The Whirlwind in the Thorn Tree (43 page)

His eyes glitter in the pits of his eye-sockets, and his sunken cheeks cling to his greening teeth.

“Help,” he says, matter-of-factly. “Please.”

A woman dangling next to him hears, and gazes at Noreen with rheumy eyes. “Per favore, lasciami uscire.”

_______

I sat back in the chair and pressed the heels of my hands to my eyes, my temples throbbing. The Sea of Dreams washed ashore before me, inky and thick, like the cast-off of an oil-spill. Even the words from the ink pen stood up from the paper. As it dried, I could run my fingertips across it and feel the ink protruding from the paper, like Braille.

“What is this?”

The Mariner lifted one of my headphones and said, “Keep your pen on the page and your eyes on the sea. Keep pulling.”

“What’s going on?” I asked, looking up at his seashore eyes.

“You have found her, now go and get her,”
sang the Beatles.

His face was grim. “He’s in the house with us.”

Normand chanced a fire. The smoke curled from the half-dead embers, mixing with the eternal fog that engulfed this cursed land. He looked around at the ruins surrounding him, a building that had once been sleek and utilitarian. Even in ancient disrepair, it was obvious that in its own time, the structure had been exponentially more advanced and comfortable than anything in Ain.

He was beginning to understand just how long the Antargata k-Setra had been here, dying in this half-sunned netherworld. Whole civilizations had come and gone before he and everything he’d known had even been born.

He curled up on the demolished sofa and tried to catch some sleep before continuing, but his thoughts were, as always, plagued with worry about the events taking place back home. He hoped he was not too late.

—The Fiddle and the Fire, vol 7 (unfinished) “The Gunslinger and the Giant”

The Goat-Fish

S
HE PICKS UP A FEMUR AND
hammers the man’s shackles with it, trying to break them. The left one’s cotterpin cracks in half and slides out; his arm free, the emaciated prisoner sets to freeing his other arm and then the woman next to him.

Before Noreen can pardon any of the others, however, she hears one last burst from the voice in our heads.

(It’s harsh, but you’re going to have to leave them to their own devices. We may not be able to save them, but if we can get out, we can prevent the Feaster from bringing any more of them down here. Just get yourself to the—)

The girl understands, even though the transmission fails. She starts running.

The floor is no longer slick with decay, so there’s no more reason to be cautious. The men and women cuffed to the wall cry out for release in a hundred different languages as she sprints past them, but there’s nothing she can do but hope they can free themselves. The regret is a swelling knot in her chest.

Not all of the shackled are human; some of them seem to be Tekyr, some of them are Iznoki, some of them are even the shadowy, white-masked Bemo-Epneme of K-Set. Some of them are of some species Noreen doesn’t even recognize, and they plead in languages she’s never known; she realizes that they are the citizens of other worlds alien even to Destin.

The Tower of Silence is a place of sacrifice, she can see now; it is filled with abductees from myriad planes of existence, thousands of people from a hundred storied worlds fed rotting to the unseen thing under the rock.

There is something going on here, deeper and larger than she’d ever expected. The Feaster’s master schemes to devour the whole of existence, and someone—or something—is giving it the leeway to do so.

Her mind is occupied with deduction when she hears a voice and halts in her tracks.

“Baby!” exclaims Sawyer.

He is cuffed to the inner wall of the tower; just above, the top of the massive dakhma opens onto the dark elements. A dazzling beam of blue-green light swords down from some point high above, filling the tower with luminescence.

She can see over the parapet and it chills her to realize that the other beams of light she has been seeing since emerging from the well end in towers just like this one. It is an endless dark forest of neglect and obscurity. Spearing up from the shadowscape are thousands of black death-spires screwing into the rock, feeding forgotten people from countless worlds to the Feaster’s ancient master.

In this instant, she understands what’s happening.

She is underneath the Vur Ukasha, in the Void-Between-The-Worlds, and something—the thing suckling at the towers as they drill the dead through the rock—is down here, waiting, preparing itself, getting ready to surface.

“It’s about time,” someone says, snapping her out of her reverie.

Noreen turns to see a short little man, half her own height, and slender, with pink skin and piercing golden eyes. Tiny goat-horns jut from the crown of his bald head, and he’s grinning. Tiny puppy-teeth shine white in the glow of the beam.

“Nice to meet you,” says Hel Grammatica, the Silen and muse of Edward Richard Brigham. “Normie’s gonna be ecstatic that you’re all three in Destin. Remind me to send Ross a Christmas card. Now could you kindly get us out of these cuffs?”

_______

The study door slammed shut with a hollow bang; I spun in my chair to see the Mariner leaning against it. Tendrils of shadow snaked around the edges of the door, licking like tongues of black flame, and I could hear it rattling softly in the frame. Ink’s Swarovski crystal glass glittered with sweat on the windowsill.

I turned back to my task, but I could hear him cursing the being behind the door.

Looking down at the pen-rope, I got an idea.

I let go of it, and it began to wash back into the Sea of Dreams.

Noreen smashes the cuff with the knob of the femur. To her dismay and shock, they both break into pieces at the same time. Hel swings free, dangling by one pink wrist.

“Well, it’s a start,” he says, and grabs his forearm with his free hand. The tattered gray robe tied around his waist flutters in the breeze as he braces himself and sticks one of his goat-horns into the keyhole of his remaining shackle.

The shimmering light extinguishes, and then flares to life again.

They look up and see that clouding overhead is an obscene stormfront of writhing black feelers, and at the forefront of that clicking-billowing-thrashing is the burning yellow god-Eye.

It stares down at them with an unblinking, all-seeing fury.

Hel pries at the cuff with the horn-point and finally, with a crackle of sparks, it breaks. He tumbles onto the floor in a spill of arrows and is instantly back on his feet.

They look up at the Feaster and Walter Rollins shouts, “No!”

A throng of freed people are barreling up the ramp into the open air, blinking blindly at the bright beam from above. The Silen is trying to free Walter and Sawyer from their shackles, but the longer it takes, the more people cluster around them trying to escape.

There are at least twenty people in the small space atop the tower, and more are trying to force their way into the apex, crying and wailing in unintelligible languages.

Walter is free.

He takes a skull away from one of the refugees and starts beating on Sawyer’s cuffs, knocking the teeth out of it.

“We’ve got to get the hell off of this thing before—” the Deon starts to say, but someone elbows him in the ear. He’s gotten one of Sawyer’s hands free, so Walter hands him the skull and shoves the refugee backwards.

Something tumbles out of the light. A rope clatters to the floor at her feet and Noreen grabs it. “Goddamnit, get off me!” she screams. The people from the tower are beginning to fight; the cluster is turning into a riot. Starved, dying people tumble from the parapet and hurtle, screaming, into the darkness.

The Feaster squids closer, watching the chaos.

Black tendrils venture in and pluck screaming people from the growing crowd, drawing them into its amorphous mass, dropping some of them. They bounce off the side of the tower and plummet, flailing, out of sight.

Noreen peers into the crowd surging up the ramp and sees a familiar face, but it confuses and exhilarates and terrifies her all at once.

Standing on the other side of the thinning crowd is Ross Brigham.

I heard a voice behind me, but I couldn’t afford to look. The Mariner was roaring something in a language I didn’t know; his voice had changed, become deeper, and hoarse. Even though I was standing on the shore of the Sea of Dreams, I could still hear the study door rattling.

“Edin na zu, emuqa!” he was shouting, “Barra, idimmu, edin na zu emuqa!”

_______

This other-Ross is not the man Noreen knows; he is leaner, darker-complected, with sharp, hungry eyes. He strides purposefully up the ramp, followed by another of the Silen, like Hel. This one, however, is taller, as tall as a man, and has skin the fiery orange of burnished bronze.

His nacreous horns branch from his gleaming skull like the antlers of a deer. A battle-skirt of leather pennants sweeps the floor around his boots as he walks. His torso is a finely-chiseled bas-relief of perfect musculature.

In the other-Ross’s hands is a strange object that Noreen only thinks of as a sword because it has the conceptual
shape
of a sword. It seems to flicker precariously from form to form, as if the thing itself isn’t sure what it wants to be. The blade shimmers like oil on water, a broadsword one second and a
no-dachi
the next.

It obviously pains Sardis to wield the thing, as blood continuously drips from his hands, and Noreen can see tears standing in his eyes.

“Rhetor Logos,” growls Hel Grammatica, turning to meet the not-Ross and the other Silen. “Getting Ed’s murderer to do even more dirty work for you? Was giving up on the Water Covenant and endangering existence not enough for you?”

The Rhetor smiles.

His teeth would be needle-sharp if they weren’t so rotten. As he speaks, they bend in the gums like an angler-fish. His eyes burn with ten thousand years of bottled malice. “I expect you know what this is,” he says, indicating the not-Ross and his bizarre amorphous sword.

Sardis gibbers, “Walla walla bing-bang.”

“You’re not going to get away with this,” says Hel. “Even with the Timecutter.”

“Hey!” says the Rhetor. His voice is bell-deep, sinister, and as oily as his skin. “I can shit out a clich
é too! How’s this:
I’ve already gotten away with it.”

“Immortality wasn’t the reward part of the Covenant, you cowardly son of a bitch,” says Hel. “Your reward and your honor was the chance to become carriers of the Water. You’re not fulfilling your duty anymore. You pervert your gift, you tell men to do horrific things to each other.”

The Rhetor laughs. “Yes, and it’s hilarious, isn’t it? Who needs cable TV when I can tell a man to shoot up a school with an assault rifle? Or drive a bus through the front of a restaurant? It’s better than anything on your precious internet. You’re half-right. The entire pact we made with the Creator is a curse. We deserve the rest of death. We all deserve one final bow. We’ve done our part a million times over since the dawn of man. No more next chapters, no more sequels, no more self-important liars like Brigham pulling whole worlds out of his ass and making people suffer for entertainment.

“For the last thousand years, I’ve been going from world to world hiding and destroying the First Sword of every civilization,” says the Rhetor, indicating Sardis and the dubious sword in his hands. “Excalibur, Dabutai, Ik-simmor, Windrender. All of them. The Timecutter here is the final facet of the First Sword: the First Sword of Destin. Now we’ll make
all
the worlds suffer, not just the fictional ones. We’ll have our fun before we finally fade away.”

“The Keyworlds will die without the water of the Vur Ukasha, Master Rhetor,” says Hel. “They’ll dry up and waste away, the system will fall apart, and—”

The Rhetor crooks his head like a curious dog. “Now you’re catching on. It’s time for the end of all stories, water-carrier. And I’m here to make sure we all die happily ever after.”