Read The Whirlwind in the Thorn Tree for Free Online Page B

to murder me outright both if I did and if I didn’t continue the series.
    I ordered a hamburger, but I don’t remember eating it.

 
     
     
    As the boy trickled his way down the hillside, picking his way among the rocks, he saw a woman hanging laundry on a line. “Blessed be!” she wailed when she saw him. “Where have you been? I’ve been worried sick! I thought you’d fallen somewhere or got ate up by a wild dog.”
    “I was just nappin. I fell asleep waiting for the train to come in and I missed it,” said the boy. He was wiping his eyes; he had obviously been crying. “Pah’s not gonna be riled at me, is he?”
    “No, I spose not. I’ll talk to him,” she said, flicking a towel at him. “Get on in the house and get ready for dinner.”
    “Yes’m.”
    “Save my heart, I swear, I thought for sure you were dead, son. Don’t scare me like that again!”
     
    —The Fiddle and the Fire, vol 1 “The Brine and the Bygone”

 
     
     
    The Wolf and the Dragon

     
     
    I WENT BACK TO MY ROOM AND put the laptop back on the table, then started filling the bathtub. By this time it was a little after 9, prime time for a good hot soak. I dug through the bag I’d come back with and mixed a Black Russian. Call me all the names you like, but I’m a fool for coffee, and beer is the most disgusting thing I’ve ever put in my mouth. Well—maybe the second most. I’ve had to eat some pretty nasty things.
    I sat on the couch staring at the box of crap on the table, sipping my drink, listening to the bathtub fill with hot water. “Why did you have to die and leave this shit for me?”
    Splatter, splatter, sip, sip, feel sorry for yourself, rationalize, splatter, splatter, angst, angst, sip, sip. I put the drink down and picked up a notebook. Flipping through it, I found page after page of intricate pictures and unintelligible text.
    Complex sketches filled entire pages: drawings of grim-faced men and women—young and old, hideous and beautiful—in dark armor of industrial make and artisan design, with rippling chain-mail shrouds and dozens of insectoid, overlapping segmented plates. Exploded diagrams of firearms of all shapes and sizes, with gruesome and inventive ammunitions, and decorative etchings of mythical beasts.
    There were also bizarre, baroque conveyances that reminded me simultaneously of futuristic hovercrafts from old Johnny Quest cartoons and illustrations of Captain Nemo’s Nautilus from 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea . Likewise, there were pages that were nothing but articles written about hundreds of different subjects, filling the paper from margin to margin, with footnotes scribbled against the edges.
    There were words that made no sense, exotic names and terms in some curling, sinuous handwriting of a language I was wholly unfamiliar with. It was a vast compendium of what amounted to multimedia glossolalia.
    There was a small planner-style journal that looked like it had seen twenty miles of rough road. I picked it up and began to leaf through it, turning each onion-skin page as if I were a Vatican historian examining the Dead Sea Scrolls. After a few minutes of reading, I realized I was looking at some sort of creation myth.
     
    “When time was young, the universe was not so different.
    “Stars drifted, without origin or destination, in a never-ending void while the laws of nature fell into place like stones settling on the bed of a stream. This was the period of first-birth.
    “Slumbering in the womb of the void was the wolf-god Oramoz—the true name of Measure and Order itself—and She was an ancient and powerful creature. She was luminescence and righteousness and distance incarnate, Her slender body stretching across the Universe, held together by a million points of light.
    “Her husband the dragon-god Angr’manu--the true name of Time, Chaos itself—was a wrathful being in an eternal state of flux, sleek and obscure, whose driving essence was to destroy and sunder and scatter.