The Whirlwind in the Thorn Tree (24 page)

This late in the voyage, they were low on provisions, but I managed to bring back a few slivers of strong cheese, very chalky biscuits, a pickle that we cut in thirds, and some dried meat that looked like the pig-ears you could buy at pet stores back home.

Sawyer and I glanced at each other in trepidation, but tucked in nevertheless. He gave his third of the pickle to Noreen and busied himself feeding pieces of the rest of his ration to her. He was barely touching it himself, giving her the lion’s share.

“Eat more,” Noreen murmured from her nest, rocking with the motion of the sea. She coughed, another dry, ragged bray. “Mm go sleep.”

Sawyer nibbled at the biscuit’s edges, savoring the crusty, greasy rim. I sat back against a pole, my feet flat on the floor and my elbows on my knees, and watched him for a while until I could hear the girl’s breathing slow. I spent the time slowly and methodically eating my pieces of cheese and pickle in tiny bites, watching the sunbeams from the ceiling grate sway back and forth.

“What was that thing you did back there?” I asked, mimicking the salute.

“It’s how they shake hands here,” said Sawyer. “It comes from the days before guns were invented, and the Kingsmen carried shields and spears. See how it looks like I’ve got a shield on my arm? Back in the old days, they bowed to each other from behind their shields as they passed on the road.”

I nodded. “Ahh, okay. I get it. What’s a
Deon?”

“A Sheriff, basically, but he’s m—”

“ON THE DECK!”

The sudden exclamation from every sailor in the room almost made me drop the remainder of my cheese and pickle. I leapt to my feet and looked around in a weird sort of terror. Sawyer’s eyes were as huge as if he’d been shot at.

I realized what had happened when I saw a man coming toward us from the front of the bay, accompanied by Walter. Sawyer got up as well, and as they approached, we gave them the shield-bow, which they returned in kind. “Friends, this is the captain of the
Vociferous
,” said Walter, motioning to the man, “Thom Cuevas. Thom, these are the castaways we took on.”

“May it be,” said Sawyer.

“May it never end,” said Cuevas. He was a surprisingly small man, with ruddy hair and beard paintstroked with silver, and a large head that made the rest of his scarecrow body look gawky. He was dressed in a similar manner to Walter, wearing no armor, but he was wearing corduroy trousers and there was a pocket watch in his vest. In all, he looked like an Irish whaler.

I was glad to see that our clothes weren’t as outlandish as I had been afraid of; from what I’d seen so far, Ainean fashion was rather similar to turn-of-the-century Earth clothes, albeit with much more leather.

“Sera Ross, I hear you are related to the presumably late Lord Bridger,” said Cuevas. “My condolences. I understand that the Deon has been applied to the mystery at hand. I suspect that he will deduce the scribe’s whereabouts—or murderer, should it come to that—in short time.”

I nodded to him in gratitude.

“Also, I’m glad we could be of use in rescuing you from a very long and protracted death at sea. That is, of course, if the Saoshoma hadn’t eaten you first.”

“Impeccable timing on your part,” said Sawyer. He did the shield-bow thing again, and introduced himself. As he spoke, I noticed that the Ain accent had begun to creep into his speech. “My name is Sawyer Winton, captain; my lady and I were accompanying Mr. Bridger here on his voyage. I was visiting relatives in K-Set, and on my way back, I fell in with these two.”

“
Fell in
, ‘e says,” remarked Cuevas, chuckling to the Deon. “That you did! Well, no need to explain yourself any further. These things happen, and you are among friends. All that matters now is that you’re safe and dry, and we’re only a few days out. You will be our guests until we make land. We don’t have much in the way of provisions, but make yourself at home as best you can. There is a seplasiary in Salt Point that can help your ill companion.”

“Thank you,” I said. Sawyer did the same.

“Boys, I’ve got to get back to it,” said the captain, rocking on his toes. He clapped the gunslinger on one bare arm and bustled away, giving a salute to a sailor that happened to be standing behind us. “Ensure that our new friends do not fall off of this boat as well, Deon?”

Normand was sitting on his cot sipping cool water when three men came in and stood in front of his cell. They stared at him, assessing his sun-blistered face and red eyes, and his filthy clothes, tinted green by the mica sands. “May I help you, gentlemen?” is what he wanted to say, but his throat was a raw tube of parched meat and he was too sullen for pleasantries anyway.

“I hear tell they gonna hang you in the morning,” said the man in the middle.

“I suppose so,” said Normand.

“I hear you and your boys have been knockin over coaches out on the border. That’s why they gon’ hang you.”

He put up his hands, giving them an awkward, supplicating half-smile.

The men looked at each other, then back at him. The middle one addressed him again. “I also hear you’re the wiliest, and most versed trapper out in the K-Set. Is that right? And you’re the first Ainean to ever survive a siege from them whatcha-callit—Beam-o Ip-nimmy fellas?”

Normand’s face slowly broke into a grin. “Ayuh.”

“Congratulations, asshole,” said the middle-man. “You’ve just been drafted.”

—The Fiddle and the Fire, vol 3 “The Rope and the Riddle”

The Bright Side

T
HE NEXT SEVERAL DAYS PASSED
at a glacial pace. We were full steam, but after a life of fast cars, jump-cut action movies, and the instant gratification of the Internet, it seemed as if we were sitting dead still. The second half of the first day and the entirety of the day after were spent exploring the ship, marveling at the ship’s intricacies and the efficiency of the crew as they went about their business.

I also learned quite a few nautical terms from the crew, earned a few pieces of Ainean currency (called “council talents”), and got a better look at their strange segmented armor.

The armor looked like a dark-green version of the Batsuit from the Christopher Nolan
Batman
films, only it had no cape or cowl. It was not crafted by any Ain or K-Set blacksmith...according to a sailor named Gosse Read, the thin green plates were artifacts left by the original inhabitants of the Antargata k-Setra, the Etudaen.

He took one of the gauntlets off and let me examine it. The material visually resembled the shell of a June bug, but it was completely impervious, as Read demonstrated when he scared the hell out of me by attempting to break my arm with an oar.

I also got a chance to examine the lightning-gun the crew of the
Vociferous
had used to stave off the Saoshoma. It was also an artifact from K-Set. The lone engineer-bosun hired to maintain it had a rudimentary understanding of how it worked, but had no more idea of how to reproduce it than I did. He told me that it was salvaged and repaired by a scientist named Atanasije that had gone missing in the war against the No-Men.

He didn’t have the insight I did, coming from 21
st
century Earth. I could plainly see that the turtle-shell “protective dome” he so proudly demonstrated to me by firing a musket ball at it was in fact the solar-panel array that powered it. I told him that if he kept damaging it, the “storm spear” (as Walter had described it) would no longer work.

I looked underneath the shell to see if there was any other damage. I got a glimpse of a strange, familiar icon stenciled on the body of the machine...a stylized eagle, wings spread and head in profile. It was barely visible, worn away by age. Something was underneath it—it looked like words—but they were so deteriorated they were illegible even if I had been able to read the language.

He told me to “shite yerself and away with ye, smart-arse”.

While I was roaming the
Vociferous,
Sawyer held constant vigil over Noreen as she became more and more ill. It was beginning to look like more than a simple cold, as the coughing had worsened. Everything after the evening of Day Two came in disjointed episodes, as I had elected to sleep through the rest of the trip in one of the rope hammocks.

To my chagrin, I found that it is nearly impossible to lie face-down in a hammock without breaking one’s back, so as I lay curled on my side, I faded in and out of consciousness. At one point I woke up to the smell of honey and lemons. Sawyer was administering some sort of steaming-hot fragrant mead to Noreen.

“If you can keep this down,” Sawyer was saying, “we’ll try the soup again.”

The next time I awoke, it was to the sound of shouting. We had made landfall.

Sawyer reluctantly left Noreen in her hammock and came topside with me to watch the ship come into port. We stood at the starboard bow bulwark, as the crew brought us in at a slow angle.

Salt Point was a pleasant surprise, a bustling seaside metropolis that wouldn’t have looked out of place on an island in the Mediterranean back home. Tall chalk cliffs overlooked the bay, arrayed with layers of chiseled terraces. These were clustered with half-timbered houses with green saltillo roofs.

The streets were a fine lacework of narrow cobblestone pathways; towers and battlements of older pedigree speared upward from the maze. They were joined by squat gothic towers constructed of grim gray stone and capped with tall steeples, their tips streaming long red pennants.

I could even see a gravel path winding out of town into the scrubby highlands, where the jagged ruins of a lighthouse held dominion in the skyline with tufts of desert brush and a sail-armed windmill. A flagpole on one of the towers flew a banner with the now-familiar Kingsman symbol, an elegant shield with a pair of sixguns over a stylized wolf-face.

I got the general impression of a medieval German village that had been transplanted into Mexico.

I smiled at Sawyer as armored sailors scurried around us, preparing to dock.

“How does it feel?” I asked.

He couldn’t help but return the grin. I could feel him restraining the joy of finally seeing the land he’d vicariously grown up in. “It feels fantastic, Ross. This is...unbelievable. If I had to do it all over, I’d step right into that elevator with you again.”

That did all but eradicate the guilt I’d been feeling at bringing them into this world. “Is it anything like you imagined?”

“I don’t know. So far, it’s more than I ever thought it would be. The Saoshoma was a thousand times scarier and more incredible.... I mean, it was mind-blowing. That thing was downright majestic...for a sea serpent.”

As we drew near, men began to assemble at the edge of the dock to receive us, ropes coiled over their shoulders.

“I’ve been wondering something.”

“What?” Sawyer asked, his eyes fixed on the wharf.

“Destin...did my dad make it up, or has it always been here?”

“Like, did he write it into existence? Or did he discover it, and wrote about it?”

“Yeah. I can’t make up my mind.”

“For what it’s worth, I think it’s always been here. Like the story Bayard told you, the Silen came to tell Ed about it, to ‘slake the thirst of imagination’ with the waters of the Sea of Dreams,” he said, elaborating the phrase with a grand flourish of his hands. “But who really knows?”

“We’ve got to find the Silen,” I said. “I want to find out who killed my dad, and and I want to know why the Silen brought us here.”

“I wonder if Normand knew about your dad’s life in our world. They were pretty close at the end of the last book your dad published. Eddick Bridger was serving as Clayton’s steward, housesitting the Rollins estate in Maplenesse while Clayton and Normand went to fight in the war.”

“I don’t know. Do you think he’s still alive?”

“We could ask Deon Rollins.”

“Ask him what, pray tell?” said Walter, strolling leisurely up behind us, twirling a leather chupalla on his finger as a nearby sailor stepped past us and flung a coil of rope off the side of the ship. The Deon whipped the hat onto his head and tugged the brim down.

Sawyer took the reins of the conversation. “Did Normand Kaliburn survive the war?”