The Whirlwind in the Thorn Tree (30 page)

We put down our forks, glanced at each other, and did the same.

To our benefit, we “won” the contest by forfeit when one of the children replenished our opponents’ waffles with some that had been preloaded with firecrackers, so that when they reached for the next load the stack exploded in their faces, throwing a geyser of syrup and culipihha all over the plaza.

Josh let out a shrill scream, threw his waffle sandwich over his shoulder, and leapt atop the table growling, “I’m gonna
kill
you little shits!” then ran into the crowd covered from head to toe in food.

To our shock, the customary method for getting cleaned up after the waffle-eating contest was to be picked up by the audience and crowd-surfed to the quay, where you were flung into the lake. Josh showed up with a pair of little boys tucked under his arms like footballs and ran right off the end of the dock into the water, regardless of the boys’ protests.

Since nobody
really
won the contest, all four of us were hoisted into the air and carried through the streets, Josh holding the trophy over his head, which turned out to be a sort of tiki or a fertility statue, carved out of a maple log.

_______

I found my feet somewhere at the end of a road, in the shadow of a long row of balconies overlooking the celebration. I stumbled out into the street behind the crowd as it surged around the corner, and caught my heel on the rough cobblestones, pinwheeling my arms and falling over on my ass.

I lay on my back in the street, my brain pinwheeling, soaked to the bone, trying to regain my faculties.

I opened my eyes and saw an eerily familiar face looking down at me from one of the balconies. There was a man leaning on the wrought-iron railing, and when he saw me, his smile vanished as fast as my own.

He was gone before I could say anything, and it took me too long to recognize him.

The only time I’d ever seen that face...was in a mirror.

I scrambled to my feet and ran into the building just in time to see my
doppelgänger
round the bottom of a stairwell and shove through a door into the night. I was standing in the dim lobby of a hostel, a bookshelf to my left, the clerk’s counter to my right.

I plunged through behind him. Luckily, the cold water of the lake had sobered me enough that I managed not to tumble headlong to my death. I emerged into an alleyway just in time to see the other-me run sidelong up a wall and pirouette over a fence like an Olympic ice-skater doing a triple-axle.

His overcoat slipped over the edge and he was gone. Like
magic.
Really, really
athletic
magic.

“You gotta be shittin me,” I said to myself.

I grabbed the top of the fence, hauled myself atop it like a sack of grain, and toppled off onto the other side. I landed on my shoulder in a wheeled cart, which tipped over and dumped me onto the street.

The other-me was several meters ahead, about to duck into a crowd of revelers. As the cart fell with a thud, he paused to glance at me, and I him.

We locked eyes and he ran. I struggled to my feet and gave chase. He was gone in an instant.

I shoved my way into the onlookers and through, yelling excuses and apologies the entire way. We were in an intersection between the alley and three long thoroughfares. I stood on a chair to see above the crowd and saw him hauling ass into a long strip of marketplace stalls.

I grew more and more amazed as I pursued him. The other-me seemed to be rather good at dodging and weaving, finding the best way through every obstacle. He came to a thick knot of people and angled to the right, diving under a table, somersaulting, and coming out the other side at a run. I knew I would never be able to do that, so I jumped onto the table and ran across the top of it.

Unfortunately it was laden with fruit, so my footing was less than optimal.

I burst through a rack of hanging clothes and slipped on a pile of something, sprawling headlong onto the cobblestones on the other end under a pile of shirts.

I heard several people gasp at my injury. I ignored them, astonished that I hadn’t knocked my teeth out on the street, and launched myself back into the chase. Someone asked me if I was all right, someone else asked me what the devil I thought I was doing.

The other-me took two lunging steps, ran up a wall, grabbed the rim of the balcony overhead, and lifted himself up onto it.

I missed snatching his ankles by about two-tenths of a second.

He looked over the edge at me and ran away. I ducked into the building he had gone into and it turned out to be a haberdashery. The man behind the counter railed at me. “What are you doing,
ulpisuci?
My shop is not a playground!”

I apologized and ran through a door in the back into a short hallway. An exit door that led to a serviceway alley. I looked up and saw a ribbon of stars two stories up. Someone jumped over the gap.

The end of the serviceway opened onto a steep hill leading up to the next terrace, a fence at the top. The other-me sailed off the roof, kicking and flailing, landing in an awkward crouch on the rim of the board fence. I heard him swear out loud in the night as I scrambled up the embankment and found a place where the planks had been pried loose.

I lifted them and dove through the hole.

Other-Me was lying on his back in the dirt, at the edge of a large garden. He rolled over and pulled one of the tines of a tomato cage out of his forearm with a choked scream of anguish, then threw it at me and ran the other direction, the heels of his boots floundering in the loose soil.

“Stop!”
I flinched, and threw up my arms to bat the cage away. A drop of his blood hit my bottom lip.

“Wasn’t me!” he cried, drawing a pistol and firing it.

I screamed like a little girl and dropped, scrambling backwards. Someone ran at me from behind. When I turned to confront him I saw it was Walter Rollins, revolvers in his hands.

“Who are you chasing, bastard?”

“I think Sardis Bridger,” I panted. “Stop calling me bastard.”

“It’s better than what I
could
be calling you,” said the Deon, and he took off running after the Other-Me.

_______

Far from the riotous merry-making of the celebration, two people sat on a veranda set into the roof of the Rollins’ house. The lights of the city sprawled down the hill from them, as if they sat on the dark shore of an ocean filled with light. A few empty glass flutes sat on the table with a half-bottle of wine from the Rollins’ cellar, uncorked by one of the house staff.

“It’s nice to finally have a moment away from everybody,” said Noreen. “We’ve been on the go since Ross ran into me at the coffee shop.”

“Yeah,” said Sawyer. The spring night air promised warmer days, a draft just the cold side of comfortable. It didn’t faze them, though, because they were together, and they were always warm when they were together. Ever since they’d huddled for warmth on the raft in the frigid trial of the Aemev.

That was the first time they’d truly held each other, and neither of them could keep it out of their minds for long, especially not him.

“I love this place,” said Noreen.

Sawyer nodded, half to himself, half to her. “Me too.”

After a hesitant pause, he elbowed her softly and said, “Not as much as I love you, though.” As he said it, his heart seemed to swell, and his face rushed with heat.

She gave him a coy smile and pretended to hide her face behind her outstretched arm, her hands clasped in front of her on the tabletop. “I do declare you’re getting sweet on me, Mr. Winton.”

He thought about scooting a little closer to her, and then he did, and put an arm around her as well.

Noreen put her hand in his, interlacing their fingers. “Thank you for taking care of me when I was sick. I don’t think I ever thanked you for that.”

“You didn’t have to thank me,” said Sawyer. “You don’t have to thank me for anything ever.”

She canted her head quizzically.

“I knew from the second you kissed me in the parking lot at the hotel that I’d do anything in the world for you,” he said. “You stole my heart that day. I didn’t know then that I’d end up following you into another world, but I’m glad I did.”

Noreen made a noise of contentment.

“I’d follow you to the ends of the Earth and another world besides,” he said. He reached up and swept her bangs out of her face, pulling her close to kiss her on the forehead. The closeness of her skin and the smell of her platinum-blonde hair made his heart flash again.

He lingered for a second, inhaling her with a sigh, so he could remember the smell, the floral scent of the bath-house soap and the salt of the ocean that still remained even days later.

Startling him a bit, she reached up and took his rough jawline in the palms of her hands, and kissed him on the lips.

He settled into her soothing proximity, her familiarity, and cupped the back of her neck, striving into the kiss, savoring the silky texture of her tongue and her nose pressing against the side of his own. Their teeth grazed against each other, and he could taste the mellow sweetness of the
culipihha
wine.

He was struck with a sudden alarum by the power of his feelings for her, and it faded away, replaced by an ironclad sense of devotion.

She pulled away and looked up into his eyes. “Not that we had any choice, but if I’m going to be dragged into an unreal place like this, I wouldn’t want anybody else here with me. I’m glad you’re here,” she said, and caressed his face, sweeping a hand down his temple. “I love you too, Fred.”

“Fred?!” asked Sawyer. “What? Who is Fred?”

“You know, Fred, from
Scooby-Doo.
You call Ross Scooby, so I get to call you Fred.”

“I don’t have to wear the scarf, do I?”

“Yes. You must wear the scarf.”

“Looks like I’m making a trip to the bazaar tomorrow, then,” he said. “You know this means I get to call you Daphne, right?”

“I don’t
think
so,” said Noreen, swerving her head. She held up a finger in warning and said, “Bitch, I’m Velma, one hundred percent. I’m
all
nerd. You better
recognize.
”

Sawyer snorted. He was still smiling as he pushed her hair behind her ear and kissed her on the cheek, and then the corner of her eye. She climbed into his lap and he continued kissing her face, and then her throat.

She kissed him on the mouth. This time he expected it, and returned it with a new ferocity. He reached into the kiss as his jaw worked, as if he were eating the last, sweetest apple in existence. He couldn’t get enough, and wanted it all for himself. He breathed deeply of her, and wrapped his arms around her slender frame. She was intoxicating, every inch and every scent of her; it felt like he had fallen into quicksand, and there was no hope of escape. He couldn’t fathom the idea of turning away from her at this point.

By the way she returned his desperate, starving kisses, it didn’t seem like she wanted to either. They lunged and gulped at each other, panting deeply through their noses.

The girl bit him softly on the earlobe and purred in his ear, “Take me to my room, please.”

Normand looked up at the dark god’s glass mask. Figures perched in the rafters, clothed in tattered shadows, their white faces fixed on him like a loft full of barn owls. Dozens of them, just waiting for him to make a move.

“I solved your riddles, ghost,” said the gunslinger. “Now call off your hounds.”

“We never shook on the deal,” said the kindly voice from a grille in the front of the cell.

Normand pulled something out of his jacket pocket. It was the stick of dynamite he’d taken off of Roger’s corpse, with one of the rubber washers pushed onto the end. He walked over to the flat thing that the god had produced out of the machine earlier and dropped it into the hole in the middle. The washer kept it from falling through.

He lit the fuse and stepped away. The tray tried to slide back into the wall with a whine of clockwork, but the dynamite was in the way. It tried several more times.

“What are you doing?” asked the god. “What is that?”

“Shake on that,” said Normand, and he ran for the door, clamping his hat onto his head.

With a choir of shrieking, the Wilders descended on him; he threw open the door and the room upended itself with a noise like a planet tearing itself in half.

—The Fiddle and the Fire, vol 7 (unfinished) “The Gunslinger and the Giant”

Ed’s Other Life