A Time of Blood
Author: John Gwynne
Date: 2019-04-16 00:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Fantasy; Adult; Science Fiction; Paranormal
Description: "A great read that accelerates the pace and goes one up on its excellent predecessor . . . Exciting, action-packed fantasy." Mark Lawrence Defy the darkness. Defend the light. Drem and his friends are haunted by the horrors they witnessed at the battle at Starstone Lake: the screams of men being warped into beasts and the sight of a demon rising from the dead. But worse than any memory is Fritha, the demons' deadly high priestess. And she is hunting them. Concealed in Forn Forest, Riv knows her very existence is a threat to the Ben-Elim. She represents their most dangerous secret, and if the w
Publisher: Orbit

The Blood Storm

Unwithering Realm 4

John C. Wright

Copyright

The Blood Storm
John C. Wright

Castalia House
Tampere, Finland
www.castaliahouse.com

This book or parts thereof may not be reproduced in any form, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or otherwise—without prior written permission of the publisher, except as provided by Finnish copyright law.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used in a fictitious manner. Any similarity to actual people, organizations, and/or events is purely coincidental

Copyright © 2017 by John C. Wright
All rights reserved

Editor: Vox Day
Cover: Steve Beaulieu
Version: 001

Contents

1. Of Words and Worlds
2. Fate of the Fated Rarities
3. Dark Elf Squire
4. Damsel in Distress
5. The Other Sons of Adam
6. Brother Abomination
7. Quaffs Blood Like Wine
8. The Twilight Gate Opens
9. The Dreadnaught of the Air

Of Words and Worlds

1. Among the Hanging Gardens

We passed over an immense wall with crenellations as large as houses, and passed under the grim, blind faces of kings and crowned beasts as large as Mount Rushmore’s. We landed skydiver style (legs slightly bent to absorb the shock) on a pavement of onyx, in the shadow and spray of a silver-basined fountain.

Nakasu hit the ground before I did, and turned, and lifted his massive arms, and helped Abby down to the ground like a ballet dancer catching a ballerina. We stood in a balcony garden broader than an eight-lane superhighway, that was covered with vines of grape and ivy, groves of orange and lemon trees, rosebushes and boxwood hedges, orchids and azaleas, ponds of lilies, little flowing streams, and the strange beauty of unknown flowers half-hidden in the gloom.

The air pressure here was higher than it was outside the balcony: I had the weird feeling I had just passed through some sort of unseen and unfelt force-field that formed a greenhouse roof over the balcony.

We were no longer at the height jetliners fly, but we were still higher than any Earthly mountain. Because the wall behind us was as far above the pavement as the Great Wall of China was above the ground, the dizzying vista of the wide nocturnal world beyond was blocked out. Standing between the infinite height of the Dark Tower to one side and the balcony wall to the other was like standing at the bottom of a green canyon. It was kind of cozy.

About a hundred feet above us were some archer slits, if archers were titans shooting ballistae. I mean the windows were very tall and not very wide. Lampwood light was streaming in beams out from the windows.

Ossifrage walked up through the air to the windows and peered in carefully. He shrank back from the window and walked back down, and whispered in Hebrew. More of my studies were coming back to me so I did not need Abby to translate: “Many are within, searching, both masters garbed as the Chaldaeans who watch the stars, and hunting apes who sniff the ground. With them is a fell spirit of the underworld, and dragoons with Tommy-guns. We must abide until they depart.”

He did not actually say Tommy-gun. He said eqdah’ — which I thought meant sparkle. When I asked Abby to translate this, she called it Ariru-Kippa-tup-psalt-birqu which means round-drum-magazine thunder-weapon. Easier to say Tommy-gun.

Ossifrage wafted us to a perch not far away, this one a little shelf only ten acres or so in width, and covered with cherry trees and statues of stork-winged nymphs. We had a clear view of the windows and settled down to watch.

We chatted a bit to kill some time.

2. Killing Time

I asked Abby, “About the Chamber of Fated Rare Steak or whatever? I thought it was a room where the Dark Tower keeps captured enemy magic items? You know, Thor’s Hammer, Space Ghost’s Power Bands, Lamont Cranston’s mystic girosol, Batgirl’s Snugly-fitting Utility Garterbelt? What makes you think the guards will leave?”

Abby spoke with Ossifrage. He said, “They are the hunters, not the watchmen.”

(I needed Abby’s help to translate that, because the shade of difference between words for a soldier looking for someone and a soldier guarding something was too subtle for my vocabulary.)

I said, “Don’t they guard this place like Fort Knox?”

Abby said, “The day and hour when a theft would be foretold, the troops would be posted there, or else go to the house of the thief a week and a day beforehand and deliver him to the tormentors, who would play him to death using the wheel, the horse, or using the claws or hooks or currycombs, or the chair, or the helm or the tunic of red-hot iron, or scourging with divers fashions of scorpions or braids of ….”

I interrupted gently. (I did not want to be rude, and I realize full well she had to live in this damned world, but that did not mean I did not get seasick hearing about it.) “But you could steal something? Because your future is hidden, right?”

Abby said, “Thievishness is a thing of the lower nature, so the lower spirits who rule this world of sorrows would behold and foretell.”

“But I can get my own back, right? My grandpa’s sword?”

And when she assured me that I could, I asked, “Why can’t we just rush the guys inside and kill them?”

Abby said, “The Master says they have with them a Kubu Ardanan.” Kubu was an ambiguous word; it meant a foetus, a stillborn child, a premature baby, or a demon. Ardananu meant a specter or doppelganger, a ghost who took the form of a living man.

I said, “We are afraid of a demon preemie? Like a small child? Why not just punt it?”

Abby said, “You would be safe. For us, it is very fearful. The child is possessed of a Watcher.”

“What is that? Something like a Beholder? Ten lesser eyes on eyestalks? The big central eye has an anti-magic ray?”

With Abby’s help, Ossifrage told me: “A Watcher is an Enochian. A Watcher is a spirit who was once a craftsman of the world, but fell in love with the fair daughters of Man and carried them to high places and outraged them. Watchers fathered the mighty giants who won great renown of old. These same spirits rose in mutiny when it was told in Heaven that flood waters would overwhelm the Earth, and they sought to protect all they had made as well as their monstrous children.”

“That doesn’t necessarily sound like he is a bad guy….”

Abby said, “The Watcher commands — what did you say of it? — an anti-magic ray.”

“I was just kidding,” I said. “I am tired of these monsters actually being real. Why do all these creatures work for the Dark Tower anyhow?”

Abby passed that to Ossifrage. His eyes narrowed and his face grew grim. She said, “He says the Chaldaeans and magicians know the future. They can force all things to their will. They are restrained from nothing….”

“… they have imagined to do. Yeah, yeah, I get it.”

“The Watchers are shadowmages, for their art is to make worlds out of ylem, and the twilight serves them,” said Abby. “Master Ossifrage’s art fails in the twilight, even as yours is made more strong. The flesh and bones of men fail if the twilight thickens into the Enduring Dark.”

Ossifrage held up his hand, forefinger out, and wiggled his thumb, doing a perfect imitation of a child playing pistol, and said something that had the word bang-bang in it.

Abby said, “The twilight stops the thunder-noise weapons of the technomancers.”

“Are there really dragoons in there? Men from my world? Working for them?”

Ossifrage said, “Almaany mearahim.” Or something like that.

Abby said, “German Troglodytes.”

I was not sure I heard right. “Troglodytes?”

“Cave-dwellers,” said Abby. “Because their weapons have made all the surface world a desert, their farmsteads are under domes, and their cities are under ground. Your scholars call them Catoudaei. They call themselves the Vrilya.”

“Whose scholars? My scholars?”

“Hesiod is an author who existed in your branch of history, did he not? The aeon where the Catoudaei rule, called Ashkinaz, is adjacent to yours. They are technomancers who control a telluric current called the virile force, or vril, which allows them to look into the past, to exchange thoughts through light beams, and to concoct food from lifeless minerals. Wands or flutes of the virile metal shed influence to invigorate the sick, cure maladies, grant clearness of thought. Chimneys and battle-towers of the same material likewise can reach across a thousand miles and induce convulsions in legions and large crowds, engender confusion, cast plagues and pestilences, induce misery, provoke earthquakes, ignite volcanoes, or reduce field and forest instantly to ash.

“The Catoudaei have land-ironclads larger than cities,” she continued, “that can trample towns under many metal legs, and flying disks that soar without noise to their fortresses on the moon. The Catoudaei kill all lesser races of men, and breed their women like livestock, and it is forbidden on their world to fall in love. Their guns are not chemical like yours, but are powered by virile force.”

Small wonder Enmeduranki had been unimpressed by my Earth. I felt obscurely cheated. Where were our moon-forts?

I said, “It might be my imagination, Abby, but you sound as if you like this aeon, whatever it is.”

She wagged her forefinger once, sharply, in her world’s version of a headshake. I noticed how unconsciously imperious even her smallest gestures were. “Ashkinaz. It is not liking, but sorrow. For a time, I did not know where my mother was from, and I may never speak to my father again. Her name was Luisa. I thought it sounded like an Ashkinazi name.”

That was a little too sad for me to talk about at the moment. I cleared my throat and pointed at the window. “About their virile-powered firearms: The golden flail could produce twilight that would knock out their Tommy-guns, right?”

She said, “But the same twilight would strengthen the Watcher. They are the fathers of the Nephilim. They assisted in all lesser things to fill the void of the world before the count of days and stars. Who knows what they can craft?”

3. Nomothete

Here was something I had been puzzling about. “How does that work, anyway? Does twilight stop inventions made after a certain date, so you just take a gizmo like that flail and twiddle the dials to A.D. 900, and woompf, instant Dark Ages? Or does it have to do with the complexity of the chemical reactions, or what? I mean, gunpowder igniting is pretty simple, chemically speaking, compared to something like what goes on in a human brain. So how come the Babbage machines and clocks operate in this place, or zeppelins, but not radio?”

Abby repeated my question to Ossifrage and Nakasu. She translated their answers back to me.

Ossifrage explained it (I am using the term loosely) in this way. “It is by the will of the Holy One, He whose name is Mighty. The darkness is without form, and void, so the works of men must fail in the twilight, because their form is less. High magic, which is celestial, is quelled by the twilight, but Shadow magic, which is chthonic, grows stronger, for it relies on formlessness to do its work; and in the light of The Archangel, the Shadow magic quails and High magic is strengthened.”

Nakasu explained it (I am using the term loosely) in another way. “Each aeon has a different master language, and the words define the powers of nature. The twilight abolishes the distinction of words, and robs the power of nature of gunpowder, which is from your aeon only, but cannot rob the brain, for that nature is in all aeons. Clockworks work by simple mechanics, and these are the same in all aeons. Only the things where sages and magicians of different worlds differ will the twilight smother.”

I said to Nakasu, through Abby, “Do you mean scientists made different discoveries in each parallel version of history? How come their discoveries do not match? Aren’t the laws of nature the same in all parallel versions of time? If George Washington was a plumber in one world rather than a planter, why would that change Newton’s Laws of gravity?”

Nakasu: “The sages of different worlds do not discover different discoveries. They make different things by the differences of the tongues. Each language exists in some form on each world, but for each turn of the great wheel of fate, only one tongue is the master tongue for that aeon.”

I made a noise like “Huhn?” which Abby translated by saying, “Ilya says your explanation is clear, but, alas, his comprehension is less than perfect, Freedman.”

Which goes to show that anyone who does a lot of translating between languages picks up a diplomatic bent.

Of course, I noticed that she was more polite to him than to me, because in her eyes I was a lower rank: abominations and slaves are below freed monsters and ex-slaves. Sorry if I sound a little sensitive to this, but even though she was rebelling against this world, she still automatically bought into its assumptions.

Nakasu launched into his explanation: “Four were the sons who survived the Flood. From Shem, all the Semitic Languages of Asia Minor—” he pointed at Ossifrage “—create the nature of Cabalism, which is the names of the Lamassu and other messengers within the Tree of Life. Each of the many worlds in that branch knows a different form of Cabalism. From Iapetus, all the Japhetic Languages spring—” he pointed at me “—Alchemy and the related arts are European. Geometry, Gramarye, Tellurics, Galvanics and Fulgration, Nucleonics and Helionics and Solar Arts, Chemistry and Alchemy, Golemics, Aeropathy, Ballistics and Gunnery and all the arts of thunder weapons. But from Ham, the eldest sons above the others, comes the arts greatest above the others, which is Necromancy, the art of Africa”—he pointed his thumb between his eyes—“each differing for each Hamitic language. The Pharaohs raise their kings, the Berber raise the Jinn, the Giants of Bashan absorb the unquiet shades of their fathers slain in the Deluge, and therefore grow to their immense size. My people torment the ghosts of our fathers, and this allows us to disregard the shape of Man and the form of God. The fourth son is Janus, who instructed Nimrod, and by his art and star-craftiness learned how to construct this Tower, and to make it utterly dark. In this cursed world the original language is preserved, and their art is Astrology.”

I said, “Are you talking about Noah’s Flood? That’s just a story.”

“No. I speak of the Flood of Ut-Napishtim, which the Serpents call the Flood of Vaivasvata.”

“The geologists on my world proved a worldwide flood never happened. Is this event before or after our timelines split off from each other?”

Nakasu and Ossifrage discussed this question through Abby. The two of them agreed that the magicians called geologists on my world must have potent magic indeed, if they could retroactively abolish the shadow of the Great Flood from the book of time.

“Father Nicholas Steno won’t be pleased to hear himself called a magician,” I snorted.

Ossifrage, who could never keep his hands still when he talked, tapped my knee, and (with Abby’s help) told me, “Each power comes because of the names of the namers, and this changes the nature of those things in man’s dominion.”

I said, “Names are just arbitrary labels you put on things.”

Nakasu laughed his horrid belly-laugh when Abby translated that. Nakasu’s comment was: “That is why the magic of your world, Technomancy, is dead. Your names are dead.” (It may have been a ruder comment before Abby’s translation.)

“What about China? You named the sons of Noah, but there weren’t any Chinamen on board the Ark, were there?”

Ossifrage had not heard of China, but Nakasu had. His answer was this: “The men of Tianxia called Cathay controlled the flood, and were not drowned. Yu the Great used a magic mud called Xirang. And the dragon aided him which cannot die, and the phoenix which rises again. Theirs is the Dragon magic, the marriage of darkness and light, and the trigrams which control the five elements as they flow along the dragon paths in sea and earth and sky and the soul of man. Their arts are strange.”

“And Japan?”

“The Cipangu were preserved by the sea-dragon Otohime, and thus had no need of the vessel of Ut-Napishtim. They practice the art of drawing down the blood of the sun goddess into their bright and demon-slaying swords.”

“Australia? The languages of the Aborigines are not from any of those groups.”

Nakasu said, “Hard to find and far is the branch of history where the men of the Antipodes, the great island called Agisymba, govern their Earth, and it has not been conquered by the Dark Tower. Their art is to walk into dreams, which is not like any other magic seen anywhere. The karadji or Cunning Men know when a rock is dreaming, and the evils that come from it. Even the stones from their world are a danger to all of us, because the dreams of we Noachians are vapors and noise without sense, and their dreams are constellations that sing silver songs of power. And yet they have no more weapons than the boomerang, the javelin, and the truncheon, crudely made of stick or stone. If you catch them in daylight, you might live. If they catch you by night, you will not.”

Because Abby was translating, I got the concept of Noachians: he meant the men of the Near and Middle East as far as India, North Africa south to the Sahara, and Europe north to the Rhine. I am not sure there is any word in English that encompasses that particular lump of geography. Mediterraneanians?

Ossifrage could understand both sides of the conversation through Abby, so now he spoke, “The First Man was named Man and named as Namegiver, for Man alone of beasts is granted the gift of language, and named the beasts and fish and fowl to set their nature, which is the same for all worlds: for the Namegiver is the Lawgiver. After the Great Deluge, magicians and sages discovered things unknown to the First Man. These new things were called by different names in different worlds, and so took on different natures. The names of the sun and moon and stars Man did not name, so no magic of any aeon has authority over them. Because the stars are the same in all worlds, and because this world, where there was no confusion of tongues, still speaks the First Tongue, the Language of Adam, therefore their star-lore and star-magic can chain us with chains of iron.”

I said to him, “Are you saying each world has a different set of laws of nature because the dominant language differs? That makes no sense at all!”

Ossifrage explained it this way: “Sages and Prophets and Magicians and Learned Men of every world have some part of their Father’s authority. Your people think you are finding, and you do not know you are commanding. It is the power of all the Sons of Man.”

I turned back to Nakasu and asked him how he knew so much about other worlds.

Nakasu grunted, “I am a wayship station officer. My duties told me of all the worlds to which free troops and fighting slaves were shipped. Cargoes and passengers below the rank of Plebian, such as Untouchables or Abominations, all pass through my yard, which is the cleanest, most horoscope-compliant in ten turlongs! Our guildhouse took the prize money from the regional chapter four seasons in a row…”

A glum look wrinkled his chest and belly. “Passed through. The yard is no more mine. The section boss will find another butthole-boy.” A little grin started at about his belly button and spread, one sharky tooth at the time, to his hip. “Of course, no more filling out bills of lading for me, or shipping reports, or wayship horoscopes.”

Then the grin faltered and fled. “But what will they say to my mate? Is any of this part of my official fate? What if I just went home? Would everyone pretend everything is normal rather than admit to the magicians an unforetold event occurred?”

He stood up, his chest-face looking haunted and uncertain. It was the first time he had not had some stern or cruel look on his face. It was almost comical. He looked lost, and my heart went out to him.

But what could I tell him? What could I say? That I had messed up his life by accident? That he would never see his kids again? That it was all for the best?

Before I could think of anything, Ossifrage stood also, and pointed. “Behold!”

The windows had gone dark. The Chamber of Fated Rarities was unguarded.

4. Hidden

Ossifrage wafted us over there. Nakasu did not see anyone in the room with his enormous eyes, so Abby (without touching a switch or anything) made the gargoyles and totems carved of lampwood set into the ceiling flicker into yellow light.

In this room, there were a series of boxes and cages of various sizes stacked up in what looked like display cases, one atop the next, on tall racks reached by ladders made of black and living metal. The racks were wood and set in stone bases, and the wood was lampwood, so the chamber had, to my eyes, an oddly modern look to it—because of the indirect lighting.

In the center of the chamber was a gold Moebius ring set in the floor. I saw the point in the room design, based on what Ossifrage had just told me: the lampwood could be turned from normal yellow light to twilight-banishing blue-white light with a thought, in an instant, and this would dampen any shadow magic in the chamber, if the rarities stored here were shadow artifacts and started acting up. Likewise, if any rarities were high magic, the Moebius coil could fan out an aura of twilight just by revving up, and quell them.

As we were being lowered from the window as if in an unseen elevator, I smiled smugly, and said to Abby, “You know, I think I am getting the hang of this world.”

A voice I recognized said in English. “Ill? Is that you? Ilya Muromets?”

I looked up. We were hanging in midair, not yet down on the floor, sinking slowly as Ossifrage lowered his finger. The voice was coming from one of the museum cases at the very top of the wooden rack. Here was a set of crystal boxes or cages of wire mesh holding treasures: a spear of ivory, a gem-encrusted book, a knife of obsidian stone, a mask of beaten gold with amber lenses for eyes, a gold arm-band cut with Viking runes, a hawk whose every feather was inset with precious stones, a cloak of jade wafers so thin light shined through them, a boar-spear, a fuller’s rod, a broom, a dragon’s skull, an iron kettle filled with silver coins shaped like crescents, a longbow formed of silvery fiberglass so transparent it faded out of view if you looked right at it, with a see-though quiver of glass arrows with diamond arrowheads hanging with it.

And there, calmly in her decorated sheath of stingray wrapped in white silk, the tassels of yellow and red, the chrysanthemum tang glinting, was Dancing Maiden, my grandfather’s sword. She was in a little closet like a miniature phonebooth made of crystal windows woven with heavy wire mesh.

I said to the sword, “Did—did you talk just now? You have a boy’s voice?”

“No! Over here!” And I suddenly became aware of a blind spot in my eyesight, something I should be seeing, but wasn’t, and the moment I became aware of what I wasn’t seeing, I saw.

It was Foster Hidden.

He was naked as a jaybird, covered in blue paint, on his tip toes, on a box, with his hand stuck through the wire mesh bars of a birdcage. His hair had been shaved close to his skull, like that of a prisoner in a camp, leaving stubble, and his jaw was dark with a two-day growth, like a man who has not shaved.

Inside the birdcage was a truly huge bracelet or bracer, a cylinder of gold nearly as long as a man’s forearm, written all over with what might have been Cyrillic or Devanagari. The armband seemed to shine with yellow and cerise and fulvous rainbows for a moment. He had been touching it with his outstretched finger. When he let go of it, was when I saw him — or was allowed to see him. The birdcage was locked and made of the black living metal of the Tower, and the massive armband was too big to fit through the bars, but his fingers could reach in and touch the gold cylinder, which was pulled hard up against the side.

“Ilya! Are you floating? How are you— Hey! Don’t touch the ground!”

“How do I know you are really Foster Hidden,” I said, “And not some outrageous shapechanging horror sent to deceive me?”

He said, “Troop Two! Second to none!”

“Hm. I guess that is good enough …”

“Don’t land! It’s a trap!”

But it was too late. Abby started talking to me, asking who this was and I was trying to gesture to Ossifrage, but pointing and waving my hand must have looked frantic, a hurry-up gesture rather than a go-up gesture, or maybe the commotion broke his concentration, because we all fell the remaining five feet to the deck.

I rolled and slapped the ground and came to my feet. Ossifrage landed on his butt, and Nakasu landed by falling flat on his back, but still he reached and caught Abby in midair, so I felt like he was more heroic than I was.

From way up above, Foster called out, “They’re coming!”

The floor flickered with light where we had hit it. Our silhouettes where we had fallen were glowing softly at first, but brighter and brighter, and the skid marks where I had rolled to my feet. When I jumped to one side, my bare feet left glowing footprints.

“I take it back,” I said, “I am still suffering indigestion of the brain. What the heck is going on? Why is the floor—”

I bent down and touched it, leaving my fingerprints glowing in the surface. It was wood. The floorboards were all lampwood.

I uttered a short, four-letter word referring to an act which, when licit, forms the nuptial joys of a honeymoon.

Because just then the floorboard glow spread from wall to wall, got bright, then intense, then blinding, and it turned blue. Some of my old wounds started twitching and stinging with pain, which was something I had not been aware could happen — and it kind of scared me.

But not too scared, because, despite what I had just said, I really was catching on to the rules. My power was a twilight power, and it was being quelled.

“Get these cases open!” Foster Hidden called. “That’s my bow and arrow!”

I shouted at Ossifrage and pointed toward the top deck of the warehouse shelves, the one where Foster Hidden was. Without getting up from his supine position, Ossifrage waved his hand at me and pointed the same direction. Gravity forgot about me, and the chamber seemed like the deep end of a swimming pool: not that it looked different, just that I kicked off the ground and swam up through thirty feet of air with a swan-dive motion.

Just then, that golden Moebius coil in the center of the floor rang with an eerie chiming noise and started to spray twilight in every direction. Now, as best I understood things, that should not have worked, because the floorboards were shining with ylem-suppressant. But it got dark fast, and Ossifrage’s power wobbled. I was slipping from where I hung in the middle of nothing. So I figure the bad guys had some way of using both ylem and ylemaramu, both twilight and blue light, without them interfering with each other. Sort of the way flying aces shoot machine guns through their rotating propeller blades without hitting them, I guess.

Foster reached out and grabbed me just as my buoyancy failed. He groaned, and I swung, and my legs slammed with a bang into the wooden cases below him, but Foster held onto my wrist with both hands while my legs dangled in space, and he did not let me go. He saved my life, or would have, if I had been, you know, normal, or saved me from a really bad fall, so I felt like he was my best friend in the world just then.

I managed to kick and kick, and find a foothold, and I almost pulled Foster to his doom. I should have been thinking about more important things, but Foster put his crotch right near my face when he was pulling me up by my shoulders, and I got a closer look at his hanging gardens than anyone not a urologist should get. I made a mental note to leave that moment out of the official histories. But it did prompt me to ask him:

“Why the heck are you naked?” (Except I did not say ‘heck’.) “Is that stinky blue stuff woad? Why are you covered in woad?”

I climbed up and was standing beside him on the shelf.

“This is why,” he said, reaching into the birdcage that held the gold armband, and touching the armband with his fingertip. The gold ring flickered and turned into glass, and vanished. Foster’s blue skin glittered and became hard to look at, and then his body turned pale and vanished.

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.

5. Time to Kill

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!”

6. Matron of the Illyrii

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.

Fate of the Fated Rarities

1. Teamwork

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.

It was bad. I should have put my back to the wall.

The werewolves outnumbered me, and came at me from behind no matter which way I turned. It was a flood of teeth and nails. My bones broke under the teeth of the ones I did not kill. One big shaggy gray brute elbowed a surprised snow-white onto my swordpoint, fouling the blade, which was caught in between snow-white’s ribs. Before I could slide Dancing Maiden free of the white one, Big Shaggy tore my sword arm off at the elbow. With a flick of his neck, Big Shaggy tossed my arm (sword still in hand) to a coal-black wolf with a supercilious expression, who jumped into the air like he was catching a Frisbee. Coal-black grinned a bloodstained grin at me over his shoulder, ran straight up the far wall toward the window, and tossed my sword and my sword arm out the window.

“Facilis descensus Averno,” he smirked. The descent is easy.

I hate smart-alecky wolves.

The whole thing was neatly done. Wolves are pack animals after all, you know? Team players.

And the team jumped at my throat.

Fighting unarmed and one-handed against monsters covered in invulnerable hair is no fun. I am sure it sounds like fun. It’s not.

But there was one fun part: Big Shaggy, pressing his luck, rushed at me trying to rip out my crotch, so I just stuffed my hand down his throat and grabbed his tongue and used his own weight and inertia to flip him over my hip in a neat hip-throw.

He sailed high like one of those girls in a poodle skirt you see dancing to big band music doing a flip over her partner’s head, except, in this case, the partner held onto the tongue and the momentum of the throw ripped it out of his throat. I tossed the severed tongue and clinging mass of blood and muscle at his face, saying, “No fur in your mouth, puppy!”

That was about the only good move I had that round.

“Saint Ailbe and Saint Edmund the Martyr, come now to my aid!” I prayed, because a young yellowish wolf had torn off my left hand just then. I looked like the Black Knight from a Monty Python movie.

Coal-black over by the window chuckled softly, “Fide, non armis?” Faith, not arms.

I managed to twist and drive the sharp end of my protruding femur into the young yellowish wolf’s eyeball with a dramatic squirt of eye jelly, and into the brain beyond.

“No fur in your eyes, puppy!” I shouted. I admit the coal-black had better bantering skills than me. I guess he was homeschooled too.

My severed hand fell onto the floor right next to the long-handled whip the witch had dropped. Something odd happened then: I got a moment of sensation from the hand, even though it was not connected to me. I closed my hand on the whip handle. Somehow, I could feel the texture of the whip handle in my hand, my severed hand. Then I was rolling with two wolves snapping in my face. By pure good luck, I rolled right over the spot where my hand was, and came to my feet, put my hand back on its stump, and put my back to a corner where the wall joined a museum shelf, and lashed out with the whip.

Why? Because the whip could hurt them, or otherwise the witch would not have bothered carrying it.

Dark red sparks danced with a hiss along the lash tip when I struck, and the sparks clung to the wolf-fur, blazing. Three and four wolves flinched back, spinning and circling, clawing and snapping at where the sparks tormented them: and suddenly one of the wolves I had not hit jumped into the air and fell down dead. Then another one. This second one, puking red, snapped with his jaws at his chest, and when his red teeth cracked on an arrow made of glass, I could see the arrow shaft outlined by blood and vomit. I could also see the shadow of the arrow outlined clearly on the floor, which was now nearly opaque with bloodstains.

But there was something in my brain making me want to not see the arrow. The effect was spreading, so the dead wolves were fading from view as well. The arrows carried, or were made of, or were dipped in, that mist of invisibility Foster could summon up. Why this allowed them to penetrate invulnerable cynocephali fur, I don’t know.

I cheered. But I should not have. The pack’s eyes darted to their two stricken brethren, now more than half vanished. Maybe if I had not cheered, they would not have noticed the blindspot in their field of view that was already swallowing up the fallen bodies. Foster’s arrows were cunning and nasty, if used for assassination: the corpse vanishes after you kill it. Unless your friend cheers before the mist spreads far enough, I guess.

The cynocephali were smart: they understood what was happening. They could not see where Foster stood, shooting them with his longbow forged on the moon, but they saw Abby and Nakasu high up on the warehouse shelves, and Ossifrage in midair, and a slender red wolf barked out a command in Latin, and half the pack executed a turn and ran up the walls toward my friends.

The other half ran at me. I lashed out with the whip, but some of them jumped at my face, so I did not notice the others flowing up the vertical walls to my left and right. The pack dropped onto my head, and the sheer weight brought me down.

So then I was on the ground having my guts torn out, and I was thinking I should take Novocaine before combat from now on.

But remember, I had shattered the Moebius coil, so the twilight had been diminishing through this vast room. It must have been clear enough just them, because Ossifrage (who was standing in the window) just wafted me up into the air.

My sword and sword arm came floating through the open window and across the air toward me. My shoulder stump and my arm came together in a nice docking maneuver in midair, and that was partly my doing, and partly the levitation of Ossifrage.

A wolf with more acrobatic skills than his pack-mates raced up the wall near the window, and leaped toward Ossifrage, even though the distance was too far to jump. But in midleap the animal barked and shot a tooth out of its throat — now, I am not sure if they were really teeth or what they were, but I am going to keep calling them teeth — and hit Ossifrage. I saw blood on Ossifrage’s head and neck, and he fell out the window. I tried to remember how far it was down to the balcony below, or if this was one of the places where the drop into the upper atmosphere was sheer.

I fell too, but this time I managed to land, to roll to my feet, and to kill three wolves, one after another, running like a hare and zigzagging, and to hell with footwork. I only needed to make a shallow wound with this sword, and I could catch the wolf blood on fire. I made a mental note not to fall into bad habits in case the next enemy was not under the special curse of the Dancing Lady.

Then I slipped on the burning blood. Blood was all over everything by that time, and burning with white fire. There was a pond, a lake of it, splashed all over the floor and halfway up the walls. Battles are messy.

I slipped, and they were all over me. With admirable teamwork, they had me pinned down, and methodically ripped me limb from limb.

I am not mentioning the pain, because I don’t know how to describe it. A mortal man suffers a finite amount of pain, because anything above a certain threshold will kill him. I did not have a threshold. I was in more than mortal pain, more pain than the deadly level. I was in immortal pain.

And, looking up, I saw Nakasu. From somewhere, he had gotten a pole of cunning metal, and it expanded to tremendous length, and he was standing atop one of the warehouse shelves, and prying the shelf away from the wall.

The shelf teetered. It was, by the way, the one all the wolves were climbing. It fell like a domino, banging into its neighbor.

All the wolves mauling me were gathered into a huge tackle mound, and when the shadow of the falling mass came over them, with cages of bronze and chests of iron and giant cases of brass and glass sliding in a waterfall toward them, some of them were quickwitted enough to try to flee.

They did not make it. Their fate was the same as those too petrified with fear to flee.

There was a noise like someone dropping the moon onto the earth. About a zillion tons of museum pieces, shelves, stone, iron, crystal, wood, came down like an avalanche.

I was trapped and flattened and buried alive, and the wolves were trapped and flattened and buried alive with me. The cases and shelving were made of bars and mesh, so we could still see out, and some of us were trying to wiggle and writhe. But there were only little gaps, like looking through a cheese grater, leading to the greater universe outside flatland.

Too small to squeeze out of. But those little gaps were big enough to shoot into.

And Foster started shooting the invulnerable werewolves with his invisible arrows one by one by one.

2. Banter

From where I was pinned, I did not see much of the remaining fight, but it also was not much of a fight. Any wolf that managed to escape the wreckage, if it ran up the wall to get away, Ossifrage, standing in midair, would whirl the creature into space, where it would be promptly shot by an invisible arrow from an invisible bowman. Foster’s power was not some lame Space Ghost-style invisibility, which leaves enemy noses and ears unaffected, but full-blown Shiwan Khan-style clouding of their minds, so they were forbidden from sensing him in any way.

The wolves died, pierced by arrows of glass, and when he was finished, their corpses were all invisible.

There was nothing sitting on the left half of my skull, and one eye was still working, so I could see the coal-black wolf in the window. He looked back at me, opened his jaws in a sad little grin and shrugged and said, “Ruinis inminentibus, musculi praemigrant.” When collapse is imminent, the little rodents flee. And with that, he turned and ran away, and I heard his claws clicking straight down the outside wall.

I shouted at his retreating back, “Come over here and fight like a man!”

You know, I just think his banter was more literary than mine. I blame it on being an American. I cannot quote Pliny. I can quote all the good lines from John Carpenter’s Big Trouble in Little China, though.

“Son of a bitch must pay!” I said softly after the retreating form. Which I guess was not actually an insult after all, considering.

3. Three Reasons

While I was trapped, I had a moment to think.

I realized I felt bad about killing the witch for three reasons.

First, she was an attractive redhead. Turning my head, I could see her shapely hips and legs sticking out from under a pile of bloody rubble. It seemed shocking that her body should look normal, like that of a person taking a nap, up to about waist level, and then be a horrible butcher-shop mess above the waist. It was a blasphemy.

She wasn't gorgeous, and her eyes were certainly freaky, but she was good-looking and I smashed her head in with a museum case as big as a sarcophagus. It felt like breaking a work of art. It turns out that it is lots easier to kill ugly people than pretty ones. Go ahead, call me shallow, but I doubt you would like movies where heroes kill scads of orcs if the orcs looked like supermodels.

Second, the witch looked kind of imposing on her chariot being pulled by wolves. She looked like a supervillainess. I thought she should have had a chance to make an impressive speech or something, not just get her neck broke having my unconscious body, and a three-hundred-pound museum case, drop on her from thirty feet up.

Third, because you are not supposed to hit girls. Anyone who says girls can take a punch as well as boys has never been hit by me.

I broke Sam ‘Sumo’ Humber’s jaw during a match, and that was with gloves on. He had his jaw wired shut for months and was eating through a straw that whole time.

The tallest girl I know is Twig Schmidle, who was the Oregon Dairy Princess two years back, and even in boots with the most ridiculous high heels I ever saw, the crown of her head does not come up to my nose. (I know because I danced with Miss Schmidle once. It was the day of the Sisters Rodeo parade, and she was wearing her crown.) She knows Taekwondo, can break a board with her hand, and she can ride a horse like nobody’s business, so she is not exactly a frail flower. But she is also more than one hundred pounds lighter than I am.

Now, there are people who like it when bathing beauties kick the butts of beefy mobsters in TV shows and stuff, but that is just TV, and if you think that is real, you need to get out more, and get in more fights.

I also saw the bundle that the witch had been carrying. It had fallen open. I craned my head, curious, and saw what it was, and I really wish I hadn’t. If you have a weak stomach, skip this next part.

4. The Brephos

Inside the swaddling was a big-headed abortion, a premature baby, half formed, hardly human looking, and its umbilical cord was still attached. Little figurines made of sticks were attached to the umbilicus, which was wrapped and knotted tightly around the thin little neck. The babyskin was semitransparent, blue with arteries, and signs and sigils had been tattooed (or branded) into the tiny soft flesh.

It was some sort of fetish or totem or tool the witch used for her magic. It had been supposed to grow up into a person.

That was when I stopped being even the slightest bit sorry.

5. Extreme Unction

When the cynocephali were all dead, Ossifrage, clutching his bloody head, walked wearily down through the air, or limped, and waved his hand, and the immense weight of the toppled racks and cases and shelves was lifted up off me. I was really messed up, more than a rosary could fix, so I said the Chaplet to Archangel Michael until I had re-gathered myself and was up on my feet. “…O glorious prince St. Michael, chief and commander of the heavenly hosts, guardian of souls, vanquisher of rebel spirits, servant in the house of the Divine King …”

By the time I was finished, I saw Ossifrage moving in a circle around the little dead body the Witch had been carrying, and he would bow and kneel and mutter what I assume were prayers or exorcisms. I did not see Abby, so I could not ask him what he was doing, but I remembered Abby had said he could unwork enchantments.

When he was done, Ossifrage stood and saw me looking, and said in Hebrew, slowly, “The mekhashefa carried her yeled. Used it as a vessel to carry an unclean spirit.” Mekhashefa was Hebrew for a poison-brewer, or a witch. Yeled meant unborn.

Ossifrage took a skin of water from beneath his cloak, and began tenderly and carefully to wash the tiny dead child. The water dissolved the little stick figures, and, somehow, made the tattoos or brands or whatever they were go away. They might have just been ink, but I doubt it.

He took out a horn of oil and anointed the child’s head.

Dark Elf Squire

1. Eflast Falinn

At that moment, the piles of wolf corpses turned visible again, like bloodstained surprises hidden behind a raised curtain.

“Creepy,” I said, wondering what was going on.

Foster Hidden stepped out from his mist and came across the floor toward us. Or, not toward us, that is, not toward me, but toward Ossifrage.

He bowed to Ossifrage, and said something in what might have been German or Dutch or Yiddish, and sank down to one knee.

Ossifrage answered in the same language, and stepped forward, took him by the shoulder, and gave him a huge hug, which left a blue woad stain on the camel-hair coat of Ossifrage. I wished I had had a camera. Foster normally looks so calm and collected. Maybe the look of shock and surprise was because of the roughness of the camel hair on his bare chest.

I didn’t follow the language, but I got the picture. Foster was apologizing; Ossifrage was accepting in an old-fashioned, old-school hands-on display of forgiveness that left Foster dumbstruck.

Foster wiped his eyes. Ossifrage wiped blue gunk off his coat.

Foster walked up to me. The big gold armband was on his left wrist and his longbow was shining like an oversized icicle in his left fist. The gold ornament reached almost to his elbow, and acted as a bracer to protect his inner forearm from his bowstring. His quiver of arrows was swinging, as was his un-underweared manhood.

“So you are covered in woad, and everything I know about you is a big fat lie,” I said wearily, before he had a chance to say anything.

I rubbed my temples, wondering when the last time was I had taken a bath, rested, or eaten a square meal. I had skipped a lot of meals, except for one orange, and the rest of them, which I had been carrying in the hood of my mantle, had gotten crushed or dropped two or three commotions ago.

I was seated on a toppled museum case, with a pile of necklaces and rings, which probably were charged up with all sorts of magic powers, spilled out around my ankles. I was still pulling random drops of blood out of the nearby environment to heal myself, and I was feeling not very nice in any sense of the word.

“Let me guess,” I said. “Like Penelope Dreadful, you are not from Earth either, and you are living in Tillamook, because there is an area of twilight where the boundaries between worlds are thin on the mountain in back of my house, near the old monastery. That is a magic ring, and the people on your world know how to turn invisible. You were sent to my planet to keep an eye on Penny and her dad, who is meddling with things he doesn’t understand. That is why you faded out that day we both went to go talk to her: you are a spy and you don’t want to be seen. That is why you are so good at disappearing in the woods, because you actually can disappear. The creatures in the room were looking for you just now, but did not find you, even though they were able to predict your future.”

“It’s not like that!” he said defensively.

“No? Then tell me, Fos, what exactly is it like?”

He shrugged sheepishly.

I just glared at him. “You should have told me. We are friends! You told me about your crush on Megan Broome and the naked pictures you had of her, and your secret desire to be an Indian medicine man, and the dream you had once about all your teeth falling out, but you never told me you were an alien! Who could turn invisible! With a magic longbow! Forged on the moon!”

“Actually, it was forged on a slab of the moon-rock brought to Midgard by creatures called Svartalfar. Those are dark earth fairies who—”

“I know what those are. I play D&D. Dwarves like from Snow White and the Seven Dwarves.”

“More like from Bilbo and the Thirteen Dwarves. Don’t you read the classics?”

“Stop changing the subject!” I snapped. “I don’t care about the number of dwarves! I want to know why my best friend kept secrets from me! We are bloodbrothers!”

“Technically, we are not bloodbrothers,” said Foster. “Bloodbrothers coat their palms in blood and clasp hands to mingle and seal the oath. You were too scared to cut yourself with the pocketknife, so we just picked boogers and put them in our hands and shook with that as the seal instead.”

“Then that makes us snotbrothers!” I said. “Don’t get all legalistic with me! It is just the same! Why?”

“I was not allowed to tell, that is why!”

“If you were sent to Earth to keep an eye on Penny and the Professor, you could have told me. I worked with them! In the Haunted Museum—” I choked off the sentence, because I just realized something about the Museum.

Why had the globetrotting Professor moved to Tillamook, Oregon, a place famous for not being famous, and hired me, the kid who just so happened to live on the mountain near a thin spot in the walls between the worlds? Was my summer job and my family and my best friend and everything in my life just a big fake?

I could not believe it. The Professor had seemed too sincerely interested in cryptids, animals thought to be extinct, and I had seen him working too often through the window or something as I was clipping the hedge, times when he did not know I was there, times when there was no reason to put on an act.

And how was it he had known about the language of the Dark Tower? I remembered his note to himself: WE is right! The Cuneiform is Ursprache!!

He had not been speaking in the first-person plural all capitals ungrammatically. WE was short for Wild Eyes. His daughter’s bird had told him that the Disaster Cuneiform was the Dark Tower's written language.

For that matter, why had he not known what world she was from? Not mine, nor the Incarnation Earth. Hidden world? Only then did it strike me that the Professor did not think Penny was from a world that was hidden away somewhere. He thought she was from Foster Hidden’s world.

“To keep an eye on you, not on her,” Foster said softly. I almost did not hear him, because I was preoccupied with the thoughts tumbling through my head.

“On me?” That got my attention.

“But I am still your friend! I swear! I mean, I joined the Scouts, but I did not fit in because I wasn’t from Earth, and you didn’t either, because you are not…”

“Not what?”

“Not from Earth either…”

“You mean you knew I was some freakish monster this whole time, and you didn’t tell me?”

Foster looked miserable. “I was under orders.”

“You are a kid. You are under seventeen!”

“On my world, we are adults as of thirteen. Carry weapons, speak in tribal councils, get married, go a-viking, all that stuff.”

“Drink booze?”

“No, we start drinking booze at three.”

“Whose orders? You belong to some sort of super-secret interdimensional spy organization or something?”

“Yeah. The Nachtdunkelnebelritterbruderschaft.”

“Gesundheit! Or is that really the name of your group?”

“It means the Brotherhood of the Knights of the Night-Dark Mist. It is our version of the Secret Service. My world is just one of seven gathered under the guidance of the Wisecraft. Eight, if you count the original homeworld of my people. We can never go back there. We were scattered to all the Earths. The Wisecraft is the name of the council organizing the resistance to the Dark Tower.”

“Your people? Your people are the Hiddens. It is one of the oldest families in Oregon.”

“No, the Hiddens are servants of the Wisecraft who pretended to adopt me to provide cover for me. I am not one of you. I am Romani.”

“What is that? Do you mean Roman Catholic or Pagan Roman? Rumanian? Ruritanian? Romulan? Romance Novel Reader? Please tell me you are a Romulan.”

“I am Rom!”

“The Space Knight?”

“I am gypsy, you flatulent moron!”

“I thought you guys lived in housecarts on wheels, picked pockets, told fortunes, that sort of…” And I almost choked, because for once I had run out of snark. It broke into my brain suddenly that Foster did know how to pick locks, tell fortunes, read cards, all that stuff. He even owned a crystal ball. It was one of his hobbies. I had never told Dad because loyal sons of the Church are never supposed to get near that occultism junk.

So instead I said, “And there are tribes of Romany in every world… Even here. They live in areas of the Tower where no one goes.”

“Vardo,” he said. “The traditional carved and gilded housewagon of my people is called a vardo. I’ve never been in one. My world is one where people are not allowed to wander.”

“So the Wise guys or whatever. How can they fight the Tower if the Astrologers know the future?”

“Each world has its own wisdom, its own secret magic. In Penny’s world the sirens know the song of the sea, which is older than any magic of field or plain, mine or mountain. My world learned the Svartalfcraft from the inner earth, so someone like me, a Nightrider, can turn invisible.”

“And you have a talking car?”

“No, but as a squire, I got a pony when I was seven. Her name is Frostmane. She is a breed of fairy horse, a shadowmare, that does not panic when exposed to twilight. The wise of my world are called Svartalflehrling or Svartalfwicken, the mortals trained in dark elf craft.”

“And every planet has its own magic power?”

He was ticking off worlds on his fingers. “The wise of Amorreus are called Artabtatitae and can talk to animals; and the wise of Dagon are the Daughters of Sedecla, and talk to ghosts. The wise of Svan are called Zduhac, and can talk to storms, the wise of Uenuku are called Tohunga Makutu. They talk to the sea. They are werefish.”

“… Werefish? Did you say werefish? Tell me you said the word werefish.”

“The witchdoctors of the Uenuku can take on the song and soul and skin and shape of an orca or whale, so don’t make fun of them!”

“Sure. They are like the Aquaman of your Justice League. You only mentioned six worlds.”

“After my world was invaded, the Wise removed to Cush. This is the aeon where Abraham and his armies were defeated by Nimrod the Hunter and his, and no one ever made any blood-bargain with the Nameless God. That timeline is ruled by ten thousand little gods, dream-gods. Sometimes the Wise of Cush, a family called the Strega, can see the future in dreams. By oneiromancy. They are sort of in charge of the Wise right now. In dreams they discovered where the Colossus was hidden, and that discovery started this whole mess.”

“What about Ossifrage? Which of your seven worlds is he from?”

“Who?”

I looked around, but Abby was out of my line of sight. “Jonas or Jonah means Dove. Peres means Bearded Eagle. What we call in English an Ossifrage or Lammergeier.”

“How can you possibly memorize such worthless drivel?”

“I work in a natural history Museum, remember? Or unnatural history. I get to dust all the stuffed birds. Besides, I got my merit badge in Bird Study during the same weekend you got yours for Indian Lore. Speaking of which, which world is Wild Eyes from? Penny’s little bird of prey. The damn thing talks, you knew that, right?”

“It is her daemon, her witchbird. Where she keeps part of her soul. In theory, the bird should keep her hidden from the Astrologers. From Amorreus. The shamen run on all fours like apes.”

“And the Flying Rabbi?”

“Ossifrage — as you call him — is from a conquered world, and so is Achitophel.”

“Who?”

“That is the Professor’s real name.”

“I knew ‘Dreadful’ could not be his real name.”

“Uh, actually—”

“You’re joking.”

“Adramelech is his cognomen, means The-Dreadful-One-is-King. I don’t know where he is from originally, but he says he is from Mizraim. This is a timeline where Moses never made it out of Egypt, the Pharaohs were never decimated of all their firstborn and livestock, gold and silver and slaves, and so Egypt basically conquered everything, got rich and fat, studied too deeply into the darker arts, learned how to open a twilight gate, and then the Dark Tower conquered them.”

“Mummy World. Got it.”

“And Dreadful One is one of their names for the sun god. So it really is the Professor’s name. Sort of.”

“I met their last king. Heck, come to think of it … I think I met their Dreadful One, too.”

Foster said, “And Penelope’s real name is Parthenope. The Professor is not her real father, you know that, don’t you?”

“I hear there is a lot of that going around these days. Is my dad in this organization?” And I suppose a note of annoyance that had faded in my voice was now creeping back in.

“No. The Ecclesia are separate from the Wisecraft.”

“The who?”

“The Roman and Byzantine Churches, and Irish and Nestorian, and I think one in Nagasaki. All the colleges of cardinals from all the parallel worlds got together and voted on who was archbishop of which Metropolitan See. And I think your parallel Supreme Pontiffs voted on a Supreme Supreme Pontiff, or something.” He looked a little embarrassed. “Your organization is more organized than mine. The Wise have some pretty dirty politics going on. I am not sure how many worlds your people made contact with. Nine, I think. I know that the Dark Tower has invaded at least three other planets aside from Albion. Anyway, your version of the Wisecraft is what the Byzantines call Ecclesia. It’s a Greek word. It means…”

“I know what it means,” I said. “I speak Greek.”

“You do not.”

“I speak it badly. It means Congregate.”

“Close enough. Congregation. On Earth, the Western Church calls the Ecclesia by another name, the Supreme Sacred Congregation of the Holy Office.”

“The Inquisition?”

“Yeah. Bet you didn't expect that.”

“Not funny. But wait a minute. If you did not know I was an unkillable super-thing, why did the Wise Arses send you to look after me?”

“They sent me to Earth, but I was supposed to stop the Professor from opening a Dark Gate, in case he betrayed us. Which he did.”

“He works for the Dark Tower?”

“No, but — well, it’s complicated. There are some dirty politics inside the Wise, like I said. Adramelech was losing his mind for a while. Exposure to twilight will do that to you. (Well, maybe not you.) His mission was to get the plans on how to build a Moebius coil and return them to the Nachtritters. But he hates the Dark Tower. Maybe too much.”

“But you said you were spying on me, not on the Professor. So are you like a double agent or something? Why did the Wisecraft send you to watch me?”

“I was not watching you, I was supposed to watch over you. But they are not the ones who told me to keep an eye on you.”

“Then who?”

“Your mother.”

“What?”

“Your mother asked me to keep an eye on you.”

I stared at him dumbly. “Why — why her?”

“She yet lives. Marusya the Wise is high in the councils of the Elves.”

“You’re kidding me.” (Except I did not say ‘kidding’. I used a word that referred to the excretion process.)

“No. I mean Elves. The Apsara are spirit beings, elves of light from the Land Beneath the Mountains of Tibet. They are also the High Ones, the suntse of our slain and long-lost homeland. We cannot ignore their voice.”

Now he drew a deep breath and looked solemn.

Puzzled, I waited to see what he was steeling himself to say.

He looked me right in the eyes. “We are sore beset by the Dark Tower, and seek alliance and fellowship and friendship with you and yours, the Ancient and Military Order of the Knights and Poor Fellow Soldiers of Christ of the Temple of Solomon.” He put out his hand to me.

I gave him a long, level look. “You’ve been waiting, like, what, forever to say that to me, haven’t you?”

“Since I was thirteen. I practiced in a mirror.”

I looked at his outstretched hand, but did not take it. “But you lied to me.”

He shrugged. “I also lied about Megan. The girl I got naked pictures of is Alyonushka, your cousin.”

“What? You hacked naked pictures of my cousin?”

“Dude, your cousin is seriously hot. And blonde. Besides, we’re snotbrothers. Not to mention trapped behind enemy lines. Cut me some slack.”

I clasped his hand. “On behalf of the Knights Templar, Earth accepts the offer of alliance from—what is your planet called?” I smiled a smile that was all teeth.

“We call it Earth. The gadje call it Mittelerde.” He gasped. “The Dark Tower calls your world Albion of the Ariphi branch, and mine Riphath of the Cimmerian branch.”

“Cimmerian like in Conan? Cool. But it sort of sucks to use their names for things,” I said, hissing my words through clenched teeth.

“Victors have certain … ouch! … privileges,” he grunted, words strained. “Istanbul is Constantinople. Even old New York was once … ugh!… New … Am…ster… DAMN!”

“Why’d …they …change it?” I forced the words out.

“I …! can’t…! say!” He gasped, sweat on his face.

“Guess …they … liked it …better ….that …way.”

“That….w- what… my uncle told me!” His face was turning red.

“Who?” I leaned toward him.

“My uncle. Uncle!” He was on his knees at this point. “UNCLE!”

I released my grip and then tried to wiggle my fingers to get some sensation back into my hand. He and I had been trying to break the bones in each other’s hands during our friendly handclasp and exchange of oaths. Hence the red-faced hissing and grunting.

“Okay,” I said, “So why are you here, and how did you get here? How did my mother get a message to you? What’s the situation back on Earth? My Earth. Alvin.”

“Albion,” he corrected. “The Dark Tower landed troops in California. Armies led by the ghosts of Pharaohs erected several monoliths a thousand feet tall all along the San Andreas faultline. These were for geomancy. Think of it as acupuncture on ley lines.”

Since I did not know what kind of line that meant, I just nodded.

He continued. “In a single hour, a Yukaghir warlock from Siberia named Shalugin woke the dragons in the mantle and triggered the fault line. Everything from San Francisco to Santa Barbara, from Los Angeles to San Diego fell into the sea. The death toll is estimated at thirty million. The dust cloud spread throughout the entire hemisphere, and cut off the sun, and turned the moon red as blood.”

Thirty million. That was equal to all the civilians killed in World War Two. I tried to imagine a global war compressed into a single hour, but I couldn't wrap my head around it.

I remembered what my dad had said about the Book of the Apocalypse, and felt ice in my heart.

“Despite their lack of modern firepower, the Dark Tower initially drove the U.S. Army back, winning every battle. It captured most of the Southwestern states and northern Mexico in about a month. Then, just as suddenly, for no known reason, the invasion force went insane, and began to scatter. By that time, the National Guard had been fully mobilized and the reinforced Army divisions had no problem pushing them back into the sea. The Dark Tower retreated and established a zone of twilight in the Pacific around Easter Island. The press calls it ‘The Black Dome.’ Any ships and planes that enter this Black Dome stall out. Gasoline won’t burn and gunpowder won’t ignite. We can see the enemy ships surrounding Easter Island, and the bivouacs they erected, and the pyramids of skulls heaped up from tourists and natives on the island. The military is watching them from orbital satellites, however, and shooting missiles in.”

I felt a moment of intense, almost insane, rage. “So they’re nuked? The bad guys were blasted with ICBMs?”

“Warheads don’t go off and electronics do turn off. So our battleships are just standing outside of the twilight dome, lobbing in shells. Whatever was making the soldiers of the Dark Tower insane seems to have stopped. Spy satellites show all the shells missing. The enemy just so happens to row out of the way so as to not be in the right spot to be hit just in time. The good news is that their Moebius coils are all severed.”

“What does that mean?”

“A severed gate is one where they can open the darkway on one side, causing a small hurricane, but they have lost the connection to the gates on the far side, so no reinforcements get in, and their retreat is blocked. It is a stand off. Uh. Until the Earth’s atmosphere is drained out.”

“My dad? My brothers?”

Foster shrugged. “Last I saw them, they were doing fine.”

“Fine? Do they know I’m alive?”

“Of course not. How could they know that? We all thought you were dead. You fell headfirst into a wild Moebius coil. No one can fall into the Uncreation and live. By the way, how did you live?”

“I’m an abomination. Do you know about a version of history where people cannot be killed? They yearn for death, but can’t find it?”

“I’ve heard of it, but never heard of any civilized man who went there returning alive. I knew you were not an earthboy, but — you are from Cainem? Wow. That is why you committed suicide and lived? You’re such a jerk, Ill.”

“Me a jerk? So says Jerkwad Jerkzilla Jerkenstein, Junior, Mayor of Jerktown, population: You.”

Foster said, “I thought you killed yourself when you went over the balcony on top of that glass case. And you’re busting my handsome chops about me not telling you about my longbow, which can shoot werewolf creatures of a kind not found on Earth, and you are some sort of cross between Vandal Savage and Mumm-Ra the Ever-Living? Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I didn’t know. Ask my dad. Speaking of which—how did you know I fell into the Uncreation?”

“Uh—”

“You were spying because you’re a spy, and you saw. Got it. Next question: Why the woad? Don’t they have pants on your world?”

He said, “The witchbird that released and led me here found my stuff for me, so I could get my finger into my craft horn, and take out the rune-ointment one finger plop at a time, but I could not get my cloak or tunic or anything out through the mesh. The Babylonians kept me naked.”

I blinked. “Babylonians?”

He snorted. “Boy, are you slow! This is the Tower of Babel.”

“Eh?”

“The tower to the stars that never got finished in our branches of time. That is why they all speak one language. They built the tower to take astronomical readings but also to act as a strength, a stronghold, to prevent any tribe from breaking away and forming independent nations or races. They have all the strength of the entire human world behind them. That is why nothing they try is denied to them.”

“How did my mother talk to you?”

“It was not to me, but to a Strega named Maleqorobar. An Apsara reached across the abyss between worlds with her soul and formed a face out of the twilight, using shadowmancy.”

“And how do you travel between dimensions?”

“I can’t. Not by myself. My people are clairvoyants, and can see things far off. The Wise among the Romany, the Chovexani, have power over space not unlike what the Astrologers have over time. So they can see where patches of natural twilight form, whenever the boundaries and wards of a world decay. Sunlight tends to disperse Uncreation. My people, actually the Calderash, discovered a persistent twilight cloud in the sea trench, where sunlight never reaches. With the help of the Raja of the Sea, a privateer named Dakkar, I made it here. We knew Penny was in the Dark Tower.”

“Why is Penny in the Dark Tower?”

“Her mission was to rescue Ossifrage. What she was doing on Earth, no one knows. But she was captured there, and sent here. The Astrologers cannot see or anticipate her familiar, that falcon of hers, and through him, she was able to get a message out to dream-witches in Cush, part of the Wisecraft.”

“Her. All falcons are her. Tercels are he. So Glinda, the Good Witch of the North, sent you to save her?”

“Not exactly. But we have a local cell here, hidden among the Romany tribes that live in the airless reaches above the atmosphere. They have a foreverborn among them who can move freely through the Dark Tower, and so save Ossifrage.”

“Why is Ossifrage important?”

“He is a prophet from Arphaxad, a holy man of the order of Melchisedech. His is a world long ago conquered by the enemy, but he is a member of the resistance who won’t give up fighting. He is important because there is a prayer-powered mecha in the kingdom of Tharaka in the aeon of Cush that only Ossifrage can recover.”

“Mecha?”

“You know: Giant walking man-shaped robotic tank.”

“Uh. What? What?”

“You know,” Foster said impatiently. “Tranzor Z. Giantor. Robotech. A mechanical man the size of a forty-story building. A mecha. One of the things Johnny Sokko owns.”

I had just been getting used to wolfmen and witches and blood-drinking fiends. Here I thought this was a clearly fantasy-type universe, maybe with a little bit of steampunk thrown in for flavoring, and now a science fiction-type prop was showing up. And not even a reasonable science fiction-type prop. It was annoying.

I said scathingly, “I always thought tanks with legs were a stupid idea. For armored units all you need is armor, preferably with the lowest possible silhouette, and a gun turret. Treads make more sense than legs. A tall, unwieldy, unstable easily visible vehicle that Luke Skywalker can trip with a towline is not a masterpiece of military technical architecture.”

“And you blame me for the two hour discussion about the rocket-jets on Artoo Detoo? Dude, you are a total fanboy! Anyway, this prayer-powered mecha is in a world called Sasan, ruled by The Beast. Our High Council needs it for the war. I’d tell you more, but I’d have to kill you.”

“Good luck with that.”

“It’s just an expression.”

Silence fell. I sat there staring at him, wondering at all the madness of what I had thought was my life. My family was not my family and my best friend was a nudist blue spy from a Grimm’s fairytale world with Dark Elves and Light Elves and kids who drink beer at three and go on Viking raids at thirteen. And he got a pony at seven.

“Your planet sounds like a great place,” I said.

“Dude, my planet is run by Prussians. You defeated these bastards in your timeline. You need paperwork to get permission to go to the outhouse, and more paperwork to get paper to wipe your buttocks. It is illegal to get married, and illegal to have sex unless you hire a harlot with a proper eugenic certificate that matches yours, and then you don’t get to see or raise the kid. You cannot wander, cannot hunt, cannot fish, cannot hike, cannot camp, cannot use the roads without a passport, cannot walk in the woods without a permit. And I am a member of the wrong race. I was smuggled into the Nachtritters. You cannot tell anyone I am a gypsy, okay? On my planet it is illegal to be one of me.”

He sighed and shook his head, and gave me a dark look. “You know, every time you whined about Tillamook, I wanted to brain you with a hatchet. In Tillamook, you can wake up at any hour you please, put on any clothes you please, put on a pair of sturdy boots, and just start walking. You can find a highway or a deer trail, a public park or a wild mountain, and walk. Walk any direction you’d like, as long as you’d like, and just keep walking. On my world they pave over trees and flowers. The Dark Elves don’t like them. America is a fracking paradise, and Oregon is the best fracking corner of it.” Except he did not use a word that referred to hydraulic fracturing in that sentence.

“Are you bored in paradise, Ilya? You are lucky to have such an aristocratic luxury as the disease of boredom. Even the rich men of my world cannot afford it. Everyone in America is a freaking aristocrat, a member of the nobility, and you just don’t know it. No one in my family is even allowed to touch a weapon but me. And I only have the right to walk around bearing arms because I am a squire.”

I felt a little miffed by his comments. “Why do it, then? If you hate your homeworld so much, why are you in uniform, bearing arms?”

“Your world is paradise and my world is purgatory, but this world is the anus of Hell. I grade on a curve.”

That made sense of a sort. “So they took your clothes away when you got here? Mine, too.”

He pointed his thumb over his shoulder. “My garb is a special elf-weave that lets the mist pass through. It is one-of-a-kind; the hood is a tarn cap and the cloak is a tarn cape. The kid, he said he would get my clothes for me.”

I was about to ask him what a tarn was, but his last comment distracted me. “He? He who?”

“The little boy.”

“What little boy?”

“The boy-ninja dressed in black, the one with the Batman-style grappling hook, can burn open the locks.”

Abby lowered herself from some high and safe place, unharmed (Thank you, God!) and with a little gray bird of prey on her wrist. (Why me, God?) It was Wild Eyes.

Foster nodded. “Him.”

I snorted. “Boy, are you slow!”

“Eh?”

Then Foster looked embarrassed, snatched his quiver off his shoulder, and held it over his crotch.

I leaned and whispered. “About my cousin Alyonushka? You and her naked selfies? Either you marry her, or I kill you.”

It was a satisfying moment.

2. Satisfying Moments

I stared at the bird Abby was carrying. (Abby also had some stuff of mine and stuff of Foster’s she had pried out of museum cases, and Foster went to find an aisle out of sight to put on his clothing.)

The falcon had evidently been waiting outside the windows but within eyeshot, to see if we would escape death, or, in my case, escape recapture.

I said, “I have about a zillion questions about what the heck is going on here, and why all you guys from other dimensions all live in Tillamook, Oregon, of all places, and why you sent us to this chamber, but all that has to wait. Bird! You do that voodoo you do so well, and make Abby’s magic needle point at Penny, or, if you know where she is—and I suspect you must know, if you are some sort of familiar spirit of hers—we are getting her out of here. Now.”

The bird cocked her head left and right, and said, “You have not the means to free her here. It would be better to retreat, to see the cloudwalker to safety, then to gather forces and return. Meanwhile, a systematic audit of what lies in this chamber is advisable. Many things of which legends speak may be here—”

I said, “That is good advice, so it pains me to ignore it, because I am going to twist your head off your goddam neck if you do not lead me to Penny! I am young and male and violent and stupid and very much in love — so are you going to argue with me?”

The bird lowered her head and ruffled her feathers to made herself look bigger. “Your infatuation is that of a loathsome toad hungering to lick the soaring she-hawk! You—”

I snatched the bird off Abby’s wrist. I have quick hands, but, even so, it was a lucky move.

Wild Eyes drove her beak, sharp as a knife, into the fleshy part of my thumb, drawing blood. It was a pretty deep cut, and might have even severed the nerve. I reached and caught her head in my other hand, and held her beak shut.

“You poked me slightly,” I said. “I hope you feel like that accomplished something.”

Because I cleared my mind and concentrated and the dripping blood dripped back up my wrist and collected itself back into the cut, and the cut closed itself like a tiny trapdoor closing.

“See?”

The bird glared at me. She was good at glaring. She was glarrific.

I said, “If I let go of your beak, the next thing you say is going to be, ‘Yes, sir.’ I am a man and a son of Man, and you are a beastie. Because you are the pet of the girl for whose sake I am suffering through all this rather than beating feet to the nearest exit sign, for her sake, I will spare you, but only if you serve her, and me, by permitting me to find her. Do you understand me, you wretched little feather duster?”

I took back one hand, releasing the beak. The bird said nothing, so I squeezed just a little bit.

“Yes, sir,” said Wild Eyes in a voice that dripped malice.

It was a satisfying moment.

Yes, I was picking on a critter one-hundredth of my size, which made me a bully, technically speaking. So what? At least she talked!

3. Portable Hole

Wild Eyes promised me to perform the task. I either had to trust her then and there, or twist her head off. But no girl ever falls in love with the guy who kills her pet, so I decided that trusting the murder-eyed little crazy bird was the better part of getting my way. She shot out of my hands like an irked arrow.

In the meanwhile, Nakasu had been kneeling by the broken hoop of the Moebius coil set in the floor. He had connected the socket in the hilt of the golden flail to some sort of valve or control I could not see, and he was adjusting the ruby rings on the flail rod, giving them little half turns to the left or right like someone working a combination lock. His chest was frowning in concentration. He looked like he knew what he was doing: I assume his work as a station master included wayship travel through Moebius gates, and maybe the basics of Moebius coil maintenance and operation.

Nakasu stood and twisted the flail. The whole thing, pole and triple arms and all, expanded and went limp, and he curled it up like it was a cat-o-nine-tails whip, except with only three tails, and laid it flat on the floor. He plugged the first arm into the socket at the base of the stock, while the other two arms lay to one side, like the tongue of the capital letter Q. With a surge of auroras, a dark ball appeared in the center of the ring. At first it roared, pulling Nakasu and assorted litter toward itself, but in the same instant the roar became a teakettle whistle, and the wind died.

(I was sort of expecting a spear-shaped Moebius coil to fling itself through the black sphere of the gate, the way it had when Penny opened her father’s crude breadboard coil in the basement of the Haunted Museum, but none did.)

Nakasu bellowed with laughter, and looked around for Abby, who was not there. He waved at me and pointed at the dark orb. We could get out at any time. That was a satisfying moment, too.

He made the gate ball shrink and vanish, and he plugged the other two arms of the flail into the socket, one after the other, to test if a gate would form. I felt a pang of embarrassment, mingled with admiration.

Because I would have assumed that if one of the flail arms worked, the others would work, too. He might be a monster, but he was older than me, and more thorough too.

4. My Fathers’ Sword I Gird Me On

Abby had picked up the child Ossifrage had cleansed, and all three went outside together for proper midair burial. She had been raised by corpse-handlers, after all, and so I guess she thought no one else would help.

When she came back in, Ossifrage floated her over to a high shelf, and she set to prying open more cases with her red-hot weapon blade.

She lowered herself on a copper chain. For a girl her age, she rappelled like a pro rock-climber or a ninja on a bat-rope.

Nakasu said something to her. She jogged toward me, saying, “The Freedman says he can open a working portal to the last three aeons this gate touched, but he does not know which is which. They are all living worlds, because only from them come these captured relicts and rarities. Whether they are allies of the Dark Tower or enemies, the gate will open directly into an Ur encampment or one of their depots.”

I said, “It may be our only way out. We cannot use it yet. We have to stay long enough to rescue my — um.”

But she was already talking to Nakasu. And, yes, I heard her call Penny my mistress to him.

“Employer,” I corrected. “No, not even my employer, really, the daughter of my employer.”

Abby smiled a beautiful smile and handed me my father’s gear: bulletproof jacket and night-vision goggles and flashlight. The gear had not been in the shelves that fell, so it was all unharmed and in working order. That was a satisfying moment, too.

I slipped the coat on. There I stood, barefoot, wearing a loincloth, in a heavy jacket that was too small for me. The moment was less than satisfying.

Then Abby handed me a leather package.

“What’s this?” I asked.

“It was with your leather-armor coat,” she said, tapping the Kevlar jacket. “It was in the pockets and compartments of the belt. The magicians removed them and cast separate horoscopes for them, but I found them locked in the same case.”

I had not checked all the pockets of the coat hours and geologic ages ago when Dad threw it on me. There were pouches and sheaths hidden in the lining. I had not even known the belt was a money belt, with secret pockets and flexible pouches.

Some of the gear was hidden in the coat, and some in the belt. The gear included a magnetized compass needle sealed in plastic, able to float in water; a cotton square coated in petroleum jelly; a small ferro-cerium rod for use as a signal mirror; a carbon steel three-inch hacksaw blade with a reverse tango-style tip, which could also be used a striker for the ferro-cerium rod to start fires; several moleskin adhesive patches, in case of blisters; over two feet of stainless steel downrigger cable packaged in plastic, for use as a garrote, or to cut zip ties, or to tie things together; Kevlar line of the same length; two small and one large black bobby pins, or maybe they were lockpicks; zirconium-ceramic razor blades; a brace of throwing knives of the same material; five gold coins, big as quarters; and a punching dagger hidden in the belt buckle.

In the largest compartment was a rosary as long as a belt, with a cross larger than my palm, with a centerpiece medallion showing two knights astride one horse.

This was no money belt. It was a utility belt. I buckled it on, feeling like Batman.

The flat wooden case of the sword cleaning kit was in one of the large jacket pockets, as if Dad had just slipped it in there during those last hectic moments while he was sending me off, and I had not noticed. Some Batman. But I had been worried about the sword, so I was glad to see it.

I made some wisecrack about not having any pants, and Abby volunteered to go look for something for me to wear on my nether parts.

6. Haunted Hauberk

It really annoyed me that I was too big to close the Kevlar jacket all the way shut, but then I realized I was thinking in too human a fashion. I cut a big slice of myself out of my chest with my sword, pushed the jacket shut and zippered it up, and then reabsorbed the extra flesh and blood and bone back into myself, ending up slightly taller and slightly thinner. That was really gross and painful, but it was still a satisfying moment, because I realized that I had not realized what the limits were on being immortal.

I was also sick and tired of getting hurt all the time, and I used to play Dungeons and Dragons, and so I know you are supposed to collect loot after a mission. I kicked through the museum of fated rarities looking for armor. There were several helmets and at least two full suits of jousting armor, but they were made for people way smaller than I was.

I scrounged around and found a suit of chainmail made of copper-colored cunning metal, and a coif. (Technically, it is called mail, not chainmail, you know, but I don’t want you to think I was wearing a bag of letters.) A coif is a hood made of mail usually worn under a helm or helmet, with a collar to protect the shoulders and neck.

The chain links expanded and contracted after I donned it, so that the mail adjusted to my height and width, and the forty pounds or more then fit snugly, so that not all the weight was resting on my shoulders.

There was a heavy conical helm that went with it, but it only had one eyehole right in the center of the faceplate, so I could not use it.

For padding and an extra layer of armor, I wore Dad’s jacket under it, but removed the belt and baldric and wore that on the outside so I had a place to hang my flashlight. I slung my night-vision goggles around my neck, and checked and was surprised the battery was still good—I had assumed my tech gear would fail in the Dark Tower.

While I was still fiddling with the sword belt, Abby returned with a pair of red silk pantaloons large enough to fit anyone who did not mind wearing puffy clown pants, and a pair of sandals too small for me, for anyone who did not mind wearing used shoes. They were old-fashioned sandals, the kind you tie up to the knee, so they would fit on any feet although my big hairy toes hung over the lip.

Abby said, “Before you touch them, know that these are from the feet of the Illyrian. They are ritually unclean, both from her death and her witchcraft.”

I grunted as I pulled the laces tight as possible. “If wearing the shoes of a dead witch was good enough for Dorothy, it’s good enough for me! I even killed her pretty much the same way, come to think of it.” Experimentally, I stood and tapped my heels together. “There is no place like Tahiti!” But nothing happened. (In hindsight, I was glad it didn’t. Considering where I was, I should have been more careful.)

Abby insisted that she was the one to tie on my sword belt and sword. “Since neither your sister nor your mother is here,” she said, “I must serve in their stead.” She put her arms around me to buckle the belt and scabbard on. My grandfather’s katana—which was apparently a magic item—was now hanging in its proper place at my side. Altogether a satisfying moment.

The chainmail made some small adjustment when she hung the sword, and this made her jump back in fear.

“What is that?” she said.

I showed her the one-eyed helmet.

“This hauberk was made for Arimaspians, Rephaim from beyond the Riphaean Mountains,” She said. Rephaim meant giants, but it also meant tall men, sort of the way our word dwarf both means a short man and a magic creature. “They are in eternal war for the Cunning Metal, the living gold, that runs through the mountains with a race of flying horse-monsters called Twyforms or Gryphons, and in the struggle, both sides display insane cupidity, and so such alloy is frequently cursed and disloyal!”

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.

7. Finally

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.

Damsel in Distress

1. Open Window

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.

2. Barred Gate

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?”

Foster grinned. “Watch my jets.”

He raised his transparent longbow and he shot, one after another, glass arrows into the wooden rail of the balcony. I had seen Foster shoot before, but even so, I was damned impressed. I mean, the arrowheads were sinking into solid oak, and he did not miss a shot.

When he was done, he raised the longbow overhead. His white cloak began to stir and billow as if lifted by an unseen wind. He must have the same tailor as Ossifrage. One streamer of fog then another crept out from the hovering cloak hems. Then a whole wall of thin mist began to seep from his cloaked and hooded body to touch each arrow. The arrows were some sort of amplifier, because a curtain of mist rose up from them, hanging upward from the arrows as if from curtain rings, to erect a sheet between us and the great cavernous space beyond. That half of the scene did not turn invisible, but it became hard to hold your eyes on it, and your brain sort of forgot details.

I said, “Remind me to kick you for not volunteering to hide us all while Ossifrage was zooming us around in that display of near-miss aerial acrobatics.”

His hood tilted in what I can only call a look of scorn. “Sure, as soon as you tell me how to plant a line of arrows in midair, and have it hang between us and the foe.”

I approached the nearest barred archway. The tunnel beyond was pink and had small stools and pillows scattered here and there, and niches holding washbasins of silver or wine carafes of rose quartz. From the curve of the tunnel, I guessed it led to some larger space beyond, perhaps another garden.

The lighting here was eerie, like dusk, drifting clouds that cast no shadows, soft and seductive as candlelight. I saw it came from little specks of sawdust trickling softly down in tiny streamers and fans from pinpoints in the roof, but it was lampwood sawdust and thus it glittered and throbbed with light.

The bars were blue, and semitransparent like glass, and carved and fretted into the most airy arabesques and curlicues, swirling spirals and little bows and hearts and thorny roses. It was lovely. The way the gemlike crystals of the bars caught the half-light, it was almost as if they were phosphorescent. But it was still the door to a slave pen, a door whose bars were razor-sharp glass, and every edge was like a scalpel, and every point a needle.

“Beware,” croaked Wild Eyes, who had landed somewhat behind me.

I shrugged, not seeing any way to do what I needed to do and be cautious about it. It really did not look dangerous. I wanted to test the strength of the bars, and did not care if my hands got slashed.

But when I put my hands near, dark red sparks flickered from the curls and needles of the cage door and jumped toward me, and my hands trembled in spasms of pain. It felt like grabbing a live electric fence, or putting your hand in a hot frying pan sizzling with grease. My body jerked my hands back, more or less without bothering to consult me.

I roared in anger, and looked around the balcony for something to throw. A large marble urn with a rosebush in it would do nicely. I put my shoulder to it and pushed with my legs, tipping the urn over in a spray of topsoil, and rolled it, urn and tree and all, toward the glass bars. Abby cried out in fear, and Ossifrage flung out his arm and removed the weight from the rolling shrub, but he could not halt the forward momentum.

Thanks to the sudden weightlessness, the urn was rising as it rolled forward as if sliding up an unseen ramp. It went high, and did not quite miss the archway. The rolling urn smashed into the bars only at the very top of the arch, breaking a small patch of perhaps half a dozen bars in a spectacular scattering of glass.

Inside the glass was a sapphire fluid that gave the glass its color. The fluid turned into vapor when it met the air, then a spreading cloud that expanded. Every single little chip and grain and glittering mote of broken glass gave forth a dark red spark, which also rushed outward like a swarm of wasps, stinging and burning.

The red sparks struck me, and suddenly the air was unbreathable. I fell and choked and gasped and for a short eternity prayed to Saint Blaise, the patron saint of throat ailments.

When my mind was clear and calm, my eyes stopped watering, and I climbed to my feet. The flowers of the garden for about a dozen paces in each direction were gray and wrinkled and dropping like late autumn leaves. The songbirds in their little cages near me were dead, even though I could hear twittering from further away.

I walked out of the dead area and eventually found Abby and the others at the far side of the vast half-domed balcony. They had fled even before the rolling potted plant had struck the barred door top.

The hole I had made was too small even for a child to fit through, thanks to Ossifrage. Who, come to think of it, just saved everyone’s life. If more bars had been smashed, more of the red sparks of pain and blue mists of death would have flooded out.

Foster walked up and slapped me on the back of my head.

“Ow!” I said.

He said, “Next time a witchbird says ‘Beware’, you say, ‘Of what, please?’ And then you take the stupidity wax out of your stupid ears and listen to the answer.”

I rubbed the back of my head, but decided I had earned that, or worse. So I merely said, “What the heck is that stuff inside the glass bars?”

Foster meanwhile walked over to another glass cage door made in the shape of knots and curlicues and roses and thorns, and he knelt before the lock. He was fiddling with it, but I could not see over his shoulder what he was doing.

Abby said, “Distilled essence of pain. It causes sickness and fainting, and robs the air of its power to sustain life, but only kills small things, birds and rats.”

“Who the heck builds cage bars out of glass?”

Foster answered me, not looking up from his work: “It’s a psychological trick. It is supposed to look to the slave as if she can escape, by making the bars seem frail, but even if she is willing to cut herself to ribbons and endure the shocks, the nausea agent released will send her barfing back into the harem, whereupon the other girls will beat her for flooding the air with teargas. The medical technology here is advanced enough that they can repair the lacerations without a scar. The whole point is to try to make the prisoner keep trying to escape until she has not the heart to even try. It is mockery.”

“How do you know all this?” I said.

He said, “Didn’t they try something like this on you? Me, too. Anyway, my people have been fighting the Dark Tower for years.”

I remembered the bottomless cage, walled by living spikes, which should have been so easy for an immortal man to get out of, and I nodded. “How did you get out?”

There was a click, and the door swung open. He straightened up, grinning. The cylinder seal was in his hand, the same I had taken from Sergeant Sakrumash. He nodded toward Wild Eyes and said, “A little bird brought me the key. You want it back?”

I had already pushed past him, and was moving at a brisk jog. Over my shoulder I said, “Hold on to it. If anyone gets caught, turn on your Invisible Girl power and wait for a likely time to go save him.”

“Invisible Man.” He was trotting behind me, his arrows clattering and ringing in their quiver like silvery sleigh bells. He had his bow out and an arrow at the string.

“Whatever. Speaking of which, where is that sack-of-creampuff bird?” Except I did not use the word creampuff, but made a reference to soil nitrates. And I clapped my hand over my mouth when Abby answered me, because talking English to Foster for one moment made me forget the little girl could hear me.

Creampuff! I felt like creampuff.

Abby said, “Take the left stairs ahead! The walking shadow is ahead of us, for bars cannot impede her.”

“I knew someone had the Walk-Through-Walls power! I am beginning to get the hang of this crazy world.”

Narrow stairs led to another corridor, which ended in a brightly lit balcony set with stools and music stands. Bulbous stringed instruments with long necks, zithers, and woodwinds with forked mouths were neatly arranged in a case. What I thought was oddest of all was that the music written on the sheet music was written in our language, not theirs: the g-clef and bars and p’s and q’s of European music notation.

The balcony was fenced in with merely iron bars this time, although nonetheless decorated with Arabic fantasies of flowers and lianas shaped of iron, or Celtic labyrinths of spirals. There were slats or louvers lowered over the ornate grillwork, blinding the musicians to the mysteries beyond. I smelled roses and other perfumes, the scent of lavender, heard the splash and lap of water on stone, but also caught the stench of blood and offal, and heard the soft murmur of terrified weeping, smothered groans of fear.

Nakasu kicked the grating out of the window frame and Ossifrage held broken bricks and falling bars in midair, so nothing below was struck. Girls’ voices shrieked at the huge sound of the bars breaking.

The light beyond was that eerie dusklight, the soft gleam produced by sawdust of lampwood trickling down from tiny holes in the dome far above, like little weeping streams or shrouds of starlight, elfin and tumbling Milky Ways.

We were about halfway up. Ossifrage swept us down to the tessellated flagstones below.

3. Under the Pleasure Dome

We descended lightly into a walled paradise beneath a hundred-yard diameter dome of nacre, a gardenland or greenhouse of perfumed orchids and herbs and opiate poppies surrounded by divans and couches, by looking glasses and shining brass taborets, by luxurious beds acred in silks, and by furniture more sinister: torture racks and whipping posts. But even these, like the glass cage bars that covered the two large entrances below, were silvered and gilded and ornamented, things of sinister beauty. Half the floor was paved with marble and gold, the other half was flowerbed and tended grass set in countersunk beds of topsoil.

The half-circle of wall facing the balcony was pierced with two archways, but a colonnade that curved and followed the wall ran also along that side. This was teethed with glistering blue glass bars in fantastic floral patterns. Beyond the bars I could see divans and small tables for the convenience of whoever might be lounging to watch the harem girls at play, or at torture, or to bid on them. No one was there now. Opposite the entrances, leading from the dome to other chambers for sleeping or changing, were unbarred arches hung with thick red curtains.

I was expecting guards or eunuchs of some sort. There were twenty-two men, young and muscular, and all of them one-legged Himantopedes. All of them were dead. They were lying in an orderly circle about the large countersunk bath in the center of the domed chamber, their single feet pointed toward the walls, their shoulders and heads (still with their iron pie-plate helmets strapped to them) under the water, which was strewn with lilies and lily pads. Their weapons were lying next to them, unbloodied and un-nicked. Each man still had his immense wheel-shaped shoe on his one foot, so all of them together looked like a troupe of fallen unicyclists.

Huddled against a far wall of ivory behind a row of ferns and lianas were forty or fifty girls.

Most of the girls were Ur, olive-skinned and dark-haired with attractive facial features: high cheekbones and thick red lips and large, dark eyes. There were a smattering of Caucasians, brunettes and blondes and redheads, and a number of Negroes ranging from coffee-colored to dark chocolate, and at least one serpent-girl with a voluptuous bosom, a tiny waist, and a Hindu caste-mark on her brow. I did not see a single girl of Oriental extraction, however.

And most of them were way too young. I am not a good judge of age, but they looked as if they were mostly between fourteen and sixteen, with maybe twelve or fifteen girls old enough to vote. Some of the girls looked to be as young as twelve.

They were all (including the gem-studded serpent-girl) dressed in the same white sleeveless tunic with wide black belts cinched tight to bring out their figures, to the extent that they had one. All were barefoot (except the gem-studded serpent-girl). The garb was not particularly flattering, but the cumulative effect was the same you see looking at a line of airline stewardesses, or cocktail waitresses, or anything from the old days when girls used to have “-esses” after their names, where the whole looks more attractive than the sum of the individuals, merely by having all the pretty young things in uniform.

They were all made up heavily.

Now, I know it takes girls hours to get their faces adorned with blush and mascara and lipstick and whatnot, and to fiddle with their hair and wash and condition and highlight and knead and roll and bake to perfection, and perfumize with throat-spray and hair-spray and armpit-spray and behind-the-knee spray and eyeliner and de-eyeliner, and lash-curler, pluck out eyebrows and paint them back in and whatever else girls do that no man should ever know. Hours.

That meant these girls here were just the ones on call. The ones waiting to be sent for.

One more thing. They all wore black metal collars around their throats as if they were dogs.

I shouted back for the others. “There are half-a-hundred girls in here! How are we going to get them all out?”

All the girls huddled up against the wall now quailed and shrank at my voice. I remembered the way Abby had also flinched at my shout. I wondered what kind of world this was, where everyone who was small and weak expected to be hit.

With an effort, I choked anger to silence, but I could not get control of my breath. This tickling or tingling sensation was crawling across my scalp: if my wiry stand-up hair had not already been on edge, it would have bristled like the mane of a lion.

Ossifrage and Nakasu were gazing at me with surprise or puzzlement. Maybe they came from worlds where child brides were a normal thing, and chattel slavery, and torture and rape and statutory rape, and chaining up children like dogs, after tarting them up like streetwalkers.

Foster had vanished. I could see his shadow on the floor stones next to me, so he had vanished but not vanished. You know what I mean. The shadow was of an archer with an arrow to his ear, longbow bent in a mighty, tense, yet steady arc. He had faded and readied his shot because he thought my shout was a danger warning.

Abby was not looking at me. She was staring at the corpses of the guards lying so neatly and nicely in a circle, with no sign of struggle, around the central lily pond.

I followed her gaze. No, she was not looking at the men. There was something alive under the water.

4. Emergence Emergency

The crown of her head, her lovely eyes with eyelashes sparkling with droplets, the perfect tip-tilted nose, the red-lipped and mysterious smile of Penelope Dreadful rose from the waters in the center of expanding concentric rings. Her blonde hair was darkened and pasted close to her skull by the water, and the trickling wetness caressed her soft skin as she rose.

Then came her ivory neck, beautiful and proud as a swan’s, but circled, as were the other girls here, by a cruel metal collar. There was a ring in the collar’s front that lightly rested against the thumbprint-shaped indent atop her breastbone.

Her athletic shoulders came next, followed by a pair of clavicles like delicate strokes an artist might use to underline the lovely line of those shoulders.

And then the water rose slightly as if in joy and was swept aside to allow the magnificent curve of her breasts to surface. I wondered if the water had magnified them somehow; they seemed bigger than before. More likely it was just the small white shift she wore was clinging so tightly and wetly to her upper body.

Of the slenderness of her waist, the firm swell of her hips, or the taut beauty of her legs, words fail me. Can perfection be described?

She turned away as she stood, presenting a sight nearly as glorious as before. From her darkened hair hanging down her back lingering streams of water fell, and formed silvery oxbows and digressions along the curve of her backside.

Facing away from me, Penny cupped her hands before her nose and mouth, bent over, and hawked like a choking bullfrog before vomiting a considerable quantity of water out of her lungs. Also her stomach, her intestines, and quite possibly her spleen, judging by how long it took before she stood up and turned around again, teary-eyed and wiping her mouth with the back of her hand.

I admit, that sort of spoiled the mood.

5. Thunder-Thief

At this point, Foster had dispersed his cloud or ended his spell or fumbled and dropped it because he was clearly visible again. That is, as visible as a man in a mask and goggles and hood can be.

Foster’s lenses as well as the eyes of Abby and Nakasu were staring at me, and Ossifrage must have had something in both eyes, because he had his thumb and forefinger rubbing their tear-ducts, and crow’s feet had crinkled the corners. Maybe he had a headache.

Turning and stepping toward Penny, Foster Hidden raised his hand in salute and said, “I am not Luke Skywalker, but I’m here to rescue you!”

Fortunately for him, I am of the Host that Yearns for Death in Vain, not the Host that Shoots Radioactive Lasers from Eyesockets, because that spared his life just then. He stole my thunder!

Penelope said briskly, “Nonsense, my dear Knight of the Nocturnal. No one can leave this chamber while wearing a collar like this, whether we are hidden from the Astrologers or not. No art of mine and none the Wisecraft know can undo them. But no matter! I am not your concern.” To Abby she said: “I sent Wild Eyes to summon those of you loyal to the Wise to this chamber, so that I could give you the instructions on how to smuggle the Cloudwalker,” (she nodded toward Ossifrage), “to Cush. Also, I have arranged for an Immortal of Cain’s Curse,” (she nodded at me), “to be rescued, because he otherwise created dangers for us. He will be an asset in our struggles against the Dark Tower …” (She looked sharply at Foster.) “… But praytell why, Sir Knight, are you here? I was not expecting one of your Order. In fact, I am rather surprised.”

Foster saluted. “Uh, ma’am, I am actually a squire, not a knight. … uh… I am helping out with Ossifrage — that is what Ilya calls him, since his name is unpronounceable — and I am not here representing any ….”

While he spoke, her eyes narrowed into emerald glittering slits. “I know that voice! Eflast Falinn? Is that you? What are you doing here?You creeping little thief!”

Some women are beautiful when they are angry: Penny was magnificence incarnate.

Her blush of anger not only pinked her cheeks, but also her neck and shoulders and almost reached the upper curve of her breasts. Her eyes flashed with vivid green, and her bosom heaved so much that I thought her tunic, which did not look so sturdy to begin with, was about to tear open at the seams. Sort of like a feminine version of when Bill Bixby turns into the Hulk, but if the flesh exposed were pink, buxom and mammalian instead of monstrous, muscular and green.

The left half of my brain wanted to see that happen more than I wanted life itself, and the right half told me to sober up and act like a man, so it was a tie. And I suppose the one brain cell where I store my microscopic conscience got the tie-breaking vote. The verdict was to grab her and break out of here before she burst out of something.

And her anger at Foster inspired me. You creeping little… ah, music to mine ears! He stole my thunder, but she flattened him with lightning.

Foster had lowered his hood and raised his goggles, “Yes, it is me. I am not representing the Knightly Brotherhood of the Dark Mist.”

“Then who sent you?” she demanded. “I thought the High Council specifically said this mission was to be handled by the sea-maidens, not by the thralls of the dark elves! This is a matter for naval intelligence, not the secret service! Does Riphath want to reignite the strife with Cush?”

“Who cares who sent me? No matter who sent me, you cannot seriously be expecting us to leave you here …”

I had heard enough. I did not care about their squabbles, and I sure as heck was not leaving her here, or anywhere on this world.

I started forward, I made a huge splash when I entered the pool, and my hauberk rang and clattered around me. I had yanked up my sword, scabbard and baldric and all, and clasped it under my armpit, holding it high so it would not be wetted. (My other arm I had shrugged back through the armhole into the sleeve, and the cunning armor once again slackened and then cinched up to accommodate me.)

When I came with a slosh and wave to Penny in the soft twilight of the falling sawdust clouds, I loomed over her.

I was kind of surprised yet again at how short she was. I don’t think I ever stood this close to her, so I never really compared heights. She had to tilt her head back to look at me, and I suddenly found myself unsettled by the mad impulse to kiss her.

But instead, I looked her in the eyes, and I put out both hands and took her by the shoulders. I cupped her wet and warm and naked shoulders beneath my giant, clumsy hands, and felt the nearness of her presence almost as if it were electricity. I was going to drag her from that pool, this place, and this Dark Tower, by brute force if need be. Brute force, after all, was my one true talent.

Staring into her eyes was like drowning in an ocean. But I focused on my mission and addressed her in a voice firm with determination. “Never fear! I can rescue you! I vow it. Come with me. We are hidden from the …”

She softly cut in “… Hidden from the eyes and arts of the Astrologers? Yes, I do know, thank you kindly. It was I who sent my hobby, who can escape their gaze partly, to find that young lady there.” (She meant Abby.) “Hope Truly Seen, we call her. She is one, the only one, who escapes their gaze altogether. My familiar led her to you.”

Penny smiled an impish little smile.

“Therefore, technically, I rescued you, not the other way around, young Mister Marmoset.”

Wow. Everyone was stealing my thunder today.

6. Safe in Chains With Books

Penny continued, “I am safe, or will be, once you depart. I have made my own arrangements to escape. It will take time, perhaps years, but if I am forced to be the concubine of some high-placed general or Astrologer, I know an art whose virtue will allow me to open the doors and enter their great library, the archive of all archives, which contains all the copies of all the volumes, codices, librums, grimoires, analects and folios of forty worlds…”

In an act of un-Ilya-like self-control, I took my hands off her naked shoulders and tucked my grandfather’s sword into the crook of one elbow to keep the blade from dipping in the water. With my other hand I took her by the arm just above her elbow to help her up out of the pool. She had the sexiest elbows I had ever seen.

“I don’t get you,” I said as I lifted her over the lip of the pool. Then we were on the tiles, facing each other, and the water drops made little tapping noises as they struck the marble floor. “You are talking about letting them turn you into a harem slave and broodmare so that you can read some books?”

“Not just books!” she said with a strange light in her eyes. “Books to end the war! The origin of the deadly Daevastra weapon from Vasumati, or the inextinguishable Agneyastra! The secrets of magnetic vitalism discovered by the Catoudaei from Ashkinaz! The lore of creating earthquakes which is the closely guarded secret of the Eskimo Warlocks of Noj—all this would be mine. And the lost love poems of Anacreon, which vanished from our times and worlds, and the writings of Agatharchides about the Erythraean Sea.”

“So—hold on,” I interrupted her erudite gushing. “How does the lost love poems of whoevertheheck help with the war effort?”

“A girl has to have something to read between deployments,” she sniffed. “The enemy are not infallible. One day I will be uncollared, and Wild Eyes, hidden all that time in the clouds of the twilight, will emerge. I need no rescue. You must complete the mission. Unless you actually have a way to get this collar off? Do you know how they work? We don’t have metal in my world.”

I heard myself blathering, “I know … I know I have not come all this way for nothing! I’ll … I’ll … I’ll think of something…. Just give me a sec …. Hold on …”

Penny turned her eyes sideways away from me, and made a little delicate gesture with her hand, twining a lock of her wet hair around her finger. “It seems the brave janitor come to rescue me is unprepared. Sad to see such fervor go to waste. But, fear not! For you can indeed help me!” She gazed up at me, and it was like seeing a pair of green spotlights, dazzling. “Take over my work here! See it gets done! I certainly don’t trust a robber to manage things.” She darted a dark glance at Foster, who smiled an engaging smile and raised both eyebrows, in a look of pretend innocence.

“But—!” I stepped forward another half step, and now I really was looming, like it or not, over her.

“But me no butting!” she snapped, eyes flashing, “I am ordering you!”

How quickly her moods changed baffled me. She had turned stern and imperious in an instant. Penny raised her chin, to give me that look older women give foolish young boys, but maybe it did not quite work. She was half-naked, and in her clinging and transparent wet shift, more than half visible, and I was standing too close, so for a moment, for the smallest possible moment, there was something in her expression—maybe it was just a slight parting of the lips—a slight dilation of the pupils—a slight flare of the nostrils—

Or maybe it was my imagination.

“Why not just go out with me?” I said.

“Go out with you?” She blinked, and then her mood changed again, and she arched an eyebrow in mock surprise. “I am flattered, but this is hardly the time…”

I gritted my teeth. “Can’t you be serious! I mean walk out with me? With us! The way we came in?” I said, hooking my thumb over my shoulder at the broken balcony doors above and behind me.

“I am quite serious. I have no power over cold iron.” Penelope touched her hand to the collar around her neck. I saw no lock nor seam, so there was no way to undo the hateful thing. I realized it was the living metal, not what she had called it, iron.

I could not keep my eyes on her slender neck. I had to turn my head aside, because otherwise a magnetic force yanking my gaze to her generous cleavage (a part of her body where the still-trickling waters were gathering together rather than fanning out, as on her hips and thighs). Instead I looked at the dead men in the pool.

The soldiers were lying there, unwounded, serene, with their shoulders just over the brink of the pool, their heads bent down and faces below the surface, smiling. Their mouths and noses were submerged less than an inch under water, but it only takes an inch to drown.

“Who killed those guards?” I started to say. But my tongue, perhaps more perceptive, slipped, and I said you rather than who. It did not come out as a question. You killed those guards.

She smiled a cold little smile then, and she looked so dangerous and so mysterious, I realized that Penny was not really Penny. The real young lady here was Parthenope. She was an agent for some power involved in a war between universes. She was like my sword, steel hidden under a fair sheath.

How old was she? If she had told the newspaper truly, she was only two years older than me, but now that distance suddenly seemed unbridgeable. And who knows, she might even be older.

Could her damned talking, rat-eating carrion bird have been right about me? Was she too far above me for me to cherish any hope?

Penny said, “I’ve had time to think this through. Really, I have. They shan’t kill me. I am the only one of my kind they’ve ever captured. A few months, or a year, I may have to endure, at most.” She smiled sadly. “But now that I have saved you, if you are grateful, as grateful as a gentleman should be, in return I ask that you must promise to carry out the mission. The man you call Ossifrage must be smuggled to safety.”

“But—”

“More buts—!” she sighed in exasperation. “You never talked this much back at the Museum!”

“Then, I was the cleaning man. Now, I am the hero.” I said it without thinking.

I have no idea how stupid it sounded, but she raised both eyebrows, and little impish dimples appeared at the side of her mouth as she suppressed a laugh she was too well-bred to let loose.

“I see the prospect frightens you,” she said. “Don’t fret! You and the others can escape easily, you know. Just jump from a window. Ossifrage can bear you aloft.”

“I won’t leave you!”

“Boys!” She held up her little soft hand in a stern gesture, cutting me off. “Don’t make me sound harsh, young man, but you are an idiot, were you informed of that fact? Or are you too much of an idiot to know? Without you in their hands, I will not be tortured. This is all your fault.”

“This is my fault?”

“Man of you to admit it!” She half-lowered her lids in derision.

“How? How is any of this my fault?”

She said coolly, “First, if you had not come to the Museum, the Astrologers would not have foreseen my attempt to open the gate. At that moment, I was hidden in the shadow Wild Eyes cast. You were not. Your fumbling attempt to rescue me and protect me did nothing but summon the invasion fleet. Second, if you had not decided to develop a foolish schoolboy crush on me, the Lord of Magicians would not have thought of breaking you by threatening me. That is the only reason I had to get you out of that cage. The moment you were free, I was safe. Imprisoned, enslaved, but alive and quite safe.”

“Safe? You killed these guards!” I pointed at the one-legged men, all still armed, all drowned. “You have to flee now.”

“The Dark Tower foreknew their deaths and let them die. They were also slaves, none of them worth a silver talent. But I am worth many talents of gold to them. Do you understand how cold these people are, how their knowing the future makes them cold? To them, everything has already happened long ago, and nothing can change, and nothing means anything! As for you, big awkward surface-dweller, you cannot defy them. You cannot fight them.”

“For you, I will!”

“You don’t even know me!”

“I know what my heart tells me!”

“Lub-a-dub? 120 over 80?”

“I know you own more shoes than any girl in Oregon. You kept sixty pairs just at the museum. And I know you are a mermaid who works for the Wisecraft.”

“What planet am I from?”

“Planet? Um…” Foster had not mentioned a name for her world.

“What’s my mother’s name?

“Well, uh.” I stammered, “I mean, uh, ….”

“That’s her. Willamina from planet Um. So you know everything about me. You want to do something for me? You want to save me? Then go! I cannot leave here, so to save me, you must go!”

7. A Crack in the Door

She raised one eyebrow like Spock, and for a moment, she did not look like the unearthly walking mermaid, and she was just Penny again, the girl from the newspapers.

For a moment, she was once again the young woman I so worried about as her father slowly drifted deeper and deeper each day into mental illness.

I remembered one evening, after her father had suffered a particularly bad episode, and she had called friends to take him home because he could not be trusted with his car keys. I had been walking with a mop and bucket down the hall and past her office door, silently swabbing. The door was open a crack. She was sitting at her desk, illumed by one lamp in a dark room, facing the dark window, with her head in her hands, her shoulders shaking. I tiptoed away, not wanting to intrude.

But I wanted to protect her. To save her. There was nothing I could do to save her father from his insanity. I hated the sensation of helplessness.

Now it was the same thing again. I was helpless to help the helpless girl.

8. Off the Clock

I wondered what I could say to snap her out of this lunatic idea of staying behind bars. There had to be a way.

“Miss—”

“Don’t call me Miss Dreadful. It sounds…”

“Miss Prisoner!” I snapped. “Time is short. Some of my friends here might be able to …”

“Ilya!” she snapped back, trying to draw herself up (which only arched her back more, and made her look more fragile and lovely) “I know who these people are and what they can do! I just told you, remember? Well, not him—why doesn’t he have a head? And why are you grinning?”

“You called me by name. I didn’t think you knew it.”

She looked flustered and dropped her eyes to stare at my sternum (which was eye-level for her) and tucked a clingy wet strand of her sopping hair behind her ear.

“Never mind Knack,” I said. “He was built by Volkswagen, and they put the engine in the trunk. Speaking of engines, why are we not jogging at full speed away from this location, before more guards arrive?”

“I told you!” she said angrily, rising her eyes again to mine. I am not sure I had ever seen her looking angrily at me before. Strangely enough, it made her seem fragile. The mocking smile made her seem like a person from another world, someone far beyond reach. But once she started raising her voice (and flashing her eyes and heaving her bosom, etc.) she was no different than arguing with my stubborn cousin Alyonushka. “And I have very little time to explain what needs to be done. So I am ordering you to—”

“Whoa, whoa! Or should I say, since you’re a sailor girl instead of a cowgirl, belay that talk? Lady, I am not on the clock right now, and we are not in the Museum, and this is not you telling me to put a second coat of wax on the floor!”

Her eyes narrowed and glittered. “Are you still grousing about that? It needed a second coat of wax.”

“Sure, but not right before opening time, when visitors might slip and fall! That forty-weight shine takes an hour to dry. Do you think I don’t know how to do my j— ah, yes, ma’am! You are right about the wax! You have absolute authority to do what you like with the Museum, and I recommend setting even more deadly traps for unwary tourists when we get back — but first we've got to get back! Now, put on some clothes— if they gave you any clothes— and prepare to march out of this hellhole, or I swear by Saint Arthelais of Benevento, I will tuck you under my arm and haul you out of here kicking and screaming!”

It must have made an impression on her. Penny raised her hand and tried to slap me, which I hoped was a good sign. I mean, a girl only does that if she likes you, right?

I suppose I should have let the blow land, because you really are not supposed to shout at girls, but her hand was moving so slow, I figured she was telegraphing it on purpose, and wanted me to block it. I raised my right palm to pattycake the incoming rush of slender, soft fingers with painted nails, but somehow her wrist intercepted my palm, and my fingers closed, and I had her trapped. Her wrist was so small and delicate that it almost made me dizzy. It was like grabbing a flower stem. I was ashamed my hand was so big and rough and dark compared to her hand. And it was so warm.

She made a noise of irritation in her nose, and yanked her hand out of my grip. Or tried to. All that happened was that it made her shrug her shoulders, which caused a jiggle to travel down the curves of her half-naked and all-wet body, and she made a little gasp that sounded unintentionally sensuous.

When she yanked, it was like yanking against a stone statue, and this made her shoulders tilt one way and her hips tilt the other, displaying her figure to her best advantage. It was almost as if nature designed women to look good struggling in a man’s grasp.

9. Slave-Collar

At this point, when I thought that thought, somewhere in my brain, I came to the realization that boys my age should probably not be allowed anywhere near girls. Men should not be allowed to see women until we are old enough to be President. In the meantime, we should be kept in military bases or in the field, killing pirates and Communists, drug runners, pantomime clowns and other lowlife undesirables, so we can have a healthy outlet for all that built-up sexual energy and aggressiveness. That is what the Victorians did, and they conquered most of the surface area of the planet.

Embarrassed, I let go of her wrist. “Sorry, Miss Dreadful.”

She said with icy calm, “Do restrain your instinctive inclinations, Tarzan. You are not carrying me anywhere. Did you not understand what I said before? The collar has been told to constrict for each step I take, or am carried, beyond the deadline surrounding this place.”

“Wh-what?”

“The one-legged guards torment the harem by forcing us over the line and watching us choke and faint as we struggle to return to our confinement. The collar has also been told to pinch my head off, if by any means I depart to an even greater distance. That includes stepping through a Moebius gate.”

I opened my mouth, she held up her hand. Her fingers were near my mouth, and for a moment, I thought she was going to touch my lips.

“And do not suggest to have the foreverborn girl use her blade,” she said, “It would be like wrapping my neck in the coil of an electric stove.”

“I have the right tools for the job,” I said. I put my hand into the secret pocket on my utility belt where the hacksaw was stowed, or where I thought it was stowed, and triumphantly pulled out the small ferro-cerium rod instead. I stared at it stupidly for a moment, and began rifling through my jacket pockets.

Penny added, “Your diamond drills and blowtorches and other technomancy of your Earth are in vain against a metal that can grow red hot at will, or grow spikes inward, or repair cuts faster than any chisel can cleave. You assume the metal will stand still. This collar will punish me for any attempts to remove it.” She touched the hard dull surface unconsciously with fingers that suddenly seemed very slender, white, gentle, and precious. I wanted no harm to come to that soft hand.

I was appalled for a speechless moment at the horror of it. It was like a terrorist chaining a dynamite vest around a girl’s neck, wired to blow. No wonder all the girls in the room were backed up against the far wall and quaking.

I looked at the flock of cowering, half-clothed girls again. None of them would raise their eyes to meet mine. They were school-aged kids. They should have been worried about nothing worse than learning how to paint fingernails or keep an embarrassing diary. They should have been home with their folks, fretting over algebra homework. They should not have been chattel in a whorehouse or prisoners on death row.

“So you see,” Penny began calmly, “If I cannot be saved from the danger you put me in, you must take it upon yourself to complete my mission. Listen carefully. The forces of the Dark Tower have many of the twilight gates from their world watched, but not all. At the mouth of the Great River, Euphrates, there is a pirate captain with an ironclad submarine, trustworthy, I hope … Are you listening to me?”

I had not been listening, but staring at the floor. Now I looked up, grinning.

“I can break you out of here,” I told her.

10. Nice Plan

Penny looked at me with surprise for a moment, and then a hopeful look appeared in her lovely green eyes, but then, very quickly, her face froze and she forced her expression back into a calmly dignified one.

“Seriously. I think I might be able to get everyone out of here.”

“I may be able to help,” she said. “My songs are strong! I have been trained for this work by the wise of Thalassa and of Amorreus and of Cush.”

“Fine, but stop talking and listen to me for a second.”

Foster broke in. His voice is so smooth and musical, it never sounds like he is interrupting when he is. “It means, genetically speaking, she kicks ass. Her father is a rocket scientist and her mother is a brain surgeon.”

I was not sure if he were kidding or exaggerating or what. “What does that have to do with what we are talking about? It is only a matter of time before someone notices the dead people and comes here, or the shift changes, or the local torture theater and go-go dancing club needs a new virgin, or something!”

Penny said briskly, “Squire Falinn is not kidding you. I am the youngest of my order ever to have achieved the master rank in three disciplines as a siren, as a theriomancer, and as a strega. That is why my familiar can speak like a man and enter the mists of the dream realm, and why I was sent here. Of mermaids, only I can elude the stars. This is why you should heed my voice.”

I had the sensation as if she were slipping higher and higher up an invisible ladder, farther out of my grasp. I had been intimidated by her being in the newspapers, or being the youngest girl ever to sail around the world. But now she was the youngest magical spy-girl ever to infiltrate the Dark Tower.

No wonder she was confident. Or cracked.

Foster said to her lightly, “Well, I have ranks in three of the occult crafts as well, I’ll remind you, missy! The Dark Elves taught me the secrets of mist, twilight, and of doppelganger. So, by that logic, you should listen to me, not me to you!”

“Mine is a mermaid cap!” she said proudly. “Woven of the hidden songs of deepest sea!”

“I have a tarn cap!” he said, more proudly. “Forged of hidden fires from deepest earth! With matching tarn cloak!”

With her little fists clenched at her hips, Penny stamped her foot in anger, something I had never seen a modern woman do. Her bare foot made no noise on the marble, but her whole body bounced buxomly at the moment, and Foster was struck mute, staring in awe at her cleavage for an unboyscout-like half-second before jerking his eyes back up to hers. I selected the spot on his jaw where I would clout him.

“Eflast! You will obey orders! You and Ossifrage will descend from the windows of the Tower to the Great River Euphrates, to the rendezvous spot! You must take this—” she glared at me with eyes like emerald lasers, so that I froze with my fist half-cocked “—this janitor with you! With him gone, I am safe! Too valuable to be slain!”

He opened his mouth to give some smart-alecky answer, but now her eyes glittered like green fire, and her voice was like a silver dirk sliding softly up under the ribs, “Or would you have me tell the Dark Grandmaster of your Order that you are absent without leave, and have violated your fealty? Well…? I am not the one you should fear. What price do Dark Elves demand to teach their arts to mortal men? I recall the clever trick you used to escape paying it, gypsy boy.”

Foster looked sheepish while looking cowed, and maybe there were a few more barnyard animals thrown in to his expression at the same time. I unclenched my fist, not wanting to jar that look off his face, since I was enjoying it.

He turned and said something in Dutch to Ossifrage. The old man said something back in that language, wrinkled his face in a look of contempt, and spat on the ground.

Foster raised his eyebrows and shrugged, answered briefly and turned back to Penny. “Master Ossifrage says he and She-Monkey flew to the Great River and to the Grove of Ningirsu earlier today. The grove was the rendezvous spot, correct?”

Penny looked worried, and put her hand to her iron-circled throat. “Why? What has happened?”

“Prince Dakkar was beset by the sea-monsters and sea-machines of the Magicians when he sent his side boat to shore. She-Monkey and Ossifrage were standing in the air, hidden in a cloud. At She-Monkey’s plea, Ossifrage made the flotilla of the Magicians too light to dive. Ossifrage parted the clouds, and Dakkar looked up with his spyglass and saw the two of them. Ossifrage gave the agreed upon signal, but Dakkar climbed through a hatch in the deck, turned his iron ship, and fled, seeking the twilight beneath the sea.”

Penny looked lost, shocked, woebegone. “What does this mean?” she said in a small voice.

(When she looked like that, I wanted to take her in my arms and comfort her, and kiss her trembling lip. Of course, I am a guy. Guy-chemicals in the glands influence my thinking.)

“It means,” said Foster with a sigh, “That he’s abandoned us. Ossifrage calls him a craven. Ossifrage says he and She-Monkey went to the Nine-Star-Aligned Chamber to check the horoscopes for another way out.”

Penny whispered, “It cannot be true!”

Foster said, “I can vouch for what he says. I was there, in the side boat before a plesiosaur in barding capsized the side boat and one by one swallowed the sailors as they floundered in the river-water. I did not see Ossifrage or She-Monkey, and I know no one saw me, which was good.

“It was good: because the dinosaurs, coracles, squids and struthopodes were in the water; beneath the water were unseen ashrays and bunyips with steel-capped tusks uglier than bull walruses and more huge; in the air were the creepy little pig-face men with flying ears; and on the shore were the wise-eyed mastodons wielding pikes in their trunks and carrying iron castles filled with Pygmaioi archers on their hairy backs. All were looking for survivors from the capsized boat.

“But someone must have seen me, because when I entered the Grove of Ningirsu, instead of you waiting, there was a Macrocephali with a head larger than a pumpkin and a body smaller than a starved monkey sitting in a sedan-chair carried by slaves. He must have figured out where I was, because next I knew, Calingi with flame-wands were burning the grass and topiary bushes all around and under me, and they lit the whole sacred acre on fire. A squad of Soracte fire-walkers came dancing over the tiptops of the flames toward the sound of my screaming ouch, ouch, ouch. Then when I tried to climb a tree to get above the fire, a trio of Oeonae hidden in the branches snared me with lassoes woven with spells and starlight and the darkness of dusk drawn from the star of Hesperides. Their spell drove the moonlight in my tarn cloak away, and so I was caught. I made my face like theirs, which fooled them for a moment, because they are stupid, but then they passed around one of those accursed eggs they eat, and when I could not take a bite, they knew I was human.”

He was silent a moment, frowning, and said reluctantly, “I am afraid … very afraid … This means that the Dark Tower has been anticipating all the raids and sinkings of Prince Dakkar all this time, all along, but just letting him think he was foreverborn.”

A grim silence hung in the air for a moment between Penny and Foster.

I said, “Abby tells me if you commit sins, it breaks the — uh, it weakens the effect.” I had been about to say breaks the spell, but I thought weakens the effect sounded more scientific. “So piracy should have been right out. How many forever people are there? You said there was only one.” This last was directed at Penny. “Where do they come from?”

Penny said, “Only one who is loyal to the Wisecraft. They come from the world called Tharsis, which has been invaded years ago, but is not yet fully conquered. I don’t recall what the deviation event was for that branch.”

Foster said, “I know. In their history, John the Baptist appeared two thousand years ago, but their promised Messiah has not arrived yet. The Wise of that world are called Therapeutae, because of their ablutions and healing baths, and they foreswear the love of women and the fruit of the vine. They hunted down and destroyed all other forms of the Craft save their own. The world is said to be wealthy beyond dreams, and ruled from a city of silver towers, called Agadir.”

Abby stepped closer and said softly, “Your pardon, great and wise ones, noble sea-witch, noble ghost-walker, noble abomination. May I speak?”

“Yes,” I said, “Provided you never think you have to ask again. We’re brother and sister, remember?”

Abby said slowly. “The sea captain. Is his name truly Dakkar? It sounds much like a word in the One Language. Daqqu-re’u. It is short for Daqqu-re’u-hinnu.”

When Abby said it, of course I understood the meaning. Re’u-hinnu meant skipper, a ship’s master. Daqqu meant the smallest crumb, the pulverized, the left-over, the remnant. It meant something too small to notice: a nobody, a nameless man.

Captain No One. It was a strange name for a sea pirate.

I said, “Who is he?”

Foster said, “Our getaway van. Which got away without us.”

Abby said, “Never have I seen the Sea Pirate of the Ocean of Uncreation. His name is known and feared throughout many immensities.”

Foster said to me, “The reason why the Dark Tower is afraid of him is that he stole the latest, biggest, best and most baddest badass dreadnaught, chock-full of experimental weapons and hexes, right out of the shipyards of the Dark Tower where she was just built, and during the theft he turned the super-weapons on the ships still being built, and blew them to scrap as well as the headquarters where the plans were stored. And he took the naval engineer who designed the vessel with him as his first mate. It was a huge slap in the mouth for Anshargal, the warlord here, and an even more huge kick in the — uh — pants for the Enmeduranki, the chief of Astrologers, because no one predicted it. That is why we thought Dakkar was a foreverborn.”

To Abby I said, “Did Ossifrage lead you to the rendezvous with Dakkar, or did you lead him?”

She said, “I led him.”

“How did you know where it was?”

“The Big Man told me to meet the Pirate in the Grove of Ningirsu, and seek escape through him.” When she said it, I knew that Ningirsu meant Battle-god.

I said to Foster, “Is her Big Man one of your Wisecraft? How many groups are there? Can they help us? Smuggle us off the planet?” I was thinking maybe the ratcatcher bird could carry a message to him, and he could talk sense into Penny’s pretty, blonde, bookworm head.

Foster said something to her in a language that sounded like Italian with a German accent.

She answered back, “Coppersmith.”

He turned to me, “Monkey-Girl was taken by the local Romany away from her master Slaughterbench a few years back, and adopted as one of us. The local tribe is of the Calderash clan.”

“Gypsies stealing children? I thought that was a myth.”

“Monkey-Girl is famous throughout the Tower. She whose destiny no star can see is the only free soul in this whole world, so, naturally, she had to be one of us. Rom Baro is our title for whatever man of the tribe by strength, luck, cunning, or merit wins the heart of the people, and speaks for them, and leads.”

“You don’t have elections? Royal families?”

There was a lilt of laughter in his tone. “We are a free people. The free people. Rules are for chumps.”

I said wryly, “So you make it a rule not to make rules?”

Foster said, “Something like that. The local Romany tribes would not be able to help us off-world. The Astrologers know where all the gates are, and when they are fated to open and shut.” He turned to Penelope, “I thought if Sea-Prince Dakkar selected the landing, I could get ashore unforeseen by star-mages, and with my cape of mist, unseen by men.”

Penny said sharply, “You’ve created another reason to reopen old quarrels among the wise. The Nightriders will be forced to repudiate your trespass, or else back you and defy the Empress of Undersea. Either way, they are shamed.”

He shrugged and smiled a charming smile. “First, the Prussians are not my people, as you just reminded me. I merely live among them. Second, the Nightriders are not involved. Only me. I am of the free people. When the Wise are unwise, it is the way of the Romany to remind you.”

Interesting. I wondered how divided this Wisecraft was. I said, “Hold it. This interdimensional spy network you told me about didn’t send you after all? Why did you come?”

He looked me in the eye and straightened his shoulders. “A Scout is trustworthy, loyal, brave. I was not going to leave my patrol leader a prisoner in the Darkest Tower. And I never again want to hear you say You should have been there. I’m here. I’m here for you, buddy.” He raised his fist, and I bumped my fist into it.

“Troop Two!” he said.

“Second to none!” I answered.

Penny said angrily, “That is enough! MY plan—”

I caught her eye and spoke softly to her in that way my dad sometimes can do, when speaking softly is louder than shouting. “Your plan to stay captive long enough to sneak into the library would not do anything for the other young ladies imprisoned here with you, would it? Your fellow harem girls.”

The look of surprise on her features was priceless.

“You were just thinking about you,” I added. “Weren’t you?”

Her face fell. “Okay, cleaning boy,” she said, when she could raise her eyes to mine again. “You may be smarter than you look. Tell me what plan you have.”

“Are there more girls?” I pressed, “Ones who are resting, or drugged, or something? Don't you think we should help them escape?”

Penny said, “There are two other watches of slave-girls, one hundred fifty in all. This is the maiden wing: we’re all virgins.”

Well. That was more information than I'd bargained for. It was also the moment that I knew she was not from Earth. Girls on my world are ashamed of being virgins.

I turned. “Abby, repeat this to the party. Ossifrage has to levitate back to the aerial burial chamber we just left. Nakasu has to go with him not just to lift the debris off the coffin, but to hold the lid shut so that the Cold One does not get out. Abanshaddi has to go with them both so she can use her needle to point the way. Foster, you will go and keep everyone unseen, so you guys can go in, get the coffin, and get out, and get back here lickety-split. And finally, Miss Dreadful—”

“Please don’t call me that,” she said. “It’s not my name.”

“Very well, Penny,” I said, and perhaps my voice betrayed how much I enjoyed saying her first name. It seems she noticed, for she blushed again. “Penny, your job is to get Wild Eyes to gimmick the needle so it points to the right place.”

Foster said, “Did you call us the party?”

I said defensively, “I play D&D. If I didn’t, I’d call us something else. But, come on. Abanshaddi is the thief, Ossifrage is the cleric, Nakasu is the fighting man, and I am the Highlander.”

Abby stamped her foot angrily. “I am not a thief! You impugn my name!”

“Sorry. You’re the spy,” I said.

“That’s not a character class.” said Foster.

“I think Spy is a character class in Fourth Edition,” I pointed out.

“No, I meant Highlander. Besides, what am I?”

“Uh, Ranger? Druid? You’ve got a longbow.”

Penny said, her voice dripping sarcasm. “He’s the burglar. Just not a nice one like Bilbo.” This disoriented me for a moment, because I was so accustomed to thinking of her as a sea-witch from another dimension, I forgot that she was an Earth girl, too. Maybe she had time to read The Hobbit on her yachting trip around the world.

This thought prompted me to ask, “Penny, by the way, why did you sail around the world? If you are not from our dimension, you wouldn’t care about our world records. Or do you sail around the world on all worlds?”

Penny said, “It was to draw a ward, a charmed circle. The only way to inscribe the whole world was to go all the way around the globe. This is why the Dark Tower cannot gain a proper foothold there. A power hostile to me reached across the dimensions through wind and wave and capsized my boat. Who it was, I have no idea. Luckily, you still have some dolphins on your world who remember the old ways. With their help, I found the broken spirit threads. I was able to continue the magic circle from the position of the break, and the Moon gave her verdict that the ward was legitimate. It counted. I did not have to go back and redo the whole thing. The hard part was not sailing so quickly and skillfully as to blow my cover. All the seas of all the worlds have songs that are almost the same, but each with its own mood and hue and beauty. The waves tell me of home. I love sailing as much as I love dancing!” She sighed a lonely sigh and shook her head so that her hair made a very slight, wet noise. I knew she had been on Earth for at least five years. I wondered how long it had been since she last saw home.

“I’ve been meaning to ask,” I said, “How can you dance? How do you have legs? Where is your tail?”

She smiled, “Mr. Muromets, it is hardly proper to inquire about a young lady’s tail in such a fashion. Only Wild Eyes can see it.”

Foster saw the dumbfounded look on my face, and said, “She means it is made of dream-stuff called ectoplasm. It is a spiritual tail, so only spirits can see it. It works the same way the feet of an Abarimon work.”

Since I had no idea how the feet of an Abarimon worked, that explanation was as clear as mud.

Penny said, “It was my first big mission! My first solo effort! Mother would be so proud of me. I hope so. She will still criticize me, because that is her way, but deep down, I know.”

“Must be nice having a mother,” I said. “All this time, I thought the Professor was a widower.”

“Perhaps he is; I know nothing of his past. My real father is an aerospace engineer from Togarmah. I suppose I cannot call him a surface-dweller, since he lives in a sky city. And my mother cannot come up on land. Weight problems, you might say.

“In any case,” she continued, “That answers your question. I was not trying to break the record. In fact, I was really trying to avoid the attention, the newspapers, and so on, because I did not want your Church that guards your world to realize who and what I was.”

Abby gave me a smug little smirk. “Virgo. Jupiter ascending and Mercury in retrograde. I told you she was no glory-seeker.”

I said sternly to Abby, “Heroines never say ’I told you so’! It’s petty.”

Abby’s face lit up, “Then… am I a heroine?”

“After saving me from that hellhole?” I exclaimed, “As far as I am concerned, you are Batgirl and Joan of Arc combined!”

Foster said, “I hate to break up the meeting of the mutual admiration society, but what is this plan to break these women out of prison? Robbing coffins?”

Abby said softly to Penny, “Daughter of the Sea, will you call your walking shadow here? We need the winged monster to point the Remembering Needle to the Funerary Chamber, to go and recover the coffin as Ilya the Barbarian has asked.”

Foster snorted and looked at me skeptically. “Wait. What are you going to be doing in the meanwhile, Ilya — here in the harem of silk pillows? While we go off to collect this mysterious coffin o’ fun?”

“I am going to stay here and protect my — uh —”

“Mistress,” said Abby.

“—my boss’s daughter. My plan is to chopify anyone who comes into this room with my mad-leet sword-fu skillz.” I held up Shirabyoshi in her rayskin and silk scabbard, adorned with the Imperial chrysanthemum, and then frowned, wishing someone would explain to me how my grandpa just so happened to get his hands on a magic sword.

“Nice plan,” said Foster. “And why did short stuff call you Ilya the Barbarian?”

“Because I am planning to crush my enemies, see them driven before me, and to hear the lamentation of their women, like any real American would do. Why else?”

“Sorry I asked,” Foster said, “So who or what is in the coffin we are trying to steal?”

“I told you. A Cold One.”

“A what?”

“One of the Host who Quaffs Blood like Wine.”

“All right… but why the hell do we want one?” He glanced at Abby. “Sorry, make that heck.”

Abby waved off his apology. “They are naked horrors that consume the souls of men. The Astrologers put out their eyes, since to meet their gaze is to fall under their charm. They do not age as men do.”

“We are talking about the Hexenvampir then? The pale things that look like human bats?” asked Foster.

“They are pale,” said Abby primly. “And they are unclean.”

Foster said, “Oh, right! Those guys! Well, hel—heck, Ilya, you are coming with us, because you are the only one carrying a crucifix.”

I blinked at him stupidly. “Don’t they worship elves or something on your world? You said. Or did you want to pray the rosary—”

Penny glared at me, irritated. “The Cold One is a nosferatu. A vampire?”

“Oh.” I blinked, a little embarrassed. It seemed kind of obvious in hindsight. “Got it.”

“All mortals carry our lives as if in a wineskin,” Abby said quietly. “And when it is pierced, life runs out, or old age leaves it wrinkled and dry. It is known that there are those who know the secret lore, witches and wise men, who can store a bit of themselves in walking shadows as if in smaller bottles for safekeeping, or to send or to fetch what is desired from the unseen order of being. But the life of the deathless abomination is connected to an unending stream. That is why you, Ilya the Barbarian, are particularly vulnerable to the breed.”

Penny said to Abby. “Please tell the others that we should follow Ilya’s plan. I admit I have no other.” She sighed. “Perhaps the library of all worlds will be open to me at some other time. Eflast, carry Ilya’s crucifix to protect yourself and those with you. You will be safe. Abanshaddi, go with them so the headless giant can talk and listen. The Nosferatu cannot approach you.”

Foster said, “Abanshaddi might be safe, but I won’t be! What good will the crucifix do me? I do not worship the White Christ.”

I said, “Hold up. And you call yourself a Boy Scout? What about being reverent?”

“I am reverent!” he said. “Toward Odin.” Then he turned back to Penny and said, “The crucifix will not repel vampires for me: you have to have faith for that to work.”

Penny raised an eyebrow. “Indeed? Where did you learn this faulty lore?”

“Um…a movie called Fright Night,” he said.

“The moviemakers were likely in the pay of the blood-quaffers, then,” she said.

Foster looked offended. “But it starred Roddy McDowall!”

“Only if the White Christ had never lived on Earth nor died on the Cross would that foolish idea be so. Or do you think it is your own name, your own power, that commands the unclean spirits? If so, then baptisms and marriages and all sacraments blessed by sinful bishops would be invalid: which is absurd.”

I said, “But in D&D, clerics of any alignment can turn undead, with a holy symbol of their god or goddess. It’s pretty generic.”

Foster and Penny both looked at me like I was an idiot.

“Sorry,” I said, shrugging. “Me technomancer. Show me a gun. I know the difference between a clip and a magazine.”

11. Nice Timing

“Why isn’t he coming?” demanded Foster, hooking his thumb at me.

Penny said, “He is staying with me.”

Foster smiled his most winning smile. “No, I think you want me to stay! I’m better looking.”

Yes, he was handsome, and yes, I so wanted to punch him in the face for that fact. If I punched hard enough, he would be less handsome. It seemed a logical thought at the time.

I turned to her. “Wait! Is it so you can tell me this all-important plan for Ossifrage?”

She nodded. “You seem to think you have another way off this planet, now that Dakkar and his ironclad submersible are gone. If you do make it off, you will have to know where to take Ossifrage next, and what the plan is for the Colossus.”

“Why not tell me later?”

She looked off to the left, and lifted one shoulder, saying airily. “We need to be prepared in case, ah…”

“In case my friends don’t make it back? In case you don’t make it out of this room?”

Foster said, “I still don’t understand what is going on. Why are we getting a coffin with a vampire in it?”

I brushed some clinging water droplets off my armor. “I’ll explain as we go. I’m coming with.”

Penny said, “No! I will not allow—”

I whirled on her, angry now. “You want to talk to me now because you don’t have faith in my friends, and you think I might get caught if I go with them. You don’t think I can get you out of this room! You don’t have faith in me that I am going to rescue you!”

She said nothing but looked chagrined.

I said sternly: “I will do all I have said I will do! A Muromets does not compromise his word! My nay is my nay and my yeah is my damn straight!”

She said, “Please spare me the posturing. We are short on time. That is all.”

“That is not all,” I said. “When we get back to Earth, you are going out on a date with me. Dinner and a show, and maybe a ride in a carriage. Or at least a haycart. I’ll be a perfect gentleman.”

That caught her by surprise. She had a confused look on her face, like she did not know whether to be flattered or annoyed, to get angry or to get icy.

She decided on icy and angry. In a voice as cold as an Arctic glacier, she said, “If it were not for your schoolboy crush on me, I would not have been captured. I have the power of deep waters, where no stars shine, and I can hide from them, and could have entered here on my own had I wished, rescued Ossifrage with no aid from you or anyone, and been in no danger of the iron hooks!”

“Miss, if it is my fault you are in danger, it is my responsibility to get you out. And to take you out.”

“How can you think about—” Now it was just anger without ice. She made a little growling noise of frustration. “How can you—! I am on a mission! My first real mission in the field! You don’t know what is at stake!”

I said, “Look, Parthygirl, or whatever your real name is, if you don’t have any faith in me, my attempt to save you will end in miserable lingering painful failure, so you will never get back to Earth and never have to grant what I demand. You can agree to a date without any worries, because the date for the date will never come. Right? If you do have faith in me, well—then you can trust me to behave myself. We share a slab of meat at the steakhouse, a slice of pie, and catch a musical.”

“No one makes musicals anymore,” she said flatly.

“Disney does. We’ll catch a rerun of Beauty and the Beast at the campus theater on cheap seat night. It’ll be appropriate. Unless you think Little Mermaid is better, considering?”

She said, “No. I’ll cook. We’ll watch a black and white at my place. To Have and To Have Not. But in return you agree to carry out the mission to unearth the Colossal Zoetic Panoply from the Chasm of Azin!”

“On one condition,” I said. “You tell me first about my birth and background. Then I’ll decide whether to carry out this mission.”

“Granted,” she said, raising her chin slightly as she spoke.

“Uh. Don’t you need a towel? I mean, I cannot pay close attention, while I am also worried about your–”

“–areolae,” offered Foster.

“–health.” I said smoothly, slapping the back of Foster’s head with my free hand as soundly as I could. “Get moving Fos! Black Hats are all around us, and someone surely saw us throw the hoppy-hopper squad off the brink. Hurry back so I can kick the h—um, heck—out of you for your wiseass mouth.”

I sat down on one of the decorative benches near the pool, looked at Penny, and patted the hard seat next to me.

The Other Sons of Adam

1. How to Sit

Penny sat down next to me.

She seemed a little distracted or confused, although she kept her face straight. First she sat down primly, knees together and feet flat on the floor; then she crossed one leg, which made the absurdly skimpy hem of her shift creep upward on her thigh, which she tried to straighten with her hands. Pulling on the hem of the shift made the transparent, wet, thin fabric cling more tightly to her curves. Then she pulled both legs up and she placed her hands around her ankles, fingers intertwined. Then she blushed, and twisted both legs under her, so she was kneeling on the bench, hips over her heels, knees together. She also did not know what to do with her hands. One moment she had them folded casually in her lap, as if the way she were undressed was no big deal, but then she was tucking strands of sopping hair behind her ear again, but the hair was too heavy at the moment to stay put. Then she started wringing out locks of her hair like you’d wring a stubborn washcloth.

I was not the epitome of aplomb during this moment, exactly, myself. I went over to one of the divans, and pulled up a sheet. It was made of silk. I looked for some fabric that would sop up water better, but there did not seem to be anything in the whole chamber aside from silk and satin. I would have offered her my jacket, but it was under my mail.

I draped the silk bedsheet around her shoulders, cursing myself inwardly for being too cowardly to let my hand linger in the softly-wonderful-shoulder-hugging position for just one more nanosecond. I also did not want to loom over her, but then again I did not want to sit next to her, because you just cannot have a serious conversation with a girl when you can see too much of her. When is the last time you had a deep, philosophical conversation with a Hooter’s waitress?

Next I thought it might be better to loom after all, but then I realized my groin would be right in front of her eyes, and I would have to look down her cleavage again to talk to her. I decided on a knightly compromise. I knelt.

She must have been shorter than I thought, because even with her kneeling on the bench and me on one knee next to it, my eyes were above her shoulder level.

2. The Tree of Life

Penny softly thanked me when I draped the silk around her shoulders. Water stains ruined it immediately, but I figure the cleaning bill would come out of the Dark Tower’s housekeeping budget, so what did I care?

She used a corner to mop unsuccessfully at her hair, but then she gave up on it, and hugged the silken sheet around her, and she looked like a little girl just out of the sea lost in a too-large beach blanket: a pyramid of soft, shining fabric leading up to a wet blonde head.

“So why are you … dressed … like that?” I asked her.

She said, “It’s tradition. Didn’t you watch Return of the Jedi? Female captives get stuck in skimpy outfits and chains.” Then she shivered, and I don’t think it was from the cold and wet. She huddled in on herself, a haunted look to her.

I said, “Enmeduranki told me what they planned to do to you. I am here to prevent that from happening.”

Penny was obviously the kind of girl who does not know how to take being rescued, because all she did was utter a bitter little laugh, and say, “I can prevent it at any time. I need only walk out yonder door, and have the collar pinch my head off. Everything will be prevented.”

“Suicide is wrong,” I said.

“Not on my world,” she said primly. “The school of sea-daughters has a code…”

“It’s wrong on every world,” I said flatly. “And so is giving in to despair. Suicide insults every world, since it rejects everything life on any Earth offers, and rejects any future life as well. It’s just wrong, there is no argument, and it is not something anyone gets to debate about, or vote on.”

She looked at me sidelong. “You speak of a sin you yourself cannot commit.”

I wasn’t sure what to make of that, so I scowled.

“But, come, let us discuss brighter matters! What would you like to know about your origin?” she asked.

“Everything. I take it my dad isn’t my father.”

“He found you as a child, thrown into a ditch or lake by your mother.”

“Thrown into a what? How would you know that?”

“Because all children of your world are treated like that. To throw one of you in a ditch will not kill you, nor will being deprived of your mother’s milk, nor will starvation, nor will isolation. The reason why the Undying throw their immortal get into lakes is to smother their cries. You are unusual for your kind since you were fed milk at a young age, so your body and brain developed normally.”

I tried to imagine a world where all babies were simply tossed into the nearest pond, and found I could not do it.

“How can they grow up if they don’t eat?” I said.

“About age seven, the children are usually large enough to catch food.”

“Large enough how? I mean, just a matter of physics, conservation of mass and all that jazz, how do they grow if they are not able to feed themselves?”

“I don’t know where the mass comes from. I suspect it is ylem, from a fourth dimension beyond the three our senses perceive. Of course, if the young ones stuff leaves or bark or gravel into their stomach to quiet the hunger pangs, that will not kill them either. But typically their brains do not develop, since they lack human company.”

“A whole world of feral children?” I sniffed, and stood up, nerves on edge. There was a smell of blood coming from somewhere.

Penny said, “Their history branched off at a point before the confusion of tongues. Any feral child who hears the Ur language, which is the primordial tongue, understands it. How and why their minds understand the words and concepts behind them, that I don’t know. It only takes a few afternoons of conversation, and they can speak as well as …”

“…Tarzan?”

“I was going to say Caliban, but the idea is the same.”

“What show is he on? I don’t recognize the character’s name.”

Penny smiled impishly, raising both eyebrows. “He is the short fellow from Fantasy Island.”

I put my hand on my scabbard and pushed the hilt with my thumb, exposing about a half inch of blade. I adjusted the angle of the scabbard carefully and wrapped my fingers around the hilt, keeping my pinky and ring finger tense, thumb and forefinger loose, so that I could draw a correct quickdraw. I did not draw the sword yet, since it is not to be drawn except to kill. But I was looking left and right around the chamber, wondering where the smell came from.

I walked around the bench where she sat, and talked over my shoulder. “I thought his name was Nick Nack.”

“You’re thinking of the Bond movie. I am talking about the TV show from the 70s.”

“The one with Khan Noonien Singh?”

“He played Prospero the Magician. Though the show did not call him that.”

I glanced at her. She had slithered from kneeling to curled-up position, and rested her arms on the back of the bench, and her cheek on her arms. It looked adorable, and I wanted to kiss her. But I could not tell if she were kidding me or not. Her expression was what I would call enigmatic, if I was sure what that word meant.

Penny said, “You are probably wondering how the children learn the power of immortality from your world.”

Actually, I’d been wondering if I pretended to drown, whether she would give me mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.

I stopped my soft, nervous walk around the bench and stared at her, thunderstruck with the realization that I could not pretend to drown in front of this girl, not ever. She knows I can’t die. Even if I said a snake had bitten my tongue, I could not trick her into sucking the poison out. Because poison could not kill me either.

Penny smiled. “Ah! I see the thought has touched you deeply!”

“Ah—yes—” I muttered, not looking into her eyes.

She said, “It is simple. The mothers of any child have the Fruit from the Tree of Life, or some juice of it, or sauce, ready to place in the mouth of the infant the moment the joys of motherhood wane, and she wishes not to suckle.”

I remembered that no one ever looks up in ninja movies, which is where the ninja is always hiding. Unless he is hiding in the sand underfoot, of course. So I craned my neck, looking up and down, sniffing.

Meanwhile, I was holding up my side of the conversation. “Did you say the Fruit of the Tree of — what? Like from Genesis?”

Maybe she nodded, since I heard her wet hair rustle, but I was not looking at her. Something near the top of the dome looked odd.

Penny said, “Your true home is the first world to split off. You know that it requires a supernatural intervention to make a split?”

“A miracle? Yeah.”

“In all other worlds, the Highest God, Dela, drove the first parents of the world out from the gardens of delight where the Golden Apples of Life shine, and established wardens to bar the way of return, celestial soldiers with swords of ever-burning flame, and the great serpent Ladon, with his triple tongues of fire. The tree is watered and tended by the Hesperides maidens, whose mistress is Ydune.”

“I heard it was Cherubs with bazookas or something, but I got the picture. We have that myth on my world.” Then I bit my tongue. The girl who had just been joshing me about television shows knew the Bible stories.

Looking up, I realized what was wrong.

3. The Smell of Death

What was wrong was that the upper cloud of sawdust lighting the room had taken on a slightly different color. It was darker, reddish.

Something like a very slow cloud of dark red dust particles was drifting down from on high, silent and ominous as a crimson sunset.

I flared my nostrils and squinted my eyes, every sense straining upward. The scent of blood, the smell of a newly dead body, was coming from the sawdust. Mingled with the odor of wood of a carpenter’s shop, was the hint of the odor of a butcher’s shop.

Penny said, “It is no myth, but true history. The garden is north of Ethiopia, in Eritrea nigh to the sea, or was. The world of your birth is the one where the supernatural intervention drawing the celestial soldiers down from heaven and arming them invincibly with swords of terrible fire never took place. Man put out his hand to take of the Tree of Life, and so he cannot die.”

This distracted me from the darkening chamber dome overhead. I looked down and looked at her face to see if she was kidding me. She looked serious. (Looked seriously adorable with a serious look on her face. Do I need to mention that?)

“But—why do they throw their babies away?” I said. “Why isn’t their world, I dunno, a utopia? Everyone lives a thousand years and more, they all learn everything there is to know, they get wise and mature—and no one can kill each other, so why worry about anything?”

She said, “Because it was not good men and women who become immortal, but the ones who ate not once, but again and again from that next tree which grows hard by the tree of gold, the dark tree of death, the tree of occult knowledge.”

“Ah—that is not what we call it. Knowledge of Good and Evil.”

“Call it rather the Knowledge of Obedience and Disobedience! It is the Tree of Lost Innocence, whatever it is called. The bliss all men remember, if only in tales, we remember from before that fatal taste of forbidden root stained all the generations of Man.”

“Root? Don’t you mean fruit?”

“It was a tea made from the root of the tree of hidden knowledge.”

“I thought it was an apple?”

“No,” she said, “The apples grow on the other tree. This one was a willow.”

“The Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil is a willow tree?”

“So says the lore of my people. It comes from the wise giants, the Nart, who instructed the first parents of the Sea People.”

“I am sure your Nart-lore is dead accurate,” I said with a straight face, “Why is the world named Cainem?”

“It is the world where Cain buried Abel alive, but could not slay him, and the crops which grew up drinking his blood were haunted, and pulled up their roots, and gathered together on the moonless midnight before All Saints’ Day to pull from the cursed soil Abel again. Abel went stalking after Cain where he slumbered, and the trees, wrapped in shadow, walked with him, rustling.”

“Freaky. But I thought Abel was a good guy.”

“Perhaps at first he was. But time did not strengthen him, not in a deathless world where no one goes to heaven, and the suffering of life has no end.”

“Uh. But the pleasures never end either. Don’t they?”

“Worldly pleasures always pale and wane. Do you enjoy the last swig of the last bottle of six as much as the first sip of the first? Do you think even Solomon with his seven hundred wives and three hundred concubines was as pleased with the kiss of the last lass in line as with his first? Whereas fresh pain is undulled by time.”

“All pleasures? They get tired of everything?”

“They have no love, and so have no true pleasure. The only thing of which they do not tire is sadism and bloodshed. It jolts their jaded nerves.”

“Sounds like hell. But they have eternal life!”

“Eternal life without hope is not life,” Penny continued. “In such a world women do not need men to survive. Survival is unavoidable! With no bonds between the sexes, there is no marriage, therefore no families, no bands, no clans, no tribes, no brotherhood, no civilization. They have no human feelings left. Every man there is as Cain toward his brother, and they bear the mark you bear, which forbids that men should slay them. The hopeless centuries grind all light slowly out from their hearts.”

“If they have no families, then how are babies born?”

“Rape.”

“But wouldn’t any group that formed a tribe find itself advantaged over all the other scattered people?”

“Advantaged for what advantage? They have no need to increase their numbers.”

“I don’t know! Building houses, getting out of the snow, having a blanket made of mastodon fur?”

“Ah! This world was never flooded by any Deluge. The gardenlands of paradise are still available for them to dwell. There is fruit in abundance, which only the younger ones bother eating. None there do hunt nor keep herds. There is no snow in those latitudes.”

“They run around naked?”

“Of course not. They clothe themselves in leaves of fig, or garments woven of their own hair, which grows as long as they wish as swiftly as they wish, since it follows their will.”

“But if the mothers do not care about their children—”

“And why should they, if the children are children born of rape?”

“—Well, it’s not the baby’s fault who the father is. But, that’s not my question. Why bother feeding the babies the Magic Applejuice of Life, if these people have no human feelings left?”

“The Dark Spirit who rules that land makes certain no child still mortal dies there, lest the child’s shade be saved alive and snatched up to the heaven above the heavens.”

“If no one dies, and women stay fertile throughout their infinite lifetimes, why isn’t their world hip-deep in humans?”

“War.”

“How can they have war if they don’t have death?”

“Their implements of war are truncheons made from their own unbreakable bones: and the result of war is to bury the vanquished alive, and pile rocks upon the unquiet body. And so the land does indeed have people beneath it, even if it is not hip deep. When many stir at once, there is an earthquake.”

“Who is this Dark Spirit who rules there?”

Then I felt a weird sensation. Someone behind me was listening closely. It was as if someone or something was reaching across my shoulder, straining to hear what Penny was about to say.

I whirled, and looked behind. There was no one there but the fifty or so slave-girls, who had not moved from where they huddled, except to flinch at my sudden motion.

I looked up again. The cloud of red was clearly visible now, hanging along the curve of the dome, keeping to the shadows, hovering away from the brighter sawdust. I did not draw Dancing Maiden because I did not see a target. But the cloud was spreading.

It was watching me. Don’t ask me how I knew. It was just a feeling in the pit of my stomach like lead, like insects made of ice crawling across my flesh.

Without taking my eyes from the spreading cloud, I said softly, “Penny. Don’t look up. Something just came into the room through the tiny vent holes that let the glow-in-the-dark sawdust in. Can you send those girls some place safer? Out of this chamber?”

4. Dangersense

Penny stood up in a slither of silk, her face pale and motionless as ice. For once, she did not look sexy to me; she looked like she was scared to death and needed help. She spoke without moving her lips. “I did not think there was another one of you in this world. With everything being readied for the invasion of Albion, I thought — never mind! I cannot tell you where he might hear. And I must not fall alive into his hands.”

I pretended I had a booger or something on my nose, so that I could scrape my shoulder against my face without taking my hands off Dancing Maiden. While my mouth was hidden, I muttered, “He who? I can take him.”

“Your brother,” she whispered.

“Dobrin? Alexei?”

“No, one of your kind. One you cannot defeat.”

I snorted. “Oh really? Just watch me.”

“He’s like you. Unkillable. You. Can’t. Win.”

“Will you kiss me if I do?”

Her eyes flickered with anger and her voice was cold as she glared at me. “Your infatuation is what put me in this danger! This is serious!”

“You think I ain’t serious about that kiss?” I demanded.

I flicked my eyes toward the red cloud. It was still hanging high, coating the sides of the dome, reaching down very slowly with arms of smoke, like rusty poison seeping into a wineglass. “What is he waiting for?” I wondered aloud. “How can he see us?”

Then I knew. That sense of being watched, that creepy feeling like spiders crawling up my spine; it was the same ghostly sensation I had gotten during that one moment when I had felt and could move my severed hand. In my mind, sort of as a joke, I dubbed it “The Quickening” but when they make the movie version of my life, they’ll have to call it something else, to avoid copyright issues. It should really have a cool pseudoscientific name, like teleproprioception, but for now let’s call it weird-beard freak-o-nightmare sensation.

I said, very softly to her. “My spidey senses are tingling. He’s curious. He wants to know — something.”

Penny drew a deep breath, and said loudly, “The Dark Spirit that rules your world! No doubt you are desperately eager to know the secret of how one of your kind, the Lalilummutillut can overcome and usurp his power, and become supreme of your world?”

“Ah — Am I? I mean, yes! Yes, I am! Supreme in my world? Sign me up!”

The dark red stain was now traveling down the dome, reaching with its many arms of smoke. But when I said that, it slowed, watching, waiting.

In case I did not make this clear, I also could feel the hate coming off the creature. Intent as an unblinking eye of a watching cat, it was ferocious, silent, filled with fury and malice that had no purpose, no object: it radiated a hatred that was pure, and had long ago forgotten its purpose. Hate that just existed for its own sake.

“Can you get the women out of this room?” I whispered to her.

“Maybe, but if I signal to them he might attack.”

Penny looked toward the other girls. She flicked her gaze toward a large archway that led into a darker chamber opposite the gallery, maybe a wardrobe or dormitory. I couldn’t tell what it was. It was very subtle, or perhaps the girls had some sort of prearranged signal. By twos and threes, moving quietly, barefooted teenagers in metal collars fled out of the room, the bigger ones holding smaller girls by the hand.

It should have worked, but it didn’t.

Brother Abomination

1. Blood Storm

The red cloud moved with startling speed, swirling together like a tornado, suddenly becoming a spinning funnel of blood which touched down before the arch and blocked the way. Perhaps ten girls were still in the darker sleeping quarters, and the other forty were with us here in the domed torture garden. They were all screaming.

I was already running. I somehow felt the cloud of blood decide to move before it went anywhere. I placed myself in between the red vertical whirlpool of medical waste and the shrieking women, then I waved them back. They obeyed without hesitation. The screams of the ten girls in the dark chamber behind the blood-tornado suddenly fell silent. I don’t know if it had somehow killed them, or if they had fallen silent for fear of drawing its attention.

I heard bare footfalls slapping the floor behind me as the girls rushed pell-mell away from the thing. The whirling funnel of blood tilted like a top made of liquid, and moved to my right, as if to flank me. I moved with it, keeping myself between it and the women.

I set my feet and drew my sword and assumed the stance called Heaven-and-Earth, holding the blade overhead, a vertical line of steel. “Your foe is here!” I shouted.

Laughter came from the bubbling column of blood. It was the cruelest, most wild laughter I had ever heard.

The blood clotted and thickened and organs formed in the middle of the goo. It turned into a red mud. Veins and nerves flickered through the surging mass. It smelled like an abattoir. I could feel the weird-beard sensation tickling all over my flesh, tugging at my organs, causing odd tides in my bloodstream. It was as if this thing, this Undying, were putting up a magnetic field to pull itself together, and that I was enough like it to be partly attuned, and feel the tug.

I shouted to Penny, “Should I attack him before he forms?”

She said back, quietly but clearly, “It does not matter what you do! Don’t you understand? The Undying are the most terrible of the servants of the Dark Tower!”

“Have a little faith in me!” I said. Maybe my voice was rougher than it should have been.

Scorn rippled through her tones. “When you’ve been doing so well so far?”

“What does that mean?”

“You fell into that Moebius coil like an idiot!”

“I was trying to save you!”

“Since I command the Eden-light, I was in more danger from the rescue attempt than from the danger!”

“Can you defeat that thing? Because I will!” I growled. “Whatever the hell it is…”

Because now it was starting to look like something.

“Get back with the other girls,” I snapped at her. “Use your witchy powers to protect them. I can beat him!”

To my surprise, I heard her naked feet slapping the marble as she retreated. Was Penny actually listening to me? Did college girls have the ability to listen to high-school boys and obey them? Maybe if the emergency was desperate enough.

2. Antediluvian

The red mass pulled itself into a manlike shape, and flecks like dandruff formed on its surface like ice forming on a pond, congealing into webs of scar tissue. It was a blur of twisted organs and pulsating sacs in a rough apelike shape, as ghastly as something you might see in a modern art museum.

Then a blobbish parody of a man with no features stood before me, faceless, trollish, and as hideously awful as a burn victim.

Its flesh pulsed with an unseen power, a power of hate that I could feel tugging at me, and then the blob grew a distinct face, eyes, nose and mouth.

He was a Neanderthal. He had shoulders like a linebacker, and deep-set eyes beneath supraorbital brow ridges, a jutting jaw like an ape’s.

I laughed. Was this the best they could do? “I am taller than you,” I told him.

He stood there a moment, glowering at me, and then he showed me two unexpected tricks. First, he squinted, and he made his hair of his head and jaw puff out like a cloud, or a slowly expanding smoke bomb. Then it formed itself into braids, and wrapped itself—there were yards and yards of hair—from left shoulder to right hip, and a fringe of beard and braids hung down to cover his groin.

I wasn't impressed by the first one. “Nice hair, Rapunzel.”

But his second trick was more impressive and it caught me off-guard. Without any warning, he suddenly ripped his left arm clean in half with his right hand. I am not kidding! He didn't show any sign of pain, and with his severed limb, he sent an arc of blood flying through the air right at my eyes.

That's how I learned that I can parry liquid. My eyebrows, nose, and mouth were stinging with whatever acidic chemical was in his blood, but I instinctively flicked the blade in such a manner that it kept the burning blood out of my eyes.

It was the best parry I had ever done, and no one ever saw it but him. When they make my life into a movie, I want a dramatic trill of bass notes at that moment. Better yet, if they make my life into a game, I want the ‘parry liquid’ skill to be something you can unlock after a side quest or something.

Like I said, I didn’t blink. He tensed, but did not spring.

The stinging sensation turned into burning fire across my cheeks and forehead. His blood, where it splashed me, seemed to have mutated into something that was trying to eat my flesh. It was not just a normal acid, as I could feel the malice within it, a sadistic drive to inflict pain for the sake of pain.

But I had gotten the hang of how this world worked. So instead of panicking or running away, I called upon a higher, more powerful blood. “Precious Blood, ocean of divine mercy: Flow upon us! Precious Blood, most pure offering: Procure us every grace! Precious Blood, hope and refuge of sinners: Atone for us! Precious Blood, delight of holy souls: Draw us! Amen.”

The glowering Neanderthal flipped the meat and flesh off the bone in his right fist, and the bloody mass crawled across his beard-covered body and reconnected at his left elbow stump. It only took a second. The left arm hung limp for a moment, then he flexed his hand, and I could see the new bone growing into place like seeing someone stuff a pool cue down a stocking. Then his left arm was good as new, and meanwhile his right fist was carrying a radius and ulna. The bones of the skeletal hand clenched themselves into a fist to form a nice bludgeon on the end.

By that time, I was done with my prayer, and I felt myself forcing his vile essence out of me. His blood drops left me, and went back to him, and they flew through the air like red bees returning to the hive. He breathed them into his nose and open mouth.

“That is a cute trick,” I said. “Rip your arm off and beat me to death with it. Is that your plan?”

He glowered at me, his eyes squinting with crazy mad-dog wrath, his big square teeth clenched, his face pale with fury. He raised his bone club and took a step toward me: I shifted my weight to my back foot, and brought my blade into Chudan no Kamae, a middle stance, sword level and pointed at the foe, slightly above the waist. He stopped.

I called to Penny without turning my head, “Can this guy talk? I thought they had the Ur speech power. Why doesn’t he have any canine teeth?”

Penny said softly, “You are Antediluvians. You are vegetarians, and need consume no meat. Haven’t you noticed we have smaller teeth than you?”

“Don’t remind me,” I muttered under my breath.

The Neanderthal looked at me carefully, drew in a breath, and swelled up. I mean he got bigger by maybe three inches, maybe four, but growing in all directions. It looked terrifying.

I think I would have run screaming from the room if his head had started to expand at that point. The degree of control he had over his body was freaking me out. I was wondering what he couldn’t do. Change into a chimera? Grow an extra heart? Extra limbs? Send an eyeball floating off by itself on spy missions?

Instead he spoke, “Epushtu ikkan’ ayyu?” It was weird, but his accent and grammar were all different from the Ursprache that Abby spoke, but somehow the words still twisted themselves in my brain and I found myself understanding him, as easily as if I had remembered all along what his words meant. “What magic be yours?”

I said, “My magic? I got rhythm. I got music. I got my gal. Who could ask for anything more?”

He shook his shaggy head. “You be a yearling. You know not how to make the blood release its virtues. And yet when my blood was in you, it did not blind you or make the nine alchemical terrors in your brain. How do you fend my blood away? What magic be yours?”

He meant the prayer I had used to focus my concentration. “Real magic,” I said. “This magic comes from the tree upon which they hung my Lord, and it is stronger than the tree whose stolen fruit gives you your power.”

He said, “Tell me your name, yearling.”

“You first.”

“Your name be Yu Ferst?”

“No. Who’s on First; What’s on Second;” I Don’t Know is on Third; and the shortstop is I Don’t Give a Damn. “You tell me your name before I tell you mine, fathead.”

“I be Rahab.”

I snorted. “So you be, be you? Well, I be Ilya. And I be kicking your butt now, unless you be nice and smart and just back away.”

He shook his head. “Your blade be proof against the man-wolf. It hold no hurt for me.”

“Are you sure of that?”

Rahab grinned. Between two lips of colorless gristle, his teeth were as square and yellow as the teeth of a cart horse.

“Ilya be a boy, then? Boy be a fool, yes? Does the boy know which hand to wipe his bottom, which hand to eat? Does he know right hand from left?”

“I'm the fool? The boy knows to use toilet paper. You should try it sometime.”

Rahab pointed with his arm-bone club over my shoulder at something behind me. I kept my eyes on him. “That be your gal? Your toys?”

“Everyone here is under my protection.”

He held his left arm out and it grew longer and hairier until it was like an ape’s arm. “Can do with any part. Strong and thick. You get?”

“Get what?”

“Stupid boy! I to rip your head off. Prop it up there. Right there.” He pointed behind me. I kept my eyes on him. “Then I rut her. Rut her fierce. So fierce I break her inside, all crushed bone and blood jelly, yes? You see it. I will break her.”

I heard a whimper from Penny. This is the girl who sailed around the world by herself. I did not think she was capable of such pure fear.

Rahab smirked. “Doctors here learn how to change bodies from us, from Host who Yearn for Death in Vain. We make others yearn for death also. Once blood of Rahab is inside her blood, make her more nerves more feel more pain. Make her stomach acid dissolve this part and that part of her innards. Twist her bones like pretzels and snap them like sticks. Yearling Ilya—he be able to do any this thing? He stop me? No? Our kind, we fight blood to blood. How you fight me, little brother?”

I was not sure how to respond to all that, so I resorted to that calm samurai stare my brothers use when they practice sword forms.

Rahab was not impressed. “You know nothing. Make your hair grow long. Can Ilya do this? Can Ilya do anything?”

“I can free you from your slavery to the Dark Tower. Would you rather be free or play Jack the Rapist for your masters?”

3. Fate of Iron

His face contorted with hatred.

When I say his face contorted, don’t think that his eyes bugged out and his lips drew back from clenched teeth. No. Think of his eyeballs actually growing bigger, and the bone sockets and flesh surrounding his eyes expanding grotesquely to compensate. His mouth grew larger and his jaw increased its bone mass, so that the lower half of his skull deformed and pushed forward, and teeth grew larger, and yellower, and pointed, and the color of his lips went from red to black, and the muscles in his cheeks and the side of his face rippled and puffed up.

It would have looked like something from a cartoon, except that a putrid, burnt smell was also coming from his flesh. And I knew I was seeing an incredible use of a power to control every cell in his body, maybe even every particle, and it was a supernatural power, indeed, an immortal power.

I was so amazed that I almost missed what he was shouting. “There be no escape! All be slaves! There be slaves who know them chained. Me. There be slaves who know nothing. You. You cannot free anyone. There be no freedom. There is nothing but the stars and fate!”

He drew a deep, shuddering breath, and hissed through his still-elongating teeth. “Your fate, you meet now.”

4. First Round

By the time he was done speaking, I could barely make out the words, because his incisors had grown like the fangs of a saber-toothed tiger.

He must have removed all the vertebrae of his neck at the same time, and replaced his neck cartilage with some sort of elastic membrane, because all of a sudden his head shot forward like a snapping cannonball, with a neck longer than a giraffe’s and powerful as the body of an anaconda behind it.

Rahab tried to bite me on the neck, but his jaws, even though he had strengthened them like the jaws of a bulldog, could not penetrate my mail coif. I smelled the venom that pumped from his fangs, and heard the hiss of acid dripping from his tongue. But I also felt the ripple of chain links across my neck and shoulders, as the cunning metal armor moved more mass into that area, so my neck armor grew thicker.

I had been trained not to look an opponent in the eye during the fight, but to use my peripheral vision and watch his hands. It was good for me at that moment that I did as I was trained, because I did not strike at the exposed four-yard-long neck—the obvious target—or at his right hand which held his truncheon. He started to swing, but it was a fake-out, because he passed the truncheon to a tentacle or tail he had been growing out of his back, sneakily out of my line of sight. This third arm came darting out suddenly from over his shoulder, snatched up the truncheon, and struck.

I parried the blow and chopped the third arm off at the wrist. The truncheon hit the ground instead of hitting my helmet, and the white bone of the truncheon’s head turned into a black blood, which splattered across the marble, hissing and wriggling. That goo would have been all over my face, digging into my eyes and up my nose if I had taken the head-feint. I could feel the black substance, the hate of it, with my spidey-senses.

Meanwhile, the saber-toothed tiger fangs had gotten caught in the links of my chain coif, or, rather, my smart armor had tightened on them. During the moment it took Rahab to eject his fangs, leaving them twitching at my neck like digger wasps, still injecting poison into me, I reversed my grip on my sword and slashed it through his neck. Halfway.

Chopping off a man’s head is harder than it sounds. Even with no bones in the way, it is tough. Go to your local butcher’s chop, get a hunk of raw meat nine inches across, hang it from a hook so that it yields to the blow, and see if you can cut all the way through it with a big knife or a cleaver. Try it.

So, it took me two strokes. It was still a good strike. The head dropped. When it bounced, I punted it across the room, screaming curses. I mean it was screaming, the skull-football. Penny was screaming too; in fact, all the girls were screaming.

I was the only one who wasn't screaming because I was too busy keeping my eyes on the target, Rahab’s body, headless or not. And I saw his prehensile hair part, and I saw where he had grown an eye like the eye of Nakasu, right where his right nipple used to be. I did a jump-lunge and put the point of my sword right into it. He elongated his left hand and raked me with the bear-claws he had grown there, and out of his severed neck-hole came a jointed monstrosity like a scorpion’s tail, the bulb swollen with poison. The yard-long neck-tail lashed at me and tried to stab me. He must have prepared the poisonous sting inside his neck while he was talking, his ‘Plan B’ in case I managed to decapitate him.

I jumped back, parrying left and right. Claws scraped off my armor, and I cut his arm to the bone, and maybe broke it with the force of the blow, but he scuttled back and shook his arm back into working shape. It clicked and was whole.

But I was in control. Now he was the one reacting to my attack, he had lost the initiative. Fights aren't like the movies, where first one guy is winning, then the other guy. In real life, they're more like a snowball on top of a mountain peak. Once it starts rolling down one side, it seldom reverses course. He lashed out at me again and again, but he had to remove the bones from any limb he made stretchy enough to reach me and I had three feet of steel between us, plus another three feet of arm. That meant he had to double the length of his limbs just to touch me. It made him slower and easier to counter, plus the lack of bone made it that much easier to sever those outstretched limbs.

Blade whirling and stabbing, feet shuffling, I drove him across the room, chopping bits from him.

I ran at him, blade high, feinted low as if intending to cut his legs out from under him, but then I brought my blade up and drove it into his left breast, piercing his one remaining eye. He reeled back, blinded, and then I chopped his legs out from under him. First his right leg, then his right.

Down he fell. I stabbed through his midsection and a strange thing happened. With a jerk, all the severed limbs and heads and wormy bloodstains we had slopped across the room jumped back into place. I mean his head came back to his neck like it was pulled on an invisible string, and so did the arms and legs I’d amputated.

It should have scared the dickens out of me, but since my adrenaline was already pumping, and I was already screaming my head off with battle-rage, and was already sweating like a pig (fighting monsters is hard work) the additional adrenaline, screaming, and sweating caused by fear was lost in the general background noise. If you hear soldiers or firemen talk about being too busy to feel scared, I guess this is what they mean.

I jumped back, bellowing swear words, drew a shaky breath, and resumed the Heaven-and-Earth stance, weight on the rear foot, blade erect. The blood on the blade was now streaming back into Rahab's body, flying through the air like scarlet sleet driven by a horizontal wind.

And then he was back to normal, dressed in nothing but his long hair, with the jutting jaw and lowering brow ridges of a Neanderthal. The bone of his own forearm had gone back into his arm.

Rahab laughed. “I take your measure. You fall short.”

I panted, “I won that round and you know it!”

“You know nothing, you. Look! You gasp! You wheeze! You tire! Boy knows not how to put fatigue from his blood. Rahab, me, I do not tire and tear. I send away the fatigue with a thought. Now we start again and you learn what it is to fight a man, boy. No more breathing for you.”

Then his chest opened like the doors of a bureau, and he ripped two sharp ribs from it, taking one in either hand. He shrugged, and his arms thickened and grew a layer of integument like rhinoceros hide, then the hide darkened, and he grew a layer of bone atop that.

His eyes drew backward into his skull, so that he was looking at me through two little tubes of bone, and he thickened the bones of his face and flattened his nose, so that his skull became a helmet.

“Again!” he growled. “We go again!”

“Neither of us can kill the other,” I said. I was still breathing heavily, really wishing I knew his trick for wishing weariness away.

“But I can give you pain. Much pain.” He grinned.

His mouth began to stretch and his teeth elongated into fangs. The rib-bones in his hands quivered, straightened, and grew and grew until he held two spears. They were four feet long, and the tips began dripping poison.

There went my reach advantage.

5. Second Round

He threw the first rib like a javelin. I turned sidewise to it, presenting a minimal target, and swatted it aside with my blade, keeping my eyes on him. He had twisted his legs backward, so they looked like the legs of an Abarimon. I don’t see how there could be any advantage to speed or agility to have your knees and feet turned wrongway-round but somehow he lunged forward at breathtaking speed, like a panther springing.

I feinted high and struck low, slashing out his belly. He raised his truncheon to block my high blow, and gagged in shock as his entrails came slithering out like a red apron. Rahab had simply never learned swordsmanship. What need did he have for the art?

But he had arts of his own. The rib-bone spear which had flown past me, had come to life and somehow snagged my rear leg from the floor. My mail jerkin only came to knee length, so the spear wrapped my lower leg like a snake, and, like a snake, reared back and struck. Only a little bit of venom was pumped into my flesh—but enough so that my leg simultaneously felt numb and on fire, and I lost control of it. The muscles spasmed like a frog’s leg being touched by an electrical jolt.

I hopped, slid, fell, and the fight should have been over right then and there. But Rahab was screaming and clutching at his bleeding guts, and he fell too. As he dropped, the snakelike bone wrapping my ankle turned into a black liquid and jumped—literally leaped across the air—back into the breast of Rahab. He still had the Abarimon feet when I gut-slashed him, but as he toppled and fell, his feet were normal again. And so was his face. The elaborate bony armored plates protecting his eyes and skull turned black and wriggled and got reabsorbed into his skull.

“Grant that I may praise thee, O sacred Virgin; give me strength against thine enemies!” I said solemnly and I felt a cool serenity flow through my limbs, washing the poison away. Sensation returned to my feet, and I jumped to them.

By that time Rahab was also back on his feet, standing in a crouch, his Neanderthal face growling and ugly, his eyes two dark little ponds of hate.

“So, pain disrupts your Mr. Stretchy trick, I see.” I assumed my stance again, weight on my rear leg, and weapon pointed, blade side up, toward his eyes. “And we cannot get rid of pain.”

“No,” he grunted, his vicious grimace looking oddly like a grin. “No escape from pain. Not for us. Not ever.”

“How come all the Undying don’t wear armor?”

He hooted. “Armor that is made of dead metal? All flesh is ours to command. Armor would but impede us, foolish boy.”

“Foolish man, if you don’t mind.”

He didn't respond, but drew in his breath and began to expand. Not just a few inches either. He swelled up until he was at least twelve feet tall.

Nor did he swell in proportion. He grew stouter and thicker faster than he grew taller, so his legs and feet turned into elephant legs more like those of Nakasu.

I lunged and slashed at his stomach, groin, jumped back, lunged again, and impaled his chest. The tip of Dancing Maiden scraped against a rib-bone with an ugly noise. It left a shallow cut, and drew blood, but did not penetrate. His whole chest area was now a solid mass of bone. From the way his flesh rippled, I could see he had closed his ribcage like Venetian blinds snapped shut.

He was thirteen feet tall. Then fourteen.

He grew a single horn from the center of his brow, and let it swell to a yard in length before ripping it free. Little tatters of his flesh dripped and oozed on the surface of the horn, emitting acrid smells. The horn flattened, becoming like a long-handled ax or pike.

And now he was fifteen feet tall.

I lunged and cut at his leg, hoping that all this was just puffing up for show. Rahab could not be pulling extra mass into existence from nowhere, could he? The laws of nature would not allow that! He must be losing density to gain so much volume! He must! The conservation of mass was a law!

I was expecting it to be like slicing your brother’s birthday cake in half with your practice sword in retaliation for him bisecting all your birthday balloons, including the one with a glow-in-the-dark mouse on it, with his. In other words, I was expecting no resistance, a feeling of immense satisfaction, and maybe getting my butt kicked a moment later.

Nope. My sword cut into rhino-hide and dense muscle, then struck bone and rebounded. The wound puckered and sprayed blood at me, and made a sardonic spitting noise before zipping itself back shut as easily as a Ziploc bag. It was if I'd never struck him at all.

I silently cursed him. It looked as if I could not injure him painfully enough to snap him back to his true form.

Apparently the conservation of mass is more like a suggestion rather than a law.

Rahab laughed. His laughter was like a gush of a wind from hell, full of cruelty and power.

I turned and ran.

6. Final Round

It was a gamble, I admit. I risked everything. If Rahab merely took the opportunity to turn and throw his poisonous blood and body parts at Penny and the other girls trapped in the chamber, all was lost. But I was gambling that he would think that I was like him, and held all living things in hatred and contempt.

To make sure he followed me, I threw four shuriken from my father’s belt (which I was wearing outside the hauberk, remember) into the conveniently large face, belly and groin of the giant. So he followed me, not pausing to slay the harem slaves. It is not like they were going anywhere.

I also zigged and zagged as I ran, a skill I learned as a child running from older brothers with longer legs than mine. The pike of horn smote to my left and right, cracking the marble floor and spraying blood-red gushes of venom as it struck.

It is not easy running, in forty pounds of chainmail, from a giant who can cover ten feet at a stride. But there is a story about a poker player, Amarillo Slim, luring a chump into a sucker bet that he could outrun a horse in the hundred-yard dash, and winning the bet by having the track set up as two fifty-yard dashes connected by a hairpin turn. The animal with the larger mass could not decelerate, turn, and accelerate as quickly as the animal with the smaller mass. This is also why jackrabbits sometimes outrun wolves. And like those rabbits, I used my ears. The thunder of Rahab’s footfalls, which were shaking the whole darn floor, and the slight change in rhythm, told me when his blows were about to fall, and I would break left or right. Once and twice and thrice he swung and missed.

Perhaps you recall the colonnade where visitors could lounge and look into the harem, a long wall of windows covered with blue glass bars. I ran toward them. I reversed course at the last minute, not caring if I were hit or not, and lashed out at the elephant legs of the monstrous Rahab behind me. It was a shallow blow to the back of his knee, but he bled gallons, and the floor was marble, and his body was as massive as an elephant’s, moving at the speed of a cavalry charge.

Unlike the law of conservation of mass, the law of conservation of momentum turned out to be more than a suggestion. He could not stop.

Rahab slipped on his own blood, did a pratfall, and smashed into the bars. There was a crash, and shards of razor-sharp glass went everywhere. There was a storm of dark red lighting all over him. It was what Abby had called distilled essence of pain.

Yes, Rahab had indeed struck me with his pike as I turned, and I think he broke my spine and both legs when he did, but merely being near the firestorm of pure pain was enough to snap my body back to its true form, unbroken and whole.

Rahab was back to his normal size too. His limbs were jerking, not in his control. Each time he jerked, another little razor sharp leaf or needle of blue glass would break. The stuff dripping out, whatever it was, would add to the torture he was already in.

The slave-girls were screaming. Rahab was screaming. I was trembling with fatigue and battle-adrenaline, but I resisted the urge to break stance or lean on my sword. (No one actually leans on a sword when they are tired: it would damage the tip. But I wanted to.) So I was the only one not screaming. I was too tired.

7. Victory

Not everyone was screaming. Penny came up beside me, quiet as a doe. She had a jar of water she was carrying on her head, which I thought was a neat trick.

And from somewhere, she had found her eyeglasses, which she was wearing. I saw she had a small book covered in black shagreen leather in her hand, with corners, hasps and lock of gold, zipped into a plastic baggie.

She knelt gracefully and lowered the water jar to the floor without spilling it.

Then she unzipped, unlocked and opened the little book. She unlocked it by touching her tongue to the hasp. The shining yellow pages were mirror-bright, covered with tiny, cramped and intricate cuneiform and hieroglyphs in black and red and green inks, diagrams and pentagrams and woodcuts of angular, bestial faces. Their eyes moved and looked at me as she flipped the golden pages. And, oddly enough, some of the pages were covered in European musical notation with clefs and notes and bars and staves.

She adjusted her eyeglasses, found a page of music, and started singing.

The words and the tune were alike lost in the uproar. I did not see any water rise up out of the jar, but I could not shake the impression that I should have been seeing it. That eerie weird-beard sensation I got from Rahab was coming from the jar. I don’t know how I could sense it, but I could.

Fascinated, I put my hand down to a point in the air between the opening of the jar and Rahab. I gasped. I could feel a cold trickling flow over my hand. I felt water. My eyes did not see any water. My eyes told me my hand was in the air.

I cupped my hand and lifted it to my face. My fingers were dry. I touched my lips to the hollow of my palm. I did not taste or feel any water, but a sensation of coolness touched my lip and ran down my throat. It was just the sensation of refreshment without the actual water. The spirit of water. I was fascinated, and stepped forward. The cool touch fell across my knees. There was an invisible and impalpable column of water about a foot in diameter writhing through the air.

Penny scowled at me with her eyes, not ceasing to sing, and waved me angrily to one side. I stepped back, feeling foolish. Note to self: do not interfere with the affairs of witches, for they are sexy and quick to anger.

From the way the writhing body of Rahab reacted, I could tell the non-existent water stream had flowed about him. Then the broken ends of the shattered blue glass flickered. The non-existent water conducted electricity just like real water, or so it seemed, because at that moment streams and darts of dark red sparks swirled out of the broken ends of the many blue bars, and the air around Rahab, and the floor where he flopped and twisted, all of it, grew dark and angry with crawling sparks. They followed invisible swirls and streams of motion.

On and on she sang, and the sparks thickened and darkened into a liquid cocoon of pure pain. Rahab could not stop shaking and twitching, and so he could not rise to his feet, or even inchworm away from the broken glass, and neither could he warp his flesh into any new shapes or sizes.

Then the shivering mass of dark red sparks flowed over his head like a plastic bag, and entered his mouth and eyes and nose. Having that stuff up your nose and down your throat must have really hurt, because all Rahab’s muscles locked up with agony, shivering and tense, and the sound of his shrieks turned into a gargle. I assume the unreal water must have created a sensation of drowning. Rahab made all the noises you’d expect from someone whose head was underwater. It sounded awful.

I threw back my head and laughed long and loud, the laughter of the Host who Yearns for Death in Vain.

“Water bending!” I grinned down at Penny. “Cool beans, Katara!”

The water left in the jar before Penny looked odd. It was de-natured, and would not create a sensation of drowning even if you were drowning. An amphibious girl might convince even a suspicious guard that she had granted him the ability to breathe water.

Penny, kneeling on the floor with her well-shaped arms aloft, now smiled, but the silvery flow of song from her throat did not cease, nor did she take her eyes from her book. Then I realized why she looked worried.

Penny dared not stop her song, lest her spell drop. I assume a professional singer can keep up a tune for a long time, but everyone runs out of breath eventually.

I sat down next to her, got the kit out of my father’s belt, and started cleaning my sword.

Quaffs Blood Like Wine

1. Time to Clean

I used a sheet of rice paper from the cleaning kit to remove all oil and blood from the blade, carefully holding the scalpel-sharp edge away from me.

“Penny,” I said. “You look anxious.” She looked lovely too, but I did not tell her that. She had left aside the silk bedsheet in which I’d wrapped her, so she was now just in the lowcut sleeveless white tunic bound at the waist with a black wide belt, and a black collar like an evil version of a necklace locked around the white skin of her throat.

“Don’t worry, I'll brush my teeth before you give me that kiss you owe me. Because I did defeat him”

She angrily rolled her enormous emerald eyes at me over the top of her little book, but she did not stop singing.

“You think I am an idiot—which, I admit, shows that you are a good judge of character. You are probably thinking that, as soon as you run out of breath, our pal Rahab is going to stand up, shake off his pain, turn into a whirlwind of bone fragments or something, and just rip me to shreds, and torture all the girls here to death.”

I started to tap the powder ball softly, each tap two inches apart, along the length of the blade. I worked carefully, dusting the blade very lightly with the polish. It must be done precisely and rhythmically, so there is something almost soothing about the task. I was far enough from Penny that there was no danger of her inhaling the powder, even when she drew in a deep breath between staves.

“But looks can be deceiving! There is one other thing that can defeat an Undying One. I know, because it got me the first hour I was here in crazyland. And I just found out less than an hour ago, that the same thing can kill living metal, because it happened to the cunning metal weapon sticking through me at the time. And Abby told me all these magical, shape-changing metals operate on the same principle.”

I used a cotton cloth to polish the blade.

“As to where we end up once I get you and the other girls out of here, that I do not know. At this point, I am thinking any place is better than this. See? It will all work out.”

She squinted at me as she sang, and I don’t know if that meant she figured out my plan—which was not all that complicated, really—or if she had not, and was still filled with doubt.

I turned the shining blade to the other side and started tapping it with the little ball of powder.

2. Time to Pack

I turned my head and called to the other slave-girls there. “Hey! Young ladies. If they gave you anything more sturdy to wear, put it on. Shoes? If you have any possessions, gather them up. We are all getting out of here.”

There was a little cooing and murmuring among the teenagers. I could not make out the words, but there were notes of doubt.

“Ladies, ladies! I defeated the big bad abomination, did I not? There he lies in a lump of pain and not one of you even has a splinter! Now get a move on!”

One of the girls stepped forward, knelt and bowed her head to the ground, so her generous cleavage was well displayed a moment before her lovely hair was on the floorstones, and her hips, round and pink as the lobes of a peach, were hoisted aloft behind.

“Master, I am Urad-Betti.”

“Please get off the ground, Betty. I am an American, and we are all equal to everyone else, and a damn sight better than most. Don’t bow to me.”

She straightened up, so that she knelt with her hips over her ankles, her feet tucked under her. She had been trained to sit with her shoulders back, so that the fabric of her tunic strained against the swell of her pert bosom. I put her age at maybe sixteen. Old enough to wear lipstick, and, if her parents were permissive, to stay out until eleven. No later.

“I will kill someone to avenge the indignity done you, Miss,” I said, teeth clenched. I could feel the muscles in my jaw twitching as I ground my teeth together.

She lowered her eyes, unwilling to look me in the face. “By what name shall we worship our master?”

“Don’t call me master. It makes you sound like Barbara Eden. My name is Ilya Muromets. As soon as I rescue you damsels in distress, I will officially be a hero. Right now I am just kind of winging it.”

She lowered her head in a bow. “Your maidservant does not understand your words, mast—”

“My first command is that you not call me master and stop taking commands! I hereby free you. You are manumitted. All the other girls also. Stop bowing!”

She straightened up, blinking, looking alarmed.

“Sir does not like it?”

Not like what? Having a beautiful girl fawning all over me in a getup skimpy enough to make a Vegas showgirl look overdressed?

All I said was, “Gather your things.”

“We have nothing, sir. We have no possessions to bring.”

I said, “Then loot the place. Do they dress you in jewelry? Gold? Anything like that may be useful where we are going.”

Urad-Betti said, “But where are we going, sir?”

Just at that moment, I heard the noise of wind, and the sound of voices, but no footsteps. I said to Urad-Betti, “I am about to find out myself where we will go. Get the other girls ready. If there is anyone sleeping in the back, wake her up! Prepare everyone. And don’t be afraid! I’ll get those collars off you. I promise.”

I looked up at the ceiling, and whispered, “Saint Peter Claver! Help me not to fail of that vow!” Saint Peter Claver is the patron saint of slaves and those who free them.

As I drew my eyes up to breathe that brief prayer, I saw a coffin floating in midair come wafting through the broken balcony where we entered, halfway up the dome, pushing aside music stands and instrument racks.

Abby was sitting atop the coffin, and she waved at me.

3. Open Lid

The coffin swooped and made a perfect three-point landing next to me. A feeling of dizziness wiggled through my head from the cold issuing from the coffin. I sheathed my blade slowly, and then jumped up and backed away rapidly. “Watch it! Don’t let him get too close to me! Just being near him makes us weak.”

Ossifrage emerged as if from a mist, along with Nakasu the headless giant, and Foster in his white hood and cloak. The crucifix I had loaned them was on the coffin lid, held in place with the copper chain from Abby’s kusarigama encircling the coffin. The long loop of rosary beads swung and rattled from the crucifix.

Abby hopped down. She said, “Who is ‘us’?” She looked at the slave teens not much older than she (who were bustling about), then glanced at Penny (who was still singing) and at Rahab (who was still writhing and drowning silently in a bubble of red-sizzling but invisible water).

I nodded at the quivering form of Rahab. “Him and me. His name is Raw Hate, or something like that. He is one of the Host that Yearns for Death in Vain. I figured this is the best way to fulfill his yearning. Or do the next best thing.”

There came a pounding and a scratching at the coffin lid from the inside, and a voice like ice spoke in Greek. “Release me, that I may slay you all. I feel life, precious life, life like a bonfire near me: I must drink your soul, even if it burn me. I am Vorvolac! Vorvolac! None live who know that dread name and fear it not!”

“None live who know that dumb name and can pronounce it,” I shouted back (in rather ungrammatical Greek). “Shut your mouth! We are deciding how much to kill you!”

The icy voice grew even colder. “Fool! You would not have borne me here unless you seek to bargain with me. You will spare me if I serve you, is that it? But why should I trust your oath?”

“I am an honest man,” I said.

“You are not a man at all: you are prey. Can the pigeon cow the raptor into obedience, or the yearling awe the jackal?”

Ossifrage said something in Hebrew, a question.

Abby answered him, saying, “I will be the one to threaten the Cold One. He is as a corpse, and my people can handle corpses.” She drew her green shawl to shadow her head, pulled up my father’s huge crucifix in her hand, and retracted the chain holding the coffin shut.

Penny stopped singing long enough to shout, “Don’t look in his eyes!”

4. Time to Die

Because her singing was interrupted, the bubble of imaginary water surrounding Rahab popped and spread. (I mean that literally. I felt something cold slosh against my toes, even though I saw nothing.)

Rahab coughed and roared and rose to his hands and knees. I picked up the nearest heavy object at hand — I think it was a vase or a bottle sitting on one of those wee little tables that dotted the garden beneath the pleasure dome — and chucked it into the glass bars right next to Rahab. Shards and fiery garnet sparks shot out, but I was standing far enough away not to be jolted. He wasn’t far enough away, and he stumbled, and fell onto some upjutting blue glass shards that still had some pain inside them.

Vorvolac the Cold One came out of the coffin like a cobra, his white glow-in-the-dark body sliding like it had no bones in it, only elastic springs.

He went right for Abby’s throat. She threw up her hands and the heavy crucifix spun and glittered in the air, and he threw himself backward onto the floor to get away from it. Vorvolac clutched at his own face with pale fingers, writhing and howling an eerie howl. Foam gushed from his mouth. Abby blinked and straightened up, puzzled.

Nakasu stepped and stooped and grabbed Vorvolac, and, with the grisly huge teeth of his belly-mouth, first on the left side, then on the right, ripped the Cold One’s leathery glider wings to shreds. The devil screamed like a devil, and bled a copious amount of white, oozy fluid. Nakasu spat Vorvolac out and beckoned to Ossifrage.

Ossifrage raised his hand, and levitated Vorvolac straight up into the air, and out of claw-range.

Foster shot a glass arrow into the creature’s leg. Then Foster touched his gold forearm-protector, and gestured toward Vorvolac. A wreath of mist issued from the arrow and formed about the creature’s bald head.

Foster said, “You can look at him, now. If he cannot see you, he cannot make eye contact, and his mesmerism won’t work.” Abby translated that to Nakasu and Ossifrage.

I said, “Abby, you’re going to have to tell the Cold One, Cadillac or whatever his name is, to drain the life-energy out of the—”

Ossifrage waved a finger and casually tossed the Cold One spinning through the air to land on top of Rahab.

5. Caveman Moment

Penny stopped singing and screamed in fear, and I took the opportunity to snatch her up from where she knelt, throw her over one shoulder, and run a short distance away, my hauberk ringing as I ran.

The warm curve of her hip was against my cheek, the nicely feminine weight of her body against my shoulder, and I could see her slender legs kicking in front of me. And, of course, I had arms wrapped about the taut muscles of her thighs.

That moment was worth all the fighting and whatnot I had gone through since, I dunno, before I was born.

Unfortunately, I stopped after a few long strides, far enough to put us out of melee range, and turned, and put my hand on my grandfather’s sword. It actually takes two hands to draw properly, since you are supposed to push the first inch free with your thumb against the hilt, and then take the sheath in one hand and the grip in the other and draw apart your arms in a smooth motion. So I did not draw it.

And I was unwilling to take my right hand off of Penny’s smooth upper leg, because I did not want to drop her. Mostly.

When I turned, I looked back and wished I hadn’t.

Vorvolac was splashed all over with blood, and the red droplets were crawling and writhing like termites across his face, jaws, and upper body. He had ripped open the steaming chest cavity of Rahab, and the meat-dripping bones of the ribcage were each separately twitching like crab legs. Vorvolac swallowed the way a bird swallows, by throwing his head all the way back and pointing his jaws toward the sky.

The thing in his mouth I thought at first was a red octopus covered in gooey red ink, pulsing. No, it was the heart of Rahab, lashing out with veins and arteries in a futile attempt to escape the frozen fangs of Vorvolac. The Cold One was gargling and slurping and giggling with joy, as happy as a baby allowed to eat his first banana split sundae. The severed, jawless head of Rahab had abandoned his body and was trying to wiggle away from the messy feasting using its tongue as a pseudopod. I won’t even try to describe the insane look in its eyes.

And the little pool of water, still snapping with the occasional dark red spark of pure pain, was all around them, so the Cold One would jump and shriek from time to time, and Rahab’s body parts, any little worm of flesh or bone that was trying to escape, would jerk back together. The slobbering and guzzling and shrieking noises were not as ugly in the ear as the smell of the whole event was to the nose.

“Put me down, Caveboy,” said Penny in a dry tone of voice from somewhere near the small of my back. “I can't see anything at this angle!”

“You don’t want to see this,” I said.

“After what he said he was going to do to me? I think I do.”

I put both hands about her waist and lowered her to the floor, facing me. “Sorry, Miss, um. Penny. I thought you were in danger.”

She tossed back her head, and smacked me in the jaw with the little book that was still in her hand. Its gold metal corner was harder than I would have expected. “I know what you were thinking. Keep your oversized hands off me!”

I snatched my hands back, and rubbed my jaw. “Sorry, but seriously, don't turn around, because if you do—”

She turned around.

She turned back toward me, raising one trembling hand to her eyeglasses. She removed them and tried to wipe the lenses with the hem of her skirt, which was really too short for that operation. “Okay—okay. That was—wow—really gross.”

She hung her eyeglasses by the earpiece from the front of her shirt, pulling it down. It was hardly my fault that the movement drew my eyes in that direction.

I said, “You need to watch more horror movies. You can desensitize yourself to gore.” The vampire was tearing out the belly of the immortal, and the guts were unwinding like spaghetti. I winced and added, “Eventually.”

Penny darted a glance at me sidelong from underneath her long lashes. “The blood is saltwater and remembers when all life was in the sea, before the One God called up the land.”

“What does that mean?” I asked. She was licking the lock shut on her little black book and stuffing into its plastic baggy.

“It means you are on your own, tough guy. My chants cannot enchant him, nor my glamour bewitch and ensnare. He’s your headache now.” She put both pinkies in her mouth, and emitted a shrill whistle. Then she tossed the black shagreen book up into the air.

Her fierce little bird — I did not see where she came from — dove down and snatched up the book in her claws. Through the hole in the bars she flew like an arrow.

“Where is your bird going?”

She was smiling, watching the falcon depart. It was a look of pride and friendship. “She has carved out a niche or nest partway into the shadow world, where the stars cannot see. Isn’t she the cleverest bird?”

I wondered if Penny were seeing the same nasty, cold-eyed eyeball-eating carrion bird I was.

After Vorvolac gnawed the still-moving body of Rahab down to about half its size, all at once the body turned black and melted, or dissolved into some sort of muddy ash. The lumpy pile of black ooze rested unquietly, trembling and bubbling on the marble. It was still not quite dead.

Vorvolac rose to his feet, mouth gaping, eyes ablaze. “Life! I quaff not merely human, but more than human! Endlessly more! I have swallowed the ocean and the roots of the ocean! It grows inside me, trying ever to escape, more and always more! It flows through me! I am infinite!”

I could feel it was true. I was the farthest one away from him, and I could feel the cold, like the cold of infinite outer space, pulling at me, blindly hungry for my soul. The light from the glowing sawdust in the air had faded where the Cold One stood, and an Arctic chill entered the air.

He turned his maddened eyes left and right blindly. Foster’s trick with the mist was still working, because the Cold One could not see us. Even so, I could feel the hypnotic magnetism in his inhuman eyes. I felt like I was drunk when I looked straight at them, and my thoughts began to slide and drift like in a fever dream.

“You lowly, crawling things!” shouted Vorvolac in his high, thin, piping voice. “You worms! You have granted me endless power! How can you hope to withstand me? Now, I am a god!”

“Not my god,” said Abby.

Abby had looped my father’s crucifix around the end of the copper chain of her weapon, and now the chain reared and reached like a metallic snake, and thrust the cross against the Cold One’s kneecap. The whole leg twisted and blackened like a stick held in a fire and the leg below the knee fell off. I stared at the stump, dumbfounded. In some dull part of my mind, I guess I was expecting the leg to get better and grow back—fighting an Undying One will warp your perceptions and reactions—so it was a moment before I realized that that vicious amputation was permanent. Vorvolac was Cap’n Ahab from now on.

Vorvolac writhed in the mud puddle, clutching his stump, and shoveled more of the muddy remains of Rahab into his mouth. Maybe it dulled the pain like whiskey.

Abby yanked back the chain of her weapon. I mean, the chain did not retract. It had lost its coppery luster about a foot or two from the end. She put her foot on the spot where the dead dull chain met the bright still-coppery chain and yanked. The dead links fell off, and Abby used her weapon-chain, now eighteen inches shorter than before, to pick up the crucifix once more.

Abby said, “Dread servant of the Dark Tower, highly favored! You have consumed a servant of the Dark Tower more highly favored than you. The Master of that Undying One will consult his horoscope, see you, and find you.”

The look of horror on the face of Vorvolac almost made me feel sorry for him.

But he rose to his hands and his one remaining knee, still twisting his head blindly one way and the other. “The Master of Rahab is Anshargal himself, the Great King. Rahab-ut-tennin Ushumgallu is His Majesty’s special assassin. If any horoscopes foretold this event, I would have been slain years long past! Yea, years ere ever I won my first painful injection of that deathless mercury, which dripped from the glass of the anathor where the Stone of Philosophers burned, expelled my human blood and all its humors and weaknesses, and yet was not consumed.”

I looked at the puddles of white fluid which dripped from Vorvolac’s still bleeding wounds. Mercury? It was a poisonous metal. While Penny had called this thing a vampire, it was actually made by alchemy. Apparently there was some particularly nasty magic chemical they took into themselves. So this was not some poor sap who had been bitten against his will by Bela Lugosi. This was someone who had sold his humanity. An ex-human.

Abby said, “I am of the foreverborn, risen from the water. There are no horoscopes of any deed I do this day. I brought you here. You are hidden from retaliation only until I cease to hide you.”

I was not sure if that was exactly true, but then again, if I understood how this worked, anything Abby did that was underhanded, lying or stealing, would be part of her lower nature, and would let the horoscopes get a reading on her. So I guess she was telling the truth.

Vorvolac, of course, was from this world, or nearby, and he knew things I did not. He grimaced in mirthless mirth. “You cannot throw aside the shadow in which you walk so easily!”

Abby said, “It is not the shadow in which I walk, but the light.”

“Bah! To my kind, light is darkness!”

“Is life also death? All I need do is bow to the stars and worship them, and I will be in the night once more, and be seen of them. It takes only a moment, only a word. Shall I speak the word?”

“You would die as well!”

“I am Foreverborn—so my living always begins, never ends. You drink the lifeblood to fill your void, but it will not fill it so your dying never ends.” Abby said softly. “Why did you make yourself no longer you, no longer man?”

“I am more than man, little girl!”

“Less. You fear death more than I do.”

6. Cushing Moment

I said, “Foster, can you part the mist so that our vampire friend can see the crucifix, without seeing us?”

Foster said, “If Monkey Girl holds it away from herself, sure.”

But she heard what he said, and dangled the crucifix of the rosary on the end of her prehensile, coppery chain several yards to one side.

I said in halting Greek, “Beast who steals and drinks the blood of men! I am a man who drinks the blood of God, freely given! In days gone, you were a man. In days to come, I will be more than man. Come, and see!”

Vorvolac focused his eyes on the crucifix. He screamed with every ounce of strength in his lungs.

It worked just like in the movies, or more so. He was rolling on the floor, yowling, ignoring the lingering red sparks of pure pain, as if this pain were worse. He started to beat his head against the marble, breaking his own nose and drawing blood from his own forehead, as if to try to drive the image of the little ivory man hung on a little wooden cross from his sight.

Abby looked shocked, and she had her chain writhe and dart over to me, and drop the rosary with the heavy crucifix into my hands. The yard-long circle of beads clattered as I caught it. I guess Abby was unnerved by how powerful this thing was. I suppose if you’d never seen a vampire movie before, it would come as a complete surprise.

Strange thing: The moment the crucifix was in my hand, I no longer felt the Arctic vacuum of hunger issuing from the body of the Cold One.

I had sort of been assuming that Abby was a wise choice to hold the vampire-mugging cross, because of her innocence or something. I thought that, as an Undying, I would be more vulnerable to the life-eating power, and that the Cross of Christ would shield me only partly or not at all. “O me of little faith,” I muttered to myself. “Thou art a moron.”

Louder, I said, “Foster! Let him see me.”

And, with sword sheathed, and with nothing but a crucifix for a shield, I walked forward to confront the vampire-alchemist creature who, unlike all his kind, had the living heart of an Undying One blazing in his guts like a star, granting him endless life, infinite power. His eyes fixed on me with a look of lust and delight, like a greedy child offered a second helping of his favorite dessert.

His eyes, his terrible eyes, swelled up in my vision, and I felt as dizzied as a seasick tightrope walker with a drop steeper than Niagara Falls yawning and roaring below. My arm suddenly felt like lead, but I raised it up, and when the little crux of wood and ivory was before me, the eyes of Vorvolac were suddenly very small and filled with fear.

I stepped forward, and it was like walking against a strong wind, or a chain around my neck, forcing me back.

“Do not meet his eyes!” cried Penny, her voice hitting a high note, albeit shrill with fear that rang like crystal.

“Re-laaax!” I scoffed, swaying, forcing one foot forward, then the other. “I am freaking Peter Cushing in this scene, and he is Christopher Lee!”

Foster said, “Grand Moff Tarkin and Count Dooku were never in the same scene together.”

“Fos, you are so shallow! Don’t you watch the classics?” I said. The wind was now a gale, but then, suddenly, whatever power Vorvolac was exerting against my will to drive me back broke like a snapped chain. The gale was a breeze, then a breath, then gone. I stumbled forward, surprised.

Penny said, “I thought you never watched old movies.”

“Horror movies, I do,” I said, grinning down at Vorvolac, who cowered. “They are highly educational.”

7. Word of Honor

I kicked Vorvolac to the ground, and then I stepped on his neck, “I will make a deal with you, Count Chocula. You do one little thing for me, and I’ll spare your filthy life and let you go unharmed. Not harmed further.”

“You lie…” he gasped.

I leaned on his throat a little. “You have my word on it, and I don’t break my word! Do what I say, and you walk out of here. Or, hop. I am going to step off your neck now, and the next words out of your face-hole will be ‘Yes, sir!’”

I released the pressure on his neck. “Yessss… sssir!” He gasped, “But you must swear!”

That seemed like a reasonable request. I lifted up the crucifix. “By Saint George and the Holy Rood, I will spare you and free you unharmed to go your way, if you help me free these prisoners, harming none and playing no tricks. In the name of the Father, and Son, and Holy Ghost, I swear it. Do you agree?”

His eyes were glaring at the crucifix with purest hate. “Ah! Your vow is in that puny talisman, which burns me! Whatever are these names by which you swear, I curse them! Put aside that bit of wooden rubbish, so that I may ravish and devour your life and soul!”

“Wrong answer,” I said, and punched him in the face, making sure I hit his broken nose.

The Twilight Gate Opens

1. Unclenched Collar

It took longer than I expected, but when I was done beating him, and he had agreed to my terms, he was weeping, so that tears of silvery poison dripped down his cheeks. Yes, my arms were tired and my knuckles were skinned raw, and I enjoyed every minute.

Foster was keeping a wreath of unseen influence around Vorvolac’s head, to prevent us from making eye contact and getting mesmerized.

Foster also was beginning to have a strained look to his features, like a student who concentrates too long on one same math problem, or a fencer who holds his blade on his fingertips minute after minute, keeping both arms straight. Evidently the inviso-power could not be kept up forever. It used up Foster’s mojo or mana or endurance points or whatever.

We blindfolded Vorvolac with a strip from a silk pillowcase, so that Foster could relax. Nakasu hauled Vorvolac upright on his one good leg, and took him, one by one by one, to each girl in the room.

Some of the girls were so afraid we had to hold them in place. Foster and I, motivated by a testosterone-fueled sense of civic responsibility, both eagerly volunteered for the job of wrestling the wiggling yet curvaceous half-naked girls to hold them still, but Penny held them in place instead, merely by singing a soft song in any frightened girl’s ear.

The Cold One touched each girl’s black metal collar. Nakasu kept his huge hand, strong as an iron clamp, around Vorvolac’s wrist and guided his hand, so that he would not brush against any flesh.

Immediately upon his touch, the living metal was no longer alive, no longer strong enough to maintain a circular shape, and most of the girls could pull the limp bands of metal from their throats without Nakasu’s help.

You should have seen their faces light up. Girls look really pretty when their faces are glowing with a joy so great it is almost like awe.

Penny insisted on going last. Her fingers were not strong enough to pull the metal loop open, so I stepped up, put my arms around her neck, and with her scented hair tickling my fingers, I found the seam where the two ends met. I flexed my arm muscles, grunted, and yanked the thing into a straight bar with a clang of noise.

I presented it to her with a slight bow and a little smile.

I wanted to tell her 'I told you so'. But there must be some cosmic law of nature that prevents heroes from saying that to the damsels they rescue, because just at that moment, to my surprise, Penny started crying.

Her shoulders hunched, her chest heaved, and tears began leaking from her enormous, glittering eyes, and her lower lip was trembling.

I have never actually had occasion to whack a jackass over the skull with a two-by-four, but I understand they are given to have an expression that combines stubbornness and dullness of wit at such moments. I suspect I may have had the same expression on my face at that moment.

Nakasu, who held the crucifix, yanked Vorvolac away from Penny and tucked him under one arm. Nakasu must have seen the look of all-consuming bewilderment on my face, because he reached out with a hand the size of a waffle iron and shoved me into Penny’s arms. Or rather, her into mine.

This was something new and beyond me. What the heck do you do when you have both arms full of a crying girl?

2. Clinched Comfort

I tried to comfort her and pat her shoulder, which was not quite possible at this angle, and I said, “There, there. It's all right.”

Apparently that was the wrong thing to say.

“All right!” Penny yanked her head back from where it rested at slightly below armpit level. She had to crane her neck back to look at me. “All right? I was afraid! I was terrified! My mother calls dragons out of the sea! She is NEVER afraid! All right? Nothing will ever be all right again!”

“No one is brave all the time. You did fine.”

“But I had to be rescued! By a boy!”

“Man, actually,” I protested, apparently to no avail.

“A boy who works for me!”

“Pretty damn huge boy—let’s be fair—unkillable boy…with a kickass magic samurai sword and highly trained super death-fu kill-mad skillz, I should add!”

“A minimum-wage employee who doesn’t even know how to wax the floors!”

“Um…now, hold on! I explained about that grade of wax…the drying time–

“You're just a h-high school dropout!”

“Homeschooled!” I said through gritted teeth.

She arched her back more, trying to crane back further so she could look me in the face. This pushed her tightly against my body, and I found myself regretting the chain hauberk I was wearing.

“You understand nothing, Ilya Muromets! I was helpless! Helpless!”

“That's not necessarily a bad thing. Look at, uh, Lois Lane, for example.”

“I am not a cartoon! I am one of the Daughters of Tiamath! But all my arts and lore failed me! What will they say when the Daughterhood finds out that I failed! That I was afraid! That I was saved by a hairy troglodyte! What will my mother say?”

I tightened my grip and she gasped and could not breathe for a moment, and could not talk.

I leaned over her and put my nose against her nose. “She had darn well better say Thank you for saving my beautiful daughter. And then she will say: Did she give you that kiss she promised?”

I relaxed my grip and let her re-inflate.

And she lifted her face to mine and parted her lips and closed her eyes.

So, yes, I finally got that kiss. Either that, or my spine turned into a lightning bolt and shot several zillion volts directly into the pleasure center of my brain.

And yes, it was my first kiss, ever. I was a lip-virgin until that moment.

She kind of rubbed tears and snot on my cheeks, because her nose had started running while she was crying, but I did not complain. I wish I knew the date and time of day. Everything in my life is measured before and after that kiss. B.K. and A.S.: Before Kiss and Anno Smooch.

I wish I could tell you that this moment was the end of the story. It would have been such a good moment to roll the credits just then, you know?

But then reality interrupted.

3. Kill the Screech Owl

While I was still in mid-kiss, Nakasu tapped me on the shoulder, and pointed to the vampire under his armpit, and grunted.

“Mm … Mm,” I said, parting for air, “Busy. Leave message at the beep.”

But now Penny turned her head, so all I got during my next lip-assault was a lipful of soft, rounded cheek. Cheeked, blast it!

“Get serious! Do you never know the right time to pay attention?” She wriggled out of my arms with an impatient sigh, just as if she had not been enthusiastically sharing one lungful of breath with me a half-second earlier. “He wants to know the fate of the Nosferatu. I say kill it now.”

My suddenly-empty arms felt an almost physical ache at their girlishlessness.

So I crossed them with a clang of mail on my armored chest, and turned toward Nakasu with a scowl. “The Cold One. We let him out. He goes his merry way, free of us and free of the Dark Tower and free of this world. That was our deal. Abby, if you would …?”

Abby, who had been watching Penny and me with rapt attention, shook herself and translated for me.

Nakasu dropped the Cold One on the floor. Vorvolac was still blindfolded, and Nakasu had found an iron chain from somewhere in the slave quarters and wrapped it several times around Vorvolac, pinning his arms to his sides. Evidently there was plenty of chain in the slave quarters. With but one leg and tattered wings and about thirty pounds of cast-iron chain around him, Vorvolac was not going anywhere.

Ossifrage said something in Hebrew that I did not catch, and, seeing the look of confusion on my face, spoke more slowly and loudly, using simpler words. “Kill him. He will be a thorn in your eye. You understand? Poke your eye.” Ossifrage pantomimed sticking a finger into one’s own eye. “Kill the screech owl.” (Or maybe the word I thought was screech owl was night monster. I am not sure.)

Foster said, “Ilya, seriously. He’s right.”

I said, “But I gave my word.”

Foster said, “Think about this. If we let this monster loose, he has so much life-force inside him, an inexhaustible supply, he will be like a superman-vampire. Wherever we drop him, he will devour innocent women, children, old men, traveling salesmen, everyone. Their blood will be on our hands. You want that?”

I turned to Nakasu. “Big guy, you said you had three settings for the twilight gates you can open from the flail? Why not stick him through one, and the rest of us go through another?”

Abby translated his reply. Nakasu said, “We will still be within the shadow of the Darkest Tower, still within the Empire of Ur. Every slave-land which has a working Moebius coil is trampled and conquered, made part of the One Folk.”

Since Ossifrage could hear her side of the conversation, he said something in Hebrew. Then, looking at me, he spoke more slowly, using smaller words: “Through gate? Screech Owl return to rabboni —” the word meant master or teacher “— and come back. We will see him again. Thorn in the eye.”

I saw his point. If we just shoved Vorvolac through a twilight gate, he would be rescued by the nearest servants of the Dark Tower, and returned to active duty.

Penny said, “His hunger for the life and blood of living men cannot be quenched. He is an enemy to all living things.”

“What if he promises to just drink cow blood?”

She said, “The souls of irrational animals dissolve at death.”

I said, “What does that mean?”

She said, “Do you have a conscience?”

I said, “I hope so.”

“What does it do?”

“Gee, teacher, I was not expecting a quiz. The conscience convicts us of sin. It lets us struggle against our darker natures.”

She nodded. “They don’t have one. The Nosferatu excise it when they join their host and become Nosferatu. It is like a lobotomy. It is not something an oath or an effort of will can change. They cannot change their nature, and their nature is to drink the life of men. They are beasts.”

“But he talks!”

“Do not be deceived by the fact that they speak. The linguistic part of their soul can be intact after the human part is destroyed.”

I gritted my teeth. “But I gave my word. And we don’t know where the gate will open. Maybe one of them opens into a place where there are no people.”

Abby translated the comment for Nakasu and Ossifrage. Nakasu snorted a rude noise though his blowhole and growled something short and sharp from his mouth, which Abby repeated as, “He says he will try.”

With this, Nakasu threw the rosary beads of the crucifix neatly over my head, and kicked the vampire toward me. Nakasu pointed and grunted. The blood-quaffer was now my responsibility. I nodded, which was a gesture Nakasu seemed to find amusing.

With no more ado, Nakasu shifted the golden flail into its flexible shape, placed it on the marble floor, and plugged one of the three tails into the socket at the butt of the now-semicircular haft.

Then he looked up, pointed, and said something.

Abby said, “The wood dust in the air is lampwood, and it will shed ylemaramu the moment the gate builds up twilight.”

I said, “What? Does opening a gate set off a detector of some sort? An alarm?”

Abby said, “The Magicians do not use alarms. It is a point of pride with them. The lampwood is treated so it sweeps up stray twilight, which otherwise would accumulate, bending the laws and habits of nature, or making small holes in the wall of reality. Everywhere throughout the Dark Tower, all the lampwood, or almost all, acts this way.”

I looked around. “Then gather everyone out on the balcony. No lampwood there. If Foster can keep us unseen with his Invisible Girl powers, maybe we can open the gate there.”

“Invisible Man!” said Foster.

“Drag Vorvolac along,” I continued, grinning. “We cannot just let him loose inside the Tower, because he’d tell the pursuit where we went. For our own safety, we have to drop him off some place far from the Astrologers or their servants.”

“Let’s drop him off the balcony edge?” said Foster, brightly.

I scowled. “Foster, I made a deal with him.”

“Ilya, he’s a monster. Looks sort of human, talks like a man, but he is still a monster. Like a man-eating lion. He is not really rational, not something you can make deals with,” Foster said. “You are the one who says horror movies are educational! Name one where the vampire is a nice guy.”

“Love at First Bite starring George Hamilton,” I said.

Penny rolled her eyes. “Interview with a Vampire,” she said, “Angel, League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Blade, Dark Shadows, Underworld, Ultraviolet, Forever Knight, Being Human… and in Twilight the vampires are even nicer. They sparkle.”

Foster sighed. “Great! We are all going to die, because idiots in Hollywood don’t know how to make a proper vampire movie any more.”

Penny said, “They are in the pay of the blood-quaffers. I told you they were.”

4. Overlooking the Immensity of the Abscission

None of the young ladies had any possessions to take, and there was very little to loot. Abby had made a careful search of the chambers lest anyone be left behind. At Abby’s suggestion, all the girls had rolled up a silk sheet or two and slung them over the shoulder. Others were carrying jars and vases which they washed and filled at one of the pools not clogged with dead guards, since we did not know, any of us, where our next drink of water might come from. Some took some of the instruments from the music room, just on the theory that they might come in handy for some unexpected reason, as fire kindling, if nothing else: but it was more out of a desperation that there was nothing else to take.

The girls, slowly at first, fearfully, clutching their naked necks as if they expected to choke, stepped through the gates of glass that Foster opened for them with the cylinder seal. Their naked footsteps made no noise as they inched forward, eyes wide. Then they started walking faster. Then they were skipping, jostling, giggling, weeping tears of joy, and their footsteps turned to dance. Holding hands, round and round in couples and shrieking triplets and laughing circles, the freed girls spun. The serpent maiden reared high, and, lifting her well-shaped arms, sang a paean.

Far underfoot was black water. Overhead, one concentric ring inside another, were townships of this immensity of the Dark Tower, one above the other. The torpedo-shaped shadows of airships could be glimpsed against lights and reflections gleaming in the dome in the far heights, but none were near us.

I said, “Say goodbye to this ugly world. We leave here and now.” I nodded at Nakasu, and he put his hand to his chest above his eye, which looked like a boy saying the pledge to the flag or a man saluting his officer, both at once.

Nakasu laid down the flail again in a circle of ruby-ornamented gold. He began moving from one to another, adjusted carefully the rings set around the hilt.

Penny looked surprised. No, she looked shocked. “How is it that you have a spear coil? The Dark Tower knows the location and power of all its coils!”

I said, “I got this one from King Tut. A dead guy. And I think I saw a god in the setting sun, but this place is weird, so who knows. Do you think it will work? You make it sound like this is not part of their system.”

She shook her head numbly. “I had no idea anyone outside the Dark Tower could make Moebius coils.”

I said, “That cannot be true. The Professor made one; that is why we are here. They sent him the plans. I assume they send the plans to any aeon with a receiver to hear them. Lots of people must know how these are made.”

Penny said, “I mean make a coil and not be found.”

Something tickled at the back of my mind, but I could not bring it forward. So I said, “Do you know these Egyptian looking guys? Mummies?”

“Their aeon is called Mizraim, their land is called Chemet.”

“What are they like?”

“They are an ancient race, conquered in time long past by the Tower, and theirs is the strangest of necromancies. They place the shadows of their kings in great howes large as mountains, with each obelisk and monument placed just so, and invisible energies like dragons in the earth, telluric currents, are shaped to flow as these pyramids direct. By these telluric currents, the shadows of Pharaohs long dead have the power to make lands sterile or fertile, raise a river in flood or lower it in drought, and bless or curse the location of walled cities. But each spell takes centuries to work out, and centuries to undo. There was no Moses in that world, and the power of their Pharaohs never waned, their gods were never humiliated, and no plagues broke the sorcerer-priests. Europe and Asia and eventually the Americas were conquered by the slow and unseen armies of the Ghost Pharaohs of Chemet, and now their pyramids loom in all lands.”

“And what do they do for the Dark Tower?”

“The same. Erect monuments. They are architects and engineers.”

I smiled. “Do they build the Moebius coils for them, too? Is that one of the engineering things they do? I'm guessing some bright guy figured out how to make a Moebius coil whose action the Magicians cannot detect. No spear filled with troops ever flew out of this coil when Knack opened it. I only wonder how the Astrologers didn’t foresee this.”

“Walking shadows are hard for the stars to see,” Penny said thoughtfully, “But not impossible to see. Did you ever open the gate aside from when Abanshaddi was influencing your actions? We are all safe as long as her shadow covers us.”

“It is not a shadow, Miss Dreadful. It is a light, and the darkness comprehends it not.”

Just at that moment, a grin of triumph split Nakasu’s belly. There came a flame of many-colored light, and the wavering gloom like a scene seen underwater. A ball of darkness had formed in the dead-center of the circle, and popped open to fill its whole circumference.

I said to Abby, “What happens to the floor a gate sits on? Why isn’t there a bowl-shape hemisphere carved out of the rock?”

Abby asked Nakasu, listened to his reply, turned to me and said, “The black surface is an opening into another dimension.” The word she used was manit, which also means measure or reckoning. “This is not truly a sphere, for it is not here, not in this place, the way an object occupying volume is in this place. It appears to be so, because of the limits of the eyes.”

“That makes no sense,” I grunted.

Foster said, “It’s magic. Deal with it.”

I wanted to be the first guy through the gate. Partly this was because I am unkillable, and partly because a lot more people recognize Neil Armstrong’s name before they recognize Buzz Aldrin’s. It’s no fun being the second man on the moon. But Nakasu stepped in before I got the chance.

I took a step forward toward the twilight gate, scowling in disappointment (okay, pouting, but I meant it to be a scowl) but then stopped, reluctant to leave Penny behind with Vorvolac even for a moment, even if he was bound up and blindfolded. Foster was frowning at the balcony rail, trying to keep a whole wall of his eye-defeating misty stuff between us and any unfriendly eyes from the countless windows overlooking the lake-sized cistern. That left Ossifrage and Abby and a small army of teenage girls to guard the Cold One.

And I saw Vorvolac hunch up his shoulders against the chain looped around him, and saw his clawlike fingers opening and closing, and saw his eerie smile as he licked his lips, saw his fangs twitching erect, heard the sniffing of his enlarged nostrils. All the young women around him, all that flesh and blood, it was making him hungry. I felt a chill in my bones, or maybe it was a cold and unseen aura of power Vorvolac shed growing as his cravings grew, reaching outward.

Loathing crawled in my throat. As suddenly as if a stick snapped in my brain and unleashed a logjam, a flow of certainty gushed into me.

I abruptly realized that Foster was right. I saw he was right.

If this thing, this thing that used to be human but tossed his humanity aside, if he were too dangerous for me to step away even for a moment, then he was too dangerous to live. If the Dark Tower found him—and they would, the moment Abby’s magic shadow no longer fell across him—he would be killing whomever the Astrologers commanded him to kill; and that included people as innocent as Abby and Penny, as old as Ossifrage, as dopey as Foster. But even supposing we dropped him somewhere the Dark Tower could not find him, he would still kill as whim or hunger struck him, just freelance rather than under orders.

I just wanted someone else to make the decision for me, to take it out of my hands.

I turned to Abby. “Abanshaddi, ask everybody why I am making this decision. I am the only one here who does not know what is going on. Not the oldest or the strongest nor do I know magic like a witch nor do I have invisibility powers like a mutant.”

Foster said, “Hey! I am not a mutant! I am a Svartalfwicken! I do runecraft. This is Rhinegold. Like from the opera!”

“Stolen gold,” said Penny sourly, turning toward him. “Like from the opera.”

Foster jerked his eyes up from where he had been staring at her behind before she turned, and blinked them owlishly. “Gee. I could put some of the sacred river-gold back…? Of course, you had plenty, and my world was getting low…”

I spread my hands. “My question is who died and left me boss? Why am I the one making this decision? Or, rather, why are you guys all listening to me rather than ordering me around?”

Foster looked a bit surprised. “I —I dunno. You seem to know what to do.”

“What?” I almost shouted. “Everyone here except the little girl is older than me, and she knows everything about this world and I don’t! I cannot even turn on the lights! Why is this decision mine?”

Penny looked scornful. “There is no decision. You must kill Vorvolac. His thirst for you will haunt him and draw him to you, even across worlds. Use your cross and burn him.”

Abby spoke up. “The Master says he awaits your decision because the Cold One is your prisoner. You are over thirteen, you carry weapons. Your magic defeated him. Yours is the Cold One’s fate.” Nakasu, of course, was not there to answer.

I said, “I told you it was not magic.”

Abby shook her head. “I believe you. This is magic.” She held up her copper sickle. With it, she pointed at the crucifix I was wearing around my neck. “That! We don’t know what that is.”

Foster raised his hand. “Buddy, the decision about the Nosferatu is yours. Turning him over to Nakasu or Ossifrage is the same as throwing him from the balcony.”

5. Watch Tower

Before I had a chance to move or speak, Nakasu jumped out of the black sphere with a happy look on his chest and a gush of blood drooling down his legs. There was a leather boot with a foot in it sticking out of the wide shark-mouth of his belly, and he was carrying a spear too small for him, which he lightly tossed to Ossifrage. In Nakasu’s other hand was a short, curved bronze sword like a meat cleaver, a samara. Nakasu was using the bronze sword as a toothpick, pulling bits of raw flesh and crumpled coppery rings from shattered armor from between his tusks.

He spoke in urgent tones, blapping with his nose-hole and gargling and clicking with his belly-mouth both at once, something I had not seen him do before.

Abby had no difficulty following the two voices from Nakasu. She said to us, “The Freedman says there is a way-station beyond, a keep without bailey or moat, and no guard in the arrival atrium at the moment. Horoscopes on the walls show that the gate will not be used again until April, which is sacred to Saturn. No one will be waiting. He has locked the doors from the inside, and saw no sign of any watch being kept. Fate is with us.”

“Good,” I said. It was nice, for once, to have luck on our side. I wondered how long it would last.

“Nakasu urges us to send the slaves through first, guarded by himself and the Master—” she nodded at Ossifrage “—with the rest staying as rearguard to protect the column. Abandon the water jars and instruments. There are both stores and pantries hard by the atrium, where we may supply the slaves with feed and drink.”

I said, “Tell him I have officially manumitted all these young ladies in the name of the Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon, also in the name of the Thirteenth Amendment of the Constitution of the United States of America and the Declaration of Independence, and by the power of this my father’s sword and grace of Heaven by whose favor I have this day conquered. Got it? Everyone treats them as free from now on. Ask him if he can redirect the Moebius gate on the far side to some further destination?”

Abby exchanged words with Nakasu. “He says he can, but without an atlas, the combination matches would be random. Since he does not know which aeon this world is in any case, one is as good as another.”

“Great,” I said. “Let’s go.”

Nakasu burped something at Abby, pointed at Vorvolac, rolled his pectoral eyes. I could hear the tone of voice, even if I could not get the words. Nakasu raised his hand to gesture me to halt when I started to step toward the whirling ball of twilight that formed the gate.

She said, “However, the atrium floor is one large expanse of watchglass, the largest Nakasu has ever seen.”

I said, “I don’t know what that means.”

Foster said he could explain. But I said to Abby, “Start the girls going through! I will stay here to guard the rear while you tell me what is going on. I have the bad feeling our good fortune is about to ebb. We are standing here out in the open on a balcony with a cyclotron-powered Moebius gate ripping open a hole in the walls of the universe, and over a dozen dead harem guards in the pond, not to mention the one-legged kids Ossifrage tossed into the water. Someone is bound to see us. Can we get a move on?”

Ossifrage and Nakasu went first to hold the atrium. Abby urged the girls into a line, telling the older ones to protect the youngsters.

I said to Foster, “You should go through too, Foster. Use your Space Ghost inviso powers to keep everyone on that side unseen.”

Foster said, “Not yet. I got to tell you what watchglass is.”

“What is it?”

“It is the reason why we have to kill your bloodsucking trophy pet over there.”

6. Watchglass

Foster said, “A watchglass is a Geiger-counter for magic. It is built specifically to find unclean spirits.”

“Like me?” I said.

“Like walking shadows,” said Abby.

“Which is what?” I said.

Foster answered, “Mummies, vampires, werewolves, creatures from the Black Lagoon, and every other Universal Movie Monster Abbot and Costello ever faced. You’re something different.”

“Yeah, I know,” I said. “Highlander was from Twentieth-Century Fox.”

Foster said, “I thought your people were more like John Carpenter’s The Thing.”

Abby offered helpfully, “The horror-cross of the Sea-Witch is also a walking shadow.”

Penny said, “Not to fear. I can place Wild Eyes in a hidden place inside my body to obscure her from the watchglass. It will take me about ten minutes to prepare. Nor will you, Ilya, trouble a watchglass by passing over it, since your life is inside your body, albeit more than human life. But the glass will turn black if he passes over it.” And she nodded at Vorvolac.

“What if we float over this glass floor?” I said. “Ossifrage can…”

“A watchglass is not pressure sensitive,” said Foster. “It is like the metal detector at school. Only spiritual.”

I looked at him in amazement. “You have metal detectors at your schools in your world?”

“No,” Foster said, “In my world, gypsies were not allowed to enter the schools, and the teachers are machines built by the military-industrial syndicates and animated by Svartalfar, the dark spirits of the underworld. I learned how to forge identity papers before I learned to read, in order to get a school passport.”

“Wait. If you could not read and write, then how could you forge papers?”

He waved his hand dismissively. “So my first few forgery attempts did not go well. In any case, just now I was talking about our world, not my world. Oregon. Metal detectors were put in last year. Remember those school shootings? And before you ask, my cloak of many mists cannot fool cameras or mirrors. I can only fool things with brains. Which I guess is why you could see me.”

“You cast a shadow in bright light,” I said. “Also, if you close one eye.”

“I know,” he said, “I know how my own superpower works. It was a joke.”

“It wasn’t funny,” I said.

“Give it a week to sink in,” he said. “You’ll wake up at midnight doubled over with laughter.”

“You know what else is not funny,” I said. “Getting old.”

“What do you mean?” he said.

“I mean this is my decision and no one else's. I am the judge, jury, and executioner. And I get one shot at it with no do-overs.”

The Dreadnaught of the Air

1. Final Verdict

At that point, Vorvolac started giggling, guffawing, snorting. There he stood on his two legs, feet bare, his arms and skin-flaps still wound up in chain, and blindfold made out of a pillowcase still over his eyes.

“Let’s play it smart!” Foster nocked an arrow and drew his bow. “Let’s kill him before we find out why he is laughing.”

Penny did not look worried, but the fierce bird on her shoulder puffed up her wings and lowered her head and uttered a shrill scream which I am sure all of the people in the townships above and below us must have heard.

I said, “Didn’t he have one leg just a minute ago?”

It was hard to tell because they were folded up like umbrellas beneath his armpits, but the leathery wings of Vorvolac did not seem torn any more.

Penny said in the tightly-wound voice, “He has the heart of Rahab in him. Twilight flows from the open gate. He has learned how to use the power he drank to regrow himself just in the moments while we stood here. He will learn more if more time passes.”

I sighed. “Okay. We have to kill him after all. Let’s just dump him over the railing. It is the only reasonable way. I mean: he gave up his humanity, right? We don’t have to be humane, do we?”

Vorvolac spoke up quickly, “Lord Ilya! I surrendered to you! I obeyed! I have harmed none!” And he grinned. He had teeth like a snake.

His eyes were still covered, but there was something so sick and so sinister in that grin I could not stand it. If my life had had a soundtrack, it would have been playing the theme from Jaws or from the shower scene in Hitchcock’s Psycho by now.

Foster did not wait for any order to shoot. He shot. There was no way he could miss at this distance. The bow had maybe a seventy-pound pull: Foster was not as tall as me, but he was stronger than most grown men. The longbow could pack a punch that would drive a shaft through a steel plate. Thwack. The glass arrow went right into the narrow chest of Vorvolac, and the arrow shaft quivered.

Vorvolac staggered backward a step or two, but he did not fall. His silvery blood did not spurt from his chest, but rather a quicksilver ball of poisonous fluid gathered at the wound, and pulsed, and then hesitated. Then it shrank as the blood was pulled back into the wound. Vorvolac grunted and groaned and then screamed like a woman in labor.

And the arrow slid itself out of his chest, and clattered to the marble floor, tinkling.

Vorvolac was laughing. “What a peculiar sensation! Ilya, you whose life I shall eat next—does this always feel so odd when you do it?”

“Oh, that is not a good sign,” I said.

I spared a glance over my shoulder. More than half the girls were into and through the gateway. “Ladies! Run, do not walk! You can enter the sphere from all sides at once!”

Abby translated this comment. Then she ignited and threw her sickle spinning like a fiery boomerang in a swift, flat arc straight toward Vorvolac’s head. It was a great shot, but the chain suddenly turned dull and lost all its color, and the red-hot blade went dark and cold. He ducked, and the weapon sailed over his shoulder, but the chain was dead and could not wrap around his neck.

Abby stared at the dropped chain which led from her hand to the sickle lying on the floor. Her face was stricken. She tugged on the chain, but it rattled limply, and did not respond.

Penny started singing, a shrill, eerie chant of two notes, high and low, over and over, that made you dizzy just to hear it.

I did not wait for whatever Penny was doing to work its charm. I rushed Vorvolac like a linebacker, grabbed the blindfolded prisoner around the body, hauled him squirming to the railing, and tossed his writhing, chain-wrapped body up and over and out into the darkness.

He dropped like a stone, but he was still laughing.

And, below him, far below, the water was disturbed.

A giant shape came out of the water, as if a whale were to leap like a dolphin, but instead of falling back, soared.

I saw it was not a submarine, or rather, not just a submarine. It was an airship. It was the length of ten football fields across, larger than any zeppelin my world had ever built. A Niagara Falls’ worth of water sluiced from the rigid gas envelope. The bowsprit was carved like a square-bearded king with the body of a winged bull, and the wings of the bull curved back to follow the long axis of the immense ironclad craft; and water dripped, glittering in streams, weeping from the stoical face of the king.

Up it rose.

“Oops,” I said.

2. A Dreadnought of the Air

Lanterns spaced on the port and starboard of the prow ignited, and a beam of flame struck me. By dumb chance, the shadow of the balcony rail fell across my face, so I was not blinded, but the top of my head and my chest and arms were on fire, so I fell backward, screaming in pain. Which, I will say again, is totally unfair, since pain is nature’s way of telling us harm is being done to an organism, but none of this harm could actually harm me.

Abby said, “I’ll go get the Master! He’ll smite the airship!” and turned and scampered toward the dark ball of nonbeing. The girls were now rushing the gate, those behind shoving those in front on through. The solid-looking black ball surface offered no resistance: it was like jumping into a pond. But Abby was in the rear of the female stampede, and there were too many panicky bodies in the way for her to reach the surface.

I heard, but did not see, the deep thrum of catapults or ballistae going off. Two harpoons longer than jousting lances came flying up from housings on the bow of the rising airship, sailed over the balcony rail, each trailing a long line behind them. With a double-crack, they planted their spearheads into the upper part of the half-dome of the gigantic alcove out of which the balcony was scooped. The shafts were eight feet long and made of lampwood, which immediately emitted a blinding blue-white light. Penny’s magic must have been the dark-flavored kind rather than the light-flavored kind, because the dreamlike dizziness following her voice cut out. She was just a normal girl with a normal singing voice.

Penny turned, raised her wrist, and practically flung her bird at the dark ball. “Flee, my soul! Flee for our life!”

But the wooden shafts hanging overhead were putting out that blazing light, ylemaramu, that quells twilight and shuts down gates. The black ball of the gateway was visibly shrinking, wavering, and the aura of northern lights whirling around it was flickering and dying. It was smaller than a bowling ball and Wild Eyes had to clap her wings tight to her body to sail through.

There were still about half-a-hundred ex-slave-girls on our side of the gate at that point. Some were screaming, but most of them knelt and put their faces to the floor, hair spilling like little black waterfalls, and stretched out their slender arms to their captors, palms up, begging to be spared.

The sight should have disgusted me, because American pioneer women would never have acted that way, nor would maidens of ancient Rome, but I cannot say I blame them. I was supposed to be the big hero, and I had failed them. It was my fault, not theirs, that they had to push their pretty faces onto the floor so that some goon could come step on them.

Abby was trapped on our side also, and so were Foster and Penelope: yes, the selfsame girl I had promised and vowed and swore and boasted I would save. That promise looked like it would turn out as false as my word to Vorvolac. Me and my big mouth.

I said a prayer to St. John the Apostle and the fat cells in my skin, which were on fire like candle tallow, simply stopped burning. My skin was all black and crispy, but honestly, since I did not fear the damage was permanent, it did not bother me as much as you'd think.

So I leaped to my feet, drew my katana, and assumed the stance called Hasso-no-Kamae, the Stance of the Eight Directions. The feet are close together with one foot forward, and the blade is before the right shoulder, edge forward, slanting up at a slight angle. Elbows are close to the body. It is also called Moku-no-Kamae, the Stance of the Tree, because the swordsman is upright.

I saw Foster’s face vanishing as he donned his goggles and mask. Then I did not see Foster except maybe as a shadow, but I heard him step up next to me. I heard him grunt, and then heard the familiar creak of a bow bending as the string was drawn back. From where his shadow fell, I could see he had drawn the great bow to his ear. The blue-white light was not driving his invisibility away.

At that moment, I knew he was more than a friend. He was not running, even though no one could see him, and he could have escaped easily. He was drawing his puny little weapon that shot a puny pointy little glass stick against a massive warship filled with soldiers and gunners and dark magicians.

But, by Saint Sebastian and all the warrior saints, he did not run, did he? He did not.

Abby stepped up to my left, and raised her now-dead sickle weapon, but she held the blade high, and had the chain gathered in her other hand to throw. She was not running either, and she was a skinny little girl. My heart seemed to expand in my chest. I was proud of her. Proud of someone willing to die beside me—me, a monster who could not die.

Penny had nothing, not even a knife, and she looked woebegone. But she would not kneel like the other girls, who wept and begged and moaned, but she instead raised her chin and defiantly slipped her eyeglasses on. She was unarmed and unclothed, but in that moment, I think I saw the real Penny, not the surface that attracted me, but the real character underneath.

“Run away, Penny,” I said. “I’ll hold them off as long as I can.”

Penny said, “Where should I flee now that they would not see and foresee? That is the flagship of the fleet. That is the craft of the Great King himself.”

I said, “Foster, is your mist entirely gone? Do you have any other tricks, any way you can hide Penny and Abby? Hide the harem girls, or get them to run?”

3. A Cloudwalker of Arphaxad

But there was no time for reply. Grapnels shot up, hung in the air a moment, and clutched the wooden balcony rail. From the unnatural way the black chains writhed and snaked, I could see they were living metal.

Over the edge of the balcony came floating the body of Vorvolac, who was still chained up and blindfolded, and still laughing in mockery and triumph. He was not even slightly dead. Indeed, he seemed in the best of health.

With him was a dark-haired, hook-nosed, and dark-bearded man. The beard was held in two short braids, and the hair was held in a ponytail so long that it looked like he had not cut it in years, maybe never. Two things were odd about him. First, he was standing on a cloud of smoke as if it were solid. Second, he held a shepherd’s crook in his hand, and his coat was of camel-hair, dyed black, but with a long train or tail that was forked like a tuxedo. It was the same costume, or, rather, the same uniform, Ossifrage wore, except in a darker hue. With a gesture of his crook he was drawing Vorvolac through the air.

Abby said in a voice of fear, “It is the Betrayer.”

I said, “You mean Ossifrage’s younger cousin or whatever up there?” Because the guy really did have a family resemblance to Ossifrage.

Abby said, “He is called Glede, the Black Kite. The eight navies and eightscore warships of the aeons of Elam, Asshur, Uz and Ul he overthrew; great cities of Sasan and Svan, of Brennis and Tharsis also were cast into the sea and drowned at his word.”

I said, “How can he do so much damage just with levitation? Levitation is a wimpy superpower.”

Abby said, “It is said the Betrayer can make the calm sea lighter or heavier in one place or another, as if the whole world were tilted, and so stir up great tidal waves as tall as mountains walking on the sea.”

Penny said, “Even in this light, which stops my song from afflicting men, I can summon the soul of the water.”

“What’s that mean?” I said.

“It means I can prevent the Betrayer from flooding us with the cistern lake, but that is all I can do. My art is not meant for closed-in spaces or small pools.”

Abby shouted, “Look!”

Foster said, “Enemy at six o’clock high! There are cynocephali above us!”

It was true. A cavalry of wolf monsters came swarming out of the windows of the next highest line of lit balconies above us, maybe two hundred yards away, maybe less, straight up the wall. They were sticking to the sheer wall like spiders, trotting, not close enough yet to charge. Or rappel. Or paratroop-drop. I am not sure what it is called when you charge down a sheer vertical wall.

At the same moment, the prow of the armored airship lofted above the railing, as huge as if the face of the Sphinx in Egypt were raising its head to look at me. Affixed to the rigid airship frame were weapons shaped like brass searchlights, and others shaped like arbalests and catapults. From square hatches in the side of the gondola protruded good, old-fashioned cannon like those from the days of Napoleon, except more decorative. The intricately-cast cannon mouths looked like so many astonished dragons with their mouths wide open in circles of anger and shock, all thrusting their serpent heads like town gossips out of their Dutch doors.

From the cheeks of the vast and kingly face of the bowsprit, like the outrageous sideburns of Civil War officers, there were upper and lower catwalks extending along the airframe. On these walks were marines in Victorian pressure suits, like extras from the undersea scenes of Disney’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea. They dripped with rivulets of water, and pointed long-barreled weapons of strange design at me; some looked like spearguns, or like blunderbusses, others like fire-extinguishers of bronze.

The brass eyeballs of the giant airship face irised open. Behind was the bridge.

4. Left Eye and Right Eye

Behind the glass of one eyeball, I saw my old pal Enmeduranki. And I do mean old. He looked more worn and withered than the mummy of Pharaoh Nectanebo I had met earlier (not many hours earlier but many thousands of feet higher).

I had not seen his face before. Then, he had been wearing a veil. His jaw was narrow, undershot, beardless except for a straggling scrap of white, and his mouth a crumpled and crooked line, as if it were full of unsweetened lemonade.

He was not on his throne, but standing. Near him were flunkies and high servants in elaborate miters and crowns and copes of white and black, each bearing a more highly decorated emblem of a nine-pointed star on brow or chest than the next, and not one of them was younger than ninety. I assumed these were the other upper ranking magicians, Astrologers and Chaldaeans of the Dark Tower. Some were carrying copper tablets, and some scrolls or charming wands. Behind Enmeduranki was a Blemmyae slave carrying a wide umbrella painted with astrological figures.

Enmeduranki was awesome enough, by the Dark Tower scale of awesome, to have a parasol even while he was inside the bridge of a submarine inside of an indoor cistern, where no drop of rain nor ray of sun could ever come.

And not one of the chief magicians lacked a treasonous hint of the same tired, weary, bored, forever-trapped look in their faces that Enmeduranki had in his face. His was the worst, the most lined, the most filled with despair, but they all had it a little bit. On their faces I saw the grinding madness of knowing the future.

The other eye of the giant face, when it opened, was filled with splendor. Here was a man among men and a king of kings—you could see that even if you were blind.

I was practically at the rail, and the airship was very close to the rail and winching itself closer, so I could see every detail of the Great King clearly.

Above his head, floating and weightless, was a coronet of tiny lights in a circle, brighter and sharper than fireflies, which somehow also looked as if they were immensely far away and utterly holy and pure. They looked like stars from the sky, ripped from heaven to serve as his hat.

The man himself was square-faced, hard-featured, square-bearded, and scarred. His eyes were like two black beads of jet, very dark and very shiny. He was evidently the kind of leader, like Patton or Alexander the Great, who led his men from the front, not from some Pentagon over the sea.

His robe was even more splendid than his crown. Above his armor, which was plated and leaved with brightest gold and blackest onyx, was a robe and alb and mantle of flowing white light. It looked like someone had taken laser-beams, made them as flexible and weightless as spiderwebs, and woven them on a loom.

But the white light was an illusion: every color in the rainbow was in that robe, and there were images within images in the white fields and folds of the mantle, and the longer I stared at the hypnotically circling spirals of images, the more I saw.

This was not like looking at an ordinary object made of matter, which fades in your memory after a month or a decade or a lifetime. The visions woven in the robe reached into my brain and drew themselves there. Whenever I close my eyes, I can bring up the memory in perfect detail, like a three-dimensional picture. If you ever see any object, a weapon, a crown, or a robe that instead of shining with light, shines with this stuff, this light that cannot be forgotten, the light immune from time, you will know you are not looking at an object from the human parts of the universe.

I saw images in silver of moons in crescent phase, and planets rising and setting over green fields. I saw two cities, one at peace woven in azure and alabaster, and one at war, illumed in red and black. I could see tiny images of a bride and groom in one city, or a judge lifting his balance scale above a kneeling criminal, whereas the warlike city showed the horrors of a siege, flames and rapine and desperate men chewing the flesh of their horses or children. Ruby-hued pulsed the glint of swords and the gush of wounds in that microscopic, glowing, supernatural thread-light. In green, I saw fields being harvested, and vineyards, and in gold, a herd of straight-horned cattle.

As the robe folded and rippled, I saw a bull from the herd savaged by lion and lioness, which the herdsmen and their dogs fended off. I saw slaves at their labor and scholars bent over their scrolls and a dancing floor where maidens bent and swayed in the dance as the robelight flowed and breathed. Surrounding all, forming the hem of the garment, was the deep ocean-stream where dolphins and leviathans sported, and a kraken with uplifted jaws rose up from a great river. And in the center of the robe’s breast was an image of a golden sun, surrounded by a spray of arrows with bright rays, too bright for my eyes to look at.

The garment itself was never without motion, and weight did not seem to touch it. Whatever winds were moving it were not the winds of this world in which I stood. The golden armor and his short and crooked sword, as drenched with gems as a Fabergé egg, looked cheap and tawdry by contrast, the way you sometimes see a gorgeous girl make herself look clownish by hiding her beautiful face under clumsy makeup meant to improve her looks.

In his hand was a spear made of a narwhal’s horn. Or maybe it was the horn of a unicorn. The thing was at least five feet tall, and came to his shoulder when at parade rest. So the Great King stood, looking down at me, garbed with a rainbow if a rainbow could be made of fire, one hand behind his back, his feet spread, his star-crowned head tilted forward.

“Who is that?” I whispered.

Abby could see where my dazed eyes stared. She said, “Anshargal, He Who Binds Earth to Heaven.”

The men near Anshargal were younger than the Astrologers. They were hard-faced men, wearing cylindrical war-helmets, carrying jeweled and crooked swords. Each had a baldric or sash studded with little hemispheres painted to look like Earth. Some had one, others had many. It was like seeing the notching in a gun, or the silhouettes painted on the hull of a fighter pilot’s plane. The marshals and generals and admirals of the Great King wore each man on his chest how many slave-worlds the troops under his command had trampled.

I flourished my katana and saluted the Great King by holding the blade before my eyes.

He nodded regally, and I was close enough to see the scar near his mouth pucker slightly as he suppressed a smile.

I also flipped the bird to Enmeduranki with my left hand.

And, again, I saw the scar of the cheek of Anshargal the Great King pucker slightly as, again, he did not smile.

5. Seen and Foreseen

There was some sort of bullhorn or amplifier working, because I heard his voice loud and clear through the glass surface of the eyeball-window. Anshargal said, “So this is the Undying that you talked me into letting defeat my most useful man-slaughterer Rahab?”

Enmeduranki replied, “Sire and Son of Nimrod, all has been seen and foreseen.”

“You have never read me a future with more gaps and blind spots in it,” Anshargal said in an icily jovial tone. “I don’t care for games where I cannot see the chessmen.”

He did not say ‘chess’ but meelulti-passu, a battle-game with pawns. Which, in a way, was even more demeaning a comment: a game where all the men were of low value.

Enmeduranki inclined his head, “Sire, there is the mermaid he loves.” The word he used was Naihiru, which means siren, dolphin, or whale.

“Put her to the hooks,” Enmeduranki was saying, “let the rape-beasts have their sport with her, and he will be broken to your will, and shall encompass the defeat of the Slumbering Crown of Shazand, uplift the Great Seven-Headed Beast of Sasan, and so end all who in this generation oppose the fates the stars ordain. All is known and foreknown.”

“Did he just call you a whale?” I muttered to Penny. “Better watch your weight.” I am glad I did, because she was nervously touching her throat, and beginning to look panicked, looking over the balcony rail as if calculating her chances of surviving the five-hundred-foot plunge into the cistern, but then my little joke snapped her out of it. Her hand twitched like she wanted to slap me, but considering the circumstances, she thought the better of it.

Foster said, “My arm is getting tired. Want me to shoot?”

“Uh,” I said.

There were maybe two hundred large-bore and small-bore weapons of various designs pointed at us. None of them would kill me, but they would kill everyone else.

I took a step forward. I was about to shout out something brave and stupid, like demanding to fight their champion, or asking my friends to be let free, but Enmeduranki glanced down at the golden dial in his hand as if checking his pocketwatch, and then, looking weary but not looking up, waved his finger at me.

The armor I was wearing flexed, snapped rigid, went tight, and I was held with my arms at my side as if in a metal cocoon. I went from tree stance to falling like a tree, and I could not bend my legs or use my arms to break my fall, so my skull hit the ground hard enough that it should have killed me, if I could have been killed. I mean, I felt the plates of my skull separate, and I smelled the smell of blood and neural fluid leaking out. No one ever felt pain like that, because I assume they would have been instantly dead.

Instead of dying, I said a prayer to St. Denis, the patron saint of headaches, gritted my teeth, and forced my skull plates to scrape back into place, once I had forced the escaping blood and fluids to run backward into my head wound. The legend is that Denis was beheaded by Emperor Decius, but that his headless body picked up his head and walked off with it. Maybe he was like me. Whatever he was, I promised gentle St. Denis that I would never complain about the gory nature of my superpower again.

And, just because I was getting better and better at this stuff, I concentrated on making my burnt hair come back where the death-lanterns had blackened the top of my head. There was a rustling noise, and I felt a sensation like ants crawling over my scalp. I lifted my head as far as the neck armor strangling me would allow, and saw that I had overdone it: At least a yard of black unruly hair, coarse as the hair of a bear, was pushing through the links of the coif, spread out in a semicircle from me, and writhing like a nest of snakes.

Meanwhile, a hook-toothed ramp fell from the slope of the gondola beneath the beard of the giant face on the prow and latched onto the railing. It created a remarkably long and narrow catwalk that swayed slightly, but connected the belly of the metal airship and the balcony.

The narrow boarding ramp was quickly crowded with soldiers. Their high cylindrical helms of brass and clanking chestplates gleamed in the harsh blue light from the lampwood spears and searchlight-shaped weapons prepped for firing. The soldiers in front held shield and spear in hand, and walked with mincing unsteadiness, because they had no hand free with which to steady themselves. Each alternate man in the rear had shield or spear slung, and used his free hand to grasp the chain that formed the railing. The soldiers on the narrow catwalks ringing the equator of the zeppelin aimed their crossbows and harquebuses downward, covering the boarding party.

The man in the front was a scarred man missing most of his nose. He put one foot on the wooden balcony rail, and hesitated. He was staring at my hair.

And if I read his expression correctly, it scared him.

6. Inevitable and Unexpected

Enmeduranki was speaking to me. “Deathless boy, I rename you Utu’abzu the Ascending Sun. Your service shall be long and loyal, indeed, shall be eternal. What else could you serve? Only the Dark Tower shall stand forever. Or would you serve blind kings, blind causes? I will tell you before each battle the exact outcome, if you like, every wound dealt, and each deathblow to our foes, to the precise minute. Do not bother to open your mouth to defy me: you know we foretell all.”

My eye fell on Abby, who was standing next to Penelope. I noticed a blind spot of something my brain would not let me notice between the two girls. It was Foster, whose question I had not answered. He was still holding his longbow drawn. It was not a compound bow, so his shoulders were probably beginning to give out with the strain. Meanwhile, Abby had donned her monkey-face breathing mask, probably to hide her fear.

Enmeduranki called, “Surrender! Beg for servitude! Fate is determined and inevitable. Even the people of your world know this: all things are controlled, down to the smallest element, the tiniest motion or passion of heart or brain, all is controlled by nature and the laws of nature. Yield! Beg to be my slave!”

Then he had to pause to cough, which sort of ruined the oratorical impression. Dark Lording is really a young man’s game. Being a gray and aging tyrant must suck.

I had been planning to be the strong and silent type, and not give them the satisfaction of getting any word out of me. Partly this was because Rahab had played it quiet when he first came upon me, and I remembered how creepy it was. Partly because I was pissed at getting caught so easily, and it was so obviously my fault. Heck, I had even been warned! Hadn’t Abby told me I was going to throw to his death someone I said I would spare? I did it anyway.

But I did not want Abby to feel disheartened. For her sake, then, I raised my head as far as the constriction of the coif would let me, and called back in my loudest and most sarcastic voice: “I laugh at fate and nature! You could not predict me in the past, and will never control me in the future!”

And I laughed, and the laughter seemed to have a life of its own as it came out of my mouth, because it sounded high and lofty and jovial and joyous, nothing like the laughter of Rahab at all.

The man with no nose in the front of the landing party still had not stepped onto the balcony. He and all his men were still on the precarious narrow ramp or corvus leading to the airship.

I realized that the reputation of the Host that Yearns for Death in Vain was so horrifying that even doughty veterans were reluctant to approach me, even though I was helpless and motionless on the ground, no more dangerous than a rump roast.

The soldiers were more spooked by that happy, ringing mirth, coming from a man they thought a monster, than anything else I could have done or said. It must have been like hearing a Tyrannosaurus Rex laugh.

The reluctance could only last a moment. The parlay between me and the Lord High Astrologer made everyone pause. But as soon as it was over, or as soon as the Great King or any of his lieutenants noticed the soldiers hesitating, someone would bark out the order and everyone would swarm over us. Why weren’t they hurrying?

The Great King Anshargal tilted his head and gave Enmeduranki a sardonic look.

“Did your wisemen invert a fraction?” said Anshargal sourly.

The aged Lord of Magicians Enmeduranki looked poker-faced. Some intuition told me that I had not been supposed to talk or laugh. They had not predicted that I would say anything at this moment.

What had thrown off their prediction?

I saw a portly general in a gold duncecap next to Anshargal was pointing his finger at me. Not at me, at us. He was counting.

Anshargal spoke with a rolling note of dangerous mockery to Enmeduranki, “Well…?”

Enmeduranki said stoically, “Great King, we are both slaves of the Dark Tower, you and I. Even though a king, you cannot oppose the fates the Astrologers read: and I am the Lord of Magicians.”

“We are both slaves of the Dark Tower, yes. Even though you are the Lord of Magicians, if your star-mages read your tablets of fate awry, what use are they?”

Enmeduranki was staring at me, at the people next to me, and at the girls cut off when the gate had shut (who were still prone and kowtowing at this point, saying nothing). His face seemed momentarily alive, excited, despite the look of bewildered fear. It was gone as soon as it appeared, covered over with an expression of detached professionalism. But I saw it. He was glad something had gone wrong.

The portly general said, “The count is correct, Great King. There are forty-one here on the balcony, as foretold. They are standing where the sketch depicts.” He proffered a thin yellow tablet made of cunning metal to the Great King.

The Great King did not glance at it, but passed it to a servant who handed it to Enmeduranki.

The gaggle of Astrologers behind Enmeduranki, as if at an invisible signal, had each one taken out tablet and stylus, abacus and some instrument as long as a yardstick which might have been a charming wand, or might have been a jumbo-sized sliderule. They were checking their math.

One of the younger ones stepped forward. “Great King! Forgive me for speaking. There is the anomaly. That one in the mask! That is not Eflast Falinn of Riphath. Where is his longbow?” And he pointed with his yard-long sliderule at Abby.

Another Astrologer spoke up, “Forgive me for speaking. The bow is unseen. He is a Rider of the Mist, and the art of mistweaving they know on the slaveworld from which he comes.”

But a third Astrologer said, “If he is a Rider, we would not see him! That is someone other!”

While this was happening, Foster said softly, “Ilya? Should I shoot? I cannot hold this long.”

Penny said, “The King is invulnerable in that robe, which angels wove in heaven for the eldest of men. Shoot the magician!”

But Abby said, “Another will take his place, and be told everything he must do. Magicians know their death hour from when they are born.”

Enmeduranki was grinning a sick grin, excited because something was happening in his life he had not foreseen years in advance. He was also quicker on the uptake than I would have been in his position. “That is a foreverborn! It must be Ersu’s lost Hope, the daughter of Uridimmu of Bashtubaraquin…” he said softly in a weird, cracked cackle. “Who else could stand where none were foreseen to stand?”

Bashtubaraquin, the Clan Under the House of Cygnus, was Abby’s old family name, back from when she was a princess. Uridimmu must be her father’s name, the man she said she could never see again. It meant Stormbeast.

Unless she was seeing him now. I wondered if he were standing there, among the warlords and Astrologers and princes.

My life had some problems, but, really, nothing like hers.

Enmeduranki shouted in his thin, weak voice: “A kingdom to whoever slays the foreverborn ! A world to who takes the foreverborn alive for the tortures!”

The Great King was raising his hand. His next command would be the order to attack.

Foster said, “The king! Should I shoot him? I can put the arrow in his eye at this distance, robe or no robe.”

I closed my eyes, trying to think. I only had a moment.

I could not think of anything.

So I prayed. Saint Agnes of Rome, send me a good idea. Tell me how to save little Abby. Tell me how to save Penny. I’ve failed. I’ve been knocked from my feet. I’ve fallen, and I cannot get…

My eyes snapped open. “Up,” I said.

Foster said, “What?”

“Shoot up. Shoot the lampwood spear.”

Penny said, “Why bother? They will have foreseen all this.”

Foster did not ask, but shot. I heard the bowstring sing, and then, eight seconds later, sing again. I did not see the arrows like slim slivers of glass dart up, but, since I was on my back looking up, I saw the two eight-foot long spears of lampwood tremble as they were struck. Once again, it was a great shot, an awesome shot, to hit a wand twenty feet straight up.

And I had figured that the mists of invisibility, if it was not cut off by the blue ylem-banishing light from the lampwood, must be the other kind of magic, celestial magic. If it came from the moon, why wouldn’t it be celestial? And the way everything worked in this world, whatever did not cut off magic made it stronger.

What I was not expecting was the glass arrows to catch fire, turn all blue through their length like neon tubes, and explode.

They exploded with mist.

For a moment, I could not focus my eyes on anything. I assume no one else could either. I was not blind. Not quite. I could still see shapes and motions, but something in my brain was not allowing me to see them clearly. I guess it was a lot like ordinary mist, except that you think you are going crazy because your optic nerve is not working right.

I heard growls, or actually, screams coming from overhead. Remember those troops of wolf-creatures that had been rushing down the sheer slope of the wall toward us? At least one of the wolves lost his footing when he went blind. I heard a long, sad, lingering wail pass overhead and fall away in an audible analogy of a parabola. Whether more fell, I could not tell; there was too much noise all around.

I also hear Penny say, breathlessly, in wonder, “That is impossible. Why did that work?”

“Because I am awesome,” I said. “And I protect women and children. When I looked at Abby, I did something according to my higher nature. I laughed, and that threw off their calculations. That is all it took.”

Whoever was concentrating on holding my chainmail rigid was distracted, or else the mist cut off the spell, because I could move again.

The voice of the Great King cried out the command to attack. A trumpeter blew.

The soldiers on the narrow catwalk all shouted their battle slogan. “Duhumnamar Nabu!” The Dark Tower decrees!

I decided I need a battlecry, too. “Beau Seant!” I cried. It was the cry of the Templars during the Crusade. Some say it means for the Glory! I say it means Looking Good

And in despair, I realized that I could never overcome so many, even with Foster and his longbow, or Penny with her witchcraft. These men knew how to fight creatures like me.

And I knew I had to call upon a greater name. I was fighting for something more than even the Templars fought, fighting an evil even deeper and older than the Paynim they faced.

“Yahweh!” I screamed at the top of my lungs. “For Yahweh!”

And I started laughing like a madman. Again. Because I heard a groan of metal against metal passing up from underfoot, as if from miles away, approaching.

At the same moment, I saw Glede the cloudwalker standing in midair with this black camel-hair robe and long black ponytail flying around him—and saw him because, with an impatient gesture of his hand, he had blown Foster’s mist upward off the balcony floor, restoring everything to visibility. Cute trick.

And then I saw Foster, looking like a specter of death in his faceless white-hoodedness, eyeless mirrored goggles, and white cloak billowing about him in the winds, appearing out of nowhere like an actor behind a rising curtain. I saw first his toe-socked sandals spread in their stance, then his uplifted bow in his arms, then his goggles beneath his hood to whose ear the string was pulled, then I saw his bow hand and his deadly icicle-hued arrow. He let fly. An unseen shaft planted itself neatly in Glede’s chest, right between the two tails of his forked beard, for from that spot a gush of blood spurted. This one time the wound looked just like it does in the movies, shooting a ghastly crimson stream into the dark air.

I saw Glede topple backward and fall.

The sight of Glede plunging like a paratrooper with a tangled chute seemed ridiculously funny to me. I was braying like a donkey as the sound of the approaching metal groans from underfoot grew louder, like an express train coming.

And then the quake struck.

The airship rocked back and forth. Men spilled off the catwalks lining the rigid airframe, screaming. The ramp between the airship and the balcony reared back, pulling yards of wooden railing into the air, and snapped magnificently in two.

Men in armor plunged down. The guy with no nose was standing on the balcony, safe, the only man of his squad not tumbling headlong through the air, and I rushed him before he got his shield ready, plunged my sword into his belly, and then kicked him out into the air, flicking the blood off the blade nonchalantly. Wished I had had a camera. I bet I looked cool.

The airship ignited its artillery, but the temblor was making the vast vessel roll and pitch and yaw. Bolts and cannonballs and catapult stones and beams of futuristic death-ray fire all flew high, smashing and scarring the walls above and behind the balcony where I stood.

The wolf-headed men clinging to the walls above us were struck full on with beams, blasts, gouts of poison, shattering arrows, and explosions, and scores of them dropped like lemmings in a Disney documentary. The outer wall to which they no longer clung was beetled out over the balcony, so they plunged into the lakewater, or rebounded like clowns on trampolines off the vast lifting envelope of the airship. Perhaps some of them clung frantically to the sloping sides of the rocking airship, but I was looking at the wolves who spun as they fell, and beat their limbs against the thin air. I could not help but think of the Coyote from the cartoons dropping from some Chuck Jones cliff in Arizona.

Really wished I had a camera. I laughed so hard I felt bad. Lord, have mercy on my soul that I thought it was so funny.

7. Exit Stage Left

And then, to my left, I saw a black ball of nothingness appear, surrounded by the aurora borealis.

The Moebius gate was open, whistling like a teakettle.

Foster’s mist had cut off the blue light, preventing it from reaching the golden flail, and Glede had parted the mist horizontally, so there was still a bar above us, still blocking the lampwood spear fragments embedded in the wall. Out from the zenith of the black sphere Ossifrage stepped into midair like a man climbing stairs. On ground level, nearest the sphere’s equator, came forth Nakasu, roaring, a worried look on his chest. Penny shouted to the girls to get to their feet and run for it. The closest ones scrambled into the ball surface, not even bothering to stand all the way up.

Ossifrage waved his shepherd’s crook at the airship, but instead of capsizing, it righted itself. Kneeling on the upper surface of the envelope, not dead like he should have been, was the black-robed cloudwalker Glede, also with a shepherd’s crook in his hand. His other hand was trying to staunch the bleeding from his arrow wound. It should have been deadly, should have killed him instantly, but obviously some magic was at work. I was not getting the hang of this mad world as quick as I would have liked.

Even worse, Vorvolac, pale as a glow worm and a look of ecstatic starvation on his face, was standing next to him, unchained, wings unripped.

Ossifrage shouted some rolling Old Testament curse at Glede, who shouted back. It being Hebrew, I only caught every other word, but it was terrible enough to make me wish that Abby had not been able to hear it.

Foster shot an arrow at Vorvolac, and Glede raised his crook and made the arrow stand still in midair between us. Which was a lucky break, because Foster cried, “For Odin!” and the arrow started emitting mist. That, I think, was why we were not all struck down when the unblindfolded Vorvolac turned his hideous gaze upon us. We were invisible to him, and to the ship, for just a moment.

I tried to shield Penny and Abby behind me, holding up the crucifix.

The airship was turning, bringing her broadside weapons to bear. In the eyes of the giant bearded figurehead forming the prow of the ship, I could see the wrinkle-featured Enmeduranki looking like a gleeful sadist, his white hair in disarray where his tall hat had fallen, and the harsh-faced Anshargal looking calm and cold beside him, methodically giving commands.

Horns and trumpets blew. The random firing ceased. Winged men, Panotii or Cruorbibitors or both, began falling out of hatches and bays along the belly of the great ship, thick and bright as autumn leaves. A dozen grapnels shot out from the ship again, hooking what remained of the balcony. Gun crews readied the death-lanterns and ballistae and cannons.

The trumpets were not merely for the soldiers aboard the airship. All the way across the lake-sized cistern, in the light from the balconies of the townships built one atop the next like shelves, I could see now the mouths of huge weapons, looking as large as the gun Jules Verne once used to shoot Impey Barbicane to the moon, being cranked slowly into elevation. I saw catapults made of living metal, big enough to hurl a Learjet as a dart. Other weapons, protruding from blisters or pillboxes, were cranked into view, and pointed their muzzles our way. There was no spot anywhere in this vast interior space, none of the townships lining the walls, not in range of these massive guns and siege engines.

Torchlight flared into view above, as massive doors high above our position were hauled up, or shutters or hatches banged open with the noise of iron gongs. On the balconies directly overhead, now visible, were steaming spigots hauled forward by teams of sweating slaves, or spouts of red-hot machines leaning over the brink above us, like the beards of giants hanging over a wall, ready to dump boiling oil or molten iron on us, careless of the remaining invulnerable cynocephali grinning and running down the acres of wall metal between them and us.

I was petrified by the sight of it. The whole immensity of the Dark Tower was one big armed trap, the teeth of the snare, all pointed inward at us.

Only Abby kept her wits: “Master! Take us through the gate now!”

Ossifrage raised his crook. I think the cloudwalker in black was still blinded by Foster’s mist, because he did not stop us.

A whirlwind snatched us all up, all the girls, me, Penny, Abby and Foster, and hurled us toward the dark sphere. I put my elbow in front of my face to block the wind, and held my unsheathed katana behind me.

Above all the commotion, from the warship was coming a voice, tremendously amplified, of the Great King, Anshargal: “Open a hundred gates to Javan! No Undying can live an hour in the lands of the Host That Quaffs Lifeblood as Wine! I grant a city to who slays the foreverborn assassin girl, a treasure city to who ravishes the sea-witch! A kingdom wide and rich for the wind-walker's head! But an aeon for the Undying boy! I give you a world to save him from the blood-drinkers and bring him to me alive!”

I fell into the surface. The uproar of battle was cut off as abruptly as if the soundtrack broke.

“He must be found! Find him! For the mother of the Undying boy is none other than–”

THE END

Science Fiction

Awake in the Night Land by John C. Wright

City Beyond Time: Tales of the Fall of Metachronopolis by John C. Wright

Unwithering Realm: The Door into Nowhere by John C. Wright

Unwithering Realm: The Darkest Tower by John C. Wright

Unwithering Realm: The Lord of the Black Land by John C. Wright

Unwithering Realm: The Blood Storm by John C. Wright

Superluminary: The Lords of Creation by John C. Wright

No Gods, Only Daimons by Kai Wai Cheah

Hammer of the Witches by Kai Wai Cheah

The Corroding Empire: Corrosion by Johan Kalsi

Back From the Dead by Rolf Nelson

Hyperspace Demons by Jonathan Moeller

Mutiny in Space by Rod Walker

Alien Game by Rod Walker

Young Man's War by Rod Walker

QUANTUM MORTIS A Man Disrupted by Steve Rzasa and Vox Day

QUANTUM MORTIS Gravity Kills by Steve Rzasa and Vox Day

QUANTUM MORTIS A Mind Programmed by Jeff Sutton, Jean Sutton, and Vox Day

Victoria: A Novel of Fourth Generation War by Thomas Hobbes

Fantasy

One Bright Star to Guide Them by John C. Wright

The Book of Feasts & Seasons by John C. Wright

Iron Chamber of Memory by John C. Wright

Moth & Cobweb 1: Swan Knight's Son by John C. Wright

Moth & Cobweb 2: Feast of the Elfs by John C. Wright

Moth & Cobweb 3: Swan Knight's Sword by John C. Wright

Moth & Cobweb 4: Daughter of Danger by John C. Wright

Moth & Cobweb 5: City of Corpses by John C. Wright

Moth & Cobweb 6: Tithe to Tartarus by John C. Wright

Arts of Dark and Light 0: Summa Elvetica: A Casuistry of the Elvish Controversy by Vox Day

Arts of Dark and Light 1: A Throne of Bones by Vox Day

Arts of Dark and Light 2: A Sea of Skulls by Vox Day

A Magic Broken by Vox Day

The Wardog's Coin by Vox Day

The Last Witchking by Vox Day

The Altar of Hate by Vox Day

The War in Heaven by Vox Day

The World in Shadow by Vox Day

The Wrath of Angels by Vox Day

Military Science Fiction

There Will Be War Vol. I ed. Jerry Pournelle

There Will Be War Vol. II ed. Jerry Pournelle

There Will Be War Vol. III ed. Jerry Pournelle

There Will Be War Vol. IV ed. Jerry Pournelle

There Will Be War Vol. V ed. Jerry Pournelle

There Will Be War Vol. VI ed. Jerry Pournelle

There Will Be War Vol. VII ed. Jerry Pournelle

There Will Be War Vol. VIII ed. Jerry Pournelle

There Will Be War Vol. IX ed. Jerry Pournelle

There Will Be War Vol. X ed. Jerry Pournelle

Plague Wars 0: The Eden Plague by David VanDyke

Plague Wars 1: Reaper's Run by David VanDyke

Plague Wars 2: Skull's Shadows by David VanDyke

Galactic Liberation 1: Starship Liberator by David VanDyke and B.V. Larson

Galactic Liberation 2: Battleship Indomitable by David VanDyke and B.V. Larson

Riding the Red Horse Vol. 1 ed. Tom Kratman and Vox Day

Fiction

An Equation of Almost Infinite Complexity by J. Mulrooney

Hitler in Hell by Martin van Creveld

Loki's Child by Fenris Wulf

The Ames Archives 1: Brings the Lightning by Peter Grant

The Ames Archives 2: Rocky Mountain Retribution by Peter Grant

The Missionaries by Owen Stanley

Non-Fiction

4th Generation Warfare Handbook by William S. Lind and LtCol Gregory A. Thiele, USMC

A History of Strategy: From Sun Tzu to William S. Lind by Martin van Creveld

Equality: The Impossible Quest by Martin van Creveld

Clio & Me: An Intellectual Autobiography by Martin van Creveld

Four Generations of Modern War by William S. Lind

On War: The Collected Columns of William S. Lind 2003-2009 by William S. Lind

MAGA Mindset: Making YOU and America Great Again by Mike Cernovich

The Nine Laws by Ivan Throne

Appendix N: A Literary History of Dungeons & Dragons by Jeffro Johnson

Transhuman and Subhuman: Essays on Science Fiction and Awful Truth by John C. Wright

Astronomy and Astrophysics by Dr. Sarah Salviander

Compost Everything: The Good Guide to Extreme Composting by David the Good

Grow or Die: The Good Guide to Survival Gardening by David the Good

Push the Zone: The Good Guide to Growing Tropical Plants Beyond the Tropics by David the Good

SJWs Always Lie: Taking Down the Thought Police by Vox Day

SJWs Always Double Down: Anticipating the Thought Police by Vox Day

Collected Columns, Vol. I: Innocence & Intellect, 2001—2005 by Vox Day

Collected Columns, Vol. II: Conceit & Crisis, 2006—2009 by Vox Day

Collected Columns, Vol. III: Failure & Freedom, 2010—2012 by Vox Day

Cuckservative: How “Conservatives” Betrayed America by John Red Eagle and Vox Day

On the Existence of Gods by Dominic Saltarelli and Vox Day

On the Question of Free Trade by James D. Miller and Vox Day

Do We Need God To Be Good? by C.R. Hallpike

The LawDog Files by LawDog

The LawDog Files: African Adventures by LawDog

The Last Closet: The Dark Side of Avalon by Moira Greyland

ARKHAVEN COMICS

QUANTUM MORTIS A Man Disrupted #1 By the Book

QUANTUM MORTIS A Man Disrupted #2 Zero Zero Tango

Right Ho, Jeeves #1 A Binge at Brinkley

Right Ho, Jeeves #2 Hungry Hearts