The River of Shadows cv-3

by Robert V. S. Redick

  The River of Shadows. That is what the innkeeper called this place. And his name, and his tavern? Think of it, remember. Orfuin. The Orfuin Club. Anyone whose need is sincere can find his way to my doorstep.

  No sooner had the thought occurred to him than he saw it: the little terrace and the wide stone archway, the scattered tables, the potbellied man at his tea. As if he had waited all these weeks for Felthrup to return. But how could he possibly get there? Felthrup spread his arms, the way he had seen Macadra and her horrible companions do, but his cloak only billowed about his head, and like a tossed playing card he flew spinning across the shaft, rising still, leaving the terrace behind. No control. He could almost hear Arunis laughing, though he knew the mage could not see or hear him in this place. He flailed, he kicked, he crashed again into a wall. He sank his hands into the vines. They were deep, but not deep enough. Fistfuls of the waxy leaves tore away in his hands as his body tried to lift away once more.

  He should not have attempted this journey. You’re failing, rat. Still just a rat, with a rat’s small soul, even if he could dream himself into the body of a man or bear.

  Then it came to him, like a gift from some mind beyond his own. Still a rat! He had that choice, too. Closing his eyes, he willed the change to happen, and it did. His fur, his half tail, his dear old claws. All at once the vines closed over his whole body. The wall of the shaft was rough, scabrous; better than the walls he scaled with ease on the Chathrand. And the wind sheared past him, deflected by the vines.

  He crawled straight down. He veered left and right following the smells of the place, dark beer and gingerbread. Rat, man, bear, yddek: he could be any of these. He was Felthrup Stargraven, and for the first time in his curious life he knew with certainty that he was something more. He thought of Arunis, stalking the Chathrand like a murderous fog, killing through mind-enslavement and yet afraid to meet him, Felthrup, in dream. I am, he thought with a totally unfamiliar pleasure, a dangerous foe.

  “Do you mean that you had no assistance whatsoever?” said the innkeeper, filling a saucer for the rat.

  “On the contrary, sir,” said Felthrup, seated on the table beside him. “I had the assistance of the written word, and an exceptional sort of help it was. The thirteenth Polylex often leads one astray, I grant you; and it is certainly biased in favor of the Northern half of my world. There is no entry whatsoever for ‘Bali Adro,’ tragically enough; one proceeds directly from Balhindar, a Rekere dish made with green rice and termite larvae, to Baliacan, a dance in honor of the Firelords, the poor execution of which was punished-do excuse my redundant vocabulary, sir-with execution.”

  “But something in this Polylex,” said Orfuin, unruffled by Felthrup’s nonstop chatter, “showed you the way to my door, though you’d never dipped so much as a finger into the River of Shadows?”

  “Master Orfuin, I had no inkling that such a River existed.”

  A gentle smile spread over the innkeeper’s face. “One day you may long to recover such ignorance. Then again, you may not. For now, let us celebrate your skill. Few dare to leap into that stream who are not born to it, or committed to a lifetime’s practice. You, Felthrup, are a natural swimmer.”

  “How very ironical,” said Felthrup, beaming. “All my life-my woken life-I have lived in fear of drowning. But I suppose one cannot drown in a river of air.”

  “There is more than one sort of drowning,” said Orfuin. “But come: tell me how you managed this miracle, and what need brought you to attempt it.”

  Felthrup reached to adjust his spectacles, then laughed: they were still gone. “Cross-references, Mr. Orfuin,” he said. “I began with Dreams, an entry that ran to some forty-eight pages. Around the thirtieth, I learned of the theory of Occulted Architecture, which states that the objects in a dream-land, like those in any other world, are made of smaller building blocks: atoms, cells, particles too small for any eye to discern-except the mage’s, and those of magical creatures. They, being able to perceive the building pattern, can also learn to change it-to turn a rat into a man, candies into worms, a damp tunnel into a castle corridor. Arunis used this ability to torture me for several months, once he discovered my dream of scholarship.

  “But the Polylex goes on to say that dream-lands are not exactly infinite. Like countries in a waking world, they do possess edges: frontiers, borders, watchtowers, walls. Some of the mightiest walls are those erected between dreamers. They are invisible even to the dreamer himself, but they are also essential: they prevent us from wandering, by accident or ill design, into the dreams of others.

  “Mages, however, can pass through these walls as though they do not exist.”

  “If that were not so I’d have fewer customers,” said Orfuin, “though not everyone who comes here does so in a dream.”

  “Well, Mr. Orfuin,” continued Felthrup, “at that point the Polylex suggested I consult the entry for Trespass, Magical. How fortunate that I did! For that entry described at some length the consequences of dream-invasion for the one so violated. They are mostly horrible. Because Arunis trespassed so often and so aggressively into my dreams, I may eventually come to suffer from insomnia, sleepwalking, fear of intimacy and verbal reticence.”

  “Surely not the last?” said Orfuin with concern.

  “Oh, it is likely, sir, and narcolepsy, and excessive familiarity too. But that is all beside the point. What matters is this: that those whose dreams have been invaded sometimes find that they have been bestowed with an equal but opposite ability-that is, to enter the dream of the one who invaded them.”

  “That is true,” said Orfuin. “The wall between two dreamers, once transgressed, is never afterward a perfect barrier.”

  “So it proved with me,” said Felthrup. “My great benefactor Ramachni, wherever his true self has gone, passed into my dream and gave me the power to fight back against Arunis. That act saved my life: for sleep had become such misery that I was performing the most extreme acts of self-torture to keep myself awake. And when at last I had the courage to dream again, I made a shocking discovery: my dreams no longer just started, with a bang as it were, in the middle of a fight or dance or bowl of soup. Not at all. Since Ramachni’s visit, I see my dream coming. Like the doorway to your club, it begins as a tiny square of light in the darkness. Very quickly that square grows into a window, and before I know it, the window crashes against me, and I tumble into the dream. Strange, and useless, I thought: for I was as helpless to control this process as I was tonight, flailing around out there.”

  Felthrup lifted his head, indicating the rushing blackness beyond the terrace. “The River of Shadows,” he said, musing. “What is it, Mr. Orfuin? Through which world does it run?”

  Orfuin paused for a long sip of tea. “The River is the dark essence of thought,” he said at last, “for thought, more than anything else in the universe, has the power to leap between worlds. It belongs therefore to all worlds where conscious life exists. And yet strangely enough, consciousness tends to blind us to its presence. I have even heard it said that the more a world’s inhabitants unlock the secret workings of the universe-its occult architecture, its pulleys and gears-the deeper the River of Shadows sinks beneath the earth. Societies of master technicians, those who trap the energy of suns, and grow their food in laboratories, and build machines that carry them on plumes of fire through the void: they cannot find the River at all.

  “But we are straying from your tale, Felthrup. You were speaking of these dream-windows. You fall through them helplessly, you say?”

  “No longer!” said Felthrup. “Once again the Polylex came to my rescue. In a footnote to the Dreams entry-I revere the humble footnote, sir, don’t you? — the book provides a list of exercises for taking conscious control of the unconscious. And what do you suppose? I mastered those exercises, and found I could slow the approach of my dream-window. Eventually I learned to stop it altogether and examine the dream from the outside, like a wanderer looking in on a firelit home. If I wish t
o enter, I do so. If not, I simply wave my hand, and the window shatters like a reflection in a pool. But the most astonishing part was yet to come.

  “Several nights ago I noticed a second window, a second dream, shining at some distance from the first. It was the sorcerer’s, Mr. Orfuin: somewhere on the Chathrand, Arunis was asleep, and sending his dream-self out to prowl the ship. I dared not approach it: suppose my new skills failed me, and I tumbled into the sorcerer’s dream? Suppose he sensed me outside the window, and by some magic drew me in? Ramachni gave me the power to master my own dreams, a task I am barely equal to. But should Arunis lay hands on me within his own-”

  “You would become his slave, in waking as in dream,” said Orfuin with conviction. “And when he had finished with you, he could break your mind like a sparrow’s egg, between two fingers. Or toy with it, for the rest of your natural life.”

  He stood abruptly, as though shaking off a spell, and walked to the edge of his terrace, where the wind of the lightless River tore at his sparse hair.

  “To be held in that mage’s invisible cell, prey to any torture that occurs to him, forever. There could hardly be a more awful fate in all the worlds.”

  Felthrup said nothing. In the club, someone was tuning a mandolin.

  With his back still turned, Orfuin added, “You knew this in your heart, did you not? Before you leaped willingly into his dream.”

  “Ah,” said Felthrup, “you guessed.”

  “Only now,” said Orfuin. “You were the little yddek that hid under my chair. The first such creature I had seen in many months. The one who swam out of the River some twenty minutes after Arunis himself.”

  “I was,” said Felthrup, “though I did not know I would become that strange creature, all tentacles and jointed shell. I only knew that I must learn what he was doing, for even from a distance, gazing fearfully at the window of his dream, I knew he was preparing for a decisive step. Maybe the decisive step in his struggle with us all. How could I simply watch him take it, and not even try to learn what it was about? So yes: I drew near, and watched him pacing through your club, pretending to be no one in particular at first, but shedding the pretense little by little as his impatience grew. And when his back was turned I summoned all my courage, and jumped.”

  The innkeeper turned to face him again. “You are fortunate that you became an yddek. I saw the sorcerer turn in surprise the moment you appeared. He sensed your intrusion into his dream, and raced from door to door, to see if it was Macadra who had come. His glance fell on you, but he has seen many yddeks in his time and thought nothing of it. But had you taken this form-”

  “He would surely have known me,” said Felthrup, raising his mangled forepaw and twitching his stumpy tail.

  “You were fortunate in another way, too,” said Orfuin. “Yddeks have very sharp ears. I assume you heard what they said on this terrace?”

  “Much of it, Mr. Orfuin,” said Felthrup, “and all that I heard was terrible. Arunis seeks the complete elimination of human beings from the world! And that woman Macadra seems to share his wish, although she denies it-and something he whispered, something I did not hear, came to her as a brutal shock. Yet I still have no idea who she is. Can you tell me?”

  Orfuin took a rag from his pocket and walked to one of the windows looking out onto the terrace. He breathed on a small square pane and rubbed it clean.

  “Macadra Hyndrascorm,” he said with distaste, “is a very old sorceress. Like Arunis, a cheater of death. All mages tend to be long-lived, but some are satisfied with nothing less than immortality. None truly attain it. Some, like Macadra and her servants in the Raven Society, deploy all their magical skills in its pursuit. They may indeed live a very long time-but not without becoming sick and bleached and repellent to natural beings. Others, like your master Ramachni, are granted a kind of extended lease: the powers outside of time stretch their lives into hundreds or even thousands of years, but only in pursuit of a very great deed.”

  Felthrup jerked upright with a squeak, almost upsetting the little table. “Do you mean that once Ramachni completes his allotted task he will die?” he cried.

  “Death is the standard conclusion, yes,” said Orfuin. “But Felthrup, you must hasten to tell me what you came here for. I have a roast in the oven. Besides, my dear fellow, you might wake at any time.”

  “That is precisely why I have come!” said Felthrup. “Master Orfuin, my Polylex tells me that the wall between two dreamers is not the only sort of wall. There is also, of course, the wall between dream and waking. But by one of the most ancient of laws, most of what we learn, and all that we collect or are given, must be left on the far side of the gate when we return to waking life.”

  Orfuin chuckled again. Then, with an air of scholarly formality, he recited: Never night’s mysteries are exposed

  To the weak mortal eye unclosed.

  So wills its King, that hath forbid

  The uplifting of the fringed lid.

  “Or something to that effect. Have you read Poe, Mr. Felthrup? A dlomic writer of some interest; there’s a book of his in the club.^ 6 Yes, it is a balm to the soul, to travel and converse and gain wisdom in the land of dreams. But only mages can carry that wisdom out into the daylight. The rest of us must leave everything but a few stray memories on the far side of the wall.”

  “But Master Orfuin, I am denied even those!” cried Felthrup, hopping in place. “If I saw Arunis’ face looming over me, or held on to some brief snatches of his words, then perhaps I could fight him. But he has placed a forgetting-charm upon me. Ramachni told Pazel Pathkendle of this charm, and Pazel told me. But Ramachni cannot dispel it, he said, until he returns in the flesh.

  “And that will not do. Here as a dreamer I know all that has happened to me, in waking life and in dreams. But my waking self knows nothing of those dreams, and so I cannot warn my friends. I cannot tell them what I overheard, here on your terrace. That this Macadra and her Ravens are sending a replacement crew-isn’t that how she put it? — to seize the Chathrand. That all the wars, feuds and battles of the North are watched with pleasure, and even encouraged, by forces in the South bent on conquest. I know the most terrible secrets in Alifros! But what good is this knowledge if it vanishes each night at the end of my dream?”

  “And you imagine that this old tavern-keeper can help you break what you yourself have just referred to as one of ‘the most ancient of laws’?” Orfuin sat back in his chair with a sigh. “Finish your tea, Felthrup. Come inside and eat gingerbread, listen to the music, be my guest. No matter how many years we’re allotted, we should never squander life in pursuit of the impossible.”

  “Forgive me, sir, but I cannot accept your answer.”

  Orfuin’s eyes grew wide. Felthrup, however, was possessed of a sudden absolute conviction. “I must take the warning back with me, somehow. I cannot possibly sit down and enjoy your hospitality if that means pretending I don’t know the fate Arunis has in mind for half the people of Alifros. If you will not help me, I must thank you for the tea and the delightful conversation, and go in search of other allies.”

  “In your dreams?”

  “Where else, sir? Perhaps one of the ghosts aboard Chathrand will help me, since you find yourself unable to do so.”

  “There is something you must understand,” said Orfuin. “I am no one’s ally, though I try to be everyone’s friend. This club survives only because it has, since time unfathomable, stood outside the feuds and factions that plague so many worlds. No one is barred who comes here peaceably. Whether the words they exchange are words of peace or barbarism I rarely know. Wars have been plotted here, no doubt-but how many more have been averted, because leaders of vision and power had a place to sit down together, and talk at their ease? It is my faith that the universe is better off for having a place where no one fears to talk. Arunis was right, Felthrup: when I closed the club and threw them out into the River, I was doing something I had never done before, and will not hasten to do aga
in. I was breaking the promise of this house.”

  “Because you heard them plotting the murder of millions of human beings!” said Felthrup. “What else could you do at such a pass?”

  “Oh, many things,” said Orfuin, rising again from his chair. “I could sell this club, and purchase a home in the Sunken Kingdom, or an apartment in orbit around Cbalu, or an entire island in your world of Alifros, complete with port and palace and villages and farms. I could break my house rule again, and then again, and soon be one more partisan in the endless wars beggaring the universe. Or I could contemplate my tea, and pretend not to have heard anything my guests were discussing.”

  Felthrup rubbed his face with his paws. “I will wake soon; I can feel it. I will forget all of this, and have no way of helping my friends. I should not have come.”

  Orfuin stepped close to the table and put his hands under Felthrup’s chin, lifting it gently. “You may sleep a little longer, I think.”

  And suddenly Felthrup sensed that it was true: the flickering, stirring feeling, the teasing scent of Admiral Isiq’s cigars still clinging to his uniforms, had quite faded away.

  “Most visitors to a tavern,” said Orfuin, “don’t come to speak to the barman.”

  Felthrup glanced quickly at the inviting doorway. You cannot help me, he thought suddenly, but you spelled it out, didn’t you? What your guests speak of is none of your concern.