Somewhither: A Tale of the Unwithering Realm (52 page)

“Maiden what?” I said.

“Girls. Only virgins are imprisoned there. Your mistress has not been exposed to her degradation yet.”

Nakasu coughed through his blowhole, and muttered something in Swahili with his chest-mouth, and meanwhile Pastor Ossifrage said something in Hebrew. I caught about every other word: Ossifrage was saying it was time to step out the window and float away.

Abby said to Ossifrage, “Such was my mind not to save Ilya the Abomination of Cain, and yet he is strong and good.”

Abby then took out a needle hanging from a thread. It was a compass needle, not a sewing needle, and it was made of a purple metallic alloy I did not recognize. She said to Nakasu, “This is a January sliver of the Remembering Metal. Have the tablet impress its influence, that we may find her… What?”

I said, “What’s going on?”

Both the other guys were still talking, but Abby turned to me, saying, “The Master wishes not to rescue a sea-witch, as she is accursed; the Freedman does not know where the Venereal Abscission Cistern Furlong is, or how to reach it, nor can he work the Memory metal. The Master insists that our mission is to return to the City of Peace, nowhere else, and unearth the Colossal Zoetic Panoply, where it has been in the chasm between the two halves of the Mountain of Olives.”

She turned to Ossifrage and said, “You cannot so requite the sea-witch, for it was by her arts alone that we discovered who had abducted you and when and why; she smuggled the walking shadow into the Dark Tower by allowing herself to be taken, and without her walking shadow to guide me…”

Ossifrage interrupted and said something in Hebrew to the effect that he could walk out the window onto the cloud or windy air, and that the feet of the holy one should not tarry for witches.

I interrupted by holding my palm before his nose and shouting, “Halt!” and then I said to Abby, “Tell Ossifrage we need him, since he has to act as our elevator to get us to the right floor. We cannot risk the streampath of Living Metal again. And you—you have to call your winged monster.”

Abby shook her head. “She said not to call her.”

“Well, you have to make up with her, no matter what the argument was.”

At this point, Master Ossifrage interrupted again, and spoke in stern tones to Abby, making huge gestures with his hands, waving, finger-wagging, making fists, like a symphony in sign language.

I tapped Abby on the shoulder. “What is his objection?”

Abby said apologetically, “He wishes to come away from this place, and meet with the Wise. He says his mission is not to save captives, but to find the Colossus, which alone can dispute the power of the Dark Tower. In truth, the Sons of the Prince of the High One have no love of witchcraft. He says my obligation to you, that you called me by the Great Name, is now complete…”

At this point Nakasu learned over my shoulder and pointed at something written on the coppery tablet. His finger did not touch the surface, but the little rows of leaves clattered into a new configuration, as quickly as an electronic signboard, and new cuneiforms appeared.

He grunted at Abby.

She said, “Your mate from the Hamitic world is here. A prisoner also, and so far unharmed.”

“What mate? I am not married.”

“Not marriage-mate. Troop-mate. Your fellow soldier.”

“I am not a soldier.”

“A soldier in your pretend army, then.”

I said, “Boy Scouts? There is no branch of the Boy Scouts in the Dark Tower. I am pretty sure of that.”

Nakasu opened his lower mouth. “
Nina Falinn jinake
.”

Abby said, “His name is Falinn.”

I said, “There is no one named Falinn in Troop Two.”

But it was Pastor Ossifrage who perked up and said, “Falinn?
Eflast
á Falinn? Eflast á Örlög-hringur?”

Nakasu said, “
Lina yeye
!”

Abby said, “The freedman says it is he. It is Eflast of the Falinn family. Perhaps you know him of that name? He is a ringbearer.”

I sighed. “I just don’t know that many ringbearers. You mean like at a wedding? Or do you mean like Sam Gamgee carrying Albrecht’s ring when it got too heavy for Tom Covenant?”

Ossifrage spoke again. I did not need Abby to translate. “We must go to the boy. Make haste!”

She said to him, “His name and finding-essence is on the tablet, but I cannot work the Remembering Metal.”

I said, “Call the Winged Monster. Do you need anything to make the call? Two-way television wrist-watch? The horn of Roland? The commissioner’s Bat-signal?”

“Forgive me, I think it is not wise…”

“Let me point out that time is short and someone is bound to notice all the corpses piled in the hall in a minute. There are guards locked outside who are going to start banging on the doors as soon as they get suspicious, or their shift ends. Ask Pastor Ossifrage what to do. But tell him I will help him rescue this Falinn fellow if he helps me rescue Penny. Oh, my Lord, there is no way we are getting out of here alive, is there? We are in freaking Alcatraz atop freaking Devil’s Island, in a tower ruled by magicians who can see the freaking
future
, and we keep adding inmates to the list of who to break out!”

There was a short discussion between the three of them, while I sat down on the floor, holding my head in both hands, and suddenly wishing I was back home getting woken up by my Dad at five in the morning for brutal physical training and fencing lessons, like any normal kid.

I could only understand Abby’s side of the conversation, and it was like a game of telephone, or listening to Luke talk to Artoo.

Abby turned to me. “The Freedman and the Master have a difference of spirit and can never agree. We say you are to choose. There is a way to retreat now from the Dark Tower, and be safe, and find the Wise, and perhaps gather allies from the Golden City. Better-armed, with others than we four, some desperate rescue might be ventured the next time one of the foreverborn is laved.”

I sighed heavily. “You are all out of your stinking heads if you leave this decision up to me. I cannot be killed, and I don’t care about anything much but saving my boss’s daughter out of this madhouse. I am in love with her. Call it infatuation if you want, or puppy love, or lust, or a case of terminal girl-crazy, I don’t care. Every boy who ever lived who had a crush on a girl wants to rescue her, no matter who she is. I am the only one in the history of the world who actually has that chance. Maybe a woman dating a police officer got to see him shoot her mugger in mid-mug, but it sure does not happen that often. My one chance. This is it. I would rather die than leave her here one more second than need be.”

Abby said, “You cannot die.”

“Yeah, well, go ahead and rub it in. Everyone else can commit acts of self-sacrifice but me. You’d think I’d be really happy about being invulnerable, but I kind of miss being human. So? If you are not kidding about it being my decision?”

Abby and Ossifrage and Nakasu had serious expressions on their faces or chest, as the case might be. They were not kidding.

“You’ll regret it. I warned you. Call the monster. Magnetize the needle. Make it point at Penny.”

Pastor Ossifrage said, “Falinn before the witch. He has…” (some word I did not know) “… of the powers.”

I was tired of arguing. “Fine! Whatever. Let’s shake a leg!”

Abby translated that. Both Ossifrage and Nakasu looked down at their legs, and then up at me, puzzled.

I said, “You said you did not use a radio. What is this calling? A magic ritual? Do you draw a circle or something?”

She said, “No. I call by calling.”

Abby put her pinky fingers into her mouth and blew a soft whistle of three notes, low, then high, then low again. It was not very loud, and I doubt you could have heard it if you were standing in the next room.

I blinked. “That’s it?”

Abby said solemnly, “The winged
izbim
is called.”

“How soon until it gets here? Can we ride on its back?”

“We cannot ride on her back.”

Ossifrage laughed and held his hands up to me, his palms about nine inches apart.

I looked around. Nothing seemed to be happening. No flaming warp gates opened in midair. Nothing materialized or faded into view or anything like that.

I said to Abby, “So what kind of thing … what kind of thing is this
izbim
? Is it actually deformed?” The word could mean either monster or deformity, I did not know whether to expect something like a fire-breathing dragon or something like Quasimodo.

“She is a familiar spirit, an
ah-napishtim
.”

I don’t know how to put this last word into English. It meant externalized life; a shadow disconnected from your feet which flew away and performed tasks, a soul outside the body.

Grandpa Mikhail used to tell us stories about Koschei the Deathless, who dressed in his own rotting skin, and kept his life inside a twig, inside an egg, inside a chicken, inside a fox, inside a wolf on an invisible island in the Arctic oceans surrounded by storms and sea-serpents, such that Koschei could not be killed until the twig was found and broken.

I assume whoever made up the story of Koschei got the idea from the evil wizard in Harry Potter: what Grandpa described was a horcrux.

So I said, “Are you talking about a flying horcrux? Oh, wait, you do not know that word…”

She looked puzzled. “How could I not know a word? Am I not
Ur
?”

“But how can you know what a horcrux is? It is a made-up word from Harry Potter! Is she selling her books here, too? Wow! That’s some sales record. I mean, I knew they were translated into other languages, but…”

“All the words of your barbarian gabble-gabble are made up words! Only our words are real and unconfused. As for your horror-cross, I have never heard that way of saying it before, but of course I know what that is. It's a shadow that walks away from the body. We do not have such impure things here. Witches and Pharaohs have that craft, and darker aeons.”

“And this winged monster is from another world?”

She sniffed in the imperious way that only twelve year old girls have mastered, or girls raised as princesses, and she was both. “Of course! Whistling for the wind is forbidden here! It is sea-magic. What do the dwellers in the Tower that surmounts heaven, or the dwellers in the shadow of the Tower, have to do with the sea? Nor do we cast our shades out of our bodies. How would the stars see us then? The shade has no nativity.”

At that moment, there came a fluttering of wings, and a small fierce-looking bird of prey with gray wings and white and black breast came up through the tall and narrow windows, flew like a streak down the aisle between the rows of shining tablets, and perched on an ornamented bull's-head topping one looming bookshelf.

It was a falcon.

It, or rather, she (all he-falcons are tercels) was wearing a falcon-hood made of white ceramic, with hemispherical lenses over its bright, fierce, wild eyes.

A bird in a gas mask. Even after all the weirdness of weirdlingland, this was something worth laughing about. But I was not laughing.

Because I knew her.

You might think I would not recognize one bird from another. But don’t forget
this
bird was perched every single day that Penny came to the Museum on its stand or in its cage, and that one of my tasks was to clean that darned cage without getting bit. Don’t forget the first time I saw this bird it was diving at my eyeballs, and fear branded the image permanently into my eidetic memory, if not my dreams. Don’t forget that this bird used to stare at me when I was dusting and mopping the upstairs office floor, because it caught me looking surreptitiously at the fine and tiny hairs that stand up on the back of Penny’s smooth and swanlike neck when she pins her hair up and then bends over some paperwork on her desk, the exact spot on the neck all women should be kissed.

“What the hell are you doing here?” I said to Wild Eyes. “And where is Penny? And don’t pretend you cannot talk. What the hell
are
you?”

Wild Eyes reached up with one claw, and, with great dignity, pulled the ceramic gas mask free.

She spoke in a voice as shrill as a tin whistle. It was like listening to a razor blade talk.

“I am the soul and messenger of the sea-siren Parthenope, whom you call by another name. I worked your rescue, sending this twice-born child whom no stars see to your salvation. Now I have worked your woe. Warned I not the child not me till dawn to call? The whisper that summoned me was overheard. Your enemies are upon you!”

And the falcon flapped her wings, jumped over to Abby’s wrist, plucked the purple metal needle up in a sharp little beak, and flapped over to a copper metal tablet: but not the one in Abby’s hand, which contained the file on Penny. This was the tablet with the information on me. Wild Eyes touched the needle to the metal surface, and with a rapid jerking twitch of her neck that was startling to behold, traced one of the cuneiform groups with the point of the memory needle.

I said, “Hold it! Attune the needle to
Penny
! We are saving
her
! What are you doing at that tablet? I’ve already been rescued.”

The falcon twisted its head around in a fashion which I thought only owls could do. The eyes were like two copper pennies on fire, and they creeped the snot out of me.

This little punk bird which was smaller than my left foot glared at me, and I felt a shiver go through me which stopped me in my tracks. The bird did not seem scary exactly, but did seem uncanny, and that was an emotion bigger, older, and deeper than fear. What was looking out at me from those hot birdlike eyes was not earthly. Maybe not even alive.

So I froze in mid-step. Yes, the pint-sized feather-duster cowed me. Size ain’t everything.

The shrill voice sounded like a nail scraping on glass. “Recover at once your lost sword, blessed of the sun goddess, for the flail of darkness cannot overcome dark powers. Hand the flail to the headless one.”

The falcon, with a pecking motion, jerked her head down and left the needle, quivering, point-first, in the table top.