The Sanity's Edge Saloon (The Sea and the Wasteland Book 1) (39 page)

Jack stared at him, exhaustion
keeping his eyes from focussing, making them burn; and the one with the
scratched cornea hurt like a bitch. “I’m sending you to a better place than you
were planning to send me. Believe me or don’t, but I’m giving you the one thing
I didn’t give the others.”

“What’s that?”

“A choice.”

Mr. Quince said nothing, unsure what
to make of Jack’s remark.

“That’s right,” Jack pushed on.
“Here’s your big chance to prove me wrong. You have a choice. It won’t be easy,
that I promise you. But the others are driven towards their destinies. I’m
giving you and you alone the opportunity to decline yours.”

“Why?” Quince asked, genuinely
perplexed.

“Because it’s what I am. In your
world, I would never fit. Too weak, too concerned with the interests of others,
too interested in my own dreams and not interested enough in my own reality.
Someone gave me a choice and I took it. Now I’m giving you the same. It’s not a
gift. It’s not appeasement. I don’t expect salvation for it, or to receive any
gratitude from you over it. I’m just being who I am. Now get on the train, Mr.
Quince.”

Stone-faced, the businessman reached
for the handrail, saw a questionable smear on the metal, and decided against
it. Instead, he simply stepped across the threshold and would not look back at
those left behind. The train burst from the station and blinked from sight,
leaving Ellen and Jack alone to stare out at the empty Wasteland.

They waited there on the platform for
a few silent seconds, neither speaking. Then they waited a little longer. But
there was only the tracks stretching out to forever in both directions,
shrinking lines of bright chrome speeding away into the wide, empty blue, and
streaking across the dead, white desert.

And across the empty tracks, so close
Ellen could see the anger in their eyes, the Tribe of Dust glared. They
appeared out of the empty sand, the high noon stare of gunfighters weighing
their opponents across the open distance—what they called the killing
ground—and she was reminded of how little she wore, exposed to their fury. Her
hand tugged self-consciously at the hem of her shirt, trying to stretch it
down. “Jack, why isn’t—”

Before she could finish her question,
the ticket in her hand turned as light as air, as brittle as ash. A breeze
touched it, and it yielded up to the winds and became dust. A startled squeak
found its way out of her throat, but nothing else.

“It’s not ready,” Jack murmured as
the flakes drifted to the platform and fell through the cracks.

She turned to find Jack leaning
against the Saloon wall, sagging downward, eyes already closed. “But what about
us?” she asked

Bergman’s question from
Casablanca,
and as if Jack seemed to be reading it in her mind, seeing the silver screen
scene that her question had suddenly starting running inside of her head, he
smiled absently, perhaps believing himself already dreaming, and answered:
“We’ll always have pancakes.”

Then he fell over, silenced.

“Jack?”

She knelt beside him, touched his
shoulder. Nothing.

“Jack?”

But he wouldn’t answer, or wake, or
even move. She risked a glance over her shoulder, hoping against reason that
the Tribe of Dust would have tired of the spectacle and gone away. Instead,
they were close enough that she could see Kreiger smiling, a fiendish leer that
sapped her remaining strength.

“
Jack
?”

ONE: THE NOVEMBER WITCH

The door slammed shut, and the train
bolted from the station, throwing Oversight against the wall.

Then through it
.

For a brief moment, she was aware of
the solid surface against her face, of pain in her shoulder and arm where she
hit. Then she passed straight through, the wall of the train turning to liquid.

Oversight lurched back, struggling to
right herself, push herself up. But the ground slipped beneath her fingers;
soft as jelly, it offered no support. She thrashed desperately, terrified she
would run out of air as she tried to stand up, not drown! Her face burst from
the surface, coughing and choking upon water already half-swallowed.

The train! Where is the train?

(What train?)

Water all around her, so prevalent it
saturated the very air. She pushed a drenched mop of hair back from her eyes,
but the world remained hidden in darkness. Not a darkness she was accustomed
to, but a black darkness shaded and concealed and bereft of the cold comfort of
the Wasteland’s ever-present moon. The world had become shadows, indistinct
shapes jutting from an imperfect landscape as black as coal tar, forms revealed
in coy shimmers hinting to dangers hidden below their surface.

And so
wet
! She felt the water
against every part of her, dripping down her face, even falling from the sky.
It was rain. She remembered the word, thought she might even have experienced
it once long ago, but the memory was faint, and knowing a thing was nothing
like experiencing it. She ran her tongue across her lips, the touch of the air cold
and clean, sweet almost; an absent flavor that was new to her.
Is this what
rain feels like?
She sat back on her heels, aware she was actually kneeling
in water. How could there be so much water that you could kneel in it up to
your waist? Where had the Caretaker sent her?

She stood slowly, the earth soft
beneath her naked feet.
Mud
. Another long-ago memory. So many years, so
many hundreds of years, but it was all coming back, memories from a distant
place, a long ago time.

It squished between her toes, and she
wondered what happened to her boots.

(
Left behind. Hurry! Before they
find you!)

Where had that thought come from?

Eyes adjusting to the darkness, she
saw rising trails of mist, an open clearing, gray murky light reflected by the
water to create a seamless plain of indigo around a lonely and decaying stump.
She started towards it, eyes tracking the noises surrounding her, whistles and
buzzes and grunts. But for the random hiccups of creation, the Wasteland was
dead. Not so, this world. It breathed life from every pore and crevice, the
trees closing around her, spreading across the sky to seal away the stars
behind a canopy thick with vines and creepers and Spanish moss.

Epiphany. Everything was different,
including her. Even her clothes were different. Gone was the dark leather
Kreiger crafted for her, clothes he envisioned her wearing always. In their
place a dress, long and flimsy, a wide belt that bound her waist right up to
the bottom of her ribs, and a vestment more for fashion than warmth. Plastered
to her skin and colored in mud, the clothes felt strange, impractical,
revealing. Without her knife and the familiar feel of tight black leather, she
felt vulnerable, naked. She was shivering.

You are afraid.

Ridiculous!
She had never been afraid. Not of anything. Never!

But never before had she been given something. Something she had wanted.
Something she had wished for. Something she could
lose.

And she knew this place; knew it from distant, nearly-forgotten memories,
a flimsy bridge joining two pieces of her life separated by eons. The Caretaker
had sacrificed his only way out to give her exactly what she wanted most.

“
Jack
,” she whispered, lips
trembling, unable to continue.

Rainwater shimmered in the natural
bowl formed from the center of the old cypress stump.

“
Jack
.” No matter how often
she repeated it, the word sounded empty, no measure of her gratitude, incapable
of expressing what burned in her soul. She crossed to the stump, looking into
the water in the bowl, and knowing instinctively what it was, what she could
make it do. She was beginning to understand.

(There’s no time. Hide! Quickly! They
found you before, they’ll find you again!)

More meaningless thoughts, but
insistent; glimmers of her new reality, maybe? She leaned over the stump, speaking
words she knew though she had no idea why, hands dancing graceful gestures over
the surface. She did not know how she knew these gestures, how she knew these
words. They were simply known; she was beginning to understand.

Blue witch light shimmered from the water in the stump, giving her light
and drawing a fleet of moths to bat and duck about her as she knelt in the
shallow water, placed her head upon folded arms, and wept. Tears of joy. Tears
of relief. Frivolous, she knew; a waste of water. But maybe water didn’t matter
so much here. Maybe it might never matter again. Maybe that was an old rule
from an old world from which she was finally free, the gates of purgatory
opened for the lost souls that would find heaven in the simple magic of stump
water mojo, or a bayou of gnarled trees and Spanish moss.

“
Thank you, Jack
.”

She never heard their approach.

Hands like iron locked about her. She
tried to jerk free, to slip from their hold as centuries of Wasteland survival
came back in a heartbeat. But this world was not the Wasteland. She could not
account for the wet tangle of her dress—so different from the second-skin of
black leather—or the mud that offered no purchase. She was used to fighting on
dust, fighting in her second skin, fighting only one enemy.

The hands doubled, caught around her
ankles and legs, forcing her back down, down into the water,
down below the
surface
. Above her, a crowd of faces staring with emotionless eyes,
features gritted with determination. They might have been wrestling a cow for
branding, or working a stubborn piece of foundation. Or perhaps her torment was
simply of no concern to them.

“Jack!”

She was screaming the Caretaker’s
name, but did not know why.
What good would it do? No good! No good at all!

Then the water covered her, forcing
its way into her nose and mouth, down her throat. Panic smashed through her
brain like lightning as she saw the very real possibility of something that
was, before this moment, distant and inconceivable: her own death. Her efforts
became simple desperation, eager only to breathe, to not drown, not
die
!

Why, Jack? Why?

She was pulled up suddenly and forced
to her knees, her hands bound tightly behind her back, trussed up like an
animal, old illusions shattered. She believed herself impervious, but the
Wasteland did not make her immortal; it simply made her forget. She was no
longer in the Wasteland, and there were things to be afraid of; things she
would have known if she had but remembered what centuries under an otherworld
sun made her forget. In the Wasteland, she had always been alone, a different
kind of cast out. She had forgotten what dangers others posed to the outcast.
Even in the promised world beyond purgatory’s gates, the predator ever lived
off the prey.

 “
Jack, help me,
” she pleaded softly.

A leather-clad hand struck her across
the face, and she felt desperate tears draw back for angry ones.

“Silence!” her attacker shouted. “No
dark spirits will come to your aid. Tell me of the others. Your accomplices?
Where are they?”

She stared uncomprehending, and the
man struck her again. She felt the hot sting, the trickle of blood from her
nose, the salty, sickening taste upon her lips.

“I asked you about your accomplices,
witch. Tell me!” And he raised his hand again.

Oversight flinched, terrified and
ashamed, desperately shaking her head, no.

“Very well,” her interrogator nodded,
a moon-pale face visible under the black cloak and tricorn, a baton on his belt
rattling a collection of shackles. Around his neck was an assortment of holy
medallions too numerous to count, metal glimmering in the night. All of the men
surrounding her had large, red crosses emblazoned upon their chests. “You are
hereby charged with conjuration, your actions implicating you as a witch, and a
servant to the Red Knight who presages Armageddon, and is the enemy of all that
is right and just. You are under arrest, and will be detained until you can
stand trial before the Court of Fathers.”

Oversight was shaking her head. Why?
Why had she been sent here? What had she done? Why did everything—the darkness,
the water, the men, everything! —scare her? She had never been afraid before.
Never! But the world had changed, and so had she. And it would never, never go
back.

“Don’t do this, Jack! Please!”

A blow struck the base of her skull
like lightning, a terrific spray of pain followed by numbness, darkness closing
around her. She fought briefly against it, but the world was already spinning
out from under her, the blackness growing, swallowing her whole.

Bound and unconscious, Oversight was
taken inside the walled city of Janus.