by Roger Taylor
‘Too much ale,’ he muttered. ‘I’ll have less tomorrow.’ It was a ritual nightly utterance that, like most rituals, had long lost its true meaning.
He glanced up and down the street. In both directions the only things visible were the flames of the pitch torches, flickering, despite the stillness, and issuing coils of their own black smoke to add to the murk. The fog’s clammy touch might have swept the people from the streets as effectively as any blustering winter storm, but the Guild of Torchlighters knew their duty. Antyr curled his lip unpleasantly.
Sanctimonious lot, he thought, as he tried without success to bring the shimmering corona around one of the wobbling lights into focus. He couldn’t stand these pompous Sened-appointed Guild men with their unctuous self satisfaction. If it wasn’t for them doing their jobs, you’d be staggering around lost all this night, wouldn’t you? said a quieter, kinder, part of his mind.
He declined the offer of a debate and carefully made his way down the slippery steps. The iron handrail was cold and unpleasantly damp and he wiped his hand on his cloak as he reached the street.
Unhooking a torch from a nearby rack he offered it, a little unsteadily, to one of the street torches. It spluttered into life almost immediately and its warmth and light were welcoming. Its hefty weight comforted him too; he had stayed longer at the inn than he had intended and, even without the fog, the streets would be deserted and uncertain at this time of night.
Not that he was likely to be attacked around here, he thought hopefully, but the brief spark of optimism faded as soon as it appeared. He knew that despite the vigilance of the Watch, there was always a risk at night; carousing young bloods from one of the Sened Lords’ Houses, conscripts from the barracks, malcontents out of the Moras district. Certainly it would be no great feat for anyone so inclined to avoid the Watch and lie in wait for lone walkers such as himself.
Puffing out his cheeks, Antyr tightened his grip on the torch, loosed his weighted club in his belt, then strode out boldly, if a little erratically.
His footsteps echoed dully behind him in the torchlit gloom.
As various landmarks loomed out of the fog, identified themselves and passed on, Antyr’s uneasiness faded a little. For all its unpleasantness, the fog held some comfort. After all, any lone street thief would be as unsighted as his victims.
Besides, he was hardly a defenceless old woman, he concluded as the evening’s ale clouded his judgement further.
Dutifully, the street torches continued to light his way, each smoky flame seeming to hover in the air at an unfocusable distance. Occasionally some other late wanderer would hurry past him, head craning forward into the darkness. Sometimes, alarmingly, footsteps came and went nearby without their creator appearing.
The hasty purposefulness of such passers-by increased Antyr’s feeling of isolation rather than eased it and his thoughts darkened again.
All of us fleeing, he thought. But from what? He gave himself no answer.
Eventually, he reached a street that ran alongside the high wall which surrounded the city. He looked up and saw its rough lichened stones disappearing damply into the torchlit canopy of fog. Built to keep out the city’s enemies, the wall seemed to him now to be more like that of a prison; herding together the people like rats in an overcrowded lair.
Too much ale, he thought again, to excuse the gloomy vision, though licking his lips he found them damp and greasy from the fog, and the acrid taste of soot on his tongue effortlessly displaced that left by his evening’s drinking. He spat.
‘Ho there!’
The voice made him start and he groped awkwardly for his club. As it tangled incongruously in his belt and cloak, firefly lights appeared, floating some way ahead of him. They were followed by the muffled clatter of arms and before Antyr could decide what to do, a dark shadow formed beneath the lights. As he watched, it shifted and then broke into a group of individuals. One of them strode forward, holding a torch high. It was an old man, though he carried himself straight and tall.
‘Oh, it’s you, Antyr,’ he said, peering forward earnestly. ‘I might have known you’d be the only one around here wandering the streets on a night like this.’
There was a familiar reproach in the voice that irritated Antyr, but his relief at finding that he had been stopped by the local Watch, and not by the Liktors or some more sinister group, took the edge off his reply. Besides, under the older man’s gaze, he could not argue against the truth.
‘You wouldn’t begrudge a man his evening’s tipple with friends, would you, Avran?’ he managed to reply, with a noisy heartiness that failed to hide his sense of inadequacy.
Avran looked at him stonily. ‘Yes, I would,’ he said unequivocally. ‘When the man’s the son of an old friend and is destroying himself and his gift with his antics.’
Antyr opened his mouth to speak, but no protest came, only a slow steaming breath which hovered yellow in the gloom like some listening spirit. Part of Antyr, blustering, uncaring, wanted to tell Avran that he was in no mood for one of his lectures, but the look in the old man’s eye told him that he would just as soon lock him up in the Watch Pen for the night as restart an old debate in this fog-shrouded street.
Wiser counsels thus prevailed and Antyr held his peace, even managing a look of contrition.
Meeting no resistance, Avran’s gaze softened. ‘The streets are quiet tonight, Antyr,’ he said. ‘But don’t linger more than you have to, and . . .’ He hesitated. ‘. . . take more care of yourself. You’re travelling down a road that’s darker and more dangerous than this one by far, and one you may not be able to return along. I’ve seen it too often before. It’s . . .’
A brief fit of coughing finished the sentence prematurely, and Avran made no attempt to restart it when he had recovered. Instead, striking his chest ruefully, he dismissed Antyr with an irritated flick of his head and rejoined his waiting companions.
Antyr spat again as the Watch disappeared into the swirling gloom. The taste of the fog still dominated, and the cold dampness now seemed to have entered into his very bones. His stomach felt leaden and ominously mobile.
As he walked on, he found that Avran’s words had resurrected the memory of his father and with it the turmoil and the deep sense of failure that had pervaded him in the practice of his art since his father’s death.
He paused for a moment and gazed around at the torchlit sphere of moving brown and yellow fog that he centred. His inability to see what he knew lay beyond seemed to mirror the blindness he had felt on so many occasions as he had searched through the dreams of his diminishing number of clients . . .
Damn the old buzzard, came a defensive thought, to save him from the grim voices of self-recrimination that were gathering in the outer darkness to bellow out his weakness and folly.
‘Why doesn’t he mind his own business?’
The spoken words, flat and strange in the soft silence, completed the rescue and goaded Antyr forward again.
He finished the rest of his journey in a mood as dark and formless as the fog itself and with the headiness he had brought from the inn mocking him where before it had seemed to uplift and sustain him.
Rapt in thought he found himself at his door almost without realizing how he had come there and, unthinkingly, he doused the torch in the pointed hood that hung by the door.
Plunged abruptly into darkness, Antyr swore and threw down the hood angrily. It bounced at the end of its chain with a clatter and then grated sullenly against the wall as it swung from side to side a few times before coming to rest.
While his eyes adjusted to the dim light offered by the street torches, Antyr groped irritably through his cluttered pockets in search of his key. Then, eventually finding it, he groped, equally irritably, to find and open the lock. It took much earnest squinting and several unsuccessful attempts before he succeeded.
Slowly he pushed the door open and stepped inside. Despite his caution, however, the door gave its familiar screech to remind him
that he neglected other things than his calling. Then, despite further caution, it repeated the complaint as he closed it.
With a small but weary sigh, Antyr drove home the large bolts then reached up in the darkness to a familiar shelf and took down a flint box and a cracked earthenware candle-holder. The flint box flared up boisterously as he struck it and the darkness in the hallway was suddenly fragmented into dancing and jostling shadows.
Antyr ignored the silent throng however, and concentrated on lighting the bent and reluctant candle. Then, gently extinguishing the flint box, he hung his damp cloak on a well-worn wooden peg and walked softly, if unsteadily, along the hallway towards a room at the back of the house.
‘You needn’t bother creeping in.’
A familiar voice filled his head. ‘I felt you coming three streets away. It’s a wonder Avran didn’t throw you into the Watch Pen as soon as he saw you, the state you’re in.’
Antyr scowled. ‘I wish you wouldn’t do that,’ he said angrily. ‘You wouldn’t have pried into my father’s thoughts like that.’
As he spoke, he reached the room and stood swaying in the doorway. The shadows from the hallway flooded past him to line the walls like waiting jurors, nodding purposefully to one another at the behest of the dancing candle flame. The remains of a fire glowed dimly in the grate.
Antyr entered and placed the solitary candle on a small shelf. The jury gradually became still and watchful.
As Antyr flopped down on to a nearby chair, the voice came again. ‘I don’t pry, Antyr, you’re perfectly well aware of that,’ it said, crossly. ‘You shout. I can’t help but hear you. I’ve told you before. I don’t expect you to have your father’s control, but . . .’
‘No, not now, Tarrian,’ Antyr intoned wearily, leaning back. ‘I’m in no mood . . .’ He released the comment he had prepared for Avran. ‘. . . for another of your lectures.’
There was a more purposeful movement among the swaying shadows as the candle flickered. In the far corner of the room a dark shape stirred and began to move across the floor towards the Dream Finder.
‘Don’t speak to me like that.’ Tarrian’s voice was angry and the sound of it in Antyr’s head mingled with a menacing growl from the approaching shadow. ‘I can’t avoid your confusion, and it washes over me like a foul stench. You seem to forget that.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Antyr said hastily, sitting up. ‘It’s been a bad night. I . . .’
‘It’s been a bad decade,’ Tarrian replied pitilessly.
Antyr winced. He had had many quarrels with Tarrian, but they had been growing increasingly more unpleasant of late and there was a tone in his friend’s voice that he had not heard before.
Briefly the eyes of the approaching shadow shone a brilliant green as if lit from some unfathomable depth. It was only a trick of the candlelight, but it chilled Antyr, reminding him not only of the true nature of his companion but also of the dark strangeness of his own calling.
Tarrian emerged relentlessly into the candlelight. The luminous green eyes were now their normal cold grey, though they were only marginally less menacing for that: Tarrian was a wolf. Old, but wild and full of the muscular vigour of youth.
‘Ah,’ he said, catching Antyr’s momentary fear. ‘You still have some perception left, I see. You should remember more often what I am and how we’re bound to one another.’
Antyr turned away. He opened his mouth to speak, but no sound came. Almost plaintively he reached out and stroked the wolf’s sleek head.
Tarrian’s voice filled his head again, though now full of compassion and concern. ‘Avran was right. More even than he understood himself. The path you’re following will destroy you more terribly than it would an ordinary man. You must turn again to the disciplines of your calling or you’ll doom us both.’
There was another note in the wolf’s voice that Antyr had not heard before: fear.
‘Yes, I am afraid,’ Tarrian said, even before Antyr could clearly form the thought. Then, impulsively, ‘Here’s how afraid I am.’
‘No!’ Antyr cried, pushing himself back in the chair as if to escape. But the wolf’s powerful personality held him firm and suddenly his mind was filled with swirling terrors and the dark, flitting shapes of nightmare. He struggled to set them aside, but in vain, Tarrian’s anger was too great. Then he felt the presence of an unseen menace seeking him out. Its power swept hither and thither, like a flailing arm. Despite himself, Antyr urged his legs to run but, as is the way in dreams, they would not respond to his desperation, they were beyond his control.
Abruptly he was free; and angry.
‘Damn you, dog,’ he shouted. ‘Don’t do your party tricks on me.’
Tarrian’s mouth curled into a snarl and a deep growl rumbled in his throat. His voice burst into Antyr’s head. ‘You’re only fit for party tricks, Petran’s son,’ it said, scornfully. ‘Do you think you could face my true fears? I, who stood by perhaps the edge of the Threshold to the Great Dream itself, and felt your father slip away from me? Do you want me to show you that?’
Antyr stood up clumsily and pushed past the wolf, his eyes wide. He snatched up an oil lamp and lifted it towards the candle.
‘Enough,’ he said breathlessly. ‘Let’s have some light.’ His hands, however, were trembling so violently that after several unsuccessful attempts to light it, he had to put the lamp down on the shelf for fear it would slip from his grasp. The waiting shadows danced and jigged expectantly.
Tarrian watched him, his grey eyes unblinking.
For a moment, Antyr leaned forward against the wall until he had recovered some composure. Then carefully, but still breathing heavily, he lit the lamp.
As the shadows dwindled and the familiar commonplace of the room asserted itself, Antyr sat down again, holding out a pleading hand to the wolf.
‘No more, please, Tarrian,’ he said, withdrawing the hand and using it to support his head. ‘I need no demonstrations of your superior skill, nor reminders of my own failings.’ Then, angrily again, in spite of himself, ‘And I need no reminders of my father, nor your ramblings about his death.’
The wolf turned away from him and padded back to its corner of the room without replying. It flopped down heavily and, resting its head over its extended forelegs, stared at Antyr patiently.
A faint echo of the fog outside hovered yellow in the air between the two antagonists.
‘My father’s heart failed him,’ Antyr said defensively into the silence after a moment, returning the wolf’s gaze. ‘It troubled him constantly after his fever.’
Tarrian still did not reply, but his denial filled Antyr’s mind.
‘No,’ Antyr protested. ‘I’ll have none of it. The dream of a dying man is notoriously dangerous . . .’ His voice broke. ‘My father should never have attempted to search for it. And you . . . his Companion . . . his Earth Holder . . . You shouldn’t have let him go.’
The reproach was unjust and Antyr knew it: Tarrian could not have defied the will of the Dream Finder in such a matter and Antyr found Tarrian’s own reproach rising in reply. He raised his hand in apology.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I shouldn’t have said that.’
He massaged his forehead as if the deed would erase his casual and cruel remark. ‘But I won’t accept your . . . beliefs,’ he continued, after a moment. ‘I wouldn’t accept them from my father and I won’t accept them from you . . . They’re foolishness . . .’
Tarrian’s eyes closed. ‘Your acceptance or otherwise will have no effect on the reality, Dream Finder,’ he said. His tone was one of resigned indifference: it was an old argument, now far beyond any passion. ‘You may choose not to believe in falling masonry if the notion offends you, but when a piece falls on your head, it’ll kill you just the same.’
Antyr rebelled at Tarrian’s cavalier presumption of rightness. ‘That’s different and you know it. We’re not . . . masons . . . working with the solid and the real. We . . . we . . . we’re just . . . gui
des . . . helpers,’ he spluttered, gesticulating irrelevantly to the unwatching wolf. ‘We have a gift to comfort people, that’s all. The bewildered, the tormented . . .’
‘But you don’t even believe that any more, do you?’ Although Tarrian was apparently asleep, his voice brutally swept aside Antyr’s ramblings. ‘You think we’re all just charlatans, using our “party tricks” to gull pennies and crowns from anyone foolish enough to pay for our services, don’t you?’
Antyr reeled under this quiet but savage onslaught. ‘No . . . Yes . . . I . . .’
‘You don’t know,’ Tarrian finished his sentence for him viciously. ‘You’re so addled with ale and self-indulgence that you’re forgetting your own puling excuses. You’re beginning to scrabble round like a rat in a wheel. Going faster and faster to nowhere. Go to sleep you sot, you sicken me. We’ll talk in the morning when you’re sober.’
The sudden, blistering contempt in Tarrian’s voice struck Antyr like a blow and choked his reply in his throat. He struggled unsteadily to his feet, and snatched up the candle.
‘Go to hell, dog,’ he tried to shout, but the curse degenerated into a strained squeak as his voice, marred by fog and drink, declined to respond.
Leaving the room, Antyr lost the small remains of his dignity by colliding with the door jamb.
He had intended to go upstairs to his bed, but his sudden rising and his collision with the door released the forces he had set in train earlier that evening. His stomach took urgent and explosive charge of events.
Somehow, Antyr reached the kitchen and an empty bucket just in time, and a few retching minutes later he was sitting on the cold floor leaning miserably against the wall with his arm draped around the stinking bucket like a grotesque parody of a replete lover and his chosen.
His head felt a little clearer, though that merely served to accentuate his distress.
‘You have a rare gift, Antyr,’ his father had said. ‘Greater by far than mine. But it will bring you nothing but pain if you do not embrace and cherish it. We are Dream Finders. In some matters we have no choice. Some dreams seek us, not we them.’