The Darkest Tower

by John C. Wright

  So I said, “The hanging gardens. They are placed about a furlong apart from each other aren’t they? Each vertical section of the tower is what you are calling a furlong?”

  She giggled.

  “What did I say? What’s funny?”

  “I have never heard them called hanging gardens before. It’s a perfectly good name for them! The plants do dangle over the parapets, after all. Yes, each droopy dangling garden is exactly one furlong above the next.”

  From the embarrassed sound of the giggle, I guessed that hanging or dangle was a play on words of some sort, or maybe a naughty double entendre.

  “What do you call the hanging gardens?” I asked.

  “Kakkabillilkiritu.” Groves of the star-gods.

  Their furlongs were more than a thousand feet tall. I did not ask why the place Penny was caged was called the Tormentor’s Furlong. I was picturing in my head a place the size of the Empire State Building, with every room occupied by professional torturers.

  “Okay, let’s go! I think I can manage to crawl…”

  “Or, if she is young and fair, she may be sent to the Harem-Keeper’s Furlong.”

  The picture in my head was now something more like the Playboy Mansion, except the size of the Empire State Building.

  “Uh. That might be a nicer place to start looking.”

  “And if she is an enchantress, to prevent her from weaving charms or cutting runes or whistling for the wind, she might be in the Blue Silence Furlong, where outsider magic is contravened.”

  “Where is she more likely to be?”

  “I do not know the likelihood.”

  “How many places could she be?”

  “More than I can count. There are holding cells and slave pens, and which one she is in depends on whether she is to be shipped or sold. It depends on which of the Tower holds her.”

  “Which what of the Tower?”

  “Which authority.”

  “How many are there? I thought you had a Dark Lord. That freak wearing a coffee pot on his head.”

  “Well… there is the navy and sky-navy, the infantry and auxiliaries and the cavalry, and the horse cavalry, elephant cavalry, whale cavalry and necro-cavalry depending on whether the steeds are alive; these all have separate captains. There is the military police, the espionage police, the secret police, the more secret police who watch the secret police…”

  “Oh.”

  “And… the officers of the watch, and the shore patrol, the air patrol, and the serpent-women authority. The serpent-women govern their own kind, and have their own police. And each of the Magicians, Astrologers, or Chaldaeans of the grandmaster rank has a personal guard for his household or fraternity.”

  “Oh.”

  “And then there is the exarchs, the suburban guard, civic guard, lower tower guard, higher tower guard, star guard, the judiciary bailiffs, the murderer brigades. And then there are retainers of the various noble families, and high-ranking diviners of many other orders, such as cephalonomancers. They all have the right to keep prisoners and enact tortures.”

  “Oh.”

  “Not to mention that engineering and architectural guild-masters have their own men at arms, sheriffs, and tormentors. And…” she drew another breath.

  “Please stop now.”

  “But I haven’t even mentioned the armed forces or guards maintained by visiting kings or ministers of foreign aeons, by priestly castes or by the vassals bound by vow to specific shrines within the tower…”

  “I got the picture. One of those groups has her. Which one might it be?”

  “Where she is held depends on whose authority controls her case: that decision depends on the clerks, scribes, functionaries and doctors of the law.”

  “So your Dark Tower is all full of bureaucrats and lawyers? This place is hell.” I squinted, trying to think. Unfortunately, my brain was still feeling a bit sloshy and wobbly in my skull. “She was captured fairly recently, from Earth. Where would they put her?”

  “Hmm. There are many slave camps in the tower, or dormitories and pens and zoos. Where she would be kept depends on her horoscope. It also depends on the number of other slaves and slave-children being caught today, or sold, altered, trained, tortured, or fed to those abominations who require unholy meat….”

  “I got the point. What if we just start looking at random and keep going until we find her?”

  “There are two hundred and twenty-six thousand, six hundred and sixty-six furlongs in the Dark Tower from crypts to the crown. If a chain as long as this tower is tall were ever made from The Archangel’s blood, it would girdle the whole of the orbicular world once and twice and thrice, and one tenth part around again. There are said to be as many chambers here as in The City over whom her shadow falls.”

  She did not say ‘this city’; she said ‘The City’ or ‘The One City’. The word she used was Urdur-h’. Monopolis. Onesville. Singleburg. Unity Town. City of Ur.

  The word for archangel was Rablammasu-h’. The aspiration at the end, that “h’” sound, served the same purpose in the spoken Ur-language as capitalization does in written English, or a definite article: not an archangel, but The Archangel.

  “Does that mean you don’t know where to start looking?”

  She spread her hands as if to show how empty they were. Of course, she was carrying a magical sickle with a self-elongating chain of self-heating copper, but I understood the gesture.

  I let my head fall tiredly back down onto the stone with a painful thump.

  She cocked her head. “Why are you still wounded? In the tales, Abominations from the aeon of Cainem just leapt to their feet when dismembered, and put their limbs back in place, or they carry their heads like lanterns in their hands, holding them by the hair.”

  “I don’t know,” I muttered. “Since I don’t know why I am not dead, I don’t know why I am not fine, neither. Enough about me: What about calling for help?” I said. “You mentioned someone sent you here–”

  “The Wisecraft.”

  “–Yeah, whoever. Did they give you a radio, or a bat-phone, or anything like that? These are machines that carry voices through the air…”

  There was a note of exasperation in her voice, “I know what they are. Technomancy. Contrived things from the slavelands.”

  That was another lovely word in their language. Kabasudari. It literally meant worlds trampled underfoot and also meant subdued, subjected, stamped down, domesticated, and broken.

  “I so hate this place,” I muttered.

  Louder, I said, “Then how about you call them on the radio and arrange an extraction team? Someone to get us out of here? And bring a large bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken; I am starved. Extra crispy. I’ve only had three meals since forever. And tell them about the girl we have to rescue.”

  “I have no machine like that. Such contrivances fail here.”

  “Why?”

  “The Dark Tower is steeped in twilight.”

  “But you have a way to report to your den-mother, or whatever?”

  “Yes. I can call the winged izbim.” The word izbim meant deformity, monster.

  “Great. Shake a leg.”

  “The calling cannot be done from here. The air is too thin.”

  “Great,” I groaned. “Let us get down below, to a level where the air is thick enough to call the monster.”

  She shook her monkey head firmly. “I was told to look for Master Ossifrage here, at this level!”

  4. Impossibilities

  I said, “Then what?”

  She said, “Then what, what?”

  “Suppose I had been Ossifrage. How were you supposed to get him out of this Tower? Can we use the same way out? What was your plan in case your Master Ossifrage was too tortured or too wounded to walk?”

  “To throw him out the window.”

  “Uh.” I looked at her soda-straw sized arms. “How?”

  “I can hook my sapara to the frame and wrap the chain around his body in a b
owline, and the contrivance will drag his weight.”

  “Uh. I guess you guys are pretty hardcore. Denial to the enemy, huhn? Don’t blame you.”

  “No. He is of the aeon of Selah through Arphaxad. The intercession which created his world occurred when Melchisedech was to be assumed into heaven bodily, but could not ascend unaided due to his corpulence and drunkenness, and therefore taught eight bearers how to ascend, who in turn instructed the Samaritans in the discipline, but they angered the One God with their idolatry, and they were given into the hand of the Chaldaeans. It is a world where the cities are scattered—there is more than one. Do they really have more than one city on your world?”

  She asked in a tone of voice like she was asking about unicorns, something that could not possibly exist.

  “What is it like?” she pressed. “They speak and don’t understand each other? How do mothers talk to their children? Do the people make war on each other?”

  “Yeah, lots of wars. It’s our main pastime on my planet, but we got so good at it, it kind of stopped being so much fun. But enough about me: Your Ossifrage master guy. He floats?”

  The monkey face nodded energetically. “He walks on the clouds.”

  I stared at her a moment, looking at the oddly out-of-place mask with its cheeks of red rouge dots. It reminded me of grandma Yaga’s collection of china shepherdesses and ballerinas.

  “Your mask,” I said. “It helps you breathe?”

  She nodded, “Yes! It unthins the air.”

  I also did not see any air hoses or air bottles, and it was just strapped on, not sealed tight at the edges. “How does it do that?”

  “By unthinning it.”

  “Exactly how does that work?”

  “It is contrived by magic.”

  “By ‘magic’ you mean you don’t understand how it works.”

  She put her little hands on her little hips. “I mean it works by magic. You don’t think I would put a thaumaturgical contrivance of mystic power on my face without knowing how it worked, do you?” She made a little hmph! noise of a kind I have never heard any male creature whatsoever make. “Its virtue works by the art of galvanic alchemy from the aeon of Brennus. The mask surface uses elemental magnetism to draw in vital elements in the correct proportion from the gasses of the air. Rare gasses are compressed and made dense by the principle of the attraction of likenesses.”

  “Does your Master Ossifrage have a mask like that?”

  “No. How could he?”

  “Is he like me, a creature who can survive without breathing?”

  “N-no…”

  I said, “The cage I was put in was bottomless. Are there different kinds of cages in this area of the tower? If not, he could not possibly have been put here. He would have just cloudwalked out, no problem. And if he was in a cage with a bottom, he would die from the thinness of the air. He is not on this level, unless he is in an airtight closet or trunk. Who told you he was here? It’s impossible.”

  She stood stock-still for a moment. Her shoulders trembled slightly.

  Look, I did not know anything about this world, or her, or whoever sent her, but I could guess what she was afraid of. She was afraid of the one thing everyone in the underground resistance of any universe is afraid of: betrayal to the local version of the Gestapo, of which the Dark Tower apparently had a zillion. Whoever had told her that her target was in this room had not made an innocent mistake. It was bad intel, misinformation, a lie, a trap.

  “It’s okay, little sister,” I croaked. “We’ll find your guy. We will spring him.”

  “You will?”

  “Darn straight. Soon as the darned deck stops pitching and yawing, we can get moving. Between your ninja-chick powers and my ability to bleed on things, we–”

  “I am not an assassin! Never call me that!”

  Her lingo magic, of course, translated the word ninja to her.

  Too late, I remembered that she had said Lord Ersu or Master Slaughterbench or whatever his name was had predicted she would kill many women and children. I had not realized the obvious: she meant kill them for him. An assassin was precisely what she had been trained to be by her owner, who was the same guy who killed her mother by torture.

  So I had said about the most hurtful and traumatic thing I could.

  “…Look, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to call you that. I am really sorry…. They don’t exist on my world any more, except in video games so people think they’re cool, you know?”

  She looked impressed. “How did you kill all the assassins?”

  “Something called chivalry. Treating an enemy with honor. Fighting honestly.”

  “I have never heard of such a thing. Wouldn’t you lose the wars?”

  “My country utterly defeats her foes and afterward gives them money and rebuilds everything we blew up like new, to make our foes into our friends. We could not do this if we used dishonorable means to fight.”

  “How could that work? The defeated are the slaves of the victors.”

  “It works when we do it right and not when we don’t. My country only fights to kill tyrants and free slaves, not for gain, not because of fear, and not for reputation. Dear God, I miss America!”

  She looked at me with her masked head cocked at an angle, as if she were puzzled or amazed.

  I said, “Only the weakest and most despised of our leaders stoops to assassination. It breaks our laws and outrages the sense of honor of our people. Give me a hand up. I am going to try to walk again.”

  I managed to make it to my knees, fell, rolled, and my stomach started rumbling and knotting inside me. I winced, and clutched my gut, and doubled up in the foetal position, helpless as a foetus.

  “What’s wrong?” she said. “Are you hurt?” Which, if you think about it, is a pretty funny thing to ask a guy with half a dozen holes punched through his limbs and major organs.

  “Just a flesh wound,” I gasped. “Every cubic inch of my flesh, inside and out, unfortunately….”

  I looked around. Since there was sunlight coming in through small windows near the top of the torture chamber, it was pretty bright in here, so it was hard to see the blue-white light shining up from two of the circular openings in the floor. The cell where I had smashed out the wood floor was not shining, but the other two were.

  “I am so stupid!” I shouted.

  Abby recoiled, scared by my tone of voice. In fact, she put her arms across her face as if to ward off a blow. I saw her eyes in the eyeholes of her mask, looking both scared and strangely resigned. My guess was that in her life a loud male voice meant a beating was coming.

  “Nothing is wrong, little sister!” I told her soothingly. “The blue light from the prison cells is hindering my recovery. I will be able to turn a handstand once I get away from this blue light! Then we will be on our way!”

  She said, “Where?”

  I said, “We are going back to wherever you were standing when someone told you that Master Ossifrage would be on this level.”

  She said, “It was in the Nine-Star Aligned Chamber. All the horoscopes of the Abominations and Outlandish Ones are kept there.”

  “Would that include Ossifrage? And Penny?”

  “Yes. And yours. Horoscopes are cast for all prisoners under question, so the tormentors can foretell escape attempts, deceptions, or learn what methods will break the prisoners swiftly.”

  “Is this place locked?”

  “It is watched both by stars and mortal men. I went in through the unclean servants’ door. It is kept open for the maidens whenever Mercury is in an ascending node. There are no Astrologers within at such times, and I can scald the locks on the tablets to pop them open, and reveal the layers of writing.”

  “What happened? Did you read the wrong record or something?”

  She nodded eagerly. “That must have been it!”

  “So if we go back there—can we find your master and my girl?”

  “We can!” She spoke in a voice filled with hop
e and eagerness. “But how do we get you away from the blue?”

  “Simple. Wind your chain around me and put that hook someplace firm in the crawlway over there. We are sure as heck getting out of this room first thing. I am going to make it at least into the corridor there, even if it kills me. Which it can’t. Pain is only pain, right?”

  So I crawled, being pulled along by her sickle-and-chain weapon, and using my hands and sometimes my teeth, and just dragged my bloody body out of there, and I left a sticky red swath on the floor behind me as I went.

  She kept whimpering and asking if she were hurting me.

  “Don’t fret, little sister! The pain can’t kill me,” I hissed through gritted teeth, “The pain can’t kill me. Nothing can kill me.”

  I also shouted a lot of four-letter words I should probably not have said in front of a girl. A whole lot.

  The Stream-Path of the Unclean Servants

  1. Gloom

  The corridor was cramped. A man’s head would have brushed the roof bricks unless he were really short, and his elbows would brush both walls unless he were really thin. The floor was paved in stone, and had a dusty, archeological look, as if no one had walked here for a thousand years. There were no decorations on the walls, just a few tubes like plumbing near the top of the low, barrel-vaulted ceiling. At forty thousand feet or so in the air, it nonetheless felt like being in a cellar.

  I managed to haul my bloody and wound-riddled body into a semi-sitting position. I slumped like a spineless sack of grain heaped against one wall, my feet against the other.

  “What is wrong?” asked Abby softly.

  “It’s not working,” I said. “I think my wounds are getting bigger…” I heard a sob in my voice.

  “But your power is chaotic,” she said, “To be removed from the light from The Archangel should aid you…”