by Roger Taylor
Silence.
Ibris waited.
Antyr and Tarrian waited, their uneasiness growing. Something was amiss. For the first time since he had been an apprentice, Antyr wanted to flee the dream.
Aaken swallowed nervously as the hairs on Tarrian’s back rose ominously, and his top lip wrinkled upwards to reveal flesh-rending teeth.
From behind the door came a . . . command? . . . a plea? Ibris felt a powerful will setting his own aside and moving him to pull open the door. He hesitated. ‘Only your great strength can do this,’ came some courtier’s allurement that both attracted and repelled him, but, as he scowled at this remark, the will had become his own and, tightening his grip on the glittering handle, he began to pull.
He felt rather than saw the door begin to open, and a sighing like a great rush of wind swirled around him: it was a mixture of relief and triumph. The shifting design became frenetic. A dark line appeared at the edge of the door as it moved but Ibris found himself struggling against some unseen resistance. Briefly he felt himself to be the pawn between two great forces, but it was of no import; he was committed.
With unbearable slowness the door opened and the dark line at its edge deepened and spread, as if a great blackness were beginning to seep around it.
A spasm of panic – no, terror – suddenly seized him, tearing the breath from him.
Then a hand seized his wrist and pushed the door forward irresistibly.
The door slammed shut with an echoing boom, and the blackness vanished.
Ibris sat up sharply, wide awake. Antyr wrenched his hand away from the Duke’s tightening grip and Tarrian let out a soft, eerie howl.
As his cry died away into a distant whimper, a deep silence filled the room and the three figures became very still. Eventually Antyr said awkwardly, ‘This was the dream you sought, sire?’
The Duke started a little at Antyr’s voice, then swung his legs round and stood up shakily, only to sit down again almost immediately. ‘Yes, yes,’ he said, his left hand rubbing his right wrist as if it had been injured in some way. ‘You have your father’s deftness. With time and discipline I suspect you could be even better than he.’
The remark was offhand, as though the Duke were saying something while his mind was on other, more important matters. Antyr, however, bowed his head in acknowledgement; offhand or not, it was a rare compliment.
But the Duke’s dream had unsettled him profoundly. Something had been dreadfully wrong about it and he wanted to be away from here. Duty held him for the moment however. ‘Did you find what you were seeking, sire?’ he asked.
The Duke turned and met the Dream Finder’s still, night-eyed gaze unflinchingly. ‘I’m not sure,’ he said. ‘Whose was the hand that closed the door?’
‘Your own, sire,’ Antyr answered simply.
Ibris nodded as if this answered some other question, then he lifted up his two hands and looked at them. ‘My left defied my right?’ he muttered.
An image of doubt, sire, Antyr was about to say, glibly. Nothing more. Merely a reflection of the difficult balancing of interests which must constantly beset you.
But though in many a lord it would have been so, here it was not, he knew. He had walked through countless nightmares, faced, and smiled at all the demons and ogres that the human mind could invent, but the Duke’s dream had had a . . . strangeness . . . in it that he had never known before. It had been as if the will that had sought the opening of the door had truly been from beyond the Duke. Not simply some ‘mysterious presence’ which was no more than a creation of the dreamer’s guilt, but a separate, distinct entity. And seeking some unknowable end.
Suddenly he felt very afraid.
He needed a drink.
Tarrian’s dismay and anger flooded through him but the Duke cut across the impending silent argument.
‘Who else was there, Antyr?’ he asked.
Antyr’s throat dried. The Duke had ruled the city and its dominions for over forty years. Years full of battles, riots, plagues, factional quarrelling and plotting, civil and military upheavals of every form. Yet too they had been years full of achievement, with magnificent buildings rising above the city’s walls, great works of scholarship, poetry, music, and paintings and sculptures, and . . .
Antyr looked down. Ibris had both survived and brought about these times. He was too complete and perceptive a man to have sought out a Dream Finder on some foolish whim.
At one with his Companion, a Dream Finder could not lie, but Antyr wished profoundly that the question had not been asked.
‘I don’t know, sire,’ he said eventually.
‘But you’re afraid?’ the Duke continued.
Antyr did not reply.
‘You needn’t answer,’ the Duke said. ‘I can smell your fear. Feel no shame about it. I . . .’
He stopped and lowered his eyes.
For a long moment he sat motionless, then he laid his hand briefly on Antyr’s and stood up. ‘Thank you, Petran’s son,’ he said. ‘And you, Tarrian. You’ve done me good service tonight.’ He gestured to Aaken and Feranc. ‘See that he’s duly paid and safely escorted home before you both retire.’ Then he was striding towards a nearby door, leaving Antyr scrambling to his feet and bowing awkwardly while trying to prevent his chair from falling over.
As he reached the door, Ibris turned. ‘I may need you again,’ he said curtly. ‘Don’t leave the city. And speak to no one of this visit.’
Antyr seemed to feel the walls and ceiling of the room closing about him like a prison. Unsteadily, he bowed again.
When the Duke had left, Antyr turned round. Feranc had moved from the door and was close behind him.
Antyr jumped. ‘I . . . I don’t leave the city much anyway,’ he stammered hastily, but the bodyguard’s face showed no expression other than a flick of the eyes towards the approaching chancellor.
‘Go with Lord Aaken for your fee,’ he said flatly. ‘Then I’ll have you escorted back home, unless you’d rather spend the rest of the night here.’
Antyr’s every instinct was to flee – to get back to his own home, away from the lingering, persistent strangeness of the Duke’s dream and the cold hardness of Feranc’s presence.
‘And to get back to that bottle,’ came a scornful blast from Tarrian, though it was edged by doubt and uncertainty.
Antyr gathered up an angry denial, but it faded almost before he could form it. The sense of menace from outside that had touched the Duke’s dream had been like that which, only a little while earlier, Tarrian had brought to him from his memory of the death of Petran.
‘Yes . . . No . . . I . . .’ Antyr faltered. ‘I don’t want anything to do with this. It’s . . .’
His reply petered out. He had no choice. Independent of his feelings, if the Duke wanted him again then that was the end of the matter; he was not a man who could safely be gainsaid by a mere Dream Finder. Antyr’s stomach turned over and for a moment he thought he was going to be sick again.
‘I think perhaps you’d better stay here,’ Aaken said, his voice concerned. ‘You’ve had an even more disturbed night than the rest of us and you don’t look very well at all.’ Antyr hesitated. ‘We’ll find somewhere for you, and some food and drink. It’s a long way back to your empty house through this fog,’ Aaken concluded.
Antyr nodded. He had the feeling that he was being manipulated, but Aaken was right. He was tired, and being marched through the gloomy streets had little appeal.
‘Thank you, sir, I will stay, if I may,’ he replied. ‘And if it’s no imposition, a little food would be appreciated, and perhaps a little ale . . . or wine . . .?’
A hand fell on his shoulder. ‘Food, yes, but ale and wine, no, Dream Finder.’ The voice was Feranc’s and it too offered Antyr no choices. ‘I know little about your strange . . . craft . . . Dream Finder, but I know enough to know that ale and wine will impair your skills severely and I have my duty to the Duke to ensure that he is served only by the most able.’
Briefly it occurred to Antyr to protest against this arbitrary prohibition; to stand on his rights as a free Guildsman. But even if Feranc’s presence alone had not indicated the futility of such an attempt, he knew that the words ‘Needs of the State’, with their subtle combination of an appeal to his loyalty and a threat of force if he did not respond appropriately, would end his rebellion with a single stroke.
He affected an indifference. ‘Water will be excellent,’ he said, with a weak smile, allowing Feranc to guide him to the door. Tarrian chuckled malevolently.
A little later, after a confusing trip through winding corridors and stairways and a promise from Aaken that he would pay him, ‘Tomorrow, without fail’, Antyr found himself sitting alone on the edge of a bed, in a small, simply decorated room. On a small table in front of him was a bowl of hot, thick stew, a plate liberally covered with slices of meat and large chunks of bread, and a plain glass jug of water.
A dish of food had been brought for Tarrian also and, after a brief and noisy chase, he had successfully nosed it into a corner and was greedily devouring the contents.
Feranc had left them there with a cursory ‘Good night’, and the meal had appeared shortly afterwards, carried on a wooden tray by a bleary-eyed servant whose surly face clearly said, ‘This is the Duke’s palace, not an inn, you know!’
Any thought the man might have had about voicing such a comment however, vanished when Antyr and Tarrian, their eyes dark as night and cruel as a desert sun, turned towards him.
For a while Antyr sat motionless, staring darkly at the jug and toying uncertainly with a spoon, then the sound of Tarrian’s furious eating stopped and a snout edged towards Antyr’s bowl.
‘I’ll have that if you don’t want it,’ Tarrian said.
Antyr wanted to ask him why he had never told him that his father had been Dream Finder to the Duke, but he knew it would be to no avail.
‘Does nothing stop you eating?’ he asked instead.
‘Nature of the beast,’ Tarrian replied. ‘We don’t survive out there by dallying delicately over our prey. Every meal’s our last. Have you finished?’
‘No, damn it, I haven’t started yet,’ Antyr said crossly, picking up a piece of meat and throwing it over the wolf’s head. Tarrian twisted round and caught the piece before it reached the floor. He swallowed it with a single gulp as he turned back in anticipation of more. His unbridled pleasure at this unexpected meal was infectious and, though not without some effort, Antyr made a start on the stew.
Despite the sour face of the servant who had brought it, the stew was excellent, and after the first few hesitant mouthfuls, Antyr began to eat with some relish.
Gradually his dark mood gave way to a quiet litany of self-reproach, and a train of well-worn thoughts started to parade through his mind. He really should do something with himself; get some order into his life; stop his drinking, get more clients, start studying his craft again – his father had been highly regarded by his colleagues, and the skill was sometimes hereditary.
But now he seemed to be viewing the thoughts from a different vantage. Something had changed. It was as if the Duke’s disturbing dream had shifted a great weight inside him which he had thought to be unmovable and now it was beginning to move like some slow avalanche.
His own words came back to him – it was a Dream Finder’s duty – privilege, his father would say – to help and comfort people – the bewildered, the tormented. But the craft, in Serenstad at least, had been severely assailed by an unwitting alliance of medical practitioners, scientists and philosophers, all of whom had prospered and progressed under Ibris’s tutelage. Antyr’s father had been the mainstay of the Guild of Dream Finders, and his dignity and experience had done much to sustain the craft. But when he died, his successors proved to be timid and futile, and they had stood by, wringing their hands as their ancient craft had fallen in public esteem and degenerated towards charlatanism.
Young, grief-stricken and only partly trained, Antyr could not begin to fill the vacuum left by his father in the Guild and he found himself standing by, a bewildered and increasingly bitter spectator.
For a while after his father’s death he had tended to the needs of his father’s old clients. But these had gradually diminished in number; some had thoughtlessly died, but the majority had turned away from him, alienated by his increasingly unpleasant and disparaging manner. This same trait had also made it difficult for him to acquire new clients.
Now, sitting in this simple room in the Duke’s palace, Antyr’s view of his life changed. He saw that he had chosen the path of bitterness and recrimination; chosen to watch the deterioration of his craft and to do nothing to stop it, while freely laying the blame on others.
His father would not have done that. He would have spoken out as need arose and pitted his integrity against all mockery and scorn.
True, he was not his father, but the word, chosen, disturbed him. He realized, chillingly, that he was what he was through his own endeavours. He had not had the wit – the cynicism – to become rich by pandering to the whims and fancies of the wives of merchants and aristocrats, yet he had not had the courage to offer them his skills honestly and without fear.
Idly he picked up a piece of meat and held it out to Tarrian, but the wolf ignored it. Instead he sat down beside him and leaned heavily against his leg. Antyr felt the ancient, silent companionship of the pack close about him. He put his arm around the wolf in reply.
‘Don’t be too severe on yourself, few could have followed in your father’s footsteps, and wiser than you have done worse with their lives,’ Tarrian said, unexpectedly sympathetic.
Antyr nodded and patted the wolf. ‘Is this just a late night and good food talking, dog?’ he said.
‘No,’ Tarrian replied after a long pause. ‘It’s the Duke’s dream. I think the masonry’s starting to fall about you at last.’
His tone was both grim and regretful, and Antyr shivered. A final item entered his revelation: fear.
Even now he was reluctant to face it. But it was coming, he knew, with the inexorability of a flood tide. It would make itself felt regardless of his wishes or his actions. That distant alarm that he had always felt, even as an apprentice. That elusive sense of the deep mystery of the dreams that he so casually wandered through.
‘We don’t know what we are doing, how we do it, or what true end it serves,’ he said softly to himself. ‘We have too little humility, too little awe.’ He looked down at Tarrian. ‘We’re children playing in the armoury, hedged about by points and edges we know nothing of. We don’t even know how we came to be, do we, dog?’ he continued stroking the wolf’s head. ‘You’re not truly of your kind, nor am I of mine. We call the finding a skill, a craft, but . . .’
Tarrian made no reply.
Then slowly, Antyr concluded, ‘Such ignorance can be nothing other than dangerous.’
‘Our lives are but dreams in the Great Dream,’ the ancients of legend had said. But they had not been called Dream Finders, they had been called the Dream Warriors, Adepts of the White Way, men of great power and wisdom, who guarded the spirits of men from . . .
From what? And from where?
Superstition, Antyr thought, out of habit. Tales for children, like tales of wizards and elves and dragons . . .
But . . .?
Fear burst inside him suddenly, and for a moment he lost control completely. His entire body trembled and shook violently. He had never known such fear, not even when he’d stood shield to shield with his fellows, facing the Bethlarii’s cavalry charge at Herion. And there he had truly expected to die!
The sudden recollection was like cold water dashed in his face. Those pounding horses and screaming men turning only at the last moment in front of the hedge of spears. Then he had seen friends and strangers alike die all around him in the hail of arrows and spears from the Bethlarii infantry.
People alive, talking, shouting but seconds before, suddenly, starkly, no more; the
ir bodies like empty mansions; like things that had never been. Yet he had not been so frightened as he was now.
Why? he asked himself. What is more fearful than death? No answer came, but in the silence, he realized that he was no longer trembling; that his fear was waning. Somehow, just as Tarrian would shake off the rain from his coat in a great flurrying cloud of spray, so his own convulsion seemed to have scattered his terror.
Just a bad night, he rationalized briefly. Too many things happening, too quickly.
Almost immediately, however, he denied this explanation with a rueful smile. Tarrian turned to look at him.
Masonry, Antyr thought. Inevitability.
‘What’s happened, Tarrian?’ he asked, gently pushing the table to one side and laying back on the bed. ‘What’s frightening you that you won’t tell me? What do you know?’
There was a long pause.
‘I know that you’re a finer Dream Finder than even your father,’ came the reply eventually. ‘I’m sorry I frightened you earlier, but it seemed to be the right thing to do.’
Antyr frowned, he had never heard Tarrian so uncertain, and the wolf’s self-reproach was quite uncharacteristic.
‘I probably asked for it,’ he said. ‘But don’t avoid my question. The Duke’s dream was bland and ordinary yet it was full of threat and doom beyond any nightmare we’ve ever found. What . . .?’
‘Go to sleep,’ Tarrian said before Antyr could finish his question.
‘What?’ Antyr exclaimed in some irritation.
‘Go to sleep,’ Tarrian repeated. ‘I’ll keep watch. This day’s been too long. We’ll see what we think about all this tomorrow.’
Antyr opened his mouth to argue, but Tarrian shut him out. For a moment he considered opposing his Companion, but he knew it would be futile. Besides, Tarrian was right. Whatever was stirring within him it could not be dealt with while he was so tired.
