Dark the Dreamer's Shadow

by Jennifer Bresnick

  There were stories of such children – stories of the type Megrithe’s grandmother would tell her little ones on cold, grim nights when they should be sleeping instead. Some called them changelings, and swore that the eallawif switched the babes in their cradles with spirit children so the unwitting mothers would raise cuckold chicks. Others said they would grow to be great wielders of the deep magic, or deathless warriors, or evil sorcerers with curdled hearts that used the enchantment of their origins for unimaginable evil. They were the caul children, masked in blood and crowned with cobwebs: the symbol of a life chosen for greatness at its very inception in the dark, hidden warmth of the womb.

  Arran was no sorcerer, as far as Megrithe was aware, and he wasn’t all that much of a warrior. But he was lucky – at least, he used to think he was – and she could tell from Elspeth’s anguish that his mother was not lying about her deed.

  “They have him,” she said eventually, the words squeaking out from the tightened cords in her throat. “The Siheldi have him now. What does that mean? Do they know? Who knows about this?”

  “No one. Not Arran. Not even Giles knew. He would have killed me. As much as he wanted a son, he would have beat the life out of me for getting one that way.”

  “Don’t say that,” Megrithe tried, feeling uncomfortable at the mournful strength of her conviction. “I’m sure that’s not true.”

  “You didn’t know him. You should be glad you didn’t. I tried everything to please him, and it never worked. Arran was always so angry with me, always so sad, but he never knew what would have happened to him if Giles had lived.

  “I deserve the hell the Siheldi sent for me,” Elspeth said dully, the handkerchief hopelessly creased as she wrung it tightly, over and over. “I have tried to be good, but I deserve that hell. I loved him too much. She said that if I loved him too much, she would take him away, and now she has. I tried not to show it. Please believe that I tried – for his sake, I tried to let him go. Gods have mercy, please I beg. Save my soul from the flames of fyrendor,” she muttered, a long jumble of mismatched prayers tumbling into obscurity as her shoulders shook with sadness.

  Megrithe had glossed over the descent into the depths of the volcano’s heart, fearing it would sound even more absurd than the rest of it, and now she was glad she had. She had feared the consequences of coming face to face with hell when she had stared into the fiery pit of broken stone and boiling earth, and Elspeth’s holy terror only stirred up those horrible feelings once again.

  “I should probably go,” she said. She was not yet done with unpleasant conversations for the day: she still needed to find a ship willing to take her to Niheba. But she didn’t know if it would be right to leave Elspeth alone in her wretched melancholy, even if she had caused it herself some thirty years ago.

  In some ways, the risk she had taken was hardly surprising. Megrithe knew well what women would do for their husbands, and what mothers would do for their children in times of desperation. She had seen the lies often enough, and how they tried to stand by their falsehoods even in the face of overwhelming evidence against them.

  She had seen housewives and washer women take up weapons to fight off Guild-trained men three times their size just to give their spouses and sons a few extra moments to flee,. She had seen the street war widows of Sorrow’s Walk gather all their courage to snitch on a brooding, violent neighbor for the merest hope of collecting a few pennies of reward money so they might put bread in their youngsters’ mouths for one more day.

  She had seen it all, and admired most of it, even when it led to her own frustration. But she wasn’t sure if she could admire selfishness. Elspeth may have feared her husband, as plenty of wives did, but she must have known that Giles’ death was not the kind of sacrifice an eallawif demanded for the gift of life. Elspeth must have known something worse was waiting in the future. If nothing else, the eallawif was bound by the rules of her kind to clearly state the terms she would accept in exchange for the safe and healthy birth of the infant boy. Elspeth must have known, and yet she did it anyway.

  “Where do you keep your tea, Mrs. Swinn?” Megrithe asked, sighing to herself as the woman’s tears showed no signs of abating. She wouldn’t stay for long – just until Elspeth regained a sense of herself. There would be plenty of time to get to the docks and arrange her passage before the dark closed in. “I’ll boil a kettle and we’ll have a nice cup to calm your nerves.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Nievfaya wrapped her arms around herself and hugged them tight, trying to stop herself from shivering. The motionless air in the pit wasn’t cold, but she was shaking like a leaf all the same. The bezhaka stone that surrounded her was icy to the touch, and now that she was sitting still, it sucked the heat right out of her skin, never warming to her like an ordinary surface.

  She reached out her hand again to feel the soft flutter of Arran’s pulse ghosting through the veins on the side of his neck. The torch had burned out hours ago, and she kept accidentally brushing her fingertips against his cheek or his eyelids or his lips when she reached out towards him in the darkness, trying to reassure herself that he was still alive. Each time, she instantly snatched her hand back with a hindbrain abhorrence of such an unwarrantedly familiar gesture.

  Touch did not form a great part of the intimacy between neneckt, who didn’t typically wear bodies unless they had to, but she was aware that it meant much more to the land-dwellers. It both fascinated and slightly repulsed her when she saw human lovers taking every opportunity they could to hold hands, share a kiss, or place their heads on each other’s shoulders, even in public where every passing stranger could see. It was odd and unsettling; a foreign craving she did not comprehend. Even as she feared deeply for his wellbeing, she had no right to do anything to Arran that he might misinterpret as affectionate, considering how many times she had betrayed and hurt him.

  He hated her, and rightly so. She certainly hated herself for her part in the entire wretched affair. Her overwhelming sense of guilt had been building steadily as the uncountable hours wore on, touching her thoughts as often as she touched Arran’s cool skin, and it was starting to get just a little bit unbearable.

  At some point, when she thought she couldn’t take it even one instant longer, she stood up and craned her neck upwards to the stone lid that locked her in.

  “Hey,” she shouted as loudly as she could, the sound falling back to her without penetrating the thick rock. “Siheldi! Where are you?” She waited for a long moment, but there was no reply.

  “I’m talking to you,” she screamed, and she kicked at the walls with a force her toes immediately regretted.

  Silence, the Siheldi said, far away and muffled as it spoke through the coffin that encased her. She couldn’t tell if it was the same individual as she had spoken to before – she didn’t really know if the Siheldi were individuals at all, or if they were just pieces broken off from the Queen’s central spirit that returned to their mother like drops of honey drizzled back into the pot.

  “I need more supplies,” Nievfaya said. “He’s soaked the bandages through.”

  You will be satisfied with what you are given.

  “I will be given what I need,” she replied stubbornly. “Take me to the storeroom. I will collect what is necessary.”

  You will –

  “Please,” she cut over it. “You don’t understand how fragile they are. Not even the bezhaka can hold back his death forever. He needs to wake so his soul can return and his body can begin to heal. We both want him to live. We will both be out of luck if he doesn’t. This is the one thing we have in common. Help me save him for you.”

  The Siheldi didn’t speak for a long time, as if it was deciding, or perhaps conferring with its fellows. It was odd to think that she might be collaborating with them on something, but she thought it was a valid point. They might strive against each other again in whatever contest came next, but the game would be finished for both of them if Arran’s body deteriorated t
oo much to support his fading heartbeat. He needed to wake. Without his conscious mind guiding the reconstruction of his flesh, his shell would be nothing but an empty hearth without a fire inside to give it purpose.

  The Siheldi seemed to agree, if grudgingly. The stone lid slowly scraped back, a puff of breeze prompting Nievfaya to inhale deeply of the comparatively fresh air.

  “Thank you,” she said when a thick rope lowered from nowhere to help her climb out. She grasped onto the line and tried to haul herself upward, surprised by the quivering of her arms that collapsed under her without any strength. She was very hungry, she realized. She had no idea how long she had been deprived of food and drink, but the lack of sustenance was starting to take its toll.

  On the second attempt, she managed to compensate for her condition and clamber up the rope, catching sight of the Siheldi’s guiding spark in the blackened corridor and following it forward through any number of twists and turns.

  “Where in the five hells did you get all of this?” she exclaimed when the spirit stopped in front of the vast storage room. The space was filled – it was absolutely stuffed – with a jumble of items from the world above.

  There were empty barrels and wooden boxes that may have been tossed from ships, tall piles of rotting sackcloth bags sorted carefully by the color of their markings, bales of raw cotton stiffened with seawater, frayed and soiled ropes straightened and hung with care, items of men’s and women’s clothing, splintered timbers from old houses with all the metal from nails, hinges, and handles meticulously removed and heaped into little piles by shape and size.

  There were foodstuffs, too, again organized by the colors of their labels instead of anything meaningful to a cook. Rice and wheat flour from the continent’s interior, stamped in blue by the coalition of merchants that shipped them outward to the coast, stood haphazardly in one corner. The green labels of oats, barley, and desiccated grape must from the Ivory Isles sat side by side with casks of expensive dried fruits from Niheba and strips of salted meat from the pastures behind Port Chardon, marked with the same verdant hue.

  Nievfaya had never thought of the Siheldi as artistic – she didn’t even know if they had eyes to see things like mortal creatures did – but she thought she could detect a method to the odd arrangement of their treasures.

  “I’m going to light this,” she said, picking up an unused torch from somewhere within the flotsam, feeling as if she should give the spirit a warning. It didn’t say anything to the contrary, so she took the flints from her pockets and struck them together, the sparks jumping from the sharp edges to the pitch-covered rag. Wedging it firmly between some ceramic jars, she climbed up a stack of crates to survey the space from above.

  What she saw made her gasp out loud. “Sun Mother preserve me,” she whispered as her sight adjusted. There really was a pattern. The colors and tones had been pushed and piled to form the crude outline of an enormous human face with an imperious frown, the red and orange items clustered thickly around where the eyes should be, with shattered bits of wood standing up like spikes and scars. She knew that face. She had seen plenty like it before. It was the face of the Divided.

  “Why would you do this?” she demanded as the flickering torch made the eerie image smirk and gibber. “What does it mean?”

  Gather what you need, the Siheldi said, ignoring her questions.

  “I need answers. Why is this here? What have they done? The Divided are the enemies of all right-thinking men.”

  Are we right-thinking men? the Siheldi asked, sounding amused. Are you?

  Nievfaya didn’t answer. As far as she was concerned, the Divided were almost as bad as the Kitefins. They kidnapped orphans to swell their ranks, blinding them as babes and secreting them away to learn black magic and the evil arts.

  To those who were brave enough to seek them out, they offered protection from many terrible fates. But their words were false and their friendship traitorous. Few who ever entered the caves of Niheba ever returned – except as bloated, swimming corpses, tortured and hollow after being torn apart by the Siheldi in pursuit of the High Warden’s studies.

  “I don’t need to be a human to know what the Divided do is wrong,” she replied. “Or to know what you do is more wrong still.”

  As wrong as cooking a chicken or eating a fish, the Siheldi said as Nievfaya left her high spot and started to root among the objects for bandages, unspoiled food, skins of fresh water, and any herbs she could find that might help staunch Arran’s impossible wound. Livestock only exists to be culled.

  “Humans are not witless beasts to be slaughtered.”

  Neither are herds of cows and sheep. They are simply somewhat more witless than you are, which makes you think you have the right to decide their fate. Lesser things must be governed, and to be governed is to be used.

  Look at your precious Guild. Do they not treat their own kind the same? The humans require it. They even crave it. All flocks must have a shepherd.

  “I have no love for the Guild,” she said absently, holding up a jar of musty, crushed leaves to the torchlight to peer inside.

  We do, the Siheldi replied. They make it so easy for us to tend to our larders.

  “You make me sick,” Nievfaya muttered.

  We do what is necessary to survive. As you are doing, too.

  “I’m not doing anything,” she said, sifting through the compartments of a surgeon’s traveling case, most of its vials broken and its pockets filled with nothing but ancient, tasteless dust. “I’m just trying to save a life that you’d be happy enough to eat, given the choice.”

  This one is not for eating, the Siheldi hissed through its spitting, cracking excuse for laughter. He would not be palatable to us.

  “Why not?”

  He has our sisters’ flesh. He stinks of them.

  “Sisters? He isn’t a neneckt.”

  We have not counted you as our brethren for centuries, the spirit sneered. You are nothing to us.

  “Then…the eallawif?” She stopped her work and stared into the darkness, the clockwork in her mind ticking over. “He’s a bargain child,” she said eventually. “Of course. That’s why you need him alive.”

  No one really knew where the eallawif had come from. Like the Siheldi, they had just always been. There were many of them, but they were all one, linked somehow in thought and deed like the off-kilter reflections in a crazed mirror.

  Nievfaya had dealt with the soulless creatures in the past, but the neneckt largely ignored them as a rule, and the icy-hearted sisterhood did not feature highly in their history or their tales. The sea folk had their own magic to rely upon, but the land-dwellers had not been given any such talents by the gods of their kind.

  Bargain children, those humans born by the gift of the eallawif, were special in ways that even the oughon didn’t fully understand. The mark they left on their world, for good or ill, was unpredictable and often uncontrollable. Whatever Arran was, or whatever the Siheldi thought Arran could do, the incredible amount of bezhaka gathered around him would multiply it a hundredfold.

  Yes. We want him alive, the Siheldi confirmed. A flute without a reed does not play music.

  “Nor does a flute that refuses to be played.”

  You ascribe great strength to this broken man.

  “Apparently, so do you. Have you not yet learned that he won’t help you?”

  Perhaps he wishes to revenge himself upon his enemies. We can help him.

  “You are his enemies.”

  We are the ones letting you save him.

  “I have what I need,” she said, stuffing her bounty into one of the empty sacks and slinging it over her shoulder. She didn’t want to talk anymore. She needed to think before she said the wrong thing. “Take me back.”

  The Siheldi’s spot of light rekindled itself, and she followed it away from the storeroom, doing her best to remember how many turns she took. The room contained more useful things than she could carry at once, and she hoped she would
be allowed to find her way back there. But in case she couldn’t, she had been sure to slip an extra torch into her waistband.

  The surgeon’s case hadn’t been a total disappointment. She had found the herbs needed, crumbly dry but hopefully still potent enough. She suspected that the Siheldi hardly knew what most of the things in their possession really were, as they had no particular use in their strange, barren society. If the talkative spirit had been just a bit more knowledgeable, she might not have had the chance to do what she now intended.

  “Here, now. Just drink a little,” she whispered to Arran when the Siheldi had departed and she had crushed the mixture of leaves into a bit of water. The pit had been sealed again, but the seclusion would work in her favor this time.

  “Only a little more,” she coaxed, trying to prevent the potion from dribbling out the corner of his mouth. “Please let this work. Please, please let this work.”

  It was the second time she was poisoning him, she thought with a wry smile as she patiently dripped in the last few drops. She had given him far, far too much ychauyad before taking him down to Emyer-Ekvori, and she was lucky it hadn’t done him any serious harm. She had needed him to sleep heavily through that night, to give her time to arrange things, but now she needed him to do just the opposite. All she could do was hope against hope that she wouldn’t be killing him in the process.

  As the last of the liquid slipped down his throat, she took a piece of smooth wood from her trove and planted it firmly between his teeth. She turned him onto his side and drew him close and tight to her chest, one hand over his gaping wound and the other over his heart, which would begin beating too furiously for comfort in just a few moments.

  “Wake up, Arran Swinn,” she said, trying to push the words into the stones that lined the walls, imagining the sounds bouncing back into her ears, back into the earth, gaining speed and power each time they ricocheted, building like a tidal wave that ghosted through the depths until it crashed with unimaginable fury when it reached the tempting sands. “Wake up. There is work to do.”