Tithe to Tartarus

by John C. Wright

  The diary shook her head. “If you were the real you, and not just some shadow or reflection like I am, you would not want me to take the chance and tell someone who might be a stranger or enemy about your private thoughts and feelings, would you? If you were the reflection of me, rather than me of you, would you not do the same?”

  7. The Final Entry

  The reflection in the mirror was now seated and no longer wearing a straw hat, but she was dressed in her skintight black supersuit, with the cowl pushed back. Over her shoulders was flung a long, sleek, black trench coat with padded shoulders and a pinched waist.

  But the expression was different from her normal reflection. There was a bitter look in the narrowed eye, a harsh set to the jaw, a frowning coldness in the crease of her brow and tilt of her pretty head.

  “Personal log. Day 1,441 since her death. She is still unavenged.”

  Her voice was like the voice of a stranger, stern of tone, joyless, fierce. It seemed like something from another life.

  “Komobo questioned me again about the nature of the mists of Everness…”

  Komo meant red-haired person. Bo was a diminutive to show affection, like using a baby name for your boyfriend.

  “…but then he insisted on doing test after test, trying to find how it affects kinetic energy. I told him the reason why pistol bullets do not work in the mist but sling bullets do is that guns are not things of the world beneath the mist. Why doesn’t he listen to me? For some reason, he thinks his laser pistol will still operate. He says there is light in the Otherworld, so it has to work. I told him it is a realm of darkness.”

  A sigh of exasperation sounded in the glass.

  “So pigheaded! It is the same argument we had when I told him any disguise would deceive anyone from the Daylight and all but the greatest of the Twilight. He thinks my mask will not fool anyone. Even though he practically made it! All that new gear he put in! I don’t have to carry that stupid huge radio around in my hand any more.

  “He said that I am the same height and have the same voice and the same walk when I dress up. He says people will recognize my bottom when I walk. In the suit, everyone can see my bottom perfectly well. I think he was saying that to tease me. He is so mean sometimes!

  “I told him! Even a tiny little mask around the eyes is enough. A pair of glasses is enough. It is one of the conventions of the Black Spell. He worries about me too much!

  “He exposed a group of white rats to the mists in higher and higher concentrations. The rats lost visibility, growing less visible to light and more visible to darkness. After that, they lost gravity, solidity, location, and then memory.

  “I saw his rats floating in their cages and others walking right through the walls.

  “I could hear the squealing of the one that had no location. It sounded scared until it suddenly fell silent. After a while, the mangled body rematerialized.

  “The one with no memory never recovered. It could not go through the maze it had been trained to run through. It did not recognize its littermates or its mate. The effect does not wear off.

  “So he is convinced the Ring of Mists is not just a story but would act the same way. He says he knows why Saturday wants it. But he would not tell me. He just grinned at me.

  “Obviously, Saturday already has a way to sneak past the guardians, enter the Third Hemisphere without permission, and smuggle creatures out. He has been doing it for months. So that is not why Saturday wants the ring.

  “We had the same argument again. I said I have to kill Saturday, so he has to show me where the hidden dockyard is. Komobo told me that the prince of giants killed my mother. How was I going to fight a giant who has a charmed life? He says his cousin will kill the giant. With a magic sword. It is what knights do. And that Saturday has to stay alive long enough to finish work on his machine.

  “I asked him what his friends thought of all this. He has not told them his plan. The squire would not let him steal the ring if he knew because theft is dishonorable. The novice would not let him because theft is a sin.

  “I don’t know what to do!

  “I cannot tell Nyctalope. Nicky-chan would not understand. I am loyal to him! I am loyal to Mother! But I love Komobo! I love him! I think he is about to propose. He has that look.”

  Her cheeks were pink, and her eyes were bright. The bitterness was, for a moment, gone.

  “I will go with him.” Now her voice was solemn. It sounded to Yumiko’s ear like her own voice, not the voice of a stranger now. “When he steals the machine, I will go with him. He does not know how to sneak and steal. I do.

  “I will go. Whatever you believe with your whole heart, even if it means your death, cannot be wrong!”

  And with those words, the reflection was her own real reflection once again.

  The diary would not speak again. Nothing else Yumiko said elicited any reply.

  She saw an ornate clock on her desk. It was now after midnight. Her cousin, Gilberec, was due to be assassinated today at noon. Today she had to rescue Elfine, by hook or crook, before Garlot was assassinated in turn. Tomorrow the wolves currently hidden under the Cobbler’s Club would be shipped to the City of Corpses, where Tom was hidden, and she had to be back there for that to follow them and to find him.

  There were other secrets in the lair of Winged Vengeance, but she had no time.

  8. Farewell Note

  Wishing for some garb less conspicuous on modern streets than a black supersuit or a kimono adorned with a Moth family crest, she took a moment to peer through her clothing in the wardrobe. There, she found the black trench coat she had just seen herself wearing in her diary: she folded it neatly into the pocket of her cape next to the kimono.

  Her emotions were disturbed as she rose to depart. Should she take that stuffed bear? Or the music box? These things were hers, but if she left, she might never see them again. If she did take her belongings, where could she put them? A rented bus locker? There was a figurine of a ballerina poised on one toe next to her calligraphy set. Had it once had some special meaning to her? The memories hovered just beyond her reach.

  With a sigh, she closed the door on her old room and its forgotten treasures. “I am an exile,” shee whispered. “I have no mother, no home.”

  Taking a paper and pen from the rolltop desk and a bottle of blue ink she found there, she wrote: Dear brother, Euhemerus Cobweb is of the Supreme Council of Anarchists. He has wispy fingers. Rotwang is also and has a prosthetic. Zahack has something instead of hands. The final shipment of werewolves leaves the Cobbler’s Club for the City of Corpses on Friday, March 20th.

  By way of signature, she drew a little cartoon of a grinning fox face.

  After a moment, the ink faded from view, and the paper seemed blank again. She thought that was a good sign. She pinned the note to the center of the desk with a knife so that he would notice it.

  Carefully avoiding laying a foot on the catwalk, she departed the loft and used the upper hatch to enter the tall brick chimney above the poison layer. Weightlessly, she soared up and out into the night.

  Chapter Four: In Darkest Night

  1. Below Street Level

  When the train she wanted began pulling away from the platform, lightly, Yumiko dropped to the metal roof of the car. She figured that, having purchased a ticket like a proper human being of the Daylight World, she could ride whichever part of the train suited her.

  Whenever a low tunnel roof threatened, she slipped over the back of the caboose. This was an older car, and there was a metal step or hitch protruding from the rear where she could perch while remaining below the level of the caboose windows, and the track would speed by, a blur of ties and a sinuous stream of rails, mere inches below the heels of her boots.

  The signal for tracer zero-four, which she had planted on the collar of Gilberec’s dog, was downtown near Grand Central Station. The signal was emanating from below street level.

  Yumiko thought it might be dangerous to mingle with th
e crowd while invisible, so she clung to the ceiling of the train platform at Grand Central Station, weightless, and passed from the lit areas to unlit ones while trying to find some buried hall or service stairway leading to the point from which the signal came.

  Down she went, and further down, to dark corridors and tunnels where no one was. She drew her flashlight from her belt and tuned it and her goggles to ultraviolet. The sensation of cold might have come merely from being in a cold, empty, unlit tunnel, but then again, it might not. In the pitch darkness, there was no point in being invisible. She twisted her ring to silver to escape the gaze of ghosts.

  Eventually, she found a utility door whose padlock she could pick, leading to a narrow metal stair leading down to a metal balcony.

  On this balcony was a diesel engine with a chain belt running to a wheel of iron affixed to a yard-wide pipe that murmured and thrummed with flowing water. The engine was throbbing and warm to the touch, idling. Here also was a spotlight on a pivot, switched off the moment, and other levers and clutches for other chain-drums connected to the engine. Down from the platform reached a ladder that could be lowered by turning a drum. She pulled the clutch, engaging the engine, and the chain played out, lowering the ladder. The hum of the engine and the clanging rattle of the ladder segments unfolding echoed loudly from the spaces below.

  Down she went and found herself in a dim but empty tunnel. It looked like a dry sewer line. In the near distance, she saw a brick archway sloping down from the main tunnel. It was lit with a carbide lamp hanging from a rusted hook.

  Closer, she could see this arch led down into a sluice or spillway. The far end was round and covered with a set of louvers, like giant metal Venetian blinds, that could be opened or shut. The louvers were open at the moment, allowing the coal-red glow of the clouds above the skyline to enter, along with a dark glimpse of the East River and cold, clear air.

  On the floor of the spillway, the beam from the hanging lantern caught something small, square, and white and made it shine like a ghost. The stone arch leading to this spillway had a sluice gate that could be lowered on chains. She did not like the look of that, but she was curious about the white gleam.

  She took a few steps down the slope. The concrete surface was slick and wet underfoot. Lying on a square stone in the middle of the mud of the tunnel floor was a white envelope, with a fragment of brick lying, as a paperweight, atop. The beeping of the tracer was loud in her ears. She clicked on the tracking grid and saw a dot of light resting on the envelope. The tracer signal came from there.

  She did not touch it. This was a trap. She started to back away.

  A rattling, sliding metallic clamor came from overhead. The trap was closing.

  2. Spotlight

  Yumiko cartwheeled backward up the slope. She landed on her feet before the archway, in time to see a barred gate fall down over the mouth of the spillway and the louvers at the far end downslope grind heavily shut. Had she been a hair slower, she would have been trapped in the slanted spillway.

  The ladder leading up to the balcony was rising.

  Yumiko leaped lightly to a point just beneath the balcony, where the ladder no longer was. She landed silently and crouched down. At the same moment, the spotlight on the platform came on, brilliant, blinding. The beam of light stabbed down and shined through the bars of the grate into the spillway. No one was trapped there. The spotlight swung in a puzzled fashion left and right, peering curiously down the dry tunnel.

  However, the balcony floor was a metallic mesh, not solid planks, and would not form a shadow, should the spotlight pivot straight down. She shot her wirepoon to snag the railing of the platform and triggered the retraction spool motor so that she was jerked upward rapidly.

  The spotlight did not swing toward her but instead shut off. It was pitch black. Her infrared lenses showed a heat source on the balcony, but it was too small to be a man and too low to the ground. Perhaps that was the residual heat from the engine. She somersaulted over the railing. She clicked her lenses and flashlight to ultraviolet. There was no one here but a dog, lying down with its head on its forepaws as if half asleep. She could not see its coloration by ultraviolet, but it was a collie. Someone had put an archer’s cap atop the dog’s head and had left a pair of gloves on the floor of the platform next to the dog.

  She turned the flashlight left and right. There was no one here. She saw a small round hatch she had not seen before, covering a crawlway. She knelt down and shone the flashlight in. She saw cables and wires strung, but no one on hands and knees was crawling rapidly away.

  That left the narrow metal stairs leading back up to the utility door. She scampered up the stairs. Even under her light footfalls, they clanged and rattled. The utility door was open, unlocked, just as she had left it. She switched her flashlight to visible light and examined the threshold and the floor beyond the door, which she, clinging to the ceiling, had not touched. The dust here was thick and undisturbed.

  Like a silent explosion, the brilliant light from the spotlight on the platform now lit up. The beam caught her and threw her shadow across the ceiling. Startled, she turned, but instinctively raised her elbow to block her eyes.

  “Freeze! Hands up! Hands up!” came a gruff voice from below. Bewildered, Yumiko obeyed, squinting against the blinding light and raising her hands.

  She was caught.

  3. Cornered

  “Drop it! Drop it!”

  She opened her fingers. The flashlight dropped away and clanged against the metal balcony before toppling to the tunnel floor. She wondered at the voice. It did not sound quite right. It was too deep for a child’s voice but very gruff and scratchy.

  “Ha ha! Thought you’d sneak up on me, did ya? Did ya? Yup! Yup! But now who’s sneaked who? I sneaked! I sneaked! I am the sneaky one. Yes, I am. Yup! Yup!” This was followed by a breathy noise like an animal panting, as if the man, or the boy, had trouble breathing.

  Slowly, Yumiko lowered one hand to let the shadow of her forearm fall across her eyes. She squinted. The scene was washed out by the brilliant spotlight. She could see nothing.

  “I liked your other uniform better,” said the gruff voice.

  She squinted down at the light. “What other uniform?”

  “Can’t hear you.”

  “I said, what other uniform? When did you see me before this, please?”

  “With the top hat. You were almost naked. I liked it.”

  “You mean the Peach Cobbler suit? You saw me in the club?”

  “Can’t hear. Take off the mask! Not very realistic. Couldn’t fool me. Nope! Nope! For one thing, those eyes don’t blink. I am very smart.”

  This was more puzzling. Yumiko tossed her head, and the fox mask slid up. The chin hung over her eyes like a visor. There was no point in hiding a face he had already seen.

  The voice was saying. “You bet! You bet! Can’t fool me. Nope. Gil did not know you, and Matt did not know you, but I knew. Because your arms and legs were bare.”

  That was puzzling. “You recognized my arms?”

  “Armpits. And your bottom. I sniff bottoms. I always know bottoms.”

  Sniff what? Then Yumiko’s confusion abruptly transformed into astonishment. “You are the dog! The dog that was with the Swan Knight!”

  “Yup, yup, that’s me. That’s me. Swan Knight’s Dog.”

  “Who are you?”

  “My name’s Ruff. Like in Ruffle, but with no L. Rhymes with tough, and gruff, and takes no guff.”

  She scowled. “It also rhymes with bluff. You have no gun trained on me, have you?”

  “What? What? Gun? Course not! Guns don’t like shooting elfs. They try to miss. You must know that. ’S why you carry weird old weapons. Right?”

  She slid down the stairway and landed at the bottom. The reflected light from the upturned spotlight showed the dog. He was sitting on his haunches, a green archer’s cap perched on his head, a white owl’s feather in the brim. His forepaws, which were covered in gr
een gloves, now looked like the forearms and hands of a human. His was scratching his furry belly thoughtfully with his human fingers.

  His tongue hung out one side of his grinning jaws.

  4. Carabas Gloves

  Seeing the direction of her gaze, he raised his hand, waved, and said, “Look what I can do.” He proceeded to interlace his fingers, raise both index fingers, and twitch his thumbs while chanting, “Here is the church, and here is the steeple. Open the doors, and see all the people! Wait. I did it wrong. Fingers go inside. Lemme try again. Oh, that is no good. Here. Want to see me hitchhike? Look! Look! Aha!” He made a fist and extended his thumb. “See?”

  “Most impressive. How can you talk?”

  “How can you turn invisible?”

  “Magic. I have a magic ring.”

  “Hah! Thought so. Me, I wear a magic hat. Also, I am a pooka.”

  “I don’t know that word.”

  “Pooka are friendly yokai. Except for the unfriendly ones. Not them. My old name is Sgeolan, but I serve a new master now. I am a Dog of the Table Round. And a member of Super Action Team Swan.”

  “Who am I?”

  “Why ask me? You forget?”

  “Yes.”

  “Oh! Well, you are the girl who vanished when Tom vanished. The Winged Vengeance’s Sidekick, Foxmaiden. You go around shooting Cobwebs to death with arrows, and then shoot their ghosts. Kinda scary, actually. I saw you throw a boomerang once. It came back to your hand. Right back! That looked like fun. I wanted to chase it. I have one, too, but I cannot throw it so good. In my spy kit. Oh! Oh! And I saw you fighting werewolves in New Jersey. You were outnumbered. Your name is not Sorry. That is a silly name.”

  “Do you know my name?”

  “Of course. Tom would not shut up about it. Yummy Cutie.”

  “Yumiko.”

  “Nope, you’re saying it wrong.”

  “But it is Yumiko.”

  “Nope. Tom said Yummy Cutie. He said it a lot. A whole lot. Ah… Where is he, by the way?”