“I don't know when the moment will come, or what we are to do, but I am sure that it must be the two of us. I will wait for it, with you, and when it arrives I will act. We will act. We will form a river, and that river will reshape the world.”
Pehr considered this for a time. “I admire your conviction,” he said at last.
Tasha made a little, unimpressed noise. “But you think I'm insane.”
“No, but forgive me if it’s hard to hear you dismiss destiny and the Gods in one sentence, and then speak of things you were meant to do in the next.”
“Not 'meant to do' but ... it's hard to put into words.”
“I understand,” Pehr said, and Tasha glanced at him, an expression of disbelief on her face. Pehr laughed. “Well, I understand that you believe there is a difference. Tasha, I will help you if I can, but if your council of elders decides this winter to sequester me with another family or send me out on my own to look for a wife, I will return to my people. I don’t belong here.”
“None of us do,” Tasha said, and then was silent, and no matter how hard Pehr pressed, she would not speak further of it that night. Soon they returned to the tent, and Tasha went to help Ehela, who was sewing pants for Ketrahm; the boy seemed to outgrow his existing clothing by the end of each month. Pehr resolved not to worry about what she had meant. As always, Tasha would tell him when the time was right. In the interim, there was always more to be done, and so the night passed, and the day that followed, and then weeks more after that.
Spring had long since become summer when the dreams returned.
Chapter 16
Pehr didn’t even realize at first that he had fallen asleep, so seamless was the transition from the waking world to the dream. He was out amidst the grasses, on the plains, standing on a hill and looking out to the west.
This was not the sort of fuzzy, indistinct dream that he usually had, shifting and tenuous as the webs that spiders sometimes spun under the jesuva trees, invisible most often until he stumbled into them. This dream was clear and crystalline, as when he’d dreamed of Tasha on the eve of the Lagos attack. It was distinguishable from reality only because the colors were somehow overbright and oversaturated. The very air itself seemed thick with color, and Pehr found himself struggling to breathe it in.
The girl with the purple eyes was standing beside him this time, looking east down into the valley, the setting sun at her back. Her eyes were wide and distant, staring, her lips slightly parted in an expression of awe. What little color she possessed had drained from her face, and there were dark circles under her eyes.
The sky above them was dark and angry, filled with clouds of intense purple tinted black at their edges. Pehr had only seen the plains look like this one or twice before, and he knew that clouds like this heralded a storm of apocalyptic proportions. Men died in storms like these, and he thought it unwise to be standing at the top of a hill, unprotected, but they could not go forward. The valley below them was filled with roiling black water, and as Pehr watched, it began to rise inexorably toward them, seething and boiling, a deadly flood two hundred feet tall – and growing – from which there was no hope of escape.
“It has come at last,” Tasha murmured, and Pehr wanted to ask her what she meant by this, but he couldn't seem to speak. The sight of the huge, black sea flooding toward him had torn the words from his mouth.
He thought that if he looked at these swiftly advancing waters any longer he would go mad with fear, and so he turned to the west and looked out across the plains below him. What he saw there was so strange that for a moment he couldn't understand what he was seeing. The shifting, writhing mass that stretched out before him was as bizarre and confusing and terrifying as the rising sea to his back.
In a moment more he realized what it was, but the comprehension brought no comfort. If anything, it only intensified the fear that throbbed within him, and Pehr felt a sudden, powerful wave of nausea run through him, as if his very body wished to revolt at the sight before it. He fought it down, clenching his teeth, and made himself look out over the plains at what was coming for them.
He understood at last what was making the throbbing, rumbling noise that he was hearing. Just below him, only a few hundred strides away at the base of the hill, a great host was advancing upon them, and their footfalls shook the very earth. Pehr knew these creatures, had seen them before, and understood that the worst had happened: the guardian had fallen. The god that kept the creatures of the jungle from advancing to the plains was no longer there, and the Lagos had descended upon them.
Their clawed feet tore and shredded the ground, kicked up red dust that filled the air with what looked like a mist of blood. There were thousands of them. When the Lagos had come to loot his village, there had been many of them, but this was some exponentially greater force. This was an army, a thing built to wipe whatever came before it off the face of the earth. The Lagos had come to the plains not to burn and pillage, not to disfigure their enemies, but to eradicate all those who lived there completely.
“Oh, what have we done?” Pehr heard himself ask, and Tasha gave a small laugh, but she did not answer him. She too had turned and was looking out at the advancing army, yet there was no fear in her sunken eyes, only that sort of dreamlike intensity, as if she was seeing things that no one else could see.
Pehr did not want to die, but he understood that flight from the Lagos army would be a pointless endeavor. The army was going to catch them – it was inevitable. He and Tasha had chosen this hill upon which to make their final stand. There would be no capture this time, no shameful march to the metal thing’s circle of bone or to anywhere else. In mere moments, the Lagos would overwhelm them, tear them to shreds, and leave their bodies for the carrion birds. That would be the end of it, or so it seemed to Pehr.
“I am frightened,” Tasha told him, but Pehr wouldn’t have known it from her voice, which was calm and steady, betraying no nerves by trembling or breaking. The look on her face had not changed. Pehr reached out and took her hand.
“I'm frightened, too,” he said, and he looked out again at the horde making its way rapidly up the hill, a rolling, unstoppable death machine, its fury matched only by that which was brewing in the clouds above. Behind him, he could hear the roar of the rising flood.
Tasha squeezed his hand, once, and said, “We have come to the confluence. We have made our choice.”
Now Tasha closed her eyes, and Pehr saw that she was weeping. The sunset glittered like flakes of copper on her wet cheeks. She smiled, and squeezed his hand again, and said nothing.
Pehr wanted to ask more, wanted to understand what Tasha seemed to know that he did not, but he was not given the chance. Even as he opened his mouth to speak, the world grew somehow brighter, the super-saturated colors around them burning out, going white. With this change came a roaring noise that grew louder and louder all around them. Soon he could see nothing at all within that great, white light, and the noise had reached a volume so intense that it seemed his head would split in two. Pehr felt himself fall to his knees, but he held on to Tasha like a man lost at sea, clinging to a bit of wood.
As the dream began to dissipate and Pehr battered his way back to consciousness, he heard, beside him, the girl with the purple eyes begin to laugh.
* * *
“Tell me what happened last night.”
Tasha was sitting with him in the dark, poking at the embers of their fire with a stick and staring up at the stars. Pehr had long since lost count of how many nights he had spent in this fashion, lying in the grass while Tasha talked of whatever was on her mind that day. Tonight he had meant to discuss the dream, which had been troubling him the entire day, but when finally they had found time to be alone, he had been unable to find a way to bring it up. Now, as so often happened, Tasha had made some nebulous statement in a tone of voice that indicated she spoke something obvious, and Pehr was perplexed.
“Tasha, what are you talking about?” Pehr asked, sitting
up and looking over at her. After a moment more of musing, she turned her gaze toward him.
“You dreamt something last night. Something important. What was it?”
Pehr was caught off guard by this and, for a few seconds, he could do no more than stare at her. Then he made a disgusted noise, lay back down, and said, “Is there anything that happens that you’re not aware of?”
“There is much that happens that I’m not aware of,” she said. “You did dream of something last night, did you not?”
“What did you dream about?”
“I asked you first …”
“I don’t care.”
Tasha turned to him again, this time to glare, but Pehr only stared back with indifference. He was tired of always being two steps behind in any discussion with her.
“Oh, fine,” Tasha growled, but she did not start immediately, choosing instead to poke at the embers of the fire with a stick.
“Was it us? You and me, on the plains?” Pehr prompted, and Tasha shook her head.
“Not on the plains. I think we must go to the mountains, Pehr. I think we have to find what’s there.”
“How do you know this?”
“Because I’ve been dreaming of it for my entire life!” Tasha cried, and she hurled the stick into the fire, sending sparks up into the night sky. Pehr was startled by this outburst, and by the tension he could feel radiating from the girl.
“You’re afraid,” he said. “You may have been dreaming of it for your entire life, but you’re still afraid of it.”
“I hate it. I do not want to go to the mountains. Whatever is up there is terrible and dangerous, but it calls to me. Since I met you it has only grown worse. It feels as though they have been locked to me all this time, and you are my key. I must go, I know I must, but I wish this task had been given to someone else.”
“Tasha, if this is your destiny—”
“There is no destiny, Pehr. I keep telling you that, but you never listen. I have spent my entire life dreaming of these things, these points in time where many things hang in balance. If I choose my steps wrong, if I falter or fail … something terrible might happen.”
“If there is no destiny, then something terrible might also not happen,” Pehr suggested, and Tasha shook her head.
“I want to believe that so very much, but …”
“But something compels you,” Pehr said, and Tasha nodded.
“Yes.”
Pehr sat up again, bringing his knees up close to his chest, folding his arms across them and resting his chin on top. He looked at Tasha for a time, but she wouldn’t look back, so finally he spoke.
“In my dream, we were standing on a tall hill, far out on the plains, and all around us it was flat. Above us were great clouds of black and purple, the worst storm I have ever seen, whipped to a frenzy and racing forth as if to consume us. Before us, there was a host of Lagos so large that they stained the very sky with the dust of their passage.”
Tasha made a shuddery moan but did not otherwise comment, and Pehr continued.
“There was no one but you, and me, and the Lagos. We were waiting. I think we were waiting to die, except …”
“Yes?”
“You said the confluence had come, that we had made our choice.”
“And then?”
“The dream went white, and I … you were laughing, Tasha. You were laughing in a way I have never heard you laugh, as if all the cares you’d ever had in this world had been lifted from your shoulders and there was no other way you could express the pure joy of it but to laugh and laugh.”
Tasha put her hands to her face, saying nothing.
“I woke up after that. It was still dark outside, and raining, but I took a walk anyway. I’m surprised you didn’t hear me leave, or come back.”
“I did hear you. I was awake,” Tasha said from behind her hands. “That is why I knew you had dreamt of something. I heard you gasp and sit up, heard you leave, heard you return. Sometimes after I dream, I can’t move. Not any part of me, not even my eyes. All I can do is lie there and wait for it to be over. Usually it lasts for only a few minutes, but last night it was longer.”
“How long has this been happening to you?” Pehr asked.
“Since I started having the dreams. So, as long as I can remember. Maybe longer than I can remember. Sometimes I think the dreams started from the very day I was born.”
“And now you wish me to take you to the mountains.”
“Yes.”
“You would climb the path that runs within them, the one that I did not take. You think this place that you dream of is there.”
“Yes. We will not find the home of any gods, but … Pehr, something is up there.”
Pehr considered this for a minute, and he sighed. Who did he suppose he was fooling? Hadn’t he known this moment would come? Hadn’t he been waiting, all this time, for the day when he could travel west? There was no way back to his family, no way back to those for whom his heart ached more with each passing day, without traveling back through the mountain pass. If there was something there in the mountains, something left by those who had built the metal thing, then perhaps it would afford him a way to get past the Lagos, through the jungle, and back where he belonged.
“Then I will take you,” he said. “We should go under cover of night, after your father and the others are asleep. Samhad wouldn’t try and stop us, I don’t think, but he would insist on coming with us.”
Tasha had removed her hands from her face but she did not look up from the fire. “He knows that I have been waiting my entire life for this. He would let me go.”
Pehr shook his head. “You are not like your father, or anyone else I know, so perhaps you don't understand … he loves you. You are his eldest child, and he loves you. If we tell him, he will want to come.”
Tasha favored Pehr with a dark glance. “I know you think I’m cold and empty and incapable of such feelings, but I know my father loves me, and I love him as well. I love all my family.”
“Tasha, I don’t—”
“You just said it. But you’re wrong. You’re wrong! I love my whole family and I do not want to leave them. I would take this burden and give it to someone else if I could. I do not want to go to the mountains. I want to stay here, on the plains, and be normal like everyone else, but it is because I love my family that I cannot. I must go.”
“I know you love your family,” Pehr said, keeping his voice gentle. “Tasha, what I said – it was wrong to say it, and I’m sorry. I have seen you accept Kissha’s ceaseless questions and Mandia’s unending need for attention to a point where I, in your stead, might have gone mad. I have seen you spend full days with Ketrahm exploring the southlands, telling him stories, adventuring together. The boy adores you. I have seen how you try so very hard when in the presence of other plainsmen to hold back, to not do or say anything that might seem strange and cause your parents discomfort.
“I know you love them. I just … your father will try and come with us, if we tell him. We can’t let him know, nor any of the rest of your family.”
“At the very least, Kissha would try to follow you,” Tasha said, and she gave him a rueful smile. “She still thinks you’re going to be married someday.”
“At this rate she may be right,” Pehr grumbled. “In another three years she will be of age, and with my luck I’ll not have met a single other interested woman.”
Tasha laughed a little. “Poor Pehr. You were supposed to be hunting boar and making babies these past two years, and instead you’ve been stuck with the one girl on the plains that has no wish to marry a strong, handsome hunter and bear his children. I am sorry.”
Pehr waved it away. “We are not meant for that.”
“No.”
“Even if Kissha didn’t follow, she would at least tell your father. We must go quietly and leave no trace.”
“My father will be able to track us no matter how careful we are.”
Pehr nodded
. “Yes, but he won’t. If we get a head start, I think he’ll understand that we are meant to do this alone.”
“Very well. It must be soon. I think … Pehr, I think we are running out of time.”
“I can put together a cache of water and food in a few days’ time. I will hide it out by the big jesuva tree to the west. We can go out on one of our walks, like tonight – your family goes to sleep before we return, most often, so they’ll think nothing of it. By the time they realize we’ve gone ...”
“We’ll be many miles away,” Tasha finished for him.
“Yes. I think we could put a great deal of distance behind us before the sun rises.”
“Will we be able to carry enough food and water for the journey?”
“More than enough, I think. The pass is no more than twelve days’ journey from here, and at its base there is the stream where we can refill our skins. I might even be able to find us some food. When I escaped from the Lagos, remember, I’d lost my weapons and my water skins, and did not know this land. This time I’ll be prepared.”
“We will both be prepared,” Tasha reminded him. “You and I, together. All right, Pehr?”
Pehr smiled at her and stretched, yawning. “Yes, together. For now I think we should get as much sleep as we can. If you truly mean to rush, we’ll travel deep into the nights, and I don't think there will be much sleep for us once we get moving.”
“It is very necessary. There is … I don’t know how to explain it, Pehr, but I understood it perfectly in my dream without it ever being said out loud. There is something coming, a moment in time during which our actions may stretch out to touch all those around us. My people, and yours, may depend on us being there in time.”
Pehr considered this, wondering how she could be so sure of something so indistinct. Finally, he realized that it didn’t matter; they had decided upon their course of action. The hunter’s code, under which he had been brought up his entire life, was to act upon a decision once made, not tarry over it.
“Very well,” he said. “In a few days, we will begin our journey. For now, let’s go home.”
The Broken God Machine Page 15