Dust of Dreams

And silence answers

Your heart drums

Brittle surfaces

BLEED!’

They staggered back as if blinded. Blue fluids spurted from ruptured joints, gushed down from gaping mouths. Agony twisted their angled faces. One fell, thrashing, kicking on the ground. Another, a woman closer to Badalle than the others, dropped down on to her knees, and their impact with the crystalline ground was marked by two bursts of bluish blood-the Quitter shrieked. The remaining two, a man and a woman, reeling as if buffeted by invisible fists, had begun retreating-stumbling, half- running.

The fires within Badalle flared, and then died.

The Quitters deserved worse-but she did not have it in her to deliver such hard punishment. They had given her but two words. Not enough. Two words. Obedience to the privilege of dying. Accept your fate. But… we will not. We refuse. We have been refusing things for a long time, now. We are believers in refusal.

They will not come close now. Not for a long time. Maybe, for these ones, never again. I have hurt them. I took their words and made them my own. I made the power turn in their hands and cut them. It will have to do.

She turned round. The ribby snake had begun moving again, strangely mindless, as if beaten by drovers, senseless as a herd of cattle crossing a… a river? But, when have I seen a river?

She blinked. Licked salty blood from her lips. Flies danced.

The city awaited them.

‘It is what we can bear,’ she whispered. ‘But there is more to life than suffering.’

Now we must find it.

Darkness passed, and yet it remained. A splinter pure, promising annihilation. Onos T’oolan could sense it, somewhere ahead, a flickering, wavering presence. His stride, unbroken for so long, now faltered. The bitter rage within him seemed to stagger, sapped of all strength. Depression rose like flood waters, engulfing all sense of purpose. The tip of his sword bit the ground.

Vengeance meant nothing, even when the impulse was all-consuming. It was a path that, once started upon, could conceivably stretch on for ever. The culpable could stand in a line reaching past the horizon. An avenger’s march was endless. So it had been with the vengeance sought against the Jaghut, and Onos T’oolan had never been blind to the futility of that. Was he nothing but an automaton, stung into motion that would never slow in step?

He felt a sudden pressure wash over him from behind.

Baffled, all at once frightened, his weapon’s stone tip carving a furrow in the dry soil, the First Sword slowly swung round.

He could deny. He could refuse. But these choices would not lead him to the knowledge he sought. He had been forced back from the realms of death. The blood ties he had chosen had been severed. No longer a husband, a father, a brother. He had been given vengeance, but what vengeance could he find sifting through a valley heaped with corpses? There were other purposes, other reasons for walking this pathetic world once again. Onos T’oolan had been denied his rightful end-he intended to find out why.

Not one among the thousand or so T’lan Imass approaching him had yet touched his thoughts. They walked enshrouded in silence, ghosts, kin reduced to strangers.

He waited.

Children of the Ritual, yes, but his sense of many of them told him otherwise. There was mystery here. T’lan Imass, and yet…

When all the others halted their steps, six bonecasters emerged, continuing their approach.

He knew three. Brolos Haran, Ulag Togtil, Ilm Absinos. Bonecasters of the Orshayn T’lan Imass. The Orshayn had failed to appear at Silverfox’s Gathering. Such failure invited presumptions of loss. Extinction. Fates to match those of the Ifayle, the Bentract, the Kerluhm. The presumption had been erroneous.

The remaining three were wrong in other ways. They were clothed in the furs of the white bear-a beast that had come late in the age of the Imass-and their faces were flatter, the underlying structure more delicate than that of true Imass. Their weapons were mostly bone, ivory, tusk or antler, with finely chipped chert and flint insets. Weapons defying the notion of finesse: intricate in their construction and yet the violence they would deliver promised an almost primitive brutality.

Bonecaster Ulag Togtil spoke. ‘First Sword. Who knew dust could be so interesting?’

There was a frustrated hiss from Brolos Haran. ‘He insists on speaking for us, and yet he never says what we wish him to say. Why we ever acquiesce is a mystery.’

‘I have my own paths,’ Ulag said easily, ‘and I do not imagine the First Sword lacks patience.’

‘Not patience,’ snapped Brolos, ‘but what about tolerance?’

‘Bone bends before it breaks, Brolos Haran. Now, I would say more to the First Sword, before we all await the profundity of his words. May I?’

Brolos Haran half-turned to Ilm Absinos, one hand lifting in an odd gesture that baffled Onos T’oolan-for a moment-before he understood.

Helplessness.

‘First Sword,’ Ulag resumed, ‘we do not reach to you in the manner of Tellann, because we make no claim upon you. We are summoned, yes, but it was-we have come to believe-not by your hand. You may refuse us. It is not in our hearts to force ourselves upon the will of another.’

Onos T’oolan said, ‘Who are these strangers?’

‘Profound indeed,’ Ulag said. ‘First Sword, they are T’lan Imass of a second Ritual. The descendants of those who sought to follow Kilava Onass when she rejected the first Ritual. It was their failure not to determine beforehand Kilava’s attitude to being accompanied. But when there is but one hole in the ice, then all must use it to breathe.’

‘My sister invited no one.’

‘Alas. And so it comes to this. These three are bonecasters of the Brold T’lan Imass. Lid Ger, Lera Epar and Nom Kala. The Brold number two thousand seven hundred and twelve. The majority of these remain in the dust of our wake. Our own Orshayn number six hundred and twelve-you see them here. If you need us, we shall serve.’

Nom Kala studied the First Sword, this warrior she had once believed was nothing but an invention, a myth. Better, she concluded, had he remained so. His bones were latticed, as if he had been pounded into fragments-and some of those bones were not even his own.

The First Sword was not the giant of the legends. He did not wear a cloak of ice. Caribou antlers did not sprout from his head. He did not possess breath that gave the gift of fire. Nor did he seem the kind of warrior to recount his exploits for three days and four nights to belittle an overly proud hero. She began to suspect few of those ancient tales belonged to this figure at all. Dancing across the sea on the backs of whales? Crossing swords with demon walruses in their underwater towers? The secret seducer of wives left alone at night?

How many children among her clan, generation upon generation, bore some variation of the name Onos, to account for impossible pregnancies?

The sudden shocked gulp that erupted from her drew everyone’s attention.

Brolos Haran had been speaking-about what Nom Kala had no idea-and he was not pleased with the interruption. ‘Nom Kala, what is it about the Fall at the Red Spires that so amuses you?’

‘Nothing,’ she replied, ‘unless it was meant to. I apologize, Brolos Haran. A stray thought. Well, a few stray thoughts.’

The others waited.

She elected to refrain from elaborating.

The wind moaned, whispered through remnants of fur.

Onos T’oolan spoke. ‘Orshayn. Brold. I have forsworn the Jaghut Wars. I seek no battle. I do not invite you to join me, for what I seek is an accounting. Like you, I am summoned from the dust, and it is to dust that I wish to return. But first, I will find the one who has so punished me with resurrection. The bonecaster of the Logros T’lan Imass, Olar Ethil.’

Ulag said, ‘Can you be certain it is her, First Sword?’

Onos T’oolan cocked his head. ‘Ulag Togtil, after all this time, do you still hold to the virtue of certainty?’

‘We fought no war against the Jaghut,’ Nom Kala said.

The bonecasters of the Orshayn reacted with a chill wave of disapproval. She ignored it.

Onos T’oolan said, ‘Ulag. I see the Orshayn Warleader standing with your kin. Why does Inistral Ovan not come forward?’

‘He is shamed, First Sword. The losses at the Red Spire…’

‘Nom Kala,’ Onos then said, ‘have you no ruler of the Brold Clan?’

‘Only us,’ she replied. ‘Even the war we fought against the humans was not a war that demanded a warleader. It was clear that we could not defeat them on a field of battle. There were too many.’

‘Then how did you fight?’

‘By keeping alive our stories, our ways of living. And by hiding, for in hiding, we survived. We persisted. This is itself a victory.’

‘And yet,’ cut in Ilm Absinos, ‘you failed in the end. Else you would not have attempted the Ritual of Tellann.’

‘That is true,’ she replied. ‘We ran out of places to hide.’

Ulag spoke. ‘First Sword, we would accompany you nonetheless. Like you, we wish to know the purpose of our return.’

‘If you join my quest,’ said Onos T’oolan, ‘then you bow to Olar Ethil’s desires.’

‘That perception may lead to carelessness on her part,’ Ulag replied.