Somewhither: A Tale of the Unwithering Realm (48 page)

He snorted something in whale-noise at me. The secret panel through which Qall had scampered away was closed, and I could not open it without the cylinder seal, and I could not get that without wrestling the monster.

I stepped into the narrow opening, but hesitated on the threshold, and looked back.

There were two normal, undisguised doors into this jail chamber, one of which was hanging wide open.

I looked one last time at the Abarimon, and spoke to him. But it does not matter what I said, because he did not understand me, and was not listening anyway.

Nakasu slid the panel shut, and it was like seeing a coffin lid close.

It took us hours to climb the stairs. You would think going down flights of stairs, even if it were a distance thrice that of the Empire State Building from observation deck to subbasement, could not take so long? Well, try walking in the dark.

Kaqqudu Nakasu the Blemmyae could see just fine, with his eyes bigger than softballs and glittering like a cat’s, but when I groped around for one of those magic lampwood sticks to light up, he slapped it roughly from my hand, and hooted at me in dolphin-snort.

If he spoke French or Spanish or some other language where your tone goes up at the end to indicate a question, or gets loud to indicate an exclamation point, then maybe I would have been able to tell from his tone of voice what he meant. As it was, I could hear the creak of his rhino-like hide as he made pantomime gestures toward me in the darkness, I did my best to convey to him by means of gestures that I could not see what he was doing.

He put his huge meaty hand over the lower half of my face at one point, and made a hiccupping noise. Was a hiccup from him the same as a shush or a hiss? Or was it something else?

Sometimes we would stop, as if there was some sort of stop sign here that only he saw. We would wait, sometimes fifteen minutes (one rosary) sometimes an hour (four). I am telling you, if you do not count the time when you are trapped in the dark with no noise with a man-eating Blemmyae who smells a bit like elephant, you are going to go crazy. Crazier. Okay, I admit, it probably does not happen very often, but just in case, take a Braille wristwatch along.

So we were sneaking. I got the concept.

What we were hiding from, that I cannot tell you. Maybe there were invisible radar beams or motion sensors sweeping through the staircase like searchlights, which he could sense and I could not.

Or maybe he just had a weird, headless-monster sort of sense of humor.

But he was as good as his non-word. Eventually, he slid open a panel, allowing a blinding sliver of light to enter.

I blinked, and saw a corridor decorated in dazzling gold and paved with blocks of onyx, and two man-headed bulls with eagle wings and scorpion tails loomed at the far end, statues taller than three-story buildings.

Beneath the winged bulls, in a double line facing each other, were man-sized eagle-headed statues cast of gold and black, each holding a realistic-looking pike.

Between them was a golden door two stories tall, inscribed with an eighteen-pointed star and surrounded by seven rings gem-encrusted in seven different hues: pearl and emerald and silver-white diamond, ruby bright as sunrise, purple amethyst, blue sapphire, and outermost, black onyx.

Above the door was a circular window above a balcony overhanging the lintel. Whatever was beyond was brightly lit with fluttering yellow light, and I could see onyx columns upholding a vast blazing vault of lampwood that shone like the sun behind clouds, but no noise came through the oriel window.

Now, I should mention that being cooped up in a narrow staircase for an hour or three with an oversized hippo-legged man-eating monster is no fun, especially if he has bad breath coming from a mouth the size of a radiator grill on a small foreign car, not to mention a weird smell to his skin, a mixture of hay and dried blood. And in the dark, smells smell stronger. So I really wanted to get away from him, and his armpits, which were just above my nose, height-wise.

Also, I wanted my cylinder seal back. Knack had of course used it to open the panel, and it was going to protrude from the other side.

I reached around the panel and took the seal in my hand. Knack grabbed me by the shoulder, and started to yank me backward.

I must have not filled my union-mandated daily quota of total stupidity, because instead of letting the hometown guy with super acute eyeballs the size of softballs drag me back to safety, I looked around with my eyeballs the size of grapes, and, seeing nothing, jerked myself forward, saying loudly, “Whatsamatter, stinky? No one’s around here.”

I jerked myself forcefully enough to pull my shoulder out of his surprised fingers, and did a pratfall on the slick gold of the marble floor, and the three-armed flail hit a metal floorpanel with a noise like a church bell bouncing across the deck of an aircraft carrier. While a jet was taking off.

And all the eagle-headed statues turned their heads in unison in a metallic rustle of coif mail and stared at me.

I suddenly realized that these were not statues at all. They were men in armor. Fighting men. And there were a lot of them.

From my location on the floor, looking up at the moving statues that turned out to be not statues at all, but soldiers armed with pike and harquebus, I got a long and lingering look at their get-up. Each wore a winged salet with a bevor shaped like an eagle beak, golden shoulderboards elongated and enameled and carved like feathers, a scaled cuirass inset with opals and dark starbursts, and gold- and black- and silver-encrusted gauntlets, and spaulders, vambraces and pauldrons, tassets and skirt, cuisses, poleyns, greaves, and sabatons, each piece fretted with a border of black admantium or shining copper or other living metals. (And if you don’t know what a salet or bevor is, you don’t spend enough time at Renaissance Faires or with the SCA.)

Nakasu groaned a belly groan of disgust and started to slide the secret panel shut. To my great delight and surprise, he was on this side of it. He had not run.

One of the eagle-masked soldiers shouted, “Officer of the Watch!”

A man in armor like theirs, but more elaborate, with the head of a peacock for his mask and the most enormous half-circular headdress enameled in the pattern of colored feathers reaching from shoulder to shoulder like a rainbow of bad taste, came strolling very slowly into view from behind a pillar. “What is it, Decurion? The next disturbance scheduled is for the thirteenth hour, when the Panotii will arrive because of the calling … what’s this?”

The eagle-masked sergeant said, “Unauthorized and unexpected use of a desecrated passage, sir!”

Peacock mask nodded in a rustle of metallic feathers, and the soldier barked out an order. Neatly as a clockwork mechanism, soldiers in their outrageously overdecorated gold armor wheeled right and left and formed a double line blocking the enormous golden door with its eighteen-pointed star.

I was sitting on my buttocks. Marble is both hard and slippery. “I was sent here by Sergeant Sakrumash to deliver this artifact of power to Lord Ersu. I bear his seal to show I come in his name. Here is his seal!” I held up the little cylinder that was still in my fingers.

All the men laughed. I don’t know what part of the fib they thought was unbelievable, but it was something as painfully obvious to them as butt ache.

Eagle mask shouted, “Acolyte! Secure that portal!”

I did not see which one of them was the acolyte, but someone must have done some hoodoo, because there was a soft thud from behind, and I glanced back and saw that clamps made of the black living metal had folded out of the walls and gripped the secret panel on four sides. One clamp was covering the spot where the cylinder seal was supposed to go.

That did not look good.

Peacock mask said to me, “Oho! So the Crown sends outlandish clowns down Star stairs fated not to be cleansed of pollution until three decades hence? Surely you concocted a more feasible tale?”

“Pizza delivery!” I shouted. “Who ordered the butt-whoop special, extra cheese?”

Peacock mask drew back, “What?”

“Landshark!” I shouted.

Nakasu walked up next to me, picked me up (which he could do without bending over, since his arms hung apelike past his knees) set me on my feet.

I started to draw the curved shortsword I had looted from Sergeant Crowmeat, but Nakasu grunted and handed me the flail. He pointed to two of the ruby rings on the hilt, hooted at me softly, made a gesture with his hand, pantomiming a half-turn on one, a full turn on the other.

I could not open the pouch one-handed, so I stuck the cylinder seal between my lips like a cigar butt and started to twist the flail hilt rings as instructed, but Nakasu made a shushing gesture with his huge, meaty hand, one of those
calm down — wait for it
sort of hand-motions.

He took a large step away from me. I nodded (a gesture that made him hunch his shoulders in amusement) because I understood. Nakasu was showing me how to open the twilight leak, an effect poisonous to everyone but me.

Without a hand free, I spat the cylinder seal into the cheek of the hood I wore, and then bucked my head like a horse to knock the hood backward. I felt the heavy metal slug of the seal fall down into the pointy part of the hood hanging halfway down my spine. I was pretty sure it would not fall out of that impromptu pocket.

Peacock mask sighed a sigh of exasperation, turned to his men, and barked out: “Unexpected event. Bugler, sound quarantine. Scorpios, fall out and secure the main doors; Virgos, fall out and secure the stairwells and waystations for the quadrant.”

Two squads of a dozen men each trotted past us and went their way. I nodded and waved genially while they double-timed it past me. Nakasu stood glowering, arms folded across his face, eyes above his elbows and haughty sneer below.

I should explain that the corridor here was laid out like a giant letter Y. The secret door was at the fork, and the giant doors at the stem. Two lesser doors, which were brass inset with lustrous blue lapis lazuli in shapes of rain clouds and sea waves, were set at the end of either arm, leading to further spaces beyond. These brass doors were only a story-and-a-half tall.

One squad of eagle-masked soldiers went down a huge gold-decorated corridor to the right, and the other went down a huge gold-decorated corridor to the left. They passed through the smaller brass doors. The echoes of their receding footfalls diminished.

Peacock mask turned toward us and raised a hand. “You there! Unexpected and disorderly! Give me use-name, house, your birthdate and hour!”

I said, “I’m a Yankee Doodle Dandy.”

“What?”

“A Yankee Doodle! Do or Die! I’m a real live nephew of my Uncle Sam, born on the Fourth of July!”

“Silence, lunatic! And what of you, Blemmyae? Your date and hour?”

Nakasu cracked his knuckles, and spat the most impressive glob of spit I have ever seen—an Olympic gold medal wad of spit, a pint at least—onto the floor.

Peacock mask said, “I don’t see a slavemark on either of you! Come now. You are freeborn! We all serve the Tower. You are caught in a mire; thrashing about will only suck you deeper.”

I counted. There were twelve men left. I felt a strange feeling began to swell in me and I started to grin.

You see, I could be dismembered, even decapitated, but I could not be killed. And Nakasu was an honest-to-Saint-George monster. I was beginning to think these dudes did not know who they were up against, and that maybe we stood a chance.

Peacock said, “Tell me your birth signs, loyal subjects of the Dark Tower! Putting fate back on course is not what you’ve heard in the public house tales! No pain is involved, no punishment. We are not going to
kill
you.”

There was enough of a suppressed snort from enough men in masks at this announcement that I knew it was false, and knew that the soldiers did not give a darn if I knew. It was not a pleasant feeling.

Nakasu grunted. The sardonic look on his chest was visible from across the room: he did not believe the officer.

I said to Nakasu in a soft voice, “I know you cannot understand me, but you understood what
he
just said. We cannot surrender and there is nowhere to run. So, you in the mood for a fight? I think we can take ’em!”

Maybe he understood my tone of voice, maybe not. Nakasu took me by the shoulder, and pointed at the smaller brass door, the one decorated with rainclouds and seawaves, to the left. Then he turned to the right and began lumbering away.

I was puzzled. He was not moving fast enough to be running, and anyway there were troops ahead of him beyond those doors. Nonetheless, I decided to trust him, and walked away from him and over to the story-and-a-half-tall door.

The twelve soldiers stood still as statues. Their expressions were hidden by their fanciful faceplates. They just watched us walking away. Maybe they were waiting to see what we would do. Maybe they were waiting for orders. I was waiting for both, I guess.

Peacock mask spoke in a cajoling, hearty voice: “You’ve had your fun while your star blinked, and you got away from your horoscope for a while, eh? But that’s done, and your horoscope is back, and the stars will guide your every footstep from now on.”

When I got to the door I suddenly realized why I was here. I could not see Nakasu from this position, but I heard the groan of hinges and the clang of metal. So I found the door ring, and pulled the heavy leaves to. There was a bar on this side which lowered into place when I turned a crank shaped like a flower. It was not made of living metal, and, of course, the door was meant to be barred from this side, for defense of the vast gold door inscribed with the eighteen-pointed star behind me. When my bar fell into place, it made the same clang as I had just heard down the other branch of the corridor.

Peacock mask was saying in a louder, harder voice: “Don’t get any crazy ideas, and don’t make it worse…”