Dust of Dreams

by Erikson, Steven

  She heard Cafal awaken, heard his muffled grunt of shock. Seven wolves crowded their small camp, shy as uninvited children.

  Her mother moved up closer, fur sliding the length of Setoc’s arm. ‘You must go,’ she whispered to the beast. ‘Please.’

  ‘Setoc,’ said Cafal. ‘They bring magic.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Can’t you feel the power—so harsh, so untamed—but I think, yes, I can use it. A warren, close enough the barrier feels thin as a leaf. Listen, if we run within it, I think—’

  ‘I know,’ she said in a croak, leaning her weight against the she-wolf, so solid, so real, so sure. ‘I know, Cafal, the gift they bring.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ he said in growing excitement as he tugged aside his blankets, ‘we can get there in time. We can save—’

  ‘Cafal, none of this is for you. Don’t you understand anything? It’s not for you!’

  He met her glare unblinking—the dawn was finally paling the sky—and then nodded. ‘Where will they lead you, then? Do you know?’

  She turned away from his despair. ‘Oh, Cafal, you really are a fool. Of course we’re returning to your tribe’s camp. No other path is possible, not any more.’

  ‘I—I don’t understand.’

  ‘I know. Never mind. It’s time to leave.’

  Destriant Kalyth scanned the south horizon, the blasted, unrelieved emptiness revealed in the toneless light of the rising sun. ‘Where then,’ she muttered, ‘are my hands of fire?’ She turned to her two exhausted companions. ‘You understand, don’t you? I cannot do this alone. To lead your kind, I need my own kind. I need to look into eyes little different from my own. I need to see their aches come the dawn, the sleep still in their faces—spirits fend, I need to see them cough the night loose and then piss a steaming river!’

  The K’Chain Che’Malle regarded her with their reptilian eyes, unblinking, unhuman.

  Kalyth’s beseeching frustration trickled away, and she fixed her attention on Sag’Churok, wondering what he had seen—those fourteen undead Jaghut, the battle that, it was now clear, completely eradicated their pursuers. This time, anyway. Was there something different in the K’ell Hunter? Something that might be … unease?

  ‘You wanted a Destriant,’ she snapped. ‘If you thought that meant a doe-eyed rodara, it must finally be clear just how wrong you were. What I am given, I intend to use—do you understand?’ Still, for all the bravado, she wished she had the power to bind those Jaghut to her will. She wished they were with them right now. Still not human, but, well, closer. Yes, getting closer. She snorted and turned back to study the south.

  ‘No point in waiting round here, is there? We continue on.’

  ‘Destriant,’ Sag’Churok whispered in her mind, ‘we are running out of time. Our enemy draws ever closer—no, not hunting the three of us. They hunt the Rooted, our final refuge in this world.’

  ‘We’re all the last of our kind,’ she said, ‘and you must have realized by now, in this world and in every other, there is no such thing as refuge.’ The world finds you. The world hunts you down.

  Time, once more, to ride Gunth Mach as if she were nothing more than a beast, Sag’Churok lumbering at their side, massive iron blades catching glares from the sun in blinding spasms. To watch small creatures start from the knotted grasses and bound away in panic. Plunging through clouds of midges driven apart by the prows of reptilian heads and broad heaving chests.

  To feel the wind’s touch as if it was a stranger’s caress, startling in its unwelcome familiarity, reminding her again and again that she still lived, that she was part of the world’s meat, forever fighting the decay dogging its trail. None of it seemed real, as if she was simply waiting for reality to catch up to her. Each day delivered the same message, and each day she met it with the same bemused confusion and diffident wariness.

  These K’Chain Che’Malle felt none of that, she believed. They did not think as she did. Everything was a taste, a smell—thoughts and feelings, the sun’s very light, all flowing in a swarm of currents. Existence was an ocean. One could skate upon the surface, clinging to the shallows, or one could plunge into the depths, until the skull creaked with the pressure. She knew they saw her and her kind as timid, frightened by the mystery of unplumbed depths. Creatures floundering in fears, terrified of drowning knee-deep in truths.

  But your Matron wants you to slide into the shallows, to find my world of vulnerabilities—to find out what we do to defeat them. You seek new strategies for living, you seek our secret of success. But you don’t understand, do you? Our secret is annihilation. We annihilate everyone else until none are left, and then we annihilate each other. Until we too are gone.

  Such a wondrous secret. Well, she would give it to them, if she could. Her grand lessons of survival, and only she would hear the clamouring howl of the ghosts storming her soul.

  Riding Gunth Mach’s back, Kalyth’s hands itched. Destinies were drawing close. I will find my hands of fire, and we will use you, Sag’Churok. You and Gunth Mach and all your kind. We will show you the horrors of the modern world you so want to be a part of.

  She thought of their dread enemy, the faceless killers of the K’Chain Che’Malle. She wondered at this genocidal war, and suspected it was, in its essence, no different from the war humans had been engaged in for all time. It is the same, but it is also different. It is … naïve.

  With what was coming, with what she would bring … Kalyth felt a deep, sickening stab.

  Of pity.

  In an unbroken line from each mother to every daughter, memory survived, perpetuating a continuous history of experience. Gunth Mach held in her mind generations of lives trapped in a succession of settings that portrayed the inexorable collapse, the decay, the failure of their civilization. This was unbearable. Knowledge was an unceasing scream in her soul.

  Every Matron was eventually driven insane: no daughter, upon ascension to the role, could long withstand the deluge. Male K’Chain Che’Malle had no comprehension of this; their lives were perfectly contained, the flavours of their selves truncated and unsubtle. Their unswerving loyalty was sustained in ignorance.

  She had sought to break this pattern, with Sag’Churok, and in so doing was betraying the inviolate isolation of the Matrons. But she did not care. All that had gone before had not worked.

  She remembered half a continent pounded level and then made smooth as a frozen lake, on which cities sprawled in a scale distorted even to K’Chain Che’Malle eyes, as if grandeur and madness were one and the same. Domes large enough to swallow islands, curling towers and spires like the spikes riding the backs of dhenrabi. Buildings with single rooms so huge that clouds formed beneath the ceiling, and birds dwelt there in their thousands, oblivious to the cage that held them. She remembered entire mountain ranges preserved as if they were works of art, at least until their value as quarries for sky keeps was realized, in the times of the civil wars—when those mountains were carved down to stumps. She remembered looking upon her kind in league-wide columns twenty leagues long as they set out to found new colonies. She stood, creaking beneath her own weight, and watched as fifty legions of Ve’Gath Soldiers—each one five thousand strong—marched to wage war against the Tartheno Tel Akai. And she was there when they returned, decimated, leaving a trail of their own dead that stretched across the entire continent.

  She recalled the birth pains of the Nah’ruk, and then the searing agony of their betrayal. Burning cities and corpses three-deep on vast fields of battle. Chaos and terror within the nests, the shriek of desperate births. And the sly mockery of the waves on the shores as a dying Matron loosed her eggs into the surf in the mad hope that something new would be made—a hybrid of virtues with all the flaws discarded.

  And so much more … fleeing through darkness and blinding smoke … the slash of an Assassin’s talons. Cold, sudden adjudication. Life draining away, the blessed relief that followed. Flavours awakening cruel and bitter in the daughter who followed�
��for nothing was lost, nothing was ever lost.

  There was a goddess of the K’Chain Che’Malle. Immortal, omniscient as such things were supposed to be. The goddess was the Matron, mahybe of the eternal oil. Once, that oil had been of such strength and volume that hundreds of Matrons were needed as holy vessels.

  Now there was but one.

  She could remember the pride, the power of what had once been. And the futile wars waged to give proof to that pride and that power, until both had been utterly obliterated. Cities gone. The birth of wastelands across half the world.

  Gunth Mach knew that Gu’Rull still lived. She knew, too, that the Shi’gal Assassin was her adjudicator. Beyond this quest, there waited the moment of inheritance, when Acyl finally surrendered to death. Was Gunth Mach a worthy successor? The Shi’gal would decide. Even the enemy upon the Rooted, slaughter unleashed in the corridors and chambers, would have no bearing upon matters. She would surge through the panicked crowds, seeking somewhere to hide, with three Assassins stalking her.

  The will to live was the sweetest flavour of all.

  She carried the Destriant on her back, a woman who weighed virtually nothing, and Gunth Mach could feel the tension in her small muscles, her frail frame of bones. Even an orthen bares its fangs in its last moments of life.

  Failure in this quest was unacceptable, but in Gunth Mach’s mind, it was also inevitable.

  She would be the last Matron, and with her death so too would die the goddess of the K’Chain Che’Malle. The oil would drain into the dust, and all memory would be lost.

  It was just as well.

  Spirits of stone, what happened here?

  Sceptre Irkullas slowly dismounted, staring aghast at the half-buried battlefield. As if the ground had lifted up to swallow them all, Barghast and Akrynnai both. Crushed bodies, broken limbs, faces scoured away as if blasted by a sandstorm. Others looked bloated, skin split and cracked open, as if the poor soldiers had been cooked from within.

  Crows and vultures scampered about in frustrated cacophony, picking clean what wasn’t buried, whilst Akrynnai warriors wandered the buried valley, tugging free the corpses of dead kin.

  Irkullas knew his daughter’s body was here, somewhere. The thought clenched in his stomach like a sickly knot leaching poison, weakening his limbs, tightening the breath in his throat. He dreaded the notion of sleep at this day’s end, the stalking return of anguish and despair. He would lie chilled beneath furs, chest aching, rushes of nausea squirming through him, his every breath harsh and strained—close to the clutch of panic.

  Something unexpected, something unknown, had come to this petty war. As if the spirits of the earth and rock were convulsing in rage and, perhaps, disgust. Demanding peace. Yes, this is what the spirits have told me, with this here—this … horror. They have had enough of our stupid bloodletting.

  We must make peace with the Barghast.

  He felt old, exhausted.

  A day ago vengeance seemed bright and pure. Retribution was sharp as a freshly honed knife. Four major battles, four successive victories. The Barghast clans were scattered, fleeing. Indeed, only one remained, the southernmost, largest clan, the Senan. Ruled by the one named Onos Toolan. The Akrynnai had three armies converging upon the Warleader and his encampment.

  We have wagons creaking beneath Barghast weapons and armour. Chests filled with foreign coins. Heaps of strange furs. Trinkets, jewellery, woven rugs, gourd bowls and clumsy pots of barely tempered clay. We have everything the Barghast possessed. Just the bodies that owned them have been removed. Barring a score of broken prisoners.

  We are a travelling museum of a people about to become extinct.

  And yet I will plead for peace.

  Upon hearing this, his officers would frown behind his back, thinking him an old man with a broken heart, and they would be right to think that. They would accept his commands, but this would be the last time. Once they rode home Sceptre Irkullas would be seen—would be known to all—as a ‘ruler in his grey dusk’. A man with no light of the future in his eyes, a man awaiting death. But it comes to us all. Everything we fear comes to us all.

  Gafalk, who had been among the advance party, rode up and reined in near the Sceptre’s own horse. The warrior dismounted and walked to stand in front of Irkullas. ‘Sceptre, we have examined the western ridge of the valley—or what’s left of it. Old Yara,’ he continued, speaking of the Barghast spokesperson among the prisoners, ‘says he once fought outside some place called One-Eye Cat. He says the craters remind him of something called Moranth munitions, but not when those munitions are dropped from the sky as was done by the Moranth. Instead, the craters look like those made when the munitions are used by the Malazans. Buried in the ground, arranged to ignite all at once. Thus lifting the ground itself. Some kind of grenado. He called them cussers—’

  ‘We know there is a Malazan army in Lether,’ Irkullas said, musing. Then he shook his head. ‘Give me a reason for their being here—joining in a battle not of their making? Killing both Akrynnai and Barghast—’

  ‘The Barghast were once enemies of these Malazans, Sceptre. So claims Yara.’

  ‘Yet, have our scouts seen signs of their forces? Do any trails lead from this place? No. Are the Malazans ghosts, Gafalk?’

  The warrior spread his hands in helpless dismay. ‘Then what struck here, Sceptre?’

  The rage of gods. ‘Sorcery.’

  A sudden flicker in Gafalk’s eyes. ‘Letherii—’

  ‘Who might well be pleased to see the Akrynnai and Barghast destroy each other.’

  ‘It is said the Malazans left them few mages, Sceptre. And their new Ceda is an old man who is also the Chancellor—not one to lead an army—’

  But Irkullas was already shaking his head at his own suggestions. ‘Even a Letherii Ceda cannot hide an entire army. You are right to be sceptical, Gafalk.’

  A conversation doomed to circle round and devour its own tail. Irkullas stepped past the warrior and looked upon the obliterated valley once more. ‘Dig out as many of our warriors as you can. At dusk we cease all such efforts—leaving the rest to the earth. We shall drive back the night with the pyre of our dead. And I shall stand vigil.’

  ‘Yes, Sceptre.’

  The warrior returned to his horse.

  Vigil, yes, that will do. A night without sleep—he would let the bright flames drive back the sickness in his soul.

  It would be best, he decided, if he did not survive to return home. An uncle or cousin could play the bear to his grandchildren—someone else, in any case. Better, indeed, if he was denied the chance of sleep until the very instant of his death.

  One final battle—against the Senan camp? Kill them all, and then fall myself. Bleed out in the red mud. And once dead, I can make my peace … with their ghosts. Hardly worth continuing this damned war on the ash plains of death, this stupid thing.

  Dear daughter, you will not wander alone for long. I swear it. I will find your ghost, and I will protect you for ever more. As penance for my failure, and as proof of my love.

  He glared about, as if in the day’s fading light he might see her floating spirit, a wraith with a dirt-smeared face and disbelieving eyes. No, eyes with the patience of the eternally freed. Freed from all this. Freed … from everything. In a new place. Where no sickness grows inside, where the body does not clench and writhe, flinching at the siren calls of every twinge, every ache.

  Spirits of stone, give me peace!

  Maral Eb’s army had doubled in size, as survivors from shattered encampments staggered in from all directions—shame-faced at living when wives, husbands and children had died beneath the iron of the treacherous Akrynnai. Many arrived bearing no weapons, shorn of armour, proof that they had been routed, had fled in waves of wide-eyed cowardice. Cold waters were known to wash upon warriors in the midst of battle, even Barghast warriors, and the tug of currents could lift into a raging flood where all reason drowned, where escape was a need that overwhelmed duty and ho
nour. Cold waters left the faces of the survivors grey and bloated, stinking of guilt.

  But Maral Eb had been sobered enough by the news of the defeats to cast no righteous judgement upon these refugees with their skittish eyes. Clearly, he understood he would need every warrior he could muster, although Bakal knew as well as anyone how such warriors, once drowned beneath panic, were now broken inside—worse, in the instant when a battle tottered on the fulcrum’s point, their terror could return. They could doom the battle, as their panic flooded out and infected everyone else.

  No word had come from the Senan. It seemed that, thus far at least, the Akrynnai had yet to descend upon Bakal’s own clan. Soon, Maral Eb would grasp hold of the Senan army and claim it for himself. And then he would lead them all against the deceitful Sceptre Irkullas.

  A thousand curses rode the breaths of the mass of warriors. It was obvious now that the Akryn had been planning this war for some time, trickling in and out their so-called merchants as spies, working towards the perfect moment for betrayal. How else could the Sceptre assemble such forces so quickly? For every refugee insisted that the enemy numbered in the tens of thousands.

  Bakal believed none of it. This was the war Onos Toolan did not want. The wrong war. Maral Eb walked flanked by his two brothers, and surrounding these three was a mob of strutting idiots, each one vying to find the perfect words to please their new Warleader and his two hood-eyed, murderous siblings. Arguments sending the arrow of blame winging away. Onos Toolan was no longer alive and so less useful as a target, although some murky residue remained, like handfuls of shit awaiting any rivals among the Senan. Now it was the Akrynnai—Irkullas and his lying, cheating, spying horsemongers.

  By the time this army arrived at the Senan camp, they would be blazing with the righteous fury of innocent victims.

  ‘whatever he needs,’ Strahl had said at the noon break. ‘Falsehoods cease being false when enough people believe them, Bakal. Instead, they blaze like eternal truths, and woe to the fool who tries pissing a stream on that. They’ll tear you to pieces.’