Somewhither: A Tale of the Unwithering Realm (30 page)

That was like having a cherry-flavored snowcone dumped into your bathing suit by your older brother when you are napping at the beach. I jerked in surprise, and the bars impaling me rattled, and my dozens of wounds started seeping blood again.

“Hold it! You can’t be for real! If you are for real, you can’t leave me!”

She stepped back another step. The monkey was still grinning at its private joke, but the set of her shoulders and spine bespoke fear and uncertainty. “Sorry—but this was not in the plan. I am not supposed to swerve from the plan. The elders told me this many times! I’d like to help you … because you look really … yucky … but I am looking for the Master….”

I fought back a sense of desperation more painful than the various bars and burns going through me. I tried to speak calmly, “Pagutu! Pa-
goo
-too! Listen. Listen to me. You don’t want to walk away and leave me here, do you?”

“The Big Man told me not to swerve from the plan—”

“But that is because he did not know about me, wasn’t it? I can help you look for your Master Ossifrage.”

I was using that tone of voice schoolteachers use for idiot children, or child molesters probably use to get Junior into the back of his windowless van for some candy. Soft and smooth and soothing.

Monkey-mask girl was not buying the soothe-y voice. She was inching backward.

“Pagutu, if I am free, the guards will come look for me and not be looking for you. Doesn’t that make sense? I could help you. Act as a distraction.” My voice began to get louder, to take on an ugly note of panic. “Do you understand? You are my only hope. Today is when they get her. I cannot even give up my life for her because
I can’t die!
”

The monkey face was smiling, but the girl was getting freaked out. Sorry, but I don’t think I was saying the right things. She turned and scampered off. I heard her footsteps, light as a doe’s, receding on the stone floor overhead.

I screamed at the top of my one non-pierced and working lung, “For the love of God! Don’t leave me! Get me out of here!”

The footsteps stopped. Then, softly, stealthily, she crept back closer. The monkey face peered over the edge, grinning.

“Which god?” she whispered.

“What?”

She-Monkey said, “By which god’s name did you utter your word?”

“Um. I mean God. God with a capital G.”

“The Astrologers say the stars are gods, and they are numbered beyond number.”

“Your Astrologers are lying-ass bitch whores, and their Head Honcho is as crazy as a bedbug hopped up on psychedelic drugs. Don’t believe a damned word they say. There is only one God, one and one alone.” I guess the Trinity was also three-in-one, but that involved some theological subtleties I wasn’t willing to go into right now.

“You do not know his name, because you are an abomination.” She spoke that in a tone of voice like a dare.

“Uh? God’s name? I know his name. It is not a secret. Everyone on my planet knows it. Maybe you never had a Moses in this world? His name is
I Am That I Am
. The Jews call him
Yahweh
, but they think that name is too sacred to pronou—”

At that moment the cell I was in rolled and pitched like a ship in a swell. It was not much, but it was enough to feel it. There was a huge noise, deeper than any noise on Earth, rumbling from outside, like a vibration in a bar of struck iron. The metal of the tower was complaining.

The monkey mask was still grinning, but her eyes were so wide and white that I could see this even through the thick glasses of her mask lenses.

I started laughing. Maybe I had gone nuts. I don’t remember why I was laughing, or what seemed so funny.

She whispered, “Alas! Now I am bound by the naming magic. I must not leave you, and must get you out of here, and yet you are one of the Deathless, the Ever-Suffering, and so you will kill me.”

“Listen, She-Monkey. Get me out of this darned cell, and I will help you. I’ll be nice.”

She spoke like someone in a daze. “My mother told me of the One God who is the enemy of the One. She told me there were others who bowed and served in secret. So long ago she said it, back when my name was my own.”

I did not interrupt her, but I did not understand her either.

She continued, “I was told to do what was asked of me in the name of the Great Name. I was not told I would be brutally murdered. I must obey. Fate is fated.”

“Fate is not fated!” I said, annoyed. “I am not going to murder you! I am not going to hurt you or let you come to harm. I swear it by the Holy Rood and my Hope of Heaven, in the name of Saint Bernard and Saint George and Saint Catherine, by John the Baptist and John the Evangelist, and in the name of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Queen of the Angels, so help me God.”

“I don’t know those people.”

“They are nice people. Real nice. People who won’t like it if I break my word. My dad won’t like it either. He doesn't even like when I break my word to tell him something I promised not to.”

She did not look convinced. In fact, she did not look like anything aside from a grinning monkey. But in any case, her chain elongated and reached out from her ninja-looking weapon like a snake made of elastic, and wrapped its tip many times around one of the spears impaling me.

Her copper chain writhed and hummed, and the black bar started to heat up to red hot, and I started to scream. I had been doing a lot of that lately.

It took a long time. She thought I was dangerous, and so she was dawdling, and nothing I said could speed things up.

And there were a lot of telescoping spears. Some were stuck through me. Some were just in the way above me, forming a lattice like a wicker basket. And they had to be heated up to red hot, like an oven, before they would squeal and let go.

An hour? It might have been longer. Pain slows time like Einstein’s Relativity, and I was also worried about Penny being introduced to the iron hooks, and that slowed time even more.

The little girl in the monkey mask worked on the ones impaling me from the left, so that once enough were missing from that side, I was able to use my arms and legs to push my body up along the blood-coated spears one way, and have them slowly pull out of my flesh from the other way, but the spears still stuck through me held me up so I did not fall through the hole out into the upper atmosphere.

(Note to imps in Hell: if you want to torment the damned, getting them to pull themselves hand over hand up along a spear sticking through their sensitive internal organs and muscles is an effective torture even Dante didn't imagine. Make sure they hear the slurping noises as their flesh inches along the metal. That sound will linger in their nightmares, trust me.)

By this time, my lungs had just gotten weary of screaming, and my other lung had a hole through it you could stick a forefinger into, so I was only making ugly, gasping noises, not bawling at full volume.

It was only when I was free, and was trying to use my pierced and shattered limbs to climb up and squeeze through the remaining spears to the hole, that I thought to ask. “Listen, She-Monkey, can I ask you a question?”

“It is best not to call me that. That was my punishment name, and the stars might hear you say it. My mother said my reborn birth name is Abanshaddi.” It meant Mountain Rock.

“Can I call you Abby?”

“It is best to use the name as it is, because the stars cannot hear it.”

“Then I’ll call you Rocky.”

“Er… Abby is fine.”

“So, Abby, riddle me this: Why are the Astrologers and their soldiers not here? How come they did not foretell a break out?”

“All are born once and once alone. But not I.”

“What does that mean?”

“Don’t they have people like me on your world?”

“People like what? I am assuming you are a split character class thief and rogue. Remember to check for traps.”

From the set of her shoulders it looked like Pagutu, or Abanshaddi, was miffed. I was sorry I made that joke. Not everyone thinks of rogues as lovable. I suppose poor people who don’t get enough to eat think even less of lovable rogues than rich people who never get their stuff robbed. (The reason why Robin Hood is a myth is not because he robs people on the highway, but because, for once, it was the
rich
people on the highway who got robbed, and poor folk love such unlikely tales.)

“Look,” I said, sighing. (My sigh was a disgusting gargle, since internal fluids from several organs were streaming down gaping and sucking wounds in my chest and abdomen.) “I meant no disrespect. But when I climb up, the moment I hit the rim, they are going to turn on the Moebius gate set into the threshold and dump me lickety-split into a fresh jail cell. That is what happened last time. Can you damage the gold ring? Put it out of action? Or melt the gold with your sickle and chain there.”

“Gold, the cunning metal cannot scald. Only living metal.” Cunning metal was
Abartemitum
: the coppery substance her haunted kusari-gama was made out of. (
Temitum
also meant
sharp
,
acute
, so the name was a deliberate play on words in her language.)

I said, “If there is a wire leading to the Coil, cut it with your cunning weapon, please.”

“That is not necessary.”

“Yeah, I am telling you it
is
necessary, or I cannot get out! Just cut the wire!”

The monkey mask shook its head. “To cut the wire may be foreseen by the maintenance Astrologers. You can get out. You must have faith in me and in those who sent me.”

“What happens if I don’t?”

“Then you stay trapped, even though the cage is open.”

Groaning and grunting, I climbed up the remaining spears like a ladder and so out of the cell. The process was more painful and wetter than it sounds, and involved pull-ups using a set of arms with grossly torn muscles and at least one broken bone. The very last part involved clawing at the stone floor beyond the gold threshold, without the strength in my body to pull me up, and me unable to swing a leg up hard enough to get it over the edge, and the girl so grossed out by the condition of my body that she huddled out of arm’s reach, shaking her head when I groaned pathetically for help.

Finally, with a ghastly effort, I rolled and slithered over the edge, then smashed face-first into the stones with a disgusting splorch of blood. Pure comedy gold.

I raised my head and looked around. There were some iron tools and wooden masks on the walls. Light came from small, fist-sized holes in the stone through which thin air softly whistled. To one side was a workbench, and to the other, two openings in the floor, like twins to the one I had climbed out from. Ahead of me was an archway leading to a crawlspace or corridor for short people. There was no other exit. I guess tall people were supposed to use the Moebius coils rimming the floor openings.

Daylight came through these gold-rimmed openings. I raised myself on one arm, and saw, sure enough, that one of the other two hanging cages had no wooden floor and a good number of the wall spikes were broken. My old cell.

Abby had backed away from me, and was now sitting in a corner between a workbench and the archway leading out, with her arms wrapped about her knees, and her sickle-and-chain retracted and clenched tightly in her gloves. She was shivering. Well, it was below freezing in here. My spreading pool of blood was already beginning to turn into thick red slush.

I squinted. The workbench she was next to had chains and manacles running over a windlass. It was a torture rack.

This room was a torture chamber, where you would work over any prisoners you fished up out of their hanging birdcages underneath, and then toss them back down when you were done. There was even a crane affixed to the ceiling with a boom-arm for lowering and raising the prisoners. I don’t know what the masks on the wall were for. Decoration?

I lay in a heap on the stone floor. I was free. I was out. Today was my Big Bang, and a whole new universe was brought into being, a universe of freedom. I was also too weak to stand, but I was not too weak to laugh and laugh with joy.

She was silent until I was done laughing. Best not to interrupt the madman, I suppose.

“Okay, She-Monkey, talk. Why didn’t the Moebius gate turn on when I climbed over the rim? Who sent you and what is going on here?”

Abby said in a voice of awe, “How can you move your arms and legs? How can you breathe? Why is there still blood — it should have run out hours ago.”

“I don’t know. Mind over matter. A violation of the law of conservation of blood. Why not ask the Scarecrow how the Tin Woodman can be alive?”

“I don’t understand what you are saying.”

“I am saying I do not know. The extra blood is being created out of nowhere. My lungs are moving even though the muscles connected to my diaphragm cannot possibly be working. My gouged-out eyeball ungouged itself, and now it is working again, but my vision is cramped and blurry in that eye. I cannot die and I heal a lot faster than I should, but not fast enough. Your head dipshit in the daffy hat, Enmeduranki, he said today they would torture my …”

She was startled. “You met the Lord High Astrologer? Himself?”

“What? You want his autograph? He said it was
today
! Today! It may have already happened. Torture hooks. Trained rapist-beasts. What kind of sick world has things like that? I’ve got to stop it, got to find out where ….”

I rose to my feet, felt so much pain that I went blind for a second, and hitting my head on the floor woke me back up. I was lucky I had not fallen over the other way, because I would have toppled into the cell and out the bottom hole of the airy oubliette again.

Now I was lying with my cheek pressed against the stone, and I felt the tickle of blood oozing out from me, warm on my cheek.

While I was prone, through my one good eye, I saw her tiptoeing toward the archway leading out of the chamber. “Where are you going?”

She hesitated. “Well, since you are free now, and you are a murdering abomination from a hell-world ruled by demons, I thought it would be … nice … if I left you to commit your … actions … against any mortals who might fall into your clutches …. Uh, hands …”