The Lord of the Black Land

by John C. Wright

  “Hush!” That was Ossifrage. The word ‘hush’ is apparently the same in all languages.

  I sat up, dizzy, and immediately wished I had not. We were on top of a curving leathery surface that, for a moment, I thought was a whale or living thing. It looked like a whale in barding, because there was chainmail covering the hide in places, as well as thick armor plates in other places. Then, in the half-darkness, I saw wires fore and aft, and ailerons and rudders painted with designs of severe and angular winged bulls.

  I stood unsteadily. The plates underfoot had a little give to them, so it was like walking on a trampoline. I was on the upper surface, the slippery upper surface, of a Babylonian airship at least ten times bigger than any zeppelin ever manufactured on Earth: an eight thousand-foot-long monster.

  The airship was an ironclad, with enough lift to bear the weight of a corset of armored plates along her rigid airframe, and mail between the joints. She had gunnery platforms and observation nests spaced around the frame’s equator, and these protruded far enough away from the ship that I could glimpse them from my position, despite the curve of the gas envelope on which I stood. I saw reflections of fore and aft lanterns, as well as running lights port and starboard. I think I could hear a flute playing a tune of two repeating notes, or maybe that was just the whistle of some sort of machinery.

  There was a flare of light from below. A searchlight mounted on a long brass arm somewhere on the zeppelin gondola below us was moving a disk of light across the balconies of a vast inner well-space where we were. We were still inside the Dark Tower, but it must have been nearly hollow at this point in its height, because we were in a vertical cylinder bigger than any astrodome I ever stood under.

  As the searchlight played across the vast walls around us, I saw cities, one above the next, each one hollow like a doughnut, so that its central park or agora was merely air. Lower, far below us, like ring upon concentric ring of constellations, I saw the glowing lights of torches and candles and lampwood gleaming through the windows and balconies of the lower cities. The cities here near the ceiling were dark and empty.

  Large as the airship on which I was precariously perched might be, the diameter of this inner world made it no more than a large fish in the ocean of air. In the distance, I saw lights against the gloom, or torpedo-shapes against the city lights, which indicated where other airships were gliding serenely through the windlessness. Far away, I saw lines upon lines of slave teams hauling on guy ropes to tow an airship into what seemed a hangar door, but the silver light shining through the door was moonlight, and that airship was bucking and struggling in a wind from outside the tower.

  I saw silvery threads like waterfalls running down several of the flora-covered balconies of the lit cities. I grabbed a guy line and inched down the smooth curve of the blimp housing. I could not see what was directly below us, but underfoot I saw very distant lights. These were running lights that showed boats and ships were crossing the face of some gigantic cistern that formed the floor of that titanic inner chasm. I could smell the water, and hear the flat echoes of the waves, like the sound you hear in a swimming pool. You could call it a big cistern or a very small inland sea.

  I looked up. A ceiling was above us, for the circle cast by the searchlight of the zeppelin we rode played over it: it was a concave of dark metal, wide as the sky, or, at least, the sky on a small planet. There were hatches and holes and mouths of pipes and chimneys poking down from that domed firmament of metal.

  The huge size of this place still was freaking me out. Unsteadily, guy wire in hand, I crept back up the slippery leather curve of the upper gasbag to where my friends were grouped. Whether I was wobbly from vertigo or awe or terror, I am not sure.

  4. Simple Explanation

  I was glad to see Abby was alright. She looked only slightly moist with monster spit. Nakasu had a terrible set of bruises, a black eye that ran along his pectoral muscle, and a bleeding lip that dribbled a line of blood down his hip, but when I asked him how he was (he knew what I was saying from my tone of voice) he thumped himself on the chest between the eyes, and raised his arms overhead like a weightlifter, fists almost touching, flexing his huge muscles in his meaty arms, and grinning a horrific shark-tooth grin.

  In the gloom, I did not see the pool of blood until I slipped on it. I was sliding across the upper curve of the lifting body when Abby, or perhaps her weapon acting on its own (how wise was it?) sent a coil of coppery chain quick as a rattlesnake snaking around my shoulders, and pulled me back to safety.

  “This is my blood, isn’t it?” I felt around my big white mantle, now torn and burnt, and found a wound or two that had not closed yet. I said a Hail Mary and a Paternoster, and cleared my mind, and drew all the blood and goo back into the wounds. It tickled as it flowed up my legs. I pushed the wounds shut with my fingers and they closed like Ziploc bags. “Why do I get the gross-looking power?”

  Ossifrage shushed me again. Abby explained in a whisper. “Speak softly. The air crew does not know we are here.”

  I lowered my voice. “Where is here?”

  Abby said, “The stairwell had no bottom. We fell into the Threefold Immensity of the Upper Noncommissioned Married Officers’ Quarters, above the Fifth Cistern. Ossifrage created an updraft, and guided us to land here.”

  Just then, as the circle from the searchlight swept back over the dome, Nakasu pointed and muttered something in his nose-snort language.

  She said, “The cynocephali have put their heads through the hole through which we fell. They are peering down, but their eyes are weaker than the Freedman’s.” (She meant Nakasu.) “He says they are confused, and have lost the scent.”

  I said, “And your needle?” Wild Eyes, I hoped, had programmed the magic needle to find our next target.

  She said, “The Chamber of Fated Rarities is above us not by far. When the hunt dies down, Ossifrage will summon a lightness to levitate us across to the highest dormitory there…” She pointed at the balcony of houses and temples and walled gardens I had called a city, but I suppose, in this world, only the One City deserved that name. “It is called Tragic Memories Forgotten. It has no lights, and seems empty. I will coax the needle to find a servants’ path, or a corpse-path, where none will hinder us walking up. We have not many steps to retrace.”

  There was something weighing on my mind, “Is killing people automatically something of a lower nature? What if it is in a good cause, dammit? And do the Astrologers as of right now know where we are and what we are going to do next, or do they somehow get to have already had known our fate, last week, last month, last year, whenever? I still do not see how it is logically possible to be unpredictable one minute and then predictable the next!”

  Abby said, “It is simple. You know how inversion paradoxes influence the readings of horoscopes such that the horoscope itself is fated, including any misinterpretations?”

  “Uh….”

  “Well, this is the reverse of that, operating by celestial rather than astral rules. The stars will occlude gaps in the fate record, but the record will not show it, because the occlusion itself is occluded. There is no way to tell the difference between a blank space, an ellipsis, or merely an uneventful day. The Astrologers cannot predict where an unpredictable event will fall — it is called a cloud— but they will know, and will have always known and predicted events beyond the cloud. Simple.”

  “Uh. If that is simple, what is complicated? No, never mind. If they knew I was going to fight the Panotii, why didn’t they send more reinforcements?”

  “They did. The reinforcements gave chase. The cynocephali.”

  “Why not send the doggies in before the battle? If they knew the outcome?”

  She shrugged. I could barely see her in the gloom, and her wooden cloak pins, at the moment, were dark. “The horoscope probably did not predict the cynocephali arriving before the Panotii retired. The Astrologers fear to curse themselves.”

  “They did not know the outcome of th
e fight, and so therefore sent reinforcements? But that must mean we entered another cloud the moment the fight ended. Ahh…” I felt stupid. We were all following Abby with her needle, going where she pointed, stopping when she stopped. She was the foreverborn in the group, and she had not killed anyone during the combat. If the Astrologers could not predict which way her footsteps led, they could not predict us following in them. The moment we fled, we had dropped off their radar.

  I clapped my hands to my head. “OH! I am so stupid! I could stop them from following me through their predict-o-vision if I had just picked up my tablet! That held all the files on me, right? Unless they made duplicates, or unless they re-do all their calculations, I could have…”

  Nakasu with a grunt and a big hip-to-hip grin opened his mouth, which was the size of a car trunk, lifted his tongue, put his huge hand in his mouth, rummaged around in his cheek, and lo and behold, he pulled out the bronze tablet. It was covered with spit, but it was mine: I recognized where the living-metal locks had been scalded apart by Abby’s wise-metal tool.

  With a flourish, the headless hulk offered the dripping brass tablet to me, smirking. “You don’t speak English,” I said. “But you were just waiting for me to realize I am an idiot. How did you guess?”

  But I realized that, in this world, the one thing every man must have always thought and dreamt about, is finding out every last thing the Astrologers knew of him, not just what the Astrologers saw fit to tell.

  Nakasu said something in his language, patted me on the head, and thumped me on the chest.

  Abby said, “He says…”

  “I know,” I said. “I am not using my skullbag because my chest ain’t got no brains in them. He and I are beginning to understand each other, language barrier or not.” Since he was sitting down, I threw a friendly arm around his shoulders, but with no neck on him, it was like putting your elbow on top of a chest of drawers. “Nakasu,” I said to him. “Since the back of your throat should be against your spine, how can your mouth hold things that, geometrically speaking, are too big to actually fit inside you?”

  I hefted the tablet in my hand. “If I pitch this over the side, will they predict the fall and recover it?”

  “Not if I do it,” she said.

  I handed her the tablet, and she bent over it with her sickle weapon, and pried loose one of the Venetian blind slats with something written in cuneiform on it.

  “What is that?”

  She said, “Your name. In case we get separated again, I will use the Remembering Needle.”

  Ossifrage said something in Hebrew. Abby said to me, “He wants to know why you do not read it, and at least discover what it is the enemy expects you to do?”

  “Toss it,” I said.

  She whirled it like a discus thrower, and it did not fly that far, but bounced once on the curve of the gasbag, went over the edge of the airship, and flipped end-over-end into the dark air below.

  I said, “Tell Ossifrage I don’t believe in astrology. Besides, the stars might be able to track my movements better if they know I know what they predicted. If I don’t know, I think my chance of doing the right thing, predictable or not, goes up.”

  And I did not say it to him, but the reason I wanted the damned thing thrown away was because I had a dread of it in the pit of my stomach.

  5. Black Magic

  I remember as a kid seeing a Twilight Zone show once where William Shatner in a diner gets addicted to a little devil-faced fortune-telling machine with a bobble head, just because it keeps telling him fortunes that were accurate. He was addicted to it. Just like cocaine. I don’t know how old I was when I saw it. I don’t think I was old enough to get the concept that one actor could play two parts. The idea that Captain Kirk, of all people, could be victimized by his own weakness offended my sense of the rightness of the world.

  But I do remember how old I was when Wizard of Oz came on television. It was years earlier. I was four. I was so terrified of the green-faced witch that I would cry and hide in my mother’s lap. That was back when I was small enough to crawl into her lap, back when I had a mother. I understood that the cruel and cackling witch could kill the sobbing and frightened little girl merely by turning an hourglass upside-down. I understood that this was black magic. It was unseen and unstoppable and unnatural. Against magic, neither the brains of the Scarecrow, nor the teeth of the Lion, nor the glittering ax of the Tin Man, could avail in the least.

  So even at four years old I understood something Foster and my teenage friends from later in my life, the ones who toyed with Ouija boards or fooled around with tarot cards, simply did not get. Magic is not something from our world; it is not healthy, it is not meant for human beings.

  The gleaming tablet with all its intricate and detailed predictions about me and my life caught the light of dormitory balcony windows as it fell past the inhabited floors, making a little glittering parabola of gold against the velvet blackness arcing toward the dark water so far below.

  I waved bye-bye, and felt like I just got a little bit of my free will back.

  I watched the searchlight play back and forth across the huge dome, as the crew of the airship on which we sat continued to hunt for us so diligently, an unpredictable anomaly in their perfect deterministic machine of a world. I stretched out on the leathery surface, found it almost as comfy as an air mattress, crossed my legs, put my hands behind my head, and felt a little smug.

  6. Over the Garden Wall

  As the airship on which we perched searched for us along the ceiling dome that was so like a low and metal sky, eventually we were carried to a position near where the needle was pointing.

  Ossifrage snatched us with his weightlessness trick off the slippery top of the zeppelin, and flung us through the air, avoiding the searchlight. But someone aboard must have had a wolf nose, or Panotii ears, or eyes as big as Nakasu’s, because a cry rang out, and then a trumpet.

  We passed over a balcony and landed in a walled garden. I smelled oranges. It was an orange grove.

  We heard a noise, and then a dozen shots from the zeppelin hit the wall behind us. It was not loud like a cannon ball, and there was not a flash like their lantern weapons, but the spears or boulders or whatever it was smashed against the bricks, cracking them in places, and a smell like molten metal or ozone, a hot and airless smell, stung my nostrils. Clouds of black smoke were pouring up from the wall where the broadside had hit. We saw the huge prow of the zeppelin turning. She was approaching us in a sinuous path, to allow her to bring her portside guns to bear while her starboard were reloading.

  Ossifrage said something, looked impatient and stepped back up into the air, his hair and beard flowing and flapping in the current of whatever unseen force boiled around him and held him aloft.

  He did not have a brave look on his face, just grim, like he had to do a task and did not have much time to do it, and he wanted it over with. I thought it was the bravest look I’d ever seen, and I made a mental note to try to copy it next time I was in a fight.

  Abby told me he was going to drive the armored warship of the air away.

  “By himself?”

  She said, “It is a lighter-than-air machine. His power is levity. They are helpless.”

  Abby must have been right, because when the airship fired another broadside, all the shots went wild, and the giant ship came into view up overhead for a moment, all horns ringing and gongs sounding, and then heeled over to one side, listing terribly, and the nose dropped, and all the propellers screamed into highest velocity. I don’t think there was an engine as such. The propellers on the gondola looked as if they were jet-black, self-moving blades of living metal.

  The ship fired wildly as she careened lower and lower—this time I saw what was being fired were black balls made of glass, balls that broke and emitted black clouds on impact. Four of them came near the severe old man standing in midair. The glass shells slowed, and stopped, and hung near him like balloons for a moment, and then floated aw
ay to land gently on a balcony not far away. He was too nice just to drop them on whoever was below.

  Meanwhile, we ducked our heads and looked for a door in the dark to get out of the walled garden. I should have been looking too, but the smell, that delightful and refreshing smell, stabbed me with pure hunger. When was the last time I had eaten? Days ago? I yanked oranges one after another into a fold of my mantle, and started wolfing them down. Nakasu laughed, and broke off a whole branch to take with him.

  Ossifrage descended from the metal sky in a flutter of camel-hair robes and said something stern in Hebrew. It was one of the few things he said where I clearly understood every word: “Thou shalt not steal.” So I pretended not to understand and I offered him an orange.

  His face darkened. He looked like he was thinking of flinging me back onto the zeppelin.

  7. Inside the Suicide Closet

  We found a door inside and ran through dark corridors, one after another.

  Then Abby called a halt, lit up her cloak pins, and, dangling her magic needle from a thread, watched it intently. She was wearing her porcelain She-Monkey-faced mask, which she had donned when the glass cannonballs started belching black smoke in our direction.

  With a mouth full of orange pulp, I said to Abby, “How do the people here get the trees to grow inside?”

  She spoke absentmindedly, tapping the needle and watching it turn. “Only trees whose wood can act like lampwood flourish. The Archangel blood gives them joy and nourishment, like sunlight.”

  “Wait, you mean you can do your glowy stick thing trick on living wood?”

  “Of course. Why should we not?”

  “How does it work?”

  “By magic.”

  “Like your mask?”

  “Of course not!” I could not see her eyes, but her tone of voice told me she was rolling them. “That is alchemy. This is twilightry.”