FSF Magazine, May 2007

by Spilogale Authors

  * * * *

  The climb uphill had never been harder. His own flesh was burned. His lungs were clogged and charred with flame and soot. As he finally reached, half-crawled, across the summit, he realized that this was the first time he'd ever ascended Burlish Hill without sensing the moods of its air. Now that he did, hauling himself up and looking around at a world which, but for the fire that still blazed in the valley, lay dark at every point of the compass, he realized that there wasn't a single breath of wind—not, at least, apart from whatever was contained within that last knot of hair he'd cut loose with a glowing claw of metal, and that his fingers now held crabbed in his pocket, and was far too precious to be released.

  Nathan coughed. With what little breath he had, he tried to call out to his mill. The sound was nothing: the mere whisper of dead leaves from some long-lost autumn. Impossible that this vast machine should respond to anything so puny, but, somehow, groaningly, massively, yet joyful as ever, it did. The sails began to turn. In a way, Nathan had always believed that the winds came as much from the mill itself as they did from the sky-arched landscape, but he'd never witnessed it happen so clearly as it did on that night. Invisibly, far beyond the moon and the stars, clouds uncoiled, horizons opened, and—easy as breathing, easy as dancing, sleeping, and far easier than falling in love—the keen easterly wind that most often prevailed across Burlish Hill, but that was never the same moment by moment, began to blow.

  There wasn't a trace of grain in need of grinding, but Nathan still attended to his mill. He released its shackles of winch and brake and pulley to set it turning wildly until all the mechanisms that he'd known and sung to for his entire life became a hot, spinning blur. The sound that the mill made was incredible—as if it were singing every spell in every voice that had ever sung it. He heard his father there within that deep, many-throated rumble, calling to his mill in the strong, clear tones that he had once possessed, and humming as he labored, and sometimes laughing for the sheer joy of his work. And the softer tones of his mother, and all the other mistress millers, were there as well. See, Nathan, how it sits, and how that band of metal helps keep it in place.... Now, it's getting near the end of its life.... Nathan Westover heard the sound of that stuttering pulley, and then of his own unbroken voice, which had caused its turning to mend. All the winds of this and every other earth sighed with him, and the mill's sails swooped, and the world revolved, and the sky unraveled, and the stars and the planets spun round in dizzy blurs, and the seasons came and went. He saw Fiona Smith, young as she was then, puffing out her cheeks before that huge cake at Stagsby Hall, when the place had still possessed lawns, and its oaks were unfelled. Saw her again at this very mill. I have a proposal to put to you, Nathan.... Saw her as she was at the grain auctions, with the light from the tall windows flaming on her red hair, then sitting in that bizarre machine that rumbled across the countryside, when that same hair was twined with smoke trails of gray. Saw all of these things, but felt, above all, the warm, soft pressures of her body in those few glorious moments when he had once held her on this very millstone floor, and the hot, amazing reality of the taste of her lips and mouth against his own.

  The mill roared and Nathan roared with it. Axles smoked, joints screamed, cogs flew, and then, as something final sagged and broke, the top face of the millstone itself bore hugely down on its lower half, screaming a brilliant cascade of sparks.

  * * * *

  That memorable night, the villagers of Stagsby were already swirling like ants around what was left of the steam mill when they looked up and saw that the windmill up on Burlish Hill was also burning. Amid the chaos, a ragged line was established to pass hand by hand, slow bucket by bucket, what little was left of the waters of the lake. But the distance was too far, and the mill was already massively ablaze, its flaming sails turning against the night in what seemed to be no wind at all. The heat soon grew far too ferocious to approach, although many stood back to watch, such was the terrible, beautiful sight it made—like some great, mythic bird.

  Afterward, there were many rumors. Most popular in Stagsby itself was that the steam mill had long been in decline, and that the grandmistress had been purposefully engineering its destruction to claim on the insurance when she'd been caught out by the suddenness of the blast. Also popular, especially amongst those who had little idea of what insurance was, was that she'd been doing some extra overtime with one of her workers, if you get the meaning, when things had got, well, just a little too hot. And as for the old windmill—most likely it had been caught by a spark flown up by the blaze, and everyone knew that the place was half ruined anyway, and doubtless tinder-dry. All assumed, for want of any other sightings, that the miller himself had died inside his mill. The perfunctory official investigations gave people little reason to vary their views. The other theory, which was that the wealthy owners of the latest self-condensing machines had used the so-called Men of the Future as a means of destroying competition, received little credence, and then only amongst those who were in their cups.

  Soon, as the wind lifted the ash and bore it westward, and the rain dissolved the charred wood and the grass regrew, nothing but a circle of stone was left on Burlish Hill. Nor was the steam mill down in the valley ever reconstructed. Farmers now sold their harvests on wholesale contract to the big new factories, thus giving up their financial independence for what seemed, for a while, to be a good enough price. Stagsby Hall was acquired by one of the leading families of the steam guilds as a country retreat. Soon, its lawns were reestablished and the lake was dredged and gleamingly refilled; the interiors were extravagantly refurbished in the latest style. The ruins of the steam mill were shored up and prettified with vines and shaggy moss. Five years on, and they could have been a bit of old castle; a relic from an entirely different age. But much of this was hearsay. To judge by all the chuffing, huffing modern carriages that came and went that way through the village, parties were frequently held at Stagsby Hall, but they weren't of the sort to which anyone local would ever be invited. You really had to climb up to the top of Burlish Hill to get any real sense of how fine the big house now looked. From up there you could still watch the clouds chase their reflections across the lake, and see the sunflash of its windows, and breathe the shimmer of its trees, but few ever did, apart from stray couples seeking solitude—for what, otherwise, would be the point?

  * * * *

  Weevils, woodworm, fire, and rats are the four apocalyptic demons in a miller's life, and, of these, fire is the worst. But, Nathan reflected as, burned and breathless, he looked back up at the river of flame that steamed westward from Burlish Hill, there were worse things still. At least, he told himself as he walked on, he hadn't left his mill, for there was nothing left to leave.

  Following no particular direction, he kept walking until morning, and came across a railway station that he dimly recognized from his journeys as a Man of the Future. He sat and waited there, and took the first train, which bore him all the way to the coast. It was a bright day. Even this early in the summer season, families were camped out on the beach behind colored windbreaks. Laughing children were bathing in the ocean's freezing shallows, or holding the tethers of snapping kites. Nathan watched and felt the bite of the salt against his face, happy to see that the world still turned and the winds still blew, whether or not there was a mill on Burlish Hill.

  The rails went everywhere now. They took you places it was hard to imagine had ever existed before the parallels of iron had found them. Even when the timetables ran out and he discovered himself sitting on a empty platform at a time when he knew that no train would be coming, their shining river still seemed ready to bear him on. He traveled. He journeyed. He leaned out of carriage windows, and looked ahead into the fiery, smoking sunset, and licked the salt smuts from his lips. Had he the breath left within him, he might have sung to the teeming air.

  Another summer was coming, and the fields were ripening across the wide and heavy land. He sat on the steps be
side the bridge of a riverside town where a mother and her daughter were feeding the crusts of their sandwiches to the geese and swans. They were both red-haired. Nathan's fingers bunched the knotted lock he still kept in his pocket. He often longed to release it, and to feel the special giving of a final wind-spell. But he remembered the look in the last embers of Fiona's eyes, and he wondered what he truly had trapped there; what, if released, he might be letting go.

  North and south, he traveled on through the many nights, and the landscapes that lay around him in the darkness were stitched in flame. Dawn brought rooftops, chimneys, on every horizon. Swallowed in giant buildings, spat out with the litter and the pigeons onto surging streets, he gawped and wandered. He was cursed, bumped into. Leering offers were made in return for money he no longer had. The sky was solidly gray here, and the airs that rushed up to greet him from the chasms of streets were disgustingly scented. This was a place without seasons, or with seasons that were entirely its own. Nathan had grown accustomed to the tides or delays of departures at stations, but here he was lost.

  He wandered the darkening city, taking odd turns as he sought some direction that was neither north nor south, east nor west. Far behind him, the girders of some vast structure were being erected, their black lines gridding the sky, but there were fewer people here, and those who were became furtive in their glances, or ran away at the sight of him with screams and clatters of clogs. Not a place to be, he thought, for anyone who doesn't have business here. But, more and more, he felt that he did. He almost ran, and the bricks rushed by him, whispering with the echo of his dried-out lungs. Whispered, as well, with the glow of all the spells and talismans that were scrawled across them. Some, he was almost sure, belonged to his own guild. Others, he thought, had the taint of the sea about them. And here were the symbols of men who tended the tallest roofs, and of other guilds of those who worked in high places, and breathed the changing airs as they looked down on a different world.

  Wheezing, exhausted, light-headed, he stumbled on. There were gates and walkways. The hidden thrumming of vast machineries ground up through the earth. Dawn, though, brought a different kind of landscape. He was tired beyond exhaustion, and it amazed him that his feet dragged on, that his heart still stuttered, that his lungs raked in some sustenance, but the city had cast itself far behind him—so far that the shifting horizons had smeared it entirely out of memory and existence. Here, puddled and rutted lanes unwound and divided to the lean of empty signposts, bounded by endless hedgerows: fences, gates, railings, snags of string and wire and thorn. And the wind blew everywhere, and from all directions—and the world fluttered with the litter of what seemed like the aftermath of some archetypal storm. Hats and scarves, stray shoes, newspapers, the pages of books, umbrellas, whole lines of washing, the weathered flags of guilds, even the torn sails of ships, fluttered everywhere, or were snatched to tumble in the sky like wild kites.

  Nathan's fingers bunched once more around the knot of Fiona's Smith's hair. Here, if anywhere, was the secret of how she might be released. He understood now what all his wanderings had been about, which was to get here, wherever here was, and find the spell, the secret, that might unlock that last knot. But he was tired. He was tired beyond believing. Walking, he decided as he leaned against another blank signpost, was an activity he might still just about be able to manage, but he wasn't so sure about breathing, nor sustaining the increasingly weary thud of his heart. But still he pushed on, and the winds, as they came from every and no direction, pushed with him, tearing at his clothing, afflicting him with hot and cold tremors, spiraling around him in moans and whoops. Then he heard another sound—it was a kind of screaming. Although he now had no idea what it was, it drew him on.

  Another fence, its slats torn, flapping and rotting, and another gate, which turned itself closed and then open in the wind, although that wasn't where the screaming came from. Nathan had to smile. It was simply an old weathercock, fixed to a fencepost, and turning madly, happily, this way and that in the wind. So familiar, although he'd never stood this close. The one odd thing about it, he realized, as it screamed and turned on its ancient bearings, was that the four angles of the compass that usually projected beneath such devices were entirely absent, even as rusty stubs. Then the gate reopened, and the weathercock screamed and shifted in directions that lay beyond any compass, and the wind also turned, pushing him along the path that lay beyond.

  There was a house, although its windows flapped and its slates and chimneys were in disorder, and there was also a garden of sorts. That blurry sense that he'd felt all morning was even stronger here. There were trees that in one moment seemed to be in blossom, but the next were green, then brown, then gold, then torn to the black bones of their branches in sudden flurries of storm. Roses untwined their red lips and then withered. This was a place of many seasons, Nathan reflected as he gasped his way on, although it belonged more to winter than it did to summer, and more to autumn than to spring.

  As much as anything, the hunched figure that lay ahead seemed to be shaped out of the ever-changing territories of the air. Not just windy days, or the sudden bluster of summer thunderstorms, but also the hot stillness of afternoons that seemed to be without prospect of any wind at all, at least until you saw something separate itself from the gray shimmer of the world below. The wind-seller had his sack laid open beside him. He was gathering the tumbled sticks of a nearby willow that shivered and danced its wild arms. Somewhere inside Nathan's head, that weathercock was still screaming, and with it came a sobbing agony in his lungs. He knew he didn't have the strength left to tell the wind-seller what he wanted, and it was a release and a relief to him when the man simply held out his pale fingers, which looked like stripped willow themselves, and took from him that glorious red tress. As Nathan Westover stumbled and fell into the puddled mud, he saw the wind-seller's hands working not to release Fiona Smith's last breath, but looping her hair again to draw another, final, knot.

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  Books To Look For by Charles de Lint

  No Dominion, by Charlie Huston, Del Rey, 2006, $13.95.

  I was quite taken with Charlie Huston's fresh approach to vampires in Already Dead (2005). I wasn't happy with his authorial tic of using em-dashes instead of quotation marks to indicate dialogue (which he still does here), and it was a little bit like reinventing the wheel when he filled in the background of his vampires (they're basically stand-ins for street gangs and the Mob), but it read like film noir on paper, and his vampire P.I., Joe Pitt, made a fascinating point-of-view character.

  This new book carries on from the last. Pitt is still the outsider vampire, but now his life has become that much harder because he made so many enemies in the first book. While looking for work—any kind of work—he gets involved in the investigation of a new drug that's recently hit the streets. It's a drug that affects vampires, which shouldn't be possible because the virus in their blood makes short work of any drugs or alcohol the vampire might have ingested.

  So, the plot is different, of course, and Huston adds the subplot of Pitt's human girlfriend suffering from HIV, but mostly it's not so different from the first book.

  Which isn't necessarily a bad thing. After all, readers devour mystery series where the protagonists solve crimes, book after book, and we look forward to and anticipate the sleuths using their own individual methods of doing so.

  But I was nevertheless a little disappointed in this book because the first was so fresh and different, but now we're familiar with the strange underground of vampires with which Huston has peopled Manhattan. It feels a bit like business as usual, with the ante upped a little, to top the events of the first book.

  Much more interesting to me is Huston's take on a revamp of Marvel's Moon Knight that has all the freshness of Already Dead, though it's a different story and world, naturally enough, told in a different medium.

  But with No Dominion, while I enjoyed Pitt's second outing here, I'm not sure I'l
l go on to read a third.

  * * * *

  Brother Odd, by Dean Koontz, Bantam, 2006, $27.

  On the other hand, Dean Koontz has got the series trick down just pat—if we ignore the fact that it's been something like seven years and he still hasn't given us the third and final book to finish the story he began with Fear Nothing (1998) and Seize the Night (1999). But we will ignore that fact (after having conveniently brought it up; are you listening, Mr. Koontz? We want to know how that story ends) and talk about the book in hand, the third, and I doubt final, entry into the ongoing story of one Odd Thomas, a young diner cook from Pico Mundo, CA, who can see the dead.

  He can feel them as well, but they can't communicate with him other than by touch, which makes it difficult for him to help them move on from this world, where they are trapped, to whatever waits for us in the next.