The Talisman

“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,