Dust of Dreams

by Erikson, Steven

  Strahl’s words were sound, ringing clear and true upon the anvil, leaving Bakal’s disgust to chew him on the inside with no way out. That ache warred with the one in his barely mended elbow, making his stride stiff and awkward. But neither one could assail the shame and self-hatred that closed a fist round his soul. Murderer of Onos Toolan. So fierce the thrust that he broke his arm. Look upon him, friends, and see a true White Face Barghast! He had heard as much from Maral Eb’s cronies. While behind him trudged his fellow Senan warriors, nothing like the triumphant slayers of Onos Toolan they pretended to be. Silent, grim as shoulderwomen at a funeral. Because we share this crime. He made us kill him to save our own lives. He made us cowards. He made me a coward.

  Bakal felt like an old man, and each time his gaze caught upon those three broad backs arrayed like bonepicker birds at the head of the trail, it was another white-hot stone tossed into the cauldron. Soon to boil, yes, raging until the blackened pot boiled dry. All that useless steam.

  What will you do with my people, Maral Eb? When Irkullas shatters us again, where will we run to? He needed to think. He needed to find a way out of this. Could he and his warriors convince the rest of the clan to refuse Maral Eb? Refuse this suicidal war? Teeth grating, Bakal began to understand the burdens under which Onos Toolan had laboured. The impossibility of things.

  The real war is against stupidity. How could I not have understood that? Oh, an easy answer to that question. I was among the stupidest of the lot. And yet, Onos Toolan, you stood before me and met my eyes—you gave me what I did not deserve.

  And look at me now. When Maral Eb stands before me, I choke at the very sight of him. His flush of triumph, his smirk, the drunken eyes. I am ready to spew into his face—and if I had any food in my guts I would probably do just that, unable to help myself.

  Onos Toolan, you should have killed us—every warrior you brought with you. Be done with the stupid ones, be done with us all—instead, you leave us with the perfect legacy of our idiocy. Maral Eb. Precisely the leader we deserve.

  And for our misplaced faith, he will kill everyone.

  Bakal bared his teeth until the wind dried them like sunbaked stones. He would do nothing. He would defy even Strahl and his companions here. There would be justice after all. An ocean of it to feed the thirsty ground. So long as he did nothing, said nothing.

  Lead us, Maral Eb—you are become the standard of Tool’s truth. You are his warning to us, which we refused to heed. So, warrior of the Imass, you shall have your vengeance after all.

  Strahl spoke at his side. ‘I have seen such smiles, friend, upon the warrior I am about to slay—the brave ones who face their deaths unflinching. I see … crazed contempt, as if they say to me: “Do what you must. You cannot reach me—my flesh, yes, my life, but not my soul. Drive home your blade, warrior! The final joke is on you!’ ” His laugh was a low snarl. ‘And so it is, because it is a joke I will not get until I am in their place, facing down my own death.’

  ‘Then,’ said Bakal, ‘you will have to wait.’ But not for long. And when the time comes I too will laugh at this perfect jest.

  The place belonged to Stolmen, but it was his wife who walked at the head of the Gadra column. And it was to Sekara the Vile that the scouts reported during the long march to the Senan encampment—which was now less than half a league away.

  Her husband’s face was set in a scowl as he trudged three paces behind her. The expression did not belong to offended fury, however. Confusion and fear were the sources of his anger, the befuddled misery of the unintelligent man. Things were moving too fast. Essential details were being kept from him. He did not understand and this made him frightened. He had right to be. Sekara was beginning to realize that his usefulness was coming to an end—oh, there were advantages to ruling through him, should that opportunity arise in the aftermath of the imminent power struggle, but better a husband who actually comprehended his titular function—assuming it was even necessary, since many a past warleader had been a woman. Although, truth be said, such women were invariably warriors, possessing the status of experienced campaigners.

  Sekara had fought many battles, of course, in her own style. She had laid sieges, in tents and in yurts. She had drawn blood beneath the furs in the armour of night, had driven knives—figurative and literal—into the hearts of scores of lovers. She had unleashed precision ambushes with utter ruthlessness, and had stared down seemingly insurmountable odds. Her list of triumphs was well nigh unending. But few would countenance any of that. They held to out-of-fashion notions of prowess and glory, and for Sekara this had proved and would ever prove the greatest obstacle to her ascension.

  No, for now, she would need a man to prop up in front of her. Not that anyone would be fooled, but so long as propriety was observed, they would abide.

  There were challenges ahead. Stolmen was not ready to be the Warleader of the White Faces. Not while in the throes of a vicious war. No, at the moment, the greatest need was to ensure the survival of the Barghast, and that demanded a capable commander. Someone clever in the ways of tactics and whatnot. Someone swollen with ambition, eager to be quickly pushed to the fore, arriving breathless and flush—quickly, yes, so that he’d no opportunity to grow wary, to begin to recognize the flimsy supports beneath him, the clever traps awaiting his first misstep.

  Sekara had long pondered prospective candidates. And she had to admit that she was not entirely satisfied with her final choice, but the bones were cast. Alone, in the chill night at that first secret meeting, in the wake of a tumultuous gathering of warchiefs, Maral Eb had seemed perfect. His contempt for Onos Toolan had filled him with hatred that she slyly fed until it became a kind of fevered madness. Nothing difficult there, and his willingness to bind himself to her conspiracy had struck her, at the time, as almost comical. Like a puppy eager to lick whatever she offered.

  He had been alone. And perhaps, in that, she had been careless. She had not considered, for even an instant, Maral Eb’s two brothers.

  Three were harder to manage than one. Almost impossible, in fact. If they were left to consolidate their domination once the war was over, Sekara knew that her chance would be for ever lost. She knew, indeed, that Maral Eb would see her murdered, to silence all that she knew.

  Well, his brothers would just have to die. In battle, to a stray arrow—these things, she had been told, happened all the time. Or some bad food, improperly cured, to strike with swift fever and terrible convulsions, until the heart burst. A lover’s tryst gone awry, some enraged rival. Charges of rape, a trial of shaming and a sentence of castration. Oh, the possibilities were countless.

  For the moment, of course, such delights would have to wait. The Akrynnai must be defeated first, or at least driven back—one more battle awaited them, and this time Sceptre Irkullas would be facing the combined might of the Senan, Barahn and Gadra clans.

  Two Barahn scouts had found her three days past, carrying with them the stunning news of Onos Toolan’s murder. The Gadra had already been on the march. Sekara had made certain that her people—a small clan, isolated and perilously close to Akryn lands—had not awaited the descent of thousands of enraged Akrynnai horsewarriors. Instead, Stolmen had announced the breaking of camp and this fast-paced retreat to the safety of the Senan, almost as soon as news of the war reached them.

  Since then, Gadra scouts had twice sighted distant riders observing them, but nothing more; and as Sekara learned from an alarmingly steady arrival of refugees from other clans, a half-dozen battles had left the Barghast reeling. The sudden coyness of the victorious Akrynnai was disturbing. Unless they too sought one final clash. One that they were content to let the Gadra lead them to at a steady dogtrot.

  Stolmen complained that his warriors were weary, barely fit for battle. Their nerves were twisted into taut knots by constant vigilance and a sickening sense of vulnerability. They were a small clan, after all. It made no tactical sense for the Sceptre to let them reach the Senan. The Akrynnai horde sh
ould have washed over them by now.

  Well, that was for Maral Eb to worry about. Sekara had just this morning sent her own agents ahead to the Senan. Onos Toolan was dead. But his wife was not, nor his children, bloodkin and otherwise. The time had come for Sekara to unleash her long-awaited vengeance.

  The day’s light was fading. Though she had exhorted her people with relentless impatience, they would not reach the Senan any time before midnight.

  And by then the blood spilled would be as cold as the ground beneath it.

  Stavi made a face. ‘He has a secret name,’ she said. ‘An Imass name.’

  Storii’s brow knitted as she looked down upon the drooling toddler playing in the dirt. She twisted round on the stone she was sitting on. ‘But we can’t get it, can we? I mean, he doesn’t know it, that name, how can he? He can’t talk.’

  ‘Not true! I heard him talk!’

  ‘He says “blallablallablalla” and that’s all he says. That doesn’t sound Imass to me.’

  Stavi tugged at the knots in her hair, unmindful of the midges swarming round her head. ‘But I heard Father talking—’

  Storii’s head snapped up, eyes accusing. ‘When? You snuck off to be with him—without me! I knew it!’

  Stavi grinned. ‘You were squatting over a hole. Besides, he wasn’t talking to me. He was talking to himself. Praying, maybe—’

  ‘Father never prays.’

  ‘Who else would he be talking to, except some five-headed Imass god?’

  ‘Really, which head?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Which head was he talking to?’

  ‘How should I know? The one listening. It had ears on stalks and they turned. And then it popped out one eye and swallowed it—’

  Storii leapt to her feet. ‘So it could look out its hole!’

  ‘Only way gods know how to aim.’

  Storii squealed with laughter.

  The dirt-faced runt looked up from his playing, eyes wide, and then he smiled and said, ‘Blallablallablalla!’

  ‘That’s the god’s name!’

  ‘But which head?’ Stavi asked.

  ‘The one with poop in his ears, of course. Listen, if we can really find out his secret name, we can curse him for ever and ever.’

  ‘That’s what I was saying. What kind of curses?’ ‘Good ones. He can only walk on his hands. He starts every sentence with blallablallablalla. Even when he’s twenty years old! As old as that, and even older.’

  ‘That’s pretty old. That’s grey-haired old. Let’s think of more curses.’

  Sitting oblivious on the ground, the son of Onos Toolan and Hetan made curling patterns in the soft dust with one finger. Four squiggles in one particular pattern, trying again and again to get it just right. It was getting dark. Shadows walked out from stones. The shadows were part of the pattern.

  The Imass possessed no written language. Something far more ancient was buried deep within them. It was liquid. It was stain on skin. It was the magic of shadows cast by nothing—nothing real. It was the gift of discord, the deception of unnatural things slipped into a natural world. It was cause in search of effect. When the sun was gone from the sky, fire rose in its stead, and fire was the maker of shadows, revealer of secrets.

  The child had a secret name, and it was written in elusive, impermanent games of light and dark, a thing that could flicker into and out of existence in the dancing of flames, or, as now, at the moment of the sun’s death, with the air itself crumbling to grainy dust.

  Absi Kire, a name gifted by a father struck with unexpected hope, long after the death of hopeful youth. It was a name striving for faith, when faith had departed the man’s world. It whispered like a chill wind, rising up from the Cavern of the Worm. Absi Kire. Its breath was dry, plucking at eyes that had forgotten how to close. Born of love, it was a cry of desperation.

  Patterns in the dirt, fast sinking into formless gloom.

  Absi Kire.

  Autumn Promise.

  Storii held up a hand, cutting short a list of curses grown past breathless, and cocked her head. ‘Some news,’ she said.

  Nodding, Stavi reached down and snatched up the boy. He struggled, tilting his head back until it pressed hard against her chest. She blew down, stirring the hair atop his slightly elongated head, and he instantly settled.

  ‘Excited voices.’

  ‘Not happy excited.’

  ‘No,’ Stavi agreed, turning to look in the direction of the camp—just beyond a sweep of tilted rock outcroppings. The glow of fires was rising beneath a layer of woodsmoke.

  ‘We should get back.’

  Hetan cursed under her breath. The girls had kidnapped their half-brother yet again, and no one had seen their escape. When they were out of her sight, the vast pit of her solitude opened its maw beneath her, and she could feel herself tumbling and spinning as she fell … and fell. So much darkness, so little hope that the plunge would end in a merciful snap of bones, the sudden bliss of oblivion.

  Without her children, she was nothing. Sitting motionless, wandering inside her skull, dull-eyed and weaving like a hoof-kicked dog. Nose sniffing, claws scratching, but there was no way out. Without her children, the future vanished, a moth plunging into the fire. She blinked motes from her eyes, hands drawn together and thumbnails picking at the scabs and oozing slices left behind by the last assault on the ends of her fingers, the tender skin round the nails.

  Frozen in place, sunken, in endless retreat.

  Another bowl of rustleaf? Durhang? A resin bud of d’bayang? D’ras beer? Too much effort, every one of them. If she sat perfectly still, time would vanish.

  Until the girls brought him back. Until she saw the twins pretending to smile but skittish and worried behind their eyes. And he would squirm in a girl’s arms, reaching for Hetan, who would see those strangely large, wide hands with their stubby fingers, clutching, straining, and a howl would rise within her, lifting out of that black maw, blazing like a skystone returning to the sky.

  She would take him into a suffocating embrace, desperate sparks igniting within her, forcing her into animation.

  Strings on the ends of those pudgy fingers, plucking her to life.

  And she howled and she howled.

  Heavy footsteps rushed past the entrance to the tent. Voices, a few shouts. A runner had entered the camp. The word was delivered, and the word was dead.

  How could imagination hope to achieve the wonders of reality? The broken, deathly landscape stretched out on all sides, but the vista was shrinking as the day’s light faded. Yet more than darkness embraced the transformation. Domes of cracked bedrock appeared, skinned in lichen and moss. Shin-high trees with thick, twisted boles, branches fluttering with the last of the autumn leaves, like blackened layers of peeled skin. Bitter arctic wind rushing down from the northwest to herald winter’s eager arrival.

  Cafal and Setoc ran through this new world. The frigid air bit in their lungs, yet it was richer and sweeter than anything they had breathed in their own realm, their own time.

  How to describe the noise of a hundred thousand wolves running across the land? It filled Cafal’s skull with the immensity of an ocean. Padded footfalls delivered a pitch and rhythm unlike that of spaded hoofs. The brush of fur as shoulders rubbed was a seething whisper. The heat rising from bodies was thick as mist, the animal smell overwhelming—the smell of a world without cities, forges, charcoal burners, without battlefields, trenches filled with waste, without human sweat and perfumes, the smoke of rustleaf and durhang, the dust of frantic destruction.

  Wolves. Before humans waged war upon them, before the millennia-long campaign of slaughter. Before the lands emptied.

  He could almost see them. Every sense but sight was alive with the creatures. And he and Setoc were carried along on the ghostly tide.

  All that was gone had returned. All this history, seeking a home.

  They would not find it among his people. He did not understand why Setoc was leading them to
the Barghast. He could hear her singing, but the words she used belonged to some other language. The tone was strangely fraught, as if warring forces were bound together. Curiosity and wariness, congress and terror—he could almost see the glint of bestial eyes as they watched the first band of humans from a distance. Did these two-legged strangers promise friendship? Cooperation? A recognition of brother-and sisterhood? Yes, to all of that. But this was no family at peace; this was a thing writhing with deceit, betrayal, black malice and cruelty.

  The wolves were innocents. They stood no chance.

  Flee the Barghast. Please, I beg you—

  But his pleading rang hollow even to Cafal. He needed them—he needed this swift passage. Night had fallen. A wind was rising to tear at the torches and hearth-fires in the Senan camp. Rain spat with stinging fury and lightning ignited the horizon.

  Eyes gleamed, iron licked the darkness—

  The gods were showing him was what coming.

  And he would not get there in time. Because, as has ever been known, the Barghast gods were bastards.

  Heart thudding with anticipation, Sathand Gril slipped out from the light of the wind-whipped fires. He had watched the children and their furtive flight into the shattered hills northeast of the camp when the sun was still a hand’s breadth above the horizon. This had been his singular responsibility for weeks now—spying on the horrid little creatures—all leading to this moment, this reward.

  He had killed the boy’s dog and now he would kill the boy. Plunging his knife into his belly with a hand over his mouth to stifle the shrieks. A large rock to crush the skull and destroy the face, because no one welcomed the face of a dead child, especially one frozen in twisted pain. He had no desire to look upon the half-lidded eyes that saw nothing, that had gone flat with the soul’s absence. No, he would destroy the thing utterly, and then fling it into a defile.