The Talisman

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.”

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 reached this far west, Morgan had sent out a crew of grotesque, twisted slaves from the ore-pits back east; these slaves were tended by stolen Wolfs and other, stranger creatures. Their foreman was a terrible man who carried a whip; he had been here almost constantly when the work began, but then he had disappeared. Anders, who had spent most of those terrible weeks and months cowering in his house, which was some five miles south of here, had been delighted to see him go. He had heard rumors that Morgan had called the man with the whip back east, where affairs were reaching some great point of climax; Anders didn’t know if this was true or not, and didn’t care. He was simply glad that the man, who was sometimes accompanied by a scrawny, somehow gruesome-looking little boy, was gone.

“His name,” Jack demanded. “What was his name?”

“My Lord, I don’t know. The Wolfs called him He of the Lashes. The slaves just called him the devil. I’d say they were both right.”

“Did he dress like a dandy? Velvet coats? Shoes with buckles on the tops, maybe?”

Anders was nodding.

“Did he wear a lot of strong perfume?”