The Whirlwind in the Thorn Tree

by S. A. Hunt

  After puking over the side earlier, my appetite had finally returned with a score to settle, and it was piling on the punishment. I wished I had the first book in the Fiddle series in one hand and a huge piece of pizza in another.

  Just the thought of pizza made my mouth water.

  I found myself imagining the smell of marinara and olive oil, and pepperoni, the crunch of the toasted crust, the mellow tang of pineapple—

  “I think I see a ship,” said Sawyer.

  I joined him at the edge of the raft. Sure enough, there was a speck in the distance, an atom of white on the edge of the known world. I resisted the urge to start screaming and jumping up and down. “Figures we’d see someone during the day, when our lantern wasn’t lit.”

  “They’ll be coming near us,” rasped Noreen. “The waypoints are meant to guide travelers across the Aemev too.”

  “There’s a whole line of them,” Sawyer said, and he seemed to relax. He went over to Noreen and knelt next to her, resting the back of one hand on her forehead. “You sound horrible, baby. You must really be sick. You’re burning up.”

  “Do ships on the Aemev usually have doctors on board?” I asked.

  Then something occurred to me. “Are there pirates out here?”

  “Not really,” said Sawyer. “Merchant ships are heavily protected by contractors, and there aren’t many ships on the coast of Ain that don’t belong to the royal fleet anyway. Not enough trees on the coast side of Ain for it, and most people can’t afford to move the lumber from K-Set or the east side of the Ainean continent.”

  The dot drew closer and closer until it resolved into a tall, smoke-stacked steamship, pulling a long white contrail, followed by two more ships. I couldn’t quite make out their flags yet, however, nor their crew.

  I thought I saw a strange movement out to the west of the incoming boat. A long, dark scratch, faint and sinuous, was undulating through the air, like an earthworm on a glass window pane. “Besides,” he was saying, “—nobody likes to stay at sea for very long in Destin. There are dangerous things living in the Aemev, Ross.”

  “Like what?” I asked, watching the black line trace a slow, jagged path along the whitecaps toward the ships. Whatever it was, it looked like it was at least a mile long.

  I glanced back at Sawyer and he spoke without turning away from Noreen. “The Saoshoma.”

  “What is that?” I asked. “Would you happen to know what it looks like?”

  “A sort of sea serpent. The coastal Wilders worship it. What makes you ask that?”

  I grabbed Sawyer by the shoulder, pulled him around as gently as I could, and pointed at the scratch on the horizon. I was extremely discouraged by the way that every bit of the color immediately drained out of his face.

  The men buried his father while he ate. He’d gone without food for so long he wasn’t even hungry anymore; his ribs and distended belly made him look like a great big horrible frog in the afternoon sunlight.

  He choked and gagged; his stomach threatened to purge itself. The woman took hold of his wrist and said, “Slow down afore you get sick.”

  Once he’d gotten one of the eggs down and had some water, a trapper came into the tent and knelt by the boy’s cot. “Who did this?” asked the man, burning into his eyes with an intense gaze. Three months ago, Pack wouldn’t have recognized that gaze, but he’d seen it in the broken mirror in the black shell of his house so many times it was like looking at himself now.

  “He had a picture of an eye on his back,” said Pack, and it seemed like an incantation as the words came out of his mouth. As if summoned by magic, his hunger ripped into him like a wild animal and he picked up the drumstick and biscuit, taking a bite out of each. A bestial snarl came out of his guts.

  —The Fiddle and the Fire, vol 1 “The Brine and the Bygone”

  Wonder and Lightning

  THE SAOSHOMA GLIDED OVER THE waves, a terrible force of nature that snaked smoothly on billowing lateral membranes, reminiscent of photos I’d seen of sea-slugs, flat-worms, cuttle-fish. The way it moved, the dragon-like animal reminded me of the ribbon-dancers I’d seen at the Olympics: long, thin, sibilant blades that curved gracefully in broad arcs and corkscrews.

  As the ships neared our waypoint, the “serpent” accompanied them. Soon we could see its blotchy, otter-like hide, like velveted leather swirled with iridescent colors. At times it was a breathless shade of pale green, and then the feverish, electric indigo of a late sunset.

  It was easily almost twenty meters across, including wingspan, and as it dove toward the water, I figured it to be at least a kilometer long. The water thundered under our feet as the goliath creature pierced the surface, throwing a tall plume of spray, and slid into the ocean with a continuous rumble.

  It fed itself into the depths until it had vanished.

  “Holy Jesus,” said Sawyer. “Everybody get down and pretend you don’t exist.”

  He didn’t have to explain it again. We lay on our bellies in the center of the raft, shoulder to shoulder, gripping the logs. I peered out at the ships and recognized the icon on the lead ship’s flag. It was the same shield-style coat of arms I’d seen etched into the gunmetal of the revolver I’d found in the ghostly Wilder village.

  The ocean swelled under us, and Noreen said, “God in heaven—!” as a great black shadow passed below, dwarfing the waypoint raft. We could feel the current of its wake pulling the anchor-chain, strumming it like a guitar string.

  The Saoshoma cut through the blue deep for several minutes and eventually faded away. When it did, the beast carried the raft with it. We rode the wave back down and strained hard at the very end of the chain, filling me with fear that it would break and send us sailing free, deeper into nowhere.

  The lead ship approached us as the sea calmed. Several men leaned over the side; all of them but one were dressed in sleek, vespine green armor. The man not wearing any of that tossed a rope over the side and yelled something. It sounded vaguely like English, but was so heavily accented I couldn’t understand it at this distance.

  I got the gist of what he wanted, though. The rope hit the raft with a clatter and I picked it up.

  “Can you guys bat-walk up the side of the ship with this?”

  “Bat-walk?” asked Noreen.

  Sawyer joined me, looking up at the men on the ship. “I think he’s talking about like what Batman and Robin used to do on that old TV show with Adam West.”

  “Oh, okay,” she said. “I’m not sure I can do that. Not right now.”

  “Oh yeah, you’re sick,” noted Sawyer.

  Someone on the ship shouted in fear. I understood the word “Saoshoma”, though as they said it, the term sounded like SOH-she-ma.

  “Konyay clamb peah far de Saoshoma bebbok?” demanded the man with no armor. His long, wavy black hair rustled in the breeze. “Nao, ef yedunna maind! Needa roonda stairm spare!”

  Sawyer and I shared an instant of confusion.

  I shrugged and said, “You go on up, and I’ll carry her. Get going.”

  “To hell with that,” he said. “This is my gig, Scooby. You get your ass up there, and we’ll be right behind you.”

  I looked at Noreen. She seemed to nod vaguely, as if to reassure me, her expression an exhausted combination of resolve and bemusement.

  I took up the rope and stepped into the water, reeling myself closer to the hull of the ship. Once I reached the pitched boards, I bobbed, planting my feet on them, and began to walk and pull, walk and pull my way up the ship wall Batman-style as the sailors pulled me up at the same time. It took a bit more time and a bit more effort than I expected, but once I got within reach, the unarmored man leaned down and pulled me up. “Cammen,” he said, as I hopped down from the bulwark. “Dear go. Bour yer fran doonther? Gone make toop.”

  I realized that I was beginning to be able to understand them. He was speaking English.

  What about your friend down there? he was saying, Gonna make it up?

  It wa
s oblique—no doubt flavored by the culture of a parallel world—but there was no mistaking the language: a strange, mellifluous combination of the tight-wound trill of British-Irish brogue and the laconic, tropical drawl of Jamaican. I resisted the urge to ask him to repeat himself and joined them at the starboard side.

  Noreen was climbing onto Sawyer’s back, wrapping her legs around his waist and her arms around his chest.

  He rolled his shoulders, cracked his neck, and stepped into the water with the rope in his hands. The instant the two of them were submerged, the ocean surface exploded in a mist of vapor, and the Saoshoma breached a quarter of a kilometer away.

  An overwhelming chill of terror rippled up my back at the sight of such an enormous, intimidating monster. It hesitated as it rose, giving me a better view of its long, thin face, an alien amalgam of shark and crocodile features. The Saoshoma’s three feline eyes reflected the sunlight like spheres of flaming copper, the center orb the largest, a rolling yellow globe in the bridge of its snout. It stared down at us with all the unfeeling emotion and empathy of a Greek statue.

  Sawyer was about a fourth of the way up the side of the ship, standing on the hull, the veins on his arms standing out, brow furrowed, mouth locked in a grimace of pain and determination. Noreen was as tight around his body as a vest, her ankles locked in front of his crotch, her face pressed against his back. The sailors had formed a bucket brigade with the rope, but he was doing the brunt of the work. They didn’t seem to want to stay on-deck in view of the monster.

  Sweat or sea-water ran down his forehead and cheeks in sheets. A knot of emotion welled in my throat with a surge of adrenaline. I barely knew the man, but this was the proudest I’d ever been of anybody in my life. “Come on, you can do it,” I screamed over the rushing chaos of the sea-dragon rising from the water.

  I was so entranced, I didn’t notice the hairs on my arms were standing up.

  “You got this! You’re almost there! Ten more feet!”

  At the sound of my voice, the towering beast in front of us turned, ceased to breach, and faced the ship. Its snout was easily the size of a school bus.

  The cavernous maw opened with the sluggish motion of sheer size, revealing two jaws of teeth like the serrated edge of a saw. The space between the sawbands bristled with baleen, and slopping from the opening of its narrow throat was a tongue, obscenely pink and muscular, tipped with a barbed lance of bone.

  There was a strange electric trilling from my left that rose to a crescendo and faded out with a whine.

  Out of the corner of my eye, some large object standing on the poop deck lit up from back to front, and discharged a white tree of light into the Saoshoma’s mouth. My heart surged as a deafening whip-crack turned the very air into a twelve-ton punch to the lungs.

  The electricity arced, crackling like fireworks as it went, and forked throughout the animal’s fleshy mouth in a series of bright flashes. The Saoshoma immediately drew back in pain.

  I recoiled from the bulwark, frightened and disoriented. For a moment, I was blinded. I stared dumbly at the monster through an afterimage that looked like a maple branch.

  Everyone nearby moved at once, and it struck me that Sawyer was near the railing. I fought through the knot of men, shouting, tearing sailors out of the way until I was standing next to the unarmored man. We both reached down and took hold of one of Sawyer’s arms, hauling him up and over the side.

  As he stumbled onto the deck, I could see the sunlight glowing behind his arm-hairs as they stood straight up.

  The Saoshoma shook its head, flinging sea-water across the ship in a mist of rain, and lunged again. In that instant, other than Sawyer, Noreen, and the unarmored man, all I could see was the inside of the thing’s mouth, hollow and bleeding, a panorama of teeth and tongue.

  Another flash of light and the lightning-cannon ripped the wind in twain, shooting another salvo of white-purple electricity into the beast’s mouth. The following slam of thunder hit me like a brick and I flinched, swearing out loud.

  The unarmored man glanced at me.

  I felt a sense of disconnected shock when I noticed that he had recognized my face.

  I took my friends’ hands and led them away from the Saoshoma, cutting through the crowd of men staring up at the monster in astonishment. I got the feeling that many of the young men had never seen it before, from their wide eyes and the hushed tones they spoke in as they made signs of genuflection in a bid for divine protection.

  We ran up the first staircase we saw, which happened to be the officers’ way to the upper level, and ran through the first doorway into what turned out to be a richly-furnished office.

  “We’re in the captain’s quarters,” said Noreen, slamming the door. “We probably shouldn’t be in here.”

  “We’ll tell them we just ran in here to get as much structure between us and the monster. Do you really want to go back out there?”

  “Sounds like a plan, Stan,” said Sawyer, and he ran to the bay window in the back of the room, pressing his face to the window in an attempt to see the beast. Below the window, the steamship’s gigantic propulsion combine rolled over and over with a dull roar.

  He didn’t have to wait long. There was a terrifying peal of sound that reverberated throughout the ship, a piercing wail of agony, and the entire room fell dark as the Saoshoma whipped right, crashing headlong into the ocean behind the ship. The resulting tide washed against the glass panes like the soapy spray of a car wash.

  Sawyer jerked away from the window as it crackled under the stress.

  The monster dove under, pouring itself back into the sea, and soon, with a whip of its tail, it was gone. A grand ovation erupted outside on the deck as the men cheered and applauded the Saoshoma’s escape and their own survival. They chanted something over and over, but I couldn’t decipher it.

  “I must be losing my mind after all,” said Sawyer, relaxing on the cushioned windowsill. “I could swear I heard those guys speaking English.”

  “You’re not the only one. I heard it too,” I agreed.

  The unarmored man stepped inside and closed the door, his longcoat swirling at his calves as he did so. He turned to assess us, giving me the first chance I’d had to examine him at length.

  He was a lean, handsome, swarthy man...his jet-black hair cascaded in lank, sensuous curls, framing an expressive mouth and honey-colored eyes as sharp as the tip of a sword. His dark olive complexion made him hard to pin down—he could have been Italian, Asian, part African.

  The overcoat was something of a thin leather kimono...its huge sleeves were tied up at the shoulder, freeing most of his arm to move. He was wearing canvas trousers and a vest, but just about everything else was made of unfinished leather, which gave him the aspect of a samurai and a barbarian simultaneously.

  He shrugged his right arm out of the overcoat, which was cinched with a belt at the waist, and flexed his fingers.

  The empty sleeve dangled down his back. Hidden in the folds of the coat, a polished sixgun glittered in the holster strapped across his chest. His slender, bare arm was a study in musculature.

  The gunslinger peered at me and spoke in that obscure flavor, his voice dusky and low. “We meet again, murderer. This time you do not leave my sight alive.”

  The Two-Faced Man

  I SAT IN THE CORNER OF the tiny brig cell, on the floor, hugging my knees. Sawyer was in the opposite corner with his legs crossed, cradling Noreen in the pit of his lap like a baby, her face buried in his shirt. His arms were wrapped around her, his fingers interlaced behind her back, and his lips rested on her head.

  I could occasionally hear him mumbling words of comfort into her pale blonde hair. They were sitting on a primitive, stained mattress, which lay on the floor. The sine-wave motion of the ship, nearly imperceptible, kept me in a constant state of mild nausea.

  “I’m sorry I got you guys into this mess,” I said, staring at the wall.

  They offered no reply. I wasn’t sure whether
to feel worse about that, or relieved. I glanced over at Sawyer. His expression was one of quiet despondency, his features tight and severe, his unfocused eyes locked on the foot of the mattress. A fly zipped around the room, finally lighting on my wrist. I waved it away.

  After a few minutes, I got up and stood at the door. We were in a small hardwood room with an entrance made of wrought-iron bars. If I pressed my face to the bars and cut my view to an extreme left angle, I could see down the hallway, where one of the armored sailors was leaning against the wall.

  “Hey,” I said. “Hey, guard. I don’t know who you think I am, but I’m not. Come here and talk to me, and I’ll explain everything.”

  He ignored me.

  I gripped the bars and fought the urge to shake the hell out of them, rattle them in a blind fury, scream demands and threats at the man. Demonstrating a capacity for violence would probably not play out in my favor. I just went back to my corner and sat down again.

  Sawyer cleared his throat. “Don’t apologize. We came on our own accord. In for a penny, in for a pound.”

  I shrugged. It felt like my heart was somewhere underneath my stomach.

  “Besides,” he said, “I get the feeling we’ll be okay. I’m not much of a betting man, or a churchy kinda guy, but I don’t think this is the end.”

  Noreen turned to regard me, squinting against the light. Her face was puffy and pale. “Yeah...I have faith. This is all a big misunderstanding, and these guys can’t be so hard-ass they’ll just ignore what you have to say. They’re Kingsmen, Ross: good people. A long line of good people.”

  “I hope you guys are right,” I said, and leaned against the bulkhead, closing my grainy, tired eyes.

  When I opened them again, I sensed that an hour or two had passed, as the hot light of the sun was no longer streaming into the brig at an angle, but falling straight down onto the windowsill above me, and onto my cold scalp. Sawyer and Noreen were fast asleep, sprawled on the mattress, Sawyer on his back and she huddled against him with her head on his stomach.