The Whirlwind in the Thorn Tree (22 page)

He didn’t have to explain it again. We lay on our bellies in the center of the raft, shoulder to shoulder, gripping the logs. I peered out at the ships and recognized the icon on the lead ship’s flag. It was the same shield-style coat of arms I’d seen etched into the gunmetal of the revolver I’d found in the ghostly Wilder village.

The ocean swelled under us, and Noreen said, “God in heaven—!” as a great black shadow passed below, dwarfing the waypoint raft. We could feel the current of its wake pulling the anchor-chain, strumming it like a guitar string.

The Saoshoma cut through the blue deep for several minutes and eventually faded away. When it did, the beast carried the raft with it. We rode the wave back down and strained hard at the very end of the chain, filling me with fear that it would break and send us sailing free, deeper into nowhere.

The lead ship approached us as the sea calmed. Several men leaned over the side; all of them but one were dressed in sleek, vespine green armor. The man not wearing any of that tossed a rope over the side and yelled something. It sounded vaguely like English, but was so heavily accented I couldn’t understand it at this distance.

I got the gist of what he wanted, though. The rope hit the raft with a clatter and I picked it up.

“Can you guys bat-walk up the side of the ship with this?”

“Bat-walk?” asked Noreen.

Sawyer joined me, looking up at the men on the ship. “I think he’s talking about like what Batman and Robin used to do on that old TV show with Adam West.”

“Oh, okay,” she said. “I’m not sure I can do that. Not right now.”

“Oh yeah, you’re sick,” noted Sawyer.

Someone on the ship shouted in fear. I understood the word “Saoshoma”, though as they said it, the term sounded like
SOH-she-ma.

“Konyay clamb peah far de Saoshoma bebbok?” demanded the man with no armor. His long, wavy black hair rustled in the breeze. “Nao, ef yedunna maind! Needa roonda stairm spare!”

Sawyer and I shared an instant of confusion.

I shrugged and said, “You go on up, and I’ll carry her. Get going.”

“To hell with that,” he said. “This is my gig, Scooby.
You
get
your
ass up there, and we’ll be right behind you.”

I looked at Noreen. She seemed to nod vaguely, as if to reassure me, her expression an exhausted combination of resolve and bemusement.

I took up the rope and stepped into the water, reeling myself closer to the hull of the ship. Once I reached the pitched boards, I bobbed, planting my feet on them, and began to walk and pull, walk and pull my way up the ship wall Batman-style as the sailors pulled me up at the same time. It took a bit more time and a bit more effort than I expected, but once I got within reach, the unarmored man leaned down and pulled me up. “Cammen,” he said, as I hopped down from the bulwark. “Dear go. Bour yer fran doonther? Gone make toop.”

I realized that I was beginning to be able to understand them. He
was
speaking English.

What about your friend down there?
he was saying,
Gonna make it up?

It was oblique—no doubt flavored by the culture of a parallel world—but there was no mistaking the language: a strange, mellifluous combination of the tight-wound trill of British-Irish brogue and the laconic, tropical drawl of Jamaican. I resisted the urge to ask him to repeat himself and joined them at the starboard side.

Noreen was climbing onto Sawyer’s back, wrapping her legs around his waist and her arms around his chest.

He rolled his shoulders, cracked his neck, and stepped into the water with the rope in his hands. The instant the two of them were submerged, the ocean surface exploded in a mist of vapor, and the Saoshoma breached a quarter of a kilometer away.

An overwhelming chill of terror rippled up my back at the sight of such an enormous, intimidating monster. It hesitated as it rose, giving me a better view of its long, thin face, an alien amalgam of shark and crocodile features. The Saoshoma’s three feline eyes reflected the sunlight like spheres of flaming copper, the center orb the largest, a rolling yellow globe in the bridge of its snout. It stared down at us with all the unfeeling emotion and empathy of a Greek statue.

Sawyer was about a fourth of the way up the side of the ship, standing on the hull, the veins on his arms standing out, brow furrowed, mouth locked in a grimace of pain and determination. Noreen was as tight around his body as a vest, her ankles locked in front of his crotch, her face pressed against his back. The sailors had formed a bucket brigade with the rope, but he was doing the brunt of the work. They didn’t seem to want to stay on-deck in view of the monster.

Sweat or sea-water ran down his forehead and cheeks in sheets. A knot of emotion welled in my throat with a surge of adrenaline. I barely knew the man, but this was the proudest I’d ever been of anybody in my life.
“Come on, you can do it,”
I screamed over the rushing chaos of the sea-dragon rising from the water.

I was so entranced, I didn’t notice the hairs on my arms were standing up.

“You got this! You’re almost
there!
Ten more feet!”

At the sound of my voice, the towering beast in front of us turned, ceased to breach, and faced the ship. Its snout was easily the size of a school bus.

The cavernous maw opened with the sluggish motion of sheer size, revealing two jaws of teeth like the serrated edge of a saw. The space between the sawbands bristled with baleen, and slopping from the opening of its narrow throat was a tongue, obscenely pink and muscular, tipped with a barbed lance of bone.

There was a strange electric trilling from my left that rose to a crescendo and faded out with a whine.

Out of the corner of my eye, some large object standing on the poop deck lit up from back to front, and discharged a white tree of light into the Saoshoma’s mouth. My heart surged as a deafening whip-crack turned the very air into a twelve-ton punch to the lungs.

The electricity arced, crackling like fireworks as it went, and forked throughout the animal’s fleshy mouth in a series of bright flashes. The Saoshoma immediately drew back in pain.

I recoiled from the bulwark, frightened and disoriented. For a moment, I was blinded. I stared dumbly at the monster through an afterimage that looked like a maple branch.

Everyone nearby moved at once, and it struck me that Sawyer was near the railing. I fought through the knot of men, shouting, tearing sailors out of the way until I was standing next to the unarmored man. We both reached down and took hold of one of Sawyer’s arms, hauling him up and over the side.

As he stumbled onto the deck, I could see the sunlight glowing behind his arm-hairs as they stood straight up.

The Saoshoma shook its head, flinging sea-water across the ship in a mist of rain, and lunged again. In that instant, other than Sawyer, Noreen, and the unarmored man, all I could see was the inside of the thing’s mouth, hollow and bleeding, a panorama of teeth and tongue.

Another flash of light and the lightning-cannon ripped the wind in twain, shooting another salvo of white-purple electricity into the beast’s mouth. The following slam of thunder hit me like a brick and I flinched, swearing out loud.

The unarmored man glanced at me.

I felt a sense of disconnected shock when I noticed that he had
recognized my face.

I took my friends’ hands and led them away from the Saoshoma, cutting through the crowd of men staring up at the monster in astonishment. I got the feeling that many of the young men had never seen it before, from their wide eyes and the hushed tones they spoke in as they made signs of genuflection in a bid for divine protection.

We ran up the first staircase we saw, which happened to be the officers’ way to the upper level, and ran through the first doorway into what turned out to be a richly-furnished office.

“We’re in the captain’s quarters,” said Noreen, slamming the door. “We probably shouldn’t be in here.”

“We’ll tell them we just ran in here to get as much structure between us and the monster. Do you really want to go back out there?”

“Sounds like a plan, Stan,” said Sawyer, and he ran to the bay window in the back of the room, pressing his face to the window in an attempt to see the beast. Below the window, the steamship’s gigantic propulsion combine rolled over and over with a dull roar.

He didn’t have to wait long. There was a terrifying peal of sound that reverberated throughout the ship, a piercing wail of agony, and the entire room fell dark as the Saoshoma whipped right, crashing headlong into the ocean behind the ship. The resulting tide washed against the glass panes like the soapy spray of a car wash.

Sawyer jerked away from the window as it crackled under the stress.

The monster dove under, pouring itself back into the sea, and soon, with a whip of its tail, it was gone. A grand ovation erupted outside on the deck as the men cheered and applauded the Saoshoma’s escape and their own survival. They chanted something over and over, but I couldn’t decipher it.

“I must be losing my mind after all,” said Sawyer, relaxing on the cushioned windowsill. “I could swear I heard those guys speaking English.”

“You’re not the only one. I heard it too,” I agreed.

The unarmored man stepped inside and closed the door, his longcoat swirling at his calves as he did so. He turned to assess us, giving me the first chance I’d had to examine him at length.

He was a lean, handsome, swarthy man...his jet-black hair cascaded in lank, sensuous curls, framing an expressive mouth and honey-colored eyes as sharp as the tip of a sword. His dark olive complexion made him hard to pin down—he could have been Italian, Asian, part African.

The overcoat was something of a thin leather kimono...its huge sleeves were tied up at the shoulder, freeing most of his arm to move. He was wearing canvas trousers and a vest, but just about everything else was made of unfinished leather, which gave him the aspect of a samurai and a barbarian simultaneously.

He shrugged his right arm out of the overcoat, which was cinched with a belt at the waist, and flexed his fingers.

The empty sleeve dangled down his back. Hidden in the folds of the coat, a polished sixgun glittered in the holster strapped across his chest. His slender, bare arm was a study in musculature.

The gunslinger peered at me and spoke in that obscure flavor, his voice dusky and low. “We meet again, murderer. This time you do not leave my sight alive.”

The Two-Faced Man

I
SAT IN THE CORNER OF
the tiny brig cell, on the floor, hugging my knees. Sawyer was in the opposite corner with his legs crossed, cradling Noreen in the pit of his lap like a baby, her face buried in his shirt. His arms were wrapped around her, his fingers interlaced behind her back, and his lips rested on her head.

I could occasionally hear him mumbling words of comfort into her pale blonde hair. They were sitting on a primitive, stained mattress, which lay on the floor. The sine-wave motion of the ship, nearly imperceptible, kept me in a constant state of mild nausea.

“I’m sorry I got you guys into this mess,” I said, staring at the wall.

They offered no reply. I wasn’t sure whether to feel worse about that, or relieved. I glanced over at Sawyer. His expression was one of quiet despondency, his features tight and severe, his unfocused eyes locked on the foot of the mattress. A fly zipped around the room, finally lighting on my wrist. I waved it away.

After a few minutes, I got up and stood at the door. We were in a small hardwood room with an entrance made of wrought-iron bars. If I pressed my face to the bars and cut my view to an extreme left angle, I could see down the hallway, where one of the armored sailors was leaning against the wall.

“Hey,” I said. “Hey, guard. I don’t know who you think I am, but I’m not. Come here and talk to me, and I’ll explain everything.”

He ignored me.

I gripped the bars and fought the urge to shake the hell out of them, rattle them in a blind fury, scream demands and threats at the man. Demonstrating a capacity for violence would probably not play out in my favor. I just went back to my corner and sat down again.