The Sanity's Edge Saloon (The Sea and the Wasteland Book 1) (45 page)

She shushed him gently. “It’s all
right, you can finish it later. Rest now. I brought you some juice.”

“Later,” he whispered, fatigue
dragging him back. “It wasn’t ready.”

“It’s okay,” she insisted. “Try and
rest.”

“I wanted it … I wanted you … to like
…”

His eyes closed and he was asleep
again.

Ellen stayed beside him for a while
as he slept, drinking coffee, thinking. Did Jack have a plan? Kreiger didn’t
think so, but the Cast Out was a psychopath and a liar who manipulated the
truth with as much facility and indifference as he manipulated people. But she
wasn’t certain she
couldn’t
trust him either. Kreiger was smart enough
to sew truth into his lies and make them that much more believable. He was a
sorcerer/insurance salesman; an arch-mage wizard of the ninth circle corrupted
into a carpetbagger, or maybe a vacuum cleaner pitchman. Was he lying?
Probably
.
Was everything he said a lie?
Probably not
. Jack seemed to know what he
was doing, and for all she thought that understanding the rules of this dream
park/nightmare ride was an impossible feat, she was willing to give him the
benefit of the doubt. After all, he’d sent four of them on their way.

But that still left only one ticket
and two of them. How was Jack going to free them both?

Or had that never been part of Jack’s
plan?

Nail stood beside her, staring, eyes
dark and content. The madness had passed out of him, just as it had passed out
of the Caretaker. Or maybe it had simply run its course and fallen back asleep,
dormant like LSD, waiting for that inexplicable moment of flashback to burst
free.

Ellen kissed Jack lightly before
turning to leave: a small thing, really, just concern. She told herself that
was all it was. Then she took the gargoyle’s extended hand and together they
left.

Please have a plan, Jack,
she prayed.
Send us home
.

*     *     *

Kreiger stared at the Nexus for a
long time, studying its shape, the idiotic disguise it wore to please the
current reign of Caretakers, buffoons more interested in syntax and connotation
than the evolution of their souls. Like primordial amphibians, they refused to
leave the slime, to rise up and take hold the ring of destiny. Halfway to
walking upright, and the writers turned indecisive, their courage gone flaccid
as they wallowed in the sea with the fish. Idiots. Incompetents.

Gods
.

His eyes turned to the tracks, the
glistening steel running to forever. The barrier draped down over the Nexus
like a birdcage, safeguarding the fragile canaries from the rough and hungry
jaws without. The barrier bent out over the edge of the cliff, the dividing
line between scraping sanity and pure, unadulterated madness, and he could not
risk one of his remaining allies upon so foolish a venture. Once over the edge,
there was no guarantee they could ever make it back. And if by some remote
chance they did, their mind might be so far gone as to make them useless.

That only left the other way. The way out and back to the real worlds.

Kreiger turned a calculating stare
upon Reginald Hyde. “Gather together all manner of your magic. Any stray mana,
mojo, talismans, or souls you find, I want bound to your will for the very
moment when

(…
if!!!
…)

the barrier collapses. The time of an
easy, bloodless transfer is gone; this will be a knockdown, drag-out,
no-holds-barred battle to the last; winner take all. Our pretend Caretaker has
somehow found a measure of steel in himself,

(…
and if I catch that bitch, I
will make her spend forever screaming for my forgiveness!!!
…)

and will not go quietly. Our only
chance of escape lies in crushing this pretend god the moment the opportunity
presents itself. He must be broken, quickly and irreparably. No coming back. No
sideshow Lazarus tricks. Gone and forgotten.”

Hyde nodded vacantly, eyes distant
and glazed. Kreiger suspected he was losing the fat dreamer. The
once-playwright, poet and pedophile turned bone priest and juju-sorcerer was
drowning in his own hopelessness, on the edge, looking over,
falling off
.
But Kreiger needed him just a little longer; long enough to gain access to the
Nexus … and not a moment more.

It would have to do.

He turned to Rebreather, the man’s
frame a statue of gray menace against the bone-white sand. “If that fifth train
runs down that track and we are not on it, I do not expect we will see the next
day’s sunrise.”

The tall Cast Out nodded
thoughtfully, a simple gesture that spoke volumes to their particular straits.
The mountains were gone. A quarter of the dregs had collapsed overnight, carcasses
now reduced to dried bones and papery skin burning under the new day’s sun.
There was little mana left for trickery or staging. The backlash of Kreiger’s
desperate gamble to steal the focal lens of the Nexus was now being felt.
Unreplenished, waiting on the desperate, happenstance jolts that sparked here
and there throughout the cosmos, they were slowly dying, a colony of lepers
left alone to rot. There was only one train left that could be summoned; one
way left out of hell. It was their last chance; their only chance. Endgame.

“If we are to catch that train when
it comes, we must move very fast,” Kreiger continued, his voice dropping to a
cryptic whisper. “Or we must
slow
the train.”

Rebreather’s head turned,
glass-covered eyes expressionless. The leader of the Tribe of Dust was staring
grimly at the rails leading off into the distant tracts of white Wasteland,
that ephemeral road back to reality countless parsecs from this place on the
edge of dreams and madness. Time unwound between them, long and agonizing,
spinning out in greater and more fearsome arcs until the white wizard voiced
the unthinkable.

“Rip up the rails!”

THE FACES OF JANUS

Janus was a cancer, a malignancy of
brick and mortar, steel and iron, progressing with rapid, senseless
misdirection, pushing outward from all sides even as the black interior was
buried within; smothered; necrotized. It boiled forth without direction, the
only requisite to bury, push outward and conceal what lay behind. It was a
blanket of patches stitched badly over patches, a tatter of scars partly healed
then torn open again. An architectural abomination, a trembling glom of listing
towers and narrow archways over roads and alleys interconnected by hallways,
tunnels, stairs and gates to form a Minotaur’s maze that long ago outstripped
the beast’s primitive instincts, leaving it trapped in some forgotten
cul-de-sac to starve and die. Inhabitants ventured forth like foraging rodents
adhering to ways well-known and safe, pathways passed from one generation to
the next like family secrets and grandma’s china. In Janus, it was enough to
know where you were and how to get to the few places you needed to go. Anything
more was hubris. A wise man could claim to know six distinct ways to travel
from the Court to the Wall; a liar might claim to know seven.

The inhabitants of Janus had greater
concerns. Everywhere, there were signs. The rain would not fall on the fields.
The wind blew forever from the north, scouring the earth until it was dust.
Animals fell to disease, bodies rotting where they stood. And then there was
the Day of Dead Birds. Witches were surfacing throughout the territories; one
would prove key to the End of Days, but which one, no one knew. The Red Knight
was coming, and Armageddon would follow.

According to the
Third Book of
Revised Prophets and Revelations
, Armageddon would erupt in a city of
gateways, and Janus was named for the two-faced god, guardian of portals and
gateways.

*     *     *

Oversight awoke to a rope tied around
her neck, a man dressed in black tugging on one end, repeatedly shouting move
as if she was a willful dray. What happened since her capture in the swamp, she
could not recall, only that she was now in a hay-strewn animal cart crowded
with a dozen other women, only the chains on their wrists and the rope around
their necks in common, lashed one to the next like a line of cattle for market.

The man in black jerked sharply on
the rope, pitching Oversight against the splintered planks, straw reeking of
animal dung. One of the women started moaning.

“Quiet back there.” More annoyance
than anger. “And you. Come or be dragged!”

Oversight moved stiffly, old bruises
now sore and swollen. The drizzle of rain left her soaked and shivering, teeth
kept from chattering only by force of will, her jaws clenched to the point of
aching as her world was reduced to the most primitive needs, the most basic
discomforts. She had ruled the Wasteland for centuries, a savage queen in
exile, a dark angel cast from heaven, afraid of no one—except Kreiger, but that
was different. And while she never loved the Wasteland, she understood it. She
may have walked its bone-colored dust for eons, but she never crawled.

How the world turns.

The Caretaker had recreated her
reality, meddling with things meant to last forever, subverting the eternal to
suit his whims. On hands and knees for no more reason than to convince
strangers not to hurt her. Such was Jack’s desire; such was her sentence.

A thick-gloved hand snatched the
collar around her neck, yanking her from the cart. Splinters ripped at the hem
of her skirt, gouging red trails into her knees as she fell to the ground, the
hard shock of stone jarring every bone in her body, awakening earlier pains and
leaving her momentarily stunned.
Don’t move; maybe it won’t get worse
. A
foolish notion, but one she hadn’t the will to act against. She simply lay
there, staring through a curtain of her own hair at the approaching guard, his
boots stamping the stone. She drew herself tighter, steeled against the kick
she prayed wouldn’t come.

Instead, she felt herself pulled up
by the rope around her neck, choking as she was dragged to her feet and held up
like a broken doll. Sticky webs of unconsciousness shrugged from her mind,
reason making her situation frighteningly clear. The manacles were too tight,
the drenching cold still lingering in her limbs to turn her fingers numb, her
hands cold and nerveless, as brittle as ice. Were she freed from her bonds this
very moment, she could not escape. Not like this.

“On your feet!” someone barked. “Eyes
on the ground!”

A line was forming, victims of the
city’s perverse sense of law and papal doctrine. No one spoke; no one moved; no
one looked at anything but the cobblestones at their feet.

Hungry.

Cold.

Helpless.

Frightened
!

Why are you doing this to me, Jack
? A vestige of Wasteland arrogance
and anger kept back the tears, but it was hard; maybe the hardest thing of all.
Please, Jack. I don’t want this. Not this!

She glanced sideways at the
surrounding alley, a narrow cut between two monolithic buildings crisscrossed
with chains, cables, catwalks and bridges that stitched the air overhead like a
badly sutured wound; spider lines trapping a crevice in the rock. Cold and
rain-slicked, every stone, brick and tile cracked and blackened, once-pale
seams now dark pen-strokes of weathered mold. Everywhere iron jacks, steel
pins, props and buttresses, slipshod devices and ramshackle constructions to
keep the surrounding buildings, long out of control, from collapsing upon
themselves. And far away, too high to glimpse without drawing her captor’s
wrath, a gap of sky, clouded and dark with the onset of night.

A man in a priest’s collar and
small-framed glasses stepped from an inconspicuous door, his black uniform
cleaner, more ornate. “Pending your appearance before the Court of Fathers, you
will be incarcerated at the expense of the goodly people of the guardian city
of Janus.” He looked the prisoners over, tongue working the inside of his mouth
as if trying to remove an unpleasant film from his teeth. “You should beg their
forgiveness for your wickedness and your dealings with the Enemy, and be
thankful for their compassion. You are undeserving.”

Turning, he disappeared back inside
the building, and Oversight and the others were led in after him.

The world outside drew away.

Marched down flights of stairs to a
corridor of doors, they huddled while guards consulted with functionaries
before being herded into a small, tiled room, lime-crusted showerheads
sprouting from the walls and ceiling. They were stripped and locked inside,
left with only the rope around their necks and the shackles on their wrists,
their tattered belongings swept away. Then water blasted from all sides,
scalding hot and hard enough to bruise before a milky liquid sprayed down from above,
the air thick with a chemical stench that burned the eyes and throat. When the
door finally opened, the guards dragged them out, half-blind and soaking wet,
skin raw and red, noses dripping snot, eyes running with tears. They were
crowded into a dimly lit cell—one of the many doorways off the
corridor—unchained, and presented with white shifts.

As her hands closed on the simple
garment, Oversight thought,
Now; if I’m to be free, it must be now
.

No! They’ll hurt me!

It was impossible to ignore the terrified
voice. A moment’s peace, a respite from the torment, was all she wanted. And
while it would cost her freedom and maybe her life, the opportunity was too
great. Do nothing; an imperfect solution, but all she was capable of.

Despairingly, Oversight sat upon the
floor, scrubbing the chemicals from her eyes and face with the shift before
pulling it over her head. Beside her, a woman stared fixedly at empty space,
eyes swollen, nose running. The woman’s gingery hair was plastered against her
head as she sat there, non-responsive, folded shift clutched to her sagging
breasts.

Oversight looked at her a moment then
used the cuff of her shirtsleeve to gently dab the other woman’s eyes, trying
to wipe away the chemicals. Then she slowly took the garment from the woman’s
fingers. “Put this on or you’ll get cold,” she said, helping the woman slide
her arms and head through the simple covering.

“You hear things,” the woman
whispered. “You think you understand, but you don’t. You can’t.”

Oversight shook her head uncertainly.

“They just don’t care,” the
ginger-haired woman continued. “They’re afraid and they’re angry, but I didn’t
think they’d be so …
cruel
. We’re human beings. Doesn’t that matter?”

“I doubt they allow themselves the
luxury of conscience,” Oversight replied grimly.

“They deserve to be in here for what
they’re doing.”

Oversight did not disagree. “What
will happen to us?”

The ginger-haired woman looked
cautiously around the crowded room. “In the morning, they’ll take us before the
Court of Fathers. I’ve heard sentencing starts after vespers and runs until
noon.”

“Sentencing? For what?” She knew
nothing of this world before the night in the swamp, nothing to incur the wrath
of these people. There was only the spell, that one little spell that made the
stump water glow. Harmless, really; she knew better ones—how, she didn’t know,
and none would serve her here—and compared to a wizard like Kreiger, her
talents were beneath notice, sleight-of-hand trickery and misdirection. Nothing
more.

But the other woman’s expression
suggested otherwise. “They think we’re witches. That’s all the Court of Fathers
needs.”

“But why,” Oversight said.

“You must be from far away to not
know that. The entire city is terrified. They know Armageddon begins here; know
the Red Knight will come to Janus and begin the great war, and that war will
end the world. It’s in their scriptures, their teachings. It’s all they know.
But the Red Knight is supposed to need the help of a witch to bring about
Armageddon. They don’t know who the Red Knight is or when he will come, so the
only thing they can do to deter the end of the world is gather every witch
throughout the territories and bring them here to Janus for sentencing.”

“That makes no sense.”

The other woman shook her head. “A
witch will be the beginning of their end; she will help the Red Knight bring
about Armageddon, and it will begin here. The texts are very clear on this. As
to the identity of the witch, the scriptures are less specific.”

“They don’t say at all, do they?”

The ginger-haired woman only shook
her head.

*     *     *

As dawn turned the sky over the
canyon walls to a pale, stippled gray, Alex shook Brother Bartholomew awake,
pushing the man’s shoulder repeatedly until he awoke, grumbling and upset.

“It’s likely the city gates haven’t
even opened,” Bartholomew complained.

“Then we’ll wait there until they
do,” Alex replied stiffly.

“We can wait here just as well,” the
other retorted.

“We can wait at the gates just as
well,” Alex said.

Bartholomew stopped his efforts at
wiping the crust of sleep from his eyes, his voice dropping to a papery
whisper. “Is it today?”

“Is what today?”

“Him.” Still whispering. “Is he
coming today?”

“Who?”

“The Red Knight, Alex! The Red
Knight!” Bartholomew’s voice broke on the verge of shouting and Alex glared.
The man’s eyes shifted ruefully, looking to see that no one had heard, then
whispered, “Is the Red Knight coming today?”

Alex swallowed. Was he supposed to
know? Was he supposed to tell if he did, or was it a secret that would reveal
itself in time like most prophecies? Jack might have inserted him into this
life, but insight was apparently not part of the travel package.

Janus holds the answers.

“Come on,” Alex said. “We can wait at
the gates for the city to open.”

“But what about breakfast?” Bartholomew
protested.

Alex stood up and walked away,
heading in the general direction of the gates. “We’ll get it in Janus.”

A moment later, the large man came
jogging up behind him, medallions and crosses batting and clinking as he moved.
“Yesterday, you talked as if you didn’t even know where this city was. But
today you have to be inside at the crack of dawn. What possible reason?”

Alex stopped abruptly and Bartholomew
collided with him. He turned, exasperated, and said, “You’re going to have to
trust me on this, Brother Bartholomew. Call it a matter of faith.”

The rebuke left the friar chastened.
“I have witnessed the Lord’s mysteries and deigned to question. If you need to
get into the city then, by all means, we will get in even if we have to scale
the walls. Mine is not to question, but to hear the Lord’s will and follow as
best I am able.”