A Bait of Dreams

by Clayton, Jo;

  “He found the source of the Ranga Eyes.” Deel’s voice was a thin monotone, all life and warmth stripped from it. “He’s going to destroy it. You’d better kill him. I don’t care. I’m going back.”

  Gleia twitched, stilled at a warning hiss from Zidras, lay shaking with fury and helplessness as she heard Deel running back to the womb as if she wanted to be eaten. Madar knows, maybe she did. Good! But as soon as she felt the flare of satisfaction at the thought, there was sickness back in her stomach; betrayal bought betrayal bought more betrayal; it would never end until the Mother Eye was shattered, dead.

  “Juggler.” Zidras was close, his voice loud over her. “Move, say one word, I shoot you, cut her throat.” His voice was shrill, nervous; a breath could set him off. “Gleia, move careful and slow, arms only, bring them around behind your back; press the backs of your hands together so the thumbs stick up. Right. Good. Hold that.” He went down on one knee. She felt a loop of twine tighten about her thumbs, then he was up and away, quick and light. A moment later he said, “You can sit up now, Gleia, but remember, slow and careful.”

  He was standing a few body lengths away, his delicate features erased by the dark, only eyebrows, moustache and beard visible. The moustache lifted. He was smiling. “Ranga Eyes,” he said. “The Source. I knew you had something good you were going after, Juggler, though how in Aschla’s hells you found it … I suppose you won’t talk about that, so I’ll never know. Too bad.” His smile widened. “I’ll just have to make do with the good food and lovers and the rest of the things the Eyes are going to buy for me.”

  “You go in there and you’re dead.” Shounach’s voice was flat, harsh. “The Mother Eye will swallow you before you know you’re gone.”

  “You come out, Gleia come out. Me, I’m not worried. Not about that.” He frowned, his eyes moved from Shounach to Gleia and back. “I was going to leave you once I’d got hold of whatever it was you were hunting, tied up to give me time to get away. Seems to me, thinking it over, the Dancer’s right. Better to kill you. Can’t let you destroy the Eyes, I might need to come back for more. And you make a helluva bad enemy.” He lifted the crossbow, sighted, began a steady pull on the trigger.

  A shadow flashed from the dark, merged with Zidras. He gave a small grunt, his brows went up and apart; he dropped, the bolt breaking free but flying off in a wild arc to clatter down among the pillowstones.

  Ruhshiyd crouched beside Zidras, wiped his blade on the dead man’s shirt, then strolled over to Shounach, contentment and pride in every line of his body. “Ruhshiyd see dog follow, follow dog.” With a few swift strokes of his knife he cut Shounach loose, moved with the same strut to Gleia.

  Shounach stood rubbing at his wrists, frowning at the tendrils of light still moving over the mountain slope. Gleia came up beside him, put her hand on his arm. “We’ll have to get her out again,” she said.

  He turned his frown on her. “Why?”

  “To make an end. One I … no, we … one we can live with. She’s nothing, not after … she doesn’t matter. We do.”

  He drew a hand over his face, stood with eyes closed, struggling with the rancor that threatened his control of himself, a struggle she shared. She kept her hand on his arm, though the surging fury in him burned through her also. Finally he smiled warily down at her. “Once she’s out, that’s the end of it.”

  “Yes.”

  He looked over his shoulder. “Firebrother, you could help us again, if you will.”

  “Firebrother, I will.” Ruhshiyd’s face lifted in a complacent smile-grimace, content as chanoyi to dispense favors to lesser beings.

  “Take the horses back to the place where there are many thin pillars and wait there. We’ll meet you there when we can.”

  “It is done.”

  Shounach pulled his arm from her hold, caught her hand in his. “Ready?” He chuckled as she shook her head. “I know. Come on.”

  The glow was thicker, stiffer, like old cold milk pudding, but they forced through and burst into the womb chamber.

  An Alahar grown solid and feral came plunging through the heavy sluggish veils to tackle Shounach, knock him off his feet. They rolled on the floor, wrestling, gouging, slamming at each other, a bitter fight. The drums were throbbing, something was whining, a high thin keening that was like knives in her brain, Deel was shrieking in her born-tongue, long rolling curses like sea waves, while she caught up stones, crystal shards, handfuls of the pea-sized crystals and flung them at Shounach and Gleia. Arm crooked to protect her eyes, Gleia ran at Deel, threw herself, curled in a tight ball, at the Dancer’s legs, brought her down, flipped up and landed in a crouch beside her, wrapped her hands in Deel’s hair and forced her down, sat in the middle of her back and pressed hard against the artery until Deel stopped struggling, then she was on her feet again, going for the Alahar’s figure, driving the knife in wherever she could find a target. He was solid enough, the knife cut and worried him, though no blood came from him. Shounach broke free, Gleia drove herself at the Alahar’s legs. He staggered. She slashed at his heels, at the backs of his knees, butted herself into him. He fell over her. Shounach kicked him in the head and he went limp. Gleia scrambled to his feet, Shounach took his arms; together they swung him back and forth and flung him at the Eye.

  The gossamer bubble flickered a little and absorbed him without effort.

  The veils formed about them again; the whispering tugging mesmerizing shift of light and sound began again. They were close enough to touch the shimmering glimmering bubble and it was powerful, more powerful than either of them had imagined. Shounach struggled, reached out. Gleia struggled, put her hand in his. They started backing away, step by slow step, their bodies stiffening against them until they finally couldn’t move, were frozen to the littered stone. The bubble rippled and grew larger as if it drained the strength out of them and added it to that which was the multiplication of all the lives sucked unto it from the duplicates it had budded off and allowed to be carried into the world.

  Shounach begins to draw his silence around him. Gleia feels it, tries to merge herself with it, but is distracted by the touch of the bubble. Its tendrils move over her, caressing her. She is terrified and nauseated and filled with a dreadful sick pleasure. And she begins to see images forming in the darkness within the bubble, she struggles against seeing them, but she cannot turn her head way.

  A child is playing on a tiled floor. There are many adults moving about the room, but they are tall shadows she ignores. She is two years-standard, perhaps a little older, a sturdy healthy child absorbed in her game of making patterns with brightly colored bits of tile. She arranges them and rearranges them until she is satisfied, then she looks up and speaks directly to Gleia. “You want to know who I am.” Her voice is curiously adult and sounds vaguely familiar but Gleia cannot place it. “My name is Egleia. My cousins tease me about it but Mama tells me it’s a very old name and only given to very special people. I live in the vadi Kard. My grandmother Kantili is dreamsinger here. My mother’s name is Zavar. That’s a special name too. The first Zavar here was wed to Vajd the Blind who came here to be dreamsinger a long, long time ago. He is famous everywhere. He was my great, great, lots of greats, grandfather. Mama says we must be very proud of our line; it has had more dreamsingers in it than any other.” The soft disturbing voice patters on, child’s phrases in a woman’s tones. Gleia strains to hear, forgetting Shounach, forgetting everything but her hunger to know more. The girl stops talking and goes back to playing with her bits of tile. Gleia is ready to scream with frustration. The child gets to her feet and walks away … and is walking down a rutted, unpaved street, taking pleasure in stomping her bare feet in pockets of white dust, making the dust rise and blow about her. A woman is with her, tall, with long brown braids looped about her head. Gleia cannot see her face; she moans, tears run unheeded down her own face; she tries to go closer but something is holding her back, it has her hand and won’t let her go. The woman turns her head
, looks down, smiles at the small child playing in the dirt. She is not quite pretty, but has a quiet restful look that touches Gleia deeply, brings a little peace to the turmoil inside her. A man comes riding down the street, leading two pack-horses piled high with furs. He is a big man with sun-dark skin and light brown eyes. Zavar runs past the child, who totters and sits down abruptly in a puddle of dust. The man jumps down from his horse and hugs his wife—“Chail,” Gleia whispers, “Zavar, even in dreams I have forgot your faces.” He sees the child, he grins, strides to her, scoops her up and hugs her. “I can smell the sweat on him, his beard scratches me, but I don’t mind. While Mama fetches the bread for Grandmother he asks me what I’ve been up to. I tell him about the mik-mik nest I found and how the babies are growing and about the time I fell in the Kard and one of my cousins pulled me out and about Tamil who likes to tease me and pull my hair and put bugs down my back.” She stops speaking, the child is gone but she is the child. Chail and Zavar smile at her, call to her, eagerly, joyously, lovingly. “Egleia, daughter, Gleia, child, come to us. You’ve been away from us too long, oh so terribly long, stolen from us, we searched for you, we could not find you, you thought we were dead, you were wrong so wrong you see you were wrong, you see us now, come home, baby, come home, little Egleia, come home, Gleia my child, my daughter, our child, our daughter, come where you belong.” Love and warmth and welcome flood out from them, drop round her like a warm blanket. It is what she’s always wanted, what she’s needed. Again she tries to move toward them. The thing has her hand, it won’t let go, it holds her back, she cries out against it, struggles against it, deep booming words batter at her ears, she will not hear them, she refuses to hear them.

  Pain. She cries out. Pain like fire running up her arm.

  And the images are gone. She is standing beside Shounach who has her hand in his, two fingers doubled and squeezed to produce a pain almost unbearable. She understands then that he is doing for her what she had done earlier for him, breaking her free of the bubble’s trap, understands too why he attacked her with such rage; what she has lost in losing that dream is beyond words. She is empty. She gazes at him, hating him and loving him and mourning for him and for herself. He can’t move. She sees his face contort with the effort he is making, but he can’t speak. She wants to smile at him, reassure him, but she can’t move. Yet it is not necessary that either speak. He knows her loss, it is his loss, she feels his care, he knows hers. The numbness in both retreats. Anger flows into the emptiness of both, a rage at being raped by the thing that uses their deepest selves against them. The rage in Gleia merges with Shounach’s fury. She is in him and he in her, they are one in rage and outrage, one mind, one force. The Gleia/Shounach meld takes the force and molds it into a spear of fire and drives the spear deep into the Eye. The bubble screams and writhes; it batters at the meld but cannot touch the Gleia/Shounach. The meld churns the spear about. The Eye roars its rage and pain, filling the great chamber with noise and shaking the mountain itself. The meld reaches Shounach’s hand into the magicbag and takes out one of the blue spheres. Shounach’s hand sets it down close to their feet. One by one the Gleia/Shounach draws out the blue spheres until five sit there, cool and blue and tranquil. The meld, Shounach pointed, trips them to a soft whispering life that begins to count the seconds off. Two-as-one, the Gleia/Shounach steps away from the keening, throbbing bubble, knowing that they have pricked it but not seriously damaged it, that with all their shared strength they cannot hurt it beyond its ability to repair itself. The blue spheres whisper the seconds away but the Gleia/Shounach does not think of them, the meld has done what Shounach came to do, now it is time to save themselves. They pick up Deel and drape her over Shounach’s shoulder. They walk away from the bubble, moving faster and faster until they are loping through the dying veils, pushing out of the chamber into a ragged crack in black stone that seems to groan as they move through it.

  The wind is growing stronger; it moans at them, throws grit into their faces as they emerge from the mountain. They run across the littered black plain like fire racing through dry grass, run as one, drawing strength from the dying embers of anger and need, drawing strength from air and stone and all around them, racing with only one thought, to get away, to get as far away from the mountain as they can, racing on and on, powered by a force that comes into them from all around them, running on and on.…

  The sky cracks open, a strain of blue spreads over the dark, blotting out the stars. Shounach catches Gleia round the shoulders, falls with her into a hollow in the stone. SOUND fills the night, a WIND rushes over them, hot as the breath from Aschla’s hells, the stone judders under them, throwing them away from each other.…

  Gleia sat up, scrubbed at her face with a trembling hand, then stared at the blood seeping from her lacerated palm. “I’m always wrecking my hands.” Her ears were ringing, her voice comes to her from a great distance.

  Shounach laughed. He got to his feet and stood looking back the way he’d come, satisfaction and weariness written deep into his face.

  Gleia followed his gaze. The black mountain was spouting fire, specks of it flying out like spittle from a drooler’s mouth. “Well,” she said, “You’re thorough.” She looked around. “Where’s Deel?”

  Shounach grimaced. “Behind you. Still out.”

  Gleia got to her feet, wincing as deep bruises, stone burns and shallow cuts complained. She walked like an old woman over to Deel and stood looking down at her. The Dancer was curled like a child asleep; she seemed gentle and vulnerable, all the strains of the past days erased from face and body.

  Shounach came to stand beside Gleia. “She’s a survivor.”

  Gleia nodded. “Better than me, I think.”

  “No!” The denial had a violence in it that made her stare at him, startled. “In no way is she better than you.”

  He swung her around, stood with his hands closed hard on her shoulders. “You know where your family is now. You can go back to them if you want. They’ll take you in, be sure of that.”

  “I am.” She put her hands on his arms and smiled at him.

  “Are you going to them?”

  “No.”

  “Gleia … where do you go, then, if not to them?”

  “With you.”

  “No doubts? No questions?”

  “Always. They don’t matter.”

  He drew a finger along the brown lines of her brands, traced the outline of her lips, tapped at the end of her nose. “You’re wiser than me.” He moved away from her, caught hold of Deel’s arms, lifted her a little, set his shoulder under her middle and got heavily to his feet. “Huh! she gets heavier each time.” He reached out his free hand to Gleia. “Come on, Vixen. It’ll be morning soon and Ruhshiyd is waiting.”

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Jo Clayton (1939–1998) was the author of thirty-five published novels and numerous short stories in the fantasy and science fiction genres. She was best known for the Diadem Saga, in which an alien artifact becomes part of a person’s mind. She also wrote the Skeen Trilogy, the Duel of Sorcery series, and many more. Jo Clayton’s writing is marked by complex, beautifully realized societies set in exotic worlds and stories inhabited by compelling heroines. Her illness and death from multiple myeloma galvanized her local Oregon fan community and science fiction writers and readers nationwide to found the Clayton Memorial Medical Fund.

  All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 1985 by Jo Clayton

  Cover design by Andy Ross

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nbsp; ISBN: 978-1-5040-3851-5

  This edition published in 2016 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

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