The Sanity's Edge Saloon (The Sea and the Wasteland Book 1)

by Mark Reynolds

  Rebreather nodded.

  “Good. Then go to the mountains and await my return. The time is at hand when I will take back the Nexus, and any who walk with me will drink from that power as easily as water from a glass.” Then God produced from behind his back a staff, conjured from its hiding place within a fold of thin, desert air, six feet of decorative iron and blackened copper tapering to a sharp point, a sphere of blue crystal caged within the middle of its length, the metal carved and decorated like a stairway spindle from a night witch’s home, symbols and hieroglyphs dancing up and down its length, scarabs and ibises, eyed-pyramids and japing faces; terrible juju the likes of which had never been seen this far from the Nexus. Rebreather knew what this was.

  “Yes,” God said. “This is the rod and the staff of God. But it is also a key, and the Nexus is the lock to which this key fits. It is a lightning rod, but the lightning it draws in is the lightning of the Nexus, and with this rod I can bend that lightning to my will.”

  Then God thrust the staff into the dust. “Behold!”

  And where God’s scepter punched the hardpan, water was released as if the Wasteland was merely the skin of a balloon that, once punctured, would pour forth all the oceans of the universe. Water bubbled up from the dust, running over Rebreather’s booted ankles, the press of liquid reaching through the cracked leather to brush feather-light against nerves he thought long ago dead to such sensations.

  God pulled the staff from the dust, and the waters subsided, leaving behind a puddle in a land that had never known such a thing. “Now go. I will send my servants to you, so that when next the train crosses the desert, we will take the devil unaware, and cast him from my throne. And all who serve me will be raised up above all other men and made as gods themselves … or something like that.”

  “The key of God will open the Nexus to the Cast Outs?”

  “Of course, my aspiring dreamer. I am Gusman Kreiger, and I shall lead the Cast Outs from the Wasteland and to their rightful place. Now, for the last time, go to the mountains and wait, and I will send my servants to you. First I must wrestle the Beast, for he has grown careless, and believes himself immune to my wrath.” And God turned and walked away, stepping upon the air as if born on the skirls of heat rising off the hardened sand. “He is wrong.”

  Beneath Rebreather’s boots, the water turned to wine! It was a cheap, flavorless port, as dry as the dust of the Wasteland from whence it came, but a miracle nonetheless.

  The minions arrived later as God promised. Rebreather found three of them waiting at the ridge of stone, simple-minded Wasteland dregs: a gerrymander, a dust runner, and a skinker. Poised like statues, they remained until this morning when they arose and walked as one into the Wasteland. Rebreather watched them go, uncertain whether he was meant to intervene, or whether he could even do so without permanently damaging them.

  But then God who would be called Gusman Kreiger appeared before the dregs clothed in a suit of pale linen, His skin smelling pleasantly of distantly remembered aromas, musk and ionized water. The odor somehow penetrated the filters of Rebreather’s mask, awakening memories of long ago, shrieking haunts threatening to awaken something else; something old and dead and forgotten; something nearly rotted and gone, but which had the power to ruin him if he allowed it to be brought back to life.

  But before it could happen, God waved to Rebreather as if they were old friends and disappeared, taking the three creatures with him. Gone as completely as mescaline dreams the morning after, the system crashing out as the angry demons ripped themselves free of the cloistering flesh prison, Rebreather could now see a single person crossing the desert alone, a speck on the illusionary mirror of the desert, the water that was not.

  So he waited.

  And when she arrived—and it was a she—she offered him a single look, an acknowledgment that spoke volumes of her hatred. She was thin, her skin the color of roach husks bleached in the sun, her hair long and black and full of the dust and the wind of the Wasteland. Her eyes were like the night sky, and she wore leather that looked somehow new, black and fine, and Rebreather knew she was not anything from the Wasteland. This one was made by God’s own hand from the dust of the desert and the sepia of His pen. But she was not a Cast Out. She was … lower.

  Pity. There was a time when he might have enjoyed this bountiful gift of God. No doubt she was born from the dust with knowledge of all carnal matters, for she was a child of the Wasteland shaped by God’s raving fantasies. In that, she was not so different from the animals God had taken with him just now. Rebreather might have pleasured himself upon her, used her for his amusement. But that part of him was gone now, as dead as the memories of scented tinctures or the old words rolling unconnected around his mind. It was all long ago, and he did not see the world that way anymore. This thing that crossed the Wasteland at God’s bidding was a temptation to open himself to the air, to draw in its disease that it might rot his flesh and burst his brain with fever like a copper kettle left too long on the fire. She was nothing to him, fodder in God’s cannon; and he held the fuse in his fingers, atremble with anticipation.

  “What are you?” he asked. He did not really care as such, interested only in how he could use her in his attack upon the Caretakers.

  “He never gave me a name.”

  Rebreather considered this, and said, “You are Oversight. Wait where you will. He will come to us when we are needed.”

  “He will come when he jerks himself off, which I’m sure he—”

  Her blasphemy took him off guard, and he lashed out reflexively, a blow so hard that for a moment he feared he had broken her neck. She collapsed upon the rock, shocked into silence. But she did not cry, or shriek, or even look up at him, staring useless daggers of hatred. And she did not continue to denigrate Gusman Kreiger, the avatar of God. She simply sat there upon her knees, defiant, refusing to look at him, one delicate-fingered hand gingerly staunching the flow of blood from her nostrils.

  “Do not speak against God, or by His own hand you will be struck down,” Rebreather said quietly, hoping she would not bleed too much. It would draw spiders and beetles eager to feast upon the sand where it fell, the smell driving the dregs into a frenzy. And he had no desire to spend his morning housecleaning. God was moving, and he had things to take care of. If she planned to bleed, he might still have to kill her.

  God’s gathering of the animals and the subsequent arrival of Oversight were the signs Rebreather had been waiting for, as clear as the sounding of the Horn of the Apocalypse. No longer did he send stars shrieking from the heavens. Gone were the days of salt pillars and raging columns of fire to guide addle-minded prophets. Gone even were the saintly images of God in the spilled coffee of a roadside diner. God manifested his miracles in subtle smells that had the ability to burn through the fog of decades of exile in the tasteless dust world of the Wasteland. These olfactory signs awakened something inside of him like the butterfly chewing free from its self-created prison of silk and spit. He could feel the anticipation squeeze at his stomach, and awaken thoughts and aspirations long forgotten. It coursed through his blood, pumped rapidly at his heart, and tingled into his loins, so long unused he thought himself incapable of such things. But it was God’s sign, like so many others happening around him now. He felt the life flow back into his manhood, felt it rise as he would rise to crush the Outsider that usurped God’s throne and kept His servants forever in exile.

  He looked at Oversight, wondering if there still might not be a use for her. His mind kept memories of pleasure locked deeply away, but not so far that he had lost all notion of what soft skin felt like, blood-warm and smooth.

  It was the sound from the desert, the screaming whistle of the approaching train that brought his head around, notions of Oversight forgotten just as her name foretold.

  Rebreather raced along the gray plateau towards a pinnacle of rock that stood above all other places on the Wasteland. He leaped at the stone, clearing a rift nearly thirty f
eet across, spent pistols and rusted knives that he kept belted to his waist clattering against the stone, metal digging sharply into his belly and hips. But feeling was meaningless, time having hardened him: mentally, spiritually, physically. Yellowed nails clawed into the soft stone as Rebreather pulled himself hand over hand to the summit of the rock. And there he stood, taking full advantage of his height to see as far across the Wasteland as possible, the telescope pressed to his masked eye.

  And there he stayed as the sun rose towards noon and began to lean into what he continued to think of as west, though such a term truly had no meaning. He saw only one person emerge from the train; not the old Caretaker, but someone new.

  This would be so much easier than he had imagined. How God overpowered the previous Caretaker, Rebreather did not know; such was the wonder of God. But so long as the old Caretaker could not accompany his scion to the Nexus as they had done before for as long as Rebreather had watched the trains come and go, the new Caretaker was vulnerable. Perhaps God had chased the Devil back to one of the Earths and killed him, leaving this new Caretaker without benefit of the knowledge that would save his life.

  There would never be a more perfect time to take back control of the Nexus. And whosoever controlled the Nexus controlled … everything!

  God would show favor upon him, opening the way between the worlds, sending him …

  … home.

  The word blazed once again with connotations he had diligently stripped away, casting them aside in his years of living in the Wasteland because they were useless and confusing and they made him cry dry tears of sand as if he were no more than a common witch. But he remembered sorrow and tears, and that was more important than crying real water anyway. The body was simply a vessel that safeguarded the mind, and so long as the mind remained, all was not lost.

  He stared at the distant Nexus and the speck that wandered about it. And the longer Rebreather stared, the more enraged he became. This small thing, so far away and insignificant, was all that denied him his real world, all that kept him prisoner in the Wasteland. How unjust that others could come from outside when so many were already here, wanting only to go …

  … home.

  He stood there upon the rock, his imagination running freely. He could hear in his mind the sound of the distant Caretaker screaming, a scream neither male nor female—he had not yet decided upon the new Caretaker’s sex, and eventually, after enough pain, all screams sounded the same. But the androgynous sound was an even more pure pleasure than he had received from striking down Oversight, or imagining her cowering naked before him. This was power; power without limit, power oozing from his flesh like sweat, and spiraling from his nostrils with every breath as if he was a living volcano.

  He glanced at Oversight on the distant plateau, small and insignificant. Like the Caretaker at the Nexus. Whatever she had been moments ago—whatever she had even hinted at being moments ago—she was no longer. His mind slammed shut upon all of it, burying those things back into the graves from whence they crawled. And in those same tombs he buried the memories of pleasure and home. He was God’s chosen messenger, and his message was war.

  The woman-child was meat now, nothing more; she was to be used and disposed of in whatever manner God saw fit. Henceforth, Rebreather would exist only as an instrument of slaughter and hatred. It would be the water he drank, and the food he ate, and the fire that warmed him. Hatred and the burning need to satisfy its hungers with pain.

  Staring at the sharp-tongued temptress, pondering her slender body, stringy muscles beneath a thin layer of soft skin—truly, a poor soldier for God’s army—he hoped Gusman Kreiger would bring him better. Perhaps an army of Wasteland dregs, mindless brutal beasts good only for ruthless, instinctual slaughter. Surely, anyone who could wring water from the Wasteland and bring down a Caretaker could gather better soldiers than a lone girl and three dregs. Surely.

  But then, who was he to question the wisdom of God.

  * * *

  Not all had the benefit of seeing God—or one who called himself God, leastwise—appear physically, calling them to service. For some, manifestations were unnecessary, a ridiculous deception easily penetrated. It was enough to know that there was another out there who promised salvation from the Wasteland; a means to take control of the Nexus and use its powers to create a heaven on earth, the promised pleasure dome of Kublai Kahn, a Shangri-La of blue opium smoke and writhing flesh, naked and supple, pressing tightly against him, smooth and slippery and …

  A shudder of ecstasy passed through Reginald Hyde, a flicker of the impression that he had been contemplating. The words that covered every spare inch of stone and earth from floor to ceiling of his underground burrow, words he had written himself not with ink—which he did not possess—but a mixture of guano and charcoal, blood and feces, had momentarily captured one of the live lines of power coursing through the Wasteland. And for that one brief moment, the words he had so diligently set down had channeled the power that converged upon the Nexus from all times and worlds and realities, and made the Word real.

  The infrequent capture of pleasure in its purest form distracted him, and he ejaculated like a youth in the grips of a pubescent wet dream.

  Reginald Hyde had lived in the Wasteland for years beyond count, and by all reckoning except his own, he was quite mad.

  Actually, he lived under the Wasteland. To live on the Wasteland was to be a victim to the blistering sun and the sucking wind that robbed water from the flesh as surely as a kiss from a succubus robbed a man of vitality and strength.

  Ohh, but for the soft-lipped kiss of a succubus once again.

  But the words would not bend the lines of power to his will this time. Anywhere outside the Nexus, it was catch as catch can. You latched upon the cable and chewed off the insulation like a sewer rat, hoping like hell to complete the circuit without getting fried for your efforts. Anyone not in the Nexus was at the whim of the power and its imprecision; fitful bursts followed more often than not by long periods of melancholic absence.

  He knew of Rebreather’s obsession to regain the Nexus. What Cast Out did not? But what Reginald Hyde knew most about Rebreather was that he should be feared. Rebreather was insane. The Wasteland had destroyed Rebreather’s mind and left a psychopathic shell behind in its place; a shell filled by a demon that waffled unpredictably between catatonic indifference and manic savagery. Rebreather was, to use the idiom, as crazy as a shit house rat and all the worse for not knowing. Some nights Hyde woke up screaming, his nightmares the simple hiss of Rebreather’s filter, and the click of the madman’s hammers as he ferreted out Reginald’s hiding place under the dust where the water still trickled and insects ran free for the eating, and power—with diligence and words and luck—could still be bent to the Cast Out’s will. Rebreather would shoot Hyde in the belly if he found him, then eat him alive and screaming.

  Reginald Hyde was an enormous, corpulent man, fat hanging from him in thick layers that the years in the Wasteland seemed unable to affect. His arms and legs were portly hocks that would fill a butcher with envy, and for that reason, he hid. The waddles of his chin excited the Wastelanders like raw meat excited wolves or sharks. But he was smarter than they were. He could still forge reality, as Rebreather once had before he went mad, his imagination shackled by the rituals of a psychotic’s crazed mojo until he actually believed it was the air of the Wasteland that would kill him.

  Shit house rat.

  Of all the Cast Outs still living throughout the Wasteland, and there were others, only Gusman Kreiger was a match for Reginald Hyde. Kreiger might even be superior, but that thought also made Hyde wake up screaming.

  Unlike Rebreather, Kreiger only affected madness. He was not insane, but he found it amusing to act as if he was, and that annoyed Hyde … and frightened him. He had seen what Kreiger could do, knew that the man had perfected his craft over two thousand years, and now eagerly awaited the opportunity to free himself from the barriers of the
Wasteland. He was like many of the Wastelanders who had come here over the centuries to forge reality, and been found … lacking. He was cast out. And now he wanted the Nexus back.

  And Kreiger just might get it; he was that strong. God? No, but as close as a mortal might come without burning out the fragile coil of flesh.

  But Kreiger lacked the simple pleasures in his work. He was lofty and grand, as God had been. But God turned to Lucifer for guidance in creating the subtle pleasures and the simple details. Like God, Kreiger was deficient; the smell of the rose escaped him in the act of creating the plant itself.

  And, as it happened, the sensual world was Reginald Hyde’s area of expertise. He had indulged his flesh in all manner of pleasures, both subtle and gross, before seeking out the Nexus. The Nexus could make his imagination reality—or so it was promised—and his imagination, however dark, was a fine, fine place.

  He ran his hands—soft, small and effeminate—over his naked head, his skull as bald as a newborn’s for as long as he had been in the Wasteland. Sweat made it oily like it made the rest of his body. His belly was so enormous that he had long ago forgotten the appearance of his own penis. But while he could no longer see it, he knew of it, felt its warm sensations, the tingling messages it created in his mind, wants it ached to have fulfilled. And after he had invented the narrow caves to protect himself, and the water that dripped milky white with lime from the ceiling, and the pool of blind fish that he ate when the bugs and the lizards proved too hard to catch, or too sickening to stomach, he spent the rest of his time creating fantastically vivid images to tease and arouse his mind, accentuations of his own perverse longings for a return to a life of endless pleasure.

  Yes, he could do great things with the Nexus. A never-ending world of limitless ecstasy could be created. It was, in fact. But he could not master the power to the sufficient and highly subjective determination of whatever demanding entity seemed to oversee it, and the Nexus rejected him.