by Col Buchanan
With growing unease Shard called up her profiling glyph and ignited it with a spark of will, calling to life the habits she had ingrained within it. The glyph vanished, and in its place sequences of running dashes or solid lines appeared wherever she looked, seemingly chaotic for the most part, rippling with patterns wherever there was something to be seen. Raw bindee, the underlying language of the Black Dream; the underlying language of everything.
No one could decode the bindee save for that rare individual, a Dreamer; it was the very thing that gave them their power in the waking world. Within the Black Dream of the farcrys, rooks made do with more generalized manipulations using will and trickery, usually performed through collections of habits enshrined in easily recallable glyphs; a visual method that Shard had naturally carried on into her Dreaming.
Now she studied the immediate bindee of the Black Dream, and saw the shape of what she was inside.
I’m in some kind of memory construct wrapped in a loop. It’s what she got herself trapped inside.
Can you reach her?
I don’t know yet. I’ve never seen this before.
Let me see, said Blame.
No! Stay back, both of you.
Well who did this to her? demanded Remedy.
It was a sound question. And the instant she reflected upon it, an image appeared in the mirror over the shoulder of the barber; a head writhing with what looked like many snakes; a sharp face glistening with the sheen of a glimmersuit.
Shard, what is it? You just flared up like a grenade.
What a day this was turning out to be.
It’s Seech, she thought with loathing. Seech did this to her.
Tabor? He’s working for the Mannians now?
It would appear so, though she could barely believe it. To think that her ex-lover – the only other Dreamer from the Free Ports before he had fled to work for the Caliphate – would fall so low as to join their fated enemy. Shard had grown used to thinking of Tabor as a murderer, a thief and a mercenary. Now she would have to think of him as a traitor against his own people too.
Perhaps the Empire had offered him more riches than the Caliphate, or perhaps the Caliphate had simply grown tired of his services, for the Alhazii had Dreamers of their own, and little need to put up with the man’s usual provocations, for even as a young student, Tabor had always delighted in shooting off his mouth and puncturing the certainties of others.
Shard was aware of General Mokabi wondering just then how the man had appeared as though from nowhere. He didn’t suspect that the image was created and projected by his own mind – just as everything else was, ultimately – and that Tabor Seech was not really there at all, but spoke to him through thought alone. The old general knew only enough to fear the Dreamer’s powers. His ageing heart was beating faster now.
‘You wished to speak with me?’ Seech asked in his strange, scratching voice, always spoken in a slow monotone, and General Mokabi cleared his throat, his body tensing as the Dreamer took another step closer behind him to leer over the barber’s shoulder, a few of his writhing dreadlocks snapping out at roaming motes of dust.
Mokabi squinted into the mirror, peering at the rainbow sheen of Seech’s glimmersuit made bright by the light of day. His second skin was identical to Shard’s. They had gained them together three years earlier, during an expedition into the Alhazii deep desert as lovers and star students of the Academy. A journey which had led them to the holy men in their tower of mud bricks and to the ancient secrets of Dreaming: of how to lucid dream in the waking world – and all other degrees of reality – by playing with the living bindee of the cosmos.
‘You took your time,’ the general barked aloud, and his barber jerked backwards with the blade in his hand, startled that the general was talking to himself.
‘Well now I am here, so talk.’
‘My message was clear enough, Dreamer. And the price well beyond generous. Just tell me you will do it.’
‘Ah, but generous is such a relative term, don’t you think?’
The general waved the barber away with a flourish of temper, wiping his face clean with a towel. With the coolness of an old dog, Mokabi stared up at the figure in the mirror, dressed in a suit of wine-red silk beneath a cloak of darkest night, a lean and wiry fellow swaying with an inner dynamism; a man burning up with great desires and passions.
Shard’s old lover looked much the same as he had done three years ago when last she’d seen him, though his eyes were bloodshot and his face had grown a little leaner. She’d heard how he imbibed regular infusions of Royal Milk these days, not as an anti-ageing remedy but purely for the kick of vitality it offered him, so rich had he become, selling his services.
Back in the higher reality of the waking world, where Shard sat in her storm-battered eyrie with her eyes closed, the badly scarred portion of her face was itching beneath her silvered mask, and throbbing with a dull pain. Beneath her glimmersuit, her goosebumps had arisen in a rash of emotions.
‘You have a problem now in aiding us against your own people, the Free Ports?’ asked Mokabi’s level voice.
‘It isn’t a deal breaker, no.’
Tentatively, as a test, Shard tried to will herself away from this loop of memory, to jump to a different reference point outside of it. Nothing happened and so she tried harder, as hard as she was able, until she sensed a measure of panic rising within herself and cut back.
I could be in trouble here.
I’m coming in, Remedy declared. I can’t help from out here.
What? Stay clear, you hear me?
But it was too late. She felt her rook’s presence in the same loop of reality that held her so fiercely, and cursed to herself in Contrarè.
It’s tight all right, Remedy remarked, studying his own profiling glyph in action, its output much less sophisticated than Shard’s, not raw bindee but ghostly shapes and impressions. Can’t see any feedbacks though. Maybe if we run some dampeners and yank out from the Black, it won’t be so bad.
You’re welcome to try it first.
You think maybe—
Sshhh!
By the window Seech was talking again, and his brittle voice held all the general’s attention.
‘You’re asking me to openly go to war against my own people. Needless to say, such a thing should warrant a higher price than usual. Let’s say your offer is enough, at least to pay for my coterie of rooks while they run communications security on your assault. It might be enough, even, to entice them into running some offensive actions against your enemy’s communications too. But if it is me that you are after, one of only half a dozen Dreamers in all the Midèrēs and the only one that will work with you, then I’ll need much more than that. Otherwise you’re wasting my time here, old man, and my time is more valuable that most.’
The general crunched his false teeth together hard. Peeved as he was his voice remained detached of feeling. He had larger needs than the sating of his own annoyance.
‘How much for it all?’
‘For it all? Five times as much.’
‘Agreed.’
It was the turn of Seech to hide his surprise.
‘Perhaps I should have asked for even more.’
‘Don’t push me, Dreamer. Taking Bar-Khos means everything to me. That doesn’t equate to my purse being infinite. Just tell me where I need to deliver the gold.’
‘No need, you can give it to me in full when I arrive at the siege.’
I don’t believe it, she thought with a start.
Shard?
Ssshhhh!
‘And when should we expect the honour of your presence?’
‘Soon. I have some business to finish off first. An old lover to contact, in fact.’
Who is he talking about? Is he talking about you?
Seech spun around to face the seated Mokabi fully. The Dreamer’s expression had changed in some subtle way, and his eyes were bright while the lower part of his face lay in shadow.
Shard had the sudden unnerving sensation that Tabor was staring not at the general now, but directly at her.
With two strides he was before her and clamping his hands to either side of her head, his fingernails digging in sharply. Shard tried to reel away from a sudden wave of pain, but she was pinned there by his glare.
Sabo! she called out in her mind, a single panic-word that popped protection glyphs into action all around her.
‘I thought you might want to know,’ Seech said down to her, and she could smell his breath and the perfumed scent of him just like the real thing. ‘I’m coming to the Shield very soon. If you want to settle our old score once and for all, you can seek me out there.’
Feedback, Shard. We’re being hit by feedback.
Shard was too busy to respond for a moment, for she was igniting every glyph in her dampening suite one after the other, knowing now that Remedy was right and that pulling the connection was their only chance.
Blame, can you hear me?
Yes.
Get out and slap some shock-patches on our necks, we’re going to need them.
White light blinded her, flooded her with a howling wilderness of agony, a stunning assault of feedback that would have blown her mind had she been unprepared for it. Her dampening glyphs started buckling one by one.
Blame, hurry!
*
Following the initial successes of their home-grown imitation farcrys, the student rooks had refined their replicas while the practice had spread fully to the other Academies, where others had taken up the craft too.
These days, the Academy of Salina treated rooking as an official pastime of much of its student membership, admittedly a dangerous pastime now that they were engaged directly in the war, their efforts concentrated against the larger network of enemy farcrys in the empire surrounding them. The League had become interested in these developments, and was directing what aid it could their way, including new fully sized farcrys shipped all the way from Zanzahar, large fortunes each one of them, in return for their sustained work against the Empire of Mann.
In response, the Mannians and the Alhazii Caliphate had begun to train and recruit their own small cadres of rooks, including a few from the students of the Free Ports, bribed by riches to pass on the secrets of their trickery. As a further consequence, the inner security of farcrys – an aspect long ignored by those institutions who used them for distant communications – was tightening further every day, and becoming rapidly more violent too. Now minds were torn when caught in Tumbler traps or blasted away entirely by the latest enemy Mirrors.
The Black Dream was becoming ever more a place of war.
*
Shard jerked her eyes open, her vision swimming with the same nausea that came with the worst migraines, sagging back in the chair in her log house that was still shaking with the thunder and wind of the storm.
On the opposite side of the oval worktable, Remedy’s head lolled back on his neck, eyes staring emptily at the ceiling. His hand twitched on the wooden surface, still clutching the end of the farcry’s fleshy tether.
‘He’s dead,’ Blame said flatly, standing next to him holding a shock-patch in his hand, peeling back Remedy’s eyelids to reveal their glassy stare.
Shard felt the sting of the shock-patch on her own neck, feeding a concoction of medicines that helped prevent her heart from stopping and her brain from being scrambled in a seizure, though it came with its own risks every time one was used.
‘I didn’t have time to get to him,’ Blame said quietly. ‘Sorry.’
Anger rose in her gullet, became a silent scream directed at Tabor Seech, wherever he may be. She stifled it with a clenching of her jaw, feedback still pulsing through her.
‘You got to me first. That’s what I expect you to do.’
The young man was shaking. She couldn’t tell if it was fear or excitement or both.
‘Why do I get this horrible sense that now wasn’t the best time to have joined your team?’
What team? she thought, taking in her two fallen rooks.
Hail was clattering hard against the shingled roof of the house, though the wind had died down outside. Shard pinched the bridge of her nose against jagged pains in her brow, watching Blame cross to a window and stare out with open-mouthed wonder.
‘What is it?’ she gasped.
‘I’m not sure. Maybe you should come and see.’
She sighed, then made a careful effort to rise to her feet. Shaky. Her sense of balance all over the place. Shard trod slowly to join him by the window, steadying herself against its frame.
At first she thought it was more hail falling, but no, these things raining from the storm clouds were oddly dark.
‘What do we do about Moon?’ Blame asked.
‘What we always do. Bring her down to the infirmary. Wait for her body to die.’
‘It was really Tabor Seech in there?’
Awe in his young voice; speaking of a legend that every rook had heard of.
The storm was Seech’s doing, she realized now, and she was as impressed by the feat as much as she was shocked by it. To have created a weather phenomenon of such scale . . . Tabor would have needed to set it up weeks ago, tipping small and delicate factors in intentional ways. He had planned this from the beginning, waiting for the storm to hit today before springing his trap within the Black Dream, sating his vain need to show off his brilliance with a touch of the dramatic.
He was goading her. Challenging her to face him in Bar-Khos.
Lightning crashed within the clouds. It provoked images in her mind; Shard left for dead in the desert sands by Tabor Seech, half her face contorted in burning agony, blood flowing from between her legs.
‘What are those things?’ Blame wanted to know, leaning close enough to the window to mist the glass. His voice was near lost in the deafening clatter of the shingles.
Shard staggered to the front door and yanked it open, gazed in both horror and fascination at what she saw outside.
‘Get ready to leave,’ she cast over her shoulder. ‘Pack what travel gear you can find.’
‘We’re going somewhere?’
In her dripping cloak, the Dreamer stared hard through the doorway with her seething eyes taking it all in.
They were snails, those things falling from the sky. Hundreds of snails with their shells smashing across the flat stones of the path.
CHAPTER SIX
Killing Truth
They were arguing with each other, gently at first, though their voices were rising with the heat of the words; two men who lounged in comfort on the upper deck of a rocking warwagon, rumbling onwards towards the siege of Bar-Khos.
It was religion they quarrelled over, of all things. Philosophy and the underlying assumptions of life, while they were tended with chee and sweetmeats by mute servants who were the slaves of recent conquests. Like many people of fame, both men feigned not to notice the attentions of those around them, though it was impossible not to, for the air sizzled with raw hostility. Within earshot, the Mannian priests, bodyguards and officers of staff held their tongues in silence but glanced with dangerous eyes at the strangely garbed figure who spoke blasphemy to their general, hatred coiling within them.
No doubt they would have killed this man, had General Mokabi not been paying him so generously for his unique abilities, and had they not known enough of this Dreamer to fear him.
In the waning afternoon daylight, Tabor Seech’s skin shone like water and snakedreads writhed on his head. The cloak that he wore, made from layers of hanging cloth strips, soaked up the light with its eternal blackness, blotting him out from the world save for his lean face and his scowling, bloodshot eyes. Stiffly he sat, bedecked with a curious brace around his neck; a gold contour of skin that rose out of the collar of his fine silk shirt, and flowed up around his chin and jawline in curving flames which gripped his face lightly, flexing when he moved.
In his drawn-out tones, the Dreamer pressed on without chall
enge, his words a calmly measured violence wrought upon them all, so much so that one of Mokabi’s nearby bodyguards began to stir nearby, the blades sliding from his lowered scratch-glove.
Tabor Seech pretended not to notice this too.
‘Truth you say?’ he exclaimed, his nasal singsong of a voice rising so all would be sure to hear him, recklessly enjoying himself. ‘And what could you Mannians know about such a slippery thing as that, when you regard truth – reality, in other words – as a fixed position to be wholly objectified?’
General Mokabi, ex-Archgeneral of Mann, shifted his weight in the chair uncomfortably, his body gone to fat in these years of retirement. Against the winter chill he wore a hat of grey wool upon his bald dome, beneath which his nose was a prominent wedge blackened with ink. In a face made puffy with age, his eyes were nonetheless alert, inquisitive, challenging.
So far, the general had remained composed in the gale of this man’s provocations, though privately Mokabi was appalled, wishing he had never begun this discussion in earshot of his people. Clearly there was no telling how far this Dreamer from the Free Ports might go, how much heresy he was willing to stir for the sake of making his point, and Mokabi could think of no way of stopping him. Not without losing face.
Furtively, he glanced towards a figure sitting hunched on a nearby chair, the Mannian historian and writer Sheldin Ting, bundled in layers of wool and scribbling away in a notebook lying open on a table. Ting was his official biographer for this campaign. A civilian, chosen because he had long been a trusted mouthpiece for the Empire’s official narratives, and because he had agreed to write only what Mokabi allowed him to write. Still, he remained a loose set of ears nonetheless.
It was Mokabi’s own fault, he knew. In his buoyant spirits he’d somehow thought he was his younger self again; a youth with a reputation for fiery debate, when really he was an ageing general brought out of retirement for his final campaign. He was rusty now at this kind of conversation, too many years spent commanding the obedience of those around him.
