The Talisman

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 Outpost. 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 ears) 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 . . .