The Black Dream

by Col Buchanan

  A knot of lights glimmered through the still night air beyond the eastern edge of the Windrush – the captured city of Tume afloat on the silvery waters of Simmer Lake, matched by a rash of camp fires around the southern shoreline: the Imperial Expeditionary Force.

  From the closest corner of Simmer Lake, the glistening waters of the Chilos meandered along the edge of the forest with more lights ranged along the far bank, following it southwards towards the red glimmer of Juno’s Ferry, where explosions and cannon fire sparkled in the darkness.

  An imperial assault was taking place, it seemed, and a major one at that. It appeared the enemy were no longer content to remain on the eastern side of the river for the duration of winter.

  Shard was witnessing a new chapter in the war unfolding, yet it seemed not to matter just then who was fighting who or for what. She felt a clean detachment from it all, freed of all earthly concerns, and in her freedom she rose even higher, slowing her spin yet further.

  With a clarity of vision she saw how highlands covered the eastern half of the island of Khos, rugged with impressive snowy peaks, diminishing into foothills that ran down into the wide plateau of the Reach and the valley of the Chilos. She tracked the holy river on its long course all the way to the southern coast of the island, where it emptied into the Bay of Squalls not far from the fiery glow of Bar-Khos and the Lansway, that dark bridge to Pathia and the southern continent, where Mokabi’s forces were assaulting the Shield.

  Still no telling pricks of sentiment, even when she thought of Seech and how she would soon need to face him. And so the besieged city panned away from her sight as she turned westwards to face the lowland half of the island, where its many towns were strung along the rivers and roads like faintly shining jewels. At last Shard faced north and the sight of far Al-Khos perched on the northern coastline, with the Midèrēs sea shining in the moonlight all the way to the curving horizon.

  She was watching it all so closely as she drifted around that it took a moment before her instincts told her to glance upwards, startled, at the apparition hovering before her in the air.

  A naked woman floated there with the same Contrarè features as her own, though she was older than Shard, lined about the eyes and marked by stretches across her belly, and her breasts were fuller, and her black hair was long and flowed across her shoulders as though it swayed in invisible currents of water.

  ‘Walks With Herself,’ said the woman in a voice of honey, floating amongst the stars in her fulsome nakedness.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I would talk with you, if you will listen to my words.’

  For an instant Shard felt the danger of a sudden fall, and she glanced down at the distant speck of light directly below in the dark sea of trees, the bonfire of Council Grove, no doubt, where her body would be lying unconscious to the world while voices argued over war. When she looked up again, she was still floating there before the woman.

  ‘Who are you?’

  ‘An expression of the Great Dream, as all things are,’ the figure answered, with the tenderness of a mother. She reached out a hand to touch the side of Shard’s face, the side normally covered in scars, though not now. ‘I’m whoever you need me to be.’

  ‘Then who are you?’

  ‘Call me Elios, if you must call me anything. Elios, Mother of the Forest. That sandworm in your gut. It’s killing you.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Then kill it first. You know which concoction will work. Hold as much of it down as you can and hope the worm dies before you do.’

  ‘But I can’t, not yet. I must master it first.’

  ‘You mean you must master this man Seech first.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘It is that important to you? Important enough to risk your life?’

  ‘Yes!’

  ‘But why?’

  ‘I have my reasons.’

  ‘Then share them with me.’

  Heartache surged through Shard suddenly, shattering the detached calmness of her mind.

  She saw a bundle in her shaking hands, the size of a miscarried infant wrapped in a shawl. A hole in the drift of sand where she was burying him.

  Memories crashed upon her. Recollections of the expedition into the Alhazii deep desert, of the year she had worked so hard to forget.

  *

  Shard had been nineteen at the time, a student of exotics at the Academy of Salina as well as their leading rook, cocky and self-assured for her age because she was a travelled Contrarè refugee all the way from troubled Pathia, and because she was smart and remarkably good at what she did.

  So it was hardly a surprise when she had been one of only two student rooks offered a place in an academic expedition into the Alhazii deep desert, hand-picked by its leader, Feyoon, the Academy’s most flamboyant of Observers. They were to search for the fabled sandworm of the Zini oasis, Feyoon had told them with his usual fervour. A sandworm fabled to aid in unlocking the underlying bindee of the cosmos to a special few, the so-called Dreamers of the Alhazii.

  Weeks later, a sea voyage on an armed convoy to Zanzahar had cured Shard quickly of her arrogance, attacked as they had been by a gauntlet of imperial men-of-war and hit by foul weather for the rest of the time. From the teeming Alhazii metropolis of Zanzahar, the largest city she had ever seen, the expedition and its local guides had set off east onto the famed Spice Road through the dusty rock of the Sill, hoping to reach a place where they could find guides into the deep desert and the oasis of Zini.

  In practice, the Spice Road revealed itself to be more of a route than a road that skirted the northern foothills of the Sill Mountains. It was dotted with waystations where skyships moored for the night and caravans pitched up with their cargoes: exotics from the Isles of Sky being carried into the far east, and spice brought back in return, that potent narcotic known elsewhere in a refined form as dross, to which many of the Sill Alhazii seemed to be addicted.

  Along the way, the copious forts and patrols of the Caliph they encountered offered the impression of safe travel, but on one hot dry day travelling through a pass in the hills, their complacency was shattered by a sudden ambush by hill bandits. The encounter saw the death of Feyoon, the expedition’s leader. And everyone else too, save for Shard and Seech, for together they had run at the first instant of trouble.

  In her survivor’s numbness, Shard was shocked further when she heard that Tabor was of a mind to continue onwards, to travel into the deep desert in search of the sandworm and the secrets of the Dreamers. An insane idea if ever she had heard one.

  She would have protested, yet she knew this man well who was her lover. Seech would have taken it as a personal victory over her, perhaps the most important of all their ongoing contests.

  So onwards they continued, alone.

  *

  For weeks they travelled the Sill, stealing and trading what they could for survival, often relying on the kindness of others. Slowly they made their way closer towards the deeper desert, with their travelling clothes becoming rags and their hair growing wild, until they bore the resemblance of beggars.

  But good fortune eventually befell them too. In a settlement on the very edge of the Sill they had come across a trading caravan preparing to carry onwards into the sea of dunes that was the Alhazii deep desert, and before she could protest, Seech had talked the caravan captain into allowing them to come along. Too late to turn back now, Shard had gone along with it.

  And so it was that Shard and Tabor, after months of travel and personal risk, after weeks of riding through the desert on the backs of swaying sandwalkers, at last found themselves where the expedition had always intended to end up, at the life-giving waters of Zini oasis, a settlement dominated by a mud-brick tower.

  Enclosed within the tower, the desert shamans were as Feyoon had said they would be, secretive and protective of their ways. Soon it became clear to Shard that had she not passed herself off as a young man the shaman there would not have spoken with her at all. Bu
t given time, they admitted to knowing the secrets of the sandworm, and after a month of careful negotiation and explicitly making a nuisance of themselves, one of the shamans agreed to take them under his wing.

  The old man had smiled when Tabor had pumped him for information concerning the Dreamers.

  Yes, he had admitted – they had indeed produced a handful of Dreamers over the centuries, though they were more rare than Shard and Tabor had been led to believe. While all the desert shamans took the juice of the sandworm in their rituals, few had ever truly unlocked the code of the bindee. Those rare exceptions who had done so, those whose names were recited as ancient masters, claimed time and again that the process was unique to themselves, how each person must decipher their own code individually; a personal experience that could not be shared with another.

  Lovers still, as close as any two people can be who competed on every level of their lives, Shard and Tabor now found their old rivalries blossoming like never before. For years they had tested each other to see who was the best rook between them, a battle which Shard had decisively won. But now it seemed that Tabor had found a way of proving he was the better person after all. To her face he swore he would unlock the bindee before Shard could.

  And so it was in a spirit of rivalry that they set out to prove they could do it, even as the shaman laughed with his eyes at the arrogance of their presumptions.

  *

  Over the following weeks they discovered that Feyoon had been right in his claims concerning the bile of the sandworm, that it was one of the most potent substances in the world.

  Obtained from their friendly shaman amongst a litany of warnings, they had surprised him by taking to the worm’s juices remarkably well. Perhaps because they were both skilled rooks already versed in the disorientating strangeness of the Black Dream. Perhaps because they already possessed copious experience of mind-altering substances taken in heroic doses.

  Indeed they took to the juice almost too well. Chanting words of intent over and over, a Contrarè trick that Shard had used in her rooking for focusing her mind, they took ever-increasing doses of the juice until even the old shaman began to marvel at it, shaking his head in dismay.

  Respect, he tried to tell the pair gently. You must respect the slow rhythms of the worm and engage upon a relationship with it, a kind of courtship. You should not force it or you will go crazy in the head like Zawooz over there, you understand?

  But they were already half crazy, the pair of them, and so they paid him little heed. Soon paranoia was descending upon them both like a world of echoes and mirrors, so that even when Shard was free of the juice, recovering in between their sessions, she started seeing things that should not be there, could not be there, and Tabor heard meanings in her voice never intended. Sometimes demons racked those endless nights spent voyaging into the unknown together.

  One night at the very peak of this inner exploration, they both ventured off for a walk into the dunes as high as they ever had been or ever would be again, and heard a pair of rutting desert foxes screeching out to the sister moons in their mad passions. Somehow even in their delirious conditions Shard and Seech found similar passions surging within them, and on the shifting sands they had rutted like the two animals they were, calling out their chanted words of intent, losing themselves so fully that when they both came together in ecstasy their minds blew away entirely, leaving them both adrift beyond space and time where there was only raw and fundamental information, the binary code of the Great Dream, the bindee.

  No satisfying way to share what Shard and Tabor experienced in those moments or hours of silent unravelling, for language was too thin a tool to fully express their awakening.

  Blasted of all thoughts, each became aware of the slow dance of vibrations from which everything was made, pure information prompted into existence by nothing more than the focus of their attention, like a beam of lantern-light illuminating things in pitch blackness; a vast and strange existence in which nothing was truly real but their own consciousness; a cosmic illusion, a Great Dream, a seething unconsciousness that was evolving towards higher complexity and a distant unknowable singularity.

  The bindee, they realized, formed the underlying web of their seemingly material existence, its binary code presenting the simplest form of discrimination within the All. The first information.

  And beyond the cosmos? Outside of the Dream? Too far to see, too deep to fathom, too impossible to grasp. Perhaps nothing lay out there for there was no ‘out there’ to be comprehended. Or perhaps beyond this cosmic egg of a maturing universe existed countless others, which begged the question – what then held them all?

  Did they exist in some creator’s mind, and if so, what then held the mind of the creator?

  In dawn’s prescient light, waking upon the dune and feebly stirring in their bodies and minds once again, Shard and Tabor realized they were no longer the same people as before. Something fundamental had changed within them.

  *

  Over the forthcoming days the shaman saw it too, this change in them. He came to them with an offering: an invitation to follow him into the tower.

  In the dead of night he led them down beneath the leaning tower of mud, where a rock cave sheltered a pool of dark liquid.

  It was the source of glimmersuits, the shaman had translated for them. Now that they had unlocked the code of the bindee they could choose to take the next step, to clad themselves in a glimmersuit of their own. Only then would they be able to manipulate the bindee as Dreamers.

  Of course Seech was the first to splash into the strange pool, submerging himself entirely in his clothes before he’d even asked if the process was reversible. Only after a long deliberation did Shard step into it herself.

  Moments later, upon stepping out again it was as though their skins refused to dry.

  It took days for Shard to become remotely at ease with this living second skin now covering the entirety of her body. Her sense of touch was just the same as it had been before, though her sensitive parts seemed even more so now. The suit even sweated like her own skin. When she moved there was no sense of it, no folds or tucks or creases. For long hours she would study herself in the mirror, pulling back the lips of her mouth or the lids of her eyes, trying to see where the glimmersuit ended.

  Shard marvelled at what she was now able to perform before her eyes. It was like rooking, her most passionate of passions, though this was rooking in the waking world, with real things she could touch and see. With their new second skins, both Shard and Seech found they could read the bindee whenever they wished to, and more than that, they could reach out with their minds to manipulate it. Soon they had discovered how to see and speak from afar, even into the past. How to tell of a person’s illness. How to plant a desire into an animal’s mind.

  Sometimes she rejoiced at these new-found abilities, and sometimes she trembled late at night in fear of them. She was strongly aware that whatever lay in her future now was vastly different from before, and that there was no turning back.

  After a while the people of the oasis began whispering about the two strangers amongst them and their increasingly strange ways. Tensions rose between the pair too. Even now Tabor was annoyed that he hadn’t attained the state of Dreaming first, to the point where he claimed it had all been his own doing by rutting so fiercely with her, that he had inadvertently taken her along for the ride. They began to fight more often. Began to separate their experiments and their daily lives.

  Began to unravel.

  *

  When Shard first discovered she was pregnant, she was both surprised and appalled.

  Tabor flung himself into a fury at her unexpected news. He claimed she had done it to sabotage his work there, that she wanted to return home and this was the only way she could tear him away. Such hubris, she had thought in her own silent anger.

  For a time she even wondered whether she should keep the child or not. There were concoctions she could take, even here in the des
ert, to rid her of this burden. Seech, of course, was all for the idea. One night he came to her with a flask of the stuff he had already brewed.

  Shard had slapped it out of his hand, resolving there and then to have the child no matter how untimely it might be for this man she had once considered her lover. Whatever feelings she had for him seemed to vanish in that moment.

  They spoke even less after that, and Shard’s belly began to grow. She dropped hints whenever she could then started saying it straight out. Yes, she told him, she wanted to return home before the child was born. Yes, she wished to be with her family in the safety of their home.

  When he still refused to leave she pointed out the obvious. How long do you think it will be before the shamans see this bump beneath my robe? How well do you think they’ll take it, their secrets passed on by trickery to a mere woman?

  For an instant she was certain Tabor was considering ways of getting rid of her quietly and without fuss – so low had he fallen in her eyes. But with a mighty show of regret he had appeared to relent at last, agreeing that they would leave and soon. A fortnight, he asked her for. No more and no less. Let him procure some zels first so they could travel between oases back to the Sill.

  What Tabor spent most of his remaining weeks on, though, seemed to be the acquisition of some sandworms, for the single worm in their possession had been withering away by the day. Tabor grew obsessed with the notion of returning to the Academy with proper living specimens in hand.

  On the fateful night before they were due to leave, with a string of zels tethered outside their hut, procured once more through the good faith of the old shaman, Shard was wakened by a single shout in the night, and stumbled to the door to see flames licking from the side of the mud tower, and smoke billowing from its small windows, where figures leaned out calling for help. Even as she watched on someone jumped, burning, from a high ledge and crashed into the sand, not moving.