Black Pearl Dreaming

by K. Bird Lincoln

  No running away.

  Maybe if I repeated it another hundred times I could control my racing heart and the urge to jerk out of Ken’s grasp.

  “You’re sure this is the best way?”

  Ken maneuvered us closer to the water. “She can’t be free until you break her out of the dreaming. She’s suffered long enough for the Council’s pleasure.”

  The Black Pearl’s head rose from the coils of her body, blinking double eyelids, the fleshy frilled protrusions around her eyes and along her jaw glistening wetly in the morning sun. She seemed confused, but no longer wildly thrashing.

  “I won’t…I can’t hurt you.” Was I saying it to the Black Pearl or Ken?

  Ken squeezed my wrist. “Your heart is strong enough for this, Koi. I can do this. You can do this.”

  “I’ll never forgive you if you die.”

  “Yukiko won’t let that happen.” Ken’s voice was firm, but a fierce tic pulsed in his jaw. He’d gone feral Kitsune again, all sharp planes and bloodless lips pressed together in a grim line of terrible resolve. And the sight of him, even bruised and bloodied, still had the power to make my chest ache with an urge to feel those lips on my own, to breathe in his Old Spice and for a short space, not be alone with my fear of becoming a monster.

  Morbanoid Koi understood why Ken risked his life. It was atonement. It made sense in a way I hadn’t understood until Ullikemi’s fierce desire for the sun, Mangasar Hayk’s evil, and Tojo’s ruthlessness. Something had to be done and I was the one with the power to do that something.

  “Into the breach,” I said, and stepped through crushed cat tails with Yukiko and Ken sidling after me. The water was a chill shock that grew colder by degrees. It didn’t matter, I had to push forward over shifting river rocks and ankle-grabbing slimy river plants. Yukiko kept that cold gaze fastened on the Black Pearl, but I didn’t dare pay attention to her for too long. Instead I concentrated on trying to catch hold of a nearby floating coil.

  “Watch out!” Kwaskwi called from above. The Black Pearl’s tail swiped toward us in a rolling wave of brackish water. Ken waded in front of me with surprising speed, using his arms to deflect the impact. With a sharp cry of pain he teetered and began to tip over in slow motion, eyes closed tightly in a face gone as pale as Yukiko’s.

  I grabbed his arm just as Yukiko caught the slim end of the Black Pearl’s gray-tipped tail and slapped it around my bare wrist. A fleeting impression of a hand formed of ice pressing my neck and wet sandpaper on my wrist touched me before the world swiveled in on itself like a movie camera shutter.

  A dream. No, two dreams—Yukiko and the Black Pearl—jostled for dominance in a nausea-producing psychedelic dance of gray, white and black, fading finally into blessed darkness.

  A white web of cracks split the bottom left corner and spread in diagonal bursts with a heart-stopping wave of needling cold and the sting of ozone. A precarious urgency gripped me, like standing on tip-toes, reaching for the last clean shoyu dish from the high shelf at Marinopolis. Then the darkness shattered, spinning away in shards.

  I swam in my river. The metallic, decayed flesh tang of the water, the tiny shapes of darting fish, and the warm sunlight meant home and contentment. The powerful flex of my tail sent me streaming through the water, my length undulating in rhythmic harmony with the current. Warmth on my back made me fairly vibrate with happiness, a song that spiraled out from me in all directions, communicated up and down the river in a joyful prayer to Abka Hehe. She would surely send her spotted kesike servants to sing feline yowls with me.

  What then is that oddly elongated shadow disturbing the bang huahua yu ahead of my path?

  Just ahead, around the bend, the river entered a narrow valley where the sturgeon glided like torpid ghosts, an easy meal for an agile river dragon, but that shadow was no sturgeon.

  Another thought appeared startling in its simple clarity: It is Koi who knows this. I am Koi.

  I paused, muscles spasming up and down my undulating spine, gliding blind as double eyelids shut in surprise. I am Muduri Nitchuyhe and you are Baku!

  I reared out of the water only to crash down again in an explosion of frothing water; a choking cloud of plant slime and pebbles and mud.

  Time froze. Silt particles suspended in the water were eerily distinct, as was the surprised eye of a brown-silver fish caught mid-flight from my snout.

  And then the world spun 360 degrees, vertigo morphing to top-of-a-rollercoaster breathlessness, before morphing again to sour nausea.

  Then cold. Glaring, caustic, bone-eating, gorgeous cold. The white perfection of snow-covered land in an unbroken expanse with room enough to breathe and to grow. Teasing wind drove the far-off mournful cry of wolves to my ears, but they were only a minor irritation in the glory of the sunlit morning. I pressed bare soles into packed snow, hardening foot prints into ice, and opened my arms to the whistling wind teasing snarls into my long white hair.

  Yukiko’s fragment? How did I—?

  A flame burst into life within, the crawling heat making me wrinkle my nose in distaste. Acting on instinct, I flung myself to the ground, inhaling sweet snow as a great weight shook loose with a yank that tore through each individual cell in my body. Gasping on my back, I stared up at an endless watery blue sky. I flipped over, only to have the sky blocked by a face so pale it was easily lost in the lazy swirl of delicate wind-driven flakes.

  Yukiko stood over me. Not the Yukiko I’d met, but a primal Yukiko that must have inspired all the deadliest snow maiden stories. Unbound, streaming white hair tangled into knots over her exposed, creamy flesh. Her cheeks shone with a faint fever blush and her eyes, the gelid blue of glaciers, were devoid of fleshly aberrations like emotion.

  I’m in your dream.

  She nodded. I remembered the ice cold hand at my neck just before the dreams. I sat up, distracted by the peculiar homeliness of my own hands. Koi’s hands, bitten cuticles and healing scratches from the airport attack so long ago. Eons ago.

  You grabbed me in the river to give me your dream? Why?

  I stood, shivering in the wind despite the steady, warming flame of my Baku self burning within my belly. A wrinkle marred the pale porcelain of her brow. Her eyes narrowed, piercing through flimsy conjecture.

  I remembered Ullikemi’s final dream—the great snake and I in a primeval forest of Ken’s dreaming. In it, I’d had a presence distinct from the dreamer for the first time. Like now. Only this was Yukiko’s primal dream. I had a sense of being Yukiko, like coming in from winter sledding flushed, cheeks wind-burned and still tingling hours afterwards, but also of myself. Is this what it’s like to be invited in? Can I exist as myself, Koi Pierce?

  She gave an impatient nod. Amazing she could convey that mix of disdain and eagerness with such tiny nuanced changes in the muscles of her face. She was giving me her most primal, kernel-self dream. The only reason for pulling me into her dream other than trying to stop me, would be to try to help.

  Someone’s going to have to die, Ken had said in the truck.

  Yukiko was powerful and had accumulated eons of dreaming. It was like offering the Baku hunger a seven layer Opera Cake while Ken was a mere shortbread cookie. The Baku in me hungered for Yukiko, but I held back.

  This isn’t the plan. But even as the thoughts flickered between us, frigid resolve strengthened the piercing challenge of Yukiko’s regard. She knew what I’d left unspoken. This way Ken didn’t get the absolution he craved: risking his life. Anger percolated through the corralled hunger.

  Who are you to take that away from him?

  Yukiko flung her arms wide and the teasing wind swept forward, gentle no longer, gusting strong enough to feel like a punch to the guts, bending me double. The flame of myself deep inside flickered, shrunk to a pinprick. Her bloodless lips curled back in a grimace, revealing pointed canines. With hair streaming like a living, growing ice cloud, she was the very embodiment of winter itself. Some primitive part of my hindbrain recognized a pitiless pre
dator. Fear washed over me.

  The air crackled. My eyelids were frozen open, the inside of my nose scraped raw with killing frost. It hurt to breathe.

  So stop breathing. This is a dream. Fear had woken the survivalist part of me and rekindled a wisp of the little Baku flame. I lusted for the rich bounty of Yukiko’s dream in the same way I’d hungered for Dzunukwa. A dream. And I am a dream eater. So burn, little flame, burn.

  The flame, all that was Koi and Baku, flared with a searing pain across my middle. Still I held it in check. This wasn’t the plan.

  Yukiko’s eyes narrowed to slits of glacial ice, the mortal elemental enemy of fire. She spread her arms again wide and made a harsh whistling noise between clenched teeth. The wind gusted again, knocking me to my knees in the packed snow. I closed my eyes and grit my teeth against the cutting edge of the cold.

  If I die here, will my real body die too?

  Images flashed. Mom’s devastatingly thin face smiling up at me from the worn vinyl of the infusion chair, Marlin clinking her soy mocha against my regular latte at Stumptown with a familiar, endearing impatience, Mt. Hood rising up out of rainclouds over the glass and metal panels of the PCC Sylvania Bookstore like a benediction.

  I don’t want to die. I don’t want to hurt Yukiko, but I am not running away from this. I am Baku. She is in my realm.

  I pried open my eyelids and pushed myself up to a standing kneel. Yukiko gave me a slow, fierce flash of her teeth, ending in a sneer just as another impossibly strong gust of wind knocked me flat on my back.

  Okay, then. Monster it is.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  The floodgates and the fiery hunger burst loose. Baku hunger consumed the wind to feed my Koi-self flame. I shrugged off the prison of Yukiko’s cold. Her eyes widened and an expression disturbingly similar to relief blossomed across her face. Energy, sweet and pure as the driven snow, poured into me.

  My flame burned on.

  Yukiko’s expression screwed into a tight rictus of pain, her hands clawing at her throat like she was choking as energy continued streaming into me, fueling the fire. It burned hotter, gleefully siphoning Yukiko’s dream into a heady fizzing that curled warm and heavy into my belly, spreading through arteries with every exultant beat of my heart.

  And still the power rushed into me as Yukiko sank to her knees in rapidly melting snow. It channeled up through my spine to the base of my skull where it throbbed, pressure building like a strained balloon. It was so much, so much.

  Want more.

  Need more.

  And I didn’t care that Yukiko’s hands dropped and fluttered, weak and useless things, at her sides.

  She was so old, so drenched in accumulated dream-self. How many centuries? Like Thunderbird and Ullikemi and the Black Pearl herself. The only other times I’d eaten dreams like this I’d drowned in sensation, unable to pull away from the influx of power until Ken had given me the strange haven of his primeval forest dream as a safety valve through which to focus the more powerful ancient dreams. In Ken’s dream, I was always standing under the draping filigree boughs of giant cryptomeria cypress, a glowing angelic figure utterly foreign from my own self-image. And yet each time, that image pulled me back to my Koi-self.

  I am holding Ken’s arm.

  Somewhere underneath Yukiko’s frozen plains and the Black Pearl’s sun-kissed river was Ken and his forest, if I could dig down to find it.

  Pain grew, spreading twisting buds all over my head and shoulders, unfurling petals of molten metal to press against my brain. Still, Yukiko’s dream burned on, perma-ice consumed by Baku hunger and transformed into a gushing fountain of heat.

  No. Enough.

  But there was no cessation in the dream. Yukiko wanted me here, she’d invited me into the deep center of herself. And she goaded me into eating this dream with abandon, taking us dangerously close to the point where I’d take it all. Putting herself in danger for the Black Pearl? To protect Ken? Or out of disdain for Ken’s Hafu status and the paltry bit of power his dream could give me? We’d switched places in the dreamscape, Yukiko sprawled back on the snow, somehow turning paler while I loomed over her like some mad elemental. The gushing fountain slowed to a trickle. Still Yukiko didn’t fight or protest.

  You’re dying.

  The snow was melting, and with it the hot edge of my anger. Time sped up, like watching time-lapse footage on the Nature Channel. In no time at all the white expanse transmuted into mud. Slender, green shoots poked up, unfurling into tundra grass. Yukiko was a splatter of white stillness in the ocean of gently waving grass.

  What have I done?

  Pain spiked through my temples, each breath dragged through cages of iron. I was filled to the bursting and all that power needed to go somewhere or I would explode into fragments like a dream grenade.

  The Black Pearl. A voice like a weak sigh at the outermost borders of my consciousness. Yukiko. Free her.

  I stepped back from her body, horror twisting tendrils all along the spikes of pain. She wanted to die, to give her life’s energy to set the Black Pearl free forever from decades of Baku-induced dreaming. I was the gun in the hand of the suicide.

  I shook my head in denial, gasping with the agony of that movement. I couldn’t handle eating the Black Pearl’s dream on top of hers without a focus or release.

  I tried calling up the verdant scent of ferns and the cool mist of the forest. But that connection faltered against a wall of unease and confusion where there used to be the peaceful haven of Ken’s forest dream. He’d given my name to the Council, kept back his true age, his parentage, and he’d fooled me into thinking he was the Council’s slave. I no longer trusted that this was Ken’s core dream of himself. What if the primal forest was just another layer of Kitsune illusion? Pain equal to the pounding in my temples arced across my chest like a Tesla Coil. I couldn’t think straight.

  Ken’s dream wouldn’t work. The Black Pearl was the only being here I could really trust. I’d focus on her.

  I began to hum, a vibration low in the back of my throat, and, instead of forest, reached for sun-kissed waters and the blessing of the Black Pearl’s praise song for her divine benefactor.

  My grassy plain blurred, the colors dripping down around like melting Jell-O in the summer heat. Too late I reached out for Yukiko, but she was gone in an instant, her pale form blotted out by muddy browns and greens that swirled in chaotic patterns like four-year-old Marlin with tempera paints and a Spirograph. Abruptly, the bottom dropped out of my stomach.

  When the world settled into itself, I stood on the banks of the Heilong Jiang, staring at the Black Pearl as she stretched out full-length in her beloved river resonating with whalesong at a harmonic fifth below mine. Oh. I am still me even here in her dream.

  Burning down through Yukiko’s dream back to the Black Pearl’s had released a scant bit of the building energy, but it was only enough room for a few breaths. I patted down the familiar curves of my own body with trembling hands still chilled by Yukiko’s snow.

  Abka Hehe? The Black Pearl raised her head to face me, river water streaming from the fleshy frills around her eyes. The humming prayer stopped. No. You are Baku. A weary sadness tinged the words, evoking years and years of loneliness in her sunless cavern prison. The absence of anger and the abrupt cessation of whalesong etched a hollow depth to the Black Pearl’s grief.

  One tormenter is not enough?

  The outline of a man shimmered into existence next to me. He wore the blue uniform of the Japanese Occupation, younger and less hunched then when I knew him. My heart leapt. Dad? But there was no answer, and the ghostly apparition did not solidify further—a fading ghost memory.

  Disappointment crumbled the bones holding me upright and I sagged to my knees. Of course Dad wasn’t here. Just as this wasn’t the Aisaka but the Black Pearl’s dream memory of the Heilong Jiang. Dad had said once, in a lucid period before the dementia became really bad, we are all alone in death and dreaming. I was on my own figu
ring this out.

  The Black Pearl’s head twisted back and forth in agitation, the movement displacing so much water that my knees were soaked. I thought how Ullikemi had opened gaping jaws and swallowed my head whole in that last dream as I released him, shuddering at the memory of dank snake-breath and darkness.

  Surely it didn’t have to be that way every time. Maybe I just had to be touching the Black Pearl in this dream as I was in real life. I scrambled forward on hands and knees into the river. Let me help you.

  Full of lies! Enemy! The Black Pearl’s tail lashed out of the water. I ducked, getting a face full of the rotting leaf matter that floated on top. The massive tail skimmed over my head and came down with a solid thwack on top of Dad’s ghost. It winked out with a little sucking noise.

  I opened my arms in supplication. I am Koi AweoAweo Pierce Herai, I said, giving the Black Pearl my name in desperation. I am not my father. I am American. I just met the Council two days ago.

  You expect me to trust when the enemy skulks in your shadow?

  What?

  There was another outline of a man, not a shimmering ghost this time, but an oozing inky darkness submerged on the near side of the river. Overshadowed by a hanging willow branch, it had been easily missed, but it began to swim closer. Now that I saw it, I couldn’t tear my eyes away, mesmerized by the dark swirls and ripples that hinted at the shape of human limbs. Power leaked from my eyes and ears like snow-colored blood, carried by strangely direct eddies toward the shadow.

  Eagerness, anger, and a colossal certainty emanated from it, re-orienting the dream world so that the shadow was the center of everything.

  I didn’t bring that here.

  The Black Pearl submerged her head, bunching muscles all along her spine.

  No! Stay, please. I lurched deeper into the river, hands reaching for the iridescent glinting black scales of her disappearing mid-section.