The Whirlwind in the Thorn Tree (21 page)

“Wait a minute. D-d-don’t these rafts have signal braziers?” said Sawyer, unfolding himself and rolling stiffly to his feet.

He jumped, took hold of the driftwood tripod, and climbed it like an upside-down squirrel until he could see into the point where the ends of the logs were tied together together in the middle. Where the logs were crossed, someone had tied down a primitive sort of hurricane lantern.

He fished through his pockets and produced a Zippo, using it to light the wick. To all our delight, the lighter was dry enough to spark, the wick caught, and a tiny tongue of flame began to burn the oil inside the reservoir.

He hopped back down and curled up next to one of the brazier’s tripod legs again, bundling up in his jacket.

I could finally make out their faces by the weak flicker of the lantern. “Now...” I said, shivering, “...we wait.”

As I lay down and drifted into unconsciousness, I remember thinking about how sluggishly cold my face felt, and the next thing I knew, I was struggling up out of the frigid bonds of sleep, awakened by the cold and the sound of Noreen shuffling across the platform to huddle next to Sawyer.

I swore in my head, and tried to fight my way back under, and finally managed to doze off again.

The rumors of sun finally irritated me back out of my cocoon, lighting up the world in my dreams until I couldn’t keep my grainy eyelids shut any longer. I rolled over onto my back and stretched, painfully peeling my limbs out of the stiff dead-bug position I’d slept in all night.

I squinted up at the potential of a sunrise lighting up the horizon with a sickly, motionless maelstrom of green and red. The moon was a dome of white disappearing over the opposite edge of the world.

My feet were like the unfeeling claws of a dead bird, cadaver-cold and stricken with rigor. I rubbed my numb face and found a runny nose. There was nothing to be done. For the next several hours, until the golden glow of the rising sun shot an arrow of light into my eyes, I simply lay on my side and pretended to sleep.

The week coursed over my mind like troubled water over a bed of river-stones, worn smooth by worry and confusion.

I was too cold, too tired to form conclusions, to puzzle over clues...I simply replayed scenes and conversations, over and over, ad nauseam, until they lost all meaning and simply became trite scripts that the people in my head acted out like puppets on a stage again and again.

Semantic satiation,
I thought in a mild delirium, waking up again. I thought about putting on a pot of coffee.

That’s what it’s called.

I opened my eyes. Sawyer was sitting up, gazing eastward as the white-hot orb grew into sight, burning away the shrouds of the night, warming the world and willing the life into it for another day.

I rolled over and unfolded myself again, trying to ignore the cramps.

An hour passed, and then two, as the sun rose ever higher, and seared away the chill. Soon, I was sweating in my leather jacket. I took it off and hung it on one of the knots protruding from the driftwood tripod, then climbed up to the oil lamp and cut it off. When I landed back on the platform with a
clunk,
I winced at the shock to my knees.

Noreen rubbed her eyes and said, “I feel like crap.”

“Yeah, me too.”

The sea around us was an infinity of dark blue, broken into hillocks of wind-shoveled water that threatened to overtake the buoy. The breeze grew stronger with the sun until the raft was bobbing in great slow swaying arcs, straining against the chain that anchored it to the sea-bed.

As the waves came underneath it, the platform would cant heavily to one side to climb the surf, and then after teetering for a split second, slide into the trough like a half-pipe skater.

I scrambled to the edge of the raft and spewed bitter bile into the spray.

_______

“I am seriously regretting my enthusiasm right now,” I said, lying on my back with my arm over my eyes, nursing a headache. Noreen was the only one of us with a watch, but it had stopped a long time ago, now displaying the time it had been when we’d stepped into the elevator at the hotel: 11:21 AM. Sawyer’s cellphone was dead, and mine was somewhere on the ocean floor below us.

The white sun was at the apex of the sky, burning down on us with the intense directional heat of a bonfire.

Sawyer had taken his shirt, shoes, and sweater off, and was standing on the edge of the raft wordlessly staring into the horizon. The blinding white wood of the raft felt as if it were scorching the inside of my skull.

I could kill for a cup of coffee,
I thought, and licked my chapped lips.
I could kill a wolf. With my bare hands.

“I’m still trying to figure out what to make of this,” said Noreen. She was leaning against one of the poles, hugging herself, with her jacket pulled over her shoulders like a shawl. Her voice sounded impaired, wet, as if she was having trouble breathing through her nose. “I think I’ve gotten past the I-might-be-crazy part, but I’m still having a little trouble warming up to the idea that I just walked into a fantasy novel.”

“How are you still cold? It’s like, a thousand degrees out here.”

“I don’t feel good. I think I might have gotten sick last night.”

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s not your fault.”

“Really?” I asked. “You really don’t think I dragged you into this?”

“No, Ross,” she said, with a weak, yet comforting smile. “You didn’t. I’m actually half-tempted to think it was fate.”

“You think so?”

“Maybe. Do you believe in fate?”

“Nah. Well, I don’t know. Sometimes I wonder. Whenever I think luck’s going my way, it steps up and kicks me right in the balls. I’ve found that if you leave fate alone and do your thing, and let it do its thing, it doesn’t kick you so hard anymore. Damn. It’s too hot to be asking me philosophical questions when I’m starving. It’s like a Looney Tunes cartoon, you look like a hot dog with a face.”

I peeled my arm from my sweaty face and sat up. The world blinded me with brilliant shades of washed-out green that became the deep, fervent blues of ocean and sky, and the bone-white of the raft.

Diamond knots punctuated the wood at organic intervals, and it was lashed together with—surprisingly enough—some sort of plastic-coated cord, like the power cord of an appliance. I blinked. “Hey, I thought you guys said my dad’s books were a fantasy series. What’s this power cord doing here?”

Sawyer looked down at the raft.

“The Antargata k-Setra was home to an advanced society, remember? Well, there’s very little working power grid in most of K-Set, and a lot of the ruins were scavenged for materials and resources. Most cords like this were taken and used as waterproof rope.”

“Oh,” I said.

“There’s actually electricity on mainland Ain, though. They were at least smart enough to reverse-engineer electric lights to use windmill power.”

My listlessness grew by the hour until I had whipped myself into a lather and exhausted all available mental topics. I stood up and started pacing slowly back and forth, counting the logs as I walked across them, feeling my stomach knot up tighter and tighter with hunger.

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

T
HE 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.”