Somewhither: A Tale of the Unwithering Realm

by John C. Wright

  The wolves died, pierced by arrows of glass, and when he was finished, their corpses were all invisible.

  There was nothing sitting on the left half of my skull, and one eye was still working, so I could see the coal-black wolf in the window. He looked back at me, opened his jaws in a sad little grin and shrugged and said, “Ruinis inminentibus, musculi praemigrant.” When collapse is imminent, the little rodents flee. And with that, he turned and ran away, and I heard his claws clicking straight down the outside wall.

  I shouted at his retreating back, “Come over here and fight like a man!”

  You know, I just think his banter was more literary than mine. I blame it on being an American. I cannot quote Pliny. I can quote all the good lines from John Carpenter’s Big Trouble in Little China, though.

  “Son of a bitch must pay!” I said softly after the retreating form. Which I guess was not actually an insult after all, considering.

  3. Three Reasons

  While I was trapped, I had a moment to think.

  I realized I felt bad about killing the witch for three reasons.

  First, she was an attractive redhead. Turning my head, I could see her shapely hips and legs sticking out from under a pile of bloody rubble. It seemed shocking that her body should look normal, like that of a person taking a nap, up to about waist level, and then be a horrible butcher-shop mess above the waist. It was a blasphemy.

  She wasn't gorgeous, and her eyes were certainly freaky, but she was good-looking and I smashed her head in with a museum case as big as a sarcophagus. It felt like breaking a work of art. It turns out that it is lots easier to kill ugly people than pretty ones. Go ahead, call me shallow, but I doubt you would like movies where heroes kill scads of orcs if the orcs looked like supermodels.

  Second, the witch looked kind of imposing on her chariot being pulled by wolves. She looked like a supervillainess. I thought she should have had a chance to make an impressive speech or something, not just get her neck broke having my unconscious body, and a three-hundred-pound museum case, drop on her from thirty feet up.

  Third, because you are not supposed to hit girls. Anyone who says girls can take a punch as well as boys has never been hit by me.

  I broke Sam ‘Sumo’ Humber’s jaw during a match, and that was with gloves on. He had his jaw wired shut for months and was eating through a straw that whole time.

  The tallest girl I know is Twig Schmidle, who was the Oregon Dairy Princess two years back, and even in boots with the most ridiculous high heels I ever saw, the crown of her head does not come up to my nose. (I know because I danced with Miss Schmidle once. It was the day of the Sisters Rodeo parade, and she was wearing her crown.) She knows Taekwondo, can break a board with her hand, and she can ride a horse like nobody’s business, so she is not exactly a frail flower. But she is also more than one hundred pounds lighter than I am.

  Now, there are people who like it when bathing beauties kick the butts of beefy mobsters in TV shows and stuff, but that is just TV, and if you think that is real, you need to get out more, and get in more fights.

  I also saw the bundle that the witch had been carrying. It had fallen open. I craned my head, curious, and saw what it was, and I really wish I hadn’t. If you have a weak stomach, skip this next part.

  4. The Brephos

  Inside the swaddling was a big-headed abortion, a premature baby, half formed, hardly human looking, and its umbilical cord was still attached. Little figurines made of sticks were attached to the umbilicus, which was wrapped and knotted tightly around the thin little neck. The babyskin was semitransparent, blue with arteries, and signs and sigils had been tattooed (or branded) into the tiny soft flesh.

  It was some sort of fetish or totem or tool the witch used for her magic. It had been supposed to grow up into a person.

  That was when I stopped being even the slightest bit sorry.

  5. Extreme Unction

  When the cynocephali were all dead, Ossifrage, clutching his bloody head, walked wearily down through the air, or limped, and waved his hand, and the immense weight of the toppled racks and cases and shelves was lifted up off me. I was really messed up, more than a rosary could fix, so I said the Chaplet to Archangel Michael until I had re-gathered myself and was up on my feet. “…O glorious prince St. Michael, chief and commander of the heavenly hosts, guardian of souls, vanquisher of rebel spirits, servant in the house of the Divine King …”

  By the time I was finished, I saw Ossifrage moving in a circle around the little dead body the Witch had been carrying, and he would bow and kneel and mutter what I assume were prayers or exorcisms. I did not see Abby, so I could not ask him what he was doing, but I remembered Abby had said he could unwork enchantments.

  When he was done, Ossifrage stood and saw me looking, and said in Hebrew, slowly, “The mekhashefa carried her yeled. Used it as a vessel to carry an unclean spirit.” Mekhashefa was Hebrew for a poison-brewer, or a witch. Yeled meant unborn.

  Ossifrage took a skin of water from beneath his cloak, and began tenderly and carefully to wash the tiny dead child. The water dissolved the little stick figures, and, somehow, made the tattoos or brands or whatever they were go away. They might have just been ink, but I doubt it.

  He took out a horn of oil and anointed the child’s head.

  Chapter Twenty-Six: Dark Elf Squire

  1. Eflast Falinn

  At that moment, the piles of wolf corpses turned visible again, like bloodstained surprises hidden behind a raised curtain.

  “Creepy,” I said, wondering what was going on.

  Foster Hidden stepped out from his mist and came across the floor toward us. Or, not toward us, that is, not toward me, but toward Ossifrage.

  He bowed to Ossifrage, and said something in what might have been German or Dutch or Yiddish, and sank down to one knee.

  Ossifrage answered in the same language, and stepped forward, took him by the shoulder, and gave him a huge hug, which left a blue woad stain on the camel-hair coat of Ossifrage. I wished I had had a camera. Foster normally looks so calm and collected. Maybe the look of shock and surprise was because of the roughness of the camel hair on his bare chest.

  I didn’t follow the language, but I got the picture. Foster was apologizing; Ossifrage was accepting in an old-fashioned, old-school hands-on display of forgiveness that left Foster dumbstruck.

  Foster wiped his eyes. Ossifrage wiped blue gunk off his coat.

  Foster walked up to me. The big gold armband was on his left wrist and his longbow was shining like an oversized icicle in his left fist. The gold ornament reached almost to his elbow, and acted as a bracer to protect his inner forearm from his bowstring. His quiver of arrows was swinging, as was his un-underweared manhood.

  “So you are covered in woad, and everything I know about you is a big fat lie,” I said wearily, before he had a chance to say anything.

  I rubbed my temples, wondering when the last time was I had taken a bath, rested, or eaten a square meal. I had skipped a lot of meals, except for one orange, and the rest of them, which I had been carrying in the hood of my mantle, had gotten crushed or dropped two or three commotions ago.

  I was seated on a toppled museum case, with a pile of necklaces and rings, which probably were charged up with all sorts of magic powers, spilled out around my ankles. I was still pulling random drops of blood out of the nearby environment to heal myself, and I was feeling not very nice in any sense of the word.

  “Let me guess,” I said. “Like Penelope Dreadful, you are not from Earth either, and you are living in Tillamook, because there is an area of twilight where the boundaries between worlds are thin on the mountain in back of my house, near the old monastery. That is a magic ring, and the people on your world know how to turn invisible. You were sent to my planet to keep an eye on Penny and her dad, who is meddling with things he doesn’t understand. That is why you faded out that day we both went to go talk to her: you are a spy and you don’t want to be seen. That is why yo
u are so good at disappearing in the woods, because you actually can disappear. The creatures in the room were looking for you just now, but did not find you, even though they were able to predict your future.”

  “It’s not like that!” he said defensively.

  “No? Then tell me, Fos, what exactly is it like?”

  He shrugged sheepishly.

  I just glared at him. “You should have told me. We are friends! You told me about your crush on Megan Broome and the naked pictures you had of her, and your secret desire to be an Indian medicine man, and the dream you had once about all your teeth falling out, but you never told me you were an alien! Who could turn invisible! With a magic longbow! Forged on the moon!”

  “Actually, it was forged on a slab of the moon-rock brought to Midgard by creatures called Svartalfar. Those are dark earth fairies who—”

  “I know what those are. I play D&D. Dwarves like from Snow White and the Seven Dwarves.”

  “More like from Bilbo and the Thirteen Dwarves. Don’t you read the classics?”

  “Stop changing the subject!” I snapped. “I don’t care about the number of dwarves! I want to know why my best friend kept secrets from me! We are bloodbrothers!”

  “Technically, we are not bloodbrothers,” said Foster. “Bloodbrothers coat their palms in blood and clasp hands to mingle and seal the oath. You were too scared to cut yourself with the pocketknife, so we just picked boogers and put them in our hands and shook with that as the seal instead.”

  “Then that makes us snotbrothers!” I said. “Don’t get all legalistic with me! It is just the same! Why?”

  “I was not allowed to tell, that is why!”

  “If you were sent to Earth to keep an eye on Penny and the Professor, you could have told me. I worked with them! In the Haunted Museum—” I choked off the sentence, because I just realized something about the Museum.

  Why had the globetrotting Professor moved to Tillamook, Oregon, a place famous for not being famous, and hired me, the kid who just so happened to live on the mountain near a thin spot in the walls between the worlds? Was my summer job and my family and my best friend and everything in my life just a big fake?

  I could not believe it. The Professor had seemed too sincerely interested in cryptids, animals thought to be extinct, and I had seen him working too often through the window or something as I was clipping the hedge, times when he did not know I was there, times when there was no reason to put on an act.

  And how was it he had known about the language of the Dark Tower? I remembered his note to himself: WE is right! The Cuneiform is Ursprache!!

  He had not been speaking in the first-person plural all capitals ungrammatically. WE was short for Wild Eyes. His daughter’s bird had told him that the Disaster Cuneiform was the Dark Tower's written language.

  For that matter, why had he not known what world she was from? Not mine, nor the Incarnation Earth. Hidden world? Only then did it strike me that the Professor did not think Penny was from a world that was hidden away somewhere. He thought she was from Foster Hidden’s world.

  “To keep an eye on you, not on her,” Foster said softly. I almost did not hear him, because I was preoccupied with the thoughts tumbling through my head.

  “On me?” That got my attention.

  “But I am still your friend! I swear! I mean, I joined the Scouts, but I did not fit in because I wasn’t from Earth, and you didn’t either, because you are not…”

  “Not what?”

  “Not from Earth either…”

  “You mean you knew I was some freakish monster this whole time, and you didn’t tell me?”

  Foster looked miserable. “I was under orders.”

  “You are a kid. You are under seventeen!”

  “On my world, we are adults as of thirteen. Carry weapons, speak in tribal councils, get married, go a-viking, all that stuff.”

  “Drink booze?”

  “No, we start drinking booze at three.”

  “Whose orders? You belong to some sort of super-secret interdimensional spy organization or something?”

  “Yeah. The Nachtdunkelnebelritterbruderschaft.”

  “Gesundheit! Or is that really the name of your group?”

  “It means the Brotherhood of the Knights of the Night-Dark Mist. It is our version of the Secret Service. My world is just one of seven gathered under the guidance of the Wisecraft. Eight, if you count the original homeworld of my people. We can never go back there. We were scattered to all the Earths. The Wisecraft is the name of the council organizing the resistance to the Dark Tower.”

  “Your people? Your people are the Hiddens. It is one of the oldest families in Oregon.”

  “No, the Hiddens are servants of the Wisecraft who pretended to adopt me to provide cover for me. I am not one of you. I am Romani.”

  “What is that? Do you mean Roman Catholic or Pagan Roman? Rumanian? Ruritanian? Romulan? Romance Novel Reader? Please tell me you are a Romulan.”

  “I am Rom!”

  “The Space Knight?”

  “I am gypsy, you flatulent moron!”

  “I thought you guys lived in housecarts on wheels, picked pockets, told fortunes, that sort of…” And I almost choked, because for once I had run out of snark. It broke into my brain suddenly that Foster did know how to pick locks, tell fortunes, read cards, all that stuff. He even owned a crystal ball. It was one of his hobbies. I had never told Dad because loyal sons of the Church are never supposed to get near that occultism junk.

  So instead I said, “And there are tribes of Romany in every world… Even here. They live in areas of the Tower where no one goes.”

  “Vardo,” he said. “The traditional carved and gilded housewagon of my people is called a vardo. I’ve never been in one. My world is one where people are not allowed to wander.”

  “So the Wise guys or whatever. How can they fight the Tower if the Astrologers know the future?”

  “Each world has its own wisdom, its own secret magic. In Penny’s world the sirens know the song of the sea, which is older than any magic of field or plain, mine or mountain. My world learned the Svartalfcraft from the inner earth, so someone like me, a Nightrider, can turn invisible.”

  “And you have a talking car?”

  “No, but as a squire, I got a pony when I was seven. Her name is Frostmane. She is a breed of fairy horse, a shadowmare, that does not panic when exposed to twilight. The wise of my world are called Svartalflehrling or Svartalfwicken, the mortals trained in dark elf craft.”

  “And every planet has its own magic power?”

  He was ticking off worlds on his fingers. “The wise of Amorreus are called Artabtatitae and can talk to animals; and the wise of Dagon are the Daughters of Sedecla, and talk to ghosts. The wise of Svan are called Zduhac, and can talk to storms, the wise of Uenuku are called Tohunga Makutu. They talk to the sea. They are werefish.”

  “… Werefish? Did you say werefish? Tell me you said the word werefish.”

  “The witchdoctors of the Uenuku can take on the song and soul and skin and shape of an orca or whale, so don’t make fun of them!”

  “Sure. They are like the Aquaman of your Justice League. You only mentioned six worlds.”

  “After my world was invaded, the Wise removed to Cush. This is the aeon where Abraham and his armies were defeated by Nimrod the Hunter and his, and no one ever made any blood-bargain with the Nameless God. That timeline is ruled by ten thousand little gods, dream-gods. Sometimes the Wise of Cush, a family called the Strega, can see the future in dreams. By oneiromancy. They are sort of in charge of the Wise right now. In dreams they discovered where the Colossus was hidden, and that discovery started this whole mess.”

  “What about Ossifrage? Which of your seven worlds is he from?”

  “Who?”

  I looked around, but Abby was out of my line of sight. “Jonas or Jonah means Dove. Peres means Bearded Eagle. What we call in English an Ossifrage or Lammergeier.”

 
“How can you possibly memorize such worthless drivel?”

  “I work in a natural history Museum, remember? Or unnatural history. I get to dust all the stuffed birds. Besides, I got my merit badge in Bird Study during the same weekend you got yours for Indian Lore. Speaking of which, which world is Wild Eyes from? Penny’s little bird of prey. The damn thing talks, you knew that, right?”

  “It is her daemon, her witchbird. Where she keeps part of her soul. In theory, the bird should keep her hidden from the Astrologers. From Amorreus. The shamen run on all fours like apes.”

  “And the Flying Rabbi?”

  “Ossifrage — as you call him — is from a conquered world, and so is Achitophel.”

  “Who?”

  “That is the Professor’s real name.”

  “I knew ‘Dreadful’ could not be his real name.”

  “Uh, actually—”

  “You’re joking.”

  “Adramelech is his cognomen, means The-Dreadful-One-is-King. I don’t know where he is from originally, but he says he is from Mizraim. This is a timeline where Moses never made it out of Egypt, the Pharaohs were never decimated of all their firstborn and livestock, gold and silver and slaves, and so Egypt basically conquered everything, got rich and fat, studied too deeply into the darker arts, learned how to open a twilight gate, and then the Dark Tower conquered them.”

  “Mummy World. Got it.”

  “And Dreadful One is one of their names for the sun god. So it really is the Professor’s name. Sort of.”

  “I met their last king. Heck, come to think of it … I think I met their Dreadful One, too.”

  Foster said, “And Penelope’s real name is Parthenope. The Professor is not her real father, you know that, don’t you?”

  “I hear there is a lot of that going around these days. Is my dad in this organization?” And I suppose a note of annoyance that had faded in my voice was now creeping back in.