Dream Finder

Tarrian jumped up on to an overhanging rock and peered over the edge. Antyr contented himself with staying a comfortable distance back from it.

The two stood silent for some time, the only intrusion being the faint sounds of distant streams flowing down to the valley below. Then, from above, a throaty croak reached them. Tarrian looked up. Two ravens were circling high above.

'I knew a raven once,’ he said distantly.

'What?’ Antyr exclaimed irritably at this seeming irrelevance.

'Never mind,’ Tarrian replied softly. ‘It was a long time ago. When I was a pup.'

Antyr let out an exasperated sigh. ‘What are we doing here, Tarrian?’ he said. ‘My feet are soaking, and I'm frozen half to death. I need hardly remind you that this was your idea. I'd have been quite happy to stay in the palace.’ He paused, brought to earth briefly. ‘Which reminds me, Aaken never paid us for last night's work.'

He looked out across the great open cauldron of space that the cliffs bounded, and then up at the sky.

'And it's going to start raining soon, I'll swear. We're going to get soaked. And it wouldn't surprise me to find the palace guards waiting for us when we get back. The Duke did say…'

'For pity's sake, be quiet.’ Tarrian's voice was like an axe blow. Antyr was used to stern words from his Companion, but there was a quality in the rebuke that he had never heard before and it left him too stunned to muster an immediate reply.

'We've got worse problems than your footling discomfort and an unpaid fee to contend with,’ Tarrian went on. ‘Or for that matter, even Duke Ibris's displeasure.'

Under other circumstances, Antyr would have begged to differ on this last point, but Tarrian, alone on the jutting rock, silhouetted against the grey sky, was a creature in complete harmony with his element and he spoke with such command that it might have been the mountain itself speaking.

Antyr opened his mouth to reply, but no sound came.

'Something's amiss,’ Tarrian said, using again the words he had used in Ibris's dream. ‘There was a wrongness in the Duke's dream. A profound wrongness.’ He paused, then, as if he were speaking something that he had already repeated countless times, ‘There were others there.'

Antyr began to shake his head as if to scatter Tarrian's words before they reached him. ‘I don't want to discuss it,’ he said petulantly. ‘I don't want to discuss it. There was nothing wrong. It was just our imagination. I was tired and shaken and not at my best-being marched through the streets at that time-and under escort. And don't forget, we … I … have never seen the dreams of a man like that. He's a great leader, a warlord, a statesman. His dreams are bound to be unusual. We misunderstood, that's all. How could there be anyone else in a dream? Let's get back home … get warm … perhaps go to the palace … get our fee … and…'

Tarrian ignored him, as if he were just another babbling stream.

'There were others there,’ he said again, more surely. ‘Others with … skills … that I can't begin to understand. Skills that brought them looking for you and that snatched you away from my protection…'

His voice tailed off into bewilderment.

'Tarrian, stop this!’ Antyr's mind was beginning to reel. ‘I've told you, I don't want to discuss any of this. It was a long, strange day and…’ He waved his hands in submissive concession. ‘Perhaps you're right … in fact you are right … I've been drinking too much, not attending to my affairs properly. It's just caught up with us, that's all. I'll really get to grips with things when we get back this time. Honestly. Start looking after myself better … getting us some steady clients…'

'Antyr!’ Again Tarrian's voice abruptly stopped the Dream Finder's increasingly frantic rambling. ‘Stop it. Stop it, for pity's sake. I'm trying to think. Trying to make some sense of what's happened … what's happening. I'm frightened. I need your help, I don't need a recital of your well-worn promises to improve yourself.'

Suddenly, the all-too-human reproaches with which Tarrian was filling Antyr's mind were gone, and the wolf threw back his head and howled.

Antyr listened, wide-eyed and fearful. The song rose and fell and though Antyr understood none of it, he felt its poignant intensity.

When it was finished, Tarrian was silent for a long time, his head bowed. From out of the greyness before them came no reply.

'You see,’ he said eventually. ‘My pack is gone. Gone to other hills, to other valleys. My mates have other sires. My cubs too are grown and gone. Do you think you're alone in your desire to be other than you are? Do you think I'd tolerate this life, this appalling stench of humanity, if I had a choice?'

Antyr winced at the bitterness and anger in Tarrian's voice. The words ‘I'm sorry’ formed in his mind but he did not speak them. They would have seemed like a wilful insult in the face of Tarrian's distress.

Instead he walked out on to the overhanging rock and sat down beside him.

'No one binds you, old friend,’ he said gently.

'You bind me, Dream Finder,’ the wolf replied. ‘You bind me. As did your father before you. Through none of our own choosing, we bind each other. It's the nature of our calling, and it's beyond our changing. I understand your pain. I really do, your pain is mine. But it comes only from your struggle to avoid the truth and will stop only when you accept it.'

'I don't understand,’ Antyr said after a long silence.

'Yes, you do,’ Tarrian replied. ‘You understand more than you realize.’ His voice softened. ‘Perhaps your pain is partly my fault. Perhaps I tried to make you into the Dream Finder that your father was when I should have stood and watched you more carefully. Guided you more subtly. Not tried to force you into the ancient ways of our craft just because that was the way it had always been done. Perhaps I stood in the light that I was supposed to show you.'

Antyr shook his head. The spirit of Tarrian's song still seemed to possess him. He reached out to console the animal in some way. ‘No. You did as my father bid you, and you did it well. I'm what I made myself, not what you made. If it's me that binds you, then I release you. Go back to your own kind where you'll be happy. I'm no true Dream Finder nor have I any wish to be.'

Even as he tried to speak the words sincerely, he heard their falseness.

Tarrian turned and looked at him.

'You have no choice,’ he said. ‘You are a Dream Finder. What I've never told you is that you have an ability far beyond any I've ever known. Even your father would have been dwarfed by you.'

Antyr turned away from the compassion and pain that filled the wolf's thoughts.

Tarrian continued. ‘I think that's why I get so angry with you. I doubt my ability to guide you as I should. I'm frightened I might be either a spectator, impotently watching you destroy yourself, or your inadvertent destroyer.'

Antyr shook his head slowly, but Tarrian's will would allow him no denial.

'Why are you saying these things?’ he managed eventually.

'Because I don't know what else to do,’ Tarrian replied unexpectedly. ‘Something's wrong. You know it as well as I do. Something … someone … assailed the Duke last night, and then assailed you. You must begin to accept what you are and stop trying to be something else or…'

'Or what?'

'Or we will be doomed, destroyed, and others with us. They will come again. You stand between them and the Duke.'

'They? Who …?’ Antyr made a last attempt to escape. ‘How can you know this?’ Antyr asked angrily.

'I know it the way you know it, but you won't listen to yourself,’ Tarrian replied softly, then he stood up and began walking back down the rocks. ‘Antyr, you didn't stand solid in that pike wall against the Bethlarii cavalry, shield to shield with your fellows, by pretending you were somewhere else. You saw your enemy for who they were and you faced them squarely. This is no different. An enemy you won't face will outflank and encircle you, and then crush you utterly.'

'But…'

'I need to run,’ Tarrian said, his voice still quiet, but almost desperate. ‘Go home. Wait for me. I'll be back later.'

And then he was gone, his dark bobbing form soon lost amid the scattered rocks. His voice sounded distantly in Antyr's mind. ‘You have two enemies, Antyr. Yourself and whoever is trying to destroy the Duke. Take up your spear and shield against both. Defend yourself. I'll be with you.'