The Whirlwind in the Thorn Tree

by S. A. Hunt

  We waved to them as we left, and passed Kabma on the way out of the encampment. He said to us, “M’digdi ur vyo hium, Kingsman. Be careful in Ostlyn. Word is there are fomenters of dissent in the city. I hear whispers of rally and rout. This is why we are leaving for Fi Himdet so early in the month. My family and I want to be out of the way in case of insurrection.”

  “Understandable,” said Walter, shooting us a grim look as we left the caravan. “Take care, Kabma, and thanks for the warning. May your journey be more than its end.”

  The Iznoki rifleman tipped his hat as the forest enveloped us in birdsong and solitude. “May it be, friends.”

  The arid-lands continued even here, making for hours of hiking across a sparse timberland. Massive gray oaks stood at spacious distances from each other, leaving great gaping holes in the canopy that spilled in hot white sunlight and flat, reaching meadows.

  Standing among the oaks were lanky, towering pine trees with needle-branches only at the very top, which made them resemble giant chimneysweeps stood on end. The pines carpeted the ground with dry, crunchy brown needles through which punched berry-bushes and green-leafed briars. There were also swaying bobble-headed sunflowers, and fat clumps of hairy mothweed that looked like patches of bread-mold.

  At one point I saw a stand of foliage that looked like fiddlehead fern, but when I went to touch one of the fronds, instead of curling up protectively it spread its leaves so that it looked like a mimosa branch and tried to lick my hand.

  We came to the base of the mountain range that stood between us and Ostlyn, and started up a broad, shallow grade where it seemed someone or something had burned out a good deal of undergrowth. The woodland had thinned out until we were ants under a magnifying glass, and the birdsong faded until we were only accompanied by the constant rush of wind. Intimidating raptors perched in the treetops: brown barrel-bodied birds that focused on us with the unblinking intensity of their golden gimlet eyes.

  The red-brown soil was layered in a fine black char that stained our boots and trouser legs. The few remaining pines ended not in greenery, but gray ember-spikes that crumbled under our hands. Squat, knobby joshua-trees competed for moisture with jackalberry trees that reached into the razor-blue sky with dozens of lightning-fork fingers.

  Ominous black thistle-bushes offered us berries, served on sawblade leaves. Hulking boulders of shale and granite made for a labyrinth of black-smeared obstacles. Several times I spied little brown reptiles on them, scuttling out of sight.

  Looking back the way we came, we had climbed above the treetops. Behind us was a sea of green and gray that did not seem to move in the wind, but hissed at us just the same, a constant, dry rasping rush that sounded like a waterfall.

  Our path led up the seared mountainside into a deep divot between two wide buttes, like a pair of gapped teeth. As we got closer, and pushed through a stand of tamarind trees, I realized that the pass actually wound through a crack in a plateau. The trail lay at the bottom of a smooth-walled crevice so deep that the light struggled to reach us. Tufts of green jutted from holes in the cavern sides, serving as beards to the curved cheeks of weathered stone that swelled and ebbed like sideways sand-dunes. The further we walked, the darker it got until we were moving through honey-colored shade that took our shadows away. The ground was flat and soft with powdery red dirt and the walls bulged inward, making low, deep places filled with darkness.

  We alarmed some furry creature that got up and bounded deeper into the chasm; after another few minutes we encountered it sprawled on a rock ledge some five or six meters overhead. It was a slender mountain cat, with salt and pepper fur like an Australian shepherd dog and a lush mane of silver hair. It watched us with unnerving, judicious eyes that glinted like nickels in the artificial gloom. I recognized it as the cat that had been embroidered on Memne’s clothes, and thoughts of her gave me comfort. I wondered if I’d ever see her again.

  The Deon walked a little closer with me. “Before we reach the City, I feel I must address with you a certain effect produced in a man who survives exposure to the Acolouthis. It is the secret to the prowess of the gunslingers of Ain.”

  I holstered the pistol. “I’m listening.”

  “I can probably explain it in terms he’s more familiar with, if you don’t mind, Deon,” said Noreen. Our voices reverberated tightly in the narrow corridor. “I’ve done a bit of personal research into the things Ed described in his...records.”

  Walter tossed a shoulder. “By all means, mis’ra.”

  “Basically, the Acolouthis is a nootropic hallucinogen.”

  “Well, you’ve lost me already,” I said.

  “Where did I lose you?”

  “Is.”

  “What?”

  “You lost me at the word is.”

  “Oh.”

  “I’m kidding. Continue.”

  Noreen shot me an evil squint, and started speaking again. “The Acolouthis is a nootropic hallucinogen. The most powerful in all of human history. Back home it wouldn’t even have a street value. It would be priceless. Even the supply here is very limited. One of the stipulations of becoming King is that you have to undertake a voyage to find new growths of the fungus and bring them to Ostlyn. You can be nominated for coronation, but that’s just a formality unless you can retrieve some of the Sacrament.

  “That’s another story altogether. In addition to altering your personal reality—in effect opening a doorway and pushing you through it—it also alters your brain chemistry. In order to make the changes to your personal reality-fabric, it has to ramp up the efficiency of your mental system in order to make you process what you’re seeing. And see what you are processing.”

  Sawyer added, “Otherwise, the hallucinations would just fry your neurons and put you into catatonic shock. To put it into technical terms, the Sacrament installs a brand-new video card into your computer-brain so it can run the newest game—your hallucination. Otherwise your brain will crash.”

  “Right,” said Noreen.

  “That explains the slow-motion freakout I had back in Synecdoche. Welcome to the sticks!”

  They looked at me in confusion. I looked at my feet and pretended I hadn’t said anything.

  “And now you’ll have that high-powered graphics card in your head until the day you die. To break it down Mickey-Mouse-style—” said Noreen, “—that stuff made your brain chemistry so powerful it was able to temporarily rearrange a large enough piece of time and space to let you through. For about six hours, you were a demi-god.”

  “Holy shit.”

  “Basically you are now the proud new owner of an extremely overclocked brain. And now every time you get a big enough hit of adrenaline?”

  “Yeah?”

  “That supercognitive time-dilation comes back.”

  Walter was packing his pipe as he walked. “I’m afraid I didn’t understand any of that explanation myself, friends,” he said. “But it all sounded very legitimate and knowledgeable and did the trick. Good show. However, you forget one key point.”

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  “It is nigh useless without a certain level of preparation and training. You’ve got to learn to control the Sacrament before it can use you.”

  I had a little trouble wrapping my head around the connotations of what they were telling me. I had no trouble understanding the technical aspects of it, right, but...“Before it can use me?”

  “You didn’t think you were the one in the driver’s seat, did you?” asked Walter, grinning. “You are merely the conduit through which the Sacrament delivers the justice of the Kingsmen. We are in service to the power of the Acolouthis. We are the righteous hand of the Acolouthis. You will do well to respect it. The Sacrament abides us, not the other way around.”

  “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

  WE 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.