Dust of Dreams

by Erikson, Steven

  The blind are an ocean’s flood

  On the road’s shore

  Walk then unseeing

  Like children with hands outstretched

  Down to valleys of blinding darkness

  The road leads down through shadows

  Of weeping gods

  This sea knows but one tide flowing

  Into sorrow’s depthless chambers

  The sea is shore to the road

  And the road is the sea’s river

  To the blind

  When I hear the first footfalls

  I know the end has come

  And the rain shall rise

  Like children with hands

  Outstretched

  I am the road fleeing the sun

  And the road is blind to the sea

  And the sea is blind to the shore

  And the shore is blind

  To the sea

  The sea is blind …

  RIDDLE OF THE ROAD OF GALLAN

  SHAKE CHANT

  W

  hen leading his warriors, warchief maral eb of the Barahn White Face Barghast liked to imagine himself as the tip of a barbed spearhead, hungry to wound, unerring in its drive. Slashes of red ochre cut through the white paint of his death-face, ran jagged tracks down his arms. His bronze brigandine hauberk and scaled skirt bore the muted tones of blood long dead, and the red-tipped porcupine quills jutting from the spikes of his black, greased hair clattered as he trotted in front of four thousand seasoned warriors.

  The stink from the severed heads swinging from the iron-sheathed standards crowding behind the warchief left a familiar sting in the back of his broad, flattened nose, a cloying presence at the close of his throat, and he was pleased. Pleased, especially, that his two younger brothers carried a pair of those standards.

  They’d stumbled upon the Akrynnai caravan late yesterday afternoon. A pathetic half-dozen guards, five drovers, the merchant and her family. It had been quick work, yet no less delicious for its brevity, tainted only when the merchant took a knife to her daughters and then slit her own throat—gestures of impressive courage that cheated his warriors of their fun. The puny horses in the herd they had slaughtered and feasted upon that night.

  Beneath a cloudless sky, the war-party was cutting westward. A week’s travel would find it in the Kryn Freetrade, the centre of all eastern commerce with Lether. Maral Eb would slaughter everyone and then assume control of the caravanserai and all the trader forts. He would make himself rich and his people powerful. His triumph would elevate the Barahn to the position they rightfully deserved among the White Faces. Onos Toolan would be deposed and the other clans would flock to join Maral. He would carve out an empire, selling Akrynnai and D’ras slaves until the vast plains belonged to the Barghast and no one else. He would set heavy tariffs on the Saphii and Bolkando, and he would build a vast city in Kryn, raising a palace and establishing impregnable fortresses along the borderlands.

  His allies among the Senan had already been instructed to steal for him the twin daughters of Hetan. He would bring them into his own household and when they reached blooding age he would take them as his wives. Hetan’s fate he left to others. There was the young boy, the true son of the Imass, and he would have to be killed, of course. Along with Cafal, to end once and for all Humbrall Taur’s line.

  His musings on the glory awaiting him were interrupted by the sudden appearance ahead of two of his scouts, carrying a body between them.

  Another Barghast—but not one of his own.

  Maral Eb held up one hand, halting his war-party, and then jogged forward to meet the scouts.

  The Barghast was a mess. His left arm was gone below the elbow and the stump seethed with maggots. Fires had melted away half his face and fragments of his armour of tin coinage glittered amidst the weltered ruin of skin and meat on his chest. By the fetishes dangling from his belt Maral knew him to be a Snakehunter, one of the smaller clans.

  He scowled and waved at the flies. ‘Does he live?’

  One of the scouts nodded and then added, ‘Not for much longer, Warchief.’

  ‘Set him down, gently now.’ Maral Eb moved up and knelt beside the young warrior. He swallowed down his disgust and said, ‘Snakehunter, open your eyes. I am Maral Eb of the Barahn. Speak to me, give me your last words. What has befallen you?’

  The one surviving eye that opened was thick with mucus, a dirty yellow rimmed in cracked, swollen flesh. The mouth worked for a moment, and then raw words broke loose. ‘I am Benden Ledag, son of Karavt and Elor. Remember me. I alone survived. I am the last Snakehunter, the last.’

  ‘Does an Akrynnai army await me?’

  ‘I do not know what awaits you, Maral Eb. But I know what awaits me—damnation.’ The face twisted with pain.

  ‘Open your eye—look at me, warrior! Speak to me of your slayer!’

  ‘Damnation, yes. For I fled. I did not stand, did not die with my kin. I ran. A terrified hare, a leap-mouse in the grass.’ Speech was drying out the last fluids within him and his breath grated. ‘Run, Maral Eb. Show me how … how cowards live.’

  Maral Eb made a fist to strike the babbling fool, and then forced himself to relax. ‘The Barahn fear no enemy. We shall avenge you, Benden Ledag. We shall avenge the Snakehunter. And may the souls of your fallen kin hunt you down.’

  The dying fool somehow managed a smile. ‘I will wait for them. I will have a joke, yes, one that will make them smile—as was my way. Zaravow, though, he has no reason to laugh, for I stole his wife—I stole her pleasure—’ he hacked out a laugh. ‘It is what weak men do … have always done.’ The eye suddenly sharpened, fixed on Maral Eb. ‘And you, Barahn, I will wait for you, too.’ The smile faltered, the face lost its clenched pain, and the wind’s air flowed unclaimed through the gape of his mouth.

  Maral Eb stared down into that unseeing eye for a moment. Then he cursed and straightened. ‘Leave him to the crows,’ he said. ‘Sound the horns—draw in the forward scouts. We shall camp here and ready ourselves—there is vengeance in our future, and it shall be sweet.’

  Two of the six women dragged what was left of the horse trader to the gully cutting down the hillside and rolled him into it. Hearing snakes slithering in the thick brush of the gully, they quickly backed away and returned to the others.

  Hessanrala, warleader of this troop of Skincuts, glanced over from the makeshift bridle she was fixing to her new horse, grinned as both women tugged fistfuls of grass to clean the blood and semen from their hands, and said, ‘See to your horses.’

  The one closest to her flung the stained grasses to one side. ‘A nest of vipers,’ she said. ‘Every clump of sagebrush and rillfire swarms with them.’

  ‘Such omens haunt us,’ the other one muttered.

  Hessanrala scowled. ‘A knife to your words, Ralata.’ She waved one hand. ‘Look at this good fortune. Horses for each of us and three more to spare, a bag of coins and mint-soaked bhederin and three skins of water—and did we not amuse ourselves with the pathetic creature? Did we not teach him the gifts of pain?’

  ‘This is all true,’ said Ralata, ‘but I have felt shadows in the night, and the whisper of dread wings. Something stalks us, Hessanrala.’

  In reply the warleader snarled and turned away. She vaulted on to her horse. ‘We are Ahkrata Barghast. Skincuts—and who does not fear the women slayers of the Ahkrata?’ She glared at the others, as if seeking the proper acknowledgement, and seemed satisfied as they drew their mounts round to face her.

  Ralata spat into her hands and took charge of the only saddled horse—the Akrynnai trader’s very own, which she had claimed by right of being the first to touch her blade to the man’s flesh. She set a boot into the stirrup and swung on to the beast’s back. Hessanrala was young. This was her first time as warleader, and she was trying too hard. It was custom that a seasoned warrior volunteer to accompany a new warleader’s troop, lest matters go awry. But Hessanrala was not interested in heeding Ralata, seeing wisdom a
s fear, caution as cowardice.

  She adjusted the fragments of Moranth chitin that served as armour among the Ahkrata, and made sure the chest-plate of Gold was properly centred. Then took a moment to resettle into her nostrils the broad hollow bone plugs that made Ahkrata women the most beautiful among all the White Face Barghast. She swung her horse to face Hessanrala.

  ‘This trader,’ said the warleader with a faint snarl directed at Ralata, ‘was returning to his kin as we all know, having chased him from our camp. We can see the ancient trail he was using. We shall follow it, find the Akrynnai huts, and kill everyone we find.’

  ‘The path leads north,’ said Ralata. ‘We know nothing of what lies in that direction—we might ride into a camp of a thousand Akrynnai warriors.’

  ‘Ralata bleats like a newborn kid, but I hear no pierce-cry of a hawk.’ Hessanrala looked to the others. ‘Do any of you hear the winged hunter? No, only Ralata.’

  Sighing, Ralata made a gesture of release. ‘I am done with you, Hessanrala. I return to our camp, and how many women will come to my Skincut cry? Not five. No, I shall be warleader to a hundred, perhaps more. You, Hessanrala, shall not live long—’ and she looked to the others, was dismayed to see their expressions of disgust and contempt—but they too were young. ‘Follow her into the north, warriors, and you may not return. Those who would join me, do so now.’

  When none made a move, Ralata shrugged and swung her horse round. She set off, southward.

  Once past a rise and out of sight of the troop—which had cantered off in the opposite direction—Ralata reined in. She would have the blood of five foolish girls on her hands. Most would understand her reasons for leaving. They knew Hessanrala, after all. But the families that lost daughters would turn away.

  There was a hawk out there. She knew it with certainty. And the five kids had no shepherd, no hound to guard them. Well, she would be that hound, low in the grasses on their trail, ever watchful. And, should the hawk strike, she would save as many as she could.

  She set out to follow them.

  ______

  The low cairns set in a row across the hill’s summit and leading down the slope were almost entirely overgrown. Windblown soils had heaped up along one side, providing purchase for rillfire trees, their gnarled, low branches spreading out in swaths of sharp thorns. High grasses knotted the other sides. But Tool knew the piles of stone for what they were—ancient blinds and runs built by Imass hunters—and so he was not surprised when they reached the end of the slope and found themselves at the edge of a precipice. Below was a sinkhole, its base thick with skalberry trees. Buried beneath that soil, he knew, there were bones, stacked thick, two or even three times the height of a grown man. In this place, Imass had driven herds to their deaths in great seasonal hunts. If one were to dig beneath the skalberry trees, one would find the remains of bhed and tenag: their bones and shattered horns, tusks, and embedded spear-points of grey chert; one would find, here and there, the skeletons of ay that had been dragged over the cliff’s edge in their zeal—the wolves’ canines filed down to mark them as pups found in the wild, too fierce to have their massive fangs left in place; and perhaps the occasional okral, for the plains bears often tracked the bhed herds and found themselves caught up in the stampedes, especially when fire was used.

  Generation upon generation of deadly hunts mapped out in those layers, until all the tenag were gone, and with them the okral, and indeed the ay—and the wind was hollow and empty of life, no howls, no shrill trumpeting from bull tenag, and even the bhed had given way to their smaller cousins, the bhederin—who would have vanished too, had their two-legged hunters thrived.

  But they did not thrive, and Onos T’oolan knew the reason for that.

  He stood at the edge of the sinkhole, anguish deep in his soul, and he longed for the return of the great beasts of his youth. Eyes scanning the lie of the land to the sides of the pit, he could see where the harvest had been processed—the slabs of meat brought up to the women who waited beside smaller, skin-lined pits filled with water that steamed as heated stones built it to boiling—and yes, he could see the rumpled ground evincing those cooking pits, and clumps of greenery marking hearths—and there, to one side, a huge flattened boulder, its slightly concave surface pocked where longbones had been split to extract the marrow.

  He could almost smell the reek, could almost hear the droning chants and buzzing insects. Coyotes out on the fringes, awaiting their turn. Carrion birds scolding in the sky overhead, the flit of rhizan and the whisper of capemoths. Drifts of smoke redolent with sizzling fat and scorched hair.

  There had been a last hunt, a last season, a last night of contented songs round fires. The following year saw no one in this place. The wind wandered alone, the half-butchered carcasses grew tough as leather in the sinkhole, and flowers fluttered where blood had once pooled.

  Did the wind mourn with no song to carry on its breath? Or did it hover, waiting in terror for the first cries of bestial pain and fear, only to find that they never came? Did the land yearn for the tremble of thousands of hoofs and the padded feet of tenag? Did it hunger for that flood of nutrients to feed its children? Or was the silence it found a blessed peace to its tortured skin?

  There had been seasons when the herds came late. And then, with greater frequency, seasons when the herds did not come at all. And the Imass went hungry. Starved, forced into new lands in a desperate search for food.

  The Ritual of Tellann had circumvented the natural, inevitable demise of the Imass. Had eluded the rightful consequences of their profligacy, their shortsightedness.

  He wondered if, among the uppermost level of bones, one might find, here and there, the scattered skeletons of Imass. A handful that had come to this place to see what could be salvaged from the previous year’s hunt, down beneath the picked carcasses—a few desiccated strips of meat and hide, the tacky gel of hoofs. Did they kneel in helpless confusion? Did the hollow in their bellies call out to the hollow wind outside, joined in the truth that the two empty silences belonged to one another?

  If not for Tellann, the Imass would have known regret—not as a ghost memory—but as a cruel hunter tracking them down to their very last, staggering steps. And that, Tool told himself, would have been just.

  ‘Vultures in the sky,’ said the Barghast warrior at his side.

  Tool grimaced. ‘Yes, Bakal, we are close.’

  ‘It is as you have said, then. Barghast have died.’ The Senan paused, and then said, ‘yet our shouldermen sensed nothing. You are not of our blood. How did you know, Onos Toolan?’

  The suspicion never went away, Tool reflected. This gauging, uneasy regard of the foreigner who would lead the mighty White Faces to what all believed was a righteous, indeed a holy war. ‘This is a place of endings, Bakal. Yet, if you know where to look—if you know how to see—you find that some endings never end. The very absence howls like a wounded beast.’

  Bakal uttered a sceptical grunt, and then said, ‘Every deathcry finds a place to die, until only silence waits beyond. You speak of echoes that cannot be.’

  ‘And you speak with the conviction of a deaf man insisting that what you do not hear does not exist—in such thinking you will find yourself besieged, Bakal.’ He finally faced the Barghast warrior. ‘When will you people discover that your will does not rule the world?’

  ‘I ask how you knew,’ Bakal said, expression darkening, ‘and you answer with insults?’

  ‘It is curious what you choose to take offence to,’ Tool replied.

  ‘It is your cowardice that offends us, Warleader.’

  ‘I refuse your challenge, Bakal. As I did that of Riggis, and as I will all others that come my way—until our return to our camp.’

  ‘And once there? A hundred warriors shall vie to be first to spill your blood. A thousand. Do you imagine you can withstand them all?’

  Tool was silent for a moment. ‘Bakal, have you seen me fight?’

  The warrior bared his filed tee
th. ‘None of us have. Again you evade my questions!’

  Behind them, close to a hundred disgruntled Senan warriors listened to their every word. But Tool would not face them. He found he could not look away from the sinkhole. I could have drawn my sword. With shouts and fierce faces, enough to terrify them all. And I could have driven them before me, chased them, shrieking at seeing them run, seeing their direction shift, as the ancient rows of cairns channelled them unwittingly on to the proper path—

  —and then see them tumble over the cliff’s edge. Cries of fear, screams of pain—the snap of bones, the thunder of crushed bodies—oh, listen to the echoes of all that!

  ‘I have a question for you, Bakal.’

  ‘Ah! Yes, ask it and hear how a Barghast answers what is asked of him!’

  ‘Can the Senan afford to lose a thousand warriors?’

  Bakal snorted.

  ‘Can the Warleader of the White Face Barghast justify killing a thousand of his own warriors? Just to make a point?’

  ‘You will not survive one, never mind a thousand!’

  Tool nodded. ‘See how difficult it is, Bakal, to answer questions?’

  He set out, skirting the sinkhole’s edge, and made his way down the slope to the left—a much gentler descent into the valley, and had the beasts been clever, they would have used it. But fear drove them on, and on. Blinding them, deafening them. Fear led them to the cliff’s edge. Fear chased them into death.

  Look on, my warriors, and see me run.

  But it is not you that I fear. A detail without relevance, because, you see, the cliff edge does not care.

  ‘Which damned tribe is this one?’ Sceptre Irkullas asked.

  The scout frowned. ‘The traders call them the Nith’rithal—the blue streaks in their white face paint distinguish them.’

  The Akrynnai warleader twisted to ease the muscles of his lower back. He had thought such days were past him—a damned war! Had he not seen enough to earn some respite? When all he sought was a quiet life in his clan, playing bear to his grandchildren, growling as they swarmed all over him with squeals and leather knives stabbing everywhere they could reach. He so enjoyed his lengthy death-throes, always saving one last shocking lunge when all were convinced the giant bear was well and truly dead. They’d shriek and scatter and he would lie back, laughing until he struggled to catch his breath.