“Niim.”
The woman’s voice did not disturb him this time. Something shifted within him. Suddenly his skin prickled with a chill far deeper than that of the desert night, and the air tasted dry and bitter, like metal gone to rust. He opened his eyes and found the an-sherrat in shades of white and gray. Even the fire that smoldered at his feet had gone oddly colorless. More whiteness, glimmering and strange, covered the tent walls and every surface. He touched a mass nearby, and the cold of it stung his fingers. Snow? He had never seen it before, but he had been thinking of it, remembering his father’s tales—At once he understood. “I’m dreaming.”
“Yes. But not in Ina-Karekh.” The templewoman, when he looked around, stood a few feet away. There was something odd about her dreamform, which shimmered now and again as if trying to warp into a different shape, but for the moment she had it under control.
“This is the realm between waking and dreaming,” she said. “Your soul has brought me here again and again, rather than into Ina-Karekh. I believe this is a sign that some part of you has gone out of true.” She paused. “Do you have visions often?”
Wanahomen flinched, and lied. “No.”
She was silent for so long that he knew she saw right through him. But he had no intention of admitting the truth to her.
“It’s no matter,” she said at length. “I mean to teach you how to heal yourself, anyhow.”
He frowned in confusion, wrapping his arms around himself; the cold was going right through his robes. “I don’t like this.”
“Then change it,” she said. “This is your realm.”
“I don’t understand.”
“A Gatherer is one whose mind creates new worlds via the act of dreaming. Doing so is natural to them. Indeed, if not for the balancing power of dreamblood, some would spend all their time in the worlds of their mind’s creation. You would call that madness.”
He shuddered, or shivered. She seemed unaffected by the cold for some reason, though she wore less. “I’m not a Gatherer.” When she said nothing in reply, he scowled and changed the subject. “How do I leave this place?”
“Create another. As you created this one.”
He had remembered his father’s tales and imagined a dreamscape draped in snow. He decided to try another memory of his childhood: the gardens of Kite-iyan, palace of his mothers and siblings. In his mind’s eye he saw the delicate miniature palms, smelled the fragrance of the vineflowers and the nearby river, felt the soil between his toes—
His toes. He had been wearing sandals, but now his feet were bare. The air was warm. He opened his eyes to Kite-iyan—colorless, shadowed, but unmistakable.
Hanani looked around, nodding in what might have been approval. “Your will is strong. But that has never been in question.” She moved through the garden then, incongruous in her barbarian finery and Hetawa discipline, trailing her fingers over plants, boulders, a stone wall. “What do you see here? Is everything in order?”
He frowned, wondering what in the gods’ names she was talking about. “It’s as I remember it, yes, except for this ugly grayness.”
“Nothing out of place? You’re certain?”
“Of course I’m not certain, I haven’t been here for ten years.” Oh, but how he had missed it! He had played in these gardens as a child, hide-and-find with his brothers and building sand castles with his sisters. He had listened to his mother, in the days long before sickness and age had weakened her voice, sing the songs of the homeland in ancient Sua. He had listened—
A sound. Something in the garden sounded wrong.
Pivoting to orient on the sound, he began to move through the palms and ferns. Water. Yes, the old fountain; he had almost forgotten it. Set into the wall, a sculpted leopard’s head poured water into the open mouths of three cubs, which then spilled into a pool underneath.
“It’s too soft,” he murmured, half to himself. “There’s not enough water, it’s trickling too slowly.”
“Set it right.” In silence, the woman had come to stand beside him. Had she even walked, or simply manifested there?
Wanahomen looked around the fountain, searching for some mechanism, though the fountain had been built centuries before and he’d never known how the damn thing worked. But Hanani touched his arm.
“This is your world,” she said. The odd blurring of her dreamform had stopped; she was wholly focused on him now. He felt obliquely flattered. “Set it right.”
Abruptly Wanahomen understood. He had no need of mechanisms and construction lore when he controlled everything he saw by will alone. So he concentrated on remembering how the flow of water had gone, tuning his imagination. When the sound of the fountain matched the sound of his memory, a shiver passed down his spine that had nothing to do with the flecks of ice still melting in his hair. By pure instinct he looked up, his gaze drawn to the sky. That was wrong too. He had given it the seared, cloudless sky of the deserts around Merik-ren-aferu. Instead he willed a deeper blue, and thin wisps of moisture that would vanish by midday, but always return at night.
The shiver passed through him again, stronger now, and with it came a sensation of rightness so powerful that he caught his breath.
“What you feel is balance,” said Hanani. “Peace. Remember it. When that feeling shifts or fades, come back to this place and do what you just did. Or create a different place; it doesn’t matter. When you invoke your soulname, you shed the artifice of your waking self. When you create a realm in this empty place, everything—all that you see—is you. Change it, and change yourself.”
He took a deep breath, savoring the sensation of rightness. It amazed him that he had not noticed its absence before. Did that mean he had been slowly slipping into madness? A frightening thought. “I don’t understand how this works.”
“You don’t need to. No one else does.” When he looked at her in surprise, she smiled, though there was little humor in it. He had the sense that the expression was more of a reflex. “This is dreaming, Prince. These are the realms of the gods. Only the strongest Gatherers have any hope of understanding: they are born to the Goddess’s power in a way the rest of us can only struggle to imitate. This is why they lead us—and why we have such hope for you, Avatar of Hananja.”
Wanahomen frowned at this—but even as he did, he realized the signs had been there all along, as obvious as the circles under the Shadoun’s eyes. He’d thought the Hetawa’s interest in him was purely political. They needed a new figurehead, and military help in ridding themselves of the Kisuati. But now he knew: they actually believed he was one of them. Cursed with their magic, untrained and uncontrolled—but blessed with the Goddess’s favor too. To the Hetawa, that was everything.
Wanahomen had never truly believed in Hananja. Oh, he dreamed, and he had seen the power of the Hetawa’s magic, but the notion that a goddess could possibly care about the tiny creatures who crept into Her dreams seemed ludicrous. The avatar business had always been just another title to him, more meaningless than the rest. But if it was the reason the Hetawa had agreed to aid him, then that title indeed had real power. And what if there was truth in it? What if the power these priests kept saying that he had—power that should have made him a Gatherer—had some other, holier purpose? What was it? And why had She given it to him?
Wanahomen shook his head and got to his feet. He would think on all this later. “So that’s it, then? Now I’ll be able to keep myself from going mad?”
“You can use this method to keep your humors in balance, yes. But stay vigilant, for madness takes many forms, and not all are affected by dreamblood. Your father’s corruption was the proof of that.”
He stiffened, and a sudden sharp wind blew through the garden. “He wasn’t mad.”
“Then you believe he was simply evil? Even we don’t go so far, Prince.”
He turned on her, scowling. “I don’t believe that either.”
“You know what he tried to do. He tortured a Gatherer, twice over, until that
Gatherer became a monster. He unleashed those monsters on his enemies and allies alike, sentencing all to fates far, far worse than death—”
“It wasn’t like that! He wasn’t like that! He was—”
The garden changed, washing over with bright—though still colorless—sunlight. Now he was in the upper levels of Kite-iyan, standing on the balcony of the sumptuous, many-roomed apartment that once had been his. He looked down at himself and saw the clothing of a different life: his once-favorite leopard-skin loinskirt and a loose shirt of imported silk, the latter overlaid with the jasper collar that his mother had given him for his adulthood ceremony. His hands were softer, his arms less muscled than they had become in ten years as a hard-living warrior—
“Wanahomen,” said a voice behind him, and his heart went still. Then he turned.
Eninket, now King on Gujaareh’s Throne of Dreams, crossed the room in the broad strides that had been his habit in waking. A smile was on his face, his arms held out to embrace his favorite son. Nearly paralyzed by shock and memory and still-fresh grief, Wanahomen returned the embrace, his eyes welling with tears as the dream supplied so many important details he’d all but forgotten. His father’s scent, sweat and frankincense and clove oil. The tinkle of tiny gold cylinders woven into his hair. The strength of his arms, which back then—even as a young man well past the delusions of youth—Wanahomen had believed could never falter.
The day. Yes, he remembered this too. It was the day before the armies of Kisua and Gujaareh were to meet at Soijaro, in northern Kisua. The day before his father’s death.
“Father,” Wanahomen whispered, holding him tight. “Father.”
When he opened his eyes, however, he saw something that jarred him: the templewoman. She watched them, her form still gray and white and colorless, from the far side of the room. As he watched, she blurred again, and this time he could glimpse flickers of her other self: a weeping, wailing figure. A haggard creature with eyes full of bitter compassion.
That was right. She knew what it meant to lose a father too.
Wanahomen pulled back from his father’s embrace, gazing into the face of the man who had been god of his world for so long. Had there really been such sorrow lurking behind his father’s expansive smile, back then? Or was that merely a trick of memory?
“What’s wrong, Wana?” his father asked, half-smiling in bemusement at his expression.
“Nothing,” he said. “I’m just glad to see you.” So his father smiled and put a companionable arm around his shoulders, guiding him out toward the balcony.
This is your world, Hanani had said. He would see what he wanted to see. Back then, when he was a pampered prince’s child, there had been much he hadn’t wanted to see about his father. Now—
Hesitating a moment longer, Wanahomen closed his eyes and willed the memory to become right.
When he opened his eyes, his father had stepped away, leaning on the balcony railing as they gazed together at the setting sun. Now Wanahomen saw the worry-lines around his father’s eyes, read the uncharacteristic tension in his body. Now Wanahomen noticed—at last—that his father would not meet his eyes.
“I want you to know,” his father said, “that whatever I do tomorrow is for you.”
The Reaping of the armies. His father had done it to achieve immortality, per magical lore so ancient and forbidden that most of the world had forgotten its existence—but though Wanahomen had not known this at the time, Charris had confessed the truth to him in the years since. Had Eninket become immortal, Wanahomen would have been doomed to the fate that awaited most of his siblings—a life of precarious uselessness, wealth and privilege without purpose. As a favored son, he might have been married into some high-ranking lineage in order to cement that family’s ties to the throne, but he could never have achieved power or acclaim of his own, not even if he took up some profession or art. Any son of the Prince whose glory rivaled that of his father was a potential threat to the Sunset Throne.
And would his father have summoned assassins for him in that case, as tradition dictated?
His father threw him a glance then. How had Wanahomen never noticed the shame in those eyes that were so like his own?
“I want to keep you safe,” Eninket said, softly. “I want your life peaceful. The burdens of rulership—” He sighed. “I would keep those from you, if I could. I would keep you as you are now, untainted.”
Keep me as I am, Father? A boy in a man’s body? A pet?
Beyond his father, the templewoman looked away.
“Wana? Do you understand?” His father looked up at him, troubled by his silence.
Yes, I understand. What kind of man chooses such a fate for his son? I understand exactly what you meant to do.
And yet Wanahomen sighed, rubbed his eyes, then reached up to grip his father’s shoulder with one hand. That hand, not entirely to Wanahomen’s surprise, was the hand he possessed now. It was no longer soft. It was lined and weathered from wind, darkened by the sun, nicked all over with scars from learning the knife, practicing the sword, fighting hand to hand. He had become the man his father never wanted to see.
“I love you, Father,” he said, and it was true. “I never said that to you enough. But the wrongness here, in this world that is my soul—” He closed his eyes, hating himself for this betrayal, of his own youthful image of his father if nothing else. “It’s you.”
And closing his eyes, he willed it, all of it, to vanish. They floated again in the space between realms, which had shed its guise and showed its true nature as endless, featureless darkness. This suited his mood.
“I’m sorry,” came her voice from somewhere.
“How is it that you’re able to be here?” he asked. He felt empty inside the crystal wall that protected his innermost self. All his anger had burned out. He could not even hate the Hetawa anymore—for now, at last, he understood they had been right to kill his father. “If this is my place to control.”
“Some part of you must want me here. I can go now, however, and leave you to sleep. The lesson is done.”
“No.” He willed the crystal wall of his soulname to thin and become permeable, an invitation. “Stay. We can comfort each other.”
Abruptly he felt the walls of her self manifest, solid yet brittle as bone. “I need no comfort.”
He had never heard her lie before.
But before he could confront her about it, she drew away. “Rest well, Prince. In peace.” Swift as light, she was gone.
“And Her peace to you as well,” he said. But he knew that too would be a lie for a long time.
33
Invitation
In the dark of her tent, Hanani sat contemplating madness.
She could feel it encroaching on her consciousness with each passing moment. She had felt it in Ina-Karekh with Wanahomen, and even in the realm between. She did not know how to escape the madness. Nor was she entirely certain that she wanted to.
Dayu. Merchant Danneh. Mni-inh. Everyone I care for dies.
But it hadn’t been just those, had it? Azima, Gatherer Sonta-i, even the nameless Shadoun woman. She might not be the direct cause in every case, but contact with her had heralded each tragedy. She was a living, breathing omen of death.
I have feared the Banbarra, but it is they who should fear me, in truth. I should leave the waking realm before I destroy this whole tribe.
So went the madness.
She knew her thoughts were irrational. The Hetawa taught that there were no omens, save those sent directly from the Goddess in the form of true-seeings. Mni-inh, especially, would be furious with her for thinking such heresy. But no matter how fiercely she tried to hold the thoughts at bay, they always returned. And grew steadily stronger.
The only solution was not to feel at all, and not to think of the things that caused her pain. That was difficult with so many people trying to talk to her, touch her, comfort her. They didn’t understand. Nothing could comfort her after Mni-inh’s loss. Not
hing would ever comfort her again.
Curling on her side amid the cushions, Hanani slept.
The tribe was in high spirits when Hanani finally emerged from her tent that morning. She had slept later than usual, her body failing to wake with the dawn for the first time in her memory. She had had no dreams. Looking around as she came outside, she spied the Banbarra who were awake clustering near the lookout point again. By their excitement and pointing, she guessed that another hunt party had arrived.
She went down to the ground level to bathe, this time surprising a few other Banbarra women at the pool. They waved in greeting and made way for her, showing more courtesy than ever before. Though she had no idea what they were saying as they chattered around her, she found just the tone of the women’s voices enough to grate; they were so happy. When she could no longer bear their occasional bursts of laughter, she straightened, nodded a polite farewell, and left the pool. They fell silent then, though she felt their eyes on her back as she dressed. No doubt they would gossip about her once she was gone, so she obliged them and left as quickly as she could.
Back on the camp ledge, leaders of the final two Banbarra tribes, Vilisyo and Amaddur, had come up to exchange greetings with Unte and the others. The Banbarra slaves practically blurred as they hurried about, trying to prepare for the final night of the solstice and a celebration that was certain to be wilder than any in recent memory. The women of the tribe were frantic, rushing to pretty themselves; the men were more subtle about it but essentially the same. As the day wore on, Hanani witnessed sparring bouts, speed-dancing contests with a coveted bit of jewelry as the prize, and men surreptitiously lifting their veils to each other to discuss the shine of their teeth.
The Shadowed Sun: Dreamblood: Book 2 Page 30
