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.