Somewhither: A Tale of the Unwithering Realm (80 page)

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.

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.

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.