Dust of Dreams

by Steven Erikson

  And no one is a better liar than the culpable. So he’d done nothing to deserve any of this. He’d only ever done what he needed to do to get by, to slip round and slide through. To go on living, feeding all his habits, all his wants and needs. The killer had no reason!

  Gasping, he ran down corridor after corridor, through strange rooms, on to spiralling ascents and descents. He told himself that he was so lost no one would ever find him.

  Lost in my maze of excuses—stop! I didn’t think that. I never said that. Has he found me? Has the bastard found me?

  He’d somehow misplaced his weapons, every one of them—how did that happen? Whimpering, Sheb rushed onward—ahead was a bridge of some sort, crossing a cavernous expanse that seemed to be filling with clouds.

  All my life, I tried to keep my head down. I never wanted to be noticed. Just grab what I can and get out, get free, until the next thing I need comes up. It was simple. It made sense. No one should kill me for that.

  He had no idea how thinking could be so exhausting. Staggering on to the bridge, iron grating under his boots—what was wrong with damned wood? Coughing in the foul vapours of the clouds, eyes stinging, nose burning, he stumbled to a halt.

  He’d gone far enough. Everything he did, he’d done for a reason. As simple as that.

  But so many were hurt, Sheb.

  ‘Not my fault they couldn’t get out of the way. If they’d any brains they’d have seen me coming.’

  The way you lived forced others into lives of misery, Sheb.

  ‘I can’t help it if they couldn’t do no better!’

  They couldn’t. They weren’t even people.

  ‘What?’ He looked up, into the killer’s eyes. ‘No, it’s not fair.’

  ‘That’s right, Sheb. It isn’t, and it never was.’

  The blade lashed out.

  The ghost shrieked. Suddenly trapped in the Matron’s chamber. Mists roiled. Rautos was on his knees, weeping uncontrollably. Breath was casting her tiles, which were no longer tiles, but coins, glittering and bright—yet every pattern she scanned elicited a snarl from her, and she swept them up yet again—the manic snap and bounce of coins filled the air.

  ‘No answers,’ she hissed. ‘No answers! No answers!’

  Taxilian stood before the enormous throne, muttering under his breath. ‘Sulkit transformed it—and now it waits—everything waits. I don’t understand.’

  Sulkit stood nearby. Its entire body had changed shape, elongating, shoulders hunched, its snout foreshortened and broader, fangs gleaming wet with oils. Grey reptilian eyes held fixed, unblinking—the drone was a drone no longer. Now a J’an Sentinel, he stood facing the ghost.

  The unhuman regard was unbearable.

  Veed strode into the chamber and halted. Sword blade dripping gore, the front of his studded vest spattered and streaked. His face was lifeless. His eyes were the eyes of a blind man. ‘Hello, old friend,’ he said. ‘Where should I start?’

  The ghost recoiled.

  Rautos stood facing his wife. Another evening spent in silence, but now there was something raw in the air. She was searching his face and her expression was strange and bleak. ‘Have you no pity, husband?’

  ‘Pity,’ he’d replied, ‘is all I have.’

  She’d looked away. ‘I see.’

  ‘You surrendered long ago,’ he said. ‘I never understood that.’

  ‘Not everyone surrenders willingly, Rautos.’

  He studied her. ‘But where did you find your joy, Eskil? Day after day, night after night, where was your pleasure in living?’

  ‘You stopped looking for that long ago.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You found your hobbies. The only time your eyes came alive. My joy, husband, was in you. Until you went away.’

  Yes, he remembered this now. One night, one single night. ‘That was wrong,’ he’d said, his voice hoarse. ‘To put all that . . . in someone else.’

  Her shrug horrified him. ‘Overwhelmed, were you? But Rautos, that’s just not so, is it? After all, you can’t be overwhelmed by something you don’t even bother to notice.’

  ‘I noticed.’

  ‘And so you turned away from me. Until, as you say, here you stand with nothing in your heart but pity. You once said you loved me.’

  ‘I once did.’

  ‘Rautos Hivanar, what are these things you are digging up from the river bank?’

  ‘Mechanisms. I think.’

  ‘What so fascinates you about them?’

  ‘I don’t know. I cannot glean their purpose, their function—why are we talking about this?’

  ‘Rautos, listen. They’re just pieces. The machine, whatever it was, whatever it did, it’s broken.’

  ‘Eskil, go to bed.’

  And so she did, ending the last real conversation between them. He remembered sitting down, his hands to his face, outwardly silent and motionless yet inside he was wracked with sobs. Yes, it was broken. He knew that. And not a single piece left made any sense. And all his pity, well, turned out it was all he had for himself, too.

  Rautos felt the bite of the blade and in the moment before the pain rushed in, he managed a smile.

  Veed stood over the corpse, and then swung his gaze to Taxilian. Held there for a moment, before his attention drifted to Breath. She was on her knees, scraping coins into her hands.

  ‘No solutions. No answers. They should be here, in these! These fix everything—everyone knows that! Where is the magic?’

  ‘Illusions, you mean,’ Veed said, grinning.

  ‘The best kind! And now the water’s rising—I can’t breathe!’

  ‘He should never have accepted you, Feather Witch. You understand that, don’t you? Yes, they were all mistakes, all fragments of lives he took inside like so much smoke and dust, but you were the worst of them. The Errant drowned you—and then walked away from your soul. He should not have done that, for you were too potent, too dangerous. You ate his damned eye.’

  Her head snapped up, a crazed grin smeared across her face. ‘Elder blood! I hold his debt!’

  Veed glanced at the ghost. ‘He sought to do what K’rul did so long ago,’ he said, ‘but Icarium is not an Elder God.’ He regarded Feather Witch again. ‘He wanted warrens of his own, enough to trap him in one place, as if it was a web. Trap him in place. Trap him in time.’

  ‘The debt is mine!’ Feather Witch shrieked.

  ‘Not any more,’ said Veed. ‘It is now Icarium Lifestealer’s.’

  ‘He’s broken!’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘It’s not his fault!’

  ‘No, it isn’t, and no, it’s not fair either. But there is blood on his hands, and terror in his heart. It seems we must all feed him something, doesn’t it? Or perhaps it was the other way round. But the ghost is here now, with us. Icarium is here. Time to die, Feather Witch. Taxilian.’

  ‘And you?’ Taxilian asked.

  Veed smiled. ‘Me, too.’

  ‘Why?’ Taxilian demanded. ‘Why now?’

  ‘Because Lifestealer is where he must be. At this moment, he is in place. And we must all step aside.’ And Veed turned to face the ghost. ‘The J’an sees only you, Icarium. The Nest is ready, the flavours altered to your . . . tastes.’ He gestured and the ghost saw that both Feather Witch and Taxilian had vanished. ‘Don’t think you are quite rid of us—we’re just back inside you, old friend. We’re the stains on your soul.’

  The ghost looked down and saw grey-green skin, long-fingered, scarred hands. He lifted them to touch his face, fingers brushing the tusks jutting from his lower jaw. ‘What must I do?’

  But Veed was gone. He was alone in the chamber.

  The J’an Sentinel, Sulkit, stood watching him. Waiting.

  Icarium faced the throne. A machine. A thing of veins and arteries and bitter oils. A binder of time, the maker of certainty.

  The flavours swirled round him. The entire towering city of stone and iron trembled.

  I am aw
ake—no. I am . . . reborn.

  Icarium Lifestealer walked forward to take his throne.

  The shore formed a ragged line, the bleak sweep of darkness manifested in all the natural ways—the sward leading to the bank that then dropped to the beach itself, the sky directly overhead onyx as a starless night yet smeared with pewter clouds—the realm behind them, then, a vast promise of purity at their backs. But the strand glowed, and as Yan Tovis dismounted and walked down her boots sank into the incandescent sand. Reaching down—not yet ready to fix her gaze on what was beyond the shoreline—she scooped up a handful. Cool, surprisingly light—she squinted.

  Not crumbled coral. Not stone.

  ‘It’s bone,’ said Yedan Derryg, standing a few paces to her left. ‘See that driftwood? Long bones, mostly. Those cobbles, they’re—’

  ‘Yes,’ she snapped. ‘I know.’ She flung away the handful of bone fragments.

  ‘It was easier,’ he continued, ‘from back there. We’re too close—’

  ‘Be quiet, will you?’

  Suddenly defiant, she willed herself to look—and reeled back a step, breath hissing from between her teeth.

  A sea indeed, yet one that rose like a wall, its waves rolling down to foam at the waterline. She grunted. But this was not water at all. It was . . . light.

  Behind her, Yedan Derryg said, ‘Memories return. When they walked out from the Light, their purity blinded us. We thought that a blessing, when in truth it was an attack. When we shielded our eyes, we freed them to indulge their treacherous ways.’

  ‘Yedan, the story is known to me—’

  ‘Differently.’

  She came near to gasping in relief as she turned from the vast falling wall to face her brother. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘The Watch serves the Shore in its own way.’

  ‘Then, in turn, I must possess knowledge that you don’t—is that what you’re saying, brother?’

  ‘The Queen is Twilight, because she can be no other. She holds the falling of night. She is the first defender against the legions of light that would destroy darkness itself. But we did not ask for this. Mother Dark yielded, and so, to mark that yielding, Twilight relives it.’

  ‘Again and again. For ever.’

  Yedan’s bearded jaws bunched, his face still stained with blood. Then he shook his head. ‘Nothing’s for ever, sister.’

  ‘Did we really lack sophistication, Yedan? Back then? Were we really that superstitious, that ignorant?’

  His brows lifted.

  She gestured at the seething realm behind her. ‘This is the true border of Thyrllan. It’s that and nothing more. The First Shore is the shore between Darkness and Light. We thought we were born on this shore—right here—but that cannot be true! This shore destroys—can you not feel it? Where do you think all these bones came from?’

  ‘This was a gift to no one,’ Yedan replied. ‘Look into the water, sister. Look deep into it.’

  But she would not. She had already seen what he had seen. ‘They cannot be drowning—no matter what it looks like—’

  ‘You are wrong. Tell me, why are there so few Liosan? Why is the power that is Light so weak in all the other worlds?’

  ‘If it wasn’t we would all die—there’d be no life anywhere at all!’

  He shrugged. ‘I have no answer to that, sister. But I think that Mother Dark and Father Light, in binding themselves to each other, in turn bound their fates. And when she turned away, so did he. He had no choice—they had become forces intertwined, perfect reflections. Father Light abandoned his children and they became a people lost—and lost they remain.’

  She was trembling. Yedan’s vision was monstrous. ‘It cannot be. The Tiste Andii weren’t trapped. They got away.’

  ‘They found a way out, yes.’

  ‘How?’

  He cocked his head. ‘Us, of course.’

  ‘What are you saying?’

  “In Twilight was born Shadow.”

  ‘I was told none of this! I don’t believe you! What you’re saying makes no sense, Yedan. Shadow was the bastard get of Dark and Light—commanded by neither—’

  ‘Twilight, Shadow is everything we have ever known. Indeed, it is everywhere.’

  ‘But it was destroyed!’

  ‘Shattered, yes. Look at the beach. Those bones—they belong to the Shake. We were assailed from both sides—we didn’t stand a chance—that any of us survived at all is a miracle. Shadow was first shattered by the legions of Andii and the legions of Liosan. Purity cannot abide imperfection. In the eyes of purity, it becomes an abomination.’

  She was shaking her head. ‘Shadow was the realm of the Edur—it has nothing to do with us, with the Shake.’

  Yedan smiled—she could not even recall the last time he had done that and the sight of it jolted her. He nodded. ‘Our very own bastard get.’

  She sank down to her knees in the bed of crumbled bone. She could hear the sea now, could hear the waves rolling down—and beneath all of that she could hear the deluged voices of the doomed behind the surface. He turned away when she did. But his children had no way out. We held against them, here. We stood and we died defending our realm. ‘Our blood was royal,’ she whispered.

  Her brother was beside her now, and one hand rested on her shoulder. ‘Scar Bandaris, the last prince of the Edur. King, I suppose, by then. He saw in us the sins not of the father, but of the mother. He left us and took all the Edur with him. He told us to hold, to ensure his escape. He said it was all we deserved, for we were our mother’s children, and was she not the seducer and the father the seduced?’ He was silent for a moment, and then he grunted and said, ‘I wonder if the last of us left set out on his trail with vengeance in mind, or was it because we had nowhere else to go? By then, after all, Shadow had become the battlefield of every Elder force, not just the Tiste—it was being torn apart, with blood-soaked forces dividing every spoil, every territory—what were they called again? Yes, warrens. Every world was made an island, isolated in an ocean of chaos.’

  Her eyes felt raw, but not a single tear sprang loose. ‘We could not have survived that,’ she said. ‘That assault you described. You called it a miracle that we survived, but I know how—though I never understood its meaning—not until your words today.’

  Yedan said, ‘The Watch commanded the legions, and we held until we were told to withdraw. It’s said there were but a handful of us left by then, elite officers one and all. They were the Watch. The Road was open then—we but marched.’

  ‘It was open because of Blind Gallan.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Because,’ she looked up at him, ‘he was told to save us.’

  ‘Gallan was a poet—’

  ‘And Seneschal of the Court of Mages in Kharkanas.’

  He chewed on this for a while, glanced away, studying the swirling wall of light and the ceaseless sweep of figures in the depths, faces stretched in muted screams—an entire civilization trapped in eternal torment—but she saw not a flicker of emotion touch his face. ‘A great power, then.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘There was civil war. Who could have commanded him to do anything?’

  ‘One possessing the Blood of T’iam, and a prince of Kharkanas.’

  She watched his eyes slowly widen, but still he stared at the wall. ‘Now why,’ he asked, ‘would an Andii prince have done that?’

  She shook her head. ‘It’s said he strode down to the First Shore, terribly wounded, sheathed in blood. It’s said he looked upon the Shake, at how few of us were left, and at the ruin surrounding us—the death of the forests, the charred wreckage of our homes. He held a broken sword in one hand, a Hust sword, and it was seen to fall from his grip. He left it here.’

  ‘That’s all? Then how do you know he commanded Gallan to do anything?’

  ‘When Gallan arrived he told the Twilight—he had torn out his eyes by then and was accompanied by an Andii woman who led him by an arm down from the shattered forest—he
came down like a man dying of fever but when he spoke, his voice was clear and pure as music. He said to her these words:

  “There is no grief in Darkness.

  It has taken to the skies.

  It leaves a world of ashes and failure.

  It sets out to find new worlds, as grief must.

  Winged grief commands me:

  Make a road for the survivors on the Shore

  To walk the paths of sorrow

  And charge them the remembrance

  Of this broken day

  As it shall one day be seen:

  As the birth of worlds unending

  Where grief waits for us all

  In the soul’s darkness.” ’

  She slipped out from the weight of his hand and straightened, brushing bone dust from her knees. ‘He was asked, then, who was this Winged Grief? And Gallan said, “There is but one left who would dare command me. One who would not weep and yet had taken into his soul a people’s sorrow, a realm’s sorrow. His name was Silchas Ruin.” ’

  Yedan scanned the beach. ‘What happened to the broken sword?’

  She started, recovered. Why, after all this time, could her brother still surprise her? ‘The woman with Gallan picked it up and threw it into the sea.’

  His head snapped round. ‘Why would she do that?’

  Yan Tovis held up her hands. ‘She never explained.’

  Yedan faced the refulgent wall again, as if seeking to pierce its depths, as if looking for the damned sword.

  ‘It was just a broken sword—’

  ‘A Hust sword—you said so.’

  ‘I don’t even know what that means, except it’s the name for Ruin’s weapon.’

  He grimaced. ‘It should have healed by now,’ he muttered, walking out on to the strand, eyes scanning the pallid beach. ‘Light would reject it, cast it up.’

  She stared after him. Healed? ‘Yedan!’

  He glanced back. ‘What?’

  ‘We cannot live here.’

  ‘No, of course not.’

  ‘But something is happening in Kharkanas—I don’t know if I can even go back there.’