by Dorian Hart
Morningstar was in the dream as well, a Seer-dream of startling clarity; the moonlight etched the edges of every leaf and branch, and the shadows cast upon the ground were knife-sharp. She held her morning-star mace.
The boy walked toward her down a corridor of oaks, slowly, fearfully. “I’m lost,” he said in a small voice. “Where am I?”
“You’re dreaming,” said Morningstar, and this was peculiar because dreamers of Seer-dreams could only observe. They could not talk, or move, or influence the dreams, but were granted a place inside them by Ell to better understand the workings of the world.
This was something new.
She took a step forward, marveling at the tactile sensations of her bare feet on the leaves, the feel of her robe against the pale skin of her arms.
“But something’s after me,” pleaded the boy. “I’m in trouble!”
“No, child,” said Morningstar soothingly. “No harm can come to you here. This is only a dream.”
“Do not lie to the boy, Dreamwalker.”
A man stepped out into the forest path, emerging from a gap in the tree wall that Morningstar couldn’t see from her straight-on vantage point. He was clad foot to neck in gleaming blood-red plates, but his movements were fluid, troublingly unencumbered. A sheathed blade hung at his belt, and a helmet, red to match his armor, was tucked under his left arm. A goatee covered his chin beneath a wicked grin. This newcomer stood between Morningstar and the boy.
It was the man from her first Seer-dream—the one whom Tor had bull-rushed off the tower-top.
“Plenty of harm can come to you, boy,” said the man. Casually, with his one free hand, he picked up the child by the collar of his shirt and tossed him toward Morningstar, effortlessly, like a man scattering bread crumbs for pigeons. The terrified child crashed into Morningstar, sending them both sprawling. The boy wailed in shock and pain; blood ran from a freshly scraped elbow.
Morningstar struggled to one knee. “Wake up, child,” she implored. “Wake, and all of this will be forgotten.”
The red-armored warrior walked slowly forward.
Morningstar filled her voice with urgency. “Wake up! You must wake!”
The boy looked back at her with wide eyes and a trembling lip. Tears gathered on his lashes.
At the sound of a sword being drawn she risked a glance upward. The warrior was only ten feet away.
She closed her eyes and tried to will the boy from the dream. “Awaken!”
The boy vanished. A pair of gleaming red greaves moved into view. Morningstar looked up at the red-armored man looming above her and scurried back, regaining her feet as she moved. The man took another step forward, unhurried.
“He told me there might be some Ellish roaches crawling around inside your world’s dreams. I didn’t expect to have to step on one so soon.”
A good part of Morningstar’s subconscious was yammering at her to wake up, flee the dream. The warrior’s sword was like a shard of black ice, glistening with a dark liquid that oozed over its metal surface. But this was a Seer-dream (wasn’t it?), and Ell would not have put her here if she was meant to flee. She raised her mace in defiance.
“You don’t belong here,” she said, surprising herself with the steadiness of her voice. “Get out, before I drive you out.”
The man chuckled. “Roaches all have one thing in common,” he said. “Shine a light upon them and they scurry away. Begone, little bug.”
He held up his off-hand, and a ring on his finger blazed with a furious white light. Morningstar flinched but held steady.
“Is that supposed to put me off?” she asked, standing her ground though her eyes burned in the glare. “You have a lot to learn, though you’ve figured out cowardice well enough, tormenting a defenseless child. What is your name, coward?”
A flicker of doubt and surprise passed over the man’s face; he had expected his light to be more enervating, Morningstar was certain. But he regained his composure and his sneer.
“I am Aktallian Dreamborn. Remember that, so you can answer those who ask who sent you to the afterlife.”
Morningstar’s weapon vanished from her hand; somehow her enemy had willed it away. No, more than that, he had altered the dream so that she no longer held it. Aktallian laughed, stepped quickly forward, and thrust his sword into her stomach. She screamed, the fire of the wound burning her guts. Clutching her abdomen as he withdrew the blade, blood pouring out in a torrent through her hands, she dropped to her knees.
“Speed you to the heavens, Ellish roach.” He spat upon her, and she fell.
* * *
Morningstar woke, screaming, in the hold of the ship. Relief shot through her, but only briefly, before it was replaced by a terrible agony from her belly. She tried to sit up but her muscles didn’t respond; just the attempt made the already indescribable pain even more intense. She screamed again, more loudly, and around her in a pain-dimmed haze she became aware of lights and voices.
Aravia was there first, shining a lit coin upon her. “Dranko!” Aravia shouted. “Get over here now! Wake up! Dranko!”
Morningstar feebly raised her hands from her stomach; they were soaked with gore, and more blood was pooling all around her. How…?
“Ernie, Tor, something attacked Morningstar. Something’s in here with us; find it! Dranko, hurry, she’s dying!”
The pain faded, replaced by a numbing cold. Aravia’s light was fading away.
“Keep your eyes open!” shouted Aravia. “Can you talk? Morningstar, look at me. Keep looking at me. Dranko, is there anything you can do for her?”
Then Dranko was above her, his face darkening at the extent of her wound.
Goddess, please, don’t let that goblin face be the last thing I ever see.
Dranko spoke quickly, words of entreaty spilling from his lips, and for a second the pain surged back into her legs, her belly; her throat opened and fresh screams poured out. But then the pain was gone, replaced by warmth and light and now she would sleep, and was it a terrible blasphemy to ask for dreamless slumber?
Her wish was granted.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
DRANKO AWOKE COVERED in blood, drying but still sticky, and this made him grumpy. His thoughts were slow and mushy, like someone was stifling his mind with a pillow. Mild nausea stirred his stomach, probably from the gentle rocking of the ship, and that wasn’t helping matters.
The others were already awake, sitting against the shipping crates, talking quietly and drinking from water skins. If the blood were indicative of some imminent or ongoing emergency, he would have expected more activity and shouting, so that was a relief.
“Whose blood is this?” he demanded. “And why is it all over me?”
“It’s mine,” said Morningstar. The Ellish priestess wasn’t talking or drinking but sat with her eyes closed even as she spoke. “You healed me about an hour ago.”
Maybe this was one of those dreams where you think you’ve woken up, but it’s a sham and you’re still dreaming. “I…what?”
“You were still half-asleep yourself,” said Aravia. “You channeled, Dranko. You saved Morningstar’s life and fell right back asleep.”
Dranko shook his head, but this did little to clear it.
“I channeled? Really?”
“Really,” said Ernie. “Your hands glowed yellow, and Morningstar’s stomach healed right up.”
Why don’t I remember that?
“Good for me,” he said. “But what happened to Morningstar’s stomach? And why is no one else still worried about it?”
“I was attacked,” said Morningstar. “And I’m plenty worried. But none of the rest of you are in danger, I think. I was attacked in a dream.”
That didn’t make sense. None of this did. He hadn’t even tried to channel since the disaster with Mrs. Horn at Verdshane. He had convinced himself that the beggar had been a fluke, a one-time thing that had pushed his limits too far, left him a broken vessel unworthy of Delioch.
No. That’s not it. You’re terrified of the price Delioch demands for His grace. If you can’t be honest with the others, be honest with yourself at least.
But unless the others were playing an extremely tasteless joke, he had channeled a second time. He wished he could recall what it was like.
“You…what? Is that possible? How can something hurt your actual body while you’re dreaming?”
“I don’t know.” Morningstar sounded frustrated, dejected, and scared in equal measures. “I was having what I thought was another Seer-dream, but there was…there was an armored man there with a black sword, the same man I saw in my first Seer-dream, the man who Tor tackled from a high ledge.”
In fits and starts, Morningstar described the entirety of her experience, right up to when she woke and found that the sword wound inflicted upon her in the dream had also done its damage to her waking body.
“So,” said Dranko, when Morningstar was finished, “any idea what it all means?”
Morningstar shook her head. “I’ve never heard of a sister having Seer-dreams where the dreamer had agency, nor of any case where a dreamer suffered real injuries from anything that happened while asleep. But I do remember one thing clearly—this Aktallian made a comment that he had been sent by someone else and had been warned about ‘your world’s dreams.’”
Dranko tried to shake the cotton stuffing out of his head; he ought to be making some connection. Of course Aravia put it together immediately.
“I think Aktallian is from Naradawk’s prison world, and it was Naradawk who sent him,” she said. “Though it’s possible he’s come from some other world entirely.”
Dranko had been imagining that Naradawk’s prison was more like a big room, out on a little island in the ocean somewhere, cut off from the rest of Spira. But other worlds? He was just going to have to ask.
“Aravia, for the sake of those of us who weren’t taught at Serpicore’s Wizard School for the Insufferably Gifted, could you maybe explain a bit more about other worlds?”
“Dranko,” said Aravia with mock disapproval, “you’ve often talked about the education you received at the Church of Delioch, before you…left.”
Dranko grimaced. “You can say ‘before you were kicked out on your arse’ if you want.”
“Didn’t they teach you about the afterlife and where the Gods live before you were kicked out on your arse?”
Dranko tried to sound as professorial as possible, adopting the formal tones of his one-time teachers. “Of course. The Gods occupy the Heavens, and each maintains His or Her own celestial realm. When someone dies, their soul ascends to the realm associated with their chosen deity, assuming they’ve been diligent about following that God’s teachings. And bad people go to the Hells, naturally.”
“So you have learned about other worlds,” said Aravia. “The Heavens and the Hells are real places, you know. You just can’t visit them unless you’re dead.”
Dranko had spent more than his fair share of time thinking about the Hells, given the steady litany of warnings from Mokad that he was destined to wind up there should he continue his malcontented delinquency. Some of the scarbearers’ descriptions were gruesomely detailed: souls forced into the forms of monsters fated to prowl the fiery plains; souls returned to human bodies, the better to experience an eternity of anguish, and impaled on stakes; souls immersed in rivers of boiling acid; that sort of thing. But so absurdly horrific were these portraits of the netherworld that Dranko had eventually concluded it must all be a kind of tortured (ha!) metaphor, that no such place really existed.
In other words, it was mostly scare tactics.
“So this guy in the red armor,” he said, “he may have come from the Hells?”
“No, probably not,” said Aravia. “Most other worlds are like this one. Normal places with normal people in them. You can’t travel between them the same way you could walk from, say, Tal Hae to Verdshane. They’re not in the same dimension.”
“I have no idea what that means,” said Dranko. This would be a better conversation to have once he’d recovered a bit more.
“It doesn’t matter,” said Aravia. “Just take my word for it. There are potentially an infinite number of worlds similar to this one, but as a matter of course they never have anything to do with one another. But with the proper magic at one’s disposal, one could travel between them.”
Dranko rubbed his temples. “So the prison world that Abernathy’s monster is trapped in, it’s actually a whole world, like this one, with countries and people and trees and everything else?”
“Possibly. Oh, it’s certainly a world, but it could be a barren wasteland, or one with thriving cities, or nothing but forest for thousands of miles. But if Naradawk is as powerful as Abernathy thinks, it’s a good bet that he’s running the place.”
“And now he’s sending thugs through Abernathy’s portal to attack us in our dreams?”
“That’s what I’m saying,” said Aravia. “I suppose we should be happy that he’s still unable or unwilling to come himself, but yes.”
Dranko was still troubled. “Could Aktallian get himself into any of our dreams, then, and slice us up?”
“I don’t know!” Morningstar said, probably more loudly than she intended. “I’m sorry, but…I just don’t know. This is all out of my experience. Maybe Previa knows, or someone else at the Temple. I’ll find out when we get back. But…”
She raised her arms in a gesture of helplessness, but she caught Dranko’s eye, lowered her hands, and stared at him.
“Thank you, Dranko,” she said quietly. “I admit, I’ve been…unhappy with you, about having to endure the Mouth of Nahalm after we rescued you. Walking in the sun all that way was not easy for me, and I blamed you for it. I still do. I don’t like you. You’re crude, abrasive, and not half as clever as you think you are.”
Dranko gave a little laugh. “I’d hate to think how this conversation would be going if I hadn’t just saved your life. Can we say three-quarters as clever and be done with it?”
Morningstar’s face was unreadable in the shadows. “You did save my life. And you tried to save Mrs. Horn. I’ve often wondered why it was that Abernathy’s spell chose you to help us safeguard Charagan, but it’s become obvious, hasn’t it? You truly are a channeler. Delioch favors you—though I cannot imagine why.”
Dranko smiled at her. “You’re terrible at apologies.”
Morningstar rose without another word and climbed the ladder to the deck. The others shifted around uncomfortably, none of them looking at his face.
“What?” he demanded. “I just saved her life, apparently, and for that I get called all sorts of names. And I’m supposed to just sit here and take it?”
“You weren’t there,” said Ernie. “Not awake, at least. In the desert. She’s been having a really hard time with this whole thing, Dranko. She feels like an outcast, and she’s being forced to endure terrible physical hardships. Give her a break.”
An outcast, huh? Physical hardships? He imagined the feel of Mokad’s scarring blade against his skin. He knew how that felt. Without giving himself time to think too hard (and it was still too hard to think, anyhow), he heaved himself to his feet and followed Morningstar up the ladder. It was dark, the hour before sunrise, and the stars above the ship played hide and seek among the high moonlit clouds. Morningstar stood close at hand, eyes closed, leaning on the rail.
“I know how you feel,” he said.
She didn’t turn to face him. “I doubt it.”
The ship rocked gently, water chuckling against the hull.
Dranko took a deep breath. “When I was eight, one of the other boys in the village threw a rock at me, right at my head. Chipped my tusk and gashed the side of my face. His name was Pietr Tock. Can’t say I hated him more than any other kid, and it wasn’t the first rock I’d had hurled at me. Usually I dodged ’em better.
“Everyone in town loved Pietr Tock. He was a fine, handsome, hard-working lad, and I was…wel
l, when I got home and cried to Grandpa, blood and tears all over my face, you know what he did? He beat me for lying. Said ‘Shame on you, Melen, shame for telling tales about such a well-mannered child.’ That was my name back then, Melen, before I changed it. After giving me the belt, Grandpa smeared some old salve on my cheek and told me to stop wailing and to make dinner. Wasn’t long before that was my first real scar, years before Mokad got his hands on me.”
Morningstar didn’t turn to look at him, but she asked, “Why did you change your name?”
Dranko almost told her the whole story, right there, but some of it he still wasn’t ready to share. The abridged version would do. “It was just me and my grandparents. My parents had both died…when I was very young. Grammy Saramin loved me like her own son, but Grandpa, he blamed me for every bad thing that had happened to our family, and there were a lot of bad things. When Grammy died, Grandpa didn’t wait two weeks before shipping me off to Tal Hae to be a ward of the Church of Delioch. Old bastard couldn’t wait to be rid of me. I was fourteen years old by then.
“One of the things they let you do at the church is take a new name, if you want. So I looked in some books in the church library and found what I needed. I told Mokad I was changing my name to Dranko. It’s a goblin word. It means ‘unwelcome.’”
Morningstar’s hands tightened on the railing, and now she looked at him. Her eyes reflected the starlight.
“Morningstar, maybe Abernathy’s spell, or fate, or whatever it was, put us both where we are because we can understand one another’s pain. I’m not asking you to like me, but when I say I know how you feel, it’s because I know how you feel. I’ll probably regret sharing all this with you, but now that we’ve taken turns saving each other’s life, it seemed like a thing to do. Now I’m going back down to get some more sleep. Gods, but my head hurts.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
DESPITE HIS OWN small town upbringing, Ernie found Seablade Point to be outwardly quaint. It was a tiny fishing village, bigger than Verdshane but only half the size of White Ferry. Clinging to the southern tip of the Balani Peninsula like a fixture of barnacles, its scattering of small buildings crouched low to avoid the constant crosswinds.
