The Seared Lands

by Deborah A. Wolf

  “It probably is a trap,” she allowed. “The trees—”

  “Not the trees. Not just the trees, ta?” She nodded at Daru. “That one. You are certain this man is the same boy you lost?” It was not the first time she had asked.

  “Yes,” Sulema told her, and it was true. She was not sure that the trees in this place were really trees, or that the birds in this place were really birds, but Daru was Daru, sweet and true of heart, and always had been. “I am certain. He was my mother’s apprentice. I trust him with my life.”

  The tall woman snorted. “You trust him with all our lives. Too easily, I think. At your word we have followed this stranger through a strange land, following blind as cave rats. What if he is leading us into a trap, as I suspect? Or… what if he leads us back to our own world, but we emerge into our world years older, as you say he has done?”

  “Well,” Sulema told her as the chorus of screaming howls sprang up behind them with renewed vigor, “I suppose you could try to retrace our steps and somehow make your way to the Seared Lands to be eaten by reavers. For my part, I am going to follow Daru to Min Yaarif. The food is better there, for one thing.”

  Tamimeha’s lush mouth quirked and she almost smiled. “Beg your dragon you are right, greenlander. Because if you are not—”

  The howls grew closer.

  “—we are food. I believe we are being hunted.”

  “We are being hunted,” Daru agreed, “and the hounds are quite close. We should hurry. But we are nearly there, if the place has not moved.”

  “Nearly where?”

  “Nearly to a place where a door opens into the foothills of the Jehannim, not far from Min Yaarif. I have used this way before, many times—” He sighed wearily. “If the place has not moved this time. When we are close I will open the way, and you must gather the people and send them through quickly. Very quickly—we will not have much time. When the last of them has left Shehannam I will see to it that the way is shut, so that nothing might escape.”

  “Escape?” Sulema asked. That did not sound promising.

  “What do you mean, ‘this time’?” Tamimeha asked, frown deepening.

  But Daru did not answer their questions. He simply raised the flute back to his lips and played on as he led them through the hostile forest toward an uncertain future.

  * * *

  The clearing to which Daru led them seemed small at first glance—too small to accommodate the throng of weary and frightened people—but either the trees made way, expanding in an ever-widening circle, or things were not as they appeared to her eyes.

  Either way, Sulema would be glad to leave Shehannam as quickly as possible. It had not been so terrible a place to visit in her dreams, when Jinchua was there to guide her, but she could live the rest of her life without stepping upon these strange and shifting roads, and never feel a moment of regret.

  Yet when they emerged once more into the waking world, what then? It had been a simple plan—somehow she would travel to and then escort a girl through the Seared Lands, retrieve the Mask of Sajani, and—again, somehow—use it to overthrow Pythos, retake the Dragon Throne, then figure out how to wield atulfah so that she could soothe the dragon’s waking dreams and save the world.

  “I wanted an easier path for you,” Hafsa Azeina had said.

  Sulema touched the pouch at her waist, which held the mask, and tightened her grip on the fox-head staff.

  I would have liked an easier path for me, too.

  She missed her mother.

  Her mother’s apprentice—a man full-grown now, powerful and strange—played his bird-skull flute. As he did so the air rippled like water, shuddering and pulsing to the tune of his music, at last parting like the lids of a blind eye. This doorway—for so it seemed to Sulema—grew wide enough that several people might walk through it at once. When Daru stopped and tucked the flute back into its ornate pouch, it seemed to Sulema that the music played on, tangled in the air like beads braided into a stallion’s mane.

  The way steadied and held, as real as a tent-flap or doorframe in the waking lands. Daru opened his eyes, saw her and smiled, but it was a distracted expression, as if his mind had already flown beyond this small matter of walking between worlds.

  As he has outgrown his clothing, Sulema thought, so has he outgrown us.

  “Is it done?” Maika’s high voice broke through her reverie.

  “It is done,” Daru answered, “and will hold until I close it again. Gather the people and send them through.”

  “Yes, let us be finished with this place,” Maika said as she moved toward the door.

  “I will go ahead of you,” Tamimeha said, stepping before her queen, “and the Dragon Queen with me. You may trust this sorcery, Sulema an Wyvernus ne Atu, but I have my doubts.”

  “As you wish.” Sulema schooled her face to politeness. “But we should—”

  A long, low wail rose into the wind, a cry of such loneliness and despair that tears prickled at Sulema’s eyes. The sound stirred her heart to pity, and to fear; her mother had told her stories, warned her of the dangers she might find if ever she was to enter Shehannam.

  Of this peril, she had warned most vehemently.

  “The Hounds are here,” Sulema breathed. Another cry joined the first. This one sounded… hungry. “We need to leave now.” She had not realized how unquiet the Dreaming Lands were. Between the wail and woe of the Quarabalese, the sound of the hounds, the wind in trees, the song of Shehannam was a paean of pain—

  Until it stopped, and the silence came.

  The wind stopped whistling on the heath. The weary travelers held their breaths. The hounds stopped howling among the trees.

  The Dreaming Lands went quiet as death. All went still; the woods became nothing more than a gathering of trees bearing dumb, blind witness.

  The silence settled upon them like fog. It stole the air from their lungs, stifling the sense of urgency that had brought them all from the deep heart of Saodan through the Edge of the Seared Lands and across the bone-strewn smoking length of the shadowed roads—

  the silence had a name, it was sleepless, it hunted them

  —to die.

  The silence was broken by a fennec’s bark—Fly, foolish girl!—but it was too late to run.

  Three figures emerged from the mute woods. The first was a man, or man-seeming; broad-shouldered and tall with a ragged blue touar sagging round his face. He stopped an arrow’s flight from Sulema; even at such a distance she could see the pale and shining skin of a reaver.

  The second was a boy, perhaps, just shy of manhood. He was dressed in rags that had once been the robes of an apprentice dreamshifter, and stood with his head canted horribly to one side, one arm dangling loose and long as if it had been partly severed. The third figure…

  Sulema stifled a yell. The third was a man she recognized. Had been a man she recognized; dreamshifters from the other prides would often come to consult with her mother, and Hamran of the Nisfim had been no exception. His robes billowed, though the wind had died. Then in the next moment he moved, raising his dreamshifter’s staff as if to greet them, and she saw that the dreamshifter had corpse arms sewn down his sides and back. These twitched and flailed and flopped about so that her stomach heaved at the sight.

  Hamran—the thing that had been Hamran—leveled its staff at her.

  “You sssshall not—”

  The sun rose over Shehannam, warming Sulema’s back. She spared a startled glance over her shoulder and froze in shocked wonder. Maika, the child-queen of Quarabala, had thrown off her robes and blazed with the lights of a thousand worlds. She was the night sky and the stars, eyes round and bright as hunting moons, and her voice when she spoke sent tremors through the land.

  “You dare,” Maika thundered. “Foul thing of Eth, you dare turn that face to me?” The stars on her skin shone so brightly that Sulema could not bear to look upon her any longer. She looked back toward the dark figures who, faced with the splendor that was
Maika, seemed to shrink back upon themselves.

  Then the tormented thing which had been a dreamshifter raised his staff, and his many arms, and hissed. Shadows boiled from the trees and dropped like spiders to fall burning among the massed people.

  Hannei brushed past Sulema and rushed at the corrupted dreamshifter, dark blades drawn, her face a mask of beauty and courage. Daru ran after her, seeming to grow larger with each step, his face hard and fearsome as any warden’s. Maika’s voice raised in a shout—“A’olek hanolo o’aino o’ ainakane au!”—heat seared Sulema’s back, and a burst of incandescent light lit the Dreaming Lands, leaving her half-blinded.

  Sulema shifted her own dreamshifter’s staff to her off hand and reached for the hilt of her shamsi, but froze as a sweet voice whispered in her ear. Little sister, it sang to her. Let me see.

  Sulema had put the mask away when they had come into Shehannam—through the eyes of Sajani the place looked even stranger than it had with her own, and it spoke to her here too sweetly, too convincingly for comfort. As if in a dream she drew the precious thing forth now and pressed it upon her face. It felt warm, as always, and fit better than her own skin.

  A jewel of time lay frozen in her sight, sparkling and pretty and precious. The dreaming shadows of this place had been raised and came against them as an army; Daru stood between these and Hannei, bird-skull flute raised to his lips. Hannei was poised like a dancer on the balls of her feet as she prepared to charge toward the reft Zeeranim, dark blades naked in the half-light. Tamimeha and her warriors were herding their people through the opening Daru had made between worlds, placing their bodies between their countrymen and danger.

  All this she saw in one moment, and this she knew as well: they would die, all of them, their quests and lives come to naught as they fell into shadow. For it had been a trap deftly woven by the Nightmare Man, baited by the loves of her life, and it held her fast. Sulema could, if she so chose, run through the portal and into the waking world, saving herself.

  No, she refused, countering the mask’s unspoken suggestion. No.

  Very well, replied the mask.

  The next moment in time took a breath, setting the world to motion.

  The big reaver, who had once been a warden, rushed sideways and leapt toward Hannei. His insectoid eyes shone with delight—

  —but so did hers.

  Hannei was beauty in youth and beauty in death as those blades danced to meet the reavers. She moved with all the deadly grace and speed of a wild vash’ai; Sulema knew in that instant that their match in the fighting-pit had been nothing, a child’s game. Hannei Two-Blades, vengeance made flesh, was not playing now; her blades whistled through the air, calling for the reaver’s second and final demise.

  The smaller reaver, who had once been a boy even as Daru had been a boy, stretched his mouth impossibly wide and crouched, burnt eyes fixed on Sulema, hissing a death-rattle at her. But before he could leap Maika stepped into Sulema’s line of sight, and she had been transformed by the moons-and-stars of an Illindrist’s magic. The young queen’s arms were raised as if in supplication, and she held the oracular spider cupped in her small hands. A seething mass of shadow boiled in the air before her. Tendrils of the stuff tore loose, whipping toward the boy reaver. He squealed, leaping back and away.

  There was no time for wonder. The Arachnist-dreamshifter’s many arms twitched, reaching for Sulema, and he screeched. Tangled webs of twisted weaving poured forth from the dark forest. This conjuration rose high, higher than the trees, obliterating the wool-gray sky. A plague of shadows rained down to land between the people and the wide doorway; they flew on wings of fear and crawled on legs of wrath and they were legion, they were endless, they were the death of all hope.

  Even now you can save yourself, crooned the Mask of Sajani in Sulema’s mind. You have only to leave your companions behind, and they are going to die anyway. Their flesh will slow the advance of our enemies, their blood will slake the shadows’ thirst for yours. You have only to run through the doorway and you will be safe, you will be free.

  Sulema drew her sword and laughed. “You do not know me,” she said aloud. “I am a churra-headed brat, rash and foolish, and my faults are many. But I would never, never, abandon those I love.”

  Nor, it seemed, would those who had loved Sulema abandon her.

  From the deeps of the dreaming forest came a ringing call, golden and pure as the reavers were foul. A bright light rose from behind the shadowed trees; it came with cleansing fire as no dawn ever could in the Dreaming Lands, driving out the unclean shadows before it. Hounds poured into the clearing, red-eyed and terrible, their slavering jaws flecked with bloodfoam and joy in their bass bayings as they fell upon the befouled shadows.

  The reft warden had fallen to Hannei’s blades, and the reft boy had been smothered beneath the weight of Maika’s weavings. The Arachnist-dreamshifter raised his arms, raised his staff, and the putrid pulse of his power trembled through the thick air as he raised nightmares to life in the Dreaming Lands—

  You have passed the test, little one, the Mask of Sajani sang. Her voice was a light in the dark places of Sulema’s heart. She raised her own voice in song, like her father’s yet unlike, green and cool and full of life where his had been hot and wrathful. Green things sprang up at the feet of the corrupted dreamshifter; vines wove about his feet, up his legs, winding round and round his many arms, trapping them against his side. The wide fanged mouth and burning eyes were lost to sight as a profusion of foliage smothered the nightmare thing, circling it as a forest might creep round an abandoned tower in a thousand years’ time. Sulema sang, and Sajani laughed, as a green mound rose up to stand where the reft shadowmancer had been. It burst into bloom, a riot of colors for which Sulema had no names. As the dreamshifter came to this final verdant end his shadows burst into black dust which disappeared before it hit the ground.

  The horn sounded again, a single clear note of victory, and the hounds faded back into the woods whence they had come. One of them, a massive pale beast with golden eyes, paused to regard Sulema for a long moment with eyes that held a mother’s measure of suffering and love. Sulema took a step toward the beast, hand outstretched, as a terrible certainty rose in her heart.

  A wail of terror rose up from the people of Quarabala. Daru touched her shoulder. His face was streaked with blood and soot, and his eyes were bright with grief.

  “Sulema,” he said. “We need to go. We need to get these people out of here; these lands belong to the Huntress. She suffers our presence for now, but if we linger—”

  “My mother,” she protested, turning to him. “Daru, that hound is—”

  “Shhhhh,” he said. “To speak of this is khutlani.”

  “You knew…?”

  “Khutlani,” he said again, and there was iron in his voice. “We need to leave now, Sulema. I cannot hold this Way open indefinitely, and if any are still here when it closes—”

  Child, Jinchua urged, and her voice was not laughing. Sweet child. You must do as the waymaster says; there is nothing more you can do for your mother. She knew the price, and paid it willingly.

  “We will go,” Sulema said. Her voice cracked on that last word, and she hardened her heart. In this, she was her mother’s daughter. “Tamimeha!” she called, seeing that the woman had survived and was walking toward her. “The way is open—we need to get these people out of here as quickly as possible.”

  Tamimeha gave a quick, short nod and raised a shout; the people of Quarabala began to pour out of the Dreaming Lands and into whatever future lay before them.

  “This is not over,” she said to Daru. “If my mother is being held here in some form—”

  “Beware of promises made in the Dreaming Lands, Dreamshifter,” he warned. “There are forces here beyond your understanding.”

  Sulema snorted a laugh. “There are many things beyond my understanding, Daru,” she told him. “But you should know this—if my mother is a prisoner here, I will re
turn, and I will free her. I swear it.”

  “Sulema—”

  “I swear it,” she insisted, and brought her staff down hard upon the ground once, twice, three times. “By my blood I do.”

  Somewhere deep in Shehannam the Huntress raised a golden shofar to her lips, and blew once, twice, three times.

  It is done.

  * * *

  Those who had survived the exodus from the Seared Lands emerged wounded and weary into the waking world not far from Min Yaarif beside the twisted pillars of stone so like the Bones of Eth. The russet earth was hot as yesterday’s embers, the sky a thin and angry blue, and Sulema could smell the city’s shit-pits even from a distance. She was so glad to be once again in the waking world, and away from the Seared Lands, that she could have wept.

  Rehaza Entanye took a deep breath of the foul air.

  “Ahhh,” she sighed, “thank Atu, I am home.”

  “Uh!” Maika twisted her tear-streaked face. “It stinks!”

  Rehaza Entanye spat. “You think this stinks, you should smell the slave pits, eh—”

  Abruptly Hannei reached for her swords.

  “Ware!” Daru cried in a voice like that of a hunting eagle. He pointed at the twisted stone pillars, from between which a hooded figure emerged.

  Nightmare Man, was Sulema’s first thought. She had half expected him to be waiting for her, him and Pythos, to snatch her up before she could lay claim to the wretched throne. At second glance, however, she saw that the figure was female, slight of build and bold in manner. She had a warrior’s swagger, though she wore no vest and bore no sword. Her dark arms were mottled from bonding, though there was no vash’ai at her side. She led a chestnut stallion, older but fine enough to—

  Sulema jerked, and Hannei’s jaw dropped open.

  “Thief!” Sulema shouted and started toward the woman, staff upraised as fury and grief bloomed in her heart. It was too much; after the golden-eyed hound, it was too much. The old chestnut stallion could be none other than Ani’s Talieso, and there was no way short of murder that any stranger might claim him. Behind her she heard Hannei’s blades whisper free of their sheaths, eager for blood. “Step away from that horse. Do it now.” She raised the fox-head staff and felt atulfah stir in the ground beneath, the sky above, the air in her lungs. “I said—”