The Black Dream

by Col Buchanan

  It needed some thinking, that question. So Cole stood and stripped off his filthy trousers and started washing down his body while he worked the matter over in his mind. They all fell quiet once more.

  ‘There’s a good reason why I go into the kree warrens alone,’ he said as he scrubbed beneath his arms, looking up into a cobwebbed corner as he spoke. ‘It’s a simple equation, and a sound one. The more people who go down into the tunnels with you, the more chance of the kree finding you out. And then you’re all dead.’

  ‘Yes, I understand that,’ said the man Meer. ‘Tell me. How many trips have you made so far?’

  Cole flashed him four fingers, and the man was clearly surprised by that. Meer looked about at the cold and bare room he sat within. ‘Four hauls of Milk, yet this is how you live?’

  ‘Three hauls. I lost the last one. And what’s wrong with how I live?’

  ‘Nothing at all. You should see how I normally live. But you should be a wealthy man by now. Where has it all gone?’

  Cole tucked a fist into his hip and looked up at the far corner again in contemplation.

  ‘Whores and gambling mostly. The rest I squandered.’

  Through the doorway the decking of the veranda creaked minutely. It was the farlander, standing up straight with his arms still crossed and the crows calling behind him.

  ‘Can it be done?’ the old man rasped.

  ‘You’d be testing your luck, is what I’m trying to tell you all. And that’s assuming your ship is able to cross the Spine in the first place. Which is the other part of this plan of yours I’m having a problem with.’ He shrugged, shedding water. ‘Good odds to gamble on, though.’

  ‘So you will do it, you will guide us in?’

  Five rhuls of Milk at least, and they were offering him one fifth of the load. It was more than he had left behind in the Hush. He should be jumping at the chance to join them. Yet still, that worm of dread in his belly was coiling itself even tighter.

  ‘Where did you say you folks have come from?’ he asked, drying himself with a fresh shirt.

  ‘Khos,’ answered Meer. ‘And I wouldn’t admit that to anyone right now but a fellow Khosian.’

  Cole stiffened. He took a deep breath of the mountain air. Started tugging on clothes over his goosebumped flesh.

  ‘How can you tell?’

  ‘Your accent has been slipping ever since we started to talk.’

  So here it was then, after all. The meaning of his survival in the Great Hush and the high passes. The reason all those turns of fate had led him to here, now, this moment. The calling from home again.

  From a pail on the table Cole poured himself a mug of water, thirsty as a desert all of a sudden. His hands were shaking, and he was certain they all could see it.

  In the cooling air the cat wandered in and lay down before the empty hearth, waiting for him to light it; complacent these days of the miracles he provided her.

  For a precious moment Cole remembered a different life entirely, back at the cottage and the farm. A wife and son he never thought he would see again, and their family dog Boon.

  ‘Will you help us?’ asked the farlander once more.

  He felt an urge to be gone from these people, but his feet were clamped to the floor. All he could do was swallow around the lump in his throat as he tried to speak.

  ‘On one condition.’

  ‘Go on.’

  Resignation thickened his voice as he spoke.

  ‘You take me back to Khos with you when we’re done.’

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Future’s Ghosts

  Beneath a sky hidden by the dull overcast, they hiked up one of the many paths on the gentle eastern slope of the Mount of Truth, a broad low-shouldered hill covered in trees and parkland, named for its vicinity to the Shield and the view from its flattened back to the Lansway beyond, where the siege of the city continued after ten long years and where now an even greater force was assaulting them, Mokabi’s newly arrived army.

  Indeed horns were calling from the Shield as they climbed, echoing across the rooftops of Bar-Khos like wild obors in heat. Calls of retreat, Marsh the bodyguard told them grimly, making official what they had already heard in the streets below, rumours that Kharnost’s Wall had finally fallen, even with the reinforcements of Volunteers from the League, overwhelmed by a hundred thousand of Mokabi’s mercenaries.

  In the grey skies over the city, squadrons of recently arrived sky-ships patrolled against further enemy air raids. Squinting, Shard could see them clustered most heavily to the south over the foremost battlements of the Shield; small marrow-shaped blobs twinkling with the yellow specks of cannon fire, circling over a bank of smoke that obscured the mighty Kharnost’s Wall below them and much of the remaining three walls behind it, smoke that was being pushed inland on the breeze. Concussions rattled the stillness of the cool air. Every so often a scream or the snap of rifle fire carried on the wind to her ears, snatched from the distant retreat.

  She blinked hard, wondering for the briefest of moments if any of this was real.

  ‘Creed will be in a foul mood,’ remarked Coya to himself, looking up through the trees of the hill for a glimpse of the Ministry at the very top. And then louder, to the others: ‘Confined to bed rest while Mokabi’s forces take Kharnost’s Wall. I hope he will agree to see us.’

  Marsh glanced back from where he led the way, the bodyguard’s eyes twinkling through his goggles. ‘That heart attack of his. I hear it broke old Bearcoat’s spirits in two.’

  Coya’s response was almost lost in a renewed roar of cannon fire from the Shield. ‘That will be the day. Marsalas Creed, a broken man!’

  His bodyguard shrugged and looked ahead again, alert for trouble. ‘It’s what they’re saying.’

  ‘Then it must be true, eh?’

  ‘Just repeating what I heard.’

  Shard was barely listening as they walked, for her gaze was fixed on the Lansway and the action at the walls, seeking glimpses of the Mannian forces beyond the smoke.

  Tabor Seech would be out there somewhere.

  ‘I suppose you believe everything the enemy claims too? That Creed is really dead? And this move of theirs is actually a defensive siege?’

  ‘What?’ Shard said by his side, finally registering the words between them.

  ‘It’s true!’ exclaimed Coya, pausing to wave his cane at the smoke of the Shield. ‘They’re calling this a defensive siege now in the Empire’s news-sheets. A defensive siege! Can you believe it? They’re saying that the people of the democras are extremists. A baying mob made crazy by their worship of disorder. They say we’re bent on the destruction of Mann, whom we hate most of all because we envy their achievements. To read what they say would have you thinking they were the victims here, and we the aggressors.’

  Shard was hardly surprised, knowing what she did by now of the Empire’s ways. She tried to focus, tried to hold on to what they were discussing. But people were dying down there, she realized in her fugue condition. Dying even as the trio ambled along this path talking of war. Those horns called over the heads of men running for their lives.

  No wonder Coya was shaking.

  ‘Sounds just like their conquest of the southern continent,’ she heard herself say, her tongue thick and lazy in her mouth. ‘When they claimed it was a noble gesture in the toppling of tyrants.’

  ‘Indeed,’ said Coya. ‘And their people believed it too!’

  ‘Or wanted to believe it,’ drawled Marsh.

  Coya grew sombre, shaking his head as he watched the siege. ‘Mercy help those people down there.’

  Shard shivered, for it was getting colder now. Across the slope of the hill the shadows were deepening, the sun sinking below the far side.

  This war was too much to handle today. Her body was an over-sensitized bag of skin that flinched from every stimulus, even the flow of the breeze against her glimmersuit. Her emotions were the same, fiercely open to everything.

  All
effects of the worm juice now coursing through her blood, making a dream of the waking world. Her abdomen throbbed dully, reminding her always that the sandworm was inside her. A coppery taste filled her dry mouth no matter what she drank to replace it.

  Shard hadn’t slept during the night in their temporary quarters in a nearby taverna, too high on the sandworm’s juices coursing inside her, wondering in her less frantic moments whether taking the worm had been a sound judgement after all.

  For a time, young Blame had rallied from his own delirious condition, caused by simply touching the worm. He had marvelled at the potency of the worm’s juices while offering her shaking cups of tannis tea to take the edge off the worst of the rushes. But even that hadn’t been enough for sleep, and eventually Blame had curled himself in a corner unable to cope with his own ordeal, and Shard, lost too in strong winds blowing Contrarè greening-songs through her mind along with images from her earlier life – gripping the spinning bed as though she might otherwise take off into flight – had been in no condition to do anything for the young man as the endless night held them in its maw.

  Days later, weeks even, the first rays of daylight had at last forced their way through the shutters of the room like rescuers’ fingers scrabbling through rubble, slowly unearthing her to sunlight, the food of life.

  Rousing herself, she’d found that Blame was gone from their room and missing from the taverna. Run off into the surrounding streets, yelling about bats chasing him, one of the Rōshun had said with some bemusement.

  It would teach him to wear gloves next time, as she’d instructed. Or so she told herself, though Shard asked a few of the men to search for him anyway, and to make sure that he was safe.

  Barely able to move, Shard had wished only to return to her bed for the rest of the day. But Coya had been insistent he needed her with him, and Coya was a man skilled at getting his way. So she had infused herself with massive doses of tannis tea to coax her mind down from the ceiling, and had allowed him to drag her for hours around the city’s limits to appraise its situation, even though she could barely stand straight, could barely even speak.

  Down in the cobbled streets the crowds round her had seemed like a raging babbling torrent trying to sweep her mind away. Soldiers were everywhere, along with Volunteers from the rest of the League packed into the city. Down in the southern quarters amongst the press of traffic, a constant trickle of reinforcements had been hurrying for the Lansway while carts filled with the wounded trundled back in the opposite direction, sights of blood-soaked bandages and gaping wounds, the hospitals of the Shield filled by then, fresh casualties overflowing into the city.

  Nothing for ordinary citizens to do though but spread the word and carry on with another day in Bar-Khos, city of eternal siege. Or so she had thought, until she noticed the many citizens covered from head to foot by dirt and sweat, people returning from work shifts on the Shield or from the smaller northern walls of the city, where they were erecting great earthworks as fast as they could.

  All the while, Shard was trying to block out the growing mood of inevitability she could sense gathering like the clouds over the city, this place that was surely doomed to fall without some miraculous overturning of fate. Usually known for her optimism in hard situations, Shard had witnessed the ghosts of the future in the streets she had just been walking through, drifting through; shadows or impressions of a city falling before her eyes; the mayhem of mass murders and rapes, families slaughtered in front of each other and children’s heads dashed against walls or under boots, the desperate panic of ordinary citizenry trapped and with no way out.

  The worst of all evils in this world, a city sacked.

  Nothing is fated but the Laws themselves, Shard reminded herself again. All else is only probability.

  It was a thought she tried hard to hold on to now: this city still had a chance at survival, no matter how remote. And perhaps she and Coya could help improve the odds a little further yet.

  ‘You okay?’ Marsh asked from ahead without turning round, and she saw his magnified eyes blinking at her in the extra lenses on the back of his head.

  ‘Fine,’ she panted, soothed a little by the humanness of his concern. Though he tainted the moment somewhat by eyeing a buxom maiden hurrying past them on her way down the hill, Marsh turning his head to watch her blonde hair and curves from behind; like a dog in heat as usual, even here overlooking the fall of a wall.

  By the Dreamer’s side, picking his way carefully along with his cane, Coya Zeziké spoke his thoughts out loud again, as he was wont to do. ‘I still don’t see why you had to take that worm thing now, of all times, when I need you the most. Yes, yes, Tabor Seech. Well I’m sure you’ll make a fine adversary in your present condition, eh?’

  ‘Maybe you should concern yourself with your own business, and I with with mine.’

  ‘Yet this is my business, Shard. I hope you can still help me in the Windrush, before your fated reunion with Seech?’

  ‘Of course. It will take time to control the effects of the worm. Weeks maybe. The longer I can put off confronting Seech the better.’

  He nodded, satisfied enough, focusing once more on his awkward steps and the placement of his cane on the stony path. She was glad of Coya’s slow pace. Control of her body seemed a shaky gamble today, each step forwards one of faith. She even gripped a fallen branch by way of her own rudimentary cane, using it to maintain her balance, so that she and Coya resembled a pair of walking wounded, shambling along to the distant percussions of war.

  It had been years since Shard had last stood in Bar-Khos as a girl, fleeing Pathia with her parents. Hardly a city she had wished to return to, though their present destination, it had to be said, was an intriguing one.

  She could see it now, the Ministry of War on the very peak of the hill, surrounded by hedgerows and batteries of guns pointing to the overcast sky; home to the Lord Protector, General Creed.

  ‘Why is it,’ huffed Shard as they walked along, ‘that for as long as I’ve known you, whenever you ask something of me I usually find myself doing it?’

  ‘Because,’ puffed Coya, ‘I always ask you as a friend.’

  By the pinch of his smile she could tell that Coya was in trouble too, even now that the path had levelled off through one of the narrow, tree-filled tiers of the park. Ahead of them the bodyguard Marsh was pushing the pace as best he could, though the tall figure in his stiffened longcoat had stopped for a moment beneath a withered jupe tree, where an equally withered old monk sat perched on a bench talking to a dog that was watching Marsh instead.

  The bodyguard frowned back at the state of her and Coya hobbling along. Marsh was Shanteel, one of the lifelong protectors of the noble Zeziké bloodline, a companion of Coya since they had been boys. Never one to take it easy on his charge, always pushing Coya to his limits.

  The Minosian wore goggles that wrapped around his head and allowed him to look behind him at the same time, goggles which Shard herself had provided from the Academy. She knew that he was observing the hedgemonk through the rear lenses in case he might leap up with a knife or a pistol at any moment, but the old man looked harmless enough, clearly drunk on a bottle of wine he cradled in his arms.

  ‘Coya?’ exclaimed the monk as they shambled past the figure. ‘Coya Zeziké, is that really you?’

  Coya stopped, and looked down at the old fellow kindly enough. ‘Have we met, brother?’

  ‘No, but I’ve seen your likeness. It hangs in the library. A spectral-graph, I think they called it. Very real. Though also unreal, in a way. Strange.’

  ‘Ah. That was my wife’s idea. Several hours of tedium I wouldn’t care to repeat.’

  The old hedgemonk nodded, chewing his toothless gums. At his feet the black dog watched them both, its ears pressing back at every rumble of gunfire.

  ‘You come to us now even as a wall is falling,’ said the man. ‘Yet I see no trace of despair in your eyes, Coya Zeziké. Only hope and clever scheming!’
/>   Coya smiled, leaning closer to press a Khosian coin into the man’s hand.

  ‘For your blessings,’ Coya said, nodding in farewell.

  ‘Coya Zeziké, blood of the blessed Zeziké!’ the hedgemonk called after them drunkenly, standing now with the bottle held high. ‘Saviour of the Free Ports, heh!’

  ‘I told you we should have come up by cart,’ Marsh growled unhappily, and Shard followed his gaze as he scanned the nearest trees for likely assassins. Seeing Mannian Diplomats everywhere, no doubt, though no wonder, for they had tried to kill Coya many times now, and would no doubt try again. ‘And I warned you about that damned spectralgraph too. Let the whole world know what you look like, why don’t you?’

  Compelled to look over her shoulder, Shard saw the old hedge-monk still standing on the path, though he was pressing his hands together in sami now, pressing them against his forehead in respect, and then against his heart in hope.

  Below them in the city, wailing horns continued to lament the falling wall.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  The Crossing of Storms

  ‘Stones, you idiot, can’t you see the rocks? The wind’s pushing us into the mountain!’

  On the quarterdeck of the Falcon, Captain Trench was hollering through sleet that lashed at them through the blackness of a howling gale, causing Ash to marvel that he could shout loud enough to be heard in these conditions, never mind catch a breath in the rarefied chill that passed for air up here.

  Ash stood with his back pressed against the port rail and his arms hooked around it to stop the wind from plucking him off his feet. The decking of the Falcon was heaving like the bed of a drunk. He rode it with his heart hammering and his head filling with a different storm in a different time entirely: the sea voyage from Honshu, the faces of his fellow exiles looming out of the darkness as though he was there again – young Baso whooping at the thrill of it and General Oshō grimly silent, the rest of them convinced that this was their end.