The Whirlwind in the Thorn Tree

by S. A. Hunt

  “I’m exceedingly glad to find that you were able to succeed where so many others have not. We might not have come back from wherever we were.”

  “Speaking of that...place,” said Sawyer, “What the hell was up with that? I thought I saw Ross down there with another Silen.”

  “That wasn’t me,” I said. “That was my brother Sardis.”

  “He looks that much like you?”

  “I guess he does.”

  “The last thing this Hel creature said was to find the Timecutter,” said Walter. “I’m assuming that was the weapon Sardis Bridger killed it with.”

  “What is the Timecutter?” I asked.

  “A sword. A legend. A child’s story, an old spinsters’ tale. It is said that the sword is the blade the Wolf Oramoz used to cut the Time Dragon in half. No one knows where it came from or what became of it, though there are certainly enough stories handed down through the centuries that tell of other heroes wielding it in the name of whatever kingdom was in vogue at the time.”

  Noreen patted my knee. “Ross, do you still have that piece of paper from Ed’s cottage?”

  I thought about it and shook my head. “No, I put it in my dad’s satchel, and I don’t have it anymore. The fiddler took it.”

  “Do you remember what it said?”

  “Something about a Dragonslayer.”

  Walter folded his arms and leaned back in his seat. “That’s another name of the Timecutter. Who do you suppose put that there?”

  “Well, since there wasn’t any blood in the house except for in the bed where he was shot,” I said, “I don’t suppose my dad did it, so that leaves Sardis himself. But why would he do that?”

  Sawyer said, “Did you hear what he said when he stabbed Hel Grammatica with the Dragonslayer? He was talking gibberish.”

  “Glossolalia,” said Noreen. “Divine inspiration. I’ll bet your brother was being influenced by the Silen Hel called ‘Rhetor Logos’.”

  “I’m grateful for the creature’s involvement there at the last moment,” said Walter. “At least now we know what’s going on. I wonder why they felt the need to murder Lord Eddick, though.”

  “Maybe he knew too much. Hel was his muse, after all. I’m sure Ed heard more from him than stories about Normand.”

  “Of the King,” said Walter, “I believe we would do well to go to Normand with our questions. No doubt he and my father may be more informed than we on these matters. And if Eddick was slain for knowing too much, they may be next on the Rhetor’s list.”

  “I wonder what Sardis was trying to tell us,” said Sawyer. “Maybe he was trying to tell us where the Timecutter is going to be hidden. But why?”

  Walter told him, “He is obviously not acting of his own volition. I recall what transpired during the Mokehlyr celebration when Ross spotted him in the crowd and gave chase. He denied involvement, but fled.”

  “I don’t figure he wanted to be locked up or interrogated,” said Sawyer. “Probably even afraid of this Rhetor guy.”

  “I remember the other word on the paper was Totem,” I said. “Sardis killed Hel with the Timecutter. Maybe he wanted us to know it can be used on the Rhetor.”

  “Totem. The word is meaningless to me,” said Walter. “Like I’ve proposed, if anyone is better equipped with knowledge than ourselves, it would be Eddick’s confidants Normand Kaliburn and my father. Let us continue to Ostlyn and see if he knows anything about Eddick’s death and this ‘Totem’. We must warn them of the Rhetor’s machinations as well. Let’s pray we aren’t too late.”

  The Deon tamped pear leaves into a pipe and searched himself for a match. As he was lighting his pipe, he reached into his jacket and unholstered one of his Kingsman pistols. He handed it to me. “Now that you’ve been through the Trial of the Sacrament, that makes you a Kingsman—well, a fledgling, at any rate. I wager you didn’t even know, did you?”

  “What?” I asked in astonishment, looking down at the battle-worn revolver. It was long and the barrel was grooved with etchings in the exotic Ainean script.

  Sawyer and Noreen were beaming. “That’s awesome, man!” said Sawyer. “Congratulations? I guess?”

  “It’s an honor,” I said to Walter. “Both the pistol and the promotion.”

  “Bravery is not the absence of fear,” said Walter. “—That’s what it says. On the pistol. I gather you can’t read Ainean.”

  “Afraid not.”

  “Hold onto that, until we can get your father’s guns back from your brother. It may come in handy at some point.”

  “Will do,” I said. “What does the other one say, by the way?”

  “Mercy is not the absence of strength.”

  We sat there for a moment before we all realized the train wasn’t going anywhere. I got up and went out into the dark hallway, and went from room to room looking for other passengers. There was no one in our car and no one in the adjacent cars either. As I was coming back from the dining car, I met Walter.

  “We are alone, I take it,” he said. “As I expected. The other passengers are regrettably still down there in that tower.”

  “Oh, God,” I said, feeling my heart drop into my stomach. “All those people.”

  He put a gentle hand on my chest and gave me a steely glare. “Don’t you dare blame yourself. You could only do so much with what you were given. You barely rescued us—you never would have been able to haul all those thousands of people out as well. Tens of thousands, even, perhaps. You are no superhuman, Ross.”

  I made note of the fact that he had called me by my name, instead of bastard. I had crossed some kind of threshold. I felt the flush of embarrassed pride.

  “You couldn’t save them all, but maybe you can keep more people from ending up down there. Maybe we can even save some of the ones already down there. Now that we’ve won the battle, it is time to address the war.” His lips pursed at the sight of my worried face, and he cupped the back of my neck with his hand. “Are you with me? Now is not the time to falter or doubt yourself.”

  I stood there, gazing into the sword-edge of his eyes, and gradually calmed down. I felt a hand on my shoulder and saw that Noreen was standing behind me.

  “He’s right,” she said. “Now we’ve seen the whites of their eyes. It’s time to take the fight to them.”

  I considered their supportive words, and touched her hand in gratitude.

  “Now what?” I asked, once I felt confident again.

  Walter flung the door open, bathing us in moonlight. “Now? We start walking.”

  _______

  The world lay bare before us, a meadow of spring-born wildflowers that unfurled to the distance like a giant quilt. Motes of white drifted up from the undergrowth as we walked, kicked up from the weeds mingling with the red and blue blossoms. They made the night look as if snow were falling into the sky, where the double moons hung logy and ponderous among the too-bright stars. Moonlight gave the fibrous white matter an unearthly pearlescent-green glow, and each tuft sparkled like satin as it turned, rising, in the air.

  “The mothweed blooms,” said Walter, as we made our way toward a fervent red glow on the horizon. He sneezed. “Late spring gives me fits.”

  “Do you know where we are?” asked Sawyer.

  “Judging by the flora and the mountains, I’d say somewhere outside of the village of Teg White, just on the other side of the Longmarch.”

  “That puts us a day’s walk to the Weatherhead, then,” Sawyer said, and pointed at the warm red glow on the northern horizon, saying to me, “That’s what that glow is, Ross—Council City Ostlyn.”

  “What an odd place to end up,” said Noreen.

  Walter gestured with his pipe and said, “Girl, if there’s one thing I’ve learned in my life—recently, in particular—it’s never to look a gift steed in the mouth.”

  “That’s a saying back where we come from too. What a co-inky-dink!”

  The Deon fell quiet and grim as we walked. I held the pistol in both my hands,
studying its mechanisms and etchings, my feet mindlessly eating up the ground in front of me. —Eating! Damn, I was hungry. Even as I acknowledged it, my stomach growled in anticipation. The gnawing hunger hit me all at once, as if it had been lying in wait to ambush me.

  I put the pistol in my pocket and took off my knapsack. I had found it searching the train for provisions, and filled it with stuff from the train’s galley. Miraculously, the lifeless train had still been stocked with fresh food as if we’d stepped right off the Mary Celeste.

  Okay, it was a lady’s handbag, but I’m going to call it a knapsack.

  I was ravenously violating some sort of fruitcake when Noreen saw me and asked me for the sack. Soon we were all cramming our faces. I said around a mouthful of cake, “I wonder if this is what happened to all those ghost-ships and explorer expeditions. The mysterious disappearances.”

  “Whaf?” asked Sawyer, his own mouth packed. “Dint ungastan you.”

  I chewed up the cake and swallowed it, then repeated myself. “Like the Mary Celeste. Amelia Earhart. Ambrose Bierce.”

  Noreen hesitated, then said, “I was going to say that’s a bit farfetched, but I don’t find anything farfetched anymore.”

  After what felt like an hour of walking, we began to see a cluster of buildings at the other end of the meadow, under a heavy, stormcloud-like canopy of oak trees.

  The distant shapes were cloaked by the night in angles of cold blue and black...I could just make out the warm orange lights in the windows: tiny, bright squares in the dark. As we approached the little village, I realized that they were tents, erected in a clearing in the sparse undergrowth.

  They were cylindrical and at least two stories tall, with walls of stiff hide that barely moved in the breeze. The upper floors were tied off to the trees with a web of ropes, and the bottom rooms were tied to stakes in the ground.

  We came around the side of a tent, picking our way through the stake-ropes so as not to trip, when we saw a campfire. The man that had been tending it stood up and aimed a muzzle-loader at us. I could see that he was an Iznoki, dressed in a loose, flowing tunic and sandals.

  His eyes glowed a lambent green in the firelight. “Zui um vair zed tyir va nui?”

  “Lyirui pigylli’ht ziim rui, yrm um f’huirti.” said Walter, holding up his hands. “Yrm um rid hiumukih’m.” The last word reminded me of the Dari language. Hee-oo-moo-kee-um.

  “Ig um ‘r Kingsman.”

  The Iznoki lowered the rifle and spoke in a language we could understand. “Welcome to our camp, Kingsman. Please sit and spend my watch at my fire with me.”

  Walter went to him and gave him the shield-bow salute, and we all sat down on logs and rocks around the flickering embers. The Iznoki dropped another log on the flames, which erupted in a spiraling cloud of crimson glitter. The breeze carried the sparks into the treetops, where they faded away into ash.

  While we needed to be on the move, I appreciated the opportunity to rest and get something more substantial to eat than cakes and cold pastries.

  “My name is Kabma,” said the Iznoki, tossing a hand at the pot hanging over the fire. “Have some soup. There is plenty to go around.”

  “Peui tergui,” said Sawyer.

  There was a stack of empty tin cups next to the pot frame. He picked one up and ladled a smoking helping of soup into the cup, handing it to Noreen, then went back for a cup himself.

  She smiled up at him, “I didn’t know you knew how to speak Iznok.”

  “All I know is thank you,” he said with a smirk.

  Once we’d gotten settled in, Kabma asked, “What brings you into the foothills?”

  I blew on my soup. I thought about telling him some sort of convoluted story about our train getting ambushed, but I decided to take an honest tack and said, “We were heading to Ostlyn on a train when we were ambushed by an otherworldly being and my friends here were thrown into the Void-Between-The-Worlds.”

  I continued to talk, and told him the whole story in a brief tale, interrupting myself a few times to slurp my soup. It was satisfying and onion-pungent, with a tart lemon bite. Something like water chestnuts floated in it with boiled cabbage. When I was done talking, Kabma stared at us wordlessly for a beat, then burst into loud laughter.

  “Sounds like you’ve had a very productive day,” he said in a doubtful, if amused, tone. “If you were looking for a place to tell a tall tale, there is no better place than a campfire, eh?”

  “Part of the road we were on slid down a hill,” said Walter. “Our stagecoach overturned, one of our pohtir broke a leg and the other one ran away. We’ve been walking all evening. I can’t tell you how glad we were to see you out here. I for one am ecstatic for the chance to rest before we head over the pass into Council City.”

  Kabma kept chuckling and said, “Well it is nice to meet such heroes in the dead of night such as this. I am honored to sup with men who will no doubt be legends by summer. You, boy, you should make a living of being a storyteller.”

  I smiled at my friends. “I’m strongly considering it.”

  We huddled over our cups of soup by the fire. I could feel the heat pouring into my bones and radiating through my body; my face felt taut and my eyes got grainy. I slid down off the rock I was sitting on and leaned against it, dozing off and on at the fire’s edge, lulled by the crickets and treefrogs trilling their obdurate, fragile sonnets through the vaults of the forest. I had a brief dream in which I was wading through a dark, ominous swamp, carrying a inflatable pool toy, a large and vividly-colored unicorn.

  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 a
t 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

  WE 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.