The River of Shadows

by Robert V. S. Redick

  As if in explanation, he showed them his left hand. On the thumb shone a rough, heavy ring, like a nugget of solid silver. Rose frowned at it, hesitating, then gestured for the sailors to lower the man to his feet. “What in the Nine Pits do they call you?” he said at last.

  “I am Olik,” said the stranger, wincing as his feet touched the boards.

  “Just Olik?”

  The stranger probed the wounds on his face and chest. He took a deep breath and straightened to his full height, which was considerable. He gazed steadily at Rose.

  “My full name,” he said, “is Prince Olik Ipandracon Tastandru Bali Adro.”

  He raised a hand as if to address them further, but before he could say another word, he collapsed.

  The Rule of the House

  24 Ilbrin 941

  The thin man in the golden spectacles fled the stateroom in a rush. He was off-balance from the first, but there was no turning back. Oh, he had botched things, he was in danger—he would never again be ruled by fear. But the ship was not his. He could taste the change. A spectacular dreamer he might be, but not a practiced one, like the enemy he faced.

  For ten yards the passage was silent, warm, and he sensed the life all around him. Hercól in a meditative trance. Neeps unconscious but restless in his hammock, his dream-self raising head and shoulders to gaze through wooden walls in the direction of the man in glasses. Marila awake, rigid, listening for Thasha and Fulbreech, barely allowing herself to breathe. Thasha herself far behind him in the stateroom, by the windows, hoping there would be no knock on the door. Bolutu asleep and very distant, running through dream-lands of his own.

  Then the man stepped over the red line, through the magic wall, and the chaos of his dream engulfed him. The ship tilted—or was it the pull of the earth that changed—and he stumbled against the bulkhead. There was a background rumble, a groaning, in the very air, and the light was fugitive and dim. No matter, he would not be here long. He turned down the portside passage and reached for a doorknob (vaguely aware that it was the entrance to the old first-class powder room) and flung it open to see—the bakery, his own beloved bakery in Noonfirth! The humble shop where he had become a woken animal! He could smell the bread, see the black woman bent over her mixing-bowl. Couldn’t he go to her for a moment, fall on his knees, inform her of the miracle she had worked? Madam! I was a thief in your shadows, a rat. You cried one morning, your husband had run away with the butter-churn girl. I heard, and I woke: yours was the spark to the tinder that burns inside me yet.

  No, he could not do that. He was looking not for comfort but for allies, and he had not a moment to spare.

  Another turn, another passage. There were ghost-sailors fighting in the adjoining rooms. Translucent flashes, limbs and weapons and faces and shields, flowed by at the intersection ahead. Pirates or Volpek mercenaries, battling Chathrand’s sailors; a fight to the death among the dead. Echoes of war cries, faint sounds of steel on steel. Was it the past he was seeing? Or the disordered nightmare of another dreamer, just out of sight?

  There was the door he sought. No question. He could feel eternities throbbing beyond the fragile wood. Bounding up to it (fear would not stop him) he seized the knob, turned it and pulled.

  An abyss. A maelstrom. Wind tore at his cloak like a hurricane through tattered trees. All as it should be. He was better at this than he’d thought.

  He forced himself to lean forward until his face crossed the threshold. The wind like a boot to the underside of his chin. He nearly lost his balance; his glasses were torn from his head and flew upward, out of sight. No matter. You don’t need them. You’ll be blind until you will yourself to see.

  But he was blind for now—blind and, yes, afraid. Was it his fault if there was only darkness before him? What should he expect—warm windows, vines, music and laughter spilling onto the terrace? True, he had managed to see all that once before, and to hear a great deal. But that night he had been a stowaway in another’s dream, not the architect of his own.

  Then he sensed the sorcerer.

  It was true: Arunis was walking the dream-ship once again, sure enough of himself to call out with his mind: Ah, Felthrup. I wondered when you’d come back to me. Are you ready to bargain, rat?

  Felthrup turned away from the door, anger crackling through his dream-body. He turned his mind in the mage’s direction. You think nothing has changed. You think you can torture me as before, use me against them, make me your fool.

  I think I would know if Ramachni were guarding you, as he did last time.

  Come, then. Come and talk to this rat. He is waiting for you.

  He felt his dream-voice betray him. No control, no control. Somewhere Arunis was indeed rushing toward him, laughing at his forced bravado.

  We have an account to settle, don’t we, vermin?

  Felthrup closed the door. He turned in the direction of the mage’s voice. We most certainly do, Arunis.

  He felt his slim scholar’s body throb with sudden power, hideous and sublime, the strength of a thousand-pound animal, and he spread his jaws and roared through five decks, a bear’s furious battle roar, and Arunis stopped dead in his tracks.

  That’s better.

  No taunting reply from the mage. Felthrup was satisfied. Within this ship, within his dream, he was his own master, and would bow to no one again.

  Felthrup reopened the door. The black abyss loomed before him, unchanged; the wind made him stagger.

  Where can you be going, Felthrup? said the mage, his voice suddenly affable. Come now, you don’t want to step through any … unusual doors. I know all about them, you’ll want to talk to me first.

  He let go of the door frame.

  Don’t you do it! You have no idea what you’re in for if you stray from this ship!

  No more tricks. No more words of poison. He leaped.

  As a rat he had once plunged from a moving ship into the sea. This was infinitely worse: the air current blasted him straight upward, head over heels; the door became a dim rectangle that shrank to nothing in the darkness. He rose like a cannonball fired at a midnight moon—and then the current vanished, and he became weightless, and started to fall—

  Only for an instant. The next blast shot him faster, farther upward. Do not wake. Do not panic. Now there were windows, and cave mouths, and luminous insects somehow surviving the wind. Felthrup had lost all control of his dream. He perceived the wall of this great black tunnel, ten times the width of any mineshaft, and no sooner had he seen it than he collided, scraping along the wall shaggy with vines, while somewhere within the leaves tiny voices cursed him, You great oaf, that’s my property, you’ve knocked my mailbox into the River.

  The River of Shadows. That is what the innkeeper called this place. And his name, and his tavern? Think of it, remember. Orfuin. The Orfuin Club. Anyone whose need is sincere can find his way to my doorstep.

  No sooner had the thought occurred to him than he saw it: the little terrace and the wide stone archway, the scattered tables, the potbellied man at his tea. As if he had waited all these weeks for Felthrup to return. But how could he possibly get there? Felthrup spread his arms, the way he had seen Macadra and her horrible companions do, but his cloak only billowed about his head, and like a tossed playing card he flew spinning across the shaft, rising still, leaving the terrace behind. No control. He could almost hear Arunis laughing, though he knew the mage could not see or hear him in this place. He flailed, he kicked, he crashed again into a wall. He sank his hands into the vines. They were deep, but not deep enough. Fistfuls of the waxy leaves tore away in his hands as his body tried to lift away once more.

  He should not have attempted this journey. You’re failing, rat. Still just a rat, with a rat’s small soul, even if he could dream himself into the body of a man or bear.

  Then it came to him, like a gift from some mind beyond his own. Still a rat! He had that choice, too. Closing his eyes, he willed the change to happen, and it did. His fur, his half tail, h
is dear old claws. All at once the vines closed over his whole body. The wall of the shaft was rough, scabrous; better than the walls he scaled with ease on the Chathrand. And the wind sheared past him, deflected by the vines.

  He crawled straight down. He veered left and right following the smells of the place, dark beer and gingerbread. Rat, man, bear, yddek: he could be any of these. He was Felthrup Stargraven, and for the first time in his curious life he knew with certainty that he was something more. He thought of Arunis, stalking the Chathrand like a murderous fog, killing through mind-enslavement and yet afraid to meet him, Felthrup, in dream. I am, he thought with a totally unfamiliar pleasure, a dangerous foe.

  “Do you mean that you had no assistance whatsoever?” said the innkeeper, filling a saucer for the rat.

  “On the contrary, sir,” said Felthrup, seated on the table beside him. “I had the assistance of the written word, and an exceptional sort of help it was. The thirteenth Polylex often leads one astray, I grant you; and it is certainly biased in favor of the Northern half of my world. There is no entry whatsoever for ‘Bali Adro,’ tragically enough; one proceeds directly from Balhindar, a Rekere dish made with green rice and termite larvae, to Baliacan, a dance in honor of the Firelords, the poor execution of which was punished—do excuse my redundant vocabulary, sir—with execution.”

  “But something in this Polylex,” said Orfuin, unruffled by Felthrup’s nonstop chatter, “showed you the way to my door, though you’d never dipped so much as a finger into the River of Shadows?”

  “Master Orfuin, I had no inkling that such a River existed.”

  A gentle smile spread over the innkeeper’s face. “One day you may long to recover such ignorance. Then again, you may not. For now, let us celebrate your skill. Few dare to leap into that stream who are not born to it, or committed to a lifetime’s practice. You, Felthrup, are a natural swimmer.”

  “How very ironical,” said Felthrup, beaming. “All my life—my woken life—I have lived in fear of drowning. But I suppose one cannot drown in a river of air.”

  “There is more than one sort of drowning,” said Orfuin. “But come: tell me how you managed this miracle, and what need brought you to attempt it.”

  Felthrup reached to adjust his spectacles, then laughed: they were still gone. “Cross-references, Mr. Orfuin,” he said. “I began with Dreams, an entry that ran to some forty-eight pages. Around the thirtieth, I learned of the theory of Occulted Architecture, which states that the objects in a dream-land, like those in any other world, are made of smaller building blocks: atoms, cells, particles too small for any eye to discern—except the mage’s, and those of magical creatures. They, being able to perceive the building pattern, can also learn to change it—to turn a rat into a man, candies into worms, a damp tunnel into a castle corridor. Arunis used this ability to torture me for several months, once he discovered my dream of scholarship.

  “But the Polylex goes on to say that dream-lands are not exactly infinite. Like countries in a waking world, they do possess edges: frontiers, borders, watchtowers, walls. Some of the mightiest walls are those erected between dreamers. They are invisible even to the dreamer himself, but they are also essential: they prevent us from wandering, by accident or ill design, into the dreams of others.

  “Mages, however, can pass through these walls as though they do not exist.”

  “If that were not so I’d have fewer customers,” said Orfuin, “though not everyone who comes here does so in a dream.”

  “Well, Mr. Orfuin,” continued Felthrup, “at that point the Polylex suggested I consult the entry for Trespass, Magical. How fortunate that I did! For that entry described at some length the consequences of dream-invasion for the one so violated. They are mostly horrible. Because Arunis trespassed so often and so aggressively into my dreams, I may eventually come to suffer from insomnia, sleepwalking, fear of intimacy and verbal reticence.”

  “Surely not the last?” said Orfuin with concern.

  “Oh, it is likely, sir, and narcolepsy, and excessive familiarity too. But that is all beside the point. What matters is this: that those whose dreams have been invaded sometimes find that they have been bestowed with an equal but opposite ability—that is, to enter the dream of the one who invaded them.”

  “That is true,” said Orfuin. “The wall between two dreamers, once transgressed, is never afterward a perfect barrier.”

  “So it proved with me,” said Felthrup. “My great benefactor Ramachni, wherever his true self has gone, passed into my dream and gave me the power to fight back against Arunis. That act saved my life: for sleep had become such misery that I was performing the most extreme acts of self-torture to keep myself awake. And when at last I had the courage to dream again, I made a shocking discovery: my dreams no longer just started, with a bang as it were, in the middle of a fight or dance or bowl of soup. Not at all. Since Ramachni’s visit, I see my dream coming. Like the doorway to your club, it begins as a tiny square of light in the darkness. Very quickly that square grows into a window, and before I know it, the window crashes against me, and I tumble into the dream. Strange, and useless, I thought: for I was as helpless to control this process as I was tonight, flailing around out there.”

  Felthrup lifted his head, indicating the rushing blackness beyond the terrace. “The River of Shadows,” he said, musing. “What is it, Mr. Orfuin? Through which world does it run?”

  Orfuin paused for a long sip of tea. “The River is the dark essence of thought,” he said at last, “for thought, more than anything else in the universe, has the power to leap between worlds. It belongs therefore to all worlds where conscious life exists. And yet strangely enough, consciousness tends to blind us to its presence. I have even heard it said that the more a world’s inhabitants unlock the secret workings of the universe—its occult architecture, its pulleys and gears—the deeper the River of Shadows sinks beneath the earth. Societies of master technicians, those who trap the energy of suns, and grow their food in laboratories, and build machines that carry them on plumes of fire through the void: they cannot find the River at all.

  “But we are straying from your tale, Felthrup. You were speaking of these dream-windows. You fall through them helplessly, you say?”

  “No longer!” said Felthrup. “Once again the Polylex came to my rescue. In a footnote to the Dreams entry—I revere the humble footnote, sir, don’t you?—the book provides a list of exercises for taking conscious control of the unconscious. And what do you suppose? I mastered those exercises, and found I could slow the approach of my dream-window. Eventually I learned to stop it altogether and examine the dream from the outside, like a wanderer looking in on a firelit home. If I wish to enter, I do so. If not, I simply wave my hand, and the window shatters like a reflection in a pool. But the most astonishing part was yet to come.

  “Several nights ago I noticed a second window, a second dream, shining at some distance from the first. It was the sorcerer’s, Mr. Orfuin: somewhere on the Chathrand, Arunis was asleep, and sending his dream-self out to prowl the ship. I dared not approach it: suppose my new skills failed me, and I tumbled into the sorcerer’s dream? Suppose he sensed me outside the window, and by some magic drew me in? Ramachni gave me the power to master my own dreams, a task I am barely equal to. But should Arunis lay hands on me within his own—”

  “You would become his slave, in waking as in dream,” said Orfuin with conviction. “And when he had finished with you, he could break your mind like a sparrow’s egg, between two fingers. Or toy with it, for the rest of your natural life.”

  He stood abruptly, as though shaking off a spell, and walked to the edge of his terrace, where the wind of the lightless River tore at his sparse hair.

  “To be held in that mage’s invisible cell, prey to any torture that occurs to him, forever. There could hardly be a more awful fate in all the worlds.”

  Felthrup said nothing. In the club, someone was tuning a mandolin.

  With his back still
turned, Orfuin added, “You knew this in your heart, did you not? Before you leaped willingly into his dream.”

  “Ah,” said Felthrup, “you guessed.”

  “Only now,” said Orfuin. “You were the little yddek that hid under my chair. The first such creature I had seen in many months. The one who swam out of the River some twenty minutes after Arunis himself.”

  “I was,” said Felthrup, “though I did not know I would become that strange creature, all tentacles and jointed shell. I only knew that I must learn what he was doing, for even from a distance, gazing fearfully at the window of his dream, I knew he was preparing for a decisive step. Maybe the decisive step in his struggle with us all. How could I simply watch him take it, and not even try to learn what it was about? So yes: I drew near, and watched him pacing through your club, pretending to be no one in particular at first, but shedding the pretense little by little as his impatience grew. And when his back was turned I summoned all my courage, and jumped.”

  The innkeeper turned to face him again. “You are fortunate that you became an yddek. I saw the sorcerer turn in surprise the moment you appeared. He sensed your intrusion into his dream, and raced from door to door, to see if it was Macadra who had come. His glance fell on you, but he has seen many yddeks in his time and thought nothing of it. But had you taken this form—”

  “He would surely have known me,” said Felthrup, raising his mangled forepaw and twitching his stumpy tail.

  “You were fortunate in another way, too,” said Orfuin. “Yddeks have very sharp ears. I assume you heard what they said on this terrace?”

  “Much of it, Mr. Orfuin,” said Felthrup, “and all that I heard was terrible. Arunis seeks the complete elimination of human beings from the world! And that woman Macadra seems to share his wish, although she denies it—and something he whispered, something I did not hear, came to her as a brutal shock. Yet I still have no idea who she is. Can you tell me?”