Somewhither: A Tale of the Unwithering Realm (61 page)

A mist welled out of his blue body paint and swirled around him. My eyes could not focus on it. When I blinked, he was gone. Now, despite all that, I still
knew
he was there, and I knew my eyeballs were seeing him, just that my brain was not. Here is how I knew: he was standing with his body between me and Dancing Maiden when he pulled his disappearing act. If he were transparent, I would just be able to see through him and see the sword. The scene looked normal to me, and I could not tell where the discontinuity was — but I could not see the sword.

I could see him, but something in my head was preventing the image from forming in my brain. I don’t really know how to describe it better than that.

I closed one eye and looked at the spot where the sword was. Now I could make out a silhouette, sort of. He looked like a vaguely humanoid shape made of mist and smoke with his bright blue eyes glittering through. The light from the floorboards cast his shadow along the locked cases and cages behind him: his shadow was not affected by the magic. I could see it just fine.

I said, “Just like the Invisible Girl from Marvel! Can you project force fields?”

His voice came out of midair, “Just like the Invisible
Man
from Wells! Don’t you read the classics?” For some reason, when he spoke, the misty shape was easier to see. But if I opened both eyes, he faded again. I stood there winking one eye then the other, then both eyes, fascinated and distracted.

He shouted, “Ilya! Find a crowbar! Help me get these cases open! They’re here!”

I started to say, “I see them,” because when he said
they’re here
, I thought he meant the cases he wanted pried open were right next to him. But I did not get the chance.

Abby screamed.

I should not have been staring at my vanishing friend when he had just warned me we were about to be jumped, but you have to admit, it was pretty weird that a guy I had known my whole life was (1) in this hellish unearthly dimension (2) in this particular room right now (3) standing with his fingers stuck through the bars of a cage and (4) naked as a bluejay and twice as blue.

He also had the power to cloud men’s minds, but I did not think that part was weird. I mean, not compared to what had been going on.

Abby was screaming because a pack of sleek-bodied wolf-men were pouring out of a rainbow-burning hemisphere of darkness which had formed above the Moebius coil set in the floor. I could hear the teakettle whistling of air escaping the crack between universes. There were dozens of the creatures, and they arrived as suddenly as paratroopers.

Nakasu was up on his hippo feet, and he shoved Abby behind him protectively. He spat the golden flail into his hand from out of his mouth, which I was now convinced contained its own pocket dimension, because he seemed to have room for everything in his cheek pouches. She whirled her ever-lengthening chain, and threw a hook up to the top shelf where Foster and I stood. The cunning metal hook hit a post at a bad angle, but instead of bouncing off, the hook changed shape into a question mark, and the chain threw a loop of itself around that post once or twice, and hooked the question mark, which snapped shut into an ankh. Then the chain retracted, yanking Abby up and up as neatly as Spider-Man on a strand of webbing.

Nakasu started knocking wolf monsters aside with the flail. He could not hurt them. I saw that these were not naked, nor did they have French Poodle coats of the bestiality brigade: their fur was thick and shaggy, and Abby had said their fur made them invulnerable.

“I wish the Lone Ranger were here,” I said, pulling Abby up next to me. “Don’t recall if he ever fought werewolves, but he’s got silver bullets.”

Abby, once she was on her feet, flung her weapon back down toward Ossifrage, who shot straight up into the air before he bothered rising to his feet. But the twilight suddenly drained his powers, so he was bobbing around like a limp three-day-old fair balloon, trying to swim out of reach of the wolf things, who were running straight up the walls and launching themselves laterally at him. A loop of cunning chain wrapped a bowline around his chest and Abby began to reel him in.

Foster said, “My longbow was forged on the moon. It can harm a werewolf, despite its charmed life. Holy oil also harms them, thanks to the miracle of the Maccabees.”

I clapped him on his misty and unseen shoulder, and said heartily, “Fos, do you remember last August when we were trying to get my brother Dob to drive us to the fair grounds, so we could see the World Famous Pig-N-Ford races? And he said if we did his yard chores, and hauled firewood to the shed, he’d do it, but then we kind of goofed off, and didn’t haul much, and so he got mad and wouldn’t drive us, and we missed Guppy Solo’s victory in the finals? You remember that? We talked about how bad the first three Star Wars movies were.”

He said, “Ilya, we are being attacked by cynocephali from Thoebel!”

Ossifrage was up with us now.

I said to Foster, “You spent two hours of my life telling me that any medical technology which can cyborgize a guy who has been dismembered and burnt in space lava should be able to perform a C-section. Do you recall that conversation? I missed a fabulous race involving pigs in Model-T cars because of it.”

Abby, meanwhile, had jammed the point of her weapon into the locked cabinet containing the silvery glass longbow and the crystal arrows. The black metal was starting to heat up and shriek. I pointed past her, saying, “Hey! Is that my goggles and flak jacket over there? Jimmy my stuff out next, will you?”

Foster said, “Can we talk about this later—if we survive? Look! There are
wolves
. Big nasty wolves with sharp teeth! They can climb sheer surfaces at a dead run. And shoot teeth out of their mouths like bullets. Are you really fuming about the pig races?”

I said to Foster, “Do you recall the conversation to which I refer?”

He groaned. “If I answer the question, will you pay attention to the life-or-death emergency here?”

I looked down. Nakasu was holding his own. He had a wolf clutched in his mouth by the spine, but could not bite and kill it, and he was turning this way and that, keeping the unhappy wolf-headed guy between him and incoming fire from bullet-teeth, which ricocheted from the pelt. Despite this, Nakasu was bleeding from where teeth had hit him in the chest-face. They were more like sling bullets than pistol bullets, so he was not dead, but they were still hurting him.

“Yeah, I remember the conversation,” Foster said. “You said Artoo-Detoo couldn’t have rockets.”

Ossifrage reached down with both hands tensed into claws, his face slick with sweat, and his hair and beard began to writhe and flap around him in the motionless air. He groaned, and Nakasu floated up off the floor, but slowly, wobbling. Nakasu kicked his legs to put himself head-downward (headless-downward, but you know what I mean) and spun the flail right and left, dealing out massive strokes to the wolf-creatures, who were flung yowling to crash into glass display cases, but who sprang back up, unhurt.

I gritted my teeth. “Good! Well, instead of boring me with bellyaching about a space movie, why didn’t you tell me you had a longbow and arrows
forged on the moon
? I would have kind of liked to know, y’know! You’d think a friend of mine would mention that detail about his life!”

I looked down. A busty redhead chick, tall and angry-looking, in a long black cloak came out of the hemisphere of the Moebius gate riding a tiny chariot pulled by four cynocephali.

Her features were cold and queenly, her chin sharp, her lips as red as blood, and her cascade of hair spilled past her shoulders all the way to her hips in wanton curls and spirals, a crimson cloud. She wore a sheer silk dress shining and jet like a bright darkness. A narrow sash set with emeralds and smaragds and cut stones of beryl from behind her neck crossed down between her breasts, tightly cinched her waist, fell in a triangle down the curve of her lower belly, and left long graceful tails to dangle between her legs.

Little figurines made of sticks and wicker were woven in her shining fire-colored hair. There were no reins to the chariot, since the wolves were rational creatures, but she held a long-handled whip that crackled with dark red sparks. In her other hand she cradled a small bundle wrapped in swaddling, like a mother with a babe in the crook of her elbow.

I call her car a chariot, but it was more like those lightweight traps used in horseracing, just a spidery framework holding two bike wheels, except that she was standing.

She looked up at us. I saw that she had four pupils, two in each eye.

Nakasu swooned when she glared at us, and dropped the flail. Ossifrage fainted, and dropped Nakasu. Ossifrage started to slump over the edge himself, but an invisible blue hand coated in mist grabbed his camel-hair cloak and dragged him back.

Then the redhead looked at me, and it was as if every vein in my head was carrying jet fuel that right then caught on fire, and every artery, including the ones woven through my gray matter, was carrying liquid nitrogen.

The pain blinded me, but I did not faint. I gritted my teeth and told myself that if I could not die, I sure as heck could not be poisoned by a nasty glower.

“
Saint Michael the Archangel, defend us in battle!
”

It came out as a scream, but with those words, I found I was wrestling back the flaming cloud of fever eating though my skull, and slowing the rate of burning — slowing it, but I could not halt it, much less drive it away. I had only moments of consciousness. I could still move my arms and legs, but it was like wading through boiling mud.

“…And do thou, O Prince of the Heavenly Host…”

Sightlessly, I put my arms around the case holding my sword.

“…by the power of God…”

The case rattled under my grip. The thing was two or three hundred pounds. There was no time for Abby to burn through the lock, and I was not strong enough to pry it open with just my fingers.

“…cast into Hell Satan, all the evil spirits …”

But I was strong enough to put both feet against the back wall, and push.

“… who prowl about the world…”

The glass-and-iron case groaned, and at the spot where the bottom of the case rested on the shelf something snapped with a metallic noise, and the case tilted slowly, so slowly—

“…seeking the ruin of souls!”

—and the huge case and I both fell from the high warehouse shelf and we plunged down like a meteorite and hit the redhead’s chariot and killed her.

I was unconscious when I hit, thanks to the power from her quadruple-pupil gaze boiling my brains, but the wolves did not have time to tear me to bits before I was painfully awake and back up on my foot. Singular. My other foot, and the bloody bits in the teeth of the wolf-things who were mugging me, I simply pulled back into myself with a huge and disgusting slurping noise, and I reached into the wreckage of the case — which had conveniently broken in two — and drew out my grandfather’s sword — which conveniently had not.

“I take it all back,” I said in English. “Gross or not, my power
rocks
!”

I flourished the blade overhead, so the cynocephali might know who they dealt with.

They laughed. The manlike wolf-things actually opened their jaws and laughed at me and my sword.

One of them spoke in Latin. I was not fluent, but what words I did not know, I could guess. “By strange alchemies the blood of beasts is mingled with ours, therefore no weapon forged in earthly fires, nor held in mortal hand, can wound the cynocephali!”

I split his head in two with a downward, two-handed centerline stroke called
men
. I kept my shoulders loose and tightened my hands inward at the moment of impact, powering through the skull and jaw and in one stroke, chopped the golden ring in the floor. Wood splintered and there was a flash like lightning as the Moebius coil hissed and whined and crackled into silence. The ball of darkness evaporated, the twilight began to lift. (It looked darn cool, but I winced, certain I had chipped the blade.)

I addressed them in halting Latin. “Good fortune,
catuli
!” Catulus means puppy. “My blade is not earthly, and I am not mortal, and your way of retreat is not …” I could not think of the word for
unobstructed
or
uncontested
, but I think the pack staring at their dead leader understood my meaning when I shouted
“Tsuki!”
and put my sword point with a two-handed lunge neatly into the chest of the next nearest wolf. The rich red blood of his heart sprayed out in a crimson parabola when I recovered from the lunge and brought the blade back to position: blade edge up, fists at eye level, feet wide, weight on the back foot.

The blood on the blade caught flame, but the flames were an unearthly white hue instead of red or yellow, white as chalk dust, and there was no smoke.

Sweet.

Where that eerie white flame burned, it was as if bright sunlight, the sunlight of a summer noon, was in the chamber. The two wolves dead at my feet had sparks of the same white light fall into their blood, and their corpses began to blaze as they twitched and shuddered in their death throes.

I centered my breathing, raised my blade aloft and back at an angle, wrists above the eyes, my weight still back and stance solid.

There was fire over my head, and fire to my left and right.

“
Ecce homo
,” I said, because it was the only Latin phrase I could think of at the moment. “Behold! I am the
Man
!”

The wolves howled in madness, and roared in wrath, and attacked.

I was in the stance called
Dai Jodan no Kamae
: sword pointed up and back, hands overhead, weight on the rear foot, elbows rotated out, eyes front and looking out from under your wrists. It is an aggressive stance, designed to intimidate.

The wolves did not seem intimidated, so I brought my hand forward and segued into the
Gaden no Kamae
: it is a low guard stance with the sword held below waist-level and the point held at about knee-level, which was the height at which the wolves’ gleaming eyes seemed thickest. This posture allows a quicker turn and strike toward any point of the compass. But I could not strike toward all points at once.