The Whirlwind in the Thorn Tree (29 page)

Long lines of storefronts displaying all manner of crude wares stretched for miles, overshadowed by brick mezzanines, their faces a panoply of dizzying geometric patterns and designs. There were also many damaged buildings, great swaths of destruction where I didn’t see many people milling about. Gaping holes yawned in the eaves and sides of structures, open to the elements, rimmed with teeth of shattered masonry.

“The War,” said Sawyer, when I asked him about it.

I gave him a look of confusion.

“Oh right,” he said, glancing at the Aineans in the carriage and leaning in to speak in a conspiratorial tone, “The climactic battle in the last book took place here. Several No-Men walked across the floor of the Aemev Ocean from K-Set. They came ashore near Salt Point, and proceeded to march across Ain toward Council City Ostlyn, leaving a trail of death and carnage. They were put down by Normand Kaliburn, Clayton Rollins, and the Griever Ardelia Thirion.

“I think,” he said, after a beat, “Ed never finished that one.”

A few minutes after we’d passed the outskirts of the town, we came into a heathered valley and then out into an arid meadow of brush, wavy with rolling hillocks. In the distance, I could see something that looked like a mangled battleship lying on its side, rusting in the sun.

Someone had built a shack in the shadow of it, and that someone sat in a chair out front watching the train pass. He waved.

“That’s a No-Man,” said Read. “The first one to be defeated. That was what demonstrated to Normand and his lot that they could indeed be killed. The Swordwives were instrumental in their victory.”

I marveled at the massive steel homunculus. It was bigger than anything I’d imagined.

It resembled a sort of battleship with great hind legs like a dinosaur, and the front of it bristled with guns, long turrets with polka-dot coolant holes. In my mind I’d held images of the wing-armed robot-men from old Superman cartoons, something cartoonishly antagonistic and just a few meters tall. Instead, I found them to be nothing short of nightmarish. A robot monster out of an H. P. Lovecraft story. I couldn’t fathom how an army could stand up to them, much less two pistol-packing cowboys and a sword-wielding Calamity Jane.

The sun was low in the west, and gray mountains had come into being to the east when I noticed that we were passing into a place of sand dunes. They stood taller than the train itself, mountainous hillocks comprised of what appeared to be dark green sand like crushed soda bottles.

The sunset reflected itself in trillions of sparkling flakes. The rose-colored light swept up the sides of the dunes over and over in satin-silver crescents, like fireworks that never dreamed of dying, and burst into oblivion at the top of every one of them. Monumental buttes of pale green, like oxidized bronze, jutted out of the dunes.

This must have been the Emerald Desert I’d seen described in Ed’s notes, an expanse of sedimentary chromium-mica pulverized and deposited here by a long-dry river analogous to the Mississippi. It certainly glittered like emeralds.

As we flickered through the deeper moss shadows of the dune-valleys, we heard a knock at the door.

It was a refreshments cart, pushed through the train cars by another one of the small blue-skinned people. This one was a small, childish woman in a watercolor sarong; she had no shirt on because she had no need of one, having no breasts. The tiny holes along her collarbone irised endlessly, like the shutter of a camera that never stopped taking pictures.

The fine wrinkles around her eyes and the gray in her hair told me she was older than she appeared. She spoke to us and it dawned on me that she had no nostrils—her nose was merely a ridge in the center of her face. “Thurgm, mihe?”

The man in the green tunic smiled to her, and handed her a few of the Council Talent coins. “D’nerg ayo, ert nihim-e cuddci mylid’nurk iq-dhe wy ayo.”

The blue girl tried to refuse, but he wouldn’t let her. “Ry, u serry’d degi d’nimi.”

“U urmum’d,” said the man. “Degi d’nilh u zucc pi y’wirtit.”

She handed out little cakes and cookies with fruits and nuts baked into them, and wooden cups of some sweet, cool water that reminded me at once of both coconuts and honeysuckle nectar. I sipped it, trying to savor it and make it last.

I spied a tray of pastries that looked like turnovers on the cart and asked for one. It turned out to be a sort of savory herb falafel, wrapped in flatbread, and it was delicious. The smell of fennel and coriander made my stomach knot up and growl.

“So what do you do?” I asked the man in green.

He smiled, the toad-goiter swelling and subsiding. “I am a trader, young man. And yourself?”

“I’m an...artist, I guess.”

“You guess?” he asked. “You don’t know what you are?”

“Sometimes I think I do. Some days I just don’t know.”

“Sounds like you need a change of scenery!” croaked the trader.

It was my turn to smile. I glanced at Sawyer and Noreen when I said, “I think I found it.”

“I am very glad to hear that,” said the trader. “Where are you heading now?”

“To Maplenesse. My friends and I...I guess you could say we’re visiting family.”

“Well,” he remarked. “You could do worse than to travel with Kingsmen. You are as safe as you could possibly be.”

The bottle-green sands of the Emerald Desert faded with the day, and the evening brought rolling foothills crested with heather and milkweed that swayed in the breeze. Ancient fenceposts jutted up from the hilltops like memorials. The double moons of Destin had just risen when we reached Geary Pass, a tiny mining village in the mountains southwest of Maplenesse.

“It’s only about an hour’s ride from here,” said Walter, as we got off the train. We all had to piss, and no matter how many times I offered to hold her hands, I couldn’t convince Noreen to hang her ass off the back of the caboose and water the tracks.

“Good,” said Sawyer. “I’m looking forward to a hot meal and a good night’s sleep.”

“I don’t know how much sleep you’re going to get,” said Read. “Mokehlyr’s going full-sail this week, startin’ yesterday. Huge festival. Shenanigans and drunken carousing every night.”

I snorted a chuckle. “Sounds like my kind of party, then.”

“Who are you kidding?” asked Walter. “You’re a wallflower if ever I saw one.”

Waffle-Eaters & Doppelgängers

W
E COULD SEE THE LIGHTS OF
Maplenesse as we came down the other side of the mountain a little while later. The urban heart of the city framed a small body of water. The lake in turn was nestled in the belly of a deep, wide valley. Curving streets filled with electric lamps and oil lanterns made the valley into a bowl of glittering night-life.

It was a tremendous horseshoe built around the lake, and each semi-circle described successive rings of buildings that became more and more rural as one climbed the walls of the valley.

The south end of the massive box canyon faded into a forest of maples bisected by the river that fed the lake, and as we came out of the pass and wound our way down the side of the ridge into the city center, I got a distant glimpse of wooden buckets hanging from the trees for sap-collecting.

The train slid out from behind a copse of maples and past the end of an alleyway. We were greeted with the dazzling sight of paper lanterns strung from the eaves and people dancing on the balconies overhead.

Maplenesse was a beautiful city. As the train encircled it on a great arcing track, it reminded me both of Mexican and Mediterranean architecture in ways I couldn’t quite define.

The sand-colored buildings were rarely less than two stories tall, and all the roofs were made of the same saltillo tile as Salt Point, but in a hundred more colors. Many of the walls were painted with colorful murals, scenes of merriment and derring-do, and most of the people wore flowing knit ponchos and tabards in brown and blue sea-colors.

The station abruptly enveloped us in darkness, muffling the chaos of celebration. Electric lanterns slid into view, filling the windows with amber light. The throng of passengers disembarking turned the platform into a shadowy, crowded labyrinth of dark strangers.

Noreen was beaming as we stepped off of the train.

“You must be feeling much better,” I said. “Do you know anything about this festival?”

“Oh yes,” she said, clutching Sawyer’s elbow. “This is the spring maple harvest festival of the Tekyr. They’re the blue people with the air-holes on their necks. I can’t believe we’re just in time for this year’s Mokehlyr!”

“I hope you like waffles,” said Sawyer, with a smirk. “Especially corn waffles. They’re the local delicacy this time of year.”

“Corn waffles? Like, cornmeal?”

“Yup.”

I looked at Noreen. “Are waffles normally made out of cornmeal?”

“No, Ross.”

“So it’s spring here?” I asked. “It’s coming up on November back home. That’s funny. I wonder if they celebrate some sort of Christmas kind of holiday here.”

“There’s no Christ. No Bible. Why would there be a Christmas? There’s not even a Santa Claus.”

“That’s a crying shame,” I said, feeling like an idiot.

“Nah,” said Noreen. “There are plenty of other holidays, just as awesome.”

Walter came out of the car behind us, hefting a duffel bag over one shoulder. He was grinning. “This is what I came home for, children! How could I stand myself if I were to miss my hometown’s biggest harvest fair? Come, bastard, let us party until the sun rises wool-headed and aching.”

He took my arm and guided me to the station entrance as if he were kidnapping a blind man, then shoved me out into the street, where I almost collided with a Tekyr man, who spun in surprise and handed me a wooden flask. “Thurg, thurg, z’nudi ler! Sici phedi zud’n om!”

“I don’t know what you just said,” I yelled over the commotion, trying to make him understand me. He simply grinned and clapped me on the arm, and went back to dancing. Another Tekyr man sat on a stoop nearby in a robe and a huge woven hat with maple leaves tied into it, playing some steel instrument that looked like a cross between a banjo and a lute.

Walter took off his hat and did a little jig with a Tekyr woman and two human women. They were applauding his fancy footwork as he asided to me, smirking and shaking his head, “Don’t worry about it! Just enjoy yourself for now! We’ll be going to Ostlyn soon to speak with my father and the King!”

_______

I surprised myself by having a very good time. Children hooted on little wooden whistles and shook rattles, while men strummed lutes and blew trumpets, while women wheezed alongside with garish accordions and pitter-pattered on big booming bongos, blending into a great big bacchanalia of what sounded like merengue and zydeco.

After I finished the rather strong drink the Tekyr man gave me, I couldn’t help but join the square dance going on around a huge fountain by the wharf. Sawyer and Noreen and I joined hands with a line of people whose skin ranged a dozen shades of a dozen colors, and I learned that my two (now very sweaty) best friends knew how to jitterbug.

The look in their eyes, as they careened through the crowd matching each other step for step and smile for smile, could have melted a thousand glaciers.

At one point I ended up in a waffle-eating contest with three other people: an unusually tall and skinny Tekyr man with braided hair named Furmyr Hirwyhi, the trader in green from the train (whose name turned out to be Lennox Thackeray), and a very beefy young man named Josh who looked like he would win handily.

Maplenessian waffles, I discovered, were like silver dollar pancakes: small, and round, and toasted, so that they were like fluffy cakes with griddle designs embossed in them, and a crusty exterior that held up to the toppings that were piled on them.

And they did pile: scoops of sweet cream, drizzles of maple syrup, with bits of a fruit that looked like a blue pomegranate, had flesh like an apple, and tasted like a cross between a lime and a strawberry. The tangy, refreshing
culipihha
was surprisingly well-suited to the task.

Thackeray and I made the initial mistake of trying to eat them with a fork. Josh and Furmyr reached right into the pile and ate them with their hands like sandwiches, cramming the waffles ass-over-teakettle into their faces. It wasn’t even half a minute before their chests and faces were plastered in a slime of cream and syrup.