Somewhither: A Tale of the Unwithering Realm (66 page)

I ran my hand over the nice, hard, pebbly surface of cold metal links, so dense and firm between my easily-cut flesh and a world full of nasty, pointed objects with unfriendly edges.

“The metal is haunted?” I said. I was hoping that a friendly ghost like Casper would be inside this hauberk, because I really wanted to keep it on.

Abby said patiently, “Yes. In that aeon, called Taari, to escape any second flood, all the wise men and philosophers and magicians lived not in a dark tower but instead in an underground city called Janaidar, and when she was destroyed in earthquakes, all were crushed. The unburied ghosts of the philosophers were impregnated by the fire at the heart of the world into the copper lodes of the Riphaean Mountains. This metal employs the self-deceit of the ghosts of the wise as its basis, rather than the pride of kings or the lust of witches as in
abarbaltu
or
abartahsistu
.” These were the words for the black living metal and the purple remembering metal. “It shares the same weaknesses. Only the alloy is different. I think it contains less tin.”

“Maybe these spirits will like me! I am tired of getting cut and bit. Nothing else fits!”

She continued in a severe voice, “You should take it off. It is best not to wear such armor, and the Ur never do, for any foe at one with the Oneness can turn it against you. Observe.” She put her hand on it, and it tightened uncomfortably. “You cannot remove it now. Can you unify your soul and spirit, heart and mind?”

I was thinking what to answer her, when we were interrupted.

There was the noise of an echoing bang, loud as a pistol shot. It was the sound of a battering ram, being pounded against some door I could not see. I assume the coal-black wolf man had called the reinforcements.

Abby jumped in alarm and drew her sickle-and-chain weapon. I drew a deep breath, and my hauberk adjusted itself to sit comfortably on me again. The corselet now sort of creeped me out, but there was no time to doff it.

“Where is that noise coming from?” I shouted.

Foster was now dressed in a strange combination of Halloween costume mixed with a crimefighter’s garb. By this, I mean he was wearing white pantaloons with knee-length toe socks, a tunic even whiter, and a hooded cloak of white and silver inset with threads that looked like fiber-optic glass. He was wearing glacier sunglasses with lenses and sidepieces of polarized glass, and a ninja mask over his mouth and nose, I kid you not. Why a man who can turn invisible wears a mask, I could not bring myself to ask. I think he still had the blue paint on under his getup, but hardly an inch of flesh showed anywhere.

With those glasses and covered face, he looked like the Claude Rains version of the Invisible Man. In the cloak and hood, he looked like a bright white version of a blackfriar crossed with a Ringwraith, or, since I read the classics, he looked like Moon Knight.

Moon Knight had been moving around the chamber retrieving his shot arrows. The witch’s whip was tucked through his belt (I didn’t see when he picked it up) and he was arguing with Ossifrage, who was waving his hands like a semaphore, and telling Foster to toss the cursed whip away in a language that sounded like Dutch.

When the crash on the door resounded through the chamber, they both jumped up, Foster to his two feet, and Ossifrage two feet into the air. They jerked their heads left and right and up and down.

Nakasu had still been fiddling with the golden flail, or portable hole, or whatever you want to call it. When the ram smote the door, he lifted one arm to expose the earhole below his armpit, much the same way a human-shaped man would cup a hand to his ear.

Nakasu pointed. The doors were trapped under a few tons of toppled shelving. No one was coming through there in a hurry, unless someone out there had the Walk Through Walls ability. Which (considering how freaky all things here in freakyland were) someone probably did, but, for whatever reason, at the moment, the enemy forces were trying to beat the doors off the hinges the old-fashioned way. Even with the living metal in the hinges and bars straining to help them, nothing smaller than a giant armed with a steam shovel was moving the tons of toppled shelves and cases pinning the door.

So we had a clean getaway ahead of us. That was also satisfying.

Wild Eyes in a flurry of feathers landed near me, and glared at me with murderous intent. The beak of the bird was red. She had plucked out and eaten the strange double-pupiled eyes from the corpse of the redheaded witch while Ossifrage had not been looking. But in that red beak, Wild Eyes held a purple needle. I am not sure how she was speaking while holding something in her beak, but then again, I am not sure how she could speak in the first place.

But the falcon’s words were not hostile. She spoke in a voice as thin and high as the sound of a glass harp. “The needle of remembering is pointing at Parthenope, whom you call by another name.”

Abby dashed over to Wild Eyes, and took up the needle and dangled it from a thread. The needle wobbled and straightened. Abby said to Wild Eyes and me, “Your mistress is not far: Master Ossifrage can carry us there quickly.”

Ossifrage, Foster and Nakasu without a word gathered together beneath the windows. There was no more bickering or hesitation.

Off to the rescue! Finally!

We soared out the windows into the night. And that was the most satisfying of all.

It was cold, and the wind made conversation impossible. Down we went. Call it three thousand feet or two Empire State Buildings and a quarter.

Abby’s needle pointed at a blank wall guarded by colossal statues of men and dragons and birds of prey. Midmost, like a Cyclopean eye, gaped a vast ventilation shaft, blocked with a row of spinning blades, one propeller behind another, all turning under their own power: that was the only opening in the armor. We hovered there a moment, shouting at each other. Since Abby’s thin voice was carried away by the wind, I couldn't hear her. But eventually she coaxed the needle to point to another way in.

Don’t ask me how she was getting complicated replies from a sliver of purple metal or finding alternate routes. I don't know how she did it, but she did.

Lower we went again. This time we came to a vast gateway like a window. A portcullis slab at least nine acres wide and high was drawn up, and a warm wind carrying the scent from gardens and fruit arbors issued from within. Beams of light, shed by a sea of floating airborne lanterns streaming out the window, and by a small forest of trees whose trunks were eerily alight, shined out into the gloom. It was the most welcoming and friendly thing I had seen on this whole world so far.

At the window sill, like potted ferns in a window box, was an airfield where the thousand-foot-long behemoths of ironclad airships, moored at tall masts, were gathered. The airy ironclads bristled with rows of ballistae and deadly ray-weapons shaped like elongated brass searchlights. The bowsprits were shaped like winged king-headed bulls with square beards and blank eyes. Each airship was waiting in turn for a mule team to drag the huge vessel within the confines of the Tower wall.

Below the window was a beard of icicles like a frozen waterfall, the accumulation of vapor condensate striking the outer cold. Above loomed the titanic faces of crouching statues. I swear I saw one blink as we zoomed in.

Then we were in warmer air, lamps above and glowing trees below. Inside was a dockyard, or, rather, several dockyards placed one above the other to our left and right, crowded with cattle and kine, crates of produce and coffles of shuffling slaves. There was noise and clamor and commotion to the left and right, the lowing of cattle and bleating of sheep and goats, the scream of chains passing over windlasses, the shouts of longshoremen, horns and trumpets from tugs and work gangs warping airships to and from the docks, or the gush of airships dropping ballast mingled with sewerage from their tanks in long streaming waterfalls below.

Cages were stacked to the left and right among a dizzying shelflike structure of catwalks and ramps, ropes and chains and cranes. The smell of frightened cattle and the stink of human slaves kept for too long in close confinement was overwhelming. Both cow dung and dead bodies were simply dropped from the high stacked cages. Below, incongruously, was an orange grove whose trees seemed to be on fire without smoke, a green carpet beneath a scene of brass and bronze.

Now Ossifrage took Abby under his arm and dove, pulling us in a line behind him. He wove between the cables and the vast dark sides of the airships as if we were so many sparrows winging among trees, or minnows darting among whales. I saw Wild Eyes as a sharp-edged scrap, swift and sleek as a stealth bomber, dart through the air before him.

Perhaps there were guards and air traffic controllers or blimp crews at this vast window and the vaster area of hangers and arbor beyond, but we were moving quickly among the many obstacles. Any outcries would have been lost in the commotion; any arrows shot after us would have struck a crane of living metal, or chains hauling pallets of crates.

You may have seen downhill skiing in Winter Olympics, but what Ossifrage did in those few moments was a greater feat of nerve and skill than any athlete, because if a skier knocks over a flag all that happens is he loses a point. If we had hit a cable, any of us would have been cut in half, and only I would have gotten better.

Ossifrage then dived low. Just above the treetops the shadows were thickest, and branches whipped past us at high speed, and, as if by a miracle, every one of them missed.

He did not wait for our permission before, nor boast about it after. He just did it. It was over so quickly that only when I thought back did I realize how dangerous it had been, what a cold-blooded customer he was for risking all our lives like that—and how cool he was.

And he did not smile once.

Maybe there had been no danger. Maybe Ossifrage was just that good.

But on the other hand, he had the same look on his face when he stepped out of the oriel window in the Nine-Star-Aligned Chamber and faced a whole squad of enemies. It occurred to me then that he could have flung them into the air and killed them from hiding, without poking his head over the threshold. No, he had stepped out into plain view to give them the chance to surrender, to spare their lives. And he had not even broken a sweat.

Maybe he just had that much faith in himself, in which case he was a jerk, or he had that much faith in a higher power, in which case he was a saint.

We flew out above water. Since there were airships in the vast cavernous cylindrical space above us, for all I could tell, this might have been the same furlong we were just in, merely seen from a lower elevation. It seemed bigger and better lit, but the distance we had descended also seemed about right, so it might have been the cistern-floor of the same chamber whose ceiling city we had just snuck through. I looked for evidence of the airship Ossifrage had scuttled, but I didn’t see it. As before, I saw rings of lit balconies indicating warrens of rooms like townships overhead, one above the next.

Ossifrage soared up, hugging the inner walls, avoiding lit balconies and inward-looking windows. Halfway between two balcony-towns, in a dark part, we came to one lone balcony or gallery running along the wall. The niche (if that is the word for a space bigger than a mansion carved out of the solid wall) was very tall. It was an alcove shaped like a half-dome, and in this place were gardens and fountains and many golden cages holding songbirds.

And there were four guards of that strange race of men called Himantopedes who stood on one snaky kneeless leg above a foot as big as a parasol. They were carrying long pole-arms with lassos on the tip, and wearing conical coolie hats of iron. Each one wore one huge shoe of iron that clanged gong-like at each hop.

I loosened my grandfather’s sword in her scabbard with my thumb and was beginning to grin when Ossifrage flung the Himantopedes, one and all, over the rail of their balcony before they were aware we were swooping in. They did not start screaming until they were over the rail and in free fall. One of them was a kid, I mean, he looked like he was about twelve, but he was wearing armor and carrying a weapon, so I guess that made him fair game.

It was not very sportsmanlike, but I was more worried about whether the deaths would be “lower nature” enough for the Astrologers to predict it. To have had predicted it. To retroactively have had predicted … aw, never mind. I still was not clear on how it worked, much less how to say it.

The one-legged men fell, and bounced off the walls below us, leaving red smears, and landed with a brief circle of foam that opened and closed in the waters of the cistern lake. Sort of like throwing someone out of the window of a skyscraper into Central Park. It was hard for me to believe no one saw the deed.

Wild Eyes landed on the gaily painted rail. Her claws left white scars in the carven floral knot-work design where she perched. She stood staring down at where the bodies had fallen, a look of unsated hunger in her eyes, her mouth half open. Whatever vast shadow-creature it was that used that little bird body as a mask was not a nice guy. Or maybe she just wanted to peck out their eyes.

We entered the alcove. The wide balcony behind us overlooked the cistern lake and the bands of windows of stacked townships behind us. In the middle distance hung a flotilla of monstrous airships. We landed in the gardens on pavement. The half-dome was high overhead, so cunningly lit, and so well painted with motifs of clouds and birds as to create an illusion of open space. It was a cruel illusion, because through the ferns and potted trees, we could see archways leading into some interior chamber. These openings were set with brightly colored sapphire bars: festive jail cells.

Abby’s needle pointed. I dashed that way, saying over my shoulder, “Abby! Tell them we are short on time! Someone must have seen those hoppy-hoppy guys fall. Fos! Can you make more than yourself invisible? Spread your mist around?”