Dreams of the Eaten

by Arianne Thompson

  I’m sorry about Yashu-Diiwa, Shea thought – just in case that hadn’t already been said. If it makes you feel any better, I’ve made plenty of other mistakes since then.

  Some were reasonable, even inevitable. After Mille-Feuille’s suicide, Shea had been anxious not to let anything happen to Fours – to do whatever it took not to become the last surviving mereau in Sixes. And after the two of them had helped to sabotage the town, digging that tunnel down through to the river, sneaking the gates open to let the invaders in... well, Shea had told herself that they were only following orders – that they were helping to right a wrong by returning the island to the Sundowners, from whom it had been stolen in the first place. But the work had withered something in Fours. And after that last, violent night of the siege, he had been so taken with the Afriti child he found in the ruined church, so animated by a vigor and passion that Shea hadn’t seen from him in years, that she had gone along with it. She was afraid of what would happen if they took the girl – but in the end, she had been more afraid of what would happen if Fours gave up... if Shea were left alone.

  So their slapdash little family had been born of bad circumstances and worse decisions – only one of which Shea really regretted.

  I wish I hadn’t tried, she said. I would have hurt her less if I had never even tried.

  U’ru’s plump, ageless face softened; she wore the expression that would accompany a dog’s whine. I think you would hate yourself more if you hadn’t.

  She wadded her furry robe in her lap, her hands ever anxious to hold some small, soft, delicate thing, and looked down at it. I think I tried too hard, or not in the right way. And I know things would be different, if we had chosen differently. She glanced over at Día. But they’re still here, alive and in the world, and so are we. We can choose new things, and so can they.

  Shea heard the hope blossoming behind that, and shied away from it. She nodded at Hakai. What about him? What did he choose?

  U’ru frowned. I don’t know. Ten-Maia was confused and hurting, but she didn’t seem angry. Whatever he did, I don’t think he did it wickedly. I don’t think he even knows she’s there.

  Well, he certainly couldn’t have failed to notice her death. Even Shea had heard how quick and completely the Maia had collapsed after that – their lands plundered, their people killed, enslaved, or dispersed. She hoped for Hakai’s sake that he hadn’t been at fault, or hadn’t known it if he was. The guilt would have been crushing.

  Regardless, he was paying for it now. Marhuk had given him to U’ru’s keeping, trusting her healing arts to keep him alive – and perhaps trusting him to keep her safely occupied. That was a shrewd maneuver. But while U’ru’s diminished power worked well enough on fresh wounds, most of Hakai’s had been left to fester for days. She had mended his leg, but there was no telling whether he would get any use out of it. The tarré had put Ten-Maia back to sleep, but there was no telling how much she’d left of her human host.

  Or whether she could be born back into the world.

  Or whether that would bring back the rains.

  Shea stood and popped her back in the red light of sunset, eager to get in one last soak before night fell and it was time to move again. Well, he’s in the right place now.

  Yes, came the warm, answering certainty. Now all we need is Loves-Me.

  Shea didn’t answer. She didn’t stop walking, either. She kept her worry and her pessimism to herself, and submerged them in the salty-coppery depths of the Etascado. And when she’d sunk all the way down to the slow, murky bottom, she gave the river a private message to carry on ahead: after fifty years, the Dog Lady was finally returning to Island Town – and if her son ever wanted to return to his old life, he’d better not be there when she did.

  AND THAT WAS the pattern. The next morning, Elim was kicked awake just after dawn, and spent the day trailing after his silent, tireless ass of a partner. It was the same the day after that.

  And maybe it would have been the same the day after that, too. Elim was halfway to finding out when he was awakened in the middle of the night by a gunshot.

  Even then, with a lead-busting blast cracking the air overhead, it was his body that woke up first. By the time his brain pulled itself out of that deep, exhausted black pit, it found the rest of him climbing automatically to his feet, too stupid even for fear.

  “Elim, get DOWN!” Sil barked.

  It was dark. Galloping hooves were bearing down on them, accompanied a horrendous foul smell. And Sil – God almighty, Sil was charging right at the oncoming strangers, hollering bloody murder and... was he throwing a rock?

  “Bugger off!” he cried, his voice wet and ugly. “We don’t have –”

  More gunfire, and by now the moonlight and Elim’s eyes understood each other well enough to see the riders bearing down on Sil, who waded right on in to a hail of gunfire, staggering as every successive round plowed into him.

  But of course, it was going to take more than a bullet to shut him up. “– anything for you, and even if we did you wouldn’t have it, so take your guns and GET FUCKED!”

  And by now the three riders were on top of him, and Sil didn’t care a lick about that either: he grabbed one man by the leg and yanked as he rode past, pulling him halfway out of the saddle – and leaving Sil right in the path of the next oncoming stranger.

  “Sil, look out!” Elim hollered, rising up in spite of all better advice, watching in helpless horror as the horse crashed into Sil, the rider cried out in untranslatable surprise, and all three went down in a tangled half-ton heap.

  Which left one rider struggling to right himself in the saddle, and the other coming straight at Elim, shouting in a language he couldn’t recognize.

  But the whinny undercutting it was instantly, perfectly clear.

  Elim halted dead on the spot, dropping his fear in one incredulous hot second. “You son of a bitch, that’s MY HORSE!”

  And in spite of the darkness and confusion and the very real possibility that somebody here still had a round chambered, Elim moved with perfect grace: he took a step to the left, pulled back his fist, and delivered a ball-busting gelding punch to the rider’s groin.

  It finished beautifully as Molly Boone reared up – a great brown beauty pawing moonlight beside him – and dumped the hapless saddle-tramp straight off her back to hit the ground with a stunned whump.

  Elim could have kissed her. He might still get a chance: Sil was getting up, and the strangers seemed to think they’d had enough for one night. One went riding off, another lit a shuck after his retreating horse, and the one Molly had helped to dismount only rolled over, just barely smart enough to avoid her down-coming hooves as he held himself in breathless pain.

  Which left just enough room for a reunion.

  “Miz Boone,” Elim declared, “you are a brazen, shameless minx! Here I’ve gone to hell and back, and come to find you with another man ridin’ up your garters. Ain’t you shamed?”

  Oh, most certainly. She was a one-horse hurricane of nickers and snorts and high-headed enthusiasm, whinnying and jostling at him until he had to walk her forward just to be sure her paramour there on the ground didn’t take a hoof to the gut.

  “You sure about that?” Elim scolded, his hands sternly interrogating her poll, smoothing back her forelock so he could look her dead in her sweet brown eye. “You swear you don’t want no other man?”

  She blew her promises down the front of his poncho, a wet grassy blast of fidelity and hairy-lipped assurances. Hell, she even still had her saddle. Who could ask for more than that?

  Elim rubbed her cheek with a soul-cleansing sigh, luxuriating in her soft ears, her hot breath, her thick, horsey smell. He’d been so sure he’d never see her again. “You are a crass, wicked woman, Miz Boone. The things you do to me –”

  He was interrupted by a strangled shriek from below. Elim and Molly both turned to look as the last remaining stranger caught an eyeful of something behind them, and then tore off as fast as
his abused legs could go.

  But it was just Sil standing there... albeit not the Sil that Elim had expected to see.

  No, this was the one from that dire night a week ago: a sad, ghastly shadow of himself, a rotting shambles whose condition became clear with the next putrid shift of the wind. Elim couldn’t make him out too well in the dark – and thank God for that – but there was no mistaking those pitiful yellowed eyes, that rancid misery in the air.

  Elim swallowed, hard-pressed not to gag. “Sil, buddy – what happened to you?”

  He might have expected that to get him a blistering reply... but maybe Sil had already taken out the worst of his frustrations on those road-agents. He turned his hands out in a fathomlessly weary shrug. “I wish I knew.”

  Elim found Molly’s shoulder again, absently grounding himself in something warm and living and real. It was so hard to think past astonishment and exhaustion and instinctive, irrepressible disgust, and yet he couldn’t let this chance go to waste. For the first time since Sil had fallen from the edge of the trail, the two of them were alone and themselves again, as sane and calm and safe as anyone was liable to get out here… even in spite of some gross bodily irregularities. This was an opportunity Elim couldn’t waste.

  So he wrung out all the brains he still had left, striving to find the right question. “Well... can you tell me what-all you do know?”

  Sil looked out at the cool desert night all around them, and finally seemed to conclude that this was as good a time and place as any. He sat down with legs folded, ever the young gentleman, and answered with a moldering sigh.

  “I know that I was hanged,” he began, “and that I didn’t survive it. I know that Día woke me up somehow, and she said that I had died, and of course I didn’t believe it. I didn’t think about it. I just pushed it all aside and concentrated on finding you. And when I couldn’t ignore it any more...”

  Molly had put her head down to investigate the scrub. Elim tied back her reins as he listened, freeing her to browse as he went and took a seat beside his partner... and just a little bit upwind.

  “... Día said that I’d gotten stuck somehow. Weisei said that his crow-god could fix me. I believed it, but there was nothing I could do: by then I had fallen apart, and by the time anyone found me, it would be far too late for you or – you know, for anything else.”

  It was hard to see anything even with the moon, but Elim didn’t miss Sil’s sidelong glance.

  “So I thought to myself about what I should have done differently, about how much I wanted another chance, and I wished... it sounds silly, but I wished for an advance, of sorts. I wished for a second life.”

  It took Elim a minute to untangle that – but when he did, the realization all but slapped him in the face. “You sold your soul.”

  Sil snorted. “Don’t be daft.”

  That was rich, coming from a boy with a bullet-hole in his neck... but Elim wasn’t about to rile him up again. “So what was the deal?”

  “I don’t know!” Sil said, with a burst of breath so foul that Elim had to leave off his own breathing for a minute. “I didn’t – there was no agreement, no contract, no bloody signature on a dotted line. Nothing but my own stupid promises.”

  Elim stayed quiet for a bit, quelling nausea and his first deep misgivings. “So what did you promise?”

  Sil rubbed his forehead – and just as quickly jerked his hand away, as if appalled by his own oozing flesh. “I’d – I don’t remember,” he said. “I asked for, for however much time I could still have, for whatever it – for whatever I was still worth.”

  And somehow that was the biggest surprise yet. Not that Sil had sold his soul – no, the only wonder there was that it had taken him this long to think of it. Not that someone, God or Sibyl, had even considered it worth buying. But that Great Master Halfwick, Mister Dollars-and-Cents-and-Interest-on-the-Loan himself, hadn’t been shrewd enough to even guarantee what he was paying for.

  None of which would make him feel any better now. “And this is what you got?” Elim said, as neutrally as he could.

  Sil gave an anemic nod. “This at night. The – the other thing, in daytime.” He looked just gutlessly frightened as he stared down at his knees, and his voice was as near to tears as Elim had ever heard it.

  So Elim chose his next words with extra delicacy. “And is that why you been kicking the dickens out of me, you atrocious pissant?”

  That was definitely the right thing to say. “I wouldn’t have to if you could haul yourself out of a coma on your own initiative!” Sil retorted.

  This time, Elim felt no shame in coughing at the rank foulness of the reply – or in giving Sil a hearty shove. “Try breathing on me next time, sugar-lips – if that don’t do it, go ahead and bury me.”

  Sil rubbed his arm, and answered with a pallid, sickly grin. “Charming that you think I’d make the effort.”

  But he had. He’d gone to the ends of the earth to try and get Elim back in one piece – and somehow or other, he’d done it. Elim heaved a deeper, more wholesome breath. “Glad you’re still here, Slim. I woulda had it way too easy without you.”

  Sil’s smile faded; he nodded at the ground again. “Me too. For however long it is.”

  Elim didn’t want to think about that. He didn’t want to think about what kind of deal Sil might have done, or with whom – or when the bill was going to come due. Not because he didn’t care, but because he couldn’t do anything about any of it.

  In fact, if he put his mind to it and gave it his all, he could probably just about scrape himself back up to walk again tomorrow – ride, he reminded himself, with a fresh spark of happiness at that handsome brown backside ambling over to the road.

  “Right,” he said at last, pushing himself up to a stand. “I’m gonna go unshuck my horse, and then I’m going back to sleep. Don’t strike any more bargains, try not to fight any more road-agents, and... and you know, Sil, I don’t think I ever got around to saying it, but I just... I wanted to tell you...”

  Sil looked up. “What?”

  Elim fixed him with a flat stare. “If I catch that foot in my face again tomorrow, I’m gonna break it clean off. Comprende?”

  Sil rose to the challenge with a gleam in his jaundiced eye. “I guess we’ll find out!” And then, much to Elim’s surprise, he rose to his feet as well. “And in the meantime, I’ll just chaperone you two, shall I?”

  But as they went to go strip off Molly’s tack, Elim felt wonderfully unbothered about the rest of it. They’d come this far, after all – and as soon as they made it back to Eaden, back to God’s own country, all their strangeness would wash right off them. It had to. After all, Elim had his horse and his partner now, and everything after that was details.

  IT WASN’T AS bad as all that, really. At least, not once the initial shock had worn off.

  In fact, Sil’s chief complaint wasn’t even the time he spent moonlighting as a rancid shambling horror. It was that he still couldn’t sleep. Not counting the oblivion he’d found at the end of the noose, he hadn’t properly slept since... why, not since the night Elim had shot Dulei. What was that, two weeks ago now? Three?

  Well, regardless: if he were going to go mad from insomnia, Sil expected he would have done it by now. For the most part, he’d stopped worrying about it. But without those nightly full-stops he’d once taken for granted, the world had become an endless run-on sentence – a flat, constant series of and thens. No, he shouldn’t have been so awful to Elim... but besides the stark existential terror of watching his own body wax and wane with the daylight, Sil found it impossible not to sit there fermenting in the dark, burning with caustic, bilious envy as he watched the big man gorge himself on sleep.

  Still, it did give him time to think. And by the time Sixes was in sight, Sil was well resolved.

  “Elim, let’s walk for a bit, can we?”

  Elim glanced back at Sil, but raised no objections. He brought the horse to a halt, dismounted, and helped Sil dow
n after him. Molly blew out through her nose.

  You’re welcome, Sil thought.

  “So you reckon we ought to just up and announce ourselves?” Elim said.

  It was a fresh, pleasant October morning: warm but not overly so, with a handsome view of the native farms and fields outside Sixes. Sil would have liked to say, Yes, absolutely – let’s just carry on this delightful little stroll, tip our hats to the locals on the way past, and head straight on home.

  “Well, almost,” Sil said. He’d long since composed the words in his head, but it didn’t make them easier to say. “Actually, I think you should go on in by yourself.”

  Elim halted on the spot. “Sil, what –”

  “– and not because I don’t care to come with you,” Sil continued, forcing Elim to keep walking or be left behind, “but because I’ve thought about it, and I don’t think I can do you any good. Just the opposite, actually. The people who – who dropped that rope over my head still think I’m dead. And as long as they believe that, they have no reason to bother you. But if I show up again, and they realize they left the job half-done” – and Sil all but shuddered to recall Faro’s angelic, black-eyed smile – “they already know they can get to me through you. And you won’t be safe anywhere inside those walls.”

  To his credit, Elim didn’t reply straightaway. He led the horse along at a soft clopping walk, his gaze fixed on the blocky, irregular skyline of the town up ahead. “Yeah, but we’re not... it’s not like we’re booking ourselves in for a long honeymoon. We just go in, get clear with the Azahi, and get out. That’s it. That’s all he asked for.”

  Sil didn’t tell him that the Azahi was the one person besides Día who knew about his spontaneous resurrection, or mention the order he had issued to her afterwards: since Island Town had already recognized the death of Sil Halfwick, anyone found ‘impersonating’ him would be charged with some impressive-sounding list of offenses that Sil could no longer recall – identity theft, disgracing the dead, and so on. He had no idea how seriously the Azahi meant to follow up on that, but the implications were clear: within those walls, Sil was persona non grata.