The Lord of the Black Land (Unwithering Realm Book 3)

by John C. Wright

  At that moment, there came a fluttering of wings, and a small fierce-looking bird of prey with gray wings and white and black breast came up through the tall and narrow windows, flew like a streak down the aisle between the rows of shining tablets, and perched on an ornamented bull's-head topping one looming bookshelf.

  It was a falcon.

  It, or rather, she (all he-falcons are tercels) was wearing a falcon-hood made of white ceramic, with hemispherical lenses over its bright, fierce, wild eyes.

  A bird in a gas mask. Even after all the weirdness of weirdlingland, this was something worth laughing about. But I was not laughing.

  Because I knew her.

  2. Familiar

  You might think I would not recognize one bird from another. But don’t forget this bird was perched every single day that Penny came to the Museum on its stand or in its cage, and that one of my tasks was to clean that darned cage without getting bit. Don’t forget the first time I saw this bird it was diving at my eyeballs, and fear branded the image permanently into my eidetic memory, if not my dreams. Don’t forget that this bird used to stare at me when I was dusting and mopping the upstairs office floor, because it caught me looking surreptitiously at the fine and tiny hairs that stand up on the back of Penny’s smooth and swanlike neck when she pins her hair up and then bends over some paperwork on her desk, the exact spot on the neck all women should be kissed.

  “What the hell are you doing here?” I said to Wild Eyes. “And where is Penny? And don’t pretend you cannot talk. What the hell are you?”

  Wild Eyes reached up with one claw, and, with great dignity, pulled the ceramic gas mask free.

  She spoke in a voice as shrill as a tin whistle. It was like listening to a razor blade talk.

  “I am the soul and messenger of the sea-siren Parthenope, whom you call by another name. I worked your rescue, sending this twice-born child whom no stars see to your salvation. Now I have worked your woe. Warned I not the child not me till dawn to call? The whisper that summoned me was overheard. Your enemies are upon you!”

  And the falcon flapped her wings, jumped over to Abby’s wrist, plucked the purple metal needle up in a sharp little beak, and flapped over to a copper metal tablet: but not the one in Abby’s hand, which contained the file on Penny. This was the tablet with the information on me. Wild Eyes touched the needle to the metal surface, and with a rapid jerking twitch of her neck that was startling to behold, traced one of the cuneiform groups with the point of the memory needle.

  I said, “Hold it! Attune the needle to Penny! We are saving her! What are you doing at that tablet? I’ve already been rescued.”

  The falcon twisted its head around in a fashion which I thought only owls could do. The eyes were like two copper pennies on fire, and they creeped the snot out of me.

  This little punk bird which was smaller than my left foot glared at me, and I felt a shiver go through me which stopped me in my tracks. The bird did not seem scary exactly, but did seem uncanny, and that was an emotion bigger, older, and deeper than fear. What was looking out at me from those hot birdlike eyes was not earthly. Maybe not even alive.

  So I froze in mid-step. Yes, the pint-sized feather-duster cowed me. Size ain’t everything.

  The shrill voice sounded like a nail scraping on glass. “Recover at once your lost sword, blessed of the sun goddess, for the flail of darkness cannot overcome dark powers. Hand the flail to the headless one.”

  The falcon, with a pecking motion, jerked her head down and left the needle, quivering, point-first, in the table top.

  The bird launched herself at me, and I panicked and threw my hands in front of my face, afraid she was going to peck out my eyes with her knifelike hammering beak. But then she merely landed on my shoulder and ducked her head into my hood.

  Then with a whirl of wings, she was at the window a dozen yards away and a dozen feet overhead. There was something bright and shining in her beak. A glint of brazen metal.

  “Wait!” I shouted, “You lunatic bird! Where is Penny? Why did you send Abanshaddi after me—how did you even know where I was? No, never mind that question. What the heck is going on here? Wait! Are you telling me she is really a witch after all? How did she get to our planet?? Stop!”

  Wild Eyes twisted her head owl-like again to glare back down at us, a sight that made my neck want to twinge in sympathy. Again, something glaring in those eyes made me flinch and put my hand in front of my face. It was like that falcon skull was a mask, and there was someone bigger and older behind, looking out through the eyeholes.

  She put down what she was carrying on the sill next to her. It was the cylinder seal.

  I bellowed in outrage, and so did Nakasu. I don’t know what he said, but what I said was, “Give that back right now! Or so help me, I will pluck you like a goddam chicken and stuff you into a falcon, lettuce and tomato sandwich!”

  Wild Eyes shrieked in her shrill, harsh voice: “If haply you obtain the sun-blessed sword in the Chamber of the Fated Rarities, forget not to take up the unseen bow and the ring of the river-maiden’s gold. I go to free him. The cynocephali that patrol the sides of the tower will then be upon you. If perchance you live, and the greater enemy you must fear appears not, let the Twice-Born me call once more, and shall I come, to lead you to her, that you may watch her die.”

  That made me mad. I could feel my heartbeat pounding in my face, since I was flushed with anger. “I am so totally going to save her! You don’t think I can?”

  The crazed white-hot falcon eyes narrowed, and the little bird hunched up her shoulders and lowered her head. “In this Dark Tower, twilight cloaked, even my deep power is naught. What, then, are you, boy?”

  “I love her!”

  “Aai Aaitch! Love! Thine is neither lore nor power, wit nor secret art, nor fortune in the living world, nor name among the lordly dead; and you are ill-made, unsightly, and of a race accursed. You dare to aspire? She is as high above you as a pure star at zenith soaring above the oozy mud which clings to the bottom of a foetid bog midge-clouded. I will eat the jelly of your eye ere I allow you demean her with your gaze.”

  Abanshaddi spoke up: “Walking shadow! If your witch-mistress did not favor him, why did she send you to deceive me into saving him?”

  Wild Eyes said, “When sea-witches sing, must men go mad, and wild wave rise higher. For whom will she renounce the mystic power only virgin hearts, consecrated, mysterious, and cold, with queenly occult words command?” The falcon threw back her head and uttered a cry of wild, mad laughter which could have meant anything. “She is not for him, but I will not forbid him nor curse my curse: for, see, the Panotii against whom I warned you have arrived! Let the untried youth unfamed fight his utmost and unmake her foes, and her glance of favor merit, albeit never more than that receive.”

  So saying, the falcon plucked up the stolen cylinder seal in her sharp beak, and dropped away from the sill, shot off like an arrow, and was gone.

  Pastor Ossifrage said something in his language. From the tone of voice, his expansive shrug, I could tell was he was saying: “So? What was that all about? Lover’s quarrel? At a time like this? You kidding me? Oy!” — something along those lines.

  Nakasu snorted. A snort is a snort in every language. He had no head to shake, but when he rolled his eyes, it was like seeing a weightlifter flex his pectorals, and you would see it from across the room. He spread his arms and looked toward Ossifrage, shrugging. “Watoto!” From the tone of voice, I knew he was saying: kids!

  Abby clapped her hands and jumped up and down. “You will win her heart for certain!”

  “What? Penny’s little pet just said she hated me! No girl in the history of the world ever liked a boy her pet didn’t.”

  Abby said, “That is not her pet. It is her shadow. Her … ah … hoar cross?”

  “Her shadow hates me! There is no way….”

  Abby said scornfully, “You know nothing of love stories. How can you win her love if she has no shad
ow from which to win it? Of course her soul hates you now!”

  I said, “Am I the only sane person in this room?”

  Pastor Ossifrage must have known a word or two in English, because he said, “No. You much hishtamea mi too, eh?” Hishtamea mi was Hebrew for crazy. Then he stepped over, and touched me on the shoulder, and pointed.

  I turned. There in the window, first in one window and then rapidly in the others, were gathering skinny little swine-faced monsters. Behind them, above the silver clouds, were ungainly winged shapes, comically ugly, of the deformed men with ears as large as sails, wearing bejeweled war-belts that glowed, soaring on their winglike ears, circling like vultures. I saw at least five dozen of them, and more arriving.

  Only then did I remember what the captain in the peacock mask had said in passing. The next disturbance the horoscope predicted was when the Panotii would arrive because of the calling. He had meant Abby calling Wild Eyes.

  Abby had warned us her power to hide us from prediction was limited. We had overstepped, either by fighting, or summoning familiar spirits, the limit of what her blessing blocked. Now we were back in the area of time and reality the horoscopes had mapped out.

  We were once more trapped by the invisible bars Enmeduranki the Dark Lord had spoken of, with such sorrow, to me.

  3. Izi of Izan

  From the swarm of black shapes that circled the tower like autumn leaves blown in wild spirals, one scrap of darkness broke free and fell toward us.

  He sailed down out of the moonlight and lit upon the windowsill, swine-eyes glittering like beads of jet in the half light.

  This man-creature was taller than the others, and he folded his earlobes around him like a cloak, so that the line of studs and gems piercing the rims of his earlobes gleamed like twin snakes against the expanse of brown leather. His puffy pig snout was wrinkled with odd joy.

  He spoke in the Ursprache. “Well met, friends! Here is matter for song! With all your care and caution, your mists and shadows that blind the stars, you are the first criminals in an age and half-an-age again to conspire against the all-seeing Tower, from whose crown no secrets of Heaven are hid! And yet like fools you whistle for your familiars, primitive magic uncouth and strange, and dream that we will not hear?”

  He grinned at us, showing his tusks had been capped with steel, talking as he waited for more and ever more of his men to land.

  I should mention they were all armed, though none of them were armored. And they had dirks and boathooks or barbs in their hands, or they lifted to their snouts blowguns taller than themselves.

  “I am called Izi of the Izan. We have a saying: The Dark Tower sees all, and what it does not see, we hear. All your plans, your dreams and dares, all you said now, even when you did not understand each other, I understood.

  “First are you in an age and half-an-age to have run like mice through the walls of the Dark Tower! This name of mine will be brought to the ears of the high magicians, for having forestalled a disturbance even they did not foresee.

  “At them, my bullies! Take care not to mar the faces! We will pickle the heads to preserve them and present them to the lords and captains and magicians. The headless hulk we need not. Lariat first him and topple him from the height!”

  And even though these things were only four feet tall, and even though Nakasu, if he had had a head, would have been eight or nine feet tall, the little men attacked without fear. Against my will, I found myself admiring their boldness.

  A dozen or a score of hooks flew out from the big-eared pig-faced pygmies, and cruel barbs like fishhooks sank into the flesh of Nakasu, or drove into his elbows when he crossed his arms to shield the eyes in his chest. Loops of rope from lariats fell around him, and then, two or three to each rope, the Panotii holding the rope ends simply stepped back or fell back out of the windows, and let their falling weight yank Nakasu across toppling chairs and overturned tables, across the great chamber and up the wall toward the window.

  He screamed. It was like hearing a bull elephant scream.

  I had wasted a whole moment trying to twist and turn at the ruby rings ornamenting the hilt of the flail I held. I should have listened to Wild Eyes and handed it to Nakasu. Now, when he screamed, I just ran forward, whirling the flail like the rotor of a crashing helicopter. I lashed out at the huddle of landed Panotii who were crouching like vultures in a circle near Nakasu. At this point, Nakasu had already been dragged halfway up the wall nearer and ever nearer the window and the endless plunge.

  I rushed in. And I did not hit a single foe—I guess they heard me coming—because they all leaped straight up into the air.

  Honestly, I was not expecting that. Swans and condors and big birds take a long moment to take off. These guys just jumped twenty feet straight up as if yanked by an invisible thread. Or, rather, if what I could tell from the way they were jerked upward was correct, the force was projected from belts they wore around their chests and waists, studded with glowing gems.

  Some Panotii were still at the windows. Others landed on the huge wooden chandeliers or golden shields hung across the roofbeams so far above. The hall was taller than the roof of a gymnasium. They were not within flail range.

  The windows were not so tall. So I jumped up on a table, and swung the flail at the nearest pygmy shape crouching like a bat on the sill of a tall window. He fell out of that window, flapped his huge ears, and landed in the next one, raised a blowgun to his pig snout, and blew a feathered dart into my neck.

  It was a good shot, and I took a moment to draw in a deep breath, say a prayer to Saint Benedict, the patron saint of cures for poison, calm my thoughts, and to decide that the venom I could feel spreading like cold fire through my neck would have no effect.

  I did not know how much, if any, of the Oobleck was still present in my system. I did not know if my state of mind had total control over my ability not to die, or only partial.

  I knew that if I could breathe with a hole in my lung, and stick my severed leg back on my leg-stump and be walking on it one second later, that none of the normal laws of biology applied to me. My mind simply did not need my body to operate. So, in theory, nothing should be able to affect me. But in practice, it was not that simple. Because I somehow knew — call it intuition if you like, or call it random guess — that the least particle of fear would allow the particles of poison to affect me.

  I had to stop and concentrate, or, rather, zenlike, to clear my mind of clouds, of self, of doubt. When I stopped, though, all the long-eared monstrosities, grunting and snorting and snuffling and shrieking like boars in heat, whirled and threw their barbs and throwing knives, and tossed their lariats.

  A flail is not the best weapon for parrying a thrown knife. In fact, you cannot do it at all. What you can do is whirl the arms of the flail in a great circle and catch or snarl all the ropes that are leading to the fishhooks now stuck in your mantle or in your tender flesh, or the loops snaking around your neck or upper body. And if you are quick, you can snatch shut the arms of the flail against each other with your other hand, so that all the ropes are caught in the elbow joint of the weapon. There was a handy rack of tablets right next to me: I stuck the haft of the flail between two tablets on the rack, so that when the dozen or so pygmies jumped off the windows backward, all their weight was tugging on the huge library rack bolted into the marble floor, not against me trying to brace my feet against nothing on a slippery marble table top.

  Nakasu was not doing well: he was bleeding from a dozen minor wounds, and I don’t know if he had any poisoned darts in him. I could not see Abby: I assume Pastor Ossifrage had pushed her down behind one of the overturned tables.

  Only a few throwing knives or blown darts were winging toward Pastor Ossifrage, but they all wavered and spun when they got near him, as if bouncing off an unseen wall of air, and they struck the bookshelves to his left and right. He was waving his arms at the Panotii like a mad conductor orchestrating a silent Wagner opera, one with lots of trumpe
t blasts and drumrolls, had it been audible: but nothing at all was happening. When his levitation power robbed them of weight, or floated them upward, they just flapped their wing-sized ears and floated downward again. And I saw them adjust the colored gems on those big belts they wore, and again I guessed that they were some sort of Buck Rogers-style anti-gravity belt, except, because this is crazymagicland, probably they operated by grav-alchemy rather than technomancy, or something ridiculous like that.

  “Abby! Can you hear me!” I shouted over the din of battle. I forgot to mention, everyone in the chamber was screaming at the top of his lungs, except the guys blowing little feathered blowdarts at us. I did not hear the captain Izi, shouting any orders, however. Once or twice I heard him say something in a soft voice, almost a whisper. If your men have ears the size of overcoats, I guess there is no need for trumpets or bullhorns.

  There was no reply from Abby. That was bad.

  I shouted at Ossifrage, trying to remember words in the Hebrew I had studied. Finally I remembered, “H’erev! H’erev!” It was the word for sword. I was pointing at the dead body of one of the men he had killed inside the room earlier, one of the two soldiers. The corpse was all the way across the chamber from me. I would never reach it before Nakasu was hauled out the window.

  Ossifrage understood, though. He pointed a finger at the scabbard on the dead man’s belt, and the scimitar flashed, spinning, through the air, and landed, quivering, embedded in the head of a wooden winged serpent statue near to me. I yanked it out and belabored the ropes twining me. They parted reluctantly. Even lightweight rope is harder to cut than you think. It is not the kind of thing that parts in one stroke. Usually it just gives a bit, and a few strands come loose.

  I realized, to my horror, that it would be quicker to cut the barbs out of my flesh. Oh, the pain. So I just hacked at myself, screaming, sword in one hand, pulling out huge hooks dripping with me-juice with the other. The flail, you remember, was wedged between two tablets on the bookrack at this moment, acting as my anchor.