by David Drake
The grayness resisted for a moment; the curtain wasn't a fabric but rather a blurring of light and of all proper existence. Ilna grimaced sourly—the touch reminded her of putting her hand on a slug's trail in the dark—but pushed on through.
That was her responsibility, after all. What was there in a decent person's life besides carrying out her responsibilities?
The grayness closed around Ilna. She swallowed and continued walking. She'd been in this place, this clammy gray limbo, before. That time the way back to the waking world had led through Hell, and Ilna had brought a portion of Hell back with her. Tenoctris would never have sent a friend back to that place, but Tenoctris hadn't, couldn't, walk this route herself.
Ilna took the hank of cords out of her sleeve and began knotting them. She had no pattern in mind, but it gave her fingers something to do as she walked and stared into a self-lit emptiness, a place without shape or color or hope.
As the pieces of cord joined into fabric, a line of jagged darkness drove a schism through the gray. Ilna walked toward it, without confidence or even hope. She would face her future as she faced all things, without complaint or flinching. If that future meant this place, this non-place, for all eternity, then so be it.
She stepped into the crevice in the gray, and through it, into a world of color again. This wasn't the waking world Ilna had departed a seeming lifetime ago: the hues were washed out like those of vegetable dyes left in the sun, and when Ilna tried to touch the oak beside her, her hand passed through the bark with only the slightest resistance.
That didn't matter. This was a world, even if it wasn't hers.
Breathing deeply, she stood among the trees on top of a hill otherwise grassy. On one horizon—the sky was bright but there was no sun, so she couldn't tell directions—rose the hulking stone forms of great buildings, spires and cylinders and domed roofs carried on pillars. The movement along the ramp circling the outside of a tower was a line of human beings climbing it; at this distance they were ant-sized.
In a swale below Ilna, two chastely dressed women talked with what would have been a man—he was nude, so that wasn't in doubt—if he'd had a human head instead of a stag's. Ilna thought first he was wearing a mask, but the beast's pinched-in skull was narrower than a man's.
The stag-man extended a hand. One of the women took it tentatively. They turned and walked together toward a nearby glade. After a moment, the other woman followed them.
Ilna's lips tightened, but it was nothing to do with her. Tenoctris told her there would be a track somewhere... .
Yes, of course; and quite obvious when she looked for it. A discontinuity trailed across the landscape—across this world, moreover, because the sky itself showed the same distortion. It was an absence and bunching, like the damage caused by pulling a single thread from a fabric.
In the middle distance, a procession of humans mounted on beasts Ilna had never seen or imagined came riding across the strain mark. There were hogs the size of oxen, horses with the hind parts of lions, and a thing like a goat that walked hunched over on two legs—but saddled and ridden by a nude woman as lushly beautiful as Syf, the goddess of love, whose image harlots wanted woven into their scarves.
Ilna grinned coldly. The customer can request any design she pleases; but the weaver refused some requests as she pleased.
The riders talked cheerfully among themselves. They didn't seem to notice the discontinuity as they approached, but when each crossed it he or she fell silent for a time. A man plucking a harp made from antelope horns fumbled his instrument and almost dropped it.
They passed out of sight behind a hill. One of the women had brought a curved brass horn to her lips several times as she rode along, but Ilna heard neither the horn call nor the voices some of the others raised in song. So far as Ilna was concerned, this place was as silent as the bottom of a frozen millpond.
She started off, following the distortion. It struck her that whatever had warped this world might be unpleasant company to meet. Tenoctris hadn't seemed to think that was likely; and if it happened, well, they'd see what came next.
Ilna smiled faintly. Her fingers were knotting another pattern, this time one she understood very well. If she met the thing, then it too might find it was in unpleasant company.
She continued in the direction of the strain. Her legs moved normally, but instead of feeling the touch of springy turf she found herself on a path circling a lake when her foot came down.
The water was so clear that only the ripples quivering from ivory boats shaped like fallen leaves showed that there was a surface. Couples and trios sat in the boats; a handsome older woman poled one while a youth smiled at her from a cushion in the bow, but the other vessels merely drifted.
A group of severe-looking bearded men stood on the shore a few feet away, talking among themselves with a solemnity obvious even without Ilna being able to hear them. One stared fiercely in her direction; she frowned and waved a hand toward him. He turned, having composed his mind, and resumed the discussion with his fellows.
So. She could see but not hear the inhabitants of this place, and they couldn't even see her.
The chasm in the world stretched across a distant building that looked as if it was teased from meringue. It was decorated with fanciful wings, puffs, and feathers of alternating pink and blue. A naked man was dancing on the tip of one of the flares; a bird, easily the size of the man, watched him with the solemn dignity which he so completely lacked.
Ilna's nose wrinkled. She stepped forward, wondering what would happen if she found herself within the dreadful structure. It disturbed her, and not merely because it was tasteless.
Ilna was used to tastelessness, after all. She'd now lived in cities as well as the countryside where she was born. She'd found people were generally the same anywhere, and even more generally without taste or decency—judged by Ilna's standards, of course, but she lived by those standards and saw no reason she shouldn't judge others by them also.
Her foot came down in a forest. Near her a stocky man with unkempt hair drew figures and symbols on a slab of rock, using his finger for a stylus and lees dipped from a wine cup for ink. He wore a calm, distracted look; Ilna suspected that he still wouldn't have seen her if they'd been fully in the same world.
Ilna understood that kind of focus. She practiced it herself, after all.
Tenoctris had called this place "the dreamworld." It wasn't what Ilna thought of dreams being filled with, but perhaps that was because she herself dreamed rarely and those few times were always unhappy.
The strain mark passed through the kneeling man's bare right foot. His big toe twitched to a rhythm controlled by the shimmer of the discontinuity, but his gaze never faltered and his finger continued to draw. With a nod of approval, Ilna strode on.
She was in a darkness lit by the fires of devastation. A city burned on the skyline. Its structures were silhouetted and picked out by flames leaping from roofs and through the windows.
A slender bridge arched between buildings. The figure crossing it was human or might have been, using a long pole to balance. The exercise seemed pointless as both ends of the bridge blazed like a rich man's hearth in the winter, but the figure struggled on.
Ilna smiled without humor. She'd never dreamed that particular dream, but she understood the mind from which it sprang.
She walked on. How far was she to go? Until she'd found an answer, she supposed. She could only hope that she'd recognize what Tenoctris had sent her after. Since the old wizard hadn't known what the thing was, Ilna might wander this landscape until she chose to turn back, having failed.
She smiled again, even more harshly. She might well fail, but she wouldn't turn back.
She stepped into the boggy lowlands that fringed a river. Eyes peered through the reeds toward her, then vanished in a muddy bubble that popped silently. Did the things that weren't human—the things that lived in this place that dreamers visited—see what the dreamers' eyes did not?
Ilna took another step; she flinched despite herself when she found herself in a wasteland. The ground had been baked till it cracked. A few woody-stemmed plants twisted from it, their gray-green leaves wrapped into tight bundles in hope of better times. There'd been a creek large enough to be crossed by an arched stone bridge, but the channel was now so dry that a dust devil swirled briefly over the silt-blanketed rocks.
To Ilna's right was a round tower; a fortress, perhaps, or a prison. The gate leaves were open; an iron grate had slipped halfway down from its slot above the passage, then skewed and stuck. Ilna saw no sign of life, either in the structure or the surrounding landscape it was meant to dominate.
On the dust-blown path between the bridge and the tower stood a wagon carrying a large iron cauldron. The skeleton of a horse lay between the wagon poles; the beast's flesh and all but a few brass studs of the harness had wasted away.
The strain in this world's fabric ended at the mouth of the cauldron.
Ilna looked about her, seeing nothing more than she'd seen the last time she looked around. She glanced at the knotted pattern in her hands, nodded, and took a step. This time she remained in the same landscape, just a little closer to the wagon.
The tailboard lay on the ground; it had shrunk out of the mortise meant to hold it. Ilna stepped onto the wagon bed, paused, and looked into the cauldron.
Instead of rusty iron she saw below her the interior of a temple. A group of priests wearing robes of white-slashed black chanted around a pool which reflected the full moon.
“Thank the Sister!” called a voice behind Ilna. She whirled to see a girl dressed in animal skins running toward the wagon. “That goat I sacrificed to Her has saved me after all!”
Chapter Nine
Ilna glared reflexively at the newcomer. The Great Gods weren't a part of Ilna's world; the only truths she knew were those formed on her loom and in her heart. For those who did believe and worship, though, a sacrifice to the Queen of the Underworld meant they had turned in directions Ilna did not.
“You're still in the waking world, aren't you?” said the girl. Her voice was thin and hollow, as if she was speaking up through the pipes feeding a cistern. “You can't hide from me so you needn't try. I can't see you clearly, but you won't be able to get away now that I've found you.”
She was no more than Ilna's modest height, but her large breasts and broad hips meant the two women were unlikely ever to be confused. Carried openly in the newcomer's hand was a bronze knife with a long, leaf-shaped blade.
Ilna glanced at the cords she held and deliberately placed them back in her sleeve. “Can you hear me?” she asked in a cold voice. “If you can, then hear me when I say that I'm Ilna os-Kenset, and I'm not in the habit of running away. Who are you and what do you want with me?”
The girl squatted on her haunches beside the wagon and began to draw on the hard-baked dirt with her dagger point. “I'm Alecto,” she said, without looking up. “And what I want from you is to get away from the Pack.”
Ilna's eyes narrowed, first at the tone and then still further as she took in the girl's appearance. Alecto's clothing was savage beyond doubt, but it wasn't crude. The short wolfskin cape, the only cover for her torso, was well sewn and closed at the throat with a pin of gold and garnets, and the ivory pins in her hair were subtly carved. Her kilt was of deer hide, tanned and bleached to the shade of cream. Judging from the way it bunched over the girl's knees, the leather was butter soft.
The kilt had a sinuous line of decoration made with porcupine quills, chosen for thickness and color. Ilna didn't remember ever seeing a more able piece of embroidery, though the pattern—or rather, what the pattern suggested to her—made her lip curl.
Alecto had sketched a many-pointed star and was now drawing words around the outer angles. It didn't take someone with Ilna's eye for patterns to make the connection between this wizard and whatever was attacking Garric. “The Pack you're afraid of,” she said. “You loosed them, and they've turned on you?”
The girl leaped to her feet, switching her grip on the dagger so that she held it as a weapon rather than an awkward stylus. “That's a lie!" she shouted. “I was just trying to frighten Brasus. I didn't let the Pack out! Brasus wasn't worth that, and besides, I'm not such a fool.”
Her face changed. “Faugh!” she said, shaking her head as she squatted again. “I can't imagine anybody letting the Pack out, but somebody did... and I came across them because of what I was looking for.”
She resumed drawing. Ilna could hear the skritch of Alecto's bronze on the hard soil, though, like the girl's voice, it was muted by a distance not of space.
“And all right, I took more of a risk than I should've for Brasus, I see that now,” Alecto muttered as she wrote. “I should just've laughed and let him go back to his wife. I can find men, the Sister knows!”
Ilna's nose twitched again. She wondered if Alecto could see her expression. Well, it wasn't Ilna's place to correct the tramp... .
“You expect the Pack to come here after you, then?” she asked instead. Without Ilna noticing what they were doing, her hands had brought the hank of cords out of her sleeve again.
Alecto looked up from her work with a cruel sneer. “Worried?" she said. “Well, you needn't be. They won't touch you while you're in the waking world, not unless they're set on you. I came too close to their lair, though, because I didn't realize that anybody'd be stupid enough to let them loose ... but they had.”
“I didn't say I was worried,” Ilna said, wishing that this slut didn't have such a remarkable talent for irritating her. “I asked if this Pack was coming after you. Coming here, that is, since this is where you are.”
“I won't be for long, thanks to you, Ilna os-Kenset,” the girl said. “Never fear, we'll be in the waking world long before they arrive. I couldn't get back by the portal I'd made because that'd mean going through the Pack. I wouldn't have made it.”
Alecto looked up with an expression that Ilna had seen once before on a rabbit paralyzed by a serpent's gaze. “Nobody'd make it!” she said. “But it doesn't matter, because it's not going to happen.”
Alecto sliced carefully into the ball of her thumb and squeezed a drop of blood into the circle. “No choice in this desert,” she muttered.
She began chanting, tapping out the words of power with the point of her dagger. Unlike most of the athames Ilna had seen in the hands of wizards, Alecto's was a perfectly serviceable weapon and had obviously been used as such.
Ilna looked into the cauldron again. The scene had changed. The temple's interior was empty, now. The rectangular pool in the center reflected the sun, which must be squarely overhead, streaming through a roof opening that Ilna couldn't see.
She wondered if she was visible to someone in the temple looking upward. Probably not, since her own reflection didn't appear in the pool.
Alecto's voice was growing louder; it seemed to be coming from all directions. Ilna straightened and glared at the wild woman. Dust devils began to spin around the wagon, six of them sunwise and the seventh widdershins.
Ilna sniffed. It was time she returned to the palace and Tenoctris. She could describe the temple and the chorus of priests; there didn't seem any further benefit to hanging around here. She supposed if she followed the schism in the same fashion as she'd come to this place, it would bring her back.
She tried to step down from the wagon. Her body didn't move. Her muscles weren't paralyzed, but they strained uselessly as though her limbs were stuck in blocks of stone.
Ilna's fingers twisted cords into a pattern. It was desperately hard work, but not even the power that held her now could prevent her from working her own art.
The bright baking sky grew darker. Alecto's voice thundered from the heavens. Ilna could no longer see the dust devils. She felt a wind tugging at the sleeves of her tunic.
“Alecto!” she shouted, but she couldn't hear her own voice over the scream of the wind.
Ilna's world di
ssolved into a flow of downward-rushing color. Alecto stood before her, her face triumphant and the bronze dagger raised skyward. They whirled together, then landed feetfirst on a stone floor hard enough to send them both sprawling.
Ilna rose to her hands and knees. It was night, and she was at the edge of a pool in a circular room. A double row of columns supported the domed ceiling; above the pool was an opening, an oculus as she'd heard Liane refer to a similar structure.
She and Alecto were in the place Ilna had viewed in the cauldron. They were in the temple from which a nightmare had been sent to trouble Garric's sleep.
Alecto had dropped her dagger when she hit the floor. She snatched it into her hand again before she stood up.
“You utter fool!” Ilna said.
Chanting voices echoed through the temple's entrance passage, the only way in or out of the room. The priests were returning.
Sharina tried to concentrate on the mural. Before her was a scene of herdsmen with long poles driving brindled cattle back from mountain pastures in autumn; the trees had already begun to lose their leaves. Barca's Hamlet was sheep country. They raised cattle in the highlands of Northern Haft, but those regions had been as far away as the moon when Sharina was growing up.
Merchants and drovers came to the borough from Sandrakkan, Blaise, and even Ornifal during the Sheep Fair. Nobody came from the north of the island, though. The folk there had their own markets and their own customs. If they bought wool, they did so from factors in Carcosa when they drove their herds to market in the capital.
Sharina thought about Ilna lying on the bed in waxen silence, of Cashel vanished without a trace, and Garric's body walking and talking under the control of a mind not his. She hugged herself and wondered if she were going to cry.
She turned, planning to ask Tenoctris—again—how long it'd been since Ilna had gone into her trance. The old woman sat on her backless chair, reading from a small parchment codex. She looked up with a smile when she felt Sharina's eyes, but Sharina waved her back to her book.