by S. A. Hunt
She chewed her lip. “Okay.” She expected him to take her hand in his, but he passed through the doorway into a dim, narrow corridor. She followed him down it. As they walked through the gloom toward the dancing light of a torch, the gunslinger said, “You are afraid of me.”
Noreen said nothing, but she had no need to.
“I understand your reticence,” he said. “You’ve been privy to every last thing I’ve had to do in my life. I am in an unusual position, you must know. It’s not every father whose life has been laid bare to his children. Most men, at least, have the advantage of omission. I at least have the advantage of tardiness, I suppose. I cannot teach you what not to do, because you’ve already done it.”
They came to a tall wooden door. Normand unlocked it with a key and pushed both sides open. The door split in the middle and swung apart; a breeze flowed in to take their place. A rich, warm light filled the hallway around his lean silhouette.
The room they entered was a round parlor twenty paces across. In the center of a round wooden table was a hurricane lantern. A half-dozen books lay scattered around it, half of which were well-thumbed volumes of The Fiddle and the Fire. Others were treatises on war, poetry anthologies, and nature encyclopedias.
A cool copper teapot stood among them, along with an empty teacup that had a tiny Saoshoma writhing along its rim. More books stood in teetering stacks around the room, at least a hundred or more of them. Mired somewhere in that forest of literature was a plush red wingback chair with cherrywood lion-feet.
Paintings and mounted game heads hung from the walls, the former in various states of tilt and the latter draped with all manner of accoutrements. A roebuck gawped at nothing, a multicolored scarf dangling from its antlers like bunting. An off-kilter frame held an oil painting of a woman. A bird that looked like a pale brown turkey perched on a lacquered log that had a hat hanging from one end of it.
A staircase followed the curvature of the wall up the left-hand side to the second floor. It all looked very Merlinesque, and Noreen surprised herself by feeling more at ease.
“I’ve found myself in many dark situations, doing dark things,” Normand said in a slow gravelly tone, his fingertips brushing the surfaces of Ed’s books. He pulled out one of the table’s diamondwood chairs and sat down in it with a sigh, picking up one of the Fiddle books and indicating it. “But I am not an evil man.” He punctuated the sentiment by looking up at her across the table, his brow crinkling.
Am I?, his face seemed to say.
Noreen sat in the red armchair and slipped out of her boots, pulled her feet up under her. They sat like this for a long moment, basking in each others’ presence like lizards on a too-hot rock. The rough fabric of the chair felt good on her bare feet, contrasting against the uncomfortable silence.
Normand started to speak, and stopped himself—and then said, “Would you like some coffee?”
“No,” said the girl. She smoothed out her sundress, and picked little knots off where the fabric was pilling. “You’re not.”
“Hmm?” he said, and paused in the middle of getting up.
She looked up at him with his own arctic eyes. “You’re not evil.”
“Ahh,” he said, and stood up. He seemed to hesitate, then went through a nearby door. She could hear him rooting around in a kitchen, banging pots together, pouring water.
She slid out of the chair and padded into the kitchen. It was a surprisingly cramped space, little more than an oven, a pantry, and a horseshoe-shaped counter with wall cupboards. A chopping-block island stood in the middle, and he tended to bump it with his hip when he wasn’t paying attention as he moved around the rough slate floor.
“I run into this thing all the time,” he said. “I’m surprised it hasn’t fallen over.”
“It’s a very small kitchen.”
“It’s all it must be. We usually have an attendant around during the day for breakfast and midday meals, but after the sun goes down, we’re on our own. Just as well,” Normand said, crinkling his crow’s-feet. “I don’t eat much.”
He put a kettle on the stove to boil and turned around, leaning against the counter and folding his arms.
“So—have you made a decision on whether you’re going to stay here, or...go back to Earth? For good, I mean.”
“It’s not etched in stone yet,” she said, “but I think I want to stay here.”
The gunslinger nodded, staring down at the chopping block. “I really am glad you’re here. I’d— If it’s all right with you, I’d like to have you around. Around here, you know—I’d like to get to know you. I don’t know how you feel about that.”
Noreen went to put her hands in the pockets of her jacket, but she wasn’t wearing it anymore. She clasped them behind her back.
“I can see you’ve had a little time to think about it all,” said the King.
“Yeah.”
“Taking you to Earth wasn’t my idea, you know. Wasn’t even my call. I wasn’t even here for it. Not to say he did the wrong thing, or made the wrong call, but it was all Ed. In retrospect, I’m glad he did it. —Took you away from here. I wasn’t here to protect you, and at the time, you needed it.”
He anxiously twirled the corner of his mustache and added, “I’d like a second chance to do that. To take care of you. If you want to stick around with this old man. My house always has been, and forever will be, your house.”
Noreen pursed her lips together and felt the sting of tears burn her sinuses. She fought to contain them and nodded, smiling, her brows knitting together.
He tossed a thumb over his shoulder. “I’m making tea, if you’d like some of that. Maybe you aren’t a coffee drinker.”
“Okay,” she said, her voice breaking.
“That sound good?”
“Yeah. Yeah, I think I’d like that.”
“W’go get that teapot sitting in there on the table so I can wash it out.”
She did just that. When she returned, Normand was lathering up a rag in the basin. “Oh,” he said, and turned, wiping his hands with a towel. He took the teapot off her hands and put it on the stove, but to his surprise, the girl stepped in against him, hugging herself, and he understood what she meant to do without being told.
She laid her ear on his chest, her hair tickling his nose, and the old man put his arms around her. One of his ursine hands cupped her head against the silky robe and he kissed her on the part of her blonde hair.
“You said earlier that you were always there with me,” he said. “All the way back to the beginning. I’ve been thinking, maybe I always knew you were there. All of you, but especially my Noreen. Even then. Perhaps your brave little heart is what kept me going. What kept me from giving up.”
“Maybe,” she said, her arms and hands clasped to her chest. His robe smelled of wood-smoke and the cloying-sweet smell of the jacarandas. She stepped back and he beheld her at arms’ length.
“You may have my eyes, but you’ve your mother’s face.”
“My mother....” she said. “Who is my mother? Is....”
“The kindest, toughest, smartest lady I’ve ever known in my life. Lucas...took her life while I was overseas. It was...actually the impetus driving Edward’s decision to take the three of you to Earth. He knew that if Lucas could take Josephine away from me, he could take any of you.”
“That was my mother?” asked Noreen. She squinted up at his weathered face. “Josephine Rose? You finally got together with her?”
“Yes. By the gods, she was really something.”
“If what Ed wrote is true, then I liked her. I wish I could have met her; could you tell me about her?”
“I think you two would have gotten along famously,” said Normand, as the teapot began to whistle. “I ran into her again about a year before the No-Men came to Ostlyn.”
They retired to the sitting room and conversed until their cups were empty and the dregs in the teapot were cold. They talked about a very beautiful woman whose life was taken
far before her time. They spoke about the past and they spoke about the future.
And to turn things on their head for a change, a storied old knight sat and listened to a long tale about a lonesome little girl that never once suspected that she was a real princess.
The darkness was rent by a disc of white light. Normand found himself standing in it, as if illuminated from above by a spotlight. “Heyo?” he called into the shadows, the taste of the Sacrament cloying on his dry tongue. “Anybody?”
He realized that his voice was different; squeaky, small, thin. He looked down at his hands and saw the smooth, unmarked hands of a child. When his head rose again, he was standing in his childhood bedroom, draped in the gloom of midnight. He gripped his father’s gun tight in the hand that had not been torn by the mountain cats.
A figure lay in his bed, facing the wall.
He approached it and when he touched it, Pack came awake in the bed himself, disoriented and displaced, still holding the pistol. Something had hit the roof. He smelled smoke.
This time he would not let them take his family. Six bullets for six men.
—The Fiddle and the Fire, vol 4 “The Truth and the Trial”
Revelations
SAWYER AND I GOT UP AND dressed as soon as we awoke and went up to the Weatherhead. Noreen was still dead asleep, having come to bed some time after midnight. The sun hung low over the eastern horizon, mounted on a wall painted in a thousand shades of red. Scrims of purple and orange lay shredded across the sky, dusted with the night’s dying stars. The sounds of the waking city drifted to us from the maze unfurling down the mountain like a bride’s train.
My mind wandered as we walked, and I became introspective, contemplating the events of the last several days. I realized that I was remembering the train-ride to Ostlyn in an unbroken sequence, as if the whirlwind had never happened. I even recalled getting off the train on the opposite side of the city and missing our run-in with Lennox Thackeray.
Looking back, it felt as if I were looking at two timelines at the same time, and the sheer implausibility of having existed in two simultaneous temporal stretches made my head hurt.
I couldn’t quite put the sensation into words, so I decided to wait until we spoke with Normand to bring it up. Perhaps he had some insight that could encapsulate and explain it better than I could. We passed through the innermost rampart and started walking up the stairs to the capitol entrance.
“I need coffee,” I said, shivering a little. I carried one of the chestpieces tucked into my armpit like a picture book.
“You always need coffee.”
“I’m not sure what I ate yesterday, but I need you to help me make sure I never eat it again.”
“Why?” Sawyer asked.
“I dreamt I was trapped at the bottom of a well with the Golden Girls. The last thing I remember was seeing Estelle Getty bite into a rat like a slice of watermelon, and then I woke up sweating.”
He laughed. “Will do.”
We’d gotten a great night’s sleep—I felt better than I had in a long time—but the last ten steps were still a bit of a trek. When we got to the top, we paused to catch our breath. A gunslinger in green strolled over and greeted us with a ready smile, taking off his hat. He was a thin, handsome fellow, with narrow-set eyes and a beakish nose.
“Good mor-ning!” he said. “Welcome to the seat of Ain.”
“The home of the Whopper,” I said.
“The huh?” said the retainer.
“Nothing. We’re here to see the King.”
“Is that so!” he said. “Who may I say is calling? The King is in exercises, and normally does not like to be disturbed.”
“The Chiral’s son,” said Sawyer, “—which would be myself, and the scribe’s son, which would be this unsmiling savage slouching here.” He rapped on my chest as if it were a door.
“Hey,” I said. “I smile. When nobody’s looking, I smile a whole lot.”
“And that’s why you’re creepy.”
The gunslinger bowed over his fist; we did the same. “You must be the individuals we were briefed on this morning. I will go and announce you.”
“No, that’s all right,” said Sawyer. “We’ll go in ourselves. No need.”
He seemed put off balance by the shirking of custom, but recovered quickly. “Very well, then. Go on ahead.”
We went through the ebony door and into the council chamber, which had nobody in it. A door stood open behind the dais, spilling bright golden sunlight across the backs of the thrones standing there.
I looked at Sawyer and he shrugged, going around the chairs and through the archway. I followed him into a large courtyard between two of the seven rook towers. The space sprawled atop a plateau of rock carved out of the mountainside, jutting from the back of Weatherhead like a Cadillac’s tail fin.
As we walked outside, we passed a stone bench that had a tall metal canister standing on it with a valve spout on the bottom. Steam issued from the top of it and curled from its sides in the chilly early air.
“Oh, coffee,” I said. “I wish I had a cup.”
We passed a ring of rocks that enclosed a small, crackling campfire. Hanging on a spit was a pot of some bubbling gruel, and a man in a linen suit and suspenders was tending it. He nodded as we passed, and we did the same.
Normand was at the very end of the courtyard where it jutted out in a great arc of stone, looming over the hillside.
If one were to vault the parapet, it was easily a twelve-meter drop to a steep, rocky slope, and a very injurious tumble ending in a head-on crash against Ostlyn’s innermost wall. I peered over the edge, imagining this plummet, and leaned back with a wince.
The old man only wore a pair of canvas trousers and roper boots. His bare skin was a biography of pain written on pages of taut glove-leather. Some of the arcing scars marred a tattoo that engulfed his left shoulder, an intricate enigma of lines and symbols that looked like an illustration from a medieval text on the occult.
He was lost in thought as we approached, performing what appeared to be slow, meditative tai-chi katas. I noticed when we got close enough that he had a revolver in either hand.
The polished guns caught the dawn’s light and flicked ghostly sun-cats across the floor at our feet. He stepped this way and that, with no wasted movement, light and clever, moving around the balcony in a graceful, sweeping slow-motion waltz. His muscles rolled as he moved, his tendons as fine as guitar strings.
Every time he stopped, whether he had them thrust out straight or tucked under his elbow or behind his back, the pistols were leveled at some invisible opponent. With each pause, I could hear the actions click and the hammers hit empty chambers.
When he saw us watching, Normand turned the weapons with subtle gestures and slid them into his gunbelt. I realized that there were four holsters.
“Good morning, children,” he said in that wrought-iron bass-baritone. His long silver hair curtained down his temples. He tossed his head back to clear his face, put down the belt, and took the undershirt draped over the parapet, putting it on.
I have to admit I was impressed and not a little intimidated—the years had been kind to the old man. He had to have been in his early seventies, but he looked like a chiseled statue. A slender, hungry, battle-scarred old wolf. Even his icy eyes looked wolven.
“Good morning, sir,” said Sawyer. I echoed the greeting.
“How goes your first day in our fair city?”
“We haven’t been up long,” said Sawyer, and I handed him the K-Set chestpiece. “We had a few questions and wanted to come see if you had any possible answers.”
He strode past us, pulling his suspenders on. “I am an open book, my friends—but if you’ll excuse me, I’d like a few minutes to put on my cover and warm my pages. Why don’t you come with me and we’ll see if Merritt can’t rustle you boys up some coffee and something for breakfast.”
Merritt was the man in the linen suit tending the campfire. He followed the
King into the citadel, and a few minutes later came out with two ceramic decanters, two tin cups, a little pewter boat full of sugar, and a tiny jug of cream.
Sawyer showed me how to use the decanters; apparently, here you don’t stir your coffee, you pour it from the carafe into the decanter. Then you add the cream and sugar to the decanter, swirl it around, and pour it into your cup. We sat on the stone bench and sipped coffee while Merritt fried bacon and made omelets over the fire.
When Normand came back, we had just been handed our plates. He was wearing a blue frock coat with leather elbows and a pair of canvas slacks. His gunbelt was on the outside of his doublet. He looked a bit like a Union general as he sat next to Sawyer and the attendant handed him an omelet.
“Now then,” Normand said, putting the armor on the ground by the bench. He illuminated his next point by gesturing at the air with his fork, “—let us continue. Good conversation always aids digestion, or so I hear.”
“I told you about my hallucination under the influence of the Acolouthis,” I said.
The gunslinger cut off a bite and chewed it thoughtfully. “Ahh, so you did. The Sacrament is a powerful experience. It is forever in debate...whether the events that take place in that ethereal consciousness are real or imagined. For instance, how do you know you ever even visited that abandoned town by the wayside? The entire thing could have been wholly in your mind.”
‘That’s an unsettling thought.”
“You said yourself that you read the sign on the wall in that town. It was in the Earth language. Haven’t you asked yourself why you could understand it?”
(WELCOME TO THE STICKS!)
It hadn’t even occured to me. I’d been in such a state at the time that the fact had completely eluded me.
“I have to admit I haven’t.” I didn’t know what else to say. It was a strange epiphany, one that made me doubt myself. I began to feel a little crazy again, and the sensation was not pleasurable. “Wait—that was before the outlaw ever gave me the stuff. How could—”