Somewhither: A Tale of the Unwithering Realm (38 page)

The chain wrapped around me, even though broken, was still sentient and prehensile, and it whipped out and snagged the prow of a boat as I was looking down over the infinite drop. Skydiving with no parachute was the story of my life.

Weight returned with a jerk at my waist like a mule kick.

I was yanked in a mathematically perfect quarter circle of arc terminating at a point where I was smashed face-first into the wall; I fell vertically, and ended up wedged in the crack where the pointy stern of a glass boat curved down and blended into the gold surface of the wayship holding the boat by its keel. The wayship hull and glass boat hull were fused together, but the stern of the boat was not flush with the wayship, and that was where I landed. So I did not fall to my non-fatal street-pizzahood thirty thousand feet below.

In the movie version, the director will include a nice long shot of my white cuttlebone nightstick making a graceful parabolic arc out into the darkness—but I did not see myself drop it, as far as my slam-woggled brain could tell, my only weapon had simply vanished.

I said, “Did you see where it went?” And then I realized I was talking to a glowing skull mask between my legs, and told myself to wake up and keep fighting.

Shaking my head made my vision darken and blur all the more, and I squirmed and tried to unwedge myself and I looked up just in time to see two things at once.

First: Hellpoodle was dead. He was hanging by his neck like you’ve seen in old Westerns by a chain that was red hot, and he wore a bib of running blood. The chain he had severed had simply noosed him with its free end. The fur on the back of his neck was not burning, but his throat, which was naked, looked like someone had taken the heating element from an electric stove and garroted him with it. Which, come to think of it, someone had. I made a mental note to have Charles de Gaulle give Abby a medal for keeping a cool head under tooth-fire. I was so addled that it took me a moment to remember de Gaulle was dead. Wellington or Lincoln would have to decorate her.

Second: Lon Chaney was clinging by three legs somewhat above me to the surface of this second gold wayship where I now was stuck, the one parallel to ours, which he had been using as his firing position. His other leg held the crossbow, which he displayed to me in a front-view aspect, as if asking me to admire the workmanship of the business end.

Lon Chaney had the same patient look on his doggy face I get on my face when I am waiting in the blind for the deer to move into the shot: eyes half-narrowed and mouth half-open (so the deer won’t hear my breathing). This time, I was the deer. When I craned back my head to see what was happening to Abby, I was exposed.

I heard that
twang
of the cord after I felt the bolt enter my chest. Single lung shot.

It was a good shot under difficult conditions in bad lighting on the roof of a speeding train, and he had to miss the prows and keels of other glass boats between us, so instead of swearing like a sailor, I decided to award him a victory.

Recalled my acting lessons from the time I played the magical bear in the school play, I writhed a bit, and slumped over. I resisted the impulse to croak out the word
Rosebud
.

Since I was wedged in, I could relax like a corpse without falling the infinite fall. The glass hull was right under my nose, and I could see a funhouse mirror reflection of Lon Chaney dimly in the glass.

His head was turned toward Abby’s location. I was in a sweat, because if he started that way, I had no way to climb after him. But then in the reflection, I saw the sleek canine head turn toward me. Even though the glass was dim, in the reflection I could see above and behind me the glint of his nocturnal eyes like two coppery mirrors, or two burning matches, approaching.

He slid smoothly down the golden hull surface toward me. I had some half-baked notion of grabbing the crossbow from him if he got closer, but he halted.

Twenty yards away. Fifteen. Ten. I tried to urge him within arm’s reach by radiating hypnotic waves from my brain, but that was not one of the superpowers I was given.

He stopped.

Does swearing count as blasphemy if you do it silently in your heart? I decided to ask Father Flannery next time I went to confession. If I were so lucky.

I sat there, playing possum while I watched him hang head-downward and cock another bolt with three hands.

Cripes, but I wished I had something to throw at him during the moment when there was only one leg holding him to the surface.

This time, I heard the string go
thwang
before the bolt entered my back. He struck some major vein. I could see the blood pumping from my back. Even with my childhood acting skills of pretending to be a bear, I could not convincingly impersonate a man whose heart had stopped beating.

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.

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.

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 looked 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.