Dust of Dreams

In the tower of the Azath, within a chamber that was an entire realm, she slept and she dreamed. And since dreams existed outside of time, she was walking anew a landscape that had been dead for millennia. But the air was sharp still, the sky overhead as pure in its quicksilver brilliance as the day of its violent birth. On all sides buildings, reduced to rubble, formed steep-sided, jagged mounds. Passing floods had caked mud on everything to a height level with her hips. She walked, curious, half-disbelieving.

Was this all that remained? It was hard to believe.

The mounds looked strangely orderly, the chunks of stone almost uniform in size. No detritus had drifted down into the streets or lanes. Even the flood silts had settled smooth on every surface.

‘Nostalgia,’ a voice called down.

She halted, looked up to see a white-skinned figure perched atop one of the mounds. Gold hair hanging long, loose, hinting of deep shades of crimson. A white- bladed two-handed sword leaned against one side of his chest, the multifaceted crystal pommel flashing in the brightness. He took many forms, this creature. Some pleasant, others-like this one-like a spit of acid in her eyes.

‘This is your work, isn’t it?’

One of his hands stroked the sword’s enamel blade, the sensuality of the gesture making her shiver. He said, ‘I deplore your messiness, Kilmandaros.’

‘While you make death seem so… tidy.’

He shrugged. ‘Tell me, if on your very last day-day or night, it makes no difference-you find yourself in a room, on a bed, even. Too weak to move, but able to look around-that’s all. Tell me, Kilmandaros, will you not be comforted by the orderliness of all that you see? By the knowledge that it will persist beyond you, unchanged, bound to its own slow, so slow measure of decay?’

‘You ask if I will be what, Osserc? Nostalgic about a room I’m still in?’

‘Is that not the final gift of dying?’

She held up her hands and showed him her fists. ‘Come down here and receive just such a gift, Osserc. I know this body-this face that you show me now. I know the seducer and know him too well. Come down-do you not miss my embrace?’

And in the dread truths of dreams, Osserc then chuckled. The kind of laugh that cut into its victim, that shocked tight the throat. Dismissive, devoid of empathy. A laugh that said: You no longer matter to me. I see your hurt and it amuses me. I see how you cannot let go of the very thing I have so easily flung away: the conceit that we still matter to each other.

So much, yes, in a dream’s laugh.

‘Emurlahn is in pieces,’ he said. ‘And most of them are now as dead as this one. Would you blame me? Anomander? Scabandari?’

‘I’m not interested in your stupid finger-pointing. The one who accuses has nothing to lose and everything to hide.’

‘Yet you joined with Anomander-’

‘He too was not interested in blame. We joined together, yes, to save what we could.’

‘Too bad, then,’ Osserc said, ‘that I got here first.’

‘Where have the people gone, Osserc? Now that you’ve destroyed their city.’

His brows lifted. ‘Why, nowhere.’ He gestured, a broad sweep of one hand, encompassing the rows of mounds around them. ‘I denied them their moment of… nostalgia.’

She found herself trembling. ‘Come down here,’ she said in a rasp, ‘your death is long overdue.’

‘Others concur,’ he admitted. ‘In fact, it’s why I’m, uh, lingering here. Only one portal survives. No, not the one you came through-that one has since crumbled.’

‘And who waits for you there, Osserc?’

‘Edgewalker.’

Kilmandaros bared her massive fangs in a broad smile. And then threw a laugh back at him. She moved on.

His voice sounded surprised as he called out behind her. ‘What are you doing? He is angry. Do you not understand? He is angry!’

‘And this is my dream,’ she whispered. ‘Where all that has been is yet to be.’ And still, she wondered. She had no recollection, after all, of this particular place. Nor of meeting Osserc among the shattered remnants of Kurald Emurlahn.

Sometimes it is true, she told herself, that dreams prove troubling.

‘Clouds on the horizon. Black, advancing in broken lines.’ Stormy knuckled his eyes and then glared across at Gesler from a momentarily reddened face. ‘What kind of stupid dream is that?’

‘How should I know? There are cheats who make fortunes interpreting the dreams of fools. Why not try one of those?’

‘You calling me a fool?’

‘Only if you follow my advice, Stormy.’

‘Anyway, that’s why I howled.’

Gesler leaned forward, clearing tankards and whatnot to make room for his thick, scarred forearms. ‘Falling asleep in the middle of a drinking session is unforgivable enough. Waking up screaming, why, that’s just obnoxious. Had half the idiots in here clutching at their chests.’

‘We shouldn’t’ve skipped out on the war-game, Ges.’

‘Not again. It wasn’t like that. We volunteered to go and find Hellian.’ He nodded to the third occupant of the table, although only the top of her head was visible, the hair sodden along one side where it had soaked up spilled ale. Her snores droned through the wood of the table like a hundred pine beetles devouring a sick tree. ‘And look, we found her, only she was in no shape to lead her squad. In fact, she’s in no shape for anything. She could get mugged, raped, even murdered. We needed to stand guard.’

Stormy belched and scratched at his beard. ‘It wasn’t a fun dream, that’s all.’

‘When was the last fun dream you remember having?’

‘Don’t know. Been some time, I think. But maybe we just forget those ones. Maybe we only remember the bad ones.’

Gesler refilled their tankards. ‘So there’s a storm coming. Impressive subtlety, your dreams. Prophetic, even. You sleep to the whispers of the gods, Stormy.’

‘Now ain’t you in a good mood, Ges. Remind me not to talk about my dreams no more.’

‘I didn’t want you talking about them this time round. It was the scream.’

‘Not a scream, like I told you. It was a howl.’

‘What’s the difference?’

Scowling, Stormy reached for his tankard. ‘Only, sometimes, maybe, gods don’t whisper.’

‘Furry women still haunting your dreams?’

Bottle opened his eyes and contemplated throwing a knife into her face. Instead, he slowly winked. ‘Good afternoon, Captain. I’m surprised you’re not-’

‘Excuse me, soldier, but did you just wink at me?’

He sat up on his cot. ‘Was that a wink, Captain? Are you sure?’

Faradan Sort turned away, muttering under her breath as she marched towards the barracks door.

Once the door shut behind her, Bottle sat back, frowning. Now, messing with an officer’s head was just, well, second nature. No, what disturbed him was the fact that he was suddenly unsure if she’d spoken at all. As a question, it didn’t seem a likely fit, not coming from Faradan Sort. In fact, he doubted she even knew anything about his particular curse-how could she? There wasn’t a fool alive who confided in an officer. Especially ones who viciously killed talented, happily married scorpions for no good reason. And if she did indeed know something, then it meant someone had traded that bit of information in exchange for something else. A favour, a deal, which was nothing less than a behind-the-back betrayal of every common soldier in the legion.

Who was vile enough to do that?

He opened his eyes and looked around. He was alone in the barracks. Fiddler had taken the squad out for that field exercise, the war-game against Brys Beddict’s newly assembled battalions. Complaining of a bad stomach, Bottle had whined and groaned his way out of it. Not for him some useless trudging through bush and farmland; besides, it hadn’t been so long ago that they were killing Letherii for real. There was a good chance someone-on either side-would forget that everyone was friends now. The point was, he’d been the first one quick enough with the bad-stomach complaint, so no one else could take it up-he’d caught the vicious glare from Smiles, which of course he’d long got used to since he was always faster off the mark than she was.

Smiles. Bottle fixed his gaze on her cot, studied it through a suspicious squint. Behind-the-back shit was her forte, wasn’t it? Aye, and who else had it in for him?

He swung his feet to the floor and-gods, that stone was cold!-padded over to her berth.

It paid to approach these things cautiously. If anyone was in the habit of rigging booby traps to just about everything they didn’t want anyone else to touch, it was that spitting half-mad kitten with the sharp eye-stickers. Bottle drew his eating knife and began probing under the thin mattress, leaning close to peer at seams and seemingly random projections of tick straw-any one of which could be coated in poison-projections which, he discovered, turned out to be, uh, random projections of tick straw. Trying to lull me into something… I can smell it.

He knelt and peeked under the frame. Nothing obvious, and that made him even more suspicious. Muttering, Bottle crawled round to kneel in front of her lockbox. Letherii issue-not something they’d be taking with them. She’d not have had much time to rig it, not deviously, anyway. No, the needles and blades would be poorly hidden.

She’d sold him out, but she would learn to regret doing that.

Finding nothing on the outside of the trunk, he slipped his knife point into the lock and began working the mechanism.

Discovering that the lockbox wasn’t even locked froze him into a long moment of terror, breath held, sudden sweat beading his forehead. A snare for sure. A killer snare. Smiles doesn’t invite people in, oh no, not her. If I just lift this lid, I’m a dead man.

He whirled upon hearing the scrape of boots, and found himself looking up at Corabb Bhilan Thenu’alas. ‘Hood’s breath, soldier, stop sneaking up on me like that!’