half a heartbeat.
I was not in trouble. The three people staring at me belonged by family right. They were my in-laws, Sarie’s brother Thai Dei with his arm in a sling, Uncle Doj and Mother Gota. Of the three only the old woman ever said much. And nothing she said was ever anything I wanted to hear. She could find the bad side of anything and complain about it forever. “What?” I asked.
Uncle Doj countered, “Did you drift away again?” He sounded troubled. “When did you go? Dejagore?”
“It wasn’t that. That hasn’t happened for a while.” All three continued to stare at me like I had something hanging out of my nose. “What?”
Uncle Doj said, “There is something different about you.”
“Shit. Goddamned right there is. I lost a wife that meant more to me than—” I clamped down on the rage. I turned toward the door. No good. Smoke was in a wagon headed south. They continued to stare at me.
It was like this every time I came back after going out without letting Thai Dei tag along. They did not like me getting out of their sight.
That and their stares gave me a little shiver of the sort of feeling Croaker got every time he looked at one of the Nyueng Bao. Sarie being gone left a vacuum bigger than the one that emptied my heart. She had been the soul that made this weird bunch work.
Uncle Doj asked, “Do you wish to walk the Path of the Sword?”
The Path of the Sword, the complex of ritualized exercises associated with his two-handed longsword style of fighting could become almost as restful and free of pain as was walking with the ghost. Although Uncle Doj has been teaching me since I became part of the family, it is still difficult for me to get into the sort of trance the Path requires.
“Not now. Not tonight. I’m tired. Every one of my muscles aches.” Yet another way I was going to miss Sarie. That green-eyed angel had been an artist at massaging out the accumulated tensions of the day.
We were speaking Nyueng Bao, which I use fairly well.
Now Mother Gota demanded, “What you doing, you, you hide from your own?” in her abominable Taglian. She refuses to believe she does not speak the language like a native.
“Work.” Even without the Old Man’s paranoia I would have kept Smoke to myself. Hell, I’m taking a huge risk just mentioning him in these pages even though I’m scribbling them in a language hardly anyone down here even speaks, let alone reads.
Soulcatcher is out there somewhere. Our precautions against her discovering Smoke are more elaborate than those keeping the Radisha and the Shadowmaster away.
Catcher was in the Palace not long ago. She stole those Annals that Smoke hid before his disaster. I am pretty sure she did not notice Smoke himself. The network of confusion spells around him is supposedly extremely subtle on its fringes, so that even a player as powerful as Soulcatcher would not notice the misdirection unless she was really focused on finding something like it.
I told them, “I just talked to the Captain. He said the headquarters group will leave tomorrow or the next day. You’re still determined to go?”
Uncle Doj nodded. He did not seem emotional when he reminded me, “We too have a debt to repay.”
The few material possessions the three shared were packed and piled by the apartment door already. They had been ready to go for days. I was the one who needed to focus and finalize my preparations. I had lied to Croaker when I had said I was ready to travel.
“I’m going to bed now. Don’t wake me up for anything but the end of the world.”
4
Sleep is not an escape from pain. In sleep there are dreams. In sleep I go places more horrible than those I walk when I am awake.
In dreams I still go back to Dejagore, to the death and disease, the murder and the cannibalism and the darkness. In dreams Sarie still lives, whatever the horror of the place she walks.
That night my dreams did not restore me to the wonder of Sarie’s company.
I remember only one. It came first as a shadow, an all enveloping malice full of playful cruelty, as though I was sinking into the soul of a spider that enjoyed tormenting its victims. The malice did not take note of me. I passed through to its other side. And there the dream wrenched sideways, twisted, and took on life, though it was a life entirely of black and white and greys.
I was in a place of despair and death. The sky was lead. Bodies rotted around me. The stench was strong enough to drive the buzzards away. The sick vegetation was coated with what looked like thick grasshopper spit. Only one thing moved, a distant flock of mocking crows.
Even amidst my horror and revulsion I felt that the scene was familiar. I tried to hang on to that thought, to pursue it, to sustain my sanity by ferreting out why I would know a place I had never been. I stumbled and tripped across a plain of bones. Pyramids of skulls were my milemarks.
My foot slipped on a baby’s skull that spun and went rattling off to the side. I fell. And fell. And then I was in another place.
I am here. I am the dream. I am the way to life.
Sarie was there.
She smiled at me, then she was gone, but I clung to her smile as the only thing capable of letting me keep my head above the waters of a sea of insanity.
I was in that other place. It was a place of golden caverns where old men sat beside the way, frozen in time, alive but unable to move so much as an eyelash. Their insanity slashed the air like a million dueling razors. Some were covered with glittering webs of ice, as though a million fairy silkworms had spun them into cocoons of delicate threads of frozen water. An enchanted forest of icicles hung from the cavern roof.
I tried to dash forward, past the old men, to get out of that place. I ran as you run in dreams, slowly going nowhere.
And then the horror worsened as I realized that I knew some of those mad old men.
I ran harder, into the treacly resistance of animate evil laughter.
I swung wildly at whoever was touching me, flung my hand under my pillow to recover the dagger hidden there. A powerful blow slammed my wrist as it came into the light. A strong voice snapped, “Murgen.”
I focused. Uncle Doj stood over me. He looked grave, troubled. Thai Dei stood near the foot of my bed, where he could take me from behind if I jumped up at Doj. Mother Gota stood in the doorway, agitated.
Uncle Doj said, “You were screaming in a language none of us knows. We found you wrestling with the darkness when we arrived.”
“I was having a nightmare.”
“I know.”
“Hunh?”
“That was obvious.”
“Sarie was there.”
For one instant Mother Gota’s face became a mask of rage. She muttered something softly and too quickly for me to follow, but I did catch the name Hong Tray and the word “witch.” Sahra’s grandmother Hong, long dead, was the only reason her family had accepted our relationship. Hong Tray had given her blessing.
Ky Dam, Sahra’s grandfather, also gone now, had claimed his wife possessed the second sight. Perhaps. I had seen her forecasts work out during the siege of Dejagore. Mostly they had been very sybilline, very vague, though.
I had heard Sarie described as a witch, too, on one occasion.
“What is that smell?” I asked. The shakes had left me. Already I could recall details of the nightmare only through determined effort. “There a dead mouse in here?”
Uncle Doj frowned. “This was not one of your journeys through time?”
“No. It was more like a trip to hell.”
“Do you wish to walk the Path of the Sword?” The Path was Doj’s religion, his main reason for being, it
