I stood still for a moment, not sure what to do. There was no noise and no reaction from the Pharaoh. I stepped gingerly into the chamber, my naked feet loud on the icy floor, wondering if there were an exit.
As I stepped between the pillars into the main part of the room, I felt a weird sensation of stage fright, but as if I were facing an audience of perfectly quiet and very hostile enemies.
The head of the corpse on the throne did not turn toward me, nor did his eyes light up as if with icy, unearthly fire, but I could feel his awareness, his chilly, inhuman, dispassionate thoughts turning toward me. It was like a pressure, like when you sneak into the basement for an illegal soda and open the refrigerator door at midnight, the one which does not have a light, and you see nothing but still feel the touch of cold.
4. Unseen Eyes
I froze. After a moment, I turned my eyes without moving my head. It was coming from behind me.
Like the Pharaoh, the statues had not moved an inch, but there was an inhuman, unearthly awareness and watchfulness behind their glass bead eyes, grim and ancient and deadly spirits behind their beastlike masks.
Suddenly and for no reason, I was convinced that these were not statues at all, but beings who chose to appear as statues, and merely decided to stand without moving, without drawing breath.
A slight wind moved in through the open, round window. The dead slave warriors and dead queens shivered slightly. I could see they were trying to keep still, trying not to move. From the way they held their heads, I could tell they were listening intently, but none dared raise his eyes before the throne of the Pharaoh.
A cloud passed before the setting sun, and it was darker in here, and I heard stealthy noises, as golden gloves tightened on ceremonial spears and curved swords. I realized that this was not natural darkness: this was the blurring of reality, the twilight effect.
The twilight was coming from the flail held in the hands of the mummy king.
For those of you who never played a man-at-arms in Dungeons & Dragons, or haven’t read history books, a flail is a tool used by farmers to beat grain free of its chaff, or used by soldiers to beat in enemy faces. A flail is a long stick, maybe the size of a broomstick, connected by a short rope or chain to another stick, and you can get some really impressive momentum out of the thing with a simple overhand stroke. The royal model here was shorter than the standard model, the shaft about as long as a golfclub, and it had three tails instead of one, each tail a bar of iron as thick around as my thumb and as long as my forearm.
But this was not a real flail. The shaft was one of those gold spear-sized invasion machines, an uncoiled coil, which had slipped into my world through the Professor’s Moebius coil. The only difference was the paint job. This was red and gold rather than black and gold. The arms of the flail looked like three separated tails, each with its own pointed tip matching the mouth-socket in the butt of the flailshaft.
It was a working model, producing the twilight that strengthened my ability to recuperate, and also knocked out radios (so Abby said) and guns (so Dad said).
I had been locked in that midair cage for so long, I had almost forgotten how badly I yearned to escape from the larger cage of the world I knew before. Foolish dreams, I know that now, but all kids go through a foolish phase. Now I yearned for home, for earthly skies and normal-looking people, the sound of my native tongue, the smell of junkfood, the blare of rock music, yes, even disco, like a drowning man yearns for air. I wanted to see my family of black foxes again.
And there was a Moebius coil right in front of me. If I could figure out how it worked, it was my escape tunnel out of here, my passkey to other worlds, including the world called home.
Every instinct and every argument of common sense told me to get the heck out of that chamber of the dead. I believed in magic now that it had been shoved down my throat. I knew this place was haunted. It was like the heaviness that hangs in the air before a storm. You did not need to be Uri Geller or Luke Skywalker to feel the menace.
I approached the throne. The wind and wind noise stopped.
My feet were very loud on the marble floor, and my footsteps echoed from the walls.
The throne was before me. I stepped up on the dais, careful not to put my feet on the faces of the dead men half-buried there. Then I leaned, and reached my hand toward the golden flail.
And then I was too scared to move. Something was preventing me from moving.
My legs were shaking, I was sweating, and a voice inside my head was screaming at me to get out of there, and run, not walk, to the nearest exit. Better yet, throw myself out that big round window and into the clouds so far below. Anything to get out of here.
I could not turn, but I heard scraping noises behind me, a rustle of fabric, the grinding sound of stone sliding against stone. I turned my eye toward the solar-disk mirror in front of me, above the throne, but nothing in the chamber was moving.
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 movie
s.) 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 master 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.
Chapter Seventeen: Plumber of the Dark Tower
1. Pally
Pallishabdu was a wealth of information, almost none of it useful. The man never stopped talking.
Somewhither: A Tale of the Unwithering Realm Page 31
