The Black Dream

by Col Buchanan

  He blinked when a male voice squawked from a grille set next to the door, accompanied by a loud crackling hiss. ‘Hrmph-maffle-crik!’

  ‘What?’

  The hiss faded away. ‘Enter your pass into the slot provided.’

  Ash took the serrated disc pass from the leather wallet and slid it into the slot, hoping that he did it right.

  ‘Maffle-muffle-crik!’

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘Remove your pass. Do not lose it.’

  When the steel door slid open it expelled a sigh of frigid air, wonderfully refreshing. The old farlander hesitated only briefly before he stepped through into the corridor of white walls beyond, and the door slid closed behind him.

  Along the ceiling, three rows of glowing orbs illuminated the way, one row of lights blinking on and off in a running sequence so that it seemed they were guiding the route. He followed them around a curving corner into a side-passage, where another door slid open and led him into a windowless chamber with a high vaulted ceiling. Inside, his breath condensed to mist in the air.

  Another door slid closed behind him. Ash could see no way of opening it.

  ‘Remove your clothes,’ came a disembodied female voice from the ceiling, and his eyebrows rose in surprise when a hatch in one of the walls slid open into darkness. ‘Place them in the cubicle provided. Any jewellery and other items too.’

  No point in being shy about it. Save that if they were somehow watching him his black skin might spark a few curious stares. No choice in it, he supposed.

  Quickly he stripped off and bundled everything into the hole in the wall: the burnoose and boots and gloves, his leather flask of water, his pouches of leaves and gold and silver coins, the sun-goggles, his sword. Without sound the hatch slid closed again and Ash was left standing with nothing more than his naked body for warmth. He wrapped his arms about himself and stamped his feet on the hard tiles of the floor, which were too cold to sit upon even if he’d wanted to. His teeth began to lightly chatter.

  Suddenly it was snowing in the chamber. White flakes blew from vents in the arched ceiling and fell all around him. Ash looked up and felt them settle against his skin. They weren’t cold like snow, nor did they melt away with his heat. Gradually the flakes covered his entire body and face, and when he rubbed them clear the flakes turned to talc, leaving a chalky smear in their place. A layer of the stuff covered the floor, while the finer dust began to fill the air so that he breathed it in too and started to cough, feeling light-headed.

  ‘Please breathe normally,’ the placid voice advised him.

  And then, like a sudden change in the weather, it began to rain from the vents overhead instead, and the droplets were so scorching hot that Ash hissed from the burning sting of them. In streams and rivulets the dust of the snow washed away into gutters around the edges. Gasping, Ash cleared his eyes and looked about him through the steady shower of water, wondering how long it would last.

  Too much energy in him today, he was finding. He was jittery from it, unable to stand still for long. As the time passed by and the water kept falling Ash began to shadow-spar where he stood, the air whooshing from his lips while he punched and kicked and hopped around the chamber, feeling light on his feet, feeling young again.

  ‘Please remain stationary,’ announced the voice, but Ash ignored it. He sparred with a ghost opponent until the shower finally stopped and the last of the water dripped clear. Suddenly warm air was blasting into the room, drying his skin in moments.

  A door slid open in the far wall.

  ‘You may now exit the chamber to redeem your belongings.’

  *

  The cable car swayed about him as it rose into the air, creaking noisily.

  Ash stared down through the open window at the slopes of the mountain falling away not that far below. The jungle was receding now, replaced by terraced farms and intricate drainages rushing with water, as the car climbed the cable up the mountain, roughly following the course of a winding road.

  From here he could look back and see where vast swathes of the jungle appeared to be turning brown and dying off; all along its upper edges, in fact, wherever water seemed to flow, eating into the deeper canopy lower down. Indeed, the odd solitary tree passed close enough below for Ash to see the mottled sickliness of its leaves. And the crops too, those growing on the terraced farms, seemed blighted in some way.

  Clouds were trailing rain up there nearer the peaks. A shower passed over the cable car, soft rain pattering lightly on its metal roof, and Ash leaned out of the window and opened his mouth to taste a sample, just as another car went past in the opposite direction bearing a startled Alhazii face.

  Ash winced, for the water was foul and his eyes stung from it.

  Bad rain, he thought with a frown, reminded of what fell from the skies in distant Q’os.

  It was as though something was poisoning the land and the sky of this place.

  *

  This high up, the air was starting to grow noticeably thinner. It felt like hours since the cable car had begun its long journey.

  Indeed the world below was losing itself now to the gathering dusk, though the trails of jungle mists remained faintly visible in their luminescence. Thanks to the Milk his vision seemed sharper than he had ever known it. To the west the sky was a deepening wash of blue which shone brighter where the sun had so recently set. Over his shoulder to the east, he saw a dark, greyish band arching just above the far horizon; the shadow of the world itself.

  Even as he watched, a pink glow brightened the band of shadow across its upper edge and then a star glimmered, two stars, three; a handful wherever he looked.

  Such beauty!

  Under a dome of stars, Ash saw that he was approaching the walls of the city at long last, and a white building that looked much like the Clearing House down in the town.

  The white walls blocked his view of the city beyond. Above them, though, soared a structure which made him blink in wonder. Into the night rose a limb of pearlstone arching impossibly high over the glow of the city, ending in a central hub where other more distant limbs reached up to join it too, all of them covered in thousands of windows lit from within, faintly illuminating what looked like netting draped over the entire structure. Those flat-sided legs of the Sky Bridge glimmered with the same violet light that shot upwards into the sky, following the colossal needle thrusting towards the stars.

  For a moment he squinted as a blinding light swept over the walls. Through his splayed fingers he spotted a vessel coming down from the sky with its wings cupping the air like some giant bird, landing somewhere on the other side. And then the car was entering the side of the building and everything fell away from sight, and Ash jerked as it came to a sudden, swaying stop. The door on its side popped open.

  ‘Welcome,’ announced a disembodied voice.

  Alone, Ash stepped out into the City of the Lost.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  Rubbing with the Enemy

  Sunrise found them hunkered down on a lonely outcrop of rocks overlooking the surrounding forest of the Windrush, exchanging the odd rifle shot with the enemy force that had circled their position. There were snipers in the trees below them, betrayed by puffs of smoke drifting to nothing in the grey, though brightening, morning air, and occasionally a flash of movement between the rocks at the foot of the bluff: a Contrarè head ducking down, a Purdah scout rushing between cover, slowly making their way upwards.

  ‘Bastards don’t give up, do they?’ growled the bodyguard Marsh from where they all lay on their bellies in the dirt, the bodyguard perched on a rock peering through an eyeglass. A shot struck the rock and threw dust against Marsh’s grimy cheek, but he didn’t flinch from it, merely raised an eyebrow in disdain. For all the lack of sleep in the man, for all the tightness of their present situation, he seemed chirpy enough this morning.

  Coya too seemed more lively than he should this morning, considering there was a crossbow bolt sticking through his skull.
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  ‘They do seem determined to have at us,’ he replied from where he lay on his back, grunting in pain as the medico Kris finished cutting off the ends of the wooden bolt extending from both sides of his head.

  Still alive and talking, even now. For the life of her Shard could barely believe it, even though she had worked on him herself during the previous hours of darkness. Exhausted and barely able to talk, she had cradled Coya’s head in her hands while she purged the wound clean with her mind, pinching off what internal bleeding she could, slowly realizing that the bolt through his brain was the only thing keeping him alive now. It could not be removed.

  Yet Coya had taken the news as calmly as a man being told of placid weather, in stark contrast to Marsh, lifelong bodyguard to the man since they had both been boys, who had sworn loudly in a sudden burst of temper, cursing Coya for these reckless plans of his that made it impossible to protect him.

  All the while the enemy fired at them from the trees and tried to get closer to their position, and Shard tried her very best not to fall asleep.

  ‘Maybe they’re in a hurry,’ Coya ventured now, focused gamely on other things like the enemy forces surrounding them in a tightening ring. ‘Maybe they’re worried about the local Contrarè turning up.’

  ‘I doubt it,’ said the captain of the rangers from further along the lip of the outcrop. ‘Most of the Contrarè war bands are in the eastern fringes now, ranged along the Chilos. Far from here anyway.’

  Again the bodyguard spoke up, addressing Coya in his angry clipped voice.

  ‘They were after you last night during their attack on the camp, did you notice?’

  ‘Nonsense,’ retorted Coya, blinking up at the sky.

  But it was true, for Shard had seen it herself.

  ‘Marsh is right,’ sounded her own sleepy voice in her ears. ‘They were trying to kill you. I saw the bolts flying your way.’

  Coya Zeziké considered the news sombrely.

  ‘Perhaps they found out my mission here, and have decided to stop me.’

  ‘You think?’ mocked Marsh.

  Five of the rangers had made it out alive from the ambush of the camp, nearly half their number left behind them as they fled. For the remains of the night the survivors had made a running retreat through the forest, a ‘run and reply’ as their captain had called it, a routine they had obviously performed many times before. While one group of rangers stopped and fired back at their pursuers to keep the enemy heads down, the rest leapfrogged past their flanks, running onwards for a distance before stopping too, firing back to give the first group cover while they retreated. And so they had leapfrogged like that for what seemed like hours, the sweat running off them in sheets as the enemy tried to outflank them, until they had spotted the outcrop of rock ahead, and had run for the temporary salvation that it offered.

  For the last few hours they had hunkered down in the rocks sheltering from the occasional sniper shot, dozing while they could or staring down with blasted eyes into the surrounding darkness, the survivors still in shock at the loss of their comrades. They had huddled together for warmth, for they had been unable to save any zels or food or sleeping skins during the retreat, so they had no way of keeping themselves warm. With the first welcome rays of dawn their professionalism had begun to assert itself once again, sheer necessity overriding their bleak silence. Voices had croaked out in query or suggestion.

  ‘How are you?’ came a voice now, and it was Curl the younger medico, her sagging crest of hair cleaving the blue sky in two, come to check on Shard’s bandages.

  ‘Fine,’ she breathed, and winced as the girl inspected the wound on her calf where the enemy wolfhound had mauled her. Curl looked calm for all that they were in a tight spot here.

  These people had witnessed some interesting things during the frenzy of the night attack. Enemy fighters reeling about as though blind. A wave of flames bursting across the enemy-covered slope. This morning they seemed to treat Shard with a new-found deference, even the wild young Volunteer Xeno, who offered her a nod before taking another deafening pop with his rifle, then ducked down quickly as a shot struck the rocks in reply. Shard turned her head to take in the situation below.

  The bodies of three renegade Contrarè lay dead amongst the scree and rocks at the foot of their position, where gangs of black birds squabbled over the flesh. They had long stopped fleeing at the occasional gunshot over their heads.

  Footsteps scrabbled from behind. It was Sergeant Sansun returning from his scouting trip down the other side, a bare open slope with only a few trees and rocks for cover.

  ‘It’s clear down there,’ he reported to the captain. ‘Not a soul anywhere.’

  Captain Gamorre frowned. ‘They must think we’re fools.’

  ‘So we stay here then,’ said the sergeant. ‘Dig in and wait them out.’

  ‘No,’ announced Coya, and struggled to sit upright, his pale face etched with lines of dirt. ‘We’re wasting time here that we no longer have. I must be at the Contrarè council, no matter what the cost. The entire war may hinge on its outcome.’

  His stare was an open challenge to the captain, and Shard knew who was going to win this one. Coya, she had long ago decided, was not a man to ever bet against.

  The captain looked to Sansun for his opinion, and the sergeant shrugged.

  ‘Looks like there’s some marshes to the north of us,’ he said. ‘We could break out on the north side and head for those. Lose them there.’

  Captain Gamorre squeezed her eyes shut tightly, summoning her inner reserves.

  ‘We have any smoke grenades with us?’ she asked him.

  ‘Aye.’

  ‘Then get ready to move out,’ the captain told the others wearily. ‘The man’s got somewhere he needs to be.’

  *

  By the fall of early twilight the party staggered out into a large forest clearing with the remnants of the day darkening behind them, chased by clouds and heavy snow flying sideways in a gale.

  Through frozen-lashed eyes they saw the flowing river ahead of them, and the stilted platforms of a Contrarè settlement standing along its banks.

  ‘Must be the Moth river,’ one the Volunteers called out. He meant the river that would lead them to the elders of Council Grove.

  At least they were no longer lost.

  Faces glanced desperately over their shoulders towards the direction they had come from, knowing their pursuers to be close behind. All day they had barely stayed ahead of them.

  Quickly they staggered towards the structures in the midst of what was now a worsening blizzard, the dogs of the settlement barking madly. On the outskirts they came upon a roofed corral of zels, and Coya cursed and demanded to be let down from Marsh’s back.

  ‘I don’t believe it!’ Coya exclaimed aloud as he staggered to the corral, and they all caught a glimpse of what he was staring at on the rumps of the zels – the branded miniature hands of Mann.

  ‘They’re here,’ Coya declared and shook his head in wonder. ‘That bastard Mannian delegation is here, tonight!’

  The Volunteers didn’t like it, pinned by the enemy both behind and ahead. ‘We’re in no condition to fight,’ spoke their captain on behalf of all.

  ‘No need to,’ spoke up Shard, stirring from her stupor. ‘The delegation travels under truce, just like us. If they cause us any harm, the people here will fall on them.’

  ‘Maybe those sons of bitches behind us will hold off then,’ ventured Marsh, ‘if they know their people are here.’

  The forest was a dim wall around the clearing of the encampment, glimpsed through breaks in the blizzard. Over the feathers and fur of her high collar she peered at the twilight deepening within it, trying to sense how close their pursuers were out there. In this weather, the Purdah scouts might be glad of a respite themselves, a chance to hunker down in their cloaks in conditions of exhaustion that must rival their own. The sergeant too was watching the trees, and the lad Xeno peering through his scope for a si
ght of the enemy.

  Well they couldn’t just stand here all night long, freezing to death in the blizzard. Shard peered ahead at the nearest stilted structure. Thought she spotted something flying from its roof, a banner of sky blue. The Contrarè colour for truce.

  She tucked down her head and stomped towards it, not waiting to see if the others followed.

  *

  It was a trading station, the structure they approached, a two-storey log building perched on stilts by the bank of the river, with a sign swinging in the gusts.

  There was a lift contraption sitting beneath it, big enough for four people to stand inside. Marsh and the sergeant pulled on a vertical rope, and a felled trunk that was a counterweight began to lower as the lift rose squeaking into the air, bearing them upwards.

  ‘Remember,’ Coya called down to the Volunteers awaiting their turn. ‘The Mannians are under truce so we can’t touch them either. Keep a lid on your tempers, all of you.’

  He was as ragged as the rest of them, for all that poor Marsh had carried him all this way.

  ‘Any symptoms yet?’ the Dreamer asked Coya, studying the blooms of blood on his bandaged head.

  ‘Not yet, but I’ve certainly lost some memories. Let’s hope they’re all bad ones, eh?’

  *

  Together they stepped through a wooden door into a stifling atmosphere of heat and smoke, and the chatter in the room ceased as the door slammed shut behind them.

  Shard took in the tables and piles of bedding about the room, and the fire burning in a stone hearth in the centre beneath a hole in the sloping roof. The room was mostly empty, but a group of four men sitting at a table in the far corner turned to study them, eyes widening in surprise at their non-Contrarè appearances and their stained travel attire much like their own: the Mannian delegation.

  Her gaze flickered towards a few hands reaching for weapons at their belts.