by S. A. Hunt
When he noticed me staring at him, the man smiled beatifically and I looked out the window, embarrassed.
These larger towns wheeled past in pale panoramas of sandstone edifices, like thousands of sandcastles in succession. I saw blunt, low forts made of massive bricks, their ramparts, towers and corners bulbous and soft-cornered. At a distance, those looked like tall sand dunes with windows cut into them.
There were also tall and majestic cathedrals with spindly towers, all covered in honey-comb mosaics of sea-colored tiles and limned with gold etchings of fantastic beasts that writhed and rampaged across their sides and over their keystones.
Long lines of storefronts displaying all manner of crude wares stretched for miles, overshadowed by brick mezzanines, their faces a panoply of dizzying geometric patterns and designs. There were also many damaged buildings, great swaths of destruction where I didn’t see many people milling about. Gaping holes yawned in the eaves and sides of structures, open to the elements, rimmed with teeth of shattered masonry.
“The War,” said Sawyer, when I asked him about it.
I gave him a look of confusion.
“Oh right,” he said, glancing at the Aineans in the carriage and leaning in to speak in a conspiratorial tone, “The climactic battle in the last book took place here. Several No-Men walked across the floor of the Aemev Ocean from K-Set. They came ashore near Salt Point, and proceeded to march across Ain toward Council City Ostlyn, leaving a trail of death and carnage. They were put down by Normand Kaliburn, Clayton Rollins, and the Griever Ardelia Thirion.
“I think,” he said, after a beat, “Ed never finished that one.”
A few minutes after we’d passed the outskirts of the town, we came into a heathered valley and then out into an arid meadow of brush, wavy with rolling hillocks. In the distance, I could see something that looked like a mangled battleship lying on its side, rusting in the sun.
Someone had built a shack in the shadow of it, and that someone sat in a chair out front watching the train pass. He waved.
“That’s a No-Man,” said Read. “The first one to be defeated. That was what demonstrated to Normand and his lot that they could indeed be killed. The Swordwives were instrumental in their victory.”
I marveled at the massive steel homunculus. It was bigger than anything I’d imagined.
It resembled a sort of battleship with great hind legs like a dinosaur, and the front of it bristled with guns, long turrets with polka-dot coolant holes. In my mind I’d held images of the wing-armed robot-men from old Superman cartoons, something cartoonishly antagonistic and just a few meters tall. Instead, I found them to be nothing short of nightmarish. A robot monster out of an H. P. Lovecraft story. I couldn’t fathom how an army could stand up to them, much less two pistol-packing cowboys and a sword-wielding Calamity Jane.
The sun was low in the west, and gray mountains had come into being to the east when I noticed that we were passing into a place of sand dunes. They stood taller than the train itself, mountainous hillocks comprised of what appeared to be dark green sand like crushed soda bottles.
The sunset reflected itself in trillions of sparkling flakes. The rose-colored light swept up the sides of the dunes over and over in satin-silver crescents, like fireworks that never dreamed of dying, and burst into oblivion at the top of every one of them. Monumental buttes of pale green, like oxidized bronze, jutted out of the dunes.
This must have been the Emerald Desert I’d seen described in Ed’s notes, an expanse of sedimentary chromium-mica pulverized and deposited here by a long-dry river analogous to the Mississippi. It certainly glittered like emeralds.
As we flickered through the deeper moss shadows of the dune-valleys, we heard a knock at the door.
It was a refreshments cart, pushed through the train cars by another one of the small blue-skinned people. This one was a small, childish woman in a watercolor sarong; she had no shirt on because she had no need of one, having no breasts. The tiny holes along her collarbone irised endlessly, like the shutter of a camera that never stopped taking pictures.
The fine wrinkles around her eyes and the gray in her hair told me she was older than she appeared. She spoke to us and it dawned on me that she had no nostrils—her nose was merely a ridge in the center of her face. “Thurgm, mihe?”
The man in the green tunic smiled to her, and handed her a few of the Council Talent coins. “D’nerg ayo, ert nihim-e cuddci mylid’nurk iq-dhe wy ayo.”
The blue girl tried to refuse, but he wouldn’t let her. “Ry, u serry’d degi d’nimi.”
“U urmum’d,” said the man. “Degi d’nilh u zucc pi y’wirtit.”
She handed out little cakes and cookies with fruits and nuts baked into them, and wooden cups of some sweet, cool water that reminded me at once of both coconuts and honeysuckle nectar. I sipped it, trying to savor it and make it last.
I spied a tray of pastries that looked like turnovers on the cart and asked for one. It turned out to be a sort of savory herb falafel, wrapped in flatbread, and it was delicious. The smell of fennel and coriander made my stomach knot up and growl.
“So what do you do?” I asked the man in green.
He smiled, the toad-goiter swelling and subsiding. “I am a trader, young man. And yourself?”
“I’m an...artist, I guess.”
“You guess?” he asked. “You don’t know what you are?”
“Sometimes I think I do. Some days I just don’t know.”
“Sounds like you need a change of scenery!” croaked the trader.
It was my turn to smile. I glanced at Sawyer and Noreen when I said, “I think I found it.”
“I am very glad to hear that,” said the trader. “Where are you heading now?”
“To Maplenesse. My friends and I...I guess you could say we’re visiting family.”
“Well,” he remarked. “You could do worse than to travel with Kingsmen. You are as safe as you could possibly be.”
The bottle-green sands of the Emerald Desert faded with the day, and the evening brought rolling foothills crested with heather and milkweed that swayed in the breeze. Ancient fenceposts jutted up from the hilltops like memorials. The double moons of Destin had just risen when we reached Geary Pass, a tiny mining village in the mountains southwest of Maplenesse.
“It’s only about an hour’s ride from here,” said Walter, as we got off the train. We all had to piss, and no matter how many times I offered to hold her hands, I couldn’t convince Noreen to hang her ass off the back of the caboose and water the tracks.
“Good,” said Sawyer. “I’m looking forward to a hot meal and a good night’s sleep.”
“I don’t know how much sleep you’re going to get,” said Read. “Mokehlyr’s going full-sail this week, startin’ yesterday. Huge festival. Shenanigans and drunken carousing every night.”
I snorted a chuckle. “Sounds like my kind of party, then.”
“Who are you kidding?” asked Walter. “You’re a wallflower if ever I saw one.”
Waffle-Eaters & Doppelgängers
WE COULD SEE THE LIGHTS OF Maplenesse as we came down the other side of the mountain a little while later. The urban heart of the city framed a small body of water. The lake in turn was nestled in the belly of a deep, wide valley. Curving streets filled with electric lamps and oil lanterns made the valley into a bowl of glittering night-life.
It was a tremendous horseshoe built around the lake, and each semi-circle described successive rings of buildings that became more and more rural as one climbed the walls of the valley.
The south end of the massive box canyon faded into a forest of maples bisected by the river that fed the lake, and as we came out of the pass and wound our way down the side of the ridge into the city center, I got a distant glimpse of wooden buckets hanging from the trees for sap-collecting.
The train slid out from behind a copse of maples and past the end of an alleyway. We were greeted with the dazzling sight of paper lanterns strung fr
om the eaves and people dancing on the balconies overhead.
Maplenesse was a beautiful city. As the train encircled it on a great arcing track, it reminded me both of Mexican and Mediterranean architecture in ways I couldn’t quite define.
The sand-colored buildings were rarely less than two stories tall, and all the roofs were made of the same saltillo tile as Salt Point, but in a hundred more colors. Many of the walls were painted with colorful murals, scenes of merriment and derring-do, and most of the people wore flowing knit ponchos and tabards in brown and blue sea-colors.
The station abruptly enveloped us in darkness, muffling the chaos of celebration. Electric lanterns slid into view, filling the windows with amber light. The throng of passengers disembarking turned the platform into a shadowy, crowded labyrinth of dark strangers.
Noreen was beaming as we stepped off of the train.
“You must be feeling much better,” I said. “Do you know anything about this festival?”
“Oh yes,” she said, clutching Sawyer’s elbow. “This is the spring maple harvest festival of the Tekyr. They’re the blue people with the air-holes on their necks. I can’t believe we’re just in time for this year’s Mokehlyr!”
“I hope you like waffles,” said Sawyer, with a smirk. “Especially corn waffles. They’re the local delicacy this time of year.”
“Corn waffles? Like, cornmeal?”
“Yup.”
I looked at Noreen. “Are waffles normally made out of cornmeal?”
“No, Ross.”
“So it’s spring here?” I asked. “It’s coming up on November back home. That’s funny. I wonder if they celebrate some sort of Christmas kind of holiday here.”
“There’s no Christ. No Bible. Why would there be a Christmas? There’s not even a Santa Claus.”
“That’s a crying shame,” I said, feeling like an idiot.
“Nah,” said Noreen. “There are plenty of other holidays, just as awesome.”
Walter came out of the car behind us, hefting a duffel bag over one shoulder. He was grinning. “This is what I came home for, children! How could I stand myself if I were to miss my hometown’s biggest harvest fair? Come, bastard, let us party until the sun rises wool-headed and aching.”
He took my arm and guided me to the station entrance as if he were kidnapping a blind man, then shoved me out into the street, where I almost collided with a Tekyr man, who spun in surprise and handed me a wooden flask. “Thurg, thurg, z’nudi ler! Sici phedi zud’n om!”
“I don’t know what you just said,” I yelled over the commotion, trying to make him understand me. He simply grinned and clapped me on the arm, and went back to dancing. Another Tekyr man sat on a stoop nearby in a robe and a huge woven hat with maple leaves tied into it, playing some steel instrument that looked like a cross between a banjo and a lute.
Walter took off his hat and did a little jig with a Tekyr woman and two human women. They were applauding his fancy footwork as he asided to me, smirking and shaking his head, “Don’t worry about it! Just enjoy yourself for now! We’ll be going to Ostlyn soon to speak with my father and the King!”
_______
I surprised myself by having a very good time. Children hooted on little wooden whistles and shook rattles, while men strummed lutes and blew trumpets, while women wheezed alongside with garish accordions and pitter-pattered on big booming bongos, blending into a great big bacchanalia of what sounded like merengue and zydeco.
After I finished the rather strong drink the Tekyr man gave me, I couldn’t help but join the square dance going on around a huge fountain by the wharf. Sawyer and Noreen and I joined hands with a line of people whose skin ranged a dozen shades of a dozen colors, and I learned that my two (now very sweaty) best friends knew how to jitterbug.
The look in their eyes, as they careened through the crowd matching each other step for step and smile for smile, could have melted a thousand glaciers.
At one point I ended up in a waffle-eating contest with three other people: an unusually tall and skinny Tekyr man with braided hair named Furmyr Hirwyhi, the trader in green from the train (whose name turned out to be Lennox Thackeray), and a very beefy young man named Josh who looked like he would win handily.
Maplenessian waffles, I discovered, were like silver dollar pancakes: small, and round, and toasted, so that they were like fluffy cakes with griddle designs embossed in them, and a crusty exterior that held up to the toppings that were piled on them.
And they did pile: scoops of sweet cream, drizzles of maple syrup, with bits of a fruit that looked like a blue pomegranate, had flesh like an apple, and tasted like a cross between a lime and a strawberry. The tangy, refreshing culipihha was surprisingly well-suited to the task.
Thackeray and I made the initial mistake of trying to eat them with a fork. Josh and Furmyr reached right into the pile and ate them with their hands like sandwiches, cramming the waffles ass-over-teakettle into their faces. It wasn’t even half a minute before their chests and faces were plastered in a slime of cream and syrup.
We put down our forks, glanced at each other, and did the same.
To our benefit, we “won” the contest by forfeit when one of the children replenished our opponents’ waffles with some that had been preloaded with firecrackers, so that when they reached for the next load the stack exploded in their faces, throwing a geyser of syrup and culipihha all over the plaza.
Josh let out a shrill scream, threw his waffle sandwich over his shoulder, and leapt atop the table growling, “I’m gonna kill you little shits!” then ran into the crowd covered from head to toe in food.
To our shock, the customary method for getting cleaned up after the waffle-eating contest was to be picked up by the audience and crowd-surfed to the quay, where you were flung into the lake. Josh showed up with a pair of little boys tucked under his arms like footballs and ran right off the end of the dock into the water, regardless of the boys’ protests.
Since nobody really won the contest, all four of us were hoisted into the air and carried through the streets, Josh holding the trophy over his head, which turned out to be a sort of tiki or a fertility statue, carved out of a maple log.
_______
I found my feet somewhere at the end of a road, in the shadow of a long row of balconies overlooking the celebration. I stumbled out into the street behind the crowd as it surged around the corner, and caught my heel on the rough cobblestones, pinwheeling my arms and falling over on my ass.
I lay on my back in the street, my brain pinwheeling, soaked to the bone, trying to regain my faculties.
I opened my eyes and saw an eerily familiar face looking down at me from one of the balconies. There was a man leaning on the wrought-iron railing, and when he saw me, his smile vanished as fast as my own.
He was gone before I could say anything, and it took me too long to recognize him.
The only time I’d ever seen that face...was in a mirror.
I scrambled to my feet and ran into the building just in time to see my doppelgänger round the bottom of a stairwell and shove through a door into the night. I was standing in the dim lobby of a hostel, a bookshelf to my left, the clerk’s counter to my right.
I plunged through behind him. Luckily, the cold water of the lake had sobered me enough that I managed not to tumble headlong to my death. I emerged into an alleyway just in time to see the other-me run sidelong up a wall and pirouette over a fence like an Olympic ice-skater doing a triple-axle.
His overcoat slipped over the edge and he was gone. Like magic. Really, really athletic magic.
“You gotta be shittin me,” I said to myself.
I grabbed the top of the fence, hauled myself atop it like a sack of grain, and toppled off onto the other side. I landed on my shoulder in a wheeled cart, which tipped over and dumped me onto the street.
The other-me was several meters ahead, about to duck into a crowd of revelers. As the cart fell with a thud, he paused to glance at me, and I him
.
We locked eyes and he ran. I struggled to my feet and gave chase. He was gone in an instant.
I shoved my way into the onlookers and through, yelling excuses and apologies the entire way. We were in an intersection between the alley and three long thoroughfares. I stood on a chair to see above the crowd and saw him hauling ass into a long strip of marketplace stalls.
I grew more and more amazed as I pursued him. The other-me seemed to be rather good at dodging and weaving, finding the best way through every obstacle. He came to a thick knot of people and angled to the right, diving under a table, somersaulting, and coming out the other side at a run. I knew I would never be able to do that, so I jumped onto the table and ran across the top of it.
Unfortunately it was laden with fruit, so my footing was less than optimal.
I burst through a rack of hanging clothes and slipped on a pile of something, sprawling headlong onto the cobblestones on the other end under a pile of shirts.
I heard several people gasp at my injury. I ignored them, astonished that I hadn’t knocked my teeth out on the street, and launched myself back into the chase. Someone asked me if I was all right, someone else asked me what the devil I thought I was doing.
The other-me took two lunging steps, ran up a wall, grabbed the rim of the balcony overhead, and lifted himself up onto it.
I missed snatching his ankles by about two-tenths of a second.
He looked over the edge at me and ran away. I ducked into the building he had gone into and it turned out to be a haberdashery. The man behind the counter railed at me. “What are you doing, ulpisuci? My shop is not a playground!”