Somewhither: A Tale of the Unwithering Realm (25 page)

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.”

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.

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.”

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.”