by Col Buchanan
Blame was chuckling at something softly.
‘If you go ahead with this, you’re going to lose your kushing mind, Shard.’
‘Maybe. Though there’s more chance of it killing me through toxic shock first.’
‘Still. If it doesn’t. If it takes hold in you. That’s going to be some ride.’
He wasn’t helping. She could think of a dozen reasons not to swallow this writhing sandworm in her grasp. In the oasis of Zini, in their ancient mud tower, the desert shamans had placed the worms upon their tongues for only short amounts of time, using the narcotic excretions to propel their minds beyond their bodies. From regular uses, a few of them had even become capable of reading the raw code of the bindee.
The desert shaman had spoken of an extreme practice, largely frowned upon, of swallowing the entire sandworm for the strongest effects of all; though it was something rarely undertaken, for few had ever survived the experience.
If it didn’t kill you first, they had said, if the worm survived long inside you, then it would fasten itself to your intestines.
Shard would be shockingly high for as long as it remained inside her.
‘How will you even get it out again?’ asked Blame now, still feigning his concerns for her while he tried to hide his excitement at what they were doing here, his eagerness to see what would happen when she took it.
‘I have some ideas.’
‘You mean you don’t know yet?’
Shard tutted, lowering the worm on the thread so she could scowl at him again.
‘You saw that storm he threw at us. You saw what Seech is capable of doing now.’
‘Well you’re capable of a few things yourself,’ he said, grinning.
Flirting with her, now of all times.
She had no choice in this, Shard reminded herself. For the last three years, Seech had been exploring his powers without care or caution, no doubt pushing the limits as far he could. While Shard, at the Academy, had been experimenting with the usual patience and rigour of an Observer, carefully recording everything that she discovered. Seech had a lead on her. He was the stronger Dreamer by far.
‘This worm is the only chance I have of matching him. It will heighten my grasp of the bindee. If there was another way, believe me, I’d take it instead.’
There, at last. She had talked herself into going through with this.
Shard dangled the writhing worm over her open mouth and Blame gasped. She dropped it inside and tasted its slimy bitterness on her tongue before she swallowed as fast as she was able, gagging as she grasped for the cup of water on the floor, drinking deeply to help it down. Between pants she took another drink, rinsing the taste from her mouth with the flavour of the water, infused with jinyin and hazii weed to help control the nausea.
A hiccup squeaked from her throat, and she held a hand to her lips feeling a sudden urge to giggle.
Sweet kush, it was having an effect on her already.
A sudden sharp pain in her belly bent the Dreamer in two with a groan. She felt Blame’s hand on her back, heard him say something through the red mist in her mind. It felt like she had swallowed a red-hot stone that was trying to burn its way through her abdomen.
Shard rolled onto the tarpaulin holding her belly tightly; nothing else she could risk taking now for fear of killing the thing before it had established itself within her.
Welcome softness beneath her as Blame placed a cushion under her head. Sudden warmth as he draped a blanket over her shivering form.
‘Milk,’ she gasped. She could at least risk some day-old goat’s milk.
Perhaps he was not so useless after all, for Blame was there a moment later, lifting her head as he helped her drink it down, the cool goat’s milk soothing the fire in her stomach.
The Dreamer lay back with her mind swirling, seeing patterns in the air that were like the outlines of trees repeating forever within themselves. The more she looked the more she felt like she was flying through them, so fast it was sickening. But when she closed her eyes there was no escape, for she saw the same dazzling shapes leading her off into infinity.
Shard dived head first into it.
*
Hours passed. Perhaps only the stretching of moments.
Someone was peeling her eyelids open. It was Blame. He looked like a dog just then with his open panting mouth and his pupils dilated hugely, the tip of his pink tongue poking from the corner of his lips.
‘What are you seeing?’ came his voice like an echo from the past.
No words for him. Shard had forgotten how to speak.
‘I’m seeing the craziest things here,’ he whispered. ‘People I haven’t seen for years, because they’re dead.’
The Dreamer was flying. She was lifting off from her body on the floor and drifting towards the ceiling, which was not a ceiling at all but the closed hatchway of the hold. She rose through it as though it wasn’t there, and found herself hovering above the small deck of the flying skud in the starlight of a clear night sky.
Shard had lost all sense of herself. The night air swirled with trails of coloured light. She stared upwards at the rippling canopy of gas that held the small skyboat aloft, then ahead along the short deck, her attention drawn like a firemoth towards the distant lights gathered like constellations beyond the prow; the besieged city of Bar-Khos.
Figures stood gathered at the rail taking in the nearing city. She moved towards them, seeing the Rōshun talking amongst themselves quietly, including the huge Alhazii man known as Baracha. Coya was there too, next to his lifelong bodyguard Marsh, gripping both the rail and his cane in subdued silence.
All of them were silhouettes of blackness, yet colours surrounded each one, auras pulsing around their bodies as though in play. Shard stopped just behind Coya’s shoulders, his bright aura shaded with the various crimsons of pain.
Together, they were flying across a black mirror of starry sea contained within the arms of the Gulf, aiming for the Shield of Khos.
From afar the city pulsed like a brazier of burning coals, flooding the night with an impish glow. Bar-Khos was burning, and as the speeding skud flew across the water towards it a silence filled the deck save for the skud’s roaring thrusters. Scents of smoke and rumbles of explosions came to her on the wind, fading away just as quickly. In the sky above the city she caught the glitter of flashes from sky battles raging fiercely, and along the coast and above the Lansway, clustershells bursting in the air.
‘They said it was bad,’ Coya muttered under his breath to his bodyguard Marsh, ‘but this?’
Marsh said nothing, only tightened his lips and cast his frown towards the distant explosions, their reflections smeared across the dark waters of the bay and sparkling in his eyes.
‘You didn’t tell us the city was about to fall,’ came Baracha’s growl from where he towered above the gathering of Rōshun volunteers.
‘It’s worse than it looks,’ Coya reassured the big Alhazii. ‘Mokabi has been hitting the city with sky raids, but they’ll weather them as they’ve always weathered them before.’
Coya gripped the rail hard, for the deck suddenly pitched forwards as the skud dove fast towards the city. Shard witnessed the sudden pains shooting through his crippled body as glimmers of purple across his aura. Flying along behind his shoulder, her mind filled with the sounds of the loft rippling above their heads and the creaking of the rigging and spars, it wasn’t any press of wind that she experienced just then but instead the passionate flow of the man’s thoughts. Shard sensed his affection for these islands of the Free Ports, strung out in a chain across the Midèrēs though joined in mutual support, where the seeds of the democras, these people without rulers, flourished like wild flowers.
His thoughts pattered against her mind.
Of all the Free Ports . . . Khos, pseudo-democras, where the bastard Michinè aristocracy still linger . . . where we either stop the Empire or are overrun by them . . . Most of all we cannot lose Khos.
Desc
endant of the famed Zeziké himself, philosopher of the democras, Shard had known this young man Coya Zeziké for half a decade now, long enough to have nurtured a deep though private respect for him. She knew how much he was committed to the cause of the Free Ports.
Years ago, Coya had visited the Academy of Salina where Shard had lived as a burgeoning student rook. A man in his twenties, stooped over his cane yet shining with an inner vitality, impressed, he had claimed, by what the students were doing in their spare time within the Black Dream of the farcrys.
Amongst all the young rooks of the Academy, he had spoken with Shard first. By then she had long cast aside her Contrarè name of Walks With Herself, and had cut her hair short to create even more distance from her heritage, not liking the prejudice it drew to her.
‘They tell me you’re the best rook they have here,’ Coya had said when they were alone and the office door closed.
Shard had said nothing. No sense in denying it.
‘Tell me then about the Black Dream. I’m not sure I understand it fully yet.’
‘It’s a construct dreamed up by the farcrys. Fundamentally, much the same as any other construct.’
‘What do you mean?’
She had waved her hand about as though it was obvious, a young rook who already knew it all. ‘The Veiled Dream of sleep. The Black Dream of farcrys. The Great Dream that encompasses it all. They’re all reality constructs. Some are simply more subjective than others.’
He had sat back and blinked like an owl for some moments.
‘Interesting. My ancestor wrote of such things when he wrote of his spiritual highs. How he transcended his own perspective. How he became one with everything within the Great Dream and felt nothing but love, nothing but an eternal bliss.’
Shard had only shrugged, hardly finding his comments relevant to the discussion. Coya had chuckled at that.
In his usual friendly manner, Coya had recruited her in the war against the Empire, enlisting her skills as a rook along with those of her peers deemed most capable, Tabor Seech included. And so as students they had intensified their efforts against the Mannian Empire, which by then had surrounded the Free Ports, and many of her peers had fallen along the way, their minds wrecked or lost entirely, cast senile before their years. Yet Coya had only ever asked for more.
Three years ago, Shard had returned from the Academy’s disastrous expedition into the Alhazii deep desert, the only survivor along with Seech. Covered in her gleaming glimmersuit and with half her face mauled by fresh scars, she was suddenly able to do things that few others could barely believe.
These powers had drawn Coya to her once again.
‘So you’re a Dreamer now,’ he had said with a smile and a disbelieving, almost sorrowful shake of his head.
With suspicious glances at the walls about them, Coya had asked if she would join him for an amble on the slopes of the Painted Mountain. In the summer heat, he had told her breathlessly about the network he secretly belonged to, an organization known as the Few. For an hour she had listened as he opened her eyes to a hidden world she had never known existed before, layers within layers within layers.
The Few, he had explained, were an organization founded in the early days of the democras, and given the perpetual mission of guarding against counter-coups and silent takeovers of the revolution, while privately promoting the spirit of liberty and solidarity both at home and abroad. The Few were funded by the League itself, which in turn was funded largely by anonymous public donations. Though barely anyone had ever heard of them.
There was no pay involved. Barely even travel expenses. And travel seemed like a large part of the deal, at least for Coya, who sounded more and more like some kind of troubleshooter, asked to go off to one flashpoint after another.
‘We need your help,’ Coya had claimed. ‘We need what you can do for the Free Ports. We’ve been trying for years to enlist the services of a Dreamer from Zanzahar, but without luck.’
‘I barely know what I can do yet myself.’
‘Then keep at it. And help us out whenever you can, no strings attached. That’s normally how we work anyway.’
‘I’m not even from the Free Ports. You know this. How can you possibly be certain I’d be loyal to this . . . cause of yours?’
‘Please, Shard. Walks With Herself. Your parents were driven from Pathia by the Mannian purges. Those who remained behind still suffer under the heels of the Empire. And now, the people who took you in as refugees in your hour of need, the people of the Free Ports – now we ask of you something in return. Now we ask for your help in our survival.’
Impossible to say no to such a sentiment, especially when it was expressed by this young man with his cane and his glittering, soulful eyes. Coya was a charismatic, there was no doubting it. In a way he reminded her of the Sky Writers back home when she had been a girl; urbanized Contrarè folk like herself – the lowest caste of the low – yet these splendid men in all their colours standing on the rooftops of their city quarter, shaking sticks at the sky while they chanted poems of life and death from the source of the Great Spirit.
All gone now. The Sky Writers wiped out in the first purges.
The very thing that Coya was fighting to prevent in the Free Ports.
*
Shard?
Roars and bangs in the world around her, soft concussions that pulsed through her consciousness like pebbles plopping into a lake. They were explosions in the dark sky over there, pretty blossoms of fire. Bar-Khos swung below them. The siege. The war.
Shard?
It was her own mind calling for her return.
Black sea not that far below them, she saw. Over the skyboat’s starboard rail lay the dark hills of the southern continent; over the port rail, the steep and rugged coastline of Khos. In between ranged the skinny bridge of land known as the Lansway, a thin strip connecting the two and covered in a rash of lights, where the might of the Empire had been assaulting the walls of the Shield for years now, slowly taking one wall after the other. Four were still standing, though even now it was clear that the foremost wall was under heavy assault, torchlights swarming over it in a wave as though it had already fallen to the enemy.
The skud was nearing the burning city, and Shard could make out that it was mainly the southern quarters of Bar-Khos on fire, those nearest to the Lansway and the Shield spanning its breadth. Sheets of flames rose brilliant in the eyes, swathes of buildings glowing red amongst areas of black calm. Everywhere she looked, clouds of smoke filled the air.
It was like the end of the world down there, mythic in its proportions, like something from those old Lagosian legends about the Fall of Ages – legends that had come true enough for the people of Lagos, at least in the form of the Empire. A fate that could still happen here.
Coya was pointing at something over the rail, and Shard looked to see a wave of skyships coming in from the south over the open waters of the Gulf. Mannian birds-of-war in their scores.
‘I’ve never seen them in such numbers,’ said Marsh.
‘It’s as well our reinforcements arrived in time.’
He spoke of the thousands of fighting Volunteers that had lately flooded the city from the rest of the Free Ports to shore up its defences, along with squadrons of skyships.
On the deck a voice was calling out for a full burn. The thrusters of the skud roared even louder and the spars strained against the sudden increase of drag from the envelope, and then they were diving straight for the blazing city in a race to reach it before the enemy formations.
Coya had asked to see the action on the Shield upon their arrival. Now because of his curiosity they were arriving right in the thick of it. Starry explosions of clustershells lit the skies to their right. A bang sounded somewhere beneath the boat, debris spattering against the hull.
Amongst the bursts of light the enemy skyships were tumbling now, falling from the sky trailing ribbons of fire and blue streaks from their thrusters. A trio of them, four, five
. She followed one that looked like an imperial flagship from the huge banner fluttering in its wake, burning like a wick in a falling candle. She watched it all the way down with its bag rippling empty and its twisting deck spilling debris and human figures, suddenly bringing to life the waters of the bay with a splash of white water; suddenly bringing to life the war and the spent lives that were its fuel.
Beyond the fading splash, the dark Lansway stretched before them, filled with the lights of the vast army brought here by General Mokabi himself. The largest army ever assembled in the history of the world.
Just then the silence of the Rōshun caught her ear. It drew Shard’s attention as she watched them now, nine figures standing together along the rail, the glints of their stares fixed on the vast Mannian forces ranged against the Shield. Their enemy too. The people they had come here to take on.
All at once a mood had overcome the cramped and swaying deck like the promise before a storm. With little effort, the Dreamer willed their auras into the visible range once again, and saw that each individual halo had merged into a greater one shared by them all.
The Rōshun shone with a violet intensity of rage.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Sore Luck
‘Holy kush, it’s cold up here,’ remarked Aléas, rubbing his long-fingered hands together and blowing into them, stamping his feet in the snow.
‘Harder to breathe,’ complained Kosh, his fleshy face snug within the fur lining of his hood.
Ash was squinting even with the smoky goggles he wore, for the light here was stronger too, bouncing off the snow which covered the field of the skyport and the pale rock of the mountains above their heads. Inside his leather gloves the tips of his fingers were throbbing, reminders of frostbite during his recent venture to the southern ice. He flexed his hands, trying to get some blood into them.
The Untamed Plateau was as wild and remote as its name suggested, a high tableland of pale mesas standing proud and lonesome amongst the greens and scarlet of ancient forest, the silver of lakes and rushing rivers. Perched in the arms of the Aradèrēs, it was almost surrounded by snow-capped mountains save for a northern horizon of twisted-ribbon clouds, which gathered most thickly where the beginnings of the Red Elba toppled unseen over the brink of the plateau; a heart-stopping waterfall when seen from the lowlands, a pilgrimage for Pathians seeking wonders.
