As they walked through the empty streets of Constantia, a cold wind began to blow gently down the wide boulevards. Omar saw the tiny shiver in Nadira’s shoulder and the prickling gooseflesh around her bare throat. He shrugged off his coat and held it out to her, and she took it and slipped it on without a word.
“So what’s the story with the walking corpses?” she asked.
“I don’t know yet. Are you interested in that sort of thing?”
“I’m interested if I need to be.”
He shook his head. “I doubt it’s anything we’ll need to worry abo-”
A moan echoed out of the alleyway beside them.
Omar looked over and saw three figures staggering toward them. He drew his seireiken. “I’m starting to regret destroying that lovely sword of yours.”
“A pity, but that life is behind me now,” Nadira said as she gestured to the alley. “Whenever you’re ready, old man.”
He sighed. “This is turning into Ysland all over again.” The three corpses began shuffling along faster, their frozen eyes fixed on his bright sword.
“What happened in Ysland?”
“Very bad things.” He raised his weapon and saw Ito Daisuke standing to one side out of the corner of his eye. “At least this time it’s not my fault.”
Chapter 17. Nightmare
“It looks like the aether is starting to settle,” Wren said. “If the wind could move it, it would probably thin out pretty fast, I think. Oh well.” She lingered by the balcony a few more moments and watched the stars shine down on the palace and the water.
The screams echoing across the city outside had died down shortly after she took the bracelets from Yaga, and once she had used her own ring to sweep the aether out of the tower, most of the nightmare sounds had faded away completely, leaving the city quiet, though still shrouded in darkness.
Wren came back inside and sat down by Yaga’s head. “How are you feeling?”
“I hate you.”
Wren sighed. “I suppose I can keep you like this. Without a sun-steel resonator, you can’t move the aether, and as long as I’m nearby, I can keep the aether from carrying your nightmares out there.”
“Idiot child,” Yaga muttered. “I am forever.”
“I know, and that’s the problem. I can’t always be here, taking care of you, can I?” Wren played with the silver bracelets and ran her fingers over the veins of gold running around them. As she touched the warm sun-steel, dozens of strange faces flashed in the shadows around her, the ghosts of men and women wearing furs and leather cloaks covered in bones, almost like armor.
Her ancestors? Her enemies? Her priests? What sorts of souls would a woman like this collect for her trinkets?
Wren said, “So you can’t sleep, and you can’t stop having the nightmares. All right then. I can fix that.”
“No, you can’t.” The answer was a mangled chorus of Yaga, the ancient valas of Denveller, and the souls inside the bracelet she was holding.
Wren dropped the bracelet into her lap and frowned. “Thanks for the support.” She shuffled over closer to Yaga’s head. “So, you’re always having these nightmares, eh? All right then. Let’s take a look at your ghost.”
She reached out and laid her right hand on the woman’s brow and pressed down tightly, squeezing her sun- steel ring between their skin. Wren closed her eyes.
Gudrun had explained ghost-talking to her once, during one of the old crone’s more lucid moments, but the lesson had been less than helpful. Omar had found the story amusing and offered a few similar anecdotes, but no lessons of his own.
I can do this. If Gudrun could do it, I can do it.
For a brief moment she felt herself falling through the darkness, falling forward through a shadowy space where eight old women sat clustered around a tiny circle of moonlight. They glanced up at her as she passed, and Wren saw the cold eyes of Kara watching her fall.
And then she was standing on solid ground in the middle of a dirt road that had been churned up by horses and wagons and then frosted with snow and ice. The houses on either side of the road were log cabins with stone chimneys gently exhaling their hearth smoke into the pale blue sky.
This is the nightmare?
There were goats, sheep, and chickens in small wooden pens. There were people all around, chopping wood and carrying buckets of water and trudging down the lane toward a small lake with their fishing poles. The men wore dark shabby suits and women wore dark shabby dresses with colorful scarves tied over their hair.
It looks a little like Vlachia, or what Vlachia must have been like before the corpses. Is this Rus?
She started walking down the middle of the road, and she nodded to the people as she passed them, but no one nodded back. They walked on by as though they didn’t see or hear her at all.
It only took a few minutes to reach the end of the village, where she paused to gaze out over a frozen field that may have held rows of wheat just a few weeks ago, at harvest time. Now everything was bare and empty, resting for the winter.
Wren was about to turn back for another pass through the village when a small boy came running out of the woods at the far end of the field. He careened over the dirt rows and dead stalks and flew by Wren on his way into town. He shouted over and over again, “Mama! Papa! The sainted mother! Help!”
She almost followed him back to his house to hear more, but instead she set out across the field. She could see the boy’s tracks easily in the fresh snow and broken mud and at the edge of the field she pushed her way through the dead bushes and entered the woods.
The trail led downhill and Wren lifted her skirts to step over the broken branches and fallen saplings. Hundreds of brown and silver trees stood silent watch over her, their trunks making dark pillars against the white of the snowy ground. The slope was rocky in some places and icy in others, and she fell more than once before she reached the bottom of the hill. There she found a small stream running over a bed of round stones with bits of ice clinging to the mossy banks.
Now what? Where am I? What am I doing?
“Hello?” she called.
No one answered.
Upstream or downstream?
She turned right and started crunching along the snowy bank of the stream, following it back up in search of its source. The water wound through the woods in the deep depression of its bed, and Wren wondered if the water ever filled the channel, perhaps when the spring thaws unleashed the floods that were frozen high on the mountains in the distance.
As she walked, she listened to the stillness of the wood. No squirrels chattered and no birds sang. From time to time, a frozen branch would crack and tumble to the ground with a dry crash and clatter in the distance.
Maybe I did it wrong. Maybe this isn’t Yaga’s nightmare at all. After all, these are waking nightmares. Maybe they work differently from regular ones.
Wren came around a bend in the stream and found a wide flat glen ahead where a cottage stood in the center of a clearing.
Or maybe this is the right place after all.
The cottage did not sit on the ground. In the center of the clearing there stood two massive old trees with huge twisted roots snaking and writhing through the frozen earth. The trees were only a few paces apart, and they were both cut off some twenty feet in the air. And upon the tall stumps of the trees was the log cabin.
Omar said something about this. In Rus they build tree-houses to store meat where the bears can’t reach it. But I never pictured something like this.
She glanced down at the clawing roots at the bottom of the two trees.
It looks like the house has giant chicken legs.
