The Whirlwind in the Thorn Tree (46 page)

It was Kabma who woke me up a while later when he told us he was trading watch with another man. He got up and walked away. I went to sip my soup again but it was tepid. I poured it into the fire and dipped another cup, looking around with raw eyes.

Sawyer and Noreen were asleep. Walter had taken both of his pistols apart and was cleaning them by the embers’ dull light. I sat down next to him again.

“You said you were a soldier,” he said.

“That’s right.”

“I’m guessing—nay, hoping—that means you have at least a passing familiarity with these in Zam.”

“Well,” I said, “we don’t generally use revolvers there...we have gas-operated self-repeating rifles. The bolt’s on a spring. The cap firing in the cartridge pushes the bolt back, the casing flies out, the bolt rides forward and pushes another round into the chamber.”

“Semi-automatic rifles?” asked the Deon.

I felt like an idiot. “Uhh, yeah—you have those here?”

“There are rudimentary experiments here and there, but few successes. The next time you meet a man with missing fingers, you should ask him about his career trying to perfect the gas repeater.”

“I see.”

“You should send someone back home a letter and ask for a few of those. We may need them.”

“Aye aye, skipper.”

He glanced up at me, unsmiling. “I ask because at some point in the near future, we are probably going to have to do some shooting. You strike me as a man that hasn’t done much of that. At other people.”

My mind’s eye flashed back on the sight of watching my bullet go through Red’s face back in the ghost town, his brains and flecks of skull spraying across the saloon’s back wall.

I closed my eyes for a second and it didn’t help, because then I saw him lying on his face in the dirt and scrub. It hadn’t figured to me until now to admit that I’d seen the smoking red crater in the back of his head, a deep hole the size of a cueball, oozing with red-gray foam and thin, yellow curds of fat like runny scrambled eggs.

I shuddered and scalded my mouth with a sip of soup I don’t remember tasting.

Walter must have recognized the expression on my face, because he didn’t say anything else for a while.

“I’m better with a pistol than I am with a rifle,” I said, finally. “I usually got like thirty, thirty-two out of forty at the qualification range with the rifle, but almost perfect at the M9 range, give or take a shot or two. I’m shit at
Call of Duty.
”

“Whatever that is, I’m not particularly worried about your aim,” said the gunslinger. “I’m worried about your nerve.”

My silence betrayed me.

“I need to know that I can count on you when people start yelling. Because around here, yelling often precedes shooting.”

“I’m good at yelling.”

“You know what I mean.”

“Yeah.”

“When we get to Ostlyn,” said the Deon, “I want you to stay near the King. Can you do that?”

“Why’s that?” I asked. “So I can protect Old Man Normand?”

“By the Wolf,
no
,” said Walter, and the corner of his mouth curled up in a half-smile. “So Old Man Normand can protect
you.
”

Ardelia hammered the glowing steel rod into shape, the embers reflecting in the sweat on her brow. She could feel the heat against her bare arms, and even through her thick gloves. Her perfect sword existed wholly in her mind right now, but soon she would give it life. The Ancress would see to that. She would eat, sleep, and bathe right here in the Forge until the blade was completed.

She looked up at the hooded Griever standing in the archway, her arms folded, unmoving, unspeaking.

“So what’s your name?” Ardelia asked.

There was no answer. There never would be an answer, not until she had become one of them.

—The Fiddle and the Fire, vol 5 “The Blade and the Bone”

Ostlyn City Limits

W
E AWOKE IN THE LATE MORNING. THE
sun was a tempered ball of gold high over the eastern horizon, and the sunrise clouds had already burned away to reveal a pale indigo sky. The Iznoki traders were packing up their tents and getting ready to move on.

Burly white
pohtir-nyhmi
chuffed and kicked restlessly in the yokes of low-slung canvas carriages, their silvery crescent horns draped with leather reins. Pots and pans and buntings made of beads dangled from the panels of the wagons, and the canvas coverings were painted with garish figures that threatened each other with javelins and recurved bows.

We waved to them as we left, and passed Kabma on the way out of the encampment. He said to us, “M’digdi ur vyo hium, Kingsman. Be careful in Ostlyn. Word is there are fomenters of dissent in the city. I hear whispers of rally and rout. This is why we are leaving for Fi Himdet so early in the month. My family and I want to be out of the way in case of insurrection.”

“Understandable,” said Walter, shooting us a grim look as we left the caravan. “Take care, Kabma, and thanks for the warning. May your journey be more than its end.”

The Iznoki rifleman tipped his hat as the forest enveloped us in birdsong and solitude. “May it be, friends.”

The arid-lands continued even here, making for hours of hiking across a sparse timberland. Massive gray oaks stood at spacious distances from each other, leaving great gaping holes in the canopy that spilled in hot white sunlight and flat, reaching meadows.

Standing among the oaks were lanky, towering pine trees with needle-branches only at the very top, which made them resemble giant chimneysweeps stood on end. The pines carpeted the ground with dry, crunchy brown needles through which punched berry-bushes and green-leafed briars. There were also swaying bobble-headed sunflowers, and fat clumps of hairy mothweed that looked like patches of bread-mold.

At one point I saw a stand of foliage that looked like fiddlehead fern, but when I went to touch one of the fronds, instead of curling up protectively it spread its leaves so that it looked like a mimosa branch and tried to lick my hand.

We came to the base of the mountain range that stood between us and Ostlyn, and started up a broad, shallow grade where it seemed someone or something had burned out a good deal of undergrowth. The woodland had thinned out until we were ants under a magnifying glass, and the birdsong faded until we were only accompanied by the constant rush of wind. Intimidating raptors perched in the treetops: brown barrel-bodied birds that focused on us with the unblinking intensity of their golden gimlet eyes.

The red-brown soil was layered in a fine black char that stained our boots and trouser legs. The few remaining pines ended not in greenery, but gray ember-spikes that crumbled under our hands. Squat, knobby joshua-trees competed for moisture with jackalberry trees that reached into the razor-blue sky with dozens of lightning-fork fingers.

Ominous black thistle-bushes offered us berries, served on sawblade leaves. Hulking boulders of shale and granite made for a labyrinth of black-smeared obstacles. Several times I spied little brown reptiles on them, scuttling out of sight.

Looking back the way we came, we had climbed above the treetops. Behind us was a sea of green and gray that did not seem to move in the wind, but hissed at us just the same, a constant, dry rasping rush that sounded like a waterfall.

Our path led up the seared mountainside into a deep divot between two wide buttes, like a pair of gapped teeth. As we got closer, and pushed through a stand of tamarind trees, I realized that the pass actually wound through a crack in a plateau. The trail lay at the bottom of a smooth-walled crevice so deep that the light struggled to reach us. Tufts of green jutted from holes in the cavern sides, serving as beards to the curved cheeks of weathered stone that swelled and ebbed like sideways sand-dunes. The further we walked, the darker it got until we were moving through honey-colored shade that took our shadows away. The ground was flat and soft with powdery red dirt and the walls bulged inward, making low, deep places filled with darkness.

We alarmed some furry creature that got up and bounded deeper into the chasm; after another few minutes we encountered it sprawled on a rock ledge some five or six meters overhead. It was a slender mountain cat, with salt and pepper fur like an Australian shepherd dog and a lush mane of silver hair. It watched us with unnerving, judicious eyes that glinted like nickels in the artificial gloom. I recognized it as the cat that had been embroidered on Memne’s clothes, and thoughts of her gave me comfort. I wondered if I’d ever see her again.

The Deon walked a little closer with me. “Before we reach the City, I feel I must address with you a certain effect produced in a man who survives exposure to the Acolouthis. It is the secret to the prowess of the gunslingers of Ain.”

I holstered the pistol. “I’m listening.”

“I can probably explain it in terms he’s more familiar with, if you don’t mind, Deon,” said Noreen. Our voices reverberated tightly in the narrow corridor. “I’ve done a bit of personal research into the things Ed described in his...records.”

Walter tossed a shoulder. “By all means, mis’ra.”

“Basically, the Acolouthis is a nootropic hallucinogen.”

“Well, you’ve lost me already,” I said.

“Where did I lose you?”

“Is.”

“What?”

“You lost me at the word
is.
”

“Oh.”

“I’m kidding. Continue.”

Noreen shot me an evil squint, and started speaking again. “The Acolouthis is a nootropic hallucinogen. The most powerful in all of human history. Back home it wouldn’t even have a street value. It would be priceless. Even the supply here is very limited. One of the stipulations of becoming King is that you have to undertake a voyage to find new growths of the fungus and bring them to Ostlyn. You can be nominated for coronation, but that’s just a formality unless you can retrieve some of the Sacrament.

“That’s another story altogether. In addition to altering your personal reality—in effect opening a doorway and pushing you through it—it also alters your brain chemistry. In order to make the changes to your personal reality-fabric, it has to ramp up the efficiency of your mental system in order to make you process what you’re seeing. And see what you are processing.”

Sawyer added, “Otherwise, the hallucinations would just fry your neurons and put you into catatonic shock. To put it into technical terms, the Sacrament installs a brand-new video card into your computer-brain so it can run the newest game—your hallucination. Otherwise your brain will crash.”

“Right,” said Noreen.

“That explains the slow-motion freakout I had back in Synecdoche. Welcome to the sticks!”

They looked at me in confusion. I looked at my feet and pretended I hadn’t said anything.

“And now you’ll have that high-powered graphics card in your head until the day you die. To break it down Mickey-Mouse-style—” said Noreen, “—that stuff made your brain chemistry so powerful it was able to temporarily rearrange a large enough piece of time and space to let you through. For about six hours, you were a demi-god.”

“
Holy shit.
”

“Basically you are now the proud new owner of an extremely overclocked brain. And now every time you get a big enough hit of adrenaline?”

“Yeah?”

“That supercognitive time-dilation
comes back.”

Walter was packing his pipe as he walked. “I’m afraid I didn’t understand any of that explanation myself, friends,” he said. “But it all sounded very legitimate and knowledgeable and did the trick. Good show. However, you forget one key point.”

“What’s that?” I asked.

“It is nigh useless without a certain level of preparation and training. You’ve got to learn to
control
the Sacrament before it can use you.”

I had a little trouble wrapping my head around the connotations of what they were telling me. I had no trouble understanding the technical aspects of it, right, but...“Before it can use me?”

“You didn’t think you were the one in the driver’s seat, did you?” asked Walter, grinning. “You are merely the conduit through which the Sacrament delivers the justice of the Kingsmen. We are in service to the power of the Acolouthis. We are the righteous hand of the Acolouthis. You will do well to respect it. The Sacrament abides us, not the other way around.”