Date: 2015-07-03 07:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Fantasy; Science Fiction; Vampires; Fiction; Urban Fantasy; Science Fiction & Fantasy; Adventure; Alien Invasion; First Contact
Description: SOMEWHITHER is the first part of A TALE OF THE UNWITHERING REALM, a new science fantasy series from the science fiction author John C. Wright. It is an adventure, it is a romance, and it is a coming of age story of a young man who is not a man, in a world that is only one among many. It is a tale of a greater and darker evil with longer reach than anything he could imagine, of despair without bounds, of pain beyond measure, and of the faith required to surmount all three. It is a story of inexorable destiny written in the stars and the stubborn courage that is required to defy it. Ilya Muromet
Publisher: Silver Empire

Copyright Information

Somewhither
Being the First Part of A Tale of the Unwithering Realm
John C. Wright

Published by 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.

Copyright © 2015 by John C. Wright
All rights reserved

Editor: Vox Day
Cover Design: JartStar
Cover Illustration: Jeremiah Humphries
Version: 002

Somewhither

Being the First Part of A Tale of the Unwithering Realm

By John C. Wright

The men of the East may spell the stars,
And times and triumphs mark,
But the men signed of the cross of Christ
Go gaily in the dark.

G.K. Chesterton

NOWHITHER

The gates of heaven are lightly locked,
We do not guard our gold,
Men may uproot where worlds begin,
Or read the name of the nameless sin;
But if he fail or if he win
To no good man is told.

G.K. Chesterton

EVERWHITHER
EVERYWHITHER or ELSEWHITHER

The wise men know what wicked things
Are written on the sky,
They trim sad lamps, they touch sad strings,
Hearing the heavy purple wings,
Where the forgotten seraph kings
Still plot how God shall die

G.K. Chesterton

They have weirded Him to wander
till He bring within His hands
The water of eternal youth
from black-enchanted lands

Dorothy L. Sayers

WHITHERSOEVER

All wholesome advice they labor to destroy, saying, “The cause of thy sin is inevitably determined in heaven”; and “This did Venus, or Saturn, or Mars”: that man, forsooth, flesh and blood, and proud corruption, might be blameless; while the Creator and Ordainer of heaven and the stars is to bear the blame.

Saint Augustine of Hippo

ANYWHITHER

Night shall be thrice night over you,
And heaven an iron cope.
Do you have joy without a cause,
Yea, faith without a hope?

G.K. Chesterton

Acknowledgements

My grateful thanks to Nathan Smolin and Matan Arkin for their help in matters where the author’s scholarship failed.

Table of Contents

Cover

Somewhither

Chapter One: The Mad Scientist’s Beautiful Daughter

Chapter Two: The Haunted Museum
Chapter Three: The Door into Nowhere
Chapter Four: The Nothing Between Something
Chapter Five: If Death Should Overtake Me
Chapter Six: Bloodshed
Chapter Seven: The Ur Language
Chapter Eight: A Dark World Beneath
Chapter Nine: The Oubliette of the Air
Chapter Ten: The Lord of Magicians
Chapter Eleven: Falconress and Marineress
Chapter Twelve: Not Quite Saint Anthony
Chapter Thirteen: Born of the Forever Nature

Chapter Fourteen: The Stream-Path of the Unclean Servants

Chapter Fifteen: Rational Animals
Chapter Sixteen: Astray in Immensities
Chapter Seventeen: Plumber of the Dark Tower
Chapter Eighteen: Routine Police Procedure

Chapter Nineteen: Cylinder Seal and Cylindrical Cell

Chapter Twenty: The Nine-Star-Aligned Chamber

Chapter Twenty-One: Flying Creatures

Chapter Twenty-Two: Descending the Utter Dark Tower

Chapter Twenty-Three: Fury in the Funerary House

Chapter Twenty-Four: Of Words and Worlds

Chapter Twenty-Five: Fate of the Fated Rarities

Chapter Twenty-Six: Dark Elf Squire
Chapter Twenty-Seven: Damsel in Distress
Chapter Twenty-Eight: The Other Sons of Adam
Chapter Twenty-Nine: Brother Abomination
Chapter Thirty: Quaffs Blood Like Wine
Chapter Thirty-One: The Twilight Gate Opens

Chapter Thirty-Two: The Dreadnaught of the Air

Castalia House

Chapter One: The Mad Scientist’s Beautiful Daughter

1. My Question

“Dad, how many universes are there?”

“Only one, by definition, son,” he answered. “Hence the term universe.”

Spread out on the couch, still in his gear, my father spoke in a weary monotone, not raising his head, not opening his eyes. I was surprised to get even a grunt out of him, much less an answer, even if it was an answer that was not really an answer.

I prodded the fake log with a poker, but no sparks flew up. I tried to keep the frustration out of my voice. Depending on his answer, I would either be back upstairs asleep in ten minutes, or running wildly out of the house into the wide darkness before the dawn, at top speed.

It might be too late already. I wanted to take out my phone and look at the time but feared I might glimpse the message that was still glowing on the little screen.

“Let me ask it another way. What is reality?”

He heaved a weary sigh.

2. Before You Laugh

Before you ask, it was because of a girl. Before you laugh, tell me a better reason to dive headfirst off the edge of reality.

Her name was Penny Dreadful. Unless it wasn’t. I was in love. Unless I wasn’t.

Penny was a very pretty, witty and brave girl, as bold as a Marine platoon storming Iwo Jima. She was famous and rich, and way out of my league.

It wasn't her fault. It's not like she asked me to save her. Heck, she did not even know I was alive. Well, technically, she knew I was alive.

She saw me every day. She just couldn’t remember my name.

It’s Ilya, by the way.

Ilya Vseslavyevich Bessmertniy Saint Mitrophan Muromets.

And who in the world could recall a name like that? Aside from Russians, I mean. And most of them live in Marion County, fifty miles southwest over rough terrain backpacking, or one hundred miles by car, if you go by way of Portland. Or in Russia.

No one famous is named Ilya. Aside from the blond spy on MAN FROM U.N.C.L.E. reruns. That show’s been off the air since before the moonshot. I think my mother had a crush on the actor or something when she was a girl, which is how I got stuck with it.

I had been afraid my whole life to ask my father this one, haunting, huge, dread question. Had I never heard of her, nor met her, nor seen her emerald eyes, beheld her golden hair, nor heard her silver voice, I never would have found the nerve.

So, technically, it is her fault, sort of.

But I don’t blame her.

If you blame the damsel in distress, you are not the hero.

Before you laugh, tell me a better role for a guy like me to shoot for. A bystander? An extra? A nobody?

So, it was not because of a girl. It was because of the guy I wanted not to be.

I wanted not to be just a big, huge, bulky, ugly, quiet, shy guy whose name no one knew.

3. A Father’s Eye

Father spoke again, his eyes still closed, “Reality is what’s not the voting booth and not the salad bar. When you don’t get to vote and don’t get to pick,” he spoke louder. “That’s reality.”

“And…” I slid my tongue over my lips, surprised to find my mouth dry. “How many? How many are there? How many … realities?”

Usually when he comes home from one of his business trips, Dad goes straight to the couch in the den to collapse in blissful fatigue before the fireplace, too tired to climb the stairs to the bedroom, and too tired to talk. So he lay now, head back, elbow over his eyes, one boot on the arm of the couch, and one on the floor.

The unmarked black helicopter that flies without lights and brings him home lands in the grove my brothers and I have to keep clear of shrub and sapling as one of our chores, way up the mountain above the ruins of the old monastery. Dad takes over an hour to trudge down the twisting paths and switchbacks. So he is not the most energetic of conversationalists right after a trip.

This time something was different, because Dad lowered his arm and turned his head, so he could catch me with his eye. I could not tell if the squint in his eyes was just fatigue, or if there was something else, a look of accusation there. Or fear.

“I have always known this day would come. Who talked to you? What did they tell you?”

I heard more in his voice than I had seen in his eyes. His look was one of accusation, but his tone was one of self-accusation. It was the fear of a father wolf who had failed to protect his cubs.

He was afraid for me.

The moment felt like the whole earth and sky together had just missed an expected bottom step, and was jarred to an ankle-spraining halt and bit its tongue.

4. My Back Yard

When I was younger, and Mom was still here, she would get my two brothers and me all out of bed before dawn, and we would stand shivering on the back porch with mugs of hot cocoa in hand, waiting for Dad to appear at the wood’s edge beyond the fallow field, now waist-high with tares and circled by the dismembered posts of a skeletal fence, that lay uphill beyond the back yard.

There were both bees’ nests and owls’ nests in those ungainly oaks. Their roots hid an extensive clan of rabbits fat and unwary enough that, with a .22 and help from Lady, we could have coney in the stewpot, except not on Fridays.

Deeper and higher in the wood, a family of foxes, black as midnight, made their den in the roofless remains of the chapel overlooking a cliff. Only the tips of the ears and tails of that fox family were white, as if snowflakes landed only just there. They helped us keep the rabbit population in check, so Dad told us not to disturb them.

Because of this, while we toiled and sweated long summer days to chop the weed and vine away from the rest of the monastery’s frowning and tumbledown walls, or clear leaves and beehives out of the narrow slits of its creepy and squinting cross-shaped windows, we did not have to approach the chapel haunted by the foxes, but let the greenery slowly cover the faded frescos of tormented martyrs and floating saints.

So I was thankful to those soot-black creatures with snow-white on the tips of their ears and tails. Not only did they get me out of a chore, one of them got me my job at the Museum. And the black foxes got me interested in Natural History, because they showed me at a young age that the world will show you its wonders, but only if you seek.

I sometimes wonder what kids who don’t have woods behind their backyards do in the summer. Join street gangs, I guess.

Back in the days before her funeral, when Mom had us awake and awaiting Dad’s homecoming, I recall how the birds would start singing while it was still pitch dark, able to sense a dawn I could never guess was coming. We would leave the windows open and all the lights in the house burning, and we carried flashlights in hand, so that our meeting would be nice and bright. We never knew which part of the wood would release him, since he never approached from the same way twice. He never held a light in his hand, and he moved quite silently, so we never saw him until he was at least halfway across the yard. Mom would gently wipe the camouflage paint from his face while he was sleeping, and undo his boots, dismount the bayonet, lock his rifle in the gun cabinet, lock the relic-bearing crucifix in the reliquary and the flask of holy water in the font, and then shoo us away back upstairs until the alarm clocks would ring the time for Morning Services, and we could officially get up.

I miss her. Dad took his favorite pictures of her and had them framed, and hung them in every room and corridor in the house, at the top and the bottom of the stairs, and over every cabinet in the kitchen and the arsenal, to remind us that she was still watching us, even if we could not see her.

This time, my older brother Alexei decided to spend his Spring Break with his college chums, drinking booze and getting in trouble, and my younger brother Dobrin was staying with Aunt Iaga, to keep him out of trouble, so this time it was only me here to greet the prodigal father at his return, and make sure the fireplace was lit.

I should mention: Alexei is tall and slim and blue-eyed and blond, and Dobrin is taller and slimmer and bluer-eyed and blonder.

Me? Back when we went to school like other kids, and they put on THE HOBBIT as a play, Dobrin was Elrond the Elf and Alexei was the Elf who keeps the Elfs' wine cellar, and I was the guy who turns into a bear. I got to wear a huge furry mask in the fight scene. I did not really need the mask, even at that age. When they did the Disney-musical version of HUNCHBACK OF NOTRE DAME, I landed the role of Quasimodo, and not for my singing voice either.

I am tallest of all, but dark and bushy-browed and thick and broad, hook-nosed and thick-lipped, with a big stupid jaw like a Neanderthal and a sloped forehead like a Cro-Magnon, and big square teeth like a horse so I am afraid to smile at girls, because they might faint; either that, or offer me a lump of sugar.

Dad makes us all wear crew cuts, so my ears stick out. Alexei and Dobrin can carry off the Jarhead ’do. They look like Aryan Supermen straight off the recruiting poster or something. My hair is ink-black and wiry and sticks up no matter how short-cropped it is, so I look like I could use my skull to scrub away stubborn stains in pots.

I could not make a cup of real cocoa, and the kitchen kind of intimidated me, but I did microwave a cup of hot water and dump a powdered mix into it, the kind with mini-marshmallows. The cup sat ignored on the end table next to the couch, unsipped, and I could see clots of brown powder floating in it.

And I was crouching by the fireplace, prodding the log with the poker, trying to get a blaze to come up. I had not gathered firewood, kindling and tinder and all that, since that is a really slow and involved process. I had bought one of those oil-soaked logs wrapped in paper and made out of packed sawdust for a few bucks at the local Mega-mart, the kind you can light with a single match. But I was still poking at it, because it made me feel like I had done something to welcome him home.

In theory, I was supposed to tiptoe upstairs and let him sleep, and not stir from bed until the alarm rang to show that I was officially allowed to be awake.

But I had to ask. There had to be more worlds than this.

5. Penny Dreadful

“I was talking with Penny,” I answered his question. “Now that the Professor is in the nuthouse, she moved her things into his office at the Haunted Museum, and I was helping clean his desk…and we found something odd.”

He visibly relaxed with every word I spoke. The fear left his face. Apparently the day he thought would someday come, whatever that was, had not come. Whoever he wanted me not to talk to, it was not Penny.

It was a clue. But a clue of what?

I had that familiar, old sensation that my whole life was playing a game of Huckle Buckle Beanstalk with me, but there was no one around to call out ‘warmer’ and ‘colder’ as I drew nearer to or farther from the hidden thimble.

As a child, I always imagined it was the thimble itself that was growing warmer if I blindly stumbled closer to where a brother had hidden it, and that if I touched it, the thimble would be hot enough to burn. It never stopped me. (It was not until my young cousins Alyonushka and Zabava were visiting, the only creatures on Earth blonder than my brothers, and felt sorry for me, and cheated, and whispered clues to me, that I ever found that darned thimble. I remember standing with it in my entirely unburned hands, turning it over and over again, offended that the universe was too stubborn to abide by my elegant theory. It did not make sense. If someone yelled ‘warmer’ that meant that something was getting warmer, right?)

Father’s voice found its old, familiar calm note of fatherly authority again. “You should call her by her last name.”

“What? I am not calling anyone Penny Dreadful. It sounds ridiculous. In any case, I don’t even think that is her family’s real name. It is a stage name the Professor made up. I think his real name is Dunderpfocalypse or something. Don’t you want to hear what we found?”

He did not look interested. Whatever made him afraid, afraid for me, was receding. The thimble was getting colder.

“If she is now your superior, you must speak with respect of her.”

“She is not my superior. Penny is just my boss.”

Dad’s eyes narrowed. “All the more reason to speak of her respectfully, lest you forget yourself with her.”

“Why should I call her by her last name? She is my age! Well, give or take a year…”

“Older than you. Old enough to act as trustee for her father’s estate while he is non compos mentis.”

“And I don’t even think she knows how to drive a car yet!”

“Son, that young lady proved herself; she sailed solo around the world in a yacht when she was sixteen years old and made world headlines.”

“She made headlines for not sailing around the world, you mean.”

“She gave it the good college try, which shows considerably more application and ambition than any of my sons have displayed. Speaking of which, your applications have not been accepted yet to any college. What are you going to do next year? As of your birthday, I am starting to charge you rent!” The thimble was ice-cold by now. The conversation had somehow transformed into Dad trying to be motherly, which he didn't do very well. He usually ended on a distinctly unmotherly note, such as the warning about rent. And no, he was not kidding.

I bit back the comment that Professor Dreadful could afford to have his daughter wreck a yacht in the Indian Ocean. If Dad was so impressed with daredevilry, then maybe he could buy me a used apple barrel on the cheap; and I could ride it over Niagara Falls.

But I knew better than to argue when he gave me a direct order. After all, I had not raised him; it was the other way around.

So I said, “Yes, sir. So Miss Dreadful and me, we were looking through the Professor’s desk, and we found this—I don’t know, some sort of research paper for something he was trying to get published. He was working on the enigma of the CERN Collider Disaster Cuneiform.”

“Don’t call them cuneiform. Sloppy thinking. It is not yet established the cloud chamber markings are in fact a writing system. They could merely be random scratches.”

The Super Large Hadron Collider is seventeen miles in circumference, five hundred feet below ground, near Geneva. It was too large to fit in Switzerland, so part of it overlaps into France, or under it. Because it was buried so deep, the quench event was contained: no one on the surface died. The ALICE facility in sector twelve was subjected to an inexplicable escape of radiation when the bending magnets in the section failed.

If there are verbs for each type of death caused by exposure to various exotic particles, I don’t know what they are: so until then, let’s just say over a dozen scientists, staff members, and visitors were electrocuted, microwaved, and Hiroshima’d. If you have not seen the pictures, don’t look them up, because they are gross. Or just stick a Barbie doll into a toaster. You would not think a thing that operates at a temperature not far above absolute zero could unleash such energy, could you? Well, those guys who died did not either, and they understood the math.

Certain recording instruments — the press insisted on calling them “Black Boxes” even though technically they weren’t — had survived intact, and they showed that some of the mass-energy of particles was unaccounted for, as if it had vanished from the universe.

Meanwhile, the mass-energy polite enough not to have vanished from the universe had turned into an ultrahigh frequency electromagnetic burst, which, strangely, had left an almost symmetrical pattern of dents in the cloud chamber, arranged in rectilinear rows and ranks. It looked too regular to be natural. And it looked oddly like the triangular letters of Sumerian cuneiform.

A signal? If so, from where? From whom?

“The Professor is convinced that they are a writing,” I said stoutly.

“Mm. He says the same thing about crop circles.”

“He is a Harvard-trained symbologist!”

“Amazing what they give degrees in these days. But if you cannot measure it, it is not science.”

“Measured or not, he found the key to translate the Disaster Cuneiform…”

Dad grunted. “Was this before or after he started hallucinating?”

“He really did figure it out!” I said hotly.

Dad made a skeptical noise in his nose, “Him, and no one else? Not likely.”

I knew what he was thinking. He was thinking of Bletchley Park and Project Ultra, Alan Turing and the Enigma Project; of MIT and CalTech; of think tanks and linguists and cryptographers and cryptologists and mathematicians. He was thinking of the National Security Agency, who is the biggest employer of mathematicians and purchaser of computer parts in the world. He was thinking of the NASA team that inscribed the Voyager plate and had experts on the theory of how to make first contact with alien intelligences.

Everyone who was assuming this was a First Contact, assumed we should be doing the things that in theory you should do if you ever pick up signals from space aliens for the first time: you look for common ground. If they are from another planet, your only common ground is the scientific facts of the objective reality surrounding you. What else would you have in common? So you tap about prime numbers in base two or something.

These people—or entities—who inscribed the Disaster Cuneiform were not doing that. Why not? It was as if they were not even trying to be understood. But then why send the code at all? Maybe people from another universe did not even have any objective reality in common with us.

I said stubbornly, “He solved it. He translated it.”

Dad closed his eyes. “How?” And he drawled out the word with a long lingering vowel of disbelief bordering on disgust. Hao-ooo-ow?

“He sought back to the primordial language, older than Indo-European, theorists say must exist. The ancestor of all languages. The marks that looked like Cuneiform were not a mathematical cipher, and so all the code crackers could not crack it. The marks actually were Cuneiform — but a version so primal and ancient, older than Sumer and Babylon, that no record survives. Because he thought it was a message from another branch of history, an Earth whose events never happened, not here. The papers in his desk were about the Many Worlds Theory.”

“It does not make testable statements,” Dad said, laying down his head, and putting his elbow back over his eyes. “So it is the Many Worlds Interpretation, not a theory.”

I realized I was bickering. How much of my ten minutes was left? I had to get back on track.

“How many are there?” I pressed. “Worlds, I mean? How many could there be? More than one?”

“The Everett and DeWitt interpretation supposes that every possible outcome for every event at a quantum level defines its own world. That means if one electron twitches for one second in one carbon atom in the photosphere of a giant star in an unnamed galaxy beyond the Virgo Cluster, it creates a new timespace continuum identical, but for that twitch, to ours.” He uttered a noise that was half sigh, half snort. “How that one electron-second has the energy to reproduce the mass of the Big Bang, not to mention the memory to Xerox the location of every particle in the macrocosmic universe, is something Everett and DeWitt did not interpret. Now, Ilya, you’ve known that since you were twelve, when we taught you quantum mechanics.”

One problem with being homeschooled, is that your parents never stop lecturing you: school is never out. The advantage is that you can get a summer job interning for someone like Professor Dreadful, who seems to know everything about everything.

But as Dad spoke this, his words were slow. I did not think it was just because he was tired. Something was making him tense again, although his elbow was still hiding his face. The thimble was warmer, but I was not sure why.

I said, “The Professor’s theory is that only human moral choices would cause a split into two timelines. He thinks the universe was strictly monolinear until the human race evolved.”

“Hmph,” My Dad’s grunt showed that he was less than overwhelmed. He relaxed again. “The point of the Many Worlds Interpretation was to cleave to classical cause-and-effect while saving the appearance of quantum-mechanical events, which are random. It has nothing particular to do with choices mortals make, moral or no.”

So the topic of many worlds theory was warm, and so was the cuneiform, but any theory Professor Dreadful had about those topics was cold. So maybe Dad believed other worlds were real, but thought the Professor was fake.

I had to keep feeling around and get a final answer to my question before fatigue carried Dad away to bed, leaving me with no way to know what to do.

And time was running out. My phone was in my pocket like a bomb.

Groping, I said, “The Professor says that the inanimate universe, and the behavior of plants, animals, and most of the things humans do, are all rigidly determined like clockwork.”

“Well, he’s about a century behind the times. Not even Einstein could save classical causation. It seems God does roll dice after all.” This was all muttered absentmindedly. Dad sounded bored. Very cold now.

I pressed on. “He says most human actions are determined, most, but not all. Things that seem like random choices, like deciding whether or not to have a bean burrito for lunch, are just the brain mechanisms acting out their pre-programmed conditioning. Only when we are making a choice that involves a moral question — such as whether or not to break a promise — do we actually interact with something outside of normal causation and above normal psychological mechanisms, an eternal principle only the conscience can perceive; and that is what splits the universe in two.”

Dad just sighed. After a pause, he said, “Do you know how long it took me to make up my mind to ask your dear, sainted mother to marry me, Ilya? If this idea were true, that was all time wasted. I both asked her and also never found the nerve, both raised my sons to be fine young men and also never held them in my arms or heart.

“That choice and every other moral decision would be pointless, because no matter how carefully you use your judgment, in the other branch of time, you always act stupidly. Even to the weakest temptation, in the other branch, you always give in.

“No, the Professor’s Many Worlds idea is just one of those many ideas that are as pretty as the patterns on a poisonous snake, and you stare fascinated by the sinuous Celtic knotwork of its bright coils and gazing in its unwinking cold eyes, you never notice that all it is really telling you is that life is a lie. Don’t believe it. Only liars say life is a lie.”

Dad took down his arm and sat up. He had not undressed, so that his Kevlar jacket still covered him mostly; but he had unzipped it, so a flap hung open, and the white collar of the deacon’s uniform he wore beneath was visible above his ammo bandolier. Around his neck, on a chain of rosary beads the Archbishop himself had blessed, he wore an ivory crucifix that contained, in a tiny glass vacuole, the finger bone of Saint Demetrius of Sermium, patron saint of Crusaders, coated in the oil it spontaneously exuded. Next to it, in a sheath, was his black-bladed stiletto with the wide hilts, a dark cross next to a pale one.

“No, my son, if you must believe that there are many worlds, believe me, I pray you, that if you do evil in this world, you have not the power to create some new world where that choice was made aright. Only the Creator can create new worlds. Only miracles change history; nothing inside nature has the power to undo the natural consequences of what evil men do.”

Then he looked at me sharply and said, “What order are you thinking of disobeying? What promise were you planning to break?”

He had been playing Huckle Buckle Beanstalk too, it seemed, and somehow figured out exactly where to put his hand to find what I was hiding from him, my own personal little sizzling thimble.

The fire was hot, and I was bent over it, so that I did not notice the warmth of the blush of anger spreading through my face until I heard how harsh my answer was: “Is my life all a lie? Well, you would know, wouldn’t you, Dad? If you are my dad!”

I gave the fake log one last strong blow from the fire poker, then stood and turned. I pointed the poker at him accusingly. “How many universes are there? You know, don’t you?”

6. Rare Books

The same day Professor Dreadful was dragged away in a straitjacket, raving, I discovered what he had been working on.

You see, I did not want to go home and face the looks on the faces of Dobrin and Father. Looks of total not-surprise, looks that said I told you so louder than words. And I could not stay at the Museum; they had a cordon around it.

It was a simple choice. Either he was crazy, and there was no way to translate random marks left by a random energy discharge during a random accident because there was nothing to translate, just a crazed mind seeing patterns in chaos, like a child who keeps seeing his mother’s face in the fluffy clouds. Or he was crazy, but right, and had read them.

I decided on option two. Because that meant I did not need to go home right away and face Dobrin’s carefully sarcastic unshocked looks. So your Professor who collects animals that don’t exist actually was a babbling lunatic after all, not just a guy who acted like one?

What angle had the Professor been working on? What had he seen that the rest of the world had not?

So I went to the library. I looked up his work, read his papers and articles.

Hours went by, but it was not hard work, like weeding ruins, just brainwork, and if bow-hunting teaches anything, it teaches patience.

I struck gold when I found a recent issue of SIGN AND SEMIOTICS journal, which published peer-reviewed papers on comparative symbology. Tucked in between an article on Merovingian Grail-Kings and an article on the links between Egyptian esoteric practices and the Cathars of Andalusia, was a paper by my own Professor Achitophel Dreadful.

It was an article on semantic drift between Akkadian Cuneiform and a hypothetical proto-Sumerian logogram system, deduced from an application of Grimm’s Law. The article had extensive footnotes, as you’d expect, and some of the references were to books right here in this very library—where, come to think of it, the Professor was doing most of his research last year.

I had to get the librarian to unlock the case in the rare books room tucked into a corner of the top floor.

“You have to sign in,” she said sharply, pointing with her beaklike nose toward the visitor’s log.

I was looking for one book in particular from the Professor’s footnotes. And I found it, tucked between the sole surviving volume, number XI, of the lost First Encyclopædia of Tlön compiled by the Orbis Tertius Society, and a rare unabridged edition of A Study of the Chaldaean Roots in the Ancient Cornish Language (with observations on the early tin trade in West Cornwall) by W.S.S. Holmes. The book I sought had the catchy title of Paleogenetic Assessments of Epipaleolithic Migration and Population Replacement in Erythraean Coastal Areas by the Eritrean Research Project Team.

The librarian had to sit in the rare books room with me, since I was underage, or maybe she just did not trust my sloping cranium with its supraorbital brow ridge. She watched me with a cold and scowling eye while I read, no doubt fretting that, had she not been there, I would have blown my nose on the antique pages. I even had to wear white plastic gloves while handling the book. I don’t know if everyone who steps into the rare books room has to wear them, or only teenagers with oily skin.

I thought it would be dull as ditchwater. Instead, I kept having that dizzying sensation Dorothy must have felt when she stepped out of her monochrome Kansas house into the Technicolor Munchkinland. Twice I flipped back to the front matter to assure myself that this was a real, copyrighted book published by Cambridge University Press.

There was a discussion of the Urheimat, which is the hypothetical homeland of whatever tribe fathered the first Indo-European language.

For over a century, scholars had speculated about the location of Urheimat. This volume claimed to know the secret: one of the most fertile lands of the Fertile Crescent, between Ethiopia and Felix Arabia, between the Kebassa plateau and the Red Sea, where the modern city of Asmara rises in Eritrea.

This is the spot where legend says the Queen of Sheba gave birth to the son of Solomon, Menelich, while history says the ambition of Caesar during his Egyptian campaigns attempted to annex this rich land but failed. Long before Caesar, before Solomon, before even the long-vanished Sabaeans dwelt here, the nameless and primordial tribe of Man walked upright, invented fire, invented language: The first tribe of the first true humans.

That original band of fire-using early man was less than two thousand breeding individuals. Recent studies in genetics traced all human lineages back to ten sons of a genetic patriarch and eighteen daughters of a genetic matriarch. The Tree of Man is rooted in a single mother, the mitochondrial matriarch, because all other branches fell extinct. The first three lineages that arose from the genetic patriarch spread through Africa. Most paleogeneticists rather fancifully referred to the ancestral genetic markers as Shem, Ham and Japheth. This author, more stolid, designated them Son I, Son II and Son III.

Son III’s lineage was the one with whom this author was mainly concerned, the line from which races as distinct as Chaldaeans and Cornishmen, Peloponnesians and Paleosiberian Macedonians and Manx arose. Perhaps clutching logs, this clan braved the waters of the Red Sea, those straits the Arabs call The Gate of Grief: twenty miles from isle to isle to the coasts of what is now Yemen. From there, Son III and his bloodline migrated to Asia to beget Sons designated IV through X: this great Diaspora of his bloodline reached from the Sea of Japan (Son IV), to Northern India (Son V) to the South Caspian (Sons VI and IX).

I bent my head over the page. The author speculated about the origins of dialects, and how they grow to form independent languages, and why they change over time. His basic question: since there is such a strong evolutionary incentive for individuals and groups to communicate with each other, either to form alliances in war or partnerships in peace, what possible reason was there for linguistic drift? Why did people form local dialects which rendered them unable to talk to their cousins in the tribe a day’s march away? No other animal signals, birdcalls and suchlike, showed such a strong and rapid drift.

He saw how you would get special words for birds and beasts in one area not found in another, or why seashore people would have names for tools and nautical terms that mountain-dwelling tribes would lack: but aside from these special cases, whoever stops using a word his neighbors and ancestors used, and deliberately starts using a word no one understands?

The trait of misunderstanding had no evolutionary value, no good reason to exist.

He did not think it was nurture that caused languages to divide away from each other. He thought it was nature: a genetic disease. This author had written out the transmission vectors of the disease. As best he could from genetic and cultural clues, he tried to identify where it had started, how it had spread.

The Y chromosome lineages are positively associated with the major language groups of the world. In the absence of the genetic drift or defect, there is no correlative grammatical drift…

… the indication is that some primordial catastrophe, of which no record survives, or perhaps garbled as myth, disorganized the genetic and intellectual structure of early man, causing a rapid degeneration from the robust features and larger brain of the Neanderthal, and other transitional forms…

The back flap of the book was a folding chart, like a map, of the linguistic tree, showing the descent of all the dead languages in the world.

It was yellow with age, and brittle, and I unfolded it very carefully, while the librarian stared at me, looking like she wanted to hiss. I did not tear it.

The sheet, unfolded, covered most of the table, and was covered with hundreds of spidery branching lines, like a family tree, or like a nervous system would look, if you just picked it up out of someone’s body by the upper spinal column, and let the nerves dangle.

At the lowest root of the tree was a strange word: Ursprache.

This was the name assigned for the hypothetical common ancestral tongue of the Cauco-Sinitic, Euro-Asiatic, and Austric language groups; the languages of Son I, Son II and Son III.

If it had been spoken at all, it was spoken thirty-five thousand to sixty million years ago. The diagram showed the first major division into three language families appearing in the Tigris-Euphrates valley: that was the day the pan-human Ursprache language died. An explosion of languages followed. According to this chart, it had occurred as suddenly, on the geological scale, as the extinction of the dinosaurs and the explosion of mammalian varieties of life. But what was the disaster?

Something fluttered to the floor like a dry leaf. It was a folded scrap of paper. I dropped my pencil, bent over, and palmed the scrap of paper before the librarian saw me.

I did not dare look at it until I was outside, just in case the librarian was peering at me through a slatted window, around the corner. I didn’t know what the penalty was for stealing material from the library, but even if the cops were not involved, the librarian knew my family, as well as knowing my boss, since both Dad and the Professor were pretty frequent visitors.

The little scrap was in Professor Dreadful’s handwriting.

WE is right! The Cuneiform is Ursprache!! An application of the Law of Semantic Drift, following an analogous genetic drift, to the earliest possible ur-words of the CS, EA, and A linguistic groups reveals common signs.

Parallel worlds use the common oldest language found on all versions of Earth as their Lingua Franca: the one semiotic form older than all others, the central stem predating the earliest division of offshoots.

On the other side of the scrap were questions.

What world is my daughter from?

Not mine, nor the Incarnation Earth. Hidden world?

How many universes are there?

At that time, that day when the Professor was first committed, I had not had the courage to ask my Dad that question.

7. Unspoken Words

I knew there was more.

To be sure, the globe of the earth and the reach of the skies, from amoeba to the great nebula in Andromeda, all the cosmos is fearsomely and wonderfully made. You have to be dead inside not to be awed, or stupid to pretend to be so cool as not to be. You cannot just be a scientist to learn it all, not just an explorer to see it, not just a poet to praise it, not just a priest to bless it. You also have to be a hero to protect it.

But there are also clues in the Earth, hidden things, overlooked, half-whispered things; clues that there is something more. Our world is mostly civilized these days, mostly tamed: but I knew there was wildness and weirdness out there. Where? Hither or thither or somewhere or somewhither: In elfland or outer space or beyond the walls of the world.

And it was as if I could smell the wild hint of that somewhither clinging to my father like woodsmoke, like the musk of bloodshed.

Whenever I caught the scent, my happy life turned into a beartrap I would have gnawed off my leg to escape. Some universe larger than this one was meant for me.

And then there was the girl. (Maybe she was meant for me, too? But that was a thought I dare not think or else my brain might explode.) So I had to know if her peril was real. Not everything madmen say can be trusted.

So I had to ask. My words gushed out in an angry rush.

“How many worlds are there? And where do you go on your business trips? What business requires you be armed to the teeth? And don’t say it is dangerous missionary work—”

He said, “It is. Missionaries sometimes have to enter other — I mean, enter other places that are a little, ah, wild, and with my background in the service — it’s not illegal, but it is not something the Council of Bishops wants any public, ah, outcry —”

“— Where do you go? Name the spot on the globe. Give me the longitude and latitude, can’t you? You can’t. And you can’t tell me who am I really, can you, Father? Can’t or won’t! Why don’t I look like you or like my brothers? And tell me where Mom is!”

“You mother cannot be with us.” His words were sad and slow. “She is no longer in this …”

“In this life? In this world?” My words were hot and quick. “So you’ve always said. Until today, I thought you meant she was dead and gone to Heaven. But you want to lie to me without actually lying. What world is she in? Is it one the Professor’s machine can reach?”

But I had said too much. The moment of weakness, of truth, had passed. Dad was stony-faced again. Mentioning the machine snapped him out of it.

He rose to his feet and looked up at me. Ever since I turned fifteen, I have been taller than him, taller than my older brother. And yet, somehow, he managed to loom.

He said, “What machine? What does it look like?”

I wanted to argue. I could not.

I took my phone out of my pocket, snapped it open with my thumb, and brought up the text message, and handed it to him.

Dad had his face bent over the tiny phone screen. Dad said, “Why did he call you Marmoset?”

“It auto-corrects Muromets. Professor Dreadful, uh, sometimes has trouble working the spelling-check.”

Dad grunted and turned his eyes to the tiny screen. “You would think he would learn that in symbology school. How to spell words, I mean. They are symbols.”

8. The Hither Shores of Uncreation

Marmoset

My daughter is in danger and needs your help.

I have escaped the asylum: those fools cannot begin to understand my power. And yet I cannot save her. Only you.

You recall our last talk, when we spoke of Many Worlds? It is all true.

A working model of a Moebius Field Coil, just as described in the Disaster Cuneiform, is even now in the basement of the Haunted Museum. The cuneiform instructions on how to build and power it were precise. But the power is still running. I was not able to shut it off before they took me!

Penny is on her way to the Museum now. She left from Tillamook about two minutes ago. You must get there first. She is a foolish and headstrong girl, and does not realize her peril.

The Moebius coil can be used as a casement, to see what lurks on the hither shores of the Deep of Uncreation, beyond the Unborn Ocean.

I have seen the shadows that thirst for human blood, and heard the hunting cries of the Arch-Beasts that are above man in evolutionary scale. There are Giants in the Other Earths whom this Earth drowned, and fallen gods are their fathers. Deadlier far the Architects of the Tower of Utter Night, that hideous strength, for they are restrained from nothing they have imagined to do.

Woe to the inhabitants on Earth! Woe when the Dark Tower opens the dreadful gate! For the casement through which I peered is also a portcullis!

I know why you are not like your brothers.

Trust in me, only me, and fear nothing. The exodimensional radiation will do you no hurt. Only you. Bring no one else, lest he die. Do not be afraid of the fog.

Go into the basement. Break open the door if you have to. The Moebius coil Solenoid is upright on the breadboard stand. It is a hoop of twisted gold over a foot wide, woven with naked copper wire. You cannot mistake it. You must shut the power OFF.

Box the Coil and the three Penrose Triangle antennae, and bring all to me. Make special note of which cables and plugs are fixed where, and bring them and the cable adapters, the rheostat and the dry cells.

I am in the same place.

Remember what you swore! I trust you. Tell no one. They will lock me up again. I am not insane! Believe in me!

Especially do not tell your Father!

He is the Ostiary of the Templars.

9. The Door into Twilight

Now Dad looked at me with eyes that bored like twin lasers, and no trace of tiredness was in his face. “Is this the promise you mean to break? What did you swear?”

“To help him. To help his daughter.”

I did not mention that the Professor, during that last afternoon before his hearing, in that hot and airless motel room where he was holed up, had taken the Gideon’s Bible out of the drawer and made me put my hand on it, just like I was in a court of law or something. It was not the kind of oath a boy makes, afraid to cut his thumb and his friend’s with a pocket knife and vowing to be best friends forever. It was the kind of oath a man takes. Or a champion.

“What else?”

“Not to — not to tell anyone.”

“Anyone? Or not to tell me?”

“Not to tell you.” I mumbled.

“Why did you swear such a foolish oath? And once you bound yourself by it, why in the world did you break it?”

“Dad! Are you asking me to hide things from you? Hide the truth?”

His voice was oddly gentle. “Ilyusha, it would break my heart if I found you lied to me, and that includes the lies of omission. Your word is your word! Breaking your word is worse than breaking my heart, boy. My heart will recover. What you do now defines the kind of man you will one day be. One day very soon.” Then there was that odd look in his eyes again. “Not very soon —now. Today.”

My eyes kept being pulled toward my feet, but I forced myself to straighten my spine and look him in the face.

And I saw the fear again. Fear of the father wolf for his cub.

Fear for me.

He had raised me to be Trustworthy, Loyal, Helpful, Friendly, Courteous, Kind, Obedient… you know the drill. Those are the virtues a boy has to practice to become a man. Dad was afraid he had not prepared me well, had not raised me right.

He closed his eyes a moment, his lips moving. When he opened them, the fear was gone, and something firmer, something like iron, was there instead. Of all the lessons I want to learn from him, that was the one I most wanted. Brave, Clean, Reverent.

Dad spoke. “When he says I am in the same place; what place is that?”

“The Motel Eight on Straight Street. He was in Room 222 before. He likes the number for some reason.” Now I raised my eyes and raised my voice. “Dad! He trusts me! I swore! We can't turn him in to the police.”

“No one is turning anyone in! When did this message come?”

“While I was making the cocoa. Ten minutes ago. Less.”

He jumped to his feet, took me by the shoulder and began marching us out from the den and toward the garage. “Why didn’t you leave the moment you got the message?”

Why? That was a good question.

There was a confused tangle of reasons inside me. One thread of reasoning said that if my father knew there was only one world, the one reality all sane people live inside, then the insane Professor was not only insane, but wrong. If there were no extra-dimensional worlds, then there was no Moebius coil, and no danger, and no damsel in distress to save, and no need to leave.

Another thread said if there were many worlds, and my dad knew that and never told me, then I could trust the Professor (who had told me the truth) rather than Dad (who hadn’t) and then, with a clear conscience, I could leave without asking, knowing whose voice to follow.

Another thread, this one even more tangled, said that if there were other worlds, and Mom was in one, and alive and watching over us, she would not want me to leave the house without welcoming Dad home, even if the cocoa was only instant.

So everything in the snarl was somehow caught up in the one question of whether this was the only world there was, and therefore I could not leave without asking it.

Why had I not left? No way I could tell him. It would have sounded stupid. Stupider. Instead I said: “Gosh, Dad. I can't drive the car! Was I supposed to jog?”

“Don’t get smart with me. You’re allowed to drive the Jeep.”

“During daylight, with an adult. Sun’s not up yet. And you told me not to—”

“Son, different rules apply during the End of the World.”

I did not know what to say to that.

10. Dancing Maiden

We did not cut through the kitchen to get to the garage, which would have been the shortest route. Instead we went through the tiny, windowless utility room, not much bigger than a closet, which Dad calls his office, because his rolltop desk is there, with a hardwood armchair. The desk is metal and bolted to the concrete floor. He opened the rolltop with a key. There is a small safe built into the drawers of the desk. Inside he kept legal documents in manila envelopes and accordion files, a tarnished silver box of Grandma’s jewelry, stocks and bonds, things like that.

He pulled out a large yellow envelope with my name on it. He shut the safe and spun the dial.

Then we were at the garage door. The car keys hang on a little plaque of pegs, neatly labeled, beneath a picture of Mom. I mentioned there are pictures of her all over the house. She is in her wedding dress and behind the wheel of the world’s ugliest jalopy, made beautiful with well-wishes painted on the windshield and boots and tin cans tied to the tailpipe, and a snowfall of flung rice. She is standing on the seat, her long veiling frozen in mid-float of a long-ago gust of wind, and flings the bouquet toward some blurred figures out of focus at the edge of the frame. Dad in his Midshipman’s uniform, sword and all, is in the passenger’s seat, scowling at whoever was wielding the camera. Someone wrote DRIVE CAREFULLY in red on the glass of the picture in one corner of the frame.

Dad picked up the key to his gas hog, and pushed the little button that starts its engine. I heard the quiet roar of the big V-10 engine before he opened the side door into the garage. The engine was built into the frame of a Chrysler Crown Imperial. Huge car, a real beauty.

The car he started was for him. For me, he flicked the keys of the Jeep off the pegboard and tossed them my way.

“It’s early yet,” he said. “Turn on the antiradar gear, the police band scanner, and run any red lights. If the police see you, crack the nitro tank and outrun them. Or just run on nitro the whole way. Here, take my night-vision goggles, and drive without your headlights on.”

I have always wondered what a person looks like when they completely lose their minds. They look normal.

My dad looked entirely normal, just like he did when he was serious. It is the sane people who tend to look crazy when the weirdness starts. I cannot imagine what my face looked like. Watch yourself carefully in a mirror while having a good friend slam you over the head with a two-by-four, maybe you can tell me what it looks like.

I stammered out, “D-Dad?! You want me to lose my license before I even get a license?”

“Saving lives is more important. And keeping your word is more important. Get to the Museum just like he said, and shut down the equipment just like he said. If you see Miss Dreadful, warn her out of the area. Or anyone else. If the Coil is active long enough to condense a dark fog, there is an influence — think of it as a type of radiation — there will be radiation present that her cell structure will not be able to withstand.”

“Radiation? And what about me?” He was not answering. So I said, slightly louder, “Well, Father? What about my cell structure?”

“You will — uh — be okay.”

“How interesting! You know, Dad, when I was younger you let me ride without a helmet. Skydive, too. But not my brothers. Why is that? Didn’t care if I broke my head?”

“Because I knew you would be — uh — be okay.” He looked embarrassed. “We don’t have time to talk.”

“Don’t we? Because I ain’t moving a darned inch unless you give me some answers, Dad! What happens if I don’t move?”

“You’ve read the Revelation of Saint John?”

“Yes. But what does that have to do with — uh? What?”

“Ilya, this is serious. I’ll keep talking if you keep walking. Into the garage.”

“I'm wearing sweatpants and a bathrobe!”

“Take my jacket.”

The jacket was heavy and black and a little small on me. My wrists stuck out. I think it was Kevlar, but whatever it was, it was darned heavy. I am a little broader in the shoulder than my dad, so I couldn't zip it all the way up. I clipped the collar shut, although it kind of choked me.

Great. I was wearing a bulletproof coat that did not cover my centerline ribcage, where I keep things like my heart and lungs. Maybe he just wanted me not to be cold.

He said, “Grab that flashlight there.” (This was a six-cell black Maglite as long and heavy as a billy club.) “And—this. Here! There may be trouble.”

He unlocked the garage weapon cabinet. We don’t keep the firearms there, just blades. He handed me the katana Grampa Mikhail had brought back from Japan after World War Two.

In the last days of the war, the Japanese government produced a lot of cheaply made samurai-style swords called shingunto to give to officers, because the military government was trying to enflame the populace with the romance of bushido, and devotion to the Imperial Family.

This was not one of those.

Forged in 1913, a twenty-five inch blade, the tang was signed by Sadakazu, the Imperial Court Artist under the Meiji. The temper line pattern was ko-notare, or ‘billowing wave’, characteristic of the Soshu school. The hilt was ray-skin wrapped in white silk, the tassels were red and gold; a sixteen-petal Imperial chrysanthemum was engraved on the tang of the blade; the fittings, guard and pommel were decorated with a cherry blossom motif, a symbol of the beauty and brevity of life. It was called Shirabyoshi — the White Dancing Maiden. It was named for the dancing girls, garbed as men and bearing white-sheathed swords, which performed for the Heian emperors before their downfall.

He held it toward me in both hands. “Bow and take the blade.”

This blade was probably worth more than the tuition would be for whatever college had not accepted me yet. I bowed and took it. It felt oddly heavy in my hands, even though, in reality, it was lighter than the hardwood practice sword I had been using since I was seven years old.

“Let it dangle from the baldric when you have to sit, but clip it to the jacket belt when you have to run, otherwise it will bark your legs. Treat it just like a gun. That means you do not draw unless you mean to kill someone. Remember to store the blade face up, and not to let the edge touch the saya when sheathing and drawing. Push the tsuba away from the throat of the scabbard with your thumb. And keep your gear clean.”

He tucked the sword cleaning kit into my pocket. This was a flat wooden case containing sword oil, cotton cloth, polishing powder and a powder ball to apply it, and rice paper for both fine cleaning and polishing. I felt a chill. How long was Dad expecting me to be gone?

“Dad—you can’t—uh—Grandfather’s sword—it is too important! Let me use your Springfield—”

He said, “If you see someone who looks like he is wearing a costume for a science fiction convention, don’t try to shoot him. A really convincing costume.”

“Father? Of course I would not shoot a…”

“Better to slay him with the edge of the sword.”

“Uh?”

“Remember your footwork and maintain your distance. You are trying to stroke, not chop, because you want to bite deep and open a major vein, not make a shallow slice. Let his blood loss work for you. Head, abdomen, hand: Decapitate, disembowel, dismember.”

“But not shoot him? If … he is in a costume.”

“If the area around the Museum is still crisp and clear-looking, not foggy, it is normal reality, and you will have time to go get your squirrel gun from the shed there. Only use the gun on people who look human. Got it?”

It struck me for the first time that not every kid’s father trains him in deadly weapons, modern and ancient, and expects such training to be used. For that matter, not every kid’s father orders him to kill science fiction fans, which struck me as a bit harsh.

And, anyway, science fiction fans look human. Some of them. Sort of.

“Slash the freaks. Shoot the mundanes. Got it. Tell me why? Or, rather, why the hell?” I said.

“Watch your mouth. Gunpowder does not ignite in the Twilight region.”

“No gunpowder in the Twilight Zone. Wonderful.”

He nodded.

I kept my voice steady. “Dad. Seriously. Who are you?”

“Me? I am going to the motel to stop Achitophel Dreadful before he wraps himself in the Twilight again. It is a side-effect of the Uncreation, and a dangerous one. A practitioner can use it to excuse himself from certain laws of nature in a limited way. I assume that's how he walked out of the asylum. I have to stop him before he brings the stars down. Otherwise I’d go with you.”

“Chyort! I didn’t ask you where are you going. I figured if you weren’t calling the cops and weren’t coming with me, you’d go to him. I asked you who are you?”

“I am the Father that loves you and raised you. And a good Father will kick your tailbone up your spine and out your foul mouth, if you use foul language, Ilyusha.”

“Okay, Mister Loving Father. How about a little straight truth? I am still not moving until you tell me—”

“Three questions. That’s all. Then you move. First question!”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Some things are men’s business only. You’re too young for the burden. I was going to tell you everything on your birthday, the day I start charging you rent. Wasted question. Ask better.”

I wanted to ask if the reason why Alexei seemed to go a little crazy when he came back from his year overseas was because of something he was told on his eighteenth birthday. But not if I had only two questions left.

“Where is Mom?”

He drew a deep breath and looked at his watch, which is a big instrument strapped to the underside of his wrist, waterproof, shockproof, probably A-bombproof, and shows military time on a big 24-hour dial.

Dad took out the large yellow envelope that had been locked in his desk, and hefted it in his hand a brief moment, as if it were weightier than it seemed. The words FOR ILYA on the occasion of his eighteenth birthday were written in Dad’s crisp, angular handwriting on the outside. His eyes were those of a man staring into a vast empty place when he looked at it.

“What’s that?” I said. “A birthday card? I don’t turn eighteen until next year.”

He stuffed the letter into my jacket pocket. “I wanted you to be older before this day came. The letter tells you where your mother is. She is trapped in another universe, on a dead world where no leaf grows and no water runs. When I lost her, she was the sole survivor of her mission. She was not captured, but was forced to retreat into an underground refuge to escape the enemy. The only doors are buried beneath the toppled ruins of a holy city, and a monster that neither eats nor sleeps crouches on top. She has a means of seeing visions from other world, including ours, but I have no way to reach her. I was not lying when I told you your mother was still watching over us.”

“If she’s still alive, you can…”

“I can do nothing! The Dark Tower stands in the way, and all the portcullises are destroyed and all the doors are shut. That is why I held a memorial service.”

He shook his head impatiently, and his eyes returned from an empty place and focused on me, sharp once more. “Last question! Make it snappy.”

“Who are you? What are you?”

“Get in the Jeep. Start the engine. You know who are the Sovereign Military Order of the Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon?”

“Sure. The Knights Templar. They were wiped out in the Dark Ages.”

“Gah! Only someone who learned his history from watching reruns of the Time Tunnel would call the Twelfth century the Dark Ages.”

“They were tortured and killed by some French dude who wanted their money.”

“Philip the Fair wanted more than that. He knew the Knights of the Temple had possession of the Ark of the Covenant.”

“The Ark? You mean the magic box that melts Nazi faces?”

“I mean the sacred vessel for carrying the tablets of Moses, the living rod of Aaron, and a jar of the bread of heaven. It also has power over the Twilight, and over the Dark of Uncreation. We used it to find and open a portcullis of twilight in the Forest of Broceliande, and fled from Philip the Fair to the only world the Dark Tower cannot destroy. Only the Visible Fellowship of the Templars was martyred. The Invisible Fellowship continues to this day. The Congregation and the Holy Father protected us.”

“We? Us?”

“I am in service to the Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ of the commandry of Archbishop Alexander, assigned to the protection of pilgrims and wayfarers in the Ultramundane Realms, the Outreterre.”

He held up the oversized and ornate high school ring he wears on his right hand, and he fiddled with the collet like he always does when he is nervous or contemplating something. This time it was not just a nervous habit, though. He was turning the collet of the ring the way he had just turned the dial of a safe.

With a click, the face changed shape. I don’t mean the ring had a secret compartment, I mean the class ring morphed like a special effect on TV: the face changed shape and color and grew larger.

Now it was no longer a class ring but a signet ring. The seal was white and gold, and engraved with two crusaders with shield on one horse and around them the legend written in raised letters: Sigillum Militum Χρisti.

He held it toward me so that I could see it.

“As in ancient days, our mission is to protect pilgrims and fight the enemies of Christendom. I am one of those who can withstand the Twilight surrounding Uncreation. I am an Ostiary, a door-warden. Not far from here is the door I watch.”

He passed his fingers over it, and I heard it click, and then it was a class ring again.

The idea that there was a supernatural and inter-dimensional portal hidden in Tillamook, Oregon, made me snort, trying to smother a laugh. If I started laughing, I would probably never stop. I forced my wobbling brain to follow what Dad was saying.

“You know about the prehistoric ossuary beneath the Monastery.”

I did. My brothers and I, many a midnight when we were younger, tried to keep each other sleepless and terrified with speculations and ghost stories about it, or by pretending we heard scratching noises approaching the house. There were ancient chambers, walled and roofed with kiln-burnt brick, too small for a child to stand erect in, connected by narrow crawlspaces only a child could navigate, filled with clay pots full of bones.

I knew there had been tribes of a darker, smaller people inhabiting North and South America long before the ancestors of the American Indians migrated across the Bering Strait and displaced and wiped them out. Northwest Indians hunted game and gathered nuts in woodlands that grew and swallowed up the pastures their predecessors had farmed.

Before they vanished, these lost people erected monoliths and standing stones that measured the stars and seasons of their planting, and buried their priestesses and holy slaves alive in chambers beneath.

Spanish explorers had discovered the bloodstained stones and skeletons below the rocks. A Mission, walled like a fortress, was erected on the spot, to remove the curse on the land. The monoliths were pulled down by mule teams and hammered to bits. No adult could crawl into the crooked opening down into the dark well of bones, so they sent a drummer boy whose name is not recorded, and, later, according to the Mission chronicles, young novices. (Those boys had been the stars of the horror stories my brothers and I concocted to give each other nightmares.)

In later years, an order of monks built a Monastery on the Mission grounds, and steadfastly prevented any antiquarians or archeologists who otherwise might have learned of the find and been curious from digging up the site. That Monastery was abandoned not long after the Oregon territory gained Statehood, and became an antique itself. But the Church still owned the acreage over most of the mountain. It was land too steep for logging, so there was no incentive for the State to claim it by eminent domain and run us off. It was officially part of the Archdiocese of Portland and my dad was allegedly the Deacon assigned to maintain the grounds, and people were kept away.

I said, “I am assuming the Monastery was abandoned for the same reason it was built here. Whatever scared the prehistoric people into putting up their monoliths scared the abbot, right?”

He smiled, pleased. “Correct. The Congregation ordered the Monastics away once the real nature of the danger was known. A man who was allegedly a Deacon of the Order of The Most Holy Savior was placed here as a watchman.”

The Order was also known as the Brigitines. Founded in 1370, they were wiped out in Europe during the Reformation. The only ones left in the whole world were here in Oregon, in Amity, where they baked fudge between prayers. It was tasty. As a member, Dad got a free supply on feast days and name days.

Only he was telling me he was not a member. I said slowly, “The Brigitine monks are a front group for the Templars?” The fudge-cooks? The idea was laughable, but I was not laughing.

Dad nodded.

I said, “Then you are telling me Deacon Derfel…?”

“He was actually an Ostiary of the Templars, a Knight: Sir Duellus. And Deacon Eustace after him was also Sir Eustachius.”

Deacon Derfel Gadarn was the man who lived here before us, and built our house, or, rather, built the main part, what is now the den and kitchen. Deacon Eustace was the man who kept the house before us, and installed modern wiring and plumbing. We had to tear out and re-do the entire septic tank because he installed it wrong, and it had been leaking into the foundations. So I had always had a personal grudge against Deacon Eustace my whole life, even though I had never met him.

My eyes were drawn to where, through the small windows in the back wall of the garage, the leafy silhouette of the treetops and the rugged silhouette of the cliffs could almost be seen against the stars and clouds.

Dad said, “The way between worlds opens in places where the walls are thin when the stars are right. The ancient peoples erected their stones to mark the spot and measure the times. We have also made measurements, using modern tools, and believe that the twilight door on this mountain here should remain quiescent for another two centuries. But there are forbidden methods that can force a door open where and when there shouldn’t be one.”

“Methods like Professor Dreadful’s machine?”

He shook his head. I saw embarrassment and shame on his face, which is a terrible thing for any son to see. “I underestimated him, or perhaps he fooled me. His machine could not possibly work.”

“I think he is from another world. I saw a note.”

Dad looked stricken. “That’s — impossible. Or, no, that’s something I cannot see how it could be possible. Unless —” He squinted. “He is not from the Vatican, and not from the Tower. Why would the gypsies do something like this? Have they betrayed us? I should tell the Congregation immediately.”

These were apparently his bosses. I said, “What Congregation?”

“The Supreme Sacred Congregation of the Holy Office.”

“Wait—what? Are we talking about the Inquisition? As in, nobody expects the …”

He made a curt motion with his hand. “Listen up! I have been fearful of this day, but now that it is here, there is no time for fear.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means you have a chore to do,” His eyes rested on mine. His tone of voice was no different than when he ordered me to do yard work or something. Just his normal voice. “Now, as of today, you are an Ostiary. You are going to help me in my duty. There are things on the far side of the door that must be kept out of our reality. If your girlfriend opens the door into twilight, the Dark Tower will know.”

I started to open my mouth, but he cut me off.

“Now bow your head for my blessing, and say these words.”

He put both his hands on my head.

The Jeep was rumbling and muttering, warm under the seat of my sweatpants, and the smell of gasoline mingled with the smell of the pre-dawn night coming from the garage door, which, groaning, had pulled itself upward and out of my way. Our front yard is a sharp slope impossible to mow with the riding mower, and the driveway dives down so sharply that riding a bicycle or sled down its length was like being dropped from a bomb bay. Every light in the house was lit, and windows splashed slanted rectangles across the lawn. Beyond, darkness.

Something in how steeply the driveway just dove into that darkness seemed to stare at me as I spoke my father’s words:

“At any moment I may find myself in battle. However rigorous the task that awaits me, may I fulfill my duty with courage. If death should overtake me on this field, grant that I die in the state of grace, forgive me all my sins, those I have forgotten and those I recall now: grant me the grace of perfect contrition.”

I wanted to ask him if I was going to die, and never see him again. But I had used up my three questions.

For those were the words of the Soldier’s Prayer, said only on the eve of engagement. There was something in those words that made it hard for me to breathe. Fear? Awe? I don’t know. What am I, a psychologist?

So I was speeding down a deserted road that rose and fell across the hilly slopes like a rollercoaster, in a weird world of green shadows, the night-vision goggles keeping the wind out of my eyes, hair blowing, and was already a mile away from the house before I could catch my breath again, and before I realized three things.

11. Three Things

Jeep motors are really loud, and they seem much louder when your headlights are off. The dark road sped by under my roaring wheels as I fretted.

First, I had messed up on my first question. I should have asked him: Am I human? What world am I from?

On the other hand—“Ah, forget about it,” I growled to myself over the noise of the wind. “Every kid my age wants to know that answer.”

Second, I had not had the chance to say, “But she’s not my girlfriend!”

On the other hand—Hey, maybe if I saved her from some murky danger, who knows? She might be really grateful. And that thought made me stomp on the accelerator under my leather slipper flat to the metal.

(Yes, I was in moccasins, because I live in the Amazing Uncarpeted House o’ Cold Floors, because I had not had time to put on my shoes. Different rules apply during the End of the World, you know. Different dress codes, too.)

Third, how could the Roman Catholic Church come to know such a thing?

I wondered how many of the old legends of witchcraft or monsters were garbled tales of travelers who had stumbled unwittingly into our world from another, perhaps a world with different technologies, techniques, or laws of nature, which here were indistinguishable from magic. The Churchmen in the old days were the only scholars, the only scientists, and the only organization with branches in every land. I could easily imagine that, during the Counter-Reformation, the Inquisition would be the only ones investigating tales of otherworldly visitors and visitants, during their searches for witchcraft and heresy.

But that just led to the next question: Once they knew, how did they keep it secret? Could anyone really keep such a thing secret? It would be as if someone had made a moonshot on the sly. The Pentagon cannot even keep its private papers safe from the New York Times.

Answer: If anyone could keep a secret, any priest who ever staggered out of confessional booth, ears ringing from the nauseating repetition of the most perverse and deadly sins anyone can imagine, but mouth zipped shut, he could do it, that is for sure.

Question: Supposing the Church discovered the secret of the twilight gates first, why hasn’t everyone else found out? Why haven’t any scientists found out?

Answer: Consider, even these days, if you saw something in the woods that looked like a ghost or a demon, would you tell the local priest, or tell your local scientist? I don’t know about you, but I know who my local priest is. I don’t even know the names of any scientists living in my town, if any do. And, two or three hundred years ago, if you went to a university to find a scholar, more likely than not, he would have been a monk or a priest anyway.

Question: What about outside Europe?

Answer: There are stories of lost wanderers seeing strange or horrifying wonders in the mountains or the ruins of jungle-smothered cities, or lights beneath the sea, from all over the globe. Everyone has stories of hapless travelers who wander into strange and elfin lands, where palaces of splendor rear golden domes above pits where dragons crawl, or wondrous gardens that no paths can ever find again. The ancient sages in China or India might have written such things down, but anyone else would only pass them along only as oral tradition, and the modern world would call them legends and ignore them. And in South America or Japan, the first white man in the area was more likely than not to be a missionary from Portugal or Spain. I had read somewhere that Spanish monks burned the Aztec codices. Now I wondered what had really been in them.

Question: Why keep it secret?

Answer: There are only three kinds of secrets you keep secret.

First, there are secrets like where Long John Silver buried his treasure. You don’t tell because you would lose something precious if you told. This might be something the Church was keeping to herself for some advantage. An advantage such as a place to hide from French kings during times of trouble?

Second, there are secrets like which girl you have a crush on. You don’t tell because it’s no one’s damned business but yours. And I know the Church teaches that occultism and meddling with familiar spirits is no one’s damned business at all, because it’s a business that might damn you. Visitations from strange dimensions might well fit into that category as far as it was concerned.

Third, there are secrets like how to build a hydrogen bomb. You don’t tell because some mad genius out there in the world could blow up the world if he were told.

I gritted my teeth. Professor Dreadful was mad. Literally. He was bipolar, or manic-depressive as they sometimes call it, and had to be locked up. He was also a genius.

Even though there were no police chasing me, I worked the switch on the dashboard that opened the nitrous oxide valve. The Jeep jumped like it was kicked by a mule. Then it was like a ramjet trying to break the sound barrier without taking off. I screamed and hollered because I was scared out of my mind. The road I was on was not exactly straight or flat, and I am pretty sure I left some olive-drab paint from the Jeep sides scraped against the guardrail in more than one place. If there had been a single other car on the road, or a slippery patch, or a large nail, I would have smeared myself all across the landscape.

I do think I was either going Mach One or Warp Eight. I don’t think I ever had so much fun in my life.

Chapter Two: The Haunted Museum

1. The Land of Cheese

When my dad was a kid, you could get a driver’s permit with your parent’s permission at the age of fourteen. He lived in North Carolina. I have never been there, but I guess it must be the coolest place in the world to live, because there when you are fourteen you can drive a real car. Probably they all drive Red Dodge Chargers with the Stars and Bars painted on the roof and the doors welded shut, doing ramp jumps over dry gulches while their horns play Dixie.

I should have had my license a year ago. But between my dad flitting off on business trips and my older brother going all weird on us, no adult was around to give me the required number of hours to get a real learner’s permit. Instead, for this year, I am legally allowed to operate farm machinery under adult supervision during the day, and for some reason that includes Jeeps operating on public roads. I guess that is in case farmers find undocumented corn growing in the median strip and need to perform an emergency harvest, when only an offroad Army vehicle is at hand.

Jeeps are more dangerous and difficult to drive than a car with a nice enclosed top, shoulderbelts, airbags, and automatic stickshift, so the permit rule makes no sense to me. But I am underage, and the State Legislature did not phone me up and ask my opinion, and I do not live in the coolest place in the world.

I live in Tillamook, the Land of Cheese.

No kidding: that is what it says on the sign at the township limits. The Professor actually lives near CalTech in Pasadena, way south of here, but he comes up here for the summer, which I cannot figure out at all. I mean, who wants to live in the Land of Cheese?

There are at least four museums in Tillamook: a maritime museum, a naval air museum, a county historic museum, and this place, the Cryptozoological Museum of Scientific Curiosities.

The Museum sits on the same hill as the Cape Meares Lighthouse. From the look of it, the building had originally been maybe a morgue or the soundstage for a Gothic haunted house movie; but really someone used to live there. I guess back in the old days they liked being creeped out or something.

The front doors are tall and peaked like the doors of a Church, and above it is a stained glass rose window with an image of a dragon twisted into a triple knot and biting its own tail. To one side of the door in a glass box like a phone booth is a stuffed replica of a Silverback Mountain Gorilla; to the other side is a statue of the one remaining Hoan Kiem Turtle in the world.

The door leaves are carved with patterns of stiff, square and octagonal flowers, and each door has a tall, thin window like an archery slit. Through these window slits, you can see the stuffed Okapi, which is a giraffe-necked red deer with striped hindquarters like a zebra. There is a lamp to mark the front exit that hangs in the museum entrance whose light shines just on the head of the Okapi, but not on anything else, so at night the head seems to hang in midair, surrounded by shadows, staring out at you through the thin windows piercing the doors.

I had never heard of cryptozoology before I met the Professor, but there were still species of life on Earth not well known enough or seen often enough to be classified. Such creatures were called cryptids, and they dwelt on our world unseen by man, or rarely. Not long ago, people thought the Okapi was a myth. Not long before that, they thought the Duck-Billed Platypus, an egg-laying mammal, was a hoax; but they thought that a fur-bearing trout allegedly from subArctic Canadian streams was real, rather than the concoction of a playful taxidermist. The coal-black foxes behind our house were one such unclassified or cryptid breed. I had gotten the summer job with the Museum by shooting one and bringing it in. The taxidermist, Mr. Gertz, had stuffed and mounted it. It stood in a glass case along the wall between the Arctic Gorilla display and the stuffed Giant Moa. I always felt a twinge of guilt and sorrow when I was cleaning that area.

I mean, I had gotten the job. I didn't shoot a vixen with cubs. But still.

There are two little towers called folly towers, not tall enough to hang bells in, to either side of the main building. There is a local story that, a hundred years ago, a man was forced at gunpoint to hang himself in the folly tower to the left; and that the robber who killed him was haunted by his ghost until he went crazy, came all the way back into town, broke back into the house, and hanged himself in the tower to the right. No one believes the story, but everyone calls the place the Haunted Museum.

The first time I talked with her was in front of the Museum.

2. Squirrel Gun

So there I was, driving, or being carried along by, the Nitro Jeep from Hell, well on my way to a life of crime, having broken every traffic law in existence, including at least one aerospace regulation, when I cut the motor, judiciously applied the brakes and merely let the Jeep roll under its own momentum up the hill and into the gravel parking lot. My teeth ached from windburn, and my cheeks ached from the lunatic grin I must have been wearing, and my heart was racing from the adrenaline rush.

The tires crunch-crunched a bit, and my ears rang from the silence, and I heard the birds twittering. Maybe there was a wee bit of pink in the East. The silhouette of the Haunted Museum flickered against the sky, caught for a moment against the light splashed against distant clouds from the turning beam from the lighthouse on the far side of the hill. The Museum itself was dark.

I stood up. Knees only wobbled a little. There I was, wearing my bathrobe and moccasins, big black bulletproof vest, cool nightvision goggles, honking huge flashlight tucked through the jacket belt at one hip, ridiculously cool, expensive, antique Japanese sword no one in his right mind would ever take into a for-real battle at the other hip, and my Dad’s blessing and prayer on my head.

And I could not decide if this was the best night of my life or the last.

I wondered if the warmth in my chest, the sense of strength, was because I was brave, despite that I was facing some danger Dad had not exactly explained to me? Or if it was because I was Mr. Crazy, Junior, son of Mr. Crazy, Senior?

The parking lot was empty. Penny rides a spluttery little motor scooter that was nowhere in evidence.

My grin faltered. Did that mean Penny was not here? Also, since the Museum was dark, it looked like no power was on. I knew how cranky the old fuse box was. If Professor Dreadful had actually left a large piece of machinery running in the building, dimensional-door engine or madman’s harmless tinker toy, it most likely would have burnt out a fuse sometime over the weekend. Whatever radiation my father was afraid of would have had days to dissipate. That is, if he were not mad also.

Did it mean no one was here? Or did it mean someone — I wasn’t sure who. Science fiction fans in costume? — someone my dad told me to shoot might be even now lying in wait, breathing silently. No, wait. I was supposed to slay science fiction fans with the edge of the sword. Shoot normal looking people. But only if there was no fog.

I looked up. The sky looked clear to me. Not a wisp of fog in sight. My locker was in the groundskeeper’s shed. I had the key, and it was not that far away.

So I snuck over to that, keeping out of line-of-sight of the dark Museum windows as much as I could. I did not dare to turn on the one dangling bulb hanging from the ceiling of the shed, even after it gonked me in the forehead. Growth spurts are nice, but you bump into things you used to walk under, and I guess that is what they mean by growing pains.

Inside the shed was my squirrel gun and a brick of ammo. I shoot a .22 Long Rifle rimfire cartridge, 40 grain weight. I can nail a rabbit or river rat at 80 yards, or a raccoon or fox at 150 yards. If expressed as a word problem, you could say my rifle was to my dad’s 30-06 Springfield as Penny’s motor scooter was to a Harley.

Don’t get me wrong. I am not knocking the advantage of confronting the Black Hats armed with an antique katana and a big flashlight. But I’d rather have a weapon more threatening.

Hmpf. Even after the rifle was in my hands, I felt the same way: I’d rather I had a weapon more threatening. Well, I guess it would work to intimidate anyone not too familiar with guns. A rifle this caliber can certainly kill a man, especially if, after knocking him off his feet with the first shot, you grab the barrel and beat him over the head with the stock.

I should mention it took me more than a minute of fumbling around to get my pathetic yet under-impressive rodent-slaying longrifle into my hands. The image in the night-vision goggles was fuzzy, so I pushed them to my forehead, covered the flashlight with my palm, and twisted it on. A very little reddish light sneaked out, enough to let me see. Hopefully not enough to be seen.

With this, I was able to find the right key on my crowded keyring, and undo the upright locker, the bicycle chain tying the gun down, the trigger lock on the trigger and the steel creel box where I store the ammo. My dad had had it drummed into him at Parris Island to keep everything polished, dry, squared away and locked up when not in use, and so that got drummed into me. There were also local ordinances about firearms storage, and in Sunday School they taught me to respect authority, render unto Caesar that which was Caesar’s and all that.

However, when a pair of raccoons started tearing up the garbage at the Museum (I think they were attracted by the smell of what the taxidermist, Mr. Gertz, was throwing out back when the Zanzibar Leopard was being stuffed for display), Professor Dreadful was aghast at the number of regulations we had to obey to get county animal control to capture the beasts. He told me to keep my rifle on the premises, and simply had me shoot the vermin, and take a shovel and bury them. Which I guess taught me not to render unto Caesar more than a certain common-sense amount. I mean, even George Washington broke some laws, right?

It took me another moment to load. I could do that in the dark, by touch, so I twisted the flashlight off. I use a 5-round clip magazine. I put the rest of the box (45 rounds) in my dad’s jacket pocket, with a wadded hankie in the box so the rounds wouldn’t rattle when I moved. His jacket has nice big pockets that zipper shut.

I came out of the shed. At that moment, I saw two little red lights in the basement windows, and I swear they looked like eyes. For some reason, they had not shown up in the greenish image of the goggles, but I sure as heck saw them now. They were looking at me.

So I hit the dirt. I lay there a moment, having driven the pommel of an ancient katana more expensive than my entire education into my groin, and trying not to yell.

Then, twitching in pain and trying not to whimper, my squirrel rifle cradled in my elbows, and the antique katana I suddenly cared a lot less about being dragged by its baldric over the grass being pulled like a big stupid metal tail behind me (no doubt picking up dirt and dings, each one of which knocked two hundred dollars off the asking price of the antique), and a honking big flashlight only now and again thwacking me in the buttocks, I crawled across the lawn toward the basement of the Haunted Museum, where I had seen the eyes of the night-creature.

3. Best Night or Last?

“You know,” said one half of my brain to me softly during these moments. “There is an all night Seven-Eleven not ten minutes away. I could drive there, go in, get myself a Coke-flavored Slurpee in two minutes, and just sit there in the parking lot, loitering for exactly fourteen minutes, sipping my drink. They don’t shoo you away until fifteen minutes pass. I bet I could get a nice greasy hot dog made from authentic meat byproducts swept up from the slaughterhouse floor. Say buying the hotdog of meatlike substances takes another minute, especially if you squirt chili-flavored goo from that little spigot onto it. By my calculation, I would be alive for that whole twenty-seven minutes. Driving back here in ten more minutes to get killed by something, gives me a subtotal of thirty-seven minutes. If it takes one second for the night-creature to tear out my throat, and seven minutes, fifty-nine seconds for my brain to cease functioning from the trauma, blood loss, and general lack of breathing, that gives me a grand total of forty-five minutes. If I go back and get that Slurpee. Maybe, I could not cram a whole lifetime of experience and thought and wonder into that forty-five minutes, but it is longer than your average sitcom episode, so a lot can happen in that amount of time. And I would get a last meal out of it.”

The other half of my brain said, “But every boy my age wants to be a hero. This is my chance. I can save somebody from danger.”

The first half said, “Somebody, or some girl? If you had wanted to save people in general, you could have taken that summer job as a lifeguard. You are only here because she’s pretty.”

The second half said, “Wait—are you making the argument that Superman is not allowed to save Lois Lane, if she is a drop-dead gorgeous yet spunky girl reporter, on the grounds that it is a violation of the Equal Rights for Ugly Women Act or something? You can only rescue people for unselfish reasons, not because you are dying to do something to get her to notice you? If your motives are less than pure, you let her die?”

“No, I am making the argument that, if she is in real danger, and if your Dad, who maybe is not your Dad, is maybe a real nutcase, maybe you should just call the police. If you are worried about her, that is. The phone is in your pocket. So far, you have not done anything that has got you caught. Are you prepared to kill someone with that thing? For real? Not a first-person shooter game, not a TV show, not little boys playing Cowboys and Indians and Cops and Robbers — which no boys play any more, except you and your brothers. For real. Maybe the jury will say it was self-defense. You can explain to them about the Moebius coil that opens up inter-dimensional doorways, and tell them the Dark Building, or whatever it is called, was threatening a girl you have a crush on, who does not know you are alive, with exo-dimensional radiation cooties that damaged her cell structure: so you killed the groundskeeper in the dark by mistake. Otherwise, leave the rifle here.”

“I am the groundskeeper. And she knows I am alive! She talked to me the day before yesterday.”

“Sure. She said, where is the key to my father’s desk, please? And then she said, get me some coffee, won’t you, please?”

“I cherish the memory. Two creams, no sugar.”

“You memorized her drink. Meanwhile, she does not know your name. She thinks your name is MARMOSET, because that is what is printed on the nametag of your uniform. Call the cops. You have a phone.”

“I also have a squirrel gun, a wicked cool katana, a honking big flashlight, a bulletproof jacket, and a bathrobe. I can take on Godzilla.”

But by then it was too late. I was at the basement window.

It is very important to set one half of your brain to argue with the other half while you are belly-crawling into possible death during what may be your last hour on Earth. You keep it occupied. Otherwise the two lobes will gang up and bring you to your senses and stop you.

4. The Window

The basement windows of the Museum were semicircles of thick glass, covered with mesh, and designed to be tilted open no more than a quarter of a right angle, exposing a crack like the toothless grin of a jack-o-lantern turned upside down.

I heard a soft noise, like the scrape of nails on concrete, come softly through the crack. Something alive was moving in the basement.

Between each window, some gardener of long ago had decided to make my life easier by planting a bush big enough to duck behind. Duck I did.

That gardener of long ago had also decided to make my life harder by picking holly as the type of bush to plant. I made a mental note to find out whether one of those gun sportsman magazines that are always lying around my house was called something like BULLETPROOF JACKET LIFE. I resolved to write to the editors to tell them my amazing discovery that a jacket that deflects bullets cannot stop the little poking thorns of nasty Christmastime plants, especially if the jacket is too small, you cannot zip it up in the front, it doesn’t cover your legs, and you are not wearing real pants. My legs and chest and stomach were pricked by dead and pointy little leaves, and one innocent little leaf somehow managed to find its way inside my collar and drive a point into my neck that felt as large as a railroad spike.

On my belly, holding my breath, I sidled closer. There were two little red flickering lights I had seen through the thick windows. As I watched, they were growing further apart. For a moment, it looked as if some creature with nocturnal red eyes were coming closer. Then it looked more like the creature were wall-eyed, his pupils growing further and further apart as one eyeball wandered away to the right while the other eyeball stayed where it was.

They were not eyes. They were candles. The power was out but someone was in the basement.

The right candle was now moving away from the first at about the pace of a slow walk. I saw this second light disappear from one window, and then appear and cross the next window, and then the next, until it reached the last basement window, the one farthest from me.

Suddenly, as bright as a lightning flash, white and clear light danced and blinked and streamed from all the basement windows, throwing black shadows shaped like a row of the letter m fantastically elongated across the parking lot from the hoops of stone embracing the windows. There was a hum like bees.

I blinked for a moment, half blind, before my eyes adjusted, and I realized what I was seeing. The fuse box was at the back of the building. Someone carrying a candle had walked back to the fuse box and reset the fuse. The light coming from the window was just the fluorescent tubes set in the basement ceiling, flickering into brightness.

But that bee-hum was louder than I thought the basement lights should sound. Cautiously, I pulled my head out from beneath the holly bush where the startling flare of lights had jerked it (ow, ow and ow), and I squinted in through the little crescent-shaped crack of the opened window next to me.

I was between two rooms, with the dividing wall right in front of my nose, so that with my left eye, I saw the main basement area. A stairway as steep as a ladder led down into a utility room with workbenches and a broken washing machine. With my right eye, I saw the older part, the wine cellar beneath the original building. Beyond the wine cellar, to the far right, was an open space with a diesel generator bolted to the concrete floor and thick cables leading up to the Museum proper. Call it the generator room, even though it was in the wine cellar. On the far wall, next to the stairs that led up to the outer cellar door, was the fuse box.

Standing by the fuse box, with a candle in one hand, the door of the fuse box in the other, blinking, was Penelope Dreadful in all her golden-haired glory, long shining tresses, full lips, high cheekbones and regal eyes, looking lovely as Juno, Queen of the Gods. If Juno wore eyeglasses.

5. A Sigh of Lovesickness

She was wearing a lab coat, I remember.

Actually, to be honest, I remember she was wearing dark-soled beige shoes with a small heel and little brass buckles on the ankle straps, nylon stockings, a knee-length dark skirt with a thin brown belt, a white blouse with a rounded collar, and over all this the aforementioned lab coat, slightly too large for her, that made her look adorable.

Actually, to be more honest, I remember with excruciating clarity her shapely legs in those nylons, curvaceous hips in that skirt, the leonine flatness of the belly cinched by that belt, and, most of all, I remember that white blouse straining against the rounded glory of her bosom, and how the little white buttons pulled tiny, curving lines of tension across the fabric as she breathed …

Okay. That is too much honesty. Never mind what I remember. I remembered myself with a hot touch of shame beating in my cheeks, and tore my gaze away.

Attractive young woman in a lab coat. Wearing glasses. You got the picture. It was the girl.

What’s more, it was a girl in what looked like absolutely no danger whatever. There was not a science fiction fan in sight.

Actually, the fact that I was not wearing pants while staring at her through the window made me look like the only source of danger here. A sad thought for a would-be rescuer.

Also not in sight were the goggles she wears to ride her putt-putt scooter. When not in use, she parks them low around her neck on a strap like a really big and awkward necklace, so that there is always a twin glint of glass near her bosom whenever she jogs unexpectedly around a corner while you are mopping or something, bright enough to catch and draw your eye. Then you have to pretend you were looking somewhere else without it being obvious you are pretending, even though there is no need for you to pretend because you were only looking at her goggles.

She looks adorable when she puts them on, too, because then she looks like a pearl diver or a biplane aviatrix. Penny takes off her eyeglasses to wear these riding goggles, so I assume either (a) that she is farsighted and therefore uses her eyeglasses only for reading fine print, or (b) that she is nearsighted and therefore she is fated to kill a dozen motorists in a multiple-car crash caused by young men all swerving and flipping their vehicles to avoid a catastrophe of Mister Magoo proportions.

Of course, I have seen her before, many a day, not wearing these goggles, such as when she takes a cab to the Museum, which she does when running late. The extra minutes it took for the cab to go to the motel and pick her up were still quicker than that cranky little scooter. Late, or in a hurry. And cabs run even early in the morning, before dawn.

Which explained why her motor scooter was not in sight.

6. A Sigh of Disappointment

If you are wondering why I did not call out to her at that moment, I have to explain something embarrassing.

I will not bother to describe the sense of crushing disappointment that caught in my throat at that moment. It would make me look silly. Sillier. Hmm... more silly.

I had wanted to help her. Is that so bad? Does that make me sound weird?

I also thought about her all the time, and yes, memorized what she took in her coffee, and I thought her goggles were sexy. So I admit that is weird. You have a lot of time to think when you are mopping floors. But a young man wanting to play the white knight to a damsel in distress is not. It is as natural as doves cooing in springtime.

Yes, I should have rejoiced to find her unmussed and in sound health instead of being tied hand and foot, screaming, dangling above a trashcan whose lid was a ticking time clock, which, when the red countdown reached zero, would pop open to reveal the scarlet eyes of menacing, drug-maddened, man-eating raccoons, whom I could plink off with my low caliber squirrel rifle as they poured forth from the trashcan’s dark depth, clutching sinister knives and forks in their paws. Then their heads could be mounted and stuffed on the walls of the nursery where our ten to twelve children would play. Mr. Gertz could do the stuffing.

Instead I pouted. So sue me.

I’ll remind you that at that point I had been ignominiously wounded in combat by a low-hanging stealth light-bulb, a deadly groin-seeking sword pommel, a butt-smiting flashlight, and a sadistic holly bush. Not wounded, severely, but I wasn’t back at my house sipping improperly-stirred instant hot cocoa either.

All for nothing. I guess I could always help her in some other fashion. Like getting her a coffee with two creams no sugar. Women respect boys younger than them and not able to get into college who bring coffee, and don’t stare at their breasts when they come jouncing unexpectedly around a corner, or so I hear. Just not in this dimension.

I was really in the mood to shoot a science fiction fan just then. Like I said, there was no one in sight.

7. A Sigh of Awe

But there was something in sight, in the utility room, and it might have been a prop from a science fiction show. I turned my head.

The incandescent light bulb in the generator room had come on right away, shining on Penny in all her Penny-ness. The fluorescent tube bolted to the bare rafter in the utility room, on the other hand, hesitated, flickering and fluttering as it came to life. That flash was like a camera bulb going off in my eyes, which were right near the same level as the buried ceiling, if you recall, and I blinked, but I could see the thing burnt into my retina.

In the utility room the table was connected by large cables running through a plug box through a small hole originally meant for wine bottles into the generator room. The worktable was covered with circuit boards and circuit breakers, rheostats, resistors, all surrounding what looked like an upright metal doughnut made of gold and as thick as a child’s leg.

I guess you have to imagine a child of a cowboy, because the kid is really bowlegged. The metal doughnut was an electromagnet, and it was wrapped tightly with naked electrical wiring.

Most doughnuts, if you bit them in half, would be circular in cross section. I want you to imagine this doughnut was triangular in cross-section, like a prism that has been bent in a hoop till its ends touch. I also want you to imagine that the triangle is torqued in a one-third roll before the ends are soldered together, so that there is only one surface to the prism, but this one surface, if you followed it with your finger, would twist around and around on itself three times, like stripes on a barber pole, before it came back to where it started. The hoop looked a little bit like those triangles made of three arrows chasing each others' tails you sometimes see on recycling bins. It was the kind of thing M.C. Escher would draw.

Maybe this was gold leaf covering a core of some conductive metal. If that thing was solid, the Professor was bizarrely rich, or backed by someone who was. Who builds a solid gold circular electromagnet?

Maybe not. The thing was shining like only gold shines, bright as an old Double Eagle coin, and the naked copper wiring was shining a slightly redder shade of yellow, bright as new pennies, and I caught my breath in awe. It looked like some magnificent Aztec idol, barbaric and massive, mated to brilliant modern technology, ambitious and potent.

And I knew the Professor must have been insane. Who uses uninsulated wiring? Anyone brushing up against the machine would suffer a powerful shock.

The second candle, the one that I had thought was the eye of a creature, was glued by its own wax on the table, next to the Professor’s blueprints and notes. I recognized them because Penny had needed my help getting the Professor’s laptop (which I jimmied the lock on his rolltop desk to get to, remember?) to connect to the printer, which had also needed a new ink cartridge. It was page after page of little triangular scratch-marks grouped in neat little squares. The Disaster Cuneiforms. It was the instructions on how to build a gateway to other Earths with other histories, and how to turn it on.

And everything must have been plugged in right, and the instructions must have been followed correctly, because when the power came back on when the new fuse connected, the twisted electromagnet hoop did indeed turn on.

The circuits had taken a moment or two to warm up, about the amount of time it takes for a young man to let out a sigh of lovesickness, then of disappointment, turn his head, blink in the dazzle of a silent explosion of light, and utter a third sigh of awe — and the darned thing started humming.

Humming? Throbbing. I could feel the vibration from the Moebius coil in my teeth.

And that was the moment I screamed.

Because the twisted triangular hoop started to glow. The air around it shimmered like you’d see above a pavement on a hot day, that makes it look like there is water there, when there is no water.

The humming climbed in pitch to a shriek, and the shimmering thickened to a blur and the twisted hoop began to crawl with colored sparks.

The sparks flared and fanned out like a peacock opening its tail, forming an almost continuous circle of many colors, ring within ring.

The outermost was violet almost too dark to see, then a circular band of piercing navy blue and sky blue blending into green, into delicate gold the color of a canary’s wing, into a warm orange like coils in the toaster oven on high, blending finally into the color of a cherry sunset. It looked like the rings of Saturn hovering sideways. Each tint looked pure.

It was beautiful. It was everything I ever wanted in my life: the gateway out of the beartrap of my comfortable life and the window into the Somewhither.

And I was screaming my head off.

Chapter Three: The Door into Nowhere

1. The Shrieking Marmoset

Mind you, I did not want to scream.

I wanted to give forth a loud yet manly shout, as penetrating to the ear as the call of the Spartans in battle at Thermopylae, able to be heard over the commotion of war and the screams of dying Persians, but showing no trace of fear or distress. A John Wayne kind of shout, nicely bass.

Nope. I screamed like a dying Persian, or maybe like a Persian eunuch. It was a soprano note.

Did I mention how lovely the Moebius coil rings seemed, a glittering circle of energy in midair, shimmering like summer sunlight refracted into living gems by the spray of mist from a fountain of water?

Let me also mention that I could not think of a single form of energy known to my extensive high-school level of scientific knowledge that would create that kind of beautiful discharge of such bright colors that was (1) not hotter than heck, radioactivity-wise; (2) not far less safe than putting a metal spoon in a microwave and turning it on with the door open; and (3) not creating ions, high-energy particles, gamma radiation, and whatever that junk is that makes the aurora borealis look so pretty.

And I did not know what the machine was. As far as I was concerned, that pretty rainbow ring could have been the freaking Death Star powering up its main-dish industrial-strength planet-cleansing Obliterification Ray. I knew then that Professor Dreadful, even if he wasn’t literally crazy, was a dangerous lunatic. Who would build such a crazy thing in the basement where your own innocent daughter might be wandering?

Remember that from my position above and outside, I could see into the generator room through the one window and into the workroom with the humming rainbow death machine through the other, but that there was a cinderblock wall separating the two.

The darned thing was pointed toward that wall. On the other side of the wall was the most beautiful girl in the world, right in the line of fire and completely oblivious to her danger.

“Penny! Run!” I screamed. “Go up the back stairs! Get away from the machine!”

Through the other window, I saw her head lift, and turn left and right. She could tell I was above her, but not where.

I could see the lovely rainbow ring. It was getting brighter. Little firefly dots of light, like sometimes you see when you splash something on a red stove burner in that kitchen that intimidates you, started to appear in some of the bands of color around the mouth of the Coil.

The voice of Penny seemed weird because it was so calm. Of course, she did not know why I was shouting. She did not know she was in the line of fire from a death ray. The concrete wall was in the way, and the wine shelves.

“Mr. Marmoset? Is that you?”

She has a faint accent or rhythm to her speech, a very precise pronunciation. It reminds me of the way Bollywood Actresses follow British pronunciation, but sound too musical and rich to be Englishwomen.

“It’s Muromets! MUROMETS!” I shouted back, “The machine is dangerous: it is leaking some sort of radiation! Go out the back way. Don’t go back in the workroom! RUN!”

She did not run. Instead she crossed her arms (which pushed up her bosom ever so slightly) and turned her foot to one side (which cocked her hips ever so slightly) and tapped her foot impatiently (which emphasized the curve of her nylon-clad calf ever so slightly).

“Mr. Marmoset, who sent you?”

“The Professor!”

“How much did he tell you?”

Strange. That was exactly what my father had said. Everyone seemed worried about other people not telling me things.

I am sure there was an innocent explanation for it, and that this creepy feeling like Arctic ants crawling over my spine was totally an overreaction. No doubt the town of Tillamook decided to hold a holiday where, once a year, everyone keeps a bunch of secrets from just one unfortunate dupe, and today it just so happened to be my day.

“He told me everything!” I said this, not because it was true, but because I wanted her to listen to me. I made a mental note to tell that next time I went to confession also. “Your father told me most of all to get you out of danger!”

She looked thoughtful. “Ah—my father—perhaps is not in the best of health at this moment—I am sorry if he frightened you, Mr. Marmoset, but everything is under control.”

I should have known. Of course he told her about the danger. She was his daughter. And of course she did not believe him. If she had, she would not have been here in the first place.

The Coil got a little brighter. The ring of colors was now solid. The throbbing, thrumming rose a note in pitch.

“Miss Dreadful! It’s Muromets! We can talk about this when you are a hundred yards away from the building! Move it! Now!”

She did that thing girls with escaping hair sometimes do to blow a strand away from their eyes. It involves pursing your lips as if whistling while pouting and turning your eyes up and tossing your head back slightly. It looks adorable on any sufficiently pretty girl.

“Don’t call me Dreadful. It sounds ridiculous. I understand the phenomena I am dealing with, and I am safe from any danger. The seaward of the in carnie ’twould baas the danger of ass troll gee from the Direct Hour.”

I thought for a moment that my ears were dyslexic. I tried to sort out the sounds of her lilting accent in my head the way you do when you are not sure if Jimi Hendrix just sang Excuse me while I kiss the sky or Accuse me while I kiss this guy.

The crazy words finally clicked into place, but they did not make any more sense to me. The seaward of the Incarnate World bars the danger of astrology from the Dark Tower. Or maybe the first word was Sea Ward.

“Are you out there? Please come in. You can assist me in drawing down the twilight … If my father told you his plan, he doubtless failed to mention mine is the safer and wiser…”

And she started to move away from the fuse box. She took a step toward the narrow passage running past the empty wine shelves from the generator area to the basement room.

Closer to the death ray.

I was expecting her to melt into a skeleton before my eyes any second. I realized I had wasted half a minute. I could have sprinted to the back of the building, pounded down the stairs, grabbed her, thrown her over my shoulder Tarzan-style, and sprinted the hundred yards to safety (if that was far enough—what kind of radiation were we talking about?) in the same amount of time it had taken me to exchange one hundred words with her. Even now, I might be quick enough to circle to the basement door, leap down, Tarzan her over my shoulder, and hightail it out of the blast radius.

Or it might be even quicker to take my squirrel gun and shoot.

2. Battle in the Basement

With an instinct more powerful than instinct, I knew I could not shoot at the Moebius coil itself. It was a gorgeous machine. Gorgeous as the patterns on a rattlesnake, gorgeous as a forest fire leaping with wild red and billowing black. It was my ticket out of here. It was not only the gateway into other worlds; it was the escape hatch out of this one. It was the escape meant for me leading to the life meant for me.

Therefore I had to protect it as dearly as my own life.

But I noticed something. If I shot the cable leading to the table, this would simply cut the power. I had the key to the closet where the spare cables were kept. After the emergency, I could plug back the unharmed equipment and warm it back up.

At the opposite wall, less than eighteen feet away, therefore about ten times closer than I needed, point-blank, was the plug box, and it was set against a concrete wall with nothing nearby, and nothing beyond it. This was not the wall facing the generator room; it was the wall beyond which was packed dirt. It was like it was designed to be shot at. Safe as a target range.

And, heck, I really was in the mood to shoot something, and there were no science fiction fans around at the moment. And even if there had been, I could not shoot them anyway. Had to hack them to death with the antique sword. Father’s orders. So I put the rifle to my shoulder, let out my breath, held it, and…

And just then the machine started to whistle, then to shriek.

It sounded just like a teakettle.

Looked like one, too. I could see the condensation of vapor already starting to form in the room around the table, and so I could tell that the air was rushing out of the room. There was a thin little point, no bigger than a pinprick in the center of the rainbow circle, and a tiny tornado cone of vapor was beginning to form, with a needle-thin tail rushing into that spot.

Into, but not out of.

I’ve seen science fiction movies. I knew what I was looking at. It was like getting a pinhole puncture in the hull of your spaceship. All the air at fifteen pounds per square inch tries to rush out the tiny hole. The sudden expansion of the air causes a temperature change, and that makes the water vapor condense.

But this was not a pinhole in the hull of a spaceship. It was a pinhole in the walls of the universe. On the other side was not outer space. On the other side was — what had the Professor called it? — on the other side was the Deep of Uncreation.

The pinhole at the dead center flared and roared and opened. Maybe I should not have, but I looked straight at it.

Call it an orb of darkness smaller than a golf ball, an open mouth, a well, a pit, a black hole, a portal. But it was not a sphere; light and air entering any point on the circumference did not reach the far side. There was no far side. Inside, where my eyes could not focus, something was rippling like water in turmoil. Like a sailor looking out a knothole in a plank in the hull of a sinking ship, I saw the ocean of nonbeing, a vast deep, a sea of darkling chaos with no shore and no bottom.

This weird sensation was in my eyes, it reached into my brain, and something about it made me sure I was looking at the golfball-sized knothole wrong, as if my sense perceptions were inside out. This tiny dot of nothingness was somehow bigger than the basement room it was in, bigger than the Museum, maybe bigger than the continuum.

The edges of this tiny golfball (yet it was vast, so very vast) were frayed and flickering, and the Moebius coil groaned and sputtered, spitting sparks. It strained just like a primitive piece of machinery would do if someone or something, who knew such machines inside and out, had latched onto the energy field it was creating from the other side, and was forcing it open. Think of it as cracking a bottle of nitrous oxide into the professor’s Model-T.

Fog formed as quickly as when you breathe on a window on a hot day. The fog was only touching the upright coil itself, and the table, like a smoke ring. It was the same hue you sometimes see right after a cloudy sunset, when the light rays are bent by the Earth’s atmosphere into such a dark red that it mingles with purple.

I thought my eyes had been damaged by radiation, because the table and the things on it blurred and darkened so much. Then I thought instead that maybe the photons had been damaged, or maybe the fundamental structure of spacetime. This was the twilight my father had mentioned, the cloak hem of Uncreation.

It takes me a long while to describe this, but trust me; it took a short glance for me to see it. Penny had not yet taken a second step, and meanwhile this whole time I was still shouting.

“Penny! My father says your father is telling the truth! He is not crazy! He did contact an extradimensional intelligence! But the intelligence he contacted is hostile! The machine they tricked your father into constructing is a trap, a weapon, a snare! Please run!”

But she did not run. Instead she said something softly, turned, reached back with her hand, and pulled the main switch on the fuse box. I did not hear her words, but I heard the tone of voice. It was what you might call a — well then, why not just …? — tone of voice.

Click. Lights out.

Pretty smart. No need to run from the dangerous machine. Safer to turn it off.

For a second, I was giddy with relief.

But it was not dark. Only the lights in the generator room were out.

The utility room was lit up like a Christmas tree, because a rainbow the size of a bicycle wheel was still flaming and blazing on the workbench. It was fading, getting dimmer, but still there.

Some old radios take a moment to fade out of hearing even after you flip the switch, or old vacuum cleaners hum. Maybe the Moebius coil was like that. Or maybe was there power from some source not in this room, not in this universe, trying to keep the doorway open. I don’t know which, but I know which way I’d bet.

It did not get dimmer fast enough. The orb was shrinking, but…

With a crack of noise like a pistol shot, something came through.

Bang!

In the other room, by the dim light of her candle, I saw Penny’s body jerk as if struck.

Two more cracks rang out as one. Ba-Bang!

My heart stopped, or my brain. But no: she had been startled at the noise. It was a flinch, not a bullet impact. “Hit the dirt!” I shouted. “Get down!”

It was three somethings. Not pistol fire. They were long and thin and golden-red, like spears from a speargun, and they shot from the dark orb at the eye of the rainbow ring, one after another and another. The barrel velocity was respectable: that crack was a miniature sonic boom, like the snap a whip makes when the tip passes the speed of sound.

But the spears were also like snakes, because when two of them struck the far wall (leaving white cavities in the old brick) and fell to the ground, they clattered and began writhing and twisting. I smelled ozone through the open window, that storm smell you sometimes get after lightning strikes. The spears were machines, dynamos wielding immense power.

I now saw that they were chains made of scores of little triangular prisms, arranged like sausage links, so that when the metal snakes writhed and started to plug their tail-jacks into their mouth-sockets, they would have formed a twisted single-surface loop like the crude one sitting on the breadboard table. They were Moebius coils; doorway engines.

But these metal snake-chains were easily six yards long, and the hoops they were trying to form were two yards across: big enough to let something from Uncreation come into our universe, something wider in diameter than the golfball-hole the slender chains had been designed to spear through.

Through the right basement window, I could see that Penny had not hit the dirt as I had so loudly requested. Instead, she had picked up a broom from the corner where it was kept with some other cleaning equipment, and after adjusting her eyeglasses on her nose she was striding purposefully toward the door, as if meaning to fling it open and go through it. Maybe she was going to give everything a very thorough sweeping. Or maybe she thought the noise of the death-ray was being caused by a squirrel, or some other small yet furry menace that could be defeated with a broomstick. Maybe she was out of her mind. But she looked entirely calm.

The first of the metal snake-coils was settling right before the door, a closing circle of metal like the snare for a rabbit, and Penelope Dreadful, the most perfectly formed girl ever designed, was about to step through the door and put her foot right in the middle of it. Even before the C-shape of the links had closed to an O-shape, the snake-coils were whining, internal dynamos powering up, and the rainbow light of unreality was beginning to flicker up and down the metal prisms. The eerie shine seemed very bright in the multicolored gloom.

I remembered something. I was holding a rifle. Heck, I already had it at my shoulder, cheek against the stock, sights lined up and everything.

The fog effect of the twilight was not near me. Gunpowder might not ignite in the twilight, but bullets maybe could fly into it.

So I fired twice. Bang! Bang! I am still proud of those shots, and I really doubt I could shoot that well again.

Must have been the adrenaline. Or the girl.

Because I hit the glowing snake coil right in front of the door in its metal head-socket before it could form a circle and close the connection with itself, and I hit the other snake in the tail-socket, so that when it put its nose to its tail to plug in, it couldn’t.

Both the snakes made sad little electronic noises and flopped over dead. (When I am saying head and tail, I just mean the front and back ends of the chain-shaped Moebius coil machines. They did not really have heads. They had sockets. But, darn, they sure moved like snakes, and I was as afraid of them as I would have been of rattlers.) They went dark, and gloom flooded back into the utility room.

Too much gloom. The homemade Moebius coil on the desk, black with teardrops where the uninsulated copper wire was melting, chose that moment to give off a cough of smoke, and the rainbow effect snapped out of existence in a vibrating whirl of sparks.

Part of the equipment was smoking, and I heard, rather than saw, the big golden ring itself, looking now like the bowlegged child of the cowboy was fainting, toppled over with a crash.

Twilight Door closed. Ostiary mission successful.

And the gateway into the other world, something I would have gnawed off my leg to keep intact, was dark, and harmless. It was dead. Like my hopes.

My stomach was flip-flopping with acrid anguish. The door was not only closed, I had shot the other two…

Two? Where was the third one? I had counted three bangs.

The utility room was now entirely dark, or should have been: but the basement window in the corner was now lit up with the electro-rainbow glow and fog of the other-dimensional energies. It was coming from outside, from beyond the building.

3. The Third Coil

That light, dim as it was, shone colored beams enough into the dark room to reveal the dent in the waterpipe near the ceiling, and the spiderweb-shaped hole burned into the same basement window so brightly lit up. The edges of the hole were blackened where the glass had fused.

The third spear had come through at a different angle, flown wide, and ricocheted off the metal pipe and out through the glass. It must have happened right before my eyes, and made a noise like a sledgehammer, but I just did not notice it — maybe that particular split-second I had been preoccupied thinking Penny had been gun-shot.

I was off like a jackrabbit, somehow running before I had even gotten my feet under me, sprinting around the corner of the Museum, jumping with a thump over the ramp-shaped cellar doors, too much in a hurry to take the extra step it would have taken to go around, and grabbing the rain-pipe in one hand to help me swing around the corner without having to lean into the turn. The antique sword hanging from my baldric was clumsy enough to give me a sharp slap on my hip as I tore around that corner.

I saw it. It was resting on the grass. The snake had swallowed its tail, forming its Moebius coil. The circle of prism-shaped links had already powered up. The metal prisms were blurred and darkened like that heat-shimmer, and in their place was a rainbow, blue on the outside and red on the inside.

The homemade Moebius coil on the workbench in the utility room had taken several long moments for the rainbow bridge to form, and get coherent, and grow bright. Not this one. A circle of light big as a fireman’s net blazed in the grass, as quickly as a flamethrower vomiting fire, and the Haunted Museum threw a multicolored shadow directly away from it.

A black ball of mist was forming on the ground right in the center of the rainbow ring, about the size of a pea, but, with a scream and a roar, it was the size of a baseball, a basketball, a wrecking ball. The funnel of a tornado had already formed reaching upward from the rainbow flame-ring prone on the grass.

I brought my squirrel gun up to my shoulder, aimed, squeezed off a shot, missed.

The mouth of Uncreation opened wide and breathed in. The roar of a hurricane picked me off my feet before I knew it.

If you remember as a child picking up a fold of the white tablecloth that hung down into the reach of your chubby fingers, and pulling it just to see what would happen if all the china plates and fluted wineglasses and sparkling silverware, steaming pot of mashed potatoes, or pitcher of iced tea or decanter of port, Mom’s green glass vase spilling roses and water, the tall candlesticks with flame like comets’ tails, shedding hot wax, and all were to come crashing down on top of your curious little head—if you remember ever doing that, you know what this was like.

So much air at such a high velocity was being sucked into the black orb, it was like the sky was folded together pulled off the edge, everything sucked toward one point.

Me included.

The squirrel gun was yanked from my hands and went flying. There was nothing to grab on to. It was a wind tunnel, and I was a scrap of leaf. I was pulled into the black orb head-first.

I was curled in a ball, with my elbows up to shield my face from an impact that never came; but I did not hit the surface of the black orb. There was no surface. There was nothing.

And then there was more nothing.

4. Oops

So one second, I was feeling so sorry for myself that my gorgeous gateway out of the universe had burnt up and fallen over. The next second, a second gateway opens up and swallows me. Call me crazy, but at first I was elated and awed. I had fallen out of my home dimension. Even if I died in the next moment, I would die in a place beyond the beyond: a voyage greater than any man ever achieved. I had gone farther than Magellan, found a world newer than Columbus, stranger than the world on which Armstrong left his footprint.

Then I saw that was nowhere. Elation feels a lot like fear, and awe turns quickly to panic.

The deep called Uncreation was nothing. Nothing had been created there. Not even air.

It was dark and there was nothing to breathe. Let it never be said that reading science fiction books was a waste of time, because it might have saved my life just then. I had read what you are supposed to do if you suffer explosive decompression. You open your mouth and shout. This expels the air which otherwise would rupture your lungs. You have about ten seconds before you faint, ninety seconds before you die.

Chapter Four: The Nothing Between Something

1. The Deep

This vacuum felt oddly warm. I was in free fall, except unlike the time my dad made me go parachuting, during that one really long second before the ripcord opened my chute, there was no air resistance. Even so, it felt like falling.

But I was not falling. The rainbow ring through which I had toppled was hanging above me like the mouth of a well, but I was not falling down the well. It was zero gravity, and I was not moving. Maybe.

Or the ring was falling at the same rate, keeping pace with me.

Through the ring, I could see the Museum starting to come apart: tiles were being blown off the roof by the hurricane and rushing toward me. The image was distorted: The earth and sky and trees and stars and the Museum were like a fish-eye lens photograph circled by a rainbow.

The debris did not reach me. I lost track of what happened to it in the fog as it fell toward my position. Maybe it was swept to one side or the other by a current in this ocean, and missed me. Or maybe it all disintegrated, created matter returning to pre-creation goo. I did not feel any wind on this side of the Moebius ring.

The hurricanic winds that should have been squirting me ever further from the puncture in the walls of the world were roiling and boiling the nothingness around me, but the air pressure had no pressure, no force.

Where was I? What was this stuff?

I was not in a void, but in some sort of fluid, oily and clinging. And yet the fluid was like fog, because there was no pressure to it, no solidity. It seemed dreamlike, nightmarish. Whichever way I turned my eyes, there seemed to be a clear darkness before me, but the corners of my eyes were crowded with a thicker darkness.

There was some sort of grit or specks suspended in the oily fog that flickered out of existence if you looked directly at them.

There was no noise but this horrible drumming that scared the heck out of me, a drum in four-four time: Lub-GUG lub-GUG, like that.

It was my own heartbeat that I was hearing through my ear-bones.

Why wasn’t I dead? Why wasn’t I dying?

2. The Door

That question was too big right now: I focused my panic on a smaller, simpler matter of getting the heck out of here.

I made kicking, swimming motions in midair. I was trying to get back to the Moebius ring. On this side, I could see the rainbow that formed the hoop, and see the glow.

I was making progress. The opening was not that far. Soon it was about the distance from my bedroom door to the bathroom down the hall, the only room where the light is allowed to burn at night.

The stuff was thick enough that I could make some headway, but just gluey enough that it was like quicksand. Then I was about as far away from the ring as Dobrin’s door was from the bathroom. Then, only as far as the head of the stairs from the bathroom.

There was a pressure opposing me, but I kept swimming. Closer yet, I could see the ripples of the hurricanes of wind blowing into the oily, dark substance of this space. The winds expanded like a bubble, in all directions at once, out from the rainbow hoop of the opening. A vibrating smoggy ball of explosively expanding air formed a continual concussive wave, so that a spherical area about a yard in each direction from the hoop was cleared of the dark foggy goo. And the clear zone was spreading.

There should have been a roar, but it was eerily silent. Closer again, now I saw that the black smoke was turning clear where the air beat against it, as if the contact with the air made the dust particles turn into air molecules.

I did not observe it long enough to tell if the globe of clear air was expanding or contracting, but there was definitely a wrestling match going on between the darkness and the air.

By all the laws of physics, I should not have been able to approach any opening that was spewing out air at fifteen pounds per square inch of pressure any more that I could put my arm up into the bore of a huge firehose while it was going full blast. I should have been picked up like a leaf in a gale and flung into the next county.

But it was as if the air dissolved upon contact with the blackness, or maybe it lost the need to obey the natural laws concerning air pressure and kinetic energy. So maybe the darkness helped.

Now I was very close (nearly at the bathroom door, so to speak) and there was enough light shed by the glow for me to see myself.

I could not scream, because there was no air, but fear certainly kicked me in the stomach with the muscle motions of a scream.

3. The Dark

I was trying to scream because my jacket and bathrobe and things, my face and hands, all were covered with little black specks like ants. They were crawling and writhing all over me. But it was not ants, it was some kind of specks of mud, if mud were alive. There was something gross in the way the specks moved and clung, like they were hungry with blind hunger.

The strange effect which made the specks vanish when you looked directly at them seemed to be diminishing. At first I could keep them off my hands by staring at them. But then they grew bolder, and crowded more closely around the edges of my vision, and crawled up my arms. The actual sensation of itching and stinging was not so bad, but the feeling that my vision was dissolving, that I was about to faint, never to wake again, was something I cannot describe.

I paused in my frantic swimming motions and tried to scrape them off my face with my fingers, but when I did this, the nasty little boogery drips squeezed together like flecks of clay, and in my hand the stuff turned into lopsided worms that writhed and nuzzled my fingers. I flinched and flung them into black fog.

You might think that stopping my swimming motion was really foolish, pausing for even one extra second in this nightmarish limbo. Sure it was. But it also saved my life. I was not right in front of the thing when it struck, but off to one side.

The bow shock of something larger than a Japanese bullet-train and faster than a bullet threw me end over end.

4. The Invasion Engine

I saw it when it rushed past me like a supersonic whale in the ocean of mist. It was huge, larger than a freight train, and made of prisms linked together: in other words, a giant-sized version of the coil machine. A dragon-sized version of a metal snake.

This Moebius coil machine was much bigger than the first three that shot out from the basement rig, and it exploded past me and hit the rainbow ring in a perfect bull’s-eye, and the bow shock of its passage threw me like a wren flung aside by the nose of a jetliner.

I could slow my tumbling by extending my arms and legs as if in mid-jumping jack. I was still close enough to see the scene on Earth as if through a round window. The circle of the dark door was very bright on this side, perhaps because this was a very dark place. I could see what lay on the other side with peculiar clarity.

I saw the invasion machine rising like a tower, coming straight up out of the ground where the Moebius coil was lying, and for a moment the hurricane mostly stopped because the freight-train-like vessel was mostly blocking the train-tunnel-mouth-like aperture leading into my universe.

A ring rather than a globe of air from our universe shot a hundred yards into the black murk like wings or the splash from the tires of a racecar when the invasion machine bullseyed the flaming rainbow ring. And this time, there was a roar. Why I heard it then, why it was carried to my ears, I don’t know.

It was moving faster than a rocket, faster than any aircraft, far above the seven miles a second you need to escape into orbit. It punched a hole in the cloudbank and drew the cloud vapor up in a trail after it, suctioning up a few square miles of atmosphere in its vortex as it passed.

Silence fell again.

I counted. One-Mississippi; two-Mississippi; three-Mississippi …

Here was one thing that was weird. Okay, strike that. Everything was weird. But I noticed one more weird thing.

I was now facing the ring from another direction, roughly at right angles from where I had been a moment ago. So I should have seen the ring edge-on. But it was not a ring. Somehow it was a sphere, and the sphere was always surrounded by the rainbow-aura ring, no matter from which way you see it. Instead of looking through the mouth of a well from the bottom and seeing night sky, now I was like someone half buried in the soil, looking toward the Museum from the eastern aspect, seeing the lawn and trees and so on as if from a worm’s-eye view.

During the moment when the train blocked the ring and slowed the hurricane, cutting it from a giant roar to a shrill giant whistle, Penny was there. I could see her, very small but quite clear, when she stepped out of the cellar door back on Earth. In her hand was a broom.

I could not shout. Waving my arms merely made me roll and pitch. And, anyway, I remembered that the orb looks entirely black from the living side of the hole in spacetime. I wondered if light-waves were being sucked in like the air was, so that I could see her, but not she me.

By the time I reached the sixth Mississippi, the tail of the machine was clear of the dark orb. The huge length of metal rose straight up, an exercise in perspective, an endless, infinitely swift line of golden metal surrounded with white flame like the re-entry heat you see flickering around the ablation shields of returning space capsules.

Except this was exit heat, not entry heat, as the whole machine, taller than the tallest skyscraper and longer than the longest suspension bridge, ramming straight up into the air, many times the velocity of the fastest supersonic military jet ever built, receded from my view.

The vortex of its wake pulled a mass of air straight up after it, and the hurricane funneling into the dark orb started below it, a whipsaw of wind yanking Penny and tiles from the Museum roof toward the hole I was looking through.

She was pulled, but she did not reach me.

At some point, Penny had tied herself down, maybe to the door handle with her belt, or more likely, to something sturdier than the handle. I did not see what she had done because she was too far away. All I saw was that her feet left the ground, and she bent at the waist as if something were holding her back by her belt. I suppose sailor girls must know their knots.

She pointed the broomstick at me. The broom was tucked under one armpit and clutched in both hands like a Tommy-gun, and she wrestled with it, because the hurricane was trying to snatch it.

Then the broom handle caught on fire. It was a blue, shadowless, eerie light, harsh and dazzling to the eye. I don’t know what would burn blue that way. Maybe the stick was covered with propane, or some other chemical that burns blue. But it didn't look like flame, it looked like the wood was reflecting an acetylene light coming from an unseen source.

I saw the blue-shining broomstick only for a second, because then the Moebius ring flickered like an old black and white television screen, a screen that shrinks and fades and turns into one lonely dot that dies.

This was too horrible for words, like being buried alive in an Edgar Allan Poe story, or slowly bricked up in a wall.

As it was shrinking, ever so slowly shrinking, and the passage back to Earth’s home universe was vanishing, I made swimming motions and kicked my legs, and opened and shut my mouth. But there was no breath in my lungs, no air here. Moving too fast seemed to make the stuff more like quicksand. The little antlike flecks were agitated and began crawling and swarming all over my clothes and face and legs. It was in my mouth and nose, writhing. The act of swallowing, or the convulsions of my choking lungs was compressing the stuff, and it felt like it was turning into worms inside of me, stirring and moving, tickling, stinging.

The window shut so very slowly.

It was sadistic how slowly it closed, letting me see the grass I would never see again, the Museum, now battered with gale damage some other boy would have to repair. It let me see the bright and beautiful girl in glasses whom some other man would have to embrace and cherish.

Another cruelty was how she climbed to her feet and turned her back on me to unbelt herself from the cellar door handle. Why should she not? Her side of the aperture was dark: she could not see me clawing and swimming and sloshing toward her. The dwindling circle was too small to fit my body through by that point in any case.

And that was not the full measure of the sadism. It let me see one thing more.

Over the shoulder of Penny, over the shoulder of the Museum, I had seen the invasion machine. It was like I was at the bottom of a missile silo watching an ICBM launch. I had seen it over the trees and traveling easterly during the moment when she had collapsed the Moebius ring, and then I saw the light glint off its golden hull when it passed through a cloud and emerged on the other side: the first cheery pink light of dawn in the upper air. The dragon-sized machine was slowing, losing velocity, and beginning to curve back down toward Earth when I lost sight of it, and of Penny, and of Earth.

The machine was falling toward the Pacific Ocean. When it formed a circle, it would have a much bigger gateway than the puny two-yard-wide hoops. I was guessing the coil would be well over a hundred feet in diameter. That was big enough to pass giant battleships and aircraft carriers through, two abreast.

No wonder she had not run when I told her to: she was the only one who could shut the Moebius coil fields. Whatever trick she had done with the broom, however she had made that blue light, something had acted like an off-switch, or at least a jamming field.

The window was very slow in closing. The sight of life and light on Earth just lingered and lingered. But eventually it was gone.

I was alone. I did not bother to claw the antlike swarms of specks from my eyes. What was the point? What was there to look at?

And why was I alive? No organism could live in this environment.

5. An Imaginary Mastodon

When I was young, Alexei told me the male Mastodon was too big to fit inside Noah’s Ark and so it slipped and fell off the deck, which is why they were extinct.

Alexei saw the spirit of lunar desolation and horror grip me, so he smirked and walked away and left me alone. I hid in a private place of mine, because I could open the downstairs closet door, and sit in the little triangle of hall carpet formed by that door and the back corner; and rock back and forth.

I remember being unable to cease from imagining a scene: an elephantine head, rain dripping from shaggy skull and sail-like ears, raising its trunk to trumpet again and again at the shape of his bewildered mate on the receding stern of the vast square boat, the world’s one and only ship, glimpsed between monstrous waves, but vanishing into the gray rain. I remember how I imagined the great thick legs of the strongest creature in the ancient world slowing, slowing, as they thrashed in the endless sea, not strong enough to keep that head and trunk above water. I could almost see it.

6. Bog of Fog

How many minutes, or hours, I hung there, I cannot say. I am not sure if time actually ran according to schedule there. I could not tell if I was falling, was stuck in one spot in zero gravity, was spinning, or frozen in black amber.

Zero gee, by the way, makes your feet itch, makes you want to go to the bathroom all the time, and makes your head ache like you’ve been held upside down by your brothers until you are red-faced. Our bodies are not designed to have their fluids evenly distributed top to bottom. Astronauts don’t like to talk about that unglamorous part of weightlessness, but keep in mind this throbbing headache and bladder-ache and toe-numbness was going on in the background of all the other various unpleasant physical sensations I was suffering.

Panic ebbed. Your body just cannot keep up the flood of adrenaline forever. Fear turned into a sort of bitter curiosity: I wondered about the texture and substance around me. It angered me that it made no sense.

It did not seem to have any fixed character, any nature. At once it seemed to be one thing or the other, whatever was worst for me: It was just darkness and vacuum, a yawning gap through which I toppled, offering me nothing to hold to and nowhere to stand; but it seemed also to be a gluey, oily substance sticking to me greedily, so I could barely move my limbs; then it seemed also like nothing but a fog of gloom, a deadly smoke, which blocked nothing but my eyesight; and then also it seemed to be an anthill, and millions of little bugs were crawling over me, nipping and tickling; and then it seemed also like space itself had shattered like fine crystal shattering, and these were all the little sharp shards and grit, working their way into my flesh.

Or it was none of these things. My sense impressions were evolved and meant to record information within the context of space and time. Was I still inside that context? I doubted it.

I also was burning with a will to survive that blazed up inside of me as hot as anger, a rage that anyone or anything in this universe or outside it would take from me my precious mortal existence.

And yet I did not die. I hung in vacuum or fell through darkness or sank in oily glue or spun dizzily or stood buried in ice or coated with swarms of bugs — and for a time, I did nothing. Maybe it was a long time. The curiosity was not enough to get me to move. The will to survive was not strong enough: it was not bigger than this infinity around me.

The thought of my mother saved me. Go ahead and laugh, but that is all it was. I thought: my dad is not crazy. This unreality I am stuck in, it is real. Sort of. That means he could be right about Mom. Maybe she can see me.

I imagined her using some machine they have in her world they don’t have on Earth, a magic mirror or a crystal ball, and seeing my brothers safe, and seeing me, dying in the darkness of utter night, and not being able to get a message to them and tell them what had become of me, and not being able to help me herself, even though she ached to help her little boy.

I opened my mouth and shouted, “I am not a little boy anymore! I can take care of myself!” And got a mouthful of those little specks of whatever they were that swarmed like ants.

I tried to spit, but there was neither air in my lungs or saliva in my mouth at that point. I felt terrible, and I had that nightmare sensation of something crawling inside me like a plastic bag of worms.

“Okay, Mom!” I said, “Maybe I am still a little little. A little. If you can help me from wherever you are, or if you can see me, I could use a hand.”

And I heard a huge noise in the abyss, a roar too deep to be heard, the kind of thing you only feel in your bones.

7. The Second Dragon

It was cutting through the waters (or whatever I was in) and I felt it moving near, thrusting me aside with its bow shock.

I was desperate to see what it was! I remember trying to claw the goop out of my eyes, and then suddenly realizing that I was merely in a dark void, and I could not remove the darkness by pushing it away with my fingers.

So I pulled that big flashlight up from my belt and clicked the switch.

I was not expecting it to work. I mean, the twilight prevents gunpowder from igniting, so why should batteries work? But they did.

It was like I had set off a silent bomb. A cone of light appeared, and all the motes of darkness trembled, swarmed, and scattered away from the beam. Those that did not scatter fast enough ignited like flash paper. There was no heat. Each dot or crumb of dark substance popped like a dandelion puff made of photons. It was like seeing sparklers from the Fourth of July, like fireflies, like stars that flared and vanished in a second.

There was sort of a chain reaction, as the light from the lightning-bug puffs of sparkle set the motes of grime nearest the cone from my lamp also to sparkle, flare, and vanish with a bluish hue; and their light ignited a concentric cone slightly farther away with slightly less energy, and so the hue was greener and dimmer. The green sparks created a larger and dimmer concentric cone of yellow-orange; and the fringes of that were cherry-red. Did I call it a bomb? A rainbow erupted from my flashlight, or a peacock made of heatless fire, or a silent tornado of pyrotechnics. It was beautiful.

The light was so pretty that I did not realize at first that my cone of light had a solid base. There was a circle of yellow metal reflecting back at me. It was mirror-bright, and its depth was the shadow of a humanoid figure with wings and a tail and a star in his hand, moving to match the motions of my lamp.

A demon? No. A reflection. The wings were my bathrobe-tails, and the tail was the scabbard of my katana.

The golden wall was blurred, as if I were seeing a windowless skyscraper’s wall stream past me, blurred with the speed of my fall. But it was not a wall, and I felt no sensation of motion. It was a hull, moving at immense velocity, only yards from my position.

For a really weird moment, I thought my Mom had sent a submarine to come get me. It was the side of a prism-shaped freight-train rushing past me in the deep, and it was moving so quickly that it was blurred into what seemed a solid wall. I saw how the oily nothing of the non-medium curdled and tumbled into froth like blue-gray cream by the friction of its passage.

Of course. This was the second invasion-sized Moebius coil trying to shoot through the spot where an open doorway should have been waiting for it.

The doorway, in other words, I had just seen close ever so slowly.

How could the power sending the machines know that a big-eyed native girl in glasses with a really attractive figure and a sweet face could light a broomstick on fire and collapse the twilight door?

For that matter, how had she done that? Who makes broomsticks that shut Moebius coils? I mean, granted, if any place on Earth should have a magic broomstick, it should be a place called the Haunted Museum. But if no place on Earth could manufacture such a broomstick, then maybe Penny was not a native girl. Not native to our planet, I mean.

In any case, there I was, a yard or so from where the doorway had been, and so only a yard or so from the machine speeding silently past the now-vacant target spot. There was no propulsion in the back that I could see, but instead a socket the size of a train tunnel opening into a complex of rings and braces, an intricate curvilinear pattern of electromagnets and accelerators, forming a pattern of black and gold like the stripes on a bumblebee.

It was some sort of supercollider, but what exotic or fundamental particles it created or destroyed, I could not guess. All I knew was that the little breadboard copy of one of these machines in the Museum basement had opened a hole in timespace large enough to see with the naked eye. The Professor’s copy of this machine held more power than the Super Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, and it was a handmade toy. This behemoth was longer than a football field, wider than two Mack trucks occupying two lanes of highway.

I did not see anything like props or propellers or rocket exhaust. Were these things being shot like a bolt from a honking humongous crossbow?

I saw the tail receding like the caboose of a bullet train, or the tailfins of a rocket. Then the mighty golden machine was gone, and I was once more like the last Mastodon that had fallen off of the Ark, ensuring the extinction of my species.

Now for the Double Jeopardy Bonus Round question: was there going to be a third one?

The Dark Tower had shot a trio of little Moebius coils into the basement, not one. If you were invading an extradimensional world, wouldn’t you? That way, if the first one got broken hitting and killing the Wicked Witch of the East, you’d still have two spares.

So, I needed to get to that point in nonbeing-ness if I was to encounter the third invasion-sized dragon machine.

8. The Power of Positive Thinking

Now comes the weird part. Okay, strike that. Yet Another weird part. But even grading on a curve, this was weird. I began to think that what I was thinking was changing the reality around me. The unreality. The whatever.

The substance seemed somehow friendlier when it was all colored like a polychromatic rainbow, streamers of motes all flashing like magnesium sparks or mad, momentary fireflies.

I waved my arms and legs in the vacuum, trying my hardest to believe it was glue or oil after all, so that I could get some forward propulsion. That seemed to work. When I felt specks in my eyes, up my nose or in my lungs, I tried my hardest to imagine that I was in vacuum, and that there was nothing solid there, only empty darkness. That seemed to work too.

But then, when I was in vacuum, waving my limbs only spun me in a circle. So I told myself I was an idiot, donned my night-vision goggles, turned the amplification up full, and turned off the flashlight again. That saved on battery power, and freed up my hands. The specks of grime were more aggressive when the light was gone, and soon thick enough to swim through, but this time the night vision goggles kept the imaginary swarms out of my eyes.

After slorping and sloshing forward maybe fifteen times my body length, I stopped. This time, I was not bit or stung. The crawly sensation had changed to a feeling like I was swimming in ginger ale or turpentine, not acid.

Of course, I did not know really where the spot was they were aiming at. I did not know they would try to fire again. I did not know if the spot were standing still or moving relative to me. I did not know that I was not totally insane and having a nightmare while doped to the gills in the nuthouse, in the cell right next door to the professor’s. Which would have been a relief, come to think of it. Better than being here.

No, I was just acting this all out on faith. You make your best guess and take your best shot.

What, you think it is unscientific or unreasonable to act this way? Hey, you can stay back in the black oily glop if you like, covered with swarming little specks of nonexistence, but I am at least going to try to get out. Because what if Mom was actually watching me? I did not want her to see me give up and die. She would think she had raised a quitter.

Maybe time went by. Maybe it did not.

The fact that the motes or flecks seemed less aggressive and annoying when I was in good spirits fascinated me. I found after a little experimentation that I could wish the medium into a more solid form just by the power of concentrating and picturing what I wanted in my head.

I crossed my legs and sat in the middle of nonbeing. I made it solid under my butt, sort of the consistency of gritty mud. Living mud that writhed and goosed me. I could clear a little zone away from my head at the same time, making it sort of like fog rather than solid. In between was something more like fluid, so picture me sitting in the darkness up to my neck in water, up to my waist in sticky glue, sitting on a muddy anthill. Comfy.

That seemed to work, which confirms the theory you no doubt have at this point that exposure to extra-dimensional what-the-heck-is-this-don’t-tell-me substance distorts a person’s mind after a while.

Well, hold off on your theory for right now. It is about to get weirder.

It was not much of a world, but it was mine, and I had created it out of Uncreation just with my brain. My new universe was about as large in diameter as you would reach from fingertip to fingertip extending your arms, toetip to toetip extending your legs. I did not really have gravity, but the sensation of falling had left me because I was used to it. It was roughly spherical, the bottom half was muck, and the top half was drench.

“I dub thee, Asteroid Oobleck! Finest tourist trap in all Uncreation!” I shouted, or would have shouted if I had been able to make noise in here.

A thought occurred to me. If I could make the substance rarer or denser by wishful thinking, why not brighter?

“I am doing this in the wrong order! Hey, slime-o-verse out there! Yeah. I am talking to you. LET THERE BE LIGHT!”

And I saw a brightness of light in the distance, shining, luminous, wondrous.

I would not have seen it if I had not had the night-vision goggles amped up to max. As it was, it was almost blinding. Circle upon circle of glory surrounded it, as if Saturn’s rings had been ignited to blinding fire.

“Jesus H. Crapping Christ! I wasn’t expecting that to work!”

And the light winked out.

Now, I will admit that a theological explanation occurred to me. Something about using the Name of the Lord in vain and so on.

But another explanation also occurred to me. The flick of light was like a tunnel mouth opening, and then being blocked by a train coming out of it.

If Theory One were correct, I should show some contrition before I died and went to Hell. That is, more Hell. Hellisher. (I am not sure what the comparative form of that word is.)

If Theory Two were correct, the light would wink on again during the moment after the tail of the dragon machine cleared the door, and before the Dark Tower closed the door.

“Lord, I am sorry about using Your Name merely to express surprise. I left Father Flannery back on Earth, which is another dimension I am not likely to see again, so I hope I can just pull a Protestant kind of dealie here and get forgiven without any expert help. Uh. I feel true contrition and seek to offend my ways, and am deeply sorry for having amended you, and I don’t remember how the rest of it goes. Father Flannery has a card pinned on the inside of the confessional booth I usually read. That is back on Earth, too. I don’t even know if you can hear me. Is Uncreation outside Your jurisdiction? If you are reading me, Lord, send me a sign.”

The light in the distance flickered on again. It was the most beautiful thing ever. Hail! Light! First thing ever created! Never will I take you for granted again! I swear it looked like the beam of a lighthouse cutting through fog, and that it was pointing directly toward me.

Then it was dark again.

So either, theologically, I was in like Flynn, or, under a more mundane explanation, the Dark Tower had just snapped shut the door behind their third invasion engine, which they were firing across the sea of Uncreation like torpedoes from a torpedo tube. I assume these doors were dangerous to keep open, if they created a hurricane each time.

The machine would be upon me in a second.

The question was, how to grab onto something flying faster than a supersonic missile without getting splattered against the nose like a track-crossing frog with bad timing encountering the cowcatcher of the local express?

On the other hand, why was I assuming that entities like time, inertia, momentum, and force still worked here as they did back home? What if kinetic energy was not proportional to the square of the velocity?

“Asteroid Oobleck! I hereby rescind the law of inertia in your jurisdiction! So let it be written, so let it be done! Furthermore, you are hereby decreed to be soft in the middle and hard around an outer ring, like a big letter Q, or a lariat. I want you to be as sticky as heck, and grab onto that darned freight train thingie, and elastic like a bungee cord, so I can get yanked after it with no harm to myself.” And I tried my best to visualize all this in my mind, and impress it somehow onto the reality around me.

I flicked on my rainbow-haloed flashlight, trying to see it coming. In this watery oily environment, I might not see it until after it hit me.

Sure enough, when I flicked on the light, there was a ring of writhing glue, about as big as a kiddie’s swimming pool, hanging in the nothingness next to me, and it had a tail like the letter Q reaching out to glurp itself all over the lower half of my body, just as I had imagined. I had not imagined that the ring would be pulsating and the surface would be writhing like a nest of a billion worms, but, at that point, I was not picky.

Next a golden spear-shape loomed in the vastness of the deep, moving much more slowly than I expected. In fact, it was not moving at all. It just hung over me.

For size comparison, I was a tourist looking up at the Washington Monument. Just picture the Washington Monument being three-sided instead of four-sided, made of gold, and composed of many linked sections. And picture the tourist as the size of a squirrel.

The nose of the thing was made of concentric rings, each smaller than the last, and it turned and looked at me. I don’t mean it had eyes, I mean it clattered and curved its prow and pointed itself at where I was. The clatter was a remote, dull noise, like when you hear the lifeguard on the surface blowing her whistle, when you are underwater trying to hold your brother’s head down as long as possible.

A hatch surrounded by little hatches opened in the nose, and writhing wormlike metal things that looked remarkably like tongues started flick-flickering in the gloom, as if the machine was sucking up the surrounding fluid of nonbeing, and trying to suck something into that larger opening that looked remarkably like a mouth.

The thought occurred to me that maybe I should shut off the flashlight and its accompanying lightshow of green, gold and red sparkles. Shining a light in the completely empty void outside the universe might have attracted attention.

So then it was dark. The metal tongues grabbed me and yanked me inside, and I banged my head something awful on the rim of the airlock.

That blow left me jarred and dazed. I was clutching my head and feeling blood between my fingers, hoping that I did not have a concussion, hoping my brain was not exposed to the not-air. It felt pretty bad, and I could not see, and I thought I was blacking out.

I said, “Okay. I know what happens next. I am going to faint, but when I wake up, I will be on a couch covered with flowers, and a beautiful princess from another dimension will offer me a drink or something, and explain that this was all a terrific misunderstanding.”

But I did not faint. When I took my hands away from my head and reached out, I felt a leathery, slimy surface around me. I reached out with both hands, and could not extend my arms and legs. A jerk and a kick of the legs only got the surface wrapped around me, like the time my brothers found me sleeping in the hallway in my sleeping bag, and decided to roll me downstairs in it. And I was still in free fall, so either I was in zero gee, or someone had stuffed me in a leather sack and tossed me off a cliff.

Feeling around, I could feel the pucker or the seal that closed off the mouth of the bag, and I could feel the vibrations and hear the noises of the metal tongues retracting and the airlock door snapping shut.

I was alive and trapped aboard the invasion machine.

Chapter Five: If Death Should Overtake Me

1. The Sack

There was no sensation of motion. There were three possibilities for this: first, the machine was not moving; second, the machine was moving but not accelerating; third, the laws of nature in this unnatural void of nonbeing ignored Newton’s Second Law, or, at least, treated it disrespectfully.

I was unwilling to turn on my flashlight for a better view, partly because the dark substance seemed to have been caked or packed together when I was sucked into the machine’s vent and grabbed, and I was afraid if the denser crowd of motes ignited into sparkles, it might scald me.

The other reason was that I was not planning on being in here long enough to bother. I raised my left arm and extended both legs to pull the sack into a taut triangle of fabric. Then I drew and slashed with the katana in one smooth stroke.

This is harder than it sounds in zero gee, but I executed the stroke with perfect form. I wish someone had been there to see it. I wish I had seen it.

The bag did not exactly burst and slop all over the floor because in microgravity there is no floor. I want you to imagine that I was inside a falling elevator in a sleeping bag filled with mud. When I ripped out of the bag, the cloud of mud simply expanded evenly in all directions. I was gratified (and only slightly horrified) to see that a ring of the stuff, squirming like a nest of snakes, was trying to solidify and tighten around my waist, while sticky arms and strands of goo formed a rough loop and splashed against two or three nearby surfaces. (I won’t call them walls, because there was no up or down here.) The Oobleck was trying to carry out the orders I had given, and form a lasso, and stick me to the coil machine.

I was touched by the show of mindless loyalty from a writhing mud ball I had stimulated into a hideous mockery of life, but it was also darned inconvenient, because now there were gluey, sticky strands of the gunk pinning me in place, and squeezing me a little too affectionately.

Since I could not breathe anyway, it was only mildly horrible beyond description to be strangled by wormy strands of void-vomit: the kind of thing that induces neurotic twitching for a few years and makes you unable to eat Sloppy Joes ever again, but not so bad that it triggers full-blown psychotic episodes for life and makes you think that evil snot is trying to crawl up your nasal cavities and eat your brain. Just for example.

There was some light in the area, just enough to throw a dim, eye-aching gloom across the features. There were no people, or, for that matter, no furnishings. So it looked like the inside of a mostly-collapsed elevator shaft. Made of gold.

The shaft was an equilateral triangle in cross section, if by that we mean a very lazy triangle with one side bent way inward. The shaft was about half a football field in length, so at every moment my eyes and inner ear were telling me I was hanging unsupported above a five-story drop. Fibbing eyes. Several tubes or conduits ran from one side to the other along the major axis.

From the dimensions, I guessed I was parked in the corner of one of the prism-shaped freight-car sized segments of the Moebius coil, and the larger inward curving wall hid the central particle accelerator on the other side. Have you ever rolled up a poster to mail it inside of a long, thin box, and you put packing popcorn into the space formed by the curve of the tube and the corners of the box? That is where I was: the two smaller walls were flat planes that met at an acute angle, and the two opposite angles were tangents. All the angles were crowded with conduits or tubes which might have been plumbing or might have been Mayan decoration.

There were other leathery bags bobbing like balloons along a central spine to either side of me. The ones to one side were wrinkled like prunes; the ones to the other plump like plums. I will not say fore and aft, because I do not know which way the invasion machine was going, and I cannot really say up or down, because there is no such thing in zero gee.

The light here came from a lighting fixture that looked like a wooden stick with sunlight reflecting off it, except there was no sun. Each stick was about three inches long and as thick around as my thumb. I could see the grain and texture of the wood, and it was clearly wood, not an incandescent light or a cleverly disguised fluorescent tube. Again, it looked like reflected or indirect light, but there was no source of light in this dim chamber except those sticks. There were six of them, one in each corner of the chamber, standing upright on white plates made of what looked like marble.

That made a shiver of relief go through me.

Let me try to explain: this was a technology never seen on Earth. Or maybe magic. I have heard that a sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology because it actually, you know, works. That meant I really was over the rainbow, so to speak, and not just crazy. If things had looked normal, I would have thought I had fallen into a horror movie; but since they looked weird, that gave me hope that this was a science fiction movie.

On second thought, maybe my explanation here makes no sense. The strangeness of the artifact in which I was trapped comforted me. Let’s let it go at that.

I was glued to one of the surfaces, which sometimes seemed like a floor, but at other times like a wall or ceiling. Zero gravity plays little tricks with your mind, and I was not sure how clear or awake my mind was anyway: but the sensation was dizzying, sickening, and I could still feel something slithering inside my stomach, because I had swallowed some of the Oobleck. I wanted to clear my mind, and use the power of wishful thinking to persuade the wormy glue inside my intestines to turn into something nonpoisonous.

But I could not concentrate. The falling sensation made me dizzy. When I snapped my finger near my ear, I did not hear any sound. This either meant I was still in a vacuum, or that I had gone deaf.

Somehow the prospect of being deaf was scarier to me than the prospect of being an undead critter who did not need to breathe. Undead critters were safely impossible. Deafness was something that happened to real people, and scared the heck out of me.

I instinctively tried to take a deep breath to calm myself, but this scared me again, because my lungs throbbed with pain, and that was all. The goo was blocking my throat.

Let me skip over the next few minutes. I had hysterics, okay?

Screaming without making any noise, weeping, praying, banging my head against the wall that seemed to be flipping around turning into ceiling and floor, and getting clots of glue stuck to my hair. I thought I was dead, but not in the happy place good children go. I missed my mother.

Let us not dwell on details. But it was ugly.

If she were really looking at me from another world, she was seeing me — like this. A crying, pathetic, frenzied creature flailing his limbs and banging his head against the wall like a lunatic.

Despair came next. I did not want her to see me like this. I wanted to hide in the smothering darkness so she would never see me again.

Then I saw how my loyal Oobleck, which had been so helpfully trying to form the lasso and bungee cord like I asked, had now formed a number of disgusting looking tendrils and tentacles, and was reaching toward my face, angrily. Don’t tell me a cloud of mud cannot look angry: I could almost feel the hatred for life and light coming from it like heat from a closed kiln door.

No, not hate. It was coming to smother me, just like I had asked. My thoughts were still affecting it. To hide me from Mom.

Mom, or at least thinking about her, seemed to help.

2. Two Kinds of Secret

She was the only woman I knew, or had even ever heard of, who was like someone from an old black and white sitcom. I suppose you could say she was not liberated, but she had something other Moms in the neighborhood did not have. It was like a glow around her. It was like a gold crown on her head that no one could see.

Mom wore pearls and high heels and an apron in her kitchen, which she ran with the efficiency of a British warship of the line. I never recall that she ever had to raise her voice to her three boys, or to give an order twice. If you left something on the floor, she would pick it up, but she would not put it back where it should go. Instead she would charge you a quarter to buy it back from her, and if your allowance was shy a quarter that week, too bad. I remember once I had to walk to the bus stop in the snow, shivering, because I did not have a quarter and my brothers would not lend me one, when I had left my coat under the coat rack rather than hung up. The school sent a trio of people to the house to ask Mom why she sent me out into the snow without a jacket, and she did not raise her voice to them either, but observed that I was still alive.

I remember those three, an unhappy black man, a thin woman with unblinking eyes, and a fat woman with a face like lumpy bread dough, lost their temper with her and were using four-letter words of the kind we never heard in my house, but are on television all the time now.

I remember my older brothers Alexei and Dobrin consulting each other in angry whispers. They thought having anyone talk down to Mom in her own house was against the laws of nature or something. So they went to the gun case and got their shotguns, and nonchalantly went out on the porch where the grown-ups were talking.

They sat close enough, but not too close, so the school folks or social workers or whoever they were could get an eyeful of what they were doing, and field stripped and cleaned their guns, just like we are supposed to do. You would have thought from the looks on the faces of the school officials that Alexei and Dobrin were practicing Black Magic or something.

In any case, Mom sent the school folks off our land, and we never heard from them again, but Alexei and Dobrin had incurred the maternal displeasure and they got extra K.P. for three weeks. My brothers complained that they had not done anything wrong, technically, so Mom smiled like Buddha, and upped the K.P. to four weeks. So they spent a month cleaning pans and dishes while I loafed. It was like a vacation for me.

That was one of the many incidents that made Dad, when he came back from cruise and heard about it, insist on homeschooling.

A lot of the Moms of friends of mine bake their own cookies and pies and stuff. I remember Mom baked her own bread, and I think she was the only one in the township who did. Her hands were warm and smelled of flour. Her clothes smelled of that stuff you use to keep the moths away, but it also smelled of lavender. She did not like shopping.

One of my earliest memories of her was when I was a little kid, and I was crying because I wanted her to buy me a toy Batmobile I had seen in a shop window. Instead she gave me a folding knife, and a pine block, and showed me how to whittle my own car, wheels and all. On the porch, I sat on her lap and she held my hands in her hands, and the knife shaved the wood, making smooth spirals light enough for the wind to pick up into the air like dandelion puffs.

We talked.

“Mom, why are we poor?” (My reasoning was that if only we had more money, she could have bought me every toy I wanted.)

She smiled down at me. “So that we are not tempted to think we can do it all ourselves, by ourselves.”

This puzzled me terribly. “But I am making this for myself.”

She raised both eyebrows. “All by yourself?”

“I am letting you help,” I confided in her.

She nodded knowingly, smiling her wonderful smile, and tightening her arms that held me.

“How can being poor be a blessing? It’s a problem!” I said. Or words to that effect.

Mother touched my chin with her finger, and put her nose near my nose. “I will tell you a secret!”

“Is it one I have to promise not to tell?” I was eager to have something not to tell my brothers, so I could tell them I was not telling them about it.

“No. It’s not that kind of secret.”

“What kind is it?” I had not known secrets were divided into kinds.

She said, “It is the kind that, no matter how often or how clearly you tell people, they cannot hear you. They cannot understand.”

“Why not?”

“They do not have the right spirit. Understanding is not given to them, and what little they have is taken away. Listen: there are only two kinds of problems in life.”

“Problems come in kinds?” My Dad just the other day had been telling me about different kinds of bugs you could find in our forest, and how they were divided into species and families (which made me like the bugs, because they had a family like I had a family). The idea that secrets and also problems had species to them was amazing.

“The first kind of problems are the ones life sends upon you to test you, to make you humble or make you longsuffering, or whatever you may need.

“The second kind you make yourself. Most people, most of their lives, most of their problems, they simply invite into their lives, sweep out a guestroom for each pain, and give it free lodging and board.

“The first kind builds character. You cannot grow without this kind of problem, any more than you can build muscles without exercise.

“The second kind are invited by bad character, and the problems such a person has then cannot be put right until he puts himself right. It is not something a proud man can do, because proud men see no wrongness in themselves.”

“Is there a third kind, Mommy?”

She paused, frowning. “Y-yes. I suppose there is. The third kind are merely accidents, freak storms or illnesses, things that were never in Eden and never meant to be in this world. When I was young, I thought such things were natural, were part of life. Now — since I met your father, and seen some, ah, things you would not understand — now I think differently. This world is behind enemy lines. Secret powers rule it. But they don’t want to kill us with bombs or knives. They want even worse for us. They want to kill the better part of us, the part that hopes. Illnesses and accidents are weapons in their hands, weapons of despair, meant to turn our thoughts down and down to dark and dismal paths.”

She shook her head like a mare tossing away a bothersome fly.

“But none of that! We must never fear problems of any kind. The suffering we bring on ourselves, we can ask to be taken away from us once we repent of it. The suffering sent to instruct us, we can ask for the strength to endure, and the humbleness to be instructed. The third kind, we can ask to be healed of.”

I said, “Will we be answered?”

She said, “Sufferings of the third kind, yes indeed, and right away.”

“What about the other two kinds, Mommy?”

“Do not fear. Never fear. All suffering will pass away.”

And she held me in her arms, and she loved me, and so it was merely one of many days that was the best day ever. And there were so many of them. So many.

And then they stopped.

Mom lied.

Some suffering does not go away.

3. Three Kinds of Pain

Once she was gone, the family lost its heart. The house was empty, even though we were all still in it. It felt like a deserted house. It was barren.

Imagine a man with a head and hands and feet that still work, but in the middle of him is nothing; just a void. I already mentioned how weird Alexei became after he came back from Italy. He spent hours reading the Bible and the Early Church Fathers, and covering his room with little scraps of paper with little scraps of phrases on them, and maps torn out of atlases. That was when he was not doing martial arts drills, fencing his reflection in the mirror with his saber, stick-fighting, doing pushups and leg lifts. He spent hours in the back room where we used to have the pool table, but is now set up like a gym. And he spent hours on his knees, praying, his fingers twitching through circles of beads, his lips twitching silently. Sometimes I would see tears running down his cheeks.

Dobrin got weird, too. He started running away from home every few weeks, going camping up in the mountains for three and four days at a time, and coming back with his chin stubbled with the whiskers he was so proud of growing, which Dad would make him shave off. His whiskers were so blond and fine, nearly invisible against his skin, that he could never even grow a proper five O’clock shadow.

I did not think I got weird.

But on the other hand, now in the current hour, here I was, trapped in an alien dimension-piercing machine in the Uncreation sea between worlds, trapped in glue, smothered in goo, deaf and maybe undead and — maybe I should have just called the cops and gone to the Seven-Eleven for a drink. Let someone else handle the problem.

But Mom never wanted anyone else to do for her what she could do for herself, not bake her bread, not teach her kids, nothing.

And she taught me that most of a man’s problems in life were ones he just caused himself.

4. The Blue Light

In this case it was true, quite literally. The substance was reacting to my thoughts. Which is a pretty creepy idea. Or to my soul, which was a creepier idea.

So as the Oobleck came to strangle me, I thought about Mom, and it slowed, and looked peaceful.

Then, my mind cleared once more, I focused my imagination and willpower and I asked the stuff not to burn, not to explode. I raised the flashlight, and started peeling off layers of the muddy substance into sheets and clouds of fire and sparks.

I am not sure if my thinking kept it from exploding or not. Maybe it did. There is one problem with a substance that reacts to your belief if you believe you can influence it. The problem is that you dare not allow yourself to believe you are not influencing it even when you are not, because then you won’t be. It was one of those self-fulfilling prophecy deals.

Between flashlight and the power of positive thinking, I turned the Oobleck into a gas, and I was released. I was no longer stuck to the ceiling/floor/wall and being anaconda’d by paste. Even the glop in my lungs and stomach was quiet.

If they ever make this into a movie, I want the actor playing me in this scene to sit in a lotus position and float in mid air, and like have light or something float out from him, to show the audience how darn cool and darn calm I was at that moment. I cannot actually cross my legs that way.

Also, I had taken out my rosary, and said ten or fifty Hail Marys or so while I was thinking about Mom and trying to steady my nerves, and I don’t think they allow you to show people praying in the movies, unless they are cannibal ax murderers or something, not these days.

Another weird thing — boy, I am tired of saying that — the beads on my rosary were made of wood, and they started glowing in the dark, just like the little light sticks in the corner of the chamber. Whatever technology (or magic) was making the wood luminous affected them as well. The wooden scabbard of my katana was not affected.

I found a hatch, or, at least, a depression in the wall, right at the spot where the spine holding the various bags (either raisin-like or grape-like) issued from the bulkhead. There was no way to get it open from this side.

Only then did it occur to me to look inside the other sacks. For all I knew, there were other prisoners like me inside.

I carefully slit one open with the tip of my katana. That is harder to do than it sounds in zero gravity, because I had to mount the bag and circle it with my legs. There was something squishy between my knees. It did not feel like the contour of a person’s body. Not a person from any dimension I was familiar with, anyway.

The first bag held a mass of void goo. It was more voluminous than the goo that had come into the bag with me, and angrier: it expanded from the bag, formed a club from one tendril, and slammed me across the head with it. I was knocked end over end in zero gee, and bounced some forty feet away, leaving me half-stunned and seeing stars.

My second head injury in an hour. I told myself to visit the nearest hospital or Red Cross tent as may exist in the exodimensional realms, as soon as possible. I was nauseated (not a good sign) and my head seemed to be wobbling (also not a good sign) and the mass of Oobleck at the other end of the shaft started coming toward me, looking remarkably like a backed-up toilet overflowing. (Which didn't help.) It filled the chamber from side to side as it expanded in my direction.

Just at that moment, gravity returned. My thoughts snapped into clearer focus as if I had just woken from a bad dream. The shaft I was in got brighter and clearer in my vision: as if every object had been slightly out of focus or off kilter, and was just now snapping back into clarity.

As if the twilight had vanished.

My sense of smell returned. The gloop smelled like something that had died underground in the sewer. A maggoty smell, the kind that makes the back of your throat clench up before your nose even registers the true awfulness of the foetor.

As it turned out, the surface behind my shoulder decided to become ceiling. I was in a fifty-foot high well shaft whose bottom was filled with ferocious grime-colored glop. I fell. It was like falling off a five-story building.

I put my arms before me in a swan dive. I focused my imagination at the angry goo as I fell. It was taller than the regulation Olympic-height high dive at my old school, so to me it seemed as if I had a long time to concentrate.

At the same moment, like a silent bomb exploding, the six little sticks started giving off an eerie blue-white light, much brighter than the yellow sunny glow that had been glowing a moment before. The blue light reminded me of something I had seen recently, but I could not put my finger on it.

The glow made the Oobleck start to dissolve.

While it was dissolving, the goo started to obey me. I had it expand in volume and decrease in density, so the entire bottom of the shaft was filled. There was at least twenty feet of the substance flooding the compartment, even though the blue light had dissolved more than half of it before I struck. I landed into something as soft as water, or softer, and slammed into the metal bottom of the shaft. I hurt like heck, but I don’t think I broke anything. Then, two seconds later, the blue light made the rest of it vanish. I was lying face down on a cold metal floor.

I was not deaf, as it turned out. At least, I could hear something through my cheek, where it was pressed against the hatch I could not open. Bells ringing. Alarms.

Then came a scraping noise, as of bars drawing back. Someone was coming in.

Chapter Six: Bloodshed

1. Prepared

The blue-white glare vanished, and the softer yellow glow returned. The plump bags were still full, but now they hung like water-balloons, sagging, but not moving any longer. My guess: the blue light was a decontamination procedure, in case any of the substance from the void had escaped the bags.

I got to my feet. The world outside must have a heavier gravity than Earth, or else the hour or so I’d spent in the nothingness had made me lose my land legs, so to speak. I was lightheaded, and the globules of blood in my hair started trickling down my face, along with a considerable amount of sweat. It feels different when you are in microgravity: the sweat doesn’t run.

I went over to the nearest glowing stick, which was now at my foot. It did not seem connected to the marble plate in which it rested, but it did seem magnetized at the tip, because it resisted when I pulled on it. I pulled it up and it came free in my hand. Both it and the stick directly above it went dark. That was convenient. I stuck it through my sword belt, moved over to the next, and the next. In a moment, the chamber was as black as the inside of a tomb.

Then I turned on my flashlight, stepped over to the hatch, turned off the flashlight, placed my feet just so, and drew the katana.

I asked myself, “Ilya, are you prepared to kill whoever or whatever is about to come through that hatch?”

I assumed the stance called Daijodan no Kamae: feet spread, weight on my rear foot, blade at a forty-five degree angle behind my head, and my eyesight aimed beneath my wrists.

I had not assumed the technically proper stance, because I was holding the blade one-handed. The other hand held the flashlight. Its long black tube was parallel to the sword hilt, and my finger was on the switch. It was dark.

The darkness, and my lightheadedness, made the deck seem to roll and pitch beneath my feet as I waited.

If death should overtake me on this field, grant that I die in the state of grace, forgive me all my sins, those I have forgotten and those I recall…

The hatch opened.

There was a sound of breathing at my feet, the shape of some misshapen skull.

Click. I turned the light on. A thing poked its snout in. It looked like a wolf whom someone had shaved entirely bald, a triangular skull as pale as the palm of a lady’s hand. But it had human eyes.

If this was a costume for a science fiction convention, it was a really, really good one. A convincing one.

It was also carrying a strange two-bladed knife in its teeth, like a movie pirate climbing the rigging. As my light flared, the head swiveled toward me, eyes wide and blinded in the glare, and the beast froze for a moment.

That was all I needed. I brought the katana down with a practiced snap of my arm, checking my stroke at impact to leave a nice, clean even-edged wound right down the fracture line in the middle of the skull; and, turning my hand, brought the blade into second position, and swept horizontally at my ankle height, trying to catch him in the neck. The blade chopped nicely through muscles, veins and arteries, and dinked against an upper vertebra with a noise louder than expected.

I admit I was expecting a spray of blood like you see in the movies. Okay, that spray of blood is not real. They do it that way in the movies so that patrons in the cheap seats can see what happened. I did hit an artery, and so some blood did come out, but a normal man’s blood pressure is not like what you get shaking a soda can and then yanking open the pop-top through the door of your brother’s bedroom. There was a noise when his windpipe parted, and his lungs moved in the way they are supposed to do when you scream, but the scream could not reach his mouth and came out of his half-severed neck instead. It was a noise that will haunt my future nightmares.

Doing this one-handed is not easy. Carving the turkey at Thanksgiving with a kitchen knife is not easy, and that meat is cooked and soft. This guy’s head was hard as gristle. I should have used both hands like you’re supposed to, but I needed one hand to blind him with the flashlight.

And the blade was caught between the vertebrae of his neck. He slid down, suddenly a very dead deadweight, and the hilt of the absurdly expensive antique Japanese blade was suddenly yanked out of my sweat-streaked and blood-covered hand.

My original plan was to stand at the hatch and kill them one at a time as they came in. Or until they closed the hatch and pumped in cyanide gas. But when my grandfather’s sword was yanked out of sight down the hole, I shouted a dirty word starting with F and jumped after that stupid sword, mighty flashlight raised on high like the club of Hercules.

2. Relax

You are probably wondering two things.

You are wondering if I survive. Let me assure you, this story is not like one of those creepy film noir movies about silent film stars where the first-person narrator is dead in the last reel and narrating from beyond the grave.

I mean, that would be cool, but I lived through what happened next.

Now, I admit, I have only written as far as I have written, so it is possible that you will get to the end, and find a torn and bloody page or something, and the word AARRGGGHHHH scrawled along the bottom, or some cryptic last words like, “I have only one match left, but I must find the gas leak” or maybe, “The Balrog is at the door. He says he wants to parley. I am going to put the chain on the door and only open it a crack,” and then someone else’s handwriting will be some last chapter, starting with, “The Committee for the Investigation of Grisly and Unexplained Deaths found this manuscript clutched in the hands of the sole corpse recovered from the Arthur Gordon Pym expedition, burned beyond recognition, covered with vicious penguin bites, with a sharpened spork still protruding from between his ribs. Careful examination of the corpse shows that he’s got a sloping forehead like a caveboy, teeth like a Clydesdale, and he should have brushed more often. Suspected cause of death: testosterone poisoning.”

I will tell you what. If I die while telling you this story, I will come back to this page and write in a short note saying I am dead. Otherwise, assume I live.

3. Chessmaster

The other thing you are probably wondering is why I was so trigger-happy. Blade-happy. Whatever.

Perhaps you are wondering why I chopped at the head of the first crewman that stuck his head in the hatch. Maybe you imagine he was a paramedic coming to check on a man rescued from falling overboard in the sea of Uncreation.

Maybe he was coming to invite me to the Captain’s table for tea and birthday cake, because he was about to marry the captain’s daughter for her birthday later that day, and was retiring from the service by next week, and he was so filled with happiness and joy that he insisted on being the first one to put his head in through the hatch and welcome the rescued castaway back to safety.

For that matter, why did I shoot at the snake-shaped Moebius coils that snapped into existence out from the Professor's handmade model in his basement, back on Earth? How did I know that those machines were not bombs that might go off when shot, or inter-dimensional junk mail, or an invitation to join The League of Parallel Earths? You are thinking I did not know.

You’d be wrong. I knew. Call it guesswork if you like. Call it intuition. But I knew.

The moment three spear-shaped machines zoomed out at high speed from the Professor’s homemade Moebius coil, I knew that they were part of an attack. His coil had been built from instructions he read from the Disaster Cuneiform. That Cuneiform had come from the CERN labs, when the unlucky scientists had created, even if only for a split-microsecond, and even if it was smaller than the diameter of an atom, some sort of exotic particle, or singularity, or wormhole, that punctured the walls of the universe. Someone on the other side of that wall had detected the puncture: detected it instantly, quicker than instantly, and broadcast a message through the hole despite it being so tiny and so momentary.

Now ask yourself: why would someone in the Somewhither have the machinery and know-how ready to detect a supercollider in another universe, lock on, and send the signal, all in a split second? Because they had done it before. They had done it before many times.

And not just anyone. I thought I knew who that someone was. Father had spoken their name in fear, and so had the Professor. The Dark Tower.

I do not know if you have ever played chess, and seen a particularly brilliant move, and been so awed by how clever it was that you almost felt scared. Scared because you did not realize people could be that clever, or think so many moves ahead.

Okay, I have not. But only because I don't play chess.

But I remember when Dad and Alexei, Dobrin and I were playing Chinese checkers, and Dobrin got one of his pieces by a supremely twisting and convoluted path from one side of the crowded hexagonal board to the other, starting out by jumping backward away from the direction of his goal, and ending up at home.

One move, all the way to the other side of the board, and home.

The Dark Tower had obviously played this game before.

4. Let Us Suppose

Let us suppose that somewhere, out of all possible paths history might have taken, in at least one of them, one civilization invents sidewise-in-time-travel.

Only a few possible histories led to that invention; perhaps only one. If the invention were not rare, we would have established contact with one or many parallels by now, and be selling McDonald’s burgers in the world where the South won the Civil War, or the one where the Americans lost the Revolution, or the Nazis won World War Two. (Okay, maybe instead of setting up hamburger joints outside their concentration camps, we’d be re-fighting that particular war with that particular parallel world, this time starting with atom bombs rather than finishing, but you get my point.)

If the invention is rare, it is not like the Space Race in our own world: the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. knew about each other. So we can also suppose that the first civilization to find the secret would stand in the same relation to her neighboring parallel worlds as Europe in the Age of Discovery stood to the New World: one day the astonished local Aztec garrison looks out at the beach and sees Spanish cavalry with iron musket and steel sword landing there, and upon the waters never before guessed to have a farther shore, a galleon like a tower walking on the sea, whose sails look like a cloud come down to earth.

And we can suppose one more thing: I figure life must really, really suck when you first break the walls of the universe and step into parallel worlds.

Why? All your enemies of all your previous wars gloriously defeated in your version, in their versions were victorious, and they are now your nextdoor neighbors.

Imagine this: The U.S. of Nextdoor A. one step beyond the walls of our world might have death camps rounding up “Untermenschen” to please the Third Reich, and want to sell us soap made from dead Jews; whereas the U.S. of an A. one step beyond that still has slaves toiling under the lash in the tobacco fields of the Confederation, and they refuse to let our Negro statesman visit them, although they will allow black entertainers, or (as they call them), “minstrels” to come and cut capers.

You see my point. Even thinking about the possibilities in the world of other possibilities would make your blood boil. Things older in history might cut a little deeper even than this.

So you are the Dark Tower. Only you have the secret. The secret did not make you all-powerful, because you cannot enter any world you’d like. You still need a receiver at the far end.

So you broadcast a signal. If there is anyone out there in a parallel timeline, let’s say, like the poor innocent scientists at the Super Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, who has some way, even a crude one, of opening a gate, even a small one, you have a method you developed of squirting a message through as quickly as possible. The message tells the dupes on the other side how to build a receiver. The moment they are foolish enough or innocent enough to turn it on, you home in and send the attack.

All you need is to get one receiver of your own through, just one, and then you can use it to bring in additional and larger receivers, as many as you’d like.

Even if you know nothing at all about the target world, there are almost no drawbacks to attempting a full-scale attack the moment first contact is made. If the fight goes badly, you can retreat whenever you like into another dimension the natives cannot reach. As long as you scatter and hide enough receivers to keep just one hidden somewhere on the planet, you can try again. The natives do not have Moebius coils, or otherwise you would have detected them long ago. The most they can have is a few men who know about the occasional natural doors into twilight that open up every century or so. And what could such men do to stop the invasion?

Men like my dad. Or men like me?

I was resolved to darn well show them what I could do.

Look: I knew how shaky all this guesswork piled on guesswork was. I knew how much of this was based on television episodes, where Spock or Owlman or somesuch, has an evil twin with a goatee from the antimatter universe.

But even so — even if my speculations were totally off the mark, and the Dark Tower people were as gentle and sweet as gentle can be, Dad said they were the ones keeping his organization from reaching Mom again.

I did not know much of anything. But I knew if these guys were the ones blocking the path back to Mom, then it was my duty and pleasure to kill them.

Does that sound bloodthirsty to you? It should.

But I should have kept my head and used both hands, not dropped Grandfather Mikhail’s sword, and not jumped down the trapdoor hatch.

5. Pratfall

I did not just shout the F-word like you might do when you stub your toe. No, this was my battle-cry, and I meant to bellow it loud enough to startle the Frost Giants so that they thought that Thor was upon them.

Except, of course, all that happened was glop spilled out of my mouth. I made no noise, my lungs seized up with a spasm, and the choking, retching sensation which had not affected me much in the Uncreation now took control of my muscles, twisted my body like a dishrag and rolled me up into a lump. (My lungs were still full of goo, remember?)

The place into which I fell was crowded and shiny where I landed, a place as narrow as the aisle of a passenger jetliner, and cramped with plumbing and boxlike gear sticking out of the walls. It was like the kind of place two fat ladies cannot pass each other without saying excuse me.

No, don’t think of an aisle. Think of a stairwell or a fire escape, because there was an acute angle to the left and right, leading to ramps going sharply up and down. It was claustrophobic.

I don’t know quite how to describe that gear lining the walls. Imagine if the engineer making the boiler room painted all his pipes and valves with zig-zagged designs, or decorations of fanciful birds-of-paradise or goggle-eyed gnomes, and at the fuse boxes and electromagnet housings he capped them with the heads of stylized dragons with curling tusks and emerald eyes. And everything that is not made out of black cast iron is made out of yellow gold. It was all barbaric and high-tech and Art Deco all at once. The light came from foot-long wooden sticks in the corners where deck met bulkhead, and overhead were similar sticks. The sticks rested on marble squares spaced every six feet or so. Every other square was horizontal or vertical, so the lamp sticks formed an alternating pattern. Some sticks were parallel to the deck, some perpendicular.

The place had an M.C. Escher look to it, with ladders running both horizontally and vertically, and hatches of the same round shape whether set in bulkhead or deck, as if this chamber was meant to be used no matter which way gravity was flipped.

There were armed men underfoot. I landed right between two of them.

I did not hit the deck feet first as planned, nor while making noise as planned. Instead the naked wolf-headed man-thing, covered in blood, and me, covered in Oobleck and lung-vomit, hit bottom at the same time, both of us with limbs twitching, neither making any noise louder than a gargle. The fastenings on my Dad’s jacket had come undone in the fall, and now it was flopped halfway up over my head, exposing my back, half blinding me. I landed on my face in a pool of spewed-up Oobleck.

If you saw this scene in a comedy film, you’d laugh. It was ridiculous: a pratfall.

If it had been a sporting event, like a ballgame, where the sports star the crowd is cheering for turned an ankle sliding into home plate and missed and slid into the hotdog vendor’s stand instead, the crowd would have groaned in disbelief, and the game been lost.

But this was not a game; that one fumbled moment of muscular convulsion had lost me my life. There was no comedy involved. I was a dead man.

I mostly landed on the dying wolf-thing, which perhaps saved me from a broken back. I heard a gasp and a cry from the men filling the narrow space.

There may have been a guy on the ladder at whose foot I fell, who got knocked off, or maybe he jumped when Fido the hairless dog-man collapsed on him, because I was not the only guy on the ground. From the noise, it sounded like more than one guy had been knocked over. Many pratfalls. Remember this place was as cramped as the landing of an emergency stairwell, so everyone was in everyone’s way.

From beneath the face-hugging jacket tail, I saw several pairs of feet: some in sandals and in leg armor called greaves, at least two pairs of feet that looked like the legs of baboons shaved bald (feet with thumbs, in other words), and one pair of bare feet that were so pale white that they glowed with phosphorescence.

And, before I had a chance to speak, or move, or raise my head, or blink, I felt something sharp hit my back, tear the bathrobe and punch through my skin, then slide between my ribs, puncturing lung and heart and who knows what else. I found myself staring down at the triangular point of a narrow spear blade protruding nine inches out from my chest. Blood mingled with the black fluid of Uncreation poured out, and this time the blood did fountain like you see in the movies.

There is some prayer you are supposed to say before you die. I could not remember it.

6. Broadside Lung-Heart Shot

I was so astonished, so outraged, so scared. It seemed unfair. That is the raging crazed, zany, hysterical, insane thing that exploded in my dying brain. It was an offense, a trespass, worse than finding your brothers had set off your baking-soda volcano, your science project you worked four weeks to put together, and ruined it. Worse than finding your house had been broken into by foxes, and the kitchen tore up; worse than fearing your Dad maybe was never coming back, or discovering your Mom actually was never coming back.

So unfair. Dying is so unfair. It was obscene.

The spear was cruciform in cross-section, and very narrow, so it looked more like an awl or the spike on a prospector’s hammer than like what you’d normally think of as a spear point. I can still see it in my mind’s eye, every little flick of tarnish, every dint and irregularity. It looked like it was made of brass, a dull yellow metal, heavy and cold.

I closed my fingers on the protruding steeple of metal coming from my chest, and, roaring, rose to my feet. This time the roar actually did come out, along with a gallon of Uncreation fluid. The spear shaft swinging from my spine must have yanked itself loose from the hands of the spearman, because I could feel the weight of the shaft swinging like some freakish wooden tail behind me, tearing my flesh and organs. Warm blood poured down my back. I reached behind me, groped, grabbed the spearshaft, but I was not at the right angle to pull it out. Instead I took up a fold of my Dad’s Kevlar coat-tail, gathered it into a ball in my palm, and drove the spearpoint backward. I could feel it scraping against bone and wiggling around in my lung cavity.

I yanked again with my other hand, and felt the spear —actually, call it a javelin, since it was only four feet long or so — come into my grip. I lofted it in front of me, and saw the darned thing. It was about half wood and half bronze, with a heavy bronze ball at the butt, decorated with a zigzag design, and a ball of hair tied at the root of the blade. It was covered with my blood, bright and red arterial blood, and the smell of it filled my nostrils. The blood was all over my hand up to the elbow and was gushing out of my chest. The spearpoint was not barbed like it should have been. Had it been barbed, I could not have worked it free from the wound.

A gasp of awe, a breathless noise of pure terror, came from each side of me. I looked up.

7. Science Fiction Fans

I could see my grandfather’s sword, miraculously undamaged in the fall, sticking up out of the throat-mess that had once been the throat of Fido the dog-faced boy. It was a little too far away for me to grab it, but I measured the distance with my eye. The big two-foot long flashlight was only a few inches from my foot.

I was surrounded by men in costumes. Three of them were aliens: two hairless wolfmen-looking baboon-things big as apes, and one pale and phosphorescent narrow-skulled bald guy with no eyeballs in a long black cloak but no socks or shoes.

The rest were soldiers from some sword and sandals epic: corsets made of metal scales sewn to linen jerkins, long skirts decorated with colored fringes, greaves on shins and sandals on feet, onion-shaped caps of metal with coppery cheek-guards, and round black shields decorated with starbursts. The shields were tall, round at the top and square at the bottom.

Copper cleavers shaped like sickles were at the soldiers' belts. Quivers on their backs carried both arrows and bow. These were dinky double-curved bows shaped like the letter m, not the fearsome yew longbows of England nor the elegant asymmetrical bamboo bows of Japan.

All the soldiers had thick red lips, large and dark and almond eyes, and square black beards, but no moustaches. They were wearing eyeliner, and had dark lines drawn on their cheeks like football players wear.

At the moment all those mouths were gaping, all those eyes wide and white-rimmed with fear.

Everyone in the place was shorter than I was. The horsehair crests of the helmets were about at the level of my shoulder. I ate a lot of red meat growing up, so there.

Also in the back was a guy with a black beard dressed something like Abraham Lincoln in a long black skirt, except that the tall black stovepipe hat he wore on his head had no brim. On his chest was a silver starburst ornament, and on his brow a black tattoo of the same design. From his cold expression, I pegged him as the leader.

So. Two werewolves, one vampire, ten men at arms, and the guy in the black hat was their magic user. Fourteen against one.

I think I was simply out of my mind at that moment. Temporary insanity.

Because instead of running or charging or talking or anything, all I did was take the two fingers of my left hand and stick them into the open wound in my chest as deep as I could. It was so disgusting that I cannot say. I think I felt my heart pushing against my fingertips: lub-dub. Lub-dub.

The first deer I ever killed, a pretty grand six-point buck—I had spent an hour in the brake, waiting for him to stand up—I hit and killed it with this exact shot: quarter rear through one lung and the heart. He died before taking a step.

I was in a nightmare.

In a nightmare, you do not ask questions, and things don’t make any sense. Your mind just plays along, and pretends that whatever is happening is something that could actually happen. The reason why you can never tell you are asleep when you are asleep, is that part of your mind (call it the “hey—this is freaking impossible!” part of your mind) is turned off.

Now, in real life, if I stood up after a deathblow, with a hole all the way through me, dead even though I was not dead, I would be freaked out something awful. But in a dream, if I had a nightmare that I was wounded with a hole all the way through me, dead even though I was not dead, I would think it was a really freaking weird dream. It would scare the heck out of me, but I would still do the things you do in a dream, like run from the monsters you can never get away from. Or fight the creatures you cannot fight.

So I laughed. What a freaking weird dream!

Chapter Seven: The Ur Language

1. Spearthrust

My laugh was a pretty weird-sounding laugh, considering all the blood and puddings glurping out of me, and it scared me. I was not the only one. Three of the guys standing at the corner turned tail and started running when I laughed. Their sandals went clang, clang as they rushed up the ramp going up.

Of the other two guys behind me, one was trying to climb to his feet, which is harder than it sounds when you are gripping a four-foot long stabbing spear in both hands in a narrow passage. The other did not have his spear in hand, and his shield was slung behind him out of the way like you’d do to free both hands for a good grip. He had a look on his face that showed he was the stabber.

I still had his spear in my hand, covered in my blood. I had practiced this move a hundred times a day, every day except Sunday, for the last four years before sunrise. It was always what I did after sword forms and before stick fighting forms. I always hated my dad for not letting me sleep in like normal kids, and hated my brothers for always being better at it than I was. Well, every second, every split-second of that time I spent resenting my dad was wasted and worthless. I was stupid. Because, boy, all that practice was worth it.

The move was basic yari no kami. Your right foot is a yard in front of your left, at quarter angle. Right hand on the shaft three feet above the left. Lunge by stepping the right foot forward, bending the right knee, straightening the rear leg. Right hand loose to let the spear shaft move, thrust takes its power from the left hand, drive the point directly into the navel of the imaginary opponent. Recover by pushing off with the forward leg and return to stance.

Of course, this time the opponent was not imaginary. He had a jacket woven with metal plates, but I must have been pretty pumped, and he must have kept his spear sharp, because I drove the point about nine inches into him. I tore the blade sidewise to make a ragged wound that opened like a red mouth. A mouth that spat up. The guy sat down and screamed like a girl, and stuff that looked like spaghetti and meatballs, only thicker, poured out of the wound, along with blood and other fluid. I don’t mean anything against girls. All I mean is that it was a really high-pitched, really long scream of the sort you only hear in horror movie soundtracks.

I would have thought that the screams of real people would sound a lot different than fake ones. Nope. It sounds the same. My whole life, I had heard maybe ten thousand screams and seen ten thousand fake corpses on cop shows, so that now when the real thing was right in front of me and my hands were red with real blood, it did not strike me as anything real.

Thinking back, I remember seeing tears just pouring over the guy's cheeks as he sat there, trying to stuff his guts back inside of him. He was not able to close his mouth, and not able to stop screaming. In retrospect, I feel sorry for him. But at the time, nothing seemed real to me. I was in some sort of shock and I pulled back the spear and waved it overhead, whooping in savage triumph.

The score was now one guy behind me, five guys in front of me, along with the magic user, and the three freakaloids.

2. Butterfoot

I could not face the crowd and turn my back to a man behind me, despite that he had tripped and was now on his knees, so I stepped on the dying man, and drove the spear at him.

This guy — let’s call him Butterfoot Joe — he had not dropped his shield. It was held by a strap over his shoulder. Even from his kneeling position he was able to get it in my way and block my thrust. The shield was made of wicker or some lightweight substance, so my lance head penetrated it; but Joe just shrugged and dropped the shield, and my spear now had a four-foot tall surfboard attached to it.

Shouting, I shoved at him, spear and shield and all, but my spear had a fat knot of hair just below the spearhead, so nothing happened but me pushing at Butterfoot Joe like a bulldozer while he tried to leap to his feet. I mentioned these guys were all shrimpy little fellows, and he was off balance anyway, so he went stumbling back. I twisted the spear sideways, and the shield got wedged across the passage between an ornamental gnome and a pair of pipes. The shield was wedged in tightly enough that it did not drop when I let go of the spearhaft to stoop and pick up both the flashlight and my grandfather’s katana. The shield did not block Joe from coming back at me, but it made him hesitate, because he now had to decide whether to jump over or duck under, or take a moment to wrestle the little barrier out of the way.

As I straightened, I flicked on the flashlight in Joe’s eyes. The light was brighter than their wooden illumination, so it blinded him a moment. He backed up, but there was not much of a place to back up to, since he had to go around the corner, and now was on the lower part of the ramp sloping up. At that point, Butterfoot Joe just decided to run. I heard his footsteps clanging along with the footsteps of the first three guys: they had not been gone that long. They were still within earshot.

3. Two Bowmen

Something hit me in the back pretty hard, and then it hit me a second time. Thwack! Thwack!

Two arrows were sticking out of my jacket. My bulletproof jacket. The arrowheads had not penetrated, but, even if they had, so what? I was in this magical freaky nightmare land where I could be hurt, but not killed.

My chest wound was still sucking in air and spurting blood, and it hurt like the hottest part of Hell, but pain-fueled rage and adrenaline were rushing through my body and enflaming my brain.

Now I turned. No one from behind had charged. Two soldiers standing turned sideways in the cramped space, with bows in their hands and scared looks on their faces. Not scared like you are in combat. I am sure they’d seen plenty of that. Scared like they were seeing a ghost. A dead man who stood up after being stabbed and plucked out the javelin and gutted your team-mate with it.

I'm not sure why they decided to shoot me rather than rush me. Maybe no one charged me because they did not want to step on the dying guy. He was now behind me, between me and them, rolling on the ground. No one was stooping to try to help him, which struck me as rather cold. He was right in the middle of the puddle I had bled out or vomited up, blood mixed with Uncreation Oobleck, which was slithering like sticky worms from one side of the floor to the other. The dog-faced man-thing was still twitching, but he looked really dead, and he was slumped against the dying guy in the pool of Oobleck.

The soldiers were either really well trained, because they did not attack me until ordered, or really poorly trained, because they just stood there paralyzed with panic.

Maybe they did not want to step in the goop. I could see from the looks on their faces that they knew what the stuff was.

And maybe the place was too narrow to attack me easily. With two bowmen standing in front (call them Mutt and Jeff), they were blocking the way of the others behind them. I thought about rushing forward to see if I could decapitate one or both bowmen, but the two spearmen crowded up behind (or Frick and Frack, if you will), had their spears in their hands. Now they had recovered from the surprise of having people fall on their heads, so they were in position with their footing set right.

Sure, I was bigger than them, but then, a horse is bigger than a pikeman, which doesn’t do the horse any good during a cavalry charge. More mass and more muscle just means the horse can hurt itself worse by pushing the pointy end in deeper when they collide.

I hesitated a half-second, and that was too long: Mutt and Jeff, the two bowmen, knelt and raised their shields, making a little wall that Frick and Frack, the two spearmen, could thrust over to get at me. And I could not get at them.

Behind these four in the front were the two dog-headed hairless wonders. I’ve said before that they looked like baboons, but they were as tall as men, even if thinner. Call them Lassie and Rintintin. Next behind them, where the narrow aisle turned a corner was the third spearman. He was older, and had more plumes on his helm, and he got to stand back away from the danger, so let’s call him the Squad Leader wimp. Next to him was the magic user in the tall black cylindrical hat. I saw no sign of the phosphorescent blind guy in the black cloak. Maybe he was on the ramp leading down.

Mom did not like that I used to watch scary horror movies as a child. Boy, was she wrong about that. I had already seen so many fake gaping wounds and spurting gushes of blood in my TV life, that I did not freak out. I think I mentioned the real thing is less dramatic looking than the exaggerated close-ups. The smell was no worse than when you kill a buck, except that when a human being loses control of his bowels, our droppings smell really rank.

They all looked scared of me, except the magic user, who seemed bored. He had a narrow face, narrow eyes, a thin little moustache barely clinging to the corners of his mouth, and a sneer. He had this little shining toy in his hand, that looked like a compass or a pocketwatch, and he looked down at it, and pushed its golden dial with his thumbs. It was as if he was checking the time.

I raised the katana in a salute. “My name is Ilya McLeod of Clan McLeod! There can only be one!”

Mutt and Jeff relaxed, looking startled, and behind them Frick and Frack exchanged glances. They did not lower their spearpoints, but the tension went out of their shoulders.

They were acting as if they understood what I said.

The Squad Leader wimp said in a voice of awe, “What occult monster is he?”

I felt this weird sensation in my ears and in my brain. Because I had understood him before I realized that I should not understand him.

4. Non-Incomprehensible

I heard the words the squad leader spoke with my ears: umamu i-idtadum su.

Somehow, I knew the first word umamu meant beast or monster. The third word su at the end was a masculine singular pronoun, but it was not grammatically necessary. It was for emphasis only: not “what occult monster is he?” but “what occult monster is he?”

I also knew that the second word idu meant to be unknown and the letter ‘i’ at the beginning made it third person masculine singular, and the letter ‘m’ at the end made it accusative. The ta in the second position put the verb in the imperfect tense: being unknown was an ongoing act. There is no English equivalent to idtadum: “He unknowns” or “he unknownings” or even “he unknownizes.”

The word also meant strange in the sense of being a stranger, that is, unknown because it comes from outside. Our word occult when it refers to being something hidden or unearthly captures a hint of this.

Literally, then, the sentence was, “Monster, he being occult, (what is) he?” With the ‘what is’ just sort of implied.

I was not hearing it literally, you see. It's like this. I have a friend with the strange name of Foster Hidden. It's unusual, but I don’t really think of his last name meaning anything. When I hear it, my brain just interprets it to be his name.

If you said “Hidden” to me in reference to Foster, I would hear it as his name. But if I heard the word in a different context, my brain would remember the word had other meanings.

It was not as if I were an amnesiac who spoke French and then someone talked to me in French and I was surprised I could understand him. I could not speak the language. It was not like telepathy. I was understanding what he was saying, but I was also understanding the words and the grammar as if I already understood them. It was not like having a babelfish in your ear or a Star Trek universal translator, or something that gives you comical word-for-word translations.

I understood both the literal and the figurative meanings of the words: I was getting the connotations and implications of his language, including nuances with no parallel in English.

He said it again, “Umamu i-idtadum su, Bel Ersu Samavasipur?”

Turns out, the guy in the tall black hat whom the squad leader addressed actually was a magic user, or, at least an Astrologer. His name, or title, meant Lord Astute Starmage.

Samava, their word for star, literally meant va, living being, of the sama, celestial or middle heaven. You could translate the word samavasipur as astrologer rather than mage, but that might give a misleading impression. We are not talking about a guy who writes a newspaper column telling you vague things you want to hear.

Ersu meant Astute, but it was also a proper name, a title. It was not what his mother called him, it was what his masters ordered his slaves to call him during office hours. Now, keep in mind that I was not sitting there analyzing all these little nuances, I simply knew them. The knowledge appeared in my head like little firecrackers going off, the moment I heard the words.

The Starmage answered in a voice as cold as ice, nodding toward me:

Again, I heard the words with my ear: “Rabeserti, i-Lalilummutillut”

And I also heard them in my brain: “Decurion, he is of the Undying.”

5. Death Flees from Them

Rabeserti was a title rather than a name: rab meant chief, and eser was ten. I had guessed right. Squad Leader. Hurrah for me: I was Sherlock freaking Holmes.

The Undying is not a great translation for Lalilummutillut, nor was Immortal or Imperishable or Indestructible. Even if Self-Indestructible were a word, that was still not quite right.

The name he gave me meant something darker than that.

The name was made up of three word elements, going back to front, illutu, was a word-ending indicating a host, tribe, nation, clan or band: Undyingling, Undyingite, Undyingishman. Second, the middle word, Mut, meant death. But third, the prefix was a jammed-together phrase: La lil u which meant hopeless yearning or to seek in vain.

We have a word in English for those who seek glory in vain: Vainglorious. We do not have one for those who seek death in vain.

So a better way of rendering what I heard the Starmage say would be this: “Captain-of-Ten, he is of that host who seek death but do not find it; and who desire to die, but death flees from them.”

And I will not tell you how it angered and frightened me that he knew exactly what I was, and had a name for my species or race or club or whatever, but I was a big question mark to myself, just an empty blank.

It crashed in on me that all my brothers’ cruel jokes about how weird I looked, and that I was adopted, were true. I was not of my family. I was not even from Earth. How could I be? Every living organism on Earth is mortal. So who was I? What was I? What occult monster was I?

Lord Ersu the Starmage knew more than that. His next words:

“His blood is not called MacLeod, which means Son of the Ugly One. His blood is called Muromets, which means his fathers dwelt in Murom, which means the city of the land-people. He is called Ilya, which means the Lord is Yahweh.”

6. Vaunting

At that moment, the ship we were in shifted in its mooring, or maybe we were on land and this was a small earthquake. The deck swayed only enough to make everyone nervous and seasick for a second, not enough to throw anyone from his feet or do anything useful.

But they looked as startled as I felt, so I pointed my katana at the Starmage in back. “That was but the smallest sample of my power!”

Pretty good speech, I think. Reading all those comic books in my youth was not wasted. The guys in the front looked nervous.

I flourished the katana and struck a pose. “Get back, you Mortals! Everyone here who can get stabbed through the chest and live, raise your hands!”

But Lord Starmage must have read comic books too, because what he said sounded pretty impressive. “I have read the constellations and worked the calculations, and destined things both large and small. I know and foreknow, see and foresee.”

“Oh, yeah?” I shouted back, “Did you foresee that I was going to chop up Fido and gut your thugboy like a fish?”

The Starmage smiled thinly, and the men all laughed that fearless kind of laughter that makes you feel like a fool. They had known. The fact that I would ask the question at all made them roll their eyes.

The Starmage Ersu called out, “Fate is fated! Barbaran-izbu and Akalshir-redu were told this day held their hour, and they met doom with proper resignation. None of mine more will find their hour this day.”

Like I said, I understood not just the literal meaning, but what the turns of phrase and euphemisms meant. He meant he had cast horoscopes of his men: and none of them were going to die. The two names were of the two I had killed. Izbu meant a deformed beast or abomination. Redu meant private soldier. These were placed after their names the way we put “Mister” or “Miss” or “Doctor” or “Captain” in front of ours. Barbaran-izbu and Akalshir-redu were the names of the wolf-thing and the spearman I’d killed.

I now understood why no one had lifted a hand to help them. Because of Lord Starmage. These people were entirely superstitious, controlled by this Astrologer.

His eyes were dark slits, and his voice was like venom. “No power is left you, Ilya of Murom. I know the rising and the setting of the stars, and when their power wanes. And yours! No more triumphs are for you this day. Fate is fated!”

All the men answered that phrase together like a slogan or a warcry: Tupsimatu Simtu! It was a stock response, like you say And Also with You at Mass. Or at a Star Wars convention.

The two wolf-creatures snarled and coughed, first one, then the other. The language of snarls and ugly coughs was not automatically translated inside my head for me. It was almost a relief that alien beings sounded alien.

The Lord Starmage understood the wolf-ape language, for he answered them in his cold voice, “Be at peace, Tahazu-izbu and Rimanis-izbu! The Undying are not the Undefeatable. I only need his head. He was born but once, born mortal, born under his stars, and I know his nativity. He will be captured within the day, after he rests. A blacksmith’s bellows up his neck stump will allow him to answer interrogation.”

Mutt, the bowman in the front I was eyeing as the best candidate to kill first, seemed to sense that I meant his death. He spoke nervously over his shoulder, “But—but he spoke the name of the One! He said there can be only One! Does he not serve the Oneness?”

“There is only one speech,” said the Starmage in a voice that resonated with anger, “Does he speak it? There is only one folk. Is he ours? There is only one tower, one heaven, one power! Whoso serves not the Oneness shall serve unwilling. The Dark Tower tells and foretells: the Dark Tower decrees! The utter shadow of the Dark Tower falls upon all worlds!”

“The Dark Tower decrees!” All the men shouted in reply. Duhumnamar Nabu!

7. The Utter Dark Tower

Hearing the name of the enemy ringing from the lips of his minions was weird, because there were extra meanings hidden there. Namaru meant watchtower, but it also meant a looking glass of the sort a mage would use in divining the future. And Duhumu did not mean Dark. It meant a Great Darkness, and an Utmost Darkness. It meant a shadow of a tower so high that it fell across everything under heaven.

The All-Seeing Tower of the Greatest of Shadows, in other words.

The Darkest Tower.

In that moment, my hate for this guy and his stupid hat was unendurable. My fingers scrabbled madly in the pockets and nooks of my father’s jacket, and were rewarded with a nice, sharp four-pointed throwing star, which I immediately flicked at the head of the Lord Starmage.

I am not the world’s best shot. I managed to chuck the glittering thing in a whistling line right past the ears of the guys in the way. The throwing star clattered off the golden wall behind Lord Starmage, but he no longer looked bored. His tall black hat fell off as he instinctively ducked his head.

“Hey! Uri Geller! Did you foresee that?!”

The men were so amazed that I would mock their witch-doctor that they did not move, but stood staring at me. The wolfmen did not react the same way: my guess is that they could not understand English. They attacked.

8. Light Show and Lights Out

The two wolf-headed monsters jumped to the ceiling and clung flat against it like they were lizards or spiders or something. They scuttled forward at high speed, faster than leopards.

I was quicker, because all I did was twitch my thumb. My flashlight turned on, and was pointed down at the spreading pile of dark, wormy stuff all over the deck. Immediately a lightshow like peacocks hopped up on steroids with roman candles stuffed up their noses exploded in to a silent cacophony of colored light. Sparks flew everywhere, a bomb in a nest of lightning bugs. Dazzle filled the corridor from side to side, top to bottom.

I focused my mind on the anger and rage and pain and nightmarish sense of unreality which was boiling like darkness in me. “Arise, Oobleck! Be blackness for me!”

The lights went out. The burning substance of Uncreation became a vapor, filled the volume of the environment, went opaque.

Not for me: I had the night vision goggles up, and I could see just fine. Everyone else was groping.

Maybe the wolves could have hunted me by scent alone, but the Oobleck had a pretty awful and a pretty potent smell. I saw them clutch their noses and cower.

I was already sprinting in the other direction, around the corner and up the ramp, running on my moccasins like my friend Foster once showed me: the way the Tillamook Braves ran through the woods at full speed, and never stirred a leaf and never made a noise.

I was moving fast, but not so fast that I didn't see the shield still wedged in place across the path. I took it in one smooth leap like a steeplechaser.

9. One Guy Who Ran

I ran with the katana held straight back behind me, as I was taught, but this was stupid in such an enclosed space because there was not enough room for a good swing.

There was one guy waiting for me on the up ramp. He was the guy whose shield I had just jumped over. He was a green ghost to me. To him, I must have been a ghostly ghost; he never saw me or heard me coming.

Now he had neither shield nor spear, and he must have had his bow and arrow in hand when the darkness of Uncreation spread, because he was in the act of trying to slide his bow back over his shoulder into the quiver, and to draw his meat-cleaver-sized curved blade, and to listen for me coming, and not to make any noise. And so consequently neither hand was in the way when I hit him in the face as hard as I could with my two-foot long flashlight.

I might have broken his nose or his jaw, or just driven his lower jaw up against his upper teeth so sharply that the shock of it stunned him. Or maybe he fainted. In any case he fell over without any more fuss. His helmet went rolling and clattering away on the metal floor making the brightest, loudest sound and the most echoes ever. Clang! Clang! Clang!

I assume he did not die from one blow to the face, because Lord Astute the Starmage said no one else had his hour of death coming this day. His minute of getting his nose smashed so crooked that his face looked like it was painted by Picasso? Well, I guess Mr. Horoscope didn’t check for that.

I touched my chest again, and was gratified to find the open wound in my chest had sort of healed over. Now it was blocked from within by some of the black Oobleck I had swallowed, and a scab was grown over it. I should have been surprised or grossed out, but I wasn’t. Does it hurt? Under my fingers, I felt the Oobleck turning from a wet clay substance into flesh. Like in a dream, like in a nightmare, things in this world had their own bizarre logic. I was just glad I wasn’t leaving a blood-trail.

I went up, and turned, and went up again, and turned again.

Chapter Eight: A Dark World Beneath

1. Dead End

I kept running in the darkness, expecting any moment to leave the cloud. But it was still dark.

I turned the next corner, and the next. Each corner was a 60 degree angle, and the ramp was steep. How far had this zone of darkness I’d created spread? I don’t know. Maybe it was moving with me, keeping me in the center.

I realized that the invasion machine was hanging vertically. Imagine putting the engine of a train on a hook, so that all the cars were like sausage links beneath, with the caboose like a tail below. Imagine the ramp I ran up like the ribbon on a barber pole, if a barber had a triangular pole instead of a round one.

The ramp ended in a dead end. Underfoot was a round hatch, a trapdoor, lid up and open wide. I could hear three pairs of footsteps. Possibly these were the three who fled in fear from me. Either they had not run fast, or less time than I supposed had passed. As I approached, the footsteps fell silent. I crouched and listened at the opening, not exposing my head.

2. Overheard

One voice, dim with distance, spoke, “Brethren in arms, what darkness is this?”

A second spoke, “It is ylem, the primal uncreated stuff, escaped through the twilight gate into the created world.”

A third said, “Then the Undying is near. No one else can touch this stuff, and live. We saw it spill from him.”

The first, more softly, “He is a youth. The same age as Irgigi-redu. Let us overcome him: prod out his eyes with arrowheads and dismember him with the sickle sword, it is easy enough.” It was two words in their language: sapara-hukaratu meant to dismember with the sapara, the sickle-sword, xuppud-xutpu meant to put an arrowhead into an eye. Handy shorthand terms no doubt evolved from times before fighting with Undying Ones.

The second voice, “The danger is great! He is a warlock of the ylem!” This was one word in their language: ylemsippur. It literally meant wise in shadow. Shadowmage.

The first said, “The danger is greater if we be taken by the Silent Watcher. We will be torn by iron hooks for our desertion. Where can we flee the wrath of the Dark Tower, the looking glass which sees all things? The only amends to make are to bring his head to Lord Ersu.”

The second said, “He must have known we would flee. Fate is fated.”

The first: “And known that he would then give us over to those who ply the iron hooks. Fate is fated.” He used a single word for the ironhook experts: Parzil-selusarapu-le’u. Professional torturers skilled with tools other than beds of iron hooks no doubt had different names, the way we have separate names for optometrist and podiatrist.

The second said back, “I am not fated to die this day. The Astrologer has told me.”

The first replied, “Those who enjoy the attention of the barbed hooks can linger many days before death is sure, depending on the skill of the tormentor.”

The second voice said, “What say you, Naragesi-pana?”

Pana was a military designation, a scout or a patrolman. Naragesi was a name. He spoke with more authority in his voice that the other two. “If this gloom is the sending of Ilya the Undying—”

I cannot tell you how much it bothered me that they knew my name.

“— from the nearest energy altar, we ignite the lampwood to bring the ylemaramu to abolish it. As soon as it clears, the lodestone of the altar will point to the nearest source of ylem, which will be Ilya. We come swiftly upon him. If he goes where we cannot, outside the hull or to inside the power-core, we use the other-soul altar to compel Damishikaruyizbu of the Kasugallillut to pursue him. We have three drops of archangel-blood between us to convoke the altar glass of either one, energy or othersoul.”

Ylemaramu was their term for that blue-light effect which dried up the Oobleck-substance. I had seen it shining from their sticks of ‘lampwood’ not ten minutes ago.

Their word for blood from an archangel was Rablammasu-damu. Weird that they would have that as a single word. How often would the concept come up in conversation? It sounded like something they used to activate their altars, turn on their controls, summon their magic, whatever. Maybe it was a brand-name.

There are some nuances here hard to translate, but they came through loud and clear as I crouched there listening. The same way we would not use the word drunkard in English to mean a guy who drinks a lot of water or some other innocent liquid, the word shikaru referred to quaffing whiskey or vodka or some heady intoxicant. Dami meant blood, or life, or soul. The name-ending izbu indicated he was a deformity or monstrosity, not a human. Damishikaruyizbu meant It Quaffs Blood. Kasugall meant the demon of winter, a devil of the freezing cold, or a frost-ghost. I already told you what the word-ending illutu meant. Try to keep up.

So someone or something named the Lifeblood-Quaffing Abomination of the Winter Devil Creatures was the man or creature they were talking of sending after me.

Maybe that was just some sort of trumped up name, like a biker gang calling itself Hell’s Angels.

Maybe not.

Maybe it was better not to stick around and find out.

3. Coign of Vantage

I saw I could lock them below. The cocks were on this side of the floor hatch, and I recognized them as simple electromagnets. Turning on the power would pull the cocks open. Silently, I lowered the lower hatch, pinching my fingers something awful in the process, but getting it shut with no noise. I dogged it. I chopped the wires leading to them, which were gold, to kill the power to the magnets.

Above me was a second hatch. As I undogged it and pulled it toward me, a sudden wind rose up behind me. The hatch opened inward, and I had to wrestle it open against the wind from the inside of the machine. Air was gushing out into the thinner air outside, like a fountain.

Bright silvery light struck me, and, amplified by my goggles, blinded me a moment.

The first thing I heard was the wind: a high, thin whispering, whistling and moaning wind.

I pushed the goggles up on my brow, blinking. There was a full moon overhead. I clambered up. There were handholds on the outside surface of the hatch. I did not need to pull the hatch shut: It was counterbalanced to snap shut unless propped open. There was a handle on this side, made of gold and shaped like a snake biting its own tail. I turned it, heard a hum, and felt a tug on my sword, the fastenings of Dad’s jacket, and the other metal things I wore as a powerful electromagnet came on.

I saw the little triangular platform where I stood was in midair, with no railing, a steep drop nigh-infinitely deep. Overhead was a triangular ceiling just low enough that I wanted to stoop, but did not have to. So it was claustrophobic and agoraphobic at the same time.

This was the upper corner of the segment of the Invasion Machine I had just exited. Above me was the rear of the next segment. The tube connecting the segments was made of corrugated black slats, looking remarkably like the joints in the elbow of a space suit. Think of the freight train I just mentioned, hanging on a hook: now imagine I was on one of those little balcony things, whatever they are called, between the cars.

And the train was in its station. The huge machine was not under power right now.

I turned and looked out. The thin, cold air was as if I had just stepped out onto the peak of Mount Everest. I guess I am glad I was a Lalilummutillut, one of the host that seek for death but do not find it, because I surely would have found it then. The air was too thin to breathe.

But if I had been breathing, the view I beheld when I turned would have taken my breath away. I was halfway to outer space, looking out at a night world as if from the window of a jetliner: One that flew above normal civilian aircraft, maybe one of those pressurized spyplanes that brush the edge of vacuum. The stars were diamonds, brighter than those of desert midnight.

Except that there was no window, and no jet. I was up so high that I could see the curve of the horizon, and the moonlit clouds were so far below they looked like a wrinkled cotton carpet or a fallen winding sheet.

When I looked over the side, I saw the Invasion Machine was clinging to what looked like an infinite dark road bristling with spears, as if an army defied gravity and defied heaven, and marched straight toward the zenith.

But it was not a road: it was vertical immensity, too large for me to imagine or to take in, even though I was looking at it. A tower. The tower.

It was Duhumunamaru itself, infinitely above me, infinitely below.

In the moonlit gloom, the Utmost Dark Tower was a pattern of grays, dark blues, and inky black, alleviated here and there with enough touches of sard, smaragd, or gold to make the Tower look like the patterned hide of a poisonous snake, or as if some mythic dragon sleeping on a bed of gold coins, rising in flame, still had doubloons and pieces of eight wedged in the crocodile crusts of his armor.

From the shapes and shadows, I could see how it rose, bastion upon bastion, massively ornamented, massive, barbaric, gigantic. If architecture is music, this tower would be the sound made on a pipe organ by pressing all the lowest pitch keys and foot-petals at once, and holding them down until the church windows broke.

Don’t think of a round tower. I could not grasp the overall shape, but I could see that the armored darkness of the walls was wrinkled into many prows and indentations, angles acute and obtuse, with ravelins, counterguards and crownworks and hornworks, turrets and bastions fused or moored by bridges to the main donjon in an architecture of eye-defeating geometry whose symmetry was too large to be seen, all rising infinitely straight up: an insanity of height.

Don’t think of a skyscraper with windows ablaze. I saw slits and portcullises here and there along the dark miles, but no lamps, no lit windows, and I heard no movement. Only the thin and Arctic wind made noise: an endless keening, shrill and hideous.

This structure was more vast than any human work of engineering in my world, including the Great Wall of China. And yet for all its glory and dark grandeur, it seemed a thing of nightmare to me, a haunted house, if a haunted house could be taller than a mountain, taller than a mountain range stood on its end.

The parapets were thick with turrets and engines and rich with decoration. I cannot exaggerate the scale of the works: the pointed crenels of the battlements seemed large as towers.

Titanic statues were peering over the huge parapets down at the cloudscape so far below. In the moonlight, I could see their skulls from behind. They were immense shapes of shining metal: tusked dragons, and crowned hawks, and goat-headed minotaurs, and winged bulls with the heads of bearded kings.

It sank into me that, deadly as this place was, I was trapped here on another world, whose denizens were hunting me. Being trapped and hunted sucked, sure; but I was on another world.

If Neil Armstrong had been attacked by lamp-eyed insect men or man-eating centaurs coming out of buried tunnels when he first landed on the moon, and if he had been forced to move in long, slow, dreamlike leaps in the low gravity, shouting over the radio for Buzz Aldrin to step out of the landing module and punch them, that would have sucked for him, too. But it still would have been cool, because he still would have been the first earthman to step on a new globe. I felt like that.

Something crinkled in my pocket. It was Dad’s letter. It might have seemed insane to take the time to stop and read it just then, but I honestly wondered whether it might contain some clue about my attackers that would help me.

I got out my flashlight, flicked it on, and tore open the envelope one-handed, with my teeth.

4. The Dead World

The letter was ten pages, handwritten in my father’s precise, slanting cursive. It contained a brief description of everything.

Everything consisted of a multiverse where different parallel branches of time reached through the abyss of Uncreation. I was a little disappointed there did not seem to be an infinite number of parallel worlds. There were forty-nine parallel branches the Inquisition had confirmed existed, and a handful of others they suspected.

Next came a description of how Saint Brendan the Navigator in the Fifth Century had baptized a mermaid, who in return showed him a patch of dark fog in the middle of the North Sea, and told him the trick of how to use it to sail another Earth, where the stars were the same as ours, but the men and the history were different.

Apparently there is a way to cut through a shallow part of the Uncreation, so that it still looks like there is sea underfoot and ground overhead, merely all dark and blurry, and human beings, or maybe only saints in ships crewed by monks, can go this way without dying. It is a way the Dark Tower cannot detect.

At first Saint Brendan called this world Antioeci, for the inhabitants matched some of the descriptions Pliny in his Natural History had given for the monstrous men from unexplored other hemispheres of the globe.

But he thought he was travelling through the core of our world to get there, passing through the outer layers of Hell. The mermaid, who was called Muirgen, urged Saint Brendan to secrecy, for she feared travelers would be seduced by mermaids and taught unlawful magic, or discovered by the magicians of a black tower that was taller than heaven.

When he returned to Earth, the archbishop decided to keep the matter hidden under seal, and told no kings nor commoners, fearing that otherwise men would seek out these entrances.

But the Church continued to research how to locate, open, and use these twilight gates. The breakthrough came during the Crusades, when the Templars found the Ark of the Covenant.

I skipped the next few paragraphs, thinking I could always get back to them later, looking for something that would catch my eye.

Your mother is from another world, called Astabor

I wanted to read where and how he’d met her, and woo’d and wed, but, again, that would have to wait for some other time, when I was not being pursued.

Then my eye fell on this:

She is trapped in a parallel version of history, on a dead world. The enemy calls it Sabtechadur, the Land of the Sons of Sabtechah. The Linnaean designation is Hamitic-Cushite-Eritrean. The traditional name is Antregulus. Saint Brendan dubbed it ‘Against the King Star’ because in that world there was no miracle of the Bethlehem Star.

The natives call it Rom Chal.

The reason why no one can establish the original home of the gypsies is because they come from that world, not from ours, and they fled from it when the Dark Tower destroyed it.

The enemy obliterated all surface life, using an Aztec ritual called The Apocalypse of the Sixth Sun.

Humans with artificial aid can survive in Western Europe or Eastern China. But the core of Asia is deadly. Spacesuits and submarines offer no protection, because the laws of Nature are damaged and the specific molecular and neuro-chemical reactions required for animal life no longer apply.

From Uttarakhand to Nagaland, from Tibet to the sands of Xinjiang, and Quinghai west even unto Ningxia, it is all a land of unendurable night. Storms and lakes and whirlwinds of living darkness have turned everything into a sunless desert of craters and stones. It is as lifeless as the moon.

I remembered all the maps of Central Asia, the regions of Western China and Northern India and Afghanistan pinned up on the walls in my father’s study. Some were old and wrinkled, painted on yellowing parchment, and I had always thought they were historical maps, as if Dad were pondering the clash between British and Russian Empires in the region during the Victorian Era. Now I realized there was another reason why the boundaries on his maps matched no nations of our world, or why China was called Serica.

These were not maps from our universe. They had been hanging in my house for years, right over my father’s desk. I never looked at them.

Argaththa is the name of the vast metropolis and gardenlands miles below the crust, and the entrances to the surface world are in the sacred city of Lhasa in Tibet.

Outside the wall of twilight are desolated lands, empty of man, now the haunt of monsters and janissaries enslaved by the Dark Tower: Astomi from Ud who neither eat nor drink, six-armed Gegenees from Ul, and gigantic Syrbotae. The Himalayan Mountains are surrounded and besieged.

The ruins of Lhasa are dead, and have been piled up in rage atop the tunnel entrances to Argaththa when your mother took refuge there. The Behemoth crouches atop the ruins.

Within Argaththa is a treasure on which all our hopes are pinned…

5. The Vanished Moon

There came a sudden light and noise from above, a multicolored lightning.

I turned my head, shocked.

Above me rose tier on tier of bastion on bastion; and I saw the immensity of faces peering down at me, serpentine, accipitrine, caprine, or imperious.

The same pattern of statues peering downward I saw on the balcony below me was repeated above me, and this next balcony was near, so they loomed huge in my vision.

All the gigantic and gigantically silent faces were cast in shadow by a spread of colored lights behind them, and it lent them an aspect ferocious, cold, and terrible. Mile upon mile of mask upon mask all stared down, hung at each balcony like the shields on the side of a Viking ship, silent as the statues of angels in a midnight graveyard.

Behind and above the staring faces, above them all, so far and so high as to be something more akin to what an astronomer could describe rather than an engineer, flamed a blaze of pristine light, many-colored like Saturn’s Rings, coming from the upper endlessness of the tower.

Circling the upper tower at various distances were golden hoops hanging upright in the heavens: the earrings of constellations.

As first I could not tell if this were something small and close to my eye, or immense and far off. I had no perspective, no comparison. Then, when two of the rings began to glow, I realized they were Moebius coils. Orbs of darkness appeared in their dead centers. A moment later, I saw an invasion machine, gleaming and golden like a ceremonial sword, sinuous as a serpent, monstrous as a locomotive, dart like a flung javelin out from the first ring, and slide across the upper space and into the second.

A pair of roaring tornado cones appeared above and below one of the Moebius coils as it lit, but not around the other. The prow of the invasion machine was cherry red with air friction as it flew, but then the friction grew less, and the glow vanished. The machine, as large as it was, seemed no bigger than a speck when the second Moebius coil swallowed it. That gave me the comparative size. Of the rings I was seeing, some were gigantic and inside the atmosphere. Others were ultra-gigantic, and orbiting above the atmosphere.

And I wondered how they kept those Moebius rings in place. Was the top of the tower at the geosynchronous orbital point? Or were they suspended, by magic or antigravity or by one of those annoying “sufficiently advanced technologies” that are indistinguishable from magic?

6. The Darkened World

That many-colored light blazed for a moment, but not for long.

In that moment of light, I saw other dockyards holding invasion machines, some larger than the one I clung to, some much larger. Picture all the ships of World War Two, both Axis and Allies, docked in an impossible harbor where gravity works sideways. This was not the armament of a world war, but of many wars on many worlds.

Then it was dark again. The moon, which had been full a moment before, was now a half moon, and then a crescent as some vast shape moved before it and blotted it out.

I thought the Dark Tower had opened a twilight door of diameter sufficient to pass the moon into the Uncreation. You expect malign people to do scary things like murder and rapine and torture and war. You do not expect malign people to swallow the moon. You do not expect malevolence on an astronomical scale. It is the kind of thing supernatural and titanic wolf demons from Norse mythology did, or inhuman disasters of natural science, not mortal men. You might think I was seeing an eclipse, some vast instrument of the Dark Tower passing in its orbit between this world and her moon.

I thought I was seeing a heavenly body annihilated. It was too many shocks in too few hours. I screamed in panic.

By instinct, I flourished my sword in a two-handed grip, as if to parry the infinity that seemed about to topple on me. This made me drop the flashlight I frankly forgot I had been carrying in my left hand. I must have jarred its switch, because a beam swept out as it fell. Away it sailed, rebounding from wall and battlement, a tiny spinning glint of light in a very great darkness.

And the letter fluttered away and away. I had dropped it. Whatever else my father had been desperate to tell me was lost.

7. The One City

I got down on my knees, faint, and my eyes were drawn downward as if pulled magnetically, following the falling spark. I pounded my fist on the metal surface where I knelt, cursing myself for a fool, and commanding myself to keep my wits, to observe, to think.

I was behind enemy lines, an enemy that could destroy whole worlds. I had to keep a cool head.

Now that the moon was gone, through a break in the clouds I saw my first glimpse of the alien Earth. At the foot of the tower I saw the light of a city, squares upon squares, with dark patches that may have been parks or fields.

Night was there, and their lanterns burned with a yellow glint that flickered and breathed, not like the steady, scientific illumination of our incandescent lightbulbs. Their lampwood illumination, close at hand, seems bright and clear, with only the slightest flicker. At a distance, a vast city lit by such means looks like the cave of a sorcerer, elfin and uncertain, and the countless constellations of light ripple hypnotically like a vast beast breathing.

I blinked. Something was missing. There were a few large squares of light set around the city, perhaps indicating suburbs or some very large military encampments or something. And then … nothing. There were no lights in the country as far as my eye could see, and I was seeing a huge, truly huge sweep of landscape.

To calm myself, to drive the fear away, I did a little calculation in my head. The formula for calculating the distance in miles to the horizon is to divide the height of eye-level in feet by one point two, and square the result.

Suppose I was 40,000 feet up, or thereabouts. I was seeing at least 200 miles to the horizon from this height.

How far is that? Directly underfoot was a city as large as New York, and I had a sweep of the landscape so broad that in one view, I would have been able to see from Maryland to Rhode Island. But there were no lights indicating a Newark, a White Plains, or a New Rochelle. There was no New Haven, no Philadelphia, no Atlantic City, no Baltimore, no Washington, no Providence.

I looked again at the corners of the rectilinear city. No, this was much larger than New York, or any metropolis of Earth. It was large enough to be all the Eastern Seaboard gathered into one spot, with Los Angeles and San Diego, Peking, Tokyo and Bombay thrown in for good measure.

What kind of world has one mega-metropolis, and outside that — nothing?

Juggling numbers in my head did the trick. I was calmer. I was calm enough now to realize that the Dark Tower did not have the power to swallow the whole moon.

But I was not any less afraid. Because the Dark Tower must have had something, either a large airship the size of an island, or an even larger spaceship the size of an asteroid, big enough to eclipse the moon and block its light.

Frightened or not, I told myself sternly never again to overestimate the enemy. There is no reason to let fear add cubits to the giant you are fighting.

8. The Bloodquaffer

It had been foolish to stop to read my father’s letter. That could have waited until I was safe. Had I really thought it might contain a clue I could use? Or was I only a scared boy who wanted some comfort from his strong father?

There was no point in second guessing my own motives. The enemy must have figured out where I was by now, or heard my scream, or seen my dropped light. It was time to go, and past time. How long had I been out here, reading?

I was standing on the leading surface of the Invasion Machine in the joint between two of its freight-car sized segments. My hair almost touched the trailing surface of the segment over my head. Picture a triangle with a circle drawn inside it, and the circle is wide enough to divide the triangle into three corners. I don’t know what the geometry name is for a shape with two straight sides and a convex base, but it looks a bit like a Star Trek badge. The badge shapes are the leading surfaces or platforms of the machine. The circle in the center is the iron joint itself.

The Invasion Machine was flush up against the Dark Tower wall. The corner where I stood was the one sticking out away from the wall, and the other two corners were nuzzled up against it.

To go from one badge-shaped corner to the next, was only a very narrow and un-railed catwalk leading around the curve of the iron connecting joint.

This curving wall was against my shoulder as I inched along the catwalk. I could feel heat from it, and maybe a hint of humming. The linear accelerator at the core of the Invasion Machine ran through this connecting joint, directly down the axis of the whole machine.

I donned the night-vision goggles, and the starlight made the scene into greenish ghosts and outlines. As I came around the curve, I saw a massive structure of clamps and chains, looking like a primitive version of a launch tower and gantry, embracing the Invasion Machine from either side. When or how had we docked? I saw no longshoremen, no sign of any living thing.

I turned up the gain on the goggles. From this gantry, there were many ladders and catwalks leading sidewise to other docked invasion machines, or to the operator’s cages of cranes and lifting machines, or to what looked like altars hanging in midair, with bloodstains and smoke-stains all along their carved surfaces. A small octagonal portcullis or hatch leading into the interior of the Dark Tower was in the middle distance somewhat below. If I were patient and suffered no vertigo, I could reach it.

The only thing that made me nervous was that I thought I saw light, like the glow from an undersea fish, reflecting off the metal walls. Someone or something was there, but the axis of the Invasion Machine was in the way.

Well, no matter who or what that light source was, I had to go that way. I held the katana before me and advanced.

As I came around the blind curve, there was the pale fellow with no eyes and no hair.

How he got there, I don’t know. He was very dim in my night-vision goggles, like a man recently dead, turning cold.

I pushed the goggles up on my forehead. His skull and naked lower legs were glowing in the dark with a sickly phosphorescence. So he seemed like just a head floating above a dark cloak, above thin and naked feet. His toes were the color of ten little glow worms. The eyeless holes in his skull were dark pits, as was the crooked little grin of his mouth.

The moonless world was black around us, a hint of starlight overhead, a hint of citylight touching the clouds below.

I said, “Dami-shikaru? Eh? Is that you? You?” I pointed at him with my sword, then realized he could not see the gesture. “Damishikaruyizbu?”

His voice was so hoarse and cracked that it made me wince and wish I had a canteen to lend him. He sounded like he’d swallowed sand.

“Ego …” (I am.)

It was Latin, or Greek. Or maybe Freud. Earth lingo. I was just as surprised at the unexpected encounter with the familiar in the alien dimension as if he had taken a bottle of Pepsi from his pocket or a pinup of Betty Grable.

“Εgo eimi …” The words were Greek. (It is I, even I …)

I bent my head closer, trying to catch the desiccated, breathless whisper: “Ego eimi pioun to haema sas os methysoi oenos toi.”

The magic that allowed me to understand languages was not helping me out at all, but I knew just enough classical Greek to puzzle out what he’d said. Hema as in hematology meant blood, and pota as in potable meant drink, and oenos sounded like and meant wine. Methysoi meant drunkard.

At a guess, he’d just said: Even I am to imbibe your blood as a drunkard his wine.

Okay, forget that canteen. I was not giving this guy a drink. What world was he from? This one? Another?

He spoke again in his voice of dry creaking: “Anankai d’oude theoi machontai.”

The tone of voice was clear: sardonic, contemptuous, deadly. Against Necessity, the gods themselves cannot contend.

I carefully gripped the katana, forefingers relaxed, thumbs tense, controlled my breathing, focused my spirit. Because of the narrow footing, I assumed the stance called Kasumi no Kamae or Sword in the Mist. The blade is held at eye level, edge up, in a two-handed grip, right fist just in front of my cheek, palm inward, left hand on the grip two inches behind it, palm outward.

I stood with my weight on the back foot, back knee slightly bent, so I could get power in my lunge. He did not have a sword in hand, so I pointed my tip at the spot where his swordhand would have been had he been armed and addressing me properly.

Even though he could not understand English, I had to give him a chance. “Hey, Baldy. You’re blind, and I have a sword, and we are standing on a slippery gold plank nine inches wide. So why don’t you back up and sit down before I slice you into bacon strips?”

But he spoke no answer. Instead, he slid forward with a smooth, fast, effortless motion, his bare feet pitter-patting on the slim catwalk like a ballerina’s glide, which looked just weird; and he was smiling an eerie vacant smile. The cloak moved, and I saw he was naked under his black cloak, like a flasher.

When he reached toward me with his long, thin arms, a chill like the Arctic and a sensation of dizzying emptiness came over me.

I had no reluctance whatever murderizing naked blind guy with a very deadly weapon.

I was filled with that anticipatory glee you get when you know you are going to win. I was bigger than him, I had the advantage of reach and mass, and there was twenty-five inches of razor-sharp, exquisitely forged steel between us. He could not strike or grab me without me lopping off his spindly little arms first. He was starvation thin and in really bad shape; his limbs looked like soda straws with bulbous joints. His fingernails were long and dirty and ragged, and I laughed with contempt as he rushed me.

Because there was a low ceiling overhead and a wall to my left, when he came in sword-range, I yelled “tsuki” and thrust the point of the blade into his throat, reversed, and followed up with a two-stroke attack called Mizu Gaeshi or Returning Water. This is a low Gyaku kesa (diagonal cut from lower left to upper right at chest level) and a high Suihei (horizontal cut from right to left at neck level to decapitate him, or, if you are feeling particularly zazen and focused, the fancier suihei is to hit him at the level of his temple to cleave his skull above the ear).

If executed correctly, the target will be missing his sword arm (never able to play pattycake again, or to hitchhike while facing traffic) and meanwhile the top of his skull should be flying away like a Frisbee, leaving him like a pumpkin ready to scoop out.

And I was feeling zazen. I was in the zazen-zone. I swear I connected. Connected? I did it perfectly: the thrust, and both cuts, backhand and forehand. It was the kind of move you show to new students in slo-mo.

Nothing happened.

The blade went scrape-scratch, not a noise that should ever come from a blade like this. It was like striking a block of wood. There was no blood.

Great. He was a robot or a zombie or something. So unfair.

Then he had his arms around me, and those spindly arms were stronger than two anacondas. He put his face near my face, and a cold, white vapor started coming out of his mouth.

All I can tell you is that this silky, icy, colorless, harmless-looking smoke terrified me more than anything else I had seen that day. I don’t know why. The smoke seemed hungry, somehow. It came toward my face, and the vapor separated into two small streamers and one bigger stream. The two smaller ones reached very delicately toward my nostrils, and the big one touched my lips, and my mouth both went numb, and burned like I had licked acid.

I threw my head back, arching my spine, and kicked with both legs, and writhed and struggled like a madman, screaming.

It did me no good. We both fell from the edge of the invasion machine and plunged into the endless air together, forty thousand feet above sea level.

He let go of me at once, sending me spinning away with a kick. He was pointing his empty eye sockets in my direction and he grinned a sickly, mocking grin of farewell, a polite nod of his turnip-shaped pale head. Then he spread his spindly arms and legs.

There was a membrane running from his ankles to his wrists in a fashion that just seemed totally unfair, not to mention hairless, veiny, and disgusting.

It was not a cloak after all, only that the texture of the back of his glider wings was dark and leathery. No wonder he hadn't feared me. My previous contempt began to strike me as more than a little foolish, and woefully misplaced.

His belly and the inner membrane of his wings were more phosphorescent than the rest of him, and glowed with an eerie, sickly brightness. He did not have sexual organs at the crotch between his legs, but a knot of tattered scar tissue. Given the circumstances, it was hard to drum up any pity for him.

On wings of membrane he sailed away like a scrap of glow-in-the-dark autumn leaf blown from a pallid tree. With him went my light. In moonless blackness I fell.

It did not seem fair that the bloodquaffer had built-in flying squirrel wings, like Rocky, but I did not have a parachute, so I fell. Like Bullwinkle. The nightmare world I had entered apparently had a rule that I could not die, but it did not give me any pleasure.

9. Not in Kansas Anymore

Remember the Wizard of Oz? Most people know about the movie, but L. Frank Baum wrote a bunch of sequels, and the publishers after him hired folk to write dozens more. Mom read them to me as a kid, and for the most part they’re really sweet, but one thing about them always freaked me out. The Tin Woodman was originally made of meat and bone like the rest of us, but a curse on his ax made him cut off a limb or other body part each time he went out to chop wood. This being a happy fairy land, he could not die from the ax wounds, but instead he went to the local tinsmith and replaced the missing limb or part with tin. The process continued until gradually he was entirely tin.

Call me crazy, but I have never believed in evolution, at least, not the way it was explained to me in school. You see, I always thought there was something fishy about the idea that one species could turn into another provided you did it gradually enough. It reminded me of theological arguments I had with my brothers about the Tin Woodman when I was nine, and we were lying in bed supposed to be asleep. I kept saying, “But whenever he cuts off his head, that means he has got to be dead! And how come when he cut out his heart, the tinsmith did not replace that?” But Alexei would say, “Maybe he only cut one half of his brain at a time, and the flesh and blood brain programmed the tin brain with his memories, so that the next accident, when he cut out the second half of his brain, the memories in the tin half could write themselves into…” and Dobrin would groan, “This is so stupid! It’s MAGIC! Why don’t you ask the straw scarecrow how the man made of tin is alive?” Alexei would say, “If the tinsmith had some of the Powder of Life from the Crooked Magician…” and I would say, “But it could not work! If it happens one bit at a time, it is still a different person! The real woodman is dead!”

I feel I was vindicated when, in the book Tin Woodman of Oz, in one of the freakiest scenes ever, the Tin Woodman comes across his old severed head, which was stored in the deserted cabinet of the tinsmith, still alive and able to talk. The two were clearly different people. And even freakier, all the severed limbs of the Woodman were stowed in a barrel out back, still alive, but not connected to any person. I think the tinsmith later glued them together, Frankenstein-style, and made a new man out of the cast-off parts. Which made me wonder why he did not use that magic glue in the first place just to glue back on the severed fingers and limbs of Nick Chopper back when he was a flesh-and-blood person.

Whatever. The point was that people in Oz could not die, but their bodies could be severed and scattered, and each part would remain alive, but a group of cells smashed and scattered across acres of land would not be able to move, or talk, or think, or do any of the things living things do, except persist.

So I was not looking forward to hitting the ground.

10. Impact

If my people, my race, my whatever, could survive such things and walk away unscathed, we would probably be called the Really Lucky Guys That No One Can Kill, rather than Those Who Seek Death in Vain.

Two thoughts cheered me up. First, I would survive this. If a fall could kill us, we’d be called something like Those Who Seek Death Successfully by Jumping off Really High Things. Second, I had had one lesson in skydiving some months ago, and I had a really, really long way to go.

So I held my arms behind me just so, and bowed my head, and pointed my toes, and used my body like a surfboard of the air, and started drifting to the left as I fell, rather than to the right, closer and closer to the Tower, which, after all, had all sorts of projections and balconies and other things to grab on …

I heard the thunderclap of noise of a Moebius gate somewhere in the atmosphere above me snapping open and shut. You do not need to touch the cone of a tornado to be in the tornado: I did not feel the wind grab me, because I was moving with it. The Dark Tower was warping the winds of the world to carry me where it willed I should go.

The hurricanic insanity of wind that flung me along must have been calculated with the precision known to rocket scientists or sharpshooters. The flare of light from the upper Moebius gate was bright as a lightning bolt, and so for a long second or two, I was not blind.

The last thing I recall were Bronze-Age Spacemen standing in a line with nets on a battlement just below the section of wall that came far too suddenly toward me. They wore what looked like Victorian diving suits, or space-armor someone from a Jules Verne story might wear, if Jules Verne was from the pre-Biblical Near East, and copied the shape of his space helmets from the conical helms of Sumerian warlords, or Babylonian, or Chaldaean, complete with plumes shaped like question marks, ceremonial wigs made of wire and ceremonial beards made of copper.

The wall in this area was ornamented with spikes and lances pointing outward, toward which I was flung at an oblique angle at terminal velocity. The net was strung up between these spearpoints.

To me, the dark wall was a flyswatter, and I was a fly.

Chapter Nine: 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.

My other plan was to practice sword forms, do pushups and situps, jog in place until the glowing wooden floorboards threatened to crack, and use an imaginary sword to fence with the unexpected stabs and jabs of the spikes. Slowly, I grew stronger.

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.

Chapter Ten: 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 [explicative 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 Suessian 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.

Chapter Eleven: 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.”

“You 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!”

Chapter Twelve: 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.

Chapter Thirteen: 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.

Chapter Fourteen: 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.

Chapter Fifteen: 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 beasts’ 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 US 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.

Chapter Sixteen: Astray in Immensities

1. Barricade

The chain was still wrapped around me in a harness, and strong enough to bear my weight. I had about twenty feet of slack, some of which I looped over the nose of the glass rowboat on which I balanced. Then I made myself a belay tie. Thank God for old-fashioned Boy Scout knot-tying skills. I lowered myself without any hardship, and only a few hard bruises, to the nose of the next glass boat below. Then repeated the process.

Twelve feet at a time, I lowered myself from one glass boat to the next, until I was at the cab of the wayship that was sliding without lights and without noise down the side of the blue metal wall. Unlike the larger wayship I had encountered in the Uncreation, this one had its mouth-shaped prow funnel closed, and window-shaped gill-slits open.

By the time I reached the cab, about thirty Hail Mary’s and three Paternosters later, my feet had stopped bleeding.

I looked into the gill-slit window of the cab of the wayship. It was a triangular cabin, unoccupied, with benches and handholds both on walls and overhead, as if meant to be manned no matter what direction was up. There were brass metal plates on dragon-decorated arms coming from the deck and bulkheads, and a brazier of coals held in a wire cage that looked like a popcorn popper, but nothing that looked like levers or switches or brakes. How these people ran their world without door handles and light switches was still a mystery to me. I wished I had asked Abby more questions.

I gritted my teeth and told myself I would ask her when next I saw her.

There was nothing in the cab I could use, so I then very carefully and very slowly lowered myself with the chain to the bowsprit, and then I shimmied down to the hook at the end.

My reasoning was simple: the next time this wayship dropped or picked up cargo, this arm and hook would swing out over the wharf, and I would dismount. Easy peasy.

The problem was that I had inflicted on myself a fiendish torture not so very different from what I had so recently been suffering. I was once again hanging over a bottomless drop, and I had to rest with all my weight first on one foot, and then, when that got tired, the other, and neither position was really comfortable. I didn’t dare to lash myself in place with the chain, because I did not know when the next cargo drop or pickup would be.

Twice I saw other golden wayships like this one, either above me on the ribbon, or off to one side, elongate their bowsprit hooks, reaching as delicately as the crooked leg of an insect, and pluck up or drop off a container. Not this one. I squinted up at the glass vessels: it looked like the whole train was carrying cargoes of dirt and eggs. Or maybe they were mangoes, or cannonballs.

Then I saw below me what looked like a traffic jam. The ribbon to which the machine I rode was clinging was crowded with motionless wayships huge as freight trains and jammed with decelerating glass bottles, and so were the other two parallel ribbons. This was all congregated at a level underfoot where there was a ring of windows looking inward on this huge shaft, and every window seemed bright with lanterns and lampwoods and searchlights.

I don’t know if it was an airlock or a rest stop or a police barricade. I assume that if I was important enough for the withered little freak that passed for the local Dark Lord to visit me himself in person, I was important enough to put out an all-points-bulletin and stop all the traffic.

I saw the motion of figures, some walking like men, some crawling like dogs, some slithering, marching along planks of living metal that were elongating out toward the various stalled machines and vessels. Each figure seemed to have a pike in hand, whose pikeshaft was gleaming lampwood, tuned to the eye-stinging blue-white hue that drove the twilight away. From the glints as the soldiers raised their heads, I guessed they were wearing thick, leaded goggles to protect their eyes from the ylemaramu, the ylem-quelling radiation. It must have dimmed their night vision, though, since none of them looked up and saw me perched precariously on the nose of my wayship, like some Captain Ahab on the nose of Moby Dick doing a headstand.

2. Panotii

I also saw shadows that looked like enormous bats or pterodactyls flapping and circling, climbing higher, inspecting the machines that were slowing and arriving at the checkpoint. There seemed something particularly awkward in their flight, crippled and ungainly.

At first I thought these were my old friends the Host that Quaff Souls like Winos, or whatever they were called, the eyeless baldies. But no, they were something that was both uglier and more eerie.

They were men with ears like Dumbo from Disney: and they flew by flapping ears bigger than their bodies. They had several ear-rings in each sail-like lobe, and they put their hands and feet through them as if through stirrups and handgrips, and pumped energetically with both arms and both legs to stay afloat. They also had some sort of breastplate or harness with glowing gems like Christmas-tree lights glittering on them. My guess: an antigravity belt, because no human-sized animal can keep itself aloft by pumping leather earlobes no bigger than an opera cape. Don’t get me wrong, these were really absurdly big for ears, but compared to hang-gliders or ultralights, the wingspan was absurdly small.

Pure luck saved me. There was one last platform sticking out into the shaft before the final thousand-foot stretch where the police barricade was, and it must have been expecting a delivery. The hook on which I sat silently lifted up, turned, engaged the tow ring on the nose of one of the rowboats carried on the back of the golden wayship — and one where the lid was not locked, so I just reached down and pushed it open with my foot, and fell into the glass interior of the bottle-shaped rowboat.

It was filled with topsoil, of all things. I scooped it up with my hands, and poured some over me.

Just then, two of the ear-flapping humanoids circled near, silent as vultures. The guys were really, really ugly, and I mean gargoyle ugly, with tusks and bristle-clumps and ape-nostrils like twin bulletholes. Maybe they were interbred with boars and bats, in which case I am sure no one but the females of their species can find them alluring. Either that, or they are blind or mate in the dark.

If only the ear-people had sported funny clown faces, they would have been comical as Dumbo the Elephant. As it was, they were about as comical as the Elephant Man: I had a sensation not just of horror, but of pity, as if I were looking at something once-human which had been tampered with, degraded, or bewitched. Princes demoted to frogs.

They peered at me through the blue glass hull, with eyes as intelligent and ferocious as the eyes of wild pigs, and did not see me. Then they sailed away.

Meanwhile the bowsprit straightened, and the metal arm lowered me in my glass rowboat to a landing dock, onto which the boat fell with a clang. The floor had a strip of living metal, which grabbed the boat by the keel, and dragged it in perfect silence away from the platform, away from the vast axial shaft larger than any cathedral, and through an archway, and down a dark round passage that could have been a sewer culvert.

I had eluded pursuit, for now. Still at large. Unarmed, but, I hoped, dangerous.

The container came to rest in a pitch-black place. I spent a frantic time trying to find the catch or latch holding the lid shut, but then I simply pushed with both legs and forced it open. Something rolled and crashed, because a weight had been atop my container. I rose and groped this way and that, reaching out with blind fingers. I touched the surface of other rowboat-sized bottles in this room, and smelled topsoil. I stumbled into what felt and sounded like a line of tools, knocking hoes and rakes clattering down.

A sliding panel spilled me out into a short corridor lit only by a reflection of light in the distance. I followed that reflection to another sliding panel: the light I saw was seeping through the crack.

I slid it aside, and caught my breath. Beyond shined a chamber of gold: the burial chamber of an Egyptian king.

3. Lord of the Black Land and Red

Here was the corpse of a Pharaoh, crowned with a pshent, on a throne to one side of the chamber.

His crossed and bandaged arms held the flail and crosier of his kingly power. His robes were woven with images of falcon feathers, and his slippers adorned with images of the faces of enemies whose lands he had trampled. Behind him, a falcon-headed god loomed over the throne and held up a mirror adorned with a starburst of rays.

Black statues of jackals with collars of gold stood, ears like spearpoints, to either side of the throne. A line of canopic jars, perhaps containing the internal organs of the Pharaoh, stood on a semicircular bench, painted bright red, behind the throne and half-embracing it. The legs of the table were carved with serpents and phoenixes, each carrying the looped cross of eternal life, ankh or crux ansata.

The chamber itself was huge. A line of columns decorated with delicate river-lotus capitals marched down the aisle between golden braziers and tablets of jade and lapis lazuli.

And every wall was decorated, not with angular cuneiforms, but with elegant hieroglyphs, images of birds and reeds and zooanthropic gods, swans and stars and rivers flowing, all traced with cunning precision, and the cartouches were inset with gold wire.

In the center of the chamber was a life-sized curve-keeled boat carved and enameled and inset with fantastic detail, with a stern as proud as a peacock's tail curving up aft.

Facing the Pharaoh was a window larger than a garage door, and round as a well, set with blue stones. There was no glass, no shutters. Outside was the upper atmosphere, perhaps twenty thousand feet high, and a setting sun that turned the clouds to red and gold as if with alchemical fires.

In addition to the falcon-headed statue behind the throne, beings twice the height of a man stood in the chamber, and watched it with eyes made of polished onyx and painted with kohl: a frog-headed god with streams of carven blue ripples issuing from his generous mouth, a god with the head of a long-beaked ibis, scroll and quill in gold-shod hand, a cuttlefish-headed god with tentacles like Celtic knots. Lesser gods half their size with heads of crocodiles, scarabs, lionesses and curling-horned rams flanked them with the stiffness and precision of soldiers at attention.

The corpse on the throne was not the only mummy in the chamber. His dogs had been mummified carefully and placed at the foot of his throne, as well as a cat with a jade collar on a small table next to him.

Black men with shield and spear were lying dead at his feet, face down as if in endless adoration, their weapons to either side.

Nearer the throne, face up, lay dead queens, their faces hidden beneath delicate death-masks of beaten gold, their features beautiful and cold; their skulls were hidden beneath long wigs of black hair adorned with beads. Mirrors and combs of shell lay carefully to either side of the queens and wives, and distaffs were in their begemmed mittens, and gem-threaded cloaks of fabulous beauty spread like wings out from the motionless bodies.

Chancellors and priests in garbs of purest white, and officers in plumed helmets were mummified and motionless, buried upright up to their waists, eyes and mouths sewn shut, trapped in the throne dais itself, all dead with their master. If the Pharaoh had risen to his dead feet, he would have walked on their dead faces.

There were also wading pools in the chamber between the tall pillars and the distant walls. The pools were lined with mud and covered with silvery water, and in them lotuses and lilies were growing, and flowering reeds and ferns. How any living thing could grow at this altitude, above the snowline, was a mystery to me. Someone tended these pools.

I stood still for a moment, not sure what to do. There was no noise and no reaction from the Pharaoh. I stepped gingerly into the chamber, my naked feet loud on the icy floor, wondering if there were an exit.

As I stepped between the pillars into the main part of the room, I felt a weird sensation of stage fright, but as if I were facing an audience of perfectly quiet and very hostile enemies.

The head of the corpse on the throne did not turn toward me, nor did his eyes light up as if with icy, unearthly fire, but I could feel his awareness, his chilly, inhuman, dispassionate thoughts turning toward me. It was like a pressure, like when you sneak into the basement for an illegal soda and open the refrigerator door at midnight, the one which does not have a light, and you see nothing but still feel the touch of cold.

4. Unseen Eyes

I froze. After a moment, I turned my eyes without moving my head. It was coming from behind me.

Like the Pharaoh, the statues had not moved an inch, but there was an inhuman, unearthly awareness and watchfulness behind their glass bead eyes, grim and ancient and deadly spirits behind their beastlike masks.

Suddenly and for no reason, I was convinced that these were not statues at all, but beings who chose to appear as statues, and merely decided to stand without moving, without drawing breath.

A slight wind moved in through the open, round window. The dead slave warriors and dead queens shivered slightly. I could see they were trying to keep still, trying not to move. From the way they held their heads, I could tell they were listening intently, but none dared raise his eyes before the throne of the Pharaoh.

A cloud passed before the setting sun, and it was darker in here, and I heard stealthy noises, as golden gloves tightened on ceremonial spears and curved swords. I realized that this was not natural darkness: this was the blurring of reality, the twilight effect.

The twilight was coming from the flail held in the hands of the mummy king.

For those of you who never played a man-at-arms in Dungeons & Dragons, or haven’t read history books, a flail is a tool used by farmers to beat grain free of its chaff, or used by soldiers to beat in enemy faces. A flail is a long stick, maybe the size of a broomstick, connected by a short rope or chain to another stick, and you can get some really impressive momentum out of the thing with a simple overhand stroke. The royal model here was shorter than the standard model, the shaft about as long as a golfclub, and it had three tails instead of one, each tail a bar of iron as thick around as my thumb and as long as my forearm.

But this was not a real flail. The shaft was one of those gold spear-sized invasion machines, an uncoiled coil, which had slipped into my world through the Professor’s Moebius coil. The only difference was the paint job. This was red and gold rather than black and gold. The arms of the flail looked like three separated tails, each with its own pointed tip matching the mouth-socket in the butt of the flailshaft.

It was a working model, producing the twilight that strengthened my ability to recuperate, and also knocked out radios (so Abby said) and guns (so Dad said).

I had been locked in that midair cage for so long, I had almost forgotten how badly I yearned to escape from the larger cage of the world I knew before. Foolish dreams, I know that now, but all kids go through a foolish phase. Now I yearned for home, for earthly skies and normal-looking people, the sound of my native tongue, the smell of junkfood, the blare of rock music, yes, even disco, like a drowning man yearns for air. I wanted to see my family of black foxes again.

And there was a Moebius coil right in front of me. If I could figure out how it worked, it was my escape tunnel out of here, my passkey to other worlds, including the world called home.

Every instinct and every argument of common sense told me to get the heck out of that chamber of the dead. I believed in magic now that it had been shoved down my throat. I knew this place was haunted. It was like the heaviness that hangs in the air before a storm. You did not need to be Uri Geller or Luke Skywalker to feel the menace.

I approached the throne. The wind and wind noise stopped.

My feet were very loud on the marble floor, and my footsteps echoed from the walls.

The throne was before me. I stepped up on the dais, careful not to put my feet on the faces of the dead men half-buried there. Then I leaned, and reached my hand toward the golden flail.

And then I was too scared to move. Something was preventing me from moving.

My legs were shaking, I was sweating, and a voice inside my head was screaming at me to get out of there, and run, not walk, to the nearest exit. Better yet, throw myself out that big round window and into the clouds so far below. Anything to get out of here.

I could not turn, but I heard scraping noises behind me, a rustle of fabric, the grinding sound of stone sliding against stone. I turned my eye toward the solar-disk mirror in front of me, above the throne, but nothing in the chamber was moving.

And yet it grew darker still.

Some intuition, some hunch told me as clearly as if I had heard a cold voice ringing behind me, that the moment the Boat of the Million Years on which the Sun God, Ra the Mighty, stood dipped below the horizon, the unquiet dead would rise up and take me. I would not die, but I would yearn for death. It was only out of honor to him, the great Eye of Day, the God of Light, that they waited.

“I am not afraid of you!” I shouted.

A silent laughter was in the chamber. I did not hear it, but somehow I knew it was there, cruel, remorseless, hating all living things. They knew I lied.

“You cannot kill me! I cannot die! I am as immortal as you are, you shadows!”

The silent laughter ceased. A brooding sense that some spirit mightier and more magnificent had entered the chamber filled my bones. I blinked.

The Pharaoh’s eyes were open. He was looking at me. Had his eyes been open before? This whole time?

5. The Voice in the Tomb

It suddenly grew quieter. The sense of pressure, of unseen eyes, of malign willpower palpable as storm clouds, was gone. He had not raised a finger or blinked an eye, but the Pharaoh had commanded his servants who tended him and the lesser gods who blessed him to depart from this place. And they were gone.

Somehow, without knowing how I knew, I knew I was alone with him, with this king. This was a private audience. My sense of stage fright grew worse, as if he, alone, commanded more power than the unseen host he’d banished.

I got down on one knee. To this day, I don’t know if that was a wise thing to do, if I was just being polite, or if that counts as idolatry. Is it okay to bow to a king out of respect for his majesty; but if the king thinks he is a god, does that make it unlawful? I don’t know. At that moment, I was just glad I was allowed to move.

Just as suddenly, I knew exactly what to say.

“The Dark Tower conquered your world, and made you slaves in life and in death.”

The atmosphere grew thick with cold and majestic anger, the kind of wrath that could command whole nations put to the sword. I could not breathe. And yet I spoke on.

“I have compassion for your plight and I would help you if I can.”

The anger receded a little bit, but without becoming any less dangerous, like a cobra that pulls back its head.

“I plan to knock this Tower down. I do not know how yet. And yet I say it can be done, even if the stars themselves do not foretell it!”

The anger was now cold, calculating, thoughtful.

“I beg you, mighty king, generous king, to let me use what you hold in your hand. You are the shepherd of your people. If my act will help your people, allow me. I mean no dishonor to you. I am not a graverobber.”

The Pharaoh’s eyes did not move, but I sensed that he was not longer paying attention to me. He was looking out the round window toward the red and beautiful setting sun.

A voice spoke aloud, and it startled me so that I screamed like a girl and jumped to my feet. (Sorry girls, but you do scream, you know, especially in movies.) It spoke in the Ur language, not in Coptic, and so I understood it. There was warmth on my neck.

“Nakhthorheb, heed him. His is the name and voice that shook this Dark Tower.”

I whipped my head around, half-rising from my kneeling posture, and I was blinded by the sunlight. I was standing right in the light path of the final beam of the setting sun, so that my shadow fell across the knees of the Pharaoh on the throne. When I blinked, there was a silhouette of an after-image in my vision, and I saw the shape of a bird of prey in the sun, wings spread as if to soar, and on his head two crowns. But when I stopped blinking, nothing was in the death chamber, and no one had moved. The half-disk of the sun was red, bisected by the horizon, dimmed by cloud, and there was no one in it.

There was a clattering noise behind me. I turned. The flail of the Pharaoh lay on the marble floorstones, red and gold like a poisonous snake paralyzed into the shape of a rod.

I bowed again, and picked up the flail, and backed away. Through the corner of my eye, between two braziers of gold, I saw a narrow doorway out of there.

Then the sunlight failed, and darkness filled the chamber of death.

It may not have been proper etiquette for the throne-room of Pharaoh, but I panicked and ran like the blazes out of there, my naked feet slapping the stones.

6. Directions

There was no use saying ‘I was lost’ for the same reason there is no use to say ‘he needs eyeglasses’ about a blind man. I was in corridors and empty spaces inside a stronghold taller than the distance three times the circumference of the earth. I spent some hours in gloom, some in pitch darkness.

So I was simply sitting in the cold when I saw a bobbing light approaching me. It moved with what I can only call a human rhythm, the way a lantern in a man’s hand jogs.

As the approaching light grew brighter, I saw I was still in the Egyptian Wing of the Tower of Evil, because the columns here were capped with graceful lilies, and the walls were painted with slender images of rushes, crocodiles and storks rather than blocked out in rectilinear cuneiforms with square-bearded man-bulls.

To one side of me, an ivory jar sat on the floor. I sat down next to it, and put an elbow on the lid, and tried to look as casual as a mostly-naked man can look who has a golden flail in his right hand, and a wooden fright-mask hanging from his groin.

My wooden mask began to glow with its grinning-skull-shaped outline when the footsteps drew near. They were clanging, clumsy footsteps.

In outline, he looked as bulky as an ape, but short, like all the guys here were.

He was not in fighting armor; he was wearing a bronze and leather diving suit. He wore a toolbelt: the design was the same in every world, I guessed. In his hand was a long square box that could have been the double of the toolkit in my garage back home.

The diving helmet was one piece, tied by shoulder plates to his harness, with four portholes. Each porthole was crossed with a tic-tac-toe of metal bars. It looked like a Jules Verne design for a spacesuit, except with zigzagging-dragon decorations that gave it a distinctly ancient Near East motif.

In one hand he held a wand that was glowing with butter yellow lampwoodlight. It did not look like a weapon, just a torch.

I waved at him with a casual flutter of my fingers.

He stopped. The whole suit had to turn to face me. There was one porthole at the chin-level beneath the main porthole at eyelevel. No doubt he was studying me through that.

“Sprechen sie Ursprache, mein Herr?” I said in a lighthearted voice.

He clicked a brass key on his chestplate and his voice issued from a speaking trumpet.

“Who are you? What are you doing here?”

I said, “I am lost. I was instructed to go to the Nine-Star-Aligned Chamber in the Furlong of the Lower Luminous Omniscient Observation, and I was told to use the unclean servants' stream-path, but it was blocked off, and now I cannot get there. Can you give me directions?”

“Sure! Let me see your papers.”

“What papers?”

“Those little things like tree leaves that have markings on them. Those marks are speech, but they don’t make noise and you take them up with your eye. Do they have that in your aeon?”

“Nope. My people live in the woods, scratching our warts with sticks.”

“Your master must have told you that you would be punished if you lost your papers. They contain your horoscope, which tells you what your fate is. Where are they?”

“A dog ate them.”

“Oh, milk-breasts of the Moon Goddess! Are you in trouble! They hate it when you lose your fate papers! Sorry, boy, but I am going to have to report this to the section watch. Hope you like the smell of flesh-eating fungus…”

“Don’t trouble yourself. I reported the loss when it happened. My master knows. He is the one who wants me to go to the Nine-Star-Aligned Chamber and get issued new papers.”

“You master knows? Then he must have issued you temporary papers, a scrap of something saying what month you were born in, at least.”

“He wanted to, but you know how it is. He needed permission, and then he needed permission to get permission. You know how these clerks are.” Boy, I was proud of that lie. It sounded so very reasonable, and very Dark Towerish.

“Yeah, I know. Say, my oneness senses an Uncreation leak near you. You show up in my darkling-glass.” He held up a small bronze mirror connected to his wrist as if to prove it. “What is with that?”

I was kind of trapped. The flail the mummy gave me was surely able to puncture the boundaries between universes even better than the multi-milewide Super Large Hadron Collider in Geneva. His darkling-glass, whatever that was, had picked up some residue or trace of that power. (How? Radioactivity? Psychic vibrations? Astral influence? Like everything else in this Tower, I had no clue.)

Maybe I should have leaped up and knocked this guy flat, smashed his helmet, and laughed while he asphyxiated, but two things stopped me. First, the Astrologers had not predicted my movements yet. Abby said her power worked not by range, but by the sequence of events. As long as she acted according to her higher nature, she was unpredictable. She seemed sure I had no higher nature, but I figured I would give it a try, and minimize mayhem for as long as possible. Second, the advice Abby said her Big Man had given her seemed sound. Don’t run when the alarms go off. Look like you are supposed to be there.

“Oh, that. It is coming from this,” I stood up and, calm as you please, handed him the red and gold flail. “It’s my master’s. He handed to me so I could show that I am walking here with his permission and authority.”

“Why didn’t he give you his seal cylinder, like he should have? That’s procedure.”

I just shrugged. “Do you question your master when he does something weird?”

“Guess not. But that is really weird he would give you a Rarity of such power.”

“You know how these Astrologers get when they study too long.”

“Boy, do I ever. Here is your problem! You left the seeking aperture open.” He gave the butt of the gold and red flail a sharp half turn. “Gah! Walk around with ylem leaking out, you’ll set off the twilight alarms, and have the nervous decontamination teams crawling up your anus hole. Well, you’d better come along.”

And just like that, he handed the flail back to me, and waved for me to follow him.

He turned his speaking horn so it stuck out from under his armpit, pointing toward me as I walked behind. “How did you get here?”

“Oh, that. My master told me to go by a back way he knew. Not that I was supposed to sneak, exactly, but, you know … just to avoid further delay.”

“Piss of the wine-god, I sure know what that’s like!”

“And then I got sort of turned around.”

“That’s not hard to do, especially for virgins.”

I told him the old joke about how scared I was the first time I had sex, because I was alone. The humor was pan-dimensional, because he laughed.

“No, I mean new to the Tower,” he said. “What is your master’s name?”

I had that lie chambered and ready. “Lord Ersu the Astrologer.”

He said, “Never heard of him. My master’s name is Pallishu of the Diligent High Work Legion XII of Anguished Memory of Lost Glory Furlong. Well, Ersu-slave—” (that is what he called me, Ersabdu, Manservant of Ersu) “—Follow me. You are lucky Pallishabdu was on duty. This whole wing from the haunted rainspouts below to the Groves of the Star-Gods up topside, clockwise to the Unaspected Inconjunct Quincunx Parapet the clockwise to The Lord Urzigurumash’s Executioner’s side-slung suborbital trebuchet, this whole quarter, in other words, is sacred to the abomination of Nectanebo and the necromancers of the Black Land. Nectanebo and his fathers are kept, one below the next, all the way down the Ursa-Major-facing scarp to the cuvette. Those lunatic mummies are scary!”

“Yeah, I’d hate to run into one of them…” I said with a straight face. Then I asked. “Who is Nectanebo?”

“Nectanebo was and is the last king of the Black Land and the Red, just before Nimrod Lord of the Dark Tower’s son Kadashman-Enlil the Second Lord of the Dark Tower trampled him underfoot, and the whole aeon of Mizraim with him.” There was that word kabasu again, trampled down, which also meant subjugated, housebroken, tamed, subdued, ground to bits, enslaved.

“And who is Pallishabdu?”

He hooked his thumb at himself. Manservant of Pallishu. That is what he used instead of a name.

I hated this place.

Chapter Seventeen: Plumber of the Dark Tower

1. Pally

Pallishabdu was a wealth of information, almost none of it useful. The man never stopped talking.

“Were it not for me being on duty, three thousand years might have gone by ere some other breathing man walked this hall. Taskmaster sends me up to clean the Y-valve for the abattoir. The Walking Shadows of the Black Land still have to perform bull-sacrifices even though their priests are no longer alive, and you have to flush the blood using the Ninety-Score Gallon Wide-Mouth Aries-Aligned cistern at the top of this Furlong. Can’t use the one that feeds the Grove of the Star-Gods, obviously, for fear of cross-influence and pollution. So the magician reads the horoscope of another magician who has not been born yet, and found a day when he was reading horoscopes nearer the future—piggyback technique, they call it. And they saw that this valve would clog and form a backup, and introduce rot into the structural support four hundred years from now, so the gang foreman decided it had to be cleaned now, during the triple conjunction of Mercury. But it seems the wide-mouth cistern has the narrow piss-hole. That’s as they built them then, back during the last opposition of Saturn and Jupiter, when Peshgaldaramash was the Great King and Great Prince of the Heavens. Great Prince but a whoreson of an engineer, so says I, and I fret not who hears me say. Can’t use a proper snake and pressure to unclot those old valves, or you blow out the wash-vent. So the Taskmaster, just to gnaw our guts, sends me up here with a swathing-brush made of gorse. Gorse! Fit for whisks, but not a Y-valve job. Not boar-hair, like a real brush! And no extenders either worth the corpse-molester’s curse. I end up using my caulking pole as an extender! Can you believe it! Says I, strap a concubine wig to the helm of the Taskmaster, and use him for the S-bend swathing brush, eh! That will add flex to your spine-bones, eh? Well, if the harlot won’t talk, neither will the whoremaster, says I, but if the harlot won’t scream, go home to your wife. I say what I say, says I!” And he laughed at his own joke. I made laughing noises, just to play along and be polite.

We passed through a wooden airlock with hatches of brass, and into some chambers beyond, cramped as a ship’s cabin, which held normal pressure.

He found me enough tepid water in a bucket and a sea-sponge that I could swab the blood and goo off myself, and gave me a horn of perfumed oil to anoint myself and a little metal tool called a strigil to scrape off the sweat and dirt. It amused him that, like a baby, I did not know how to use simple bath things, and he called a serving man over to wash my hair and scrape my back, but I decided it would just be ungrateful to be embarrassed.

Pally gave me a long and white mantle with a hood to throw over myself, and a thing like a linen baby diaper to wear under that. He apologized, and said he would have given me a proper low-slave uniform, but he could not imagine any seamstress made anything in my size.

Then a gong rang, and we ate from a pot. Fish stew soaked in pepper and hot pepper.

The cooking was done over a coal-burning Franklin stove, but one where the chimney pipe led to a cylinder that trapped the smokes and ashes and transmuted them to oxygen. The cylinder was painted with pantomime clowns in blue and silver, done in that same delicate and frivolous decoration style as Abby’s mask. I asked Pally about it: he said it was Galvanic Alchemy from the aeon of Brennus.

There were two other men in the chambers, but they crouched, and kept their eyes down, and, when not washing or dressing me, they bowed and stayed out of our way. Like Pallishabdu, they were olive-skinned with large, dark almond-shaped eyes, thick red lips, big hooked noses, shorter than me. Unlike him, they were beardless.

Pallishabdu did not introduce me to them. They were furniture.

But he did introduce me to his cat, named In-Sin, Eyes-like-the-Moon, an ugly old tom missing one ear, who was more regal than the Pharaoh I’d just met, and condescended to let me scratch his chin and feed him morsels from my fish stew.

Since that stew was the best thing I had tasted since before I fell headfirst into a Moebius coil, it took me superhuman effort not to yank the cat up by the tail and play combination hammertoss and handball off the nearest wall, but instead to feed it and make nice.

Look: cats don’t hunt, and they don’t fetch, cannot scare burglars and they cannot bring you your pipe and slippers and newspaper while pouring you a frosty cold beer from the icebox, okay?

But I warmed up to In-Sin after a bit. The old tom seemed just the right kind of folk to hang around with Pallishabdu, and you could not live with a dog in this submarine-like room, lit with wooden sticks and no windows.

When it was time to walk me to the wayship station, Pallishabdu carried the cat around in a pressurized box, complete with oxygen bottle, and you just can’t treat dogs that way. The two serving men suited him up and gave me a wallet of raisins, prunes and lemon-soaked dried apple slices, and a ball of hard cheese coated in wax. I shook hands with one of them, and they both flinched and scurried back out of the way. Never saw them again, never found out their names. They had kind of a puffiness to their skin. I wonder if they were eunuchs.

We climbed up about a zillion stairs, and I was going to ask Pallishabdu why his people had not invented the escalator, when I saw a ramp in the distance, moving between square columns decorated in gold. The ramp was holding a sarcophagus, with an honor guard in diving suits adorned with gold medallions, and slaves in jackal-masks holding ostrich plumes on golden wands above the coffin. The procession was not walking, for the ramp was made of living metal, and it carried them along, and they glided up into the overhead gloom and out of sight.

So I did not ask. Escalators were reserved for the better people.

We emerged onto a vast balcony overlooking a dark internal well. It was not the same as I had been in before. Even though Pally and I and the cat were the only living things at this altitude, this wharf was larger, better lit, and more lavishly outfitted than the unclean servants’ path. Before us was a cloverleaf of horizontal strips woven into and around three great vertical roads of living metal, and everything was lit with lanterns of stained glass. Overhead, this cloverleaf was being brooded over by man-headed statues of winged bulls: huge empty-eyed masks of shining gold hung in the gloom, dimly lit by jeweled lanterns, their square beards hanging like sails.

I stared uneasily up at the Mount-Rushmore-sized frowns, blind eyes like agates. “Pally, I don’t think I am allowed to use this stream-path. I might be new here, but I think I am considered unclean. An abomination. Wouldn’t want to get you and In-Sin in trouble.”

“Boy, if you were unclean, your master would not let you tote around a Twilight Wand, and surely would not be sending you to the Lower Luminous Observation Furlong. That is Officer’s Country.” He did not say ‘Officer’s Country’ but that was the gist. Off-limits, verboten, no-go. What he literally said was qashduit-kibsedu which meant for sacred feet alone.

It turned out we were not exactly alone. Pally strolled over to where three seven-foot-tall headless monsters stood on a gold platform in front of a lectern. I thought the monsters were statues because they were not in pressure suits, but one of them turned around when Pally spoke.

2. Blemmyae

It was so large and so hideous that my reflexes made me jerk like a puppet on a string, and I found myself with the flail overhead, held more like you are supposed to hold a katana than a flail, and the three arms of the weapon were jarred into spinning by the jolt. I was lucky I did not brain myself.

The thing had two huge eyeballs instead of nipples built into his chest. (I know it was a ‘he’ because his eyes were not protruding.) His mouth was a shark-toothed zipper cutting across his abdomen, and his navel would have been that indent beneath the nose, if he had had a nose.

(In case you are wondering, that indent is called a philtrum. I learned that from a book about the ancient Chinese martial art of striking sensitive points on the face. Don’t let anyone tell you reading does not broaden the mind.)

He did have a goatee or a soul-patch that formed a triangle down his belly slope between his lower lip and blending into his pubic hairs. When he bowed to Pally, I saw the creature had a blowhole like a dolphin’s between his shoulder blades, but no head and no neck.

Let me stress that these guys were not just seven feet tall. There are basketball players taller than that back on Earth. That is not what made them monstrous. They were seven feet tall at the shoulder, and broad and thick and squat to match. Call it three or four feet broad at the shoulder, arms thicker than my legs, knotted with muscles like a blacksmith, and longer than an ape’s. Their legs were thicker than those of a hippopotamus, mere columns of muscle, but they were bow-legged, and walked with their toes turned out in a slouch. The flesh was leathery and thick like the hide of an elephant.

I didn’t hear what Pally said to him, and I could not understand what he said back. His voice came from his blowhole, and his language was slurps and burps without consonants, with the occasional sneeze for emphasis. The monster turned toward me, and held up a glass lens the size of a china saucer in one hand. This hand he held like he was about to say the Pledge of Allegiance. It was a moment before I realized that was a monocle: he was holding it before his left pectoral eyeball, but somehow he did not look as elegant as Rich Uncle Pennybags from the Monopoly game.

Rich Uncle (let us call him) inspected me through his eyeglass for a moment, saw me ready to do battle, laughed a gush of truly gruesome laughter from his stomach-mouth, sneered with his whole left side of his belly, and then turned away.

A second headless monster, this one hairy all over and with a beard like a kilt running from waist to knee, and looking more apish than mannish, bowed, took a metal tablet the size of a tombstone from the lectern, and cradled it in his arm under a lamp. This second headless guy was evidently the living desk of the first one, because he stood just holding the tablet there while first headless guy with the monocle tapped the surface of the tablet with a stylus. The tablet looked heavy, but the first headless guy just took his sweet time about it. What a jerk.

The tablet was covered with columns of cuneiform. The surface clattered like a row of dominoes falling and the cuneiforms changed and changed again each time the stylus tapped one spot or another on the reading surface. I am not sure whether to call it a touch-sensitive screen, or a computer monitor, an adding machine, or just a book written on thin sheets like Venetian blinds, or what. I was not close enough to see what was making the inscriptions move.

The metal of the tablet face was bright, like Abby’s chain, and may have been the same expanding and contracting metal.

I could see there were five columns on the tablet, and the first one stopped while the other four were still scrolling or moving, and then the second one stopped, and so on. It was like seeing a slot machine grind to a halt.

Headless Rich Uncle read something to Pally, and the two of them argued a bit, and both of them pulled out folds of colored paper inscribed with horoscopes, and pointed and gestured and snarled. From the Pally side of the conversation, I could tell they were arguing whether putting me on the descending wayship was part of their planned fate for the day.

Eventually, they reached a compromise: Headless Rich Uncle called over Headless Guy Number Three, who had been standing there like a corpse until that moment. Rich Uncle and Pally looked over Number Three’s papers for a few minutes, then barked at him and pointed toward me.

He walked toward me. Headless Guy Number Three wore twin bandoliers crossed over his chest, so it looked like he was wearing a raccoon mask, sort of, because the belts crossed between his eyes.

I assume Headless Guy Number Three was this world’s equivalent of a yakuza or a punk rocker, because he had a pierced bellybutton, or maybe it was a pierced lip, with a gold knickknack hanging from it.

On his spine was a tattoo of a ship atop a mountain, and beneath, a man and a boy with their arms around each other, a grapevine growing up between them. Stormclouds were on his shoulderblades, and grape-leaf patterns around his waist.

Headless Guy Number Three also was armed. His rings pierced through his shoulder bones to which his bandoliers were strapped. This prevented the bandoliers from slipping off his neckless shoulders. Slung across the flat surface of his shoulders in a tube of leather you could call either a holster or a hat, he carried a Jules Verne-style raygun, with a barrel of brass and a muzzle of crystal.

Headless Number Two, the apish one with a kilt of whiskers, now walked over to where countless glass rowboats were set against a line of statues, and, like I had seen Abby do, he studied the faces carefully, selected a boat, and hauled it over. Unlike Abby, he used a handtruck or wheelbarrow to help with the hauling. This rowboat was wider in diameter than the ones I’d seen before, and longer, more like a yacht.

Pallishabdu wandered back over, and clicked the switch on his chest to turn his speaking tube back on. “Well, nice meeting you, boy,” he said to me. “Sorry you don’t have your papers on you, since I’d like to have seen what becomes of you. There is a little SNAFU here—” (the word he used was nuchxutu, which literally meant a fit of the hiccups, but the tone of voice of world-weary disgust he used to say it in, showed he really meant an expected institutional foul-up, what Dad called a clusterfoxtrot) “— because nothing from this Furlong is allowed into Officer’s Country like the Lower Luminous Observation Furlong. And the Furlong above that is the Upper Luminous, and no one goes there. Fortunately, the one above that is called Saffron Empty Wind Furlong, and it is all blacksmiths and bellmakers for a guild long extinct, because no one uses alveromancy any more. Saffron Wind is also used for a waystation, or temporary troop billets, because the main accelerators are there.

“The Station Master’s tablet mentions a back stairway where there was one of those family-wide infanticide-suicides where the mom on a holy day kills all her own children starting with the youngest…”

(Yes, they had a single word for a mother killing herself and her entire family during a holiday. Hamhattapars’h. It’s like the Eskimos having one hundred eighty different words for snow. Except if something dark and evil and sadistic and sick fell from northern clouds rather than snowflakes, making glaciers and icebergs and permafrost. The Dark Tower was the Arctic Icecap of evil.)

“… and it looks like no priests ever got around to performing a rite, so those stairs are not marked as blessed soles of blessed feet only, but the Tablet does not have them down as off limits either. You just have to count the steps in the stairway. Three thousand, one hundred fifty two. Got that? Think you can handle that?”

“Uh…”

“Kaqqudu Nakasu here will lead you to the top of the stairway.” He gestured to the headless monster with the brass raygun, the one with the yakuza full-back tattoo.

“What is he?”

“The Host of the Sternophthalmoi, who peer from the breastbone, but we call them Blemmyae or Blems, for short. They’re Hamitic, and born of Abtuat, Cush and Sabtah, and they be Man-eaters. We look and smell like honey-scalded trout with garnish to them. Don’t offer him your hand, or he’ll snap it off and snack on it.”

“We can’t talk to each other.”

“Yeah, well, you two should have thought of that before you went and got born as barbarians on tongue-confused worlds. I’d go with you myself, but…” He shrugged. “… not in my work horoscope for today. Fate is fated.”

“Am I mentioned in his horoscope?” I asked. “I mean Entirely Headless Nick over here.”

Pally boxed my ear, just as casually as you’d slap a bug. It hurt, but not compared to what I had been through just today. “Don’t be disrespectful. He’s freeborn. His duty-name is Kaqqudu Nakasu. Say the name!”

“Cockwad-doo Knack Ass You. Got it.”

“Groin of the fertility god, what an accent you have!” And he turned off his speaking tube, stepped close, and pulled my head down next to one of the portholes of his helmet. “And, boy, don’t play word games, because all we Ur-folk know what all words mean. You won’t be laughing when they drive a heated spike through your tongue. I’m letting you know because you seem like a nice punk. You don’t wipe your hole with your eating hand, see? Or you end up with a bad taste in your mouth and none to blame. Don’t make your fate harder than your stars already have.”

“Yes, sir. Sorry, sir.”

He let go of me and turned his speaking horn back on.

(I decided, based on the fact that he was helping me and that I was surrounded by humanoid cannibalistic horrors muscled like King Kongs, not to punch him in the gut nor kick him in the groin. Forgiveness is a virtue, especially when you are behind enemy lines trying to pass yourself off as one of them.)

He said, “No, you’re not in his papers, but the wording could be taken one way or the other, so we can sling this chamberpot from the catapult, and see if it falls on the right hut, eh? That’s an old saying. It means you don’t really know what your horoscope means until you live through it, so might as well try.” His ‘old saying’ said something to me about how the people in the world’s one tower maintained their dominion over the people in the world’s one city underneath.

“I am very grateful for your help, sir,” I said, rubbing my ear, which stung rather badly.

“Don’t take it hard,” he said. “I’m doing you a favor. See, these Blemmyae, they’d rather bite your face off as see you hoist buttocks and kiss toe, so it won’t do to have them irked, because they’re not as those what loves a groveling spine underfoot. I tell ya, I don’t like much doing work at this height with such as them playing lord-o’-the-keep and swaggering, but you can see why the Lord of Magicians set them here.”

I said, “Well…I can see they don’t need pressure suits.”

He laughed. “Pressure suits! What a word.”

“What are they called?”

“Nahlapt-Aqarapas-bet.” (Armor for when breath is but rare and precious gasps.)

“Poetical way of saying it,” I grunted.

I could not see his face inside his diving suit helmet, but his voice betrayed a smile. “The One Speech has all the virtues of all confused tongues of the outer worlds piled up, and then some! It is more poetical, clear, logical, more precise; everything is better. It’s an easy tongue to pick up, and your life is a lot easier once you can ken the jabber of barbarians, and make them understand you.”

“Wait—if anyone learns your language, he can understand all languages? How is that possible?”

He turned his gloves palm up, since he could not shrug in his diving suit. “Just the way it is. The father of all languages has authority over the young ones, I s’pose. Anyway, the Blemmy’s ain’t stationed here just because they can take the thin air, but to cordon off the abandoned levels.”

“Abandoned?”

“Not every immensity is occupied by folk like us, creatures of flesh and blood. Many an immensity be haunted by creatures who manifest from the twilight, or powers called up and can’t be put down again. The nicest ones are the ghosts of women who died in childbirth before their child’s horoscope was drawn, so they couldn’t see to their wee ones as they ought. The power of love lets them linger in the living world as shadows, to help their lost children in time of need, or grandchildren. They give jewels of gold or fine rarities to their descendants, but by dawn the gifts turn to dead leaves or owl pellets.”

“Is that real, or just a story?”

He gave another palms-up shrug. “Some say one thing, some say another. There are worse things than shadows of weeping mothers in the abandoned furlongs. Little babies with empty bodies and empty eyes possessed by airy watchers, or secret police who misplaced their bodies when they detached their heads, and now the heads just drift the empty miles of hallway like balloons. More dangerous are the living creatures, such as man-eating snow-apes; or escaped blood-quaffers; or gypsies with worms in their lungs who live in the airtight sacks of giant spiders, forever climbing or descending.

“Less than one part in one hundred of the Great Tower is occupied, or so I heard it said,” he continued. “Most of the stuff above the atmosphere is just miles of cable and empty space. Near the crown is all the storehouses, lighthouses, launch stations, or arsenals. The Lord of Magicians allows the vermin to inhabit the abandoned areas so that slaves with no papers won’t think of climbing upper-ward to flee the officers.” He said this last part with heavy emphasis.

“Speaking of which, what if an officer stops me, and finds I have no papers?”

Pally said, “Well, if it’s in your horoscope to be stopped, there is no point trying to avoid it, ’cause that will only make it worse. And if it is not in the horoscope, why worry? The whoremaster don’t scream if the harlot don’t.” (I still did not know what that meant, but it was evidently a popular phrase with him.) “In any case, this week, probably everyone’ll be too busy to look your way. The traffic is really heavy right now, what with the new mobilization lamps all lit for the next war effort. Victory in the Stars! Victory under the Stars! You been to a pep rally yet?”

“A what?” I thought I had heard wrong.

“Pep rally. To cheer the troops. That should have been explained to you during orientation, the day you get butt-branded with your mark. When you first came.”

“Orientation. Um. Slept through it.”

“Wonder how you managed that standing up, because no one sits down on butt-branding day. Anyway, for rallies, they pass out free almonds and grog, and any scheduled beatings or scourging for that day cancelled. Bastinado, too! Not postponed, mind you! Worthwhile to bribe an Astrologer to predict when the dates fall, if you have anything to bribe anyone with. Like a pretty sister.”

He tilted his suit back, so that he could look up. I saw that the lanterns had been lit in the far distance of the overhead shaft.

Pally could read their meaning, for he said, “You are in luck! Must be a planet smiling on you. There is a wayship descending through this shaft. Should be here in less than an hour.”

He did not seem to be in a hurry to rush back to his job of cleaning toilets under high-altitude conditions, so I asked him about the troop ships. “Who is attacking where and why?”

Pally clapped his leathery gloves together, rubbing them as if over an imaginary fire. “It seems this world where the men with iron magic come from, technomancers with thundersticks, just decided to open a twilight gate with technomancy, and, of course, what is the first thing through but the First Conquest squadrons? Little spears and then big wayships. It’s not an important world, but it’s been at low ylem-tide for an age of time, unreachable, with no twilight paths in, even though they could get their exorcist-assassins and ostiaries out, so the Magicians had to wait for the natives to develop the twilight art themselves.

“Heard the place has ties to the Golden City, so pulling on one thread will unwind the whole skein, or so the newspapers say. I haven’t read the victory issue with the gold cover, even though it is hanging everywhere. I am one of those folk who don’t read ahead more’n a few days in the newspapers, ’cause I like to be surprised for what’s coming.”

Yes, he literally said news-paper: Nyar-bussurt-essu papyrus-of-reports-new.

“Except for big events, of course, royal weddings or royal funerals, earthquakes — there you have to get ready long ahead of time. I read those newspapers ten years ahead. Wish the censors would tell us little people what they tell the nobles.”

He sighed a sigh of satisfaction. “First this place, then on to Raamah and Sabtechadur. That will be one thorn in the great buttocks of the great Lord of Magicians plucked out, and he can go back to using the jakes with a sigh of relief, him and the Great King, too.”

I guess as a guy who fixed toilets, he talked about buttocks a lot. Then again, so did all the boys younger than me, when the grownups were not around.

“What aeon is being invaded? Has it got a name?” I asked, very casually.

“I just told you: Raamah. The Rhammanitae are the world that was given the art of banishing the twilight, the way we were given to call it. It is the world where Nimrod’s brother Rama prevailed over him, the opposite of real history! Raamah, the one world they think we can never reach. Do you know the story? Kai Khosrow was the last king there. He hated ceremony, gave all his cups and gems and loot away to the poor, abdicated, and was granted superhuman span of life. He sleeps beneath the mountain in Shazand, and will wake when our troops arrive. He will defend his people bravely — and die bravely, of course. No splendor in trampling frail foes.”

“And the other aeon?”

“Sabtechadur is where the glass-watchers are from, and all crystal balls and seeing stones. They say the Seven-Ringed Cup is there, and a whore witch who uses it to watch the Great King in all his counsels and secret meetings; she watches him do everything from rut in the harem to poop in the privy. There is a storm of twilight surrounding their holy mountain where all the gates to the buried garden-city are hidden, Agarththa. The storm is so vast and thick that even we cannot break through without the ylem-quelling master lanterns of Shazand.”

Buried garden city is my translation. The word he used meant a walled and hidden garden, but with a prefix indicating it was subterranean, and a suffix indicating it was a military city, a walled city.

I admit that when I realized who the whore witch was, I was torn between the desire to ask more, and the desire to yank his helmet off, and, while he choked and begged, to rip his jaw out of his skull and beat him to death with it. Call me weak, but I gave in to curiosity.

“No, I meant the first aeon, the unimportant one.” To my own ears, my nonchalant tone of voice was the fakest thing ever.

“We call it Albion. It is the English-speaking world. The one where they kill babies in the womb, right?”

And here I was hoping we’d be famous for the Moonshot, or democracy, or the Beatles, or something.

“Yeah,” I sighed. “That one. If there is only one… I mean, there must be some more places that have abortions?”

“Not likely. Expose infants, yes, lots of you barbarians do that, but when that happens, the spirits get their chance to save the baby by sending a shepherd or a she-wolf or something to find it crying. And the children are at least allowed to draw their first breath. Nope. Albion’s the only one that kills them by the millions before they breathe.”

I said casually, “English-speaking, you said? But maybe there are lots of languages on that world.”

“Maybe. But if those other languages do not set the rules for the world, what good are they, eh? Just create confusion. Never understood why you barbarians tolerate it. Living in a mess of words like that! But who understands the slave-worlds, eh? Not even the slaves!”

I was still puzzled about the newspapers. I said, “Why would the news of successful battles be printed up beforehand? Wouldn’t you want that stuff to be kept secret?”

“Secret why?”

“So that whoever is being mugged doesn’t know.”

He laughed. “Better for us if they do know! Then they try to struggle against the net, and they offend the stars, and bring curses, and the woes fall all the faster on them. These barbarians don’t even know the difference between First and Second Order Recursive Paradoxes, or how to avoid Self-Cancelling Interference Modes!”

“Don’t you want to hide the future from them?”

“Hide? We do all we can to get the prognostications into the hands of the trampled worlds! The barbarians never know when it is best to go face-in-the-mud, and let the cartwheels of fate roll over your neck. Jackass-brained jackanapes only bow when their legs are chopped, they do. Hide the future? Hah! The more they see, the quicker they cave in.”

“What’s it for?” I asked.

“What?” He was still chuckling and shaking his head at the idea of hiding the future from the trampled worlds.

“The war? What is it being fought over? Why are you attacking?”

“We are all One. We have never been scattered and confused. One is one. How can it be two? When Atrahasis the Exceeding Wise, the First of the Aeon Lords, was shown by the star-gods how to open the Gates of Twilight and cross the sea of Uncreation, it was found that there were other worlds, men who were not One, not part of the Oneness: and the stars wept blood in wrath.”

“Aren’t there other people on this world?”

He explained that there were not.

It took him a while to make it clear to me, since the concept was so odd: In this version of history, there was no one living in China or the Far East or Australia or Indonesia or the Pacific Islands, no one in North America or South America. The entire Western Hemisphere was untrod by human foot. No one in Scandinavia, no one in the British Isles, no one in Europe north of the Rhine, no one in Russia east of the Caucasus.

He told me that there were farms and plantations, ranches and mining colonies in India, and in Egypt up the Nile to the red desert — but no Ethiopians. No black men at all on the planet. Nor were there any Orientals, or Caucasians, Polynesians or American Indians.

There were no blonds, no redheads, no brunettes.

No Australian Aborigines, no Eskimos, no Tibetans, no Hottentots or Kalahari Bushmen, no Portuguese, no Patagonians, no Maori, no Slavs.

And no Irish need apply.

I rubbed my temples, since another stab of hatred for this dark world went through me yet again. In America, we say, e pluribus unum, out of many peoples, unity. This planet was all one same nation and tribe and race. It sounded like some eugenicist’s daydream gone mad. It was the opposite of America. It was just the unity without the peoples.

And there were no cities, no large towns, no fortresses. Only villages and hamlets.

Pally told me the towns were allowed to hold no more than nine hundred ninety-nine people, not allowed to build walls or towers, not allowed to build houses out of thick stone or with narrow windows.

Ur was the sole metropolis on the world of Ur. The Great City of Cities brooked no rivals.

I said, “So you don’t have any Japanese on this world? Who draws your anime?”

He spread his hands. “The outlandish aeons will be domesticated one day, and become part of the One.”

(I don’t know if his power to speak all languages allowed him to understand who the Japanese were, or if he only understood they were people from an outer world, not Ur, not part of the all-consuming Oneness and therefore no more than uncaught and undomesticated slave livestock.)

I realized I was treading on dangerous ground, but I was getting angry, and his self-satisfaction at being a member of an all-conquering race grated on me. “Is that really what this war is about? Even though you never met them, and even though they have nothing to do with you, you just can’t stand that there are free people out there somewhere? Just the fact that they exist bugs you?”

“It is not natural for men to be apart. All men are brothers. All serve the Dark Tower.”

I looked carefully at the joints of his helmet, wondering how hard they would be to rip out.

Pally spread his hands yet again. “It won’t be long! But soon we’ll all be together, and you barbarians can be cleaned up and given your places and fates. The Dark Tower can always add another thousand feet! Plenty of work to do!”

I blurted out: “Maybe the people of Earth have their own work they want to do! We never did anything to you!”

He spoke with a note of surprise in his voice. “What do you mean ‘we’? You are not from there.”

I choked.

This was it. I was caught.

I tried to play it nonchalant. “Not from where?”

“Whatever you called it. Dirt. Earth. The aeon of Albion out of Ariphi of Thoebel. Never occurred to me you might like whatever mudhole of fate-blindness you lived in. Gee, ah, sort of rough luck for you. Sorry, punk. You, ah — must not like this much. But don’t worry none! It means the end of war and crime, and people not knowing about their lot in life. All that fear and worry — I don’t know how you can stand it. But it will be over soon.”

Look, I wanted to yank his helmet off his head and break his teeth to shut him up, but you got to realize, in his own way, he was trying to be nice.

He clapped me on the shoulder. “I just assumed you knew where you are from. I assumed you knew that whoever taught you your gooble-gooble talk were not your folks. Never occurred to me you’d have feelings for them! Everyone says your world got no emotions but hate. You seem nice enough, considering.”

“Considering what?”

“Considering where you are from.”

“I’m from Earth. Albion.”

“No, I mean your real home.”

Ever had that feeling that your universe had just had its main structural supporting members eaten by termites so that it imploded and collapsed into the basement?

“How—How do you know I — ?”

“Well, it’s obvious as soon as you open your mouth.”

“W-what?”

“The Sons of Albion are technomancers. They speak English. Where is your flying rocketpack, night-seeing lenses, listening machines, your chemical-gunpowder fire-arm, all your toys? Sons of Albion always carry toys.”

I stood there with a dumb look on my face, thinking about all the high-tech gear my Dad carried with him on his business trips.

Pally said, “You are a Lalilummutillut. Here you are walking around with scars from deadly wounds, but not dead, and no rare-breath armor. Your real parents come from an antediluvian hell-world from before the confusion of tongues, an aeon called Cainem, and they speak Ursprache, the One Speech.”

At that moment, the Third Blemmyae whose name I could not pronounce, Knack Ace You (if I may use a more polite version of his name), reached up to thump me roughly on the back of my head to get my attention. Or he tried to. What really happened was that I turned and blocked the blow with my arm, grabbing him by the wrist and throwing him with a hip throw. Or I tried to. He slammed me to the deck. So what really, really happened was that I found myself on the floor, sitting on my butt, dazed. It felt like my tailbone was broken and my spine was cracked.

Knack Ace You was strong as an ape, and he had just shaken off my hold the way you’d shake off a pushy ten-year old.

He slurped and snorted at me, making what you would call whale-song sounds, if you were in a good mood, or farting noises, if you were not.

Pally said, “Time to go. No horseplay. He’s freeborn. Doesn’t matter if he has a head or not, brains or not. Rational creatures all serve the Dark Tower, and whoever is above us, is above. Remember what I said about wiping and eating hands, eh? Time to get aboard your Raising Vessel.” That was his name for the blue glass rowboat. “Your Wayship is due to pass.”

3. Cramped but Grinning

So I spent what seemed an hour folded up in a cramped little bottle that was designed to seat men shorter than me, and skinnier than Knack, with a headless monster much stronger than me, who thought I was lunch.

But I laughed and smiled most of that time, because Pally had unintentionally told me that Enmeduranki had fooled me. The Dark Lord who never lies had lied, or at least tried to mislead me. He did not know who I was or who my parents were. He had heard me talk, and made a guess about my origins, just like Abanshaddi had, just like Pallishabdu had.

(And I also laughed, wondering whether my dad actually really and truly owned a jetpack. That would be totally awesome.)

Suppose Enmeduranki had been misleading me about other things? I wondered if the Dark Tower had even broken through to Earth, or managed to connect with a working Moebius coil to transport in soldiers and supplies, or establish a beachhead. Pally had not mentioned troops mobilizing to go there. Earth might not be conquered. It might not even be a battleground.

And I thought about my mother in a twilight-poisoned world called Sabtechadur, buried in a walled garden city called Agarththa. And I wondered about a world called Raamah where a man named Kai Khosrow slept in a place called Shazand.

And Earth. I wondered about the aeon called Albion. I wondered what would happen there, what the outcomes of these three worlds of battle would be.

It was dispiriting to think that everyone who read the papers in the Dark Tower already knew those answers. And had known, years and years beforehand.

4. Never Stop to Look

After being stuffed together in the same Raising Vessel, a volume not much bigger than a coffin, and sniffing each others’ sweat, and sliding down a sheer drop like the neverending first slope of a roller coaster, so that we had the worst parts of claustrophobia and agoraphobia, Knack Ace You and I reached a landing somewhere far lower, where the air was warm and normal, and I saw a throng of people, mostly Persian-looking fellows in square beards and brass armor, crowding the docks.

Knack kicked open the Raising Vessel lid with a grunt of distaste. I could see he hated me from the look on his chest, as I gave him a cheery three-fingered Boy Scout salute, and climbed from the car.

I should have taken off like a jackrabbit. I stopped and gawked for a moment.

That turned out to be a mistake.

5. Embarkation

In addition to soldiers and officers in togas, kirtles, and cloaks, from various sword-and-sandal films, were men in mail byries from King Arthur flicks, figures in shawls and hoods and headscarves from the Arabian Nights tales complete with forked beards and crooked swords, and painted cannibals in grass skirts armed with bamboo javelins on spearthrowers carved from mastodon-tusk ivory carried at the shoulder. All of them ignored me.

There were also women old and young, some in many-layered gowns adorned with feathers being escorted by slaves holding parasols adorned with bells; other women wore saris or kimonos or feathered headdresses like showgirls; others wore sleek, satin, and long-skirted versions of the uniforms of their men, pips of their husband’s rank on their shoulders.

There was a pecking order. The ones dressed in rough leather got out of the way of the ones dressed in silk; and the ones dressed in burlap tunics belted with rope got out of the way of the ones dressed in rough leather. Everyone got out of the way of any lady with a bell-tinkling parasol, including soldiers and officers. Even among parasol-shaded dames there was a hierarchy. Matrons and noblewomen dressed with birds and feather designs deferred to royalty dressed in designs of stars and constellations.

It was not hard to guess what all the bustle meant. Several golden wayships longer than freight trains were being loaded with troops, and the families highborn and low had gathered to see them off.

The otherworldlies and nonhumans being marched into the cattle cars from a fenced-off section of the wharf also had their women and young ones with them: I saw savage-looking bowmen and slingers from some race whose feet and legs were put on backward wearing peaked caps and cloaks of bright red adorned with spirals of gold, hairy human scalps as bibs or scarves; I stared at even more savage-looking fellows dressed in bearskins and blue grease; I squinted at the freakishly big-eared midgets I had seen before; I grimaced at wolf-headed hominids loping and gamboling; and looming above all were creatures shaped like serpents larger than crocodiles from the waist downward, and which from the waist upward wore the panoply of Hellenic Hoplites, heavy shields round as the moon and lances longer than a human-sized soldier could carry. These serpent-men were resplendent in brass chestplates and shining Corinthian helmets adorned with crests, their faces half-unseen and skull-like beneath the Y-shaped eye-and-mouth openings.

Each inhuman race of men had their womenfolk saying tearful farewells or stern: sharp-featured women in caps as tall as miniature towers, with nicely-combed scalps (no doubt severed from enemy skulls) worn as scarves or boas, and their backward-pointing feet in delicate, decorated sandals; doe-eyed cavewomen dressed in doe-skin leather; slender, dark girls wrapped from neck to knee in their own ears, the outside flaps of which were adorned by hundreds of beads in rippling sand-painting patterns and mandalas.

But the most striking of all were the she-cobras, snake from the curvaceous hips down, but gorgeous from the wasp-waists up, with hourglass figures and generous bosoms, and all glittering with silver and sapphire and ruby and emerald, with scores of bracelets on each wrist, armlets at the elbow, nose rings piercing the nose, earrings the ears, buttons of diamond piercing the belly button, not to mention necklaces and sinuous waist-belts of fine gold chain. The snake women glittered like glass when they moved, coiling and uncoiling, for they had adorned the Cobra-patterns of the scales of their hips and tails with additional geometries and swirls of embedded gems and polished stones.

I was staring at all this when Knack the headless monster grabbed me from behind.

6. Crooked Speaking

The Blemmyae reached out with a hand twice the size of mine, and the flesh of the hand had little bristles growing out of it, like the hair of an elephant. I wonder if he had used his left hand to grab me for a reason, because there seemed to be a stink coming from his fingers.

He took my mantle by the back of the neck and heaved up his arm and dangled me by one hand over the side of the wharf, so I was both choking and kicking, my feet in midair above an infinite drop.

Faces in the crowd were turning toward us, for even among the bustle and commotion of the embarking, a murder is always a spectacle.

I still had the gold-and-ruby flail in my hands, so I slung the weapon back and forth, first over one shoulder, then the other. A flexible weapon is a perfectly good tool with which to clobber an enemy behind you. If he had had a skull, it would have been crushed. As it is, I hope I at least managed to break a collarbone.

A corporal in a plumed helmet stamped over, armor ringing, “What is all this, under-creatures? You cannot do your brawling and messy business here! There are gentle-born present!”

Knack heaved me overhead, and cast me down onto the clanging metal surface of the aerial wharf, knocking the wind and half my wits out of me. The flail went sliding across the deck, sliding toward the drop, but the corporal put his foot on it, catching it neatly. He looked down at the gorgeous, gold-plated and ruby-adorned weapon, and his eyes narrowed in recognition, surprise, alarm.

The Blemmyae snorted and coughed at the officer in his whale-song language. The corporal gestured, and two of his men pounced on me, getting me by the shoulders and arms before I could gather my wits or get my legs under me.

They hauled me upright, and the one on my left drove the butt of his short spear deep into my sternum just for good measure. The scene spun like a drunken ballerina, and I threw up part of the fish stew, my only full meal in recent memory.

The man in the plumed helmet looked down at me. “I am the corporal of the watch for this district. Kaqqudu Nakasu of the Host of the Sternophthalmoi, who gaze from their chests, is freeborn, a rational animal in service to the Tower. He says you are a slave absent from his master without leave, moving without papers, and you seek to enter a forbidden and holy place in Officer’s Country. He wants to eat you, and claims your meat as his reward.”

He paused to let that sink in, or perhaps to give me a chance to speak. I did not chance it.

“Have you any reason why I should not feed you to him feetfirst, here and now, to amuse the loyal troops and their lady wives, who serve the Tower better than you?”

Several women in the crowd nearby applauded, cheered and giggled, and called out Blood! Blood! Red blood! It was not very ladylike, in my opinion.

“I serve Lord Ersu the Wise,” I said over the commotion of bloodthirsty cheerleaders. “He gave me his wand as proof of it. I was ordered to take it to him. My papers were stolen by a wolf named Rimanis-izbu, an abomination of the retinue of Ersu. The wolf just wanted to get me in trouble.”

The Blemmyae spoke again, crossing his arms over his chest, so that his eyes were just above his thumbs, and the corners of his scowl just below his elbows. Several people in the crowd laughed and murmured.

The corporal said, “Kaqqudu Nakasu says you think us fools, because we are driven mad by the star-lore, and our nurses do not dare to wipe a baby’s nose without consulting a star-chart for the proper time. Because no one gets away with anything here, so no one tries, and no one is on the lookout for crooked folk: but he is from a crooked world, and knows you speak crookedly.”

The mere fact that the man had to use a round-about phrase like ‘speak crookedly’ itself was evidence that Knack was right about the Ur-men. Was fraud so rare in this weird world that the Ur-speak had no word for it? On my world, police states never actually lived up to their advertising, never actually cleaned crime off the streets. But a police state enforced by all-seeing magicians worked like magic (so to speak), and so people forgot to lock their doors at night, or to watch for folk like me, sneaking around. Knack came from a nastier world, and he did not forget.

A man in a black robe holding a small square tablet stepped up next to the corporal. “Sir, the records do show a Starmage Lord Ersu the Wise who serves in the College of the Astrology of Abominations. He does have a cynocephali named Rimanis-izbu in his retinue.”

The corporal said, “Scribe, does the tablet show Rimanis as fated to be investigated, or answering an accusation?”

“Sir! Not out to the time-range recorded in the first-level reports. I can put in a request for an Astrologer to look further down the fate line for this Rimanis. Otherwise, his record is clean out to the equinox.”

The corporal took the metal tablet from the scribe. The corporal took his foot off my flail. At his gesture, the scribe in the black robe donned thick leather gloves, knelt, and gingerly picked the golden weapon up.

Tablet in hand, the corporal turned to me again. “What is the service-name of Lord Ersu? What do those of your rank call him, slave?”

“Uh … we call him Lord Ersu…”

“That is his court name. Well? You are in his retinue, or so you say. It is what comes out of your mouth every single time you address him?”

“Slaughterbench.” I said the name in English, since I could not remember what it was in the Ur-language.

The corporal frowned at the tablet in his hand, and I heard it clatter as he turned through the columns. The scribe, looking over his shoulder spoke up, “Sir! Look there. That is what the record gives as Lord Ersu’s death-name. It is not unheard-of that this would be used as a service-name for one of an abominable class. Perhaps the underling is legitimate.”

I was too scared to heave a sigh of relief just yet, but I had convinced the scribe.

On the other hand, the corporal did not look so convinced.

“And his praise-name?”

I started whining. Slavedrivers like hearing a slave talk like an idiot, because it confirms the rightness of their world to them. If I played it stupid enough, then maybe he would just send me on my way. “Well, Master, Sir, this old poor head of mine can't hold so many names, no sir, no sir. I am so sorry…”

He spoke with the practiced sarcasm of someone born to sneer: “No crooked speaking, slave! You must know your master’s praise name. What epithet do you call him every new moon, and on high days, and sacrifice days, to magnify him? In the long rite, the praise-name is repeated at least thirty times. What do you call him?”

And he stared at me as if I were a worm unworthy to be stepped on, because I would be too much bother to scrape off the bottom of his boot afterward. Such self-esteem danced in his eyes, and admiration in the kohl-rimmed eyes of the cooing and simpering ladies standing nearby, casting glances at him over the tops of their veils or fans, so at that moment I hated him more than I should have.

I realized that by trying to trick him, by truckling and whining, I had made myself the same as his slave. And now, but not knowing what flattering bullhooplah Lord Ersu demanded his cringing victims to call him, I was caught anyway.

There was a man still holding my right arm and my left, but this did not prevent me from straightening my spine: “What do I call Ersu, you ask? I call him damned! I call him — —” When they make my life into a movie, the censor will replace what I said next with an electronic bleep. A pretty long bleep, too. I managed to get most of the swearwords I learned at public school out of my mouth.

That earned me a boot in the teeth, and a lot of blood in the mouth, so I could not talk very clearly after that.

But the corporal was not done talking, or, rather showing off to the giggling ladies in the crowd. “Well, under-creature? What is his sign? Even someone who did not know his praise-name would know his birthsign.”

I figured I had one chance in a baker’s dozen of guessing the right zodiacal sign, but I did not say anything, because my mouth hurt too much, and I did not have any hope in my heart at that moment.

It was like that moment when the moon was eaten, all over again. The Dark Tower knew everything. I had been a fool to try to fool them. I let my head slump down.

The spearmen decided to give me a beating with the butts of their spears then and there, and strip me of my mantle and loincloth. To this day, I don’t know whether it was braver to submit to the beating, or whether I should have put up a fight, and killed at least a few before they brought me to wherever I was to be tortured and dismembered.

I just tried to duck my head and told myself it could not kill me. Without the threat of death, the pain was just pain, and I was not as afraid of it, and somehow it did not seem to hurt as much.

Chapter Eighteen: Routine Police Procedure

1. Irregulation

The corporal in the plumed helmet demanded to see Nakasu’s papers, and, squinting narrowly at them, announced, “Your horoscope for today does not predict you traveling to this level. You trying to fight fate? You come along as well.”

The monster snarled a snarl that went from hipbone to hipbone, and spoke in tones of sullen defiance. Even though he wanted to eat me, I must say I admired him at that moment.

“Arrest…?” the corporal said back to him. “No arrest. You are volunteering to investigate horoscopic irregularity.”

The monster clutched his huge belly-mouth with both hands, a gesture that looked both like a child clutching a stomachache, and like a woman putting her hands to her cheeks in shock. He spoke once more.

The corporal answered with a laugh. “Send a last message to your mate…? Are you mad? If your whelps never know what becomes of you, serves them right. Had you been orderly, they would have known your death-date years in advance. Fate is fated.” And he nodded toward the spearmen of his squad.

All this was while I was being beaten by the spearmen. One spear butt to the jaw broke something. I spit out a tooth, and some bits of gum and a lot of blood. No one saw it, but my bicuspid lay on the ground, and its roots twitched slightly, like the legs of an insect. If I had not been in such pain, I would have thought it creepy. As it was, I managed to put my hand over it to hide it, and, when they hauled me to my feet, I put my hand to my mouth and I slipped the broken tooth back in.

By then they were bored with the entertainment of beating a naked prisoner, although the crowd which had gathered to watch the soldiers embark were hooting and cheering. The corporal snapped his fingers, and (after one final round of kicks for pure spite’s sake) two brawny spearmen hauled me to my rubbery legs.

Being marched, nude as a newborn, across balconies and down crowded corridors convinced me that nudism is no fun. The soldiers in their myriads of troops ignored me, which was not so bad. The women who looked scornfully at my bruises or at my buttocks as I was dragged past, or laughed, or whistled, or spat — that was bad.

My busted jaw twitched, and then ached, and then there was a noise like a click and it stopped hurting. Feeling around with my tongue, I found the bicuspid had crawled back into its socket where it had been knocked out. It felt strangely warm under my tongue, almost hot.

I was not sure whether to be grossed out or be grateful. I thought of the dentist bill I’d just saved, and decided on gratitude. “Glorious martyr Saint Apollonia, receive my praise and thanksgiving!”

I kept my voice down, not knowing whether the magic that allowed the Ur-folk to know all languages let them interpret mutters. But maybe it just sounded like moaning to them, the noise beaten slaves and under-creatures should make.

“… Let my heart be strengthened in the face of pain and temptation, and intercede to obtain for me a happy death …” I choked on this line of the prayer, wondering if it were kosher for one of my kind, a Lalilummutillut, to ask for such a thing.

But by then all the teeth in my jaw felt normal in my mouth. I kept my head down too, hoping no one saw how quickly my broken bones unbroke themselves, or my bruises vanished.

2. Non-Commissioned Officer

The precinct station (if I can call it that) was set high overlooking an agora or annex where many wide corridors met, with balconies from which to watch the passers-by, or one-way mirrors in the floor. There was a lectern rather than desks for the sergeant and his clerks to stand. I guess the Ur-folk did not much believe in chairs.

My trial (if I can call it that) consisted of the arresting officer saying to the sergeant, “Paperless slave, Sergeant.” (Massaratim-rabi literally meant Chief of the Watch, but he was not addressed with any of the honorifics indicating an officer, so I am assuming he was some sort of NCO.) “Stolen goods—he’s carrying what looks like a supernatural weapon.”

The sergeant was smoking a hookah, and marking a metal tablet with a stylus. He did not so much as look up at me. He shouted, “Horoscope predict any meatloaf here now?” (Yes, he actually called me a meatloaf: akalshyri.)

A voice from another room, this voice as cracked and weary as a grandfather’s, shouted back through an open doorway. “Nothing on the docket, Sarge.” (Ma’saru was a joke or play on words, not a contraction of Massaratim. It actually meant tithe or tenth. Short stuff.)

There was a groan from the whole room, and the young men shook their heads and rolled their eyes.

The grandfatherly voice from the other room said, “You want I should start the paperwork on reporting an unforeseen and irregular event? If so, close the doors, and take down the name and horoscope of everyone who witnessed, touched, or was affected or influenced by the irregularity.”

The sergeant did not look up. “I don’t need the headache. Shoot him through the heart and toss him down the rubbish shaft in the Drudge Closet.”

The arresting officer said, “What about his stuff? This flail is made of gold, and has an energy signature that turns a watchglass black. If I put it in the evidence locker, that means drawing up a horoscope, and the Astrologer on watch for the precinct, and then the Astrologer responsible for ordnance has to be notified. Every time the locker is opened, it must be noted in the log, sir.”

“Just chuck the gear in the officer’s mess cloak room for now. I’ll decide how to deal with the paperwork later.”

3. Six Hundred Paces

Two men wearing leather coats sewn with brass scales and small round brass caps on their heads took charge of me. I did not see their faces, since they stuck a bag over my head. One had a voice like gravel being ground; the other had a voice like glue dripping.

Glue said, “We need to check manacles out of supply, and chain him up?”

Gravel said, “To haul him six hundred paces, you want to go fourteen hundred paces to the supply master? Just cut the tendons in his arms.”

“Might bleed to death.”

“So what?”

This was done, and it hurt, and warm blood was dripping down my arms, which they then grabbed like they were handles made of dead sausage, and just hauled me along.

They chatted. It was just a normal workday for them.

Glue said, “How come the Sarge don’t want to question this meatloaf? Find his accomplices; drown his children, that sort of thing?”

Gravel grunted. “You got a head like a Blem on you! You know the new junior forensic Astrologer assigned to the western annex of the Servile Crime, Disturbances and Disobedience Department?”

“Lordling Burumameru.”

“He’s good with figures. He also got a pretty daughter with a good figure. Sarge likes to go see him, because hospitality means the daughter has to come out and offer him a cup of tea, on account of a second son of a second son of a minor lord can’t afford a proper serving girl, but he can’t be inhospitable.”

“If I’d ha’ been fated to be a star-reader, I’d throw the Sarge asswise down the Great Stairs, if he came a sniffing around my daughter’s skirts!”

Gravel made an ugly noise that served him for a laugh. “The highborn, they ain’t like us, no more than the wolf-skulls or the blood-quaffers is like us. They’re different.”

“That’s a word and a half!” Glue agreed.

“Anyhow, the highborn’s got their rules and their fates same as we got ours. Nobles got to be hospitable even to those they hate, because, hey, ain’t we all One? And the Sarge represents the Crown of Nimrod, on account of him taking the Great King’s Coin, and the Stars can’t throw the Crowns down no stairs.”

“I’d do it nohow, send his butt bounding and bouncing down the stairs, if’n I were a lordling, and could do figuring, and read stars and all.”

“You’re a dolt. So if the Sarge gets itching about this meatloaf or his accomplices or whatnot, he’ll use the excuse to nip up to Servile Crime, and have the lordling tally up the fate-numbers on the death-date if there is any follow-up needs to be done.”

“So we got to make a note of the execution time?”

“Execution, says he! Execution is what warlords does to generals after losing battles. This? This is hauling out the trash. We get all the trash jobs.”

“That’s a word and a half!” Glue agreed.

And one of them kicked me in the leg hard enough that I had to hop and limp all the rest of the six hundred paces to the place where I was killed. I don’t know which one it was.

4. Drudge Closet

The chamber I saw when the bag was yanked off my head looked like a small storage room or a large broom closet, with mops and brooms, and chests and shelves of supplies. A coal bin was along one wall, with coal dust darkening the deck and the overhead with a layer of permanent black smears, and along the other were washbuckets or jugs of ammonia. Everything was labeled with a little scrap of paper with the circular designs of horoscopes on it, which I assume was to show when the broom or bottle or bucket was to be used, or by whom or for how long.

The chamber had that same round hole in the center of it which my cell once had, and the same whistling sound of wind came up from it, but this hole was black, and the wind sounded like a woman sobbing.

Then I was kicked in the other leg, hard enough that I thought I heard something crack, and Glue and Gravel forced me to my knees. They then proceeded to force my head to the cold metal floor, so I did not see much more of the room at that time.

I heard the door opening and the footfalls of two more people entering the closet.

Gravel and Glue released my arms and stepped away from me. I raised my head in time to see the mouth of the weapon held in the hands of one of the newcomers — I got a nice, long, good look at it, business-end first.

The firearm itself was a brass tube about a yard long, decorated with angular dragons, with a set of rings like electromagnets ringing the mouth, and powered by a spinning generator turned by what looked like a miniature steam engine the man carried in a backpack, complete with smokestack.

This was in the hands of a tired-eyed harquebusier who chewed on a toothpick while he did his work. The second person who had entered with him was his squire or powder monkey, a lad wearing a lead vest. With tongs, he put a glowing slug that might have been uranium into the backpack engine, topped off the water, checked the pressure dials, and gave the thumbs up. The bored-faced harquebusier raised the machine to his shoulder.

I was shot twice through the chest and once through the head.

The projectiles the weapon spat looked like crossbow bolts made of red-hot iron. When he cocked the weapon for the second and third shot, the triangular cylinder (like that of a sixgun but with half the ammo) rotated to bring another shot into the nail gun or rail gun or whatever it was.

The shots left a trail of smoke and sparks behind them like little comets, but the sound was much quieter than a rifle would have made. They hit the dented metal plates of the far wall, leaving little burn-marks to match dozens of others just like them. A lot of people were shot here, I suppose.

I threw myself backward when he shot me, and I tried to splash as much blood around as I could. Now that I was a corpse, the harquebusier and Gravel and Glue were unwilling to touch me. I did not hear the conversation, nor did I hear them leave the room, because my ears were not working then. Having a white-hot needle of iron go through my brain no doubt messed up some of my nerves for a little while.

I was getting better with practice at this recuperation and regeneration stuff. I had done my fair share of meditation for my martial arts practice, and I had done plenty of regular praying before Mom was lost, and a lot more (this time more like I meant it) after. There was a drifty, floating sensation you can get if you achieve a certain state of mind, and this time, I could actually feel my blood and brains in the pools they made around me, and it only took an effort of calm, clear, strong will to pull my scattered body together. It was way cool. Like something from a horror movie. I opened an eye without getting up, and found myself alone.

Eventually a janitor or cleaning slave came in to clean up the blood spill. I watched through slitted eyelids as the janitor drew out a long dark-stained cloak or poncho from a chest, threw it over his robes like an apron, and bent himself over his mop and bucket. I had not been able to call all my blood back into my body, after all. There was still plenty for him to do.

When the janitor left, I stood up, and found a long brown cloak with a hood from the same chest, stained and patched.

I picked up a mop from the rack of a dozen mops and tried to look busy when I heard a noise at the door.

A small man with brown skin and brown hair dressed in a long green-and-black striped tunic slouched in. The tunic was wrapped around his body, and the fringed hem was drawn over his head, so that a curtain of strands hung before his face, partly obscuring it. He looked left and right, and bowed.

“Pardon me, my master,” he said whining, cringing. “There was to be a dead corpse here. I was to put it down the hole.”

I assume he was a corpse-handler, an untouchable. I remember Abby said she had been raised by members of this caste. Apparently, he was lower rank than a cleaning slave. Jeez.

I said in a haughty voice, “No, no, not here, silly slave! It is in the cloak room of the officer’s mess. Lead me there, and I will show you.”

Now he did look at me, and there was doubt and suspicion in his eyes, and he looked at my dark skin and jutting jaw and thickset, rough features of my face, and he heard me speaking in what was clearly a language from another world, so he could not have been fooled for a moment. And the look on his face slackened into one of pure terror.

He turned and scurried out of the store room. I did not know if he were running to go turn me in, or to go where I had told him, and so I did not know if it were wiser to follow him or to flee the other way as fast as my feet could carry me. If I followed him he might lead me where I told him, and I might, just might, recover that twilight flail which was my only hope of escape from his hellish world; whereas if I fled, that flail was lost, and so was that hope.

It turned out he was leading me right where I wanted to go.

5. Mess

The corpse-handler led me through narrow crooked corridors and through a large kitchen paved with stone. Franklin stoves lined one wall, and copper cauldrons big as bathtubs, sitting in walk-in chimneys, lined the other. Hocks of ham and strings of onions hung from the roofbeam, and melons and cucumbers in net bags. Leeks and garlic were gathered in jars and odorous bundles.

He was not willing to step over the threshold, but bowed and pointed toward the narrow servants’ door leading from the kitchen into what was evidently the officers’ mess.

I stepped into a chamber floored with brightly polished golden wood and roofed with gold-blazing lampwood. Statues of fat gods stood at the corners, and mosaics of stern warriors and kings adorned the walls. Long trestle boards stood in ranks as orderly as soldiers on parade, and a trestle board coated with linen stood on a dais overlooking them. These tables had couches rather than benches. The Ur-men ate reclining, like Romans. Three large doors led out, but all three were barred from this side.

There was exactly one man in the chamber: the dark-eyed and dark-bearded sergeant. He was sitting on the edge of a couch at the linen-covered high table, and before him on the tablecloth was my twilight flail, gleaming gold and red under the lampwood light as if with inner fire of yellow and scarlet. The mantle and loincloth were neatly folded to one side. I had not been carrying anything else.

The dark-bearded sergeant was toying with the golden flail, a look of care and concentration on his features, twisting the ruby-red rings clockwise or counterclockwise, and listening to them click, and watching the shimmering eye-blurring darkness reach out from the arms of the flail, or draw back in.

I came in holding the mop and bucket. The sergeant spoke without looking up, “Out! Come back later to clean up.”

But he looked up at the sound of me leaping atop his table, and he was fast enough to be halfway to his feet with his sword fully from his scabbard in time to parry the descending mop handle which would otherwise have dashed out his brains.

I was holding the mop like a shinai, although my feet were not properly set in a kendo stance. My weight was too far forward and the sergeant was a veteran fighter. He was able to chop the handle in two against the tabletop before I could recover from my lunge. Then he lifted the table under my feet as he rose, and it elevated suddenly like the deck of a ship tossed in a storm.

By reflex, I leaped at him and hit him shoulder-high in a flying tackle. We rolled and tumbled on the ground like two wild dogs tearing at each other, sending trestle legs and boards, linens and couches toppling this way and that with a huge clatter.

I managed to seize him from behind and threw him on his face, my weight atop him. But he got his knees under him somehow, and reversing the grip on his short blade, he drove it behind him with both hands. No sooner had the blade entered my sternum than he twisted it hard, cutting and tangling my guts and vital organs. He seemed to think it was a deadly stroke, and I felt him relax, waiting for me to die.

But we Deathless do not die so easily, of course. Instead of dying, I slipped an arm around him, pulled myself further up onto his blade, trapping his sword arm between my chest and his back. Then I reached out, wrapped my other arm around his throat, and began to methodically choke him out. His feet kicked against the wood floor and his free hand clawed uselessly back over his shoulder, trying to dislodge me.

The sergeant called out in a wheezing, halting voice, using the ragged last gasps of his life’s breath. He waved with his one free hand at the untouchable, who was cowering at the servants’ door, peering in, only his nose and eyes visible around the doorframe. These poor, sad eyes were wide and wet like he was about to cry, trembling like a dog who expects a cruel whipping.

“Get help!” gasped the sergeant. “Call for help! Get the men!”

“Stand still!” I called to the bewildered untouchable. “Don’t call anyone. Just stand there.”

The sergeant gasped, “Qall! I’m a good master …been good to you …if you don’t… Astrologers… will know… punish you…find you … cannot hide…”

Tears of fear started running down the face of the little man. He took half a step into the mess hall, staring at me strangling his master. He was clutching his head with both hands. His eyes were wild, and his mouth sagged like a torn pocket in an old jacket. He took a trembling step toward the large door, the one leading to the officers and men. But it was tentative, and he looked over his shoulder.

I called out to him as firmly and authoritatively as I could manage.

“Qall! Qall! Listen to me, now!” I called him by name, if that was his name. The word mean ‘boy’ or ‘slave’ or ‘insignificant thing.’ He stopped, frozen. I announced: “I am Ilya Muromets! Ilya the Barbarian; Ilya the Abomination. I cannot die and I am here to tear this Tower down!”

The slave said softly to himself, “Knock … the Tower… down? How? How?”

“I have no idea,” I grunted, gritting my teeth. Choking a man to death is harder than it sounds, and it takes longer too. “But I’ve made up my mind. Are you in? Or out?”

The sergeant gasped, “Obey! Obey! The stars … watching you…see you…”

I laughed at him. “The stars are blind! You didn’t see this coming, did you?”

And Qall just stood there, watching quietly, while I choked the life out of the sergeant. It was a little brutal, I suppose, but I figured the sergeant was an enemy in uniform and this was a time of war. Once someone invades your planet, that gives you the right to kill him. Maybe even the duty.

He stopped moving, stopped breathing, and I assumed he was dead. Also, I was in a whole lot of pain. So I rolled him off me and stood up, a little wobbly on my feet, and I drew out the foot-long length of curved bronze blade from my stomach, and dropped it clattering and splattering to the floorboards. The whole weapon was covered with my blood, all the way down the blade and up the hilt, and it made a splashing, sticky sound when it hit.

I was busily pushing my lower intestines back into place with one hand, and with the other I was picking up the golden flail, so I did not have a hand free to catch myself when the sergeant suddenly coughed and grabbed my ankles with both hands. He jerked my feet right out from under me! My jaw hit the table with a loud thwack and then hit the floor with a crack even louder and my vision went black for a moment from the pain.

And it did not hurt half as much as my inner drill sergeant calling myself an idiot. It is harder to kill a person than you think. A person will sometimes get up after being in a coma when even doctors would have sworn he was dead.

The sergeant was on top of me before my eyes uncrossed, and he caught up my arms in a wrestler’s hold, and was in the act of twisting them out of their sockets when he stiffened and looked down in surprise at the bib of red blood gushing from his opened throat. There was a weird whistling, whispering noise bubbling from his lungs, but he died without a word, without a scream. Qall was standing behind him, with the sergeant’s dropped sword in hand, trembling and smiling a lunatic little smile.

6. Free Man

“Just like cutting the throat of a chicken,” he said in a dreamlike voice. “Wish’d I’d ha’ done it long ago, back when my Abtudu was alive. She’d ha’ liked to ha’ seen this.”

I said to him, “I am not sure why my actions are not being predicted by the Astrologers, but one of the foreverborn —”

“Know all about ’em. Wash up in magic water, or somewhat, eh? Says it rinses their old fate away. Just tales, so as I heard it, like a wish-fish: Seen in the wet, never in the net.”

“— They’re real. One of them sprung me from jail, and told me that any acts of mine built on her acts would be unforeseen, but only if I obey my higher nature. Your act of helping me is built on my act, I suppose the same applies.”

“The same what?”

“The same rule. I suppose it works the same way. If you use your unpredictability to commit crimes or get away with crooked acts, you’ll become predictable again.”

“Just killt my master. That’s treason against my betters. Worst crime there is: so says the Great King’s law, and it’s written on the sides of the Tower in letters cut into adamant deep as a two-edged sword is long. So I already done a crime, but, look around! You can see no one ain’t here to do for me.”

“There is a higher Law, and a Heavenly King greater than your Great King, who has written his law not in iron, but in your heart, and deeper than any two-edged sword. I am talking about your conscience. You saved me. You risked your life when my life was not in danger. Whatever voice you listened to which made you do such a selfless act of heroism, listen to that voice alone. You understand me? I am trying to save you from getting caught. You got any place to go?”

I was a little worried about this guy. The wild look in his eye was that of a man drunk on freedom, and he had never been free in his life before. I did not know if he knew the difference between right and wrong, wise and foolish. Slaveowners, or so I read somewhere, try to keep slaves in as childlike a state as possible, mentally helpless, teaching them only so much as would allow them do their tasks and no more. Could this guy even think for himself?

My doubts were soothed, at least in part, when he said, “I helped a gypsy once, saved him from a beating and gave him a loaf of bread, and he told me how to find his tribe, and what to say to get them to take me in. They roam around in the upwards parts, high above Earth where no one strays for fear of the White Apes. If I take up the corpse, no one will get close enough to question me, for fear of being touched, and no one will think it odd, since hereabouts is not high enough to toss him, and have him burned in the air. I got no kin, no little ones. I can scrounge up a poke of food to tote from the kitchen yonder, and that will keep me hale for a time—and you should too.”

I was putting on my loincloth and wrapping myself in my white mantle, the only clothing I had, and I stopped in mid-wrap.

“Did you say gypsies?”

“They are called Romany, and descend from Keturah the Second Wife of Abraham. They serve a god called Del, and it is told that there are tribes of Romany in every world.”

“They’re in at least two…” I muttered, blinking.

“But what of you, my master? If you don’t do some good and kindly deed, unselfish-like, won’t you be seen and foreseen? Thumping the servicemen of the Dark Tower to loot yourself of a pretty gold stick don’t strike me as so high-natured and holy, if that’s the way of it, no?”

Qall began stripping the body of its ornaments, yanking one ring after another off its fingers.

“What are you doing?” I asked him.

He flinched. He was not used to people talking to him unless they were ready to beat him. Or maybe my voice just has that effect on people. I sing baritone in choir.

Qall explained, “I am not allowed to carry any goods, only the body. They would think I ha’ looted the dead, see? You have to take his things.”

He pushed a drawstring purse, a finger-ring, a horn on a strap, a sword belt, and a handful of brass buttons toward me, and a very bloody inward-curved short-sword that reminded me of a meat cleaver. I opened the purse, hoping to find a hankie to wipe the sword.

“What is this?” I held up a brass cylinder, longer than my thumb and thicker than a sparkplug, covered on all sides with a picture of angular beasts that rounded back on themselves, nipping at their own tails, and parallel rows of cuneiforms above and below. It was pretty and pretty heavy.

Qall said, “A seal. You roll it in the wet clay or awakened metal.”

“My lucky day. With this, I may be able to pass guards without papers.”

Qall nodded. “Does more than that. Every door lawful for the sergeant’s footstep his seal with his name and nativity will open. It’s a key. All his keys.” He pointed to a spot on the wall where the mosaic did not cover. “The keyhole yonder will take the seal, and unlock the officers’ door. The whole Tower, top to bottom, is bored through with passageways, wall and deck and roof, so the higher-ups can move among us, and spy us out without us seeing. And their secret passageways have secreter passageways inside them, so the more-higher-ups can spy out the higher-ups.”

That caught my interest. “Why bother with that? I thought astrology actually worked in this world, and that Astrologers can see the future?”

Qall shrugged. “They sit down with pen and compass, stylus and tablet and adding machine, and go through their figures, and then go look at the sky with a spyglass, and then sit and do their sums again. Takes a while. So if you can catch the kitchen maid stealing a silver fishknife by squinting through a peephole, save yourself all that numerating and calculating. And what if it rains? You’d have to get the high-up-going wayship to ayont the clouds for your stargazing, and wear a rare-breath helm and all, or put those green worms in your lungs.”

“How do you know about these passageways?”

“Police drag their victims into hidden rooms for rape and torture and such, and who is it that drags them out again, once they’re cold? Someone has to clean the floors.”

“But if they are secret—”

Qall raised his right hand, and showed me a brand-mark, a set of triangular cuneiforms, stamped right in the center of his palm. “I can’t go into the places of decent people. And who would I tell? I was born in the unclean quarter, and they know my birthday and hour.”

Just at that moment, there came a knock at one of the large barred doors behind us, and a man’s voice calling for the sergeant.

I whispered to Qall, “Through the kitchen. Run for it.”

He shook his head. “I hear someone coming that way already.” It was true. There were footsteps in the kitchen. These were bare feet rather than boots, which meant servants rather than soldiers, but it was just as bad for us if someone who could call for armed men saw us as if armed men saw us.

I sprinted over to the panel, and Qall pointed, and I found the keyhole behind a sliding ornament no bigger than a silver dollar. The end of the cylinder fit nicely into the slot, and the lock pulled the cylinder into itself and out of my startled fingers, as if it were a boy with no table manners slurping a noodle into his mouth. The secret panel opened, as smoothly as you please.

Qall crowded into the narrow passageway right behind me. He shoved the panel shut, and it clicked again, locking, and the little cylinder seal popped out of its hole on this side of the door, and Qall snatched it up, and handed it to me. (The hole on this side covered itself with a tab the size of a silver dollar.)

It was dark in here, until Qall found a stick of lampwood in a bracket and touched it to a marble plate set in the ceiling, where it clung as if magnetized. We heard the cries of horror and alarm as the body was discovered, and then more voices and more men came running into the officers’ mess.

Then one querulous old man’s voice was shouting above the rest, “Unexpected event! His death was years away! Cordon off the area. No one goes in or out! The irregularity of the horoscopes will have to be looked into, and everyone here—you too, lieutenant, sir!—will need to get his horoscopes recast from blank tablets. No complaining! Call everyone up here, guards at the door, turnkeys in the holding cell, everyone!”

Qall and I retreated on tiptoe down the passageway until we were out of earshot. It was dark here, and there seemed to be no marble plaques to which to touch the lampwood stick. Abby seemed to have the knack of getting them to glow just by looking at them, but maybe Qall did not.

I said, “There goes your chance to sneak out of here carrying the body.”

He chuckled. “No such, sir. Nary one of them is much likely to touch a corpse. I need but to show my nose, and they will grab it and pull me fro to do the toting. No one looks at such as me.”

“I’ll always look on you with favor,” I said, “And remember you in my prayers. You saved me from capture and torture, and that may save my girlfriend from rape and torture and death as well. It’s like ripples coming out of a pebble falling in a pond. Let me shake your hand. I am not ashamed to touch you.”

Solemnly, we shook hands. He cringed only a little.

Qall said, “You’re an abomination, ain’t you? I saw Sergeant Sakrumash put his sapara right into you.”

“Is that his name? Sakrumash?” I hate to admit it, but I felt kind of queasy, knowing his name. He seemed more like a real person and less like a target.

Qall laughed. “His name is Sergeant Crowmeat now. Are you a walking shadow or somewhat? Small wonder you deem me fit to touch…”

“In my land, I am the son of the Knight of the Temple. But no one in my land is higher or lower than anyone else. All men are equal and none are called unclean or abominable. I’d be honored to shake hands with you,” I said.

“Thank’ee,” he said, gulping. “Your words are like the words of a god.”

I hefted the cylinder seal in my hand. “I suppose we only have a little while before someone else of the same rank as Crowmeat uses a seal just like this one to open the door and walk in here. And I think you are right that looting the body may have made an event the stars can foretell, if I understand how this crazy world works, which I don’t. So I have to use my Boy Scout powers and do a good turn, and fast, to make the stars blind again. Some saintly act. Something I can do quick, in the next minute or two. Such as—”

I groaned and clutched my head. Because a thought just occurred to me, and the thought was so clear and so bright that it may as well have been a magic telepath broadcasting the idea right into my brain.

“Oh, Lordy lord! Please not that; anything but that…” I groaned. “What a stupid idea…”

“What is it?” Qall asked, voice quivering.

“I think I have to rescue the monster who betrayed me and put me here.”

“Eh? I heard tha’ not right, did I?”

“You did. There is no one guarding the cells right now. You said this seal is the sergeant’s key for everything. Will it open the holding cells? If you drag bodies out from there, you know where it is. I need to save my non-girlfriend, but this should only take a moment, and if I don’t do a good deed, the star-gods will see me and I’ll get caught again. This is the best deed I can think of.”

“Best? You be a madman, no? He’s a Blem. I saw when he was brought in. He’ll eat you.”

“I be a madman, yes! So you think the Astrologers will predict me doing this?”

Chapter Nineteen: Cylinder Seal and Cylindrical Cell

1. Abarimon

The jail cells were barrels, too small to stand upright in, made of iron set into the deck and covered with a grate. There were catwalks, planks set over the barrels where guards could walk. The bottoms of the barrels had an inch or so of accumulated dried and hard-packed sewage and bones from their previous owners. The casual sadism of the arrangement sickened me. The smell did too.

As predicted, there was no guard in sight. The emergency of an unexpected and unhoroscoped event had quarantined all of them elsewhere in the guard station.

There was one other prisoner held in a half-buried barrel aside from the Blemmyae. He was black-skinned and green-eyed, which I guess is a combination we don’t often see on Earth. His hair was a silky black tangle that hung before his eyes, and when he stared up at me through the tangle, it was like looking into twin pools of water gathered in winter beneath a thorny bush. The drained and aching emptiness in the eyes was the same I had seen in the face of Enmeduranki.

I stooped and fitted the cylinder scroll to the lock. The grate came loose, and I flung it open with a loud and echoing clatter.

The man did not get up. I lowered my hand to him, to help him up, but he did not take it, or even look at it.

He spoke without raising his head. The man’s language was like a silver waterfall, rippling. Qall said, “He says he will not be fooled by another trick.”

I had said the same thing to Abby when she had rescued me. Maybe it is just a rule of human psychology that we cannot be rescued unless we ask first, because we won’t believe it if it is a free gift.

Qall said softly, “They told to him his horoscope. He knows when the magistrate will see him, what the scribes and doctors of the law will say, and what the sentence will be, the method of execution and the hour of his death. It is a particular cruelty, since the prisoner will try to struggle against his fate in the short time remaining, and in so doing, will bring further curses on himself and his kindred.”

“What is he in for?” I asked.

The man muttered something. Qall said, “It is a forethought-crime.”

“A what?”

“The crime is foreknown, but not yet committed.”

“Wait. What? You lock people up here because they might do something? What kind of nuthouse is this?”

Qall ducked his head. “Since the time of the current Great King, Anshargal, the masters were kind enough to wait until the season when the crime was predicted, so that the years of work beforehand would be extracted from the felon-to-be. The previous Great King, Meskianggasher, had a different policy, and all felons-to-be were killed at birth by midwives. The people left over were so few in number that the army was too small to wage war. The pyramids of little skulls can still be seen, many rows of them, leading up to the Gate called Harmonious Decimation of Justice.”

I felt another headache coming on. By God, but I hated this world. They had drained all the hope out of this man, so much so that he would not even come out of his death row jail cell when the door was opened wide. Is a man without hope even really a man?

Angrily, I grabbed the guy by the hair and under one armpit, and hauled him bodily up out of the poop-smeared pit. He did not struggle or complain. When I let go, he just collapsed where he fell, like a ragdoll.

“Stand up!” I shouted at him. “Get to your f — Uh!”

His legs ended. They had cut his feet off, and I was roughhousing a cripple.

I saw his leg bending forward, and for a moment I thought they had broken and dislocated his knees.

Then I saw that his legs were like a dog’s leg, with the kneecap to the rear, and his feet were still there. He was one of those folk as I had seen on the embarkation landing, whose feet were on backward, heel to the front, toes trailing behind. I had merely been looking at him from the front, and had not seen his rearward pointing toes.

I said to Qall, “What is he?”

The little ex-untouchable wagged his head in a sort of shrug. “Hard to say without his collar. Messenger, I reckon. Too bulky to be in sports.”

“No, I mean his race.”

“He is a man. All men are men. All are One. All serve the—”

“No, no. I mean his, um, host.”

Qall said, “He is an Abarimon, descended from Aram through Gath. Run as fast as jaguars. Faster. They breathe a special air comes only from their valley and choke on our air. The doctors have to fix them like gypsies, put a worm in their lungs, so they can breathe normal-like.”

But he was not going to run away from his masters, not going to breathe the air of freedom.

Qall said, “I hear they take scalps as neckerchiefs, and the more they get, bigger they look in each other’s eyes, so their chiefs have whole coats of man hair. Only the night-eyed Albanians be safe of them, on account of being born egg-bald.”

I turned my face away from him, glad I did not know his name, or his background, or anything. I did not want him to seem real to me, and if you know someone’s name, he seems real.

2. Sternophthalmos

I walked over to the Blemmyae’s cell and looked down. Qall did not follow me, not willing to come so close. “Master!” Qall said urgently, “This is a monster! An abomination! No matter what he promises, he is not true of tongue, as we Ur-folk must be, and he will speak crookedly! Do not believe him!”

“I don’t believe him, so I am not going to ask him. I am going to believe in him. That is a different thing.”

The Blemmyae, Kaqqudu Nakasu, sat looking up at me with a sardonic expression on his chest. His eyeballs in his pectoral muscles were as large as softballs, and even with his lids at a sneering half-mast, they caught and reflected more light than a cat’s eye. So it looked like two half-moons shining in the gloom of the hellish little hole.

He farted a few words in his blowhole-noise language.

“What is he saying?” I asked.

“He wonders whether to cook you or eat you raw. He says you are a skullbag, and so the volume of your brains are smaller than his, which fill his chest.”

That distracted me. “Then where does he keep his lungs?”

“In his stomach, right behind his mouth.”

“Then where does he keep his—oh, never mind. Ask him whether he’s ever heard of the foreverborn.”

“You need not ask him, master: We are warned against them every seven days during Moon Goddess Day assembly, and there are songs and posters and brightly colored papers and everything. The foreverborn water changes your nature, and makes you unnatural. Everyone has heard of them.”

“In that case, tell him I am going to release him, and we are going to have a talk.”

I did not wait for an answer, but stopped and worked the lock and flung open the grate. It fell open with a noise like the clash of cymbals, echoing and clanging, while Qall was repeating my words.

The monster rose and stretched, and even standing hip-deep in the cell, he seemed gigantic, and his arms like pillars. He twisted left and right, cracking his knuckles and flexing his spine.

In one pounce he was up on the catwalk with me, taller than I was, despite having no head.

He reached his massive hand for my throat.

I gritted my teeth in a teensy smile, because this time the lummox was not grabbing me from behind. Bigger than me or not, I was not taken by surprise, so I politely ducked under his foot-long hand, rapping the back of his wrist just hard enough with the staff of my flail so that his grip went past my cheek by an inch and missed me.

Knack Ace You had a puzzled look on his chest, like when you are sure you swatted a fly and you still see it buzzing. He was bigger and tougher than me, but I was betting he did not have a dad who made him do four hours PT a day since age eight.

He reached out again, but I stepped back, moved to one side, and struck him on the shoulder with my free hand, hard enough to send him stumbling. The catwalk, you see, was too narrow for a big guy like him, and walking on top of barrels covered with grates or uncovered was not the best footing for a melee. Besides, he had not set his feet right. Being cramped in a little space like that had not left him in shape to put up a real fight.

So he hopped, his huge arms windmilling widely, and fell to one knee, and the noise of the clatter was deafening. He had fallen in such a way as to give himself a poke in his chest-eye with his own kneecap when he stumbled. He had no eyebrows to raise, but he could crook his shoulders in the same sort of expression. With a gesture that looked like a man brushing his shirt, he wiped his eyes.

Knack hooted at me.

Qall said, “He says that he will kill you quickly, unlike the Dark Tower, who will kill you slowly.”

I laughed a laugh of pure joy and pure mockery.

Knack twitched in surprise. No doubt this was not the reaction he expected from someone he considered to be lunchmeat.

I said, “Tell him I cannot be killed. If he ate my flesh, my flesh would grow and gather together, ripping out of his guts to come back to me. I am Lalilummutillut.”

He understood that last word. The look on the vast face was now one of mingled wonder and fear, as if I had just taken off a mask to reveal something dizzyingly abnormal seething underneath.

I squatted down on the catwalk, elbows on my knees, and stared at his monster-sized eyeballs, wondering if there was a heart behind and between them.

Prompted by an intuition, I said to Qall, “Ask him what that tattoo on his spine means.”

Knack stood up slowly, spread his huge arms, turned his back to me, and now he spoke in a deeper voice, something like a human language, and the words boomed from the immense mouth in his stomach.

I swear he said the word Uhuru, which is a word that means Freedom in Swahili, which is where Gene Roddenberry picked the name for the radio operator on the starship Enterprise. See how much useful information you can pick up from reading Star Trek books?

Qall said, “His people speak of small things through their noses, and of great things through their mouths.”

“So what great things is he saying?”

Qall shuddered. “Greatly evil! It is a bad story.”

“Tell me anyway.”

“After the world-flood, Ut-Napishtim came down from Mount Nisir where the great vessel had lodged fast. He sacrificed a sheep and offered incense at a ziggurat where he placed fourteen sacrificial vessels and poured reeds, cedar, and myrtle into the fire. There was a feast.”

“That does not sound so bad,” I commented.

“After the festival, his first son, whom the stars call Ngushur but mortal men call Am or Ham, gave him the first wine of the reborn world and made him to become drunk, and he saw his father unclothed. The first son mocked the father and boasted, and told what he had seen to his brothers with much scorn, saying he was above his father, therefore above all living things. Ut-Napishtim was commanded by sun and wind and star to punish Am and reduce him from the kingship to servitude, that Am would serve his brothers rather than rule over them, and his children after.

“But Ut-Napishtim in his shame defied sun and wind and star, and refused to curse his son.

“The blessing that grants to Man a godlike form and likeness was therefore withdrawn, and the children of Am were cast out from the law which orders that each shall bear after his own kind: for this reason, many prodigies and monstrous races were born among the children of Am. As human nature departed, they obtained the custom of tearing the flesh of men, like beasts do.

“Am begat Cush begat Sabtah begat Ab-Tuat. Ab-Tuat of Kish coupled with the goddess Menhit of the Massacres one day when she appeared to him as a lioness: and she consumed him. But as blood price, she brought forth a get of monsters mightier than the others. This race arose and slew the other monsters, and trampled the whole-born men into servitude.

“To this day, the tradition is kept among the Blemmyae, in honor of the crime that made their race strong enough to conquer the wholesome men, and they eat man-flesh like the lioness their mother. It is said among them that human necks are for collars, and heads for beheading, and so free men do not have need of them. The rules of chastity that bind other men, the sons of Ab-Tuat do not follow: and they call this unnatural disorder by the names freedom and liberation. In this, they follow the Mossynoeci, who tattoo themselves likewise, and couple in the street without shame, like swine.”

“Wow. Is there any world out there that is not totally sick? Hold it! Don’t translate that!”

Too late. Qall repeated my words to Knack, who smiled and boomed out a short answer from his neck-nose.

Qall said, “He says that many worlds are sick with evil. There is one he has heard of where the mothers, countless in number, kill their own young in the womb.”

My first impulse was to point out that I was not old enough to vote, and whatever my world did, I was not responsible for. Of course, I suppose the same might be true of him and his world.

Instead I said only, “Tell him that all men are sinners, all worlds are fallen. You are proud that you are free born, but the Dark Tower tells you what you will do tomorrow, and the next day, and the next. Do you know the death-dates of your children not yet born? How are you free?”

The Blemmyae spoke a few booming words in his chest-language. Qall said, “He says it is nature. Things must be as they must be. It is law.”

“Tell him there is a nature above nature, and a law above law. Tell him the wickedness of the Dark Tower shall also be punished, and most terribly, and at a time as unforeseen as all that has happened to him this day.”

The Blemmyae stared at me and got a weird look on his chest, like he’d seen a ghost.

I said, “Tell him nothing gives the Dark Tower the right to enslave us, no matter what we have done. Ask him if he is proud of his ancestors defying the gods? If he is proud, ask him if he will defy the Dark Tower? Or if he is ashamed, shall he atone for it?”

Qall translated the comment. The Blemmyae stood up at that point, and I stood up too. We were about eye level with each other, which meant his shoulders were as tall as the lintel of a door to me, and the slab of his body was as broad. But I stared him in the pectorals, and did not blink.

“He says no one can defy the Dark Tower. No one escapes the gaze of the stargazers. They know all things.”

I did not answer that, but merely smiled and spread my hands, gesturing to the empty and unpolice-filled, jailor-less, and soldier-free area around us with a gesture like Vanna White showing off a newly-purchased vowel.

The oversized chest-eyes of the Blemmyae turned left and right, roving over the walls of the chamber. A look of doubt began to wrinkle his stomach.

3. Rings in the Still Water

I pressed on. “Tell him I was rescued by a foreverborn, and I stand in the shadow of a deed the stars cannot see. If ever I do evil, I will step out of that shadow, and be seen again, and the Astrologers will know my deeds and doings. But if I do what is right, even if what is right seems insane, then no one can predict how it will turn out.

“Now I have freed him and he is in my shadow.

“I predict he wants to kill me and eat me, because he blames me for being here. If I can predict that, what can the Astrologers do? For him to forgive me would be a good thing, and insane, and unpredictable.

“When a pebble strikes a pool, the rings go out, larger and larger. If he frees others, and they do only what is right, and don’t give in to their natural and darker impulses, the ripple of freedom will produce more ripples. The earthquake that will topple this Tower will start with a ripple as small as a pebble makes.

“Even without becoming foreverborn himself, tell him that he can do good, and hide from the stars in the shadow I cast, as I am hidden by a greater shadow cast by she who rescued me; as he must henceforth do to others.

“Can you translate all that to him?” I finished.

“Say it all again, slowly, master,” said Qall. There was a note of awe in his voice.

And as he repeated what I had said, something dark and angry and hopeless very slowly, as if it left one drop at a time, fell away from the huge and slablike face of the Blemmyae, and did not return.

4. First Good Deed

The monster stood looking very thoughtful. For the first time, I realized that he had no visible ears.

I saw him turn his gaze—and he had to rotate his whole body to turn his gaze—toward the poor Abarimon, who was still lying in a lump, dull-eyed, like a puppet with his strings cut, without even the spirit needed to climb to his backward-pointing feet and get out of here.

The monster put his hands on my shoulders and boomed out a word or two, so loudly I could feel his hot breath against my midriff.

Qall said, “He says he will come with you.”

“No, no!” I said. “He’s not coming with me! Whatever gave him that idea?”

“He knows where you are going, and you are like a helpless child in this world, who cannot tell his food-eating hand from his anus-wiping hand. It will be his first unexpected good deed!”

“Gnu? Duh? Who?”

“He sees from the look on your skullbag that the deed is unforeseen.”

“Tell him thanks but no thanks…”

But Qall raised his voice and talked over me. “I wish the both of you luck on your journey, sir and master. May the stars shine brightly on your fate! Or—well I suppose I am not to say that any more … Fare you well! May your strange gods, whatever they are, who can blind the stars grant you your desired death, or whatever strange blessings you seek!”

“Qall! Get back here! The monster has to go with you, to the gypsies and freedom or wherever!”

“You cannot be killed by being eaten, master, but I can. His mood will wear thin.”

“But—but— But I cannot talk to him!”

Even though his feet were on frontwise, and he was not as fast as a jaguar, Qall got out of the jail chamber pretty fast.

I would have followed him, but right at that moment, Kaqqudu Nakasu the headless man dropped his catcher’s mitt-sized hand from my shoulder to my palm, where I was still holding the cylinder seal, twisted my thumb with a finger the size of a bratwurst, and snatched up the little brass tube.

He lumbered in four huge steps carefully (it was not easy walking on top of half-buried barrels) over to the wall, pushed the cylinder seal into a decoration, twisted it, and opened a secret panel, a different one from the one Qall and I had entered by.

Kaqqudu Nakasu bowed slightly from the waist, which narrowed his mouth into a sardonic line thinner than a leather belt, raised one collarbone in much the same way Spock would raise an eyebrow, and pointed toward the opening with his ungainly arm. He raised his arm high enough that I saw a small hole just below his armpit, which I realized must be his ear.

He snorted something in whale-noise at me. The secret panel through which Qall had scampered away was closed, and I could not open it without the cylinder seal, and I could not get that without wrestling the monster.

I stepped into the narrow opening, but hesitated on the threshold, and looked back.

There were two normal, undisguised doors into this jail chamber, one of which was hanging wide open.

I looked one last time at the Abarimon, and spoke to him. But it does not matter what I said, because he did not understand me, and was not listening anyway.

Nakasu slid the panel shut, and it was like seeing a coffin lid close.

5. Walking Blind

It took us hours to climb the stairs. You would think going down flights of stairs, even if it were a distance thrice that of the Empire State Building from observation deck to subbasement, could not take so long? Well, try walking in the dark.

Kaqqudu Nakasu the Blemmyae could see just fine, with his eyes bigger than softballs and glittering like a cat’s, but when I groped around for one of those magic lampwood sticks to light up, he slapped it roughly from my hand, and hooted at me in dolphin-snort.

If he spoke French or Spanish or some other language where your tone goes up at the end to indicate a question, or gets loud to indicate an exclamation point, then maybe I would have been able to tell from his tone of voice what he meant. As it was, I could hear the creak of his rhino-like hide as he made pantomime gestures toward me in the darkness, I did my best to convey to him by means of gestures that I could not see what he was doing.

He put his huge meaty hand over the lower half of my face at one point, and made a hiccupping noise. Was a hiccup from him the same as a shush or a hiss? Or was it something else?

Sometimes we would stop, as if there was some sort of stop sign here that only he saw. We would wait, sometimes fifteen minutes (one rosary) sometimes an hour (four). I am telling you, if you do not count the time when you are trapped in the dark with no noise with a man-eating Blemmyae who smells a bit like elephant, you are going to go crazy. Crazier. Okay, I admit, it probably does not happen very often, but just in case, take a Braille wristwatch along.

So we were sneaking. I got the concept.

What we were hiding from, that I cannot tell you. Maybe there were invisible radar beams or motion sensors sweeping through the staircase like searchlights, which he could sense and I could not.

Or maybe he just had a weird, headless-monster sort of sense of humor.

But he was as good as his non-word. Eventually, he slid open a panel, allowing a blinding sliver of light to enter.

6. The Doors of the South Southwest

I blinked, and saw a corridor decorated in dazzling gold and paved with blocks of onyx, and two man-headed bulls with eagle wings and scorpion tails loomed at the far end, statues taller than three-story buildings.

Beneath the winged bulls, in a double line facing each other, were man-sized eagle-headed statues cast of gold and black, each holding a realistic-looking pike.

Between them was a golden door two stories tall, inscribed with an eighteen-pointed star and surrounded by seven rings gem-encrusted in seven different hues: pearl and emerald and silver-white diamond, ruby bright as sunrise, purple amethyst, blue sapphire, and outermost, black onyx.

Above the door was a circular window above a balcony overhanging the lintel. Whatever was beyond was brightly lit with fluttering yellow light, and I could see onyx columns upholding a vast blazing vault of lampwood that shone like the sun behind clouds, but no noise came through the oriel window.

Now, I should mention that being cooped up in a narrow staircase for an hour or three with an oversized hippo-legged man-eating monster is no fun, especially if he has bad breath coming from a mouth the size of a radiator grill on a small foreign car, not to mention a weird smell to his skin, a mixture of hay and dried blood. And in the dark, smells smell stronger. So I really wanted to get away from him, and his armpits, which were just above my nose, height-wise.

Also, I wanted my cylinder seal back. Knack had of course used it to open the panel, and it was going to protrude from the other side.

I reached around the panel and took the seal in my hand. Knack grabbed me by the shoulder, and started to yank me backward.

I must have not filled my union-mandated daily quota of total stupidity, because instead of letting the hometown guy with super acute eyeballs the size of softballs drag me back to safety, I looked around with my eyeballs the size of grapes, and, seeing nothing, jerked myself forward, saying loudly, “Whatsamatter, stinky? No one’s around here.”

I jerked myself forcefully enough to pull my shoulder out of his surprised fingers, and did a pratfall on the slick gold of the marble floor, and the three-armed flail hit a metal floorpanel with a noise like a church bell bouncing across the deck of an aircraft carrier. While a jet was taking off.

And all the eagle-headed statues turned their heads in unison in a metallic rustle of coif mail and stared at me.

I suddenly realized that these were not statues at all. They were men in armor. Fighting men. And there were a lot of them.

Chapter Twenty: The Nine-Star-Aligned Chamber

1. Eagles and Peacock

From my location on the floor, looking up at the moving statues that turned out to be not statues at all, but soldiers armed with pike and harquebus, I got a long and lingering look at their get-up. Each wore a winged salet with a bevor shaped like an eagle beak, golden shoulderboards elongated and enameled and carved like feathers, a scaled cuirass inset with opals and dark starbursts, and gold- and black- and silver-encrusted gauntlets, and spaulders, vambraces and pauldrons, tassets and skirt, cuisses, poleyns, greaves, and sabatons, each piece fretted with a border of black admantium or shining copper or other living metals. (And if you don’t know what a salet or bevor is, you don’t spend enough time at Renaissance Faires or with the SCA.)

Nakasu groaned a belly groan of disgust and started to slide the secret panel shut. To my great delight and surprise, he was on this side of it. He had not run.

One of the eagle-masked soldiers shouted, “Officer of the Watch!”

A man in armor like theirs, but more elaborate, with the head of a peacock for his mask and the most enormous half-circular headdress enameled in the pattern of colored feathers reaching from shoulder to shoulder like a rainbow of bad taste, came strolling very slowly into view from behind a pillar. “What is it, Decurion? The next disturbance scheduled is for the thirteenth hour, when the Panotii will arrive because of the calling … what’s this?”

The eagle-masked sergeant said, “Unauthorized and unexpected use of a desecrated passage, sir!”

Peacock mask nodded in a rustle of metallic feathers, and the soldier barked out an order. Neatly as a clockwork mechanism, soldiers in their outrageously overdecorated gold armor wheeled right and left and formed a double line blocking the enormous golden door with its eighteen-pointed star.

I was sitting on my buttocks. Marble is both hard and slippery. “I was sent here by Sergeant Sakrumash to deliver this artifact of power to Lord Ersu. I bear his seal to show I come in his name. Here is his seal!” I held up the little cylinder that was still in my fingers.

All the men laughed. I don’t know what part of the fib they thought was unbelievable, but it was something as painfully obvious to them as butt ache.

Eagle mask shouted, “Acolyte! Secure that portal!”

I did not see which one of them was the acolyte, but someone must have done some hoodoo, because there was a soft thud from behind, and I glanced back and saw that clamps made of the black living metal had folded out of the walls and gripped the secret panel on four sides. One clamp was covering the spot where the cylinder seal was supposed to go.

That did not look good.

Peacock mask said to me, “Oho! So the Crown sends outlandish clowns down Star stairs fated not to be cleansed of pollution until three decades hence? Surely you concocted a more feasible tale?”

“Pizza delivery!” I shouted. “Who ordered the butt-whoop special, extra cheese?”

Peacock mask drew back, “What?”

“Landshark!” I shouted.

Nakasu walked up next to me, picked me up (which he could do without bending over, since his arms hung apelike past his knees) set me on my feet.

I started to draw the curved shortsword I had looted from Sergeant Crowmeat, but Nakasu grunted and handed me the flail. He pointed to two of the ruby rings on the hilt, hooted at me softly, made a gesture with his hand, pantomiming a half-turn on one, a full turn on the other.

I could not open the pouch one-handed, so I stuck the cylinder seal between my lips like a cigar butt and started to twist the flail hilt rings as instructed, but Nakasu made a shushing gesture with his huge, meaty hand, one of those calm down — wait for it sort of hand-motions.

He took a large step away from me. I nodded (a gesture that made him hunch his shoulders in amusement) because I understood. Nakasu was showing me how to open the twilight leak, an effect poisonous to everyone but me.

Without a hand free, I spat the cylinder seal into the cheek of the hood I wore, and then bucked my head like a horse to knock the hood backward. I felt the heavy metal slug of the seal fall down into the pointy part of the hood hanging halfway down my spine. I was pretty sure it would not fall out of that impromptu pocket.

Peacock mask sighed a sigh of exasperation, turned to his men, and barked out: “Unexpected event. Bugler, sound quarantine. Scorpios, fall out and secure the main doors; Virgos, fall out and secure the stairwells and waystations for the quadrant.”

Two squads of a dozen men each trotted past us and went their way. I nodded and waved genially while they double-timed it past me. Nakasu stood glowering, arms folded across his face, eyes above his elbows and haughty sneer below.

I should explain that the corridor here was laid out like a giant letter Y. The secret door was at the fork, and the giant doors at the stem. Two lesser doors, which were brass inset with lustrous blue lapis lazuli in shapes of rain clouds and sea waves, were set at the end of either arm, leading to further spaces beyond. These brass doors were only a story-and-a-half tall.

One squad of eagle-masked soldiers went down a huge gold-decorated corridor to the right, and the other went down a huge gold-decorated corridor to the left. They passed through the smaller brass doors. The echoes of their receding footfalls diminished.

Peacock mask turned toward us and raised a hand. “You there! Unexpected and disorderly! Give me use-name, house, your birthdate and hour!”

I said, “I’m a Yankee Doodle Dandy.”

“What?”

“A Yankee Doodle! Do or Die! I’m a real live nephew of my Uncle Sam, born on the Fourth of July!”

“Silence, lunatic! And what of you, Blemmyae? Your date and hour?”

Nakasu cracked his knuckles, and spat the most impressive glob of spit I have ever seen—an Olympic gold medal wad of spit, a pint at least—onto the floor.

Peacock mask said, “I don’t see a slavemark on either of you! Come now. You are freeborn! We all serve the Tower. You are caught in a mire; thrashing about will only suck you deeper.”

I counted. There were twelve men left. I felt a strange feeling began to swell in me and I started to grin.

You see, I could be dismembered, even decapitated, but I could not be killed. And Nakasu was an honest-to-Saint-George monster. I was beginning to think these dudes did not know who they were up against, and that maybe we stood a chance.

Peacock said, “Tell me your birth signs, loyal subjects of the Dark Tower! Putting fate back on course is not what you’ve heard in the public house tales! No pain is involved, no punishment. We are not going to kill you.”

There was enough of a suppressed snort from enough men in masks at this announcement that I knew it was false, and knew that the soldiers did not give a darn if I knew. It was not a pleasant feeling.

Nakasu grunted. The sardonic look on his chest was visible from across the room: he did not believe the officer.

I said to Nakasu in a soft voice, “I know you cannot understand me, but you understood what he just said. We cannot surrender and there is nowhere to run. So, you in the mood for a fight? I think we can take ’em!”

Maybe he understood my tone of voice, maybe not. Nakasu took me by the shoulder, and pointed at the smaller brass door, the one decorated with rainclouds and seawaves, to the left. Then he turned to the right and began lumbering away.

I was puzzled. He was not moving fast enough to be running, and anyway there were troops ahead of him beyond those doors. Nonetheless, I decided to trust him, and walked away from him and over to the story-and-a-half-tall door.

The twelve soldiers stood still as statues. Their expressions were hidden by their fanciful faceplates. They just watched us walking away. Maybe they were waiting to see what we would do. Maybe they were waiting for orders. I was waiting for both, I guess.

Peacock mask spoke in a cajoling, hearty voice: “You’ve had your fun while your star blinked, and you got away from your horoscope for a while, eh? But that’s done, and your horoscope is back, and the stars will guide your every footstep from now on.”

When I got to the door I suddenly realized why I was here. I could not see Nakasu from this position, but I heard the groan of hinges and the clang of metal. So I found the door ring, and pulled the heavy leaves to. There was a bar on this side which lowered into place when I turned a crank shaped like a flower. It was not made of living metal, and, of course, the door was meant to be barred from this side, for defense of the vast gold door inscribed with the eighteen-pointed star behind me. When my bar fell into place, it made the same clang as I had just heard down the other branch of the corridor.

Peacock mask was saying in a louder, harder voice: “Don’t get any crazy ideas, and don’t make it worse…”

I turned around and started walking toward him. Nakasu, coming from the other corridor, fell into step next to me, matching his longer strides to mine, so that we approached at the same speed.

Peacock mask would not shut up. He just kept talking, “… and I can have a word with the Inflictors to see your scourging will only leave you with lashmarks you can brag about to your doxies and ale-mates. My offer is generous!”

I felt my cheeks pull back with the kind of a smile you only smile when you start to get really mad.

“I am so going to kick your sorry butt.” I announced loudly.

Peacock mask tilted his head. “Decurion. What is that, Frisnian? English?”

One of the men in the rear said, “Technomancer world, sir! Look out for his jetpack and explodey-boom weapons!”

Nakasu tapped my shoulder and pointed at the flail, and pantomimed a screw-unscrew gesture.

I twisted at the ruby rings along the bottom of the staff, but nothing happened. Nakasu tore the flail from my grasp, made a quick adjustment, giving the lowest ring a half-turn, and the one above that a full turn. Darkness began to seep from the flail, and a shimmer like you see above a pavement on a hot day. He handed it back to me with a condescending grin all along his belly.

Peacock mask barked, “Winter constellations rear! Summer, fore! Death-lanterns ready!”

The men formed a musket line, rear rank resting their weapons on hooks in their pikes meant for this, the front rank kneeling, pikes tilted toward us. The rear brought out brass Jules Verne rayguns that looked very different from the steam-powered hot nail gun I had been shot with earlier. These were shorter, only about a forearm long, and looked like brass telescopes. The breech held a gem. At the command, the gems all lit up with blinding, phosphorescent light.

Nakasu picked up the pace, and was jogging. This was like seeing an elephant jog. I swear the floor trembled. I sidled a little to the left so I would not brain him (or, in his case, shoulder him) when I started swinging the flail. The three golden arms were whirling like bicycle spokes around my head, a glittering orbit. A dark cloud began to spread from me.

“Fire!”

By that point, the cloud was pretty dark, and spread from wall to wall. The energy beams looked as bright and dangerous as lightning bolts until they entered the cloud. The lantern stuff, when it touched the cloud, seemed to thicken and slow in a freakish fashion, and curve and drip and drop to the floor in shining pools that shrank. The darkness was just eating it.

Peacock mask shouted, “Pikes! Light ’em up!”

The men flourished their pole-arms, and the wooden shafts began to shine with an eye-searing blue-white light, a light that drove back the twilight. My circle of smoke shrank suddenly.

Peacock mask shouted, “La! We might as well get some fun out of an unexpected event. How’s it feel to fight not knowing the result, eh? Like being a kid again! One of you might win a gold medallion this day, or a golden girl!”

One voice said, “B-but — we don’t know what will — !”

The fear in his voice made me start laughing and laughing like a maniac. Nervous laughter, I guess.

Nakasu roared like a lion and charged. I sprinted, bellowing.

And they panicked, two of them throwing down their pikes.

Ugly, crazy laughter was bursting out of me. I was immortal and Nakasu was a man-eating monster as big as a hippo. And there were only ten of them, because two had broken ranks and were fleeing!

We plowed into the line, and it broke, so five men were to our right, and five to our left. Victory seemed near.

And then it was not so near.

Keep in mind, a line of ten pikemen, even a panicked line, is not something two abominations, even a nice abomination like me, can really hope to outnumber or outmatch. In addition to numbers, they also had reach, which means they got to hit us before we hit them. Also, they had armor, and we didn’t. In movies and stuff, whoever is more courageous and impetuous always wins, or the heroes have special powers. Well, we two abominations were special, but we were not winning.

I am pretty sure I managed to brain one of them (at least, my flail clanged loudly off his decorated helmet) before two others hooked me under my knees to throw me on my back, and a third soldier speared me through the guts, pinning me to the floor, and a fourth stepped forward with a battle cry, and swung his poleax down in a powerful overhead swing toward my favorite neck. I could not raise my flail haft to block it, because the officer in the peacock helm was standing on my arm.

Nakasu’s hide was thick enough to turn the first two spears that broke against him, but his momentum and strength were not enough to bring any of the pikemen into his grasp: three of them staved him off with broken pikestaffs while a fourth one belabored the huge target of his vast face, forcing Nakasu to cross his arms over his chest. When Nakasu roared, someone thrust a spear into his mouth.

Nakasu snapped the pikestaff in half with his monster teeth and spit the pikehead out. But he was lumbering back and puking blood. Had his tongue been cut, or was he disemboweled? I didn’t know if the wound was mortal, because I did not know where his organs were. It suddenly seemed to me as if he perhaps was not as well designed as a human being for combat. I mean, if he ever got a breastplate for armor, it would have looked like a hockey mask, and have holes in it for his eyes and stuff.

With a huge sweep of his arm, Nakasu knocked aside the guy who was trying to decapitate me, so the pikehead broke my collarbone instead, and chopped halfway through my right shoulder. I lost sensation in that arm (the one the peacock-masked officer was standing on) and my flail slipped from my grasp.

Nakasu had just saved my life! I felt a rush of such gratitude at that moment that made me ashamed of my earlier snorting at his odor.

But, no. Then I realized that, if I could not die, the strong bond of emotion people are supposed to feel when they fight shoulder to shoulder with comrades in arms would be denied to me. Why feel grateful when someone saves your life if your life cannot be lost? This being unkillable would warp my psychology into something nonhuman if I were not careful.

The officer in the peacock mask raised a pistol, a shortened version of the lantern-powered brass raygun, and sent a line of blazing fire into and through my chest. I am sure he hit my heart, because of the enormous spray of blood, but at this point I thought of my heart and lungs as my least vulnerable spots, because when you fight an immortal, you want to break his limbs and prevent him from moving.

Of course, come to think of it, since it was impossible for me to be alive at all, why could I not move a broken limb?

It was as if all my rage flooded into my numb right arm. I could dimly feel the broken ends of my collar bone grinding together, but I saw my arm flex and twist and rise up and grab the officer’s foot by its spurs, and yank him off his feet.

I tried to rise, but four or five pikemen pierced me and leaned on their pikes. I was helpless as a butterfly pinned to a board. They held me down and clubbed and chopped me over the head and chest and shoulders, and at least one leg got chopped neatly through. Note to self: being unkillable does not mean you are invulnerable.

I heard the Peacock say, “Chop the head off the abomination! I have heard they can still feel pain in their cut limbs when they are dismembered. Let’s have some fun, eh?”

Because I was flat on my back, I saw something no one else was looking at. Remember I said that there was an oriel window above the big three-story-tall golden doors? I saw a man with flowing white hair and beard step through the oriel window and onto the balcony. In his hand he was carrying a shepherd’s crook.

He looked down at me. Because he was not dressed in armor, and did not have the almond eyes and thick red lips of an Ur-man, I shouted to him for help.

His stern expression did not relax an inch, but he nodded briefly. He stepped up on the balcony rail with remarkable agility, as if drawn aloft on invisible wires.

And then he stepped on nothing.

With no pause and no hesitation, his hair and beard floating and flowing about him, the stranger’s feet left the railing. He walked out onto the emptiness as if he were walking on an invisible floor.

Gravity was just not paying attention to this guy today, I figured.

2. A Walk in the Air

Don’t think this shepherd was thin and frail because his hair was white: think of a weightlifter or boxer. When I say his beard and hair were flowing, I mean he looked like he was underwater, and his hair was like a cloud streaming back from his harsh face. Like Charlton Heston playing Moses in a Cecil B. DeMille movie, except dressed more shabbily. He was garbed in a toga or coat of camel hair, and his belt was a hank of rope. His calloused feet were bare.

He gazed down with eyes as hard and cold as outer space, and raised his crook in a gesture like that of a conductor readying the orchestra for the first thunderous opening chords of Beethoven’s Fifth. He closed his eyes as if in concentration, and thrust the crosier.

And the soldiers in their gold armor, screaming, were plucked up in midair as neatly as Dorothy’s house in Kansas, and whirled up and up, ten then twenty then thirty feet in the air. The half-score of men spun like a swirl of autumn leaves, shouting hysterically, bouncing off the walls and each other. Their pikes swirled and spun and fell through the air like straw in the wind. But there was no wind.

The effect, whatever it was, was not affecting me. Nakasu climbed heavily to his elephant-feet, and stood blinking. The flow of blood from his mouth was less, just a trickle running down his hip and thigh, and he stood with his arms akimbo, wiping the corner of his mouth. His pectoral muscle flexed as he squinted, but whether he was annoyed or in pain or amazed at our sudden rescue, I could not say.

I used my left arm to push my severed right arm back into its stump (and, no, I had not noticed when it got detached) concentrated a moment to rejoin the limbs, and then used it to point upward at the white-haired Moses wannabe. (My other limbs and organs were not all together at this point. I looked like the Scarecrow of Oz after his battle with flying monkeys.) Nakasu had to lean back to look up, like the Tim Burton version of Batman—one disadvantage of having no head, I suppose.

The shepherd standing in midair spoke like Moses, too. His was a booming voice, ringing with authority, that filled the corridor and echoed off the far wall. It sounded like Hebrew, a language I had studied, but I did not have my lexicon with me.

He was evidently addressing the captain in the peacock-mask helm, who answered with a stream of abuse and insult I understood, but I won’t bother to repeat here. Evidently swearwords in every aeon of the multiverse are pretty much the same: excretion, fornication, blasphemy, you get the picture.

The shepherd guy gestured again with his crook, and the spinning stopped, and the men simply hung in midair, puppets on unseen threads.

The captain gained control of himself. Even though his voice shook with terror, his words were words of defiance, “The Dark Tower has been father and mother to me, and the stars have granted me shelter, garb, viand and wine, and name and rank and power: I will not break faith, but die obedient to her laws. Which of you, my men, will call upon this outlandish abomination to save his life? Who here will betray?”

The shepherd spoke again. It was a few syllables: harsh, cold, and final. It was a death sentence. I could have told that from the tone of voice even without recognizing any words.

One of the men answered, “We will fall: the Dark Tower will forever stand.”

The men all roared their agreement. It made me sick to my stomach, since they were cheering for their own deaths, but I cannot fault them their loyalty. It was magnificent, in a way.

The captain gave his men the order to fire. The shepherd did not give them the chance to obey. A falling body falls really rapidly. You always think that if someone were falling off a cliff or through a trapdoor in a gallows, and you were standing right next to him, you could put out your hand fast enough to save him, but you’d be wrong. It is too quick.

The soldiers had been hanging near the ceiling, which was forty feet off the deck or higher. An Olympic platform dive is thirty-three feet. So the ten soldiers were ten feet or more higher than that, and they fell onto the marble floor rather than into water.

They made quite a noise when they hit, but it was more of a crunching splatter than a splash. I'd seen a lot of horrible things by then, but that was certainly up there.

Then the shepherd guy walked down from midair as if he was walking down an invisible flight of stairs.

He reached the floor and stood among the mess and splatter of broken bodies and shattered armor. A voice cried out, followed by a second one. “Kill us!” and “Don’t let the Masters know!” and I heard one of them say something about his wife and children.

The shepherd stooped.

I saw the sapara I’d taken from Sergeant Crowmeat resting on the bloody floor. I recognized it because it was not covered in ornate fretwork. It must have fallen out of my scabbard during the brawl. The shepherd picked the weapon up off the floor and started moving among the broken bodies.

Anyone who was still moving or groaning or begging, the white haired man would kneel next to him, and chop at his neck in one swift stroke. Remember the blade was shaped like a cleaver, short and heavy, with the inner curve being the business edge. He held the sword like it was a hatchet, and struck with the same finesse you might see a boy who had not achieved his Tote and Chip badge would use to hew firewood. This man was not a soldier, but he was not letting that stop him. He had the same look on his face I often saw on my father. I wondered what grim and regrettable business Dad did.

By the time he was done, his sword arm was red up to the elbow, and the crooked brass sword was dripping, leaving a little trail of red drops behind him on the marble floor. He came walking back toward Nakasu and me, this time with his feet on the floor. He had tucked his beard under his coat so that there were not so many stains on it.

3. When in Rome

I should have stopped him. I wish I had. I could have. He was an old man.

I thought about it at the time, but, first, the enemy had not surrendered when asked; second, I had no way to take prisoners or give them medical care; third, I wanted them to die while begging and sobbing, the bastards, even though it made me sick to my stomach to hear the meat-chopping noises, and I wanted to be tough enough to enjoy the sight, even though I was not; fourth, I did not know how to talk to the guy; fifth, it wasn’t my world. Maybe this was the way things were done here.

That was what I thought at the time. You see, I thought the rules of decency and honor were not necessarily the same in every situation, in all worlds, in every aeon.

I did not think it for sure. I just thought maybe.

And that maybe was enough to stop me.

I had seen one too many Star Trek shows where morons from Star Fleet are supposed to respect the customs of all the backward savages of space, I had read too many sci-fi stories about how it is hunky-dory for Martians to practice cannibalism, and every hero for courtesy’s sake is supposed to abide by whatever rules the locals of the land he happens to be passing through happen to pass on to him, especially if the locals have fun rules like temple prostitution and wife-swapping.

Sure, I sort of knew that the script writers oh-so-conveniently never let Star Fleet officers come across Hindus burning widows or Phoenicians sacrificing maidens or Nigerians performing ritual female genital mutilation on little girls without anesthesia. And if the local custom required our snarky sci-fi hero to pleasure the wife of his Eskimo host, she was always willing, young, buxom, disease-free, and never smelled of rancid whale blubber. So in the front of my mind, I knew the morals of these little Aesop fables were bogus as a three-dollar bill.

You think something as frivolous as a TV show or a cartoon or a science fiction paperback doesn’t affect your thinking? It does. You just don’t notice. In the back of your mind, in that half-asleep corner where your imagination stows all the things you heard on television which only television people believe, there will be no images of any show named Star Civilization vividly showing you that barbarism is barbaric.

All you will find in the back of your mind is a little voice of scorn, saying maybe you are wrong to be too sure, wrong to judge, wrong to think, wrong to act.

And during your time of testing, during the one and only time you might need to have absolute faith in your ability to know the difference between right and wrong, the time when you only have a few moments to make up your mind, that maybe will be in your mind. And maybe you’ll freeze up.

I froze up.

Oh, and my sixth reason was this: I was too scared of the guy, and, yes, too impressed, to leap up and wrestle the cruel bright blade out of his red-dripping hand, as he leaned on his shepherd’s staff in the other. I thought he was cool, a real badass.

And, seven: He had just pulled the soldiers off me who were chopping me up. I was grateful.

And, eight: what if I annoyed him and he just flung me out the window using the same antigravity he had used on a squad of men? I might not die, but I sure was not going to find Penny or save anyone.

And, nine: I was still pulling myself back one piece at a time into myself. What was I supposed to do? Take my severed foot and wing it through the air at him like a boomerang?

The fact that I heard one or two actually asking him to do it rather than not to do it did not cut any mustard with me one way or the other. Helping someone commit suicide was still murder. I think I knew why the ones who begged for death were begging, though, but I was not sure.

4. Back Together

I had pulled myself back together, pressing my leg stump against my severed limb until it sort of schlorpfed back into one piece. There was not even a scar. My fingers were all broken where they had been smashed under a metal boot, but I found I could simply make a fist and straighten it, and there was a popping, cracking noise as all the little delicate bones in my hand slipped back into place.

My friend Foster had been in a finger cast for months back when he was younger, and had fallen out of a tree and broken a finger and sprained a wrist. Months. He had been really bitter about it, too, because we had been doing some project involving painting sets for the school play, and he fancied himself a bit of an artist, and now he could not hold a brush. He could not hold a bow, and it was not until next summer that he got his archery merit badge (which he got easily, since he was the best shot in the troop, or in the Jamboree). And here I was with a hand that had been mashed to bits, and I just shook it off.

The golden flail was not far, and I grabbed it, and used it as a walking stick to pull myself to my feet. My reconnected leg was tingling with pins and needles, as if I had slept on it wrong. Long John Silver and Captain Ahab had to go through life hopping on one foot, not to mention Cap’n Bill from Oz. I almost felt guilty for my good luck. Just experimentally, I reached my hand toward the pool of blood, my blood, that I was standing in, and I cleared my mind and concentrated.

The red liquid rippled, and then moved, and then swarmed up my legs like a little waterfall going in reverse. Of course, I could not absorb it through my pores, and I did not want to take the stuff into my mouth or in through (ew!) any other orifice, and I was not in the mood to find something to cut myself with to make an opening. So for the moment, I just let this huge bloodstain cling to me.

I looked at Nakasu. “I want a less gross superpower, OK?”

He had no idea what I was saying, so he gestured toward the Moses guy and snorted something through the blowhole between his shoulders.

The shepherd strode to us, and stood. There was something majestic in the way he walked, and something totally creepy in the way he just let his arm and short sword drip next to him. He regarded us with a gaze stern and dignified, and spoke a few words in his language.

I turned to Nakasu, saying, “You know, I don’t understand him or you, so any of us could be saying anything. My first question is about eating people. Is it true we taste like pork?”

Nakasu said something to me with his mouth, his voice like a rumble of rocks. So I assume he was speaking of something significant. The white-beard turned toward me, and spoke rapidly in Hebrew, too quickly for me to catch.

He pointed at my groin and then pointed at my face. I was not sure what that meant, but the tone of voice made it sound like a question.

I said, “I bet you are saying to yourself about now, gee, I sure wish I had left some of those soldiers alive, because none of us savvy each other’s lingo, right?”

I moved over to the main doors, but a yank on the big rings showed that they were locked from the inside.

I banged on the doors. They were so thick that the noise was like pounding a wall.

“Say, buddy, could you float back over inside here, and open these doors?”

I turned back toward Whitebeard. I am not sure what they pantomimed to each other while my back was turned, but it must have been a dirty gesture, because Nakasu had picked up a broken pikestaff. Moses, his hair once more a cloud and his camel-hair robe flapping weightlessly about him, was standing in midair, flourishing his bloody sapara-sword, with his other hand upraised, muscles standing out in his arm, the shepherd’s staff in his hand pointed upward as if he were about to shut off the flow of gravity again.

They were facing each other, about to commit some sort of mayhem, so I decided to step between them, holding my arms up. I kept speaking in a soothing tone of voice.

“I am hoping this is the right place to find records to find where they are keeping the girl who is not my girlfriend. I really need her. Need to save her, I mean.” I'm afraid I may have rambled on a bit more after that, but keep in mind that I was drunk on the intoxicating combination of pain and victory.

The Moses guy turned his icy gaze toward me. “Abanshaddi …?”

I stared at him, speechless. I sound smarter that way.

Abby’s voice came from behind the door. “He says he must save his mistress, the girl who is not his friend, whom he admires for her fame. He says she has really large udders, large as watermelons, like two zeppelins in a race crossing the finish line as a tie. He smote his friend on the mouth for saying so, but in his heart he agreed. He also says he is glad I am not here to listen to him.”

Whatever I said, it sounded a lot worse translated into Ur. Nakasu crossed his arms over his mouth, suppressing a laugh, and the white-bearded man tried not to smile, which made the crags of his face looked microscopically less harsh and forbidding.

I sighed, wishing the old man would throw me out the window right about then, and a hole would open up in the ground so I could fall into that mass of Uncreation that was supposed to be eating away at the core of this planet. But I said: “Um … hold it. I know who you are. You’re Master Sooey.”

He raised an eyebrow.

I slowly said to him. “Sooey ewe so you use sushi boo ray-you —did I get it right?” and pointed at him.

He nodded but corrected my barbaric pronunciation. “Re’u. Sua’u-su’u-ussushibu-re’u.”

Of course I should have recognized him right away. I mean, how many people can there be who have the power of levitation? It was Master Ossifrage.

Then he said in Hebrew, clearly and slowly enough that I could catch the words: “In the tongue, I am called Shepherd-of-Heaven Dove Ossifrage.” Raboni Shamayim Yonah Perec.

You can see how easy it is to lose the nuances of things like names even with magical language translation: Sky and heaven are two different words for the same thing in English, master and shepherd and pastor are the same in Hebrew, pigeon and dove and bird were the same word in the Ursprache.

I turned to Nakasu. “Knack, this is Pastor Jonah Breakbone. Call him Ossifrage. He is a friend of the child who saved me. She is behind the door. Her name is Abanshaddi, which means Mountain Rock.”

Ussushibu or Ossifrage or Jonah Perec or whatever-his-name said, “Evenhar.” (Which I think is a pretty sweet sounding. That was Abby’s name in Hebrew.)

I said, “Like Aragorn of the Rangers of the North, she has many names, including She-Monkey and Trust-in-Hope. Pastor Jonah, this is my friendly man-eating monstrosity Nakasu. I don’t remember his first name, but it sounds like Cockle-doodle-do without the doodle.”

“Khaqqudu Nakasu,” the Blemmyae spoke the words with his lower, shark-toothed belly mouth and pointed between his eyes with his thumb. “Irtuamarillut.” And because this last was in the Ur Language, we all understood the word: the Host of Chest-eyed Folk.

I pounded on the door. “Abby, can you unlock this from your side? Or ask Pastor Ossifrage to waft us up to the balcony?”

Wafting turned out to be easier than unlocking. The sensation of falling up is just like the sensation of falling down, except, you know, it looks like someone flipped the upside down for the rightside up.

Boy, I could have used this guy on the rock-climbing fight with the dog-headed were-poodles. In through the transom window we flew, and landed as lightly as the down of a thistle.

“Why can't I have a Way Cool power like that?” I said aloud to no one in particular. I concentrated on forcing my skin cells to absorb the bloodstains, and when I did that, it made those patches of skin itch abominably. Gross.

5. Archive of the Conniving Stars

Inside, the chamber was lit with wooden chandeliers made of fragrant, polished wood. They held no candles. Instead the glowing sticks and beams were woven into shapes larger than wagon wheels, and more intricate than Celtic crosses. Hanging just above them from the rafters, golden shields like mirrors cast their light down onto the shelves of black living metal. High above were tall, narrow windows without glass that opened upon a bitterly cold realm of stars, with silver clouds far underfoot. All had shutters of black metal, but there was no obvious mechanism to close them.

The tablets themselves were made of copper living metal, and there were dozens and dozens in each rack, and dozens of racks. I had already described how the copper tablet leaves of the book the Blemmyae had consulted were like Venetian blinds. Now that I saw them closely, I could tell each tablet was perhaps fifty or a hundred paper-thin sheets of metal foil, impressed into some sort of moving metal matrix which allowed each page’s letters to flip to the surface one line at a time.

Between the shelves were jars of carved solid diamond filled with wine or water, square dark statues of winged beings, phoenixes and winged fishes and cloud-dragons and other chimerae standing before the library shelves and desks. There were also two dead bodies that I saw, heads shattered like raw eggs dropped on a sidewalk, killed as dead as Aeschylus. By their armor, I assumed they were the pair who had fled from the fight. How they got inside this hall without opening the main doors I don’t know. There must have been a side door or servant’s entrance. They evidently ran into the flying shepherd. They had their swords in their hands, so I assume they died in a fair fight. Nakasu licked his stomach with a tongue the size of an anaconda, and stepped over toward the fresh meat.

There was a girl standing there whose height and skinny shape I recognized, even though her face was strange to me. She had her copper sickle and chain in-hand. She was no longer dressed in her ninja poncho, but had on some dull dress with a border of floral frills, and a hairpiece of frills, which I assumed was some sort of cleaning maid’s outfit. It was two sizes too big for her, and the belt went twice around her boyish waist. Probably something she had picked up, the better to sneak around in.

Her face was triangular, with high cheeks and a pointy chin, full lips and very large eyes. Her skin was dusky olive, and her eyebrows and lashes very dark, and her eyes sparkled with precocious intelligence.

If you saw her on Earth, you would think she was Spanish. Her ears looked big and fragile and like they were sticking out too far from her head, perhaps because her jet-black hair was drawn back so tight.

Actually, you’d think she was a Spanish queen, since her spine was so straight and her gaze so regal. Apparently being raised by Lord Ersu had never beaten her early years out of her. She had the face of one born to command.

I was a little shocked. She was younger than I thought. I revised my estimate downward from fourteen to twelve or so. At first I wondered how the people she worked for, the one she called the Big Man, could bear to send her into danger. But she had been trained since age seven to be an assassin, and not by them, so maybe the danger was within what she could bear. In my heart, I fervidly prayed Lord Ersu to be damned and sent alive to hell.

“Abby, do me a favor,” I said. “And tell Knack the Headless wonder not to munch on the dead bodies. They deserve a Christian burial, or whatever you people do here. Throw people out of upper airlocks and watch them burn up in re-entry heat, was that it?”

She asked Nakasu not to eat the dead people, and he answered with a short blat of noise from his blowhole. “He says it will cover the evidence. And you are not to command him, as he is your elder in years.”

I heaved a loud sigh, and turned toward Pastor Ossifrage. “You are the one here who looks like Moses. Use your Old Testament Fu on him.”

He must have guessed the gist of my comment, because he looked surprised, and said something in Hebrew too rapidly for me to catch.

Abby said, “Ussushibu asks why you have compassion on the empty bodies of the enemy once fallen. They are uncircumcised. Their breath is gone from them.”

I tried to think of something this Bronze Age floaty man would understand. “Tell him my people say all men are made in the image of the One God, and are stamped with his likeness like a — it is like a coin with the king's face on it. You would not spit on the coin, even if it were a tarnished coin, because that is like spitting on the king. I mean, come on, it is not just because my people are sentimental that we show respect to enemies.”

Ossifrage snapped his fingers, and pointed at me, his face lighting up. “Ah! Emanot-adon par! Angli? English?”

Abby said, “He wants to know—”

To him, I said, “Emanot-adon, ken.” And bowed. To her I said, “I caught the gist. He asks if I am a gentleman of the art, by which I assume he means I am a technomancer? Tell him I am from that world. Has he met others from my world? Who does he know?” (And secretly, I was glad to meet at least one person to whom we Earthmen were famous for something other than Planned Parenthood.)

But Ossifrage did not wait, but strode over to Nakasu, stepping between the headless monster and the headless corpses, arms flung out and face stern, denying the monster a lunch of raw human.

Sure, I was interested in who would win a throw down between Moses Junior and Headless Herman Munster, and sure, I really did not want them to fight and bring the guards or make a ripple in fate the Astrologers could have had retroactively detected last week (or however that works—don’t ask me!) but at the risk of sounding obsessed or something, I was more worried about Penny, and torture hooks, and whatnot.

So I said to Abby, “Have you looked up where Penny is being kept?”

“The enchantress who enslaves you?”

“She is not an enchantress and she did not enslave me, but yeah, her.”

“The one with the breasts like melons?”

“I like her personality as well, or I will, once I get to know her. Until that time, be sure to tell her how shallow and ignoble my motives are once I rescue her from this hellpit you call a world. So where is she? What level? How do we get there?”

“We did not know where to look.”

“Try looking under D for Dreadful.”

“I don’t know that code.” Abby meant she did not know the Latin alphabet. “Do you know her nativity?”

“Sure. What obsessed fanboy does not know a famous girl’s birthday? September 13th. She’s a Virgo. Born the same day as my friend Foster Hidden. What are the odds?”

“Three years out of four, the odds are one in three hundred sixty-five; during Leap Year, one in three hundred sixty-six.” She craned her head and walked between the black shelves and copper tablets, looking at the statues and star-patterns inscribed on every row.

“I assume everything here is by date, is that it?” I said.

“By dominance, by year and by house. How else?”

“Can you find the file on me?”

“I did. The winged monster found it for me.” Abby pointed to where a copper tablet lay on a reading desk. The black iron locks at the top had been burnt away so the metal cover could be opened.

I stepped over to the reading desk and looked at the indecipherable angular cuneiform.

“What did it say?” I called over my shoulder to Abby.

She was wandering carefully between the shelves, now craning back her head, now stooping to look at a brass tag affixed to a shelf end. Her tone was somewhat absent-minded. “You would endure torture for seventy-three days, but after that, you'd break the ward of song and shadow circling your world of Albion, and proceed to defile the seven-ringed Grail of Jamshyd from the aeon of Sabtechadur. After which you would aid the Great Beast of the aeon of Sasan to overcome the Golden City, which is the source of all the opposition to the Dark Tower. You are to be a great champion of the Dark.”

It was pretty much what Enmeduranki had told me. No wonder she had been unwilling to release me at first. “But it does not say where I will be taken when they drag me to watch Penny get, uh, you know?”

“It did not say.”

“Any other details about what I do today?”

“You fight a battle in the thirteenth hour against deformed abominations who have lost the glory of their human shape.” (Those who lost the glory of their man-shape was one word: Zimuhalaqabratizbim. I wondered how often it happened that it would have its own word.) “I do not recall which host. One of the outland tribes used for reconnaissance or guards.”

“Good. Maybe I will be killing whoever is guarding Penny. Does it say I do that?”

“No. Later, just after Mercury-rise, in the Immensity of the Abscission of Venus, you throw to his death one of the Kasugallillut whom you said you would spare.”

“I said I would what? That does not sound like me. Are you sure you read that part right?”

“The passage was marked as a conditional inevitability, since the prior events are occluded.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means the act of knowing your future affects your future, in this case bringing about what you seek to avoid.”

“In that case, don’t tell me any more. Can he find the horoscope for Penny? Where is he now?”

“He who?”

“Your winged monster. The one who found my horoscope.”

“The winged monster is a she. We quarreled. She departed, cautioning me not to call her again before dawn.”

“This tablet — does it say where they put my sword?” I was talking more from nerves than anything else. I kept wondering what would happen if I knew where she was — how was I going to get Penny out of jail and out of this aeon?

“You mean the sword you do not know which sex it is?” Abby said impatiently. “That one?”

“Yes, there are people I want to chop in half while rescuing the buxom maiden, and this flail is just not as deadly as what I am used to. I think I only brained one guy in that last fight, and I did not even cleave his fancy-schmancy helmet.”

She did not draw her eyes down from the inspection of the star-signs inscribed on the upper parts of the shelves, but she kept talking as she walked. “There was a note in your tablet that said a separate horoscope was drawn up for the sword found on you. It did not say more.”

“If your magicians are as cautious about writing every last thing down as you told me before, there must be a record or a tracking number or something in my file!”

“What is the sword’s fate?” she asked.

“Fate?”

“Surely you inquired before you came to it? You are carrying a sword around blind-fated, are you? What is it destined to do?”

“Destined? I don’t know that. How does someone know that?”

“By the name and nativity.”

“The name is Shirabyoshi, which means White Rhythm …”

“I know what it means. I know what all words mean.”

“How supercalifragilisticexpialidocious of you! Shirabyoshi is a type of courtly song of the Heian period performed by courtesans dressed in white samurai robes, so does that make the sword a girl?”

“Not necessarily. What about the nativity, do you know that?”

“1913 A.D.” I said proudly. I mean, how many people know the year their sword was made? How many people even have a sword, these days, much less a way cool Japanese antique?

She said she did not know our calendar, and asked me how many years ago 1913 was. And when I told her, she said, “And what of the month and day and hour?”

“Um.”

“It would be the moment the blade is plunged in the water for the last time to quench and harden the steel, not the hour of its mounting, not the hour of its naming.”

“No, I don’t know the, uh, exact birthdate of my sword to the hour.” (I did not even know my own birthdate to the hour.)

“The custom is to honor your sword with a vigil once a year, on the anniversary of the forging.” Without her mask on, Abby had a very expressive face, and she could purse her lip and raise her eyebrow like nobody’s business. She had the archest of arch looks. Maybe it was the princess in her. “You don’t know the star-sign of your very own sword, but you know it of your mistress? What kind of warrior are you?”

“She is not exactly my —” I sputtered, “Well, for that matter, I am not really a — gah! Never mind.”

“How many years ago was she born?”

“Twenty.”

“Fortunate! We will be in time to save her.”

“Wait. What? How do you know that?” Hope went off in me like a firecracker. There are times when you will grasp at anything, believe in anything.

“Virgo is governed by the thrones Spica and Porima, but Vindemiatrix, Auva and Heze are powerful potentates and principalities: The virginal mysteries protect your mistress, and so does the Moon,” Abby spoke in a matter-of-fact tone, like a twelve-year-old New Yorker answering a question about the subway system. “In September of that year, twenty years past, Jupiter, who controls the sanguine humor, was in ascending node, and Mercury, who is hermaphroditic, was in female aspect and retrograde in sextile. This requires that your mistress is detail-oriented, meticulous, reliable, clean, perhaps a bit of a perfectionist. Mercury governs scholars and magicians, lawyers, actresses, and others who live by quickness of wit and smoothness of tongue.”

I felt a headache coming on. On a planet where astrology actually works, everyone believes in it. You would think the universe itself would have done just about anything to prevent such a truly annoying possibility.

“She is witty without being wise, bookish and alone,” added Abby. “She is in exile when at home and at home when in exile, and does not keep pets.”

“You got that wrong. She owns a hobby. And she sailed around the world. At sixteen!”

“How strange. For what reason?”

“To break a world record,” I said. “For adventure and fame! She is a glory-hound.”

“One of her birth should avoid fame. She seeks no glory.”

“You are so wrong about her. Astrology is bogus.”

“I am only repeating common knowledge. A true magician would know more.”

“Bogus with a capital Bo.”

“In any case,” Abby said, “today Friday falls on the sixth day of the week, and is sacred to Venus, and ravishments by beasts are not auspicious. It would not be done today. But if you doubt me, we can read a detailed horoscope cast by a Magician of the First Dark Knowing. Because here are the records for abominations born under the Ides of Virgo.”

She flung her grapnel-and-chain and scampered like a monkey up the rack of tablets to some twenty or thirty feet above the floor.

“Say, Abby, there are ladders on wheels I could push over here to reach the higher shelf…”

Abby said, “The ladders are made of the Living Metal, and would not obey you. We cannot close the windows nor unlock the tablet racks. But the Cunning Metal gives me power over the Living Metal. Cunning Metal comes from the Taari Aeon in the Tubalite branch, where one-eyed Arimaspians battle the gryphons for living gold.”

Abby stuck the point of her copper sickle into one of the tablets. I still did not see her flip a switch or mutter an incantation or anything. The weapon blade just glowed like a neon tube, copper-red. I reminded myself to ask her how she turned stuff on and off.

The tablet was locked in place, but not only did she scald the living metal clamp holding it in place, she looped the copper wire in a bowline around the silver post opposite, and cranked on the tablet until something shattered inside the rack, and the tablet came tumbling and clattering loose, hitting the floor with a noise like a broken cash register.

I picked the thing up, and looked helplessly at the rows of little boxlike cuneiforms, all made of arrowheads and chicken tracks.

Down she scampered.

By that point, Nakasu and Pastor Ossifrage had resolved whatever macho contest one can resolve with just pantomime gestures. If Ossifrage had been dangling the Blemmyae by one ankle via power of levitation, I had missed the whole scene: the monster’s belly was not covered with blood, so either he was a neat and silent eater, or the corpses had not been desecrated.

I said to her, “Can you read the tablet?”

Abby looked excited and made a little hopping motion, looking, for once, very undignified. “Your mistress is in the East Outlandish Harem above the Fifth Cistern, near the Abscissor of Venus Cloud-Gate.”

I said, “Why is that good news?”

“That Cloud-gate of the Venereal Abscission Furlong is where livestock are unloaded, and my people draw away those who perish in transport. So East Outlandish Harem is for new arrivals: maidens’ quarters.”

“Maiden what?” I said.

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

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

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

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

I said, “What’s going on?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He grunted at Abby.

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

“What mate? I am not married.”

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

“I am not a soldier.”

“A soldier in your pretend army, then.”

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

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

Abby said, “His name is Falinn.”

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

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

Nakasu said, “Lina yeye!”

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

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

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

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

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

“Forgive me, I think it is not wise…”

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

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

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

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

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

Abby said, “You cannot die.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She said, “No. I call by calling.”

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

I blinked. “That’s it?”

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

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

“We cannot ride on her back.”

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

Chapter Twenty-One: Flying Creatures

1. A Narrow Mask

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“And this winged monster is from another world?”

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

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

It was a falcon.

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

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

Because I knew her.

2. Familiar

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The bird launched herself at me, and I panicked and threw my hands in front of my face, afraid she was going to peck out my eyes with her knifelike hammering beak. But then she merely landed on my shoulder and ducked her head into my hood.

Then with a whirl of wings, she was at the window a dozen yards away and a dozen feet overhead. There was something bright and shining in her beak. A glint of brazen metal.

“Wait!” I shouted, “You lunatic bird! Where is Penny? Why did you send Abanshaddi after me—how did you even know where I was? No, never mind that question. What the heck is going on here? Wait! Are you telling me she is really a witch after all? How did she get to our planet?? Stop!”

Wild Eyes twisted her head owl-like again to glare back down at us, a sight that made my neck want to twinge in sympathy. Again, something glaring in those eyes made me flinch and put my hand in front of my face. It was like that falcon skull was a mask, and there was someone bigger and older behind, looking out through the eyeholes.

She put down what she was carrying on the sill next to her. It was the cylinder seal.

I bellowed in outrage, and so did Nakasu. I don’t know what he said, but what I said was, “Give that back right now! Or so help me, I will pluck you like a goddam chicken and stuff you into a falcon, lettuce and tomato sandwich!”

Wild Eyes shrieked in her shrill, harsh voice: “If haply you obtain the sun-blessed sword in the Chamber of the Fated Rarities, forget not to take up the unseen bow and the ring of the river-maiden’s gold. I go to free him. The cynocephali that patrol the sides of the tower will then be upon you. If perchance you live, and the greater enemy you must fear appears not, let the Twice-Born me call once more, and shall I come, to lead you to her, that you may watch her die.”

That made me mad. I could feel my heartbeat pounding in my face, since I was flushed with anger. “I am so totally going to save her! You don’t think I can?”

The crazed white-hot falcon eyes narrowed, and the little bird hunched up her shoulders and lowered her head. “In this Dark Tower, twilight cloaked, even my deep power is naught. What, then, are you, boy?”

“I love her!”

“Aai Aaitch! Love! Thine is neither lore nor power, wit nor secret art, nor fortune in the living world, nor name among the lordly dead; and you are ill-made, unsightly, and of a race accursed. You dare to aspire? She is as high above you as a pure star at zenith soaring above the oozy mud which clings to the bottom of a foetid bog midge-clouded. I will eat the jelly of your eye ere I allow you demean her with your gaze.”

Abanshaddi spoke up: “Walking shadow! If your witch-mistress did not favor him, why did she send you to deceive me into saving him?”

Wild Eyes said, “When sea-witches sing, must men go mad, and wild wave rise higher. For whom will she renounce the mystic power only virgin hearts, consecrated, mysterious, and cold, with queenly occult words command?” The falcon threw back her head and uttered a cry of wild, mad laughter which could have meant anything. “She is not for him, but I will not forbid him nor curse my curse: for, see, the Panotii against whom I warned you have arrived! Let the untried youth unfamed fight his utmost and unmake her foes, and her glance of favor merit, albeit never more than that receive.”

So saying, the falcon plucked up the stolen cylinder seal in her sharp beak, and dropped away from the sill, shot off like an arrow, and was gone.

Pastor Ossifrage said something in his language. From the tone of voice, his expansive shrug, I could tell was he was saying: “So? What was that all about? Lover’s quarrel? At a time like this? You kidding me? Oy!” — something along those lines.

Nakasu snorted. A snort is a snort in every language. He had no head to shake, but when he rolled his eyes, it was like seeing a weightlifter flex his pectorals, and you would see it from across the room. He spread his arms and looked toward Ossifrage, shrugging. “Watoto!” From the tone of voice, I knew he was saying: kids!

Abby clapped her hands and jumped up and down. “You will win her heart for certain!”

“What? Penny’s little pet just said she hated me! No girl in the history of the world ever liked a boy her pet didn’t.”

Abby said, “That is not her pet. It is her shadow. Her … ah … hoar cross?”

“Her shadow hates me! There is no way….”

Abby said scornfully, “You know nothing of love stories. How can you win her love if she has no shadow from which to win it? Of course her soul hates you now!”

I said, “Am I the only sane person in this room?”

Pastor Ossifrage must have known a word or two in English, because he said, “No. You much hishtamea mi too, eh?” Hishtamea mi was Hebrew for crazy. Then he stepped over, and touched me on the shoulder, and pointed.

I turned. There in the window, first in one window and then rapidly in the others, were gathering skinny little swine-faced monsters. Behind them, above the silver clouds, were ungainly winged shapes, comically ugly, of the deformed men with ears as large as sails, wearing bejeweled war-belts that glowed, soaring on their winglike ears, circling like vultures. I saw at least five dozen of them, and more arriving.

Only then did I remember what the captain in the peacock mask had said in passing. The next disturbance the horoscope predicted was when the Panotii would arrive because of the calling. He had meant Abby calling Wild Eyes.

Abby had warned us her power to hide us from prediction was limited. We had overstepped, either by fighting, or summoning familiar spirits, the limit of what her blessing blocked. Now we were back in the area of time and reality the horoscopes had mapped out.

We were once more trapped by the invisible bars Enmeduranki the Dark Lord had spoken of, with such sorrow, to me.

3. Izi of Izan

From the swarm of black shapes that circled the tower like autumn leaves blown in wild spirals, one scrap of darkness broke free and fell toward us.

He sailed down out of the moonlight and lit upon the windowsill, swine-eyes glittering like beads of jet in the half light.

This man-creature was taller than the others, and he folded his earlobes around him like a cloak, so that the line of studs and gems piercing the rims of his earlobes gleamed like twin snakes against the expanse of brown leather. His puffy pig snout was wrinkled with odd joy.

He spoke in the Ursprache. “Well met, friends! Here is matter for song! With all your care and caution, your mists and shadows that blind the stars, you are the first criminals in an age and half-an-age again to conspire against the all-seeing Tower, from whose crown no secrets of Heaven are hid! And yet like fools you whistle for your familiars, primitive magic uncouth and strange, and dream that we will not hear?”

He grinned at us, showing his tusks had been capped with steel, talking as he waited for more and ever more of his men to land.

I should mention they were all armed, though none of them were armored. And they had dirks and boathooks or barbs in their hands, or they lifted to their snouts blowguns taller than themselves.

“I am called Izi of the Izan. We have a saying: The Dark Tower sees all, and what it does not see, we hear. All your plans, your dreams and dares, all you said now, even when you did not understand each other, I understood.

“First are you in an age and half-an-age to have run like mice through the walls of the Dark Tower! This name of mine will be brought to the ears of the high magicians, for having forestalled a disturbance even they did not foresee.

“At them, my bullies! Take care not to mar the faces! We will pickle the heads to preserve them and present them to the lords and captains and magicians. The headless hulk we need not. Lariat first him and topple him from the height!”

And even though these things were only four feet tall, and even though Nakasu, if he had had a head, would have been eight or nine feet tall, the little men attacked without fear. Against my will, I found myself admiring their boldness.

A dozen or a score of hooks flew out from the big-eared pig-faced pygmies, and cruel barbs like fishhooks sank into the flesh of Nakasu, or drove into his elbows when he crossed his arms to shield the eyes in his chest. Loops of rope from lariats fell around him, and then, two or three to each rope, the Panotii holding the rope ends simply stepped back or fell back out of the windows, and let their falling weight yank Nakasu across toppling chairs and overturned tables, across the great chamber and up the wall toward the window.

He screamed. It was like hearing a bull elephant scream.

I had wasted a whole moment trying to twist and turn at the ruby rings ornamenting the hilt of the flail I held. I should have listened to Wild Eyes and handed it to Nakasu. Now, when he screamed, I just ran forward, whirling the flail like the rotor of a crashing helicopter. I lashed out at the huddle of landed Panotii who were crouching like vultures in a circle near Nakasu. At this point, Nakasu had already been dragged halfway up the wall nearer and ever nearer the window and the endless plunge.

I rushed in. And I did not hit a single foe—I guess they heard me coming—because they all leaped straight up into the air.

Honestly, I was not expecting that. Swans and condors and big birds take a long moment to take off. These guys just jumped twenty feet straight up as if yanked by an invisible thread. Or, rather, if what I could tell from the way they were jerked upward was correct, the force was projected from belts they wore around their chests and waists, studded with glowing gems.

Some Panotii were still at the windows. Others landed on the huge wooden chandeliers or golden shields hung across the roofbeams so far above. The hall was taller than the roof of a gymnasium. They were not within flail range.

The windows were not so tall. So I jumped up on a table, and swung the flail at the nearest pygmy shape crouching like a bat on the sill of a tall window. He fell out of that window, flapped his huge ears, and landed in the next one, raised a blowgun to his pig snout, and blew a feathered dart into my neck.

It was a good shot, and I took a moment to draw in a deep breath, say a prayer to Saint Benedict, the patron saint of cures for poison, calm my thoughts, and to decide that the venom I could feel spreading like cold fire through my neck would have no effect.

I did not know how much, if any, of the Oobleck was still present in my system. I did not know if my state of mind had total control over my ability not to die, or only partial.

I knew that if I could breathe with a hole in my lung, and stick my severed leg back on my leg-stump and be walking on it one second later, that none of the normal laws of biology applied to me. My mind simply did not need my body to operate. So, in theory, nothing should be able to affect me. But in practice, it was not that simple. Because I somehow knew — call it intuition if you like, or call it random guess — that the least particle of fear would allow the particles of poison to affect me.

I had to stop and concentrate, or, rather, zenlike, to clear my mind of clouds, of self, of doubt. When I stopped, though, all the long-eared monstrosities, grunting and snorting and snuffling and shrieking like boars in heat, whirled and threw their barbs and throwing knives, and tossed their lariats.

A flail is not the best weapon for parrying a thrown knife. In fact, you cannot do it at all. What you can do is whirl the arms of the flail in a great circle and catch or snarl all the ropes that are leading to the fishhooks now stuck in your mantle or in your tender flesh, or the loops snaking around your neck or upper body. And if you are quick, you can snatch shut the arms of the flail against each other with your other hand, so that all the ropes are caught in the elbow joint of the weapon. There was a handy rack of tablets right next to me: I stuck the haft of the flail between two tablets on the rack, so that when the dozen or so pygmies jumped off the windows backward, all their weight was tugging on the huge library rack bolted into the marble floor, not against me trying to brace my feet against nothing on a slippery marble table top.

Nakasu was not doing well: he was bleeding from a dozen minor wounds, and I don’t know if he had any poisoned darts in him. I could not see Abby: I assume Pastor Ossifrage had pushed her down behind one of the overturned tables.

Only a few throwing knives or blown darts were winging toward Pastor Ossifrage, but they all wavered and spun when they got near him, as if bouncing off an unseen wall of air, and they struck the bookshelves to his left and right. He was waving his arms at the Panotii like a mad conductor orchestrating a silent Wagner opera, one with lots of trumpet blasts and drumrolls, had it been audible: but nothing at all was happening. When his levitation power robbed them of weight, or floated them upward, they just flapped their wing-sized ears and floated downward again. And I saw them adjust the colored gems on those big belts they wore, and again I guessed that they were some sort of Buck Rogers-style anti-gravity belt, except, because this is crazymagicland, probably they operated by grav-alchemy rather than technomancy, or something ridiculous like that.

“Abby! Can you hear me!” I shouted over the din of battle. I forgot to mention, everyone in the chamber was screaming at the top of his lungs, except the guys blowing little feathered blowdarts at us. I did not hear the captain Izi, shouting any orders, however. Once or twice I heard him say something in a soft voice, almost a whisper. If your men have ears the size of overcoats, I guess there is no need for trumpets or bullhorns.

There was no reply from Abby. That was bad.

I shouted at Ossifrage, trying to remember words in the Hebrew I had studied. Finally I remembered, “H’erev! H’erev!” It was the word for sword. I was pointing at the dead body of one of the men he had killed inside the room earlier, one of the two soldiers. The corpse was all the way across the chamber from me. I would never reach it before Nakasu was hauled out the window.

Ossifrage understood, though. He pointed a finger at the scabbard on the dead man’s belt, and the scimitar flashed, spinning, through the air, and landed, quivering, embedded in the head of a wooden winged serpent statue near to me. I yanked it out and belabored the ropes twining me. They parted reluctantly. Even lightweight rope is harder to cut than you think. It is not the kind of thing that parts in one stroke. Usually it just gives a bit, and a few strands come loose.

I realized, to my horror, that it would be quicker to cut the barbs out of my flesh. Oh, the pain. So I just hacked at myself, screaming, sword in one hand, pulling out huge hooks dripping with me-juice with the other. The flail, you remember, was wedged between two tablets on the bookrack at this moment, acting as my anchor.

The vision of me cutting myself to bits was so bloody that the Panotii all stopped and stared, their little pig eyes wide and round in their uncouth faces.

The last barb was out. I threw it from me in the sudden silence, and it rang, clattering, on the marble floor. They were all staring at me while I slurped the puddles of my blood off the table and floor like a horror scene filmed in reverse and had it run up my legs and shoulders into my mouth. I swallowed it. At the same time all my wounds closed like so many little doors in a clock once the hour is rung and the cuckoos vanish back inside.

One of the staring, shocked Panotii uttered a single fearful word:

“Lalilummutillut”

I raised my sword and shouted.

And gravity turned off and I was soaring like a superman, sword-first, an avenging angel, and this time I did slice the ropes, the ones holding Nakasu, or most of them, at one blow, and the others parted beneath his weight, or he took the ropes in a giant hand and yanked to him four or five of the pygmy men.

They were dead before they could disentangle themselves, because his melee tactic was just to scoop them into his mouth with both arms and bite. Imagine a bearhug if the bear had a beartrap where its bellybutton should be. I saw a whole body vanish headfirst into the maw of that mouth, but I did not have time to puzzle out where the monster’s digestive tract was hidden, or where or how a hundred pounds of meat could simply vanish. I am sure there is a logical explanation, such as that all Blemmyae had a small black hole lodged in the back of the throat.

I handed Nakasu the flail. He twisted the base of the shaft in his huge hands, and the world started to get that underwater look, the heat-shimmer above a hot desert, and twilight started spreading. Just a bit. I assume he could stand a certain amount of exposure without getting sick: but I noticed he did not turn it anywhere near as smoky-dark as I had turned it.

I whistled and screamed at Pastor Ossifrage. He had a big grin on his face, which shocked me, because he had looked as stern as a fresco on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel before now. Because of how he dressed, I sort of assumed he was a holy man of some sort, but I suddenly realized that he might be a barroom bouncer, or come from a world where they pick their holy men by nine rounds of mortal combat in the gladiatorial circus.

Whatever the case, he wanted to see me slay four-foot-tall men with elephant ears, because he made the chamber flip end over end (or that is what my inner ear told me was happening when he shut off my gravity) and suddenly I was up in the rafters with the flying pygmies high up near the chamber roof.

“Hiya, boys!” I grinned at them. With my feet dangling in midair, I could not fence at all, and Ossifrage was trying to bump me into targets like a boy trying to control a kite from the ground. It did not matter. These guys were the size of children, they did not wear armor, and their weapons could not dismember me, which meant they could not stop me.

I chopped without grace or art, not caring which part of their bodies I cut, and the wounded who fell or fluttered to the floor were grabbed by Nakasu and stuffed into his maw feet-first. Little rivers of blood and viscera were running down his belly and legs like a red apron.

Suddenly, all the lights overhead went out. The Panotii had pulled the lampwood sticks away from the marble plate that fed the chandeliers. There was some moonlight coming in through the windows, but not enough for me to see what was what. The glowing belts looked like distant flocks of fireflies.

Out of the dark, four or five poisoned blowdarts hit me at once, all right in the chest. At a shooting range, they would have earned a good score for target control. They were aiming by ear. From the placement of the shots, I knew they were hearing my heartbeat. I assume Izi thought they could hear us better than we could see them, belts or no belts.

I could not see what was happening on the floor below me, but there was an uproar of noise. I wobbled in midair: Ossifrage, wherever he was, had almost dropped me. Suddenly I realized Izi’s tactic.

Izi was concentrating his men on Ossifrage, because without Ossifrage to hold me in the air, I could not attack the flying pygmies on the ceiling. Nakasu was quicker on the uptake than I was (monster or not, he was still a grownup and had more experience), and must have moved quickly to Ossifrage’s position to protect the gray-bearded man.

I kicked off a nearby wall, and sailed in zero-gee over toward one of the windows, and managed to grab the sill before I floated out into the abyss of air.

Just in time: my weight returned with a slump of sudden heaviness. My feet found the narrow ledge, so I did not fall to my doom. A trio of Panotii dived at me from outside, dirks seeking my eyes and throat, trying to blind or hamstring an abomination they could not kill.

But now I had my feet under me, even if the footing was bad, and even if the sword was not the shape I was used to, it was still longer than their weapons, and they had tiny little arms like children. I concentrated on each blow to try to make it perfect, and snap the blade into the skulls just deep enough to hit brain matter without going too deep, and with enough flexibility in the stroke to let the power flow through my arm to the sword tip without forcing it. I did not like using this scimitar. It was not built right. But I was able to kill two midgets in two neat strokes, but I missed the third one's skull, and cut an ear off his head instead.

Well, that had a dramatic effect. Half his wingspan suddenly went away. He wobbled in the air like a drunk, but he did not fall.

So I slashed the sword across his belly, parting the belt of glowing stones.

He dropped like a rock down and away into the night. Far above, the broken belt fluttered upward, a twisting snake of gems.

I turned. From this position, I had a clearer view than when I had been among the rafters. I could see the glitter of the flying belts of the Panotii, and the gleam of the giant eyes of Nakasu, eyes as large as softballs, in the dark of the vast chamber. All the glittering lights of the belts near him suddenly went dark.

Then the lights came back on. High above, Abby was sitting in a chandelier, her chain of cunning metal in a bowline around her, the hook of her weapon like a grapnel lodged in the rafters, and one hand was touching the lampwood, calling forth its power somehow. The twilight spread by the golden flail was neutralizing the flying ability of the Panotii, who simply were not big and strong enough to face Nakasu in his rage. I saw a dozen knives and barbs flung toward Abby, and I shouted in alarm, being too far away to help her. But then they parted and fell to her left and right as if they had struck an unseen wall of air. Only then did I notice Ossifrage walking up through the air, out of the reach of Nakasu’s cloud of twilight, and he put himself between Abby and the main group of Panotii.

I spoke in a normal voice, without shouting, “Bold captain Izi of Izan! Pull your men back, and I will let you live!”

I was not sure where he was, whether in the room somewhere, or among the flock still outside, or perched along the windows and ornaments.

But I was confident he could hear me with those sail-like ears.

“We can spread twilight along the ground,” I said, “And any man afoot our friend the Blemmyae will eat, and any man in the air, our friend the windwalker will fling me at them, and they will find the death for which my kind seek in vain. We are the enemies, not of the slaves of the Dark Tower, but only of its masters. We would spare you if we could.”

4. Parley

Sudden silence came from the chamber. The Panotii had fled from Nakasu, and were clustered along the tops of the bookshelves throughout the chamber, but they were not trying to approach Ossifrage or Abby. She was now standing next to him in midair alongside the wooden chandelier.

There was a noise behind me. I turned. Izi was perched like a monkey atop an ornamental projection on the outer wall of the tower, his knees near his cheeks, ears spread like a cape to either side.

He said in Ursprache, “Why do you call them friends?” He pointed. “The one is a Blemmyae of Sabtah, an eater of men, who sees all other races as cattle. The Cloudwalker is a Jeshurun of Arphaxad, who serves the hermit god who hates all other gods. The girl is Pagutu-mar’-Nazar, a Therapeutae of Tharsis, a sect that will never drink wine, nor touch gold, nor clasp women, because they despise all life. You are an abomination of Cain, whose race neither loves nor is loved.”

Pagutu-mar’-Nazar meant She-Monkey daughter of the Accursed. It suddenly occurred to me that the one person in all the Dark Tower whose fate could not be foretold must be famous.

I said, “We are each from those places, yes. What is your point?”

“All the races hate each other.”

“We found a way to get along so far,” I said with a shrug.

“You cannot be One!” he objected. “Only the One are One.”

(I am not sure how to translate Ur bas’ uru. It might have meant ‘the one people are one’ or it might have meant ‘the city is unified’ or even ‘we are the world.’ Whatever the specific nuance, the general gist was that only the Dark Tower had the right to be unified.)

I spoke coldly. “The Dark Tower is a mockery of us. Their unity is the unity of slaves, all chained alike under one cruel master, a union of fearful underlings and proud overlords. Ours is the unity of a marriage, where opposites attract, and unlikeness is cherished for itself, complimented, completed. It is the true unity.”

“On whose behalf do you speak? Who sent you? The Golden City? Or the Lady of the Grail?”

“I don’t know who sent me,” I admitted.

“What does that mean?”

“That means I am not here by accident, but neither can the Astrologers predict my fate. Whoever or whatever sent me, it was a power greater than any this aeon holds.”

“Who — who are you?”

“Ilya Muromets, Destroyer of the Dark Tower.”

He tilted his pug-nosed swine-tusked head to one side, unfolding one ear wider than an umbrella. “Ridiculous! A childish boast.”

“You underestimate me, ear-flappy man? I am a Life Scout of Troop Two of Tillamook!”

“I say nothing can destroy the Tower. Its strength reaches to the heavens.”

“Really? I know a Heaven even higher, and a strength even greater. You doubt me?” I reached out the window where I stood, and struck the metal wall of the outside armor of the Tower with the side of my fist, saying, “Yahweh!”

There was again a noise as if the deepest string on a bass fiddle the size of a skyscraper had been plucked, and a murmuring swell as the sound rushed up from the earth below. Then the place where I stood shook, and dust fell from above. Then the upper reaches of the Dark Tower trembled, and from where I clung, I could see the crown of the Tower sway against the stars.

Izi was staring, round-eyed in amazement and astonishment. “You shook the Tower with your hand!”

I said, “No. Of myself, I can do nothing.”

I saw in his little pig-eyes that this modesty unnerved him more than if I had claimed the credit.

Izi of Izan heaved a great sigh, and said, “Very well. I already can hear the host of the cynocephali on their way. Their noses will seek you out whatever your path, wherever you hide. No glory is to be won for the host of the Panotii, the all-hearing, this night. We will remain as we always are, the clowns and mockeries of greater powers, and the scorn of fairer races.”

With that, he turned and sailed off into the moonlight, and his troop flung themselves like a flock of bats through the windows after him, forming into V-shapes like migrating ducks, and descending to the cloudbanks below.

If he had not just been trying to kill a little girl, I would have felt sorry for him. Instead I said softly, knowing he could hear me, “There are better jobs you could do, better masters you could work for, little big-eared man.”

I raised my eyes. In the distance, small as snowflakes, I could see pale wolflike shapes clinging to the side of the Dark Tower, head-downward, loping toward me. More than a score, they came, more than a hundred.

I jumped inside, landed awkwardly on a table, skidded across the marble floor through one of the many puddles of blood pooled upon it, and ended up by the big doors. “Time to bug out! Big bad wolves on the way! Can anyone get these doors open?”

Stupid question. Ossifrage made a sweeping gesture with his arm. Weightless as thistledown, a rollercoaster of wind whirled me through the oriel window thirty feet in the air in the wall above that door, leaving perhaps the pit of my stomach behind: and monster and prophet and ninja-girl blew after me, swirling like autumn leaves in a gale.

Chapter Twenty-Two: Descending the Utter Dark Tower

1. Out of the Fork

The Y-shaped corridor outside had two doors that Nakasu and I had barred. Some Astrologer must have sent the soldiers on post outside new scrolls by pneumatic tube with updates to the new fate, because now came the sound of battering rams smashing the metal doors ringing on their massy hinges; or else the soldiers had just heard the noise and decided (showing more initiative than I think it is fair for minions of an omniscient tyranny of magicians to show, let me say) to batter down the doors. Whichever it was, the doors trembled and rang on their massy hinges. The banging was coming from both forks of the corridor.

Without a word, Abby got out her burnificating sickle-blade, jammed the coppery point into the clamps holding shut the secret panel to the stairway out of here, and heated the sucker up to deep fat fry.

With a shriek of anger, the living metal clasps released the panel, and when I shouted that the cylinder seal needed to unlock it was missing, Nakasu kicked the panel in two, and the dark stair lay opened before us. I was thinking of going up, since it was the way we came, but Nakasu took the lefthand path and went down the spiral stairs.

I said, “If we all jump, can Ossifrage catch us?”

Abby said, “I think it is too narrow. We will be battered against the sides.”

The wooden ornaments on Abby’s cloak lit up with flickering yellow light, and we pounded down the stairs, our shadows like giants swaying dizzily behind us along the curving walls and slanting roof-vaults overhead.

As we fled, we heard the noise of wolf claws behind us.

2. Down the Haunted Stair

Down we fled. In a short time, Nakasu and I had pulled a landing or two ahead of Abby and Ossifrage, who called breathlessly for us to wait up. When they caught up, I slung Abby across my back in a fireman’s carry and Nakasu pulled Ossifrage atop his — what do you call the upper part of a headless monster, anyway? — his shoulderline.

The noise of the wolves hesitated at the threshold above and behind us—I don’t know why, but maybe they were afraid the stairs were cursed—and this gave us a few precious minutes to descend, while they gathered their nerve, or confirmed their orders, or something.

I had been in this cursed stairwell half an hour ago, further up than my present location. This time I could see it. There was a waist-high line of graffiti of ugly, angular blood-red glyphs running all along the righthand wall as the stairs turned and turned again, and I could not shake the feeling that these were magic runes of some sort, meant to hold back whatever curse was afflicting this forbidden stairway.

There were baskets held shut with chains that we jogged past every now and again on a landing, and once when I looked back up behind me, I saw a disembodied head of a dark-skinned long-haired face hanging quite silently above the basket behind us, and tears ran down the cheeks. It was a freaky sight, but we were kind of in a hurry, so I did not stop to inquire.

To the left was a spiral brass rail overlooking an endless well.

Then the whining of the wolves turned to howls, and a sudden glare of lights above, the shout of men’s voices, startled me. I was staring upward when Nakasu grabbed me from behind and tossed me headfirst over the railing. Abby was gone. Nakasu had plucked her neatly off my back and was holding her in one hand.

I fell. I had been falling a lot lately. Since I was getting less and ever less afraid of pain and wounds, to me it was like a ride at the fair. I looked around slowly. Looking down, I saw tiny lights moving slowly.

Looking up, silhouetted against the lamps and energy gun-flares of the soldiers high above, I saw Nakasu, with Abby’s little feet sticking out of the side of his mouth. I was horrified only a moment, until I realized what he was doing. He had understood what she had said about being battered against the sides.

When his body caromed off the side of the metal railing, or struck a projection in that narrow well down which we dropped, he curled into a ball, and his thick, tough rhino-hide absorbed the blow. She was covered in spit, and how she was breathing I did not know, but she was not being battered to death. On second thought, I know how she was breathing, because she had a porcelain monkey mask.

Ossifrage, head downward, was hanging behind and above us, waving his hands in small, delicate gestures, his wide hems of his camel-hair coat flapping like wings around him.

Behind and above him, I saw men in bronze helmets, looking downward. I saw the lights of lamps and then the brighter lights of their energy weapons.

I put out my hands, slapping the walls of the stairwell sliding by. This slowed my motion and made me tumble, but Ossifrage must have seen, despite the darkness and gloom, what I was trying to do, because air swirled around me, and then I was behind and above the whole group.

My white mantle was a big hunk of fabric, and I am sure it messed up the aim of the soldiers.

Shockingly hot lances of fire struck my back, but none of them, at that range, passed all the way through me, and the mortals underneath me were not hit. I was a little surprised that the pain made me black out.

I thought I was tougher than that.

3. Above the Cistern Lake

I woke groaning. “What the heck is the point of being unable to die, if a little bit of pain can make you faint anyway? What a stupid, stupid superpower. Why can’t I have flight, or super-eating, or a talking bird?” I groped around for the shortsword I had been carrying, but it was gone.

“Hush!” That was Ossifrage. The word ‘hush’ is apparently the same in all languages.

I sat up, dizzy, and immediately wished I had not. We were on top of a curving leathery surface that, for a moment, I thought was a whale or living thing. It looked like a whale in barding, because there was chainmail covering the hide in places, as well as thick armor plates in other places. Then, in the half-darkness, I saw wires fore and aft, and ailerons and rudders painted with designs of severe and angular winged bulls.

I stood unsteadily. The plates underfoot had a little give to them, so it was like walking on a trampoline. I was on the upper surface, the slippery upper surface, of a Babylonian airship at least ten times bigger than any zeppelin ever manufactured on Earth: an eight thousand-foot-long monster.

The airship was an ironclad, with enough lift to bear the weight of a corset of armored plates along her rigid airframe, and mail between the joints. She had gunnery platforms and observation nests spaced around the frame’s equator, and these protruded far enough away from the ship that I could glimpse them from my position, despite the curve of the gas envelope on which I stood. I saw reflections of fore and aft lanterns, as well as running lights port and starboard. I think I could hear a flute playing a tune of two repeating notes, or maybe that was just the whistle of some sort of machinery.

There was a flare of light from below. A searchlight mounted on a long brass arm somewhere on the zeppelin gondola below us was moving a disk of light across the balconies of a vast inner well-space where we were. We were still inside the Dark Tower, but it must have been nearly hollow at this point in its height, because we were in a vertical cylinder bigger than any astrodome I ever stood under.

As the searchlight played across the vast walls around us, I saw cities, one above the next, each one hollow like a doughnut, so that its central park or agora was merely air. Lower, far below us, like ring upon concentric ring of constellations, I saw the glowing lights of torches and candles and lampwood gleaming through the windows and balconies of the lower cities. The cities here near the ceiling were dark and empty.

Large as the airship on which I was precariously perched might be, the diameter of this inner world made it no more than a large fish in the ocean of air. In the distance, I saw lights against the gloom, or torpedo-shapes against the city lights, which indicated where other airships were gliding serenely through the windlessness. Far away, I saw lines upon lines of slave teams hauling on guy ropes to tow an airship into what seemed a hangar door, but the silver light shining through the door was moonlight, and that airship was bucking and struggling in a wind from outside the tower.

I saw silvery threads like waterfalls running down several of the flora-covered balconies of the lit cities. I grabbed a guy line and inched down the smooth curve of the blimp housing. I could not see what was directly below us, but underfoot I saw very distant lights. These were running lights that showed boats and ships were crossing the face of some gigantic cistern that formed the floor of that titanic inner chasm. I could smell the water, and hear the flat echoes of the waves, like the sound you hear in a swimming pool. You could call it a big cistern or a very small inland sea.

I looked up. A ceiling was above us, for the circle cast by the searchlight of the zeppelin we rode played over it: it was a concave of dark metal, wide as the sky, or, at least, the sky on a small planet. There were hatches and holes and mouths of pipes and chimneys poking down from that domed firmament of metal.

The huge size of this place still was freaking me out. Unsteadily, guy wire in hand, I crept back up the slippery leather curve of the upper gasbag to where my friends were grouped. Whether I was wobbly from vertigo or awe or terror, I am not sure.

4. Simple Explanation

I was glad to see Abby was alright. She looked only slightly moist with monster spit. Nakasu had a terrible set of bruises, a black eye that ran along his pectoral muscle, and a bleeding lip that dribbled a line of blood down his hip, but when I asked him how he was (he knew what I was saying from my tone of voice) he thumped himself on the chest between the eyes, and raised his arms overhead like a weightlifter, fists almost touching, flexing his huge muscles in his meaty arms, and grinning a horrific shark-tooth grin.

In the gloom, I did not see the pool of blood until I slipped on it. I was sliding across the upper curve of the lifting body when Abby, or perhaps her weapon acting on its own (how wise was it?) sent a coil of coppery chain quick as a rattlesnake snaking around my shoulders, and pulled me back to safety.

“This is my blood, isn’t it?” I felt around my big white mantle, now torn and burnt, and found a wound or two that had not closed yet. I said a Hail Mary and a Paternoster, and cleared my mind, and drew all the blood and goo back into the wounds. It tickled as it flowed up my legs. I pushed the wounds shut with my fingers and they closed like Ziploc bags. “Why do I get the gross-looking power?”

Ossifrage shushed me again. Abby explained in a whisper. “Speak softly. The air crew does not know we are here.”

I lowered my voice. “Where is here?”

Abby said, “The stairwell had no bottom. We fell into the Threefold Immensity of the Upper Noncommissioned Married Officers’ Quarters, above the Fifth Cistern. Ossifrage created an updraft, and guided us to land here.”

Just then, as the circle from the searchlight swept back over the dome, Nakasu pointed and muttered something in his nose-snort language.

She said, “The cynocephali have put their heads through the hole through which we fell. They are peering down, but their eyes are weaker than the Freedman’s.” (She meant Nakasu.) “He says they are confused, and have lost the scent.”

I said, “And your needle?” Wild Eyes, I hoped, had programmed the magic needle to find our next target.

She said, “The Chamber of Fated Rarities is above us not by far. When the hunt dies down, Ossifrage will summon a lightness to levitate us across to the highest dormitory there…” She pointed at the balcony of houses and temples and walled gardens I had called a city, but I suppose, in this world, only the One City deserved that name. “It is called Tragic Memories Forgotten. It has no lights, and seems empty. I will coax the needle to find a servants’ path, or a corpse-path, where none will hinder us walking up. We have not many steps to retrace.”

There was something weighing on my mind, “Is killing people automatically something of a lower nature? What if it is in a good cause, dammit? And do the Astrologers as of right now know where we are and what we are going to do next, or do they somehow get to have already had known our fate, last week, last month, last year, whenever? I still do not see how it is logically possible to be unpredictable one minute and then predictable the next!”

Abby said, “It is simple. You know how inversion paradoxes influence the readings of horoscopes such that the horoscope itself is fated, including any misinterpretations?”

“Uh….”

“Well, this is the reverse of that, operating by celestial rather than astral rules. The stars will occlude gaps in the fate record, but the record will not show it, because the occlusion itself is occluded. There is no way to tell the difference between a blank space, an ellipsis, or merely an uneventful day. The Astrologers cannot predict where an unpredictable event will fall — it is called a cloud— but they will know, and will have always known and predicted events beyond the cloud. Simple.”

“Uh. If that is simple, what is complicated? No, never mind. If they knew I was going to fight the Panotii, why didn’t they send more reinforcements?”

“They did. The reinforcements gave chase. The cynocephali.”

“Why not send the doggies in before the battle? If they knew the outcome?”

She shrugged. I could barely see her in the gloom, and her wooden cloak pins, at the moment, were dark. “The horoscope probably did not predict the cynocephali arriving before the Panotii retired. The Astrologers fear to curse themselves.”

“They did not know the outcome of the fight, and so therefore sent reinforcements? But that must mean we entered another cloud the moment the fight ended. Ahh…” I felt stupid. We were all following Abby with her needle, going where she pointed, stopping when she stopped. She was the foreverborn in the group, and she had not killed anyone during the combat. If the Astrologers could not predict which way her footsteps led, they could not predict us following in them. The moment we fled, we had dropped off their radar.

I clapped my hands to my head. “OH! I am so stupid! I could stop them from following me through their predict-o-vision if I had just picked up my tablet! That held all the files on me, right? Unless they made duplicates, or unless they re-do all their calculations, I could have…”

Nakasu with a grunt and a big hip-to-hip grin opened his mouth, which was the size of a car trunk, lifted his tongue, put his huge hand in his mouth, rummaged around in his cheek, and lo and behold, he pulled out the bronze tablet. It was covered with spit, but it was mine: I recognized where the living-metal locks had been scalded apart by Abby’s wise-metal tool.

With a flourish, the headless hulk offered the dripping brass tablet to me, smirking. “You don’t speak English,” I said. “But you were just waiting for me to realize I am an idiot. How did you guess?”

But I realized that, in this world, the one thing every man must have always thought and dreamt about, is finding out every last thing the Astrologers knew of him, not just what the Astrologers saw fit to tell.

Nakasu said something in his language, patted me on the head, and thumped me on the chest.

Abby said, “He says…”

“I know,” I said. “I am not using my skullbag because my chest ain’t got no brains in them. He and I are beginning to understand each other, language barrier or not.” Since he was sitting down, I threw a friendly arm around his shoulders, but with no neck on him, it was like putting your elbow on top of a chest of drawers. “Nakasu,” I said to him. “Since the back of your throat should be against your spine, how can your mouth hold things that, geometrically speaking, are too big to actually fit inside you?”

I hefted the tablet in my hand. “If I pitch this over the side, will they predict the fall and recover it?”

“Not if I do it,” she said.

I handed her the tablet, and she bent over it with her sickle weapon, and pried loose one of the Venetian blind slats with something written in cuneiform on it.

“What is that?”

She said, “Your name. In case we get separated again, I will use the Remembering Needle.”

Ossifrage said something in Hebrew. Abby said to me, “He wants to know why you do not read it, and at least discover what it is the enemy expects you to do?”

“Toss it,” I said.

She whirled it like a discus thrower, and it did not fly that far, but bounced once on the curve of the gasbag, went over the edge of the airship, and flipped end-over-end into the dark air below.

I said, “Tell Ossifrage I don’t believe in astrology. Besides, the stars might be able to track my movements better if they know I know what they predicted. If I don’t know, I think my chance of doing the right thing, predictable or not, goes up.”

And I did not say it to him, but the reason I wanted the damned thing thrown away was because I had a dread of it in the pit of my stomach.

5. Black Magic

I remember as a kid seeing a Twilight Zone show once where William Shatner in a diner gets addicted to a little devil-faced fortune-telling machine with a bobble head, just because it keeps telling him fortunes that were accurate. He was addicted to it. Just like cocaine. I don’t know how old I was when I saw it. I don’t think I was old enough to get the concept that one actor could play two parts. The idea that Captain Kirk, of all people, could be victimized by his own weakness offended my sense of the rightness of the world.

But I do remember how old I was when Wizard of Oz came on television. It was years earlier. I was four. I was so terrified of the green-faced witch that I would cry and hide in my mother’s lap. That was back when I was small enough to crawl into her lap, back when I had a mother. I understood that the cruel and cackling witch could kill the sobbing and frightened little girl merely by turning an hourglass upside-down. I understood that this was black magic. It was unseen and unstoppable and unnatural. Against magic, neither the brains of the Scarecrow, nor the teeth of the Lion, nor the glittering ax of the Tin Man, could avail in the least.

So even at four years old I understood something Foster and my teenage friends from later in my life, the ones who toyed with Ouija boards or fooled around with tarot cards, simply did not get. Magic is not something from our world; it is not healthy, it is not meant for human beings.

The gleaming tablet with all its intricate and detailed predictions about me and my life caught the light of dormitory balcony windows as it fell past the inhabited floors, making a little glittering parabola of gold against the velvet blackness arcing toward the dark water so far below.

I waved bye-bye, and felt like I just got a little bit of my free will back.

I watched the searchlight play back and forth across the huge dome, as the crew of the airship on which we sat continued to hunt for us so diligently, an unpredictable anomaly in their perfect deterministic machine of a world. I stretched out on the leathery surface, found it almost as comfy as an air mattress, crossed my legs, put my hands behind my head, and felt a little smug.

6. Over the Garden Wall

As the airship on which we perched searched for us along the ceiling dome that was so like a low and metal sky, eventually we were carried to a position near where the needle was pointing.

Ossifrage snatched us with his weightlessness trick off the slippery top of the zeppelin, and flung us through the air, avoiding the searchlight. But someone aboard must have had a wolf nose, or Panotii ears, or eyes as big as Nakasu’s, because a cry rang out, and then a trumpet.

We passed over a balcony and landed in a walled garden. I smelled oranges. It was an orange grove.

We heard a noise, and then a dozen shots from the zeppelin hit the wall behind us. It was not loud like a cannon ball, and there was not a flash like their lantern weapons, but the spears or boulders or whatever it was smashed against the bricks, cracking them in places, and a smell like molten metal or ozone, a hot and airless smell, stung my nostrils. Clouds of black smoke were pouring up from the wall where the broadside had hit. We saw the huge prow of the zeppelin turning. She was approaching us in a sinuous path, to allow her to bring her portside guns to bear while her starboard were reloading.

Ossifrage said something, looked impatient and stepped back up into the air, his hair and beard flowing and flapping in the current of whatever unseen force boiled around him and held him aloft.

He did not have a brave look on his face, just grim, like he had to do a task and did not have much time to do it, and he wanted it over with. I thought it was the bravest look I’d ever seen, and I made a mental note to try to copy it next time I was in a fight.

Abby told me he was going to drive the armored warship of the air away.

“By himself?”

She said, “It is a lighter-than-air machine. His power is levity. They are helpless.”

Abby must have been right, because when the airship fired another broadside, all the shots went wild, and the giant ship came into view up overhead for a moment, all horns ringing and gongs sounding, and then heeled over to one side, listing terribly, and the nose dropped, and all the propellers screamed into highest velocity. I don’t think there was an engine as such. The propellers on the gondola looked as if they were jet-black, self-moving blades of living metal.

The ship fired wildly as she careened lower and lower—this time I saw what was being fired were black balls made of glass, balls that broke and emitted black clouds on impact. Four of them came near the severe old man standing in midair. The glass shells slowed, and stopped, and hung near him like balloons for a moment, and then floated away to land gently on a balcony not far away. He was too nice just to drop them on whoever was below.

Meanwhile, we ducked our heads and looked for a door in the dark to get out of the walled garden. I should have been looking too, but the smell, that delightful and refreshing smell, stabbed me with pure hunger. When was the last time I had eaten? Days ago? I yanked oranges one after another into a fold of my mantle, and started wolfing them down. Nakasu laughed, and broke off a whole branch to take with him.

Ossifrage descended from the metal sky in a flutter of camel-hair robes and said something stern in Hebrew. It was one of the few things he said where I clearly understood every word: “Thou shalt not steal.” So I pretended not to understand and I offered him an orange.

His face darkened. He looked like he was thinking of flinging me back onto the zeppelin.

7. Inside the Suicide Closet

We found a door inside and ran through dark corridors, one after another.

Then Abby called a halt, lit up her cloak pins, and, dangling her magic needle from a thread, watched it intently. She was wearing her porcelain She-Monkey-faced mask, which she had donned when the glass cannonballs started belching black smoke in our direction.

With a mouth full of orange pulp, I said to Abby, “How do the people here get the trees to grow inside?”

She spoke absentmindedly, tapping the needle and watching it turn. “Only trees whose wood can act like lampwood flourish. The Archangel blood gives them joy and nourishment, like sunlight.”

“Wait, you mean you can do your glowy stick thing trick on living wood?”

“Of course. Why should we not?”

“How does it work?”

“By magic.”

“Like your mask?”

“Of course not!” I could not see her eyes, but her tone of voice told me she was rolling them. “That is alchemy. This is twilightry.”

“Which means what?”

I heard her sigh, and I imagined I heard the courtesy of a noble-born lady’s upbringing coming to the fore, preventing her from any further sign or sound of impatience. “As I said before. An aspect of the wood is carefully lowered towards Uncreation, which is unseen, all around us. The light is shed by the tears of pain of The Archangel.”

“Creepy. I’ve been meaning to ask. How do you ignite the lampwood? Nothing here has switches or buttons.”

She said, “I am of Ur. I am of the Oneness. All which is part of the One touches all else which is part of the One.”

But then the needle twitched, and she must have liked that twitch particularly, for she set out at a quick trot.

Abby led us through empty dormitory rooms and unlit corridors. Some of the rooms had furniture in them, but covered with tarps (which oddly enough, made me feel homesick. I mean people back on earth putting chairs and couches into storage do the same thing). Other rooms had fire pits in the floor.

The apartments were clustered in squares of nine, each one surrounding a public bath. The water in the bath was frozen, but not cold to the touch. How they crystallized the water without lowering the temperature, I did not know. They had running water coming out of aqueducts of living metal. Our plumbing is better. They did not seem to have hot-water pipes.

Multiple apartments also opened up on a central space where there were these tall, round, narrow rooms with nooses made of white silk hanging from the ceiling. They had walls covered in velvet, and incense burners shaped like flowers. Beneath each noose was a tall and narrow stool on a hinge. It did not look like a gallows.

I pointed at a noose. “What is this? I thought this was the married officers’ quarters?”

She said, “This is a communal death-closet. It is provided as a convenience. It is considered bad luck for a bride who commits suicide to spill her blood on the wedding night.”

I did not ask any further questions. In my mind’s eye, I was trying to imagine living in a world where everyone knows whom he will marry from the day he is born, or if your parents or grandparents were curious enough to ask, from before that. So there is no mystery, no courtship, no romance, no nothing. Just breeding like livestock.

Look at it from the girl’s point of view. Even if you might have liked the guy if he had asked for your hand, how could you do anything but hate him if he were assigned?

I thought about people in my world who just hook up without getting married. I felt like a freak in school, back when I went to school, because most the kids even at fourteen or fifteen, if they were not virgins, had at least gotten some sort of action. Or at least all the guys talked that way. Maybe they were all lying. Maybe they felt like freaks too. My dad told me that the teen suicide rate was a lot higher than it had been in his youth, or at any point in history.

I looked at the nooses, disturbed. I don’t know many girls, but every single one I know watches soap operas or reads romance novels. It is all about the romance for them. So when that is gone, what do they really live for?

8. Solitude and Dishonor

My mom once told me, back when I was a kid, that I would never understand girls unless I understood the fear of being lonely and alone. She said no girl would ever understand boys unless she understood the fear of being dishonored and defeated.

I don’t know if she was right, and I do remember what brought the subject up: I had quarreled with the babysitter’s niece when she wanted to play house, and I tried to sacrifice her Raggedy Ann doll, our baby, to the Dark Side of the Force. I cannot bring her name to mind. Becky? Boopsie? Bonny? Babs?

She grew up to be totally smoking hot, and I mean like a cover girl on a girly magazine, a svelte and athletic brunette with hazel eyes that positively smoldered. She started hanging out with Curt Champion, from one of the older families in town, and he was pretty well-off and pretty wild and did pretty much whatever the heck he felt like.

I suppose Curt Champion probably did pretty much whatever he felt like with her too. Around that time, she started getting tattoos painted up and down both her arms, and not little delicate floral ones either, but leering faces and images of death like you see on the cover art of heavy metal bands. And she got pierced, and then pierced some more. She was wearing nose rings and lip studs and a dozen rings in each ear until she looked like a cannibal squaw in National Geographic. All the kids at school said she was cool.

But the smoky fire in her eyes vanished. They were just dull brown after that.

She dropped out of school, and I never saw her again, and did not hear what eventually happened to her. I was being homeschooled by then, and you don’t pick up rumors in the cafeteria when you eat in your own kitchen every day.

But now I knew what happened to her. Without ever leaving the Earth, she entered a world like this one: a place without romance. Without mystery, without love.

With one last look at the white silk noose, I put my head down and hurried after Abby, glad to be out of there.

9. Through the Differential Engine Yard

Eventually we made our way to a dark chamber filled with small, child-sized coffins. Here was something that looked like an elevator door for midgets. With her weapon, Abby pried up some clamps holding that small door shut. I assume the door was meant for people tiny as Panotii. She could not open it, even when all the clamps whined and retracted, so Nakasu put his shoulders (both shoulders, including his collar bone) against the door, and his massive feet against the opposite wall, and just straightened his legs. We heard creaking and snapping noises. He slammed his shoulders, both at once, into the door again and again. With no head in the way, and his blowhole pinched shut, he could act as a human battering ram, and get a lot of leverage for his blows. Boom. The door went down.

From beyond came the last noise I expected to hear: the clatter of machinery.

When the door fell in, we were almost deafened. Nakasu tucked his huge hands in his armpits where his ears were kept and pressed his elbows down.

We were in a place larger than a warehouse; some sort of factory or workfloor, and the sound was like waterfalls made of iron dominoes toppling down slopes of brass into a sea of bronze.

Here were rank upon rank of machines, each one four stories tall, and nine feet wide, composed of thousands of interlocking clockworks. It looked like a graveyard for giants, with rows upon rows of headstones forty feet high and three yards wide. The ceiling was made of girders and railway tracks and catwalks, and chains and cranes and hooks on pulleys hung like backstage machinery used to raise and lower scenery.

About half the machines were not in use or were under repair, and work crews were fitting and balancing gears and toothed wheels larger than a man is tall, or lowering whole gearboxes into place through skylights on huge chains. There were a number of trapdoors in the ceiling, and I assume a warehouse of spare parts occupied the places overhead. Communication between foreman and workers was all by means of flags and lanterns.

Systems of ladders and catwalks webbed the front of the machines. The slaves toiled over the machines, oiling, changing gears, working clutches, busy as ants. At the foot of the machines were clerks in lightest gray, and slaves in kilts. An overweight overseer with a whip coiled at his broad leather belt stood loitering nearby, watching the slaves cart in and cart out thousands of sheets of metal, either blank or stamped with cuneiform. The sheets of metal were being carried along on a conveyer belt that ran like a river with many tributaries around the feet of the giant machines.

Halfway up, held in baskets like window-washers, were young magicians, apprentices in short robes of dark gray, twisting the knobs of what looked like seven-armed clockfaces. A ring of astrological symbols ran around the edge of each clockface. Whenever an apprentice magician had the hands set in the proper form, he would pull an arm like those you see on slot machines.

At the top level were magicians in black robes and earmuffs staring up at yard-wide spherical armatures of brass and bronze hung with astrological symbols. These skeletal globes were evidently astrolabes and orreries, miniature models of the heavens in motion. Near the magicians was a line of typesetters in leather aprons. The typesetters were hunched over endless boxes of punch types, placing cuneiforms rapidly into plates. The plates were then carried by teams of sweating boys (who handled the plates like they were hot) across a narrow and unrailed catwalk into the jaws of some sort of steam-powered press. The lid would clamp shut just a second after the boys had slid the plates into place.

The press would shove the cuneiform plates against a comb of movable teeth, which would rise or fall according to the shape of the cuneiform underneath. These in turn raised and lowered larger pistons forming the uppermost story of the four-story machine, and set all the clockwork gears to spinning, first the top rows, then the middle, and so on down. It was like watching water made out of bronze and brass, copper and carbon-steel flow down in rippling circles. It was hypnotic.

And every turn of every wheel made a loud metallic noise. No one had heard us break in the door. I assume they had all gone deaf years ago.

The whole process looked so dangerous from top to bottom, I was amazed the machines were not coated with blood and severed hands. But maybe any kid destined to lose a hand that day just called in sick. I am not sure how a world where people knew their future would deal with safety hazards. Why wear a seatbelt on days that are known to be accident-free?

Of course, they kept a closet full of boy-sized coffins in a chamber right off the main area, so it could not have been all that safe.

Abby pointed to one of the empty coffins behind us, gestured for us to pick it up. Ossifrage and I took the front, and Nakasu held both rear corners by himself.

She drew out a long green-and-black striped cloth from her pouch, threw it over one shoulder, and draped the hem over her head so that a veil of dangling strands hung before her eyes, hiding her face. She drew out a brass cowbell from somewhere, unwrapped it, hooked a metal tongue inside it, and stepped forward. She walked with her hands swinging up and down with every step. I think it is one of those philosophical questions, like asking if a tree falls in a wood with none to hear, whether it makes a noise, to ask if her bell made any sound in that metallic uproar.

We walked behind her, carrying a coffin. There was a pathway painted with pale green and black stripes of the same design she wore. The path wound around the backside of the huge machines, staying near the unlit walls.

No one stopped us, no one interfered. Some people looked up as we walked slowly by, but they put their hand before their left eye, or before their heart, or they bit their thumb and spat on the floor. Hey, my folks are from the Old Country: I recognize the signs to ward off bad luck even when those signs are not the same here as they are back on Earth. Some things are the same wherever people are people.

Then we came to a larger green-painted door. The doorposts and lintel were decorated with images of winged skulls and inverted torches. Abby looked carefully over her shoulder, trying to make it look like she was not looking. She still had that mummified hand of a corpse with her. (The one she had used to unlock the glass boat on the stream-path, remember?) She touched the dead hand to the pale green door. The living metal controlling the lock must have thought that this was its cue to open. The door unlocked. It was a double door, large enough for men carrying a coffin to enter with room to spare.

A cold sensation touched me.

I looked over my shoulder at the nearest of the titanic clockworks in this warehouse-sized vastness. This one was eight stories high rather than four, because a second unit, equal in size with the first, had been lowered on immense chains from a place in the ceiling where the ceiling panels had been pulled aside, and this second unit fitted atop the first like children’s blocks stacked up. A set of linkages and bands of living metal communicated the motions from the bottom of the upper unit to the top of the lower.

The calculation process, whatever it was, that turned the wheels within wheels evidently needed more computing power than only one unit could provide. The magicians clustered gravely about this machine were older and their chains of office were longer and coffee-pot-shaped hats were taller and shinier.

With the master magicians was a rout of monsters from various worlds: I saw a group of Cyclopes-eyed spearmen in leather jackets sewn with rings of golden Cunning Metal, and on their heads were tall cone-shaped helms of the same metal; I saw an Abarimon in a red jacket fidgeting his backward-pointing feet impatiently, a spear in a spear-thrower carried at his shoulder; and next to him a fierce-looking man with dreadlocks and a bone through his nose carried himself on a single leg six feet long and sinuous as the body of an anaconda, ending in a foot as large and round as a parasol. There were two Panotii hunkered down with their ears wrapped around their bodies like miniature leather teepees.

A bald man with strange yellowish-gray eyes like the eyes of a night-hunting animal turned his head to look at us. He wore a narrow black fur cap and a fierce black moustache. He was dressed in a striking costume of black sable adorned with braids of tiny gold bells, and the recurved bow of horn that was tucked through his sash was as crooked as the scimitar next to it. He was smoking a long clay pipe, the first tobacco I had seen in this world.

The bald man, without taking his yellow eyes from us, lowered his head to speak to something hunched next to him, a creature also bald, but one I would never mistake for a man. The creature was barefoot and wrapped in the leathery cloak of his featherless glider wings, with empty pits where his eyes once had been. His skin was bio-luminescent like glow-in-the-dark moss growing on a corpse. It was a Damishikaruyizbu, one of the Host who Quaffs Blood Like Wine.

Now I saw what the clerks at the bottom of the machines were gathering up. Tablets of coppery metal.

Every single tablet, each time it was moved, even if it was only moved from a conveyer belt to a metal box, was picked up by three men, unlocked from its place before the move and when it was set down again, locked in place with a twist of a cylinder seal.

By the scores and hundreds, tablets were being checked, listed, stamped, stacked, and placed in carts and then shelved in smaller racks placed (in turn) into larger racks, which were then lifted on cranes to pallets on the floor or buckets dangling from the ceiling and moved to a big cloverleaf made of the black living metal: the fountainhead of a stream-path. A dozen paths radiated out from the fountainhead like railways from a roundhouse. Here sat a trio of traffic-control officers in a tower who raised and lowered flags to direct the cargo. The racks of tablets were carried on these stream-paths away from this workfloor either up ramps to high doors, or through the skylights into the dark chambers above, or down through wells gaping in the floor.

Each were the same kind of tablet I had thrown from the blimp. Horoscopes.

10. Beyond the Corpse Door

The double doors closed behind us. The Architects of the Dark Tower must have had some supernaturally perfect system for insulating sound, because the pandemonium of clanging cut off like a break in the soundtrack. Silence exploded. I wiggled my forefingers in my both ears, wondering if yawning helped with ears ringing, or if that was only for pressure changes in an airplane.

The chamber was round and richly appointed, but solemn, like a funeral home, with a black marble floor beneath a blue dome. A circle of square stone pillars or stele, dark with cuneiform, ringed the room. Two wands of lampwood standing to either side of the double doors shed light when Abby nodded at them.

Opposite the double doors was an elaborate gold shrine to some fish-tailed vulture-faced god. In the middle of the floor like an old friend was the now-familiar sight of a pit with no railing and no bottom. I could hear the moan of the wind against the sides of the Tower far above and far below coming through the dark opening.

I spoke aloud. “Those were Babbage machines. Differential Engines. Hundreds of them.”

Abby smiled and nodded. “As you can see, the magicians are hardly barbarians.”

“Well, I have more computer power in my cellphone then your magicians have in that whole room. Let me tell you about a company called Texas Instruments…”

She said politely, “I am sure your technomancers are very accomplished. All the rumors speak of your flying rocket packs and boomsticks. But fulgration—what did you call it? Cellphone Instruments. Your art will not work in that chamber, because it is too near the sources of twilight.”

“Yeah, and guns don’t fire,” I said. “I remember. Why is that, by the way?”

“I don’t know,” she said, “We are close now. Here is the pit where corpses are thrown. It empties to a waste-gate, so we are near the curtain wall. If Master Ossifrage can lower us down this shaft and then raise us up one immensity, we can reach the Fated Rarity Chamber immediately. The needle shows it is right overhead, and close. Once there, I will call again the winged monster.”

“And wring her neck and force her to tell us why she sent us there, rather than straight to wherever Penny is being kept? I am all for that.”

“I am sure her reason is sound.”

“But if you whistle again, the Panotii, the big-eared guys, will hear again.”

“Ah!” she said, “Should I not call? I spoke of this to Master Ossifrage while you slept. He says all the Panotii throughout the tower heard your words with Izi of Izan. They know you spared him.”

“So he thinks they may spare us, out of gratitude?”

“Oh, no. He thinks they will be doubly bent on revenge. He warns me not to call the winged monster, as she is a familiar spirit, and a walking shadow.”

“He is a good judge of character. I don’t like Wild Eyes much neither. But let’s say we ignore his sound advice and call her anyway. What then?”

Abby pulled out a small brass tag with cuneiform written on it. For a moment, I thought it was the metal slat she had pulled from my tablet, the one with my name on it. “If your mistress is in the Harem Furlong, that is but a thousand feet straight down, at the water level of the Fifth Cistern. Not far from the High Officers’ dormitories. What will be required to free her, I do not know. We—”

Her eyes behind the veil of dangling hem she still was wearing before her face grew wide and slack with fear. Abby trembled.

Something was coming slowly, deliberately, up through the mouth of the pit where corpses were thrown.

Chapter Twenty-Three: Fury in the Funerary House

1. Cruorbibitor

It felt like someone had just opened the door of a walk-in freezer. Over the rim of the corpse pit came the bald and eyeless head of the Cold One who had seen us pass through the chamber.

Abby said, “Noble sir, this place is unclean, hence unworthy to receive one of your host.”

With only his head above the rim, he laughed, and wisps of white fog escaped his lips. I noticed he had fangs like a snake. “Yours is wholesomer than springtide compared to mine, the Cruorbibitors, the most abominable of all abominations, the deadliest of all the death-givers enslaved to the Tower Dark.”

He answered her in the Ur language, but used his own Latin word for his own race: cruor bibitor. Cruor did not mean blood, it meant spilled blood, shed blood. Bibitor did not mean drink, it meant to drink like a drunkard, a tippler, a wine-bibber.

He smiled and spoke in a soft, slithering voice, “I wondered why an untouchable would walk before a coffin from which came no smell of corpse, no trace of death-essence. Did you think to deceive me? Even blind, I am not dull to the world. I wondered as well why a member of the Host that Seeks in Vain for Death, trembling and burning with an abundance of life, delicious life, life and to spare, would be walking behind a funeral bell, when custom does not allow his kind near dead bodies?”

He clambered up the side, his thin arms and legs looking spiderish, the long flap of skin running between his ankles and wrists shedding a pale light from its underside, and a sickening smell. He was naked and had no sexual organs, merely scar tissue at his crotch.

I backed up. “This guy is kryptonite to me. Anyone here got some Vroom in his hat he can unload on this sucker?”

My tone of voice must have been enough to tell him what was up, because Ossifrage, without a second of hesitation, raised an arm, and the Cold One was flung up in the air and straight down the corpse hole.

But with a flap of his leathery wings the pale creature shot up and out again in a moment. Ossifrage turned to me and spread his hands, shrugging. His power was not telekinesis, so he could not bend spoons with his brain, or choke mouthy space-colonels, it was levitation, which was not much use against a man with wings.

But in this case it was enough, because by the time the Cold One came back up again Nakasu had lumbered across the room, loomed over the hole, and hit the Cold One with the empty coffin he was still carrying. It was smaller than a normal coffin, but it was still a big wooden box too heavy for a normal man to pick up, and it slammed the Cold One right across the middle of his body like Babe Ruth swatting a homer.

The Cold One hit the far wall so hard that he bounced. But the same way they seemed to be immune to sword blows, the Cold Ones seemed to be immune to being smashed by big wooden boxes too heavy for a normal man to pick up.

The Cold One leaped on Nakasu’s chest-face and wrapped cold arms and legs snakelike around the giant’s body; and Nakasu merely opened his mouth and chomped on the Cold One’s leg. But it was like chewing a rubber band. The Cold One seemed to be proof against shark teeth as he was proof against swords and heavy boxes.

The Cold One lowered his head to Nakasu’s shoulder and snapped his fangs shut. It looked like he was instinctively trying to bite a neck, but of course Nakasu had no neck. Then the Cold One tried to drive his fangs into Nakasu’s collarbone, but the rhino hide was too thick to pierce.

Nakasu did not seem to be able to harm the creature, and the Cold One began breathing out a fog of life-absorbing white mist. Impatiently, Nakasu pulled the Cold One off his face, yanking the writhing pale body back with one hand, and pulling the clinging hands and feet away with his other. Then he stuffed the Cold One into the coffin, slammed the lid, and sat on it.

I don’t know what kind of wood the box was made of, but it must have been airtight, or, at least, magic-tight, because the life-absorbing cold did not escape from the box.

Abby threw her weapon. It flew around the box Nakasu sat on, orbiting it and wrapping it in copper cunning-metal chain, and then, trailing its chain, came back to her hand. (I should mention the coffin had little brass legs like a bathtub, so the chain could slide under it, no problem). The coffin lid strained and the copper chain whined as the thing inside struggled to get out.

Nakasu stood. There were marble pillars or steles in this chamber, big and square and covered with angular writing. Nakasu cracked one in half with his fist, and two huge fragments fell to either side. He put his shoulders to one fragment and heaved. But the marble rectangle was too big even for him to lift unaided. Ossifrage pointed at the marble mass and lofted it in midair. It still had inertia, even though it did not have weight, and so Nakasu had some trouble getting it across the chamber, but he maneuvered it above the coffin, and nodded at Ossifrage, who lowered it slowly. The coffin creaked and complained as the weight came down on it. The huge square pillar now sat on the coffin lid, and Abby retracted her chain.

But that was only half the fight.

2. Arimaspians and Himantopedes

I was not completely useless in this combat because the frontal assault was not the only assault. There came an attack from behind. A deafening roar of noise entered the room when the corpse door was kicked open.

I had no sword and no spear, but I think I mentioned there were wands of lampwood in stands by the door, and I yanked one up. Half the light in the room went away when I plucked the wand out of its stone stand.

I assumed the staff-fighting form called tenchijin, which I like to call Babe Ruth stance, because you hold the wand like a baseball bat, tip pointing straight up, except closer to your body than you hold a bat, with your elbows not so high. In movies you see the stunt men swing the wand around like a baton in the hands of a drum majorette. Don’t get me wrong, there is nothing wrong with getting some angular momentum, but you just want to hit the guy fast and hard, preferably with the tip rather than the midpoint, and preferably while he is within staff-range but beyond arm’s length.

Like I said, the double doors burst open. I was only in position to kick one of the leaves shut again. Two guys came in at once, so I kicked the door into the guy on the left.

The guy on the right was the yellow-eyed bald guy in a sable fur coat, and he had his bow bent and arrow nocked, but the bow went flying out of his hands when I cracked my wand into his leading wrist and followed through with an upward strike alongside his jaw. I connected and he fell to his knees, and the black cap he wore went sailing off. I did not make the stroke correctly, because broken bits of his skull did not go sailing off.

Meanwhile, the guy on the left must have been off-balance, because when the door swung back again and nearly hit me, he was falling on his face. He was an Abarimon kid about fourteen years old with his feet on backward. As he fell prone, I brought the tip of my stick down onto the back of his head as hard as I could, using a two-handed overhand stroke as if I were John Henry driving a railroad spike.

In the movies, people get hit on the head and fall unconscious. In real life, blows like that give you brain damage, internal skull-bleeding or sudden death, or all three. I am assuming this was a young and eager kid, full of beans, and because he was super fast on his feet, he got to the door first to win the glory of being the first in the room. The noise from the machines in the room beyond was too great for me to hear whether I broke his skull.

The guy behind Baldy was human-sized, and while he had only one eye, it was in the center of his head. A cyclopes, not a pirate. And he was also the first guy I had seen in this tower of short folks who was eye-level with me.

He had a weird cone-shaped helmet with one eyehole in the middle above a vertical mouth slit, so his helm-face looked like an upside-down exclamation point. He must have come originally from a cold climate, because his brigandine was a parka sewn with copper rings. His weapon was made of cunning metal, and it was a freakish self-elongating spear.

The spear snapped open like a telescope, and the spearhead went into my chest, and then forks and barbs folded out of the sides of the spearhead, and then all the branches of the spear sizzled and burst into red-hot heat that made my mantle catch on fire. I stiffened in shock and he breathed a sigh of relief, sure I was dead.

Whereupon I drove the point of my wand right into the helmet’s faceplate, trying to hit the eyehole. Whether I hit the eye or not, the stroke sent him tumbling backward, and I drove the point of the wand into his neckpiece as hard as I could.

His hands dropped the spear-thing. The spear-thing was too full of fishhooks for me to pull it out, and the weight was pulling on my ribcage.

And behind him were two more one-eyed soldiers in conical helmets and fur brigandines. One of them held a weird two-ended spear that uncoiled like a snake, lashing through the air whiplike and trying to get me in the face. The other threw a many-armed chain which ignited in midair, and it fell like a red-hot octopus all over me, and tried to snare me around the knees and ankles.

Behind the one-eyed man was a line of four of those one-legged men with feet large as parasols I had seen a moment ago, and legs that looked like boneless snakes. (I wondered later if they were a halfway version or evolutionary side-branch of the huge snake-bodied warriors I had seen being deployed.) These one-footed guys were bowmen. The four had asymmetrical bows of bamboo, like you might see a samurai use, and the arrows were a yard long and smeared with poison. They were sitting on their buttocks, each man with his one huge round foot up before him like a shield, and each man had a metal plate affixed to the sole of his boot (or whatever you call a saucer-shaped footgear that could double as a trashcan lid). They tilted down their feet, shot a flight of arrows into me, and raised their feet again, dipping their arrowheads carefully into small lacquered pots. They also carried small bucklers strapped to their heads like sugegasa or coolie hats, and they tilted their heads forward between shots.

I ducked behind the half-closed door, but now there were too many arrows sticking into me, and living anacondas made of red-hot metal digging into me and stabbing into my chest cavity, for me to fight. I had to drop the wand and grab the metal spear-snake that was trying to wrap my face in burning copper. I managed to get it off me, and hold it at arm’s length, but I could not let go of it, as both ends had blades that kept trying to jab me. The palms of my hands were charbroiled like two hamburger patties.

I also had to fight the sensation of poison I could feel flaming in my veins. My power was not automatic: I had to be in the right state of mind, prayerful or za-zen, or both. Not easy to do when you are in combat, murdering and being murdered.

3. Nyctalope

All this happened faster than you can say Saint Michael the Archangel Defend Us in Battle. The door was kicked in just as Nakasu and Ossifrage had hauled the huge marble fragment atop the coffin containing the Cold One. Now Nakasu grunted at Ossifrage, and he hefted the other half of the square pillar, also too heavy for him to lift, and sent it spinning as lightly through the air as a pizza-man tossing a circle of dough. Ossifrage let the giant marble pillar’s weight return when it zoomed through the door, crushing the men, one-legged or one-eyed, into bloody paste like bugs.

There were reinforcements behind them: I had been fighting only the front two ranks, but I never got a good look at the rear guard: only a glimpse of glittering spears, helmets, and weapons that burned with red flame or blazed blue-white. There was some sort of metal thing on legs looming up behind them all, a walking tank or giant crab in barding, but whether it was alive or dead or undead, and what it could fire or what it could do, I never found out, and I am glad of that.

What saved me from finding out was that the yellow-eyed bald man in black, who was still on his knees, insane as this sounds, took a moment to pull his clay pipe from beneath his fur coat, and a pinch of tobacco, reach, touch the pinch against one of the links of the red-hot metal chain trying to rape me, stick it in the bowl of his pipe, and puff it to light.

He stood up, cheeks all puffed out, and smiled at me.

And night came out of his mouth.

I do not mean a dark gas or smoke from a pellet came out of him: and it did not look like the blurry dimness of the twilight effect. Nor was I blind, because I could still see the red-hot links of the cunning metal weapons eating into my chest and mugging my face and burning my legs. But it was black in here, black as the inside of a paint can, and not a brightly colored paint either. The roaring of machines outside filled my ears and night filled my eyes.

Yellow-eyed guy could still see, however, at least well enough to recover his dropped weapons, because one arrow hit me in the throat and then another in the temple. I'll tell you, it feels weird when you can feel a cold wooden rod right in your brain. I did not hear his bowstring snap, though, because the roar from the machine room was too great.

I could not get the multi-branching spear out of my chest, and my legs were still being stabbed and tangled by the burning chain-bolo, but the two-ended spear thing was in my hands, and I whipped it through the air toward his last known position. I did not know where the door was, or where he was, and any noise he made was covered by the uproar. In the chaos of noise, I heard screaming, and I was sure that this was the sound of Abby, and then Ossifrage getting shot, and a few arrows into the huge mouth and huge eyes of Nakasu would probably do him in.

We had lost. I kept swinging the hot chain wildly because I think a man is supposed to keep fighting after it is hopeless, and I swung high enough that I would not brain Abby if I connected with her, in the dark, by mistake.

Another arrow hit me, and I stepped toward the source, swinging. At that moment I stumbled across the stone-covered coffin. The red glint from the hot weapons stopped, and they became cool and limp. Some trace of life-destroying vapor must be hovering around the coffin, and it drained the vital force from the metal.

I had an arrow through my skull and several mortal wounds at that moment, so it would have been a really awkward time for my power to fail me. I scrambled back out of range before Cold Guy’s magic BO drained my magic oomph from me, and before my get-out-of-death-free card could be rejected by the credit agency.

The octopus chain around my ankles was gone, and I had dropped the writhing two-ended spear-snake.

But the Coldness also affected the many-branched spear in my chest. I could feel it moving slowly as barbs folded back into the shaft. It started to heat up again when I scrambled away from the coffin. So it was stunned, not dead. I yanked it out of my chest with pain that seemed remarkably distant and uninteresting, and felt beneath my burnt hands the many-branching spear begin to throb back to life.

Sound suddenly returned like deafness cured by miracle, and this was how I knew someone had shut the doors again.

So I heard the bowstring sing this time. The arrow hit me, and that was enough. The chamber was not so very big. I threw the spear in a line parallel to the shaft of the arrow that just struck me. I doubt I could have hit the target with a normal spear under those conditions, but Cunning Metal-weapons seemed to know how to curve into their targets. I heard the scream of the yellow-eyed man, and his sobbing, and the beginning of what must have been a prayer begging the spear not to unfold. Then I heard the ringing noise of fishhooks and barbs and branches erupting out of the spearhead and into every vital organ. The sound of it was truly appalling.

I laughed aloud.

Abby spoke in the darkness, “Freedman Nakasu, only your eyes can pierce this gloom. Gather us to the corpse pit. Master Ossifrage, levitate us, please. We must flee this room before the darkness clears.”

The noise returned with a clash and a roar, so I assume the crab-shaped walking tank, or a group of other troops, had shoved aside whatever huge weight Nakasu had placed before the doors to wedge them shut.

But by that time, we were floating down and down.

My eyesight returned. We were hanging in vast and empty space outside the tower, with moonlit clouds below us, elfin and silvery, and stars above, and cold wind all around. To one side, a black and many-angled wall, lit only by a crawling fire of dark blue light, rose from endlessly below us, reaching to endlessly above. Among the stars, shining with rainbow light, I could see the disks of two or three Moebius coils flaming, eating vast golden wayships, no doubt on their way toward Earth.

Abby stood on nothing in mid air, and dangled her needle from a thread. She pointed. “The Chamber of Fated Rarities is there.”

Chapter Twenty-Four: Of Words and Worlds

1. Among the Hanging Gardens

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We chatted a bit to kill some time.

2. Killing Time

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Abby said, “German Troglodytes.”

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

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

“Whose scholars? My scholars?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

3. Nomothete

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“And Japan?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

4. Hidden

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It was Foster Hidden.

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

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

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

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

He said, “Troop Two! Second to none!”

“Hm. I guess that is good enough …”

“Don’t land! It’s a trap!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Abby screamed.

5. Time to Kill

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ossifrage was up with us now.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

6. Matron of the Illyrii

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“…by the power of God…”

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

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

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

“… who prowl about the world…”

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

“…seeking the ruin of souls!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sweet.

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

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

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

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

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

Chapter Twenty-Five: Fate of the Fated Rarities

1. Teamwork

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

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

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

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

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

I hate smart-alecky wolves.

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

And the team jumped at my throat.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2. Banter

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

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

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

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

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

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

3. Three Reasons

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

4. The Brephos

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

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

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

5. Extreme Unction

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

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

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

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

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

Chapter Twenty-Six: Dark Elf Squire

1. Eflast Falinn

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He shrugged sheepishly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“On me?” That got my attention.

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

“Not what?”

“Not from Earth either…”

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

Foster looked miserable. “I was under orders.”

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

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

“Drink booze?”

“No, we start drinking booze at three.”

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

“Yeah. The Nachtdunkelnebelritterbruderschaft.”

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

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

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

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

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

“I am Rom!”

“The Space Knight?”

“I am gypsy, you flatulent moron!”

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

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

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

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

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

“And you have a talking car?”

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

“And every planet has its own magic power?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Who?”

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

“How can you possibly memorize such worthless drivel?”

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

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

“And the Flying Rabbi?”

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

“Who?”

“That is the Professor’s real name.”

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

“Uh, actually—”

“You’re joking.”

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

“Mummy World. Got it.”

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

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

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

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

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

“The who?”

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

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

“You do not.”

“I speak it badly. It means Congregate.”

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

“The Inquisition?”

“Yeah. Bet you didn't expect that.”

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

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

“He works for the Dark Tower?”

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

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

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

“Then who?”

“Your mother.”

“What?”

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

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

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

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

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

Now he drew a deep breath and looked solemn.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Who?” I leaned toward him.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What does that mean?”

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

“My dad? My brothers?”

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

“Fine? Do they know I’m alive?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Uh—”

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

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

I blinked. “Babylonians?”

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

“Eh?”

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

“How did my mother talk to you?”

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

“And how do you travel between dimensions?”

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

“Why is Penny in the Dark Tower?”

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

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

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

“Why is Ossifrage important?”

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

“Mecha?”

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

“Uh. What? What?”

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

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

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

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

“Good luck with that.”

“It’s just an expression.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“The little boy.”

“What little boy?”

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

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

Foster nodded. “Him.”

I snorted. “Boy, are you slow!”

“Eh?”

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

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

It was a satisfying moment.

2. Satisfying Moments

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“See?”

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

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

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

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

It was a satisfying moment.

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

3. Portable Hole

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

4. My Fathers’ Sword I Gird Me On

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Then Abby handed me a leather package.

“What’s this?” I asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

6. Haunted Hauberk

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What is that?” she said.

I showed her the one-eyed helmet.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

7. Finally

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Off to the rescue! Finally!

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

Chapter Twenty-Seven: Damsel in Distress

1. Open Window

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And he did not smile once.

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

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

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

2. Barred Gate

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Foster grinned. “Watch my jets.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Ow!” I said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“How do you know all this?” I said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Creampuff! I felt like creampuff.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

3. Under the Pleasure Dome

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They were all made up heavily.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

4. Emergence Emergency

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I admit, that sort of spoiled the mood.

5. Thunder-Thief

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Penny smiled an impish little smile.

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

Wow. Everyone was stealing my thunder today.

6. Safe in Chains With Books

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Or maybe it was my imagination.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“But—”

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

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

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

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

“I won’t leave you!”

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

“This is my fault?”

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

“How? How is any of this my fault?”

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

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

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

“For you, I will!”

“You don’t even know me!”

“I know what my heart tells me!”

“Lub-a-dub? 120 over 80?”

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

“What planet am I from?”

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

“What’s my mother’s name?

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

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

7. A Crack in the Door

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

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

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

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

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

8. Off the Clock

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

“Miss—”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

9. Slave-Collar

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

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

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

“Wh-what?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

10. Nice Plan

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

No wonder she was confident. Or cracked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Penny whispered, “It cannot be true!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I said, “Who is he?”

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

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

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

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

She said, “I led him.”

“How did you know where it was?”

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

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

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

She answered back, “Coppersmith.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Troop Two!” he said.

“Second to none!” I answered.

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

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

The look of surprise on her features was priceless.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Sorry. You’re the spy,” I said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Mistress,” said Abby.

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

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

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

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

“I told you. A Cold One.”

“A what?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

11. Nice Timing

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

Penny said, “He is staying with me.”

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

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

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

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

“Why not tell me later?”

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

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

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

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

Penny said, “No! I will not allow—”

I whirled on her, angry now. “You want to talk to me now because you don’t have faith in my friends, and you think I might get caught if I go with them. You don’t think I can get you out of this room! You don’t have faith in me that I am going to rescue you!”

She said nothing but looked chagrined.

I said sternly: “I will do all I have said I will do! A Muromets does not compromise his word! My nay is my nay and my yeah is my damn straight!”

She said, “Please spare me the posturing. We are short on time. That is all.”

“That is not all,” I said. “When we get back to Earth, you are going out on a date with me. Dinner and a show, and maybe a ride in a carriage. Or at least a haycart. I’ll be a perfect gentleman.”

That caught her by surprise. She had a confused look on her face, like she did not know whether to be flattered or annoyed, to get angry or to get icy.

She decided on icy and angry. In a voice as cold as an Arctic glacier, she said, “If it were not for your schoolboy crush on me, I would not have been captured. I have the power of deep waters, where no stars shine, and I can hide from them, and could have entered here on my own had I wished, rescued Ossifrage with no aid from you or anyone, and been in no danger of the iron hooks!”

“Miss, if it is my fault you are in danger, it is my responsibility to get you out. And to take you out.”

“How can you think about—” Now it was just anger without ice. She made a little growling noise of frustration. “How can you—! I am on a mission! My first real mission in the field! You don’t know what is at stake!”

I said, “Look, Parthygirl, or whatever your real name is, if you don’t have any faith in me, my attempt to save you will end in miserable lingering painful failure, so you will never get back to Earth and never have to grant what I demand. You can agree to a date without any worries, because the date for the date will never come. Right? If you do have faith in me, well—then you can trust me to behave myself. We share a slab of meat at the steakhouse, a slice of pie, and catch a musical.”

“No one makes musicals anymore,” she said flatly.

“Disney does. We’ll catch a rerun of Beauty and the Beast at the campus theater on cheap seat night. It’ll be appropriate. Unless you think Little Mermaid is better, considering?”

She said, “No. I’ll cook. We’ll watch a black and white at my place. To Have and To Have Not. But in return you agree to carry out the mission to unearth the Colossal Zoetic Panoply from the Chasm of Azin!”

“On one condition,” I said. “You tell me first about my birth and background. Then I’ll decide whether to carry out this mission.”

“Granted,” she said, raising her chin slightly as she spoke.

“Uh. Don’t you need a towel? I mean, I cannot pay close attention, while I am also worried about your–”

“–areolae,” offered Foster.

“–health.” I said smoothly, slapping the back of Foster’s head with my free hand as soundly as I could. “Get moving Fos! Black Hats are all around us, and someone surely saw us throw the hoppy-hopper squad off the brink. Hurry back so I can kick the h—um, heck—out of you for your wiseass mouth.”

I sat down on one of the decorative benches near the pool, looked at Penny, and patted the hard seat next to me.

Chapter Twenty-Eight: The Other Sons of Adam

1. How to Sit

Penny sat down next to me.

She seemed a little distracted or confused, although she kept her face straight. First she sat down primly, knees together and feet flat on the floor; then she crossed one leg, which made the absurdly skimpy hem of her shift creep upward on her thigh, which she tried to straighten with her hands. Pulling on the hem of the shift made the transparent, wet, thin fabric cling more tightly to her curves. Then she pulled both legs up and she placed her hands around her ankles, fingers intertwined. Then she blushed, and twisted both legs under her, so she was kneeling on the bench, hips over her heels, knees together. She also did not know what to do with her hands. One moment she had them folded casually in her lap, as if the way she were undressed was no big deal, but then she was tucking strands of sopping hair behind her ear again, but the hair was too heavy at the moment to stay put. Then she started wringing out locks of her hair like you’d wring a stubborn washcloth.

I was not the epitome of aplomb during this moment, exactly, myself. I went over to one of the divans, and pulled up a sheet. It was made of silk. I looked for some fabric that would sop up water better, but there did not seem to be anything in the whole chamber aside from silk and satin. I would have offered her my jacket, but it was under my mail.

I draped the silk bedsheet around her shoulders, cursing myself inwardly for being too cowardly to let my hand linger in the softly-wonderful-shoulder-hugging position for just one more nanosecond. I also did not want to loom over her, but then again I did not want to sit next to her, because you just cannot have a serious conversation with a girl when you can see too much of her. When is the last time you had a deep, philosophical conversation with a Hooter’s waitress?

Next I thought it might be better to loom after all, but then I realized my groin would be right in front of her eyes, and I would have to look down her cleavage again to talk to her. I decided on a knightly compromise. I knelt.

She must have been shorter than I thought, because even with her kneeling on the bench and me on one knee next to it, my eyes were above her shoulder level.

2. The Tree of Life

Penny softly thanked me when I draped the silk around her shoulders. Water stains ruined it immediately, but I figure the cleaning bill would come out of the Dark Tower’s housekeeping budget, so what did I care?

She used a corner to mop unsuccessfully at her hair, but then she gave up on it, and hugged the silken sheet around her, and she looked like a little girl just out of the sea lost in a too-large beach blanket: a pyramid of soft, shining fabric leading up to a wet blonde head.

“So why are you … dressed … like that?” I asked her.

She said, “It’s tradition. Didn’t you watch Return of the Jedi? Female captives get stuck in skimpy outfits and chains.” Then she shivered, and I don’t think it was from the cold and wet. She huddled in on herself, a haunted look to her.

I said, “Enmeduranki told me what they planned to do to you. I am here to prevent that from happening.”

Penny was obviously the kind of girl who does not know how to take being rescued, because all she did was utter a bitter little laugh, and say, “I can prevent it at any time. I need only walk out yonder door, and have the collar pinch my head off. Everything will be prevented.”

“Suicide is wrong,” I said.

“Not on my world,” she said primly. “The school of sea-daughters has a code…”

“It’s wrong on every world,” I said flatly. “And so is giving in to despair. Suicide insults every world, since it rejects everything life on any Earth offers, and rejects any future life as well. It’s just wrong, there is no argument, and it is not something anyone gets to debate about, or vote on.”

She looked at me sidelong. “You speak of a sin you yourself cannot commit.”

I wasn’t sure what to make of that, so I scowled.

“But, come, let us discuss brighter matters! What would you like to know about your origin?” she asked.

“Everything. I take it my dad isn’t my father.”

“He found you as a child, thrown into a ditch or lake by your mother.”

“Thrown into a what? How would you know that?”

“Because all children of your world are treated like that. To throw one of you in a ditch will not kill you, nor will being deprived of your mother’s milk, nor will starvation, nor will isolation. The reason why the Undying throw their immortal get into lakes is to smother their cries. You are unusual for your kind since you were fed milk at a young age, so your body and brain developed normally.”

I tried to imagine a world where all babies were simply tossed into the nearest pond, and found I could not do it.

“How can they grow up if they don’t eat?” I said.

“About age seven, the children are usually large enough to catch food.”

“Large enough how? I mean, just a matter of physics, conservation of mass and all that jazz, how do they grow if they are not able to feed themselves?”

“I don’t know where the mass comes from. I suspect it is ylem, from a fourth dimension beyond the three our senses perceive. Of course, if the young ones stuff leaves or bark or gravel into their stomach to quiet the hunger pangs, that will not kill them either. But typically their brains do not develop, since they lack human company.”

“A whole world of feral children?” I sniffed, and stood up, nerves on edge. There was a smell of blood coming from somewhere.

Penny said, “Their history branched off at a point before the confusion of tongues. Any feral child who hears the Ur language, which is the primordial tongue, understands it. How and why their minds understand the words and concepts behind them, that I don’t know. It only takes a few afternoons of conversation, and they can speak as well as …”

“…Tarzan?”

“I was going to say Caliban, but the idea is the same.”

“What show is he on? I don’t recognize the character’s name.”

Penny smiled impishly, raising both eyebrows. “He is the short fellow from Fantasy Island.”

I put my hand on my scabbard and pushed the hilt with my thumb, exposing about a half inch of blade. I adjusted the angle of the scabbard carefully and wrapped my fingers around the hilt, keeping my pinky and ring finger tense, thumb and forefinger loose, so that I could draw a correct quickdraw. I did not draw the sword yet, since it is not to be drawn except to kill. But I was looking left and right around the chamber, wondering where the smell came from.

I walked around the bench where she sat, and talked over my shoulder. “I thought his name was Nick Nack.”

“You’re thinking of the Bond movie. I am talking about the TV show from the 70s.”

“The one with Khan Noonien Singh?”

“He played Prospero the Magician. Though the show did not call him that.”

I glanced at her. She had slithered from kneeling to curled-up position, and rested her arms on the back of the bench, and her cheek on her arms. It looked adorable, and I wanted to kiss her. But I could not tell if she were kidding me or not. Her expression was what I would call enigmatic, if I was sure what that word meant.

Penny said, “You are probably wondering how the children learn the power of immortality from your world.”

Actually, I’d been wondering if I pretended to drown, whether she would give me mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.

I stopped my soft, nervous walk around the bench and stared at her, thunderstruck with the realization that I could not pretend to drown in front of this girl, not ever. She knows I can’t die. Even if I said a snake had bitten my tongue, I could not trick her into sucking the poison out. Because poison could not kill me either.

Penny smiled. “Ah! I see the thought has touched you deeply!”

“Ah—yes—” I muttered, not looking into her eyes.

She said, “It is simple. The mothers of any child have the Fruit from the Tree of Life, or some juice of it, or sauce, ready to place in the mouth of the infant the moment the joys of motherhood wane, and she wishes not to suckle.”

I remembered that no one ever looks up in ninja movies, which is where the ninja is always hiding. Unless he is hiding in the sand underfoot, of course. So I craned my neck, looking up and down, sniffing.

Meanwhile, I was holding up my side of the conversation. “Did you say the Fruit of the Tree of — what? Like from Genesis?”

Maybe she nodded, since I heard her wet hair rustle, but I was not looking at her. Something near the top of the dome looked odd.

Penny said, “Your true home is the first world to split off. You know that it requires a supernatural intervention to make a split?”

“A miracle? Yeah.”

“In all other worlds, the Highest God, Dela, drove the first parents of the world out from the gardens of delight where the Golden Apples of Life shine, and established wardens to bar the way of return, celestial soldiers with swords of ever-burning flame, and the great serpent Ladon, with his triple tongues of fire. The tree is watered and tended by the Hesperides maidens, whose mistress is Ydune.”

“I heard it was Cherubs with bazookas or something, but I got the picture. We have that myth on my world.” Then I bit my tongue. The girl who had just been joshing me about television shows knew the Bible stories.

Looking up, I realized what was wrong.

3. The Smell of Death

What was wrong was that the upper cloud of sawdust lighting the room had taken on a slightly different color. It was darker, reddish.

Something like a very slow cloud of dark red dust particles was drifting down from on high, silent and ominous as a crimson sunset.

I flared my nostrils and squinted my eyes, every sense straining upward. The scent of blood, the smell of a newly dead body, was coming from the sawdust. Mingled with the odor of wood of a carpenter’s shop, was the hint of the odor of a butcher’s shop.

Penny said, “It is no myth, but true history. The garden is north of Ethiopia, in Eritrea nigh to the sea, or was. The world of your birth is the one where the supernatural intervention drawing the celestial soldiers down from heaven and arming them invincibly with swords of terrible fire never took place. Man put out his hand to take of the Tree of Life, and so he cannot die.”

This distracted me from the darkening chamber dome overhead. I looked down and looked at her face to see if she was kidding me. She looked serious. (Looked seriously adorable with a serious look on her face. Do I need to mention that?)

“But—why do they throw their babies away?” I said. “Why isn’t their world, I dunno, a utopia? Everyone lives a thousand years and more, they all learn everything there is to know, they get wise and mature—and no one can kill each other, so why worry about anything?”

She said, “Because it was not good men and women who become immortal, but the ones who ate not once, but again and again from that next tree which grows hard by the tree of gold, the dark tree of death, the tree of occult knowledge.”

“Ah—that is not what we call it. Knowledge of Good and Evil.”

“Call it rather the Knowledge of Obedience and Disobedience! It is the Tree of Lost Innocence, whatever it is called. The bliss all men remember, if only in tales, we remember from before that fatal taste of forbidden root stained all the generations of Man.”

“Root? Don’t you mean fruit?”

“It was a tea made from the root of the tree of hidden knowledge.”

“I thought it was an apple?”

“No,” she said, “The apples grow on the other tree. This one was a willow.”

“The Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil is a willow tree?”

“So says the lore of my people. It comes from the wise giants, the Nart, who instructed the first parents of the Sea People.”

“I am sure your Nart-lore is dead accurate,” I said with a straight face, “Why is the world named Cainem?”

“It is the world where Cain buried Abel alive, but could not slay him, and the crops which grew up drinking his blood were haunted, and pulled up their roots, and gathered together on the moonless midnight before All Saints’ Day to pull from the cursed soil Abel again. Abel went stalking after Cain where he slumbered, and the trees, wrapped in shadow, walked with him, rustling.”

“Freaky. But I thought Abel was a good guy.”

“Perhaps at first he was. But time did not strengthen him, not in a deathless world where no one goes to heaven, and the suffering of life has no end.”

“Uh. But the pleasures never end either. Don’t they?”

“Worldly pleasures always pale and wane. Do you enjoy the last swig of the last bottle of six as much as the first sip of the first? Do you think even Solomon with his seven hundred wives and three hundred concubines was as pleased with the kiss of the last lass in line as with his first? Whereas fresh pain is undulled by time.”

“All pleasures? They get tired of everything?”

“They have no love, and so have no true pleasure. The only thing of which they do not tire is sadism and bloodshed. It jolts their jaded nerves.”

“Sounds like hell. But they have eternal life!”

“Eternal life without hope is not life,” Penny continued. “In such a world women do not need men to survive. Survival is unavoidable! With no bonds between the sexes, there is no marriage, therefore no families, no bands, no clans, no tribes, no brotherhood, no civilization. They have no human feelings left. Every man there is as Cain toward his brother, and they bear the mark you bear, which forbids that men should slay them. The hopeless centuries grind all light slowly out from their hearts.”

“If they have no families, then how are babies born?”

“Rape.”

“But wouldn’t any group that formed a tribe find itself advantaged over all the other scattered people?”

“Advantaged for what advantage? They have no need to increase their numbers.”

“I don’t know! Building houses, getting out of the snow, having a blanket made of mastodon fur?”

“Ah! This world was never flooded by any Deluge. The gardenlands of paradise are still available for them to dwell. There is fruit in abundance, which only the younger ones bother eating. None there do hunt nor keep herds. There is no snow in those latitudes.”

“They run around naked?”

“Of course not. They clothe themselves in leaves of fig, or garments woven of their own hair, which grows as long as they wish as swiftly as they wish, since it follows their will.”

“But if the mothers do not care about their children—”

“And why should they, if the children are children born of rape?”

“—Well, it’s not the baby’s fault who the father is. But, that’s not my question. Why bother feeding the babies the Magic Applejuice of Life, if these people have no human feelings left?”

“The Dark Spirit who rules that land makes certain no child still mortal dies there, lest the child’s shade be saved alive and snatched up to the heaven above the heavens.”

“If no one dies, and women stay fertile throughout their infinite lifetimes, why isn’t their world hip-deep in humans?”

“War.”

“How can they have war if they don’t have death?”

“Their implements of war are truncheons made from their own unbreakable bones: and the result of war is to bury the vanquished alive, and pile rocks upon the unquiet body. And so the land does indeed have people beneath it, even if it is not hip deep. When many stir at once, there is an earthquake.”

“Who is this Dark Spirit who rules there?”

Then I felt a weird sensation. Someone behind me was listening closely. It was as if someone or something was reaching across my shoulder, straining to hear what Penny was about to say.

I whirled, and looked behind. There was no one there but the fifty or so slave-girls, who had not moved from where they huddled, except to flinch at my sudden motion.

I looked up again. The cloud of red was clearly visible now, hanging along the curve of the dome, keeping to the shadows, hovering away from the brighter sawdust. I did not draw Dancing Maiden because I did not see a target. But the cloud was spreading.

It was watching me. Don’t ask me how I knew. It was just a feeling in the pit of my stomach like lead, like insects made of ice crawling across my flesh.

Without taking my eyes from the spreading cloud, I said softly, “Penny. Don’t look up. Something just came into the room through the tiny vent holes that let the glow-in-the-dark sawdust in. Can you send those girls some place safer? Out of this chamber?”

4. Dangersense

Penny stood up in a slither of silk, her face pale and motionless as ice. For once, she did not look sexy to me; she looked like she was scared to death and needed help. She spoke without moving her lips. “I did not think there was another one of you in this world. With everything being readied for the invasion of Albion, I thought — never mind! I cannot tell you where he might hear. And I must not fall alive into his hands.”

I pretended I had a booger or something on my nose, so that I could scrape my shoulder against my face without taking my hands off Dancing Maiden. While my mouth was hidden, I muttered, “He who? I can take him.”

“Your brother,” she whispered.

“Dobrin? Alexei?”

“No, one of your kind. One you cannot defeat.”

I snorted. “Oh really? Just watch me.”

“He’s like you. Unkillable. You. Can’t. Win.”

“Will you kiss me if I do?”

Her eyes flickered with anger and her voice was cold as she glared at me. “Your infatuation is what put me in this danger! This is serious!”

“You think I ain’t serious about that kiss?” I demanded.

I flicked my eyes toward the red cloud. It was still hanging high, coating the sides of the dome, reaching down very slowly with arms of smoke, like rusty poison seeping into a wineglass. “What is he waiting for?” I wondered aloud. “How can he see us?”

Then I knew. That sense of being watched, that creepy feeling like spiders crawling up my spine; it was the same ghostly sensation I had gotten during that one moment when I had felt and could move my severed hand. In my mind, sort of as a joke, I dubbed it “The Quickening” but when they make the movie version of my life, they’ll have to call it something else, to avoid copyright issues. It should really have a cool pseudoscientific name, like teleproprioception, but for now let’s call it weird-beard freak-o-nightmare sensation.

I said, very softly to her. “My spidey senses are tingling. He’s curious. He wants to know — something.”

Penny drew a deep breath, and said loudly, “The Dark Spirit that rules your world! No doubt you are desperately eager to know the secret of how one of your kind, the Lalilummutillut can overcome and usurp his power, and become supreme of your world?”

“Ah — Am I? I mean, yes! Yes, I am! Supreme in my world? Sign me up!”

The dark red stain was now traveling down the dome, reaching with its many arms of smoke. But when I said that, it slowed, watching, waiting.

In case I did not make this clear, I also could feel the hate coming off the creature. Intent as an unblinking eye of a watching cat, it was ferocious, silent, filled with fury and malice that had no purpose, no object: it radiated a hatred that was pure, and had long ago forgotten its purpose. Hate that just existed for its own sake.

“Can you get the women out of this room?” I whispered to her.

“Maybe, but if I signal to them he might attack.”

Penny looked toward the other girls. She flicked her gaze toward a large archway that led into a darker chamber opposite the gallery, maybe a wardrobe or dormitory. I couldn’t tell what it was. It was very subtle, or perhaps the girls had some sort of prearranged signal. By twos and threes, moving quietly, barefooted teenagers in metal collars fled out of the room, the bigger ones holding smaller girls by the hand.

It should have worked, but it didn’t.

Chapter Twenty-Nine: Brother Abomination

1. Blood Storm

The red cloud moved with startling speed, swirling together like a tornado, suddenly becoming a spinning funnel of blood which touched down before the arch and blocked the way. Perhaps ten girls were still in the darker sleeping quarters, and the other forty were with us here in the domed torture garden. They were all screaming.

I was already running. I somehow felt the cloud of blood decide to move before it went anywhere. I placed myself in between the red vertical whirlpool of medical waste and the shrieking women, then I waved them back. They obeyed without hesitation. The screams of the ten girls in the dark chamber behind the blood-tornado suddenly fell silent. I don’t know if it had somehow killed them, or if they had fallen silent for fear of drawing its attention.

I heard bare footfalls slapping the floor behind me as the girls rushed pell-mell away from the thing. The whirling funnel of blood tilted like a top made of liquid, and moved to my right, as if to flank me. I moved with it, keeping myself between it and the women.

I set my feet and drew my sword and assumed the stance called Heaven-and-Earth, holding the blade overhead, a vertical line of steel. “Your foe is here!” I shouted.

Laughter came from the bubbling column of blood. It was the cruelest, most wild laughter I had ever heard.

The blood clotted and thickened and organs formed in the middle of the goo. It turned into a red mud. Veins and nerves flickered through the surging mass. It smelled like an abattoir. I could feel the weird-beard sensation tickling all over my flesh, tugging at my organs, causing odd tides in my bloodstream. It was as if this thing, this Undying, were putting up a magnetic field to pull itself together, and that I was enough like it to be partly attuned, and feel the tug.

I shouted to Penny, “Should I attack him before he forms?”

She said back, quietly but clearly, “It does not matter what you do! Don’t you understand? The Undying are the most terrible of the servants of the Dark Tower!”

“Have a little faith in me!” I said. Maybe my voice was rougher than it should have been.

Scorn rippled through her tones. “When you’ve been doing so well so far?”

“What does that mean?”

“You fell into that Moebius coil like an idiot!”

“I was trying to save you!”

“Since I command the Eden-light, I was in more danger from the rescue attempt than from the danger!”

“Can you defeat that thing? Because I will!” I growled. “Whatever the hell it is…”

Because now it was starting to look like something.

“Get back with the other girls,” I snapped at her. “Use your witchy powers to protect them. I can beat him!”

To my surprise, I heard her naked feet slapping the marble as she retreated. Was Penny actually listening to me? Did college girls have the ability to listen to high-school boys and obey them? Maybe if the emergency was desperate enough.

2. Antediluvian

The red mass pulled itself into a manlike shape, and flecks like dandruff formed on its surface like ice forming on a pond, congealing into webs of scar tissue. It was a blur of twisted organs and pulsating sacs in a rough apelike shape, as ghastly as something you might see in a modern art museum.

Then a blobbish parody of a man with no features stood before me, faceless, trollish, and as hideously awful as a burn victim.

Its flesh pulsed with an unseen power, a power of hate that I could feel tugging at me, and then the blob grew a distinct face, eyes, nose and mouth.

He was a Neanderthal. He had shoulders like a linebacker, and deep-set eyes beneath supraorbital brow ridges, a jutting jaw like an ape’s.

I laughed. Was this the best they could do? “I am taller than you,” I told him.

He stood there a moment, glowering at me, and then he showed me two unexpected tricks. First, he squinted, and he made his hair of his head and jaw puff out like a cloud, or a slowly expanding smoke bomb. Then it formed itself into braids, and wrapped itself—there were yards and yards of hair—from left shoulder to right hip, and a fringe of beard and braids hung down to cover his groin.

I wasn't impressed by the first one. “Nice hair, Rapunzel.”

But his second trick was more impressive and it caught me off-guard. Without any warning, he suddenly ripped his left arm clean in half with his right hand. I am not kidding! He didn't show any sign of pain, and with his severed limb, he sent an arc of blood flying through the air right at my eyes.

That's how I learned that I can parry liquid. My eyebrows, nose, and mouth were stinging with whatever acidic chemical was in his blood, but I instinctively flicked the blade in such a manner that it kept the burning blood out of my eyes.

It was the best parry I had ever done, and no one ever saw it but him. When they make my life into a movie, I want a dramatic trill of bass notes at that moment. Better yet, if they make my life into a game, I want the ‘parry liquid’ skill to be something you can unlock after a side quest or something.

Like I said, I didn’t blink. He tensed, but did not spring.

The stinging sensation turned into burning fire across my cheeks and forehead. His blood, where it splashed me, seemed to have mutated into something that was trying to eat my flesh. It was not just a normal acid, as I could feel the malice within it, a sadistic drive to inflict pain for the sake of pain.

But I had gotten the hang of how this world worked. So instead of panicking or running away, I called upon a higher, more powerful blood. “Precious Blood, ocean of divine mercy: Flow upon us! Precious Blood, most pure offering: Procure us every grace! Precious Blood, hope and refuge of sinners: Atone for us! Precious Blood, delight of holy souls: Draw us! Amen.”

The glowering Neanderthal flipped the meat and flesh off the bone in his right fist, and the bloody mass crawled across his beard-covered body and reconnected at his left elbow stump. It only took a second. The left arm hung limp for a moment, then he flexed his hand, and I could see the new bone growing into place like seeing someone stuff a pool cue down a stocking. Then his left arm was good as new, and meanwhile his right fist was carrying a radius and ulna. The bones of the skeletal hand clenched themselves into a fist to form a nice bludgeon on the end.

By that time, I was done with my prayer, and I felt myself forcing his vile essence out of me. His blood drops left me, and went back to him, and they flew through the air like red bees returning to the hive. He breathed them into his nose and open mouth.

“That is a cute trick,” I said. “Rip your arm off and beat me to death with it. Is that your plan?”

He glowered at me, his eyes squinting with crazy mad-dog wrath, his big square teeth clenched, his face pale with fury. He raised his bone club and took a step toward me: I shifted my weight to my back foot, and brought my blade into Chudan no Kamae, a middle stance, sword level and pointed at the foe, slightly above the waist. He stopped.

I called to Penny without turning my head, “Can this guy talk? I thought they had the Ur speech power. Why doesn’t he have any canine teeth?”

Penny said softly, “You are Antediluvians. You are vegetarians, and need consume no meat. Haven’t you noticed we have smaller teeth than you?”

“Don’t remind me,” I muttered under my breath.

The Neanderthal looked at me carefully, drew in a breath, and swelled up. I mean he got bigger by maybe three inches, maybe four, but growing in all directions. It looked terrifying.

I think I would have run screaming from the room if his head had started to expand at that point. The degree of control he had over his body was freaking me out. I was wondering what he couldn’t do. Change into a chimera? Grow an extra heart? Extra limbs? Send an eyeball floating off by itself on spy missions?

Instead he spoke, “Epushtu ikkan’ ayyu?” It was weird, but his accent and grammar were all different from the Ursprache that Abby spoke, but somehow the words still twisted themselves in my brain and I found myself understanding him, as easily as if I had remembered all along what his words meant. “What magic be yours?”

I said, “My magic? I got rhythm. I got music. I got my gal. Who could ask for anything more?”

He shook his shaggy head. “You be a yearling. You know not how to make the blood release its virtues. And yet when my blood was in you, it did not blind you or make the nine alchemical terrors in your brain. How do you fend my blood away? What magic be yours?”

He meant the prayer I had used to focus my concentration. “Real magic,” I said. “This magic comes from the tree upon which they hung my Lord, and it is stronger than the tree whose stolen fruit gives you your power.”

He said, “Tell me your name, yearling.”

“You first.”

“Your name be Yu Ferst?”

“No. Who’s on First; What’s on Second;” I Don’t Know is on Third; and the shortstop is I Don’t Give a Damn. “You tell me your name before I tell you mine, fathead.”

“I be Rahab.”

I snorted. “So you be, be you? Well, I be Ilya. And I be kicking your butt now, unless you be nice and smart and just back away.”

He shook his head. “Your blade be proof against the man-wolf. It hold no hurt for me.”

“Are you sure of that?”

Rahab grinned. Between two lips of colorless gristle, his teeth were as square and yellow as the teeth of a cart horse.

“Ilya be a boy, then? Boy be a fool, yes? Does the boy know which hand to wipe his bottom, which hand to eat? Does he know right hand from left?”

“I'm the fool? The boy knows to use toilet paper. You should try it sometime.”

Rahab pointed with his arm-bone club over my shoulder at something behind me. I kept my eyes on him. “That be your gal? Your toys?”

“Everyone here is under my protection.”

He held his left arm out and it grew longer and hairier until it was like an ape’s arm. “Can do with any part. Strong and thick. You get?”

“Get what?”

“Stupid boy! I to rip your head off. Prop it up there. Right there.” He pointed behind me. I kept my eyes on him. “Then I rut her. Rut her fierce. So fierce I break her inside, all crushed bone and blood jelly, yes? You see it. I will break her.”

I heard a whimper from Penny. This is the girl who sailed around the world by herself. I did not think she was capable of such pure fear.

Rahab smirked. “Doctors here learn how to change bodies from us, from Host who Yearn for Death in Vain. We make others yearn for death also. Once blood of Rahab is inside her blood, make her more nerves more feel more pain. Make her stomach acid dissolve this part and that part of her innards. Twist her bones like pretzels and snap them like sticks. Yearling Ilya—he be able to do any this thing? He stop me? No? Our kind, we fight blood to blood. How you fight me, little brother?”

I was not sure how to respond to all that, so I resorted to that calm samurai stare my brothers use when they practice sword forms.

Rahab was not impressed. “You know nothing. Make your hair grow long. Can Ilya do this? Can Ilya do anything?”

“I can free you from your slavery to the Dark Tower. Would you rather be free or play Jack the Rapist for your masters?”

3. Fate of Iron

His face contorted with hatred.

When I say his face contorted, don’t think that his eyes bugged out and his lips drew back from clenched teeth. No. Think of his eyeballs actually growing bigger, and the bone sockets and flesh surrounding his eyes expanding grotesquely to compensate. His mouth grew larger and his jaw increased its bone mass, so that the lower half of his skull deformed and pushed forward, and teeth grew larger, and yellower, and pointed, and the color of his lips went from red to black, and the muscles in his cheeks and the side of his face rippled and puffed up.

It would have looked like something from a cartoon, except that a putrid, burnt smell was also coming from his flesh. And I knew I was seeing an incredible use of a power to control every cell in his body, maybe even every particle, and it was a supernatural power, indeed, an immortal power.

I was so amazed that I almost missed what he was shouting. “There be no escape! All be slaves! There be slaves who know them chained. Me. There be slaves who know nothing. You. You cannot free anyone. There be no freedom. There is nothing but the stars and fate!”

He drew a deep, shuddering breath, and hissed through his still-elongating teeth. “Your fate, you meet now.”

4. First Round

By the time he was done speaking, I could barely make out the words, because his incisors had grown like the fangs of a saber-toothed tiger.

He must have removed all the vertebrae of his neck at the same time, and replaced his neck cartilage with some sort of elastic membrane, because all of a sudden his head shot forward like a snapping cannonball, with a neck longer than a giraffe’s and powerful as the body of an anaconda behind it.

Rahab tried to bite me on the neck, but his jaws, even though he had strengthened them like the jaws of a bulldog, could not penetrate my mail coif. I smelled the venom that pumped from his fangs, and heard the hiss of acid dripping from his tongue. But I also felt the ripple of chain links across my neck and shoulders, as the cunning metal armor moved more mass into that area, so my neck armor grew thicker.

I had been trained not to look an opponent in the eye during the fight, but to use my peripheral vision and watch his hands. It was good for me at that moment that I did as I was trained, because I did not strike at the exposed four-yard-long neck—the obvious target—or at his right hand which held his truncheon. He started to swing, but it was a fake-out, because he passed the truncheon to a tentacle or tail he had been growing out of his back, sneakily out of my line of sight. This third arm came darting out suddenly from over his shoulder, snatched up the truncheon, and struck.

I parried the blow and chopped the third arm off at the wrist. The truncheon hit the ground instead of hitting my helmet, and the white bone of the truncheon’s head turned into a black blood, which splattered across the marble, hissing and wriggling. That goo would have been all over my face, digging into my eyes and up my nose if I had taken the head-feint. I could feel the black substance, the hate of it, with my spidey-senses.

Meanwhile, the saber-toothed tiger fangs had gotten caught in the links of my chain coif, or, rather, my smart armor had tightened on them. During the moment it took Rahab to eject his fangs, leaving them twitching at my neck like digger wasps, still injecting poison into me, I reversed my grip on my sword and slashed it through his neck. Halfway.

Chopping off a man’s head is harder than it sounds. Even with no bones in the way, it is tough. Go to your local butcher’s chop, get a hunk of raw meat nine inches across, hang it from a hook so that it yields to the blow, and see if you can cut all the way through it with a big knife or a cleaver. Try it.

So, it took me two strokes. It was still a good strike. The head dropped. When it bounced, I punted it across the room, screaming curses. I mean it was screaming, the skull-football. Penny was screaming too; in fact, all the girls were screaming.

I was the only one who wasn't screaming because I was too busy keeping my eyes on the target, Rahab’s body, headless or not. And I saw his prehensile hair part, and I saw where he had grown an eye like the eye of Nakasu, right where his right nipple used to be. I did a jump-lunge and put the point of my sword right into it. He elongated his left hand and raked me with the bear-claws he had grown there, and out of his severed neck-hole came a jointed monstrosity like a scorpion’s tail, the bulb swollen with poison. The yard-long neck-tail lashed at me and tried to stab me. He must have prepared the poisonous sting inside his neck while he was talking, his ‘Plan B’ in case I managed to decapitate him.

I jumped back, parrying left and right. Claws scraped off my armor, and I cut his arm to the bone, and maybe broke it with the force of the blow, but he scuttled back and shook his arm back into working shape. It clicked and was whole.

But I was in control. Now he was the one reacting to my attack, he had lost the initiative. Fights aren't like the movies, where first one guy is winning, then the other guy. In real life, they're more like a snowball on top of a mountain peak. Once it starts rolling down one side, it seldom reverses course. He lashed out at me again and again, but he had to remove the bones from any limb he made stretchy enough to reach me and I had three feet of steel between us, plus another three feet of arm. That meant he had to double the length of his limbs just to touch me. It made him slower and easier to counter, plus the lack of bone made it that much easier to sever those outstretched limbs.

Blade whirling and stabbing, feet shuffling, I drove him across the room, chopping bits from him.

I ran at him, blade high, feinted low as if intending to cut his legs out from under him, but then I brought my blade up and drove it into his left breast, piercing his one remaining eye. He reeled back, blinded, and then I chopped his legs out from under him. First his right leg, then his right.

Down he fell. I stabbed through his midsection and a strange thing happened. With a jerk, all the severed limbs and heads and wormy bloodstains we had slopped across the room jumped back into place. I mean his head came back to his neck like it was pulled on an invisible string, and so did the arms and legs I’d amputated.

It should have scared the dickens out of me, but since my adrenaline was already pumping, and I was already screaming my head off with battle-rage, and was already sweating like a pig (fighting monsters is hard work) the additional adrenaline, screaming, and sweating caused by fear was lost in the general background noise. If you hear soldiers or firemen talk about being too busy to feel scared, I guess this is what they mean.

I jumped back, bellowing swear words, drew a shaky breath, and resumed the Heaven-and-Earth stance, weight on the rear foot, blade erect. The blood on the blade was now streaming back into Rahab's body, flying through the air like scarlet sleet driven by a horizontal wind.

And then he was back to normal, dressed in nothing but his long hair, with the jutting jaw and lowering brow ridges of a Neanderthal. The bone of his own forearm had gone back into his arm.

Rahab laughed. “I take your measure. You fall short.”

I panted, “I won that round and you know it!”

“You know nothing, you. Look! You gasp! You wheeze! You tire! Boy knows not how to put fatigue from his blood. Rahab, me, I do not tire and tear. I send away the fatigue with a thought. Now we start again and you learn what it is to fight a man, boy. No more breathing for you.”

Then his chest opened like the doors of a bureau, and he ripped two sharp ribs from it, taking one in either hand. He shrugged, and his arms thickened and grew a layer of integument like rhinoceros hide, then the hide darkened, and he grew a layer of bone atop that.

His eyes drew backward into his skull, so that he was looking at me through two little tubes of bone, and he thickened the bones of his face and flattened his nose, so that his skull became a helmet.

“Again!” he growled. “We go again!”

“Neither of us can kill the other,” I said. I was still breathing heavily, really wishing I knew his trick for wishing weariness away.

“But I can give you pain. Much pain.” He grinned.

His mouth began to stretch and his teeth elongated into fangs. The rib-bones in his hands quivered, straightened, and grew and grew until he held two spears. They were four feet long, and the tips began dripping poison.

There went my reach advantage.

5. Second Round

He threw the first rib like a javelin. I turned sidewise to it, presenting a minimal target, and swatted it aside with my blade, keeping my eyes on him. He had twisted his legs backward, so they looked like the legs of an Abarimon. I don’t see how there could be any advantage to speed or agility to have your knees and feet turned wrongway-round but somehow he lunged forward at breathtaking speed, like a panther springing.

I feinted high and struck low, slashing out his belly. He raised his truncheon to block my high blow, and gagged in shock as his entrails came slithering out like a red apron. Rahab had simply never learned swordsmanship. What need did he have for the art?

But he had arts of his own. The rib-bone spear which had flown past me, had come to life and somehow snagged my rear leg from the floor. My mail jerkin only came to knee length, so the spear wrapped my lower leg like a snake, and, like a snake, reared back and struck. Only a little bit of venom was pumped into my flesh—but enough so that my leg simultaneously felt numb and on fire, and I lost control of it. The muscles spasmed like a frog’s leg being touched by an electrical jolt.

I hopped, slid, fell, and the fight should have been over right then and there. But Rahab was screaming and clutching at his bleeding guts, and he fell too. As he dropped, the snakelike bone wrapping my ankle turned into a black liquid and jumped—literally leaped across the air—back into the breast of Rahab. He still had the Abarimon feet when I gut-slashed him, but as he toppled and fell, his feet were normal again. And so was his face. The elaborate bony armored plates protecting his eyes and skull turned black and wriggled and got reabsorbed into his skull.

“Grant that I may praise thee, O sacred Virgin; give me strength against thine enemies!” I said solemnly and I felt a cool serenity flow through my limbs, washing the poison away. Sensation returned to my feet, and I jumped to them.

By that time Rahab was also back on his feet, standing in a crouch, his Neanderthal face growling and ugly, his eyes two dark little ponds of hate.

“So, pain disrupts your Mr. Stretchy trick, I see.” I assumed my stance again, weight on my rear leg, and weapon pointed, blade side up, toward his eyes. “And we cannot get rid of pain.”

“No,” he grunted, his vicious grimace looking oddly like a grin. “No escape from pain. Not for us. Not ever.”

“How come all the Undying don’t wear armor?”

He hooted. “Armor that is made of dead metal? All flesh is ours to command. Armor would but impede us, foolish boy.”

“Foolish man, if you don’t mind.”

He didn't respond, but drew in his breath and began to expand. Not just a few inches either. He swelled up until he was at least twelve feet tall.

Nor did he swell in proportion. He grew stouter and thicker faster than he grew taller, so his legs and feet turned into elephant legs more like those of Nakasu.

I lunged and slashed at his stomach, groin, jumped back, lunged again, and impaled his chest. The tip of Dancing Maiden scraped against a rib-bone with an ugly noise. It left a shallow cut, and drew blood, but did not penetrate. His whole chest area was now a solid mass of bone. From the way his flesh rippled, I could see he had closed his ribcage like Venetian blinds snapped shut.

He was thirteen feet tall. Then fourteen.

He grew a single horn from the center of his brow, and let it swell to a yard in length before ripping it free. Little tatters of his flesh dripped and oozed on the surface of the horn, emitting acrid smells. The horn flattened, becoming like a long-handled ax or pike.

And now he was fifteen feet tall.

I lunged and cut at his leg, hoping that all this was just puffing up for show. Rahab could not be pulling extra mass into existence from nowhere, could he? The laws of nature would not allow that! He must be losing density to gain so much volume! He must! The conservation of mass was a law!

I was expecting it to be like slicing your brother’s birthday cake in half with your practice sword in retaliation for him bisecting all your birthday balloons, including the one with a glow-in-the-dark mouse on it, with his. In other words, I was expecting no resistance, a feeling of immense satisfaction, and maybe getting my butt kicked a moment later.

Nope. My sword cut into rhino-hide and dense muscle, then struck bone and rebounded. The wound puckered and sprayed blood at me, and made a sardonic spitting noise before zipping itself back shut as easily as a Ziploc bag. It was if I'd never struck him at all.

I silently cursed him. It looked as if I could not injure him painfully enough to snap him back to his true form.

Apparently the conservation of mass is more like a suggestion rather than a law.

Rahab laughed. His laughter was like a gush of a wind from hell, full of cruelty and power.

I turned and ran.

6. Final Round

It was a gamble, I admit. I risked everything. If Rahab merely took the opportunity to turn and throw his poisonous blood and body parts at Penny and the other girls trapped in the chamber, all was lost. But I was gambling that he would think that I was like him, and held all living things in hatred and contempt.

To make sure he followed me, I threw four shuriken from my father’s belt (which I was wearing outside the hauberk, remember) into the conveniently large face, belly and groin of the giant. So he followed me, not pausing to slay the harem slaves. It is not like they were going anywhere.

I also zigged and zagged as I ran, a skill I learned as a child running from older brothers with longer legs than mine. The pike of horn smote to my left and right, cracking the marble floor and spraying blood-red gushes of venom as it struck.

It is not easy running, in forty pounds of chainmail, from a giant who can cover ten feet at a stride. But there is a story about a poker player, Amarillo Slim, luring a chump into a sucker bet that he could outrun a horse in the hundred-yard dash, and winning the bet by having the track set up as two fifty-yard dashes connected by a hairpin turn. The animal with the larger mass could not decelerate, turn, and accelerate as quickly as the animal with the smaller mass. This is also why jackrabbits sometimes outrun wolves. And like those rabbits, I used my ears. The thunder of Rahab’s footfalls, which were shaking the whole darn floor, and the slight change in rhythm, told me when his blows were about to fall, and I would break left or right. Once and twice and thrice he swung and missed.

Perhaps you recall the colonnade where visitors could lounge and look into the harem, a long wall of windows covered with blue glass bars. I ran toward them. I reversed course at the last minute, not caring if I were hit or not, and lashed out at the elephant legs of the monstrous Rahab behind me. It was a shallow blow to the back of his knee, but he bled gallons, and the floor was marble, and his body was as massive as an elephant’s, moving at the speed of a cavalry charge.

Unlike the law of conservation of mass, the law of conservation of momentum turned out to be more than a suggestion. He could not stop.

Rahab slipped on his own blood, did a pratfall, and smashed into the bars. There was a crash, and shards of razor-sharp glass went everywhere. There was a storm of dark red lighting all over him. It was what Abby had called distilled essence of pain.

Yes, Rahab had indeed struck me with his pike as I turned, and I think he broke my spine and both legs when he did, but merely being near the firestorm of pure pain was enough to snap my body back to its true form, unbroken and whole.

Rahab was back to his normal size too. His limbs were jerking, not in his control. Each time he jerked, another little razor sharp leaf or needle of blue glass would break. The stuff dripping out, whatever it was, would add to the torture he was already in.

The slave-girls were screaming. Rahab was screaming. I was trembling with fatigue and battle-adrenaline, but I resisted the urge to break stance or lean on my sword. (No one actually leans on a sword when they are tired: it would damage the tip. But I wanted to.) So I was the only one not screaming. I was too tired.

7. Victory

Not everyone was screaming. Penny came up beside me, quiet as a doe. She had a jar of water she was carrying on her head, which I thought was a neat trick.

And from somewhere, she had found her eyeglasses, which she was wearing. I saw she had a small book covered in black shagreen leather in her hand, with corners, hasps and lock of gold, zipped into a plastic baggie.

She knelt gracefully and lowered the water jar to the floor without spilling it.

Then she unzipped, unlocked and opened the little book. She unlocked it by touching her tongue to the hasp. The shining yellow pages were mirror-bright, covered with tiny, cramped and intricate cuneiform and hieroglyphs in black and red and green inks, diagrams and pentagrams and woodcuts of angular, bestial faces. Their eyes moved and looked at me as she flipped the golden pages. And, oddly enough, some of the pages were covered in European musical notation with clefs and notes and bars and staves.

She adjusted her eyeglasses, found a page of music, and started singing.

The words and the tune were alike lost in the uproar. I did not see any water rise up out of the jar, but I could not shake the impression that I should have been seeing it. That eerie weird-beard sensation I got from Rahab was coming from the jar. I don’t know how I could sense it, but I could.

Fascinated, I put my hand down to a point in the air between the opening of the jar and Rahab. I gasped. I could feel a cold trickling flow over my hand. I felt water. My eyes did not see any water. My eyes told me my hand was in the air.

I cupped my hand and lifted it to my face. My fingers were dry. I touched my lips to the hollow of my palm. I did not taste or feel any water, but a sensation of coolness touched my lip and ran down my throat. It was just the sensation of refreshment without the actual water. The spirit of water. I was fascinated, and stepped forward. The cool touch fell across my knees. There was an invisible and impalpable column of water about a foot in diameter writhing through the air.

Penny scowled at me with her eyes, not ceasing to sing, and waved me angrily to one side. I stepped back, feeling foolish. Note to self: do not interfere with the affairs of witches, for they are sexy and quick to anger.

From the way the writhing body of Rahab reacted, I could tell the non-existent water stream had flowed about him. Then the broken ends of the shattered blue glass flickered. The non-existent water conducted electricity just like real water, or so it seemed, because at that moment streams and darts of dark red sparks swirled out of the broken ends of the many blue bars, and the air around Rahab, and the floor where he flopped and twisted, all of it, grew dark and angry with crawling sparks. They followed invisible swirls and streams of motion.

On and on she sang, and the sparks thickened and darkened into a liquid cocoon of pure pain. Rahab could not stop shaking and twitching, and so he could not rise to his feet, or even inchworm away from the broken glass, and neither could he warp his flesh into any new shapes or sizes.

Then the shivering mass of dark red sparks flowed over his head like a plastic bag, and entered his mouth and eyes and nose. Having that stuff up your nose and down your throat must have really hurt, because all Rahab’s muscles locked up with agony, shivering and tense, and the sound of his shrieks turned into a gargle. I assume the unreal water must have created a sensation of drowning. Rahab made all the noises you’d expect from someone whose head was underwater. It sounded awful.

I threw back my head and laughed long and loud, the laughter of the Host who Yearns for Death in Vain.

“Water bending!” I grinned down at Penny. “Cool beans, Katara!”

The water left in the jar before Penny looked odd. It was de-natured, and would not create a sensation of drowning even if you were drowning. An amphibious girl might convince even a suspicious guard that she had granted him the ability to breathe water.

Penny, kneeling on the floor with her well-shaped arms aloft, now smiled, but the silvery flow of song from her throat did not cease, nor did she take her eyes from her book. Then I realized why she looked worried.

Penny dared not stop her song, lest her spell drop. I assume a professional singer can keep up a tune for a long time, but everyone runs out of breath eventually.

I sat down next to her, got the kit out of my father’s belt, and started cleaning my sword.

Chapter Thirty: Quaffs Blood Like Wine

1. Time to Clean

I used a sheet of rice paper from the cleaning kit to remove all oil and blood from the blade, carefully holding the scalpel-sharp edge away from me.

“Penny,” I said. “You look anxious.” She looked lovely too, but I did not tell her that. She had left aside the silk bedsheet in which I’d wrapped her, so she was now just in the lowcut sleeveless white tunic bound at the waist with a black wide belt, and a black collar like an evil version of a necklace locked around the white skin of her throat.

“Don’t worry, I'll brush my teeth before you give me that kiss you owe me. Because I did defeat him”

She angrily rolled her enormous emerald eyes at me over the top of her little book, but she did not stop singing.

“You think I am an idiot—which, I admit, shows that you are a good judge of character. You are probably thinking that, as soon as you run out of breath, our pal Rahab is going to stand up, shake off his pain, turn into a whirlwind of bone fragments or something, and just rip me to shreds, and torture all the girls here to death.”

I started to tap the powder ball softly, each tap two inches apart, along the length of the blade. I worked carefully, dusting the blade very lightly with the polish. It must be done precisely and rhythmically, so there is something almost soothing about the task. I was far enough from Penny that there was no danger of her inhaling the powder, even when she drew in a deep breath between staves.

“But looks can be deceiving! There is one other thing that can defeat an Undying One. I know, because it got me the first hour I was here in crazyland. And I just found out less than an hour ago, that the same thing can kill living metal, because it happened to the cunning metal weapon sticking through me at the time. And Abby told me all these magical, shape-changing metals operate on the same principle.”

I used a cotton cloth to polish the blade.

“As to where we end up once I get you and the other girls out of here, that I do not know. At this point, I am thinking any place is better than this. See? It will all work out.”

She squinted at me as she sang, and I don’t know if that meant she figured out my plan—which was not all that complicated, really—or if she had not, and was still filled with doubt.

I turned the shining blade to the other side and started tapping it with the little ball of powder.

2. Time to Pack

I turned my head and called to the other slave-girls there. “Hey! Young ladies. If they gave you anything more sturdy to wear, put it on. Shoes? If you have any possessions, gather them up. We are all getting out of here.”

There was a little cooing and murmuring among the teenagers. I could not make out the words, but there were notes of doubt.

“Ladies, ladies! I defeated the big bad abomination, did I not? There he lies in a lump of pain and not one of you even has a splinter! Now get a move on!”

One of the girls stepped forward, knelt and bowed her head to the ground, so her generous cleavage was well displayed a moment before her lovely hair was on the floorstones, and her hips, round and pink as the lobes of a peach, were hoisted aloft behind.

“Master, I am Urad-Betti.”

“Please get off the ground, Betty. I am an American, and we are all equal to everyone else, and a damn sight better than most. Don’t bow to me.”

She straightened up, so that she knelt with her hips over her ankles, her feet tucked under her. She had been trained to sit with her shoulders back, so that the fabric of her tunic strained against the swell of her pert bosom. I put her age at maybe sixteen. Old enough to wear lipstick, and, if her parents were permissive, to stay out until eleven. No later.

“I will kill someone to avenge the indignity done you, Miss,” I said, teeth clenched. I could feel the muscles in my jaw twitching as I ground my teeth together.

She lowered her eyes, unwilling to look me in the face. “By what name shall we worship our master?”

“Don’t call me master. It makes you sound like Barbara Eden. My name is Ilya Muromets. As soon as I rescue you damsels in distress, I will officially be a hero. Right now I am just kind of winging it.”

She lowered her head in a bow. “Your maidservant does not understand your words, mast—”

“My first command is that you not call me master and stop taking commands! I hereby free you. You are manumitted. All the other girls also. Stop bowing!”

She straightened up, blinking, looking alarmed.

“Sir does not like it?”

Not like what? Having a beautiful girl fawning all over me in a getup skimpy enough to make a Vegas showgirl look overdressed?

All I said was, “Gather your things.”

“We have nothing, sir. We have no possessions to bring.”

I said, “Then loot the place. Do they dress you in jewelry? Gold? Anything like that may be useful where we are going.”

Urad-Betti said, “But where are we going, sir?”

Just at that moment, I heard the noise of wind, and the sound of voices, but no footsteps. I said to Urad-Betti, “I am about to find out myself where we will go. Get the other girls ready. If there is anyone sleeping in the back, wake her up! Prepare everyone. And don’t be afraid! I’ll get those collars off you. I promise.”

I looked up at the ceiling, and whispered, “Saint Peter Claver! Help me not to fail of that vow!” Saint Peter Claver is the patron saint of slaves and those who free them.

As I drew my eyes up to breathe that brief prayer, I saw a coffin floating in midair come wafting through the broken balcony where we entered, halfway up the dome, pushing aside music stands and instrument racks.

Abby was sitting atop the coffin, and she waved at me.

3. Open Lid

The coffin swooped and made a perfect three-point landing next to me. A feeling of dizziness wiggled through my head from the cold issuing from the coffin. I sheathed my blade slowly, and then jumped up and backed away rapidly. “Watch it! Don’t let him get too close to me! Just being near him makes us weak.”

Ossifrage emerged as if from a mist, along with Nakasu the headless giant, and Foster in his white hood and cloak. The crucifix I had loaned them was on the coffin lid, held in place with the copper chain from Abby’s kusarigama encircling the coffin. The long loop of rosary beads swung and rattled from the crucifix.

Abby hopped down. She said, “Who is ‘us’?” She looked at the slave teens not much older than she (who were bustling about), then glanced at Penny (who was still singing) and at Rahab (who was still writhing and drowning silently in a bubble of red-sizzling but invisible water).

I nodded at the quivering form of Rahab. “Him and me. His name is Raw Hate, or something like that. He is one of the Host that Yearns for Death in Vain. I figured this is the best way to fulfill his yearning. Or do the next best thing.”

There came a pounding and a scratching at the coffin lid from the inside, and a voice like ice spoke in Greek. “Release me, that I may slay you all. I feel life, precious life, life like a bonfire near me: I must drink your soul, even if it burn me. I am Vorvolac! Vorvolac! None live who know that dread name and fear it not!”

“None live who know that dumb name and can pronounce it,” I shouted back (in rather ungrammatical Greek). “Shut your mouth! We are deciding how much to kill you!”

The icy voice grew even colder. “Fool! You would not have borne me here unless you seek to bargain with me. You will spare me if I serve you, is that it? But why should I trust your oath?”

“I am an honest man,” I said.

“You are not a man at all: you are prey. Can the pigeon cow the raptor into obedience, or the yearling awe the jackal?”

Ossifrage said something in Hebrew, a question.

Abby answered him, saying, “I will be the one to threaten the Cold One. He is as a corpse, and my people can handle corpses.” She drew her green shawl to shadow her head, pulled up my father’s huge crucifix in her hand, and retracted the chain holding the coffin shut.

Penny stopped singing long enough to shout, “Don’t look in his eyes!”

4. Time to Die

Because her singing was interrupted, the bubble of imaginary water surrounding Rahab popped and spread. (I mean that literally. I felt something cold slosh against my toes, even though I saw nothing.)

Rahab coughed and roared and rose to his hands and knees. I picked up the nearest heavy object at hand — I think it was a vase or a bottle sitting on one of those wee little tables that dotted the garden beneath the pleasure dome — and chucked it into the glass bars right next to Rahab. Shards and fiery garnet sparks shot out, but I was standing far enough away not to be jolted. He wasn’t far enough away, and he stumbled, and fell onto some upjutting blue glass shards that still had some pain inside them.

Vorvolac the Cold One came out of the coffin like a cobra, his white glow-in-the-dark body sliding like it had no bones in it, only elastic springs.

He went right for Abby’s throat. She threw up her hands and the heavy crucifix spun and glittered in the air, and he threw himself backward onto the floor to get away from it. Vorvolac clutched at his own face with pale fingers, writhing and howling an eerie howl. Foam gushed from his mouth. Abby blinked and straightened up, puzzled.

Nakasu stepped and stooped and grabbed Vorvolac, and, with the grisly huge teeth of his belly-mouth, first on the left side, then on the right, ripped the Cold One’s leathery glider wings to shreds. The devil screamed like a devil, and bled a copious amount of white, oozy fluid. Nakasu spat Vorvolac out and beckoned to Ossifrage.

Ossifrage raised his hand, and levitated Vorvolac straight up into the air, and out of claw-range.

Foster shot a glass arrow into the creature’s leg. Then Foster touched his gold forearm-protector, and gestured toward Vorvolac. A wreath of mist issued from the arrow and formed about the creature’s bald head.

Foster said, “You can look at him, now. If he cannot see you, he cannot make eye contact, and his mesmerism won’t work.” Abby translated that to Nakasu and Ossifrage.

I said, “Abby, you’re going to have to tell the Cold One, Cadillac or whatever his name is, to drain the life-energy out of the—”

Ossifrage waved a finger and casually tossed the Cold One spinning through the air to land on top of Rahab.

5. Caveman Moment

Penny stopped singing and screamed in fear, and I took the opportunity to snatch her up from where she knelt, throw her over one shoulder, and run a short distance away, my hauberk ringing as I ran.

The warm curve of her hip was against my cheek, the nicely feminine weight of her body against my shoulder, and I could see her slender legs kicking in front of me. And, of course, I had arms wrapped about the taut muscles of her thighs.

That moment was worth all the fighting and whatnot I had gone through since, I dunno, before I was born.

Unfortunately, I stopped after a few long strides, far enough to put us out of melee range, and turned, and put my hand on my grandfather’s sword. It actually takes two hands to draw properly, since you are supposed to push the first inch free with your thumb against the hilt, and then take the sheath in one hand and the grip in the other and draw apart your arms in a smooth motion. So I did not draw it.

And I was unwilling to take my right hand off of Penny’s smooth upper leg, because I did not want to drop her. Mostly.

When I turned, I looked back and wished I hadn’t.

Vorvolac was splashed all over with blood, and the red droplets were crawling and writhing like termites across his face, jaws, and upper body. He had ripped open the steaming chest cavity of Rahab, and the meat-dripping bones of the ribcage were each separately twitching like crab legs. Vorvolac swallowed the way a bird swallows, by throwing his head all the way back and pointing his jaws toward the sky.

The thing in his mouth I thought at first was a red octopus covered in gooey red ink, pulsing. No, it was the heart of Rahab, lashing out with veins and arteries in a futile attempt to escape the frozen fangs of Vorvolac. The Cold One was gargling and slurping and giggling with joy, as happy as a baby allowed to eat his first banana split sundae. The severed, jawless head of Rahab had abandoned his body and was trying to wiggle away from the messy feasting using its tongue as a pseudopod. I won’t even try to describe the insane look in its eyes.

And the little pool of water, still snapping with the occasional dark red spark of pure pain, was all around them, so the Cold One would jump and shriek from time to time, and Rahab’s body parts, any little worm of flesh or bone that was trying to escape, would jerk back together. The slobbering and guzzling and shrieking noises were not as ugly in the ear as the smell of the whole event was to the nose.

“Put me down, Caveboy,” said Penny in a dry tone of voice from somewhere near the small of my back. “I can't see anything at this angle!”

“You don’t want to see this,” I said.

“After what he said he was going to do to me? I think I do.”

I put both hands about her waist and lowered her to the floor, facing me. “Sorry, Miss, um. Penny. I thought you were in danger.”

She tossed back her head, and smacked me in the jaw with the little book that was still in her hand. Its gold metal corner was harder than I would have expected. “I know what you were thinking. Keep your oversized hands off me!”

I snatched my hands back, and rubbed my jaw. “Sorry, but seriously, don't turn around, because if you do—”

She turned around.

She turned back toward me, raising one trembling hand to her eyeglasses. She removed them and tried to wipe the lenses with the hem of her skirt, which was really too short for that operation. “Okay—okay. That was—wow—really gross.”

She hung her eyeglasses by the earpiece from the front of her shirt, pulling it down. It was hardly my fault that the movement drew my eyes in that direction.

I said, “You need to watch more horror movies. You can desensitize yourself to gore.” The vampire was tearing out the belly of the immortal, and the guts were unwinding like spaghetti. I winced and added, “Eventually.”

Penny darted a glance at me sidelong from underneath her long lashes. “The blood is saltwater and remembers when all life was in the sea, before the One God called up the land.”

“What does that mean?” I asked. She was licking the lock shut on her little black book and stuffing into its plastic baggy.

“It means you are on your own, tough guy. My chants cannot enchant him, nor my glamour bewitch and ensnare. He’s your headache now.” She put both pinkies in her mouth, and emitted a shrill whistle. Then she tossed the black shagreen book up into the air.

Her fierce little bird — I did not see where she came from — dove down and snatched up the book in her claws. Through the hole in the bars she flew like an arrow.

“Where is your bird going?”

She was smiling, watching the falcon depart. It was a look of pride and friendship. “She has carved out a niche or nest partway into the shadow world, where the stars cannot see. Isn’t she the cleverest bird?”

I wondered if Penny were seeing the same nasty, cold-eyed eyeball-eating carrion bird I was.

After Vorvolac gnawed the still-moving body of Rahab down to about half its size, all at once the body turned black and melted, or dissolved into some sort of muddy ash. The lumpy pile of black ooze rested unquietly, trembling and bubbling on the marble. It was still not quite dead.

Vorvolac rose to his feet, mouth gaping, eyes ablaze. “Life! I quaff not merely human, but more than human! Endlessly more! I have swallowed the ocean and the roots of the ocean! It grows inside me, trying ever to escape, more and always more! It flows through me! I am infinite!”

I could feel it was true. I was the farthest one away from him, and I could feel the cold, like the cold of infinite outer space, pulling at me, blindly hungry for my soul. The light from the glowing sawdust in the air had faded where the Cold One stood, and an Arctic chill entered the air.

He turned his maddened eyes left and right blindly. Foster’s trick with the mist was still working, because the Cold One could not see us. Even so, I could feel the hypnotic magnetism in his inhuman eyes. I felt like I was drunk when I looked straight at them, and my thoughts began to slide and drift like in a fever dream.

“You lowly, crawling things!” shouted Vorvolac in his high, thin, piping voice. “You worms! You have granted me endless power! How can you hope to withstand me? Now, I am a god!”

“Not my god,” said Abby.

Abby had looped my father’s crucifix around the end of the copper chain of her weapon, and now the chain reared and reached like a metallic snake, and thrust the cross against the Cold One’s kneecap. The whole leg twisted and blackened like a stick held in a fire and the leg below the knee fell off. I stared at the stump, dumbfounded. In some dull part of my mind, I guess I was expecting the leg to get better and grow back—fighting an Undying One will warp your perceptions and reactions—so it was a moment before I realized that that vicious amputation was permanent. Vorvolac was Cap’n Ahab from now on.

Vorvolac writhed in the mud puddle, clutching his stump, and shoveled more of the muddy remains of Rahab into his mouth. Maybe it dulled the pain like whiskey.

Abby yanked back the chain of her weapon. I mean, the chain did not retract. It had lost its coppery luster about a foot or two from the end. She put her foot on the spot where the dead dull chain met the bright still-coppery chain and yanked. The dead links fell off, and Abby used her weapon-chain, now eighteen inches shorter than before, to pick up the crucifix once more.

Abby said, “Dread servant of the Dark Tower, highly favored! You have consumed a servant of the Dark Tower more highly favored than you. The Master of that Undying One will consult his horoscope, see you, and find you.”

The look of horror on the face of Vorvolac almost made me feel sorry for him.

But he rose to his hands and his one remaining knee, still twisting his head blindly one way and the other. “The Master of Rahab is Anshargal himself, the Great King. Rahab-ut-tennin Ushumgallu is His Majesty’s special assassin. If any horoscopes foretold this event, I would have been slain years long past! Yea, years ere ever I won my first painful injection of that deathless mercury, which dripped from the glass of the anathor where the Stone of Philosophers burned, expelled my human blood and all its humors and weaknesses, and yet was not consumed.”

I looked at the puddles of white fluid which dripped from Vorvolac’s still bleeding wounds. Mercury? It was a poisonous metal. While Penny had called this thing a vampire, it was actually made by alchemy. Apparently there was some particularly nasty magic chemical they took into themselves. So this was not some poor sap who had been bitten against his will by Bela Lugosi. This was someone who had sold his humanity. An ex-human.

Abby said, “I am of the foreverborn, risen from the water. There are no horoscopes of any deed I do this day. I brought you here. You are hidden from retaliation only until I cease to hide you.”

I was not sure if that was exactly true, but then again, if I understood how this worked, anything Abby did that was underhanded, lying or stealing, would be part of her lower nature, and would let the horoscopes get a reading on her. So I guess she was telling the truth.

Vorvolac, of course, was from this world, or nearby, and he knew things I did not. He grimaced in mirthless mirth. “You cannot throw aside the shadow in which you walk so easily!”

Abby said, “It is not the shadow in which I walk, but the light.”

“Bah! To my kind, light is darkness!”

“Is life also death? All I need do is bow to the stars and worship them, and I will be in the night once more, and be seen of them. It takes only a moment, only a word. Shall I speak the word?”

“You would die as well!”

“I am Foreverborn—so my living always begins, never ends. You drink the lifeblood to fill your void, but it will not fill it so your dying never ends.” Abby said softly. “Why did you make yourself no longer you, no longer man?”

“I am more than man, little girl!”

“Less. You fear death more than I do.”

6. Cushing Moment

I said, “Foster, can you part the mist so that our vampire friend can see the crucifix, without seeing us?”

Foster said, “If Monkey Girl holds it away from herself, sure.”

But she heard what he said, and dangled the crucifix of the rosary on the end of her prehensile, coppery chain several yards to one side.

I said in halting Greek, “Beast who steals and drinks the blood of men! I am a man who drinks the blood of God, freely given! In days gone, you were a man. In days to come, I will be more than man. Come, and see!”

Vorvolac focused his eyes on the crucifix. He screamed with every ounce of strength in his lungs.

It worked just like in the movies, or more so. He was rolling on the floor, yowling, ignoring the lingering red sparks of pure pain, as if this pain were worse. He started to beat his head against the marble, breaking his own nose and drawing blood from his own forehead, as if to try to drive the image of the little ivory man hung on a little wooden cross from his sight.

Abby looked shocked, and she had her chain writhe and dart over to me, and drop the rosary with the heavy crucifix into my hands. The yard-long circle of beads clattered as I caught it. I guess Abby was unnerved by how powerful this thing was. I suppose if you’d never seen a vampire movie before, it would come as a complete surprise.

Strange thing: The moment the crucifix was in my hand, I no longer felt the Arctic vacuum of hunger issuing from the body of the Cold One.

I had sort of been assuming that Abby was a wise choice to hold the vampire-mugging cross, because of her innocence or something. I thought that, as an Undying, I would be more vulnerable to the life-eating power, and that the Cross of Christ would shield me only partly or not at all. “O me of little faith,” I muttered to myself. “Thou art a moron.”

Louder, I said, “Foster! Let him see me.”

And, with sword sheathed, and with nothing but a crucifix for a shield, I walked forward to confront the vampire-alchemist creature who, unlike all his kind, had the living heart of an Undying One blazing in his guts like a star, granting him endless life, infinite power. His eyes fixed on me with a look of lust and delight, like a greedy child offered a second helping of his favorite dessert.

His eyes, his terrible eyes, swelled up in my vision, and I felt as dizzied as a seasick tightrope walker with a drop steeper than Niagara Falls yawning and roaring below. My arm suddenly felt like lead, but I raised it up, and when the little crux of wood and ivory was before me, the eyes of Vorvolac were suddenly very small and filled with fear.

I stepped forward, and it was like walking against a strong wind, or a chain around my neck, forcing me back.

“Do not meet his eyes!” cried Penny, her voice hitting a high note, albeit shrill with fear that rang like crystal.

“Re-laaax!” I scoffed, swaying, forcing one foot forward, then the other. “I am freaking Peter Cushing in this scene, and he is Christopher Lee!”

Foster said, “Grand Moff Tarkin and Count Dooku were never in the same scene together.”

“Fos, you are so shallow! Don’t you watch the classics?” I said. The wind was now a gale, but then, suddenly, whatever power Vorvolac was exerting against my will to drive me back broke like a snapped chain. The gale was a breeze, then a breath, then gone. I stumbled forward, surprised.

Penny said, “I thought you never watched old movies.”

“Horror movies, I do,” I said, grinning down at Vorvolac, who cowered. “They are highly educational.”

7. Word of Honor

I kicked Vorvolac to the ground, and then I stepped on his neck, “I will make a deal with you, Count Chocula. You do one little thing for me, and I’ll spare your filthy life and let you go unharmed. Not harmed further.”

“You lie…” he gasped.

I leaned on his throat a little. “You have my word on it, and I don’t break my word! Do what I say, and you walk out of here. Or, hop. I am going to step off your neck now, and the next words out of your face-hole will be ‘Yes, sir!’”

I released the pressure on his neck. “Yessss… sssir!” He gasped, “But you must swear!”

That seemed like a reasonable request. I lifted up the crucifix. “By Saint George and the Holy Rood, I will spare you and free you unharmed to go your way, if you help me free these prisoners, harming none and playing no tricks. In the name of the Father, and Son, and Holy Ghost, I swear it. Do you agree?”

His eyes were glaring at the crucifix with purest hate. “Ah! Your vow is in that puny talisman, which burns me! Whatever are these names by which you swear, I curse them! Put aside that bit of wooden rubbish, so that I may ravish and devour your life and soul!”

“Wrong answer,” I said, and punched him in the face, making sure I hit his broken nose.

Chapter Thirty-One: The Twilight Gate Opens

1. Unclenched Collar

It took longer than I expected, but when I was done beating him, and he had agreed to my terms, he was weeping, so that tears of silvery poison dripped down his cheeks. Yes, my arms were tired and my knuckles were skinned raw, and I enjoyed every minute.

Foster was keeping a wreath of unseen influence around Vorvolac’s head, to prevent us from making eye contact and getting mesmerized.

Foster also was beginning to have a strained look to his features, like a student who concentrates too long on one same math problem, or a fencer who holds his blade on his fingertips minute after minute, keeping both arms straight. Evidently the inviso-power could not be kept up forever. It used up Foster’s mojo or mana or endurance points or whatever.

We blindfolded Vorvolac with a strip from a silk pillowcase, so that Foster could relax. Nakasu hauled Vorvolac upright on his one good leg, and took him, one by one by one, to each girl in the room.

Some of the girls were so afraid we had to hold them in place. Foster and I, motivated by a testosterone-fueled sense of civic responsibility, both eagerly volunteered for the job of wrestling the wiggling yet curvaceous half-naked girls to hold them still, but Penny held them in place instead, merely by singing a soft song in any frightened girl’s ear.

The Cold One touched each girl’s black metal collar. Nakasu kept his huge hand, strong as an iron clamp, around Vorvolac’s wrist and guided his hand, so that he would not brush against any flesh.

Immediately upon his touch, the living metal was no longer alive, no longer strong enough to maintain a circular shape, and most of the girls could pull the limp bands of metal from their throats without Nakasu’s help.

You should have seen their faces light up. Girls look really pretty when their faces are glowing with a joy so great it is almost like awe.

Penny insisted on going last. Her fingers were not strong enough to pull the metal loop open, so I stepped up, put my arms around her neck, and with her scented hair tickling my fingers, I found the seam where the two ends met. I flexed my arm muscles, grunted, and yanked the thing into a straight bar with a clang of noise.

I presented it to her with a slight bow and a little smile.

I wanted to tell her 'I told you so'. But there must be some cosmic law of nature that prevents heroes from saying that to the damsels they rescue, because just at that moment, to my surprise, Penny started crying.

Her shoulders hunched, her chest heaved, and tears began leaking from her enormous, glittering eyes, and her lower lip was trembling.

I have never actually had occasion to whack a jackass over the skull with a two-by-four, but I understand they are given to have an expression that combines stubbornness and dullness of wit at such moments. I suspect I may have had the same expression on my face at that moment.

Nakasu, who held the crucifix, yanked Vorvolac away from Penny and tucked him under one arm. Nakasu must have seen the look of all-consuming bewilderment on my face, because he reached out with a hand the size of a waffle iron and shoved me into Penny’s arms. Or rather, her into mine.

This was something new and beyond me. What the heck do you do when you have both arms full of a crying girl?

2. Clinched Comfort

I tried to comfort her and pat her shoulder, which was not quite possible at this angle, and I said, “There, there. It's all right.”

Apparently that was the wrong thing to say.

“All right!” Penny yanked her head back from where it rested at slightly below armpit level. She had to crane her neck back to look at me. “All right? I was afraid! I was terrified! My mother calls dragons out of the sea! She is NEVER afraid! All right? Nothing will ever be all right again!”

“No one is brave all the time. You did fine.”

“But I had to be rescued! By a boy!”

“Man, actually,” I protested, apparently to no avail.

“A boy who works for me!”

“Pretty damn huge boy—let’s be fair—unkillable boy…with a kickass magic samurai sword and highly trained super death-fu kill-mad skillz, I should add!”

“A minimum-wage employee who doesn’t even know how to wax the floors!”

“Um…now, hold on! I explained about that grade of wax…the drying time–

“You're just a h-high school dropout!”

“Homeschooled!” I said through gritted teeth.

She arched her back more, trying to crane back further so she could look me in the face. This pushed her tightly against my body, and I found myself regretting the chain hauberk I was wearing.

“You understand nothing, Ilya Muromets! I was helpless! Helpless!”

“That's not necessarily a bad thing. Look at, uh, Lois Lane, for example.”

“I am not a cartoon! I am one of the Daughters of Tiamath! But all my arts and lore failed me! What will they say when the Daughterhood finds out that I failed! That I was afraid! That I was saved by a hairy troglodyte! What will my mother say?”

I tightened my grip and she gasped and could not breathe for a moment, and could not talk.

I leaned over her and put my nose against her nose. “She had darn well better say Thank you for saving my beautiful daughter. And then she will say: Did she give you that kiss she promised?”

I relaxed my grip and let her re-inflate.

And she lifted her face to mine and parted her lips and closed her eyes.

So, yes, I finally got that kiss. Either that, or my spine turned into a lightning bolt and shot several zillion volts directly into the pleasure center of my brain.

And yes, it was my first kiss, ever. I was a lip-virgin until that moment.

She kind of rubbed tears and snot on my cheeks, because her nose had started running while she was crying, but I did not complain. I wish I knew the date and time of day. Everything in my life is measured before and after that kiss. B.K. and A.S.: Before Kiss and Anno Smooch.

I wish I could tell you that this moment was the end of the story. It would have been such a good moment to roll the credits just then, you know?

But then reality interrupted.

3. Kill the Screech Owl

While I was still in mid-kiss, Nakasu tapped me on the shoulder, and pointed to the vampire under his armpit, and grunted.

“Mm … Mm,” I said, parting for air, “Busy. Leave message at the beep.”

But now Penny turned her head, so all I got during my next lip-assault was a lipful of soft, rounded cheek. Cheeked, blast it!

“Get serious! Do you never know the right time to pay attention?” She wriggled out of my arms with an impatient sigh, just as if she had not been enthusiastically sharing one lungful of breath with me a half-second earlier. “He wants to know the fate of the Nosferatu. I say kill it now.”

My suddenly-empty arms felt an almost physical ache at their girlishlessness.

So I crossed them with a clang of mail on my armored chest, and turned toward Nakasu with a scowl. “The Cold One. We let him out. He goes his merry way, free of us and free of the Dark Tower and free of this world. That was our deal. Abby, if you would …?”

Abby, who had been watching Penny and me with rapt attention, shook herself and translated for me.

Nakasu dropped the Cold One on the floor. Vorvolac was still blindfolded, and Nakasu had found an iron chain from somewhere in the slave quarters and wrapped it several times around Vorvolac, pinning his arms to his sides. Evidently there was plenty of chain in the slave quarters. With but one leg and tattered wings and about thirty pounds of cast-iron chain around him, Vorvolac was not going anywhere.

Ossifrage said something in Hebrew that I did not catch, and, seeing the look of confusion on my face, spoke more slowly and loudly, using simpler words. “Kill him. He will be a thorn in your eye. You understand? Poke your eye.” Ossifrage pantomimed sticking a finger into one’s own eye. “Kill the screech owl.” (Or maybe the word I thought was screech owl was night monster. I am not sure.)

Foster said, “Ilya, seriously. He’s right.”

I said, “But I gave my word.”

Foster said, “Think about this. If we let this monster loose, he has so much life-force inside him, an inexhaustible supply, he will be like a superman-vampire. Wherever we drop him, he will devour innocent women, children, old men, traveling salesmen, everyone. Their blood will be on our hands. You want that?”

I turned to Nakasu. “Big guy, you said you had three settings for the twilight gates you can open from the flail? Why not stick him through one, and the rest of us go through another?”

Abby translated his reply. Nakasu said, “We will still be within the shadow of the Darkest Tower, still within the Empire of Ur. Every slave-land which has a working Moebius coil is trampled and conquered, made part of the One Folk.”

Since Ossifrage could hear her side of the conversation, he said something in Hebrew. Then, looking at me, he spoke more slowly, using smaller words: “Through gate? Screech Owl return to rabboni —” the word meant master or teacher “— and come back. We will see him again. Thorn in the eye.”

I saw his point. If we just shoved Vorvolac through a twilight gate, he would be rescued by the nearest servants of the Dark Tower, and returned to active duty.

Penny said, “His hunger for the life and blood of living men cannot be quenched. He is an enemy to all living things.”

“What if he promises to just drink cow blood?”

She said, “The souls of irrational animals dissolve at death.”

I said, “What does that mean?”

She said, “Do you have a conscience?”

I said, “I hope so.”

“What does it do?”

“Gee, teacher, I was not expecting a quiz. The conscience convicts us of sin. It lets us struggle against our darker natures.”

She nodded. “They don’t have one. The Nosferatu excise it when they join their host and become Nosferatu. It is like a lobotomy. It is not something an oath or an effort of will can change. They cannot change their nature, and their nature is to drink the life of men. They are beasts.”

“But he talks!”

“Do not be deceived by the fact that they speak. The linguistic part of their soul can be intact after the human part is destroyed.”

I gritted my teeth. “But I gave my word. And we don’t know where the gate will open. Maybe one of them opens into a place where there are no people.”

Abby translated the comment for Nakasu and Ossifrage. Nakasu snorted a rude noise though his blowhole and growled something short and sharp from his mouth, which Abby repeated as, “He says he will try.”

With this, Nakasu threw the rosary beads of the crucifix neatly over my head, and kicked the vampire toward me. Nakasu pointed and grunted. The blood-quaffer was now my responsibility. I nodded, which was a gesture Nakasu seemed to find amusing.

With no more ado, Nakasu shifted the golden flail into its flexible shape, placed it on the marble floor, and plugged one of the three tails into the socket at the butt of the now-semicircular haft.

Then he looked up, pointed, and said something.

Abby said, “The wood dust in the air is lampwood, and it will shed ylemaramu the moment the gate builds up twilight.”

I said, “What? Does opening a gate set off a detector of some sort? An alarm?”

Abby said, “The Magicians do not use alarms. It is a point of pride with them. The lampwood is treated so it sweeps up stray twilight, which otherwise would accumulate, bending the laws and habits of nature, or making small holes in the wall of reality. Everywhere throughout the Dark Tower, all the lampwood, or almost all, acts this way.”

I looked around. “Then gather everyone out on the balcony. No lampwood there. If Foster can keep us unseen with his Invisible Girl powers, maybe we can open the gate there.”

“Invisible Man!” said Foster.

“Drag Vorvolac along,” I continued, grinning. “We cannot just let him loose inside the Tower, because he’d tell the pursuit where we went. For our own safety, we have to drop him off some place far from the Astrologers or their servants.”

“Let’s drop him off the balcony edge?” said Foster, brightly.

I scowled. “Foster, I made a deal with him.”

“Ilya, he’s a monster. Looks sort of human, talks like a man, but he is still a monster. Like a man-eating lion. He is not really rational, not something you can make deals with,” Foster said. “You are the one who says horror movies are educational! Name one where the vampire is a nice guy.”

“Love at First Bite starring George Hamilton,” I said.

Penny rolled her eyes. “Interview with a Vampire,” she said, “Angel, League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Blade, Dark Shadows, Underworld, Ultraviolet, Forever Knight, Being Human… and in Twilight the vampires are even nicer. They sparkle.”

Foster sighed. “Great! We are all going to die, because idiots in Hollywood don’t know how to make a proper vampire movie any more.”

Penny said, “They are in the pay of the blood-quaffers. I told you they were.”

4. Overlooking the Immensity of the Abscission

None of the young ladies had any possessions to take, and there was very little to loot. Abby had made a careful search of the chambers lest anyone be left behind. At Abby’s suggestion, all the girls had rolled up a silk sheet or two and slung them over the shoulder. Others were carrying jars and vases which they washed and filled at one of the pools not clogged with dead guards, since we did not know, any of us, where our next drink of water might come from. Some took some of the instruments from the music room, just on the theory that they might come in handy for some unexpected reason, as fire kindling, if nothing else: but it was more out of a desperation that there was nothing else to take.

The girls, slowly at first, fearfully, clutching their naked necks as if they expected to choke, stepped through the gates of glass that Foster opened for them with the cylinder seal. Their naked footsteps made no noise as they inched forward, eyes wide. Then they started walking faster. Then they were skipping, jostling, giggling, weeping tears of joy, and their footsteps turned to dance. Holding hands, round and round in couples and shrieking triplets and laughing circles, the freed girls spun. The serpent maiden reared high, and, lifting her well-shaped arms, sang a paean.

Far underfoot was black water. Overhead, one concentric ring inside another, were townships of this immensity of the Dark Tower, one above the other. The torpedo-shaped shadows of airships could be glimpsed against lights and reflections gleaming in the dome in the far heights, but none were near us.

I said, “Say goodbye to this ugly world. We leave here and now.” I nodded at Nakasu, and he put his hand to his chest above his eye, which looked like a boy saying the pledge to the flag or a man saluting his officer, both at once.

Nakasu laid down the flail again in a circle of ruby-ornamented gold. He began moving from one to another, adjusted carefully the rings set around the hilt.

Penny looked surprised. No, she looked shocked. “How is it that you have a spear coil? The Dark Tower knows the location and power of all its coils!”

I said, “I got this one from King Tut. A dead guy. And I think I saw a god in the setting sun, but this place is weird, so who knows. Do you think it will work? You make it sound like this is not part of their system.”

She shook her head numbly. “I had no idea anyone outside the Dark Tower could make Moebius coils.”

I said, “That cannot be true. The Professor made one; that is why we are here. They sent him the plans. I assume they send the plans to any aeon with a receiver to hear them. Lots of people must know how these are made.”

Penny said, “I mean make a coil and not be found.”

Something tickled at the back of my mind, but I could not bring it forward. So I said, “Do you know these Egyptian looking guys? Mummies?”

“Their aeon is called Mizraim, their land is called Chemet.”

“What are they like?”

“They are an ancient race, conquered in time long past by the Tower, and theirs is the strangest of necromancies. They place the shadows of their kings in great howes large as mountains, with each obelisk and monument placed just so, and invisible energies like dragons in the earth, telluric currents, are shaped to flow as these pyramids direct. By these telluric currents, the shadows of Pharaohs long dead have the power to make lands sterile or fertile, raise a river in flood or lower it in drought, and bless or curse the location of walled cities. But each spell takes centuries to work out, and centuries to undo. There was no Moses in that world, and the power of their Pharaohs never waned, their gods were never humiliated, and no plagues broke the sorcerer-priests. Europe and Asia and eventually the Americas were conquered by the slow and unseen armies of the Ghost Pharaohs of Chemet, and now their pyramids loom in all lands.”

“And what do they do for the Dark Tower?”

“The same. Erect monuments. They are architects and engineers.”

I smiled. “Do they build the Moebius coils for them, too? Is that one of the engineering things they do? I'm guessing some bright guy figured out how to make a Moebius coil whose action the Magicians cannot detect. No spear filled with troops ever flew out of this coil when Knack opened it. I only wonder how the Astrologers didn’t foresee this.”

“Walking shadows are hard for the stars to see,” Penny said thoughtfully, “But not impossible to see. Did you ever open the gate aside from when Abanshaddi was influencing your actions? We are all safe as long as her shadow covers us.”

“It is not a shadow, Miss Dreadful. It is a light, and the darkness comprehends it not.”

Just at that moment, a grin of triumph split Nakasu’s belly. There came a flame of many-colored light, and the wavering gloom like a scene seen underwater. A ball of darkness had formed in the dead-center of the circle, and popped open to fill its whole circumference.

I said to Abby, “What happens to the floor a gate sits on? Why isn’t there a bowl-shape hemisphere carved out of the rock?”

Abby asked Nakasu, listened to his reply, turned to me and said, “The black surface is an opening into another dimension.” The word she used was manit, which also means measure or reckoning. “This is not truly a sphere, for it is not here, not in this place, the way an object occupying volume is in this place. It appears to be so, because of the limits of the eyes.”

“That makes no sense,” I grunted.

Foster said, “It’s magic. Deal with it.”

I wanted to be the first guy through the gate. Partly this was because I am unkillable, and partly because a lot more people recognize Neil Armstrong’s name before they recognize Buzz Aldrin’s. It’s no fun being the second man on the moon. But Nakasu stepped in before I got the chance.

I took a step forward toward the twilight gate, scowling in disappointment (okay, pouting, but I meant it to be a scowl) but then stopped, reluctant to leave Penny behind with Vorvolac even for a moment, even if he was bound up and blindfolded. Foster was frowning at the balcony rail, trying to keep a whole wall of his eye-defeating misty stuff between us and any unfriendly eyes from the countless windows overlooking the lake-sized cistern. That left Ossifrage and Abby and a small army of teenage girls to guard the Cold One.

And I saw Vorvolac hunch up his shoulders against the chain looped around him, and saw his clawlike fingers opening and closing, and saw his eerie smile as he licked his lips, saw his fangs twitching erect, heard the sniffing of his enlarged nostrils. All the young women around him, all that flesh and blood, it was making him hungry. I felt a chill in my bones, or maybe it was a cold and unseen aura of power Vorvolac shed growing as his cravings grew, reaching outward.

Loathing crawled in my throat. As suddenly as if a stick snapped in my brain and unleashed a logjam, a flow of certainty gushed into me.

I abruptly realized that Foster was right. I saw he was right.

If this thing, this thing that used to be human but tossed his humanity aside, if he were too dangerous for me to step away even for a moment, then he was too dangerous to live. If the Dark Tower found him—and they would, the moment Abby’s magic shadow no longer fell across him—he would be killing whomever the Astrologers commanded him to kill; and that included people as innocent as Abby and Penny, as old as Ossifrage, as dopey as Foster. But even supposing we dropped him somewhere the Dark Tower could not find him, he would still kill as whim or hunger struck him, just freelance rather than under orders.

I just wanted someone else to make the decision for me, to take it out of my hands.

I turned to Abby. “Abanshaddi, ask everybody why I am making this decision. I am the only one here who does not know what is going on. Not the oldest or the strongest nor do I know magic like a witch nor do I have invisibility powers like a mutant.”

Foster said, “Hey! I am not a mutant! I am a Svartalfwicken! I do runecraft. This is Rhinegold. Like from the opera!”

“Stolen gold,” said Penny sourly, turning toward him. “Like from the opera.”

Foster jerked his eyes up from where he had been staring at her behind before she turned, and blinked them owlishly. “Gee. I could put some of the sacred river-gold back…? Of course, you had plenty, and my world was getting low…”

I spread my hands. “My question is who died and left me boss? Why am I the one making this decision? Or, rather, why are you guys all listening to me rather than ordering me around?”

Foster looked a bit surprised. “I —I dunno. You seem to know what to do.”

“What?” I almost shouted. “Everyone here except the little girl is older than me, and she knows everything about this world and I don’t! I cannot even turn on the lights! Why is this decision mine?”

Penny looked scornful. “There is no decision. You must kill Vorvolac. His thirst for you will haunt him and draw him to you, even across worlds. Use your cross and burn him.”

Abby spoke up. “The Master says he awaits your decision because the Cold One is your prisoner. You are over thirteen, you carry weapons. Your magic defeated him. Yours is the Cold One’s fate.” Nakasu, of course, was not there to answer.

I said, “I told you it was not magic.”

Abby shook her head. “I believe you. This is magic.” She held up her copper sickle. With it, she pointed at the crucifix I was wearing around my neck. “That! We don’t know what that is.”

Foster raised his hand. “Buddy, the decision about the Nosferatu is yours. Turning him over to Nakasu or Ossifrage is the same as throwing him from the balcony.”

5. Watch Tower

Before I had a chance to move or speak, Nakasu jumped out of the black sphere with a happy look on his chest and a gush of blood drooling down his legs. There was a leather boot with a foot in it sticking out of the wide shark-mouth of his belly, and he was carrying a spear too small for him, which he lightly tossed to Ossifrage. In Nakasu’s other hand was a short, curved bronze sword like a meat cleaver, a samara. Nakasu was using the bronze sword as a toothpick, pulling bits of raw flesh and crumpled coppery rings from shattered armor from between his tusks.

He spoke in urgent tones, blapping with his nose-hole and gargling and clicking with his belly-mouth both at once, something I had not seen him do before.

Abby had no difficulty following the two voices from Nakasu. She said to us, “The Freedman says there is a way-station beyond, a keep without bailey or moat, and no guard in the arrival atrium at the moment. Horoscopes on the walls show that the gate will not be used again until April, which is sacred to Saturn. No one will be waiting. He has locked the doors from the inside, and saw no sign of any watch being kept. Fate is with us.”

“Good,” I said. It was nice, for once, to have luck on our side. I wondered how long it would last.

“Nakasu urges us to send the slaves through first, guarded by himself and the Master—” she nodded at Ossifrage “—with the rest staying as rearguard to protect the column. Abandon the water jars and instruments. There are both stores and pantries hard by the atrium, where we may supply the slaves with feed and drink.”

I said, “Tell him I have officially manumitted all these young ladies in the name of the Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon, also in the name of the Thirteenth Amendment of the Constitution of the United States of America and the Declaration of Independence, and by the power of this my father’s sword and grace of Heaven by whose favor I have this day conquered. Got it? Everyone treats them as free from now on. Ask him if he can redirect the Moebius gate on the far side to some further destination?”

Abby exchanged words with Nakasu. “He says he can, but without an atlas, the combination matches would be random. Since he does not know which aeon this world is in any case, one is as good as another.”

“Great,” I said. “Let’s go.”

Nakasu burped something at Abby, pointed at Vorvolac, rolled his pectoral eyes. I could hear the tone of voice, even if I could not get the words. Nakasu raised his hand to gesture me to halt when I started to step toward the whirling ball of twilight that formed the gate.

She said, “However, the atrium floor is one large expanse of watchglass, the largest Nakasu has ever seen.”

I said, “I don’t know what that means.”

Foster said he could explain. But I said to Abby, “Start the girls going through! I will stay here to guard the rear while you tell me what is going on. I have the bad feeling our good fortune is about to ebb. We are standing here out in the open on a balcony with a cyclotron-powered Moebius gate ripping open a hole in the walls of the universe, and over a dozen dead harem guards in the pond, not to mention the one-legged kids Ossifrage tossed into the water. Someone is bound to see us. Can we get a move on?”

Ossifrage and Nakasu went first to hold the atrium. Abby urged the girls into a line, telling the older ones to protect the youngsters.

I said to Foster, “You should go through too, Foster. Use your Space Ghost inviso powers to keep everyone on that side unseen.”

Foster said, “Not yet. I got to tell you what watchglass is.”

“What is it?”

“It is the reason why we have to kill your bloodsucking trophy pet over there.”

6. Watchglass

Foster said, “A watchglass is a Geiger-counter for magic. It is built specifically to find unclean spirits.”

“Like me?” I said.

“Like walking shadows,” said Abby.

“Which is what?” I said.

Foster answered, “Mummies, vampires, werewolves, creatures from the Black Lagoon, and every other Universal Movie Monster Abbot and Costello ever faced. You’re something different.”

“Yeah, I know,” I said. “Highlander was from Twentieth-Century Fox.”

Foster said, “I thought your people were more like John Carpenter’s The Thing.”

Abby offered helpfully, “The horror-cross of the Sea-Witch is also a walking shadow.”

Penny said, “Not to fear. I can place Wild Eyes in a hidden place inside my body to obscure her from the watchglass. It will take me about ten minutes to prepare. Nor will you, Ilya, trouble a watchglass by passing over it, since your life is inside your body, albeit more than human life. But the glass will turn black if he passes over it.” And she nodded at Vorvolac.

“What if we float over this glass floor?” I said. “Ossifrage can…”

“A watchglass is not pressure sensitive,” said Foster. “It is like the metal detector at school. Only spiritual.”

I looked at him in amazement. “You have metal detectors at your schools in your world?”

“No,” Foster said, “In my world, gypsies were not allowed to enter the schools, and the teachers are machines built by the military-industrial syndicates and animated by Svartalfar, the dark spirits of the underworld. I learned how to forge identity papers before I learned to read, in order to get a school passport.”

“Wait. If you could not read and write, then how could you forge papers?”

He waved his hand dismissively. “So my first few forgery attempts did not go well. In any case, just now I was talking about our world, not my world. Oregon. Metal detectors were put in last year. Remember those school shootings? And before you ask, my cloak of many mists cannot fool cameras or mirrors. I can only fool things with brains. Which I guess is why you could see me.”

“You cast a shadow in bright light,” I said. “Also, if you close one eye.”

“I know,” he said, “I know how my own superpower works. It was a joke.”

“It wasn’t funny,” I said.

“Give it a week to sink in,” he said. “You’ll wake up at midnight doubled over with laughter.”

“You know what else is not funny,” I said. “Getting old.”

“What do you mean?” he said.

“I mean this is my decision and no one else's. I am the judge, jury, and executioner. And I get one shot at it with no do-overs.”

Chapter Thirty-Two: The Dreadnaught of the Air

1. Final Verdict

At that point, Vorvolac started giggling, guffawing, snorting. There he stood on his two legs, feet bare, his arms and skin-flaps still wound up in chain, and blindfold made out of a pillowcase still over his eyes.

“Let’s play it smart!” Foster nocked an arrow and drew his bow. “Let’s kill him before we find out why he is laughing.”

Penny did not look worried, but the fierce bird on her shoulder puffed up her wings and lowered her head and uttered a shrill scream which I am sure all of the people in the townships above and below us must have heard.

I said, “Didn’t he have one leg just a minute ago?”

It was hard to tell because they were folded up like umbrellas beneath his armpits, but the leathery wings of Vorvolac did not seem torn any more.

Penny said in the tightly-wound voice, “He has the heart of Rahab in him. Twilight flows from the open gate. He has learned how to use the power he drank to regrow himself just in the moments while we stood here. He will learn more if more time passes.”

I sighed. “Okay. We have to kill him after all. Let’s just dump him over the railing. It is the only reasonable way. I mean: he gave up his humanity, right? We don’t have to be humane, do we?”

Vorvolac spoke up quickly, “Lord Ilya! I surrendered to you! I obeyed! I have harmed none!” And he grinned. He had teeth like a snake.

His eyes were still covered, but there was something so sick and so sinister in that grin I could not stand it. If my life had had a soundtrack, it would have been playing the theme from Jaws or from the shower scene in Hitchcock’s Psycho by now.

Foster did not wait for any order to shoot. He shot. There was no way he could miss at this distance. The bow had maybe a seventy-pound pull: Foster was not as tall as me, but he was stronger than most grown men. The longbow could pack a punch that would drive a shaft through a steel plate. Thwack. The glass arrow went right into the narrow chest of Vorvolac, and the arrow shaft quivered.

Vorvolac staggered backward a step or two, but he did not fall. His silvery blood did not spurt from his chest, but rather a quicksilver ball of poisonous fluid gathered at the wound, and pulsed, and then hesitated. Then it shrank as the blood was pulled back into the wound. Vorvolac grunted and groaned and then screamed like a woman in labor.

And the arrow slid itself out of his chest, and clattered to the marble floor, tinkling.

Vorvolac was laughing. “What a peculiar sensation! Ilya, you whose life I shall eat next—does this always feel so odd when you do it?”

“Oh, that is not a good sign,” I said.

I spared a glance over my shoulder. More than half the girls were into and through the gateway. “Ladies! Run, do not walk! You can enter the sphere from all sides at once!”

Abby translated this comment. Then she ignited and threw her sickle spinning like a fiery boomerang in a swift, flat arc straight toward Vorvolac’s head. It was a great shot, but the chain suddenly turned dull and lost all its color, and the red-hot blade went dark and cold. He ducked, and the weapon sailed over his shoulder, but the chain was dead and could not wrap around his neck.

Abby stared at the dropped chain which led from her hand to the sickle lying on the floor. Her face was stricken. She tugged on the chain, but it rattled limply, and did not respond.

Penny started singing, a shrill, eerie chant of two notes, high and low, over and over, that made you dizzy just to hear it.

I did not wait for whatever Penny was doing to work its charm. I rushed Vorvolac like a linebacker, grabbed the blindfolded prisoner around the body, hauled him squirming to the railing, and tossed his writhing, chain-wrapped body up and over and out into the darkness.

He dropped like a stone, but he was still laughing.

And, below him, far below, the water was disturbed.

A giant shape came out of the water, as if a whale were to leap like a dolphin, but instead of falling back, soared.

I saw it was not a submarine, or rather, not just a submarine. It was an airship. It was the length of ten football fields across, larger than any zeppelin my world had ever built. A Niagara Falls’ worth of water sluiced from the rigid gas envelope. The bowsprit was carved like a square-bearded king with the body of a winged bull, and the wings of the bull curved back to follow the long axis of the immense ironclad craft; and water dripped, glittering in streams, weeping from the stoical face of the king.

Up it rose.

“Oops,” I said.

2. A Dreadnought of the Air

Lanterns spaced on the port and starboard of the prow ignited, and a beam of flame struck me. By dumb chance, the shadow of the balcony rail fell across my face, so I was not blinded, but the top of my head and my chest and arms were on fire, so I fell backward, screaming in pain. Which, I will say again, is totally unfair, since pain is nature’s way of telling us harm is being done to an organism, but none of this harm could actually harm me.

Abby said, “I’ll go get the Master! He’ll smite the airship!” and turned and scampered toward the dark ball of nonbeing. The girls were now rushing the gate, those behind shoving those in front on through. The solid-looking black ball surface offered no resistance: it was like jumping into a pond. But Abby was in the rear of the female stampede, and there were too many panicky bodies in the way for her to reach the surface.

I heard, but did not see, the deep thrum of catapults or ballistae going off. Two harpoons longer than jousting lances came flying up from housings on the bow of the rising airship, sailed over the balcony rail, each trailing a long line behind them. With a double-crack, they planted their spearheads into the upper part of the half-dome of the gigantic alcove out of which the balcony was scooped. The shafts were eight feet long and made of lampwood, which immediately emitted a blinding blue-white light. Penny’s magic must have been the dark-flavored kind rather than the light-flavored kind, because the dreamlike dizziness following her voice cut out. She was just a normal girl with a normal singing voice.

Penny turned, raised her wrist, and practically flung her bird at the dark ball. “Flee, my soul! Flee for our life!”

But the wooden shafts hanging overhead were putting out that blazing light, ylemaramu, that quells twilight and shuts down gates. The black ball of the gateway was visibly shrinking, wavering, and the aura of northern lights whirling around it was flickering and dying. It was smaller than a bowling ball and Wild Eyes had to clap her wings tight to her body to sail through.

There were still about half-a-hundred ex-slave-girls on our side of the gate at that point. Some were screaming, but most of them knelt and put their faces to the floor, hair spilling like little black waterfalls, and stretched out their slender arms to their captors, palms up, begging to be spared.

The sight should have disgusted me, because American pioneer women would never have acted that way, nor would maidens of ancient Rome, but I cannot say I blame them. I was supposed to be the big hero, and I had failed them. It was my fault, not theirs, that they had to push their pretty faces onto the floor so that some goon could come step on them.

Abby was trapped on our side also, and so were Foster and Penelope: yes, the selfsame girl I had promised and vowed and swore and boasted I would save. That promise looked like it would turn out as false as my word to Vorvolac. Me and my big mouth.

I said a prayer to St. John the Apostle and the fat cells in my skin, which were on fire like candle tallow, simply stopped burning. My skin was all black and crispy, but honestly, since I did not fear the damage was permanent, it did not bother me as much as you'd think.

So I leaped to my feet, drew my katana, and assumed the stance called Hasso-no-Kamae, the Stance of the Eight Directions. The feet are close together with one foot forward, and the blade is before the right shoulder, edge forward, slanting up at a slight angle. Elbows are close to the body. It is also called Moku-no-Kamae, the Stance of the Tree, because the swordsman is upright.

I saw Foster’s face vanishing as he donned his goggles and mask. Then I did not see Foster except maybe as a shadow, but I heard him step up next to me. I heard him grunt, and then heard the familiar creak of a bow bending as the string was drawn back. From where his shadow fell, I could see he had drawn the great bow to his ear. The blue-white light was not driving his invisibility away.

At that moment, I knew he was more than a friend. He was not running, even though no one could see him, and he could have escaped easily. He was drawing his puny little weapon that shot a puny pointy little glass stick against a massive warship filled with soldiers and gunners and dark magicians.

But, by Saint Sebastian and all the warrior saints, he did not run, did he? He did not.

Abby stepped up to my left, and raised her now-dead sickle weapon, but she held the blade high, and had the chain gathered in her other hand to throw. She was not running either, and she was a skinny little girl. My heart seemed to expand in my chest. I was proud of her. Proud of someone willing to die beside me—me, a monster who could not die.

Penny had nothing, not even a knife, and she looked woebegone. But she would not kneel like the other girls, who wept and begged and moaned, but she instead raised her chin and defiantly slipped her eyeglasses on. She was unarmed and unclothed, but in that moment, I think I saw the real Penny, not the surface that attracted me, but the real character underneath.

“Run away, Penny,” I said. “I’ll hold them off as long as I can.”

Penny said, “Where should I flee now that they would not see and foresee? That is the flagship of the fleet. That is the craft of the Great King himself.”

I said, “Foster, is your mist entirely gone? Do you have any other tricks, any way you can hide Penny and Abby? Hide the harem girls, or get them to run?”

3. A Cloudwalker of Arphaxad

But there was no time for reply. Grapnels shot up, hung in the air a moment, and clutched the wooden balcony rail. From the unnatural way the black chains writhed and snaked, I could see they were living metal.

Over the edge of the balcony came floating the body of Vorvolac, who was still chained up and blindfolded, and still laughing in mockery and triumph. He was not even slightly dead. Indeed, he seemed in the best of health.

With him was a dark-haired, hook-nosed, and dark-bearded man. The beard was held in two short braids, and the hair was held in a ponytail so long that it looked like he had not cut it in years, maybe never. Two things were odd about him. First, he was standing on a cloud of smoke as if it were solid. Second, he held a shepherd’s crook in his hand, and his coat was of camel-hair, dyed black, but with a long train or tail that was forked like a tuxedo. It was the same costume, or, rather, the same uniform, Ossifrage wore, except in a darker hue. With a gesture of his crook he was drawing Vorvolac through the air.

Abby said in a voice of fear, “It is the Betrayer.”

I said, “You mean Ossifrage’s younger cousin or whatever up there?” Because the guy really did have a family resemblance to Ossifrage.

Abby said, “He is called Glede, the Black Kite. The eight navies and eightscore warships of the aeons of Elam, Asshur, Uz and Ul he overthrew; great cities of Sasan and Svan, of Brennis and Tharsis also were cast into the sea and drowned at his word.”

I said, “How can he do so much damage just with levitation? Levitation is a wimpy superpower.”

Abby said, “It is said the Betrayer can make the calm sea lighter or heavier in one place or another, as if the whole world were tilted, and so stir up great tidal waves as tall as mountains walking on the sea.”

Penny said, “Even in this light, which stops my song from afflicting men, I can summon the soul of the water.”

“What’s that mean?” I said.

“It means I can prevent the Betrayer from flooding us with the cistern lake, but that is all I can do. My art is not meant for closed-in spaces or small pools.”

Abby shouted, “Look!”

Foster said, “Enemy at six o’clock high! There are cynocephali above us!”

It was true. A cavalry of wolf monsters came swarming out of the windows of the next highest line of lit balconies above us, maybe two hundred yards away, maybe less, straight up the wall. They were sticking to the sheer wall like spiders, trotting, not close enough yet to charge. Or rappel. Or paratroop-drop. I am not sure what it is called when you charge down a sheer vertical wall.

At the same moment, the prow of the armored airship lofted above the railing, as huge as if the face of the Sphinx in Egypt were raising its head to look at me. Affixed to the rigid airship frame were weapons shaped like brass searchlights, and others shaped like arbalests and catapults. From square hatches in the side of the gondola protruded good, old-fashioned cannon like those from the days of Napoleon, except more decorative. The intricately-cast cannon mouths looked like so many astonished dragons with their mouths wide open in circles of anger and shock, all thrusting their serpent heads like town gossips out of their Dutch doors.

From the cheeks of the vast and kingly face of the bowsprit, like the outrageous sideburns of Civil War officers, there were upper and lower catwalks extending along the airframe. On these walks were marines in Victorian pressure suits, like extras from the undersea scenes of Disney’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea. They dripped with rivulets of water, and pointed long-barreled weapons of strange design at me; some looked like spearguns, or like blunderbusses, others like fire-extinguishers of bronze.

The brass eyeballs of the giant airship face irised open. Behind was the bridge.

4. Left Eye and Right Eye

Behind the glass of one eyeball, I saw my old pal Enmeduranki. And I do mean old. He looked more worn and withered than the mummy of Pharaoh Nectanebo I had met earlier (not many hours earlier but many thousands of feet higher).

I had not seen his face before. Then, he had been wearing a veil. His jaw was narrow, undershot, beardless except for a straggling scrap of white, and his mouth a crumpled and crooked line, as if it were full of unsweetened lemonade.

He was not on his throne, but standing. Near him were flunkies and high servants in elaborate miters and crowns and copes of white and black, each bearing a more highly decorated emblem of a nine-pointed star on brow or chest than the next, and not one of them was younger than ninety. I assumed these were the other upper ranking magicians, Astrologers and Chaldaeans of the Dark Tower. Some were carrying copper tablets, and some scrolls or charming wands. Behind Enmeduranki was a Blemmyae slave carrying a wide umbrella painted with astrological figures.

Enmeduranki was awesome enough, by the Dark Tower scale of awesome, to have a parasol even while he was inside the bridge of a submarine inside of an indoor cistern, where no drop of rain nor ray of sun could ever come.

And not one of the chief magicians lacked a treasonous hint of the same tired, weary, bored, forever-trapped look in their faces that Enmeduranki had in his face. His was the worst, the most lined, the most filled with despair, but they all had it a little bit. On their faces I saw the grinding madness of knowing the future.

The other eye of the giant face, when it opened, was filled with splendor. Here was a man among men and a king of kings—you could see that even if you were blind.

I was practically at the rail, and the airship was very close to the rail and winching itself closer, so I could see every detail of the Great King clearly.

Above his head, floating and weightless, was a coronet of tiny lights in a circle, brighter and sharper than fireflies, which somehow also looked as if they were immensely far away and utterly holy and pure. They looked like stars from the sky, ripped from heaven to serve as his hat.

The man himself was square-faced, hard-featured, square-bearded, and scarred. His eyes were like two black beads of jet, very dark and very shiny. He was evidently the kind of leader, like Patton or Alexander the Great, who led his men from the front, not from some Pentagon over the sea.

His robe was even more splendid than his crown. Above his armor, which was plated and leaved with brightest gold and blackest onyx, was a robe and alb and mantle of flowing white light. It looked like someone had taken laser-beams, made them as flexible and weightless as spiderwebs, and woven them on a loom.

But the white light was an illusion: every color in the rainbow was in that robe, and there were images within images in the white fields and folds of the mantle, and the longer I stared at the hypnotically circling spirals of images, the more I saw.

This was not like looking at an ordinary object made of matter, which fades in your memory after a month or a decade or a lifetime. The visions woven in the robe reached into my brain and drew themselves there. Whenever I close my eyes, I can bring up the memory in perfect detail, like a three-dimensional picture. If you ever see any object, a weapon, a crown, or a robe that instead of shining with light, shines with this stuff, this light that cannot be forgotten, the light immune from time, you will know you are not looking at an object from the human parts of the universe.

I saw images in silver of moons in crescent phase, and planets rising and setting over green fields. I saw two cities, one at peace woven in azure and alabaster, and one at war, illumed in red and black. I could see tiny images of a bride and groom in one city, or a judge lifting his balance scale above a kneeling criminal, whereas the warlike city showed the horrors of a siege, flames and rapine and desperate men chewing the flesh of their horses or children. Ruby-hued pulsed the glint of swords and the gush of wounds in that microscopic, glowing, supernatural thread-light. In green, I saw fields being harvested, and vineyards, and in gold, a herd of straight-horned cattle.

As the robe folded and rippled, I saw a bull from the herd savaged by lion and lioness, which the herdsmen and their dogs fended off. I saw slaves at their labor and scholars bent over their scrolls and a dancing floor where maidens bent and swayed in the dance as the robelight flowed and breathed. Surrounding all, forming the hem of the garment, was the deep ocean-stream where dolphins and leviathans sported, and a kraken with uplifted jaws rose up from a great river. And in the center of the robe’s breast was an image of a golden sun, surrounded by a spray of arrows with bright rays, too bright for my eyes to look at.

The garment itself was never without motion, and weight did not seem to touch it. Whatever winds were moving it were not the winds of this world in which I stood. The golden armor and his short and crooked sword, as drenched with gems as a Fabergé egg, looked cheap and tawdry by contrast, the way you sometimes see a gorgeous girl make herself look clownish by hiding her beautiful face under clumsy makeup meant to improve her looks.

In his hand was a spear made of a narwhal’s horn. Or maybe it was the horn of a unicorn. The thing was at least five feet tall, and came to his shoulder when at parade rest. So the Great King stood, looking down at me, garbed with a rainbow if a rainbow could be made of fire, one hand behind his back, his feet spread, his star-crowned head tilted forward.

“Who is that?” I whispered.

Abby could see where my dazed eyes stared. She said, “Anshargal, He Who Binds Earth to Heaven.”

The men near Anshargal were younger than the Astrologers. They were hard-faced men, wearing cylindrical war-helmets, carrying jeweled and crooked swords. Each had a baldric or sash studded with little hemispheres painted to look like Earth. Some had one, others had many. It was like seeing the notching in a gun, or the silhouettes painted on the hull of a fighter pilot’s plane. The marshals and generals and admirals of the Great King wore each man on his chest how many slave-worlds the troops under his command had trampled.

I flourished my katana and saluted the Great King by holding the blade before my eyes.

He nodded regally, and I was close enough to see the scar near his mouth pucker slightly as he suppressed a smile.

I also flipped the bird to Enmeduranki with my left hand.

And, again, I saw the scar of the cheek of Anshargal the Great King pucker slightly as, again, he did not smile.

5. Seen and Foreseen

There was some sort of bullhorn or amplifier working, because I heard his voice loud and clear through the glass surface of the eyeball-window. Anshargal said, “So this is the Undying that you talked me into letting defeat my most useful man-slaughterer Rahab?”

Enmeduranki replied, “Sire and Son of Nimrod, all has been seen and foreseen.”

“You have never read me a future with more gaps and blind spots in it,” Anshargal said in an icily jovial tone. “I don’t care for games where I cannot see the chessmen.”

He did not say ‘chess’ but meelulti-passu, a battle-game with pawns. Which, in a way, was even more demeaning a comment: a game where all the men were of low value.

Enmeduranki inclined his head, “Sire, there is the mermaid he loves.” The word he used was Naihiru, which means siren, dolphin, or whale.

“Put her to the hooks,” Enmeduranki was saying, “let the rape-beasts have their sport with her, and he will be broken to your will, and shall encompass the defeat of the Slumbering Crown of Shazand, uplift the Great Seven-Headed Beast of Sasan, and so end all who in this generation oppose the fates the stars ordain. All is known and foreknown.”

“Did he just call you a whale?” I muttered to Penny. “Better watch your weight.” I am glad I did, because she was nervously touching her throat, and beginning to look panicked, looking over the balcony rail as if calculating her chances of surviving the five-hundred-foot plunge into the cistern, but then my little joke snapped her out of it. Her hand twitched like she wanted to slap me, but considering the circumstances, she thought the better of it.

Foster said, “My arm is getting tired. Want me to shoot?”

“Uh,” I said.

There were maybe two hundred large-bore and small-bore weapons of various designs pointed at us. None of them would kill me, but they would kill everyone else.

I took a step forward. I was about to shout out something brave and stupid, like demanding to fight their champion, or asking my friends to be let free, but Enmeduranki glanced down at the golden dial in his hand as if checking his pocketwatch, and then, looking weary but not looking up, waved his finger at me.

The armor I was wearing flexed, snapped rigid, went tight, and I was held with my arms at my side as if in a metal cocoon. I went from tree stance to falling like a tree, and I could not bend my legs or use my arms to break my fall, so my skull hit the ground hard enough that it should have killed me, if I could have been killed. I mean, I felt the plates of my skull separate, and I smelled the smell of blood and neural fluid leaking out. No one ever felt pain like that, because I assume they would have been instantly dead.

Instead of dying, I said a prayer to St. Denis, the patron saint of headaches, gritted my teeth, and forced my skull plates to scrape back into place, once I had forced the escaping blood and fluids to run backward into my head wound. The legend is that Denis was beheaded by Emperor Decius, but that his headless body picked up his head and walked off with it. Maybe he was like me. Whatever he was, I promised gentle St. Denis that I would never complain about the gory nature of my superpower again.

And, just because I was getting better and better at this stuff, I concentrated on making my burnt hair come back where the death-lanterns had blackened the top of my head. There was a rustling noise, and I felt a sensation like ants crawling over my scalp. I lifted my head as far as the neck armor strangling me would allow, and saw that I had overdone it: At least a yard of black unruly hair, coarse as the hair of a bear, was pushing through the links of the coif, spread out in a semicircle from me, and writhing like a nest of snakes.

Meanwhile, a hook-toothed ramp fell from the slope of the gondola beneath the beard of the giant face on the prow and latched onto the railing. It created a remarkably long and narrow catwalk that swayed slightly, but connected the belly of the metal airship and the balcony.

The narrow boarding ramp was quickly crowded with soldiers. Their high cylindrical helms of brass and clanking chestplates gleamed in the harsh blue light from the lampwood spears and searchlight-shaped weapons prepped for firing. The soldiers in front held shield and spear in hand, and walked with mincing unsteadiness, because they had no hand free with which to steady themselves. Each alternate man in the rear had shield or spear slung, and used his free hand to grasp the chain that formed the railing. The soldiers on the narrow catwalks ringing the equator of the zeppelin aimed their crossbows and harquebuses downward, covering the boarding party.

The man in the front was a scarred man missing most of his nose. He put one foot on the wooden balcony rail, and hesitated. He was staring at my hair.

And if I read his expression correctly, it scared him.

6. Inevitable and Unexpected

Enmeduranki was speaking to me. “Deathless boy, I rename you Utu’abzu the Ascending Sun. Your service shall be long and loyal, indeed, shall be eternal. What else could you serve? Only the Dark Tower shall stand forever. Or would you serve blind kings, blind causes? I will tell you before each battle the exact outcome, if you like, every wound dealt, and each deathblow to our foes, to the precise minute. Do not bother to open your mouth to defy me: you know we foretell all.”

My eye fell on Abby, who was standing next to Penelope. I noticed a blind spot of something my brain would not let me notice between the two girls. It was Foster, whose question I had not answered. He was still holding his longbow drawn. It was not a compound bow, so his shoulders were probably beginning to give out with the strain. Meanwhile, Abby had donned her monkey-face breathing mask, probably to hide her fear.

Enmeduranki called, “Surrender! Beg for servitude! Fate is determined and inevitable. Even the people of your world know this: all things are controlled, down to the smallest element, the tiniest motion or passion of heart or brain, all is controlled by nature and the laws of nature. Yield! Beg to be my slave!”

Then he had to pause to cough, which sort of ruined the oratorical impression. Dark Lording is really a young man’s game. Being a gray and aging tyrant must suck.

I had been planning to be the strong and silent type, and not give them the satisfaction of getting any word out of me. Partly this was because Rahab had played it quiet when he first came upon me, and I remembered how creepy it was. Partly because I was pissed at getting caught so easily, and it was so obviously my fault. Heck, I had even been warned! Hadn’t Abby told me I was going to throw to his death someone I said I would spare? I did it anyway.

But I did not want Abby to feel disheartened. For her sake, then, I raised my head as far as the constriction of the coif would let me, and called back in my loudest and most sarcastic voice: “I laugh at fate and nature! You could not predict me in the past, and will never control me in the future!”

And I laughed, and the laughter seemed to have a life of its own as it came out of my mouth, because it sounded high and lofty and jovial and joyous, nothing like the laughter of Rahab at all.

The man with no nose in the front of the landing party still had not stepped onto the balcony. He and all his men were still on the precarious narrow ramp or corvus leading to the airship.

I realized that the reputation of the Host that Yearns for Death in Vain was so horrifying that even doughty veterans were reluctant to approach me, even though I was helpless and motionless on the ground, no more dangerous than a rump roast.

The soldiers were more spooked by that happy, ringing mirth, coming from a man they thought a monster, than anything else I could have done or said. It must have been like hearing a Tyrannosaurus Rex laugh.

The reluctance could only last a moment. The parlay between me and the Lord High Astrologer made everyone pause. But as soon as it was over, or as soon as the Great King or any of his lieutenants noticed the soldiers hesitating, someone would bark out the order and everyone would swarm over us. Why weren’t they hurrying?

The Great King Anshargal tilted his head and gave Enmeduranki a sardonic look.

“Did your wisemen invert a fraction?” said Anshargal sourly.

The aged Lord of Magicians Enmeduranki looked poker-faced. Some intuition told me that I had not been supposed to talk or laugh. They had not predicted that I would say anything at this moment.

What had thrown off their prediction?

I saw a portly general in a gold duncecap next to Anshargal was pointing his finger at me. Not at me, at us. He was counting.

Anshargal spoke with a rolling note of dangerous mockery to Enmeduranki, “Well…?”

Enmeduranki said stoically, “Great King, we are both slaves of the Dark Tower, you and I. Even though a king, you cannot oppose the fates the Astrologers read: and I am the Lord of Magicians.”

“We are both slaves of the Dark Tower, yes. Even though you are the Lord of Magicians, if your star-mages read your tablets of fate awry, what use are they?”

Enmeduranki was staring at me, at the people next to me, and at the girls cut off when the gate had shut (who were still prone and kowtowing at this point, saying nothing). His face seemed momentarily alive, excited, despite the look of bewildered fear. It was gone as soon as it appeared, covered over with an expression of detached professionalism. But I saw it. He was glad something had gone wrong.

The portly general said, “The count is correct, Great King. There are forty-one here on the balcony, as foretold. They are standing where the sketch depicts.” He proffered a thin yellow tablet made of cunning metal to the Great King.

The Great King did not glance at it, but passed it to a servant who handed it to Enmeduranki.

The gaggle of Astrologers behind Enmeduranki, as if at an invisible signal, had each one taken out tablet and stylus, abacus and some instrument as long as a yardstick which might have been a charming wand, or might have been a jumbo-sized sliderule. They were checking their math.

One of the younger ones stepped forward. “Great King! Forgive me for speaking. There is the anomaly. That one in the mask! That is not Eflast Falinn of Riphath. Where is his longbow?” And he pointed with his yard-long sliderule at Abby.

Another Astrologer spoke up, “Forgive me for speaking. The bow is unseen. He is a Rider of the Mist, and the art of mistweaving they know on the slaveworld from which he comes.”

But a third Astrologer said, “If he is a Rider, we would not see him! That is someone other!”

While this was happening, Foster said softly, “Ilya? Should I shoot? I cannot hold this long.”

Penny said, “The King is invulnerable in that robe, which angels wove in heaven for the eldest of men. Shoot the magician!”

But Abby said, “Another will take his place, and be told everything he must do. Magicians know their death hour from when they are born.”

Enmeduranki was grinning a sick grin, excited because something was happening in his life he had not foreseen years in advance. He was also quicker on the uptake than I would have been in his position. “That is a foreverborn! It must be Ersu’s lost Hope, the daughter of Uridimmu of Bashtubaraquin…” he said softly in a weird, cracked cackle. “Who else could stand where none were foreseen to stand?”

Bashtubaraquin, the Clan Under the House of Cygnus, was Abby’s old family name, back from when she was a princess. Uridimmu must be her father’s name, the man she said she could never see again. It meant Stormbeast.

Unless she was seeing him now. I wondered if he were standing there, among the warlords and Astrologers and princes.

My life had some problems, but, really, nothing like hers.

Enmeduranki shouted in his thin, weak voice: “A kingdom to whoever slays the foreverborn ! A world to who takes the foreverborn alive for the tortures!”

The Great King was raising his hand. His next command would be the order to attack.

Foster said, “The king! Should I shoot him? I can put the arrow in his eye at this distance, robe or no robe.”

I closed my eyes, trying to think. I only had a moment.

I could not think of anything.

So I prayed. Saint Agnes of Rome, send me a good idea. Tell me how to save little Abby. Tell me how to save Penny. I’ve failed. I’ve been knocked from my feet. I’ve fallen, and I cannot get…

My eyes snapped open. “Up,” I said.

Foster said, “What?”

“Shoot up. Shoot the lampwood spear.”

Penny said, “Why bother? They will have foreseen all this.”

Foster did not ask, but shot. I heard the bowstring sing, and then, eight seconds later, sing again. I did not see the arrows like slim slivers of glass dart up, but, since I was on my back looking up, I saw the two eight-foot long spears of lampwood tremble as they were struck. Once again, it was a great shot, an awesome shot, to hit a wand twenty feet straight up.

And I had figured that the mists of invisibility, if it was not cut off by the blue ylem-banishing light from the lampwood, must be the other kind of magic, celestial magic. If it came from the moon, why wouldn’t it be celestial? And the way everything worked in this world, whatever did not cut off magic made it stronger.

What I was not expecting was the glass arrows to catch fire, turn all blue through their length like neon tubes, and explode.

They exploded with mist.

For a moment, I could not focus my eyes on anything. I assume no one else could either. I was not blind. Not quite. I could still see shapes and motions, but something in my brain was not allowing me to see them clearly. I guess it was a lot like ordinary mist, except that you think you are going crazy because your optic nerve is not working right.

I heard growls, or actually, screams coming from overhead. Remember those troops of wolf-creatures that had been rushing down the sheer slope of the wall toward us? At least one of the wolves lost his footing when he went blind. I heard a long, sad, lingering wail pass overhead and fall away in an audible analogy of a parabola. Whether more fell, I could not tell; there was too much noise all around.

I also hear Penny say, breathlessly, in wonder, “That is impossible. Why did that work?”

“Because I am awesome,” I said. “And I protect women and children. When I looked at Abby, I did something according to my higher nature. I laughed, and that threw off their calculations. That is all it took.”

Whoever was concentrating on holding my chainmail rigid was distracted, or else the mist cut off the spell, because I could move again.

The voice of the Great King cried out the command to attack. A trumpeter blew.

The soldiers on the narrow catwalk all shouted their battle slogan. “Duhumnamar Nabu!” The Dark Tower decrees!

I decided I need a battlecry, too. “Beau Seant!” I cried. It was the cry of the Templars during the Crusade. Some say it means for the Glory! I say it means Looking Good

And in despair, I realized that I could never overcome so many, even with Foster and his longbow, or Penny with her witchcraft. These men knew how to fight creatures like me.

And I knew I had to call upon a greater name. I was fighting for something more than even the Templars fought, fighting an evil even deeper and older than the Paynim they faced.

“Yahweh!” I screamed at the top of my lungs. “For Yahweh!”

And I started laughing like a madman. Again. Because I heard a groan of metal against metal passing up from underfoot, as if from miles away, approaching.

At the same moment, I saw Glede the cloudwalker standing in midair with this black camel-hair robe and long black ponytail flying around him—and saw him because, with an impatient gesture of his hand, he had blown Foster’s mist upward off the balcony floor, restoring everything to visibility. Cute trick.

And then I saw Foster, looking like a specter of death in his faceless white-hoodedness, eyeless mirrored goggles, and white cloak billowing about him in the winds, appearing out of nowhere like an actor behind a rising curtain. I saw first his toe-socked sandals spread in their stance, then his uplifted bow in his arms, then his goggles beneath his hood to whose ear the string was pulled, then I saw his bow hand and his deadly icicle-hued arrow. He let fly. An unseen shaft planted itself neatly in Glede’s chest, right between the two tails of his forked beard, for from that spot a gush of blood spurted. This one time the wound looked just like it does in the movies, shooting a ghastly crimson stream into the dark air.

I saw Glede topple backward and fall.

The sight of Glede plunging like a paratrooper with a tangled chute seemed ridiculously funny to me. I was braying like a donkey as the sound of the approaching metal groans from underfoot grew louder, like an express train coming.

And then the quake struck.

The airship rocked back and forth. Men spilled off the catwalks lining the rigid airframe, screaming. The ramp between the airship and the balcony reared back, pulling yards of wooden railing into the air, and snapped magnificently in two.

Men in armor plunged down. The guy with no nose was standing on the balcony, safe, the only man of his squad not tumbling headlong through the air, and I rushed him before he got his shield ready, plunged my sword into his belly, and then kicked him out into the air, flicking the blood off the blade nonchalantly. Wished I had had a camera. I bet I looked cool.

The airship ignited its artillery, but the temblor was making the vast vessel roll and pitch and yaw. Bolts and cannonballs and catapult stones and beams of futuristic death-ray fire all flew high, smashing and scarring the walls above and behind the balcony where I stood.

The wolf-headed men clinging to the walls above us were struck full on with beams, blasts, gouts of poison, shattering arrows, and explosions, and scores of them dropped like lemmings in a Disney documentary. The outer wall to which they no longer clung was beetled out over the balcony, so they plunged into the lakewater, or rebounded like clowns on trampolines off the vast lifting envelope of the airship. Perhaps some of them clung frantically to the sloping sides of the rocking airship, but I was looking at the wolves who spun as they fell, and beat their limbs against the thin air. I could not help but think of the Coyote from the cartoons dropping from some Chuck Jones cliff in Arizona.

Really wished I had a camera. I laughed so hard I felt bad. Lord, have mercy on my soul that I thought it was so funny.

7. Exit Stage Left

And then, to my left, I saw a black ball of nothingness appear, surrounded by the aurora borealis.

The Moebius gate was open, whistling like a teakettle.

Foster’s mist had cut off the blue light, preventing it from reaching the golden flail, and Glede had parted the mist horizontally, so there was still a bar above us, still blocking the lampwood spear fragments embedded in the wall. Out from the zenith of the black sphere Ossifrage stepped into midair like a man climbing stairs. On ground level, nearest the sphere’s equator, came forth Nakasu, roaring, a worried look on his chest. Penny shouted to the girls to get to their feet and run for it. The closest ones scrambled into the ball surface, not even bothering to stand all the way up.

Ossifrage waved his shepherd’s crook at the airship, but instead of capsizing, it righted itself. Kneeling on the upper surface of the envelope, not dead like he should have been, was the black-robed cloudwalker Glede, also with a shepherd’s crook in his hand. His other hand was trying to staunch the bleeding from his arrow wound. It should have been deadly, should have killed him instantly, but obviously some magic was at work. I was not getting the hang of this mad world as quick as I would have liked.

Even worse, Vorvolac, pale as a glow worm and a look of ecstatic starvation on his face, was standing next to him, unchained, wings unripped.

Ossifrage shouted some rolling Old Testament curse at Glede, who shouted back. It being Hebrew, I only caught every other word, but it was terrible enough to make me wish that Abby had not been able to hear it.

Foster shot an arrow at Vorvolac, and Glede raised his crook and made the arrow stand still in midair between us. Which was a lucky break, because Foster cried, “For Odin!” and the arrow started emitting mist. That, I think, was why we were not all struck down when the unblindfolded Vorvolac turned his hideous gaze upon us. We were invisible to him, and to the ship, for just a moment.

I tried to shield Penny and Abby behind me, holding up the crucifix.

The airship was turning, bringing her broadside weapons to bear. In the eyes of the giant bearded figurehead forming the prow of the ship, I could see the wrinkle-featured Enmeduranki looking like a gleeful sadist, his white hair in disarray where his tall hat had fallen, and the harsh-faced Anshargal looking calm and cold beside him, methodically giving commands.

Horns and trumpets blew. The random firing ceased. Winged men, Panotii or Cruorbibitors or both, began falling out of hatches and bays along the belly of the great ship, thick and bright as autumn leaves. A dozen grapnels shot out from the ship again, hooking what remained of the balcony. Gun crews readied the death-lanterns and ballistae and cannons.

The trumpets were not merely for the soldiers aboard the airship. All the way across the lake-sized cistern, in the light from the balconies of the townships built one atop the next like shelves, I could see now the mouths of huge weapons, looking as large as the gun Jules Verne once used to shoot Impey Barbicane to the moon, being cranked slowly into elevation. I saw catapults made of living metal, big enough to hurl a Learjet as a dart. Other weapons, protruding from blisters or pillboxes, were cranked into view, and pointed their muzzles our way. There was no spot anywhere in this vast interior space, none of the townships lining the walls, not in range of these massive guns and siege engines.

Torchlight flared into view above, as massive doors high above our position were hauled up, or shutters or hatches banged open with the noise of iron gongs. On the balconies directly overhead, now visible, were steaming spigots hauled forward by teams of sweating slaves, or spouts of red-hot machines leaning over the brink above us, like the beards of giants hanging over a wall, ready to dump boiling oil or molten iron on us, careless of the remaining invulnerable cynocephali grinning and running down the acres of wall metal between them and us.

I was petrified by the sight of it. The whole immensity of the Dark Tower was one big armed trap, the teeth of the snare, all pointed inward at us.

Only Abby kept her wits: “Master! Take us through the gate now!”

Ossifrage raised his crook. I think the cloudwalker in black was still blinded by Foster’s mist, because he did not stop us.

A whirlwind snatched us all up, all the girls, me, Penny, Abby and Foster, and hurled us toward the dark sphere. I put my elbow in front of my face to block the wind, and held my unsheathed katana behind me.

Above all the commotion, from the warship was coming a voice, tremendously amplified, of the Great King, Anshargal: “Open a hundred gates to Javan! No Undying can live an hour in the lands of the Host That Quaffs Lifeblood as Wine! I grant a city to who slays the foreverborn assassin girl, a treasure city to who ravishes the sea-witch! A kingdom wide and rich for the wind-walker's head! But an aeon for the Undying boy! I give you a world to save him from the blood-drinkers and bring him to me alive!”

I fell into the surface. The uproar of battle was cut off as abruptly as if the soundtrack broke.

“He must be found! Find him! For the mother of the Undying boy is none other than–”

—The End of SOMEWHITHER —

To Be Continued
in the Next Volume of A Tale of the Unwithering Realm

— NOWHITHER —

MILITARY SCIENCE FICTION

Riding the Red Horse Vol. 1 ed. Tom Kratman and Vox Day

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

SCIENCE FICTION

Awake in the Night by John C. Wright

Awake in the Night Land by John C. Wright

City Beyond Time: Tales of the Fall of Metachronopolis by John C. Wright

Somewhither by John C. Wright

Big Boys Don't Cry by Tom Kratman

The Stars Came Back by Rolf Nelson

Hyperspace Demons by Jonathan Moeller

On a Starry Night by Tedd Roberts

Do Buddhas Dream of Enlightened Sheep by Josh M. Young

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

A Magic Broken by Vox Day

A Throne of Bones by Vox Day

The Gladiator's Song by Vox Day

The Wardog's Coin by Vox Day

The Last Witchking by Vox Day

Summa Elvetica: A Casuistry of the Elvish Controversy by Vox Day

The Altar of Hate by Vox Day

The War in Heaven by Theodore Beale

The World in Shadow by Theodore Beale

The Wrath of Angels by Theodore Beale

NON-FICTION

Astronomy and Astrophysics by Dr. Sarah Salviander

A History of Strategy: From Sun Tzu to William S. Lind by Martin van Creveld

Equality: The Impossible Quest by Martin van Creveld

On War: The Collected Columns of William S. Lind 2003-2009 by William S. Lind

Four Generations of Modern War by William S. Lind

Transhuman and Subhuman: Essays on Science Fiction and Awful Truth by John C. Wright

SJWs Always Lie: Taking Down the Thought Police by Vox Day

CASTALIA CLASSICS

The Programmed Man by Jean and Jeff Sutton

Apollo at Go by Jeff Sutton

First on the Moon by Jeff Sutton

AUDIOBOOKS

A Magic Broken, narrated by Nick Afka Thomas

Four Generations of Modern War, narrated by William S. Lind

TRANSLATIONS

Särjetty taika

QUANTUM MORTIS Un Hombre Disperso

QUANTUM MORTIS Gravedad Mata

Una Estrella Brillante para Guiarlos

QUANTUM MORTIS Um Homem Desintegrado

QUANTUM MORTIS Gravidade Mortal

Uma Magia Perdida

Mantra yang Rusak

La Moneta dal Mercenario

I Ragazzoni non Piangono

QUANTUM MORTIS Тежина Смрти

QUANTUM MORTIS Der programmierte Verstand

Grosse Jungs weinen nicht

New Release Newsletter

The Castalia House New Release newsletter is sent out to subscribers several days before a new book is officially released. Subscribers who purchase the book in the specified period after the newsletter is sent out will receive either a) a free book that is offered as a bonus with the new release, or b) their choice of one of several free choices that are on offer as a bonus.

We do not spam our subscribers’ email addresses nor do we sell them to anyone. We average about one new release per month.

Click here to subscribe to the Castalia House New Release newsletter or visit castaliahouse.com and enter your email address in the right sidebar, then click “Subscribe”.