Installment 6: "a twisting, torturous path to travel"

A black duster hung dripping on a clothesline out in the yard, an ominous silhouette limned by a full yellow moon.

Three men sat in rocking chairs on the porch, polishing off the dregs of bourbon and Sake. Moths flittered around the lantern hanging from a porch beam.

“This sorcel-con you describe, it does seem like incongruous magics,” Dur said. “It sounds like a golem, but the features are native American. My hunch is it was created by a powerful wizard versed in the magic arts of diverse cultures.”

“Perhaps Torfuck has been spanning the globe incorporating various and sundry magics into his bag?” Dyb asked.

“Torfuck is not that studious,” Oz said, upending the whiskey bottle into his mouth to catch the last drops. “Too impatient. My guess is he has someone in consort with him.”

“Why a sorcerer of such power would ally himself to Torfuck I cannot fathom,” Dur said, “unless he—or she—has his or her own secret agenda.”

A mangy dog bound up onto the porch and nuzzled Dur. “Hiya, boy. You and your brother will have to get along without me for a few days.”

“Eh?” Dyb asked. “Are you going somewhere?”

“Perhaps,” Dur replied. “But now, I think I’ll turn in. I’m supposed to play trombone in church service in a few hours. If I’m gone when you get up, feel free to help yourself to breakfast. There are eggs and sausage in the fridge.”

“Aye, we’d best grab some z’s, Dyb, so we can set out bright and early.” Oz staggered when he stood up. He steadied himself on the porch railing.

“I knew the fifth lowball was going to get me,” he muttered.

* * * * * * * * * * * *

Oz shuffled into the kitchen, lured awake by the smell of frying eggs and sausage. He made a beeline for the coffee pot and poured himself some black gold.

Dyb slapped a couple eggs and pieces of sausage on a plate and handed it to a grateful Oz.

“Thanks,” he mumbled, and dropped onto a chair at the table.

When they had finished eating and done the dishes, they emerged into late-morning sunlight. A horse whinnied. Dur sat astride a white Arabian. He had a wide-brimmed straw hat on his head and was chewing on a wheat stalk.

“You boys ready?” he asked.

“You’re going with us?” Dyb exclaimed. “Awesome!”

Oz grinned. “Just like old times. What about your obligations here?”

“There is only me at the Homestead now. My cousin will take care of the dogs. Volleyball season just ended. And you will have need of me on this quest. All for one…”

“I couldn’t get into Alexander Dumas,” Dyb admitted. “But what the hell: One for all!”

Oz pulled his duster off the line and clothed himself in heavy shadow. He and Dyb got their horses out of the stall, and three rode into a sudden mist in a birch grove, leaving the Homestead behind.

“I consulted the maps of the Planes some more this morning,” Dur said as they rode through a dense forest in Between Planes. “It looks like we have a twisting, torturous path to travel. The sorcel-con you had a run-in with, it’s likely just the first foretaste of what we will face.”

“What about the route between the borders of the Kirby Panels?” Oz asked.

“They’re still in flux. Aftershocks of the Devil’s Rift War.”

“The Steranko Gates?” Dyb suggested.

“I wouldn’t advise that path either. Mephisto’s taken over that realm.”

“Hallowe’entown?” Dyb asked, the enthusiasm in his voice undisguised.

Dur shot him a quizzical look. “That would take us well out of our way.”

“Damn,” Dyb shrugged. “I just like visiting that place.”

“We may have to make some time along the outskirts of Wunderland and Uz,” Dur said, “much as you don’t care for those places, Dyb.”

“And Nurnia?” Oz asked.

“That I won’t be able to say until we see what state Umber is in.”

“Aye, lots of upheaval and political intrigue on that plane, last I heard,” Oz said.

“But first we’ll be crossing the White Tanks and the Purple Sage—your old haunts, Oz,” Dur said.
Oz began singing...

“Hear the wind moan
in the bright diamond sky
These mountains are waiting
brown, green, and dry
I’m too old for the term
but I’ll use it anyway
I’ll be a child of the wind
till the end of my days.”*

*from "Child of the Wind" by Bruce Cockburn

Installment 5: "...created for a time such as this."

Trees were down all over the property. Riders Oz and Dyb picked their way through the intersecting limbs, up the muddy path to the front porch of the Homestead.

Three raps on the door, followed after a short pause by one. The door swung open. El Dur stood there with a small jack-o-lantern in his hand, poised to toss. When he saw his visitors, he set the jack-o-lantern down on a shelf by the door and opened his arms in greeting.

“Dear gentlemen!” Dur enthused. “What a delightful surprise. I have not seen either of you since the UH book signing.”

“It is good to see you,” Oz said.

Dur was a man of slim build, like unto Dyb, his hair and thin beard brown with just the slightest touches of gray. He wore a flannel shirt and jeans and hiking boots, clothing that showed the wear of a man who liked to spend much time outdoors. There were laugh lines around his eyes, which shone with that peculiar childlike look possessed by all the Cross-Plane Riders. Though they all wore the weathering marks and scars of hard-fought battles and long journeys, there was a touch of Peter Pan about them, a part of them that would never grow up.

The three old friends exchanged hugs.

“Dyb, my friend, how are you holding up?”

“Well, to quote the old song, ‘Now she’s gone, and I don’t worry / ‘cuz I’m sittin’ on top of the world.’”

“The Cure?” Dur asked.

“No, some old blues song Dylan covered. I brought you a translation of Manic Runes.”

“Ah—a welcome gift indeed. Come inside; I’ll put some coffee on. Unless you’d prefer a glass of Sake? I don’t care for the stuff myself, but I have a couple bottles.”

“I have a bottle of Knob Creek” Oz said. “But I’ll try a glass of Sake, and I’ll have a cup of coffee…and a glass of iced tea, if you have some made up.”

“You’re the only person I know who drinks four different beverages at once.”

“Well, not strictly at once,” Oz replied. “They wouldn’t taste good at all mixed together.”

“He drinks like he reads,” Dyb said, sitting down at the kitchen table. “Four books going at once—polish off a chapter in one, set it aside, pick up another for a couple chapters...”

“Perhaps my taste buds also have ADHD,” Oz said. “Say, Dur, do you have a hose out back? I need to spray this duster down; the last gal I put my arms around complained it reeks of cigars.”

“Oh?” Dur asked. “I didn’t notice.”

“How could you, over the cigarette smell in the Homestead?” Dyb asked.

Dur put some coffee on the stove. “Are you two dropping by to catch up, or does business bring you to my door?”

“Business is a good excuse to catch up,” Dyb replied. “We don’t see enough of you, Dur.”

“No, these reunions are far too rare” Dur agreed, setting out glasses. “You’d think a couple fellows who can traverse the continent in a day cross-planing would get down more often.”

“Alas,” Oz said, setting down his gift, a bottle of bourbon, “the Code only allows us to cross-plane on business. And the business this time around is Torfuck.”

“Ahhh, yes,” Dur nodded. “Pleasant chap, except for his megalomanic drive to destroy all that is good and beautiful in the world.”

“That’d be the one,” Oz affirmed. “I should’ve taken him out in the Devil’s Rift War.”

“If I recall correctly, the Code also prevented you from doing that.”

“It can be inconvenient sometimes, that Code,” Dyb said.

Oz lifted his lowball of bourbon. “Here’s to the Cross-plane Riders, who manage to accomplish much, even burdened by the Code.”

They clinked glasses and drank.

“It looks like you had quite a storm out there,” Dyb said, peering out the window at a maple tree that looked like a mastodon had used it for a hairbrush.

“That ice storm last winter, the one that knocked out power for days.”

“When we were cut off from email contact with you,” Dyb asked, “and had to resort to old-fashioned Ritnalap communication?”

“Good thing the power came back when it did,” Dur said, “I was starting to get some kind of cross-channel bleed-over on the Ritnalap—kept seeing a single, great Eye.”

“I kept getting porn on mine,” Oz said. “Real fuzzy, though.”

Dyb and Dur fixed him wry looks, eyebrows raised.

“Not that I watched it! Real S&M, bondage stuff. Bleed-over from the shadow planet, I suspect.”

“Gor?” Dyb asked.

“Aye. The planet where they think women find their true fulfillment in being slaves to men. Real sick.”

“An entire planet stuck in a teenager’s masturbatory fantasy,” Dyb shook his head.

“Speaking of patriarchal wet dreams,” Dur interjected, “just what is Torfuck up to?”

“He’s up to the River of Potentialities.”

“I was trying to think of a worst-case scenario,” Dur said, frowning. “That’s worse than the scenario I came up with.”

“Obviously, we need to get to him right away, before he can totally f*** with our present to line up with his envisioned cesspool of a future,” Dyb said.

“Just getting to the River will be a great challenge,” Dur informed them, “beset by dangers and obstacles. I can provide some aid in that regard. Let me show you something.”

Dur stood and they followed him into a back room. The wood-paneled walls were lined with shelves full of models—intricately detailed ships, siege weapons, unidentifiable contraptions, and scale figures of men and beasts.

“These are fancies. I have about half-a-dozen prepared and ready for service. Speak the words of empowerment and they will manifest as full-scale, solid constructs, and will sustain their ‘reality’ two to five hours.”

“What happens when their force wears off?” Dyb asked.

“They revert to passing fancies, and disintegrate in a shower of glitter and fairy dust.”

Dur took one, a strange ship-like structure, down from a shelf. “This is a grimwind. Full size, it is big enough to transport a dozen people across the sky. I reinforced it with extra suspension of disbelief spells, so it’s certain to sustain its solidity the full five-hour duration. You wouldn’t want it to lose its verisimilitude when you were riding a thousand feet above the ground in it.”

He set it on his workbench, then picked up a winged lion.

“This one’s Rankin, Protector of Misfits…and here’s Fini, a Samoan giant. Let’s see…”

He rifled through the clutter, picking out three more.

“Stage-Roach, a living beast that can carry up to six passengers inside and another couple on top…Nortlov, a twenty-foot tall manga-bot...”

The last one he held up was of a warrior woman in black chainmail armor, a katana in her hand, black paint around her eyes—a Goth Joan of Arc.

Dyb reached out, almost instinctively, and plucked her from Dur’s hand. He peered strangely at the fine features of the three-inch tall model.

“This is Malia,” Dur said. “I’m rather fond of her, but she was created for a time such as this. Use them wisely, friends. Once their role is played out, they’re gone forever.”

Installment 4: "Embers and smoke..."

Logs popped and crackled in the small fire, sending red embers up on the smoke. Oz watched them rise and wink out, benighted dancers hovering toward their kindred, the stars, but never reaching the uppermost branches of the trees. He drew a puff on his cheroot and blew a smoke ring that mingled and lost itself in the campfire’s black smoke.

“Embers and smoke…” he muttered to himself. “Grasses of the field, a vapor that is blown away…”

Dyb, leaning back against his saddle, mumbled something.

“Eh?” Oz looked up from his contemplation.

“Harrowhell,” Dyb repeated.

“Easy for you to say.”

“That’s what I name it. My horse. Harrowhell.”

“Ah. Could be prescient, as we may be riding to hell and back before this campaign is over. What do you make of that sorcel-con today? Do you think it was planted to bar our way?”

Dyb downed the last of his coffee and then filled his pipe, reflecting. When he had it lit he said, “Can’t really place it. That sort of construct seems like kabbalistic magic, but the glyphs appeared native American, as did the carving. I can’t think of any reason for its being there other than to attack us.”

“Then somebody knows we’re coming,” Oz said, taking a final draw on his cheroot then flicking the butt into the fire.

“If Torfuck’s toying with future potentialities, then he must know every step we’re going to take,” Dyb suggested.

Oz grimaced, his weathered, whiskered face a chiaroscuro of firelight and shadow. He spit. “It may not be predestination, but it may as well be. If he’s writing the ending to the story, what the hell can we do?”

“He doesn’t know everything,” Dyb replied. “Otherwise, why would he send the sorcel-con? If he knew we were going to defeat it, why bother?”

“On the morrow we’ll pay a visit to the Homestead,” Oz said, pulling out a paperback to stay awake with during his turn of the watch: The Mystery of Edwin Drood, with the ending Dickens did write in another reality where he survived long enough to do so. “El Dur may have some idea on how we can re-author Torfuck’s demented vision for the future.”

Dyb emptied his pipe, stretched out, and pulled his Navajo blanket over himself. Closing his eyes, he said, “Talisman Illinois, here we come.”

Installment 3: "What the hell is that thing?"

“What the hell is that thing?” Rider Oz muttered, pulling back his duster flap and drawing a black pistol from its weathered holster.

“We’re in Between-Planes; that narrows the possibilities down considerably,” Rider Dyb answered.

The towering thing let out a piercing shriek and lumbered toward them.

The horses snorted and clomped their hooves like judges bringing down their gavels, but they stood their ground. They were trained for war.

“Let’s flank it,” Oz said.

“Yeah. It’s big, but on horseback we’re faster,” Dyb concurred.

They urged their horses off the trail, opening eighty yards between them as they cut through the trees.

When they were nearly apace with it, what they saw through the foliage was a thing that appeared to have been carved from a single mighty tree. It towered above them like a telephone pole, tall but thin in proportion to its height. Its apex had been carved into the likeness of a raptor with a great beak. Symbols—perhaps hieroglyphs—had been painted with red wode on its chest, and though it seemed to be made of wood, its joints were fluid as flesh.

It had no neck, though, so as it looked one way then the other, it craned its whole body. Its eyes were painted on—dark blue circles daubed on whites the size of saucers, giving it a wide-eyed expression—yet somehow it could see its prey. It seemed to be aware of where both of them were, but it turned in Oz’s direction.

“Sorcel-con!” Oz yelled. “My guess—not a friendly one!”

It let out another shriek, though its wooden beak did not move. It stopped and wrenched a young pine—about ten feet high—out of the ground roots and all. Then it threw it like a javelin toward Oz.

Its aim was uncanny—the missile coursed a path through the intervening trees—and the rider barely had time to react, pulling up on the horse’s reins as the tree barreled into the ground right in front of him.

Oz had evaded the attack, but in wrenching his horse out of harm’s way he was caught full in the back by a low-hanging branch. He toppled from his horse.

The living raptor totem lurched toward the fallen rider. Oz aimed and emptied his six shots into the thing. Every shot put a divot in its chest, chipping off red paint. But it was not enough. The thing was twenty yards and closing—three more of its long strides and it would be upon him.

Another report cracked through the woods. This time the creature’s gait slowed. Each subsequent shot stiffened it further, until it came to a halt. It stood rooted in place, nothing more than a wooden totem.

Oz got up from his crouch and holstered his pistol. Dyb rode up. “You all right?”

“A tree got me,” Oz said. “Only not a walking one…Good shooting.”

“My fairy bullets f***** up whatever sorcery was animating it.” Dyb looked up at the wooden sculpture. “Good shooting on your part, too. Every shot was a bulls-eye.”

“Thought maybe if I could obscure those glyphs enough, it would de-power,” Oz said.

“Maybe would’ve worked…if you’d had a Thompson machine gun.”

“TS!” Oz called his horse to him.

“What does TS stand for?” Dyb asked.

“Tennessee Stud.”

“What’s my horse’s name?”

“Dunno. I never named it. It’s your horse. You name it.”

Installment two: "That place is f***** awesome."

Dyb returned with a khaki-colored sack. As he affixed it to the appaloosa’s saddlebags, he said, “You’re right, the kids are pretty taken with Quirt. You sure she won’t eat them or anything?”

“Unlikely. The ollie-oxenfrees are renowned caregivers. They are employed as nannies and nurses throughout the Svengal plane. You may return to find your cupboards bare of powdered foods, though—flour, sugar, baking soda.”

“A babysitter I can pay with bags of flour? Nice.” Then, just as he grabbed the saddle horn to hoist himself up, Dyb asked, “You want a cup of coffee before we ride? If you haven’t eaten I’ve got some leftover pizza.”

Oz shook his head. “No time. I’ve packed some sabmel; we can eat while we ride.”

The two men turned the horses back into the glade of birch trees.

A young lady was shuffling home with a pounding early-morning hangover. Through bleary eyes she espied a stand of birch trees on her block that she had never noticed before. She stopped and rubbed her eyes. The trees were gone. There was only an empty parking lot. That did it—she resolved to lay off the drinking until she was twenty-one.

As their horses parted the pale mists of a place far from Fourth Street, Oz said, “We will have to take a shortcut through the Lost Lands.”

Dyb nodded. “Good. That place is f***** awesome.”

“I suggest, before we do, we drop in at the Homestead. I would like to consult El Dur.”

“Excellent idea. I can drop off the Manic Runes I’ve translated for him,” Dyb said, patting the sack dangling from the saddle.

“You’d already deduced that would be one of our stops?”

“Oh, yeah. I knew you wouldn’t take on Torfuck without first seeking the counsel of Dur.”

Oz twisted the corner of his moustache, an idle habit he did when he was thinking. Then he spoke his thoughts aloud. “You already knew what I would do. Does that negate my free will decision to do it? Course not.”

“Why do you bring that up?”

“Well,” Oz said, “there are some who say an omniscient God—one who already knows everything we are going to do—negates the idea of free will. His merely knowing would make all human action ‘preordained’. That idea never made sense to me. But I can’t figure out why it sways others, and that is frustrating. I like to get my head into other points of view, play devil’s advocate to understand an argument, even though that argument is flawed or unconvincing to me. If I can’t understand why the argument is compelling, then there may be something at the core of the argument I’m overlooking.”

“If someone already knows everything you’re going to do, it is still you who makes the choices,” Dyb said. “Yeah, I don’t see why that would negate free will, either. So, somewhere up the timeline, at our funeral, there may be someone who can look back at our life and know more-or-less everything we did. If they jumped back in time to when we were born, would their presence with that knowledge at our birth effectively negate our free will? They just know what we did, they did not force us to do it.”

“We need to interrogate a Calvinist one of these days, Dyb. There must be something we’re missing.”

“Wouldn’t help,” Dyb said, brushing away a dew-speckled web draped between two branches. “A Calvinist would say all is preordained because God made us to do the things we do. That’s a whole different argument.”

“Right. Speaking of foreknowledge, I know you’re about to draw your fairy gun. But that doesn’t mean you have no freewill choice in the matter.”

“What was that?” Dyb asked, reining his horse to a stop and reaching into his vest. He drew out a small polished-silver gun, a fairy gun, its mechanics reliant not on gunpowder but on magic to fire its rune-dabbed slugs.

“There.” Oz pointed.

Through the mists they could make out a distant shape that stood as tall as the trees. A silhouette in the early morning glow, it looked like a massive totem pole, its top carved into the beaked visage of a raptor. It was slowly moving toward them.

Prologue: "What are we needed for?"

Sky is turning an orange tint on the eastern horizon. A mist softens the stark outline of the trees, bare branches almost otherworldly through the haze. Predawn silence is broken by the sharp clack of hooves on gravel. In the midst of mist-shrouded birches a shadow, a black-on-gray silhouette, takes shape. It is a pale man on a black horse. Hooves click on asphalt now as horse and rider emerge onto Fourth Street. The man reins in the horse on the front lawn of a yellow house.

The front door opens. A red-haired man steps out onto the concrete porch steps. He takes his pipe from his mouth and casually waves it in greeting.

“We are needed,” the man on horseback says.

“What about my kids?” the man on the porch asks.

“Got that covered.” The man on horseback gestures behind him, and from the dissipating mist a gangly creature bounds. Barely four feet tall, it wears farmer’s overalls that sag on its lanky frame. Its skin is mottled like a mole, and it has a long aardvark’s snout. “Quirt.”

The man on the porch regards the strange creature a moment in silence.

Then he says, “Quirt will scare the kids.”

“You’d think so,” the man on horseback replies. “But actually children really take to her.”

The man on horseback wears a long black duster and a matching Stetson hat. He is Rider Oz, a seasoned rider who has crossed planes nearly thirty summers.

The man on the porch wears casual, earth-tone clothes and a brown tweed cap on his head. He is built lanky, almost reed-thin, but in his breast he harbors the spirit of Visigoth. He is Rider Dyb.

“What are we needed for?” Rider Dyb asks, tamping the ashes from his pipe on the porch’s spare iron railing.

“Torfuck is up to no good. He’s forded the River of Potentialities. He cannot travel back in time, but he can bend the future and thereby alter the course of the past—our present—to align with his twisted eventuality.”

Rider Dyb’s eyes light up. “Then we are fighting for free will.”

“Indeed.”

“I don’t have a horse.”

“That, too, has been taken care of.”

An appaloosa, spotted brown on white, trots from the last whirls of morning mist.

“Lemme introduce Quirt to the kids and grab some stuff,” Dyb says and promptly disappears back into the yellow house on Fourth Street.