Somewhither: A Tale of the Unwithering Realm (17 page)

I now understood why no one had lifted a hand to help them. Because of Lord Starmage. These people were entirely superstitious, controlled by this Astrologer.

His eyes were dark slits, and his voice was like venom. “No power is left you, Ilya of Murom. I know the rising and the setting of the stars, and when their power wanes. And yours! No more triumphs are for you this day. Fate is fated!”

All the men answered that phrase together like a slogan or a warcry:
Tupsimatu Simtu!
It was a stock response, like you say
And Also with You
at Mass. Or at a Star Wars convention.

The two wolf-creatures snarled and coughed, first one, then the other. The language of snarls and ugly coughs was not automatically translated inside my head for me. It was almost a relief that alien beings sounded alien.

The Lord Starmage understood the wolf-ape language, for he answered them in his cold voice, “Be at peace, Tahazu-izbu and Rimanis-izbu! The Undying are not the Undefeatable. I only need his head. He was born but once, born mortal, born under his stars, and I know his nativity. He will be captured within the day, after he rests. A blacksmith’s bellows up his neck stump will allow him to answer interrogation.”

Mutt, the bowman in the front I was eyeing as the best candidate to kill first, seemed to sense that I meant his death. He spoke nervously over his shoulder, “But—but he spoke the name of the One! He said there can be only One! Does he not serve the Oneness?”

“There is only one speech,” said the Starmage in a voice that resonated with anger, “Does he speak it? There is only one folk. Is he ours? There is only one tower, one heaven, one power! Whoso serves not the Oneness shall serve unwilling. The Dark Tower tells and foretells: the Dark Tower decrees! The utter shadow of the Dark Tower falls upon all worlds!”

“The Dark Tower decrees!” All the men shouted in reply.
Duhumnamar Nabu!

Hearing the name of the enemy ringing from the lips of his minions was weird, because there were extra meanings hidden there.
Namaru
meant watchtower, but it also meant a looking glass of the sort a mage would use in divining the future. And
Duhumu
did not mean Dark. It meant a Great Darkness, and an Utmost Darkness. It meant a shadow of a tower so high that it fell across everything under heaven.

The All-Seeing Tower of the Greatest of Shadows, in other words.

The Darkest Tower.

In that moment, my hate for this guy and his stupid hat was unendurable. My fingers scrabbled madly in the pockets and nooks of my father’s jacket, and were rewarded with a nice, sharp four-pointed throwing star, which I immediately flicked at the head of the Lord Starmage.

I am not the world’s best shot. I managed to chuck the glittering thing in a whistling line right past the ears of the guys in the way. The throwing star clattered off the golden wall behind Lord Starmage, but he no longer looked bored. His tall black hat fell off as he instinctively ducked his head.

“Hey! Uri Geller! Did you foresee
that
?!”

The men were so amazed that I would mock their witch-doctor that they did not move, but stood staring at me. The wolfmen did not react the same way: my guess is that they could not understand English. They attacked.

The two wolf-headed monsters jumped to the ceiling and clung flat against it like they were lizards or spiders or something. They scuttled forward at high speed, faster than leopards.

I was quicker, because all I did was twitch my thumb. My flashlight turned on, and was pointed down at the spreading pile of dark, wormy stuff all over the deck. Immediately a lightshow like peacocks hopped up on steroids with roman candles stuffed up their noses exploded in to a silent cacophony of colored light. Sparks flew everywhere, a bomb in a nest of lightning bugs. Dazzle filled the corridor from side to side, top to bottom.

I focused my mind on the anger and rage and pain and nightmarish sense of unreality which was boiling like darkness in me. “Arise, Oobleck! Be blackness for me!”

The lights went out. The burning substance of Uncreation became a vapor, filled the volume of the environment, went opaque.

Not for me: I had the night vision goggles up, and I could see just fine. Everyone else was groping.

Maybe the wolves could have hunted me by scent alone, but the Oobleck had a pretty awful and a pretty potent smell. I saw them clutch their noses and cower.

I was already sprinting in the other direction, around the corner and up the ramp, running on my moccasins like my friend Foster once showed me: the way the Tillamook Braves ran through the woods at full speed, and never stirred a leaf and never made a noise.

I was moving fast, but not so fast that I didn't see the shield still wedged in place across the path. I took it in one smooth leap like a steeplechaser.

I ran with the katana held straight back behind me, as I was taught, but this was stupid in such an enclosed space because there was not enough room for a good swing.

There was one guy waiting for me on the up ramp. He was the guy whose shield I had just jumped over. He was a green ghost to me. To him, I must have been a ghostly ghost; he never saw me or heard me coming.

Now he had neither shield nor spear, and he must have had his bow and arrow in hand when the darkness of Uncreation spread, because he was in the act of trying to slide his bow back over his shoulder into the quiver, and to draw his meat-cleaver-sized curved blade, and to listen for me coming, and not to make any noise. And so consequently neither hand was in the way when I hit him in the face as hard as I could with my two-foot long flashlight.

I might have broken his nose or his jaw, or just driven his lower jaw up against his upper teeth so sharply that the shock of it stunned him. Or maybe he fainted. In any case he fell over without any more fuss. His helmet went rolling and clattering away on the metal floor making the brightest, loudest sound and the most echoes ever.
Clang! Clang! Clang!

I assume he did not die from one blow to the face, because Lord Astute the Starmage said no one else had his hour of death coming this day. His minute of getting his nose smashed so crooked that his face looked like it was painted by Picasso? Well, I guess Mr. Horoscope didn’t check for that.

I touched my chest again, and was gratified to find the open wound in my chest had sort of healed over. Now it was blocked from within by some of the black Oobleck I had swallowed, and a scab was grown over it. I should have been surprised or grossed out, but I wasn’t. Does it hurt? Under my fingers, I felt the Oobleck turning from a wet clay substance into flesh. Like in a dream, like in a nightmare, things in this world had their own bizarre logic. I was just glad I wasn’t leaving a blood-trail.

I went up, and turned, and went up again, and turned again.

I kept running in the darkness, expecting any moment to leave the cloud. But it was still dark.

I turned the next corner, and the next. Each corner was a 60 degree angle, and the ramp was steep. How far had this zone of darkness I’d created spread? I don’t know. Maybe it was moving with me, keeping me in the center.

I realized that the invasion machine was hanging vertically. Imagine putting the engine of a train on a hook, so that all the cars were like sausage links beneath, with the caboose like a tail below. Imagine the ramp I ran up like the ribbon on a barber pole, if a barber had a triangular pole instead of a round one.

The ramp ended in a dead end. Underfoot was a round hatch, a trapdoor, lid up and open wide. I could hear three pairs of footsteps. Possibly these were the three who fled in fear from me. Either they had not run fast, or less time than I supposed had passed. As I approached, the footsteps fell silent. I crouched and listened at the opening, not exposing my head.

One voice, dim with distance, spoke, “Brethren in arms, what darkness is this?”

A second spoke, “It is ylem, the primal uncreated stuff, escaped through the twilight gate into the created world.”

A third said, “Then the Undying is near. No one else can touch this stuff, and live. We saw it spill from him.”

The first, more softly, “He is a youth. The same age as Irgigi-redu. Let us overcome him: prod out his eyes with arrowheads and dismember him with the sickle sword, it is easy enough.” It was two words in their language:
sapara-hukaratu
meant to dismember with the sapara, the sickle-sword,
xuppud-xutpu
meant to put an arrowhead into an eye. Handy shorthand terms no doubt evolved from times before fighting with Undying Ones.

The second voice, “The danger is great! He is a warlock of the ylem!” This was one word in their language:
ylemsippur
. It literally meant
wise in shadow
. Shadowmage.

The first said, “The danger is greater if we be taken by the Silent Watcher. We will be torn by iron hooks for our desertion. Where can we flee the wrath of the Dark Tower, the looking glass which sees all things? The only amends to make are to bring his head to Lord Ersu.”

The second said, “He must have known we would flee. Fate is fated.”

The first: “And known that he would then give us over to those who ply the iron hooks. Fate is fated.” He used a single word for the ironhook experts:
Parzil-selusarapu-le’u
. Professional torturers skilled with tools other than beds of iron hooks no doubt had different names, the way we have separate names for optometrist and podiatrist.

The second said back, “I am not fated to die this day. The Astrologer has told me.”

The first replied, “Those who enjoy the attention of the barbed hooks can linger many days before death is sure, depending on the skill of the tormentor.”

The second voice said, “What say you, Naragesi-pana?”

Pana
was a military designation, a scout or a patrolman. Naragesi was a name. He spoke with more authority in his voice that the other two. “If this gloom is the sending of Ilya the Undying—”

I cannot tell you how much it bothered me that they knew my name.

“— from the nearest energy altar, we ignite the lampwood to bring the
ylemaramu
to abolish it. As soon as it clears, the lodestone of the altar will point to the nearest source of ylem, which will be Ilya. We come swiftly upon him. If he goes where we cannot, outside the hull or to inside the power-core, we use the other-soul altar to compel Damishikaruyizbu of the Kasugallillut to pursue him. We have three drops of archangel-blood between us to convoke the altar glass of either one, energy or othersoul.”

Ylemaramu
was their term for that blue-light effect which dried up the Oobleck-substance. I had seen it shining from their sticks of ‘lampwood’ not ten minutes ago.

Their word for blood from an archangel was
Rablammasu-damu
. Weird that they would have that as a single word. How often would the concept come up in conversation? It sounded like something they used to activate their altars, turn on their controls, summon their magic, whatever. Maybe it was a brand-name.

There are some nuances here hard to translate, but they came through loud and clear as I crouched there listening. The same way we would not use the word
drunkard
in English to mean a guy who drinks a lot of water or some other innocent liquid, the word
shikaru
referred to quaffing whiskey or vodka or some heady intoxicant.
Dami
meant blood, or life, or soul. The name-ending
izbu
indicated he was a deformity or monstrosity, not a human.
Damishikaruyizbu
meant It Quaffs Blood.
Kasugall
meant the demon of winter, a devil of the freezing cold, or a frost-ghost. I already told you what the word-ending
illutu
meant. Try to keep up.

So someone or something named the Lifeblood-Quaffing Abomination of the Winter Devil Creatures was the man or creature they were talking of sending after me.

Maybe that was just some sort of trumped up name, like a biker gang calling itself Hell’s Angels.

Maybe not.

Maybe it was better not to stick around and find out.

I saw I could lock them below. The cocks were on this side of the floor hatch, and I recognized them as simple electromagnets. Turning on the power would pull the cocks open. Silently, I lowered the lower hatch, pinching my fingers something awful in the process, but getting it shut with no noise. I dogged it. I chopped the wires leading to them, which were gold, to kill the power to the magnets.

Above me was a second hatch. As I undogged it and pulled it toward me, a sudden wind rose up behind me. The hatch opened inward, and I had to wrestle it open against the wind from the inside of the machine. Air was gushing out into the thinner air outside, like a fountain.

Bright silvery light struck me, and, amplified by my goggles, blinded me a moment.

The first thing I heard was the wind: a high, thin whispering, whistling and moaning wind.

I pushed the goggles up on my brow, blinking. There was a full moon overhead. I clambered up. There were handholds on the outside surface of the hatch. I did not need to pull the hatch shut: It was counterbalanced to snap shut unless propped open. There was a handle on this side, made of gold and shaped like a snake biting its own tail. I turned it, heard a hum, and felt a tug on my sword, the fastenings of Dad’s jacket, and the other metal things I wore as a powerful electromagnet came on.

I saw the little triangular platform where I stood was in midair, with no railing, a steep drop nigh-infinitely deep. Overhead was a triangular ceiling just low enough that I wanted to stoop, but did not have to. So it was claustrophobic and agoraphobic at the same time.

This was the upper corner of the segment of the Invasion Machine I had just exited. Above me was the rear of the next segment. The tube connecting the segments was made of corrugated black slats, looking remarkably like the joints in the elbow of a space suit. Think of the freight train I just mentioned, hanging on a hook: now imagine I was on one of those little balcony things, whatever they are called, between the cars.