by Erin Evans
“Next morning. I sent your brothers to go check on the dragonborn and stop poking you.”
He pushed back onto his heels, surveying their position. The army of Gilgeam was nowhere in sight—except for the throngs of Untherans sitting on the ground around him. At a distance of a hundred paces or so, a fence flickered, woven of the same silvery light as the net that had scooped them all up. Beyond it a pair of giants watched over them, and beyond them more of the strange giants sat or stood along the foothills of mountains of tumbling rocks.
“What in the stlarning planes did you get us into?” Mira asked, crouching down next to him with a dipper of water. He drained it before answering.
“I have no idea. But we escaped Gilgeam.”
“Some of us.” He looked back and saw Namshita standing over them, flanked by two other Untheran warriors. “We’re counting nine hundred escaped.”
Nine hundred of two thousand sounded decent when they were numbers in a ledger. Another matter when they were people he might have seen or spoken to, people Namshita had promised safety to. “I’m sorry. It was a chance and I took it.”
Namshita nodded, but didn’t answer him. Instead she gestured to the men beside her. “I would introduce my confederates. This is Utu and Amurri.” The younger man was the soldier from Gilgeam’s guard. “Can you cast the spell to help them learn your language?”
Dahl shook his head. “My haversack is still in the camp. All my things …”
His ritual book. His symbol of Oghma. The little enamel-backed steel mirror his mother had given him the day he left the farm, the one he’d used in thousands of rituals. He’d had these things since he’d gone to the Domes of Reason, as paladin and Harper spy, through mission after mission, loss after loss. Farideh’s letters, the talisman they provided. The absence of these things hit him like a blow to the chest. All gone, as if a part of his life had been stolen away in that moment.
But nine hundred escaped, he reminded himself. Don’t be petty. “How many of the dragonborn made it?”
“Sixty-two,” Mira supplied. “Most, not all. They’re keeping to themselves, on the slope side of the fence. Don’t seem to trust the giants or the Untherans, but they like your brothers well enough. Someone named Mazarka asked after you, for Shestandeliath.”
“Her clan,” Dahl explained. “She’s been representing them. Have the giants spoken to anyone?”
“The Mash-en-li only want to talk to you,” Namshita said.
“What does that mean?” Dahl asked. “Mash-en-li.”
Namshita frowned. “You don’t have the words. They are only half in this place. Half in the world of dreams.”
“They came with you then?” Dahl asked. “With the storm?”
“They must have. We stayed away from them in the other world. They’re … You’ve seen their magic. Strange magic. Unpredictable. It’s said they carve foul curses upon their skin with chisels and hammers, and then fill the lines with the blood of human sacrifices so as to fuel their connection to that dream place.”
“You mean Gilgeam says so?”
Namshita glowered at him. “They carve their spells upon their skin. Their magic is enough to warp the mind. That much is true, and you can’t tell me otherwise. They are his enemies. They are not necessarily our friends.”
Dahl eyed the giants on the other side of the fence, two males this time. At least three times his height, their muscles seeming chiseled out of living rock and—yes—carved deeply with patterns and pictograms. Each of them wore a pendant with a rough-hewn jewel hanging from it. “I’ve made allies of worse. I thought you didn’t have magic in Abeir.”
“And so we stay away from them,” Namshita reminded Dahl. “They are not natural.”
He climbed to his feet, still a little unsteady. “You trusted me anyway?”
“We were running short of time,” Namshita pointed out. “It is very unnatural that you should know their tongue, and know they would not crush us all. You owe me an explanation for that much.”
Dahl hesitated. Namshita’s entire experience of the gods was a madman who claimed to be a reborn dead power, a man whose ego threatened to undo them all. If he tried to explain Oghma and the message to her, how all of this had come about because of a poem he couldn’t see and a word he didn’t know, Namshita would have no choice but to brush him off as a madman, a flamefool—and she’d be close enough to right, wouldn’t she? How many successes made the difference? Did Sessaca and the deal with Lorcan and the dead Zhentarim all wipe away anything he’d earned? That dark, angry something in his chest started to build.
Lord of All Knowledge, he prayed, trying to calm himself. Binder of What Is Known: Make my eye clear, my mind open, my heart true. He blew out a slow breath, the grief and fear and anger receding.
“The chieftain,” he said. “She was the one with the harp on her stomach? The one shouting about the draumrting?”
Utu turned to Namshita, speaking quickly in Untheran. She answered back, shaking her head vehemently. The sikati turned back to Dahl. “Yes. Gilgeam stole it from them. A gem of considerable size and uncanny magic. That’s what he traded for the demon’s army. Or at least what Gilgeam thinks he traded.”
“So they’re not getting it back soon.”
“Not from the Son of Victory.”
The giants on the other side of the fence seemed to notice Dahl and the cluster of people around him. They spoke quickly to one another, before one sauntered off and the other approached the fence. Dahl headed toward them, and found Mira soon at his side.
“You want to know what he really said?” Mira asked once they were a good distance on.
“Please.”
“Utu says Gilgeam still has the draumrting. That if they went back, they could steal it,” Mira said. “He was quite insistent, but Namshita said that was wrong. The draumrting was what he traded to Graz’zt, ‘among the other things.’ Utu thinks he kept it for himself.”
Dahl frowned. “I don’t suppose Utu said why he thought that.” And he knew Namshita wouldn’t have explained. “Regardless, it means we don’t have a good idea of what a draumrting’s powers are or Gilgeam’s.”
“Everything he’s done could be achieved by a charlatan with the right magic items,” Mira said stubbornly. “He’s always grabbing that amulet, for one.”
“He’s dangerous enough it almost doesn’t matter, though.” Dahl looked over at Mira as they approached the fence. “Are you all right, by the way?”
“Better now that I’m nowhere near him,” she said. “I don’t know if he’s Chosen or something like a god or a fraud of the highest order. But the Son of Victory is definitely a slimy hardjack of the highest order.”
The giant who had left, a pale fellow a head shorter than the first, strode back to his fellow, nodding once. Each took hold of their amulets, and a glittering swirl of magic poured into the carvings on their throats. The giant who had remained behind reached over the fence.
“You,” he said. “You, van. Human one. Come here, please. Somni wishes to speak to you now. I will lift you out.”
Dahl stopped in his tracks at the voice. “You speak the common tongue? How is that possible?”
The giants exchanged a glance. “This is how speaking works,” the second said, sounding confused. “You would not understand me otherwise.”
“Come on, please,” the first said. “Somni is anxious.”
Dahl let the second giant lift him out of the enclosure. Thankfully, he set Dahl down and the two of them let him walk across the rocky landscape, keeping their steps slow so as not to let him fall out of line. Dahl considered the other giants as they walked—men, women, even children. Some very young, some very elderly. Someone had built the beginnings of a rock wall on the plains side of the camp, and as Dahl watched, a female giant coaxed boulders to hop themselves down the slopes toward the growing wall. Not an army, Dahl thought. But then he remembered the Untherans. Not a usual army.
High on the slope of the moun
tain, the giantess watched him approach with eyes like onyx. Like most of the giants, male and female, her head was bald, her chest bared and carved heavily over. A skirt of mosses hung around her waist and a chain of office—embedded with uncut rubies and shining obsidian—hung around her shoulders. She lowered herself down to sit on the ground, with a difficulty that suggested she was older than she looked, and made herself, if not eye-to-eye with Dahl, then near to it.
“Who are you,” she said, still stately even huddled on the ground, “to ask for sanctuary? Who are you to have etched yourself with such words?”
Dahl bowed his head. “I’m called Dahl Peredur. I … Sorry, what words?”
“The song written on you. ‘Does the salmon demand the tide? Does the owl’s wing unfurl the gale?’ What does it mean?”
That threw him. “You can see it?”
“It is written out,” she said simply. “I can read it.” Her black eyes studied him a moment from crown to sole. “You are very marked for one of the vanen. Does this give you magic?”
“It … no, not exactly.”
“I am Somni, new-made forer of the Tusendraumren Steinjotunen,” she said. “The man that calls himself the Son of Victory killed my father and stole his draumrting. You run with him, but you flee him and beg for sanctuary from us. There are those among us who think it is madness to stop the reclamation of my father’s powers.” She sat back on her heels. “But we do not take such a call for sanctuary lightly, not even from one of the vanen. If we stop allowing these things to have meaning, we have lost the meaning of ourselves. So tell me your story, Dahl Peredur. Tell me why I should shelter that man’s allies.”
“To begin,” Dahl said, “we aren’t his allies. Some of these people planned to flee before the Blue Fire pulled them here. They know Gilgeam is dangerous and mad. They say he stole the draumrting and gave it to a demon lord. Myself and my friends and the dragonborn, we were captured and made slaves. We have no more love for the Son of Victory than you.”
“But you must admit,” Somni said, “that is what anyone would say in this moment. You don’t speak our language. Who told you to call for tjáting?”
Dahl swallowed. If it would be hard to explain to Namshita, it would be no easier to explain to Somni—and Somni was three times his size. But she watched him with infinite patience, a living mountain. She would wait him out, he felt certain.
“The … song,” he began, “was written on me by a god.”
She blinked at him. “God? Like the Son of Victory?”
“No,” Dahl said. “Oghma isn’t interested in conquest. Only knowledge.”
“A kind of conquest,” she pointed out.
“Only if you pervert it,” Dahl said. “The song, I think, is a puzzle. I think it told me to wait at the ruins for someone. I think that someone is you. The god put the word tjáting in my head, moments before you arrived. I didn’t know what it meant. I just trusted him.”
Somni tilted her head, considering him. “It sounds mad,” Dahl agreed.
“It sounds wise,” Somni said. “We believe that what we live is only a reflection of the greater world. That the world of dreams is what you see when you glimpse that something greater. From a very young age, we teach our children that dreams are not to be fought. That you gain most from them, that you can tap into their magic and strength when you go along and observe and experience all that the world is trying to show you. Your god-thing is speaking like a dream. When a dream speaks, it is wise you listen.”
“How is it,” Dahl asked, “that you can speak the common tongue? Do they speak it in Abeir?”
Somni considered him, faintly amused, the way Dahl might have looked at his little nephew Wilmot as he made a childlike observation Dahl wasn’t sure how to explain. She lifted the pendant from her chest—it was as big as a shield. “This is a draumrting,” she said, cupping the stone in one etched gray palm. “In this, we place the essence of our dreams so that we may take them into the waking world. So that we may claim a little of the dreaming world’s strength and channel it into our spells. In dreams,” she said, “we speak as we need to. So the magic of the draumrting can accommodate us, for a time anyway. I would still wish to learn it in the waking, since it seems we are meant to remain here.”
Dahl stared at the amulet. Here was a kind of magic he’d never encountered any mention of—there was tattoo magic that stored spells and runic magic, which might both mark the skin. There were warlock pacts that let a person draw the power of a plane and shape it into spells. “Can you …” He faltered, dazzled by the array of questions he found himself with. “Is that what makes your spells summon such strange things? The flowers that made sparks? The mirror-glass butterflies?”
Somni chuckled. “Are they strange? Maybe, if you don’t dream.” She considered him again. “Do you dream, Dahl Peredur? Or is this the purpose of your god-thing?”
“I dream,” Dahl said, feeling oddly defensive. “We dream. But we can’t do this sort of magic.”
“You don’t have a draumrting. Maybe this is why you have a god to fill your etchings.” She touched Dahl’s forearm with a fingertip as long as his hand. “Not this one. This is something else. And this”—she tapped his chest.
Dahl frowned. The Harper tattoo on his forearm was meant to be invisible—though less so than the words of Oghma, which he himself had never seen. As for the other … “What do you see there?” he asked.
Somni regarded him solemnly. “There are monsters in the dreaming world too.”
The demon lord, he thought. Or maybe Lorcan’s deal? “Can you tell if it’s permanent?”
Somni shook her head. “Your magics are not our magics. Those things that came in the two Sunderings we leave to themselves.”
With every careless word, Dahl’s brain began to churn—a new society of giants, an unheard of sort of magic, now artifacts from the first catastrophe that had split Abeir-Toril into two worlds. “What things?”
“Remnants of the Dawn Titans, bodies of those beings, artifacts that should be elsewhere.” She folded her hands in her lap. “Your god-thing must be pleased with such a curious one as you.”
“At times,” Dahl allowed.
“You have your freedom from the Son of Victory now. What do you intend to do?”
“There’s a city near here, Djerad Thymar,” he said. “The dragonborn are centered there, and their army.”
Somni frowned. “Do you mean the Vayemniri?”
Dahl racked his brain trying to recall the word. “The … scaly ones. I think I can rally aid for them, for all these people and an army to fight Gilgeam. I can get my family to their home and my friend to her allies. I can find … The woman I love is there. I need to get to her as well.”
Somni smiled. “Such a lot of reasons. What does your god-thing say?”
“He doesn’t,” Dahl said. “I think he wishes I would figure it out myself.”
“In the absence of dreams—or god-things—I would urge caution and patience,” Somni said. “The Son of Victory expects rashness, a lack of control. He is not one to rush into battle against. Rest. Recover your strength. Return to the dreaming.”
Dahl held his tongue—how could he possibly rest when he was this close? When Gilgeam was so dangerous? “He’s going to attack them. They need to be warned.”
“Oh, they have been,” Somni said. “That much I have dreamed. In the meantime, though, I think you and your god-thing have much to share with us. We can meet your Vayemniri on the morrow.”.
• • •
HAVILAR HESITATED EVEN as Alyona regarded her sadly. Was it rude to ask someone how they died? It seemed rude—but then, how often did you get the chance to ask? Assuming, she thought, you weren’t a priest who also tracked down murderers or something like that, there probably weren’t rules about it.
Alyona gave a little chuckle. You’re wondering how, aren’t you?
A little, Havilar admitted. Was it bad?
I don’t remember ever
ything, Alyona said. Not anymore. She and I fought. I left. I went home, but then … I remember being cornered. A lot of people. Her voice grew flat, distant. I remember they blamed me for something—I wasn’t there. It couldn’t have been my doing. Someone threw a stone. And … Things go dark after that, for a long time. Dark but painful.
Havilar felt the memory of her pulse speeding. She’d had stones thrown at her too—never a mob, never more than a stone or two. But how many did it take? How different was the world she’d grown up in from the one Alyona had died in? A part of her scoffed and wanted to insist it was as different as one plane to the next. A part of her didn’t dare believe it.
I can remember Bisera saying that it was for my own safety. Then I was here. She gave Havilar a shy smile. Or maybe a place like this. I suspect they all look similar.
Havilar frowned. All what? What is this place?
Did I forget to tell you? Alyona asked. I’m sorry—I know you asked before … You did, didn’t you? Did I say it was a soul sapphire?
You didn’t, Havilar said, trying not to sound impatient. The poor woman was dead and maybe addled from many blows to the head—who knew what carried over when you became a ghost? What’s a soul sapphire?
A trap, Alyona said. This one’s different, though. The devils made them for their Blood War. You see, if you kill a demon, it goes back to the Abyss and is reborn. But the soul sapphire traps it, and so they can interrogate it or ransom it or … other things. At least that’s what Bisera knows.
Havilar considered the hazy expanse. How do you get a demon in one?
Alyona’s expression tightened. They would put a mortal soul in first. As bait of a kind.
Havilar shot to her feet once more, for all the good it did. Is she planning to put a demon in here?
No, no! Alyona cried, waving the thought away. Don’t be ridiculous. My sister isn’t a monster.
Your sister, the Brimstone Angel? Havilar said skeptically. The one who’s supposed to have sacrificed scores of tieflings to help Asmodeus ascend? The one who possessed Crake and Moriah and got them killed? The one who broke Brin’s fingers to make the point she could kill him? Because I get the impression we think the word “monster” means different things, you and I, if you’re going to say that.
