The Darkest Tower

  “You did not name it yourself?”

  The bird cocked its head at her, she looked at it, and she laughed. “I just named the one, not all of them. Wild Eyes. Named after my personal heroine’s boat whose route I was following.”

  “When you were talking to him to tell him I was harmless—or is it her? Is that a boy falcon or a girl falcon?”

  “Her. All falcons are girl falcons. Boys are tercels.”

  “I thought that was an Italian car. When you were talking to her–”

  “Yes?”

  “Well—it really sounded like you were talking to her.”

  “You are asking whether I was talking while I was talking? Isn’t that what they call a tautology? Or is that an oxymoron? I get the two confused, I fear.”

  I swear she batted her eyelashes at me. I had never seen a real girl do that. I don’t even think I had ever seen it on TV. It was a complex process that involved her dropping her gaze, drawing in a breath halfway, tilting her head to one side, lowering her chin slightly in what might have been a pout or a smile, and then looking up at me through the side of her glance, which made her eyes look doubly big, surrounded as they were by her lenses.

  Was she flirting with me? Or was she just mocking me? Not for the first time, I wished girls would come with instruction manuals.

  I said, “It sounded like you were talking talk, not just talking at.”

  “Don’t worry,” she said, “Wild Eyes never talks back when there are people around. It is one of those Bewitched, or I Dream of Jeannie type deals.”

  I squinted at her. “You’re not kidding,” I said slowly. “I mean, you say that like you want me to think you’re kidding, but—from the way you said it–”

  That got her attention. She looked startled, and looked at me, I mean, looked at me like I was a person and not an autograph hound or something, for the first time.

  “There are breeds that can be taught a few words, like a magpie,” Penny said stiffly, “Not as many as a parrot. That is probably what you heard…” And she looked at me with the look that you have on your face when you’re waiting to see if someone buys what you’re saying.

  I stared at the bird, who looked back at me fiercely, and lowered her narrow head and hunched up her wings, as if preparing to launch at my face. Just in case, I held up my arrow in my bare hand, as if it would do any good.

  I had not heard anything, but she obviously thought I had, and decided I needed to hear an utterly unconvincing fib. On the one hand, no falcon can mimic human speech like a parrot. On the other hand, if one could, it would probably show up at the Haunted Museum.

  Penny ran her finger over the head of the hot-eyed little falcon, and the bird seemed to calm down. Wild Eyes went from DEFCON 1 back to DEFCON 2 or something, but she was still tense and ready to fly at me.

  Penny sighed and tucked another stray strand of hair behind her ear and said, “Oh! That must be my father calling. I had better hurry in, before he melts you with a meltification ray. He doesn’t like me talking to boys. Well, it’s been, ah, unreal, sort of… talking to you… watching you roll on the ground… and so on….”

  “My name is Ilya. Ilya Muromets.”

  But I was talking to her receding bottom, which was a remarkably fine thing to watch receding, swaying and bouncing with an athletic motion of her hips. She turned her head, and caught me staring at her butt, and the flash of sharp annoyance in her eyes with their beautiful long lashes told me I was both a Masher and a Stalker or worse, and she threw the bird screaming upward from her wrist. The most famous and prettiest girl in town lifted her nose in disdain and stepped in the door, banging it loudly behind her.

  The falcon flew up, way up, into a deep, deep blue summer sky.

  And my heart sank back down past my boots into the darkness below the earth about as far down as that bird flew up.

  I sank down and started picking up my stupid arrows, one by one by one, while bugs bit me.

  4. You Should Have Been There

  It was a year later that I got the job, and I had a different haircut then, and I was two inches taller, and I am not sure if she remembered having met me before, or our odd little talk on that hot summer day. I remember every word. Each was branded by the red-hot iron of boyish embarrassment into my brain, or the hotter iron of helpless frustration. I could not tell you how many times I rewound and reran the conversation in my head, thinking of other things I might have said.

  Or how often I cursed myself for not being bold enough to make some sort of smooth move to make her like me, although what that would have been, I didn’t rightly know.

  And, in case you are wondering, I found Foster at his house later that same day, mowing the lawn faithfully like a good son. In retribution, I never said a word to him about what happened when I walked up the hill, except, “You should have seen it! You should have been there! You missed it all. It was amazing, man. Amazing!”

  If he pressed me for details, I simply growled, “Like I said, you should have been there!”

  Not Quite Saint Anthony

  1. First Attempt

  Think of it as a puzzle. You are trapped in a cylinder made of metal, surrounded by inward pointing spikes. Above is an opening too high to climb to, but you can get out if only you can get that high. It has a Moebius coil built into its threshold rim. Below you is a circle of blue-glowing wood surrounding a drop into empty air.

  Clinging to the bottom of the cage was not an option without mountaineering gear or a pair of Buck Rogers atom-powered rocket-shoes.

  All I had to work with was one naked kid who just found out he was not born on Earth. Make that one naked yet slightly freaked-out kid.

  My idea came when I went to the bathroom. You would think I would have used the hole in the middle as a chamber pot, but no. My stomach was bothering me. For some reason of morbid curiosity, I did my business on the floor where I could look at it. The stool was writhing as if with a thousand tiny maggots. I was pretty much immune to being grossed out by then, because I was convinced that neither disease nor parasite could kill me.

  I leaned closer. I realized it was not maggots. I closed my eyes, cleared my mind, and when I opened them, the business was normal and motionless.

  As I had suspected. There was still some Oobleck left in my system. The supply of extra-dimensional ylem I had swallowed stayed with me. I assume the blue light somehow froze or paralyzed it, so it had been quiet, frozen like a fly trapped in amber, and riled up only when the blue light snapped off during the moments when Enmeduranki had twilighted in and out.

  Remember, I had felt a squirming in my guts when Emmy Drinky had popped up. It had not been fear or anger. It had been the solidified twilight still lingering somewhere in my stomach cavity stirring in reaction to my thoughts of fear or anger.

  How had the Astrologers not foreseen this? I was pretty sure that events happening in Uncreation, where there are no stars, were beyond the reach of their radar. Any Oobleck that came out of Uncreation might also be invisible.

  Have you ever seen someone break a board with his hand? It is not fake, but your technique must be perfect. You can snap a heavy board neatly in half without hurting your hand.

  One of the conditions is that the boards are not set in line and bolted into a metal frame that you are standing on. If you try to break a board set into a solid floor underfoot, you will probably just break your hand.

  But if you do not care how many times you break every bone in your hand, because your hand will heal itself and be fine again in an hour or less, and if you do not care how loud you scream because you are forty thousand feet up in the atmosphere, you can eventually break the board. Eventually.

  The hardest part was at first. I banged at one spot with the aching and bloody mass at the end of my arm for hours. But once I made a hole big enough to force my broken fingers into, I could sit and wait for them to heal, and they would be grown into a position where my grip could not slip, and I could pry up the floor boar
d. With immense pain before, during, and after. Did I mention the immense pain?

  Then I had a floorboard to use as a club, which I could also use as a pry-bar, and the boards to either side were already loose. A little bit of work, and then a second board could crack in two, come free, flip edgewise, and away it would fall, spinning and glowing, away into the wild blue yonder below.

  I don’t know what carpenter did the work on this floor, but he was not one of these modern contractors who do their work any which-way and send you a bill. No, this guy really took pride in his work, and fitted everything tightly, the old fashioned way. You would hope that folk working for a Dark Lord would be more lax and lazy in their approach, wouldn’t you?

  I had expected to take all three days to rip up the whole floor. No. It only took twelve rosaries, which is three hours. I did not have a place to stand, of course, by the end, but I could stick my body onto the spikes of the walls (which hurt like the dickens).

  When the last board was tossed, and the very last splinter of the lampwood was gone, and the last spark and glimmer of blue light was flung away, then my stomach started to writhe. It took me no effort to get myself to vomit. All I had to do was think about their plans for Penny. I caught some of the spew in my cupped hands.

  So I had a dollop of muddy ylem, a substance I could control with my mind. I hung, bleeding and freezing, stuck to the bars of utterly black living metal of which the Tower and its instruments were composed.

  And I waited. Soon enough, one of the bars started untelescoping, pushing me out toward the middle of the now-bottomless cage. Then another bar opened. The cage was getting ready to scrape me off.

  While the two spikes were extended, I swung like a hyperactive monkey from one to the next. More bars unfolded, faster now, trying to spear me.

  I was dizzy after a moment or two of this exercise, but by the end of it, two and three fully-extended bars had been smeared with a bit of the glop right at the spot where they emerged from the walls.

  Then I focused my mind, and thought about the molecular composition of engraver’s acid. Three parts hydrochloric acid and about seven parts nitric acid. I pictured the hydrogen and chlorine and nitrogen atoms like little tinker toys. (The reason why I knew this bit of chemistry—not my strongest subject—is that, in a novel I once read, the spy carried around engraver’s acid in his fountain pen. Amazing what you can pick up reading junk novels.)

  And it worked. The rules of chemistry must be the same in this dimension as back home. The bars started smoking and sizzling. They also trembled and made a moaning noise. Did living metal feel pain?

  I also knew how to do a palm-strike so as to put all the force of my body behind the blow. My Dad’s physical training technique was an area where I was better than chemistry. I had been exercising every day since they started feeding me again, and so with the most glorious noise my ears have ever heard, a sound louder than the Fourth of July and brighter than church bells, three bars broke.

  And they died when they broke, having lost the power to fold or unfold, open or shut. Each of the three was long enough to allow me to prop one end and then another atop retracted spikes at nearly opposite ends of the cage diameter. It was precarious, but I could balance on one bar and place the next two bars, one atop the other, horizontally resting on a higher row of spikes. I could kneel on one, hold onto the second, reach down, and pull the lowest of the three bars up. And then repeat the process, climbing a ladder and pulling it up after me.

  It takes a lot longer to travel up the side of a barrel-shaped cage made of inward pointing spikes than you might suppose. It only looked like twenty or thirty feet to climb, like getting on the roof of a three story house. But if you have to wedge in each rung of the ladder as you climb, and reach down, unwedge the lowest, haul it up, and repeat, it seems to take hours.

  And, to make things slower, the spikes in the wall were malicious. They kept trying to poke me, or shake me loose, or wiggle the bars I was using as ladder rungs free from where I was wedging them. But I had a few tricks of my own, since I could just move my stomach in the way of an impaling spike, and then rest my weight on the extended bar while I spat Oobleck out of my mouth, or just let the Oobleck issue out of my pierced stomach, and use the Power of Negative Thinking to turn it into acid, and then, clank, bang, I could snap free another bar.

  And to make it even slower still, the spikes got faster and nastier the closer I got to the top. Soon, I realized I had to spit on and break every single spike three or four across, in the line between my current position and the opening at the top of the cage. I broke at least sixty of the bars that barred my way, or about one sixth of the total number of telescoping spikes lining the cage walls.

  Another hard part came at the top. The golden rim of the opening was in the middle of the metal ceiling, so I had to get from my position clinging to the wall out into the middle of the cage and grab the edge.

  Eventually, what I did was end up taking three bars and propping them up against each other to form a rough triangle, and then I vomited up Oobleck onto the bars where they touched, and thought about epoxy. The bubbling black nonbeing obligingly changed into a thick white paste, and it took an hour or three to harden, and I kept spitting more layers of glue and more. Ilya Muromets, human digger wasp. That’s me.

  But my triangle of bars was big enough and glued together sturdily enough to hold my weight when I propped it against the line of spikes forming the uppermost ring in the cage. The triangle was parallel to the roof, and the vertices of the bars were wedged into three equidistant spots around the circumference of the cylindrical cage.

  The glue held when I put my weight on one bar, or, rather, it gave way slowly enough that I was able to step swiftly out to the midpoint of that bar, raise both hands and jump and grab.

  And then I was there. The twisted gold band forming the rim was slippery. Kicking my legs frantically in midair, I grunted and did the toughest pull-up I have ever done in my life.

  Higher I inched, and higher…

  I heard no alarm bells going off, no other noise. With my new digger wasp powers of spitting acid and superglue, I broke through the last few slender bars blocking the upper exit. I had my head and then my shoulders and both arms above the level of the rim, and…

  …And I saw the room above my cell, domed with black brick, masks hanging on the walls, lit with tiny round windows no bigger than a mailbox for newspapers…

  …And some Astrologer sometime in the preceding hours or days must have seen what I was going to do and when, because the gold rim of the opening flared up with many rainbows of twilight, and an orb of darkness swelled up, washed over me, and I was inside what looked like a ball of insubstantial glass for half a second.

  During that half second, I fell or was thrown out from one Moebius ring, across maybe an eighth-inch-wide hoop of Uncreation, and into another Moebius ring. The eight-inch-wide gap into the Uncreation whistled like a steam whistle: the sound of atmosphere departing the world.

  You get the picture? They just have two gateways placed at two different spots in and out of the world opening into the same spot in Uncreation, so you go from one to the next without having to spend any time in the abyss, where no one can live. You don’t even need an invasion machine or anything—it is over too quickly. The top half of the spherical volume being teleported is falling into the universe at another spot at the same second the bottom half is falling out of the universe at this spot. That is how fast it is.

  And the ring both gets hot when you are touching it, and it is like touching an electrified wire cattle-fence (which I have done by mistake) or grabbing a taser from the business end (which I have done during training). Gold is a good conductor. Forget about keeping hold of it unless you have some heavy-duty insulated asbestos gloves. My hands were flung off the gold rim as all my muscles spasmed.

  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.