Somewhither: A Tale of the Unwithering Realm (34 page)

The word for sky-witches,
mehukassaptillut
, was different from the word for sea-witches,
kuliltukassaptillut
. Apparently their language made room for a wide variety of witches. I was curious, but I had more pressing questions. “Can you make your needle point at where Ossifrage is now? Or Penny?”

She shook her head. “You don’t know what you are doing, do you?”

“Of course I do!”

“What are you doing?”

“Spinning my wheels, getting no traction, going nowhere. Banging my head.”

“You said you were in the army. Did they not teach you to have a destination before you marched? A tactic before you fought?”

“I was not in the army.”

“You said. You were a scout.”

“Boy Scout. Still am. Bobcat Patrol, Troop Two.
We are Second to None
.” I showed her a snappy three-finger salute.

“You were a scout who went on patrols for your troop, but you were not in the army? Were you an irregular, or did you wear a uniform?”

“I have a uniform…”

“And a badge of rank?”

“I am a Life Scout…”

“But… not in an army?”

“The Boy Scouts are a pretend army.”

“Your world is
weird
.”

“Yeah, compared to what? Your whole globe has only one city!” I blinked. “Come to think of it, the Land of Oz has only one city. Trantor, too, but that does not really count.”

“Are those real places?” Abby asked cautiously.

“No. Make-believe. Pretend.”

“Like your army!” She clapped her hands. “I am beginning to understand your world now.”

“Okay. Let us try to recapture a sense of desperation and tension, here, on account of my non-girlfriend is about to be Spanish Inquisitioned by lunatic Astrologers. Let’s not lose focus. We just got to think it through step by step. We got to do what Vizzini would do!”

“Who?”

“Vizzini! When the job went wrong, he went back to the beginning. That is standard procedure for crime gangs when a caper goes south! We have to do what Vizzini would do.”

“Vizzini is the boss of your … crime gang?”

“No. He is a character from a story. A make-believe.”

“Then … why are we going to do what he would do?”

“It is a really funny story. Really funny. So. Going back to the beginning. That is what we do. Let me think.
I am waiting for Vizzini …You keep usin’ that word: I do not think it means what you think it means… prepare to die…
”

“Is anything on your planet real?”

I snapped my fingers. “Where were you when your plan began? And then at what step did it go off the rails? What went wrong? Why was I put in Master Ossifrage’s cell? What made the needle not point where it should have pointed?
Who lied
?”

She was silent for a moment, and said softly, “It was the winged monster who lied.”

“You are sure?”

“I entered the Tower in the Bovine Furlong, near the communal kitchens for the lower young male rustic-slave slavepen acres. There are abattoirs on that level which pour out blood and refuse endlessly. There are fewer guards watching the cattle-hauling airships. We have a man there—I was not told his name—and he smuggled me into the Lower Luminous Omniscient Observation Furlong. I waited until pre-dawn Mercury set, and entered the Nine-Star-Aligned Chamber of the First External-Abomination Lord Astrologer through the indentured servant’s hallway.”

“Your people haul their cattle in airships?” (My name is Distracted. First name: Easily.)

“Yes. Airships can haul heavier loads and at higher altitudes than heavier-than-air flying machines, or ornithopters, or propeller-driven celestial engines.”

“
Yes
! In your
faces
Wright Brothers! You too, Sikorsky! Hindenburg rules!”

“I don’t know those people. Are they make-believe?”

“Yes. I mean, no. They are real. It is just that in my town, we used to build zeppelins, and so … so, okay, never mind. I am now back on track and I am staying focused. Non-girlfriend in danger. Uh. You were about to enter the Nine Whatsits Chamber.”

“The Nine-Star-Aligned Chamber is the chamber where the horoscopes related to tormentors who specialize in outerworldly abominations are kept, so that their actions can be auspiciously predicted. Any escape attempts and tactics for successful interrogation are also foretold there. It is the ninth of ten chambers of the second aspect, and the tenth, which is windowless and forever sealed, is never spoken of.”

“Why is the tenth chamber never spoken of?”

“I know not, for no man ever speaks of it.”

“Oh.”

“I called me the winged monster to read the tablets. The winged monster applied the needle of the remembering metal to the tablet that was supposed to be the horoscope of Master Ussushibu. Instead it was your horoscope. It was not an innocent mistake. I was deceived by the winged monster.”

“Why so sure? Could it have been just a clerical error? My horoscope in the Master Ossifrage folder? Wrong name on the outside?”

She shook her head. “The whole power of the Astrologers depends on the perfection of their records. Clerks who err are scourged, dismembered, de-tongued, displayed for public sport, their wounds infected with flesh-eating mushrooms, and then ….”

“Too much information. Don’t tell me.”

“It is unknown for the clerks to err.”

“Can we get to these records?”

“The Nine-Star-Aligned Chamber is in the Lower Luminous Omniscient Observation Furlong, where laity dare not go. There was no one to bar my way last time. I entered with the cleaning maids.”

“First place to go is to get back there, and maybe we can find someone who can read the tablets more trustworthy than your winged monster. So needle your needle, or whatever we need to do. Do you remember the path?”

“No. But there may be a way. Duck your head and follow me,” she said primly. “The arches were made for normal people, not giants.”

“I am not a — !” But I had to duck my head to avoid getting brained by the low ceiling, so I shut up and followed her lead.

Abby led the way, circuitously, away from the windows admitting the Arctic light from outside, toward the dark and hollow core of the Tower.

We entered a larger chamber, black as the inside of a rain barrel. A soft buttery-yellow light began to glow from the wooden cloak pins Abby wore on either shoulder, and at the same time, my wooden mask-as-codpiece started to glow too.

“What the —!” I shouted, jerking and banging my head again. I needed a helmet.

“It is lampwood,” she said.

“How does it work?”

“An aspect of the wood is lowered into the Uncreation, where light from the imprisoned angel shines, and is reflected back into our aeon, where our limited sight can see it. The Uncreation is all around us, unseen.”

“You mean like a periscope? Sorry! I should explain: a periscope is when you have two mirrors, uh, looking glasses, in a tube, and an underwater sort of boat…”

The monkey mask seemed to grin at me. “You are so odd. I know what a submersible is. The first one was made three thousand years ago at the instructions of the stars by Enki-Kilalu, the father of shipwrights. Most of the areas of twilight manifest far below the waves, beyond the continental shelf, in the deep, where sunlight will not disturb them. Yes, the lampwood acts like a periscope.”

“How did you turn it on? Thought waves? Yikes!”

I looked down at my crotch. The wooden inset into the mask was only the skull, teeth and jawbones, so that what had been an image of a living person in pain was now more like a skull.

It made me flinch and hit my head again. Three bumps in three minutes.

“Who builds their darned ceilings so low?! Is everyone a shrimp in this crapsacktastical world?” (This time, I actually did say
darned
, since I didn’t want the child to pick up any bad language from me. Or, rather, any more bad language. I was not living up to all points of the Boy Scout law, particularly the part about being courteous and clean.)

The space in which she stood and I crouched was circular with a flat ceiling, with low archways leading out. In the center was a set of what looked like meathooks hanging from chains. Between the archways were little statues the size of lawn-gnomes of chimerical creatures that looked like bat-winged bulls with the heads of gape-mouthed vultures: Ugliest griffins ever. The floor was dusty, and our light did not carry far.

She unpinned one of her glowing wooden pins and held it near the floor. I could see where the dust had been disturbed. I was not as good as Foster Hidden at tracking game, but I could see the tiny, precise footprints of Abanshaddi’s slippers.

The trail led to one of the archways.

We went by a crooked path, going through one chamber after another, never in a straight line.

The place was like the worst parts of a haunted house and the attic of a crazy murderer who collected body parts.

There was a room full of skulls, each one with a tiny brass label screwed into its forehead. Another room had nothing in it but a hole in the floor and smoke-stains on the ceiling above it. Another had a miniature guillotine and a neatly packed collection of skeletal hands.

One room was a warehouse, filled with boxes shaped like small coffins for children. The boxes were not nailed shut. Instead of nails, clamps or staples of the living metal held the boards together, and one of the clamps silently opened when I put my hand on a box.

In another room was a thing that looked like a transparent bathtub stained with blood with iron sheets or clamps that could be lowered over it, and a table that could have been an altar-stone or a control panel. There was a ticking in that room, but I could not see where it came from.

In another, there was nothing but a tall brass horn which came out of a hump in the floorstones. The horn was facing us when we entered the chamber. I looked behind me when we left by another archway, and saw that the horn had turned to face us again, making no noise.

In one of the bigger rooms we passed through, we came to a wide place, larger than a ballroom floor, where the ceiling was too high to see. Something like a ball of luminous mist floated far above, or was suspended. We passed through that chamber at a run. The misty light terrified Abby for some reason, although she would not tell me anything about it.

I had been repeating prayers to myself under my breath to help track the time. I calculated that we had been moving deeper inside, toward the axis of the Dark Tower, for about fifteen minutes.

“I hate this place. Who collects mummified hands, or coffins filled with children?”

“It is to despoil the bodies, and render them unclean, to make their ghosts angrier, hence easier to provoke by necromancy.”

Lovely. I wish I knew whether to accept her words at face value or dismiss it as superstition. I said, “A body should be disposed of respectfully.”

She nodded toward my fist. “If you fear the dead, toss away that baton. It is made from the cuttlebone of a sea-behemoth.”

“So?”

“It is bad luck.”

“It’s unlucky to believe in bad luck.”

“Cuttlebone absorbs the suffering of ghosts, which is why tormentors prefer it.”

“If I toss away this club, then I want my sword back. It belonged to my grandfather.”

“If your sword has a fate, this would also be recorded when your gear was taken. The Astrologers write down everything. Does your sword have a fate?”

“Uh. I don’t know. How do you tell?”

“Well…is your sword a he or a she?” She actually said
namsar
or
namsatur
, sword or swordette?

“I am not sure.”

“Your own sword and you are not sure?” Abby’s voice held a note of disapproval.

I said, “Well, the sooner we get back to this records room and check the records, the sooner we can read the file on me, and on Master Ossifrage, and find out where Penny is. Is there a quick way down? You did not climb all this way. Is there an elevator? An elevator is a cart or chariot like a bucket pulled on a winch…”

“I know what such things are. For an abomination, you speak very stupidly. Yes. Of course I did not climb here. There is a river-way of living metal that runs up the spine of the Dark Tower, as well as lesser stream-roads used by servants, high slaves, low slaves and the like. One is a smaller stream-path used to carry refuse, medical waste, walking shadows, death-effigies, or mummies, or other abominations.”

“How long does it take to descend, using that method?”

“There should be no living things above Memorial Immensity of the Lost and Sacred Kings of the High Necropolis. Below that? Depending on traffic loads, an hour or two.”

I gritted my teeth. Some intuition told me it was too soon to relax.

“Let’s shake a leg,” I said.

“Is that the same as rolling?”

But she picked up the pace.

Finally, we reached a larger corridor, and this opened into a wide space. The ceiling overhead soared out of sight, and I saw curving ribs like flying buttresses bracing the vast acreage of walls. These curving supports were radiating out from a series of circular stone balconies, one above the next above the next. It went up endlessly, lines of perspective disappearing at a vanishing point hidden by a distant cluster of jewel-like lamps and lanterns as dim as faraway stars.

In the midst of the chamber, directly below the balconies, was a well that dropped down infinitely. Or, rather, what I thought was the chamber floor was the floor of a circular balcony hanging over a vast abyss.

It was still very gloomy in here, but there were small holes admitting sunlight, and the dusty beams stretched across the wide space as lightly as the Gothic arches and braces.

On the walls near us there were panels of gold inscribed with cuneiforms, and niches along the walls containing king-faced bulls, and each face had different features. Above each man-bull was a circle of lapis lazuli surrounded by zodiacs and inset with diamonds. I was baffled to see the same arrows and wiggles representing Sagittarius and Aquarius as you can see in any cheap daily newspaper in our world. Those signs must be older than I thought, if they predated the division point of history between the two timelines.