Dust of Dreams

by Erikson, Steven

  ‘It’s healing, but the skin is thin.’ She suddenly had a knife in her hand. ‘I can get us through, I think.’

  ‘Do you have royal blood then?’

  ‘Snap shut that trap or I’ll do it for you. I told you, it’s a huge wound—barely mended. In fact, it seems weaker on the other side, which isn’t good, isn’t right, in fact. Did they stay on the Road? They must have known that much at least. Withal, listen well. Ready a weapon—’

  ‘A weapon? What kind of weapon?’

  ‘Wrong choice. Find another one.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Stupidity won’t work. Try that mace on your belt.’

  ‘That’s a smith’s hammer—’

  ‘And you’re a smith, so presumably you know how to use it.’

  ‘So long as my victim lays his head on an anvil, aye.’

  ‘Can’t you fight at all? What kind of husband are you? You Meckros—always fighting off pirates and such, or so you always said—’ Her eyes narrowed. ‘Unless they were just big fat lies, trying to impress your new woman.’

  ‘I haven’t used a weapon in decades—I just make the damned things! And why do I need to anyway? If you wanted a bodyguard you should have said so in the first place, and I could have hired on to the first ship out of Lether Harbour!’

  ‘Abandon me, you mean! I knew it!’

  He reached up to tear at his hair and then recalled that he didn’t have enough of it. Gods, life can be damned frustrating, can’t it just? ‘Fine.’ He tugged loose the hammer. ‘I’m ready.’

  ‘Now, remember, I died the first time because I don’t know anything about fighting, and I don’t want to die a second time—’

  ‘What’s all this talk about fighting and dying? It’s just a gate, isn’t it? What in Hood’s name is on the other side?’

  ‘I don’t know, you idiot! Just be ready!’

  ‘For what?’

  ‘For anything!’

  Withal slipped his left foot out of its stirrup and swung down to the littered sand.

  Sandalath stared. ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘I’m going to piss, and maybe whatever else I can manage. If we’re going to end up in a hoary mess, I don’t want fouled breeches, not stuck in a saddle, not riding with a horde of shrieking demons on my tail. Besides, I probably only have a few moments of living left to me. When I go I plan on doing it clean.’

  ‘Just blood and guts.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘That’s pathetic. As if you’ll care.’

  He went off to find somewhere private.

  ‘Don’t take too long!’ she shouted after him.

  There was a time, aye, when I could take as damned well long as I pleased.

  He returned and would have climbed back into the saddle, but Sandalath insisted he wash his hands in the sea. Once this was done, he collected up the hammer, brushed sand from it, and then mounted the horse.

  ‘Anything else needing doing?’ she asked. ‘A shave, perchance? Buff your boots, maybe?’

  ‘Good suggestions. I’ll just—’

  With a snarl she slashed her left palm. The air split open before them, gaping red as the wound in her hand. ‘Ride!’ she yelled, kicking her horse into a lunge.

  Cursing, Withal followed.

  They emerged on to a blinding, blasted plain, the road beneath them glittering like crushed glass.

  Sandalath’s horse squealed, hoofs skidding, slewing sideways as she sawed on the reins. Withal’s own beast made a strange grunting sound, then its head seemed to drop out of sight, front legs folding with sickening snaps—

  Withal caught a glimpse of a pallid, overlong hand, slashing through the path where his horse’s head had been a moment earlier, and then a curtain of blood lifted before him, wrapped hot and thick over his face, neck and chest. Blinded, flaying empty air with his mace, he pitched forward, leaving the saddle, and struck the road’s savage surface. The cloth of his jerkin disintegrated, and the skin of his chest followed suit. The breath was knocked from his lungs. He vaguely heard the hammer bounce and skitter down the road.

  Sudden bellowing roars, the impact of something huge against bare flesh and bone. Splintering blows drumming the road beneath him—the hot splash of something drenching his back—he clawed the blood from his eyes, managed to lift himself to his hands and knees—coughing, spewing vomit.

  The thundering concussions continued, and then Sandalath was kneeling beside him. ‘Withal! My love! Are you hurt—oh, Abyss take me! Too much blood—I’m sorry, oh, I’m sorry, my love!’

  ‘My horse.’

  ‘What?’

  He spat to clear his mouth. ‘Someone chopped off my horse’s head. With his hand.’

  ‘What? That’s your horse’s blood? All over you? You’re not even hurt?’ The hands that had been caressing him now shoved him away. ‘Don’t you dare do that again!’

  Withal spat a second time, and then pushed himself to his feet, eyes fixing on Sandalath. ‘This is enough.’ As she opened her mouth for a retort he stepped close and set a filthy finger against her lips. ‘If I was a different kind of man, I’d be beating you senseless right about now—no, don’t give me that shocked look. I’m not here to be kicked around whenever your mood happens to turn foul. A little measure of respect—’

  ‘But you can’t even fight!’

  ‘Maybe not, and neither can you. What I can do, though, is make things. And something else, too, I can decide, at any time, when I’ve had enough. And I will tell you this right now, I’m damned close.’ He stepped back. ‘Now, what in Hood’s name just—gods below!’

  This shout burst from him in shock—three enormous, hulking, black-skinned demons were on the road just beyond the dead horse. One of them held a club of driftwood that looked like a drummer’s baton in its huge hands, and was using it to pound down some more on a mangled, crushed corpse. The other two followed the blows as if gauging the effects of each and every crushing impact. Bluish blood had sprayed out on the road, along with other less identifiable discharges from the pulped ruin of their victim’s body.

  In a low voice Sandalath said, ‘Your Nachts—the Jaghut were inveterate jokers. Hah hah. That was a Forkrul Assail. It seems the Shake stirred things up somewhat—they’re probably all dead, in fact, and this one was backtracking with the intention of cleaning up any stragglers—out through the gate, probably, to murder every refugee on that shoreline we’ve just left behind. Instead, he ran into us—and your Venath demons.’

  Withal wiped blood from his eyes. ‘I’m, uh, starting to see the resemblances—they were ensorcelled before?’

  ‘In a manner of speaking. A geas, I suspect. They’re Soletaken … or maybe D’ivers. Either way, this particular realm forced a veering—or a sembling—who can say which species is the original, after all?’

  ‘Then what do the Jaghut have to do with any of this?’

  ‘They created the Nachts. Or so I gathered—the mage Obo in Malaz City seemed to be certain of that. Of course, if he’s right and they did, then what they managed to do was something no one else has ever managed—they found a way to chain the wild forces of Soletaken and D’ivers. Now, husband, get cleaned up and saddle a new horse—we can’t stay here long. We ride as far as we need to on this road to confirm the slaughter of the Shake, and then we ride back out the way we came.’ She paused. ‘Even with these Venath, we’ll be in danger—if there’s one Forkrul Assail, there’s bound to be more.’

  The Venath demons had evidently decided they were done with the destruction of the Forkrul Assail, as they now bounded up the road a few paces to then huddle round the club and examine the damage to their lone weapon.

  Gods, they’re still stupid Nachts. Only bigger.

  What a horrid thought.

  ‘Withal.’

  He faced her again.

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  Withal shrugged. ‘It will be all right, Sand, if you don’t expect me to be what I’m not.’

  ‘I ma
y have found them infuriating, but I fear for Nimander, Aranatha, Desra, all of them. I fear for them so.’

  He grimaced, and then shook his head. ‘You underestimate them, I think, Sand.’ And may Phaed’s ghost forgive us all for that.

  ‘I hope so.’

  He went to work loose the saddle, paused to pat the animal’s gore-soaked neck. ‘Should’ve given you a name, at least. You deserved that much.’

  Her mind was free. It could slip down among the sharp knuckles of quartz studding the plain, where nothing lived on the surface. It could slide beneath the stone-hard clay to where the diamonds, rubies and opals hid from the cruel heat. All this land’s wealth. And deep into the crumbling marrow of living bones wrapped in withered meat, crouched in fever worlds where blood boiled. In the moments before the very end, she could hover behind hot, bright eyes—the brightness that was the final looking upon all the surrounding things—all the precious vistas—that announced saying goodbye. That look, she now knew, did not shine forth solely among old people, though perhaps they were the only ones to whom it belonged. No, here, in this gaunt, slow, slithery snake, it was the beacon blazing in the eyes of children.

  But she could fly away from such things. She could wing high and higher still, to ride the fuzzy backs of capemoths, or the feathered tips of vultures’ wings. And look down wheeling round and round the crawling, dying worm far below, that red, scorched string winking with dull motion. Thread of food, knots of promise, the countless strands of salvation—and see all the bits and pieces falling off, left in its wake, and down and down low and lower still, to eat and pick at leather skin, pluck the brightness from eyes.

  Her mind was free. Free to make beauty with a host of beautiful, terrible words. She could swim through the cool language of loss, rising to touch precious surfaces, diving into midnight depths where broken thoughts fluttered down, where the floor fashioned vast, intricate tales.

  Tales, yes, of the fallen.

  There was no pain in this place. Her untethered will recalled no aching joints, no crusting flies upon split, raw lips; no blackened, lacerated feet. It was free to float and then sing across hungry winds, and comfort was a most natural thing, reasonable, a proper state of being. Worries dwindled, the future threatened no alteration to what was and one could easily believe that what was would always be.

  She could be an adult here, splashing water on to pretty flowers, dipping fingers into dreaming fountains, damming up rivers and devouring trees. Filling lakes and ponds with poison rubbish. Thickening the air with bitter smoke. And nothing would ever change and what changes came would never touch her adultness, her perfect preoccupation with petty extravagances and indulgences. The adults knew such a nice world, didn’t they?

  And if the bony snake of their children now wandered dying in a glass wilderness, what of it? The adults don’t care. Even the moaners among them—their caring had sharp borders, not far, only a few steps away, patrolled borders with thick walls and bristling towers and on the outside there was agonizing sacrifice and inside there was convenience. Adults knew what to guard and they knew, too, how far to think, which wasn’t far, not far, not far at all.

  Even words, especially words, could not penetrate those walls, could not overwhelm those towers. Words bounced off obstinate stupidity, brainless stupidity, breathtaking, appalling stupidity. Against the blank gaze, words are useless.

  Her mind was free to luxuriate in adulthood, knowing as it did that she would never in truth reach it. And this was her own preoccupation, a modest one, not very extravagant, not much of an indulgence, but her own which meant that she owned it.

  She wondered what adults owned, these days. Apart from this murderous legacy, of course. Great inventions beneath layers of sand and dust. Proud monuments that not even spiders could map, palaces empty as caves, sculptures announcing immortality to grinning white skulls, tapestries displaying grand moments to fill the guts of moths. All this, such a bold, joyous legacy.

  Flying high, among the capemoths and vultures and rhinazan and swarms of Shards, she was free. And to look down was to see the disordered patterns writ large across the glass plain. Ancient causeways, avenues, enclosures, all marked out by nothing more than faint stains—and the broken glass was all that remained of some unknown civilization’s most wondrous chalice.

  At the snake’s head and in front of it, the tiny flickering tongue that was Rutt and the baby he named Held in his arms.

  She could descend, plummeting like truth, to shake the tiny swaddled form in Rutt’s twig-arms, force open the bright eyes to the glorious panorama of rotted cloth and layers of filtered sunlight, the blazing rippling heat from Rutt’s chest. Final visions to take into death—this was the meaning behind that brightness, after all.

  Words held the magic of the breathless. But adults turn away.

  They have no room in their heads for a suffering column of dying children, nor the heroes among them.

  ‘So many fallen,’ she said to Saddic who remembered everything. ‘I could list them. I could make them into a book ten thousand pages long. And people will read it, but only so far as their own private borders, and that’s not far. Only a few steps. Only a few steps.’

  Saddic, who remembered everything, he nodded and he said, ‘One long scream of horror, Badalle. Ten thousand pages long. No one will hear it.’

  ‘No,’ she agreed. ‘No one will hear it.’

  ‘But you will write it anyway, won’t you?’

  ‘I am Badalle, and all I have is words.’

  ‘May the world choke on them,’ said Saddic, who remembered everything.

  Her mind was free. Free to invent conversations. Free to assemble sharp knuckles of quartz into small boys walking beside her endless selves. Free to trap light and fold it in and in and in, until all the colours became one, and that one was so bright it blinded everyone and everything.

  The last colour is the word. See it burn bright: that is what there is to see in a dying child’s eyes.

  ‘Badalle, your indulgence was too extravagant. They won’t listen, they won’t want to know.’

  ‘Well, now, isn’t that convenient?’

  ‘Badalle, do you still feel free?’

  ‘Saddic, I still feel free. Freer than ever before.’

  ‘Rutt holds Held and he will deliver Held.’

  ‘Yes, Saddic.’

  ‘He will deliver Held into an adult’s arms.’

  ‘Yes, Saddic.’

  The last colour is the word. See it burn bright in a dying child’s eyes. See it, just this once, before you turn away.

  ‘I will, Badalle, when I am grown up. But not until then.’

  ‘No, Saddic, not until then.’

  ‘When I’ve done away with these things.’

  ‘When you’ve done away with these things.’

  ‘And freedom ends, Badalle.’

  ‘Yes, Saddic, when freedom ends.’

  Kalyth dreamed she was in a place she had not yet reached. Overhead was a low ceiling of grey, turgid clouds, the kind that she had seen above the plains of the Elan, when the first snows came down from the north. The wind howled, cold as ice, but it was dry as a frozen tomb. Across the taiga, stunted trees rose from the permafrost like skeletal hands, and she could see sinkholes, here and there, in which dozens of some kind of four-legged beast had become mired, dying and freezing solid, and the wind tugged and tore at their matted hides, and frost painted white their curved horns and ringed the hollow pits of their eyes.

  In the myths of the Elan, this vista belonged to the underworld of death; it was also the distant past, the very beginning place, where the heat of life first pushed back the bitter cold. The world began in darkness, devoid of warmth. It awakened, in time, to an ember that flared, ever so brief, before one day returning to where it had begun. And so, what she was seeing here before her could also belong to the future. Past or in the age to come, it was where life ceased.

  But she was not alone.

  A scor
e of figures sat on gaunt horses along a ridge a hundred paces distant. Wrapped in black rain-capes, armoured and helmed, they seemed to be watching her, waiting for her. But terror held Kalyth rooted, as if knee-deep in frozen mud.

  She wore a thin tunic, torn and half-rotted, and the cold was like the Reaper’s own hand, closing about her from all sides. She could not move within its intransigent grip, even had she wanted to. She would will the strangers away; she would scream at them, unleash sorcery to send them scattering. She would banish them utterly. But no such powers belonged to her. Kalyth felt as useless here as she felt in her own world. A vessel empty, longing to be filled by a hero’s bold fortitude.

  The wind ripped at the grim figures, and now at last the snow came, cutting like shards of ice from the heavy clouds.

  The riders stirred. The horses lifted their heads, and all at once they were descending the slope, hoofs cracking hard the frozen ground.

  Kalyth huddled, arms tight about herself. The frost-rimed riders drew closer, and she could just make out that array of faces behind the serpentine nose-guards of their helms—deathly pale, bearing slashes gaping deep crimson but bloodless. They wore surcoats over chain, uniforms, she realized, to mark allegiance to some foreign army, grey and magenta beneath frozen bloodstains and crusted gore. One, she saw, was tattooed, bedecked with fetishes of claws, feathers and beads—huge, barbaric, perhaps not even human. But the others, they were of her own kind—she was certain of that.

  They reined in before her and something drew Kalyth’s wide stare to one rider in particular, grey-bearded beneath the dangling crystals of ice, his grey eyes, set deep in shadowed sockets, reminding her of a bird’s fixed regard—cold and raptorial, bereft of all compassion.

  When he spoke, in the language of the Elan, no breath plumed from his mouth. ‘Your Reaper’s time is coming to an end. Death shall surrender his face—’

  ‘Never was a welcoming one,’ cut in the heavy, round-faced soldier on the man’s right.

  ‘Enough of that, Mallet,’ snapped another horseman, one-armed, hunched with age. ‘You don’t even belong here yet. We’re waiting for the world to catch up—such are dreams and visions—they are indifferent to the ten thousand unerring steps in any given mortal’s life, much less the millions of useless ones. Learn patience, healer.’