Black Brillion

by Matthew Hughes

  You can do what you can do.

  If he could have thrown his hands into the air and pulled at his hair in frustration, Baro would have done so. He had to be content with a silent, inner scream. Then the answer came: the Wise Man was not a person who could be queried or engaged in direct debate. It could only come to him as a component of his own psyche that could not function on its own. If he isolated it and probed it with direct questions, its only responses would be vague pronouncements; if he allowed it to think with him, to use his brain as an instrument, he would know what it wanted him to know.

  Go ahead, he told it. Show me.

  An image appeared in his mind: Yaffak the Rover, curled up asleep beneath his cart somewhere out on the Swept. Next came a memory of Yaffak in the Rover Commons, bound by the invisible harness. Then Baro saw himself step forward and sever the tie that went off into nowhere.

  Of course, he said. The Rovers can be freed. They are the weak point. Turn them on Arboghast and the Dree and the invasion dies in the egg.

  Now he saw another image: the room under the eaves, the old desk, the worn Agrajani rug, and the wardrobe. Then the path down to the green waters. I must go back.

  He tried his voice. Even with the tube in his mouth and the rigor affecting his lips and tongue, he could still sound the tones that Guth Bandar had taught him. He sang the sequence that brought the door into being, rimmed with golden light. As he reached for the handle, the song brought a flash of another memory—he was a little boy on his father’s knee and they were singing the song about the old man and giving a dog a bone—then he pulled the door open and stepped into the brilliance.

  The light faded and he was in his boyhood room crossing to the wardrobe and seeing the mirror at its back with its lurker. His Shadow sneered, then put both hands to its throat in a throttling gesture, letting its tongue protrude and eyes roll. Baro ignored it, stepping through the image and emerging on the steep path. Moments later, he plunged into the dark tarn and swam into its light-filled depths.

  He stood on the white road between the gray stone walls. From the edge of his vision he saw motes of light flickering and evanescing all around him, dreamers passing into and out of the noösphere. Do the Dree dream? he wondered. If they absorb us all will they inherit this, to wander about and poke through our collective past? Or will all that was once ours fall into darkness when Old Earth’s last human psyche is swallowed?

  It was a sad thought. Although only a handful of adepts still bothered to master the tones and continued to visit the Commons, it was one of the enduring creations of humankind’s long sojourn on the planet. It should not be lost.

  We will win this, he told himself. It must be done.

  He felt a welling tide of confidence and recognized the Hero filling him. He looked down at himself and saw the familiar chain mail and rough cloth, and felt the sword heavy in his hand. But though he felt ready to take action, he lacked a direction in which to move. The last time he had come to the noösphere, he had been led to the wall by the Hero, but now the barbarian was nowhere to be seen. He guessed that the entity could not simultaneously be present in its pure form while it was at work within him.

  He wished that Guth Bandar was with him. He did not know enough to be on the loose in the Commons. He remembered the historian’s warning, that once off the road he could easily step into an unseen hole that would deposit him in some Location where he would be impressed into the action and never be able to win free.

  I need Bandar, he thought. The Hero always needs the Helper.

  He looked at the winks and twinkles of light in the air around him, wondering if the little man might be one of them, dreaming his way into the Commons. As soon as he posed the question the answer came. He vaulted over the wall and crossed the field to the trees. He remembered the way—or perhaps he was led—to the spot where he and Bandar had passed into the hemming of the Dree. He sang the twelve notes and the vertical ripple appeared before him; he sang the next twelve as he stepped through and emerged onto the slope that overlooked the farmhouse.

  Above the sound of his own voice, he heard again a chittering noise and knew it for what it was: the rubbing together of chitinous Dree limbs as they crouched in a tunnel mouth and directed an energy weapon toward the armored vehicles rumbling toward them across the flats.

  Baro went down the slope and out onto the plain. He knew, without knowing how he knew, where the historian would be and soon found him crouched in the bottom of the trench, poking at the dead Dree while droning the thran that kept him invisible from the entities that populated the Event.

  The young man knelt by the edge of the trench and touched Bandar’s shoulder with the flat of his sword. The little man leaped up with a shriek, spun around, then tripped over a corpse. Baro raised his voice, chanting the thran louder to cover both of them.

  “What are you doing here?” Bandar asked, then had to take over the chant while Baro replied.

  “I’ve come for you.”

  They switched roles again so that Bandar could say, “It’s too late. I am wrapped and deposited in a creche with a tube in my belly and a Dree tickling my brain’s innards. The woman security officer is in the same plight.”

  “Yet here you are poking at a dead Dree.”

  “I hoped there would be something I could use, some knowledge that would let me fight and survive.” Bandar sighed. “But there is nothing.”

  Baro was finding it difficult to carry on a conversation while trading the thran back and forth: “Is there somewhere we could go to talk?” he said. “I have an idea.”

  Bandar produced his globe and traced a path. “Come,” he said, taking Baro’s arm and chanting eight descending tones. A fissure appeared and they stepped through it into a howl of wind and horizontal, face-tearing sleet. Baro was yanked to the left, heard another sequence of tones, and emerged into an emptiness of rock and sand that stretched in all directions. A pile of wind-scoured bones lay at his feet. The sun was a yellow-white glare high above, brighter than the young man had ever seen. Baro felt the dry heat seize him like a hot fist.

  “We need no thran here,” said the noönaut. “It is the Desert.”

  Baro heard him emphasize the capitalization of the word. “No one will murder or enslave us?” he said.

  Bandar said, “It is uninhabited. That is what desert means.” He wiped his sweating brow. “Although we are here, so it is temporarily peopled by us, but if we stayed this heat and aridity would soon kill us and then it would be uninhabited again. But for a few minutes it is a place where we can talk without the insulation of a thran. You said you had an idea?”

  Baro told him about the Wise Man and the proposal to free the Rovers before the Dree mind could consolidate.

  Bandar sat on the ground and picked at the pile of bones. He lifted one and it fell away to dust. “It does not seem practical to me,” he said. “Yaffak was far out of reach of the Dree entity, and thus when he was freed he could not easily be re-shackled. The entity is in its cyst in a tunnel below Victor and Rovertown. Why can it not easily reestablish control over any Rover that we free?”

  “I had hoped you would be more encouraging,” Baro said. The Hero’s garb he wore was intended for a colder climate. Sweat was running down his back and chest and his scalp itched under the winged helmet.

  “You are under the influence of the Hero,” Bandar said. “It tends to make you see me as the Helper. Whereas, to myself, I am still just me.”

  Baro felt a rush of irritation. Why can’t the man be more helpful? Then a cooler current passed through his mind. “I am also under the influence of the Wise Man,” he said. “And he believes we can do it.”

  “It does not do to listen to one or two archetypes,” Bandar said. “They are always sure of themselves, even when they are rushing pell-mell to destruction. The sensible man consults a wide range of influences and draws a consensus.”

  “The sensible man does not allow himself to be trussed from head to toe and popped
into a niche to await transmogrification into a mindless Dree.”

  “True,” Bandar said, “but what is your point?”

  “Even if what the Hero and the Wise Man counsel us to is useless,” Baro said, “it is at least action. And if there is merely the tiniest chance of success, that is still better odds than we are offered by the Dree.”

  Bandar looked off into the haze of the distance. “My plans were different. If my examination of the hemming of the Dree produced no useful prospects I thought I would visit a few of my favorite Locations before I cease to exist. Some of the Heavens are quite wonderful. You’re welcome to accompany me. We might decide to cease chanting and be impressed into one of them. At least that would mean going out on our own terms, not the Dree’s.”

  Baro was almost tempted, but the Hero was not. “If I must die,” he said, “I would prefer to fall while striving to defeat the enemy.”

  “I fear it is a lost cause,” Bandar said.

  “Those are the best ones.”

  “Spoken like a Hero,” said the historian. “A full-bore, muscle-headed, sword-swinging, bound-for-glory, once-more-unto-the-breach, soon-to-be-chopped-into-pieces Hero.”

  “You are not convinced,” Baro said.

  “I am not,” said Bandar. “Would you care to loose the Wise Man on me?”

  Baro felt a shifting inside him. “There is one reason you will help,” he said.

  “And what is that?”

  “This,” said Baro and gestured to the waste around them.

  “The Desert?” said Bandar.

  “The Commons.”

  Bandar said nothing. He wiped sweat from his brow to his chin and as his hand descended it was as if it painted a new expression over the skepticism that had been there. The small man’s face became a mask of regret.

  Baro knew that the archetype was speaking through him as he said, “Even if there is but the smallest chance of preserving the noösphere, of saving this great construct to which you have devoted your life, will you not forgo Heaven and try?”

  Bandar heaved a long sigh. “Damn you,” he said, then he stood up and summoned the globular map of the Commons into existence. “At least I will lead you to the Wall.”

  How do I know that the Rover Commons waits on the other side?” Baro said.

  “I suppose you don’t,” said Bandar. “I was not here when you crossed before, and part of me still does not want to believe it ever happened.”

  But they found the place where Baro had swum beneath the Wall. A faint, pale scratch in the ground showed where the sword had cut a way to the Old Sea. Baro thought about the Worm, its great circle of a mouth ringed with serrated teeth. He shuddered.

  “Could you find a cord to tie around my ankle? Then you could pull me back faster than I could swim.”

  “There is no cord here.”

  “Then fetch one from somewhere else.”

  “There is a rule against moving objects from one Location to another,” the historian said.

  Baro felt the Wise Man stir in him. “That is to protect the integrity of Locations,” he said. “How better to protect their integrity than by preventing them from being forever obliterated?”

  Bandar conceded the argument but said, “I am not sure that anything from here can survive down there. It might just dissolve.”

  This time, the Hero dominated. “Can you find a rope or not?”

  The small man said, “Wait,” and consulted his globe. He sang a short thran, turned to his left, and disappeared. Almost instantly he was back, a coil of thin rope over his shoulder. “From an ancient sea battle,” he said, handing it to Baro. “I took it from the deck of a sinking galley. I doubt it will be missed.”

  Baro knelt and tied it around his ankle. He stood and set the sword point into the ground at the end of the old scar and pressed down. Again, the ground resisted like flesh, then yielded to the sword’s thrust. He sliced along the line and beyond, almost to the Wall itself.

  “This may take longer,” he told Bandar, “so I’ve made a bigger cut. Will you try to prevent it from healing over?”

  “I will try.”

  “Then here we go.” Baro dove into the slit and again felt the nothingness of the Old Sea close around him. He did not bother to kick or flail this time, but oriented himself along the axis of the incision in the human Commons and willed himself up and forward. His extended sword point met the ceiling and broke through. He widened the hole and pulled himself once more into the Rover Commons.

  He recognized the colorless place with the thorn hedge and its amazing richness of odor. But this time there was no strong scent trail to lead him to where he needed to go. I am not in a dreamscape, he reasoned. This is the Commons itself. To free a Rover I must find one dreaming and enter the dream.

  He untied the cord from his ankle and pulled a few lengths of it through the slit in the ground, then hung the coil on the thorns to guide him back to the exit. He looked about him, but there were no glints and twinks of light at the edge of his vision. Why do I see no dreamers? he wondered and even as he posed the question the answer came: because in this place seeing was a minor sense.

  Baro flared his nostrils, cast his head from side to side, and in a moment he found what he was seeking. He followed the scent, deduced its direction, then sped forward to get in front of it. The odor burst upon him full strength then, the musky, sharp scent of a young female Rover, and with no sense of transition he was in her dream.

  They were in a dark forest and she was struggling to free her forelimbs from a noose that descended from a canopy of wet black limbs and dripping, leathery leaves. Her teeth made no mark on the rope but she had gashed her own flesh. Blood dripped onto the dank and rotting carpet that was the forest floor.

  Baro stepped forward, and her eyes swung toward him in fresh terror. “I am the Good Man,” he said. “When I cut the cord, you must wake and run far.”

  She said something he could not understand—it might not even have been words—and he moved closer and swung the sword. It sliced through the tether and the noose dropped away. The Rover regarded her freed hands with wonder, then a shudder went through her and she dropped to all fours and ran.

  Baro watched her go and saw that she followed a trail that led out of the darkness under the trees and toward a meadow bathed in sunlight. She was almost clear of the forest, the light glinting on her raised ruff when a looped cord snaked down from above and snugged itself about her neck. She was yanked to her hind feet and hung there, dangling and dancing almost on her toes, as the rope was cruelly jerked and tugged. Beyond her, the bright meadow was occluded by shadow, as if a curtain of rain had swept across it.

  Baro ran to her and cut with the sword again but this time the tether was of thick, braided rawhide. The weapon’s edge had sliced only halfway through the rope and even as he drew it back for a second cut he saw that the severed ends of the thongs moved like blind snakes, reweaving themselves and thickening.

  A noise came from above, a clicking, scraping sound as of sticks rubbing against dried leather. Baro looked up into a rain of droplets shaken loose from the high branches and saw a shape moving in the darkness. A chitinous claw slid out of the leaves and down the rope, then the Dree’s blind head followed, its feathery tendrils turning this way and that.

  Baro set himself and took a two-handed grip on the sword, but the wise one’s voice within him spoke. It is the Dree archetype and in the Rover Commons it is all-powerful. We cannot fight it here. Lead it back beyond the Wall where our strength lies.

  He felt a struggle inside him as the two archetypes contended, then the Hero gave way and Baro backed down the trail to where he had entered the Rover’s dream. The Dree continued its measured descent down the braided rope. When it reached the strangling female it climbed down her as if she were inanimate. Baro felt a shiver of revulsion at the thing’s bland disregard of its captive’s suffering. It was like watching a spider methodically wrap its struggling prey.

  He
backed farther down the trail. He knew when he reached the spot where he had cut the first cord because he saw the severed loop lying on the leaf mold. Even as he looked at it, the length of rope faded and disappeared, then the black mulch of leaves and twigs beneath it lost its darkness, becoming pale and wan.

  He looked up and saw the Dree advancing stolidly toward him, its long, jointed digits opening and closing, its tendrils curling and uncurling at him, pulling his scent from the air. It moved in an unnatural way, its legs and torso bending and flexing at angles that were wrong, its smooth, ovoid head bobbing on a segmented neck.

  Around and behind it the forest and the struggling Rover faded and disappeared. Baro found himself back on the scent track where he had encountered the dreaming victim, and there was the blackthorn hedge, not far.

  The Dree clicked and chittered at him, and now he caught its scent—acrid and sharp, prickling and tearing at his nostrils the way a shriek would pain his ears. Clear of the trees, he saw that the entity was larger than the new-made specimens he had seen on the Monument, its limbs thickly ridged and spiked with chitin, its claws like wedges that tapered to needlepoints when the digits clicked together.

  It came faster now. Walking backward, Baro could not keep ahead of it. Though the Hero in him hated to do it, he turned and ran for the hedge, to the pale circle of coiled rope that marked the way back to his own noösphere. He heard it come after him, its hoof-hard feet clacking the ground, its bitter stench running before it.

  It will always pursue fleeing prey, said the Wise Man.

  The slit in the ground was smaller but it was still wide enough. He dove into it, grasped the rope that led back to Bandar and the human noösphere, and willed himself along it. He looked out into the gray abyss of the Old Sea and caught the same distant motion he had seen before, the great Worm undulating toward him.

  Again, he felt his energy fading, the emptiness of the utoposphere leaching consciousness from him. That was death, he knew, because in this no-place Baro Harkless had no flesh, no blood, no bone. Consciousness was all that he was and if it went, he would be gone with it.