The Talisman

pushing aside the mirror and a number of the jointed money-sticks. His fingers closed around what he wanted and brought it out. It was the coin Captain Farren had given him so long ago, the coin with the Queen on one side and the gryphon on the other. He slammed it down on the counter, and the room’s mellow light caught the lovely profile of Laura DeLoessian—again he was struck with wonder by the similarity of that profile to the profile of his mother. Did they look that much alike at the beginning? Is it just that I see the similarities more as I think about them more? Or am I actually bringing them together somehow, making them one?

The old man cringed back even farther as Jack came forward to the counter; it began to seem as though he might push himself right through the back of the building. His words began to pour out in a hysterical flood. When Jack slammed the coin down on the counter like a badman in a Western movie demanding a drink, he suddenly stopped talking. He stared at the coin, his eyes widening, the spit-shiny corners of his mouth twitching. His widening eyes rose to Jack’s face and really saw him for the first time.

“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?”