The Whirlwind in the Thorn Tree (32 page)

“—Than no life at all?” I asked. “Is it?”

The second epiphany I had after walking into Ed’s house was one that revealed to me the nature of my own dissatisfaction at life. Coupled with the events of the past week, it forced me to recognize that ever since I’d stepped into that elevator, I’d felt more alive than at any prior point in my existence.

I looked sadly around the room and acknowledged how right Sawyer was.

We went upstairs. The bedroom was as decorated as the den, with calligraphy paintings like the ones from Walter’s house, and shelf after shelf of Ainean literature. A huge, snakelike face as large as a horse’s greeted us at the top of the stairs, hanging from the ceiling by a string. A startling dragon-kite made to look like the Saoshoma.

The rest of the tremendous facsimile was also tied up, encircling the room with paper and sticks as if it were flying a circle around the bed. The creature’s multi-hued hide was a watercolor painting, with blotchy swirls of blue, green, red, and brown. I looked closer and saw that some sort of glittery pigment had been mixed into the paint, which made the monster sparkle in the sunbeams.

The widows-walk was through a French door at the foot of the bed, and a spyglass was mounted on a bracket bolted to the railing. Noreen looked through it and remarked, “Wow, I can see all the way to the marina.”

While they lingered on the deck, I went back into the bedroom and looked down at the bed. There was a hand-sized bloodstain on the duvet, partially underneath the pillow. On closer inspection, I noticed a hole in the cover. Pulling the pillow out of the way, I folded back the bedclothes. The hole went straight through the mattress.

I flipped the mattress, which sent the Saoshoma kite to clattering. The bedframe was a simple, short-legged wooden table on which the mattress lay; I kicked this frame out of the way and looked at the floor, and there I found what I wanted, which was the bullet that killed my father. It was lodged in the boards.

I got one of the artisan knives down off the wall and used it to pry the bullet out. When I had retrieved it, Noreen and Sawyer were standing over me.

“My brother shot him in his sleep,” I said, showing them the deformed lump of metal. “The cowardly son of a bitch came in here while my dad was in the bed and shot him.”

I put the bullet in my vest pocket and we went back downstairs.

I took a moment to examine the trophies my father displayed on the walls, and took as many of the coins in the baskets as I could carry. I didn’t know how much I had, but they looked like they could pay for a few meals, at least. I also took a small leather satchel with the Kingsman shield embossed on the front flap, and dropped the coins inside.

“Hey, check this out,” said Noreen. We gathered around her at the typewriter.

Something was typed on the sheet of paper resting behind the daisywheel.

TOTEM DRAGONSLAYER

“What do you think it means?” asked Sawyer.

“I have no idea,” I said, taking out the sheet of paper. It was basic Earth A4 paper. The rest of it was in a sheaf in one of the desk’s drawers.

—The drawers! I rifled through them, but there was nothing in them of use: pens, ink ribbons, more coins. A little planner-style journal that I tucked away into my satchel for perusal later. The words were in Ainean and I couldn’t read them.

Walter Rollins appeared in the doorway. He seemed to have regained his default good humor. I suspected it was a symptom of the hair of the dog. He had put on his clothes, finally. He had on a brown overcoat that billowed behind him in a fragile manner as he walked. A scarf in a dozen oceanic hues dangled from his neck.

“I see you’ve discovered your father’s strange writing-machine,” he said. “Hurry up, you lot. I’ve a surprise for you.”

I showed him the paper. “Do you have any idea what this means?”

“Not a clue. Are you finished?”

“I guess.”

Sawyer and Noreen were playfighting with a pair of swords, fencing and giggling behind me. My heart warmed at the sound of their childish laughter. It was good to see Noreen in better health again. “There can be only one!” hissed Sawyer, in his best Christopher Lambert impression.

“Good. Come on. We’re leaving for Ostlyn in the morning. I need to send him word of our impending arrival. I also want to treat you before we leave.”

The road that passed the Rollins house dwindled to a trail scratched into the mountainside, then curled in lazy loops up the ridge to a stone keep. As we drew near I could see gnarly little maple trees growing out of the stone exterior, as if the tower had arms and was using them to shake pom-poms in the air.

In fact, I saw as we neared the top of the mountain that the larger trees had given way to a forest of miniature maples, much like the Japanese maples back on Earth, but the leaves on these were a breathtaking shade of indigo. Birds flew in and out of large, open windows in the top of the keep, calling and singing.

A strange idea came to me as we climbed the stairs: I used to think I was addicted to the internet. I would endlessly procrastinate at work, looking at this or that, reading Twitter as if I were leafing through an old National Geographic at the doctor’s office. But since I’d come here, I had barely thought about it at all. I didn’t miss it in the least.

The random thought comforted me.

The aerie at the top of the tower was staffed by two men, a Tekyr and a tall green-eyed Iznoki, like Gosse Read. The Iznoki was lanky, and when we crested the stairs and met him, his broad shoulders were a flock of birds. They were large and resembled ravens, except for that they were a fervent shade of blood red, with copper-colored eyes, and had crests like parakeets with white down underneath.

“Rymmu tyyn, j’naastamehk,” said the Iznoki. I surprised myself by noticing that he was speaking a language other than Tekyr.

“Kuaea suna, juam fykdan. Rua-ec zo j’ytik?” said Walter.

Sawyer threw up his hands. “All right, all right. So our Iznok is a little rusty, give us a break, here.”

The green-eyed man laughed kindly. “My name is Obike Setaro. My friend here is Ytur. It is nice to meet friends of the Deon. He does not have many of them.”

“Oh, har har. I’m here to send a message, you skinny old cage-kicker,” said Walter. He handed Obike a wooden capsule about the size of his thumb. The bird-keeper attached it to the leg of one of the red ravens and tossed it out the window, then turned to his customer and rasped his thumb and forefinger together.

Walter put a couple of Council Talents into the palm of his hand. “Don’t spend it all in one bar, Beaky.”

Obike smirked. “This coming from the Man with the Paper Gullet.”

“I’ll throw you in jail.”

“I’ll throw you out the window.”

They laughed and embraced each other, and we were walking back down the path when the Deon said to us, “He’s a long-time friend of the family. His ma used to look after me when my father was in the army.”

“So what’s this treat?” asked Noreen as we came back down the mountain into the town proper. In the morning sun, Maplenesse seemed less festive and looked more like a favela. Mokehlyr would be back in full swing tonight, but while the sun was up, the citizens were all about business, a hustle and bustle of people getting back to work.

The medievality of Ain came back to me as I watched the crowds of merchants and visitors surge through the marketplace...there were crude electrical setups for lights, reverse-engineered from K-Set salvage and ostensibly powered by the windmills in the mountains overlooking Maplenesse, but I got that sense of
vero nihil verius
again.

This wasn’t a theme park, no matter how much my mind wanted to make it into one—it was the real deal.

Walter took us to the town bath-house, a large cabin that opened onto the town common where we’d danced the night before. It was getting late in the morning, so the usual crowd had dwindled to a trickle.

We weren’t there for another round of happy happy naked co-ed coffee time, this time. The Deon took us to a little salon off the lobby where we signed our names into a ledger and sat on a wooden futon. From where I was sitting I could see into the room accessible through a beaded curtain off the right-hand side. Inside, a man was getting his hair cut.

A woman came out of the left-hand door and checked the ledger, then turned to us and summoned Walter and myself into a room divided in half by a partition. She told us to strip down to our underwear and lie down on the tables, then bustled back out.

I did as I was told, warmed by a huge metal firebox at the end of the room.

A woman came in, her rich mocha skin mottled with the dark, branching lightning-bolt striations that reminded me of x-rays of lungs. “Good morning.”

I looked over at her and had the startling realization that she had four arms. Her shoulders split at the neck and became four distinct limbs, each one half the breadth of normal human arms. The foremost arms fit into the inner contour of the rear arms, and each hand had two fingers and a thumb.

Her hair also wasn’t hair—it was a backswept membrane, reminiscent of the wings of a bat, that dangled from her skull like a head-dress and draped capelike across her shoulders.

Her appearance creeped me out somewhat, but her demeanor was so pleasant and professional I couldn’t hold a grudge. She gave me a massage all over, starting at the calves and working her way up my back until she was palpating my scalp. Then she directed me to roll over and she rubbed everything but my groin, even going so far as to rub my face, tug on my arms, and pull all my fingers.

When she was done, I could do nothing but lie on the table like a roast turkey, soaking up the warmth of the fire and glowing in relaxation. I didn’t even notice she’d left; when she returned I was so wiped out and mellow that I was trying to remember how to put my clothes back on.

“That was a very good idea,” I asided to Sawyer as we traded places.

I went outside to bake in the sun like a lizard, sitting on a bench by the fountain, leaning back with my feet crossed straight out in front of me. Walter came out and sat down beside me.

“I start all my journeys this way,” he said. “Much easier to weather a long trip when you start off as relaxed as you can possibly be.”

“I can dig it,” I said.

I let my head settle against the bench-back and folded my arms, closing my eyes. The sun lit up my eyelids with orange fire.

“I have a query for you,” Walter asked.

“Shoot.”

“I always wanted to ask Eddick what your world was like, but I’m not sure I ever really believed that he was from Zam. I guess I always simply assumed that they were making a joke about Eddick’s eccentric personality or something.”

I peered at him from between my eyelids.

“What
is
your world like?”

I thought about it. “A lot like this one, but a lot dirtier and a lot more boring. We go around in machines instead of riding on
po-timir nefertiti
or whatever, nobody really carries a gun, and trains mostly just carry freight.

“Everything is too convenient. Nothing is an adventure anymore. If I want something to drink, I can just pop down to the shop and grab something, I don’t have to pump water out of a well. If I want to talk to my friend in another country, I don’t have to send him a bird and wait for a reply in a week or three weeks—I can just send him a message on my electric writing-machine and he’ll see it in seconds. If I’m cold, I don’t have to go out and gather firewood and chop it into little pieces, I can just get off the couch and turn up the heat machine.”

“I should like to see your world one day,” he said. “I bet it’s not as boring as you think it is. You are just used to it. It sounds amazing.”

“I guess. Here everything seems imbued with importance. The effort it takes to survive here makes every day so much more meaningful.” I paused in thought. “Here’s an example. Back on our world, I was a soldier.”

“A soldier? Really? Pale, doughy you?”

“Yeah, believe it or not. Thanks so much for the vote of confidence.”

Walter bit back a smile. “My apologies. Please, continue.”

“Anyway, our world has...wars going on. I don’t know if you would really call them
wars.
That’s a whole ‘nother can of worms. But when I went to the front lines, I was a long way from my home and all the conveniences there. And in the desert, in the middle of nowhere, milk is
very
hard to come by.

“I had to get together a team, get my hands on some method of travel, and drive several miles to another encampment for milk. And it was warm and thick, and came in little boxes you could store dry on the shelf. I craved milk like a son of a bitch. I couldn’t get enough of it. I would walk out of the barracks mess hall with it hidden in my pockets. I couldn’t wait to get back to my camp with it, and I would save it, stretch my ration as far as I could.

“But when I got home from the war, I could buy all the milk I wanted. I just had to go to the marketplace and I had all the cold, fresh milk I wanted. I could have mopped the floor with it if I wanted. And suddenly, well, milk didn’t seem so great anymore.”

We sat there sprawled on the bench, waiting for our friends to come out of the bath-house, watching the crowd swarm and surge around us. I could smell the tantalizing aroma of a man sizzling meat on a charcoal grill in a kiosk at the edge of the square. He probably slaughtered that meat himself. I wondered what kind of animal it came from.