Then it came into the light.
Five times the size of a man, it was naked save for scales, and devoid of all hair and human features, like a once jagged stone left in fast-running water and smoothed by the current. Snurri, or what remained of him, truncated in a great serpent’s body, disappearing behind him, into the dark. Of his torso, the musculature and bones had been wrenched about in some gruesome transformation, so that his arms flared out like a cloak’s hood caught in wind.
The worst was his head. It had grown large, tremendous, and distended in a slick, hairless wedge, creased by a great, gaping maw that smelled of freshly split flesh and old death.
“Grisssslay,” it said. “I am become… wondrousssss.”
The thing slithered forward and raised its head. Its mouth opened wide. Grislae saw the vicious maw was lined with countless teeth and wondered how the thing could vocalize at all. It was a mouth to get lost in, a mouth to fall inside and find yourself shat out into Hel.
“You are about as wondrous as a piece of shite,” she said.
Its great head reared back at her words. “I am the offssspring of Yig! The child of wondrous Yig!”
“You sorry fuck, I do not spare children,” Grislae said, and hurled the jar of oil at the thing. It shattered, sending viscous fluid everywhere.
Snurri lashed forward, his serpentine maw open, his body a single scaled spring. Grislae was ready. Leaping to the side, she drove the point of her sword into the thing’s eye as far as she could. The serpent whipped about, thrashing violently. The wedge of its head smacked into Grislae’s torso, and she was knocked back, hard, onto her arse. She crab-walked backward, scrambling up the stairs to the deck.
The arrows’ flames had grown during her time below. Smoked teared her eyes. She pulled the touchwood from her tunic, set it alight and tossed it down the stairs into the hold. Flames and heat whooshed out of the opening as the spilled oil caught.
The Reinen shifted and pitched as thunderous blows shook the hull of the longship.
“We are the Children of Yig!” the serpent Snurri cried. “We are the sumptuous brood! We are —”
“Good and fucked,” Grislae said, and turning, she dived off the Reinen.
The current was swift, and she found herself borne away from the longship. Despite her weariness, she swam clear to shore, pulling herself out of the water and slumping on her back in exhaustion. She was at the point where the river became bay, and would eventually become sea.
The Reinen was a torch upon the waters. The sail, bundled against the mast, caught fire, and for a moment, in the conflagration, Grislae thought she could see a great serpent’s head worming its way into the world above… Then something exploded, perhaps more touchwood or oil in the hold, and the serpent was gone, replaced only by tongues of flame, licking at the night sky.
She watched it until the light of the Reinen was gone, lost upon the bosom of the sea, and all was dark. A fitting funeral for Heingistr, a Northern lord.
Then, exhausted though she was, Grislae rose and looked inland, into the fog. There were corpses out there in the dark, corpses she had made from the bodies of men. If she hurried, if she could beat the sun, they would still be there, and one of their dead hands, she knew, held a sword.
Her sword.
The Dreamers of Alamoi
Jeremiah Tolbert
The madman whistled an unfamiliar tune as he walked past the tangle-choked fields, along a road in little better shape; before the plague, it had been surfaced with polished brick. Bricks that the dreamers hadn’t pried up or that hadn’t been chewed into gravel by the weeds and weather.
The guide followed close behind, scheming again.
The madman paused to light his pipe and take a preposterously deep drag from the tight-packed bowl. He inclined the stem toward his guide, exhaled blue smoke.
The guide shook his head. “The last time left me stumbling for hours.”
The madman shrugged. “I had hoped for the amusement of a repeat performance. Ah well. How far now?”
The guide squinted. “Another dozen leagues before it’s too dangerous to continue.”
“Too dangerous for you, perhaps,” the madman said, unveiling his madness again.
When they first met in the traveler’s inn a hundred leagues distant, the madman had said to the guide, whose name was Tog: “They call me Garen the Undreaming — among other, less flattering things. Those men told me you know the way to Alamoi.”
Indeed, Tog had not seen Garen rest since they had set out from the inn for Alamoi, although Tog required sleep, so it was possible that Garen had only waited to bed down until after Tog. Suspicious of the claim, Tog had only pretended to sleep one evening. Through slitted eyes, he had watched the madman drink from a wineskin, wave his hands in some elaborate pantomime, and mutter to himself for hours.
The novelty of it wore thin and Tog had drifted off, but not before he decided that it made no difference whether the assertion was true or not. Garen was mad in either case. He was especially mad if the claim was true; immune to sleep he might be, but immune to the effects of deprivation he was not.
Mad as he was, what harm to lead the man toward the city, knock him on the head, and take from him the curious bag of belongings he carried on his back? No harm to Tog anyway, and that was all that really mattered to him.
“Do you often meet travelers on this road?” Garen asked.
Tog made out the shapes of figures in the dawn mist, slouching toward them. He touched the polished antler hilt of the bone knife at his belt, reassuring himself of its presence.
“Never.”
Garen shifted his pack from his shoulders, dropped it in the dirt, and began rummaging through it. Objects clattered and thudded inside. Tog leaned in to glimpse the contents.
“Really?” Garen said to the air. “Yes, very well. I’ll find it.”
Many of the objects Garen carried with him were unrecognizable to Tog, made of bone, mountain glass, flint, and even the rare bit of copper or bronze, colored deeply as Garen’s own foreign skin.
Garen took the wooden handle of a bronze blade in his palm, and Tog felt relieved that the madman had armed himself, but then Garen set it aside and continued to dig. The approaching figures had resolved into the shapes of two men and a woman wearing the heavy fur cloaks of hillfolk when Garen clucked like a pleased hen and withdrew a fist-sized cloth bundle fastened closed with jute.
The pack contained treasures, as Tog had suspected, perhaps worth countless nights in the brothel tents. He would have it, if the hillfolk didn’t ruin everything.
“Not the kind of folk interested in trade,” Tog hissed. The hillfolk had spotted them and their pace picked up to a brisk jog. The men carried stone-tipped spears.
“Keep your mouth shut while I work,” Garen hissed, and then called out, “Well met, travelers.”
The hillfolk slowed, exchanging glances. Tog had known some who were honorable, but far more who were brigands and thieves; clever, and deadly with their spears. They rejected farming and civility, living as the old people did, by the fruits of their arms. Many found it easier to survive as bandits than to hunt game on the flinty hillsides where they dwelled.
“We are not travelers,” the woman said. “I am Theam, and these are my brothers. Who are you, and what brings you to this plague-wracked place? Few travel this road now but the dreamers.”
Garen touched his right thumb to his forehead, a customary greeting. “I am Garen, and I travel to the Shining City. This is my guide.”
“Tog.” He half-bowed.
The woman laughed. “You can’t hope to escape the teeth of such a powerful dream. If we allowed you to travel another league, you too would be cutting stone blocks from the hill quarries and dragging them into place, again and again until you collapse, rest, and rise to cut and labor again.”
Tog began to speak out against their lie, but Garen silenced him with a glare. “You have seen the dreamers of Alamoi?” Garen sounded
impressed.
“I have,” she said, nodding. “Their work teams wander into our hills to gather stone for those twin blasphemies.” She thrust a thumb over her shoulder.
Garen nodded. “Perhaps you can solve a mystery for me, then. With the fields untended and all commerce departed, what do the dreamers consume for sustenance after these seven years of labor?” The question had bothered Tog as well, and many travelers had their theories, mostly gruesome.
“The dream sustains them,” Theam said. “They do not require food or drink.”
The madman forlornly shook his head. “What a pitiful existence! A life of constant labor and no pleasure. Myself, I prefer an inversion of that imbalance. Thank you for the knowledge then.” He paused. “I see your brothers grow tired of talk and are ready to kill and rob us, but I must forestall that, I’m afraid.” Garen unfurled his closed fist and offered the bundle to the hill woman.
Theam’s eyes widened, and the men began to speak rapidly in their guttural tongue. After a moment of hesitation, she took it. One of the men said something angrily, and pointed his spear toward Garen. Theam slapped him open-palmed across the face, hard enough that the man’s nose dripped blood.
“I recognize the craftsmanship,” she told her brother in the dream tongue. Then, turning to the madman, “How did this token enter your possession, flatlander?”
Garen laughed. “I found it tucked in the belt of a dead man leagues and leagues away from here. I honestly had no idea what it was, but a voice on the wind told me to give it to you. A token, you say?”
The hillfolk shifted uneasily. Not even hillfolk wished to be in the presence of a madman for any longer than necessary. Tog nearly smirked.
“Of passage,” she said. “We will honor it as we must, or the Rutk of the Raven Eye will punish us. But if you continue down this road, you will dream or die.”
“Sadly, I must.”
“A shame your possessions will be lost with you. Go, then, but know whatever it is they construct within… it nears completion. Better to flee this place as we do.”
Garen took up his pack and began to walk down the ruined road, once again whistling the foreign tune. Tog stepped to follow, and found the hillfolk’s spear-tips at his belly.
“One token. One passage,” Theam’s taller brother snarled.
Garen shrugged. He avoided Tog’s desperate gaze.
“You cannot leave me to these beasts! I led you faithfully as promised!” Tog shouted. He made to draw his knife, but the hillmen’s icy stares chilled the anger in his blood.
Garen continued on his path, making no sign of awareness even as the hillfolk’s spears plunged about their gory work, and Tog screamed curses for the day he had met Garen the Undreaming.
Garen left stories in his wake like petals from a dying flower. These tales served as a trail that the needful could follow in order to hire or press him into service. Always they found Garen in one of a few locales: within brothels, where tawdry pleasures of the flesh could satisfy a short while; within a mead hall or winery, where strong drink could tamp down his madness for a while longer; or finally, within a temple or sanitarium, where sacred rites or ancient medicines might soothe his fractured mind a while longer still.
Meldri and Besthamun found Garen locked away in the deepest meditation pits of the goddess Sebun’s holiest temple, in the port city of Tauk.
A bribed eunuch led them through the labyrinth of dimly lit passageways. “The acolytes have subjected this one to eighteen endless days and nights of humming meditations. They believe the proper tones will align Garen’s soul shards and restore his ability to slumber.”
“For our sake, we hope they’re unsuccessful,” Meldri muttered. Besthamun frowned, but Meldri spoke the truth. If Garen were to be cured, he would not meet their needs.
The servant tittered, stopped at the entrance of a cell. He seemed held at bay by the hysterical laughter coming from within, rising above the steady tones of three acolytes.
“This wretched creature has no soul shards left to align,” whispered the eunuch. “But he made a generous enough offering to the Temple for a year of treatments.”
“I hear a little bird outside my cage,” the laughing voice cried from within. “Come in, little bird, and sing me a better song.”
The eunuch scurried away. Besthamun gave serious consideration to following, but they had traveled too far to turn back in this moment, and she steeled herself to enter.
As they did, the humming ceased, the air suddenly dangerously empty, as if the silence might swallow them all. The small stone cell was lit by a single candle, nearly spent. The acolytes rose to their feet, saying nothing as they brushed past the scholars and went into the catacombs.
A single disheveled shape remained within the cell, squeezed into the farthest corner, as if trying to disappear into the flickering shadows. The figure might have been a man, or might have been a loose bundle of sticks and rags. He was made of elbows and knees, long-limbed, thin. Long, dull black hair hung in tangles, hair from his scalp and face mingling into one tangled, rat-gnawed mess. Within the tangles burned sea-gray eyes that seemed to Besthamun to reflect more light than the candle gave off.
Besthamun cleared her throat. “Esteemed one, we offer our most humble apologies for interrupting but —”
Garen sighed. “I welcome it; I grew bored of their incessant noises six days ago, but couldn’t think of how I might say as such without insulting their cult of mysteries. One thing I know about cults: they do not take to being insulted.” Without warning or pause, he scrabbled across the room to the scholars and stood with the tip of his broad nose brushing against Meldri’s. He sniffed.
“I know that perfume. You’ve journeyed from the Salt Coast.” He squinted. “By your plain manner of dress, I make you for scholars of the Great University of Kamtun Jai.”
Meldri took a step back. Besthamun glared at him for daring to insult Garen thus, but continued her entreaty.
“ — We have a task that requires your unique person to complete, and wish to employ your services.”
“I visited the University once. They threw me out, said I was not worthy of their knowledge.”
“The mad cannot grasp enlightenment,” Meldri said with a sniff.
Besthamun considered striking her brother, but worried what the act of violence would incite in the madman. “Apologies for my brother’s insult. He is jealous of the offer we make to you.”
Meldri sneered. “We studied a dozen summers before we were allowed within the Library of Dreams. What could this one hope to learn without proper study?”
“No insult taken,” Garen said, lips twitching with the faintest smile. “Go without rest for as many years as I, and see how sound your own mind is.” He took a step back from Meldri and stretched his long limbs.
“And what must I do to gain access to your library? No doubt you believe it might contain hints regarding my affliction — or, at least, you would like me to believe so. May I borrow your knife?”
Besthamun hesitated, but she retrieved the small knife of mountain glass from within the folds of her robes and offered it up. Garen began hacking away at his beard. “Go on,” he said.
“Have you, in your travels, heard of the city of Alamoi?” she asked.
He did not hesitate. “No.”
“It was a great city, ruled by a masonic order which mastered secrets of working stones that some say predate the last Ice. Half of the great walls from the Placidine Sea to the Jaggared Mountains were built by Alamoi masons.”
Meldri continued when Besthamun paused, unwanted tears forming in her eyes. “Some call it the Shining City; the polished stone used in its construction reflects the light at sunrise and sunset brilliantly. It was a beacon of civilization once.”
“What happened? Plague?” Garen continued to hack away at his hair. His angular face slowly emerged from the chaos. Besthamun was surprised to find herself admiring its shape as the blade revealed it, as if carving his c
hin from a block of softstone.
Meldri nodded. “A dream plague fell upon the city and it did not pass. Even now, the residents of the city labor under the dream. Reports of travelers say that new constructions rise above the city.”
“And what do they work to assemble?”
Besthamun frowned. “We don’t know. It is impossible to approach close enough without falling to the dream. Nothing good. That much is certain.”
Garen finished trimming his beard and returned the knife, which Besthamun gratefully stashed away.
“You wish me to approach the city and document what I see; to learn the nature of their project. I’ve performed such tasks before. For one such as me, it is simple. As boring as the acolytes’ humming.” Already, it seemed his attention was wandering.
Meldri laughed. “Oh, no; not only that. We want you to destroy the edifice.” He turned away, spoke over his shoulder in a great show of disrespect. “Sister, this man is a waste of time. He could never accomplish our task, it is plain to see.”
Garen’s gaze snapped into focus, and Besthamun shifted uncomfortably under the madness of it. The madman grinned broadly, and Besthamun decided then that no, he was not so handsome, not with a face that could ever wear that terrible expression.
The gates of the city were open wide. Instead of streets and structures he beheld a great goat, dead from thirst, mouth hanging open and thick tongue lolling in the sand — this, a flashback from his childhood. It faded quickly with another pull on his pipe.
Of course the gates were open. What use would it serve to close the gates when any attackers would fall under the dreaming far before reaching the unmanned wall? A cool breeze blew down from the mountains, carrying a sadness that Garen could not shake. A bone-weary loneliness took hold of him as he passed through the gate and into the broad, well-paved avenues of Alamoi. The streets were as empty as the sentry posts, the windows of surrounding buildings still shuttered against the night the plague fell.
“Begone, spirits,” Garen whispered. The lonely melancholy passed as the words left his lips.
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