The Looming Tower (Movie Tie-In): Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11
Author: Lawrence Wright
Date: 2018-02-02 00:00:00+00:00
Description: The bestselling, Pulitzer Prize-winning account of the history of 9/11: the basis for the original Hulu series starring Alec Baldwin, Peter Sarsgaard, Jeff Daniels, and Tahar Rahim. A gripping narrative that spans five decades, The Looming Tower explains in unprecedented detail the growth of Islamic fundamentalism, the rise of al-Qaeda, and the intelligence failures that culminated in the attacks on the World Trade Center. Lawrence Wright re-creates firsthand the transformation of Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri from incompetent and idealistic soldiers in Afghanistan to leaders of the mo
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group

The Darkest Tower

Unwithering Realm 2

John C. Wright

Copyright

The Darkest Tower
John C. Wright

Castalia House
Kouvola, 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: 00a

Contents

1. The Oubliette of the Air
2. The Lord of Magicians
3. Falconress and Marineress
4. Not Quite Saint Anthony
5. Born of the Forever Nature
6. The Stream-Path of the Unclean Servants
7. Rational Animals

The Oubliette of the Air

1. Blank Spot

I don’t remember the impact.

If my brains scattered out of my skull like the yolk of a dropped egg, and recorded no memories until they slowly slurped back inside as bone re-grew and reassembled, and particles of blood magically or magnetically re-gathered into me, that I do not know. That would have been cool, though.

Freaky gross, but cool.

2. The Cell

I woke up naked in a cylindrical cage whose sides were black metal and whose floor was bright lampwood. The planks formed a circular platform suspended over a few miles of empty air. The lampwood planks were glowing with a cold, bright blue and ceaseless light, painful to the eye, neon-bright, annoying. Around the big hole in the floor there was no railing and no sign saying WATCH YOUR STEP.

The curve of the wall was covered with hundreds of inward-pointing spikes, like the inside-out version of one of Mom’s hair curlers or Dad’s lawn aerator.

I had a headache, and it was darn cold, and the air was too thin to breathe.

Below freezing.

What woke me, beside the cold, was a sound in the background of wind hissing or yowling or droning or screeching like the high string on a fiddle. It fell silent near where I was, but then a moment later I could hear it dimly either half a mile or two miles below me, or half a mile or two miles above. The tortured voice of the wind changed pitch and location and volume, but never fell silent.

I stood, looking for an escape. It was an ugly place.

This circle of floor slanted slightly toward the hole. I wished I had a coin or a BB to drop, so that I could have checked to see if the slant was something I was imagining, or was real.

I was going to get to know that glowing wood quite well. The entire space where I lived and moved and suffered my continued existence was a narrow zero of glowing wood surrounding a long drop into nothingness.

The walls of the cage I inspected for joints or weak spots or the seam of a door. The spikes were nine inches long, made of some alloy I did not recognize, and evenly spaced across each part of the wall, all pointing inward. So huddling up against the wall to minimize the chance of rolling over in your sleep and falling out the hole was discouraged.

Even as I stood, one of the spikes started slowly to expand like a telescoping rod or a car jack. I moved out of the way before it pushed me into the hole, staring in wonder. Magical growing metal? It was not the weirdest thing I had seen today, but it was weird because it seemed so silent, so sinister, so unnatural.

When I moved, another spike started to unfold very slowly behind me. I never heard any footsteps or voices behind the wall indicating a pikeman was shoving the pikes. Maybe the system was on automatic. If so, there was no resting inside this cage. Every few minutes, you’d have to move. So, no one could sleep here.

There was no pattern to it. The darn things were completely silent. There was no clicking or ticking an honest machine would make to warn you. Sometimes they opened quickly, too quickly to dodge, and at other times, so slowly that you could not see them growing.

The roof also had a round opening in it, directly above the hole in the floor. There was a tic-tac-toe grating of four rather thin bars that looked to me like they’d be easy to bend. The thinness of those bars almost taunted me with how easy it should be to climb out.

In a circle around the edge of this upper hole was a ring of bright gold, twisted like a Moebius strip. A twilight gate? Above that was another chamber or area. I could only catch a glimpse of a patch of its ceiling directly above me, with an arched vault of black brick.

All I had to do was wait until the random pattern of expanding spikes gave me enough of a grip to get to the top. I shook my head and snorted. Was it really going to be this easy?

It wasn’t.

There was a moment when more than four spikes at four different heights off the floor were telescoped out to their full length, and I saw my chance, and used the rods like an impromptu ladder, trying to make for that opening.

Then a rod unfolding as fast as an arrow from a string jabbed into my abdomen, and blood and viscera poured out, and my arms and legs jerked, and another rod unfolded laterally, so that it caught me across the midriff as the first rod yanked back, slipping me as neatly off the spike as you might push a meatball off your fork with your knife. All the rods were retracted at once; there was no more makeshift ladder, nothing to grab, only a long fall underfoot.

Down I plunged.

3. The First Exit

I was not too worried, insane as that might sound. I figured I would splatter somewhere in the landscape far away from the base of the tower, pull myself slowly together, rest, and walk on out of there. Maybe I would find an unwatched clothesline or a lonely farmer’s cottage where I could get some clothing. I remember I actually laughed at how easy it would be for an unkillable boy to escape an open cage, and I folded my arms behind my head, and crossed my legs, as I toppled end over end through the stratosphere.

I spread my arms and legs, so that the world stopped spinning. There were clouds pushed across the walls of the Dark Tower, which looked like an icebreaker drifting through the sea. I saw the world, a patchwork quilt of green and brown, far underfoot.

The wind caught me like a leaf, and blew me against the metal towerside, long before I hit the clouds so far below, or hit the world.

There were nets strung up to catch me and break my fall, and men in Bronze-Age looking spacesuits or diving helmets with harpoons were waiting to close the net and beat me senseless. I woke up in the cell again.

No one came to speak to me that day. No one gave me food or drink. The thirst started really getting to me. The very smallest hint of what it meant to be from the Order of Those Who Yearn in Vain for Death was beginning to nag and grow at the back of my mind.

That night, I fell again. Some spear had poked and pushed me over the side into the abyss of air. I had no recollection of falling asleep: I was just too exhausted to stay awake. I woke from dreams of flying to the dizzy horror of an endless fall. I saw the stars above and the city lights below.

I did not see the men waiting for me this time. In the distance, I saw lanterns on the top of tall brass helmets, which turned toward me like spectators at a tennis match as I zoomed past them. Perhaps I missed the net, or there was not one this time. Someone or something harpooned me as I flew past dark balconies and walls at terminal velocity, and the barbed heads sank into my flesh, and the long lines sang and went tight, and I slammed against the side of the Dark Tower and felt every bone in my body break.

How had they known both times the exact spot where I would fall? Between the wind, and even little things like my orientation as I fell, or whether I extended my limbs or pulled them in, would have changed my point of impact by thousands of feet.

And I woke in the cell again. No one was there.

They did not put me in casts or splints: I lay there with both arms and both legs broken, compound fractures sticking out of my skin, and the only medicine was me trying to push broken bones back together with my unaided, naked fingers. I had to try to straighten a broken arm with my other broken arm to get the bone ends back in place, or push the joint back into the socket.

There was no morphine, no aspirin, no nurses, no voices.

And there was nothing else in the cell. No soap to whittle into the shape of a gun, and no guard to fool with it. No floor to dig under to dig my way out.

Days passed, and nights, and I never slept longer than dazed naps, and lost track of time.

And the spikes never stopped expanding, never formed a pattern, and so, even with both arms and legs broken, I had to keep moving, despite the blinding pain, or else get pushed out of the hole again.

I was there for an eternity.

4. Gazing Down the Dark Tower

Yes, I had plenty of time to stare down that hole. From the distance between the cage and the Dark Tower wall, I figured the birdcage was suspended on some sort of really long yardarm, hanging out over an abyss of air.

By day, I gazed and pondered.

I counted the points of the bastions and made geometric calculations in my head, wishing I had something to write on. I stared at the ravelins and redoubts, bonnettes and lunettes, tenailles and tenaillons, counterguards and crownworks and hornworks and curvettes and fausse brayes and scarps and cordons and banquettes and counterscarps.

The main tower itself, I eventually deduced, was an octakaidecagon with a triangular bastion at each vertex. What looked like complex outerworks were actually part of the shield wall, connected by bridges or built as one piece.

This indicated that this world had some form of big guns, because there is no point in an architect calculating out so many zones of redundant overlapping fields of fire, if he expects the Tower to repel besiegers armed with nothing more than pikes and arrows. But it also suggested this world did not have the sophisticated weapons of our world. A hydrogen bomb would crack any tower like that in half; I don’t care what sort of metal it is made of.

By night, I studied the lights.

There were no lamps or spotlights on the Dark Tower. Hence the name, I guess. But from time to time, at dusk or dawn, I would see some sort of lines or channels or canals running straight up the sides. The same bluish light which had suddenly flamed inside the chamber where I had been caught was shining from these canals, but so dimly that they seemed like darkness made visible, illuminating nothing.

What was that blue light? A defense against escaped clouds of Uncreation? Perhaps so, because I never felt the least stirring of the Oobleck I had once swallowed. I assume they cut it out of my stomach before I woke. That is what I would have done.

At right angles to these channels, vast battlements or balconies like roadways circumvallated the diameter of the tower. Tiny patches of green and squares and threads of blue told me that there were gardens filling some of the balconies visible far below me. These were immense plots bigger than football fields, but so far away as to seem like the gardens and fountains of a dollhouse in a little girl’s room.

The air must have been thicker down there, or perhaps the gardeners had a technology for sustaining greenery above thirty thousand feet. Vines of ivy and grapes and orchids growing along the coils of lianas hung over the side of these immense battlements, beards of green reaching down from each of these crenellated brinks.

I saw petals cast by the thin, high ice-winds of the stratosphere drifting and dripping down, in a constant and intermittent confetti. The sense of desolation that comes to some men in autumn touched my soul.

I wondered idly if those blossoms, freezing once they left whatever zone of magic must have been protecting them near the tower, would turn to hailstones as they fell, reach terminal velocity, and whether they would burn up with re-entry heat, or if we were down low enough that they would only drift for miles on the winds before striking pets, livestock, and innocent bystanders with the speed and penetration of a rifle bullet.

I said battlements in the plural. I could see them one above the other, each one separated vertically by about the height of the Empire State Building. I counted fifteen before the distance blurred them into oneness.

At night, I could see the warm and friendly lights of a square supermetropolis gathered at the foot of the tower, surrounded on each side by four smaller squares of suburbs.

The city by day was a brown-gray blur too far away to make out any details. But whoever built it, and landscaped the lands around it, loved squares. All the farmlands were cut into squares. Bisecting the view was an immense canal running right through the center of the city, straight as a yardstick. There was a river to the west, and another to the east, connected by this canal. I assume the canal was busy with traffic that I was too high up to see. South was a haze of blue I took to be a sea or great lake. There was not much by way of hills or mountains down below.

I hated their urban planners. Who builds a city like an abstract problem in geometry, with no soft or curving contours for the flow of rivers, or the irregularities of coastlines?

The walls of the cage extended downward past the level of the wooden platform of the floor another ten feet or so, restricting my view of the world outside to a circle smaller than the horizon. I could not see the sky, the constellations, the phases of the moon, or measure the change in the location of sunrise, or do anything else clever prisoners like the Count of Monte Cristo could do to determine the month and season.

I tried to guess the seasons of the year by counting the hours of the daylight. Yes, I mean I started at dawn, “one Mississippi, two Mississippi, three Mississippi…” and counted every second until dusk, and I did that every four days, trying to calculate the difference in the length of the day to get a sense of what time of year it was, whether it was before or after the solstice.

I kept expecting the landscape to change color as the season passed, whatever season it was, to get white if winter came, or brown in summer, or to see some difference in the texture or tint of all those endless quilts of plantations down there. It never happened.

I could use the shadow of the Dark Tower as an immense sundial, however. The dark strip fell across the landscape, running west at sunrise, east at sunset. Someone else must have had the same idea, because I began to pick out what must have been truly immense ziggurats or pyramids crouching outside the city across the endless plains of pasture and farmland and forest so far below. They were almost too tiny for me to see, but I assume from the way they were spaced that there were twelve of them. A simple way for everyone living in the city to tell the hours. I assume that this world, this timeline, separated its history from ours sometime after the twelve-hour day was established.

From time to time I saw below me condensation trails cutting through the thin blue air. At first I thought they were jet contrails, but no. This was the condensation of invasion machines spearing through the atmosphere at high speed. I saw no airplanes nor helicopters of any type.

But I saw blimps.

Low down on the tower, at the edge of my vision, I spied dockyards and mooring arms for airships, zeppelins like the Hindenburg.

And it is a sure sign that you are in a parallel world, and maybe a more peaceful one than our home Earth, if you see airships.

There is no sound technical reason why they were not developed in our history: it was the Second World War that interfered with their development. They are less useful than airplanes in war, because they are large and slow targets, but in commerce, they can haul more, for less fuel, at higher ceilings, than those early commercial planes. Who knows what modern materials and space-age engineering might have accomplished, had the war not grounded all the Zeppelins, or war tensions removed helium from the world market?

Did I mention Tillamook once boasted the largest airship factory in the world, before the war? So, to natives of my town, the question of airships has always been a little sensitive.

But I never saw any people moving on the Tower balconies itself. Maybe they were too far away. I never saw lights, not even when an airship was mooring or lofting.

No one came to question me. No jailer.

Nothing.

5. The Eternity

I was imprisoned in one little cell for a long, long time. I will not tell you how long, because the number would be misleading. It was long enough for broken bones to heal, be broken and heal again.

Yes, eventually I got out, so technically it was not an eternity. But I want you to imagine that I never got out, and that I was there forever, because that is what it felt like.

Every inch of the wall, every stud and clamp where the metal panels were hammered into place, every line of grain in the woodwork of the floor, the position of every needle on every bar of the cell, and, above all, that light, that hideous, unwinking, blue light that was shining on me day and night—all these things are carved into my memory the way drops of water, falling one after another, wear a hole in a stone. I won’t tell you how long it was, but it was long enough, that if you asked me to draw the pattern of grains on the third board counterclockwise from the one with a knothole in it, I could.

I tried to figure out the pattern of the spike thrusts, counting the seconds between when one spike telescoped out and the next, made bets with myself as to which of the spikes would open next.

There were exactly 365 spikes, I counted, organized in thirteen rows of different heights above the cell floor. And I spent a long time staring at that mocking hole in the roof, and the universe of freedom I could see and not reach, the lure of black brick ceiling ten feet above the upper hole.

I counted all the bricks in that upper universe, and, later, gave them names and personalities and made up stories about them. All the stories ended sadly, with them cemented into the ceiling of a chamber never seen in whose floor was a hole leading to a jail cell where a crazy boy who could not die was not quite locked up.

No one fed me, except once, and that was just a torture-psychology trick. There was a flash of rainbow light from the upper hole, and down fell a delicious package wrapped in leaves of white leather. I almost fell into the hole catching it, and I tore it open with frantic eagerness.

It was a severed human foot wrapped and garnished and cooked to crispy perfection, and I threw it down the hole the moment my mouth started watering, which it did at the smell of meat, I was that hungry.

Like I said, it was a psychological trick. It smelled like pork chops. I chewed on the white leather, but it tasted like pork, and I realized it was human skin leather. I threw it out the hole, screaming.

So, yes, I fasted. I am able to go without food and water indefinitely. But I am not immune from hunger pangs, lightheadedness, and hallucinations.

6. Starving

Let me describe the symptoms. Sensations of hunger slowly get worse for two or three days, and slowly disappear. There is a gnawing pain in the abdomen. I could relieve that pain a little bit by clutching my midriff as tightly as possible, but the muscles of my hands would tire after an hour or three, and the pain returned.

One day that pain, and the sensation of hunger, just disappeared, and next came extreme weakness, spreading from my stomach and reaching throughout the body.

Hunger was my friend, because after a while it went away. Thirst is not my friend. The sensation of thirst persisted until death, insanity, or unconscious. All three happened to me at one point or another. I got better. I simply woke up again, and the pain started again.

During starvation, the body grows emaciated. Muscles get soft and reduced in size by more than one half. I measured it with my fingers. The skin becomes loose and pale and turns the color of clay. My feet and ankles were swollen.

I could describe more. Never mind. If God is kind, it will never happen to you, so you don’t really need to know more. But keep in mind, this was my existence. I got to notice all the changes to my excretion, the blood mingled in my stools. I got to experience the sensation of my thinking becoming loose and disconnected. I got to watch my cruel, cruel dreams of food and plenty like so many little horror films in my head, whether I was asleep or awake.

You are probably wondering, since I was one of the Undying Ones, why I did not simply jump out the hole and take my chances. Maybe this time I could avoid or fight the men in pressure suits. Maybe I would hit some projecting balcony, or maybe there was a way to cling to the bottom of the birdcage and shimmy to one side or the other?

Well, I did jump, at least fourteen times. Maybe sixteen. After I lost count of how often I had done it, I decided not to do it any more.

7. The Naked Skydiver

Sometimes I remember the impact. Sometimes not. I studied the sides of the Dark Tower very carefully, watched the clouds, guessed the prevailing wind, and sometimes I tried to angle my body and surf toward the tower and hit it, and sometimes I tried to angle-surf away and miss it and hit the world.

Don’t ask me why, but I never was able to hit the ground. I never even reached the ten-thousand-foot level. Perhaps their large-scale Moebius gates in the upper atmosphere could change the prevailing winds, or maybe there was a magnetic attraction, or a charm, or just plain bad luck that always blew my body back into one part of the tower or another. Each time I just hit the wall in one spot or another where there were nets strung up, or else there were men in Bronze Age-looking spacesuits or diving helmets with harpoons.

Once or twice I jumped just in the hope that maybe I would smash my legs and not my head, and get a chance to talk to the men in the diving suits.

8. I Still Miss Those Five Bars

I mentioned the psychological trick with the meat. The thinness of the bars on the round hole piercing the cell roof was another psychological trick. I would climb from wall-spike to wall-spike up to the ceiling, and wait, sometimes for hours, for one of the upper spikes to telescope open, giving me a chance to swing or balance on it, and jump and grab the thin bars of the upper grate.

There I would hang, with the lower opening very open below my toes, and either clouds or cityscape below, or, at night, elfin city lights. And I was strong enough, at least before I lost muscle mass, to begin to bend the bars. I could start to work them out of their sockets. They did not seem very firmly fixed in.

And whenever one was about to come loose, another bar would grow out of the rim of the opening and take its place, or near enough. Like the spikes coming from the walls, it made no noise, and it did not move particularly fast. Sometimes, it was downright slow, almost lingering, so you would think you might get one more bar free in time before the escape closed up again.

But like the men waiting when I jumped, the bar always slid sardonically across the opening I’d made at or before the right time.

And the number of times my hands slipped and I fell out the bottom of the birdcage away through the cold, high air and toward another few weeks or months of brokenbonedom, accounts for roughly half my plunges.

I knew there were people around, somewhere. I was never conscious when they dragged me back into the cell. I tried to keep a bar I had pulled with so much pain and effort over such a long time out of the overhead hatch, but there was no place to hide them, and someone always took them while I was out falling or being carried unconscious back up. I hated that more than anything. I deserved those bars. They were mine. I had collected five of them. Five! And one I had sharpened into a passable shiv by scraping it for hours against the metal walls. I loved my five broken bars. I swore to myself I’d find them again.

I did not spend as much time crying as you might think. No water means no tears after a while. I am not sure if I mentioned one reason why I kept jumping out. I was trying to get to that river.

So I was not thinking straight, not for eternity.

9. Crazytown, Population: Me

The pain of living with broken bones and no casts, no splits, no morphine helped with my little excursions into the fringes of Crazytown: I would lie there with all my limbs broken, delirious with pain. Sometimes the bones grew back crooked, sometimes straight. The only other medicine was to try to shove my head into a spike so that it would pierce my brain and bring a blissful darkness of dreamless sleep.

It seemed like I could heal back from anything, but I also did not, not at first, heal back any faster than a normal mortal. Often I pondered why my chest wound on that first day healed almost instantly. I did not know, but I assumed it was the Oobleck helping.

Once, an expanding spike telescoped out too quickly for me in my exhausted state to dodge, but it did not impale me firmly enough to keep me on the tip. With my feet dangling above the hungry hole, I struggled a moment, and pulled the painful shaft into my midriff, so that I felt the cold metal in my guts. Still I pulled, eager to be safely higher on the shaft, farther from the drop. The flesh of my back was slowly puckered out of shape into a tent as I drove the spike harder, and then the skin of my back tore, and the spike was all the way through me…

The cell had succeeded in getting me to torture myself. And kill myself, over and over. The cell was conditioning me, shaping me to the will of the Dark Tower.

The spike retracted so suddenly that I was slammed against the spikes of the wall, and cut in a dozen places.

Shouting in rage, next I tried to throw myself out of the hole, and, perhaps as a joke, one of the spikes (the one I named Spike Jones) snapped open suddenly enough to impale me painfully through the calf of my lower right leg, passing neatly between my tibia and fibula, so that my weight did not simply rip the spike through my leg and let me drop. Instead, the impaling spike caught me neatly and prevented my fall.

I was too weak, and still had too many unhealed broken bones, to do a midair sit-up and somehow inch my pierced leg off the spike pole. The retraction of the spikes was arbitrary, so I did not know if this one would pull back after a minute or after a day.

In this case, I hung there for hours, head downward, screaming at first, then crying, then praying, while drips and drops of blood and sweat flew out the hole below and into the world of floating clouds and carefree birds.

Then the sun sank and the world turned dark, and my blood dripped toward a city made of horrible rectilinear squares I wanted to destroy and a river I wanted to drink.

And a second spike decided at that precise moment to expand and thrust me through the side, into my lungs and heart. I recognized it (since I had given them all names) as Lee.

That was when something in my mind snapped, and I started laughing.

There I was pinned painfully through the calf with a second bar running through my sensitive, squishy, bloody internal organs, and I started laughing.

And I sang a hymn. Sorry, I don’t remember the title or who wrote it. I don’t even recall all the lyrics. Never can recall the second stanza. I used to sing or hum it to myself while I was doing yardwork on hot days, pushing that darned push mower and wondering why, since our backyard was so huge, we could not afford a power mower.

Ye holy Angels bright,
Who wait at God’s right hand,
Or thro’ the realms of light
Fly at your Lord’s command,
Assist our song,
Or else the theme
Too high doth seem
For mortal tongue.

Ye saints, who toil below,
Adore your heav’nly King,
And onward as ye go
Some joyful anthem sing;
Take what he gives
And praise him still,
Through good or ill,
Who ever lives!

My soul, bear thou thy part,
Triumph in God above;
And with a well-tuned heart
Sing thou the songs of love!
Let all thy days
Till life shall end,
Whate’er He send,
Be fill’d with praise!

You see, I sang it because otherwise I would start swearing and cursing like Alexei when it was his turn to mow.

It reminded me to suck it up, be a man, and stop whining.

Maybe you can see why I laughed, despite the impaling spike tearing my insides when my lungs moved, so that I coughed blood with each laugh. I was hanging upside-down in my own personal stratosphere-high hell of loneliness, starvation, insanity, self-mutilation, thirst and pain, and remembering how much I hated the push mower.

Maybe you cannot see it. Maybe I had just permanently emigrated to Crazytown. But I felt more sane and more alert than I had ever since the eternity of pain began.

Then and there, I started praying fervently to God and Jesus and Mary and Joseph and every saint I could recall, and some I made up.

The spikes eventually retracted and dropped me on my head. I missed the hole, somehow, and scrambled to safety, taking that as a good sign.

And still I prayed, every prayer I could think of, children’s prayers and men’s prayers, the Canticle of Mary, freeform prayer, praises, complaints, Bible stories, babbling, anything. I just kept going.

No miracles happened that night. God did not send anyone.

No answer.

What did I have to lose? I did not stop. I was in hell. Why not pray?

I know a lot of the cool kids at school look down their noses at praying and meditating, but I can tell you that when you have nothing else to do and nothing else you can do, praying is a lot better use of your time than slowly drowning in the mud of misery.

10. The End of Eternity

Eternity was still passing slowly, but something had changed.

I said a lot of rosaries. It is a good way to pass the time, and if my Mom was watching, I’d want her to think her son had finally gotten serious about his religion.

Of course, I had no beads, so I used the spike tips to keep track of which prayer I was on. And instead of saying the normal routine of five decades of Hail Mary and five Our Father for the Dolorous Mysteries, Joyous Mysteries and Glorious Mysteries, I said twenty-four, so that by the time I had recited all three Mysteries, I had counted three hundred sixty spike points. The remaining five spikes I assigned to the Sign of the Cross, the Apostle’s Creed, the Fatima Prayer, the Hail, Holy Queen. I was not sure if the part where you say we may both imitate what they contain and obtain what they promise is considered a separate prayer or part of the Hail, Holy Queen.

So at first, I tried to use that last spike for the Litany of the Blessed Virgin Mary, but I kept getting stuck at one spot: Mystical rose, Tower of David, Tower of ivory, House of gold, Ark of the covenant, Gate of heaven, Morning star…

What title comes after Morning star?

It’s Comfort of something, then Refuge of something else. Help of Christians. I could sure use some help, you know. Then a bunch of Queens. Queen of Angels, Queen of Patriarchs, Queen of Prophets, I could not remember it all. I wondered if she were queen in this somewhither world, or if this world was ruled by parallel evil Virgin Mary who dressed in black and showed a lot of cleavage. Would the rules of physics be the same in all worlds? What about the rules of morality? What if this was the version of Earth where there were only Nine Commandments, and everyone worked on Sunday?

And why, exactly, is the Virgin Mary the Morning star? Or a Tower of ivory?

So I finally decided to use the last spike for saying the Memorare of Saint Bernard (yes, he was a real saint and not just a dog).

You see, I had a lot of time to ponder these things in my heart. A whole lot of time.

Slowly, I noticed that my healing rate seemed to speed up as I prayed. I assume the cells in my body were responding to my thoughts, my frame of mind, just like the Oobleck between worlds. Breaks that should have taken weeks or months to heal were gone in a day.

This cheered me immensely. I decided that if I were trapped here for eternity, I would spend the rest of my existence just praising God and praying and practicing reaching a clear and unattached zen state of mind.

What else should I have done? Climbed out? Jumped to my death? Been there, done that. Didn’t work.

I had the plan, since I was apparently able to regenerate flesh and bone, of seeing if I could flay myself alive, sew together my own cured flesh as a kind of parachute, and use bones ripped out of my arms and legs to act as a yard-arm to stiffen the parachute, and then fly to safety. Nothing much came of that plan. You try and flay your skin off yourself just using your fingernails and teeth without fainting from the pain. That plan was soon abandoned.

I eventually found a way to get a good night’s sleep, although the solution was a hideous one. I would lie down with my feet facing the hole and my arms stretched overhead, and jam my hands, palm first, onto two adjacent spikes in the bottom rank. If those two spikes decided to expand as I slept, all I had to do was close my fingers and hang on to save myself from a drop. If their immediate neighbors decided to expand, sometimes the spike pole would slide by me to my left or right without piercing my skin or pushing me out the hole to wake me. So I only had to worry about a small group of seven spikes out of three hundred or so. My odds of an undisturbed sleep were about one in fifty. And it made me look in the morning a bit like Saint Francis.

I found I could slake my thirst in the morning by drinking my own blood from my hands. Gross, I know, but I did it. I lived. I survived through eternity.

Eventually eternity ended. Something happened.

11. Water

The blue light stopped. The floor went out.

There was a flare of multicolored peacock light right over my head, and a lettuce, nice and fresh and eatable, fell through the bars of the ceiling and hit the floor. The head of lettuce began to roll toward the big round hole in the floor.

I scrambled after it.

There were two heads of lettuce the second day, and, on the third, a loaf of crispy golden bread as long as my forearm, like a French baguette. The fourth day included a cluster of dates and a wedge of soft cheese, maybe goat cheese or Brie.

Each time, the process was the same. The lampwood floorboards would stop shining, and the multicolored fire of a Moebius coil would burn around the upper opening. Someone or something on the other side would drop food.

On the fifth day, there was a new twist. A dimple of metal forming a spout poked over the golden rim of the upper opening, and a trickle of water started running in some place in the space above the cell where I could not see, and I was tormented with the sound of it for a time, but then a silver thread appeared, hanging between the upper and the lower openings, and I scrambled so eagerly toward it, that I nearly toppled headlong into the air once again.

The Lord of Magicians

1. The Interrogation

So I was not surprised in the least when, on the seventh day, an old man appeared in the chamber above mine.

I say I was not surprised, because the only reason my unseen jailors had for feeding me was to get me in good enough shape to be questioned, or tortured. Tortured more. They wanted me to be coherent enough to answer questions.

When I say he appeared, I mean he appeared out of the twilight. All the lampwood under my feet went dark, and the Moebius coil set into the upper hatchway lit up. The bars forming the upper grating retracted silently. It was now open, and me with no way to get up there to get out.

A black ball of darkness appeared in the dead center of the gold-rimmed gap, and it swelled up and filled the hole, but no sudden rush of hurricane winds occurred. I heard a high-pitched whistling like the noise a teakettle makes, but that was all.

When the orb of darkness shrank and vanished, I saw there was something new in the chamber above me: a golden chair sitting on my roof, and a man on it, peering down through his slippers at me through the hole.

(In theory, any object ‘Moebius-coiled’ into my continuum should have materialized directly over my head, in the middle of the black sphere. How they managed to land the old man in his gold chair off to one side was a mystery to me. Maybe topspin?)

There was an old man hidden in black robes seated on a golden throne atop the ceiling above my cell, peering down at me, the way a Collie dog might peer down a well into which Timmy the farmer’s son had fallen.

He wore a metal cylinder on his head, like a fez made of gold. I suppose it was a crown, but to me it looked like a yellow coffee pot.

Beneath him was a chair of state made of black ebony and bright gold. The armrests were winged bulls with the heads of bearded kings. Spears of black and gold rose to either side of him, and held a canopy over his head, and the canopy was woven with the signs of the zodiac. I recognized those spears as the snake-like Moebius coil machines, twins to the one that had flown in through the Professor’s handmade model so long ago, during the life I lived before my life in the cage. It seemed as long ago to me as the world before the Ice Age. A film of twilight shimmered from them.

The man himself was ancient. I could tell from the way he sat and held himself, even though every part of him was gloved or mantled or robed in darkest black. His face was hidden beneath a veil, so only a narrow band showing his eyes was visible. I wondered if there was breathing gear of some sort under the veil.

“No,” I said, before he could speak.

His eyes were the saddest, weariest eyes I have ever seen in a human being.

Looking at those eyes, I felt a strange sensation in my stomach, as if I had swallowed a bucket of earthworms.

“Whatever you mean to ask,” I said, “The answer is no.”

He spoke. Duhumnamar shatar shutittu… As before, I understood the language without understanding how I understood. “The Dark Tower tells and foretells. Have you heard what the Dark Tower tells you, Ilya of the Host of the Undying?”

His voice was thin and quivering, and yet possessed of a stern authority such as I had never heard before. Many, many people try to speak in voices that sound like they have no doubt: presidents, public speakers, officers. He actually had it. It almost did not sound human. Human beings always have some little droplet of doubt somewhere in their veins. Not him.

And his voice was even more hopeless than his eyes. It was painful to hear.

It made me sad that I felt sad for this guy, when all I wanted to do was kill him, and the only weapon I had with me was an icicle I had managed to grow overnight from my brand new water supply, and five date pits. The icicle was eight inches long and pretty sharp.

Instead of answering, I threw one of the date pits at him. It plinked against the fabric of the knee of his black robe. His eyes did not look surprised, merely weary. Infinitely weary.

He waited for me to answer.

I threw the other date pits at him. I managed to hit his hat with a particularly good throw, but did not knock it askew. If only I had had a sling like David in the Bible, I could have put a pit through his skull and killed him. As it was, he did not even seem annoyed.

Then I did not have anything but the icicle. It was resting on the wood near my foot. I did not want to pick it up in my hands until I was ready to use it, because I did not want it to melt.

He had a device like a pocket watch, a golden disc of concentric dials, just like the one I had seen in the hands of Lord Ersu. He looked at it gravely.

I took a deep breath. He was timing me. He was waiting for the hour and minute when I would decide to speak.

2. The Son of Nimrod

I said angrily, “I know what you are trying to tell me by keeping me here, letting me jump out, watching me fall and break and grow back and do it again. You are pretending you can predict my every action. You can predict where the wind will blow me when I fall out of the tower.”

He did not bother to answer, but his eyes looked tired, the weariness of a man with a particularly stupid trained bear, who cannot learn a simple trick.

I was thinking that this was not the kind of man who lets some prisoner in a cage shout defiance at him. Usually pompous kings and emperors would have a man who did that fed to the sacred alligators or something. But he had come alone. Had he predicted that I would throw pits at him, and he did not want his people to see? Without witnesses, he could decide whether to punish or ignore my effrontery. Had there been anyone there to see, his dignity would have demanded retaliation.

Slowly, I said, “You usually have a huge retinue, don’t you? Are you some sort of king?”

He said, “More. Far more. Mine is the power that upholds kings and dashes them down again, of this aeon and thirty others, and three more beside.”

The word I am translating as ‘aeon’ was daru. It also meant an era, an eternity. He was not saying he ruled for thirty-three periods of history reaching into the past. He was saying he ruled thirty-three parallels of history; thirty-three universes. Thirty-four, counting this one.

“In the Court of the Stars I am named Enmeduranki Nimrod Nipur Shitimgal Duhumunamaru, Son of Nimrod the Mighty Hunter, Architect of the Tower of Darkness Absolute.

“In the Court of the Crown Above All Crowns, where the Great King over All Kings is enthroned, before the siege of the Warrior-Prince Who Binds Heaven to Earth, I am also called Beleliu Rab-Samavasipur Rab-Kassapur, Highest Lord Arch-Astrologer and Arch-Necromancer. Mine art is also knowing of hydromancy, hepatoscopy, and divination by the cedar rod, as well as many more taught to me by the stars. I am the Lord of All Magicians. The tablets of the future are open to mine eye. So—what need have I of pretense?”

Enmeduranki waited a while for that to sink in.

I said nothing.

He nodded toward the open hole underfoot. “The way is clear. Nothing impedes. Flee from my power. You shall not escape, though you pray for escape, and you shall not die, though you pray for death.”

Again he waited.

3. A Weary Little Dark Lord

I said, “So you are the Dark Lord, eh? I thought you’d be taller. Chief magician? Can you pull a rabbit out of your trashcan-shaped hat? No? Well, Enema Durante Nimrod-nipple Shat-I’m-gunna Doom-Mammy-Moo or whatever your stupid name is, I am not impressed. Whatever your question is, my answer is still no. Whatever you want from me, the mere fact that you want it gives me the power to deny it to you. I don’t care what it is. I don’t care what it costs.”

Enmeduranki was watching me carefully. Those sad, dark eyes over his face-veil were so deep, so wise, and so filled with a certain type of monstrous certainty that struck me as so wrong, so inhuman. I wish I could point to exactly what it was about this guy that seemed so strange, so unearthly.

Have you ever been in a line in a grocery store or something, and realized that the guy who is talking too much and too loud and too happy is not actually drunk, but is schizophrenic, but maybe he is taking drugs to control it? There is nothing you can put your finger on, but his eyes don’t quite point at you when he’s talking as the eyes of normal people do. The things he says don’t sound exactly like they fit in the situation you are in. And maybe he is saying the same thing he just said a moment ago, as if he is talking to you, but also hearing other voices in his head. Everything just slightly off. The way Enmeduranki talked was like that.

Normal people kind of draw away from guys like that, and look uncomfortable. If you ask them, they might say that they are not sure what the guy will do, maybe he’ll get violent. But if you read crime statistics, maybe you are actually in more real danger from sane people. So it is not the danger that creeps people out. It is something else. Something uncanny. An aura of madness.

Even with his face hidden, I could see Enmeduranki had it.

Enmeduranki said, “There are two exits from this, the Chamber of Two Exits. The one that is open you have used twenty-one times: The lower. It is for those who serve the Dark Tower unwillingly. It leads nowhere but to return here. Ah, but there is also the upper exit. It is for those who serve the Dark Tower willingly. Speak. Bow and worship the stars, and take upon yourself the name I shall bestow, and I shall make that name great among men. There is much one of the Host of the Undying can do which other men cannot. Your fate is to smite our enemies, one after another!

“Then, as has been foretold of old, all aeons, yea, all worlds shall be ours, and all the peoples of time made one.”

He made a gesture, and the spikes came out of the walls, extended to full length, but only one from each tier in a spiral pattern.

It formed a ladder reaching up to the hole. He was offering me the way out.

He said, “Fear not. The abarbaltu is the living metal of which the Dark Tower is forged. At my word, it will bear your weight.”

4. The Second Exit Opens

I said, “You are out of your [expletive deleted] mind! Is that your problem?”

I actually used a number of expletives there. Technically, there is nothing in the Bible that says we may not take the act of copulation or excretion in vain, it is only the name of Our Lord we may not abuse.)

Swearing like a sailor did not faze him. It provoked no anger, no nothing. He looked bored to tears.

I could not understand his attitude. I thought tormentors were supposed to be sadistic, and sorcerers, and evil kings were supposed to be proud and thin-skinned. He did not look like he enjoyed tempting, gloating, and toying with his starving prisoners.

He looked more like he was just going through the motions, waiting to get it over with.

I stopped shouting at him and drew a deep breath. I tried to center myself zazen-style, even though there was no blade in my hand.

Now I spoke in a calm, cool voice.

“I will not serve your proud Tower.” I said calmly.

His voice was even more calm and more cool. “All serve. Willingly or unwillingly you will serve: it does not matter. Nothing men do matters. Fate is fated.”

“That is a goddam lie. This tower of yours is built on lies. I will knock it down some day.”

“You speak words without sense. Not even an archangel could topple this Tower. We would see and foresee the day. Our horoscopic arts say that such a day will never come to pass. The stars know and foreknow.”

“And I say your horoscopic arts can bite me. Your stars will be pretty surprised.”

But I did not have that utter inhuman certainty in my voice. There was in me somewhere a drop of doubt; and I hated it, but it was there.

He made a little steeple of his fingers and leaned forward on his throne. “Any man who truly believed that we have no power to see the future would have lied when asked to bow. He would have pretended to swear, and would have climbed the ladder to me, and taken me by the throat while still praising me and promising me loyal service. And then he would have pitched me down through that egress you have so often used.”

I said nothing.

“You did not do so,” he said.

I still said nothing. I did not trust myself to speak. He was freaking me out.

“There is a reason you did not do so,” he said in that slow, patient, utterly bored and utterly certain voice of his, the voice of madness. “You see clearly in your mind’s eye the image of what would happen if you imagined in your heart to swear falsely. You know that I, knowing and foreknowing all your deeds, would allow you to ascend half the way up, and then I would ask the living metal of which the living tower is grown to retract, casting you down the middle axis of the cell and once more out the airy oubliette.”

I said, “You are reading my mind.” I did not like the tremble in my voice.

“Of course not. I am reading your stars. Do not bother to open your mouth to call me again a liar. I am the most honest of all men under heaven. Never have I need of lies, never do I utter them.”

5. Determinism and Determination

I felt so weary then that all I could do was sit down. The spikes he had extended were as long as spears, and were projected horizontally from the wall, and I used the bottom few of them as an impromptu chair, resting my naked butt on one, my naked back against another.

“You cannot predict the future,” I said. “Men have free will.”

“You say men have free will, and I say the sun rises, and the moon waxes and wanes, and the stars and wandering stars rise and set. I can name the hour and the minute of their rising and setting. The acts of men are not different from these. All things are controlled by their nature.”

“But I decide my own actions!”

“But if you spoke with the planetary intelligence guiding the sun around the fixed center of the cosmos, would he not say the same? The angel in the sun believes he guides his own actions, as does each angel in his wandering star. It is his nature to believe this. Like all else, his belief is fated.”

The magic spell or whatever it was that allowed me to understand his language did not necessarily mean I understood his idea of the world or how it worked. It took me a moment to realize that these people might not have ever had a Copernicus, a Galileo, a Kepler.

Before Copernicus, the ancients held that the sun circled the Earth, whose core was at the center of all the gravity of the cosmos; this cosmos consisted of a sphere of the fixed stars and lesser spheres holding planets riding epicycles, the whole thing moved in perfect circles by spirits and spooks.

I said, “You would not be here talking to me if that were true! All you would do is look up on your star-charts to see what I would say…”

The words died in my mouth. He knew exactly what I was going to say. That is why he looked so bored. This was a re-run to him.

I said, “I’ll make you a deal. You tell me something I am going to say, and I will say the opposite. Are your stars going to suddenly jump down out of the sky into my brain and force me to open my mouth and speak your words, and not mine?”

There was bitter amusement in his voice. “The apprentices of the noble families begin the training at seven years of age. The instruction in Paradoxes, Strictures Against Judgment, and Layered Fates on its first day begins with such exercises.”

He was telling me my idea was something a seven-year-old would think of.

“So what happens if they try?” I persisted.

“To defy fate riles fate.”

“What exactly happens?”

“Fates better avoided eventuate. We have a story in our aeon of a man who is known to be fated to slay his father and take his mother as wife. To escape fate, the parents command the child to be exposed, but he is found and raised by a shepherd and his wife. Growing to manhood, and consulting the stars, he learns of his fate of incest and parricide, and so flees from the humble rustics he falsely thinks his parents. The stars direct his wandering feet to the ford of a river, where a warlord in a chariot disputes with him who shall cross first, and in anger the fate-haunted wanderer slays the warlord. The stars direct his feet next to a city whose king has recently vanished, slain by none know whom, and to quell the civic discord, it is their custom to crown the first stranger found among them, and to give him the dead king’s widow as bride. Curses and pollutions befall the city, and the wanderer who became king discovers the murder is his, the parricide, and the incest, for the man in the chariot at the ford was his sire. Riddle me this: each footfall of this wandering man was decided and selected and chosen by him just as you boast you choose your words and deeds, was it not?”

“We have this story on my world. It’s a myth. It’s called Oedipus Rex.”

“Then you know that fate will sometimes make it fated that men should struggle against fate. But fate cannot make it fated that fate will be defied, for then it would not be fate.”

I blinked at that sentence, trying to unravel it. It is even more Doctor Seussian in the original tongue.

Then I shrugged. “Whatheheckever, Creepy Old Guy. That does not explain why you go through the motions of questioning me, when you know my answer will always be ‘no’. If you really knew, you wouldn’t ask.”

He sadly sighed a sad sigh. “I came to speak to you because the stars direct my words and deeds just as they do yours. You ask your foolish question because it is inscribed that you must ask: you are an automaton. I am an automaton. All men are automata. All men are puppets of the stars.”

“But you could do the opposite of whatever the horoscope said. You could let me out of this cage. I have done nothing to you or your people. I don’t even know you. You have no reason to keep me here and no right to do it. It’s not fair.”

His eyes looked so very tired. “I read in your stars that you would say those words, and I did not understand them then, and do not understand them now. What is right? What is reason? What is this fair of which you speak? You are within the cage because your birth and your stars destine you to be there. I am without the cage because my birth and my stars destine me to be here. There is no right and wrong, no reason and no unreason. These are the illusions of men who know nothing of the star lore.”

“You are [more expletives] insane, aren’t you?”

He uttered the tiniest laugh, and the most cheerless. “Of course I am. All who study the star lore deeply find their humanity departs from them, one little grisly bit at a time. Piece by piece, the stars eat our souls as we discover the unearthly truth of things, that we have no will, no freedom. All High Astrologers succumb soon or late to the star-madness, and must be thrown to death from a high window by their servants when the time is decreed. When my hour is come–” (his eyes were pulled as if against his will to his golden pocketwatchy device as if the date and time were also inscribed there for him to see) “–my slaves will defenestrate me—for we who serve the Dark Tower, there is no other method of execution. But I can keep my soullessness hidden by reading in my horoscope, which says how I would speak if I were sane, and carefully reciting the words, like an untalented player in a wandering street-play.”

“Why can’t they read your horoscope, and see you are fooling them?”

“The stars will not ordain that they should have cause to think to do so, until such time as I no longer serve the stars rightly. Fate is fated.”

“Yeah, but if you can fool them, what makes it so that I cannot fool you?”

Enmeduranki said, “Why would the stars wish you to fool me? You do not serve them and bow to them. I do. Aeon after aeon, world upon world, I put to their power. You oppose them, or so you say. Your words are bold, but meaningless. Tell me how a man fights the stars? What spear is tall enough to touch them? What weapon can wound them?”

I crossed my arms. “Tell me who made the stars and I will tell you how to fight them.”

He blinked, so I kept talking.

“Do your stars have a birthdate? Can you cast their horoscopes? When was the nativity of the cosmos, when the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of light shouted for joy of their Creation? Declare it, if you know so much!”

6. The Technomancers of Tellus

He glanced at his golden compass, or pocketwatch thingie, or whatever it was, and then said, “The time for speculative prattle is done. Now let us discuss your fate. Our conquest of your world is imminent. Already a sea-gate great enough for our navies is prepared, our ironclad submersibles and the cavalry of sea-monsters. My servant, Anshargal, Great King and the Warrior-Prince Who Binds the Heavens, who wears the crown of stars and the prismatic robe of Nimrod, he wishes to know the conditions of your world, that the impediments foretold may be smoothed away.”

I said, “How can there be impediments? You say you foresee all.”

He said, “Nothing was unforeseen. We waited patiently through the long-foreseen delays caused by the Kuliltukassaptillut.”

I almost did not catch the word he used. The magic ability he had to make himself understood did not mean I could make out words muttered or uttered in angry haste. Kuliltukassaptillut was two words, Kuliltu kassaptu which meant fish-woman damsel of the enchantress tribe, or mermaid singer maiden. Sea Witch.

There was a touch of anger in his voice, and for the first time, he sounded less weary, less certain. It was as if he suffered an emotion.

Had I said something he had not expected, not read beforehand? I don’t know.

So I laughed. “Sure! I’ll tell you! The conditions of my world are that we are going to kick your asses if you step foot there. So you have submersible ironclads, do you? Maybe armed with catapults? Equipped with ramming prows? We have transcontinental nuclear missiles. Those are flying rockets, things like towers made of metal, that sail through the sky from one side of the world to the other on a single leg of fire….”

“I know what they are.” He drawled, bored again.

“Wha-what?”

“Other worlds we have conquered possessed such toys. Your missiles–” the word he used was bel-mulmullu, master-arrow, “–use the power of the stars, the power which comes from uncreating the smallest indivisible bits of matter, to burn whole cities at one blow. But these master-arrows must be launched before they fall, and ordered to launch by a launch-code, and the launch-code given by a man, and of each man we know his nativity and his acts, and the acts of his enemies to whom we can give this launch-code and anything else we know. Weapons mean nothing. Arms and armies mean nothing. Knowing means all things. The Dark Tower knows and foreknows.”

“If you can conquer my world so easily, why do you need my help?”

He did not answer.

I said, this time louder, “If the Dark Tower knows so much, how come you are here asking me questions?”

Again, no answer.

“As I left Earth, I saw one of your Invasion Machines fall out of the sky toward the sea. Now, I don’t know how long I was in the Bog Between the Worlds, but I guess a few hours, maybe a day. I am guessing that in that time, you opened a Moebius gate, pushed through a bunch of barges crammed with bowmen, and maybe some of your freaky-deakies with weird superpowers, and that the USS Nimitz stood twenty miles away, over the visible horizon, and dropped shells on you the size of Volkswagens, after hosing you down with napalm dropped from supersonic stealth fighters zipping by so high you did not see them either, and lighting your invasion up like so many charcoal briquettes. How is my guess? Is that about what happened?”

Above his veil, I saw his watery eyes crinkled like a grandfather smiling. He spoke in a slow voice, “Your guess is as far from what happened as is the highest star from a grain of sand at the bottom of the deepest sea.”

“There is no way you can beat us!”

“Youth, have you met any of the host that quaffs blood like wine? The Cold Ones? In their own aeon, any man they fix with their eye is beguiled. They were as proud of their invincible power as you are of yours, for there were none of their world who could stand against them. But they did not know their fate. They did not know their future.

“From the sea-gate we launched a heavier wayship into low Earth orbit, where neither lightning can strike nor wild wind disturb. The Moebius coil can also be used as a casement as well as a portcullis, and our Astrologers have gathered the visions of your stars and wandering stars as they shine on your world, and hence can estimate the influences.”

I said, “Conquering an entire world is impossible! The logistics alone make it absurd. Do you Bronze-Age barbarians have any idea how many people live on my–”

He interrupted me, “Counting the birthdates from the star positions, we calculate over seven billion individuals living on your globe.”

I stood there with my mouth hanging open.

Enmeduranki ignored me and continued blandly, “It strains even our abilities to cast all the horoscopes for every soul, but our actuarial calculation engines have made a preliminary map of those nations whose founding took place on recognizable nativity dates—yes, we can forecast the fates of tribes and peoples and states as well as of children. A skeleton of your world’s future is already known to the Great Council of Chaldaeans and Magicians. We will know more as our clerks complete their mathematic routines and the great engines meditate.

“We know that only the English-speaking nations have highly trained military forces capable of action on a global scale. The others cannot reach our orbital position.

“For pacification, the policy of the Great King demands one warrior for every ten thousand slaves, which requires a mere seven million men under arms for your world. And less, of course, depending on how many of your cities we raze and how many of your croplands we reduce, burn, and salt.

“But seven million is as nothing, I have the manpower of many worlds, many aeons, on which to call, including worlds much more crowded than your own.

“A technological world is far more fragile than an agrarian one, and can be reduced merely by destroying its ships and roads and complexities of machinery—without fuel for your mechanisms, how many days can your great cities survive with only those foods grown within walking distance, in amounts carried by horse and cart?”

“We have radar, and submarines, and jet aircraft, and intercontinental thermonuclear warheads. We have satellites that–” And then I stopped, astonished at my own stupidity.

He waved his hand in the air with the same gesture you’d use to brush a fly away. “You have satellites, but we read the rising and setting of planets, their motions in retrograde and prograde, conjunctions superior and inferior, triunes and oppositions. Child, we rule worlds who also command weapons as fearsome as yours, and their warriors can make the sky dark with terror, rendering the whole world bright with fire from pole to pole. I have said to you, your weapons and works are nothing to us: And I never lie.”

I spread my hands. “Fine. You know the future. You know everything. Why talk to me? Why ask me any questions at all?”

“I have answered. What I am fated to speak to you, I speak.”

“Then what are you afraid of from my world, if you are not afraid of our thermonuclear intercontinental ballistic missiles?”

“We fear nothing. The stars foretold that you are fated to answer certain questions. Have you Exorcists on your world? Have you Warlocks of the Ylem on your world? Have you Doorkeepers on your world or Doorwardens of the One-sided Circle?”

His word for doorkeeper was babusippur and for doorwarden was babukanniksippur. For a moment I did not catch the implications of the words until I said them again in my head as two words. The first was Door Warlock. The second word, Doorwarden, meant someone who shut a gate by magic. Literally it meant Door-sealing Warlock. One-sided Circle or Istensehpgishur was their word for what the Professor called a Moebius coil.

He was talking about the Ostiaries of the Knights Templar. He was talking about my dad.

That was not what creeped me out. I expected him to know about the Templars. Dad told me these people were his enemy, the ones who stopped him from finding Mom.

What creeped me out was his asking about exorcists. His word sagamahu meant not only an exorcist, but a sorcerer, a magician, an incantatory priest. With a shock, it came to me that my world did have incantatory priests. He does not have a very good singing voice, but Father Flannery chants the words at every Mass. Did priests perform exorcisms any longer? Or was that just in horror movies? Did Father Flannery know the rites and prayers for casting out demons? It stood to reason that he did. They must learn something useful at seminary.

Oddly, I was more afraid for Father Flannery than for my dad. He talked to me at Mom’s funeral, and afterward. I loved him. That these freaks should be hunting that harmless, absentminded old man made my heart burn.

I folded my arms again. “How does your future-seeing power work, again, exactly? You cannot foresee these exorcists and doorwardens, as you call them, or otherwise you would not ask about them. And the ylemsippur, the shadowmages?” Then I remembered that I had been called a shadowmage, too, because the Oobleck obeyed me.

In the little strip of face below his crown and above his veil, I saw the thin vertical line of a frown appear between his eyebrows. The thimble was getting warmer. I was not sure about exorcists, but there was one thing shadowmages and ostiaries had in common.

“You cannot see and foretell what happens in the Sea of Uncreation between worlds!” I said. “There are no stars there, nothing has a nature. That means when a warlock or wise man walks through the twilight, you lose track of him. Right? That means whatever I did in the twilight was hidden from you, every moment your gate was open. So you do not know how the twilight gates you flung into my world were destroyed, or how I got here to your world. Come on. ‘Fess up. You never lie. Tell me if I guessed right.’’

His thin and weary voice grew strong and cold like iron when he answered me. “Your world has a small and secretive group of ostiaries, men who sail the twilight shallows of the ocean of Uncreation, and slip into other aeons as if by dreaming. They do not have engines like ours, which open the gates of twilight upon command as we can. They have a dim and uncertain knowledge of the greater universe. The man you call Father found you abandoned by the mother who bore you in the aeon we call Cainem—she had wearied of nursing you, and since you need no nourishment to live, threw you over her shoulder into a pit. The Host of the Undying Ones, having eaten the fruits of the gods, know no word nor thought of affection, duty, or fellowship as we who eat the bread of Earth know, we whose children perish without maternal love. Only if there are ostiaries in your adopted homeland could you have been brought to dwell there. You were not born in a world which has such engines and machines and works as the technomancers contrive. Have I guessed aright?”

His word kalbanusipur-le’u meant literally a magician skilled in the making of siege-engines. It was their word for scientist, but they thought science was wizardry. Technomancer is the closest word I can coin to express the idea.

I said: “Tell me, Crazy Freak Man in the Coffee Pot Hat, why you don’t just ask your stars to answer your question, if they know what is going to happen, everything I say, everything you will say back? Oh, wait, you told me: you do not want to have happen to you what happened to Oedipus. Because the stars punish you by cursing you if you defy them. Have I guessed right?”

That was the first thing I said that got a reaction from him. It was small, just a rustle of his robes, a tremble in his gloves, but it was something.

Something that annoyed him, that is. He made a small motion of his hand. A spear jumped out of the wall and hit me in the face.

7. My Horoscope

The point of the spear did not pierce my brain, because I saw the silent motion from the corner of my eye, and I jerked my head to one side, but it caught my ear and tore it from my head, and a long bleeding strip of flesh was dangling past my face, and the force of the blow knocked me off my feet, and I was rolling toward the open hole leading to the long fall.

I really wish I could have kept my cool and stood there like The Fonz or John Wayne with a curl to my lip and a look on my face like I was saying ‘whatever’ when he struck me, but no. I was hurt, and scared of falling, so I screamed like a girl. I am not going to make any excuses—the fear came suddenly upon me like a mad tiger falling onto Mowgli out of a tree branch, okay?

Enmeduranki said in his weary, bored, sad little voice, “It is now time for me to tell you part of your horoscope. In three days’ time, when Mercury enters the double conjunction with Venus and Mars beholding, we shall take to the place of torment the girl you love, the sea-witch born under the sign of Pisces.”

That kind of snapped me out of my hysteria, just because it was so weird, that I was trying to make sense of what he said, and so I forget that I was scared and missing an ear. Holding the side of my head with both hands, I stood and backed away from the cloud-filled hole.

Take Penny? My mine was blank. Somewhere wandering in that blankness was the thought that she was not in this dimension, this aeon, and therefore she was safe from this creepy little Dark lord no matter what.

He must have seen my disbelief on my face, or maybe in my horoscope, because he explained in a soft voice, “She was captured not long ago. She created some preliminary difficulties but we have overcome them. She will be put to the torment in three days time.

“As for her horoscope, it now reads as follows: her body will be adjusted by our torture-physicians so that the pains inflicted will be of severity greater than mortals can normally bear. We will force her to eat human flesh and other unclean meats to pollute her body. We will have our trained beasts ravish her, and this will remove her witchcraft without the danger of witch-pregnancy, as well as pollute her with uncleanness.

“Once this is done we will bring your living head before her. We will place her on the iron bed, and insert the iron hooks according to the ancient practices with exquisite slowness, and introduce chemical or electric trauma by those hooks into her arteries and nerves, or heat or cold; or by means of many threads connected to those hooks as anchor-points to contort her form by strappado, squassation, picquet, murgha stances, or by compression, torque or rack, and so dislocate her fair limbs—meanwhile your eyelids will be cut away and your head nailed in place, so that you will be unable to look away from her pain.

“Your world only in recent years has begun to make a scientific and sophisticated study of torment. We are a thousand years in advance of this, and have used whole worlds as testing grounds to refine our techniques, with billions of test subjects.

“Therefore, and at the appointed time, your will shall break; and to save her from further pain, you will vow to serve us, and bow to the stars and worship them. I will not tell you that appointed time, because you would resist for longer if you knew it.

“You were placed in this cage and allowed to leap from it at any time, to show you in a way you cannot deny, even in your heart, that there is truly no hope of escape. The Dark Tower knows and foreknows all things, and there is no escape for any of us.

“Now, because I have said these words in this order at this time, your hope is gone, and you know the beginning of the truth that destroys the souls of men: but soon you shall see all. Therefore, when you swear, you will swear fully.”

8. Desolation

At his words, a sense of desolation was in me.

It was true. I believed him, and there was no room left for disbelief.

Everything in this cage, the spiked walls, the easy escape exit offered by suicidal leaps, the shining lampwood platform, the thin atmosphere, the starvation, the isolation, everything was part of a practiced and calculated routine to them. The Dark Tower knew how to break the spirit of an Undying One, a Lalilummutillut. Me.

Likewise, they had conquered worlds before. From the first moment of squirting Moebius coil blueprints through a microscopic wormhole to the deployment of orbital gateways from which they could drop paratroopers on the ground beneath, this unhappy, tired-eyed Dark Lord and his endless slave armies had the whole thing down to an art.

It did not matter. He would not be here unless he wanted something from me. Whatever that was, he would not get it, not from me, not today.

I rose to my knees and looked up at him.

9. Fears

Enmeduranki said, “Tell me of your world. We fear none of your weapons. Two things we fear. Ostiarianism is one of them, that your people know the art of sailing the twilight. The other is horoscopy. Do you have horoscopists on your world?”

“I am a Libra,” I said. “Libras don’t believe in astrology.”

He stiffened as if I had struck his funny bone. “How do you know the name of Zibanitu, the constellation of the balance? That knowledge is secret!”

I smiled my most annoying smile, one I developed and practiced on my bullying older brothers during years of sibling rivalry. “You’ve read in your horoscope that you never learn the answer to that question, haven’t you? No–” I looked carefully at his eyes. He did not look bored. “No, it’s more than that. You’ve reached the end of your predictions!”

He raised his black glove to his black face-veil, as if trying to stroke his hidden beard with his hidden fingers, but he did not answer. I suppose a man who never fibs just never answers when he does not want to speak truthfully.

“You pored over your horoscopes, figuring out, one word at a time, every word I would say,” I pressed on. “But when you reached the point in the story where you tell me that in three days you will torture this girl, you figured there was no point in calculating the rest. You saved it, like a kid saving himself a tiny bit of candy, because you are trapped in a cage just like mine, just as terrible as mine, and you want to talk to another human being as terribly as I do. You want to talk to a live human being, not the soulless automatons you think human beings are. You endured that entire conversation just to get to this point, where you don’t know what I am going to say. Have I guessed right?”

His eyes narrowed. He made another small gesture. Two of the spikes from the walls of the cage turned into spears and impaled me right through my chest and abdomen. I did not die and could still breathe, but I was in a lot of pain.

The pain of spears passing through my body was insignificant compared to the pain of falling and breaking all my bones and rupturing all my organs. I ignored this minor pain and kept speaking.

“So you are not insane, Emmy-Drinky. May I call you Emmy-Drinky, Your Most High Royal Bigwankership? Your name is too long and stupid for me to say. Not insane, but you wish you were, because you figured out that you are a slave. Your masters, these things you call stars, communicate their orders to you by star-patterns and signs, and when you read your horoscopes, you are just decoding messages that contain the orders you must obey. All the astrologers figure this out eventually, and when that happens, your masters order them thrown out a window of this nice high tower, because you are not allowed to tell anyone that you are a slave. Have I guessed right?”

This time, I did weird him out. I spoke so normally and so calmly with these big freakish spears jammed through my flesh, that fear entered his eyes.

I realized what that fear meant.

Sure, his people knew about people like me. They knew what planet I was from. But he, himself, Enmeduranki the Master of All Magicians, he did not own a television and did not watch horror movies, and he was the Dark Lord of this place, with lots of desk work, and so he probably never went to torture chambers and battlefields.

He had heard about Undying Ones before, but he never looked into the eyes of one, and saw him bleeding from huge gaping wounds that would kill a mortal man a dozen times over, talking like it meant nothing. The difference between being a military historian and being a battlefield veteran was in his eyes.

I laughed at him.

He knew the future, did he? Knew everything? He had read about everything, seen it in a chart or something. He had not seen it in person.

Enmeduranki said, “How– how can you live– how can you be alive like that? Surely it hurts?” He was not bored now. There was astonishment in his voice.

I said, “Answer my question, and I will answer yours.”

“The answer is yes. We are both trapped by cages. You see your bars, I merely know mine.”

“The answer is yes. It hurts like hell.”

“Answer me one more.”

“No.”

“I have many torments I can inflict, if you fail to answer.”

“Bite me.”

“Do you not fear pain?”

“You cannot kill me, Emmy-Drinky, so the pain does not scare me. It only hurts. You see the difference? Without the fear, the thing that happened to you cannot happen to me.”

“What thing?”

“You thought you learned the secrets of the universe and of the future, but you only learned you are a slave. Your masters control you more completely than the lowest of men or creatures working for you. But I am a free man. Have you ever seen one like me before?”

Enmeduranki was not impressed with my speech. He leaned back on his throne, and laughed a very thin, very bitter sort of laugh.

“Yes, deathless youth! I have seen so-called free men in cages like yours, both before the torments, and after: both before they bow and worship the stars, and after. None of the other of the Hosts of the Undying Ones has studied arts and letters or knew the names of the constellations. You will be craftier than they, and wiser. I have read the accounts in the horoscopes of the deeds you will do in the service of the Dark Tower, both in wars of this generation and wars renewed in generations to come.”

“I will not serve you,” I said.

“We shall first overwhelm and overcome your aeon Earth, which we call Albion, once you lift the storms and wards that hinder us; second, the aeon of Sabtechadur, where the seven-ringed Grail of Jamshyd shines and reflects the seven heavens, we shall utterly destroy, once you enter the Psychomanteum in Agarththa to defile the Grail and break it; and third, the Great City of Gold in the aeon of Sasan, which is the coal of all the fires that burn against us, the fountainhead of all the waters that undermine us. Death to the Golden City shall you achieve, that city which is the main foe and obstacle to the Great Tower. Through you, we shall have her twelvefold gemmed foundations overthrown, and in fire, her walls shall lose the luster of the looking glass, and melt to shining slag!

“All of these great quests require that you pass where no living soul can walk, nor cast the unclean spirits out. Neither the Land of Light where all men stagger blind, nor the Deathly Wind that walks among the mountains of the dog-headed monsters, nor the Witchstorms of the sea shall hinder you. You are a lettered man. No other of the Lalilummutillut has this art.”

His eyes glittered with something like lust. It was gross.

His voice fell to a tittering whisper, a croon: “Y-Yes-ss, yes, my lovely boy, you will serve well indeed the Dark Tower in its might.”

I laughed long and loud. “Beans and baloney!”

I was pretty sure Sabtechadur was the name Dad had given for where Mom was besieged, so the chance of my helping him conquer that was less than one-half zero squared, and just as impossible.

And, just on principle, I was not helping any group that called itself The Darkest Tower against places called Great Golden City and Land of Light. That was a no-brainer. I mean, get serious. Suppose you were from another world and came to ours circa 1940 and you saw an SS officer in his black uniform with the silver skulls on his collar, and he said he wanted to exterminate some folks called The Chosen People from some place called The Holy Land, who would you think the bad guy was?

He drew back when I laughed, as if his feelings were hurt. “Young whelp! You dare…?”

“Old man, I don’t fear pain. You cannot make me yield by torturing me.”

His eyes narrowed.

Enmeduranki spoke softly. “As you say. Not by torturing you.”

It took me a moment to realize who he meant. “Torturing the creature you call my girlfriend will not work, because I am of the Host of the Undying Ones! We don’t have love or duty, remember? We think you mortals are weak. We laugh at you.”

I grabbed my left hand in my right, stuck out my thumb, and drove it into my left eye, thumbnail first. It is harder to do than you’d think, believe me. Blood and vitreous humor went pouring down my cheek.

“Your torture means nothing to me!” I said. “Go ahead and torture her in front of me! I will laugh!”

He shook his head. “You practice deception. If you are willing to smite out your eye to save her, then you will break not long after the barbed hooks enter her flesh. Do you know how many days a girl can scream in pain before her voice fails forever? We do. You were raised by mortal men, and you have our weaknesses and compassions. The stars have predicted you serve us for her sake, to spare her pain. Fate is fated.”

10. One Last Question

He did not move. I wondered what else he had to say. This will sound weird, but the pain in my eye, and where the spears passed through my body, seemed to recede when I controlled my breathing, and cleared my mind. I could still feel how hurt I was, but, somehow, at the same time, I realized that nothing could really hurt me at all, because it could not bring me one inch closer to dying.

So I said, “I have a question for you.”

He was amused. “You? Question me? I am the Lord of all Magicians. The Great Prince Who Binds Heaven to Earth is merely a warlord. Why should I answer?”

“Because you are crazy and lonesome and you want to talk to someone who doesn’t fear you. Have I guessed right?”

He chuckled the way you might at the antic of some little pet that lightened your day. He said, “You are wise beyond the reach of most Undying Ones and other abominations. For this, you will wear the name Utu’abzu, the Ascending Sun.”

The two huge spikes pulled out of my body. I wanted to stay all cool and silent, but it really freaking hurt. I screamed a little. Okay, a lot. Oh, well.

He said, “Answer my question first. Do your people have the art of horoscope reading?”

“Honestly? We do. They appear in our newspapers every day. Most people regard them as trifling and ridiculous. We laugh at those who believe in astrology and astrologers.”

He stiffened in shock, his tired eyes wide. “Trifling and– what?”

I said, “That thing in your hand. I notice you keep looking at it. I saw that Lord Ersu had one, too. What is it? Some sort of portable little star-reading gizmo? So you can do a quick check of your calculations or something?”

“It is called kenuminatil.” The word meant truth-measuring instrument. “It measures changes in stellar influences as seconds and minutes of arc pass.”

“So you can ask your golden compass if I am lying. Did you ever get a report on what happened to your first three small twilight gate machines you sent into my world? I don’t know what you call them. The little ones.”

“Spears.”

“Good name. The first three spears. Two were shot the same moment they emerged, and the third opened a gate for a minute or less, and then was negated suddenly. Does that match up with your info? If someone from our world sent spears through a small gate to try to open a bigger gate, just like what you did to us, what would happen? You would predict the exact moment, and have people standing by to smash them the moment they came through.”

“Are you saying your Astrologers foretold that we were making our breach?”

“You don’t get two questions. My turn.”

He sat back on his throne, gripping the armrests with his gloves, frustrated. “Ask.”

“These things you keep calling stars. They enslaved you. You don’t know what they are. They are just something or someone who gives you orders, using your star patterns and your calculus to tell you what to do, and cursing you like Oedipus was cursed if you disobey.”

“You blaspheme most delightfully, Undying One,” he said with a slight laugh, “But you do not ask a question.”

“The question is not mine, but yours. Riddle me this, Lord of Magicians: If the stars have enslaved you, and if serving them destroys your soul, and your reward for your loyal service is to be murdered by them, thrown out the window like a chamber pot, why serve them?”

Since he and I both saw that it did not matter what he said aloud to me in reply, he turned on the Moebius gate hidden in the rim of the hole in the ceiling of the cell, summoned an orb of darkness surrounded by the swath of many-colored fire, and vanished.

11. Despair

After he left, I was desolate. It was as if my thoughts were affecting my body.

I felt a strange rumble in my stomach, like I had swallowed a worm. Then, a moment later, the blue light began to shine from the floorboards, and my stomach quieted down.

I was alone, and I had water, and I had three days. After that, they were going to torture Penny.

If I could kill myself, they would have no reason to torture her. But I could not even do that. They were going to torture her. And I could do nothing.

Falconress and Marineress

1. The Girl in the Paper

I had heard of Penelope Dreadful two years before I met her. Me and the entire English-speaking world. I was thirteen at the time.

My dad had the habit, when he would sit in his favorite big chair with his back to the window and the sunlight on his lap, of shouting advice at the newspaper, or arguing with the editorials, even though all he was holding in his hand was, well, it was paper, a crinkly yet inanimate object.

Sometimes he would bring us in on the arguments with the newspaper. I always took Dad’s side. The newspaper could not give me an advance on my allowance because it was a crinkly yet inanimate object (as stated above, see last paragraph) and therefore it was not in my enlightened self-interest to side with the paper. My brothers reasoned likewise.

This particular morning, however, I sided with the newspaper and against my brothers and father. It seemed that this girl only two years older than I was had decided to circumnavigate the globe all by herself.

Well, herself and her pet bird: a tiny, fierce-looking thing with gray wings and white and black breast. The newspaper said it was a merlin. It was very photogenic. The papers were always showing the sailor girl in a big smile and small bathing suit with a big glove swallowing her slender wrist on which her small bird perched. She was very photogenic too.

Girl and boat and bird had set out from Cabo San Lucas at the tip of the Baja Peninsula in February; in March she rounded Cape Horn, and in May, the Cape of Good Hope. June found her in a remote area of the Indian Ocean, about 2,000 miles west of Australia, when a thirty-foot high wave capsized her forty-foot yacht and snapped off the mast. Radio contact was lost for two days while seaplanes and fishing boats in the area looked for her.

The newspaper said that her father, a widower of no fixed income who lived off of honorariums and patents, should be arrested and charged with child-endangerment, then tarred and feathered, hanged and sentenced to transportation for life. (I don’t know if that is what the newspaper actually said, or if that was my Dad’s special interpretation.) Because of the controversy, the World Speed Sailing Record Council officially discontinued marking the world record for solo world circumnavigation in the “youngest” category.

“What are they going to do?” Dad bellyached, “Pad the entire world in a pillow? Make everyone wear a helmet who wants to stick his head in a lion’s mouth? The whole world is turning into little girls! And now the only one with guts to do anything is—well, this little girl!”

Like I said, normally I’d agree. But there was something about being lost at sea which always sent a particularly cold little icepick of fear into my heart. It was one of the recurring thoughts that used to scare me at night. My brother once told me this creepy little story about how the second to last woolly mammoth in the world drowned in the sea, fighting waves against which even its great strength was of no avail. So I was not a fan of letting women drown.

The other reason was that when you disappear at sea, no one finds your body to put into the grave. When there is no body, they just put up a stone. I knew this because Mom’s funeral earlier that year had just been over a stone.

So the argument got pretty heated. Mom had not been gone long, and we had not gotten used to having no one around to break up fights. I remember at one point, I said, “If Grandpa Mikhail had let Mom get lost at sea, we’d never have been born!”

Alexei hissed. “Not us, but you’d have been born! We picked you up from the Monkey House at the zoo!”

Dad’s voice came out from behind the newspaper like the voice of Jehovah from the fires of Mount Sinai. “Son! You are never to speak that way.”

Alexei was now angry with me for getting him in trouble. He turned sideways on the couch we were sitting on, and kicked me with both legs, trying to trash-compact me into the corner where the couch arm met couch back.

I called out. “Da-aa-ad! He’s picking on me!”

Dad did not look up from the newspaper. “Grab his heel and his toes like I showed you, twist, and fracture his ankle. Try to make it a clean break.”

Mom was not there to stop word fights, so she was also not there to stop fight fights. I ended up crying, but I was getting too old to end up crying, so I started making regular stops at the gym, and paid more attention to my physical training and weapon practice. I figured the best way to prevent my brothers from murdering me, was to be fit and hale enough to murder them. There is an old saying: If you want peace, prepare for war. I think it is in the Bible or something.

It was not until later that I realized that Dad may not have been snapping at me or Alexei. He simply could not bear to hear about Mom. And his voice had sounded a little weird when he told me to mug Alexei. Maybe Dad was hiding behind that paper until he had a chance to wipe his face, and he needed the three-way wrestling match as a distraction. Dobrin joined in, of course. (I did not have the strength to twist off Alexei’s foot, but I was able to send him across the coffee table onto the carpet.)

Four months later, she was in the newspapers again. Amid cries of outrage and calls for new laws to stop such recklessness, her father had bought her another yacht from a shipwright in India, and now she was setting sail from the Coromandel Coast to resume her voyage. The newspaper speculated at her motive, since circumnavigating the world with a four-month interruption in the middle did not count for any record, and even if it had, the official record would no longer be kept for the youngest mariner to circle the globe. Everyone was puzzled, but I understood. You finish what you start.

It gave me an odd feeling, because I felt I knew her, knew her inner thoughts, even if the rest of the world could not.

I had a world map in my bedroom tacked to a board of cork. With little flags I marked the places the newspapers said she’d stopped or stayed. There seemed to be no record of where she had been born. The rumor was that her mother had given birth to her on an island in the South Seas, aided by a native witch-doctor. Her father was a world traveler, and lived out of a houseboat that was also a floating laboratory for his experiments, some of which were conducted outside the twelve-mile limit where the laws of nations ended. Each time I added a tiny flag to the map, I promised myself I would visit that place, breathe the air, see the sights, touch the soil, meet people whose every next word I could not guess.

The names of those far places were poetry to me: Katmandu and Istanbul, Mogadishu and Khartoum, Islamabad and Allepo, Amritsar and Khandahar and Zanzibar, Kyoto, Paris, and Saint Petersburg, Tallinn and Tahiti and Canton and Penzance, and Imhambane and Polokwane, Marrakech and Reykjavik, Äänekoski and Ushuaia.

She was photographed wherever she went, and she always smiled for the camera, as if she were delighted in any place she found herself, great or small, warm or cold, anywhere from Iceland to Tierra del Fuego, provided it was a place where she could wander as if lost, far and foreign lands of wonder where she could lose herself. Again, I understood; and those smiling photographs I cut out or copied or printed out in color, and thumb-tacked in careful order around the border of the corkboard.

There was never any mother seen with her, and her father spoke to no newspaper about whatever sorrow he hid. Once only, when directly asked, did he mention a gravestone on an island found only at low tide, never claimed by any nation. That loss I understood most of all.

That summer, the local newspapers told she was coming to Tillamook. I was puzzled, and I didn’t understand. What was in Tillamook that was not in California or Coromandel or all the other exotic places in the world she’d seen?

2. The Girl in the Glasses

Everyone in town was excited at having a celebrity move in. The excitement took on a quieter undertone of curious uneasiness when it was found out that her eccentric father was renovating the Haunted Museum and reopening it. The Museum had once been a fine house owned by a branch of the Stillwell family, but who had fallen on hard times when, after World War II, the Navy discontinued the use of blimps and closed the local air base.

Foster Hidden and I became buddies back when I still went to school, and he and I were the only members of the archery team who took it seriously.

Also, I liked hanging around him because girls, usually in pairs and trios and quartets, and I mean the cutest girls in school, cheerleaders in their little red and white uniforms, would come up to talk to him on the least excuse, while he was just standing leaning against a locker or something, and ask him some stupid question, for example if he wanted to be the Cheesemaker or something (Cheesemaker was our school mascot. Really.)

He had dark and fine features, but his eyes were a startling blue, with big irises, and looked like sapphire laser beams, and he had dark eyebrows which were naturally high on his forehead, giving him a look halfway between a curious imp and a drowsy fox. I think the girls were magnetized to him because he knew how to pick locks and read fortune-telling cards, and so had an aura of dangerous wickedness to him.

It was false advertising: not only was he inwardly dying of shyness (he later told me in secret) whenever groups of girls flocked to him, he and I were the only kids our age at school who didn’t drink or smoke or swear that much, worked hard, went to bed early. But there was something about his face that made it look like he was keeping secrets and smiling at the rest of us.

He and I had gone bow-hunting together for a week the summer I turned fifteen. That was when I learned how hard it was to judge distance and shot angles in the woods. At Foster’s suggestion, we marked trees with surveyor’s tape at different yardages from the blind. The tape doesn’t spook the deer if you don’t touch it with bare hands and leave your scent behind. First time out, I only took broadside or quartering away shots, and missed everything. He shot a 3 year old, about 160 pounds, 9 pointer with a clean broadside shot at 50 feet. The arrow went clean through the animal’s heart. I know how much the buck weighed because I helped him carry it back to camp, and, all the next week, helped him eat the venison steaks.

We were in the same scout troop and patrol, Troop 2, Bobcat patrol. Foster always wished he had been born an American Indian. He knew more about the tribes of the Pacific Northwest, their history and lore, than anyone I ever met. That was why he was interested in bows and arrows, I guess. He was the inventor of Bobcat Hash, a barely edible food substance that defies description, and this made him world-famous among the eight other members of our patrol. He kept half a log in back of his house near a creek that formed the border with the Snyder farm, and every now and again he would build a small fire in it and chop at the burnt insides with an ax, trying to hollow it out and make an honest-Injun dugout canoe.

Foster had seen photos of the world-famous sailor girl behind the wheel of her yacht, smiling for the cameras, falcon on her wrist, in her bathing suit, and therefore had a crush on Penelope Dreadful.

I told him it was absurd to get a crush on a girl you’d only ever seen in the papers, so he and I looked up video footage of her on my phone.

We started taking hikes with our bows in hand, like we were hunting or something, and would by non-coincidence stray near the coast around the lighthouse, but we never really ever got up the nerve to approach the Haunted Museum itself. We just wanted to see if moving vans had arrived, or if someone had mowed the grass or turned on the power or committed another murder-suicide by hanging. You know. Idle curiosity.

One hot, hot, summer day when all the insects were chirruping, there was no breath of wind at all but plenty of little midges and mites everywhere, Foster and I came out from the brush near the foot of the hill, and he stopped short.

“There she is,” he said. His voice was husky from the dryness of the air, and the heat, but I bet it would have sounded that way anyway.

I shaded my eyes with my hand and looked up. Sure enough, looking just like in her photos, except (maybe it was my imagination) she was even curvier. Girls on television look that way, but not real girls, not that often.

She was wearing a bright yellow dress that came to her knees with straps that go over the shoulder. I don’t know what that kind of dress is called. A sun dress? A peasant skirt? A pony skirt? Listen: I know the difference between a magazine and a clip, and I have seen newspapers get that one wrong. If you want to know the difference between dresses, ask a guy with sisters, or whose dad is a tailor or something.

In her hand was a large, round straw hat bigger than a dinner plate, with two ribbons dangling from it. She waved it at us, beckoning us to come up.

I blinked, sure my eyes were playing a trick. “She just beckoned at me. Us. She wants us to come up.”

Foster said, “Naw. You’re crazy.”

“Look! There again! She’s waving hello.”

“Maybe she is signaling to her pet killer hawk who tears out the eyes of guys who just remembered they were supposed to mow the lawn today. It’s circling overhead.”

“That was a wave. I am going up to say hello. You coming?”

Foster said, “She is not looking at us. Famous people don’t look at guys like us. I am all covered with sweat and bugbites, and you look like you escaped from Beneath the Planet of the Apes.”

“You mean the gorilla or the guys with no faces who worship an A-bomb?”

“Gorilla.”

“General Ursus is sexy, and chicks dig him. I’m going up. If you stay here and don’t talk to this gorgeous hot babe who sailed halfway around the world with a falcon on her arm, you will sit and regret it until you are eighty-nine and a half years old, and then you will kill yourself by jumping out of your flying car, which we will all have by then. Well? She probably just wants to ask if we are carrying a cell phone or something, or help her open a pickle jar. I don’t even know anyone who owns a falcon.”

He shook his head, looking panicky. “What if she has a bodyguard? Famous people have bodyguards. She is older than I am!”

I walked up that hill, and the long grass slapped at my knees and released a swarm of midges with every step.

When I was about halfway up, she suddenly stopped waving her hat at me, and looked down at me, standing quite still. Because of the angle of the sunlight, her glasses were two opaque disks of sun, too bright to look at, and I was not sure what her expression was.

I realized then that she had not been beckoning me to come up. She probably had not seen me at all. She had been fanning herself with her big straw hat to keep the bugs off, scooping air toward herself.

3. The Girl and Her Hobby

My insides felt like they were turning into dry seaweed. It was a mistake.

As of this second, if I kept going, I would be what Aunt Iaga called a Masher, and what Alexei called a Stalker. To this day, I am not sure what the difference is between a Masher and a Stalker, but I think you can play them as character classes in an MMO-RPG.

The girl put her hat on her head, and now her face was in shadow, and I could not see her features at all. The shadow of her hat fell across her breasts, making the yellow fabric stand out sharply in a rounded contour rather like the shape of the famous McDonald’s golden arches.

If I did not keep going, I would not be as bold as a girl who sailed halfway around the world twice. On the other hand, I had a compound bow and a quiver of arrows strapped to my back, and girls are usually nervous around armed men.

I looked over my shoulder. Foster was not in sight. I don’t know if he bugged out on me, or what. Just when I needed the support of someone who would mock me if I dared back out, he had pulled his long-practiced Last-of-the-Mohicans vanishing trick.

So I walked up to her.

Penelope Dreadful was shorter than she was in her videos, and very pretty, and very female in her yellow dress that clung very closely to her. If you are a guy, you must know that women sometimes have this smell that you can barely smell that is the best thing in the world. If you are a girl, you must know about this smelling thing, because you support a zillion-dollar-a-year perfume industry. But she was not wearing any perfume. Or makeup. I thought that was a good sign. My mother never thought women should wear makeup.

So I walked up and…

I could not think of anything to say. I opened my mouth and then my mouth was open and I was standing and covered with sweat and bugbites and really itching and I still could not think of anything to say to her.

“Hot,” I said.

“Beg pardon?” She tilted up her chin and pushed a lock of hair behind her ear with a graceful little motion of her hand, and tilted her head, which I thought was really sexy. There is no gesture in the world more attractive than a girl tucking her hair behind her ear that way.

“Day,” I said. My mouth was really dry.

She made that noise which some artists represent in comic books by a word balloon with just a question mark in it. A nasal hum on a rising note.

“Hot day. It’s a hot day,” I croaked.

“And you walked… all this way… to tell me so?” She raised both eyebrows.

She had a faint accent I could not place, and she pronounced every word carefully, like a well-bred Englishwoman. Andyu whawked… awl theis whey? Like that.

“I must remember to thank you,” she said, “Usually the weatherman says his report over the television, and leaves it at that.” She pronounced it tel-i-VIZH-ey-ehn not TEL-e-vizh-un.

Her voice was aloof, and her eyes, now that I was close enough to see them, twinkled.

She looked at me for a moment, as if waiting for me to say something. When I didn’t, she continued, “I would introduce myself, but most people who come and gawk at me know who I am, or else they would not be gawking.”

Penelope waited again. I said nothing again, having lost the gift of speech.

She spoke up in a bright and chatty tone: “Why, yes! I do mean to explore the world again, except next time I am thinking of flying to the North Pole. I do so love flying, as it is the next best thing to swimming. No, I am not paying one dime to the French government, because all boats and planes are legally required to rescue sailors lost at sea without cost. I am sorry I was in a spot halfway between Madagascar and Australia and Antarctica when I was struck by a wave, but, you know, I did not pick the spot myself; Mother Nature, she did that. Yes, the people of Desolation Island were very nice. Next question? Oh, there are about fifty people, mostly scientists, there, and about a hundred penguins I got to know very well. Dear friends of mine. Quite lovely. I should like to go back and visit them someday. If you have brought a copy of my book, I can sign it for you. I’d be honored.”

And I still could not think of anything to say. I was afraid to smile, because I have big teeth, and I hate the look in the mirror when I smile.

“Welcome to Tillamook, Penny Dreadful,” I said. “Uh. The Land of Cheese.” That was lame. I winced.

“I am delighted to be here.” She favored me with a smile. Her teeth are really white and really straight, and her mouth was a Cupid’s bow. Usually women have to paint their lips to make them look like this: the mouth of a healthy young woman in full bloom. “I promise you my father will not blow your fair township entirely off the map with one of his absurdly dangerous experiments. And don’t call me Penny Dreadful. It sounds ridiculous.”

She turned and put both her pinky fingers in her mouth. I noticed how slender and fine her hands were. They were beautiful. She emitted a high, shrill whistle of three notes, low then high then low again, much louder than I would have thought a girl her size could make. Maybe the extra mammary gland size gave her lungs more power. (Don’t tell her I thought that, please.)

She spoke up in the air, “You can come down now! He is harmless!”

I said, “Wow. I never learned how to whistle like that.”

She dropped her eyelids to halfmast, and rolled one shoulder slightly, and her voice dropped to a husky, throaty whisper, “You just put your lips together—and blow.”

Just for the record, so that you will indeed know that I am the stupidest kid in Oregon, and in the North American Continent, and in the Western Hemisphere, here is my recollection of exactly what I thought at that moment:

Oh. My. God! She is so coming on to me! Or, no, no, wait a minute. That’s impossible! Her voice is different. Her face changed! She is possessed! By a ghost! The Museum really is haunted!

She straightened up and looked at me like I was an idiot. “You don’t watch black and white movies, do you? You get movies, here in Tillamook, do you not? The Old Rerun Channel?”

It was a line from a flick or something. She was imitating someone’s voice. In the great World Series of Being Stupid, I was batting a thousand. “Ah—I don’t watch that much TV. Who were you whistling for? Who–?”

And when I turned my head, a bird of prey was diving toward my eyes, narrow wings spread, and I jumped out of the way, hit the dirt, trying to roll with one shoulder and come up again like I did every day for an hour in practice, and got my bow sort of tangled around my neck instead and the arrows fell out of my quiver. But I got to my feet. I could not find my knife so I was holding an arrow in my hand.

Penelope Dreadful was looking at me like she did not know whether to laugh or go for whatever eyeball-melting pepper-spray she might have hidden on her person.

“You have quite good reflexes,” she said. I really could not tell if she were kidding, or if she meant it. “Like a crazed berserker ninja. You are not planning on throwing that arrow with just your fingers, are you?”

“I thought that bird was attacking me!”

She answered dryly, “So I assume, or otherwise you would not have attempted an Immelmann without your biplane. You dropped your sword.”

She used her chin to indicate the ground near me. My heavy dagger lay on the grass, having fallen out of my boot, scabbard and all. It has a twenty-inch blade, straight, comes to a point, so it can be used both for lacerating ne’er-do-wells or puncturing them. It is also balanced for throwing, so you can get them in the back when they flee. I use it to open letters and whittle willow flutes.

“That’s not a sword,” I said, “It’s my Arkansas Toothpick.”

“Your– what–? Your toothpick? My! You must have great big teeth!”

Since my teeth are a bit oversized, I failed to see the humor in it.

“Your habit is to travel armed? You are perhaps expecting an assault?”

“Some of us don’t have crazed berserker chickens on hand to throw at people’s faces,” I said, standing back up.

“Oh, do you like my bird?” Penny smiled brightly at the creature, affection and pride shining in her eyes.

A fierce little gray-winged falcon clutched her wrist. She did not have her big heavy glove on, but there was a leather bracer, stained with sweat, on her wrist, and the bird was careful to keep its claws there.

She extended her arm, sort of thrusting the mean little bird of prey back toward an in-my-face sort of position. Girls’ arms have more play in the elbow than boys’ do. They almost seem to bend backward, graceful as the sway of a willow branch. (Yes, also sexy. Me am guy.) But I did not like her pet’s cruelly hooked beak so near my soft and precious eyeball.

“That is your merlin. I read it in the news.” Now I backed up.

A look of disgust came over her features. “It is my hobby. Don’t trust the newspapers.”

“Your hobby is falconing?”

“No, my falcon is Hypotriorchis.”

“Uh. Nice name.”

“I will pass your compliment on to Mr. Linnaeus if I see him.”

“Who is that?”

“That man who named my bird.”

“You did not name it yourself?”

The bird cocked its head at her, she looked at it, and she laughed. “I just named the one, not all of them. Wild Eyes. Named after my personal heroine’s boat whose route I was following.”

“When you were talking to him to tell him I was harmless—or is it her? Is that a boy falcon or a girl falcon?”

“Her. All falcons are girl falcons. Boys are tercels.”

“I thought that was an Italian car. When you were talking to her–”

“Yes?”

“Well—it really sounded like you were talking to her.”

“You are asking whether I was talking while I was talking? Isn’t that what they call a tautology? Or is that an oxymoron? I get the two confused, I fear.”

I swear she batted her eyelashes at me. I had never seen a real girl do that. I don’t even think I had ever seen it on TV. It was a complex process that involved her dropping her gaze, drawing in a breath halfway, tilting her head to one side, lowering her chin slightly in what might have been a pout or a smile, and then looking up at me through the side of her glance, which made her eyes look doubly big, surrounded as they were by her lenses.

Was she flirting with me? Or was she just mocking me? Not for the first time, I wished girls would come with instruction manuals.

I said, “It sounded like you were talking talk, not just talking at.”

“Don’t worry,” she said, “Wild Eyes never talks back when there are people around. It is one of those Bewitched, or I Dream of Jeannie type deals.”

I squinted at her. “You’re not kidding,” I said slowly. “I mean, you say that like you want me to think you’re kidding, but—from the way you said it–”

That got her attention. She looked startled, and looked at me, I mean, looked at me like I was a person and not an autograph hound or something, for the first time.

“There are breeds that can be taught a few words, like a magpie,” Penny said stiffly, “Not as many as a parrot. That is probably what you heard…” And she looked at me with the look that you have on your face when you’re waiting to see if someone buys what you’re saying.

I stared at the bird, who looked back at me fiercely, and lowered her narrow head and hunched up her wings, as if preparing to launch at my face. Just in case, I held up my arrow in my bare hand, as if it would do any good.

I had not heard anything, but she obviously thought I had, and decided I needed to hear an utterly unconvincing fib. On the one hand, no falcon can mimic human speech like a parrot. On the other hand, if one could, it would probably show up at the Haunted Museum.

Penny ran her finger over the head of the hot-eyed little falcon, and the bird seemed to calm down. Wild Eyes went from DEFCON 1 back to DEFCON 2 or something, but she was still tense and ready to fly at me.

Penny sighed and tucked another stray strand of hair behind her ear and said, “Oh! That must be my father calling. I had better hurry in, before he melts you with a meltification ray. He doesn’t like me talking to boys. Well, it’s been, ah, unreal, sort of… talking to you… watching you roll on the ground… and so on….”

“My name is Ilya. Ilya Muromets.”

But I was talking to her receding bottom, which was a remarkably fine thing to watch receding, swaying and bouncing with an athletic motion of her hips. She turned her head, and caught me staring at her butt, and the flash of sharp annoyance in her eyes with their beautiful long lashes told me I was both a Masher and a Stalker or worse, and she threw the bird screaming upward from her wrist. The most famous and prettiest girl in town lifted her nose in disdain and stepped in the door, banging it loudly behind her.

The falcon flew up, way up, into a deep, deep blue summer sky.

And my heart sank back down past my boots into the darkness below the earth about as far down as that bird flew up.

I sank down and started picking up my stupid arrows, one by one by one, while bugs bit me.

4. You Should Have Been There

It was a year later that I got the job, and I had a different haircut then, and I was two inches taller, and I am not sure if she remembered having met me before, or our odd little talk on that hot summer day. I remember every word. Each was branded by the red-hot iron of boyish embarrassment into my brain, or the hotter iron of helpless frustration. I could not tell you how many times I rewound and reran the conversation in my head, thinking of other things I might have said.

Or how often I cursed myself for not being bold enough to make some sort of smooth move to make her like me, although what that would have been, I didn’t rightly know.

And, in case you are wondering, I found Foster at his house later that same day, mowing the lawn faithfully like a good son. In retribution, I never said a word to him about what happened when I walked up the hill, except, “You should have seen it! You should have been there! You missed it all. It was amazing, man. Amazing!”

If he pressed me for details, I simply growled, “Like I said, you should have been there!”

Not Quite Saint Anthony

1. First Attempt

Think of it as a puzzle. You are trapped in a cylinder made of metal, surrounded by inward pointing spikes. Above is an opening too high to climb to, but you can get out if only you can get that high. It has a Moebius coil built into its threshold rim. Below you is a circle of blue-glowing wood surrounding a drop into empty air.

Clinging to the bottom of the cage was not an option without mountaineering gear or a pair of Buck Rogers atom-powered rocket-shoes.

All I had to work with was one naked kid who just found out he was not born on Earth. Make that one naked yet slightly freaked-out kid.

My idea came when I went to the bathroom. You would think I would have used the hole in the middle as a chamber pot, but no. My stomach was bothering me. For some reason of morbid curiosity, I did my business on the floor where I could look at it. The stool was writhing as if with a thousand tiny maggots. I was pretty much immune to being grossed out by then, because I was convinced that neither disease nor parasite could kill me.

I leaned closer. I realized it was not maggots. I closed my eyes, cleared my mind, and when I opened them, the business was normal and motionless.

As I had suspected. There was still some Oobleck left in my system. The supply of extra-dimensional ylem I had swallowed stayed with me. I assume the blue light somehow froze or paralyzed it, so it had been quiet, frozen like a fly trapped in amber, and riled up only when the blue light snapped off during the moments when Enmeduranki had twilighted in and out.

Remember, I had felt a squirming in my guts when Emmy Drinky had popped up. It had not been fear or anger. It had been the solidified twilight still lingering somewhere in my stomach cavity stirring in reaction to my thoughts of fear or anger.

How had the Astrologers not foreseen this? I was pretty sure that events happening in Uncreation, where there are no stars, were beyond the reach of their radar. Any Oobleck that came out of Uncreation might also be invisible.

Have you ever seen someone break a board with his hand? It is not fake, but your technique must be perfect. You can snap a heavy board neatly in half without hurting your hand.

One of the conditions is that the boards are not set in line and bolted into a metal frame that you are standing on. If you try to break a board set into a solid floor underfoot, you will probably just break your hand.

But if you do not care how many times you break every bone in your hand, because your hand will heal itself and be fine again in an hour or less, and if you do not care how loud you scream because you are forty thousand feet up in the atmosphere, you can eventually break the board. Eventually.

The hardest part was at first. I banged at one spot with the aching and bloody mass at the end of my arm for hours. But once I made a hole big enough to force my broken fingers into, I could sit and wait for them to heal, and they would be grown into a position where my grip could not slip, and I could pry up the floor board. With immense pain before, during, and after. Did I mention the immense pain?

Then I had a floorboard to use as a club, which I could also use as a pry-bar, and the boards to either side were already loose. A little bit of work, and then a second board could crack in two, come free, flip edgewise, and away it would fall, spinning and glowing, away into the wild blue yonder below.

I don’t know what carpenter did the work on this floor, but he was not one of these modern contractors who do their work any which-way and send you a bill. No, this guy really took pride in his work, and fitted everything tightly, the old fashioned way. You would hope that folk working for a Dark Lord would be more lax and lazy in their approach, wouldn’t you?

I had expected to take all three days to rip up the whole floor. No. It only took twelve rosaries, which is three hours. I did not have a place to stand, of course, by the end, but I could stick my body onto the spikes of the walls (which hurt like the dickens).

When the last board was tossed, and the very last splinter of the lampwood was gone, and the last spark and glimmer of blue light was flung away, then my stomach started to writhe. It took me no effort to get myself to vomit. All I had to do was think about their plans for Penny. I caught some of the spew in my cupped hands.

So I had a dollop of muddy ylem, a substance I could control with my mind. I hung, bleeding and freezing, stuck to the bars of utterly black living metal of which the Tower and its instruments were composed.

And I waited. Soon enough, one of the bars started untelescoping, pushing me out toward the middle of the now-bottomless cage. Then another bar opened. The cage was getting ready to scrape me off.

While the two spikes were extended, I swung like a hyperactive monkey from one to the next. More bars unfolded, faster now, trying to spear me.

I was dizzy after a moment or two of this exercise, but by the end of it, two and three fully-extended bars had been smeared with a bit of the glop right at the spot where they emerged from the walls.

Then I focused my mind, and thought about the molecular composition of engraver’s acid. Three parts hydrochloric acid and about seven parts nitric acid. I pictured the hydrogen and chlorine and nitrogen atoms like little tinker toys. (The reason why I knew this bit of chemistry—not my strongest subject—is that, in a novel I once read, the spy carried around engraver’s acid in his fountain pen. Amazing what you can pick up reading junk novels.)

And it worked. The rules of chemistry must be the same in this dimension as back home. The bars started smoking and sizzling. They also trembled and made a moaning noise. Did living metal feel pain?

I also knew how to do a palm-strike so as to put all the force of my body behind the blow. My Dad’s physical training technique was an area where I was better than chemistry. I had been exercising every day since they started feeding me again, and so with the most glorious noise my ears have ever heard, a sound louder than the Fourth of July and brighter than church bells, three bars broke.

And they died when they broke, having lost the power to fold or unfold, open or shut. Each of the three was long enough to allow me to prop one end and then another atop retracted spikes at nearly opposite ends of the cage diameter. It was precarious, but I could balance on one bar and place the next two bars, one atop the other, horizontally resting on a higher row of spikes. I could kneel on one, hold onto the second, reach down, and pull the lowest of the three bars up. And then repeat the process, climbing a ladder and pulling it up after me.

It takes a lot longer to travel up the side of a barrel-shaped cage made of inward pointing spikes than you might suppose. It only looked like twenty or thirty feet to climb, like getting on the roof of a three story house. But if you have to wedge in each rung of the ladder as you climb, and reach down, unwedge the lowest, haul it up, and repeat, it seems to take hours.

And, to make things slower, the spikes in the wall were malicious. They kept trying to poke me, or shake me loose, or wiggle the bars I was using as ladder rungs free from where I was wedging them. But I had a few tricks of my own, since I could just move my stomach in the way of an impaling spike, and then rest my weight on the extended bar while I spat Oobleck out of my mouth, or just let the Oobleck issue out of my pierced stomach, and use the Power of Negative Thinking to turn it into acid, and then, clank, bang, I could snap free another bar.

And to make it even slower still, the spikes got faster and nastier the closer I got to the top. Soon, I realized I had to spit on and break every single spike three or four across, in the line between my current position and the opening at the top of the cage. I broke at least sixty of the bars that barred my way, or about one sixth of the total number of telescoping spikes lining the cage walls.

Another hard part came at the top. The golden rim of the opening was in the middle of the metal ceiling, so I had to get from my position clinging to the wall out into the middle of the cage and grab the edge.

Eventually, what I did was end up taking three bars and propping them up against each other to form a rough triangle, and then I vomited up Oobleck onto the bars where they touched, and thought about epoxy. The bubbling black nonbeing obligingly changed into a thick white paste, and it took an hour or three to harden, and I kept spitting more layers of glue and more. Ilya Muromets, human digger wasp. That’s me.

But my triangle of bars was big enough and glued together sturdily enough to hold my weight when I propped it against the line of spikes forming the uppermost ring in the cage. The triangle was parallel to the roof, and the vertices of the bars were wedged into three equidistant spots around the circumference of the cylindrical cage.

The glue held when I put my weight on one bar, or, rather, it gave way slowly enough that I was able to step swiftly out to the midpoint of that bar, raise both hands and jump and grab.

And then I was there. The twisted gold band forming the rim was slippery. Kicking my legs frantically in midair, I grunted and did the toughest pull-up I have ever done in my life.

Higher I inched, and higher…

I heard no alarm bells going off, no other noise. With my new digger wasp powers of spitting acid and superglue, I broke through the last few slender bars blocking the upper exit. I had my head and then my shoulders and both arms above the level of the rim, and…

…And I saw the room above my cell, domed with black brick, masks hanging on the walls, lit with tiny round windows no bigger than a mailbox for newspapers…

…And some Astrologer sometime in the preceding hours or days must have seen what I was going to do and when, because the gold rim of the opening flared up with many rainbows of twilight, and an orb of darkness swelled up, washed over me, and I was inside what looked like a ball of insubstantial glass for half a second.

During that half second, I fell or was thrown out from one Moebius ring, across maybe an eighth-inch-wide hoop of Uncreation, and into another Moebius ring. The eight-inch-wide gap into the Uncreation whistled like a steam whistle: the sound of atmosphere departing the world.

You get the picture? They just have two gateways placed at two different spots in and out of the world opening into the same spot in Uncreation, so you go from one to the next without having to spend any time in the abyss, where no one can live. You don’t even need an invasion machine or anything—it is over too quickly. The top half of the spherical volume being teleported is falling into the universe at another spot at the same second the bottom half is falling out of the universe at this spot. That is how fast it is.

And the ring both gets hot when you are touching it, and it is like touching an electrified wire cattle-fence (which I have done by mistake) or grabbing a taser from the business end (which I have done during training). Gold is a good conductor. Forget about keeping hold of it unless you have some heavy-duty insulated asbestos gloves. My hands were flung off the gold rim as all my muscles spasmed.

Boom. The dark orb vanished, the peacock aura was gone, and I found myself falling back into my cage again.

No, it was a different cage, just the same in shape. The view through the big hole in the floor was identical, or nearly, so I had not even changed which level of the Tower I was in.

And all the spikes, every single one, all unbroken and eager for vengeance, now extended out at once and half a dozen harpooned me through every limb and major organ, leaving only my head free.

My mouth and one lung were intact, so I could swear like a sailor and scream like a girl. Okay, I know girls go through childbirth and I hear they can endure more pain than men, so let’s say I cried like a guy cries when we say he is crying like a girl.

Yeah. It really hurt. I will not describe some of the more intimate places those spearpoints of cold metal penetrated, but I will mention that the sight and smell of whatever you last ate spurting out of holes punched in your body like water from a water balloon is something you really, really, wish you could forget later.

And the blue light was back again, bright, blazing, dazzling. I did not know if I had any of the swallowed Oobleck left to upchuck, because that light put it to sleep, and, with all the holes in me now, probably cleaned out my entire digestive tract of any last drops of it.

And you know? I am going to find out who or what created the Undying Host, and slap him upside the head.

There is no reason whatever for us to have a pain center in our brains, since wounds do not kill us. Pain is totally unnecessary, like having a fire alarm in a fishtank on the moon.

It was a lot of totally unnecessary. A whole lot.

Overhead the extended spikes also formed a woven cage, a mat of bars, like one grating above the next, for thirty feet or so. The bars were so thickly placed that the interstices shrank to little wedges or holes you could not fit a hand through.

And a lot of blood, a whole lot of blood, came out of my pierced body. Gallons. I got faint and weak, and then fainter and weaker. I looked with horror at all the lifeblood dripping down from the spears passing through me, plop-plopping down through an open hole into midair, no doubt to turn into red icicles or hailstones as it fell, killing small animals and children after re-entry.

And they, or whatever automatic system they had set up, just left me there.

I was pinned in place like a butterfly. There was no way to wiggle off of one of the spears without shoving my way onto another one. I did not have the leverage to tear myself loose. There was nothing I could do.

I really hoped, on whatever hemisphere of whatever planet in whatever aeon my mom was in, it was nighttime, and she was asleep. I didn’t want her to see me. I cried a lot. Don’t tell anyone.

I saw the sunrise. The day passed. It was a day of pain. The light departed when the sun set.

At some point after midnight it was officially the third day Enmeduranki had promised: the day they were going to put the torture hooks to Penny. Of course, that is assuming Enmeduranki counts his days from midnight to midnight like a Christian. If he counted from dusk to dusk, like a Jew, then the pain might have already started.

“Being unkillable sucks,” I said aloud to no one in particular. “I want a new superpower.”

2. She-Monkey

I mentioned the noise of the wind was constant, moaning against the tower near at hand or far away, shrieking high or moaning low, overhead or underfoot; so I did not hear the person moving in the chamber above the cell until she spoke.

“Fear not! I am here to save you!”

“Is that you, Lord Jesus? Why do you sound like a little girl?”

(Okay, so maybe I was not entirely in my right mind at the time. I was impaled by half a dozen spears. And I had been up all night three nights running.)

“I am not your lord.”

She actually said Belitu-sirutim y-anni which literally meant Lady nobly-born, no longer I. So I was not being saved by a member of the aristocracy.

The voice sounded young, and I mean ten or twelve years old, not seventeen or twenty. Too young to wear makeup. Too young to be breaking people out of jail.

“Saint Anthony! I was expecting you,” I called. “Saint Anthony, Liberator of Prisoners, tear down my prison walls. Break the chains that hold me captive. Make me free with the freedom Christ has won for me.”

“Stop crying!” said the sweet, little-girly voice, “It is going to take me many minutes to scald the living metal with the wise metal. Do not despair!”

At that, a shining chain, no thicker than what you might use to leash a small dog, but about four feet long, slipped through the nearly-solid thicket of bars overhead, and then swayed like a snake, coiling around the bars. The metal was coppery and bright, not the same black substance as the tower, abarbaltu, the living metal; but it moved as if it also were alive. As I watched, the coppery chain stretched from four feet to eight in length, and it kept growing as it wove itself in and out of the bars.

The copper chain tightened and began to glow red like a stove burner. I felt heat on my face. This was refreshing; the first heat I had felt in this stratospherically cold prison in an endless time. The black bars of living metal began to glow red.

I sat there shaking my head in contempt, watching this whole show.

How stupid did Enmeduranki think I was? Everything my jailors had done from day one had been a cat playing with a mouse, letting it go and snatching it again, leaving the door open, those sort of tricks.

Now, on the day when Penny was supposed to be taken to the torture chamber, and I was going to be brought before her and cut to pieces, now they wanted to convince me I was getting broken out of jail?

Broken out by who, John Dillinger? Rudolf Vrba? The Underground Railroad? Harry Houdini? I would have believed that last one, if I had seen the Batcopter in a parking orbit up here at forty thousand feet, with Houdini hanging by his heels in a straitjacket to swing in and pick me up with his teeth.

Not to mention that she was not speaking English. That ruled out Dillinger. By process of elimination, that left Vrba.

“Yeah,” I groaned. “You just keep on with your scalding, there, Rudolf. Don’t mind me.”

I realized she could not hear me too well, perhaps because I was speaking in a gargle-ish voice with a spike through one lung and another through my throat, not to mention sobbing a bit. Just a bit. Okay, a lot. Because all she said back was, “Fear not, Sua’u-su’u-ussushibu-re’u!”

Try saying that one three times fast. Just another dumb name impossible to pronounce. The word-ending Re’u meant shepherd, and also meant a teacher, pastor, mentor or master. Sua’u meant to fly, to be airborne, and it referred to anything, bird or cloud or moon or angel, that lived in the sky. Su’u meant dove or bird or any winged thing. Ussu meant eagle or vulture. Shibu meant bearded elder, so Su’u-ussushibu was the bearded vulture, a bird also called the ossifrage or petrel. It was the carrion bird that broke the bones of its prey by dropping them on hard rocks, or, in one famous case of murder-by-turtle, on a Greek poet’s head.

So a little girl who sounded about twelve years old was looking for someone known as High Master Ossifrage. Either that or his name was Old Vulture.

I don’t think it was anyone’s nickname for me. My nickname was Ilya the Boy Pincushion.

When one of the drops of red-hot metal finally sagged enough to drip down and hit me, I screamed. I was expecting it, of course, since it took a fair amount of time to burn through the thickness of the bars overhead, and I gritted my teeth. But, sorry, being able to survive any wound does not mean wounds do not hurt. I think I have mentioned that about a zillion times by now. This is because I have been hurt about a zillion times, and each time it is still a surprise and it still hurts like hell.

This time, it literally hurt like Hell, because I was on fire. A molten droplet hit me on my upper thigh and burned through flesh and muscle down to the bone. The smell made me hungry for a hamburger.

The girl shrieked. “Master Suau Suu Ussushibu!” (Sorry, but I am not spelling that name over and over again with all those hyphens and apostrophes. You just have to imagine she is pronouncing an impossible name that sounds like a hissing hiccough. Or entering a hog-calling contest.) “High Master Ussushibu! I thought you would be standing on the floor, not in the air! I scald the living metal! Do you not see?”

“Don’t mind me,” I said, or gargled. “Can we stop by a McDonald’s after this? I am in the mood for a Big Mac.”

“Don’t try to talk! You sound very terrible! Did they torture you?”

“How am I supposed to answer your dumb question if I don’t talk? Of course they tortured me. This is the goddam Dark Tower. It is not the Tower of Fluffy Pillows.”

At that point, the bars blocking the way above shivered, let out a scream like the scream metal makes when it is torn, and retracted all at once. The hole was open. Freedom beckoned.

The only problem was that not all the bars retracted. The ones holding me kept me spitted in place like a shish-kabob, as if some incompetent or sadistic cook had skewered each bit of meat and potato multiple times from multiple angles. I could move my head, which did not have any pieces of metal going through it, so I craned my neck and looked up.

My rescuer was a grinning monkey-ninja wearing a brown outfit, whose face had turned to porcelain.

She screamed in horror. I guess I looked pretty messed up.

“Who are you?” she said. “What are you?”

“Ilya Muromets. I am one of the host of those who yearn for death in vain. I think you can guess why.”

“You’re naked!”

“Um. Sorry. You have a monkey face.”

“It’s a mask.”

“I know it’s a mask. I assume you could not breathe the air at this altitude. I am wondering why it looks like a monkey.”

“My punishment name is Pagutu.” The word meant she-monkey.

“That is an ugly name, if you don’t mind my saying so,” I commented.

“Where is Master Ussushibu?”

“Do I look like his appointment secretary? Ask at the front desk.”

“I was told he was here! In this cell!”

“Was he? How naughty of him to have wandered away!”

“How can you– talk? How can you be alive? Your leg is burning!”

“By now it is just sizzling. I think my blood quenched the metal ingot. It has not eaten through the bone, anyway.”

“Doesn’t it hurt?”

“People keep asking me that.”

The monkey-shaped mask stared at me for a moment. There was no expression of awe or terror, because it was a mask. If anything, the monkey-face looked like it was enjoying a joke. What the girl behind it thought, I don’t know.

The monkey face did not match the stark black design of the suit. Nor did it match any other bit of handiwork of anything I had seen here. The Dark Tower looked distinctly Mesopotamian, and anything in it that could be made gold, massive, square or blockish, was made so. Everything was as angular as their chicken-scratch writing. Her porcelain face looked like one of those little decorative things you see in a boutique: flamboyant, lighthearted, gaily painted, adorned with very fine curlicues and flourishes. The eyebrows were droll circumflexes; the cheeks were clownish circles of rouge. After staring at nothing but dark shapes and cruel spikes, it was a relief, it was a joy, to stare at something so ridiculous.

She stood up. I revised my age estimate upward. Maybe she was fourteen. Her hair was black as India ink, and clipped in a pony-tail over one ear that fell to her shoulder. She was thin as a rail and shaped like a boy. An underfed boy.

Her outfit looked like she had wrapped her arms and legs in black adhesive tape, put on a tunic and an oversized diaper atop that, and over both was wearing a smock or maybe a poncho. Some kind of garment made of two flaps hanging down in front and back, belted at the middle, and pinned at the shoulders and neck with three round ornaments of wood.

In her hand was a blade shaped like the letter L. There was a long chain made of coppery metal growing out of the bottom of the hilt, ending in a triangular bob or arrowhead. The chain at the moment was retracted, only about two feet long. The weapon looked like the sickle-and-chain Alexei practiced with, a kusari-gama. So she really did look like a ninja.

Some girls from my hometown, when they were fourteen, were mature enough to pose for Playboy. I assume it is because in Tillamook we put a lot of growth hormones in our cows which get in our dairy products and get in our children. This girl at fourteen was more waiflike in build, and probably did not have those things in her diet. She did not look like she had much of anything in her diet.

“We are definitely stopping at that McDonald’s,” I said. “Or maybe a Popeye’s. You need some red beans and rice in you.”

“What did they do to your eye?”

“No, I did that to myself. Poked it out with my thumb. Don’t try this at home, kiddies. Everything else is their handiwork, though.”

“And what is that… moving… thing… in the eyesocket?”

“My new eyeball. It is almost grown back. My nerves regenerate, and are always ready for more pain. Lucky me!”

“Where are you from, creature?”

“The Land of Cheese.”

“Eh?”

“Can we get on with this charade?” I said, beginning to feel a little cross. “You are supposed to be pretending to rescue me, and I am supposed to pretend to believe you. Can you make these larger bars retract with your trick? I mean, without dropping me into the bottomless drop under my toes?”

“Do you know where is Master Ussushibu?”

“I don’t even know how to pronounce his name.”

“Well…” her voice sounded uncertain and soft. It had a strange note to it. “…Sorry to leave you like this, creature, but I have to look for him. This may be our only chance before he is moved beyond the twilight to another aeon. Just don’t tell anyone you saw me, please…”

That was like having a cherry-flavored snowcone dumped into your bathing suit by your older brother when you are napping at the beach. I jerked in surprise, and the bars impaling me rattled, and my dozens of wounds started seeping blood again.

“Hold it! You can’t be for real! If you are for real, you can’t leave me!”

She stepped back another step. The monkey was still grinning at its private joke, but the set of her shoulders and spine bespoke fear and uncertainty. “Sorry—but this was not in the plan. I am not supposed to swerve from the plan. The elders told me this many times! I’d like to help you… because you look really… yucky… but I am looking for the Master….”

I fought back a sense of desperation more painful than the various bars and burns going through me. I tried to speak calmly, “Pagutu! Pa-goo-too! Listen. Listen to me. You don’t want to walk away and leave me here, do you?”

“The Big Man told me not to swerve from the plan–”

“But that is because he did not know about me, wasn’t it? I can help you look for your Master Ossifrage.”

I was using that tone of voice schoolteachers use for idiot children, or child molesters probably use to get Junior into the back of his windowless van for some candy. Soft and smooth and soothing.

Monkey-mask girl was not buying the soothe-y voice. She was inching backward.

“Pagutu, if I am free, the guards will come look for me and not be looking for you. Doesn’t that make sense? I could help you. Act as a distraction.” My voice began to get louder, to take on an ugly note of panic. “Do you understand? You are my only hope. Today is when they get her. I cannot even give up my life for her because I can’t die!”

The monkey face was smiling, but the girl was getting freaked out. Sorry, but I don’t think I was saying the right things. She turned and scampered off. I heard her footsteps, light as a doe’s, receding on the stone floor overhead.

I screamed at the top of my one non-pierced and working lung, “For the love of God! Don’t leave me! Get me out of here!”

The footsteps stopped. Then, softly, stealthily, she crept back closer. The monkey face peered over the edge, grinning.

“Which god?” she whispered.

“What?”

She-Monkey said, “By which god’s name did you utter your word?”

“Um. I mean God. God with a capital G.”

“The Astrologers say the stars are gods, and they are numbered beyond number.”

“Your Astrologers are lying-ass bitch whores, and their Head Honcho is as crazy as a bedbug hopped up on psychedelic drugs. Don’t believe a damned word they say. There is only one God, one and one alone.” I guess the Trinity was also three-in-one, but that involved some theological subtleties I wasn’t willing to go into right now.

“You do not know his name, because you are an abomination.” She spoke that in a tone of voice like a dare.

“Uh? God’s name? I know his name. It is not a secret. Everyone on my planet knows it. Maybe you never had a Moses in this world? His name is I Am That I Am. The Jews call him Yahweh, but they think that name is too sacred to pronou–”

At that moment the cell I was in rolled and pitched like a ship in a swell. It was not much, but it was enough to feel it. There was a huge noise, deeper than any noise on Earth, rumbling from outside, like a vibration in a bar of struck iron. The metal of the tower was complaining.

The monkey mask was still grinning, but her eyes were so wide and white that I could see this even through the thick glasses of her mask lenses.

I started laughing. Maybe I had gone nuts. I don’t remember why I was laughing, or what seemed so funny.

She whispered, “Alas! Now I am bound by the naming magic. I must not leave you, and must get you out of here, and yet you are one of the Deathless, the Ever-Suffering, and so you will kill me.”

“Listen, She-Monkey. Get me out of this darned cell, and I will help you. I’ll be nice.”

She spoke like someone in a daze. “My mother told me of the One God who is the enemy of the One. She told me there were others who bowed and served in secret. So long ago she said it, back when my name was my own.”

I did not interrupt her, but I did not understand her either.

She continued, “I was told to do what was asked of me in the name of the Great Name. I was not told I would be brutally murdered. I must obey. Fate is fated.”

“Fate is not fated!” I said, annoyed. “I am not going to murder you! I am not going to hurt you or let you come to harm. I swear it by the Holy Rood and my Hope of Heaven, in the name of Saint Bernard and Saint George and Saint Catherine, by John the Baptist and John the Evangelist, and in the name of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Queen of the Angels, so help me God.”

“I don’t know those people.”

“They are nice people. Real nice. People who won’t like it if I break my word. My dad won’t like it either. He doesn’t even like when I break my word to tell him something I promised not to.”

She did not look convinced. In fact, she did not look like anything aside from a grinning monkey. But in any case, her chain elongated and reached out from her ninja-looking weapon like a snake made of elastic, and wrapped its tip many times around one of the spears impaling me.

Her copper chain writhed and hummed, and the black bar started to heat up to red hot, and I started to scream. I had been doing a lot of that lately.

3. Second Attempt

It took a long time. She thought I was dangerous, and so she was dawdling, and nothing I said could speed things up.

And there were a lot of telescoping spears. Some were stuck through me. Some were just in the way above me, forming a lattice like a wicker basket. And they had to be heated up to red hot, like an oven, before they would squeal and let go.

An hour? It might have been longer. Pain slows time like Einstein’s Relativity, and I was also worried about Penny being introduced to the iron hooks, and that slowed time even more.

The little girl in the monkey mask worked on the ones impaling me from the left, so that once enough were missing from that side, I was able to use my arms and legs to push my body up along the blood-coated spears one way, and have them slowly pull out of my flesh from the other way, but the spears still stuck through me held me up so I did not fall through the hole out into the upper atmosphere.

(Note to imps in Hell: if you want to torment the damned, getting them to pull themselves hand over hand up along a spear sticking through their sensitive internal organs and muscles is an effective torture even Dante didn’t imagine. Make sure they hear the slurping noises as their flesh inches along the metal. That sound will linger in their nightmares, trust me.)

By this time, my lungs had just gotten weary of screaming, and my other lung had a hole through it you could stick a forefinger into, so I was only making ugly, gasping noises, not bawling at full volume.

It was only when I was free, and was trying to use my pierced and shattered limbs to climb up and squeeze through the remaining spears to the hole, that I thought to ask. “Listen, She-Monkey, can I ask you a question?”

“It is best not to call me that. That was my punishment name, and the stars might hear you say it. My mother said my reborn birth name is Abanshaddi.” It meant Mountain Rock.

“Can I call you Abby?”

“It is best to use the name as it is, because the stars cannot hear it.”

“Then I’ll call you Rocky.”

“Er… Abby is fine.”

“So, Abby, riddle me this: Why are the Astrologers and their soldiers not here? How come they did not foretell a break out?”

“All are born once and once alone. But not I.”

“What does that mean?”

“Don’t they have people like me on your world?”

“People like what? I am assuming you are a split character class thief and rogue. Remember to check for traps.”

From the set of her shoulders it looked like Pagutu, or Abanshaddi, was miffed. I was sorry I made that joke. Not everyone thinks of rogues as lovable. I suppose poor people who don’t get enough to eat think even less of lovable rogues than rich people who never get their stuff robbed. (The reason why Robin Hood is a myth is not because he robs people on the highway, but because, for once, it was the rich people on the highway who got robbed, and poor folk love such unlikely tales.)

“Look,” I said, sighing. (My sigh was a disgusting gargle, since internal fluids from several organs were streaming down gaping and sucking wounds in my chest and abdomen.) “I meant no disrespect. But when I climb up, the moment I hit the rim, they are going to turn on the Moebius gate set into the threshold and dump me lickety-split into a fresh jail cell. That is what happened last time. Can you damage the gold ring? Put it out of action? Or melt the gold with your sickle and chain there.”

“Gold, the cunning metal cannot scald. Only living metal.” Cunning metal was Abartemitum: the coppery substance her haunted kusari-gama was made out of. (Temitum also meant sharp, acute, so the name was a deliberate play on words in her language.)

I said, “If there is a wire leading to the Coil, cut it with your cunning weapon, please.”

“That is not necessary.”

“Yeah, I am telling you it is necessary, or I cannot get out! Just cut the wire!”

The monkey mask shook its head. “To cut the wire may be foreseen by the maintenance Astrologers. You can get out. You must have faith in me and in those who sent me.”

“What happens if I don’t?”

“Then you stay trapped, even though the cage is open.”

Groaning and grunting, I climbed up the remaining spears like a ladder and so out of the cell. The process was more painful and wetter than it sounds, and involved pull-ups using a set of arms with grossly torn muscles and at least one broken bone. The very last part involved clawing at the stone floor beyond the gold threshold, without the strength in my body to pull me up, and me unable to swing a leg up hard enough to get it over the edge, and the girl so grossed out by the condition of my body that she huddled out of arm’s reach, shaking her head when I groaned pathetically for help.

Finally, with a ghastly effort, I rolled and slithered over the edge, then smashed face-first into the stones with a disgusting splorch of blood. Pure comedy gold.

I raised my head and looked around. There were some iron tools and wooden masks on the walls. Light came from small, fist-sized holes in the stone through which thin air softly whistled. To one side was a workbench, and to the other, two openings in the floor, like twins to the one I had climbed out from. Ahead of me was an archway leading to a crawlspace or corridor for short people. There was no other exit. I guess tall people were supposed to use the Moebius coils rimming the floor openings.

Daylight came through these gold-rimmed openings. I raised myself on one arm, and saw, sure enough, that one of the other two hanging cages had no wooden floor and a good number of the wall spikes were broken. My old cell.

Abby had backed away from me, and was now sitting in a corner between a workbench and the archway leading out, with her arms wrapped about her knees, and her sickle-and-chain retracted and clenched tightly in her gloves. She was shivering. Well, it was below freezing in here. My spreading pool of blood was already beginning to turn into thick red slush.

I squinted. The workbench she was next to had chains and manacles running over a windlass. It was a torture rack.

This room was a torture chamber, where you would work over any prisoners you fished up out of their hanging birdcages underneath, and then toss them back down when you were done. There was even a crane affixed to the ceiling with a boom-arm for lowering and raising the prisoners. I don’t know what the masks on the wall were for. Decoration?

I lay in a heap on the stone floor. I was free. I was out. Today was my Big Bang, and a whole new universe was brought into being, a universe of freedom. I was also too weak to stand, but I was not too weak to laugh and laugh with joy.

Born of the Forever Nature

1. Abomination

She was silent until I was done laughing. Best not to interrupt the madman, I suppose.

“Okay, She-Monkey, talk. Why didn’t the Moebius gate turn on when I climbed over the rim? Who sent you and what is going on here?”

Abby said in a voice of awe, “How can you move your arms and legs? How can you breathe? Why is there still blood—it should have run out hours ago.”

“I don’t know. Mind over matter. A violation of the law of conservation of blood. Why not ask the Scarecrow how the Tin Woodman can be alive?”

“I don’t understand what you are saying.”

“I am saying I do not know. The extra blood is being created out of nowhere. My lungs are moving even though the muscles connected to my diaphragm cannot possibly be working. My gouged-out eyeball ungouged itself, and now it is working again, but my vision is cramped and blurry in that eye. I cannot die and I heal a lot faster than I should, but not fast enough. Your head dipshit in the daffy hat, Enmeduranki, he said today they would torture my…”

She was startled. “You met the Lord High Astrologer? Himself?”

“What? You want his autograph? He said it was today! Today! It may have already happened. Torture hooks. Trained rapist-beasts. What kind of sick world has things like that? I’ve got to stop it, got to find out where….”

I rose to my feet, felt so much pain that I went blind for a second, and hitting my head on the floor woke me back up. I was lucky I had not fallen over the other way, because I would have toppled into the cell and out the bottom hole of the airy oubliette again.

Now I was lying with my cheek pressed against the stone, and I felt the tickle of blood oozing out from me, warm on my cheek.

While I was prone, through my one good eye, I saw her tiptoeing toward the archway leading out of the chamber. “Where are you going?”

She hesitated. “Well, since you are free now, and you are a murdering abomination from a hell-world ruled by demons, I thought it would be… nice… if I left you to commit your… actions… against any mortals who might fall into your clutches…. Uh, hands…”

“I am a nice abomination. Kindhearted. Housebroken. Kid friendly. Trust me. In my civilian identity, back before this place, I am a Boy Scout. Troop Two. Second to none…”

“… and my mission was to rescue Master Ussushibu. I don’t wish to trouble you…”

“I said I would help you!” I groaned. And maybe there was a little uncouth language in there too, sort of like Gash darn it! I flocking said I would flapping help you! except using words other than gash, darn, flock or flap.

“But in return you got to help me!” I shrieked at her. “You got to!” My voice sounded kind of gross and sticky. Even I didn’t like hearing me.

She started inching back. Not that I blame her. “Um. I’d like to help, except… I have this task I am supposed to do. It’s a mission… my very first mission! It’s really important that I do it right, and not get killed by an abomination. The Big Man made me promise.” I did not know if Big Man was a name or a title. The words my ear heard were Rom Baro. “And… um… real people’s lives are at stake, not freaks like you, so…”

“Hold it!” My fingers clawed feebly at the stones while blood and some black grimy substance drooled from my teeth. I am pretty sure I was not a pretty picture. “For the love of God, wait! The Astrologers cannot foretell your actions, right?” She was somehow invisible to them, because otherwise their soldiers would have been swarming into the chamber five minutes ago.

“I have been laved in the laver.”

“So while you are near me, you act like a cloaking device? What is the range?”

I was wondering if the alarm bells in some horoscope radar station downstairs would suddenly ring if she slipped out of my sight. I resisted the impulse to crawl after her, dragging my unwound guts, since the sight of that might make her panic. Panic more.

The little grinning monkey girl inched another inch backward. “It doesn’t work like that.”

“How does it work?”

She spoke more calmly. “The Astrologers can only cast horoscopes for those born once under the stars. I am born twice. It is your world-nature the stars see, for stars govern the world. I have done an act by my forever-nature, which is from the foreverness.”

“Clear as mud. Now explain the explanation.”

She spoke as if she were reciting a lesson at school. “Everything follows its nature. But the forever-born have two natures: higher and lower. If I act by the higher nature, that is timeless. It is above the circles where the stars count time. But if I act as my old nature prompts, that is star-governed. Only pure acts are purely hidden. That is why I saved you. You have only a lower nature. If you stay here, quite still, and do no acts of your lower abomination nature, it will be… perhaps… an hour or more… before they catch you again.”

And she ducked around the corner and was gone.

2. Enchantment

So I shouted after her. I did not bother keeping the desperation out of my voice, because I was desperate.

“They are going to torture her! You have to find her! I don’t care about me! Just save her!”

There was more than that, but that was the gist of it, and my eyes started to sting because I was weeping. I had not realized I had closed my eyes—or maybe I passed out for a second, it was one of those days—until I opened my eyes again and saw her black shoes that looked like they were made of duct tape. Her feet were big compared to the size of her legs.

Abanshaddi said softly, “There is someone… you… want saved? How can this be?”

“I want you to find her, and if she is in a cage, get her out. First, they are going to do something medical to her, to make her nerves less able to resist pain, and then…”

“My mother was killed by the tormentors,” she said in a dry, matter-of-fact way. “A type of death called Two Boats. My lord Sharapumakash-simtu performed the deed and was rewarded with an Ovation.”

I actually flinched at the name. Sharapu meant to dye red. It also meant to torment with fire, to chastise, to scorch, to blister. Makash meant Slaughter-Bench. The name was Slaughterbench Dyed Red. And that was the nicest of the several possible interpretations.

His title simtu meant the person who puts a brand or ownership-mark on you. She was talking about her master, her owner.

“So he ordered you to come here…” The fear that I was being toyed with, that everything was just another psychological trick, flooded my brain.

She said quickly, “Not he! I was stolen from him long ago by the Wandering Folk, and even his knowledge of the outlandish stars did not suffice to foretell the deed.” There was a note of joy in her voice when she added, “I sometimes read of the women and children Master Slaughterbench would have had me kill by stealth by this date, in my darkened horoscope. His foretelling, now, will never come to pass.”

“He is an Astrologer? You don’t have to call him ‘Master’ any longer.”

She nodded. “My mother told me that the water of the mupasshu-h’ washes all such marks away, and prevents new marks from being branded.” The word mupasshu meant washerman or cleaner. Mupasshu-h’ was a title. The Washerman. “And the Big Man says I am free like him, like his people, like all the caravan. But at times I forget to forget my old ways of speaking. Lord Astute Starmage is an Astrologer of the Chamber of Twoscore Never-Extinguished Candles. He is of the High Ones.”

“Small world! I met him.”

She nodded. “Of course.”

“Why ‘of course’?”

“You are an abomination. Such is his purview. He deals with outlandish horoscopes. Lord Slaughterbench is his Death Name. It is told only to those over whom he is given the power of life and death. No one tells one of your kind his Death Name. You cannot die.”

“We don’t have Death Names where I am from. Your world is sick, and I would like to get her and me out of it as soon as possible, and you too, if you want to come!”

She shrank back. “To the hell world of the Abominations? I do not want to go there, thank you. That is not a good fate.”

“I live in a world different and finer than the one I was born in. I don’t even remember that one.”

Abby said, “This one you seek?”

“Her name is Penelope.”

“Cunning Face. Is she from your world?” I noticed that when Abanshaddi said Penelope’s name, I could hear the original meaning in Greek in my head.

I had had a lot of time to puzzle over the answer to that particular question while I was in the cell. “No.”

“Can you describe her?”

“Five foot three’n eyes of green, has anybody seen my gal? She is very brave and very blonde and built like a… well, never mind that. She has a talking falcon and she sails around the world and she is famous and glamorous and she knows how to shut Moebius gates with a broomstick. Boy, that sounds weird when I say it that way.”

“Your beloved!” There was a squeal of girlish joy in her voice.

“She is not really, uh– Heck with it. Yup. My beloved. She does not yet know it. Or know that I am alive. Or know my name. But she gets most of the letters right when she asks me to do some menial chore around the grounds.”

“You are her boy-servant?” Her voice was bubbling with curiosity.

“Hey! Man-servant! My official title is Employee of the Month for June.”

“Then she is an enchantress! You are bewitched.”

“Um- noooo, she is not an enchantress, it is merely that–” I thought about how pretty her blond hair was, and how shapely her figure, how red her lips and how green her eyes, and I compared it in my mind with how much I actually knew about her, and how often we had actually spoken. What did I actually know about her? Where she was born? Her favorite song?

And so I had a rare moment of honesty and said, “Um. Yeah. You got that one right. Enchanted, bewitched. That is me.”

“Master Ussushibu is elevated, and surely he knows how to snap the threads of her spell-weaving.” Abby had come over to the bloody slab of ground chuck I was using for a body at the moment, and squatted down. “If we find him, he will free you.”

“No, no. I think Penny has just the normal magic girls her age, and, uh, looks happen to have, not magic like your filthy Astrologers. The kind of magic guys less shallow than me are immune to. That kind of magic.”

Her big eyes behind her monkey lenses blinked at me. “I still think it is very sweet.”

“You are a born romantic. But enchanting or not, pretty or not, I still want to save her. Heck, I’d want to save my worst enemy’s ugliest dog from vermin like the crazy magicians that run your world.”

The monkey mask nodded in agreement. “I would even save a deathless abomination from the horror-land of Cainem from them.”

“Thanks. Hey—what was that? Never mind. Look, I help you and you help me. Deal?”

“You wish me to bargain with you? To make a covenant?”

“Yep. Shake hands. Well, since my hand is kind of… uh… we can wave at each other, and that is our solemn oath.”

Abanshaddi said in a voice of wonder, “I have never made a covenant before.”

“We’ll be a team,” I said. “Blood-brothers. Blood brother and sister. We rescue your Master Ossifrage, and my Penny. It’s agreed!”

She shyly put her hand toward mine, but I did not want to gross her out, so I did not shake it.

3. Immensities

“Very well,” she said, hopping eagerly to her feet. “Where is she?”

“What? Why are you asking me, little sister? I don’t know anything about this stupid tower.”

She sighed, and squatted down again, waiting for me to talk. She had a strange way of squatting: her footsoles were flat on the ground, and her knobby knees nearly bumping her chin.

“So,” I groaned, “What are the options? Where might she be?”

The little monkey face tilted as if the face behind it were deep in thought. “If she is to be tormented, they might send her to the Tormentor’s Furlong.”

The word she actually used for ‘furlong’ was qaqqaru, which simply meant ‘immensity’. The magic spell or law-of-nature-gone-weird or whatever it was that allowed me to understand her like a native did not give me a numerical equivalent. But I did get a sense, or a hunch, that she meant the kind of distance a bowshot could cover, not a day’s march. And from the context, I assume she meant vertical distance: an immense climb, not an immense hike.

So I said, “The hanging gardens. They are placed about a furlong apart from each other aren’t they? Each vertical section of the tower is what you are calling a furlong?”

She giggled.

“What did I say? What’s funny?”

“I have never heard them called hanging gardens before. It’s a perfectly good name for them! The plants do dangle over the parapets, after all. Yes, each droopy dangling garden is exactly one furlong above the next.”

From the embarrassed sound of the giggle, I guessed that hanging or dangle was a play on words of some sort, or maybe a naughty double entendre.

“What do you call the hanging gardens?” I asked.

“Kakkabillilkiritu.” Groves of the star-gods.

Their furlongs were more than a thousand feet tall. I did not ask why the place Penny was caged was called the Tormentor’s Furlong. I was picturing in my head a place the size of the Empire State Building, with every room occupied by professional torturers.

“Okay, let’s go! I think I can manage to crawl…”

“Or, if she is young and fair, she may be sent to the Harem-Keeper’s Furlong.”

The picture in my head was now something more like the Playboy Mansion, except the size of the Empire State Building.

“Uh. That might be a nicer place to start looking.”

“And if she is an enchantress, to prevent her from weaving charms or cutting runes or whistling for the wind, she might be in the Blue Silence Furlong, where outsider magic is contravened.”

“Where is she more likely to be?”

“I do not know the likelihood.”

“How many places could she be?”

“More than I can count. There are holding cells and slave pens, and which one she is in depends on whether she is to be shipped or sold. It depends on which of the Tower holds her.”

“Which what of the Tower?”

“Which authority.”

“How many are there? I thought you had a Dark Lord. That freak wearing a coffee pot on his head.”

“Well… there is the navy and sky-navy, the infantry and auxiliaries and the cavalry, and the horse cavalry, elephant cavalry, whale cavalry and necro-cavalry depending on whether the steeds are alive; these all have separate captains. There is the military police, the espionage police, the secret police, the more secret police who watch the secret police…”

“Oh.”

“And… the officers of the watch, and the shore patrol, the air patrol, and the serpent-women authority. The serpent-women govern their own kind, and have their own police. And each of the Magicians, Astrologers, or Chaldaeans of the grandmaster rank has a personal guard for his household or fraternity.”

“Oh.”

“And then there is the exarchs, the suburban guard, civic guard, lower tower guard, higher tower guard, star guard, the judiciary bailiffs, the murderer brigades. And then there are retainers of the various noble families, and high-ranking diviners of many other orders, such as cephalonomancers. They all have the right to keep prisoners and enact tortures.”

“Oh.”

“Not to mention that engineering and architectural guild-masters have their own men at arms, sheriffs, and tormentors. And…” she drew another breath.

“Please stop now.”

“But I haven’t even mentioned the armed forces or guards maintained by visiting kings or ministers of foreign aeons, by priestly castes or by the vassals bound by vow to specific shrines within the tower…”

“I got the picture. One of those groups has her. Which one might it be?”

“Where she is held depends on whose authority controls her case: that decision depends on the clerks, scribes, functionaries and doctors of the law.”

“So your Dark Tower is all full of bureaucrats and lawyers? This place is hell.” I squinted, trying to think. Unfortunately, my brain was still feeling a bit sloshy and wobbly in my skull. “She was captured fairly recently, from Earth. Where would they put her?”

“Hmm. There are many slave camps in the tower, or dormitories and pens and zoos. Where she would be kept depends on her horoscope. It also depends on the number of other slaves and slave-children being caught today, or sold, altered, trained, tortured, or fed to those abominations who require unholy meat….”

“I got the point. What if we just start looking at random and keep going until we find her?”

“There are two hundred and twenty-six thousand, six hundred and sixty-six furlongs in the Dark Tower from crypts to the crown. If a chain as long as this tower is tall were ever made from The Archangel’s blood, it would girdle the whole of the orbicular world once and twice and thrice, and one tenth part around again. There are said to be as many chambers here as in The City over whom her shadow falls.”

She did not say ‘this city’; she said ‘The City’ or ‘The One City’. The word she used was Urdur-h’. Monopolis. Onesville. Singleburg. Unity Town. City of Ur.

The word for archangel was Rablammasu-h’. The aspiration at the end, that “h’” sound, served the same purpose in the spoken Ur-language as capitalization does in written English, or a definite article: not an archangel, but The Archangel.

“Does that mean you don’t know where to start looking?”

She spread her hands as if to show how empty they were. Of course, she was carrying a magical sickle with a self-elongating chain of self-heating copper, but I understood the gesture.

I let my head fall tiredly back down onto the stone with a painful thump.

She cocked her head. “Why are you still wounded? In the tales, Abominations from the aeon of Cainem just leapt to their feet when dismembered, and put their limbs back in place, or they carry their heads like lanterns in their hands, holding them by the hair.”

“I don’t know,” I muttered. “Since I don’t know why I am not dead, I don’t know why I am not fine, neither. Enough about me: What about calling for help?” I said. “You mentioned someone sent you here–”

“The Wisecraft.”

“–Yeah, whoever. Did they give you a radio, or a bat-phone, or anything like that? These are machines that carry voices through the air…”

There was a note of exasperation in her voice, “I know what they are. Technomancy. Contrived things from the slavelands.”

That was another lovely word in their language. Kabasudari. It literally meant worlds trampled underfoot and also meant subdued, subjected, stamped down, domesticated, and broken.

“I so hate this place,” I muttered.

Louder, I said, “Then how about you call them on the radio and arrange an extraction team? Someone to get us out of here? And bring a large bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken; I am starved. Extra crispy. I’ve only had three meals since forever. And tell them about the girl we have to rescue.”

“I have no machine like that. Such contrivances fail here.”

“Why?”

“The Dark Tower is steeped in twilight.”

“But you have a way to report to your den-mother, or whatever?”

“Yes. I can call the winged izbim.” The word izbim meant deformity, monster.

“Great. Shake a leg.”

“The calling cannot be done from here. The air is too thin.”

“Great,” I groaned. “Let us get down below, to a level where the air is thick enough to call the monster.”

She shook her monkey head firmly. “I was told to look for Master Ossifrage here, at this level!”

4. Impossibilities

I said, “Then what?”

She said, “Then what, what?”

“Suppose I had been Ossifrage. How were you supposed to get him out of this Tower? Can we use the same way out? What was your plan in case your Master Ossifrage was too tortured or too wounded to walk?”

“To throw him out the window.”

“Uh.” I looked at her soda-straw sized arms. “How?”

“I can hook my sapara to the frame and wrap the chain around his body in a bowline, and the contrivance will drag his weight.”

“Uh. I guess you guys are pretty hardcore. Denial to the enemy, huhn? Don’t blame you.”

“No. He is of the aeon of Selah through Arphaxad. The intercession which created his world occurred when Melchisedech was to be assumed into heaven bodily, but could not ascend unaided due to his corpulence and drunkenness, and therefore taught eight bearers how to ascend, who in turn instructed the Samaritans in the discipline, but they angered the One God with their idolatry, and they were given into the hand of the Chaldaeans. It is a world where the cities are scattered—there is more than one. Do they really have more than one city on your world?”

She asked in a tone of voice like she was asking about unicorns, something that could not possibly exist.

“What is it like?” she pressed. “They speak and don’t understand each other? How do mothers talk to their children? Do the people make war on each other?”

“Yeah, lots of wars. It’s our main pastime on my planet, but we got so good at it, it kind of stopped being so much fun. But enough about me: Your Ossifrage master guy. He floats?”

The monkey face nodded energetically. “He walks on the clouds.”

I stared at her a moment, looking at the oddly out-of-place mask with its cheeks of red rouge dots. It reminded me of grandma Yaga’s collection of china shepherdesses and ballerinas.

“Your mask,” I said. “It helps you breathe?”

She nodded, “Yes! It unthins the air.”

I also did not see any air hoses or air bottles, and it was just strapped on, not sealed tight at the edges. “How does it do that?”

“By unthinning it.”

“Exactly how does that work?”

“It is contrived by magic.”

“By ‘magic’ you mean you don’t understand how it works.”

She put her little hands on her little hips. “I mean it works by magic. You don’t think I would put a thaumaturgical contrivance of mystic power on my face without knowing how it worked, do you?” She made a little hmph! noise of a kind I have never heard any male creature whatsoever make. “Its virtue works by the art of galvanic alchemy from the aeon of Brennus. The mask surface uses elemental magnetism to draw in vital elements in the correct proportion from the gasses of the air. Rare gasses are compressed and made dense by the principle of the attraction of likenesses.”

“Does your Master Ossifrage have a mask like that?”

“No. How could he?”

“Is he like me, a creature who can survive without breathing?”

“N-no…”

I said, “The cage I was put in was bottomless. Are there different kinds of cages in this area of the tower? If not, he could not possibly have been put here. He would have just cloudwalked out, no problem. And if he was in a cage with a bottom, he would die from the thinness of the air. He is not on this level, unless he is in an airtight closet or trunk. Who told you he was here? It’s impossible.”

She stood stock-still for a moment. Her shoulders trembled slightly.

Look, I did not know anything about this world, or her, or whoever sent her, but I could guess what she was afraid of. She was afraid of the one thing everyone in the underground resistance of any universe is afraid of: betrayal to the local version of the Gestapo, of which the Dark Tower apparently had a zillion. Whoever had told her that her target was in this room had not made an innocent mistake. It was bad intel, misinformation, a lie, a trap.

“It’s okay, little sister,” I croaked. “We’ll find your guy. We will spring him.”

“You will?”

“Darn straight. Soon as the darned deck stops pitching and yawing, we can get moving. Between your ninja-chick powers and my ability to bleed on things, we–”

“I am not an assassin! Never call me that!”

Her lingo magic, of course, translated the word ninja to her.

Too late, I remembered that she had said Lord Ersu or Master Slaughterbench or whatever his name was had predicted she would kill many women and children. I had not realized the obvious: she meant kill them for him. An assassin was precisely what she had been trained to be by her owner, who was the same guy who killed her mother by torture.

So I had said about the most hurtful and traumatic thing I could.

“…Look, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to call you that. I am really sorry…. They don’t exist on my world any more, except in video games so people think they’re cool, you know?”

She looked impressed. “How did you kill all the assassins?”

“Something called chivalry. Treating an enemy with honor. Fighting honestly.”

“I have never heard of such a thing. Wouldn’t you lose the wars?”

“My country utterly defeats her foes and afterward gives them money and rebuilds everything we blew up like new, to make our foes into our friends. We could not do this if we used dishonorable means to fight.”

“How could that work? The defeated are the slaves of the victors.”

“It works when we do it right and not when we don’t. My country only fights to kill tyrants and free slaves, not for gain, not because of fear, and not for reputation. Dear God, I miss America!”

She looked at me with her masked head cocked at an angle, as if she were puzzled or amazed.

I said, “Only the weakest and most despised of our leaders stoops to assassination. It breaks our laws and outrages the sense of honor of our people. Give me a hand up. I am going to try to walk again.”

I managed to make it to my knees, fell, rolled, and my stomach started rumbling and knotting inside me. I winced, and clutched my gut, and doubled up in the foetal position, helpless as a foetus.

“What’s wrong?” she said. “Are you hurt?” Which, if you think about it, is a pretty funny thing to ask a guy with half a dozen holes punched through his limbs and major organs.

“Just a flesh wound,” I gasped. “Every cubic inch of my flesh, inside and out, unfortunately….”

I looked around. Since there was sunlight coming in through small windows near the top of the torture chamber, it was pretty bright in here, so it was hard to see the blue-white light shining up from two of the circular openings in the floor. The cell where I had smashed out the wood floor was not shining, but the other two were.

“I am so stupid!” I shouted.

Abby recoiled, scared by my tone of voice. In fact, she put her arms across her face as if to ward off a blow. I saw her eyes in the eyeholes of her mask, looking both scared and strangely resigned. My guess was that in her life a loud male voice meant a beating was coming.

“Nothing is wrong, little sister!” I told her soothingly. “The blue light from the prison cells is hindering my recovery. I will be able to turn a handstand once I get away from this blue light! Then we will be on our way!”

She said, “Where?”

I said, “We are going back to wherever you were standing when someone told you that Master Ossifrage would be on this level.”

She said, “It was in the Nine-Star Aligned Chamber. All the horoscopes of the Abominations and Outlandish Ones are kept there.”

“Would that include Ossifrage? And Penny?”

“Yes. And yours. Horoscopes are cast for all prisoners under question, so the tormentors can foretell escape attempts, deceptions, or learn what methods will break the prisoners swiftly.”

“Is this place locked?”

“It is watched both by stars and mortal men. I went in through the unclean servants’ door. It is kept open for the maidens whenever Mercury is in an ascending node. There are no Astrologers within at such times, and I can scald the locks on the tablets to pop them open, and reveal the layers of writing.”

“What happened? Did you read the wrong record or something?”

She nodded eagerly. “That must have been it!”

“So if we go back there—can we find your master and my girl?”

“We can!” She spoke in a voice filled with hope and eagerness. “But how do we get you away from the blue?”

“Simple. Wind your chain around me and put that hook someplace firm in the crawlway over there. We are sure as heck getting out of this room first thing. I am going to make it at least into the corridor there, even if it kills me. Which it can’t. Pain is only pain, right?”

So I crawled, being pulled along by her sickle-and-chain weapon, and using my hands and sometimes my teeth, and just dragged my bloody body out of there, and I left a sticky red swath on the floor behind me as I went.

She kept whimpering and asking if she were hurting me.

“Don’t fret, little sister! The pain can’t kill me,” I hissed through gritted teeth, “The pain can’t kill me. Nothing can kill me.”

I also shouted a lot of four-letter words I should probably not have said in front of a girl. A whole lot.

The Stream-Path of the Unclean Servants

1. Gloom

The corridor was cramped. A man’s head would have brushed the roof bricks unless he were really short, and his elbows would brush both walls unless he were really thin. The floor was paved in stone, and had a dusty, archeological look, as if no one had walked here for a thousand years. There were no decorations on the walls, just a few tubes like plumbing near the top of the low, barrel-vaulted ceiling. At forty thousand feet or so in the air, it nonetheless felt like being in a cellar.

I managed to haul my bloody and wound-riddled body into a semi-sitting position. I slumped like a spineless sack of grain heaped against one wall, my feet against the other.

“What is wrong?” asked Abby softly.

“It’s not working,” I said. “I think my wounds are getting bigger…” I heard a sob in my voice.

“But your power is chaotic,” she said, “To be removed from the light from The Archangel should aid you…”

“Well, it is not working, is it! My body is rotting!” I am ashamed to say that I bellowed at her and spat up some blood at that same time, and this sent her cowering back.

Why she did not run off at that moment, I don’t know.

I put my head in my hands. I tried not to touch the edges of any of the gaping bloody and broken parts of me.

So I kind of curled up in a ball.

What was wrong with me? I worried frantically about that question until I realized what it had to be: me worrying frantically.

I had healed myself when trapped in the cage surrounded by blue light, had I not? I had not been scared for myself. Angry, yes. Scared, not so much. I had not felt weak and helpless. Now I did.

I was helpless to save Penelope Dreadful. And I knew it.

And I realized I had to put it from my mind somehow.

Somehow? How else?

I uncurled from the ball, and apologized to Abby, and spoke softly, “I think I got it. The blue light was keeping the chaos substance inside my body quiet. Now that I am out of the light, I should be able to turn the ylem, whatever it is called, into exactly what my body needs. But if I get scared or worried, the ylem gets all riled up, and it makes me sicker. I spat out most of it, but there must be traces left inside me. So I need to take control. Call on a higher power.”

She said, “I understand. You need to do your magic. I will step away from your circle.”

“No. This is the opposite of magic. And come to think of it, I want you to pray with me. Whenever two are gathered in his name, he said he would be here.”

“He who?”

“Remember that lonely God whose name I know? He visited my world once.”

“What joy for you! All the peoples must have danced!”

“Uh. Actually, my people sort of… murdered him.”

“W-what?”

“By slow torture. Hung him on a tree. After spitting on him and mocking him…”

“W-what?!” This a word you can really draw out in a scream in her language. ‘What’ is ayyu. So the noise that literally came from her mouth was ayyyuuuuu…?!

“But it turned out fine, just fine,” I insisted. “There was a happy ending.”

“You have spilled the blood of a god! Your world is surely accursed above all worlds! How can it be fine?”

“He forgave us.”

“Impossible!”

“Whoa, whoa, wait a minute, little sister! You are in an evil magic tower filled with evil magic Astrologers who can predict the future, headquarters of an evil magic interdimensional empire ruling thirty-three parallel aeons of time, and in each of those aeons there is some sort of dark magic or another, including blind guys who eat souls and hairless wolfy things who climb walls, and you are looking for a man who can walk through the clouds, and you rescued a kid who cannot die with your magic shape-changing prehensile sickle of plus-one heat-metal, which enables you to scare the magic cage bars into magically retracting, and you look like a monkey, but you are telling me it is impossible for a divine being big enough to create the whole supercalifragilisticexpialidocious universe to be big-hearted enough to forgive his own murderers?”

She shook her head. “Blood must repay blood. That is the law of all the gods.”

“Well, there was plenty of blood involved. Anyway, you are willing to believe in the curse but not in the cure? What kind of gullible believer-in-magic are you?”

“I can see magic,” she held up her sickle and the short curved blade hummed and gave off a little red light and a lot of heat.

I rubbed my eyes, which reminded me that one of them was still tilted and blurred and hurt like the dickens.

I said, “Okay, fine. Fine. What I am saying is something unbelievable. It is also something, at the moment, I am asking you to believe and to help me to believe. If it were easy to believe, there would be nothing to brag about if this works. It had better work.”

“If what works?”

“I think I can heal myself, but only if I can control the chaos I ate.”

“You swallowed the ylem? It is a solvent of all things! It obeys no laws, can be contained by no wards! The sages say there is a dark heart of the chaos material at the core of our globe, where over the years one drop or another has spilled, boring through all layers of ground and rock and magma to the very center, and it grows.”

“Cool. Anyway, I want to try something. Will you help me?”

The monkey mask tilted, and I wondered if the face beneath were screwed up in puzzlement. “That is strange. You used a word I don’t know. I have never heard a word I don’t know.”

“Which word?”

“Super-callous-fragile–”

“Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.”

“You said it! Very good. But what does it mean?”

“I don’t think it means anything. But if you say it loud enough, you’ll always sound precocious.”

“Ah! Well, since you know a word even those blessed with the oneness of all speech cannot speak, you must be a sage. I will help you in your magic.”

“I am no sage, and it’s not magic.”

“What is it?”

I thought about that for a long moment. “It is the thing of which magic is a shoddy and deceptive imitation. It is magic that works.”

“What must I do?”

“Pray with me.”

“We have no angel blood, nor altar-stone, nor beast, nor knife.”

“We speak as if to our father, and he hears us.”

“I am a female, and a slavegirl, and the daughter of a criminal, who died in a fashion which is most unclean, polluted by many curses. When I was taken from her, Master Slaughterbench was required to include morticians from the untouchable ranks to act as my punishers and warders, since the clean ranks could not touch me. Only a corpse handler was low enough to slap my face.” She uttered a sigh of resignation. “No one hears me. My sort cannot speak in a court of law, cannot make an accusation to the Watch, cannot enter the market.”

I quelled the stab of hatred I felt, once again, for this planet, telling myself hate could not be good for my state of mind. I said firmly: “The One God hears prayers from little girls as well as from priests, and all are made clean in his sight.”

“How can that be?”

“Magic.”

“You said it wasn’t magic!”

“Real magic. True magic beyond magic. I’ll teach you the words. Hail, Mary, full of grace! The Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou among women–”

“What does it mean?”

“Uh, well, there is a story behind it…”

She clapped her hands. “I love stories!”

“Uh… Let me see. There was a man on my world named Joseph who was the son of a long line of kings, but his people had been conquered, and he lived among peasants, and worked with his hands as a carpenter. He was espoused to a virgin named Mary, who also had the blood of vanquished kings in her, and it seemed she was pregnant, even though he knew no man had touched her. Being a just man, he was minded to put her away privily, but she told him that an angel of the Lord had appeared unto her…. Abby, do you know what angels are?”

“Messengers of the star-gods. If you see one, you die.”

“Well, this virgin did not die. Instead the angel said fear not…”

Abby clapped her hands again, bouncing with excitement. “I know she was not afraid!”

“Eh? How do you know?”

“Yes. You said she was of the blood of kings! Then she was a princess! No princess is ever afraid.”

“Um. Saint Thomas Aquinas could not fault that logic. In any case, the angel announced a strange and great prophecy to her, saying: behold, you shall conceive in your womb, and bring forth a son. He shall be great, and the Lord God shall give to him the throne of his fathers, and of his kingdom there shall be no end….”

2. Hail, Mary

You will think me a really cold-hearted man if I tell you I stopped worrying about Penny and rape beasts and torture hooks. Don’t think that of me. I had to stop worrying, or else the Oobleck would react to my state of mind. I had to stop worrying in order to speed the unnatural recuperation process. I had to.

For her sake, I had to.

I did not give into the temptation of wondering what pains and terrors and humiliations might be, even now, being thrust into Penny. I did not pace back and forth muttering, Where is she? What has happened to her? For one thing, I could not stand up yet. But I did not let that scare me either.

But, dammit, how I wanted to give in to my nagging terrors. I wanted it as badly as an alcoholic wants a drink. Unlike an alcoholic, I could not throw my beer money out the window and prevent myself from indulging. All I had to do to indulge myself was think about it.

Maybe you think praying is stupid. So did I, back when I was on Earth. You tell yourself nothing is going to happen when you pray, and then when it does happen, you tell yourself afterward that it was only a coincidence.

But you tell me if there is a better way to clear your mind of worry and fear when the things you fear are real, and there is no rational reason in the world to stop worrying. If the reasons of this world tell you that you should be afraid, you either have to be afraid, or be fearless when it is foolhardy to be fearless, or take the third option, and look to reasons not of this world. Those are the three choices: fearfulness, foolhardiness, and faith.

And I could not be whole if I were afraid, and I could not afford the folly of false courage. Lives were at stake more precious and more vulnerable than mine. Penny needed me.

3. Ilya the Barbarian

I stretched, did the beginning steps of my kata, karate chopped an invisible enemy and threw him over my hip, dropping to one knee to drive my knuckles into his throat to his vertebrae. I was feeling fit. I turned a handspring or two, and leapt to my feet for sheer exuberance. I banged my head on the low roof, and let out a yowl.

The monkey mask just stared at me with a jeering grin. “Who were you fighting? There was no one there. Was that a dance?”

“No time to explain!” I shouted. “To the batpoles!”

“To the what?”

“Or whatever way we have for getting down quickly,” I added, by way of explanation. “I am hoping a tower this size has a waterslide. That would be awesome.”

“For an abomination, you are really very odd.”

“Thanks. But I notice we are both still standing here, and not, you know, bat-jogging to the nearest super-long laundry chute. Why is that?”

“You have yet to cover the shame of your nakedness.”

Feeling a little impatient, I went back into the torture chamber, and removed one of the levers from the windlass of the rack. It was a bar made of some hard substance that looked like bone or ceramic, but it did not shatter when I smashed it against the stones of the wall with all my might.

“There!” I said hefting my club. “Now I am dressed.”

She was staring in puzzlement at my male member. “Do they circumcise the foreskin of the penis on your world?”

“Hold on.” I went back into the torture chamber one more time.

I don’t care what the sci-fi books say, nudism is not futuristic, and it is not a sign of an advanced culture.

How to find clothing? There was not much here to work with. I took one of the masks off the wall, and one of the leather straps off the torture rack, and made myself a leather jockstrap with the mask hanging and banging athletic-cup-style in front of my groin. Since the face on the wooden mask was carved to show an expression of pain and fright, I thought it only right that any foes would see that expression hanging between my legs. It would either scare them or make them double up with laughter—good either way.

I had not shaved since who knows when, so I looked nicely scruffy, and my hair was a lot longer than its normal crew cut, past my shoulders.

And I was still pretty much coated with my own blood, now dried and frozen in the upper atmospheric cold, so it looked like a bad warpaint job.

So I stomped back to the crawlspace, unshorn, unshaven, and shaggy, looking like a murder-hobo in a horror film.

“Behold! Ilya the Barbarian! By Crom!” For I had tried to strike a pose, and managed to strike my head on the low ceiling. Clutching my head, I grimaced and nodded toward the far end of the narrow corridor. “Let’s roll, Kato!”

“What needs to be rolled up?”

“Don’t have wheeled vehicles in this world, eh?”

“Kings do,” she said. “Poor girls walk.”

“If we get out of this alive, I promise you I’ll take you for a ride in my nitro-powered Jeep from Hell.”

“As a forever-born, I am immune from curses, because my future cannot be bound by dark words!”

“No, no! I am not cursing you! This Jeep is a reward! It is not really from Hell. It is a horseless carriage, powered by an internal combustion engine…”

“I know what a horseless carriage is. I also know what boys your age are like when it comes to chariots, or one-man fliers, or anything that moves fast. And I am immune from curses, not from high-speed collisions.”

I sighed. “For you, She-Monkey, I will drive nice and slow. I can drive you to Priory of Our Lady of Consolation in Amity. It is on a holy hill. My family gets free fudge. Because my Dad is a member of a secret interdimensional conspiracy of a holy order of knights. Boy, that sounds even more senseless than most things I say.”

But Abby was mollified, and nodded her little monkey mask, and said, “Very well, if we live, you can drive me in your horseless carriage to the holy refuge for fudge.”

4. Which Way?

I strode forward. It was gloomy and got gloomier and I barked my head something fierce on a low-hanging, tall-person-hating pipe or ceiling decoration.

The corridor ended in a T, with a branch to the left and right. There were cuneiforms on the walls. The cuneiforms looked like trackmarks left by chickens walking up the wall, with arrowheads tied to their claws. All the arrows of the letters pointed everywhere and nowhere, and none of them told me where to go.

“Abby, which way?”

“I don’t know.”

“I mean, which way did you come when you came? Did they give you a map or something?”

“I have a magic needle.”

“Uh. Of course you do. It points where you tell it?”

“Not where I tell it. It is made of the Remembering Metal.” The word she used was Abartahsistu. “It is from the aeon of Svan, where the sky-witches fly in dreams upon winter nights to wrestle the squalls. It is said the sky-witches can read the future in the runic shapes of cracks formed when the shoulder blades of sacrifices are burned in the fire, and for this reason, the Astrologers have yet to overcome them.”

The word for sky-witches, mehukassaptillut, was different from the word for sea-witches, kuliltukassaptillut. Apparently their language made room for a wide variety of witches. I was curious, but I had more pressing questions. “Can you make your needle point at where Ossifrage is now? Or Penny?”

She shook her head. “You don’t know what you are doing, do you?”

“Of course I do!”

“What are you doing?”

“Spinning my wheels, getting no traction, going nowhere. Banging my head.”

“You said you were in the army. Did they not teach you to have a destination before you marched? A tactic before you fought?”

“I was not in the army.”

“You said. You were a scout.”

“Boy Scout. Still am. Bobcat Patrol, Troop Two. We are Second to None.” I showed her a snappy three-finger salute.

“You were a scout who went on patrols for your troop, but you were not in the army? Were you an irregular, or did you wear a uniform?”

“I have a uniform…”

“And a badge of rank?”

“I am a Life Scout…”

“But… not in an army?”

“The Boy Scouts are a pretend army.”

“Your world is weird.”

“Yeah, compared to what? Your whole globe has only one city!” I blinked. “Come to think of it, the Land of Oz has only one city. Trantor, too, but that does not really count.”

“Are those real places?” Abby asked cautiously.

“No. Make-believe. Pretend.”

“Like your army!” She clapped her hands. “I am beginning to understand your world now.”

“Okay. Let us try to recapture a sense of desperation and tension, here, on account of my non-girlfriend is about to be Spanish Inquisitioned by lunatic Astrologers. Let’s not lose focus. We just got to think it through step by step. We got to do what Vizzini would do!”

“Who?”

“Vizzini! When the job went wrong, he went back to the beginning. That is standard procedure for crime gangs when a caper goes south! We have to do what Vizzini would do.”

“Vizzini is the boss of your… crime gang?”

“No. He is a character from a story. A make-believe.”

“Then… why are we going to do what he would do?”

“It is a really funny story. Really funny. So. Going back to the beginning. That is what we do. Let me think. I am waiting for Vizzini… You keep usin’ that word: I do not think it means what you think it means… Prepare to die…”

“Is anything on your planet real?”

I snapped my fingers. “Where were you when your plan began? And then at what step did it go off the rails? What went wrong? Why was I put in Master Ossifrage’s cell? What made the needle not point where it should have pointed? Who lied?”

She was silent for a moment, and said softly, “It was the winged monster who lied.”

“You are sure?”

“I entered the Tower in the Bovine Furlong, near the communal kitchens for the lower young male rustic-slave slavepen acres. There are abattoirs on that level which pour out blood and refuse endlessly. There are fewer guards watching the cattle-hauling airships. We have a man there—I was not told his name—and he smuggled me into the Lower Luminous Omniscient Observation Furlong. I waited until pre-dawn Mercury set, and entered the Nine-Star-Aligned Chamber of the First External-Abomination Lord Astrologer through the indentured servant’s hallway.”

“Your people haul their cattle in airships?” (My name is Distracted. First name: Easily.)

“Yes. Airships can haul heavier loads and at higher altitudes than heavier-than-air flying machines, or ornithopters, or propeller-driven celestial engines.”

“Yes! In your faces Wright Brothers! You too, Sikorsky! Hindenburg rules!”

“I don’t know those people. Are they make-believe?”

“Yes. I mean, no. They are real. It is just that in my town, we used to build zeppelins, and so… so, okay, never mind. I am now back on track and I am staying focused. Non-girlfriend in danger. Uh. You were about to enter the Nine Whatsits Chamber.”

“The Nine-Star-Aligned Chamber is the chamber where the horoscopes related to tormentors who specialize in outerworldly abominations are kept, so that their actions can be auspiciously predicted. Any escape attempts and tactics for successful interrogation are also foretold there. It is the ninth of ten chambers of the second aspect, and the tenth, which is windowless and forever sealed, is never spoken of.”

“Why is the tenth chamber never spoken of?”

“I know not, for no man ever speaks of it.”

“Oh.”

“I called me the winged monster to read the tablets. The winged monster applied the needle of the remembering metal to the tablet that was supposed to be the horoscope of Master Ussushibu. Instead it was your horoscope. It was not an innocent mistake. I was deceived by the winged monster.”

“Why so sure? Could it have been just a clerical error? My horoscope in the Master Ossifrage folder? Wrong name on the outside?”

She shook her head. “The whole power of the Astrologers depends on the perfection of their records. Clerks who err are scourged, dismembered, de-tongued, displayed for public sport, their wounds infected with flesh-eating mushrooms, and then….”

“Too much information. Don’t tell me.”

“It is unknown for the clerks to err.”

“Can we get to these records?”

“The Nine-Star-Aligned Chamber is in the Lower Luminous Omniscient Observation Furlong, where laity dare not go. There was no one to bar my way last time. I entered with the cleaning maids.”

“First place to go is to get back there, and maybe we can find someone who can read the tablets more trustworthy than your winged monster. So needle your needle, or whatever we need to do. Do you remember the path?”

“No. But there may be a way. Duck your head and follow me,” she said primly. “The arches were made for normal people, not giants.”

“I am not a–!” But I had to duck my head to avoid getting brained by the low ceiling, so I shut up and followed her lead.

Abby led the way, circuitously, away from the windows admitting the Arctic light from outside, toward the dark and hollow core of the Tower.

We entered a larger chamber, black as the inside of a rain barrel. A soft buttery-yellow light began to glow from the wooden cloak pins Abby wore on either shoulder, and at the same time, my wooden mask-as-codpiece started to glow too.

“What the–!” I shouted, jerking and banging my head again. I needed a helmet.

“It is lampwood,” she said.

“How does it work?”

“An aspect of the wood is lowered into the Uncreation, where light from the imprisoned angel shines, and is reflected back into our aeon, where our limited sight can see it. The Uncreation is all around us, unseen.”

“You mean like a periscope? Sorry! I should explain: a periscope is when you have two mirrors, uh, looking glasses, in a tube, and an underwater sort of boat…”

The monkey mask seemed to grin at me. “You are so odd. I know what a submersible is. The first one was made three thousand years ago at the instructions of the stars by Enki-Kilalu, the father of shipwrights. Most of the areas of twilight manifest far below the waves, beyond the continental shelf, in the deep, where sunlight will not disturb them. Yes, the lampwood acts like a periscope.”

“How did you turn it on? Thought waves? Yikes!”

I looked down at my crotch. The wooden inset into the mask was only the skull, teeth and jawbones, so that what had been an image of a living person in pain was now more like a skull.

It made me flinch and hit my head again. Three bumps in three minutes.

“Who builds their darned ceilings so low?! Is everyone a shrimp in this crapsacktastical world?” (This time, I actually did say darned, since I didn’t want the child to pick up any bad language from me. Or, rather, any more bad language. I was not living up to all points of the Boy Scout law, particularly the part about being courteous and clean.)

The space in which she stood and I crouched was circular with a flat ceiling, with low archways leading out. In the center was a set of what looked like meathooks hanging from chains. Between the archways were little statues the size of lawn-gnomes of chimerical creatures that looked like bat-winged bulls with the heads of gape-mouthed vultures: Ugliest griffins ever. The floor was dusty, and our light did not carry far.

She unpinned one of her glowing wooden pins and held it near the floor. I could see where the dust had been disturbed. I was not as good as Foster Hidden at tracking game, but I could see the tiny, precise footprints of Abanshaddi’s slippers.

The trail led to one of the archways.

5. Empty Chambers

We went by a crooked path, going through one chamber after another, never in a straight line.

The place was like the worst parts of a haunted house and the attic of a crazy murderer who collected body parts.

There was a room full of skulls, each one with a tiny brass label screwed into its forehead. Another room had nothing in it but a hole in the floor and smoke-stains on the ceiling above it. Another had a miniature guillotine and a neatly packed collection of skeletal hands.

One room was a warehouse, filled with boxes shaped like small coffins for children. The boxes were not nailed shut. Instead of nails, clamps or staples of the living metal held the boards together, and one of the clamps silently opened when I put my hand on a box.

In another room was a thing that looked like a transparent bathtub stained with blood with iron sheets or clamps that could be lowered over it, and a table that could have been an altar-stone or a control panel. There was a ticking in that room, but I could not see where it came from.

In another, there was nothing but a tall brass horn which came out of a hump in the floorstones. The horn was facing us when we entered the chamber. I looked behind me when we left by another archway, and saw that the horn had turned to face us again, making no noise.

In one of the bigger rooms we passed through, we came to a wide place, larger than a ballroom floor, where the ceiling was too high to see. Something like a ball of luminous mist floated far above, or was suspended. We passed through that chamber at a run. The misty light terrified Abby for some reason, although she would not tell me anything about it.

I had been repeating prayers to myself under my breath to help track the time. I calculated that we had been moving deeper inside, toward the axis of the Dark Tower, for about fifteen minutes.

“I hate this place. Who collects mummified hands, or coffins filled with children?”

“It is to despoil the bodies, and render them unclean, to make their ghosts angrier, hence easier to provoke by necromancy.”

Lovely. I wish I knew whether to accept her words at face value or dismiss it as superstition. I said, “A body should be disposed of respectfully.”

She nodded toward my fist. “If you fear the dead, toss away that baton. It is made from the cuttlebone of a sea-behemoth.”

“So?”

“It is bad luck.”

“It’s unlucky to believe in bad luck.”

“Cuttlebone absorbs the suffering of ghosts, which is why tormentors prefer it.”

“If I toss away this club, then I want my sword back. It belonged to my grandfather.”

“If your sword has a fate, this would also be recorded when your gear was taken. The Astrologers write down everything. Does your sword have a fate?”

“Uh. I don’t know. How do you tell?”

“Well… is your sword a he or a she?” She actually said namsar or namsatur, sword or swordette?

“I am not sure.”

“Your own sword and you are not sure?” Abby’s voice held a note of disapproval.

I said, “Well, the sooner we get back to this records room and check the records, the sooner we can read the file on me, and on Master Ossifrage, and find out where Penny is. Is there a quick way down? You did not climb all this way. Is there an elevator? An elevator is a cart or chariot like a bucket pulled on a winch…”

“I know what such things are. For an abomination, you speak very stupidly. Yes. Of course I did not climb here. There is a river-way of living metal that runs up the spine of the Dark Tower, as well as lesser stream-roads used by servants, high slaves, low slaves and the like. One is a smaller stream-path used to carry refuse, medical waste, walking shadows, death-effigies, or mummies, or other abominations.”

“How long does it take to descend, using that method?”

“There should be no living things above Memorial Immensity of the Lost and Sacred Kings of the High Necropolis. Below that? Depending on traffic loads, an hour or two.”

I gritted my teeth. Some intuition told me it was too soon to relax.

“Let’s shake a leg,” I said.

“Is that the same as rolling?”

But she picked up the pace.

6. Vertical Firmament

Finally, we reached a larger corridor, and this opened into a wide space. The ceiling overhead soared out of sight, and I saw curving ribs like flying buttresses bracing the vast acreage of walls. These curving supports were radiating out from a series of circular stone balconies, one above the next above the next. It went up endlessly, lines of perspective disappearing at a vanishing point hidden by a distant cluster of jewel-like lamps and lanterns as dim as faraway stars.

In the midst of the chamber, directly below the balconies, was a well that dropped down infinitely. Or, rather, what I thought was the chamber floor was the floor of a circular balcony hanging over a vast abyss.

It was still very gloomy in here, but there were small holes admitting sunlight, and the dusty beams stretched across the wide space as lightly as the Gothic arches and braces.

On the walls near us there were panels of gold inscribed with cuneiforms, and niches along the walls containing king-faced bulls, and each face had different features. Above each man-bull was a circle of lapis lazuli surrounded by zodiacs and inset with diamonds. I was baffled to see the same arrows and wiggles representing Sagittarius and Aquarius as you can see in any cheap daily newspaper in our world. Those signs must be older than I thought, if they predated the division point of history between the two timelines.

Below each horoscope was one or more rowboats made of what looked like blue glass. The rowboats had sliding shells or panels that could cover them, and they were standing upright on their sterns. I did not see what prevented them from falling over. In the gloom, they looked like headstones.

“What’s this?” I asked.

“The stream-path of the unclean,” she said. And she raised her hand, and her wood cloak pins and my wooden crotch-mask went dark.

Only then, as my eyes adjusted, did I see three vertical ribbons of metal, large as four-lane highways, hanging in midair with no support, stretching from infinitely above to infinitely below, passing through the stone rings held at the axis of this chamber, which I realized was not a chamber at all, but the platform of a train station shaped like a chimney. It was like looking at a subway station turned on its side, if the subway had been designed by the architects who built Notre Dame in Paris.

The shape and proportions of the circle of floor surrounding nothing looked so much like my bottomless cage where I had just been confined, but on a titanic scale. I could not shake the image in my heart of an empire where whole nations and peoples and worlds were as strictly enchained and as brutally treated as I had been. The true magnitude of this Dark Tower’s shadow, and the true extent of its terrible reach, became clear to me at that moment.

My feet were a little unsteady as I stepped toward the drop (there was no railing). I peered down.

I saw something as vast as the night sky rolled into a tube and propped upright: a column of air forty thousand feet tall, higher than most commercial aircraft fly, surrounded by seven miles and more of dark metal, dark brick, and threads of gold made tiny in the distance. Windows, lanterns, balconies were like distant stars, garden plots and lit greenhouses were like the nonexistent seas of the Moon or the imaginary canals of Mars, and internal airship traffic crossing the well of empty air were like tiny fishes glimpsed at the bottom of the sea.

Rational Animals

1. Down the Living Metal Way

Abby looked carefully from face to square-bearded face of the man-headed bulls, until she found one she apparently liked. She stepped forward and started wrestling with the glass rowboat standing under the gaze of the man-headed statue.

Abby had her arms wrapped partly around the boat, and was grunting and puffing, and the prow wobbled slightly. Her motions were so tentative and awkward that for a moment I did not realize she was trying to manhandle the glass rowboat across the platform, or, rather girlhandle it.

It began to tilt, threatening to collapse on her, and I stepped forward, plucked the rowboat up out of her hands, and tucked it with a grunt under one arm. It was not a little rowboat, but I have pretty big arms.

“Where to?” I asked. “And, next time, ask for help.”

The little monkey-mask face grinned at me, but the little girl’s voice from behind it was quivering. “It is not right for you to bear burdens for me. I am untouchable.”

“Well, since you rescued me from that midair version of Hell I was in, acting in my authority as temporary Ostiary for the Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon, I, Ilya Muromets, Life Scout of Troop Two, Bobcat Patrol, officially decree, ordain and establish, now and forever, that you are touchable, so help me God! And if any man should dispute me, he shall face the peril of my sword just as soon as I get it back. Troop Two! Second to none!”

Strangely enough, she did not seem impressed.

“Is this real, what you are saying, or is it make-believe?”

Since I was sort of kidding but deadly serious at the same time, I was not sure what to say. When I did not answer right away, her shoulders drooped a bit, and she walked towards the dizzying brink of the platform.

A tongue of metal like the plank from which pirates throw captives to the sharks hung out into the middle of the air: there was a hollow or slot fitted to receive the keel of the rowboat, and a block-and-tackle arrangement leading to a brass ring the size of a dinner plate, which dangled in midair on a yardarm. It looked for all the world like the brass ring you are supposed to catch with your finger on the merry-go-round, or maybe those rings dangling from threads that jousters at the Renaissance Fair try to spear on their lances.

She did not have to tell me what to do. I have seen old Cowboy movies, including ones where you hang a mailbag on a hook for the mail-train to pick up as it chugs by at high speed without stopping. I set the rowboat in position, snapped the chains into the corresponding D-rings set about the rowboat, and removed the chocks from the windlass.

When we were both settled in the rowboat, I pushed the ring to which all the chains led out on its rotating arm to a position hanging over the bottomless drop. Then we pulled the sliding panels over our heads, so that the rowboat now looked more like a soda bottle or maybe an artillery shell, with us crouched inside. The hull was semitransparent so we had a stomach-wrenching view of the endless drop into which we would fall, should a chain break or the ring slip.

Abby pulled a leather wallet out from her belt pouch, unfolded it, and took out what looked like a mummified hand, which she placed carefully in the bilge near the prow. The glass of the boat immediately grew cloudy where it was resting.

“What is that for?” I asked.

“The horoscopes controlling today’s stream-path traffic cannot see me, nor you when your acts rest atop my acts, so no hook of living metal will emerge from the wayship to seize us and carry us down. But the vessels are purified, and dead flesh is impure, so the living metal will always take away corpses or mummies found on this path, even if unforeseen.”

Kerruxsaru is the word I am translating as ‘wayship.’ I could have said ‘walking ship’ or ‘ship that walked by three thousand ways.’ The word literally meant an argosy that sailed as easily on earth and mountain, cloud and void as on the sea. These were the things I have been calling freight-trains or invasion machines: the king-sized Moebius coils. Apparently, the Dark Tower used them for everything.

At that moment, a set of gold prisms looking just like the invasion machines I had seen earlier, if perhaps slightly smaller, came sliding noiselessly down the nearest highway-sized ribbon of vertical living metal. Imagine a windowless and silent freight train that was triangular in cross section rather than square, and then imagine it hanging vertically from its caboose.

Before I could blink, a huge hook unfolded from the bowsprit of the wayship, snatched us off the plank, and dangled us in midair at forty thousand feet, rattling around like two rats in a Coke bottle. And down we sped.

I put my arms around the little girl to protect her from getting jarred or bruised. And she writhed uncomfortably, and I shouted in terror from the vertigo of the sudden fall, so I guess she thought I was clinging to her for protection, even though I am built like a linebacker and she was built like an underfed chicken in pint-size.

The bowsprit-hook of living metal twisted and banged against a flat hull-segment of gold, where we clung. Magic? Magnetics? Velcro? Your guess is as good as mine. The rowboat settled into place. We found ourselves held to the golden hull of one of the wayships, stacked like cordwood along with dozens of other bullet-shaped rowboat-sized containers.

We were falling swiftly, and came into an area where the lamps were brighter. Now I saw that there were other golden wayships above us or below or to either side, some crowded with glass rowboats clinging to their hulls like remora clinging to a shark, some with larger containers, and others bare of cargo. Here and there on the ribbon, like motorcyclists threading through a convoy of eighteen-wheelers, were rowboat-sized or yacht-sized bullets of blue glass traveling by themselves.

You are probably seeing in your mind’s eye traffic on a highway. That is not a bad picture, but remove any visible drivers and passengers, plate over all the car windows, put it through a tunnel of darkness guarded by gold monuments, shut off all the headlights and taillights, and in your mind’s ear, you should be hearing no noise aside from the whistle of wind. Machines roar and clang and stink, and well-tuned machines purr, but all this traffic was as silent as a caravan of ghosts falling toward the core of the world.

The whole thing looked like a vertical conveyer belt, but it was not: the surface of the road-sized vertical ribbon, seen up close, looked like a hairy carpet made of zillions of tiny centipede legs, which rippled in hypnotic and silent waves of motion. It was made of the living metal, and it certainly writhed like it was alive. I wonder if each tiny hair were passing all these loads from one to the next, sort of like the way a crowd surfer who throws himself into a mosh pit is passed from hand to hand, no one dancer ever bearing his whole weight.

The other two vertical ribbons must have been local or express tracks, because after a moment, we came to a spot where the three ribbons were connected by a horizontal series of ramps as baffling as any cloverleaf our highway engineers back on Earth ever erected. The wayship curved to follow the living metal road through a horizontal slant to reach an on ramp. We crossed a narrower thread of metal to a faster-moving ribbon, the express.

There was considerable jostling as we were slung at high speed from a straight vertical fall to a sideways circular slide to a second straight vertical faster-speed fall, so I put my arms around Abby again and let the hull of the rowboat slam me, not her.

2. Untouchable

“This sucks!” I said. “In my world, you step into a car the size of a closet, and push a button with a number on it, and go up or down without any discomfort. And there is soft, annoying music playing in the background.”

Abby squirmed uncomfortably. Her voice issued from somewhere in my armpit. “Comforts adorn the stream-paths for the high slaves, freeborn, and nobles. Where we are now, this stream-path, is for lepers and mummies, kinslayers and Unclean folk. Do your people really play music for them in your world?”

“Yeah. We have a special kind of music for the Unclean folk. It’s called heavy metal. But even for freight, this glass rowboat thingie is not a very elegant engineering solution. And does everyone have to carry around a dead man’s hand?”

She said, “I was raised by a corpse-handling family. You are not to touch me.”

“Oh, sorry,” I said and let her go. She kind of slid out of my hands into the stern of the boat, which was acting as the floor now. She probably thought I was a child molester or something. “Look, I did not mean to invade your personal space, I thought you might get slapped against the hull if…”

She said, “When we find Master Ossifrage, he can cleanse you.”

“Cleanse me from wha– Oh, Good God! You did NOT just say that!” Because I realized only then what she meant. She did not object to me touching her; she objected to my being touched by her.

Her stupid world had taught her that she was contaminated.

She flinched when I raised my voice. I reminded myself not to raise my voice to her ever again. Stupid world.

I said gently, “Little sister, you asked me if what I said before was make-believe. It is not. In my land, we hold the truth to be self-evident that all men are created equal, and are endowed by our Creator with certain inalienable rights, among them, life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

“But you would not shake hands with me before…”

“That was because my hands were covered in blood! I did not want to dirty your mittens.”

Behind her lenses, her big brown eyes were big with astonishment. “You thought you would taint me?”

“Never be ashamed to ask me for help. Never hesitate to ask me to protect you. I am your own private Abomination, and I am not more or less unclean than you or anyone else. You understand?”

“How can I understand? Some men are born noble, and others born base. Is a king the same as a swineherd? Don’t they have untouchables in your world?”

“Not in the civilized parts. In my country, the Untouchables are heroic lawmen who gun down rumrunners with roaring Tommy-guns during the Roaring Twenties. They’re heroes.”

“Unbelievable!”

“It is one of those unbelievable things humans have to believe to be human.”

“It has never been thus in the Dark Tower.”

I wondered how long never was. “Who built this stupid Dark Tower? Where did it come from?”

“Nimrod the Mighty established the foundations by virtue of lore he learned of the magician Janus. There was a time when a great flood swallowed the land. The waters stood fifteen cubits higher than Mount Argaeus in Antitaurus. When the seas receded, the magicians resolved to build the tower higher than all mountains, and great enough to hold all the people, that no deluge should ever again have the power to destroy us.”

I blinked. Something about what she said sounded familiar, as if I had seen it in an episode of some sci-fi show I watched as a kid, but I could not place it.

There were flood myths from all around the world in my world, so many of them that some people used that as an argument to prove it had never happened, I guess on the theory that tribes of people on different continents with no communication with each other will always, naturally, tell the same stories about the same event. Other people used the prevalence of flood myths as an argument that it did happen, on the theory that people would tend to remember worldwide disasters, and on slow news days, talk about it and tell their children about it.

But I had never heard a story of people trying to survive the next flood by preventative skyscraper construction. “Sounds like a wise precaution.”

“Nor could we be scattered by catastrophe, and whatever our lords imagined in their hearts to do, they could accomplish.” An uncharacteristic note of pride crept into her voice, which was a little ironic, considering who was talking.

I wondered if black slaves in the antebellum South ever boasted about the glories of Southern cotton production, or eunuchs in Turkey ever boasted about how many Harem guards the great Sultan had unmanned. It is a natural thing to do, I guess, but still…

She continued: “It was not hundreds of years, but thousands, ere the Dark Tower reached to its full measure. The blood of numberless slaves toiling under the lash is said to mortar every stone.”

“Don’t gross me out.”

“Whole generations of workmen were born and lived and died in the upper work camps during the building, never having set foot on the ground.”

“Enough about your stupid tower. I told Emmy-Drinky I would knock it down, and I will, even if I have to ram it with an asteroid.”

“Do you have that power?” Her voice echoed astonishment.

“No, not anything remotely like that.”

“Then why do you boast that you can….”

“Because hope springs eternal where angels fear to tread and I am an optimist. Or an idiot. Or both. An idioptimist. I’ll find a way.”

One of the corpses in a glass vessel near us slowly turned its head. Empty eyesockets glared at me, and fleshless teeth grimaced.

“Is that dead guy– supposed to be moving like that?” I muttered to Abby, but I grinned back at the moving corpse and gave him a nonchalant wave of my hand.

3. Heliography

It’s not impossible to nap standing up, slumped against the side of a giant beer-bottle-shaped elevator. I woke with a laugh to the sight of lights flashing in my eyes.

“Why are you laughing?” said Abby, who was crouched, no doubt in less comfort than I was, but also complaining less than I had been. (I have not written down all the bellyaching and whining I did, because I am the one telling the story. To make up for that, just picture in your mind that a lot more grousing went on.)

“I had a dream I was in a great glass elevator in a chocolate factory run by a nutbag hermit with a tribe of pygmy slaves—and, lo and behold, I wake up! And things are even weirder. What are those lights?” Because a beam as if from a lighthouse flashed up the endless, titanic well down which we were still descending.

A moment later, we passed what looked like a sideways lighthouse, and an apparatus that looked like a parabolic mirror with a ball of wood at the focus. The wood was blazing like a bonfire, but not being burned, and flags made of glass or of canvas were passing quickly before it. As it receded behind, I saw the colored lights blinking rapidly. Looking down, I saw at the edge of sight another lighthouse just like it.

“Heliograph messages,” I said. “Makes sense in a place where radios don’t work, I guess. Darned clever, your people.”

Abby was staring through the glass of the floor. “You speak as if we are the barbarians from the wild and you from the city. If magicians were not clever, they would not be feared.” She spoke without turning her head.

“Hey, this is not my universe, little sister. I don’t know what to expect. For example, I did not expect anyone to discover my birdcage was empty. Those signals might be alarms about us.”

She was staring down thoughtfully. “The Tower is very large. Very. We are not the only ones the magicians and their slaves might be seeking. Brother Barley, the Big Man, told me this many times. I was told not to flee from alarms, not to show guilt nor fear if guards walked by.” I could not tell if Se’u-Ahu (barley brother) was a title or a name.

“Good advice, but Emmy-Drinky’s plan was to have me hauled to where Penny was, and have me cut up in front of her. It’s one of those tortures that you can only do to guys who can’t die, I guess.”

“What planets in which houses?”

“Are you asking what time was this supposed to happen?”

“Yes. Did he mention the hour?”

“No. I don’t know. I really wish I knew what was happening to her right now. Can you read their signals?”

She straightened up. “No, but I know the red-red-green-white is a signal to the Exarch patrols, who are only used to hunt Otherworldlies. When the police lamps are lit, any low slaves below the middle rank are supposed to halt where they are, and high slaves can continue until they come to a door or gate or grating.”

“So you’ve been in a drill like this before, when they light the alarms?”

“I saw such lights when they were lit for me.” Her voice was haunted. “My woes began because I spared the life of a slave, gave her gold from my hand, and told her to flee.”

I had to coax the tale out of her. Whether I should have or not, I still don’t know.

4. Hope’s Tale

“It was not always thus. I was born a shanukkatu etellutu, a princess among princesses, one step below the royal families. I was Bashtubaraquin, of the high clan of Cygnus, and my name was called Puqqut’alu.” (Her original name meant Steadfast-in-Hope. From the sound of it, Pagutu, She-Monkey, was a cruel mockery of that name.) “In the Court of the Crown of Crowns, my Court-Name was Elmessil and the seneschal bowed his face to the floor when he spoke it.” (It meant Amber, or any precious colored stone.)

“This is how I came to lose my names.

“Until my seventh summer, the year of the opposition of Saturn and Venus, I was adored and adorned, and fed on honey and thick cream and fed on fruit from the trees that grow in lands where no man walks, beyond the southern sea, brought by soaring ship or sailing ship of those flotillas my father commanded, for he was high in fortune and rich in wealth, and benevolent stars shone on him. No harsh word ever touched my ear, nor unlovely sight my eye, nor whip my back.”

Abby continued, “I had thirty maidservants whose loyalty I was given, and sixty slave-girls whose lives I owned. That year my birthday anniversary fell on a great feastday called the Feast of Immensities, where all the lesser houses and chambers renewed their vows of fealty to my father’s house, and made their sacrifices.

“In the watches of the night before the feast, as no more than a girlish prank, it was predicted I would sneak away from my handmaidens, and see the servile reaches of the Tower, the narrow warrens of the lower orders, the lazarets of the sick, the pits of the slaves.

“Of course the episode was known for years in advance, but my father and the star-mages permitted it, thinking it would bring me the needed pride and scorn I lacked, and so I would know that I was born high among the highest, and other peoples low among the low.

“Instead I saw a mother weeping for her child whose death had come unexpectedly, the family being too poor to pay a mage to cast their horoscope. I saw an old man who did not know the day and hour of his death. And I saw corpses lying in the corridors like dogs, with none to haul the bodies away, for no mortician had foretold to the untouchables where and when to go to take the dead away.

“The cunning slave-girl who was my closest playmate in my childhood had disguised me in rags, and by stealthy ways led me out the servant’s doors into these low places. Her lip quivered, and she was sad as we walked, for it was fated that when we were caught, as is the custom, she and not I would be lashed for it.

“I soon understood why she went ever lower into the warrens, despite her fear of the lash, for she had a second purpose in coming. One of those poor wretches wasted with disease I saw that hour was her own mother, claimed by fever. In pain and torment, raving, not seeing her own daughter, she breathed her dying breath. The simplest of herbs to cure her would have cost less than the smallest ring on my slenderest finger.

“My slave-girl wept, clutching her mother’s shrunken corpse upon a filthy mat in a crowded ward. It did not seem right that my slave-girl must go from her mother’s funeral to the whipping post. Often she had told me tales of her people: their home world had been destroyed by the Dark Tower, and they wandered through the twilight from world to world, in houses carried on the backs of carts, as singers for the poor and petty thieves, but free as a bird flying. My heart was filled with compassion, and so I freed her, and told her to run away and find her people, and be free.

“Her name was Hadu.” (The name meant Brings-Joy.) “And hers was the only escape in endless years of history no starmage foresaw, and no slavedriver prevented.

“In the small hours of the night, when Jupiter was at the zenith, I came alone back to my rooms, happy that I had done good for another, and pleased to doff my rags and adorn myself once more in fineness.

“That same evening when I came to the Feast of Immensities, there was no place set for me. When the Master Cook consulted with the Governor of the Feast, it was discovered that there was no mention of me on the horoscope cast for that feast, which told how many places to set and whom to seat where.

“But, earlier, my Stewardess of Handmaidens had laid out the proper attire for me, a summer tunic white as fullers can whiten, a shawl with a purple hem embroidered by gold thread and beads of nacre, and a skirt with tiered fringe alternately dyed crimson, jet, saffron, and lavender, a wide belt tied in the back with a bow whose tails were so long a servant girl must carry them; and on my hair a scarf bedizened with gold bezants and silver shells that chimed and rang when I tossed my head.

“I recall this dress well, for I was never to wear fine linen again.

“But the horoscope for the wardrobe had been cast the day before, whereas the feast horoscope had been cast that day, and it was the midnight between when I told Joy to depart from me forever, and seek her people and her freedom.

“One of my tutors was at the feast, seated at the mid-rank servant’s table. I recall how he spoke kindly to me, his face wrinkled with puzzlement, asking of my wellbeing, for he had only that hour, before the feast bell rang, cast a horoscope for his roster of students, and seen I was not listed, and assumed I would be sick or perhaps slain on the morrow and therefore absent from lessons.

“I saw my mother, her face was the only white face in the chamber, and it was a face filled with great fear. She arose from her seat without being excused, and tried to catch me in her arms and flee from that place, but was prevented. At the highest table, the Astrologers and Chaldeans had heard the whispers running through the room, and brought out their golden compasses, and read them.

“And as suddenly as a candle is snuffed, my life was ended. My mother was pulled weeping from my arms, nor was my father present, being away on a sea voyage. The eyes of every man and woman, lord and high servant, low servant and slave, even the lowest potboy peering through the kitchen doors were filled with loathing and fear, for I had become an abomination.

“I was ordered to report to the Chambers of Inquiry, and I walked from the feast hall, and then walked quickly, and then ran.

“Lord Astute started up and shouted, and called every man there a fool. But the word he said, escape, was not known to any but the scholars in the room, so I fled from his voice while he called after me, hoping none would understand his warning.

“You see, only he realized that the Inquiry Chamber horoscope would have no prediction of my going there, and the guards no prediction of where I would go if I hid, and therefore some man would have to escort me.

“But they understood. I was not the only foreverborn our world has known. Within the minute, the lamps were lit, the doors of all the corridors were sealed. The main doors to the local stairwell swung to with a terrible noise before my nose, and I was trapped.

“The men and mages, scholars and warlords from the feast gathered about me, staring down. They debated who should walk with me with his hand on mine to see I did not flee, and the debate turned dark with acrimony. No one was willing to go, because his action would be unforeseen and the stars would curse him. The higher Astrologers commanded Lord Astute to take me, because he had called them fools. And in that moment he grabbed me cruelly by the hair, so I must scurry along with my head held at his belt, and he whispered his death name in my ear.

“And because no one foreknew our footsteps, he took me not to the Inquirers, but to the pens where his janissaries were kept, and he said I was to be trained and drilled with weapons of many sorts, so that I could assassinate such women and children whose deaths would please him. I was to be a deadliest dagger hidden in his hand because my crimes could never be foretold nor foreseen.

“My mother perished in torture. She was tied between two transparent boats, one above the other with head and feet protruding, and set in the hot sun in a fetid pool, while honey and sweet cream were forced down her throat, and coated her limbs. The space between the boats soon was filled with her diarrhea. Wasps and stinging ants and other vile insects were gathered by the sun’s heat into her dung, and multiplied, and entered at her bowels. Her wounds turned putrid and rotted while the insects ate her alive. But she was not allowed to die of hunger and thirst, as this would have been too swift. While she endured, each day for an hour I was placed in a small cage above the pool to watch. I was beaten when I showed no pain on my face and did not cry out to her, because Master Slaughterbench wished for a favorable notice from those courtiers and rumor-criers whose business it is to critique and comment on the cleverness and artistry of torment.

“You see, she had broken the highest and oldest of all our laws. She had washed me as a child with the secret rite of the Washerman, which comes from the far world that was her home. At that time, I was a second-born, a foreverborn, immune from the stars, but since I had never done a perfectly sinless act, never shown compassion, the washing waited seven years to wash me clean.

“And no matter her pain, I knew her death would carry her to the bright lands above the stars, where they have no power, and she would be beyond their reach forever.”

5. Large, Wide, Glorious Place

I wanted her to remove her mask to wipe her tears, but she consulted a dial from her pouch, and said the air was not yet thick enough to sustain her.

I talked with her for a time about her mother’s death. Never mind what we said. It’s private. We prayed together, and were silent together for a while.

The eerie sights of the Dark Tower, temples and strange brass machines, or balconies and empty windows slid past silently as we descended, level after level.

A while later I broke the silence with a question. I was still puzzled about how their system—heck, how their whole universe—could be made to work. “If she knew, Joy knew, knew for sure, that she would get a beating for sneaking out with you, why did she do it? Or why not just do it on another day?”

Abby said, “Perhaps before that hour came, she had vowed not to go, and suffer whatever curse befell. Perhaps not. At that hour, the lure of mischief was stronger than the threat of a caning. Is it not the same with your people? You come from the world that killed the One God when he visited you. Do not your people know the One God sees all, judges all, and no one escapes his grasp, or outruns the reach of his arm?”

“Well, not everyone on my world believes in God.”

She said, “I speak not of men in madhouses. What of those that have seen and know? Do they never break the law, knowing the judge is inescapable? So it is with us and the star-gods.”

“Even so, what was the temptation? Just to see things? Well, never mind. I guess I understand that impulse all too well.”

Abby said, “There’s a song about the daughter of a magician who trades uniforms with her maidservant to sneak down to see her lover, a bold captain of dragoons, and she gets caught when the police lamps light up. She ends up on the hooks, watching him die, and he has rat cages affixed to his face and flesh. It is very sad. Joy and I heard that song, and wanted to dress up and find ourselves lost in some large, wide, glorious place where our every step was not painted on the floor before we took it, if only for an hour.” She sighed wistfully. “The Hebrew slaves sing it. They have all the best songs.”

“What the who? Who sings it?”

“The Sons of Abraham. They became the slaves to toil upon the Tower when Nimrod defeated Abraham in battle on the Philistine Way below Mount Megiddo. Abraham refused to bow and worship Semiramis, the Queen, and pay her honors due a goddess.”

I would have asked her more, but at that moment, a half-hairless dog-faced man came around the lower corner of the golden wayship to which our bottle-shaped boat was clamped.

6. Cynocephali

The thing had hands on all four paws so it looked like a grotesque monkey made from a bad verbal description. It also had a leather belt, and carried weapons: a sickle, a crossbow, a quiver of bolts.

Half-hairless is the only way to describe it. It was shaved like a French Poodle, with thick fur around its head and upper torso, and a mane along its spine, but its arms and legs and hips were naked and pink, and we were treated to the sight of its flapping gonads and bright purple buttocks cheeks. Its tail was shaved too, like the tail of a rat, which I thought was a terrible thing to do, even to a wolf-monster.

The thing was clinging to the vertical surface of the living metal road like a giant spider, and it ran at full speed straight upward, scuttling swiftly, not climbing with the slow care of a mountain-climber.

A second wolf loped into view, and a third, racing upward toward us. As fast as we were descending, my stomach was descending faster.

I saw now that these wolves were coming from the cab or prow of the wayship to which our rowboat was attached, or, if you want to think of it as a building rather than a freight train, they were coming out of the lowest story, the spot directly below us. They had their noses pressed to the wall-like surface of the vertical road, and were casting back and forth, scenting. Then they climbed onto the golden surface of the wayship, and began clambering up and through the bottle-shaped vessels, like the one we occupied, working their way car by car up toward us.

Abby said suddenly, “Will you slay me if I ask you?”

“Is it that bad?” I asked, shocked at her tone of horror. “And the answer is no. What are the chances they will pass by without finding us?”

She said, “Does your world have a magic art that makes scents scentless?”

“Lots of deodorant companies are working on it, but, nope. Nothing like that.”

“Perhaps do you know the art calling the mist, to walk unseen among mortals?”

“I got a stick made of cuttlebone. Me mash heads. Me Ilya; You Jane.”

“My name is Abanshaddi,” She said primly.

“Sorry. Trying to be serious. Failing.”

“I cannot throw myself from the vessel to commit honorable suicide,” she said glumly. “It is one of the things forbidden to those granted the foreverness of a second birth. I suppose you could leap, but it would not kill you. In a way, you are as I am, then. We are both fated for the tormentors. I am afraid of the hooks. They will make me worship the star-gods again….”

“HA!”

My laughter interrupted her gloomy prediction in mid-predict.

“I am like you, little sister, only bigger and meaner,” I said, cracking my knuckles. It doesn’t always work, but this time I got a nice, loud series of pops from my knuckles. I took that as a good sign.

I smiled at her. “You forget that these vermin are now facing a Never-dying hidden by a Forever-born. You said your power comes from above the stars. Well, mine must come from the hells below! We got it covered, little sister! The future is unknown, wide and free. As long as you are behind me, anything can happen. Anything!”

She flinched at my grin, no doubt awed by my big, square, yellow horse teeth. “You cannot fight them. The living metal holds them to the stream-path; you will be as if walking on nails, and fall…”

“As your big brother,” I interrupted her, “it is my job to go out there and kick their doggy butts to doggy perdition. Wrap your chain around me and fix the hook in somewhere that will support my weight.”

Turns out the prow of the boat was equipped with a winch designed to bear a lot more weight than mine, and the chain whipped itself through a quick half-hitch like a snake, all by itself.

She said, “You have no chance to prevail.”

“What are they?”

“These are human souls wearing cloaks of wolves. See how their fur is cut? This kind despoils maidens, and they do not spare girl-children for their youth.”

These were the same monsters the Dark Lord was going to sic on Penny. That was why Abby asked me to kill her first. The stab of hatred in my head was like a migraine.

Abby said, “They are set apart and sacred to the goddess of rapists, Lilitu, so it is a blasphemy to fight them. But their power is in their hair, and turns all blows, so if you strike where they are bald, there alone your weapon can draw blood.”

The chain slid up like a freezing cold and darned uncomfortable worm around my flesh. I showed her how to form it into the kind of harness you wear for a parachute: through the crotch, around the waist, over both shoulders, around the chest, and under the arms.

By that time, there was no question of cowering down and trying to pretend to be mummies. One of the wolf-headed man-things gave tongue. Their eyes gleamed in the gloom like coals from a dying fire, and they loped up toward the side of the car, skipping lightly from glass rowboat to rowboat, tongues lolling, jaws grinning.

They looked like they were having a grand old time. Probably had read their horoscopes that morning, and they all knew they were promised they’d die in bed of old age, surrounded by bitches in heat and big-eyed puppies.

“Light ’em up, Abby. I am going to need to see out there,” I said.

Her cloak pins started glowing with yellow light, and my crotch mask lit up like a Coleman lantern. I hope when they make this into a movie, they just give the actor playing me a miner’s helmet with a lamp on it or something.

I kicked the shell open, shouting, “You are in for a surprise, you sons of bitches!” And I pushed off with my legs.

“GERONIMO!”

7. Dogfight

Turns out, rapelling down a sheer surface is fun and easy when you have a chain that elongates by itself. I was in the obtuse angle formed by the prism-shaped gold wayship car and the blue living metal road, when, as warned, the surface of living metal turned into a bed of inch-long spikes driven right into my unshod foot. So I slipped and was dangling head-downward, when the first wolf-headed thing loped straight up the wall toward me. The chain retracted and yanked me up like a yoyo on a string just in time to jerk my head out from the snapping jaws. His spit was in my hair and I smelled his breath.

In the jumping light of my glowing codpiece, the beast’s hairdo looked even worse than it looked at a distance. Only the top and the nose of the wolf-skull had hair on it. Its cheeks and lower jaw were clean-shaven, as was its neck. Ugly.

I began to realize what a bad idea it was to get into a fight while rock-climbing, or while window-washing a skyscraper, when I banged into the vertical road-surface again—and nails unfolded from the living metal and stabbed into my buttocks and left leg. Ouch, ouch and gawddamittall ouch.

Wolf soldier number two, let’s call him the Poodle from Hell, just scuttled up the wall past me, pausing only to make a snort in its nose, and it headed like an arrow for the glass rowboat where Abby was trying to guide my little marionette show down here.

In case I was not clear in my description, I was not the one making the chain grow long and grow short, since I did not know how that was done. She was the one who had just yoyoed me to safety a second ago.

Like I said, Hellpoodle was smart enough to figure out where my weak spot was, and dashed on past, his four naked humanoid hands slapping the living metal like a drum tattoo.

The first wolf, the one who had snapped and missed, let’s call him Big Bad, came rushing toward me in a sinuous slither, his body hugging the surface, looking more like a lizard than a snake, his head jerking back and forth too fast and too unpredictable to hit.

He opened his mouth, and there was a snap of noise and he shot me with his teeth.

That’s what it looked like. Little sharp splinters of white shot out of his mouth as if he had a gun down his esophagus.

One incisor bullet hit me in the cheek, drawing blood, and one hit me in the forehead, drawing more blood, and other teeth went echoing as ricochets off the metal to either side of my face. He was trying to get me in the eyes.

I raised my hand to block my face, which is what he expected, because he lunged and snapped and closed his teeth on my arm and through my arm to the bone. There was an explosion inside his mouth, as he used his esophagus-gun at point blank range, and I felt the bone crack under the impacts.

In any normal wolf-versus-human fight, that probably would have been game over for any human aside from a U.S. Marine. Humans don’t fight all that well with broken arms. But I simply decided, in defiance of all rules about normal biology, that my broken arm must still work, on account of I was a Lalilummutillut, one of the Undying Host.

I don’t know if that had any effect, or if I was just crazy-high from adrenaline and battle-endorphins, but I slammed my nightstick of cuttlebone into his face hard enough to drive his teeth deeper into my flesh, and then straightened my not-so-broken arm and slammed him against the wall surface. That did not seem to do much to him—he had fur on his back, which Abby implied was armor—and he raised his rear two hands to try to rip out my guts. He had a knife in one rear hand. I managed to get both legs in the way before he disemboweled me, took a knife to my thigh, and then merely straightened both legs, and meanwhile slammed the nightstick into his gums. He had no invulnerable hair on his gums, so I got his jaws off my arm. He had no hair on his lower belly, or covering his groin, so I kicked the fight out of him. So Big Bad went sailing grandly away into the air, letting out a long, mournful howl that Dopplered down the scale.

Bye-bye, Big Bad.

If sex is as good as all the rock songs and toothpaste commercials and boring R-rated movies make it out to be, I doubt ecstasy would be as satisfying as what I felt during that half second while I saw that four-handed freak spinning away like parade confetti, with so much time to think before he hit bottom, tens of thousands of feet of it, because if it were this satisfying, then no one would ever get divorced. (Tell whatever future wife I may have that I will be happy to be proved wrong on the wedding night, by the way.)

Let me mention what wolf number three was up to. Let’s call him Lon Chaney. He had a little more hair than the other two, and some of it was gray.

He had taken a position on the wayship next door, half hidden between two bullet-shaped glass boats, and was dangling precariously by one leg, and drawing back his crossbow string with the other three. His crossbow was one of those kind where you put your foot into a stirrup while clutching the string with both hands, and push your foot to cock it, or, in this case, your rear left monkey-hand.

Abby screamed. I looked up, and saw Hellpoodle trying to get the shell-like lid of the glass rowboat open, and Abby was using her chain-fu to try to keep it shut. A loop of the chain wound around anchor points on the lid and the hull, and the chain was contracting, trying to force the lid shut. But Hellpoodle had his sickle-sword jammed into the crack, and was turning it sidewise to keep a crack open, and teeth-shaped darts were flying from his mouth and bouncing around the inside of the rowboat. Hellpoodle was upside-down, clinging like a giant spider to the blue glass surface of the rowboat by two hands, with his other two hands on the sickle. I saw that the chain that came to me hung from the prow of the boat and was going between his legs.

So I put my feet on the living metal and ran across a bed of nails. I was trying to kill two wolves with one stone: I ran toward Lon Chaney, trying to sack-the-quarterback him before he got his crossbow up, while hoping the swing of my chain as I ran would tangle and dislodge Hellpoodle before he killed Abby.

It almost worked. Sort of. Sort of not at all, I mean.

Hellpoodle actually laughed a very human sounding laugh, flourished his sickle-sword, and cut the chain in two when I tried to trip him with it.

I was suddenly in free fall, and Lon Chaney simply scuttled spiderman-like up the sheer wall and looked at me with cool amusement while I flew past him, screaming like a banshee and whipping a long chain after me like a kite tail.

The chain wrapped around me, even though broken, was still sentient and prehensile, and it whipped out and snagged the prow of a boat as I was looking down over the infinite drop. Skydiving with no parachute was the story of my life.

Weight returned with a jerk at my waist like a mule kick.

I was yanked in a mathematically perfect quarter circle of arc terminating at a point where I was smashed face-first into the wall; I fell vertically, and ended up wedged in the crack where the pointy stern of a glass boat curved down and blended into the gold surface of the wayship holding the boat by its keel. The wayship hull and glass boat hull were fused together, but the stern of the boat was not flush with the wayship, and that was where I landed. So I did not fall to my non-fatal street-pizzahood thirty thousand feet below.

In the movie version, the director will include a nice long shot of my white cuttlebone nightstick making a graceful parabolic arc out into the darkness—but I did not see myself drop it, as far as my slam-woggled brain could tell, my only weapon had simply vanished.

I said, “Did you see where it went?” And then I realized I was talking to a glowing skull mask between my legs, and told myself to wake up and keep fighting.

Shaking my head made my vision darken and blur all the more, and I squirmed and tried to unwedge myself and I looked up just in time to see two things at once.

First: Hellpoodle was dead. He was hanging by his neck like you’ve seen in old Westerns by a chain that was red hot, and he wore a bib of running blood. The chain he had severed had simply noosed him with its free end. The fur on the back of his neck was not burning, but his throat, which was naked, looked like someone had taken the heating element from an electric stove and garroted him with it. Which, come to think of it, someone had. I made a mental note to have Charles de Gaulle give Abby a medal for keeping a cool head under tooth-fire. I was so addled that it took me a moment to remember de Gaulle was dead. Wellington or Lincoln would have to decorate her.

Second: Lon Chaney was clinging by three legs somewhat above me to the surface of this second gold wayship where I now was stuck, the one parallel to ours, which he had been using as his firing position. His other leg held the crossbow, which he displayed to me in a front-view aspect, as if asking me to admire the workmanship of the business end.

Lon Chaney had the same patient look on his doggy face I get on my face when I am waiting in the blind for the deer to move into the shot: eyes half-narrowed and mouth half-open (so the deer won’t hear my breathing). This time, I was the deer. When I craned back my head to see what was happening to Abby, I was exposed.

I heard that twang of the cord after I felt the bolt enter my chest. Single lung shot.

It was a good shot under difficult conditions in bad lighting on the roof of a speeding train, and he had to miss the prows and keels of other glass boats between us, so instead of swearing like a sailor, I decided to award him a victory.

Recalled my acting lessons from the time I played the magical bear in the school play, I writhed a bit, and slumped over. I resisted the impulse to croak out the word Rosebud.

Since I was wedged in, I could relax like a corpse without falling the infinite fall. The glass hull was right under my nose, and I could see a funhouse mirror reflection of Lon Chaney dimly in the glass.

His head was turned toward Abby’s location. I was in a sweat, because if he started that way, I had no way to climb after him. But then in the reflection, I saw the sleek canine head turn toward me. Even though the glass was dim, in the reflection I could see above and behind me the glint of his nocturnal eyes like two coppery mirrors, or two burning matches, approaching.

He slid smoothly down the golden hull surface toward me. I had some half-baked notion of grabbing the crossbow from him if he got closer, but he halted.

Twenty yards away. Fifteen. Ten. I tried to urge him within arm’s reach by radiating hypnotic waves from my brain, but that was not one of the superpowers I was given.

He stopped.

Does swearing count as blasphemy if you do it silently in your heart? I decided to ask Father Flannery next time I went to confession. If I were so lucky.

I sat there, playing possum while I watched him hang head-downward and cock another bolt with three hands.

Cripes, but I wished I had something to throw at him during the moment when there was only one leg holding him to the surface.

This time, I heard the string go thwang before the bolt entered my back. He struck some major vein. I could see the blood pumping from my back. Even with my childhood acting skills of pretending to be a bear, I could not convincingly impersonate a man whose heart had stopped beating.

Lon Chaney spoke in a sonorous, delicate language, in the lofty accents of an aristocrat. I swear he sounded like a guy who would introduce Masterpiece Theatre on public TV.

“Immortalis es, ut mihi videtur,” he said, with a slight lilt of laughter to his voice. “Rationalis creatura sum: noli te versari in me fallendo. Si lubet.”

Latin. It was one of the languages I had studied. I could translate it… that is, while sitting with my Lewis’ Dictionary or Souter’s Glossary open at my elbow, or Harden’s Vulgate, a pencil with a good eraser for erasing plenty of mistakes, a bright lamp, a clean desk, and loads of time: hanging sideways over a sickening abyss while bloodied in combat while panicking about underfed little girls dressed in monkey-masks was a different matter. But I knew some of the words.

Deathless, you seem. I am a rational creature: do not busy yourself in deceiving me. If you please.

8. Dog Latin

I raised my head. “Okay, dogbreath. You got me.”

This time I wiggled like a salmon, and managed to get out of the wedge without falling to my non-doom. I braced one foot against the gold and one against the blue glass.

I shook my broken arm, and said a prayer to Saint Michael the Archangel. He was listening, or someone was, because there was a snap of noise, and my broken bone unbroke itself right then and there. I yanked the crossbow bolts out of my back and chest and flung them spinning away with a casual nonchalance. I flexed my fingers, smacked my fist into my palm, and beckoned the wolfie thing to come closer.

“Here, doggy, doggy! Good doggy! Come to papa!”

He removed the bolt from his crossbow and carefully returned it to his quiver. The mouth of the quiver was shaped like a fish trap with inward-pointing teeth, to prevent the bolts from spilling. He pulled the trigger and twanged the empty string, and used his left hand and right foot to strap the weapon in place on his furry back.

Then he said something rapidly in Latin that I could not follow, but the tone of voice was clearly smirking.

I shouted to the Wolf-thing, “Out of many, one! He blesses our beginnings! A new order of the world! Uh… The thing speaks for itself! This for that! After this, therefore because of this!… Thus passes the glory of the world! She Flies With Her Own Wings!” That was about all the non-prayer Latin I could remember off the top of my head, and I hoped it would rile him up a bit, and lure him within reach.

He said something else in a very non-riled up tone of voice. I could not follow it, except I think the phrase Verba sine ratione meant ‘words without reason’ and O bacchabunde meant ‘O thou raving Maenad’. Quaeso and Precer was ‘I beg you’ or ‘prithee’ and Venia tua was ‘pardon me’.

He was asking me very nicely to stop spouting nonsense.

I shook my fist at him. “I’ve spouted nonsense my whole life, and I ain’t stopping now! Come here and make me, dog breath!” I tried to remember the word for carrion-eater. “Cariosos voratore!”

That must not have been right, because all he did was tilt his head, open his jaws slightly and let his tongue loll out. (I might have called him a frequently-turning ship-keel. Which is not much of an insult, really.)

I shouted up to Abby. “Little sister! I am alive!”

She called back, “I know that.” Her tone was one of motherly patience with a slowwitted child. “You are of the host that cannot die.”

Lon Chaney cocked his ear. I reminded myself that he could understand anything she said the same way I could. It was only my side of the conversation he did not get.

“Tell the wolfman here I challenge him to a wrestling match, no holds barred, first guy to be thrown loses!”

She repeated it. The wolfman answered in a stream of sonorous words that sounded like poetry, the dactylic hexameter of Virgil. This guy was really creeping me out. Werewolves were supposed to be ravenous mindless monsters, not the well-spoken reincarnation of Rupert of Hentzau or Don Juan.

She called down to me, “The Daughter of Wolf-Nursed Romulus, Birthed under the red War-star, and Triscurion of the Exarch Watch Oeolyca the Swift-running of the Host of the Cynocephali respectfully declines your offer of personal combat. She says that stars have not foretold her death this day; nor any victory.”

I squinted. Come to think of it, the dangling gonads Big Bad and Hellpoodle had been sporting were not in evidence here, nor were the monster’s flanks and hindquarters nude. I wondered if having more hair meant having a higher station.

The she-wolfman, or bitch-woman, or whatever you call a distaff-side werewolf spoke again, another stream of fluid Latin dactyls. Darn critter was beginning to make me feel uncivilized, and that made me want to bash her skull.

“She says that you are welcome to the curse that comes of attempting to becloud the stars, but she prefers not to step outside the predicted path. Triumph obtained without blood hot in the mouth is less sweet, but is more sure.”

With no more ado, Oeolyca the Swift-running turned and ran swiftly down the sheer surface of the living metal. I soon lost sight of her between the golden wayship caravans that seemed not to be moving and the glass boats that seemed to be sliding down the wall of living metal like raindrops on a windowpane.

Perhaps Oeolyca was running toward the nearest heliograph station, because I saw a spotlight beam flashing in many colors against a golden mirror hanging, an acre wide, like a banner in the gloom, and the reflected beam glanced against a mirror even more distant, one that twinkled like a star.

Because my eyes were turned down, I almost did not see it happen. I heard Abby call out. I whirled, and slipped, and grabbed at the slippery prow of the glass boat I was precariously balanced on.

The bowsprit of the golden wayship on which Abby’s glass boat was perched suddenly opened. Out from this opening came a long hook of living metal, which elongated, reached back, and snagged Abby’s boat by its tow-ring, and swung it dizzyingly out over the abyss. I watched helplessly.

We fell past a wharf which had a pirate plank sticking out in midair, just like the wharf from which we had launched. The plank wobbled like rubber, almost bending double under the pressure imparted to it as it was struck by the passing wayship. But there was Abby’s bullet-shaped glass vessel, left behind, caught by the nose ring, bobbing up and down and up and down.

Through the glass sides of the fast-receding boat, I could see Abby staring down at me, her hands spread against the glass, but the monkey-mask still grinning its empty grin.

You would think I would be frantic because, now that she was gone, whatever I did next would be foreseen and foretold by the Astrologers. Nope. That didn’t worry me. The only thought that kept rattling around in my brain was this one:

I had not ever gotten a look at her face.

Here ends The Darkest Tower

To Be Continued in the Next Volume of Unwithering Realm

The Lord of the Black Land

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

Table of Contents

- The Oubliette of the Air
- The Lord of Magicians
- Falconress and Marineress
- Not Quite Saint Anthony
- Born of the Forever Nature
- The Stream-Path of the Unclean Servants
- Rational Animals
- Castalia House