I said to him, “Are you saying each world has a different set of laws of nature because the dominant language differs? That makes no sense at all!”
Ossifrage explained it this way: “Sages and Prophets and Magicians and Learned Men of every world have some part of their Father’s authority. Your people think you are finding, and you do not know you are commanding. It is the power of all the Sons of Man.”
I turned back to Nakasu and asked him how he knew so much about other worlds.
Nakasu grunted, “I am a wayship station officer. My duties told me of all the worlds to which free troops and fighting slaves were shipped. Cargoes and passengers below the rank of Plebian, such as Untouchables or Abominations, all pass through my yard, which is the cleanest, most horoscope-compliant in ten turlongs! Our guildhouse took the prize money from the regional chapter four seasons in a row…”
A glum look wrinkled his chest and belly. “Passed through. The yard is no more mine. The section boss will find another butthole-boy.” A little grin started at about his belly button and spread, one sharky tooth at the time, to his hip. “Of course, no more filling out bills of lading for me, or shipping reports, or wayship horoscopes.”
Then the grin faltered and fled. “But what will they say to my mate? Is any of this part of my official fate? What if I just went home? Would everyone pretend everything is normal rather than admit to the magicians an unforetold event occurred?”
He stood up, his chest-face looking haunted and uncertain. It was the first time he had not had some stern or cruel look on his face. It was almost comical. He looked lost, and my heart went out to him.
But what could I tell him? What could I say? That I had messed up his life by accident? That he would never see his kids again? That it was all for the best?
Before I could think of anything, Ossifrage stood also, and pointed. “Behold!”
The windows had gone dark. The Chamber of Fated Rarities was unguarded.
4. Hidden
Ossifrage wafted us over there. Nakasu did not see anyone in the room with his enormous eyes, so Abby (without touching a switch or anything) made the gargoyles and totems carved of lampwood set into the ceiling flicker into yellow light.
In this room, there were a series of boxes and cages of various sizes stacked up in what looked like display cases, one atop the next, on tall racks reached by ladders made of black and living metal. The racks were wood and set in stone bases, and the wood was lampwood, so the chamber had, to my eyes, an oddly modern look to it—because of the indirect lighting.
In the center of the chamber was a gold Moebius ring set in the floor. I saw the point in the room design, based on what Ossifrage had just told me: the lampwood could be turned from normal yellow light to twilight-banishing blue-white light with a thought, in an instant, and this would dampen any shadow magic in the chamber, if the rarities stored here were shadow artifacts and started acting up. Likewise, if any rarities were high magic, the Moebius coil could fan out an aura of twilight just by revving up, and quell them.
As we were being lowered from the window as if in an unseen elevator, I smiled smugly, and said to Abby, “You know, I think I am getting the hang of this world.”
A voice I recognized said in English. “Ill? Is that you? Ilya Muromets?”
I looked up. We were hanging in midair, not yet down on the floor, sinking slowly as Ossifrage lowered his finger. The voice was coming from one of the museum cases at the very top of the wooden rack. Here was a set of crystal boxes or cages of wire mesh holding treasures: a spear of ivory, a gem-encrusted book, a knife of obsidian stone, a mask of beaten gold with amber lenses for eyes, a gold arm-band cut with Viking runes, a hawk whose every feather was inset with precious stones, a cloak of jade wafers so thin light shined through them, a boar-spear, a fuller’s rod, a broom, a dragon’s skull, an iron kettle filled with silver coins shaped like crescents, a longbow formed of silvery fiberglass so transparent it faded out of view if you looked right at it, with a see-though quiver of glass arrows with diamond arrowheads hanging with it.
And there, calmly in her decorated sheath of stingray wrapped in white silk, the tassels of yellow and red, the chrysanthemum tang glinting, was Dancing Maiden, my grandfather’s sword. She was in a little closet like a miniature phonebooth made of crystal windows woven with heavy wire mesh.
I said to the sword, “Did—did you talk just now? You have a boy’s voice?”
“No! Over here!” And I suddenly became aware of a blind spot in my eyesight, something I should be seeing, but wasn’t, and the moment I became aware of what I wasn’t seeing, I saw.
It was Foster Hidden.
He was naked as a jaybird, covered in blue paint, on his tip toes, on a box, with his hand stuck through the wire mesh bars of a birdcage. His hair had been shaved close to his skull, like that of a prisoner in a camp, leaving stubble, and his jaw was dark with a two-day growth, like a man who has not shaved.
Inside the birdcage was a truly huge bracelet or bracer, a cylinder of gold nearly as long as a man’s forearm, written all over with what might have been Cyrillic or Devanagari. The armband seemed to shine with yellow and cerise and fulvous rainbows for a moment. He had been touching it with his outstretched finger. When he let go of it, was when I saw him — or was allowed to see him. The birdcage was locked and made of the black living metal of the Tower, and the massive armband was too big to fit through the bars, but his fingers could reach in and touch the gold cylinder, which was pulled hard up against the side.
“Ilya! Are you floating? How are you— Hey! Don’t touch the ground!”
“How do I know you are really Foster Hidden,” I said, “And not some outrageous shapechanging horror sent to deceive me?”
He said, “Troop Two! Second to none!”
“Hm. I guess that is good enough …”
“Don’t land! It’s a trap!”
But it was too late. Abby started talking to me, asking who this was and I was trying to gesture to Ossifrage, but pointing and waving my hand must have looked frantic, a hurry-up gesture rather than a go-up gesture, or maybe the commotion broke his concentration, because we all fell the remaining five feet to the deck.
I rolled and slapped the ground and came to my feet. Ossifrage landed on his butt, and Nakasu landed by falling flat on his back, but still he reached and caught Abby in midair, so I felt like he was more heroic than I was.
From way up above, Foster called out, “They’re coming!”
The floor flickered with light where we had hit it. Our silhouettes where we had fallen were glowing softly at first, but brighter and brighter, and the skid marks where I had rolled to my feet. When I jumped to one side, my bare feet left glowing footprints.
“I take it back,” I said, “I am still suffering indigestion of the brain. What the heck is going on? Why is the floor—”
I bent down and touched it, leaving my fingerprints glowing in the surface. It was wood. The floorboards were all lampwood.
I uttered a short, four-letter word referring to an act which, when licit, forms the nuptial joys of a honeymoon.
Because just then the floorboard glow spread from wall to wall, got bright, then intense, then blinding, and it turned blue. Some of my old wounds started twitching and stinging with pain, which was something I had not been aware could happen — and it kind of scared me.
But not too scared, because, despite what I had just said, I really was catching on to the rules. My power was a twilight power, and it was being quelled.
“Get these cases open!” Foster Hidden called. “That’s my bow and arrow!”
I shouted at Ossifrage and pointed toward the top deck of the warehouse shelves, the one where Foster Hidden was. Without getting up from his supine position, Ossifrage waved his hand at me and pointed the same direction. Gravity forgot about me, and the chamber seemed like the deep end of a swimming pool: not that it looked different, just that I kicked off the ground and swam up through thirty
feet of air with a swan-dive motion.
Just then, that golden Moebius coil in the center of the floor rang with an eerie chiming noise and started to spray twilight in every direction. Now, as best I understood things, that should not have worked, because the floorboards were shining with ylem-suppressant. But it got dark fast, and Ossifrage’s power wobbled. I was slipping from where I hung in the middle of nothing. So I figure the bad guys had some way of using both ylem and ylemaramu, both twilight and blue light, without them interfering with each other. Sort of the way flying aces shoot machine guns through their rotating propeller blades without hitting them, I guess.
Foster reached out and grabbed me just as my buoyancy failed. He groaned, and I swung, and my legs slammed with a bang into the wooden cases below him, but Foster held onto my wrist with both hands while my legs dangled in space, and he did not let me go. He saved my life, or would have, if I had been, you know, normal, or saved me from a really bad fall, so I felt like he was my best friend in the world just then.
I managed to kick and kick, and find a foothold, and I almost pulled Foster to his doom. I should have been thinking about more important things, but Foster put his crotch right near my face when he was pulling me up by my shoulders, and I got a closer look at his hanging gardens than anyone not a urologist should get. I made a mental note to leave that moment out of the official histories. But it did prompt me to ask him:
“Why the heck are you naked?” (Except I did not say ‘heck’.) “Is that stinky blue stuff woad? Why are you covered in woad?”
I climbed up and was standing beside him on the shelf.
“This is why,” he said, reaching into the birdcage that held the gold armband, and touching the armband with his fingertip. The gold ring flickered and turned into glass, and vanished. Foster’s blue skin glittered and became hard to look at, and then his body turned pale and vanished.
A mist welled out of his blue body paint and swirled around him. My eyes could not focus on it. When I blinked, he was gone. Now, despite all that, I still knew he was there, and I knew my eyeballs were seeing him, just that my brain was not. Here is how I knew: he was standing with his body between me and Dancing Maiden when he pulled his disappearing act. If he were transparent, I would just be able to see through him and see the sword. The scene looked normal to me, and I could not tell where the discontinuity was — but I could not see the sword.
I could see him, but something in my head was preventing the image from forming in my brain. I don’t really know how to describe it better than that.
I closed one eye and looked at the spot where the sword was. Now I could make out a silhouette, sort of. He looked like a vaguely humanoid shape made of mist and smoke with his bright blue eyes glittering through. The light from the floorboards cast his shadow along the locked cases and cages behind him: his shadow was not affected by the magic. I could see it just fine.
I said, “Just like the Invisible Girl from Marvel! Can you project force fields?”
His voice came out of midair, “Just like the Invisible Man from Wells! Don’t you read the classics?” For some reason, when he spoke, the misty shape was easier to see. But if I opened both eyes, he faded again. I stood there winking one eye then the other, then both eyes, fascinated and distracted.
He shouted, “Ilya! Find a crowbar! Help me get these cases open! They’re here!”
I started to say, “I see them,” because when he said they’re here, I thought he meant the cases he wanted pried open were right next to him. But I did not get the chance.
Abby screamed.
5. Time to Kill
I should not have been staring at my vanishing friend when he had just warned me we were about to be jumped, but you have to admit, it was pretty weird that a guy I had known my whole life was (1) in this hellish unearthly dimension (2) in this particular room right now (3) standing with his fingers stuck through the bars of a cage and (4) naked as a bluejay and twice as blue.
He also had the power to cloud men’s minds, but I did not think that part was weird. I mean, not compared to what had been going on.
Abby was screaming because a pack of sleek-bodied wolf-men were pouring out of a rainbow-burning hemisphere of darkness which had formed above the Moebius coil set in the floor. I could hear the teakettle whistling of air escaping the crack between universes. There were dozens of the creatures, and they arrived as suddenly as paratroopers.
Nakasu was up on his hippo feet, and he shoved Abby behind him protectively. He spat the golden flail into his hand from out of his mouth, which I was now convinced contained its own pocket dimension, because he seemed to have room for everything in his cheek pouches. She whirled her ever-lengthening chain, and threw a hook up to the top shelf where Foster and I stood. The cunning metal hook hit a post at a bad angle, but instead of bouncing off, the hook changed shape into a question mark, and the chain threw a loop of itself around that post once or twice, and hooked the question mark, which snapped shut into an ankh. Then the chain retracted, yanking Abby up and up as neatly as Spider-Man on a strand of webbing.
Nakasu started knocking wolf monsters aside with the flail. He could not hurt them. I saw that these were not naked, nor did they have French Poodle coats of the bestiality brigade: their fur was thick and shaggy, and Abby had said their fur made them invulnerable.
“I wish the Lone Ranger were here,” I said, pulling Abby up next to me. “Don’t recall if he ever fought werewolves, but he’s got silver bullets.”
Abby, once she was on her feet, flung her weapon back down toward Ossifrage, who shot straight up into the air before he bothered rising to his feet. But the twilight suddenly drained his powers, so he was bobbing around like a limp three-day-old fair balloon, trying to swim out of reach of the wolf things, who were running straight up the walls and launching themselves laterally at him. A loop of cunning chain wrapped a bowline around his chest and Abby began to reel him in.
Foster said, “My longbow was forged on the moon. It can harm a werewolf, despite its charmed life. Holy oil also harms them, thanks to the miracle of the Maccabees.”
I clapped him on his misty and unseen shoulder, and said heartily, “Fos, do you remember last August when we were trying to get my brother Dob to drive us to the fair grounds, so we could see the World Famous Pig-N-Ford races? And he said if we did his yard chores, and hauled firewood to the shed, he’d do it, but then we kind of goofed off, and didn’t haul much, and so he got mad and wouldn’t drive us, and we missed Guppy Solo’s victory in the finals? You remember that? We talked about how bad the first three Star Wars movies were.”
He said, “Ilya, we are being attacked by cynocephali from Thoebel!”
Ossifrage was up with us now.
I said to Foster, “You spent two hours of my life telling me that any medical technology which can cyborgize a guy who has been dismembered and burnt in space lava should be able to perform a C-section. Do you recall that conversation? I missed a fabulous race involving pigs in Model-T cars because of it.”
Abby, meanwhile, had jammed the point of her weapon into the locked cabinet containing the silvery glass longbow and the crystal arrows. The black metal was starting to heat up and shriek. I pointed past her, saying, “Hey! Is that my goggles and flak jacket over there? Jimmy my stuff out next, will you?”
Foster said, “Can we talk about this later—if we survive? Look! There are wolves. Big nasty wolves with sharp teeth! They can climb sheer surfaces at a dead run. And shoot teeth out of their mouths like bullets. Are you really fuming about the pig races?”
I said to Foster, “Do you recall the conversation to which I refer?”
He groaned. “If I answer the question, will you pay attention to the life-or-death emergency here?”
I looked down. Nakasu was holding his own. He had a wolf clutched in his mouth by the spine, but could not bite and kill it, and he was turning this way and that, keeping the unhappy wolf-headed guy between him and incoming fire from bullet
-teeth, which ricocheted from the pelt. Despite this, Nakasu was bleeding from where teeth had hit him in the chest-face. They were more like sling bullets than pistol bullets, so he was not dead, but they were still hurting him.
“Yeah, I remember the conversation,” Foster said. “You said Artoo-Detoo couldn’t have rockets.”
Ossifrage reached down with both hands tensed into claws, his face slick with sweat, and his hair and beard began to writhe and flap around him in the motionless air. He groaned, and Nakasu floated up off the floor, but slowly, wobbling. Nakasu kicked his legs to put himself head-downward (headless-downward, but you know what I mean) and spun the flail right and left, dealing out massive strokes to the wolf-creatures, who were flung yowling to crash into glass display cases, but who sprang back up, unhurt.
I gritted my teeth. “Good! Well, instead of boring me with bellyaching about a space movie, why didn’t you tell me you had a longbow and arrows forged on the moon? I would have kind of liked to know, y’know! You’d think a friend of mine would mention that detail about his life!”
6. Matron of the Illyrii
I looked down. A busty redhead chick, tall and angry-looking, in a long black cloak came out of the hemisphere of the Moebius gate riding a tiny chariot pulled by four cynocephali.
Her features were cold and queenly, her chin sharp, her lips as red as blood, and her cascade of hair spilled past her shoulders all the way to her hips in wanton curls and spirals, a crimson cloud. She wore a sheer silk dress shining and jet like a bright darkness. A narrow sash set with emeralds and smaragds and cut stones of beryl from behind her neck crossed down between her breasts, tightly cinched her waist, fell in a triangle down the curve of her lower belly, and left long graceful tails to dangle between her legs.