The Whirlwind in the Thorn Tree (47 page)

“The Dude abides.”

“Eh?”

“Nothing.”

“There’s another thing you should be aware of,” said Sawyer. “Remember the overclocked-brain analogy?”

I nodded.

“The same thing applies here. If you overexpose yourself to the effects...use the Acolouthis Effect too much at one time...you’ll burn out your brain. You have to moderate yourself, you’ll have to practice being calm. Meditation, maybe. Zen shit.”

“Zen shit does vat?” I said in a bad German accent.

“Very funny, Frau Blucher.”

Noreen whinnied like a horse.

“Maybe I’ll start a rock garden and rake sand when I get too excited,” I said. “I don’t turn green or anything, do I?”

“No, Ross. You don’t turn green.”

“Good. So you were saying: I’ll burn out my brain if I let it happen too much?”

“Your memory will be mush. You turn into a deranged madman,” said Walter. “You’ll forget who you are. You’ll forget your friends. You won’t know your arse from a gopher-hole.”

Noreen said, “Lord Seymour Bennett from
The Fiddle and the Fire
is a burned-out gunslinger. He wore the same outfit every day—his mother’s wedding dress—for the last six years of his exile in Ormont, and slept in a hamper with a jar of crickets.”

Walter scoffed, a humorless chuckle. “You want to know something funny, though? Seymour is the best shot that’s ever earned a place on the walls of Ostlyn. Even after he went mad, he could still knock a cigarette out of a man’s mouth at two hundred paces with a pistol. Some say going mad made him an even
better
shot.”

“He’s still alive?” asked Sawyer.

“Oh, yeah,” said the Deon. “He’s been living in Council City Ostlyn for years. He’s the son of Councilman Thaddeus Bennett. Normand agreed to let him live there with Thaddeus as long as nobody let him get within reach of a firearm.”

Half an hour later the shadows did not reel back into their hiding places, but the blue light of day brightened our path again. We came to the end of the trail at the bottom of the crack and pushed through a stand of brush. As soon as we emerged from the hidden pass, the sudden, outright majesty of Council City Ostlyn nearly knocked me down.

At first, I thought the city was on fire and I felt an instant of panic. The longer I looked, however, I realized that what I was seeing were hundreds of red jacaranda trees peeking over the ramparts, blazing brightly in the mid-day sun. They rippled, teasing the sky, like unending bonfires.

Ostlyn lay draped over a dome-shaped mountain like a gargantuan ziggurat, its protective battlements carved from the very rock itself. The dark gray walls, several meters high, formed concentric circles successively higher up the mountain, enclosing rising sections of the city like a vast conical bulls-eye.

Deep bas-reliefs of seated figures, like three-dimensional hieroglyphics, formed an unbroken band that ran just below the top of each wall, all the way around the city. Each figure faced outward: thousands of silent sentinels, gazing at the cottages, farms, and gardens that formed the patchwork Ainean countryside surrounding Ostlyn.

“Each statue you see on the walls,” said Walter, coming up behind us, as we stood at the mouth of the pass in abject awe, “—is the likeness of a gunslinger that came before. We honor our fallen that way because none of us are allowed to have grave-stones. We must be buried in unmarked graves, to foil graverobbers. The bones of a Kingsman are a highly lucrative business opportunity.”

Saltillo-tile roofs in a thousand colors filled the open space between each protective wall, and I could see that these tight streets were a winding labyrinth of switchbacks, leading visitors to the peak that stood in the center. On that flattened apex stood the Weatherhead, a dark cathedral with no discernible face.

Slim walls drooped down the sides of a central pineapple-shaped spire, radiating outward to seven rook-style keeps. The craggy mosaic surface of the Weatherhead glittered in the sun like rock candy, lending the black-green malachite structure the sheen of a wet fish. Silvery angles and scrollworks decorated its edges and lines.

“The entire city is round, to facilitate constant three-hundred-and-sixty-degree vigilance,” said Walter, as we picked our way down the crumbling shale mountainside. We were heading toward a rutted road that meandered through the rural outskirts. Wagons and pedestrians trundled along it in a slow, straggling parade.

“Gunslingers always sit with their backs against a wall, but Ostlyn stands alone. The only way to sit against a wall, when there are no walls big enough, is to not have a back.”

The Uncomfortable

Solace of Madness

W
E MINGLED WITH THE TRAFFIC
and spotted a hay wagon bumping and jangling along the rutted road. Sitting on the back was Lennox Thackeray, cutting slices from a baguette of some dark-rinded bread and eating them. He wore a voluminous green robe and a peaked cap, all of it trimmed in gold piping and braided velvet cords, and as he sat on the backboard, he kicked his feet like a little boy.

His toadish goiter swelled and ebbed when he saw us, and he made a
BRRRROB
sound that I wasn’t sure was a belch or a frog-noise. “Good morning, friends! It is nice to see you again! What a small world it is!”

“It’s nice to see a familiar face,” I said.

We walked along behind the wagon, talking to the trader as the ruts jostled him. For a man that ate as much as he did, he was surprisingly slender. He had very short legs and small feet, and his arms were very long. He almost seemed to have monkey-like proportions; the robe gave him a curious bell-shape.

“I have to agree,” said Walter. “Still moving on the plans to help your brother run his shop here in the City that Sleeps with One Eye Open?”

“I am, I am!” said Thackeray, chortling to himself. His nictitating eyelids blinked, the membranes filming over his eyes for an instant, and he added, “You guys must have had one hell of a trip. You look worn-out. Here,” he interrupted himself, scooting over, “Have a seat, take a load off.”

Sawyer and Noreen piled on with him. As there was no room left, Walter and I continued walking. “It’s a long story,” I said. “Maybe I’ll tell it to you sometime. Maybe I’ll even write a book about it. Who the hell knows.”

“Let me know when you do!” said Thackeray. “I want a signed copy!”

I smiled. “Absolutely.”

The gates of Ostlyn soared over the road in a grand arc, carved to look like a pair of majestic eagles facing away from each other. Their wings stretched out behind them and touched in the middle, forming an archway of stone feathers wide enough for forty men abreast and four meters higher than the tallest carriage.

As we entered the city, I looked up at the stoic faces of long-dead heroes and heroines carved into the outermost wall. The life-sized statues stared into the distance, some of them with their arms crossed over their chests, some of them peering from under the brim of a hat.

We slipped through the gate and I saw that doorways in the eagles’ backs led into their hollow interiors, which served as gatehouses. Thin archer-slit windows in the eagles’ necks provided visibility and protection.

“Heaven help me,” said Noreen, her eyes wandering the tremendous edifice above us. “This is amazing.”

The chills coursing along my scalp had never left me—indeed, as we entered Ostlyn, they had grown progressively stronger until I had trouble remembering to breathe. My chest swelled with amazed euphoria. We bid Thackeray farewell and started off on foot.

The first circle of the labyrinth was comprised of perhaps a hundred shops, taverns, and boutiques. I could just see their wares through their mullioned windows: glittering chainmail, satiny tunics and tabards, colored bottles filled with foaming and sparkling concoctions, tooled-leather longcoats and flat-crowned hats. The goldleaf fonts of their signs mirrored the morning sun, throwing italic sun-cats across the shops’ white stucco walls.

Men and women of a dozen nationalities and colors sat at tables outside of quiet pubs and raucous taverns, sipping steins of lager or mugs of coffee. They chattered with each other in exotic languages, dressed in shimmering finery and tailed jackets dusty from travel. My stomach complained to me as I spied crusty sandwiches piled with tender meats and colorful vegetables, and smelled the hearty spices of pot pies.

“I’m going to be three hundred pounds by the time we get out of here,” said Sawyer.

“Damn skippy,” I said.

We had barely walked a half-mile when Walter stepped into a tavern and made a bee-line for the kitchen door. I only had the time to glance at the people sitting at the rough-hewn tables before we were crossing the fire-lit galley and coming out of a service door. The piano music faded as we went down an alleyway and came out in the second inner circle of the city.

Here, the ramparts were lined with cozy half-timbered brownstones. Residents sat on the stoops eating breakfast and conversing. Several times, men recognized Walter and waved to him with broad smiles. “May it be, m’Deon,” they called.

“May the end never come,” he called back.

The Deon cut down into a narrow alleyway and climbed a steep staircase to a wooden catwalk behind one of the brownstones, then climbed a short ladder to the top of a rampart. Deeply-weathered memorial statues watched the day with bland, regal faces as we ascended past them to the battlement.

The breeze off the plains was rather fierce on top of the labyrinth wall, ripping at our clothes and threatening to throw my hat away. Noreen’s sundress flapped at her hips as we threaded down the narrow walkway between the crenelated parapets, the gigantic Weatherhead looming over us in the middle distance. Rifle-wielding armored men patrolling the walls paused at the sight of civilians on their level, but recognized the Deon when he waved to them.

Walter led us through several more shadowy, convoluted secret passages before we finally came round a corner and started up a sloping meadow carpeted with crimson poppies. They swayed in the air, creating a mesmerizing, roiling texture that captured the eye.

Our road cut through the middle of it, leading to a gate in the innermost wall. This was indeed the oldest rampart in Ostlyn. The sentinels’ statues here were beaten almost faceless by the centuries, the blades of their stone swords broken and blunt and their chests and arms pitted by the elements.

Through the gates was a wide staircase of mountain-stone. Dozens of steps led up, narrowing, into the wide-open mouth of the central temple; to either side of them stood a flaming jacaranda tree. A wide portico served as the entrance to the great pineapple-shaped dome.

As we crested the stairs with burning legs, I saw a man lying on the floor. He was on his belly with his ear to the cool travertine slab, dressed in embroidered jeans and a black frock coat florid with curlicues. “May it be,” he said, without looking up. He seemed to be a good ten years older than us, his greasy hair dangling lank around his face.

“May it be, Seymour,” said Walter. “It is good to see you again.”

Seymour looked up at us from his prostrations. “I wish I could say the same, William,” he said, his voice low and introspective, a furtive croak. He reminded me of a dog that’d been kicked one too many times.

“You’re not glad to see me, old friend?”

“You only visit when something is wrong,” said Seymour. He licked his lips and asided to us in all seriousness, making odd, indicative gestures with his hands like a magician, “He doesn’t like the Council very much. The feeling is mutual, but they put up with each other because of the Chiral.”

Noreen knelt by the Councilman’s son and laid a soft hand on the shoulder of his silken coat. “Hello there. It’s nice to meet you, Lord Seymour.”

The man sat up and smiled. “You’re very pretty,” he said, tucking his tongue into his cheek and regarding her with narrowed eyes. “What’s your name?”

“Thank you very much. My name is Noreen. This is my...boyfriend Sawyer,” she said, glancing at Sawyer as she said it. He smiled broadly back at her. She touched my knee to indicate me. “And this is Ross, Lord Eddick’s son.”

“I’m so sorry for your loss,” said Seymour, putting his ear to the floor again. He seemed to have finished the conversation, at least on his end.