The Talisman (56 page)

“Jason,” he whispered in a trembling voice. Its former weak bluster was gone. It trembled now not with fear but with awe. “Jason!”

“No,” he said. “My name is—” Then he stopped, realizing that the word which would come out in this strange language was not
Jack
but—

“Jason!”
the old man cried, and fell on his knees. “Jason, ye’ve come! Ye’ve come and a’ wi’ be well, aye, a’ wi’ be well, a’ wi’ be well, and a’ manner a’ things wi’ be well!”

“Hey,” Jack said. “Hey, really—”

“Jason! Jason’s come and the Queen’ll be well, aye, a’ manner a’ things wi’ be well!”

Jack, less prepared to cope with this weepy adoration than he had been to deal with the old depot-keeper’s terrified truculence, turned toward Richard . . . but there was no help there. Richard had stretched out on the floor to the left of the door and had either gone to sleep or was giving a damned good facsimile thereof.

“Oh
shit
,” Jack groaned.

The old man was on his knees, babbling and weeping. The situation was rapidly passing from the realms of the merely ridiculous into those of the cosmically comic. Jack found a flip-up partition and went behind the counter.

“Ah, rise, you good and faithful servant,” Jack said. He wondered blackly if Christ or Buddha had ever had problems like this. “On your feet, fella.”

“Jason! Jason!”
the old man sobbed. His white hair obscured Jack’s sandaled feet as he bent over them and began to kiss them—they weren’t little kisses, either, but good old spooning-in-the-hayloft smackers. Jack began to giggle helplessly. He had managed to get them out of Illinois, and here they were in a ramshackle depot at the center of a great field of grain which wasn’t quite wheat, somewhere in the Outposts, and Richard was sleeping by the door, and this strange old man was kissing his feet and his beard tickled.

“Rise!”
Jack yelled, giggling. He tried to step back but hit the counter.
“Rise up, O good servant! Get on your frigging feet, get up, that’s enough!”

“Jason!” Smack! “A’ wi’ be well!” Smack-smack!

And a’ manner a’ things wi’ be well,
Jack thought crazily, giggling as the old man kissed his toes through the sandals.
I didn’t know they read Robert Burns over here in the Territories, but I guess they must—

Smack-smack-smack.

Oh, no more of this, I really can’t stand it.

“RISE!”
he bellowed at the top of his voice, and the old man finally stood before him, trembling and weeping, unable to meet Jack’s eye. But his amazingly broad shoulders had come up a bit, had lost that broken look, and Jack was obscurely glad of that.

5

It was an hour or better before Jack could manage a coherent run of conversation with the old man. They would
begin
talking, and then Anders, who was a liveryman by trade, would go off on another of his O-Jason-my-Jason-how-great-thou-art jags and Jack would have to quiet him down as quickly as he could . . . certainly before the feet-kissing started again. Jack liked the old man, however, and sympathized. In order to sympathize, all he had to do was imagine how he would feel if Jesus or Buddha turned up at the local car-wash or in the school lunch line. And he had to acknowledge one other clear and present fact: there was a part of him which was not entirely surprised by Anders’s attitude. Although he felt like Jack, he was coming more and more to also feel like . . . the other one.

But he’d died.

That was true; undeniably true. Jason had died, and Morgan of Orris had probably had something to do with his death. But guys like Jason had a way of coming back, didn’t they?

Jack considered the time it took to get Anders talking well spent if only because it allowed him to be sure that Richard wasn’t shamming; that he really had gone back to sleep again. This was good, because Anders had a lot to say about Morgan.

Once, he said, this had been the last stage depot in the known world—it went by the euphonious name of Outpost Depot. Beyond here, he said, the world became a monstrous place.

“Monstrous how?” Jack asked.

“I don’t know,” Anders said, lighting his pipe. He looked out into the darkness, and his face was bleak. “There are stories about the Blasted Lands, but each is apt to be different from each, and they always begin something like ’I know a man who met a man who was lost on the edge of the Blasted Lands for three days and he said . . .’ But I never heard a story that begun ’
I
was lost on the edge of the Blasted Lands for three days and
I
say . . .’ Ye ken the difference, Jason my Lord?”

“I ken it,” Jack said slowly.
The Blasted Lands
. Just the sound of that had raised the hairs on his arms and the nape of his neck. “No one knows what they are, then?”

“Not for sure,” Anders said. “But if even a quarter of what I’ve heard is true—”

“What have you heard?”

“That there are monstrosities out there that makes the things in Orris’s ore-pits look almost normal. That there are balls of fire that go rolling across the hills and empty places, leaving long black trails behind them—the trails are black in the daytime, anyway, but I’ve heard they glow at night. And if a man gets too close to one of those fireballs, he gets turrible sick. He loses his hair, and sores’re apt to raise all over his body, and then he begins to vomit; and mayhap he gets better, but more often he only vomits and vomits until his stomach ruptures and his throat bursts and then . . .”

Anders rose.

“My Lord! Why d’ye look so? Have y’seen something out the window? Have y’seen a spook along those double-damned tracks?”

Anders looked wildly toward the window.

Radiation poisoning,
Jack thought.
He doesn’t know it, but he’s described the symptoms of radiation poisoning almost to a
T.

They had studied both nuclear weapons and the consequences of exposure to radiation in a physical science mod the year before—because his mother was at least casually involved in both the nuclear-freeze movement and the movement to prevent the proliferation of nuclear power plants, Jack had paid very close attention.

How well, he thought, how well radiation poisoning fit with the whole idea of the Blasted Lands! And then he realized something else, as well: the west was where the first tests had been carried out—where the prototype of the Hiroshima bomb had been hung from a tower and then exploded, where any number of suburbs inhabited only by department-store mannequins had been destroyed so the Army could get a more or less accurate idea of what a nuclear explosion and the resulting firestorm would really do. And in the end they had returned to Utah and Nevada, among the last of the
real
American Territories, and had simply resumed testing underground. There was, he knew, a lot of government land out there in those great wastes, those tangles of buttes and mesas and crenellated badlands, and bombs were not all they were testing out there.

How much of that shit would Sloat bring over here if the Queen died? How much of that shit had he
already
brought? Was this stageline-
cum
-railhead part of the shipping system for it?

“Ye don’t look good, my Lord, not at all. Ye look as white as a sheet; I’ll take an oath that ye do!”

“I’m fine,” Jack said slowly. “Sit down. Go on with your story. And light your pipe, it’s gone out.”

Anders took his pipe from his mouth, relit it, and looked from Jack to the window again . . . and now his face was not just bleak; it was haggard with fright. “But I’ll know soon enough if the stories are true, I suppose.”

“Why is that?”

“Because I start through the Blasted Lands tomorrow morning, at first light,” Anders said. “I start through the Blasted Lands, driving Morgan of Orris’s devil-machine in yon shed, and carrying God alone knows what sort of hideous devil’s work.”

Jack stared at him, his heart pumping hard, the blood humming in his head.

“Where? How far? To the ocean? The big water?”

Anders nodded slowly. “Aye,” he said. “To the water. And—” His voice dropped, became a strengthless whisper. His eyes rolled toward the dark windows, as if he feared some nameless thing might be peering in, watching, eavesdropping.

“And there Morgan will meet me, and we’re to take his goods on.”

“On to where?” Jack asked.

“To the black hotel,” Anders finished in a low, trembling voice.

6

Jack felt the urge to break into wild cackles of laughter again.
The Black Hotel
—it sounded like the title of a lurid mystery novel. And yet . . . and yet . . . all of this had begun at a hotel, hadn’t it? The Alhambra in New Hampshire, on the Atlantic coast. Was there some other hotel, perhaps even another rambling old Victorian monstrosity of a hotel, on the Pacific coast? Was that where his long, strange adventure was supposed to end? In some analogue of the Alhambra and with a seedy amusement park close at hand? This idea was terribly persuasive; in an odd, yet precise way, it even seemed to pick up the idea of Twinners and Twinning . . .

“Why do ye look at me so, my Lord?”

Anders sounded agitated and upset. Jack shifted his gaze away quickly. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I was just thinking.”

He smiled reassuringly, and the liveryman smiled tentatively back at him.

“And I wish you’d stop calling me that.”

“Calling ye what, my Lord?”

“My Lord.”

“My Lord?” Anders looked puzzled. He was not echoing what Jack had said but asking for clarification. Jack had a feeling that if he tried to push on with this, he would end up in the middle of a “Who’s on first, What’s on second” sort of sketch.

“Never mind,” Jack said. He leaned forward. “I want you to tell me everything. Can you do that?”

“I’ll try, my Lord,” Anders said.

7

His words came slowly at first. He was a single man who had spent his entire life in the Outposts and he was not used to talking much at the best of times. Now he had been commanded to speak by a boy whom he considered to be at least royalty, and perhaps even something like a god. But, little by little, his words began to come faster, and by the end of his inconclusive but terribly provocative tale, the words were nearly pouring out. Jack had no trouble following the tale he told in spite of the man’s accent, which his mind kept translating into a sort of ersatz Robert Burns burr.

Anders knew Morgan because Morgan was, quite simply, Lord of the Outposts. His real title, Morgan of Orris, was not so grand, but as a practical matter, the two came to nearly the same. Orris was the easternmost cantonment of the Outposts, and the only really organized part of that large, grassy area. Because he ruled Orris utterly and completely, Morgan ruled the rest of the Outposts by default. Also, the bad Wolfs had begun to gravitate to Morgan in the last fifteen years or so. At first that meant little, because there were only a few bad (except the word Anders used also sounded a bit like
rabid
to Jack’s ear) Wolfs. But in later years there had been more and more of them, and Anders said he had heard tales that, since the Queen had fallen ill, more than half the tribe of skin-turning shepherds were rotten with the sickness. Nor were these the only creatures at Morgan of Orris’s command, Anders said; there were others, even worse—some, it was told, could drive a man mad at a single look.

Jack thought of Elroy, the bogeyman of the Oatley Tap, and shuddered.

“Does this part of the Outposts we’re in have a name?” Jack asked.

“My Lord?”

“This part we’re in now.”

“No real name, my Lord, but I’ve heard people call it Ellis-Breaks.”

“Ellis-Breaks,” Jack said. A picture of Territories geography, vague and probably in many ways incorrect, was finally beginning to take shape in Jack’s mind. There were the Territories, which corresponded to the American east; the Outposts, which corresponded to the American midwest and great plains (Ellis-Breaks? Illinois? Nebraska?); and the Blasted Lands, which corresponded to the American west.

He looked at Anders so long and so fixedly that at last the liveryman began to stir uneasily again. “I’m sorry,” Jack said. “Go on.”

His father, Anders said, had been the last stage driver who “drove out east” from Outpost Depot. Anders had been his ’prentice. But even in those days, he said, there were great confusions and upheavals in the east; the murder of the old King and the short war which had followed it had seen the beginning of those upheavals, and although the war had ended with the installation of Good Queen Laura, the upheavals had gone on ever since, seeming to work their way steadily eastward, out of the spoiled and twisted Blasted Lands. There were some, Anders said, who believed the evil had begun all the way west.

“I’m not sure I understand you,” Jack said, although in his heart he thought he did.

“At land’s end,” Anders said. “At the edge of the big water, where I am bound to go.”

In other words, it began in the same place my father came from . . . my father, and me, and Richard . . . and Morgan. Old Bloat.

The troubles, Anders said, had come to the Outposts, and now the Wolf tribe was partly rotten—just how rotten none could say, but the liveryman told Jack he was afraid that the rot would be the end of them if it didn’t stop soon. The upheavals had come here, and now they had even reached the east, where, he had heard, the Queen lay ill and near death.

“That’s not true, is it, my Lord?” Anders asked . . . almost begged.

Jack looked at him. “Should I know how to answer that?” he asked.

“Of course,” Anders said. “Are ye not her son?”

For a moment, the entire world seemed to become very quiet. The sweet hum of the bugs outside stilled. Richard seemed to pause between heavy, sluggish breaths.

Even his own heart seemed to pause . . . perhaps that most of all.

Then, his voice perfectly even, he said, “Yes . . . I am her son. And it’s true . . . she’s very ill.”

“But dying?” Anders persisted, his eyes nakedly pleading now. “Is she dying, my Lord?”

Jack smiled a little and said: “That remains to be seen.”