Dreams of the Eaten

by Arianne Thompson

  “Bzi’daa ast, emi,” Hawkeye mumbled. He was burning hot, and already awake again – a bad omen for sure.

  But at least that meant that Elim could shift the load a little, make Hawkeye cling to his back instead of keeping him slung over his shoulders like a top-heavy sack of suet.

  “You got that right,” Elim said, choosing to assume that what Hawkeye had said was Sundowner for Isn’t this a mother. He pressed his weight to the wall, but not too hard in case he jostled his friend’s bad leg, and took another big step, but not too big in case he slipped, and calculated the next one with his night-friendly eye, but not too long because there was almost-certainly still a crazy crow-man out looking to shoot him, and no telling how close he was to catching up.

  For a brief, evil moment, Elim longed for his gun.

  Then he took another step, and another one, and another, until he was too witless to think of anything but the ground and the wall and the huge, yawning drop waiting to eat him –

  – until the next clumsy wall-clutching grab of his hand brought down a rain of earth.

  Elim threw himself into it, cringing into the inevitable rockslide – and when none came, he was left with only his own momentum, rebounding off the wall just as hard as he’d bulled into it. He took a single backward step, the heel of his foot hanging out into nothing.

  Nothing.

  It was nothing. No rockslide. No collapse. Hawkeye hadn’t even twitched. Elim had just loosed a little dirt – not even enough to fill his shoes.

  It was no comfort. He stood rooted to the spot, heel hanging out into the dark abyss, dizzy with remaindered panic and sick-hearted certainty: if he moved a step, an inch, he was going to fall.

  The mountain was going to eat him.

  He was going to die.

  Then Hawkeye’s hot arms circled almost protectively around his neck, his good knee pressing gently into Elim’s side, like a rider prompting his mount to move forward. “Don’t worry, sir,” he said, his voice a warm puff in Elim’s ear. “She won’t hurt you.”

  Elim had no blessed clue who ‘she’ was – but it didn’t matter. He was ‘sir’ again. Which meant that Hawkeye was here again. The mild-mannered translator, the soft-spoken sorcerer, the smartest man on this or any mountain had scraped together enough brains to take a look at things and assure Elim that no, he really didn’t need to get himself in a fix. They could just go on their way, just like anybody would, and maybe settle in for a leisurely work-shy smoke at the end of it.

  That was all Elim needed.

  The drop didn’t get any kinder, and the wall didn’t get any firmer, but the distance from his left foot to his right got longer, and then shorter, and then longer again, and just like that, they were past the choke-point and back out onto safer ground, the path stretching wide and straight ahead of them.

  Elim let out a breath his bollocks had been holding for the last half-mile, and patted Hawkeye’s knee. “Gonna make it, buddy,” he said again, cheered by the faint, rosy glow of the eastern horizon – so much prettier in his right eye than his left. “You and me – professional survivors.”

  Hawkeye didn’t answer.

  Elim glanced over his shoulder, just to be sure there weren’t any head-turning dire portents going on back there, and checked his surroundings in what was fast becoming instinct. The trail was wide and gentle for another handful of yards. Then it switch-backed, disappearing up into the trees above their heads, and from there it was anyone’s guess. Lots of dirt, and a few trees. No boulders, except the odd few at ground level. And no guarantees that Hawkeye wouldn’t drop said ground out from under Elim’s feet, the way he had with Sil.

  Elim forced away the thought of Sil. “Ain’t that right?” he said, anxious to keep Hawkeye talking as they hurried on. “Ain’t you a survivor?”

  Hawkeye’s only answer was the tightening of his arms around Elim’s neck.

  “Hey, go easy,” Elim said, bolstering his hold on Hawkeye’s good leg to assure him that he wouldn’t fall off. “Don’t...”

  His mouth might have kept moving, but no more air came out. The arms garlanding his neck suddenly became a stranglehold, a feverish fleshy vise throttling him on the spot. Elim dropped Hawkeye’s leg to yank on his arms, but that left the man’s whole weight hanging from the forearm digging like an iron bar across his throat.

  Elim staggered, the world swimming in his periphery. Down. He had to get down – get the weight off. But the ground was pitching and yawing under his feet, the edge swelling and lunging at him, waiting for the one off-balance step it needed to swallow him whole.

  Elim staggered and dropped to one knee, his vision blackening around the edges. He had just time to think of turning, whacking Hawkeye’s broken leg against something to force him to let go. Then his eyes rolled back, and his brain gave up.

  And then his body fought back. Even as Elim’s grip on Hawkeye’s arm began to go slack, his right hand stretched and hardened, crushing the Sundowner’s forearm in a massive mailed fist. Even as he swayed and lolled left toward the precipice, his kneeling-foot bulged and ossified likewise, growing and growing until with a stitch-popping snap it burst his moccasin open and held fast there amidst the ruined leather – as a godly huge hoof, a titanic doorstopper holding Elim back from the edge. His entire self changed like that: bones popping, muscles rippling, his whole body swelling up like a superhuman allergy to death. He didn’t even have to pull Hawkeye off him: the burgeoning taut cords of his neck broke the Sundowner’s grip like tree-roots bursting through an old pipe.

  And as Elim sucked in his first unfettered breath, Hawkeye gasped and dropped off him like a blood-fatted tick. Which left Elim free to kneel there and suck wind, glutting himself on endless draughts of cold, dry, sweet mountain air.

  Until something flitted by his ear and skittered away over the edge.

  Until another one zipped past right afterwards – an arrow that stuck and trembled in a dirt-and-stone crevice not five feet ahead.

  Until Elim realized that Hawkeye hadn’t miraculously come to his senses and decided to let go. He’d been shot.

  Elim stared at the black-feathered shaft sticking out from his friend’s back, its head buried deep in his kidney – a malicious bullseye already enlarging a target around itself, seeping a dark second-prize ring through Hawkeye’s dirty shirt.

  Elim whipped his head around, closing his human eye to let his horsey one show him the enemy with uncluttered certainty: a dark crouching man-shape in the muddy green-and-yellow night-world, his every movement a predatory beacon – his arm already preparing another arrow.

  Elim had had enough. He surged up to his mismatched feet with a shout, with an enraged STOP that emerged as a deafening foghorn bellow. The stranger startled, ducked, but he was fresh out of chances: Elim bent and wrenched up the arrowed stone behind him, tearing the hundred-pound rock out of the mountainside as if he were pulling up a potato, and hurled it down the trail.

  He aimed it a little low, anxious in spite of everything not to add another body to the weight on his soul, but didn’t wait to see the result: the trail ahead was too long, too straight, and too narrow to have any hope of avoiding another shot. He was going to have to improvise.

  So as the rock thudded and rolled, Elim bent and snapped off the arrow in Hawkeye’s back, his oversized fingers trying to keep the head undisturbed while breaking the shaft as close to the skin as possible. Sorry about this, buddy, he thought – right before he picked up the translator and pitched him up over the dirt-packed wall. He couldn’t see where the trail would switch back exactly, but at least there were trees up there – some kind of cover.

  Hawkeye hit with a cry, and Elim lost no time following him: he threw himself at the big earthy roll and climbed, his gauntleted fingers driving into the dry soil like so many railroad spikes, his iron-hard hoof kicking in every second toehold, his breath billowing out like a human steam-engine until he was up and over and up again – picking up Hawkeye again – and runni
ng, crashing through the trees with no certainty save that in that moment, Elim was exactly who he was supposed to be.

  God willing, that would be enough.

  IF SHEA WERE human, her place in the Dog Lady’s arms would have been just perfect: warm and soft, a furry makeshift pocket to fend off the chill. But there was no moisture in that warm-blooded embrace, nothing to help the desiccating dry air.

  Shea made no complaint. She held still and waited, saving her energy, striving to stay awake. Día was out here somewhere, and Yashu-Diiwa, and Prince Jeté, and whether and which of them found each other first would spell the difference between hope and disaster.

  Then she felt U’ru’s ground-eating strides change course – with an accompanying burst of enthusiasm. Puppy!

  There was a faint, foreign echo after that, a mental aftertaste of surprise and disapproval at this sudden shift in direction. Was that the crow?

  Well, nevermind: they were apparently close enough to Yashu-Diiwa that U’ru could find him even here, at the very seat of Marhuk’s power – which meant that he was still alive, which meant that the a’Krah hadn’t caught him, which meant that this might still be salvageable. Shea felt her stomach unclench as U’ru stopped and set her down, and she took her first tentative steps on some sort of wide mountain path –

  – and all but tripped over a shapeless dark heap.

  Shea couldn’t see worth a damn in the dark, but the feel of cold flesh, thin cloth, and shorn wool told her everything she needed to know. That was a body.

  A human body.

  Día’s body.

  Puppy? The great goddess knelt to make her own inspection, a new, tentative confusion just then rippling through her mind. Shea dropped to a stunned squat and let her, marveling at their perfect triple complicity: Día had become one of the Dog Lady’s children, Shea had allowed it to happen, and true to form, U’ru had destroyed her.

  SIL COULDN’T DO it. Of course he couldn’t. Leeching heat from Día would have killed her. And who knew if it would work anyway? Why should he think he had any of his talent left, when the rest of him was rotting away?

  Anyway, it was done and she was gone – long gone – and now there was nothing left but to endure his own second-guessing: to listen to the little voice that said it wouldn’t have mattered anyhow – that she was already dead, and that he was responsible, and that now he’d lost his only chance at saving himself – and passionately exhort it to shut up.

  But in its place was only silence, and that was the worst of all. There was nothing he could do now, literally nothing, but sit in frozen solitude and fight the rising tide of raw, existential terror.

  What if it never ended? What if he was just stuck in his own consciousness, watching his body decay into a putrid pile of bones? God, what if he was doomed to exist forever?

  He wasn’t. He wouldn’t. He couldn’t possibly. Weisei had said that Marhuk would help him. Día had said that he’d gotten stuck somehow – that he’d died between day and night, between the age of a boy and a man, on an island between two lands. Surely the old crow could mend that. Surely he could jostle Sil back into his proper place somehow, like jimmying out a sticky nickel caught in a brass tobacco-dispensary.

  At this point, Sil didn’t even care which side he fell out on. He just needed it to be over.

  But until then, he was left kneeling there in the cold and lonely dark, raging at creation.

  Why me? he demanded of the universe at large. He hadn’t sold his soul to the Sibyl. He hadn’t lost a gamble with a Sundowner shaman. He hadn’t made any infernal bargains at all – nothing to warrant this extraordinary torture.

  Why not? came the imaginary reply, its tone laden with the infinite indifference of the world.

  Because I don’t deserve this, he said, his mind’s voice full of righteous anger. I was a good person. I was trying to do the right thing.

  What then? What answer could there be to that? Sil turned the chess board and tried to imagine it, staving off stark raving terror by playing both sides.

  Prove it.

  Well, that was easy enough. I was trying to make money for the Calvert family, he said. Going to exceptional pains to undertake a generous act for my neighbor.

  But he had scarcely set down the white piece before the black one demolished it. Fallacious. You wanted to make a name for yourself. You even fancied poisoning the remainders to save face.

  To restore my family! Sil corrected. To do honor to my parents – to revive OUR name, not mine alone.

  Disingenuous, said his other-self. Would Father have approved of you hazarding your neighbor’s money? Would Mother like to see the way you lord yourself over everyone else? Have the courage to be honest: you covet their name, their pedigree, the wealth and prestige that used to attend it – but you’ve never lived their values.

  Suddenly it wasn’t a game anymore: not a chess match, but a court case... one he absolutely couldn’t afford to lose. Because their values drove them into penury! Sil snapped back at himself. Too much soft living, too much soft-hearted lending. I did it all the hard way – MY way. Why, I risked everything to rescue Elim, got myself killed trying to get him out of his own mess!

  Irrelevant, came his other-self’s pitiless reply. He wouldn’t have needed your help if you hadn’t blackmailed him across the border. Everything you did for him was for your own conscience and concern, a reckless losing streak you sustained trying to correct a mistake of your own making. Admit it, Halfwick: you accrued no moral credit. You gambled it and lost.

  No, that wasn’t true. It wasn’t. He did good things all the time. He had given Weisei his belt back, when he won it at cards, just to be kind – he had refused to take ownership of that tongueless white boy, just because it was the right thing to do – he had taken Elim out to eat at the fair, just because he knew Calvert’s mule desperately wanted to go.

  But he’d made the mistake of letting out the nasty, self-critical voice in his head, and now there was no silencing it. To reiterate: you courted favor by refusing a useless novelty, and kept your hands clean by declining an opportunity to free a slave, leaving your crowning moment of selflessness as the time when you begrudgingly consented to escort your partner to a supper that cost you nothing. Is that it?

  No, it wasn’t – not at all – but even as he racked his mind for something to put on his side of that swiftly tilting scale, Sil could dredge up nothing that wasn’t either a stillborn intention or compensation for some previous error. He’d tried so hard, tried all his short life to be someone, to amount to something – and yet there was nothing, absolutely nothing to show for it. He reeled like a perjured witness on the stand, groping for something to help himself. I want an advocate, he moaned, clutching at the conventions of his lonely artifice. I have the right to an advocate.

  You had one, came his own instant, pitiless reply, of the most constant and selfless character –

  – Sil tried to shut that thought down, already knowing that its end would ruin him –

  –and three times you refused her, the last even in violence –

  – but of course he could no more prevent the terrible conclusion than halt a bolt of lightning –

  –and now she’s gone, and you’ll have no other.

  There was nothing to say to that, nothing to reply with. In that moment, there was nothing but the galling memory of Día coming to him with the horse and the dog, the packs and the bags, having readied herself to accompany him on his quest – daft, bossy girl! – and whatever might come after. What could he have done if he hadn’t squandered all that?

  What could he have done, if only he had lived?

  I need another chance, Sil said, retreating further into frantic fantasy, imagining what he would say to a hypothetical god, one real enough to exist and omnipotent enough to intervene and aware enough to devote even a tenth of his attention to the pleadings of some wretched wisp of a soul that had gotten itself wedged and forgotten between the couch-cushions of creation.
Please – you have to let me try again.

  Why should I? God would reply – because if he was anything, he was a bored speculator, doling out lots ranging from lavish to execrable and watching with anemic interest to see what his creatures would do with them... and if Sil was anything, he was a prodigal son who’d already lost what little he’d been given.

  Because I have POTENTIAL, Sil would say – and THAT he could make a case for. I’m clever, and charming, when I put my mind to it, and bloody persistent. Before we left Hell’s Acre, I’d already educated myself. Before Elim picked up his gun, I’d already made enough on those horses to return Calvert ten times his asking-price, and mint my reputation. And then I would have made my way back east, gotten a job as a clerk somewhere, worked my way up to run the business or build one of my own. I would have become the master of hundreds and then thousands. My industry would have clothed and fed and housed more men than all the tithes of all the churches together. I would have restored my family, left my children a grand inheritance to continue my work. I would have been a boon to my nation, an example to my race, and a credit to your investment in me. I would have...

  What came next was a strange, incongruous thought, born from the smallest, deepest part of himself.

  I would have saved him.

  Yes, that was it. That was the right answer. If Sil could have just gotten here a little sooner, if his body had just held out a little longer, he would have been able to advocate for Elim – bargain with the a’Krah to let him go. That was his case. Sil deserved another chance, because Elim deserved to go home.

  By what means? the Infinite Underwriter would say. I gave you everything you needed to put things right. I gave you a miracle itself. What more can you ask me for?