Dark the Dreamer's Shadow

by Jennifer Bresnick

  Her fingers brushed the side of his neck as she tried to grab a hold of him, and she recoiled in pain, hissing at the touch of his skin. He was burning with a fever that had nothing to do with the temperature of his surroundings. Despite the heat inside him now, the seawater would soon start to chill him all too well. She knew how little time the humans could spend in the open ocean even if they were in the best of health – and there was so much blood trailing behind them as she started to move through the water. She would need to hurry, but it would be a long, long way.

  ***

  Megrithe wanted to stop crying, but that was the one thing she just couldn’t do. She had been so sure. She had seen him. In the bowels of the ocean the Siheldi burrowed like rats, nesting and breeding and haunting the subterranean darkness, waiting for their mother to break them free. And in the middle of it all was a little hollow, like two cupped hands holding a crystal bowl. Arran had been there, curled up at the bottom, dreaming away an impossible pain, waiting for something.

  She could not flatter herself into believing that he had been waiting for her, but why else would the song have given her such a vision? She knew for certain that the sight had stemmed from the incantation. It reminded her of the eallawif’s singing: beautiful and alien and as cold as the grave.

  If the image had been meant for her, then it was an exquisitely painful cruelty. She had come so close. She had felt like she could almost touch him before the mountain’s tortured agonies had taken him away. She felt as if the devastating wave racing to catch them could do no more damage than had been done to her already, but her heart was not the only thing at risk.

  There was Niheba, and the conviction that a few innocent people still remained on the poisoned isle. They might still be saved, and Nikko was doing his very, very best to get them back to land before the roiling surf caught the city up and plunged it into death.

  Her head felt like it would split open first, spilling her brains into the ocean and leaving her empty. She almost wished it, just so the pounding agony would stop. The crying was making it worse. She wanted to be safe. She wanted to feel well. She just wanted to disappear.

  No one said a word as Nikko focused all his attention on speed. They simply tried to hold on. Jairus had an arm around her, and Leofric kept the back of her collar in his tight fist, but she felt no security from either of them. She kept seeing that shape flickering underneath the surface of the milky boulders, the crest of a back flexing its muscles; the shadow of claws clenching to test their strength. A suggestion of teeth, sharp and shining, gnashing together in anticipation with the scent of supper on the air.

  She wanted to vomit. Her thoughts were ticking over with things that had never been there before, and her blistered hand felt like a boiled potato. She shouldn’t have touched the stone. She felt as if the action had infected her, and something had settled in her stomach like a batch of rotting fish.

  “They are coming,” she whispered to herself, too softly for anyone to hear. The words burned inside her, but there was no relief in saying them aloud. There would be no relief for anyone, ever again, because they were coming. There would be nowhere to hide now that they were free.

  Megrithe was lost in her own half-lucid twilight by the time they reached the shallows surrounding Niheba again. The rush had been for nothing. The news had gotten to the island first.

  Everyone had heard the explosion; everyone had seen the column of black smoke on the horizon, struck through with lightning, raining down chucks of stone and clouds of pulverized rock. The city was in a panic, neneckt and humans alike crowding the streets, pointing and praying, while the smarter residents secured their possessions and the smartest sneaked into wide open doors and secured the possessions of their neighbors.

  The quays were rapidly emptying as she stumbled ashore, leaning heavily on Jairus. She was glad to see it – there was safety away from the waterfront, she hoped. But something didn’t look quite right. There were men in the harbor, but they were only submerged up to the waist as they tried to haul the smaller fishing boats, already stuck in the mud, behind the stone jetties for some sort of protection from what was about to come.

  “We need to get inland,” Leofric said.

  “There’s no height to this place,” Jairus told him. “There’s nowhere to be safe.”

  “We don’t need to go up,” Nikko said. “We need to go under. Follow them.”

  He nodded towards a stream of neneckt heading into the center of the city, quickly and with much greater order than the humans who tried, unsuccessfully, to follow them. The neneckt did not hurt them, but any land-dweller that attempted to join their exodus was firmly put aside.

  Suddenly a man shouted and shoved back, and then everyone was stampeding, flooding the route the neneckt were taking, incensed that the sea folk were heading towards their own private safety while leaving the poor and unprotected to drown.

  “Perhaps not,” Nikko said, steering them in the opposite direction as the crash of broken glass and a shrill cry made Megrithe cringe. “There are other places.”

  “I don’t – I don’t feel well,” she said, her words cut short as she fell to her knees, the entire island jolting beneath them as a new bellow from the mountain made the buildings sway like dancers. There was nothing in her stomach to come up when she retched into the gutter, the pounding in her head exploding into blue-green lights in front of her eyes, her face as flushed as if she had sat in front of the hearth for too long.

  “She’s broiling,” Jairus said, his hand on her forehead as she wiped sour spittle from the corner of her mouth. He sounded scared. She hadn’t heard him sound scared before, not even when he was running to fight a neneckt three times his size.

  “They are coming,” she said urgently, but he wasn’t listening.

  “She needs a physician,” he was telling Leofric.

  “Do you really think we’ll find one with some spare time on his hands?” Nikko said, gesturing to the spreading chaos around them. “We have only moments to get to safety. I have seen this before. You still have ychauyad in you, and there are safe places under the island’s center that are made for this very purpose. We have to go.”

  “All right,” Jairus decided quickly, picking up Megrithe as easily as if she was a little girl.

  “Stop that,” she said, squirming feebly. “I’m fine. I can walk. Put me down. You’re more hurt than I am.”

  “You shut up right this instant,” he said, silencing her quite effectively as she gaped in astonishment at the uncharacteristic impoliteness. “We have to be quick.”

  While the neneckt had dwelt near the volcano for countless years, and had memories of its moodiness to prepare them for its outbursts, the human colonists on the island were too new to have experienced such a disaster. No one seemed to know how to react. Pockets of terror and violence almost immediately sprung up across the city’s human neighborhoods, and it appeared that they would soon join and meld into one seamless riot.

  “They’re all going to die,” Megrithe said quietly as a group of women stood wailing in front of their homes, begging for help from gods who lived too far away to hear them. There were children there, clinging to their mothers’ skirts as they stared wide-eyed at the darkening sky.

  Jairus didn’t answer her, but he didn’t need to. His jaw was clenched and his face set stonily forward. He knew it as well as she did. There were tears in his eyes.

  “The city guard will try to move them into the palace,” Leofric called over his shoulder, motioning towards a small cluster of the local lawmen that were herding the women and anyone else they could find towards a long queue clogging the main boulevard. “May the gods grant that they get there.”

  The main roads soon became too crowded for anyone to push their way through. None of the jostling or shouting or pushing made a difference: even the side streets were impassable as hopeful humans from the other boulevards tried to sneak through alleyways to find some more promising path but found the
mselves stuck again, only now in narrower places.

  By the time the first piercing screams rang in from the harbor, followed by the crash of snapping timbers, the hollow ring of falling bricks, and the relentless churning of hungry waters, the crush was so dense that no one, not even the neneckt, could move an inch.

  “This way,” Nikko said, putting his shoulder to the door to the nearest building and pushing them through, followed by a few strangers desperate for any outlet. It was a tall construction, three floors with a flat roof, and it was the highest point for blocks around.

  As soon as they reached the rooftop, which had been turned into a potted garden for the enjoyment of its residents, the space started to fill with people. Megrithe wasn’t sure how Jairus made it up all three flights without dropping her – he was breathing hard and his arms were shaking as he set her down on a carved wooden bench under the shade of a spindly fig tree. Everyone turned towards the sea.

  Megrithe immediately levered herself up and pushed her way towards the rail. She had to see. She would look at what she had unleashed onto the island and its people. It was her fault, and she knew it.

  She had woken the sleeping beast by following the eallawif’s instruction, and these were her deaths. She would not allow herself to flinch away from the devastated harbor: its buildings demolished, its beautiful pools and sculptures buried under fathoms of churning mud, seawater, bodies, and debris.

  The gnawing flood crept inland, its initial power lost as it digested half the city, but strong enough still to destroy nearly everything that tried to stand in its way. The people had mostly fled, but there had been plenty enough of the unwilling, the unlucky, or the unbelieving to get caught up in the terrible tide.

  On the street below her, the pavement was still dry, but every rooftop she could see, flat or peaked, was now densely occupied with dazed or crying faces. Though the sight was tragic enough to fill her nightmares for the rest of her life, it also brought some level of relief to see how many had escaped. There would be trials to come, of course – most of the humans were now homeless, and the tainted water would bring plague with it, which would kill many more. But for now, hundreds of them were as safe as possible, and that was something, at least.

  “It isn’t your fault,” Leofric said, reading the expression on her face as she finally wrenched her eyes away. “You do not control the fires of the earth.”

  “But I helped to stir up what does.”

  “I don’t think you did. Did you hear the chanting? The man who sang that song is the one responsible. Not you.”

  “It was the Warden,” Jairus said, rage making his voice tight. “I would know him anywhere.”

  “The Divided did this?” Megrithe asked, searching his face for any sign of a lie. “Did you know?” she demanded a moment later.

  “No,” he insisted. “No, I didn’t. I had no part in it. I never would have allowed such a thing. You have to believe that. This is beyond everything – I could never want this.”

  “All right, I believe you,” she said, and it was true. No one but a soulless, vile monster would be capable of planning such wanton death, and she did not think that’s what Jairus was.

  She didn’t know what to do. She wanted to form a plan, connect the events and make sense of everything – first, she would have to find the Warden and condemn him to the worst torture she could devise – but the wheels of her mind were spinning loose and wobbly, unable to find purchase.

  “All right,” she said again, less certainly, rubbing her temples. Everything hurt. Inside and out, everything hurt. “We can –” she started to say, raising her head to stretch the throbbing muscles in her bruised and swollen neck, and the motion made her catch sight of someone on the street below.

  Perhaps it was the blood that drew her eye, as bright as paint down the front of the man’s shirt. Perhaps it was the way he was slumped over the arm of a young woman in trousers caked in mud and salt, with his face hidden by her shoulder and her eyes heavy with deep, deep weariness as she dragged him along the cobbles.

  “Oh my God,” she breathed, nearly tumbling over the railing as she craned to get a better look. Her legs were unable to support her, and she grasped feebly at the wrought iron as she leaned forward enough to make Nikko grab her back.

  “You’ll fall,” he said, but she pushed him away.

  “That’s him,” she cried, pointing, but by the time Nikko and Leofric had followed her finger, the pair had disappeared into the mulling crowds. “That’s Arran. That’s – I just – that was him,” she stammered, scanning the throngs that had swallowed them. “I just saw him. I swear I did. Where did he go?”

  “You need rest,” Leofric said, sharing a glance with Nikko. It was a glance that said that she was not well in the head, and that she needed to be placated so she wouldn’t hurt herself. It made her angry.

  “I saw him,” she said again, but now she was crying so hard that she even started to doubt herself. She hadn’t seen his face, but she was sure she didn’t need to. She knew him. She had felt him. Something inside her had felt its twin in the limp form stumbling along the cobbles. Something that was coming. Something that wanted to be free. “At least, I think I did…”

  “No one could have survived that explosion,” Leofric said gently, leading her away as she twisted her head to keep her eyes on the street for as long as she could. “Even if he ever was under the mountain. You know that. We barely made it out ourselves, and we had Nikko to help us.”

  “But I saw him,” she sobbed, her eyes closing of their own accord as Leofric eased her gently back onto the bench, making shushing noises as she curled herself into a tight, aching ball. “I saw him,” she repeated to herself before her battered body finally gave out on her, plunging her deep into a nightmarish rest.

  EPILOGUE

  The panic and terror that swept through Niheba appeared as little more than the jerky, mute motions of far-away dolls in Tiaraku’s mirrors. Each exquisitely framed oblong showed a different quarter of the city, some of which were now nothing more than swirling whirlpools of soiled water and silt. Broken beams and pieces of trees piled up in narrow alleys, damming the smaller streets and channeling the flood inward towards the huddled masses screaming for sanctuary at the palace gates.

  Tiaraku had not let them in. Even Habur thought that was disgraceful as he limped along invisibly, no longer able to hold even a basic shape underwater thanks to the serious wound that the Daggertooth had given him.

  Coral glass was the only thing that could kill a neneckt, and his own blade, snatched from his hands by his quicker opponent, had nearly finished him. It was only by luck that Habur had survived the encounter, but he wasn’t about to give Nikodelmus another chance to get it right.

  “Your Majesty,” he said, doing his best to bow when he reached Tiaraku’s presence, but the neneckt king was absorbed in his mirrors, and distracted by his other guest. “Mistress,” he added, bowing to the eallawif in turn.

  She did acknowledge him, with a slight nod, but then she returned her attention to the king. Habur waited, looking at the changing pictures in the gilded frames. That bastard Bartolo was in one of them, a piece of red iron clutched in his hand as he huddled with a hundred other refugees in a corridor of a building. The Warden, his scarred and pitted face smiling broadly as he sat in his sheltered cave, his hands outstretched onto the table in front of him, something bright and glittering peeking through his fingers. The darkness, dim and smoking, that had once been Sind Heofonne’s pulsing heart.

  “I wanted Swinn recovered, Habur,” Tiaraku said eventually, and his warrior cringed. That was not a tone he ever wanted to hear from his master. “Yet here you stand, weak and empty handed.”

  “I was not expecting the Daggertooth, sire.”

  “The Daggertooth,” Tiaraku mocked, spitting the name back at him. “I should have you take his place in the cells. It was a mistake to ever let him go.”

  Habur didn’t say anything. When Tiaraku was
angry, making excuses would only fan him into a blind rage.

  “It matters little,” the eallawif said to the king, her eyes locked onto one of the panes of glass, which showed a swarm of people packed into Oakwood Lane. Among them was an injured man held up by a neneckt in a woman’s shape. “Here he is. Send soldiers for him.”

  “He doesn’t have the gemstones,” Tiaraku rumbled irritably.

  “He doesn’t need them anymore. Neither do you. He has been touched,” she said, pressing a fingertip over his heart. “He has the seed inside him now. It will do.”

  “I will fetch him for you, Mistress,” Habur said, studying the face closely so he would remember it. It would be easy enough. Humans couldn’t change how they looked. “I will not fail again.”

  “Very well,” Tiaraku conceded eventually. He did not have to mention the consequences of another disappointment.

  “And the girl, too,” the eallawif added, a flick of her wrist changing the image to focus on a young woman, her dress smeared in blood and her skin flushed with fever, lying down on a rooftop with her eyes tightly closed, long tracks of tears cutting through the grime on her face. “I need her for myself.”

  “As you wish, Mistress,” Habur said, storing her features away in his mind. “I will bring them both to you.”

  The eallawif nodded. “It will be good to see my family again,” she said, and Tiaraku barked a short laugh.

  “You must be so proud of your child,” he said to her.

  “I am,” she replied, smiling fondly as she turned back to where the sleeping woman twitched uneasily in her dreams. The eallawif reached out to touch the glass again, stroking her cheek across the distance, and the woman sighed and quieted down. “Both of them.”

  GLOSSARY OF TERMS

  Agnise: A Guild agent working in Niheba who uncovers an important secret.

  Andrus Gunhilde: A former Guild inspector who lives in Niheba.