The Lord of the Black Land

  I froze up.

  Oh, and my sixth reason was this: I was too scared of the guy, and, yes, too impressed, to leap up and wrestle the cruel bright blade out of his red-dripping hand, as he leaned on his shepherd’s staff in the other. I thought he was cool, a real badass.

  And, seven: He had just pulled the soldiers off me who were chopping me up. I was grateful.

  And, eight: what if I annoyed him and he just flung me out the window using the same antigravity he had used on a squad of men? I might not die, but I sure was not going to find Penny or save anyone.

  And, nine: I was still pulling myself back one piece at a time into myself. What was I supposed to do? Take my severed foot and wing it through the air at him like a boomerang?

  The fact that I heard one or two actually asking him to do it rather than not to do it did not cut any mustard with me one way or the other. Helping someone commit suicide was still murder. I think I knew why the ones who begged for death were begging, though, but I was not sure.

  4. Back Together

  I had pulled myself back together, pressing my leg stump against my severed limb until it sort of schlorpfed back into one piece. There was not even a scar. My fingers were all broken where they had been smashed under a metal boot, but I found I could simply make a fist and straighten it, and there was a popping, cracking noise as all the little delicate bones in my hand slipped back into place.

  My friend Foster had been in a finger cast for months back when he was younger, and had fallen out of a tree and broken a finger and sprained a wrist. Months. He had been really bitter about it, too, because we had been doing some project involving painting sets for the school play, and he fancied himself a bit of an artist, and now he could not hold a brush. He could not hold a bow, and it was not until next summer that he got his archery merit badge (which he got easily, since he was the best shot in the troop, or in the Jamboree). And here I was with a hand that had been mashed to bits, and I just shook it off.

  The golden flail was not far, and I grabbed it, and used it as a walking stick to pull myself to my feet. My reconnected leg was tingling with pins and needles, as if I had slept on it wrong. Long John Silver and Captain Ahab had to go through life hopping on one foot, not to mention Cap’n Bill from Oz. I almost felt guilty for my good luck. Just experimentally, I reached my hand toward the pool of blood, my blood, that I was standing in, and I cleared my mind and concentrated.

  The red liquid rippled, and then moved, and then swarmed up my legs like a little waterfall going in reverse. Of course, I could not absorb it through my pores, and I did not want to take the stuff into my mouth or in through (ew!) any other orifice, and I was not in the mood to find something to cut myself with to make an opening. So for the moment, I just let this huge bloodstain cling to me.

  I looked at Nakasu. “I want a less gross superpower, OK?”

  He had no idea what I was saying, so he gestured toward the Moses guy and snorted something through the blowhole between his shoulders.

  The shepherd strode to us, and stood. There was something majestic in the way he walked, and something totally creepy in the way he just let his arm and short sword drip next to him. He regarded us with a gaze stern and dignified, and spoke a few words in his language.

  I turned to Nakasu, saying, “You know, I don’t understand him or you, so any of us could be saying anything. My first question is about eating people. Is it true we taste like pork?”

  Nakasu said something to me with his mouth, his voice like a rumble of rocks. So I assume he was speaking of something significant. The white-beard turned toward me, and spoke rapidly in Hebrew, too quickly for me to catch.

  He pointed at my groin and then pointed at my face. I was not sure what that meant, but the tone of voice made it sound like a question.

  I said, “I bet you are saying to yourself about now, gee, I sure wish I had left some of those soldiers alive, because none of us savvy each other’s lingo, right?”

  I moved over to the main doors, but a yank on the big rings showed that they were locked from the inside.

  I banged on the doors. They were so thick that the noise was like pounding a wall.

  “Say, buddy, could you float back over inside here, and open these doors?”

  I turned back toward Whitebeard. I am not sure what they pantomimed to each other while my back was turned, but it must have been a dirty gesture, because Nakasu had picked up a broken pikestaff. Moses, his hair once more a cloud and his camel-hair robe flapping weightlessly about him, was standing in midair, flourishing his bloody sapara-sword, with his other hand upraised, muscles standing out in his arm, the shepherd’s staff in his hand pointed upward as if he were about to shut off the flow of gravity again.

  They were facing each other, about to commit some sort of mayhem, so I decided to step between them, holding my arms up. I kept speaking in a soothing tone of voice.

  “I am hoping this is the right place to find records to find where they are keeping the girl who is not my girlfriend. I really need her. Need to save her, I mean.” I'm afraid I may have rambled on a bit more after that, but keep in mind that I was drunk on the intoxicating combination of pain and victory.

  The Moses guy turned his icy gaze toward me. “Abanshaddi …?”

  I stared at him, speechless. I sound smarter that way.

  Abby’s voice came from behind the door. “He says he must save his mistress, the girl who is not his friend, whom he admires for her fame. He says she has really large udders, large as watermelons, like two zeppelins in a race crossing the finish line as a tie. He smote his friend on the mouth for saying so, but in his heart he agreed. He also says he is glad I am not here to listen to him.”

  Whatever I said, it sounded a lot worse translated into Ur. Nakasu crossed his arms over his mouth, suppressing a laugh, and the white-bearded man tried not to smile, which made the crags of his face looked microscopically less harsh and forbidding.

  I sighed, wishing the old man would throw me out the window right about then, and a hole would open up in the ground so I could fall into that mass of Uncreation that was supposed to be eating away at the core of this planet. But I said: “Um … hold it. I know who you are. You’re Master Sooey.”

  He raised an eyebrow.

  I slowly said to him. “Sooey ewe so you use sushi boo ray-you —did I get it right?” and pointed at him.

  He nodded but corrected my barbaric pronunciation. “Re’u. Sua’u-su’u-ussushibu-re’u.”

  Of course I should have recognized him right away. I mean, how many people can there be who have the power of levitation? It was Master Ossifrage.

  Then he said in Hebrew, clearly and slowly enough that I could catch the words: “In the tongue, I am called Shepherd-of-Heaven Dove Ossifrage.” Raboni Shamayim Yonah Perec.

  You can see how easy it is to lose the nuances of things like names even with magical language translation: Sky and heaven are two different words for the same thing in English, master and shepherd and pastor are the same in Hebrew, pigeon and dove and bird were the same word in the Ursprache.

  I turned to Nakasu. “Knack, this is Pastor Jonah Breakbone. Call him Ossifrage. He is a friend of the child who saved me. She is behind the door. Her name is Abanshaddi, which means Mountain Rock.”

  Ussushibu or Ossifrage or Jonah Perec or whatever-his-name said, “Evenhar.” (Which I think is a pretty sweet sounding. That was Abby’s name in Hebrew.)

  I said, “Like Aragorn of the Rangers of the North, she has many names, including She-Monkey and Trust-in-Hope. Pastor Jonah, this is my friendly man-eating monstrosity Nakasu. I don’t remember his first name, but it sounds like Cockle-doodle-do without the doodle.”

  “Khaqqudu Nakasu,” the Blemmyae spoke the words with his lower, shark-toothed belly mouth and pointed between his eyes with his thumb. “Irtuamarillut.” And because this last was in the Ur Language, we all understood the word: the Host of Chest-eyed Folk.

  I pounded on the door. “Ab
by, can you unlock this from your side? Or ask Pastor Ossifrage to waft us up to the balcony?”

  Wafting turned out to be easier than unlocking. The sensation of falling up is just like the sensation of falling down, except, you know, it looks like someone flipped the upside down for the rightside up.

  Boy, I could have used this guy on the rock-climbing fight with the dog-headed were-poodles. In through the transom window we flew, and landed as lightly as the down of a thistle.

  “Why can't I have a Way Cool power like that?” I said aloud to no one in particular. I concentrated on forcing my skin cells to absorb the bloodstains, and when I did that, it made those patches of skin itch abominably. Gross.

  5. Archive of the Conniving Stars

  Inside, the chamber was lit with wooden chandeliers made of fragrant, polished wood. They held no candles. Instead the glowing sticks and beams were woven into shapes larger than wagon wheels, and more intricate than Celtic crosses. Hanging just above them from the rafters, golden shields like mirrors cast their light down onto the shelves of black living metal. High above were tall, narrow windows without glass that opened upon a bitterly cold realm of stars, with silver clouds far underfoot. All had shutters of black metal, but there was no obvious mechanism to close them.

  The tablets themselves were made of copper living metal, and there were dozens and dozens in each rack, and dozens of racks. I had already described how the copper tablet leaves of the book the Blemmyae had consulted were like Venetian blinds. Now that I saw them closely, I could tell each tablet was perhaps fifty or a hundred paper-thin sheets of metal foil, impressed into some sort of moving metal matrix which allowed each page’s letters to flip to the surface one line at a time.

  Between the shelves were jars of carved solid diamond filled with wine or water, square dark statues of winged beings, phoenixes and winged fishes and cloud-dragons and other chimerae standing before the library shelves and desks. There were also two dead bodies that I saw, heads shattered like raw eggs dropped on a sidewalk, killed as dead as Aeschylus. By their armor, I assumed they were the pair who had fled from the fight. How they got inside this hall without opening the main doors I don’t know. There must have been a side door or servant’s entrance. They evidently ran into the flying shepherd. They had their swords in their hands, so I assume they died in a fair fight. Nakasu licked his stomach with a tongue the size of an anaconda, and stepped over toward the fresh meat.

  There was a girl standing there whose height and skinny shape I recognized, even though her face was strange to me. She had her copper sickle and chain in-hand. She was no longer dressed in her ninja poncho, but had on some dull dress with a border of floral frills, and a hairpiece of frills, which I assumed was some sort of cleaning maid’s outfit. It was two sizes too big for her, and the belt went twice around her boyish waist. Probably something she had picked up, the better to sneak around in.

  Her face was triangular, with high cheeks and a pointy chin, full lips and very large eyes. Her skin was dusky olive, and her eyebrows and lashes very dark, and her eyes sparkled with precocious intelligence.

  If you saw her on Earth, you would think she was Spanish. Her ears looked big and fragile and like they were sticking out too far from her head, perhaps because her jet-black hair was drawn back so tight.

  Actually, you’d think she was a Spanish queen, since her spine was so straight and her gaze so regal. Apparently being raised by Lord Ersu had never beaten her early years out of her. She had the face of one born to command.

  I was a little shocked. She was younger than I thought. I revised my estimate downward from fourteen to twelve or so. At first I wondered how the people she worked for, the one she called the Big Man, could bear to send her into danger. But she had been trained since age seven to be an assassin, and not by them, so maybe the danger was within what she could bear. In my heart, I fervidly prayed Lord Ersu to be damned and sent alive to hell.

  “Abby, do me a favor,” I said. “And tell Knack the Headless wonder not to munch on the dead bodies. They deserve a Christian burial, or whatever you people do here. Throw people out of upper airlocks and watch them burn up in re-entry heat, was that it?”

  She asked Nakasu not to eat the dead people, and he answered with a short blat of noise from his blowhole. “He says it will cover the evidence. And you are not to command him, as he is your elder in years.”

  I heaved a loud sigh, and turned toward Pastor Ossifrage. “You are the one here who looks like Moses. Use your Old Testament Fu on him.”

  He must have guessed the gist of my comment, because he looked surprised, and said something in Hebrew too rapidly for me to catch.

  Abby said, “Ussushibu asks why you have compassion on the empty bodies of the enemy once fallen. They are uncircumcised. Their breath is gone from them.”

  I tried to think of something this Bronze Age floaty man would understand. “Tell him my people say all men are made in the image of the One God, and are stamped with his likeness like a — it is like a coin with the king's face on it. You would not spit on the coin, even if it were a tarnished coin, because that is like spitting on the king. I mean, come on, it is not just because my people are sentimental that we show respect to enemies.”

  Ossifrage snapped his fingers, and pointed at me, his face lighting up. “Ah! Emanot-adon par! Angli? English?”

  Abby said, “He wants to know—”

  To him, I said, “Emanot-adon, ken.” And bowed. To her I said, “I caught the gist. He asks if I am a gentleman of the art, by which I assume he means I am a technomancer? Tell him I am from that world. Has he met others from my world? Who does he know?” (And secretly, I was glad to meet at least one person to whom we Earthmen were famous for something other than Planned Parenthood.)

  But Ossifrage did not wait, but strode over to Nakasu, stepping between the headless monster and the headless corpses, arms flung out and face stern, denying the monster a lunch of raw human.

  Sure, I was interested in who would win a throw down between Moses Junior and Headless Herman Munster, and sure, I really did not want them to fight and bring the guards or make a ripple in fate the Astrologers could have had retroactively detected last week (or however that works—don’t ask me!) but at the risk of sounding obsessed or something, I was more worried about Penny, and torture hooks, and whatnot.

  So I said to Abby, “Have you looked up where Penny is being kept?”

  “The enchantress who enslaves you?”

  “She is not an enchantress and she did not enslave me, but yeah, her.”

  “The one with the breasts like melons?”

  “I like her personality as well, or I will, once I get to know her. Until that time, be sure to tell her how shallow and ignoble my motives are once I rescue her from this hellpit you call a world. So where is she? What level? How do we get there?”

  “We did not know where to look.”

  “Try looking under D for Dreadful.”

  “I don’t know that code.” Abby meant she did not know the Latin alphabet. “Do you know her nativity?”

  “Sure. What obsessed fanboy does not know a famous girl’s birthday? September 13th. She’s a Virgo. Born the same day as my friend Foster Hidden. What are the odds?”

  “Three years out of four, the odds are one in three hundred sixty-five; during Leap Year, one in three hundred sixty-six.” She craned her head and walked between the black shelves and copper tablets, looking at the statues and star-patterns inscribed on every row.

  “I assume everything here is by date, is that it?” I said.

  “By dominance, by year and by house. How else?”

  “Can you find the file on me?”

  “I did. The winged monster found it for me.” Abby pointed to where a copper tablet lay on a reading desk. The black iron locks at the top had been burnt away so the metal cover could be opened.

  I stepped over to the reading desk and looked at the indecipherable angular cuneiform.

  ?
??What did it say?” I called over my shoulder to Abby.

  She was wandering carefully between the shelves, now craning back her head, now stooping to look at a brass tag affixed to a shelf end. Her tone was somewhat absent-minded. “You would endure torture for seventy-three days, but after that, you'd break the ward of song and shadow circling your world of Albion, and proceed to defile the seven-ringed Grail of Jamshyd from the aeon of Sabtechadur. After which you would aid the Great Beast of the aeon of Sasan to overcome the Golden City, which is the source of all the opposition to the Dark Tower. You are to be a great champion of the Dark.”

  It was pretty much what Enmeduranki had told me. No wonder she had been unwilling to release me at first. “But it does not say where I will be taken when they drag me to watch Penny get, uh, you know?”

  “It did not say.”

  “Any other details about what I do today?”

  “You fight a battle in the thirteenth hour against deformed abominations who have lost the glory of their human shape.” (Those who lost the glory of their man-shape was one word: Zimuhalaqabratizbim. I wondered how often it happened that it would have its own word.) “I do not recall which host. One of the outland tribes used for reconnaissance or guards.”

  “Good. Maybe I will be killing whoever is guarding Penny. Does it say I do that?”

  “No. Later, just after Mercury-rise, in the Immensity of the Abscission of Venus, you throw to his death one of the Kasugallillut whom you said you would spare.”

  “I said I would what? That does not sound like me. Are you sure you read that part right?”

  “The passage was marked as a conditional inevitability, since the prior events are occluded.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means the act of knowing your future affects your future, in this case bringing about what you seek to avoid.”

  “In that case, don’t tell me any more. Can he find the horoscope for Penny? Where is he now?”