Dust of Dreams

by Erikson, Steven

  Now he too was broken. But they couldn’t let that happen. She couldn’t, because if he broke then the Quitters would get them all. ‘Rutt. Without you, Held is nothing. Listen. I have flown high—I had wings, like the gods. I went so high I could see how the world curves, like the old women used to tell us, and I saw—Rutt, listen—I saw the end of the Glass Desert.’

  But he shook his head.

  ‘And I saw something else. A city, Rutt. A city of glass—we will find it tomorrow. The Quitters won’t go there—they are afraid of it. The city, it’s a city they know from their legends—but they’d stopped believing those legends. And now it’s invisible to them—we can escape them, Rutt.’

  ‘Badalle—’ his voice was muffled against the skin and bone of her neck. ‘Don’t give up on me. If you give up, I won’t—I can’t—’

  She had given up long ago, but she wouldn’t tell him that. ‘I’m here, Rutt.’

  ‘No. No, I mean’—he pulled back, stared fixedly into her eyes—‘don’t go mad. Please.’

  ‘Rutt, I can’t fly any more. My wings burned off. It’s all right.’

  ‘Please. Promise me, Badalle. Promise!’

  ‘I promise, but only if you promise not to give up.’

  His nod was shaky. His control, she could see, was thin and cracked as burnt skin. I won’t go mad, Rutt. Don’t you see? I have the power to do nothing. I have all the powers of a god.

  This ribby snake will not die. We don’t have to do anything at all, just keep going. I have flown to where the sun sets, and I tell you, Rutt, we are marching into fire. Beautiful, perfect fire. ‘You’ll see,’ she said to him.

  Beside them stood Saddic, watching, remembering. His enemy was dust.

  What is, was. Illusions of change gathered windblown into hollows in hillsides, among stones and the exposed roots of long-dead trees. History swept along as it had always done, and all that is new finds shapes of old. Where stood towering masses of ice now waited scars in the earth. Valleys carried the currents of ghost rivers and the wind wandered paths of heat and cold to deliver the turn of every season.

  Such knowledge was agony, like a molten blade thrust to the heart. Birth was but a repetition of what had gone before. Sudden light was a revisitation of the moment of death. The madness of struggle was without beginning and without end.

  Awakening to such things loosed a rasping sob from the wretched, rotted figure that clambered out from the roots of a toppled cottonwood tree sprawled across an old oxbow. Lifting itself upright, it looked round, the grey hollows beneath the brow-ridges gathering the grainy details into shapes of meaning. A broad, shallow valley, distant ridges of sage and firebrush. Grey-winged birds darting down the slopes.

  The air smelled of smoke and tasted of slaughter. Perhaps a herd had been driven over a bluff. Perhaps heaps of carcasses spawned maggots and flies and this was the source of the dreadful, incessant buzzing sound. Or was this something sweeter? Had the world won the argument? Was she now a ghost returned to mock the rightful failure of her kind? Would she find somewhere nearby the last putrid remnants of her people? She dearly hoped so.

  She was named Bitterspring in the language of the Brold clan, Lera Epar, a name she had well earned for the terrible crimes she had committed. She had been the one flower among all the field’s flowers whose scent had been deadly. Men had cast away their own women to clutch her as their own. Each time, she had permitted herself to be plucked—seeing in his eyes what she had wanted to see, that he valued her above all others—even and especially the mate he had abandoned—and so their love would be unassailable. Before it went wrong, before it proved the weakest binding of all. And then another man would appear, with that same hungry fire in his eyes, and she would think, This time, it is different. This time, I am certain, our love is a thing of great power.

  Everyone had agreed that she was the cleverest person in all the clans of the Brold Gathering. She was not a thing of the shallows, no, her mind plunged unlit depths. She was the delver into life’s perils, who spoke of the curse that was the alighting of reason’s spark. She found divination not in the fire-cracked shoulder-blades of caribou, but in the watery reflections of faces in pools, springs and gourd bowls—faces she knew well as kin. As kin, yes, and more. Such details as made one distinct from all others, she knew these to be illusions, serving for quick recognition but little else. Beneath those details, she understood, they were all the same. Their needs. Their wants, their fears.

  She had been regarded as a formidable seer, a possessor of spirit-gifted power. But the truth was, and this she knew with absolute certainty, there was no magic in her percipience. Reason’s spark did not arise spontaneously amidst the dark waters of base emotion. No, and nor was each spark isolated from the others. Bitterspring understood all too well that the sparks were born of hidden fires—the soul’s own array of hearth-fires, each one devoted to simple, immutable truths. One for every need. One for every want. One for every fear.

  Once this revelation found her, reading the futures of her kin was an easy task. Reason delivered the illusion of complexity, but behind it all, we are as simple as bhederin, simple as ay, as ranag. We rut and bare our teeth and expose our throats. Behind our eyes our thoughts can burn bright with love or blacken with jealous rot. We seek company to find our place in it, and unless that place is at the top, all we find dissatisfies us, poisons our hearts.

  In company, we are capable of anything. Murder, betrayal. In company, we invent rituals to quench every spark, to ride the murky tide of emotion, to be once again as unseeing and uncaring as the beasts.

  I was hated. I was worshipped. And, in the end, I am sure, I was murdered.

  Lera Epar, why are you awake once more? Why have you returned?

  I was the dust in the hollows, I was the memories lost.

  I did terrible things, once. Now I stand here, ready to do them all again.

  She was Bitterspring, of the Brold Imass, and her world of ice and white-furred creatures was gone. She set out, a chert and jawbone mace dangling from one hand, the yellowed skin of the white-furred bear trailing down from her shoulders.

  She had been too beautiful, once. But history was never kind.

  He rose from the mud ringing the waterhole, shedding black roots, fish scales and misshapen cakes of clay and coarse sand. Mouth open, jaws stretched wide, he howled without sound. He had been running straight for them. Three K’ell Hunters, whose heads turned to regard him. They had been standing over the corpses of his wife, his two children. The bodies would join the gutted carcasses of other beasts brought down on their hunt. An antelope, a mule deer. The mates of the felled beasts had not challenged the slayers. No, they had fled. But this one, this male Imass roaring out his battle-cry and rushing them with spear readied, he was clearly mad. He would give his life for nothing.

  The K’ell Hunters did not understand.

  They had met his charge with the flat of their blades. They had broken the spear and had then beaten him unconscious. They didn’t want his meat, tainted as it was with madness.

  Thus ended his first life. In rebirth, he was a man emptied of love. And he had been among the first to step into the embrace of the Ritual of Tellann. To expunge the memories of past lives. Such was the gift, so precious, so perfect.

  He had lifted himself from the mud, summoned once more—but this time was different. This time, he remembered everything.

  Kalt Urmanal of the Orshayn T’lan Imass stood shin-deep in mud, head tilted back, howling without sound.

  Rystalle Ev crouched on a mound of damp clay twenty paces from Kalt. Understanding him, understanding all that assailed him. She too had awakened, possessor of all that she had thought long lost, and so she looked upon Kalt, whom she loved and had always loved, even in the times when he walked as would a dead man, the ashes of his loss grey and thick upon his face; and in the times before, when she harboured jealous hatred for his wife, when she prayed to all the spirits for the woman’s death.
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  It was possible that his scream would never cease. It was possible that, as they all rose and gathered in their disbelief at their resurrection—as they sought out the one who so cruelly summoned the Orshayn—she would have to leave him here.

  Though his howl was without voice, it deafened her mind. If he did not cease, his madness would infect all the others.

  The last time the Orshayn had walked the earth had been in a place far away from this one. With but three broken clans remaining—a mere six hundred and twelve warriors left—and three damaged bonecasters, they had fled the Spires and fallen to dust. That dust had been lifted high on the winds, carried half a world away—there had been no thought of a return to bone and withered flesh—to finally settle in a scattered swath across scores of leagues.

  This land, Rystalle Ev knew, was no stranger to the Imass. Nor—and Kalt’s torment made this plain—was it unknown to the K’Chain Che’Malle. What were they doing here?

  Kalt Urmanal fell to his knees, his cry dying away, leaving a ringing echo in her skull. She straightened, leaning heavily on the solid comfort of her spear’s shaft of petrified wood. This return was unconscionable—a judgement she knew she would not have made without her memories—to that time of raw, wondrous mortality replete with its terrible crimes of love and desire. She could feel her own rage, rising like the molten blood of the earth.

  Beyond the waterhole she spied three figures approaching. T’lan Imass of the Orshayn. Bonecasters. Perhaps now they would glean some answers.

  Brolos Haran had always been a broad man, and even the bones of his frame, so visible beneath the taut, desiccated skin, looked abnormally robust. The clear, almost crystalline blue eyes that gave him his name were, of course, long gone; and in their place were the knotted remnants, gnarled and blackened and lifeless. His red hair drifted like bloodstained cobwebs out over the dun-hued emlava fur riding his shoulders. His lips had peeled back to reveal flat, thick teeth the colour of raw copper.

  To his left was Ilm Absinos, her narrow, tall frame sheathed in the grey scales of the enkar’al, her long black hair knotted with snakeskins. The serpent staff in her bony hands seemed to writhe. She walked with a hitched gait, remnant of an injury to her hip.

  Ulag Togtil was as wide as Brolos Haran yet taller than Ilm Absinos. He had ever been an outsider among the Orshayn clans. Born as a half-breed among the first tribes of the Trell, he had wandered into the camp of Kebralle Korish, the object of intense curiosity, especially among the women. It was the way of the Imass that strangers could come among them, and, if life was embraced and no violence was stirred awake, such strangers could make for themselves a home among the people, and so cease to be strangers. So it had been with Ulag.

  In the wars with the Order of the Red Sash, he had proved the most formidable among all the Orshayn bonecasters. Seeing him now, Rystalle Ev felt comforted, reassured—as if he alone could make things as they once were.

  He could not. He was as trapped within the Ritual as was everyone else.

  Ulag was the first to speak. ‘Rystalle Ev, Kalt Urmanal. I am privileged to find two of my own clan at last.’ A huge hand gestured slightly. ‘Since dawn I have laboured mightily beneath the assault of these two cloud-dancers—their incessant joy has proved a terrible burden.’

  Could she have smiled, Rystalle would have. The image of cloud-dancers was such an absurd fit to these two dour creatures, she might well have laughed. But she had forgotten how. ‘Ulag, do you know the truth of this?’

  ‘A most elusive hare. How it leaps and darts, skips free of every slingstone. How it sails over the snares and twitches an ear to every footfall. I have run in enough circles, failing to take the creature into my hands, to feel its pattering heart, its terrified trembling.’

  Ilm Absinos spoke. ‘Inistral Ovan awaits us. We shall gather more on our return journey. It has not been so long since we last walked. Few, if any, will have lost themselves.’

  Brolos Haran seemed to be staring into the south. Now he said, ‘The Ritual is broken. Yet we are not released. In this, I smell the foul breath of Olar Ethil.’

  ‘So you have said before,’ snapped Ilm Absinos. ‘And still, for all your chewing the same words, there remains no proof.’

  ‘We do not know,’ sighed Ulag, ‘who has summoned us. It is curious, but we are closed to her, or him. As if a wall of power stands between us, one that can only be breached from the other side. The summoner must choose. Until such time, we must simply wait.’

  Kalt Urmanal spoke for the first time. ‘None of you understand anything. The waters are … crowded.’

  To this, silence was the only reply.

  Kalt snarled, as if impatient with them all. He was still kneeling and it seemed he had little interest in moving. Instead, he pointed. ‘There. Another approaches.’

  Rystalle and the others turned.

  The sudden disquiet was almost palpable.

  She wore the yellow and white fur of the brold, the bear of the snows and ice. Her hair was black as pitch, her face wide and flat, the skin stained deep amber. The pits of her eyes were angled, tilted at the outer corners. The talons of some small creature had been threaded through her cheeks.

  T’lan Imass, yes. But … not of our clans.

  Three barbed harpoons were strapped to her back. The mace she carried in one hand was fashioned of some animal’s thighbone, inset with jagged blades of green rhyolite and white chert.

  She halted fifteen paces away.

  Ilm Absinos gestured with her staff. ‘You are a bonecaster, but I do not know you. How can this be? Our minds were joined at the Ritual. Our blood wove a thousand-upon-a-thousand threads. The Ritual claims you as kin, as T’lan Imass. What is your clan?’

  ‘I am Nom Kala—’

  Brolos Haran cut in, ‘We do not know those words.’

  That very admission was a shock to the Orshayn. It was, in fact, impossible. Our language is as dead as we are.

  Nom Kala cocked her head, and then said, ‘You speak the Old Tongue, the secret language of the bonecasters. I am of the Brold T’lan Imass—’

  ‘There is no clan chief who claimed the name of the brold!’

  She seemed to study Brolos for a moment, and then said, ‘There was no clan chief bearing the name of the brold. There was, indeed, no clan chief at all. Our people were ruled by the bonecasters. The Brold clans surrendered the Dark War. We Gathered. There was a Ritual—’

  ‘What!’ Ilm Absinos lurched forward, almost stumbling until her staff brought her up short. ‘Another Ritual of Tellann?’

  ‘We failed. We were camped beneath a wall of ice, a wall that reached to the very heavens. We were assailed—’

  ‘By the Jaghut?’ Brolos asked.

  ‘No—’

  ‘The K’Chain Che’Malle?’

  Once more she cocked her head and was silent.

  The wind moaned.

  A grey fox wandered into their midst, stepping cautiously, nose testing the air. After a moment, it trotted down to the water’s edge. Pink tongue unfurled and the sounds of lapping water tickled the air.

  Watching the fox, Kalt Urmanal put his hands to his face, covering his eyes. Seeing this, Rystalle turned away.

  Nom Kala said, ‘No. The dominion of both was long past.’ She hesitated, and then added, ‘It was held among many of us that the enemy assailing our people were humans—our inheritors, our rivals in the ways of living. We bonecasters—the three of us who remained—knew that to be no more than a half-truth. No, we were assailed by ourselves. By the lies we told each other, by the false comforts of our legends, our stories, our very beliefs.’

  ‘Why, then,’ asked Ulag, ‘did you attempt the Ritual of Tellann?’

  ‘With but three bonecasters left, how could you have hoped to succeed?’ Ilm Absinos demanded, her voice brittle with outrage.

  Nom Kala fixed her attention upon Ulag. ‘Trell-blood, you are welcome to my eyes. To answer your question: it is said that no memory survives
the Ritual. We deemed this just. It is said, as well, that the Ritual delivers the curse of immortality. We saw this, too, as just.’

  ‘Then against whom did you wage war?’

  ‘No one. We were done with fighting, Trell-blood.’

  ‘Then why not simply choose death?’

  ‘We severed all allegiance to the spirits—we had been lying to them for too long.’

  The fox lifted its head, eyes suddenly wide, ears pricked. It then trotted in its light-footed way along the rim of the pool. Slipped beneath some firebrush, and vanished inside a den.

  How much time passed before another word was spoken? Rystalle could not be certain, but the fox reappeared, a marmot in its jaws, and bounded away, passing so close to Rystalle that she could have brushed its back with her hand. A flock of tiny birds descended to prance along the muddy verge. Somewhere in the shallows ruddered a carp.

  Ilm Absinos said, in a whisper, ‘The spirits died when we died.’

  ‘A thing that dies to us is not necessarily dead,’ Nom Kala replied. ‘We do not have that power.’

  ‘What does your name mean?’ Ulag asked.

  ‘Knife Drip.’

  ‘How did the ritual fail?’

  ‘The wall of ice fell on us. We were all killed instantly. The Ritual was therefore uncompleted.’ She paused, and then added, ‘Given the oblivion that followed, failure seemed a safe assumption—were we capable of making assumptions. But now, it appears, we were in error.’

  ‘How long ago?’ Ulag asked her. ‘Do you know?’

  She shrugged. ‘The Jaghut were gone a hundred generations. The K’Chain Che’Malle had journeyed to the eastern lands two hundred generations previously. We traded with the Jheck, and then with the Krynan Awl and the colonists of the Empire of Dessimbelackis. We followed the ice in its last retreat.’

  ‘How many of you will return, Knife Drip?’

  ‘The other two bonecasters have awakened and even now approach us. Lid Ger—Sourstone. And Lera Epar—Bitterspring. Of our people, we cannot yet say. Maybe all. Perhaps none.’

  ‘Who summoned us?’