The Whirlwind in the Thorn Tree (44 page)

“I’m sorry,” says not-Ross, his voice strained and sad.

He plunges the sword-point into Hel’s chest, groaning, “Purple monkey dishwasher.”

_______

I grinned at the weight on the other end of the rope.
Hold on tight,
I thought, looping it around my arms for grip.
I’m getting you guys out of there.
The study seemed to melt away around me, becoming transparent, as if the rope had pulled me out of the house. The card table blew out from under me like ashes in the wind, and then I was standing in sand, cold ocean-water lapping around my boots.

I hauled up another two feet of rope, digging my heels into the sand, and reached for more. It felt like I was pulling a shipwreck out of the sea. My arms and hands cramped with exertion, and my back ached from neck to hip.

“I am the Duke of the Field,” growled Ink. I heard the sibilance of a sword being drawn from a sheath.

The ocean fell quiet; I felt the rope go slack in my hands.

_______

Noreen, Sawyer, and Walter swing precariously over the Tower of Silence at the end of the prosaic rope. The burning neon eye of the Feaster is close enough to them that they can feel the heat of its gaze like a bonfire. Protuberances snake out of the blackness and threaten to envelop them.

As he lies dying at the feet of the Rhetor and Sardis Bridger, Hel Grammatica calls up to them, “Find the First Sword! It’s the only thing that can kill—”

Ink the Mariner’s voice erupts from the light like a peal of thunder. “I AM THE LORD OF TRIALS, THE KEEPER OF FEARS AND SECRETS! I AM THE
GOAT-FISH OF THE VUR UKASHA AND THE STEWARD OF THE HOUSE OF WATER,
AND
THIS IS WHERE YOU END!”

At the same time, with a wince, Sardis lifts the infinitely-sharp blade of the Timecutter, known to the Iznoki as the Datdimra, known to the Tekyr as the Dragonslayer, and brings it down on Hel’s throat.

_______

I hazarded a glance over my shoulder and saw two things:

The first was a door standing on end in the sand, alone, with no wall around it. This door was ajar and some slender, terrifying figure was moving through it. I had a sense of cold fire, wreathed in darkness. The other was that the Mariner—or what I knew of him—was gone. In his place was a beautiful warrior, armored in golden plates that glittered as though the light came from within him.

Bovine white horns as big around as a man’s calves curled from the temples of his helmet. His skin was a deathly blue-white and his eyes were as those of a hooved animal: gray, his pupils ragged and gaping. His tattered, faded red cape billowed in the gale as he pulled the blade of a gleaming cutlass out of the scabbard at his hip.

The ocean seemed to inhale, then, and grew silent.

The tip of the sword came from the scabbard, and an arc of water leapt out of the tide like a sheet on a fish-hook. It trailed the cutlass as the Duke of the Field swept it across the study door, following the cut of his blade, and the Unremembered Man was flung backwards into the dark doorway. The door itself was cleft clean in half.

Dark with a nameless poison, the sea swelled behind me and disgorged itself onto the beach in a stunning deluge, as if it were vomiting up the influence of the ancient being underneath it.

The rope came at me in twirling curls of hemp and hit me in the face. I was knocked off my feet and submerged in the singing-chanting-whispering tsunami. Shadowy figures approached me, thrown by the water, and I thought I recognized one of them.

Having cleansed itself, the ocean ebbed, diminishing back into itself and taking us with it. The study window exploded with a muffled crash of glass and water and I was washed through the jagged hole into something that resembled a galaxy—not of stars but of a million trillion stories, and just as many wishes.

Peering through the murky glass of the tide I saw that each point of light was another place and time, another unending tale containing another storyteller containing a tale, and so on, each inside the other like a Russian stacking doll crafted by M.C. Escher.

I could read each bright star as easily as signs on a road.
This is the water of the Sea of Dreams,
I thought to myself, as I sank toward a cluster of light somewhere in a farflung arm of the gargantuan spiral. I was adrift in the collective creative consciousness of every storyteller that ever lived and ever would live, the drinking-font of every God-thing that gathered around a campfire with his own ladle of fables.

The akashic records wheeled for light-centuries underneath me in a green-black liquid aether, a infinitely large compendium of love and hate, war and peace, hope and regret. It was a great grand library shaped into something that looked like the Milky Way.

I tumbled past dark shapes that resolved into multicolored creatures. Sleek, gargantuan paunches loomed from the darkness, whales trailed by iridescent ribbons as long as lifetimes. They stared at me as I passed, with a hundred tiny silver eyes, and I saw members of the Sileni clinging to their dirigible hides like horned remora.

I hurtled through this secret universe, gaining speed, the gurgling roar of liquid rushing past my ears. A low whistling came to me, like the steam-whistle of a train, and found myself orbiting a Jovian sphere made of white-chrome light, inscribed with so many words I couldn’t possibly ever hope to read them all.

Shades of pink and teal darkled across its surface like koi swimming in milk, refracted by cracks where something had broken it. The tectonic shards drifted, slow and massive.

Floating next to it, I must have looked like an ant on a bowling ball.

What I did see, and understand, showed me pieces of our story I’d never been privy to. I saw Noreen and Sawyer lying together in Maplenesse. I saw Maxwell Bayard talking to the Silen on the doomed plane. I saw the Unremembered Man take Julian Clines’ name and leave him a soulless shell in the sands of the abandoned town in the desert.

I even saw my father materializing in the trees behind his house on Earth, splashing facefirst into the stream with a fresh hole in his neck from Sardis’ Ainean bullet.

All of this took place in the theater of my mind’s eye as I scanned the words.

I reached out and touched the glowing sentences with one quivering finger, and fell through the sphere’s blinding surface.

I didn’t even have a chance to scream.

The Second Verse,

Just Like the First

I
HAD THE DISTINCT SENSATION OF
speeding backwards, reeling and tumbling through open space, and of things being reassembled. Angular movements of reconstruction and realignment slid past each other, pieces of the past interlocking to create panoramas of happenstance that, suddenly, were never broken to begin with. Moments unshattered in tumbling fragments, seconds becoming minutes becoming hours becoming days.

The sphere was being repaired by someone or something I could not see. A mural of narrative rebuilt itself before my eyes, feeding itself into the darkness behind me as I hurtled toward the end of it.

I felt like I was inside of a nucleus, racing down a track made of DNA.

My memory flashed on a time in high school when my mom used to paint ceramics. She loved her hobby with all the ferocity of a new passion, and churned them out as fast as they could kiln them at the pottery store in town. She had meticulously painted a Santa Claus one week, and I had accidentally knocked it off a shelf and broke it into three dozen pieces. The paint wasn’t even two days dry.

I had stayed up all night gluing that ceramic statue back together, my heart aching at how hard she’d cried at seeing that broken Santa figurine. It turned out good as new, and I’d even painted over the cracks. My mind recalled that now, with that same sense of broken things being seamlessly put back together.

The abrupt feeling of being dropped into my rightful place came to me, as if I were a video tape being pushed into a VCR. Time slowed and garbled words coalesced into real things: the smell of smoke and of sweat, the sound of wind rustling in grass.

Lucidity came at me from every angle, a silent flock of doves converging on my confusion, and I clustered into a diamond focus. I opened my eyes.

The low whistle I’d been hearing resolved into the hollow hoot of the wind in eaves. I was sitting on a cushioned seat in darkness.

To my left was a rectangle only slightly lighter than the room I was in, looking out onto dim, moonlit colors. There a cool, thin wind caressed a gently rippling meadow of wildflowers: crimson clover, and blue gay-feathers. In the distance loomed a great purple mountain. I heard a loon out there, or something like it yodeling over a chorus of night-bugs.

As I stared open-mouthed at the scenery, I heard furtive movement to my right. Someone struck a match and a face flickered into view.

It was the Deon of the Southern Kingsmen. He held out the flame, and I saw Sawyer’s and Noreen’s faces glowing in the shade. We were sitting in our car back on the train out of Maplenesse. Tears laced my vision at the sight of my friends. I saw the firelight in their own welling eyes just before Walter swore and shook the match out.

He lit another one and used it to light an oil sconce on the wall. The compartment brightened again and Noreen leapt at me without a word, throwing her arms around my neck. To my surprise, so did Sawyer.

I held them at arms’ length and appreciated them: Sawyer’s narrow face, large, expressive mouth, patchy week-old beard, and intense gray eyes...Noreen’s heart-shaped face and fine features, her platinum-blonde hair. I couldn’t help but be infatuated with the curve of her cupid’s-bow lips.

It was like meeting them all over again. I burned their faces into my brain: the dogged, steely guile that never left Sawyer’s eyes even when he was laughing...his easy confidence...Noreen’s eternally fairy-serene smile...the way she stuck her tongue through her teeth as she cackled at our jokes. The way her hair smelled as I embraced them, like tulips and sea-breeze.

“You guys,” I gushed, and broke down. I hugged them again, and wept on someone’s shirt.

I didn’t know what else to say—something about how they’d been with me all this way, and sentiments about loyalty and brotherhood and such, and how glad I was to have them back, but in the end I didn’t have to find the words—because it was Sawyer that did me the favor with one concise phrase.

“Ditto, Scooby.”

I suddenly realized that my shoulder was unmarked. I looked at the sleeve and pulled my collar back in astonishment. The hole was gone; it was as if the fiddler’s bullet had never hit me.

“I can’t believe it,” said Walter, clapping slowly and softly. “Congratulations, Mr. Bridger. I don’t know what happened and I don’t know how you fixed it, but bravo.”

“It was the Acolouthis,” I said.

“The Acolouthis?” asked Walter. “You took the Sacrament?”

“Some guy tied me to a chair and fed it to me after you guys and the train disappeared. I wandered across the desert all that night until some guy called the Mariner found me,” I said, and briefly recounted my adventures since losing them to the Feaster.

“So the tales were true,” said Walter. “The Sea of Dreams exists.”

“You met the Mariner?” asked Noreen.

“You know who that is?”

“He’s in the books.”

“Every gunslinger knows him,” said Walter. “We all take the Sacrament. It’s a rite of passage for the gunslingers of Destin, even your father many years ago. The Mariner waits at the House of Water to help us to cleanse ourselves of failure and self-doubt, and to overcome the parts of ourselves that keep us from greatness. He is the Lord of Trials.

“No one knows if he is real or simply an illusion of the Acolouthis—though, in light of the events that have just transpired, it would appear that there is more than a grain of veracity to his existence.”

“The gods of Destin aren’t quite as hands-off as the one back home,” said Noreen. “Taking the Sacrament is like a Native American going on a vision quest. Only, the Acolouthis is a
little
stronger than peyote.”

“Not everyone survives the hallucinations,” said Walter. “The Acolouthis doesn’t simply alter your perceptions, it alters your very reality. It works from the outside in, not the inside out, and opens a doorway in your head. The wastelands of Ain are littered with the bones of the men and women that tried and failed to overcome their worst fears and flaws.