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
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yon shed, and carrying God alone knows what sort of hideous devil’s work.”
Jack stared at him, his heart pumping hard, the blood hum-
ming 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 sup-
posed 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 tenta-
tively 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.
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“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 in-conclusive 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, An-
ders 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.”
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“Ellis-Breaks,” Jack said. A picture of Territories geogra-
phy, 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 Out-
posts, 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 east-ward, 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
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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.”
8
Anders said that until the troubles began, Morgan of Orris
had been a little-known frontier lord and no more; he had inherited his comic-opera title from a father who had been
a greasy, evil-smelling buffoon. Morgan’s father had been
something of a laughing-stock while alive, Anders went on,
and had even been a laughing-stock in his manner of dying.
“He was taken with the squitters after a day of drinking
peach-fruit wine and died while on the trots.”
People had been prepared to make the old man’s son a
laughing-stock as well, but the laughing had stopped soon after the hangings in Orris began. And when the troubles began in the years after the death of the old King, Morgan had risen in importance as a star of evil omen rises in the sky.
All of this meant little this far out in the Outposts—these great empty spaces, Anders said, made politics seem unimportant. Only the deadly change in the Wolf tribe made a
practical difference to them, and since most of the bad Wolfs went to the Other Place, even that didn’t make much difference to them (“It fashes us little, my Lord” was what Jack’s ears insisted they had heard).
Then, not long after the news of the Queen’s illness had