced man came around the lower corner of the golden wayship to which our bottle-shaped boat was clamped.

  6. Cynocephali

  The thing had hands on all four paws so it looked like a grotesque monkey made from a bad verbal description. It also had a leather belt, and carried weapons: a sickle, a crossbow, a quiver of bolts.

  Half-hairless is the only way to describe it. It was shaved like a French Poodle, with thick fur around its head and upper torso, and a mane along its spine, but its arms and legs and hips were naked and pink, and we were treated to the sight of its flapping gonads and bright purple buttocks cheeks. Its tail was shaved too, like the tail of a rat, which I thought was a terrible thing to do, even to a wolf-monster.

  The thing was clinging to the vertical surface of the living metal road like a giant spider, and it ran at full speed straight upward, scuttling swiftly, not climbing with the slow care of a mountain-climber.

  A second wolf loped into view, and a third, racing upward toward us. As fast as we were descending, my stomach was descending faster.

  I saw now that these wolves were coming from the cab or prow of the wayship to which our rowboat was attached, or, if you want to think of it as a building rather than a freight train, they were coming out of the lowest story, the spot directly below us. They had their noses pressed to the wall-like surface of the vertical road, and were casting back and forth, scenting. Then they climbed onto the golden surface of the wayship, and began clambering up and through the bottle-shaped vessels, like the one we occupied, working their way car by car up toward us.

  Abby said suddenly, “Will you slay me if I ask you?”

  “Is it that bad?” I asked, shocked at her tone of horror. “And the answer is no. What are the chances they will pass by without finding us?”

  She said, “Does your world have a magic art that makes scents scentless?”

  “Lots of deodorant companies are working on it, but, nope. Nothing like that.”

  “Perhaps do you know the art calling the mist, to walk unseen among mortals?”

  “I got a stick made of cuttlebone. Me mash heads. Me Ilya; You Jane.”

  “My name is Abanshaddi,” She said primly.

  “Sorry. Trying to be serious. Failing.”

  “I cannot throw myself from the vessel to commit honorable suicide,” she said glumly. “It is one of the things forbidden to those granted the foreverness of a second birth. I suppose you could leap, but it would not kill you. In a way, you are as I am, then. We are both fated for the tormentors. I am afraid of the hooks. They will make me worship the star-gods again….”

  “HA!”

  My laughter interrupted her gloomy prediction in mid-predict.

  “I am like you, little sister, only bigger and meaner,” I said, cracking my knuckles. It doesn’t always work, but this time I got a nice, loud series of pops from my knuckles. I took that as a good sign.

  I smiled at her. “You forget that these vermin are now facing a Never-dying hidden by a Forever-born. You said your power comes from above the stars. Well, mine must come from the hells below! We got it covered, little sister! The future is unknown, wide and free. As long as you are behind me, anything can happen. Anything!”

  She
flinched at my grin, no doubt awed by my big, square, yellow horse teeth. “You cannot fight them. The living metal holds them to the stream-path; you will be as if walking on nails, and fall…”

  “As your big brother,” I interrupted her, “it is my job to go out there and kick their doggy butts to doggy perdition. Wrap your chain around me and fix the hook in somewhere that will support my weight.”

  Turns out the prow of the boat was equipped with a winch designed to bear a lot more weight than mine, and the chain whipped itself through a quick half-hitch like a snake, all by itself.

  She said, “You have no chance to prevail.”

  “What are they?”

  “These are human souls wearing cloaks of wolves. See how their fur is cut? This kind despoils maidens, and they do not spare girl-children for their youth.”

  These were the same monsters the Dark Lord was going to sic on Penny. That was why Abby asked me to kill her first. The stab of hatred in my head was like a migraine.

  Abby said, “They are set apart and sacred to the goddess of rapists, Lilitu, so it is a blasphemy to fight them. But their power is in their hair, and turns all blows, so if you strike where they are bald, there alone your weapon can draw blood.”

  The chain slid up like a freezing cold and darned uncomfortable worm around my flesh. I showed her how to form it into the kind of harness you wear for a parachute: through the crotch, around the waist, over both shoulders, around the chest, and under the arms.

  By that time, there was no question of cowering down and trying to pretend to be mummies. One of the wolf-headed man-things gave tongue. Their eyes gleamed in the gloom like coals from a dying fire, and they loped up toward the side of the car, skipping lightly from glass rowboat to rowboat, tongues lolling, jaws grinning.

  They looked like they were having a grand old time. Probably had read their horoscopes that morning, and they all knew they were promised they’d die in bed of old age, surrounded by bitches in heat and big-eyed puppies.

  “Light ’em up, Abby. I am going to need to see out there,” I said.

  Her cloak pins started glowing with yellow light, and my crotch mask lit up like a Coleman lantern. I hope when they make this into a movie, they just give the actor playing me a miner’s helmet with a lamp on it or something.

  I kicked the shell open, shouting, “You are in for a surprise, you sons of bitches!” And I pushed off with my legs.

  “GERONIMO!”

  7. Dogfight

  Turns out, rapelling down a sheer surface is fun and easy when you have a chain that elongates by itself. I was in the obtuse angle formed by the prism-shaped gold wayship car and the blue living metal road, when, as warned, the surface of living metal turned into a bed of inch-long spikes driven right into my unshod foot. So I slipped and was dangling head-downward, when the first wolf-headed thing loped straight up the wall toward me. The chain retracted and yanked me up like a yoyo on a string just in time to jerk my head out from the snapping jaws. His spit was in my hair and I smelled his breath.

  In the jumping light of my glowing codpiece, the beast’s hairdo looked even worse than it looked at a distance. Only the top and the nose of the wolf-skull had hair on it. Its cheeks and lower jaw were clean-shaven, as was its neck. Ugly.

  I began to realize what a bad idea it was to get into a fight while rock-climbing, or while window-washing a skyscraper, when I banged into the vertical road-surface again—and nails unfolded from the living metal and stabbed into my buttocks and left leg. Ouch, ouch and gawddamittall ouch.

  Wolf soldier number two, let’s call him the Poodle from Hell, just scuttled up the wall past me, pausing only to make a snort in its nose, and it headed like an arrow for the glass rowboat where Abby was trying to guide my little marionette show down here.

  In case I was not clear in my description, I was not the one making the chain grow long and grow short, since I did not know how that was done. She was the one who had just yoyoed me to safety a second ago.

  Like I said, Hellpoodle was smart enough to figure out where my weak spot was, and dashed on past, his four naked humanoid hands slapping the living metal like a drum tattoo.

  The first wolf, the one who had snapped and missed, let’s call him Big Bad, came rushing toward me in a sinuous slither, his body hugging the surface, looking more like a lizard than a snake, his head jerking back and forth too fast and too unpredictable to hit.

  He opened his mouth, and there was a snap of noise and he shot me with his teeth.

  That’s what it looked like. Little sharp splinters of white shot out of his mouth as if he had a gun down his esophagus.

  One incisor bullet hit me in the cheek, drawing blood, and one hit me in the forehead, drawing more blood, and other teeth went echoing as ricochets off the metal to either side of my face. He was trying to get me in the eyes.

  I raised my hand to block my face, which is what he expected, because he lunged and snapped and closed his teeth on my arm and through my arm to the bone. There was an explosion inside his mouth, as he used his esophagus-gun at point blank range, and I felt the bone crack under the impacts.

  In any normal wolf-versus-human fight, that probably would have been game over for any human aside from a U.S. Marine. Humans don’t fight all that well with broken arms. But I simply decided, in defiance of all rules about normal biology, that my broken arm must still work, on account of I was a Lalilummutillut, one of the Undying Host.

  I don’t know if that had any effect, or if I was just crazy-high from adrenaline and battle-endorphins, but I slammed my nightstick of cuttlebone into his face hard enough to drive his teeth deeper into my flesh, and then straightened my not-so-broken arm and slammed him against the wall surface. That did not seem to do much to him—he had fur on his back, which Abby implied was armor—and he raised his rear two hands to try to rip out my guts. He had a knife in one rear hand. I managed to get both legs in the way before he disemboweled me, took a knife to my thigh, and then merely straightened both legs, and meanwhile slammed the nightstick into his gums. He had no invulnerable hair on his gums, so I got his jaws off my arm. He had no hair on his lower belly, or covering his groin, so I kicked the fight out of him. So Big Bad went sailing grandly away into the air, letting out a long, mournful howl that Dopplered down the scale.

  Bye-bye, Big Bad.

  If sex is as good as all the rock songs and toothpaste commercials and boring R-rated movies make it out to be, I doubt ecstasy would be as satisfying as what I felt during that half second while I saw that four-handed freak spinning away like parade confetti, with so much time to think before he hit bottom, tens of thousands of feet of it, because if it were this satisfying, then no one would ever get divorced. (Tell whatever future wife I may have that I will be happy to be proved wrong on the wedding night, by the way.)

  Let me mention what wolf number three was up to. Let’s call him Lon Chaney. He had a little more hair than the other two, and some of it was gray.

  He had taken a position on the wayship next door, half hidden between two bullet-shaped glass boats, and was dangling precariously by one leg, and drawing back his crossbow string with the other three. His crossbow was one of those kind where you put your foot into a stirrup while clutching the string with both hands, and push your foot to cock it, or, in this case, your rear left monkey-hand.

  Abby screamed. I looked up, and saw Hellpoodle trying to get the shell-like lid of the glass rowboat open, and Abby was using her chain-fu to try to keep it shut. A loop of the chain wound around anchor points on the lid and the hull, and the chain was contracting, trying to force the lid shut. But Hellpoodle had his sickle-sword jammed into the crack, and was turning it sidewise to keep a crack open, and teeth-shaped darts were flying from his mouth and bouncing around the inside of the rowboat. Hellpoodle was upside-down, clinging like a giant spider to the blue glass surface of the rowboat by two hands, with his other two hands on the sickle. I saw that the chain that came to me hung from the prow of
the boat and was going between his legs.

  So I put my feet on the living metal and ran across a bed of nails. I was trying to kill two wolves with one stone: I ran toward Lon Chaney, trying to sack-the-quarterback him before he got his crossbow up, while hoping the swing of my chain as I ran would tangle and dislodge Hellpoodle before he killed Abby.

  It almost worked. Sort of. Sort of not at all, I mean.

  Hellpoodle actually laughed a very human sounding laugh, flourished his sickle-sword, and cut the chain in two when I tried to trip him with it.

  I was suddenly in free fall, and Lon Chaney simply scuttled spiderman-like up the sheer wall and looked at me with cool amusement while I flew past him, screaming like a banshee and whipping a long chain after me like a kite tail.

  The chain wrapped around me, even though broken, was still sentient and prehensile, and it whipped out and snagged the prow of a boat as I was looking down over the infinite drop. Skydiving with no parachute was the story of my life.

  Weight returned with a jerk at my waist like a mule kick.

  I was yanked in a mathematically perfect quarter circle of arc terminating at a point where I was smashed face-first into the wall; I fell vertically, and ended up wedged in the crack where the pointy stern of a glass boat curved down and blended into the gold surface of the wayship holding the boat by its keel. The wayship hull and glass boat hull were fused together, but the stern of the boat was not flush with the wayship, and that was where I landed. So I did not fall to my non-fatal street-pizzahood thirty thousand feet below.

  In the movie version, the director will include a nice long shot of my white cuttlebone nightstick making a graceful parabolic arc out into the darkness—but I did not see myself drop it, as far as my slam-woggled brain could tell, my only weapon had simply vanished.

  I said, “Did you see where it went?” And then I realized I was talking to a glowing skull mask between my legs, and told myself to wake up and keep fighting.