The Darkest Tower

by John C. Wright

  “Well, it is not working, is it! My body is rotting!” I am ashamed to say that I bellowed at her and spat up some blood at that same time, and this sent her cowering back.

  Why she did not run off at that moment, I don’t know.

  I put my head in my hands. I tried not to touch the edges of any of the gaping bloody and broken parts of me.

  So I kind of curled up in a ball.

  What was wrong with me? I worried frantically about that question until I realized what it had to be: me worrying frantically.

  I had healed myself when trapped in the cage surrounded by blue light, had I not? I had not been scared for myself. Angry, yes. Scared, not so much. I had not felt weak and helpless. Now I did.

  I was helpless to save Penelope Dreadful. And I knew it.

  And I realized I had to put it from my mind somehow.

  Somehow? How else?

  I uncurled from the ball, and apologized to Abby, and spoke softly, “I think I got it. The blue light was keeping the chaos substance inside my body quiet. Now that I am out of the light, I should be able to turn the ylem, whatever it is called, into exactly what my body needs. But if I get scared or worried, the ylem gets all riled up, and it makes me sicker. I spat out most of it, but there must be traces left inside me. So I need to take control. Call on a higher power.”

  She said, “I understand. You need to do your magic. I will step away from your circle.”

  “No. This is the opposite of magic. And come to think of it, I want you to pray with me. Whenever two are gathered in his name, he said he would be here.”

  “He who?”

  “Remember that lonely God whose name I know? He visited my world once.”

  “What joy for you! All the peoples must have danced!”

  “Uh. Actually, my people sort of… murdered him.”

  “W-what?”

  “By slow torture. Hung him on a tree. After spitting on him and mocking him…”

  “W-what?!” This a word you can really draw out in a scream in her language. ‘What’ is ayyu. So the noise that literally came from her mouth was ayyyuuuuu…?!

  “But it turned out fine, just fine,” I insisted. “There was a happy ending.”

  “You have spilled the blood of a god! Your world is surely accursed above all worlds! How can it be fine?”

  “He forgave us.”

  “Impossible!”

  “Whoa, whoa, wait a minute, little sister! You are in an evil magic tower filled with evil magic Astrologers who can predict the future, headquarters of an evil magic interdimensional empire ruling thirty-three parallel aeons of time, and in each of those aeons there is some sort of dark magic or another, including blind guys who eat souls and hairless wolfy things who climb walls, and you are looking for a man who can walk through the clouds, and you rescued a kid who cannot die with your magic shape-changing prehensile sickle of plus-one heat-metal, which enables you to scare the magic cage bars into magically retracting, and you look like a monkey, but you are telling me it is impossible for a divine being big enough to create the whole supercalifragilisticexpialidocious universe to be big-hearted enough to forgive his own murderers?”

  She shook her head. “Blood must repay blood. That is the law of all the gods.”

  “Well, there was plenty of blood involved. Anyway, you are willing to believe in the curse but not in the cure? What kind of gullible believer-in-magic are you?”

  “I can see magic,” she held up her sickle and the short curved blade hummed and gave off a little red light and a lot of heat.

  I rubbed my eyes, which reminded me that one of them was still tilted and blurred and hurt like the dickens.

  I said, “Okay, fine. Fine. What I am saying is something unbelievable. It is also something, at the moment, I am asking you to believe and to help me to believe. If it were easy to believe, there would be nothing to brag about if this works. It had better work.”

  “If what works?”

  “I think I can heal myself, but only if I can control the chaos I ate.”

  “You swallowed the ylem? It is a solvent of all things! It obeys no laws, can be contained by no wards! The sages say there is a dark heart of the chaos material at the core of our globe, where over the years one drop or another has spilled, boring through all layers of ground and rock and magma to the very center, and it grows.”

  “Cool. Anyway, I want to try something. Will you help me?”

  The monkey mask tilted, and I wondered if the face beneath were screwed up in puzzlement. “That is strange. You used a word I don’t know. I have never heard a word I don’t know.”

  “Which word?”

  “Super-callous-fragile–”

  “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.”

  “You said it! Very good. But what does it mean?”

  “I don’t think it means anything. But if you say it loud enough, you’ll always sound precocious.”

  “Ah! Well, since you know a word even those blessed with the oneness of all speech cannot speak, you must be a sage. I will help you in your magic.”

  “I am no sage, and it’s not magic.”

  “What is it?”

  I thought about that for a long moment. “It is the thing of which magic is a shoddy and deceptive imitation. It is magic that works.”

  “What must I do?”

  “Pray with me.”

  “We have no angel blood, nor altar-stone, nor beast, nor knife.”

  “We speak as if to our father, and he hears us.”

  “I am a female, and a slavegirl, and the daughter of a criminal, who died in a fashion which is most unclean, polluted by many curses. When I was taken from her, Master Slaughterbench was required to include morticians from the untouchable ranks to act as my punishers and warders, since the clean ranks could not touch me. Only a corpse handler was low enough to slap my face.” She uttered a sigh of resignation. “No one hears me. My sort cannot speak in a court of law, cannot make an accusation to the Watch, cannot enter the market.”

  I quelled the stab of hatred I felt, once again, for this planet, telling myself hate could not be good for my state of mind. I said firmly: “The One God hears prayers from little girls as well as from priests, and all are made clean in his sight.”

  “How can that be?”

  “Magic.”

  “You said it wasn’t magic!”

  “Real magic. True magic beyond magic. I’ll teach you the words. Hail, Mary, full of grace! The Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou among women–”

  “What does it mean?”

  “Uh, well, there is a story behind it…”

  She clapped her hands. “I love stories!”

  “Uh… Let me see. There was a man on my world named Joseph who was the son of a long line of kings, but his people had been conquered, and he lived among peasants, and worked with his hands as a carpenter. He was espoused to a virgin named Mary, who also had the blood of vanquished kings in her, and it seemed she was pregnant, even though he knew no man had touched her. Being a just man, he was minded to put her away privily, but she told him that an angel of the Lord had appeared unto her…. Abby, do you know what angels are?”

  “Messengers of the star-gods. If you see one, you die.”

  “Well, this virgin did not die. Instead the angel said fear not…”

  Abby clapped her hands again, bouncing with excitement. “I know she was not afraid!”

  “Eh? How do you know?”

  “Yes. You said she was of the blood of kings! Then she was a princess! No princess is ever afraid.”

  “Um. Saint Thomas Aquinas could not fault that logic. In any case, the angel announced a strange and great prophecy to her, saying: behold, you shall conceive in your womb, and bring forth a son. He shall be great, and the Lord God shall give to him the throne of his fathers, and of his kingdom there shall be no end….”

  2. Hail, Mary

  You will think me a really cold-hearted man if I tell you I stopped worr
ying about Penny and rape beasts and torture hooks. Don’t think that of me. I had to stop worrying, or else the Oobleck would react to my state of mind. I had to stop worrying in order to speed the unnatural recuperation process. I had to.

  For her sake, I had to.

  I did not give into the temptation of wondering what pains and terrors and humiliations might be, even now, being thrust into Penny. I did not pace back and forth muttering, Where is she? What has happened to her? For one thing, I could not stand up yet. But I did not let that scare me either.

  But, dammit, how I wanted to give in to my nagging terrors. I wanted it as badly as an alcoholic wants a drink. Unlike an alcoholic, I could not throw my beer money out the window and prevent myself from indulging. All I had to do to indulge myself was think about it.

  Maybe you think praying is stupid. So did I, back when I was on Earth. You tell yourself nothing is going to happen when you pray, and then when it does happen, you tell yourself afterward that it was only a coincidence.

  But you tell me if there is a better way to clear your mind of worry and fear when the things you fear are real, and there is no rational reason in the world to stop worrying. If the reasons of this world tell you that you should be afraid, you either have to be afraid, or be fearless when it is foolhardy to be fearless, or take the third option, and look to reasons not of this world. Those are the three choices: fearfulness, foolhardiness, and faith.

  And I could not be whole if I were afraid, and I could not afford the folly of false courage. Lives were at stake more precious and more vulnerable than mine. Penny needed me.

  3. Ilya the Barbarian

  I stretched, did the beginning steps of my kata, karate chopped an invisible enemy and threw him over my hip, dropping to one knee to drive my knuckles into his throat to his vertebrae. I was feeling fit. I turned a handspring or two, and leapt to my feet for sheer exuberance. I banged my head on the low roof, and let out a yowl.

  The monkey mask just stared at me with a jeering grin. “Who were you fighting? There was no one there. Was that a dance?”

  “No time to explain!” I shouted. “To the batpoles!”

  “To the what?”

  “Or whatever way we have for getting down quickly,” I added, by way of explanation. “I am hoping a tower this size has a waterslide. That would be awesome.”

  “For an abomination, you are really very odd.”

  “Thanks. But I notice we are both still standing here, and not, you know, bat-jogging to the nearest super-long laundry chute. Why is that?”

  “You have yet to cover the shame of your nakedness.”

  Feeling a little impatient, I went back into the torture chamber, and removed one of the levers from the windlass of the rack. It was a bar made of some hard substance that looked like bone or ceramic, but it did not shatter when I smashed it against the stones of the wall with all my might.

  “There!” I said hefting my club. “Now I am dressed.”

  She was staring in puzzlement at my male member. “Do they circumcise the foreskin of the penis on your world?”

  “Hold on.” I went back into the torture chamber one more time.

  I don’t care what the sci-fi books say, nudism is not futuristic, and it is not a sign of an advanced culture.

  How to find clothing? There was not much here to work with. I took one of the masks off the wall, and one of the leather straps off the torture rack, and made myself a leather jockstrap with the mask hanging and banging athletic-cup-style in front of my groin. Since the face on the wooden mask was carved to show an expression of pain and fright, I thought it only right that any foes would see that expression hanging between my legs. It would either scare them or make them double up with laughter—good either way.

  I had not shaved since who knows when, so I looked nicely scruffy, and my hair was a lot longer than its normal crew cut, past my shoulders.

  And I was still pretty much coated with my own blood, now dried and frozen in the upper atmospheric cold, so it looked like a bad warpaint job.

  So I stomped back to the crawlspace, unshorn, unshaven, and shaggy, looking like a murder-hobo in a horror film.

  “Behold! Ilya the Barbarian! By Crom!” For I had tried to strike a pose, and managed to strike my head on the low ceiling. Clutching my head, I grimaced and nodded toward the far end of the narrow corridor. “Let’s roll, Kato!”

  “What needs to be rolled up?”

  “Don’t have wheeled vehicles in this world, eh?”

  “Kings do,” she said. “Poor girls walk.”

  “If we get out of this alive, I promise you I’ll take you for a ride in my nitro-powered Jeep from Hell.”

  “As a forever-born, I am immune from curses, because my future cannot be bound by dark words!”

  “No, no! I am not cursing you! This Jeep is a reward! It is not really from Hell. It is a horseless carriage, powered by an internal combustion engine…”

  “I know what a horseless carriage is. I also know what boys your age are like when it comes to chariots, or one-man fliers, or anything that moves fast. And I am immune from curses, not from high-speed collisions.”

  I sighed. “For you, She-Monkey, I will drive nice and slow. I can drive you to Priory of Our Lady of Consolation in Amity. It is on a holy hill. My family gets free fudge. Because my Dad is a member of a secret interdimensional conspiracy of a holy order of knights. Boy, that sounds even more senseless than most things I say.”

  But Abby was mollified, and nodded her little monkey mask, and said, “Very well, if we live, you can drive me in your horseless carriage to the holy refuge for fudge.”

  4. Which Way?

  I strode forward. It was gloomy and got gloomier and I barked my head something fierce on a low-hanging, tall-person-hating pipe or ceiling decoration.

  The corridor ended in a T, with a branch to the left and right. There were cuneiforms on the walls. The cuneiforms looked like trackmarks left by chickens walking up the wall, with arrowheads tied to their claws. All the arrows of the letters pointed everywhere and nowhere, and none of them told me where to go.

  “Abby, which way?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I mean, which way did you come when you came? Did they give you a map or something?”

  “I have a magic needle.”

  “Uh. Of course you do. It points where you tell it?”

  “Not where I tell it. It is made of the Remembering Metal.” The word she used was Abartahsistu. “It is from the aeon of Svan, where the sky-witches fly in dreams upon winter nights to wrestle the squalls. It is said the sky-witches can read the future in the runic shapes of cracks formed when the shoulder blades of sacrifices are burned in the fire, and for this reason, the Astrologers have yet to overcome them.”

  The word for sky-witches, mehukassaptillut, was different from the word for sea-witches, kuliltukassaptillut. Apparently their language made room for a wide variety of witches. I was curious, but I had more pressing questions. “Can you make your needle point at where Ossifrage is now? Or Penny?”

  She shook her head. “You don’t know what you are doing, do you?”

  “Of course I do!”

  “What are you doing?”

  “Spinning my wheels, getting no traction, going nowhere. Banging my head.”

  “You said you were in the army. Did they not teach you to have a destination before you marched? A tactic before you fought?”

  “I was not in the army.”

  “You said. You were a scout.”

  “Boy Scout. Still am. Bobcat Patrol, Troop Two. We are Second to None.” I showed her a snappy three-finger salute.

  “You were a scout who went on patrols for your troop, but you were not in the army? Were you an irregular, or did you wear a uniform?”

  “I have a uniform…”

  “And a badge of rank?”

  “I am a Life Scout…”

  “But… not in an army?”

  “The Boy Scouts
are a pretend army.”

  “Your world is weird.”

  “Yeah, compared to what? Your whole globe has only one city!” I blinked. “Come to think of it, the Land of Oz has only one city. Trantor, too, but that does not really count.”

  “Are those real places?” Abby asked cautiously.

  “No. Make-believe. Pretend.”

  “Like your army!” She clapped her hands. “I am beginning to understand your world now.”

  “Okay. Let us try to recapture a sense of desperation and tension, here, on account of my non-girlfriend is about to be Spanish Inquisitioned by lunatic Astrologers. Let’s not lose focus. We just got to think it through step by step. We got to do what Vizzini would do!”

  “Who?”

  “Vizzini! When the job went wrong, he went back to the beginning. That is standard procedure for crime gangs when a caper goes south! We have to do what Vizzini would do.”

  “Vizzini is the boss of your… crime gang?”

  “No. He is a character from a story. A make-believe.”

  “Then… why are we going to do what he would do?”

  “It is a really funny story. Really funny. So. Going back to the beginning. That is what we do. Let me think. I am waiting for Vizzini… You keep usin’ that word: I do not think it means what you think it means… Prepare to die…”

  “Is anything on your planet real?”

  I snapped my fingers. “Where were you when your plan began? And then at what step did it go off the rails? What went wrong? Why was I put in Master Ossifrage’s cell? What made the needle not point where it should have pointed? Who lied?”

  She was silent for a moment, and said softly, “It was the winged monster who lied.”

  “You are sure?”

  “I entered the Tower in the Bovine Furlong, near the communal kitchens for the lower young male rustic-slave slavepen acres. There are abattoirs on that level which pour out blood and refuse endlessly. There are fewer guards watching the cattle-hauling airships. We have a man there—I was not told his name—and he smuggled me into the Lower Luminous Omniscient Observation Furlong. I waited until pre-dawn Mercury set, and entered the Nine-Star-Aligned Chamber of the First External-Abomination Lord Astrologer through the indentured servant’s hallway.”