Somewhither: A Tale of the Unwithering Realm (51 page)

If you saw her on Earth, you would think she was Spanish. Her ears looked big and fragile and like they were sticking out too far from her head, perhaps because her jet-black hair was drawn back so tight.

Actually, you’d think she was a Spanish queen, since her spine was so straight and her gaze so regal. Apparently being raised by Lord Ersu had never beaten her early years out of her. She had the face of one born to command.

I was a little shocked. She was younger than I thought. I revised my estimate downward from fourteen to twelve or so. At first I wondered how the people she worked for, the one she called the Big Man, could bear to send her into danger. But she had been trained since age seven to be an assassin, and not by them, so maybe the danger was within what she could bear. In my heart, I fervidly prayed Lord Ersu to be damned and sent alive to hell.

“Abby, do me a favor,” I said. “And tell Knack the Headless wonder not to munch on the dead bodies. They deserve a Christian burial, or whatever you people do here. Throw people out of upper airlocks and watch them burn up in re-entry heat, was that it?”

She asked Nakasu not to eat the dead people, and he answered with a short
blat
of noise from his blowhole. “He says it will cover the evidence. And you are not to command him, as he is your elder in years.”

I heaved a loud sigh, and turned toward Pastor Ossifrage. “You are the one here who looks like Moses. Use your Old Testament Fu on him.”

He must have guessed the gist of my comment, because he looked surprised, and said something in Hebrew too rapidly for me to catch.

Abby said, “Ussushibu asks why you have compassion on the empty bodies of the enemy once fallen. They are uncircumcised. Their breath is gone from them.”

I tried to think of something this Bronze Age floaty man would understand. “Tell him my people say all men are made in the image of the One God, and are stamped with his likeness like a — it is like a coin with the king's face on it. You would not spit on the coin, even if it were a tarnished coin, because that is like spitting on the king. I mean, come on, it is not just because my people are sentimental that we show respect to enemies.”

Ossifrage snapped his fingers, and pointed at me, his face lighting up. “Ah!
Emanot-adon par
!
Angli
? English?”

Abby said, “He wants to know—”

To him, I said, “
Emanot-adon, ken
.” And bowed. To her I said, “I caught the gist. He asks if I am a gentleman of the art, by which I assume he means I am a technomancer? Tell him I am from that world. Has he met others from my world? Who does he know?” (And secretly, I was glad to meet at least one person to whom we Earthmen were famous for something other than Planned Parenthood.)

But Ossifrage did not wait, but strode over to Nakasu, stepping between the headless monster and the headless corpses, arms flung out and face stern, denying the monster a lunch of raw human.

Sure, I was interested in who would win a throw down between Moses Junior and Headless Herman Munster, and sure, I really did not want them to fight and bring the guards or make a ripple in fate the Astrologers could have had retroactively detected last week (or however that works—don’t ask me!) but at the risk of sounding obsessed or something, I was more worried about Penny, and torture hooks, and whatnot.

So I said to Abby, “Have you looked up where Penny is being kept?”

“The enchantress who enslaves you?”

“She is not an enchantress and she did not enslave me, but yeah, her.”

“The one with the breasts like melons?”

“I like her personality as well, or I will, once I get to know her. Until that time, be sure to tell her how shallow and ignoble my motives are once I rescue her from this hellpit you call a world. So where is she? What level? How do we get there?”

“We did not know where to look.”

“Try looking under D for Dreadful.”

“I don’t know that code.” Abby meant she did not know the Latin alphabet. “Do you know her nativity?”

“Sure. What obsessed fanboy does not know a famous girl’s birthday? September 13
^th
. She’s a Virgo. Born the same day as my friend Foster Hidden. What are the odds?”

“Three years out of four, the odds are one in three hundred sixty-five; during Leap Year, one in three hundred sixty-six.” She craned her head and walked between the black shelves and copper tablets, looking at the statues and star-patterns inscribed on every row.

“I assume everything here is by date, is that it?” I said.

“By dominance, by year and by house. How else?”

“Can you find the file on me?”

“I did. The winged monster found it for me.” Abby pointed to where a copper tablet lay on a reading desk. The black iron locks at the top had been burnt away so the metal cover could be opened.

I stepped over to the reading desk and looked at the indecipherable angular cuneiform.

“What did it say?” I called over my shoulder to Abby.

She was wandering carefully between the shelves, now craning back her head, now stooping to look at a brass tag affixed to a shelf end. Her tone was somewhat absent-minded. “You would endure torture for seventy-three days, but after that, you'd break the ward of song and shadow circling your world of Albion, and proceed to defile the seven-ringed Grail of Jamshyd from the aeon of Sabtechadur. After which you would aid the Great Beast of the aeon of Sasan to overcome the Golden City, which is the source of all the opposition to the Dark Tower. You are to be a great champion of the Dark.”

It was pretty much what Enmeduranki had told me. No wonder she had been unwilling to release me at first. “But it does not say where I will be taken when they drag me to watch Penny get, uh, you know?”

“It did not say.”

“Any other details about what I do today?”

“You fight a battle in the thirteenth hour against deformed abominations who have lost the glory of their human shape.” (Those who lost the glory of their man-shape was one word:
Zimuhalaqabratizbim
. I wondered how often it happened that it would have its own word.) “I do not recall which host. One of the outland tribes used for reconnaissance or guards.”

“Good. Maybe I will be killing whoever is guarding Penny. Does it say I do that?”

“No. Later, just after Mercury-rise, in the Immensity of the Abscission of Venus, you throw to his death one of the
Kasugallillut
whom you said you would spare.”

“I said I would what? That does not sound like me. Are you sure you read that part right?”

“The passage was marked as a conditional inevitability, since the prior events are occluded.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means the act of knowing your future affects your future, in this case bringing about what you seek to avoid.”

“In that case, don’t tell me any more. Can he find the horoscope for Penny? Where is he now?”

“He who?”

“Your winged monster. The one who found my horoscope.”

“The winged monster is a
she
. We quarreled. She departed, cautioning me not to call her again before dawn.”

“This tablet — does it say where they put my sword?” I was talking more from nerves than anything else. I kept wondering what would happen if I knew where she was — how was I going to get Penny out of jail and out of this aeon?

“You mean the sword you do not know which sex it is?” Abby said impatiently. “That one?”

“Yes, there are people I want to chop in half while rescuing the buxom maiden, and this flail is just not as deadly as what I am used to. I think I only brained one guy in that last fight, and I did not even cleave his fancy-schmancy helmet.”

She did not draw her eyes down from the inspection of the star-signs inscribed on the upper parts of the shelves, but she kept talking as she walked. “There was a note in your tablet that said a separate horoscope was drawn up for the sword found on you. It did not say more.”

“If your magicians are as cautious about writing every last thing down as you told me before, there must be a record or a tracking number or something in my file!”

“What is the sword’s fate?” she asked.

“Fate?”

“Surely you inquired before you came to it? You are carrying a sword around blind-fated, are you? What is it destined to do?”

“Destined? I don’t know that. How does someone know that?”

“By the name and nativity.”

“The name is
Shirabyoshi
, which means White Rhythm …”

“I know what it means. I know what all words mean.”

“How supercalifragilisticexpialidocious of you! Shirabyoshi is a type of courtly song of the Heian period performed by courtesans dressed in white samurai robes, so does that make the sword a girl?”

“Not necessarily. What about the nativity, do you know that?”

“1913 A.D.” I said proudly. I mean, how many people know the year their sword was made? How many people even
have
a sword, these days, much less a way cool Japanese antique?

She said she did not know our calendar, and asked me how many years ago 1913 was. And when I told her, she said, “And what of the month and day and hour?”

“Um.”

“It would be the moment the blade is plunged in the water for the last time to quench and harden the steel, not the hour of its mounting, not the hour of its naming.”

“No, I don’t know the, uh, exact birthdate of my sword to the hour.” (I did not even know my own birthdate to the hour.)

“The custom is to honor your sword with a vigil once a year, on the anniversary of the forging.” Without her mask on, Abby had a very expressive face, and she could purse her lip and raise her eyebrow like nobody’s business. She had the archest of arch looks. Maybe it was the princess in her. “You don’t know the star-sign of your very own sword, but you know it of your mistress? What kind of warrior are you?”

“She is not exactly my —” I sputtered, “Well, for that matter, I am not really a — gah! Never mind.”

“How many years ago was she born?”

“Twenty.”

“Fortunate! We will be in time to save her.”

“Wait. What? How do you know that?” Hope went off in me like a firecracker. There are times when you will grasp at anything, believe in anything.

“Virgo is governed by the thrones Spica and Porima, but Vindemiatrix, Auva and Heze are powerful potentates and principalities: The virginal mysteries protect your mistress, and so does the Moon,” Abby spoke in a matter-of-fact tone, like a twelve-year-old New Yorker answering a question about the subway system. “In September of that year, twenty years past, Jupiter, who controls the sanguine humor, was in ascending node, and Mercury, who is hermaphroditic, was in female aspect and retrograde in sextile. This requires that your mistress is detail-oriented, meticulous, reliable, clean, perhaps a bit of a perfectionist. Mercury governs scholars and magicians, lawyers, actresses, and others who live by quickness of wit and smoothness of tongue.”

I felt a headache coming on. On a planet where astrology actually works, everyone believes in it. You would think the universe itself would have done just about anything to prevent such a truly annoying possibility.

“She is witty without being wise, bookish and alone,” added Abby. “She is in exile when at home and at home when in exile, and does not keep pets.”

“You got that wrong. She owns a hobby. And she sailed around the world. At sixteen!”

“How strange. For what reason?”

“To break a world record,” I said. “For adventure and fame! She is a glory-hound.”

“One of her birth should avoid fame. She seeks no glory.”

“You are so wrong about her. Astrology is bogus.”

“I am only repeating common knowledge. A true magician would know more.”

“
Bogus
with a capital
Bo
.”

“In any case,” Abby said, “today Friday falls on the sixth day of the week, and is sacred to Venus, and ravishments by beasts are not auspicious. It would not be done today. But if you doubt me, we can read a detailed horoscope cast by a Magician of the First Dark Knowing. Because here are the records for abominations born under the Ides of Virgo.”

She flung her grapnel-and-chain and scampered like a monkey up the rack of tablets to some twenty or thirty feet above the floor.

“Say, Abby, there are ladders on wheels I could push over here to reach the higher shelf…”

Abby said, “The ladders are made of the Living Metal, and would not obey you. We cannot close the windows nor unlock the tablet racks. But the Cunning Metal gives me power over the Living Metal. Cunning Metal comes from the Taari Aeon in the Tubalite branch, where one-eyed Arimaspians battle the gryphons for living gold.”

Abby stuck the point of her copper sickle into one of the tablets. I still did not see her flip a switch or mutter an incantation or anything. The weapon blade just glowed like a neon tube, copper-red. I reminded myself to ask her how she turned stuff on and off.

The tablet was locked in place, but not only did she scald the living metal clamp holding it in place, she looped the copper wire in a bowline around the silver post opposite, and cranked on the tablet until something shattered inside the rack, and the tablet came tumbling and clattering loose, hitting the floor with a noise like a broken cash register.

I picked the thing up, and looked helplessly at the rows of little boxlike cuneiforms, all made of arrowheads and chicken tracks.

Down she scampered.

By that point, Nakasu and Pastor Ossifrage had resolved whatever macho contest one can resolve with just pantomime gestures. If Ossifrage had been dangling the Blemmyae by one ankle via power of levitation, I had missed the whole scene: the monster’s belly was not covered with blood, so either he was a neat and silent eater, or the corpses had not been desecrated.

I said to her, “Can you read the tablet?”

Abby looked excited and made a little hopping motion, looking, for once, very undignified. “Your mistress is in the East Outlandish Harem above the Fifth Cistern, near the Abscissor of Venus Cloud-Gate.”

I said, “Why is that good news?”

“That Cloud-gate of the Venereal Abscission Furlong is where livestock are unloaded, and my people draw away those who perish in transport. So East Outlandish Harem is for new arrivals: maidens’ quarters.”