The Blood Storm

by John C. Wright

  He did not wait for our permission before, nor boast about it after. He just did it. It was over so quickly that only when I thought back did I realize how dangerous it had been, what a cold-blooded customer he was for risking all our lives like that—and how cool he was.

  And he did not smile once.

  Maybe there had been no danger. Maybe Ossifrage was just that good.

  But on the other hand, he had the same look on his face when he stepped out of the oriel window in the Nine-Star-Aligned Chamber and faced a whole squad of enemies. It occurred to me then that he could have flung them into the air and killed them from hiding, without poking his head over the threshold. No, he had stepped out into plain view to give them the chance to surrender, to spare their lives. And he had not even broken a sweat.

  Maybe he just had that much faith in himself, in which case he was a jerk, or he had that much faith in a higher power, in which case he was a saint.

  2. Barred Gate

  We flew out above water. Since there were airships in the vast cavernous cylindrical space above us, for all I could tell, this might have been the same furlong we were just in, merely seen from a lower elevation. It seemed bigger and better lit, but the distance we had descended also seemed about right, so it might have been the cistern-floor of the same chamber whose ceiling city we had just snuck through. I looked for evidence of the airship Ossifrage had scuttled, but I didn’t see it. As before, I saw rings of lit balconies indicating warrens of rooms like townships overhead, one above the next.

  Ossifrage soared up, hugging the inner walls, avoiding lit balconies and inward-looking windows. Halfway between two balcony-towns, in a dark part, we came to one lone balcony or gallery running along the wall. The niche (if that is the word for a space bigger than a mansion carved out of the solid wall) was very tall. It was an alcove shaped like a half-dome, and in this place were gardens and fountains and many golden cages holding songbirds.

  And there were four guards of that strange race of men called Himantopedes who stood on one snaky kneeless leg above a foot as big as a parasol. They were carrying long pole-arms with lassos on the tip, and wearing conical coolie hats of iron. Each one wore one huge shoe of iron that clanged gong-like at each hop.

  I loosened my grandfather’s sword in her scabbard with my thumb and was beginning to grin when Ossifrage flung the Himantopedes, one and all, over the rail of their balcony before they were aware we were swooping in. They did not start screaming until they were over the rail and in free fall. One of them was a kid, I mean, he looked like he was about twelve, but he was wearing armor and carrying a weapon, so I guess that made him fair game.

  It was not very sportsmanlike, but I was more worried about whether the deaths would be “lower nature” enough for the Astrologers to predict it. To have had predicted it. To retroactively have had predicted … aw, never mind. I still was not clear on how it worked, much less how to say it.

  The one-legged men fell, and bounced off the walls below us, leaving red smears, and landed with a brief circle of foam that opened and closed in the waters of the cistern lake. Sort of like throwing someone out of the window of a skyscraper into Central Park. It was hard for me to believe no one saw the deed.

  Wild Eyes landed on the gaily painted rail. Her claws left white scars in the carven floral knot-work design where she perched. She stood staring down at where the bodies had fallen, a look of unsated hunger in her eyes, her mouth half open. Whatever vast shadow-creature it was that used that little bird body as a mask was not a nice guy. Or maybe she just wanted to peck out their eyes.

  We entered the alcove. The wide balcony behind us overlooked the cistern lake and the bands of windows of stacked townships behind us. In the middle distance hung a flotilla of monstrous airships. We landed in the gardens on pavement. The half-dome was high overhead, so cunningly lit, and so well painted with motifs of clouds and birds as to create an illusion of open space. It was a cruel illusion, because through the ferns and potted trees, we could see archways leading into some interior chamber. These openings were set with brightly colored sapphire bars: festive jail cells.

  Abby’s needle pointed. I dashed that way, saying over my shoulder, “Abby! Tell them we are short on time! Someone must have seen those hoppy-hoppy guys fall. Fos! Can you make more than yourself invisible? Spread your mist around?”

  Foster grinned. “Watch my jets.”

  He raised his transparent longbow and he shot, one after another, glass arrows into the wooden rail of the balcony. I had seen Foster shoot before, but even so, I was damned impressed. I mean, the arrowheads were sinking into solid oak, and he did not miss a shot.

  When he was done, he raised the longbow overhead. His white cloak began to stir and billow as if lifted by an unseen wind. He must have the same tailor as Ossifrage. One streamer of fog then another crept out from the hovering cloak hems. Then a whole wall of thin mist began to seep from his cloaked and hooded body to touch each arrow. The arrows were some sort of amplifier, because a curtain of mist rose up from them, hanging upward from the arrows as if from curtain rings, to erect a sheet between us and the great cavernous space beyond. That half of the scene did not turn invisible, but it became hard to hold your eyes on it, and your brain sort of forgot details.

  I said, “Remind me to kick you for not volunteering to hide us all while Ossifrage was zooming us around in that display of near-miss aerial acrobatics.”

  His hood tilted in what I can only call a look of scorn. “Sure, as soon as you tell me how to plant a line of arrows in midair, and have it hang between us and the foe.”

  I approached the nearest barred archway. The tunnel beyond was pink and had small stools and pillows scattered here and there, and niches holding washbasins of silver or wine carafes of rose quartz. From the curve of the tunnel, I guessed it led to some larger space beyond, perhaps another garden.

  The lighting here was eerie, like dusk, drifting clouds that cast no shadows, soft and seductive as candlelight. I saw it came from little specks of sawdust trickling softly down in tiny streamers and fans from pinpoints in the roof, but it was lampwood sawdust and thus it glittered and throbbed with light.

  The bars were blue, and semitransparent like glass, and carved and fretted into the most airy arabesques and curlicues, swirling spirals and little bows and hearts and thorny roses. It was lovely. The way the gemlike crystals of the bars caught the half-light, it was almost as if they were phosphorescent. But it was still the door to a slave pen, a door whose bars were razor-sharp glass, and every edge was like a scalpel, and every point a needle.

  “Beware,” croaked Wild Eyes, who had landed somewhat behind me.

  I shrugged, not seeing any way to do what I needed to do and be cautious about it. It really did not look dangerous. I wanted to test the strength of the bars, and did not care if my hands got slashed.

  But when I put my hands near, dark red sparks flickered from the curls and needles of the cage door and jumped toward me, and my hands trembled in spasms of pain. It felt like grabbing a live electric fence, or putting your hand in a hot frying pan sizzling with grease. My body jerked my hands back, more or less without bothering to consult me.

  I roared in anger, and looked around the balcony for something to throw. A large marble urn with a rosebush in it would do nicely. I put my shoulder to it and pushed with my legs, tipping the urn over in a spray of topsoil, and rolled it, urn and tree and all, toward the glass bars. Abby cried out in fear, and Ossifrage flung out his arm and removed the weight from the rolling shrub, but he could not halt the forward momentum.

  Thanks to the sudden weightlessness, the urn was rising as it rolled forward as if sliding up an unseen ramp. It went high, and did not quite miss the archway. The rolling urn smashed into the bars only at the very top of the arch, breaking a small patch of perhaps half a dozen bars in a spectacular scattering of glass.

  Inside the glass was a sapphire fluid that gave the glass its color. The fluid turned into v
apor when it met the air, then a spreading cloud that expanded. Every single little chip and grain and glittering mote of broken glass gave forth a dark red spark, which also rushed outward like a swarm of wasps, stinging and burning.

  The red sparks struck me, and suddenly the air was unbreathable. I fell and choked and gasped and for a short eternity prayed to Saint Blaise, the patron saint of throat ailments.

  When my mind was clear and calm, my eyes stopped watering, and I climbed to my feet. The flowers of the garden for about a dozen paces in each direction were gray and wrinkled and dropping like late autumn leaves. The songbirds in their little cages near me were dead, even though I could hear twittering from further away.

  I walked out of the dead area and eventually found Abby and the others at the far side of the vast half-domed balcony. They had fled even before the rolling potted plant had struck the barred door top.

  The hole I had made was too small even for a child to fit through, thanks to Ossifrage. Who, come to think of it, just saved everyone’s life. If more bars had been smashed, more of the red sparks of pain and blue mists of death would have flooded out.

  Foster walked up and slapped me on the back of my head.

  “Ow!” I said.

  He said, “Next time a witchbird says ‘Beware’, you say, ‘Of what, please?’ And then you take the stupidity wax out of your stupid ears and listen to the answer.”

  I rubbed the back of my head, but decided I had earned that, or worse. So I merely said, “What the heck is that stuff inside the glass bars?”

  Foster meanwhile walked over to another glass cage door made in the shape of knots and curlicues and roses and thorns, and he knelt before the lock. He was fiddling with it, but I could not see over his shoulder what he was doing.

  Abby said, “Distilled essence of pain. It causes sickness and fainting, and robs the air of its power to sustain life, but only kills small things, birds and rats.”

  “Who the heck builds cage bars out of glass?”

  Foster answered me, not looking up from his work: “It’s a psychological trick. It is supposed to look to the slave as if she can escape, by making the bars seem frail, but even if she is willing to cut herself to ribbons and endure the shocks, the nausea agent released will send her barfing back into the harem, whereupon the other girls will beat her for flooding the air with teargas. The medical technology here is advanced enough that they can repair the lacerations without a scar. The whole point is to try to make the prisoner keep trying to escape until she has not the heart to even try. It is mockery.”

  “How do you know all this?” I said.

  He said, “Didn’t they try something like this on you? Me, too. Anyway, my people have been fighting the Dark Tower for years.”

  I remembered the bottomless cage, walled by living spikes, which should have been so easy for an immortal man to get out of, and I nodded. “How did you get out?”

  There was a click, and the door swung open. He straightened up, grinning. The cylinder seal was in his hand, the same I had taken from Sergeant Sakrumash. He nodded toward Wild Eyes and said, “A little bird brought me the key. You want it back?”

  I had already pushed past him, and was moving at a brisk jog. Over my shoulder I said, “Hold on to it. If anyone gets caught, turn on your Invisible Girl power and wait for a likely time to go save him.”

  “Invisible Man.” He was trotting behind me, his arrows clattering and ringing in their quiver like silvery sleigh bells. He had his bow out and an arrow at the string.

  “Whatever. Speaking of which, where is that sack-of-creampuff bird?” Except I did not use the word creampuff, but made a reference to soil nitrates. And I clapped my hand over my mouth when Abby answered me, because talking English to Foster for one moment made me forget the little girl could hear me.

  Creampuff! I felt like creampuff.

  Abby said, “Take the left stairs ahead! The walking shadow is ahead of us, for bars cannot impede her.”

  “I knew someone had the Walk-Through-Walls power! I am beginning to get the hang of this crazy world.”

  Narrow stairs led to another corridor, which ended in a brightly lit balcony set with stools and music stands. Bulbous stringed instruments with long necks, zithers, and woodwinds with forked mouths were neatly arranged in a case. What I thought was oddest of all was that the music written on the sheet music was written in our language, not theirs: the g-clef and bars and p’s and q’s of European music notation.

  The balcony was fenced in with merely iron bars this time, although nonetheless decorated with Arabic fantasies of flowers and lianas shaped of iron, or Celtic labyrinths of spirals. There were slats or louvers lowered over the ornate grillwork, blinding the musicians to the mysteries beyond. I smelled roses and other perfumes, the scent of lavender, heard the splash and lap of water on stone, but also caught the stench of blood and offal, and heard the soft murmur of terrified weeping, smothered groans of fear.

  Nakasu kicked the grating out of the window frame and Ossifrage held broken bricks and falling bars in midair, so nothing below was struck. Girls’ voices shrieked at the huge sound of the bars breaking.

  The light beyond was that eerie dusklight, the soft gleam produced by sawdust of lampwood trickling down from tiny holes in the dome far above, like little weeping streams or shrouds of starlight, elfin and tumbling Milky Ways.

  We were about halfway up. Ossifrage swept us down to the tessellated flagstones below.

  3. Under the Pleasure Dome

  We descended lightly into a walled paradise beneath a hundred-yard diameter dome of nacre, a gardenland or greenhouse of perfumed orchids and herbs and opiate poppies surrounded by divans and couches, by looking glasses and shining brass taborets, by luxurious beds acred in silks, and by furniture more sinister: torture racks and whipping posts. But even these, like the glass cage bars that covered the two large entrances below, were silvered and gilded and ornamented, things of sinister beauty. Half the floor was paved with marble and gold, the other half was flowerbed and tended grass set in countersunk beds of topsoil.

  The half-circle of wall facing the balcony was pierced with two archways, but a colonnade that curved and followed the wall ran also along that side. This was teethed with glistering blue glass bars in fantastic floral patterns. Beyond the bars I could see divans and small tables for the convenience of whoever might be lounging to watch the harem girls at play, or at torture, or to bid on them. No one was there now. Opposite the entrances, leading from the dome to other chambers for sleeping or changing, were unbarred arches hung with thick red curtains.

  I was expecting guards or eunuchs of some sort. There were twenty-two men, young and muscular, and all of them one-legged Himantopedes. All of them were dead. They were lying in an orderly circle about the large countersunk bath in the center of the domed chamber, their single feet pointed toward the walls, their shoulders and heads (still with their iron pie-plate helmets strapped to them) under the water, which was strewn with lilies and lily pads. Their weapons were lying next to them, unbloodied and un-nicked. Each man still had his immense wheel-shaped shoe on his one foot, so all of them together looked like a troupe of fallen unicyclists.

  Huddled against a far wall of ivory behind a row of ferns and lianas were forty or fifty girls.

  Most of the girls were Ur, olive-skinned and dark-haired with attractive facial features: high cheekbones and thick red lips and large, dark eyes. There were a smattering of Caucasians, brunettes and blondes and redheads, and a number of Negroes ranging from coffee-colored to dark chocolate, and at least one serpent-girl with a voluptuous bosom, a tiny waist, and a Hindu caste-mark on her brow. I did not see a single girl of Oriental extraction, however.

  And most of them were way too young. I am not a good judge of age, but they looked as if they were mostly between fourteen and sixteen, with maybe twelve or fifteen girls old enough to vote. Some of the girls looked to be as young as twelve.

  They were all (including
the gem-studded serpent-girl) dressed in the same white sleeveless tunic with wide black belts cinched tight to bring out their figures, to the extent that they had one. All were barefoot (except the gem-studded serpent-girl). The garb was not particularly flattering, but the cumulative effect was the same you see looking at a line of airline stewardesses, or cocktail waitresses, or anything from the old days when girls used to have “-esses” after their names, where the whole looks more attractive than the sum of the individuals, merely by having all the pretty young things in uniform.

  They were all made up heavily.

  Now, I know it takes girls hours to get their faces adorned with blush and mascara and lipstick and whatnot, and to fiddle with their hair and wash and condition and highlight and knead and roll and bake to perfection, and perfumize with throat-spray and hair-spray and armpit-spray and behind-the-knee spray and eyeliner and de-eyeliner, and lash-curler, pluck out eyebrows and paint them back in and whatever else girls do that no man should ever know. Hours.

  That meant these girls here were just the ones on call. The ones waiting to be sent for.

  One more thing. They all wore black metal collars around their throats as if they were dogs.

  I shouted back for the others. “There are half-a-hundred girls in here! How are we going to get them all out?”

  All the girls huddled up against the wall now quailed and shrank at my voice. I remembered the way Abby had also flinched at my shout. I wondered what kind of world this was, where everyone who was small and weak expected to be hit.

  With an effort, I choked anger to silence, but I could not get control of my breath. This tickling or tingling sensation was crawling across my scalp: if my wiry stand-up hair had not already been on edge, it would have bristled like the mane of a lion.

  Ossifrage and Nakasu were gazing at me with surprise or puzzlement. Maybe they came from worlds where child brides were a normal thing, and chattel slavery, and torture and rape and statutory rape, and chaining up children like dogs, after tarting them up like streetwalkers.