Somewhither: A Tale of the Unwithering Realm Page 30

  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 looke
d 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 a
ft.

  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.