Dreamweaver

by C. S. Friedman

  “You shouldn’t have talked to Virilian,” Isaac said in a strained voice. “Now you’ve lost the element of surprise.”

  I sighed. “This battle can’t be won just by killing people, Isaac. We could never do enough of that to make a difference. What we have to do is convince Virilian that the Shadows’ hunting methods have failed—that there are so many Dreamwalkers he could never hunt us all down—and we’re capable of hurting his people in ways they can’t afford. And only if they end their crusade against us, and free the Dreamwalker souls they’ve enslaved will we stop hurting them. If I don’t explain all that to Virilian, so he doesn’t know what our end game is—if he doesn’t understand how to tap out—what can we accomplish here, besides meaningless bloodshed? He has to know the rules.”

  Ahota nodded. “Not to mention, by offering him a choice, you’ve placed the responsibility for this confrontation squarely on his head. He called for this conflict; he has the power to end it.”

  So if people do die, I thought, the guilt will not be all mine to bear. Her words didn’t banish my fear, but they took a bit of the edge off it.

  At last everything was ready. I knelt beside the bags of colored sand and shut my eyes while Ahota walked around the circle setting fire to the herb bundles. Breathing deeply, I tried to prepare myself for what was to come. But there was no way to prepare for something like this. Once more I was going to trust myself to the unknown, only this time all my enemies would be present. What if Morgana’s information wasn’t good enough? What if using it didn’t have the effect I was hoping for? I was painfully aware that I had no plan B. If my strategy didn’t work, I would probably not be coming home.

  Familiar scents filled the air, marking each cardinal direction: North, South, East, West. I closed my eyes and focused on them. Breathe deeply. Try to relax. The smells permeated my spirit, soothing the edge of my fear, consecrating me for my journey. Or for sacrifice.

  Then I opened my eyes, took a handful of sand, and began to draw.

  The Dreamwalker’s world is empty.

  I stand on the ridge between the tower and the red grasslands, alone. Overhead the sky is a sullen purple, like a bruise, with a swollen red sun in its center. The colors seem appropriate to today’s business, as if the world itself were bleeding.

  I look around me, but there’s no one else visible. What if the others don’t show up? The guardian promised to carry my message to them, but she’d offered no guarantees about how it would be received. What if the abbie Dreamwalkers decided they were better off staying under the Shadows’ radar, as they had done for centuries, and weren’t willing to confront their enemies openly? If so, I can hardly blame them. The last open confrontation didn’t exactly go well.

  The black thorn bushes have taken over much of the grasslands. I feel a visceral hatred toward them that isn’t wholly rational. They hurt someone I cared about and I hunger to destroy them. But I can’t allow myself such a luxury. I’m going to need all the energy I have to summon Shadowlords to this place, and then use whatever is left to deal with them. I can’t afford to waste any of it.

  Suddenly I sense a presence behind me. I turn to see the guardian of the Dreamwalker haven standing there, the spirit I once called the avatar. She’s wearing the same body as when I first met her, but this time, instead of being wrapped in mystical patterns, she’s armored like an ancient Japanese warrior. I open my mouth to ask her if the others will be coming, but the words catch in my throat; I’m so afraid of being told that they won’t, and that all my planning was in vain.

  But then another presence takes shape beside her: a thin, pale-skinned Homo sapiens female with short golden hair. I feel a rush of relief so powerful it’s dizzying. Next a male shows up, this one with skin the color of charcoal and geometric scars decorating his chest. And then another female, tall and lanky, her face painted with streaks of red, black, and yellow, in fearsome patterns. War paint.

  Now they’re appearing in twos and threes, each one wearing a body that reflects some variant of my own species. There are as many types of armor and war paint and tattoos visible as there are Dreamwalkers. Ancient and modern, primitive and sophisticated, details randomly intermingled, as if someone flipped through the pages of a book on Terra Colonna history and chose images at random. Which is possibly what happened. Most of these people have probably never seen my world in person.

  After believing for so long that I was the only Dreamwalker left, the sight of the others is overwhelming. I’d estimate at least three dozen are present, maybe four, more than I’d dared hope for. I want to say something to welcome them, but will they understand me if I do? The guardian spirit has been interacting with people on Terra Prime for centuries and clearly understands some of our languages, but to the rest of these visitors the Terran cluster is no more than a fearsome legend: the birthplace of monsters, a realm to be avoided at all costs. What are the odds they would have bothered to learn the monsters’ language?

  I look at the guardian. She’s waiting. They’re all waiting. “Can they understand me?” I ask.

  She shakes her head slightly. Damn.

  “Can you translate?”

  She nods.

  How the hell did I get to this point, when the fate of so many people is riding on my shoulders? I take a moment to steady my nerves before speaking. “Thank you for coming.” The words seem insufficient in this fantastic setting, but they’re the best I can come up with. I wait for the guardian to translate them, but she says nothing aloud. Suddenly I realize that I’ve never heard an abbie speak. Do they communicate on frequencies I can’t hear, maybe, or have a means of psychic communication, like Farspeakers do? Or is she using the special power of this place to insert knowledge into their brains without words, as sometimes happens in a dream? She’s not signaling me to stop, so I must assume she’s communicating with them somehow. “We’re here to force the Shadows to abandon their hunt of the Dreamwalkers, and to release the souls of the dreamers they’ve enslaved. We can’t do that just by killing. Even if we could get all the ones who came here, there would still be thousands left in the world, and they would want revenge for their losses. We need to try a different strategy.”

  Dozens of faces are staring at me, their features stylized in the same way that the guardian’s are. “We need to accomplish two things. First, demonstrate by sheer numbers that their hunt has failed. They’ve spent centuries trying to kill us off, and it obviously didn’t work.” That is a lie, of course. The Shadows’ genocidal efforts was frighteningly efficient within the Terran Cluster, and if they ever learned there were Dreamwalkers in other clusters they would start slaughtering those as well. But since my new allies had all disguised themselves as Homo sapiens to prevent that, it would look like dozens of dreamers on the Shadows’ own world had survived the holocaust. There was power in such fiction.

  “Second, we need to show them we have the knowledge and the power to hurt them. Really hurt them, in a way no one else has ever done before. They need to know that if this state of war continues, their people will be in danger every time they sleep. Then they’ll have no choice but to negotiate.” Or so I hope. What is the saying about mice and men?

  I create a copy of my book of notes and hold it up to show to them. “I have here a list of their fears. Strong emotion interferes with how their talent works, so if we can inspire that emotion, we can turn their own Gift against them. Unfortunately, we can’t target Shadowlords individually when we don’t know who is who, so we’re going to need a more general strategy. I think each of us should take one of these fears and apply it to multiple Shadows. See who responds to it most strongly, and then focus on them. Unless someone has a better idea?” I look at the guardian. She is silent for a moment—listening to something, perhaps?—then looks at me and nods her approval. “Okay. I’ll read through these and we can divvy them up . . . somehow.

  “Sunlight is at the top of nearly ev
eryone’s list. I don’t know if they’re actually harmed by it, or if the phobia is just a side effect of being undead, but either way, it gives us control over something that can hurt all of them.” I point to the swollen red sun overhead. “We need to brighten that. And bring the lake back, for its reflective properties. Extend it as far as we can.”

  I read the rest of the data to them. Some of the Shadows’ fears are surprisingly mundane, a reminder that each Shadowlord was once a normal human being, with normal human weaknesses: claustrophobia, arachnophobia, herpetophobia. Others are deeply personal in nature, rooted in traumas that they must still be struggling to forget: abuse, abandonment, humiliation. As I read each fear aloud, a Dreamwalker gestures acceptance of that one as his or her personal project. So my translator is clearly doing her job.

  By the time I’m done reading there are three times as many Dreamwalkers crowded around me as before, but I sense through my Gift that the real number hasn’t changed. One of the abbies must have bolstered our small army with dream constructs, so that we’ll appear to be a larger force than we actually are. Good move. The sun has doubled in size and now blazes white in a cloudless blue sky, so someone took care of that, too; I have to create a pair of sunglasses so I can see comfortably. The lake is back, looking just like it did in the avatar’s dream, a gleaming mirror that reflects the sunlight with painful intensity. The whole world is awash in light.

  It’s time.

  Shutting my eyes, I focus my mind on the mystical pattern that will lead me back to Virilian’s dream. This time I can’t simply follow it to him, but I need to use it to draw him into my dreamscape. I’m honestly not sure how to do that, but my fetter visions suggested that the tower once channeled such knowledge to those who dreamwalked here, so I cross my fingers and hope that the building is still intact enough to help me. If not, then this is going to be a very short campaign.

  But as I envision the pattern in my mind, I can indeed see where changes will be needed. A few alterations in one place will shift the flow of energy between myself and Virilian, so that it runs against its natural current; a few extra connections in another will bind his fate to that of the tower, so that he is naturally drawn to it. I craft a new pattern to reflect these changes, weaving it strand by strand, with delicacy, like a spider creating its web. As I do so the music of the dream world resonates around me, echoing my creation back at me. I allow it to draw me into a half-trance of concentration, so that all things fade from my mind except the codex and its music. It feels good. It feels right. This is what I was born to do.

  But binding Virilian to my web is only the first step. A single witness wouldn’t be enough to carry our message to the Shadows, especially if he was someone the Shadows considered mentally unstable. If Virilian told the others about a nightmare confrontation with militant Dreamwalkers, it might be judged nothing more than a delusion. No, we need enough Shadows to attend that the truth of the event can’t be denied later—but not so many that we lose control of the confrontation. It’s a delicate balancing act.

  The last time I visited Virilian’s dream, I used his personal relics to find him. Now I’m using him as a relic to find those who are connected to him. One by one, I reach out to the people who are part of his fate-pattern, following mental paths of authority, loyalty, rivalry, duty, and even hatred, back to their sources. I’m able to get a solid fix on eleven Shadowlords that way, which seems a good number for our purposes. I weave them into my web, trapping them in its pattern like helpless flies.

  At last my creation is complete, and I begin to draw my flies to me. Virilian is the first to arrive, manifesting so suddenly that it startles me out of my trance. He flinches in pain and raises up an arm to protect his face from the sunlight, a welcome validation of our strategy, but an instant later he recovers his composure and straightens up. Now he’s raising both arms to the sky and chanting in a foreign language. Dark clouds appear overhead, and for a moment I’m afraid that he’s trying to summon the reapers back. Am I really sure they’re gone for good? But it’s only storm clouds that he wants, thick grey ones that congeal in front of the sun’s blazing face, casting the landscape into shadow. Rain begins to fall, not so heavily as to be a threat in its own right, but as it strikes the lake it breaks up the surface into a million shivering ripples, destroying its mirror-like perfection. Our most powerful weapon has been negated.

  Shit.

  Much as I want to counter his efforts, my immediate duty is to complete my summoning. I shut my eyes and try to focus again, trusting the other Dreamwalkers will deal with Virilian. But can they? This man has bound the souls of Dreamwalkers and claimed their Gift for his own; he may have as much power over this dreamscape as we do.

  More Shadowlords are beginning to manifest now, some with ghostly attendants trailing behind them like wisps of silk. The new arrivals seem confused by their surroundings, and I wonder if they even know that they’re dreaming. If not, that’s good; they won’t think to take control of the landscape. Now the clouds are starting to thin out and the rain begins to falter; I see that one black-skinned abbie is staring upward, doubtless trying to restore the sunlight. But Virilian overrides his efforts easily. As he does so he sees me looking at him and smiles. There is hunger in his eyes, black and boundless, so nakedly cannibalistic that it makes me shudder.

  It’s time for our assault to begin.

  The ground beneath the Shadows starts to buck and heave, then liquefy. Spiders rise up from cracks in the ground in swarms so thick the earth can no longer be seen, and rabid rats claw at the grey fabric of the Shadowlords’ robes as they scramble to climb up toward their faces. Walls of stone appear around some of the invaders, sealing them into tomb-like enclosures; those who have not yet realized that they are dreaming have to break free by brute physical force, while others concentrate to banish the stone. Flames spurt from the ground, and the air is filled with the smell of burning flesh, while faceless, nameless corpses litter the earth as far as the eye can see. Each of these things is an emotional trigger for one of the Shadows, but which one? I must leave it to my companions to figure that out, because right now my attention is fixed on Virilian.

  Infinitely confident, maddeningly arrogant, he stands in the midst of the chaos, brushing our constructs aside with the power of his mind as casually as one might swat a fly. The ground beneath his feet is stable, and neither snakes nor spiders nor rats nor any other noxious beasts come near him. A wall of stone that begins to take shape around him crumbles at his touch. Wildfire streaks across the ground in his direction, but it divides as it reaches him, leaving him unscathed. I hear others cry out as they are burned, but his clothing isn’t even singed.

  Shekarchiyandar has been to this world before, and he knows how to control it.

  His black eyes fixed on me, he mutters another incantation. Suddenly I can see all the ghosts that surround him—horrific creatures, starved and bruised and bleeding, forever looking like they did when they were tortured to death. One of them looks at me, and I see a desperate plea in its eyes: Destroy us! End this! When Virilian summons lightning to cast at the abbies, the ghosts twitch in pain, and several cry out; in that moment I understand what they are, and why he wants me to see them.

  Dreamwalkers.

  He’s drawing on them for power, draining them of energy to fuel his dream creations, so that his own vitality isn’t diminished. Can all the Shadowlords do that? If so, then we are sorely outnumbered. There may be three times as many Dreamwalkers in the field as Shadows, but the latter have ten times our ability to alter dreams. Long after we collapse from exhaustion, the Shadows will still be going strong.

  I feel sick.

  The battle is beginning in earnest now, two nightmare forces meeting on the field of the human imagination, unrestricted by the laws of science. Black fire roars across the landscape, rain turns to scalding steam, and monsters appear, strike, and then vanish. I see a small Asian-loo
king abbie summon a scarlet dragon from the clouds, flames licking forth from its mouth, as it heads straight toward the Shadows. But then a flock of bats meets it in mid-air, and they tear at its wing membranes until it, too, vanishes. It’s impossible to tell which nightmare images are being controlled by which side. Some even seem to change sides, as a Dreamwalker or Shadow takes control of an enemy’s creation. I see a swarm of venomous insects heading directly toward a group of Dreamwalkers, so I counter that attack myself, creating a cloud of insecticide that the insects must fly through to get to them. The gambit is successful, but it costs me dearly. Sickness wells up in my throat, and for a moment I am so dizzy I can barely stay on my feet. Summoning so many Shadowlords must have drained me of nearly all my vital energy; I’m running on empty now. And unlike the Shadows, I have no wraiths to devour for fuel.

  Suddenly a Shadowlord screams. I look over and see that one of them has been encased in a concrete cylinder, whose sides are steadily contracting. From inside we can hear terrified screams and the frenzied pounding of fists against stone. Apparently someone figured out which of the Shadowlords is claustrophobic. Virilian notices as well, and he takes control of the cylinder, forcing the concrete to crumble to dust, freeing its occupant. But it’s too late. The man’s skin no longer bears the chalky pallor of the undead, but is a sickly yellow streaked with blood; his eyes are no longer featureless black orbs, but reddened whites with pinpoint pupils. As he falls senseless to the ground I am struck with wonder and fear at what I am seeing and what it implies.

  He is alive. Truly alive.

  Virilian looks back at me, and this time there is no arrogance in him, nor laughter, only a black and terrible hatred. His eyes remain fixed on me as he begins to incant again, and something about his tone warns me that it’s a summoning. Reflexively, I step back a few feet, as ghosts begin to appear on both sides of him. I see men and women, old and young, and even small children, each one ritually lacerated like Jacob was in Isaac’s dream. Their eyes are empty and their faces are slack; it’s as if someone has surgically removed their souls. More and more of them appear as I watch: a dozen, two dozen, three: soldiers in an army that now outnumbers mine by vast numbers. Distantly I am aware that the fighting has stopped, both sides now focused upon this frightening panorama, albeit with different motives.