Somewhither: A Tale of the Unwithering Realm (29 page)

Boom. The dark orb vanished, the peacock aura was gone, and I found myself falling back into my cage again.

No, it was a different cage, just the same in shape. The view through the big hole in the floor was identical, or nearly, so I had not even changed which level of the Tower I was in.

And all the spikes, every single one, all unbroken and eager for vengeance, now extended out at once and half a dozen harpooned me through every limb and major organ, leaving only my head free.

My mouth and one lung were intact, so I could swear like a sailor and scream like a girl. Okay, I know girls go through childbirth and I hear they can endure more pain than men, so let's say I cried like a guy cries when we say he is crying like a girl.

Yeah. It really hurt. I will not describe some of the more intimate places those spearpoints of cold metal penetrated, but I will mention that the sight and smell of whatever you last ate spurting out of holes punched in your body like water from a water balloon is something you really, really, wish you could forget later.

And the blue light was back again, bright, blazing, dazzling. I did not know if I had any of the swallowed Oobleck left to upchuck, because that light put it to sleep, and, with all the holes in me now, probably cleaned out my entire digestive tract of any last drops of it.

And you know? I am going to find out who or what created the Undying Host, and slap him upside the head.

There is no reason whatever for us to have a pain center in our brains, since wounds do not kill us. Pain is totally unnecessary, like having a fire alarm in a fishtank on the moon.

It was a lot of totally unnecessary. A whole lot.

Overhead the extended spikes also formed a woven cage, a mat of bars, like one grating above the next, for thirty feet or so. The bars were so thickly placed that the interstices shrank to little wedges or holes you could not fit a hand through.

And a lot of blood, a whole lot of blood, came out of my pierced body. Gallons. I got faint and weak, and then fainter and weaker. I looked with horror at all the lifeblood dripping down from the spears passing through me, plop-plopping down through an open hole into midair, no doubt to turn into red icicles or hailstones as it fell, killing small animals and children after re-entry.

And they, or whatever automatic system they had set up, just left me there.

I was pinned in place like a butterfly. There was no way to wiggle off of one of the spears without shoving my way onto another one. I did not have the leverage to tear myself loose. There was nothing I could do.

I really hoped, on whatever hemisphere of whatever planet in whatever aeon my mom was in, it was nighttime, and she was asleep. I didn’t want her to see me. I cried a lot. Don’t tell anyone.

I saw the sunrise. The day passed. It was a day of pain. The light departed when the sun set.

At some point after midnight it was officially the third day Enmeduranki had promised: the day they were going to put the torture hooks to Penny. Of course, that is assuming Enmeduranki counts his days from midnight to midnight like a Christian. If he counted from dusk to dusk, like a Jew, then the pain might have already started.

“Being unkillable sucks,” I said aloud to no one in particular. “I want a new superpower.”

I mentioned the noise of the wind was constant, moaning against the tower near at hand or far away, shrieking high or moaning low, overhead or underfoot; so I did not hear the person moving in the chamber above the cell until she spoke.

“Fear not! I am here to save you!”

“Is that you, Lord Jesus? Why do you sound like a little girl?”

(Okay, so maybe I was not entirely in my right mind at the time. I was impaled by half a dozen spears. And I had been up all night three nights running.)

“I am not your lord.”

She actually said
Belitu-sirutim y-anni
which literally meant
Lady nobly-born, no longer I
. So I was not being saved by a member of the aristocracy.

The voice sounded young, and I mean ten or twelve years old, not seventeen or twenty. Too young to wear makeup. Too young to be breaking people out of jail.

“Saint Anthony! I was expecting you,” I called. “
Saint Anthony, Liberator of Prisoners, tear down my prison walls. Break the chains that hold me captive. Make me free with the freedom Christ has won for me
.”

“Stop crying!” said the sweet, little-girly voice, “It is going to take me many minutes to scald the living metal with the wise metal. Do not despair!”

At that, a shining chain, no thicker than what you might use to leash a small dog, but about four feet long, slipped through the nearly-solid thicket of bars overhead, and then swayed like a snake, coiling around the bars. The metal was coppery and bright, not the same black substance as the tower,
abarbaltu
, the living metal; but it moved as if it also were alive. As I watched, the coppery chain stretched from four feet to eight in length, and it kept growing as it wove itself in and out of the bars.

The copper chain tightened and began to glow red like a stove burner. I felt heat on my face. This was refreshing; the first heat I had felt in this stratospherically cold prison in an endless time. The black bars of living metal began to glow red.

I sat there shaking my head in contempt, watching this whole show.

How stupid did Enmeduranki think I was? Everything my jailors had done from day one had been a cat playing with a mouse, letting it go and snatching it again, leaving the door open, those sort of tricks.

Now, on the day when Penny was supposed to be taken to the torture chamber, and I was going to be brought before her and cut to pieces, now they wanted to convince me I was getting broken out of jail?

Broken out by who, John Dillinger? Rudolf Vrba? The Underground Railroad? Harry Houdini? I would have believed that last one, if I had seen the Batcopter in a parking orbit up here at forty thousand feet, with Houdini hanging by his heels in a straitjacket to swing in and pick me up with his teeth.

Not to mention that she was not speaking English. That ruled out Dillinger. By process of elimination, that left Vrba.

“Yeah,” I groaned. “You just keep on with your scalding, there, Rudolf. Don’t mind me.”

I realized she could not hear me too well, perhaps because I was speaking in a gargle-ish voice with a spike through one lung and another through my throat, not to mention sobbing a bit. Just a bit. Okay, a lot. Because all she said back was, “Fear not, Sua’u-su’u-ussushibu-re’u!”

Try saying that one three times fast. Just another dumb name impossible to pronounce. The word-ending
Re’u
meant shepherd, and also meant a teacher, pastor, mentor or master.
Sua’u
meant to fly, to be airborne, and it referred to anything, bird or cloud or moon or angel, that lived in the sky.
Su’u
meant dove or bird or any winged thing.
Ussu
meant eagle or vulture.
Shibu
meant bearded elder, so
Su’u-ussushibu
was the bearded vulture, a bird also called the ossifrage or petrel. It was the carrion bird that broke the bones of its prey by dropping them on hard rocks, or, in one famous case of murder-by-turtle, on a Greek poet's head.

So a little girl who sounded about twelve years old was looking for someone known as High Master Ossifrage. Either that or his name was Old Vulture.

I don’t think it was anyone’s nickname for me. My nickname was Ilya the Boy Pincushion.

When one of the drops of red-hot metal finally sagged enough to drip down and hit me, I screamed. I was expecting it, of course, since it took a fair amount of time to burn through the thickness of the bars overhead, and I gritted my teeth. But, sorry, being able to survive any wound does not mean wounds do not hurt. I think I have mentioned that about a zillion times by now. This is because I have been hurt about a zillion times, and each time it is still a surprise and it still hurts like hell.

This time, it literally hurt like Hell, because I was on fire. A molten droplet hit me on my upper thigh and burned through flesh and muscle down to the bone. The smell made me hungry for a hamburger.

The girl shrieked. “Master Suau Suu Ussushibu!” (Sorry, but I am not spelling that name over and over again with all those hyphens and apostrophes. You just have to imagine she is pronouncing an impossible name that sounds like a hissing hiccough. Or entering a hog-calling contest.) “High Master Ussushibu! I thought you would be standing on the floor, not in the air! I scald the living metal! Do you not see?”

“Don’t mind me,” I said, or gargled. “Can we stop by a McDonald's after this? I am in the mood for a Big Mac.”

“Don’t try to talk! You sound very terrible! Did they torture you?”

“How am I supposed to answer your dumb question if I don’t talk? Of course they tortured me. This is the goddam Dark Tower. It is not the Tower of Fluffy Pillows.”

At that point, the bars blocking the way above shivered, let out a scream like the scream metal makes when it is torn, and retracted all at once. The hole was open. Freedom beckoned.

The only problem was that not all the bars retracted. The ones holding me kept me spitted in place like a shish-kabob, as if some incompetent or sadistic cook had skewered each bit of meat and potato multiple times from multiple angles. I could move my head, which did not have any pieces of metal going through it, so I craned my neck and looked up.

My rescuer was a grinning monkey-ninja wearing a brown outfit, whose face had turned to porcelain.

She screamed in horror. I guess I looked pretty messed up.

“Who are you?” she said. “
What
are you?”

“Ilya Muromets. I am one of the host of those who yearn for death in vain. I think you can guess why.”

“You’re naked!”

“Um. Sorry. You have a monkey face.”

“It’s a mask.”

“I know it’s a mask. I assume you could not breathe the air at this altitude. I am wondering why it looks like a monkey.”

“My punishment name is Pagutu.” The word meant she-monkey.

“That is an ugly name, if you don’t mind my saying so,” I commented.

“Where is Master Ussushibu?”

“Do I look like his appointment secretary? Ask at the front desk.”

“I was told he was here! In this cell!”

“Was he? How naughty of him to have wandered away!”

“How can you—talk? How can you be alive? Your leg is
burning
!”

“By now it is just sizzling. I think my blood quenched the metal ingot. It has not eaten through the bone, anyway.”

“Doesn’t it hurt?”

“People keep asking me that.”

The monkey-shaped mask stared at me for a moment. There was no expression of awe or terror, because it was a mask. If anything, the monkey-face looked like it was enjoying a joke. What the girl behind it thought, I don’t know.

The monkey face did not match the stark black design of the suit. Nor did it match any other bit of handiwork of anything I had seen here. The Dark Tower looked distinctly Mesopotamian, and anything in it that could be made gold, massive, square or blockish, was made so. Everything was as angular as their chicken-scratch writing. Her porcelain face looked like one of those little decorative things you see in a boutique: flamboyant, lighthearted, gaily painted, adorned with very fine curlicues and flourishes. The eyebrows were droll circumflexes; the cheeks were clownish circles of rouge. After staring at nothing but dark shapes and cruel spikes, it was a relief, it was a joy, to stare at something so ridiculous.

She stood up. I revised my age estimate upward. Maybe she was fourteen. Her hair was black as India ink, and clipped in a pony-tail over one ear that fell to her shoulder. She was thin as a rail and shaped like a boy. An underfed boy.

Her outfit looked like she had wrapped her arms and legs in black adhesive tape, put on a tunic and an oversized diaper atop that, and over both was wearing a smock or maybe a poncho. Some kind of garment made of two flaps hanging down in front and back, belted at the middle, and pinned at the shoulders and neck with three round ornaments of wood.

In her hand was a blade shaped like the letter L. There was a long chain made of coppery metal growing out of the bottom of the hilt, ending in a triangular bob or arrowhead. The chain at the moment was retracted, only about two feet long. The weapon looked like the sickle-and-chain Alexei practiced with, a
kusari-gama
. So she really did look like a ninja.

Some girls from my hometown, when they were fourteen, were mature enough to pose for Playboy. I assume it is because in Tillamook we put a lot of growth hormones in our cows which get in our dairy products and get in our children. This girl at fourteen was more waiflike in build, and probably did not have those things in her diet. She did not look like she had much of anything in her diet.

“We are definitely stopping at that McDonald’s,” I said. “Or maybe a Popeye’s. You need some red beans and rice in you.”

“What did they do to your eye?”

“No, I did that to myself. Poked it out with my thumb. Don’t try this at home, kiddies. Everything else is their handiwork, though.”

“And what is that … moving … thing … in the eyesocket?”

“My new eyeball. It is almost grown back. My nerves regenerate, and are always ready for more pain. Lucky me!”

“Where are you from, creature?”

“The Land of Cheese.”

“Eh?”

“Can we get on with this charade?” I said, beginning to feel a little cross. “You are supposed to be pretending to rescue me, and I am supposed to pretend to believe you. Can you make these larger bars retract with your trick? I mean, without dropping me into the bottomless drop under my toes?”

“Do you know where is Master Ussushibu?”

“I don’t even know how to pronounce his name.”

“Well …” her voice sounded uncertain and soft. It had a strange note to it. “… Sorry to leave you like this, creature, but I have to look for him. This may be our only chance before he is moved beyond the twilight to another aeon. Just don’t tell anyone you saw me, please…”