The Lord of the Black Land (Unwithering Realm Book 3) Read online

  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 luc
ky 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.