The Lord of the Black Land

by John C. Wright

  And yet it grew darker still.

  Some intuition, some hunch told me as clearly as if I had heard a cold voice ringing behind me, that the moment the Boat of the Million Years on which the Sun God, Ra the Mighty, stood dipped below the horizon, the unquiet dead would rise up and take me. I would not die, but I would yearn for death. It was only out of honor to him, the great Eye of Day, the God of Light, that they waited.

  “I am not afraid of you!” I shouted.

  A silent laughter was in the chamber. I did not hear it, but somehow I knew it was there, cruel, remorseless, hating all living things. They knew I lied.

  “You cannot kill me! I cannot die! I am as immortal as you are, you shadows!”

  The silent laughter ceased. A brooding sense that some spirit mightier and more magnificent had entered the chamber filled my bones. I blinked.

  The Pharaoh’s eyes were open. He was looking at me. Had his eyes been open before? This whole time?

  5. The Voice in the Tomb

  It suddenly grew quieter. The sense of pressure, of unseen eyes, of malign willpower palpable as storm clouds, was gone. He had not raised a finger or blinked an eye, but the Pharaoh had commanded his servants who tended him and the lesser gods who blessed him to depart from this place. And they were gone.

  Somehow, without knowing how I knew, I knew I was alone with him, with this king. This was a private audience. My sense of stage fright grew worse, as if he, alone, commanded more power than the unseen host he’d banished.

  I got down on one knee. To this day, I don’t know if that was a wise thing to do, if I was just being polite, or if that counts as idolatry. Is it okay to bow to a king out of respect for his majesty; but if the king thinks he is a god, does that make it unlawful? I don’t know. At that moment, I was just glad I was allowed to move.

  Just as suddenly, I knew exactly what to say.

  “The Dark Tower conquered your world, and made you slaves in life and in death.”

  The atmosphere grew thick with cold and majestic anger, the kind of wrath that could command whole nations put to the sword. I could not breathe. And yet I spoke on.

  “I have compassion for your plight and I would help you if I can.”

  The anger receded a little bit, but without becoming any less dangerous, like a cobra that pulls back its head.

  “I plan to knock this Tower down. I do not know how yet. And yet I say it can be done, even if the stars themselves do not foretell it!”

  The anger was now cold, calculating, thoughtful.

  “I beg you, mighty king, generous king, to let me use what you hold in your hand. You are the shepherd of your people. If my act will help your people, allow me. I mean no dishonor to you. I am not a graverobber.”

  The Pharaoh’s eyes did not move, but I sensed that he was not longer paying attention to me. He was looking out the round window toward the red and beautiful setting sun.

  A voice spoke aloud, and it startled me so that I screamed like a girl and jumped to my feet. (Sorry girls, but you do scream, you know, especially in movies.) It spoke in the Ur language, not in Coptic, and so I understood it. There was warmth on my neck.

  “Nakhthorheb, heed him. His is the name and voice that shook this Dark Tower.”

  I whipped my head around, half-rising from my kneeling posture, and I was blinded by the sunlight. I was standing right in the light path of the final beam of the setting sun, so that my shadow fell across the knees of the Pharaoh on the throne. When I blinked, there was a silhouette of an after-image in my vision, and I saw the shape of a bird of prey in the sun, wings spread as if to soar, and on his head two crowns. But when I stopped blinking, nothing was in the death chamber, and no one had moved. The half-disk of the sun was red, bisected by the horizon, dimmed by cloud, and there was no one in it.

  There was a clattering noise behind me. I turned. The flail of the Pharaoh lay on the marble floorstones, red and gold like a poisonous snake paralyzed into the shape of a rod.

  I bowed again, and picked up the flail, and backed away. Through the corner of my eye, between two braziers of gold, I saw a narrow doorway out of there.

  Then the sunlight failed, and darkness filled the chamber of death.

  It may not have been proper etiquette for the throne-room of Pharaoh, but I panicked and ran like the blazes out of there, my naked feet slapping the stones.

  6. Directions

  There was no use saying ‘I was lost’ for the same reason there is no use to say ‘he needs eyeglasses’ about a blind man. I was in corridors and empty spaces inside a stronghold taller than the distance three times the circumference of the earth. I spent some hours in gloom, some in pitch darkness.

  So I was simply sitting in the cold when I saw a bobbing light approaching me. It moved with what I can only call a human rhythm, the way a lantern in a man’s hand jogs.

  As the approaching light grew brighter, I saw I was still in the Egyptian Wing of the Tower of Evil, because the columns here were capped with graceful lilies, and the walls were painted with slender images of rushes, crocodiles and storks rather than blocked out in rectilinear cuneiforms with square-bearded man-bulls.

  To one side of me, an ivory jar sat on the floor. I sat down next to it, and put an elbow on the lid, and tried to look as casual as a mostly-naked man can look who has a golden flail in his right hand, and a wooden fright-mask hanging from his groin.

  My wooden mask began to glow with its grinning-skull-shaped outline when the footsteps drew near. They were clanging, clumsy footsteps.

  In outline, he looked as bulky as an ape, but short, like all the guys here were.

  He was not in fighting armor; he was wearing a bronze and leather diving suit. He wore a toolbelt: the design was the same in every world, I guessed. In his hand was a long square box that could have been the double of the toolkit in my garage back home.

  The diving helmet was one piece, tied by shoulder plates to his harness, with four portholes. Each porthole was crossed with a tic-tac-toe of metal bars. It looked like a Jules Verne design for a spacesuit, except with zigzagging-dragon decorations that gave it a distinctly ancient Near East motif.

  In one hand he held a wand that was glowing with butter yellow lampwoodlight. It did not look like a weapon, just a torch.

  I waved at him with a casual flutter of my fingers.

  He stopped. The whole suit had to turn to face me. There was one porthole at the chin-level beneath the main porthole at eyelevel. No doubt he was studying me through that.

  “Sprechen sie Ursprache, mein Herr?” I said in a lighthearted voice.

  He clicked a brass key on his chestplate and his voice issued from a speaking trumpet.

  “Who are you? What are you doing here?”

  I said, “I am lost. I was instructed to go to the Nine-Star-Aligned Chamber in the Furlong of the Lower Luminous Omniscient Observation, and I was told to use the unclean servants' stream-path, but it was blocked off, and now I cannot get there. Can you give me directions?”

  “Sure! Let me see your papers.”

  “What papers?”

  “Those little things like tree leaves that have markings on them. Those marks are speech, but they don’t make noise and you take them up with your eye. Do they have that in your aeon?”

  “Nope. My people live in the woods, scratching our warts with sticks.”

  “Your master must have told you that you would be punished if you lost your papers. They contain your horoscope, which tells you what your fate is. Where are they?”

  “A dog ate them.”

  “Oh, milk-breasts of the Moon Goddess! Are you in trouble! They hate it when you lose your fate papers! Sorry, boy, but I am going to have to report this to the section watch. Hope you like the smell of flesh-eating fungus…”

  “Don’t trouble yourself. I reported the loss when it happened. My master knows. He is the one who wants me to go to the Nine-Star-Aligned Chamber and get issued new papers.”

  “You m
aster knows? Then he must have issued you temporary papers, a scrap of something saying what month you were born in, at least.”

  “He wanted to, but you know how it is. He needed permission, and then he needed permission to get permission. You know how these clerks are.” Boy, I was proud of that lie. It sounded so very reasonable, and very Dark Towerish.

  “Yeah, I know. Say, my oneness senses an Uncreation leak near you. You show up in my darkling-glass.” He held up a small bronze mirror connected to his wrist as if to prove it. “What is with that?”

  I was kind of trapped. The flail the mummy gave me was surely able to puncture the boundaries between universes even better than the multi-milewide Super Large Hadron Collider in Geneva. His darkling-glass, whatever that was, had picked up some residue or trace of that power. (How? Radioactivity? Psychic vibrations? Astral influence? Like everything else in this Tower, I had no clue.)

  Maybe I should have leaped up and knocked this guy flat, smashed his helmet, and laughed while he asphyxiated, but two things stopped me. First, the Astrologers had not predicted my movements yet. Abby said her power worked not by range, but by the sequence of events. As long as she acted according to her higher nature, she was unpredictable. She seemed sure I had no higher nature, but I figured I would give it a try, and minimize mayhem for as long as possible. Second, the advice Abby said her Big Man had given her seemed sound. Don’t run when the alarms go off. Look like you are supposed to be there.

  “Oh, that. It is coming from this,” I stood up and, calm as you please, handed him the red and gold flail. “It’s my master’s. He handed to me so I could show that I am walking here with his permission and authority.”

  “Why didn’t he give you his seal cylinder, like he should have? That’s procedure.”

  I just shrugged. “Do you question your master when he does something weird?”

  “Guess not. But that is really weird he would give you a Rarity of such power.”

  “You know how these Astrologers get when they study too long.”

  “Boy, do I ever. Here is your problem! You left the seeking aperture open.” He gave the butt of the gold and red flail a sharp half turn. “Gah! Walk around with ylem leaking out, you’ll set off the twilight alarms, and have the nervous decontamination teams crawling up your anus hole. Well, you’d better come along.”

  And just like that, he handed the flail back to me, and waved for me to follow him.

  He turned his speaking horn so it stuck out from under his armpit, pointing toward me as I walked behind. “How did you get here?”

  “Oh, that. My master told me to go by a back way he knew. Not that I was supposed to sneak, exactly, but, you know … just to avoid further delay.”

  “Piss of the wine-god, I sure know what that’s like!”

  “And then I got sort of turned around.”

  “That’s not hard to do, especially for virgins.”

  I told him the old joke about how scared I was the first time I had sex, because I was alone. The humor was pan-dimensional, because he laughed.

  “No, I mean new to the Tower,” he said. “What is your master’s name?”

  I had that lie chambered and ready. “Lord Ersu the Astrologer.”

  He said, “Never heard of him. My master’s name is Pallishu of the Diligent High Work Legion XII of Anguished Memory of Lost Glory Furlong. Well, Ersu-slave—” (that is what he called me, Ersabdu, Manservant of Ersu) “—Follow me. You are lucky Pallishabdu was on duty. This whole wing from the haunted rainspouts below to the Groves of the Star-Gods up topside, clockwise to the Unaspected Inconjunct Quincunx Parapet the clockwise to The Lord Urzigurumash’s Executioner’s side-slung suborbital trebuchet, this whole quarter, in other words, is sacred to the abomination of Nectanebo and the necromancers of the Black Land. Nectanebo and his fathers are kept, one below the next, all the way down the Ursa-Major-facing scarp to the cuvette. Those lunatic mummies are scary!”

  “Yeah, I’d hate to run into one of them…” I said with a straight face. Then I asked. “Who is Nectanebo?”

  “Nectanebo was and is the last king of the Black Land and the Red, just before Nimrod Lord of the Dark Tower’s son Kadashman-Enlil the Second Lord of the Dark Tower trampled him underfoot, and the whole aeon of Mizraim with him.” There was that word kabasu again, trampled down, which also meant subjugated, housebroken, tamed, subdued, ground to bits, enslaved.

  “And who is Pallishabdu?”

  He hooked his thumb at himself. Manservant of Pallishu. That is what he used instead of a name.

  I hated this place.

  Plumber of the Dark Tower

  1. Pally

  Pallishabdu was a wealth of information, almost none of it useful. The man never stopped talking.

  “Were it not for me being on duty, three thousand years might have gone by ere some other breathing man walked this hall. Taskmaster sends me up to clean the Y-valve for the abattoir. The Walking Shadows of the Black Land still have to perform bull-sacrifices even though their priests are no longer alive, and you have to flush the blood using the Ninety-Score Gallon Wide-Mouth Aries-Aligned cistern at the top of this Furlong. Can’t use the one that feeds the Grove of the Star-Gods, obviously, for fear of cross-influence and pollution. So the magician reads the horoscope of another magician who has not been born yet, and found a day when he was reading horoscopes nearer the future—piggyback technique, they call it. And they saw that this valve would clog and form a backup, and introduce rot into the structural support four hundred years from now, so the gang foreman decided it had to be cleaned now, during the triple conjunction of Mercury. But it seems the wide-mouth cistern has the narrow piss-hole. That’s as they built them then, back during the last opposition of Saturn and Jupiter, when Peshgaldaramash was the Great King and Great Prince of the Heavens. Great Prince but a whoreson of an engineer, so says I, and I fret not who hears me say. Can’t use a proper snake and pressure to unclot those old valves, or you blow out the wash-vent. So the Taskmaster, just to gnaw our guts, sends me up here with a swathing-brush made of gorse. Gorse! Fit for whisks, but not a Y-valve job. Not boar-hair, like a real brush! And no extenders either worth the corpse-molester’s curse. I end up using my caulking pole as an extender! Can you believe it! Says I, strap a concubine wig to the helm of the Taskmaster, and use him for the S-bend swathing brush, eh! That will add flex to your spine-bones, eh? Well, if the harlot won’t talk, neither will the whoremaster, says I, but if the harlot won’t scream, go home to your wife. I say what I say, says I!” And he laughed at his own joke. I made laughing noises, just to play along and be polite.

  We passed through a wooden airlock with hatches of brass, and into some chambers beyond, cramped as a ship’s cabin, which held normal pressure.

  He found me enough tepid water in a bucket and a sea-sponge that I could swab the blood and goo off myself, and gave me a horn of perfumed oil to anoint myself and a little metal tool called a strigil to scrape off the sweat and dirt. It amused him that, like a baby, I did not know how to use simple bath things, and he called a serving man over to wash my hair and scrape my back, but I decided it would just be ungrateful to be embarrassed.

  Pally gave me a long and white mantle with a hood to throw over myself, and a thing like a linen baby diaper to wear under that. He apologized, and said he would have given me a proper low-slave uniform, but he could not imagine any seamstress made anything in my size.

  Then a gong rang, and we ate from a pot. Fish stew soaked in pepper and hot pepper.

  The cooking was done over a coal-burning Franklin stove, but one where the chimney pipe led to a cylinder that trapped the smokes and ashes and transmuted them to oxygen. The cylinder was painted with pantomime clowns in blue and silver, done in that same delicate and frivolous decoration style as Abby’s mask. I asked Pally about it: he said it was Galvanic Alchemy from the aeon of Brennus.

  There were two other men in the chambers, but they crouched, and kept their eyes down, and,
when not washing or dressing me, they bowed and stayed out of our way. Like Pallishabdu, they were olive-skinned with large, dark almond-shaped eyes, thick red lips, big hooked noses, shorter than me. Unlike him, they were beardless.

  Pallishabdu did not introduce me to them. They were furniture.

  But he did introduce me to his cat, named In-Sin, Eyes-like-the-Moon, an ugly old tom missing one ear, who was more regal than the Pharaoh I’d just met, and condescended to let me scratch his chin and feed him morsels from my fish stew.

  Since that stew was the best thing I had tasted since before I fell headfirst into a Moebius coil, it took me superhuman effort not to yank the cat up by the tail and play combination hammertoss and handball off the nearest wall, but instead to feed it and make nice.

  Look: cats don’t hunt, and they don’t fetch, cannot scare burglars and they cannot bring you your pipe and slippers and newspaper while pouring you a frosty cold beer from the icebox, okay?

  But I warmed up to In-Sin after a bit. The old tom seemed just the right kind of folk to hang around with Pallishabdu, and you could not live with a dog in this submarine-like room, lit with wooden sticks and no windows.

  When it was time to walk me to the wayship station, Pallishabdu carried the cat around in a pressurized box, complete with oxygen bottle, and you just can’t treat dogs that way. The two serving men suited him up and gave me a wallet of raisins, prunes and lemon-soaked dried apple slices, and a ball of hard cheese coated in wax. I shook hands with one of them, and they both flinched and scurried back out of the way. Never saw them again, never found out their names. They had kind of a puffiness to their skin. I wonder if they were eunuchs.

  We climbed up about a zillion stairs, and I was going to ask Pallishabdu why his people had not invented the escalator, when I saw a ramp in the distance, moving between square columns decorated in gold. The ramp was holding a sarcophagus, with an honor guard in diving suits adorned with gold medallions, and slaves in jackal-masks holding ostrich plumes on golden wands above the coffin. The procession was not walking, for the ramp was made of living metal, and it carried them along, and they glided up into the overhead gloom and out of sight.