Dreams of the Eaten

by Arianne Thompson

  “Go?!” the mereau said, almost speechless with incredulity – but U’ru was already bending down, and Día was already climbing out from her grasp, a baby opossum discovering life outside its mother’s pocket. “You can’t go. What do you think you’re doing?”

  The first touch of her feet on the burning-cold ground, and her first tentative wobbling efforts to bear her own weight, gave Día a moment’s pause. Did she really propose to do this? Go tearing off after Halfwick again, even after every previous effort had invited her closer to catastrophe?

  Yes, she realized. Yes, she would – because she could, and because she had been far too blessed a receiver not to go back out and give in turn, and because she had already been through the worst and survived it. God and U’ru and Marhuk were with her, and not even Halfwick’s rotten contrarianism could mar that.

  “I’m doing the right thing,” Día assured Miss du Chenne – and U’ru too. She was following their example, after all: moving heaven and earth to save a lost soul.

  The Dog Lady approved. Good girl. She straightened again, a voluptuous robed giantess lingering just long enough to give Día a pat on the head – and a mental picture of the path she had taken since collecting her during the night.

  It was winding and difficult, with places too steep for a human-sized person to climb – but as Día called out her farewells and promises and then set off following the great godly footsteps in the earth, she worried not at all. She would find Halfwick again. She always did.

  ELIM HADN’T MEANT to spook the girl – but he sure as hell couldn’t blame her. Every second was a horror, every step a quickening disaster: Hawkeye was going funny again, and though Elim hadn’t seen any falling trees or smashing rocks, the spreading wetness over his still-human hand assured him that every back-arching jerk and shudder of the man in his arms was shredding his insides on that arrowhead.

  So Elim bolted after the girl like a hound coursing a hare, hoping to God that the crow city was close, and that Hawkeye would be spent by the time the girl went to ground. He charged up and forward, clearing tree-roots and earth-rills and the toe of his own heavy horse-foot, needing not to think about what would happen if he tripped and fell on the burning-hot body he carried.

  And then he ran clean out of mountain.

  As he crested the last rise, the ground opened out into a great clearing scooped into the top of the peak – into a little terraced town too small to be a city, too elaborate to be a village, and too busy for anyone to miss the shrieking panic of the girl running headlong into their midst.

  It was a tiny, living world, full of diamond-patterned cabin-houses with fire-lit windows, dotted here and there with strange stone monuments, and criss-crossed with foot-worn streets busy with people.

  People shouting in astonishment and alarm. People fleeing at Elim’s approach. People crying out in the universal language of surprise as one of the five sky-scraping wooden platforms on the western slope tilted and crashed into its neighbor, spilling piles of something whitish-yellow-gray all down the mountainside.

  Too late, Elim looked down and realized that Hawkeye’s seizure hadn’t stopped – its range had just gotten bigger. Even as Elim turned to retreat, a barn-sized sinkhole opened up to his right, swallowing half a street full of houses and gardens and shocked, screaming people. Even as he ran back to the left, a huge, ruinous boom brought down a ten-ton stone slab, crushing an adobe building like a boulder dropped on a dried mud pie. Even as he spun to find a way back into the trees, the mountain’s highest peak began to crumble, belching out a sky-blackening mass of crows like hornets from a stone-pelted nest.

  It wasn’t ending. Hawkeye wasn’t stopping. He just kept convulsing in Elim’s arms, blood pulsing from his back, sinister leafy-green veins crawling up his neck, his bulging eyes and straining muscles fit to burst as his rictus expression darkened to an air-starved choking blue.

  This couldn’t happen. It just couldn’t be. Elim was supposed to save this one – he was supposed to get him here alive, and somehow that would make everything right. He turned and turned in horror-stricken circles as the holy crow city collapsed around him, pleading for an intervention. Help! he shouted at the billowing chaos. Someone help us!

  But as the screams and dust and crow-shadows enveloped him, all that came out of his mouth was a frantic bellowing bray.

  AND THAT WAS how Día went: running between the trees and down the slope and through the drought-stricken brush, following U’ru’s footprints just until they led her to the faint man-made wrinkle in the mountain’s eastern face, a little track far too steep and narrow to admit anything but single-file human feet. Then she helped herself down, step by step, pace by careful ground-gripping pace, anxious not to slip and kill herself even as she longed to keep going fast, to keep her fire stoked and furnace-hot for Halfwick’s sake. She would keep an eye out for good kindling, once she had arms free to carry it. She could try burning his jacket again, but it would make an ungodly stench, and the cloth might go too quickly to thaw all his joints. And if that didn’t work... if he just absolutely fell apart... well, then Día would simply bring Marhuk down to him, once his business with the Dog Lady was done. Yes: one way or another, she would see this finished. She could do that. She had that power.

  And Día was so alive with that power, so potent and brave and wonderfully, ferociously certain, that she almost didn’t hear the footsteps pounding up from the other side of the bend. She halted on the spot just before the two of them would have collided –

  – and found herself staring at a far more perfect Halfwick than nature had ever first allowed.

  He was brilliant to behold there in the first fiery light of dawn – just absolutely immaculate, all fresh-milk skin and spun-gold hair and ice-blue eyes, without a shadow or a smudge to mar them. He stood and stared at her in open-mouthed surprise, positively radiating youth and health and life – so much life that if he hadn’t still been wearing his reeking gore-stained rags, Día would have taken him for an imposter.

  As it was, she could only gape, stunned to utter speechlessness by the manifested miracle before her.

  Fortunately, he didn’t seem to know what to do either. “Día,” he said – a clear-voiced confession of the obvious. “I – er, I meant to say... you know, that I’m sorry.”

  God had apparently made Halfwick flawless, but Día was still painfully, imperfectly human. “I know,” she said – an awkward compromise between I forgive you and as well you should be.

  They stood there like that for a moment, locked in an uncomfortable little pocket between untruth and unkindness. Then his sapphire eyes flicked their attention up to the path behind her. “We should go,” he said. “Elim might... I still have to fix everything.”

  “Yes,” she said, her voice distant and faintly silly in her own ears. “Of course. Come on, I’ll – I can show you the way.”

  And before her doubts knew what she was doing, Día took Halfwick’s hand one more time, gratified to feel his cold, answering squeeze as they turned and hurried up the path together.

  SHEA STILL HAD precious little idea what the hell was going on. Día had rabbited right off again – shameless, wicked, ungrateful child! – and U’ru’s mind remained a cold wall of silence.

  It was a bit awkward, being carried by someone who wasn’t speaking to you.

  But the crow had no shortage of sentiment: it grew increasingly anxious and irritable, cawing admonishments before finally giving up and flying off.

  After the first tremor, Shea didn’t wonder why. The ground shook hard enough that she could feel it even in U’ru’s arms, and it came punctuated with a resonant boom – as ominous and profound as a bookcase falling in a distant, empty room.

  Then came the crows – a great black-winged geyser fountaining up into the sky. Then the first faint sounds of chaos, of human fear. By the time they crested the last rise, U’ru’s anxious, tightening grip on Shea all but admitted it: they had delayed too long. Whatever Marh
uk had wanted the Dog Lady to prevent had already come to pass.

  Shea was left to discover the rest on her own. U’ru scarcely bothered to bend forward as she dumped her out on the ground, and she scarcely needed to: the great lady was already diminishing with the sunrise, and she knew it. She hurried on alone, leaving Shea at the edge of town.

  Or what had been a town, anyway. It was a war zone now, a collapsing crucible of misery and human fear. Its heart was obscured by a great blossoming cloud of dust, a toxic earthen miasma that assaulted Shea’s already painfully dry eyes and throat even from this distance. But as she loped forward into the blinding chaos, the rest of her senses filled in all too well: she couldn’t miss the smell of burning pitch and pine, or the roar of the fire gouting up through the buckled roof of a nearby broken log-house, or the wailing of children and adults alike, their cries needling through the heavier sounds of breaking stone and caving earth.

  And in the middle of it all were the Dog Lady and her son.

  Yashu-Diiwa was himself again: a lopsided equine juggernaut, offering up a bloodied, spasming figure like a child handing up a broken toy for its mother’s mending. If he said anything, Shea couldn’t hear it.

  But she didn’t miss the outraged cawing above and behind her – and when she turned, even her poor eyes couldn’t miss the stranger, the a’Krah archer, standing not twenty paces away: feet apart, bow drawn, and steel-tipped arrow aiming straight at the Dog Lady.

  Or Yashu-Diiwa. Or the man he’d just given her. Shea couldn’t tell, and had no time to wonder. She bolted forward to block the shot, already cringing as she prepared to complement the fading bullet-scar under her arm, to add a crow-feathered arrow to the top of the list of outrages and indignities she’d suffered on behalf of that wretched, incorrigible boy –

  But Shea’s martyr complex went begging as the arrow clattered and skidded to a halt before her foreshortened feet – as the stranger cried out, fell, and vanished in a black cloud of dive-bombing crows.

  And then things went quiet.

  Not silent, of course: there was no stanching the noise from a disaster of this magnitude. But whether because the nearest a’Krah had stopped to wonder what their kinsman had done to incur Marhuk’s collective displeasure, or because the man in U’ru’s arms had finally gone still, or because the world had simply stopped tearing itself apart, the result was a strange, fleeting moment of tranquility.

  One that Shea should probably make use of. Coughing and wiping her eyes, she went to go see how the family reunion was proceeding... and was positively astonished to recognize the bloodied wretch in U’ru’s arms.

  “Ah, Mister Hakai,” she said, in that old, scolding voice that had belonged to her lovelier human persona. “What have you gotten yourself into now?”

  Yashu-Diiwa glanced at Shea, apparently recognizing the name, but then went right back to fretting over its unlucky owner.

  As well he should. Hakai looked terrible:his face ashen, his lips blue, with a sinister, unnatural greenish tint creeping up through his bulging veins. His breathing came quick and shallow, his eyelids trembled with barely-suppressed apoplexy, and even as U’ru held him, some hidden wound watered the ground with drips and sprinkles of blood. And was that a gun strapped to him?

  He broke his leg, and there’s a metal tooth in his back, U’ru said. And he ate Ten-Maia.

  Shea understood the first, had just started on deciphering the second, and had absolutely no idea what to do with the third. “I... what?”

  But U’ru’s power was ebbing by the moment, her shrinking figure already bathed in daylight: if she was going to do anything for Hakai, they had to work fast. Help me take it out, Water-Dog. Use your fingers to pull it. And she knelt down to roll him over, so that Shea could see the wound: a blood-soaked wet stain over the right side of his lower back, with the broken stump of an arrow-shaft jutting out from the center.

  So maybe that archer had already found his mark.

  Well, regardless: this was going to hurt like a whelping mother, and bleed like one too. Shea sucked her teeth as she prepared to do the necessary thing, thinking of how much more handily Hakai could have done this himself. She told herself that the arrowhead was a poetically appropriate way to pay him back for the bullet he’d so kindly relieved her of, and wished she at least had something for him to bite down on.

  The answer hit her square in the chest.

  Shea glanced down at the bag hanging from her neck. “Wait, Mother – wait just one moment.” Then she was pulling it off, dumping the rocks out, handing the bag itself over for U’ru to give him as a teether... and ripping out the arrowhead before she could think herself out of it.

  His scream was the gut-wrenching cherry on a whole apocalyptic cake – and he hadn’t even finished it before U’ru was rolling him over, pulling his shirt away to expose his torn, gouting flesh.

  There was not much of the dog left in the Dog Lady by then, and Shea did not care to watch what that steadily-humanizing face did to close the wound.

  Which gave her plenty of time to notice that rusty yellow tin of tarré lying amidst a heap of novelty rocks. No mereau would use such a water-weak container... and the House of Losange had probably pickpocketed Hakai after they swarmed over him in the river that night... and Shea had known him to enjoy a smoke, of an evening.

  She sat back, staring at the bloody, shuddering spit-flecked wretch before her, pursing her lips at the implications. She’d heard the withdrawals were hell, but this...

  ... well, better late than never.

  “Come on, you old goat,” she said, and set about prying the tin open. “If you can’t have a pipe, be grateful for a chew, eh?”

  It was a sad state of affairs – pitiful, even. But as Shea worked his mouth open and tucked a generous pinch of the spice under his tongue, she declined to judge him: at least among his present company, Hakai’s addiction was more honest and wholesome than any of them.

  ELIM DIDN’T KNOW what to do with himself after that. The dog-woman seemed to know how to tend to Hawkeye, and the fishman had apparently found some medicine for him. At least he wasn’t wrecking things anymore.

  Not that there was much left to wreck. Elim looked out at the carnage all around him, dumbstruck by how completely everything had fallen apart. Maybe half the town was still whole, at least the parts that he could see. Another quarter had tipped or buckled or fallen over, and the rest was just... gone.

  He stared at the sinkhole, at the place where houses and furniture and yards and people had been just minutes ago, before the ground swallowed them. Could anyone still be alive down there? Would it do any good to get close enough to look?

  Elim hesitated, torn between the urge to make himself useful and the fear of somehow making things worse. The handful of ashen-faced a’Krah who had stopped to stare at him weren’t helping... but then again, neither was he.

  “Elim!”

  A familiar voice rang out, clear and strong. He spun to face it, forgetting that one foot was heavier than the other, and stumbled, ending up on his backside with an impact worthy of one of Hawkeye’s aftershocks.

  But he hadn’t imagined it. That was Sil coming for him, running up with a bald a’Krah fellow in tow – and he was stunning.

  No, more than that: he was a living miracle. As he approached, Elim stared at his partner in helpless astonishment, too stupid to understand anything except that the Sil Halfwick he knew had never, ever enjoyed even half so much health and vigor.

  He still stank like a dead man, or maybe that was his clothes. Regardless, as his cold blue gaze darted to Elim’s face, his hand, his foot, his everything, Sil’s expression matched Elim’s just about perfectly: each man just too plumb gobsmacked to do anything but stare at the other.

  Which left all the conversation to Sil’s native friend. “Elim, thank heavens – we didn’t want to think what might have happened to you.”

  And Elim, who thought he had found the bottom of his own ignorance, apparently h
adn’t half scratched the surface. He closed his horsey eye and squinted, his disjointed vision already brewing him a double-rectified headache. No, that wasn’t a Sundowner, much less a man. That was... was that Día?

  What could she be doing all the hell way out here? And what on earth had happened to her hair?

  Elim didn’t have the voice to ask, and she offered no answers. There was just Sil and Día, smudging to a pair of sharply contrasting blurs as Elim’s eyes filled, offering their hands there in the middle of a settling dust cloud.

  But as their dual hot-and-cold grasp reached down and helped him up to his feet, something in him fell out or got left. Elim sagged forward between his friends, ebbing, softening, draping himself over their shoulders like a two-quart drunk as his strength drained out through his soles.

  As it turned out, Elim had been wrong all these years. Here he’d been thinking he was different from other fellows, that he would live his whole life too tall to fit and too big to carry – when the whole time, it was just a two-person job.

  Thank God. Thank every god. Elim hung there in helpless gratitude, in a relieved echo of the posture he’d once adopted when tied between a pair of sun-roasted streetposts: head down, knees weak, arms outstretched across the backs of two people who had gone to the ends of the earth to find him.

  One of whom ought to be dead three times over... while the other shouldn’t have been there at all.

  Elim glanced over and down at Día’s almost-barren fleecy scalp, dumbstruck all over again. “You came,” he said. “You came to get me.” And after the way he’d treated her – after that terrible silence he’d given her, when she’d come to break the news about Sil’s death...!

  She might have glanced over at Sil just then. The two of them were mostly a pair of heads sprouting from Elim’s armpits, so it was hard to tell.