Black Brillion

by Matthew Hughes

  “Perhaps the most earnest scroot might not realize the lack,” said Imbry.

  “A worrisome thought,” said Bandar, “for it would make him narrow and strange, like those obsessives who encompass every minim of minutiae about some arcane discipline yet cannot sustain a decent conversation about the weather.”

  “There is nothing wrong with pursuing a calling,” Baro said.

  “I recall a story about a man who followed a star. He was so bedazzled by its lure that he stepped over a cliff.”

  “I do not know that story,” said Baro.

  “Well, you wouldn’t, would you?” said the historian. “It is probably not reproduced in police manuals.”

  They had reached their cart. “I think I need sleep,” Baro said. A wave of fatigue was suddenly rising up from within him, almost threatening to overwhelm his consciousness.

  “I will take care to remain awake until you are finished,” Bandar said. “In fact, I will watch over you and shake you into consciousness if I detect the signs of dreaming.”

  “I understand,” Baro said. “Thank you.” He stretched out on the ground in the cart’s shade. A few of the other passengers had done likewise, though most had gathered in a group to chant and expand their chuffe.

  Baro rolled onto his stomach and looked through heavy eyes across the, clearing. The Rovers had finished their meal and were lying on the trampled grass. Yaffak already seemed to be twitching in a dream.

  “Is there any danger that I might intrude upon Yaffak’s dream, as I did on yours?” Baro asked.

  “Now there is ambition,” Bandar said. “But you need not concern yourself. There is an unbreachable barrier between us and them, as there is between any two species. Still, it would be fascinating to explore the Rover Commons. Their psyches being more deeply embedded in instinct, there is a closer connection between the lower and upper brains, and the tides of the Old Sea ebb and flow not far beneath their consciousness.”

  “Has it been tried?”

  “Everything has been tried. That which was possible has been done. What remains undone is therefore impossible.”

  Baro yawned and said, “In the past, there must have been occasions when hybrids were produced—as you say, all that can be done has been done. What would the Commons of such a hybrid look like?”

  “It would be either a very deserted place,” said Bandar, “or a very crowded one. Either case might explain why hybrids never flourish and are frequently mad.”

  “If bridging the Commonses of two species could be done, that would be something new,” said Baro, “would it not?”

  “Yes,” said Bandar, “which is why it will not be done.”

  “Yet I feel it might.”

  The historian sighed. “You have only recently begun to gauge the depth of your ignorance yet you are prepared to make it the foundation for a towering confidence.”

  “Perhaps he is a visionary,” said Imbry.

  “Or biting mad,” said Bandar. “The terms are frequently interchangeable.”

  Their voices became a buzz in Baro’s ears as he slid down into sleep. He was immediately before the wardrobe and its dark mirror. His Shadow smirked at him and said, “Hail the hero,” in a sarcastic tone but Baro stepped right through the phantom and rushed down to the tarn. He was possessed by a great urgency, an ironic sense in this timeless place that time was shortening. He plunged into the green water and was instantly transposed to the white road.

  He was alone and then he wasn’t. The Hero stood in the field beyond the low wall, clad in its shaggy cope and shining mail. It carried a round shield on its arm. The dog’s-head design painted on it came to life, silently gnashing its teeth and laying back its ears.

  Baro felt a shock when the Hero’s gaze met his. A shiver of pure terror convulsed his body and for a moment he wanted to turn and run heedlessly in any direction but that of the barbarian whose face, he now saw, was his own. But the Hero made no move toward him, only raised its sword to point across the field and angled its head in a way that said, Come. He set off in the direction it had indicated.

  Baro shook himself free of his fear and vaulted over the wall. He followed the warrior toward the horizon, walking through a dreamscape where the ground beneath him kept changing its nature, from grass to dust to stubble to bare rock. But the Hero remained unchanged, as did Baro, although he now saw that he was again clad in the identical rough garb, with the same shield on his back and gray sword in his hand.

  Baro had walked no more than a few dozen steps before he looked up and found that the horizon, which had seemed so distant, was now gone. In its place was a wall, fashioned from immense blocks of white stone, an impassable barrier that rose straight up to the sky.

  The muscles of the Hero’s right arm bunched and it swung the great sword at the wall. Sparks flew as iron struck stone and the sound of the blow rang in Baro’s ears. He looked and saw that the wall was unmarked. The Hero looked at him, sword hanging.

  Baro knew, with a dreamer’s knowledge, what the wall was and why it could not be breached. “It cannot be done,” he said.

  “It must be done,” said a voice beside him. He turned and saw the old man with the staff, its beard and hair long and white, its features both craggy and noble. Behind him a crowd had assembled. Baro recognized them from when he had crossed the bridge and from Bandar’s descriptions: the Fool in the shape of a young man, though its face showed more brave innocence than folly; the multi-armed Destroyer; the tongue-lolling Good Beast, reared up on shaggy hind legs; the Lovers, arms entwined. There was the Mother, suckling the Child, and beside them the Father, wearing the face of Captain Baro Harkless.

  The Father nodded its head and Baro recognized the gesture as his own father’s gesture, the one that said, Go on. You can do it.

  Baro faced the wall. He raised his sword and swung as the Hero had. No sparks flew and he heard no clash of metal on rock. The blade rebounded from the wall. He turned back to the crowd.

  “Not the wall,” said the old man. It pointed to the ground.

  There is nothing beneath us but the Old Sea, Bandar had said.

  “Can it be done?” Baro asked the old man.

  “It can be done, if you can do it,” was the answer.

  “And if I cannot?”

  “If you cannot, then it cannot be done.” The old man’s pupils were immense, the irises thin rims of gold. Baro saw his own reflection in the dark circles. “Yet it must be done,” the old man concluded, one gnarled finger pointing to the ground.

  Baro set the point of his sword against the changeable dream-earth that was now red dirt, dry and thick with clods. He leaned his weight against the pommel and pushed. Nothing happened. He felt no resistance but it was as if the weapon was immobilized.

  A sigh came from the crowd. Baro put both hands on the rough-shaped iron that anchored the sword’s hilt and pushed down again, with all the strength he could muster. And now he felt the tiniest give to the ground.

  Another sound went up from the gathered entities, a wordless syllable of expectation. It seemed to Baro that the sound entered him, filled him with a power that flowed into his arms and down to the hands that cupped the pommel of the sword. He pushed the iron into the red ground and whatever force had resisted its entry now abruptly failed.

  The sword pierced the soil and Baro sliced a rent in the ground as if the earth was no more substantial than a veil. Another exhalation rose from the crowd at his back, a sound of release.

  The wound in the red soil was gray at its center. It widened, revealing nothingness.

  “Step,” said the old man.

  “I am afraid,” Baro said.

  “I know.”

  The young man looked again at the crowd that stood silently watching him. The Father nodded again. Baro turned and leaped feetfirst into the gray.

  It took him, swallowed him. He was in a place that was no place, without up or down, with neither forward nor back, a realm of luminous, shadowless pearl. H
e floated, or so he thought. Or perhaps he sank. There was no way to know. He looked about him and saw nothing, looked down and saw his feet, still in hero’s buskins, then looked up and saw not far above him a rent in the grayness, the place where he had entered.

  From two fixed points he could make a map: that was what they taught in the Bureau orienteering course. There was the rent above him. It had a beginning and an end, and those two points made a direction in this directionless no place. It ran toward the wall, Baro knew, and therefore the wall must be here and thus beyond the wall must be there.

  He kicked his feet, but the Old Sea was not made of water. Still, it was enough that he willed to go somewhere and so he moved, the sword extended above his head as if he were a ship and the weapon his bowsprit. He moved and then his motion stopped as the sword point met resistance.

  He still felt the power that had come from the entities and he willed the sword to pierce what it touched. Instantly the barrier yielded, splitting open the gray above him. He moved and his head and shoulders entered the rent and a moment later he had pulled himself onto firm ground.

  At first he wondered if he had come out into some solid part of the Old Sea, someplace where the grayness took a tangible form. There was no color to the land around him, only black and white and endless variations of gray. But when Baro took his first breath, his senses were filled with a riot of odors, subtle and stark, faint and overwhelming, more than he could ever encompass at once and far more than he could even name.

  He stood up and saw that he was in a field of short grass. At his back an impenetrable hedge of black thorns stretched up as high as he could see. The land at his feet rolled down a long slope and went on forever to where a gray horizon met a gray sky. There were no roads to be seen, but as he turned his head from side to side Baro discovered that there was in fact an unseen trail nearby, a path marked by scent. It was a sharp odor, complex and strong. Somehow he knew that it resulted from the passage of many bodies.

  Baro followed his nose to the scent trail and it seemed to lead him on. He moved forward. The land shifted and changed around him as he went; he recognized the signs. I am in a dreamscape, he thought, and in a moment he knew whose dream he had entered.

  A figure appeared on the scent path in front of him, a panting Rover on all fours, trembling in all its muscles so that they rippled beneath the fur, jaws agape and dripping foam, tongue hanging loose, as if exhausted from a long and unsuccessful struggle.

  “Yaffak,” Baro said.

  The Rover turned to him, a look of despair in its eyes that here were solid black. Now Baro saw that behind Yaffak a crowd had formed, like that which had watched him pierce the soil in his own Commons. These are the entities of the Rover noösphere, he thought. That will be the Mother, her dugs engorged with milk, and that big one must be the Pack Leader. They were all staring at him, except for one young one that kept breaking off to chase its own tail.

  Why do they not attack me? Baro wondered. I am an intruder here. Then he remembered the Good Beast from his own Commons. The Rovers must have a Man among their archetypes, and I have been fitted into that role.

  Yaffak made a sound. It was not a human word nor a doglike yelp or howl. It was a groan from the deepest core of his being, rising, as if against relentless pressure, to break free.

  Baro stepped to the young Rover and put out a hand to touch the oddly shaped head. But before his fingers reached the thick fur he felt a deep chill that invaded his fingertips, then traveled up his arm. He drew back his hand and shook it to relieve the growing numbness.

  Now the Rover snarled, revealing long, sharp canines. Baro withdrew his hand and would have backed away, but Yaffak’s eyes belied the message of the growl. They gazed at Baro with a fading hope.

  The man passed his hand over the Rover’s head again, felt the chill, then felt it abruptly end as his hand moved on. Yaffak snarled again, but did not move. The Rover stood unmoving except for the constant trembling, but it seemed to Baro that Yaffak was exerting every minim of his strength against an unseen restraint.

  Baro explored the idea, passing his hand over the Rover’s chest and shoulders. The deep cold came and went as his fingers moved. The chill was in broad intersecting lines like a network. It’s a kind of harness, he thought, tight about the whole body. His fingers investigated further and he found a thin region of cold that extended from the midpoint of Yaffak’s bunched shoulders up into the diffuse grayness that approximated a sky.

  It’s a leash, Baro thought and with the thought came revulsion and instant action: he swung the iron sword sideways above the Rover’s back and when it reached the point where the invisible tether rose above Yaffak it bit into something and stopped. Baro felt a deeper chill than ever pass through the weapon and into his arm. He yanked the sword free, took it in both hands and swept it through the air again, felt it bite into the leash and again the numbing cold passed into his hands and arms. Baro put his weight behind the weapon, sawed with the edge, while his hands turned to insensate lumps of icy flesh. The unseen strap resisted, then stretched, then the sword’s edge cut through.

  At once the cold fled from Baro’s limbs and he reached one hand toward Yaffak, whose limbs now seemed to lose all their strength. The Rover settled to the ground, panting, eyes closed, and lay still for a few heartbeats. Then he pushed himself back onto all fours, and shook from front to back, shoulders rolling and ears flapping. He squatted on his hind legs, then stood. He gave a long sigh and his long mouth opened in what Baro could only interpret as a smile.

  “Free,” the Rover said, and though he said it in his own tongue, Baro understood. Now Yaffak’s solid image began to fade into transparency. The other figures of the Rover noösphere also grew dim, as if they were actors on a darkening stage. The horizon that, though indistinct, had nonetheless appeared to be distant now seemed to be rushing toward Baro from all directions.

  He is waking, the young man thought. And what happens to me if I am trapped in his Commons when he leaves it? That seemed a question better resolved by conjecture than by waiting for a concrete answer. Baro turned and ran up the scent trail, now fading like the light, toward the hedge of black thorn.

  The ground grew dark beneath his feet and he almost did not see the spot where he had torn through from the Old Sea. The rent was mending itself, closing from either end, and now it was no more than a few hands long. If I’d waited it would have disappeared, he thought. He inserted the sword into the slit and lengthened it again.

  And then a worse thought came: What if the hole beyond the hedge-wall has closed? Will I be trapped in the Old Sea forever—or at least until the Worm comes to devour me?

  He dove headfirst through the slit, aiming toward the hedge because that should carry him under the barrier to the place where he had entered the Old Sea. Again he plunged into a gray oblivion, and now he saw nothing ahead or above, no sign of where his original entry point had been.

  He twisted and rotated, seeing only the pearly nonlight from every nondirection in this no-place. Then his eye caught a motion and he turned toward it. Something was moving, far off in the gray emptiness, and though it appeared tiny Baro knew somehow that it was not, knew that it was immense, and knew that it was coming for him.

  He turned and turned again, found the tear he had made in the Rovers’ dreamscape. It was closing again but he envisioned a line extending from it to where the first entry must have been.

  He saw it, a slit no longer than his hand with a glimmer of light behind it. He moved toward it, sword extended, willing himself to cross the nondistance that nonetheless separated him from his only exit. But the power he had felt before was fading. He seemed to move achingly slowly, gliding toward the closing gap when he wanted desperately to surge forward.

  He sensed that he did not have the same strength as when he had entered the Old Sea from his own dreamscape. He felt no fatigue, and his will was as strong as before, but he was sure that his desire, his sense of purpose, did not tra
nslate into a result as easily as it had when he had first plunged through.

  He was slowly, oh so slowly, drifting toward the closing gap, which was now no more than a hand’s length. He looked down between his feet and saw that the far distant thing that swam toward him no longer appeared so tiny. It was long and segmented, and gray like everything here. It moved by a continuing undulation, and it moved quickly. Where its head might have been there was no more than a circular hole in its front end, and that hole at least was not gray; it was the deep black of complete nothingness, ringed with flecks of white. Baro understood that the Worm, this moving maw lined with concentric rows of razor teeth, was the original answer to the mystery of life’s existence: Why do you exist? Because then you don’t—the negative, by existing, paradoxically proving the positive.

  But this was no time for Baro to replay memories from the schoolroom. He concentrated on the need to go forward and simultaneously moved his feet and arms. But there was nothing to push against. Still, he slowly inched toward the closing gap, no more than a rip now in the grayness, only the faintest glimmer of light leaking through.

  He extended the sword again. Its tip crept toward the rip, impossibly slowly. But now he saw a glimmer of light touch the point of the blade and shimmer down the polished iron. Somehow the light changed the dynamic of his situation. It was as if the light, once touched, pulled him toward it. He moved forward with speed, and as he moved he thrust the sword into the slip and widened it, bringing more luminescence down the blade to bathe his hand and arm and upturned face.

  He burst through into the light of his own dreamplace and pulled himself onto the dry red earth. He knelt and looked down into the incision. Through the grayness the Worm was still rising to take him. Its mouth was wide enough to have swallowed the Orgulon, its teeth great jagged triangles glowing against its inner blackness.

  Baro passed his hand across the wound in the ground of his dream, brushing the red soil over the rent, causing it to disappear. His last image of the Old Sea was of the great Worm turning away, swimming back into nowhere.