The Whirlwind in the Thorn Tree

by S. A. Hunt

  And then, as we watched, the swordsman disappeared in a diffusion of matter, a silent explosion that scattered him to nothing. He wasn’t there anymore. It was like he’d simply stepped out of reality, ceased to exist.

  We ran. Sawyer took three steps and the corrugated tin roof collapsed with a horrendous crash.

  He bounced off of the top of the wall underneath and I almost made it to the other side before a rafter broke and sent me sailing into a dark hallway below. A nail scratched my back as I fell. I landed in a hail of cloudy dust beside Sawyer, who was coughing, the breath knocked out of him.

  I kicked, wrestling with the debris, stood up, helped Sawyer stand. He was grunting, keening like a dying calf, trying to breathe: “Hhhhhnnnnngh!”

  I saw a sliver of moonlight and kicked at it. A door shattered, flying into grey-blue light and I pulled Sawyer through. We were in another alley. Sawyer was drooling, holding his stomach.

  “You okay?” I asked.

  I quickly checked him for injuries. Nothing was protruding from his gut, but there was a rivulet of blood running down one arm. He nodded, staggering, and waved me off.

  We kept running and six seconds later we were in front of the windmill, facing two more members of the Bemo-Epneme that were coming toward us from the other end of the way.

  I snatched the door open and shoved Sawyer inside with my body, then spun and slammed the door shut.

  “My father’s books?!” I said, overturning a table. I dragged it in front of the door and started throwing bags of cornmeal behind it. “You said Dad’s books?”

  Sawyer was bent over, his hands on his knees, wheezing. “Yeah,” he croaked, and straightened up. His face was red. “Books.”

  I grabbed his sweater and dragged him toward the storage bin at the back of the millhouse.

  “Ah, Jesus,” I said, when we got to the back.

  We were staring at a blank wall. There was no doorway.

  I took out my cellphone and shined it at Sawyer. He had tears in his eyes that threatened to come tumbling out, and he was holding his left arm. I went to pull out the revolver and realized my pockets were empty. I’d lost the gun somewhere—probably in the roof collapse. I swore several times and kicked the wall, producing a deep thud.

  “No gun!” said Sawyer, crawling over to the corner of the bin. He squeezed into a ball and hugged his knees. I joined him, and put a finger to my lips. “Shh.”

  Pale shafts of moonlight fell through the cracks in the wooden ceiling, made solid by the meal dust. It was a bisected bin lid that opened in the middle and hinged out to either side. Soundless shadows coursed back and forth overhead, sending the beams of light flickering in epileptic mania.

  I heard footsteps in the front of the millhouse. Someone was walking toward us. Sawyer shook bodily, trembling harder than I’d ever seen anybody tremble.

  A pale bald head came into the moonlight, crowned with a pair of goat horns. Sloping lavender shoulders came into view, and fiery yellow eyes flared to life, regarding us with amusement.

  Clayton thanked the girl and closed the door on her. She was winsome, he gave her that, but he dared not lay a hand on her; not even to help her out of a pit of snakes. The Grievers were nasty customers and would brook no transgressions on any of their number, no matter how slight.

  He crept over to the edge of the fire-lit platform and strained his eyes to see down the dark tunnel to the left and the right. The catacombs clattered with the distant echo of falling water, making it hard to get his bearings in the gloom. He sat down and felt with his toes, trying to find purchase, and slid until there was no hope of pulling himself back up.

  At the point of no return, his fingertips slipped and he fell into the water like a log, touching bottom and bobbing back up. The bitch was down here somewhere, he thought, as he clasped the airtight waterskin with his pistols inside. He would swim all night if that’s what it took.

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

  Muffins

  I OPENED MY EYES. I was in darkness, enveloped in some soft, binding material. Visions of giant spiders and cotton-candy cocoons filled my mind, exacerbated by a terrifying, buzzing, obnoxious screech from somewhere to my right. I threw an arm in that direction and hit something hard.

  The screeching stopped. I sat upright.

  Weak daylight streamed in around heavy drapes, diffused by diaphanous curtains. I slid out of the bed and ripped the curtains open, revealing another gray day in Blackfield.

  The interstate traffic poured past, coursing down the freeway, a river of raw nerves and subsonic steel. The sky was a dark, pendulous iron belly, once again threatening to unleash on the people below.

  There was a family in the parking lot loading their minivan for the next leg of their journey, and their youngest, a chubby little girl in pigtails, was screaming her desire for pancakes. I blinked in confusion, unable to form any coherent inner dialogue except for that which came naturally to the front of my mind. The whole thing was a dream?

  I was still wearing yesterday’s clothes. I found my cellphone lying on the bedsheet. It was dead. I plugged it into the wall charger, but nothing happened—I couldn’t even turn it on. I thought about using the room phone to call Sawyer, but I couldn’t remember his number without looking at my phone’s contact list.

  I stood in the parking lot, my fists on my hips, and sighed. My car was evidently still at the church, because it wasn’t here at the hotel.

  How the hell did I get back from the house?

  Did we even go to Dad’s house?

  This was going to be a hell of a walk, especially if it started raining. I went back to the room and got my jacket—no, in case I was gone too long to renew my room, I got all my stuff and took it to—ahh, shit, no car.

  I tightened my rucksack’s straps, pulled my hood over my head, and started walking.

  _______

  Cap’n Pacino’s Coffee Cafe was busy this morning, but not packed. It was a classy place, if a bit kitschy, with booths that resembled the seats in a dinghy and a bar that looked minimally like the bulwark of a galleon, festooned with a faux-aged rope. The whole thing had a sort of art-nouveau nautical theme like a waterfront pirate tavern, if pirates were known to plunder Seattle in the year 2040.

  There were sleek white life rings and stylized green anchors on the walls, along with dreary expressionist paintings of storm-tossed seas and lonely lighthouses and riotous scenes of pirate bacchanalia, and everything was done in shades of tan, bottle-green, and driftwood-gray.

  There were at least three laptop screens glowing in the booths as I pushed the wooden door open and humped it inside with my over-stuffed rucksack like some kind of backpacker Santa Claus.

  I went to the counter and ordered the strongest mocha I could find on the chalkboard over the bar. I was going to need the energy to make it all the way to the Hampton Inn on the other side of town. I was standing around waiting for my coffee when I heard a familiar voice chirp behind me.

  “Ross?” It was Noreen Mears. She was sitting by herself in a booth, watching the news on a flatscreen bolted to the wall in the corner, her pull-behind suitcase on the booth seat next to her.

  I collected my mocha and crammed my pack into the booth, sitting next to it.

  “What are you doing here?” I asked. “I thought you took off for home.”

  “I got about six miles out of town,” she said, and sipped her own drink. I could smell peppermint. “My transmission ate shit. I had to get a tow back here, and I had to sleep in my car overnight because with the repair bill, I didn’t have enough money for another motel room. Can you believe it took the tow truck three hours to get out to me? Is that not some bullshit?”

  “I agree. Hey, if you need a place to stay tonight, I’ll spot you.”

  “Oh, thank you. I hate to put you out, though.”

  “It ain’t no thang,” I said, burning my tongue with my coffee, which had apparently been extracted from the cen
ter of the earth. I coughed, making a face, and Noreen chuckled. “Hot?”

  I sucked air, and stared at her hands thoughtfully, noticing that she was a nailbiter. Finally, I said, “Something happened last night.”

  The girl tilted her head, smirking, her brow furrowed. “That sounds ominous. Do I want to know?”

  I gave her a reproachful look and traced the rim of the cardboard sleeve with my thumb. “No, something really, really weird happened, and I’m not entirely sure it was even real. Hell, the last few days have been a little bit unreal, to be honest.”

  It occurred to me that I’d never said anything to Noreen about the demon I’d seen in the closet, and now had seen in the mysterious millhouse and the gilded mirror. I told her about what had happened that first night, when I’d gone by myself to Ed Brigham’s house and saw the horned man, and, later, Sawyer and I delving into the mystery and coming up empty-handed.

  She seemed skeptical. “Maybe you’re just really stressed out from your dad’s funeral. My sister used to see shadow-people when she had throat cancer.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah, but I think it was because she didn’t get much sleep, with the pain and the chemo making her sick all the time.”

  “I believe it. Sleep deprivation can do that,” I said, and scalded myself again with a wince. “But I don’t think that’s the case here. For one thing, Sawyer saw it too. What happened last night, we were side-by-side for. We saw some shit.”

  I sounded like a Vietnam vet. We saw some shit, man, it was rough out there, Bubba.

  “You’ll have to get a little more specific than ‘shit’,” Noreen said.

  “Crazy shit.”

  “Woah,” she interjected, “Too much detail. Just the facts, ma’am.”

  I chuckled. “Well, after you left yesterday, me and Sawyer—we went back to my dad’s house to get his laptop, and I ended up dragging the mirror out of the closet so I could look at it.”

  “The demon closet?”

  “The very same. And then...something happened. I don’t know what. It was like...we were on auto-pilot. Like we’d been hypnotized and we started sleepwalking. I don’t even remember thinking, we need to take the mirror out of the house, it just—happened. I was standing there with the mirror, and the next thing I know, we were putting it in the back of my car, and then we were at the church.”

  “The church?” asked Noreen. “Walker Memorial?”

  “Yeah. And then we were taking it down to the cellar. I don’t know why; it was like the whole thing was our idea, but it wasn’t, too. Does that make sense?”

  “Not one bit. But continue.”

  I recounted how we discovered the mirror door, and the abandoned city beyond.

  “You guys know how to get your hands on the good stuff,” said Noreen, with a sardonic smile. “Your dad must have had one hell of a stash.”

  I shook my head. “I don’t do drugs, you goon. Anyway, these creepy people—”

  “People?” asked Noreen. Her wiseacre skepticism had started to transform into genuine concern.

  “I don’t know what they were or if they were even human, but Sawyer said he knew what they were. He said—and I’d swear on a stack of Bibles—that he knew them from my dad’s novels. He called them Wilders.”

  Noreen’s eyebrows shot straight up. “Wilders?”

  “Yes. We ran from them and there was somebody there chasing us.” I told her about the swordsman chasing us, and the goat-horned man in the grain bin.

  “What about Sawyer? Have you talked to him?”

  “No,” I said, showing her my dead phone. “I don’t know his number.”

  Noreen took out her own phone and dialed Sawyer, then put the phone to her ear and listened. “Hey, sweetie. Call me back when you get this message. Thanks,” she said, and immediately got up out of the booth. I understood without having to be told.

  _______

  We were marching down the sidewalk a couple blocks from Cap’n Pacino’s, warming our hands with hot coffee cups, when Noreen said, “That person with the sword that you said you saw—I don’t think that was a man.”

  “How could you possibly know that?” I demanded, but I knew the answer as soon as the question came out of my mouth.

  “Well, you told me that you saw Wilders there, wherever you were. It doesn’t make a bit of sense, but if I completely abandon all remaining semblance of tangible reality here and take what you’ve told me at face value, then according to Fiddle lore, the person you saw was a Griever, or a swordwife, in the book’s more casual slang.”

  “The hell is a Griever?” I asked, stepping onto a redbrick planter-wall built out front of a law office. I tightroped down it beside Noreen as she ate up the sidewalk, walking and talking, pulling her suitcase behind her on noisy wheels.

  “You haven’t really read any of the books, have you?” she asked. “They’re kinda like nuns, except they’re like Amazon warriors. Look, in book five, The Blade and the Bone, your dad established that certain women are enlisted specially to fight No-Men.”

  “Certain women?”

  “Widows,” she said. “The House of the Forge sends emissaries around the world of Destin to find and indoctrinate war widows into their culture. The House was established as a way to mobilize those that lost loved ones to the war to rid the world of the ones that killed them. It’s a bit of a cross between a Ladies’ Auxiliary and a kung-fu monastery.”

  “That’s crazy as hell,” I said, hopping down off the end of the planter wall.

  “Not as crazy as the main subplot of that book. You see, when widows are brought into the fold, they’re trained in the ways of swordsmanship. The only way you can end a No-Man is with a blade. So all the widows are trained in swordfighting and then, at the end of their training, they have to forge their own sword in a ceremony not unlike marriage. Basically, they’re remarried to the sword they create, and they never, ever take another lover for the rest of their lives.

  “It’s an unbreakable bond, punishable by imprisonment in the catacombs underneath the House. There are rituals after that, for other things, but the sword ceremony is the true dividing line that you could say separates the girls from the women.”

  “So you said the subplot was crazy. What happened?”

  “Are you sure you want the spoilers?”

  “Yeah.”

  Noreen took a deep breath, “Well, in The Blade and the Bone, the Kingsmen found out that Ancress Bachelard was secretly ordering the murder of dozens of men in a concerted effort to fill the House’s ranks and create an army she was going to use to overthrow the King.

  “She was defeated and killed by Normand Kaliburn’s squire Clayton Rollins at the end of the book, and now they’re all knights-errant, like ronin samurai, wandering Destin looking for No-Men to eliminate and killing other horrible things and devious people for pocket money. They’re basically bounty hunters now. After the Ancress’s betrayal, they’re not exactly popular, but they’re treated a hell of a lot better than the Redbirds.”

  “I’m starting to wish I’d read the series now,” I admitted.

  “I’m starting to wish you’d read it too. I don’t know what’s going on, but regardless of whether you both had a serious mental break, or got baked on some top-shelf grass you found in your dad’s house, or the two of you walked through a magic wardrobe into E. R. Brigham’s dark-fantasy novels, this is some profoundly messed-up shit.”

  I heartily concurred that this definitely qualified as quote-unquote messed-up shit, although I was a bit offended at the wardrobe jibe. “It was a mirror, not a wardrobe.”

  She gave me a sharp look.

  “You keep mentioning ‘No-Men’,” I said, grabbing at a change of subject. “Who—or what—are they?”

  “It’s a long story. Honestly, you’d be better off reading the books.”

  “Let’s say, hypothetically speaking, that I’m a terribly impatient man.”

  We kept walking for a little while in
an artificially cool and uncomfortable silence. I could sense her assembling and arranging the information in her mind. Finally, she looked over to me and said, “You’re going to ruin it for yourself.”

  “I’ll survive. If you don’t fill me in, I might not.”

  She sighed and said, “I’ll start with the basics, give you a Cliff’s Notes version of how the series started. The Antargata k-Setra—affectionately referred to as ‘K-Set’— is where the bulk of the Fiddle and the Fire series takes place. A couple of generations before the beginning of the first novel, a large medieval nation—the country of Ain—began to send explorers to the farthest reaches of the world of Destin looking for new territory and resources.

  “With seventeen large, well-provisioned ships, the explorers embarked on an expedition from the western shores of Ain across the massive Aemev Ocean. Nearly a year later, the final remaining ships finally reached the shores of what the remaining crew called ‘the Undiscovered Continent’.

  “By this time, the survivors were only a fraction of the initial party, having dwindled from around five hundred and forty to just a little under two hundred men and women. When they landed, they were astonished to see the ruins of tall, slender buildings in the distance.

  “See, the Undiscovered Continent held the very last vestiges of an ancient and very advanced civilization, isolated from the rest of the world by the ocean. No one really knows anything about them, and no one can read their language.”

  We stopped to wait for a traffic light to change. As the cars trundled by, their music fading past in disconnected snippets of noise, Noreen continued to talk.

  “The ‘Wilders’ you saw are a nomadic tribe of humanoids that inhabited K-Set long before the people of Ain began to attempt to colonize it. They call themselves the Bemo-Epneme. At first, the Wilders were leery of the explorers from Ain, but after several months they were trading with each other.

  “That’s when Ainean expansionists began to send scouting parties into K-Set, looking for resources and places to establish new settlements and outposts. As you can imagine, the Wilders weren’t too happy with these strangers overtaking parts of their territory, so they started attacking the expansionist parties.”