The Whirlwind in the Thorn Tree (17 page)

She gave me a sharp look.

“You keep mentioning ‘No-Men’,” I said, grabbing at a change of subject. “Who—or what—are they?”

“It’s a long story. Honestly, you’d be better off reading the books.”

“Let’s say, hypothetically speaking, that I’m a terribly impatient man.”

We kept walking for a little while in an artificially cool and uncomfortable silence. I could sense her assembling and arranging the information in her mind. Finally, she looked over to me and said, “You’re going to ruin it for yourself.”

“I’ll survive. If you don’t fill me in, I might not.”

She sighed and said, “I’ll start with the basics, give you a Cliff’s Notes version of how the series started. The Antargata k-Setra—affectionately referred to as ‘K-Set’— is where the bulk of the
Fiddle and the Fire
series takes place. A couple of generations before the beginning of the first novel, a large medieval nation—the country of Ain—began to send explorers to the farthest reaches of the world of Destin looking for new territory and resources.

“With seventeen large, well-provisioned ships, the explorers embarked on an expedition from the western shores of Ain across the massive Aemev Ocean. Nearly a year later, the final remaining ships finally reached the shores of what the remaining crew called ‘the Undiscovered Continent’.

“By this time, the survivors were only a fraction of the initial party, having dwindled from around five hundred and forty to just a little under two hundred men and women. When they landed, they were astonished to see the ruins of tall, slender buildings in the distance.

“See, the Undiscovered Continent held the very last vestiges of an ancient and very advanced civilization, isolated from the rest of the world by the ocean. No one really knows anything about them, and no one can read their language.”

We stopped to wait for a traffic light to change. As the cars trundled by, their music fading past in disconnected snippets of noise, Noreen continued to talk.

“The ‘Wilders’ you saw are a nomadic tribe of humanoids that inhabited K-Set long before the people of Ain began to attempt to colonize it. They call themselves the
Bemo-Epneme.
At first, the Wilders were leery of the explorers from Ain, but after several months they were trading with each other.

“That’s when Ainean expansionists began to send scouting parties into K-Set, looking for resources and places to establish new settlements and outposts. As you can imagine, the Wilders weren’t too happy with these strangers overtaking parts of their territory, so they started attacking the expansionist parties.”

The traffic slowed to a stop and Noreen and I jogged across the street. When we reached the other side, we passed in front of a deli getting ready for the day’s business, filling the air with the smell of baking bread and roasting meats. The aroma made my stomach knot up in anticipation.

“By the time the colonists left Ain for the voyage to K-Set, Ain had invented firearms and crude machinery, like clockworks and steam engines. Guns were the deciding factor in the new war against the Wilders; in several years, the colonists had penetrated the mainland of K-Set and built several towns and farms in a free-homestead expansion.

“It was a war of attrition. Basically, if you could take it and survive on it, it was yours. There were some Aineans, though, that sympathized with the Wilders, and broke away from colonist society to form adversarial groups—some of them actually began to cohabitate with the Bemo-Epneme, even stepping into the more primal lifestyle of the Wilders.”

“Is this ever going to get to the No-Men?” I asked with a smirk.

“Be patient, you jerk,” she said. “So, it turned out that the Wilders worship a god called ‘Obelus’, an entity that was responsible for the destruction of the civilization that had ruled over K-Set centuries before
The Fiddle and the Fire.
They prayed to this god, desperate for salvation from the invaders, and finally, one day, Obelus answered them.

“At the end of the first book,
The Brine and the Bygone,
a large expedition of settlers were slaughtered by something at the farthest frontier of Ainean territory. Only two people survived the attack: the boy Pack and a settler named Aarne Hargrave. Pack escaped unhurt to a far-flung sympathist fortress where the second book,
The Cape and the Castle,
took place.

“Aarne made it back to their camp three days’ march away, where he died of his injuries, but not before warning the Kingsmen captain there of what devastated them. The captain asked him if the attackers were men, and Aarne’s last words were, ‘No...they are no men.’ It stuck.

“As for what they are, your dad never really went into much detail about them—he always portrayed them as mysterious lurking giants, never really showing the ‘face behind the mask’. In the second book, Pack gets a good look at a dead No-Man while he’s imprisoned by the Wilder sympathists. He describes a ‘monolithic golem made of some strange metal he couldn’t identify...a heavy, vaguely human figure all draped in the overgrowth of the ruins’.”

My coffee cup was cold and empty when I saw the spires of Walker Memorial reaching over the trees. The cars on Main Street whooshed past us in an endless multicolored stream of steel and lights as we approached the church.

I bypassed the building itself and went straight to the parking lot, where I spotted my car right in the place I’d parked it the previous afternoon. I cursed when I saw the white square on the windshield, but it turned out to be nothing more than a promotional pamphlet for an upcoming street festival, turned spongy and sloppy by the condensation on the glass.

I scooped the wet paper off and unlocked my car, put my rucksack inside. I was going to head into the church to check on the mirror, but Noreen had already climbed into the passenger side of the Topaz and was sitting there, her arms folded, her mouth pursed tight.

I got in and started the car. We were pulling into traffic when she said, “If he’s not in his room, I’m going to—gonna—I don’t know what I’m gonna do.”

_______

I caught myself doing sixty twice on the way across town. The entire path was a forty-five zone—it’s a wonder I never attracted the ire of the local police. I pulled into the parking lot of the Hampton so fast that the ass-end of my car scraped the pavement as we crossed the frontage.

Noreen was already climbing out as I parked the car and turned it off. I fell out of the door, putting my hand in a rain puddle, and ran to catch up to her. We nearly sprinted through the lobby, where the desk clerk started to ask us about our reservation, and went directly to the elevator.

Noreen jabbed the up-button a rapid-fire ten or fifteen times. I could hear the cab inside moving, but it simply wasn’t fast enough. She walked away, shoved the door open to the stairwell, and ran up the stairs, throwing her coffee cup into a nearby trash can.

Two flights of climbing later, and we were beelining down the third floor hallway toward 312. Noreen pounded on the door with one tight fist and waited.

Silence.

She beat on it again, faster and harder. “Sawyer! Are you in there?”

“Sawyer—?” I called, kicking the door lightly a few times for deep thumps that echoed down the lushly-carpeted corridor.

Nobody came to the door. Noreen stepped back as if she were going to try to kick it open, and thought better of it. “
Goddam it!
We need to get a key and get this door open,” she said, obviously starting to panic. There was a wild look in her eye. “We need to get this door open!”

I jiggled the doorhandle in desperation. It was definitely locked.

Noreen turned and stormed past me in the opposite direction, and then stopped short. I turned to follow her and paused as well.

Sawyer was standing at the corridor intersection, clad only in a pair of jeans and socks, his hair wet and spiky. “What’s all the yelling about?” he asked. “I told you I was in 321, you crazy-people.”

Noreen ran at him and embraced him so hard she almost knocked him down.

“Woah,” he said with a smile. “Nice to see you too. I thought you left?”

We followed Sawyer back to his room and I started searching it, shaking out the clothes that were lying around and peeling back the bedsheets. I was looking through his bags when Sawyer interrupted me.

“Hey there officer, do you have a search warrant for that?”

I sat back and exhaled. The room was warm and swampy, and from where I was sitting, I could see that the bathroom mirror was foggy. “Where’s your camera?”

“I dunno,” he replied. “I guess I left it at your dad’s house last night. The hell did we get into? I don’t remember any booze, but it must’ve been something strong. The last thing I remember is going through the stuff in your dad’s bedroom, and then I was waking up in my bed wearing all my clothes.”

I sighed.

Sawyer shrugged. “And for some reason, I was covered in flour or cornmeal. Did we get drunk and bake something? I don’t remember muffins. I would definitely have remembered muffins—maybe not
bran
muffins.”

“Why didn’t you answer your phone, you asshole?” asked Noreen, shoving him lightly. It was more of a pushing slap.

He shrugged, and picked up his phone, checking the screen. “Like I told you, I woke up gross. I guess you called me while I was taking a shower.”

I sighed. “No proof at all. I look like a psycho.”

“Proof of what?” asked Sawyer, knuckling one eye. “You don’t need proof to look like a psycho.”

“Proof that we walked through a mirror under the church and into the world in my dad’s books, that’s what!”

Sawyer’s eyes got as big as silver dollars and he dropped his phone. The battery cover popped off and it slid under the bed. “Are you
shitting me?”
he asked, getting down on his hands and knees to look for it. “I had a dream about that. Are you telling me I didn’t dream that? That happened
for real?”

“Hell yeah, it happened for real,” I said, squatting next to him.

He found his phone and put it back together. Once he’d turned it back on, he stared at it for a moment in thought, then looked up at me. “Didn’t you take a picture with your phone?”

(I gazed up at the windows as we passed them, fearing the sight of some guarded, unwelcoming, half-glimpsed face, and whispered to Sawyer. I took a picture with my cellphone.)

I nodded. “I remember doing that, but my phone is dead,” and blinked. “Why isn’t yours?”

“I left it in my room when I went with you to Ed’s house.”

“Oh.”

“Well,” said Noreen, throwing Sawyer a shirt, “Now that we know Sawyer’s non-phone-answering ass is okay, I think we should hie thee to the church and see if that mirror is still there. You two have me crawling with curiosity.”

A Heart-to-Heart

I
DID NOT EXPECT TO FIND
the church locked up tighter than a— “Tighter than a hooker with lockjaw,” said Sawyer, coming around the corner to join us. We had been all around the perimeter of the sprawling church and found no entry whatsoever. Noreen and I both froze mid-step and laughed at him. He came toward us, shrugging it off.

“Got any more bright ideas, Columbo?”

Noreen looked up at the castle-like church and let her arms drop to her sides. “You guys really had me going. Were you telling the truth about what happened? Are you playing a prank on me or something?”

“I wish I could say I was,” I said. “But as far as I can tell, unless both of us are having identical hallucinations, it really happened.”

I let my hands drop to my sides, consternated.

“I have to admit, this is getting a little weird,” said Noreen. “I’m not sure what to think anymore.”

Sawyer shrugged helplessly. I felt like a fraud—no, worse, I felt like I might actually be losing my marbles after all. I couldn’t deny how crazy it all sounded, and even now I was having trouble reconciling the surreality of the previous night myself. I looked around at the parking lot. We were the only ones that had a car here.

As I thought about the situation, a sensation of warmth spread across the back of my neck. When I turned back around, the morning sun was breaking through the clouds. I was momentarily blinded by a force of golden light.