Somewhither: A Tale of the Unwithering Realm Read online

  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 clou
ds 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.