The Black Dream Read online

  ‘And how else would you have us regard truth, then?’ he asked with a rougher voice than he would have liked.

  ‘As a gamble of course. A gamble of perception.’

  ‘Hardly a practical suggestion, that. Or is this why the peoples of the south call life the Great Dream, because you are so uncertain all the time of everything?’

  In reply the Dreamer threw up his hand before letting it drop into his lap again. His dreadlocks were writhing about his head like snakes, and a few lashed out at the hostile stares around him. ‘Surely it must be a matter of degrees and educated guesses rather than absolutes? More than simplified dualities of either this or that? A combination of the two, or a myriad of different perspectives, or a deeper paradox entirely, unknowable through reason alone?’

  The Dreamer inspected Mokabi with his dark eyes; searching for his elusive truth perhaps. ‘Take the order of Mann for example. You people are so filled with self-importance and certainty that your minds are closed off from anything beyond your beliefs. If anyone is in need of more doubt in their lives, it is you Mannians most of all. Doubt allows you to stay open to new evidence, new ways of thinking. Doubt keeps us human, allows us to shine a questioning light upon our predicament.’

  ‘So we cannot be certain of anything,’ grumbled Mokabi. ‘Is that what you’re really proposing here?’

  A chuckle from one of the priests nearby. His bodyguards pursed their lips together in silence. ‘That our actions should be riddled with doubts? Pish and nonsense I say! You offer a religion for old women and do-nothings. We did not build an empire on such humbling sentiments. We did not become great on the backs of our indecisions.’

  General Mokabi threw a winning grin to his people then composed himself with a sip of chee, observing the man from where he lounged on the sedan: the Dreamer smiling thinly now, dangerously. A chill ran down Mokabi’s spine as the warwagon rumbled onwards along the road.

  He’s like a child, thought the general to himself. A spoilt child lacking restraint or any respect for authority. I’ve enlisted the aid of a dangerous fool.

  Yet if I am to take Bar-Khos, I may need him.

  Seech was still smiling when he next spoke. ‘Indeed the whole world knows of your growing mastery over machinery and nature,’ countered the man. ‘Yet it is interesting how there are no Dreamers amongst you, no mystics either, not even any real sense of spirit in your daily lives. Only an order of priests spreading dogmas that deny the vitality of life, whilst proclaiming your own selves as a chosen people. And such people! You talk as though you have no beliefs at all, only truths, only the way it really is. To listen to your words, you would think it is everyone else who is blinded by their own ideology. Not you.’

  General Mokabi caught the eye of his cleverest priest, Anastaza, his religious and legal adviser, swaying back and forth amongst her white-robed companions. They were all glaring at the Dreamer now with naked intent.

  Not yet, Mokabi thought. Not while he still holds the advantage.

  ‘And you,’ chuckled Mokabi with genuine mirth, feeling somehow freed now by the ferociousness of the man’s statements, by the open insults of his words, ‘you are such a paragon of selfless virtue. Ethical lessons from Tabor Seech, of all people!’ And the old general tossed back his head and laughed aloud to press home his point, for he knew the Dreamer’s reputation only too well, knew what things he had done for the gain of fame and riches.

  Seech’s hands were as dirty as the rest of them, for all that he liked to speak like a monk of the Way.

  What was this, a sudden withdrawal? The Dreamer had turned his face towards the afternoon sky, and was gazing out without expression over the nearest wooden crenellations that surrounded the deck of the warwagon, silenced at last.

  The unexpected cessation of words was like the empty howl after a storm.

  Relieved, Mokabi held his cup out for more chee, squinting ahead as the warwagon was pulled along the road by a swaying line of massive, shaggy mammoots. The general’s vision had grown poor in his old age, though he steadfastly refused to wear spectacles while on campaign. Squinting a little, he took in the paved military road running before them straight and true, filled as far as he could see with the marching ranks of his mercenary army.

  A road that even now led them northwards towards the Lansway, that bridge of land between Pathia and Khos, and the besieged walls of Bar-Khos known as the Shield.

  ‘Look at you all now,’ returned the Dreamer’s relentless voice in the wind. ‘Wishing to take out your knives and gut me for what I’m saying – for mere words. Are your foundations so insecure you cannot talk about them openly?’

  ‘I suspect it is more your lack of respect.’

  Seech raised his voice again for all to hear. ‘I have little respect for anyone in this world. You people hardly stand alone in that.’

  A truce then, not a withdrawal after all.

  ‘Anastaza!’ Mokabi called over to the priest at last, huddled with the others around a smoking brazier. The woman bustled over in her white robe, her eager eyes blinking amongst a face of silver piercings.

  ‘Anastaza. Our guest has expressed some misunderstandings concerning the ways of our creed. Perhaps you would care to enlighten him a little further.’

  ‘Please,’ drawled the Dreamer in disgust, waving her away.

  With a bow, Anastaza began to chant one of the wordbindings relating to the nature of ultimate truth. Her words tumbled out in a fast patter that could only just be followed, a structured argument that had first been used by Nihilis himself, legendary first Patriarch of Mann, as written in his Book of Truths before his untimely death. It was impossible to lose a discourse if the priest was skilled enough in the use of wordbindings, and he knew that Anastaza studied and recited them night and day.

  ‘This is what you offer me?’ Seech protested, and Mokabi wondered if he had discovered his weak spot at last, an hysterical loathing of boredom. Even Mokabi could barely stand the droning of word-bindings, had always hated having to learn them as a youth in the Mannian order.

  He was surprised when Anastaza abruptly fell silent in mid-sentence, and he saw her hands reaching for her throat and her lips suddenly flapping without sound.

  Seech was blinking at the woman’s rising horror without expression.

  What has he done? Mokabi wondered, as Anastaza glanced at him for support but saw only his annoyed curiosity.

  ‘Enough,’ Mokabi sighed, and waved the voiceless priest away.

  ‘A neat trick. What did you do, make her think she couldn’t talk?’

  ‘Perhaps she simply realized the emptiness of her own words.’

  There was laughter in the man’s wretched stare.

  Possessed with a need to assert himself, Mokabi lifted his hand to the serving boy by his side, and stroked his thick mop of hair with longing. The youth tensed, not meeting his eye.

  He knew the boy still had a tongue in that mouth of his, not yet a mute.

  Tonight, Mokabi thought with a throb of his cock. Some dross and hazii weed to relax you, then we’ll see how shy you really are.

  A clatter of porcelain. A sudden searing heat in his lap.

  Mokabi leapt up from his sedan chair, yanking at his sodden, scalded crotch as Tabor Seech watched on with quiet bemusement. The boy had clearly knocked the cup over in feigned accident. Now he was apologizing in his stuttered backwoods Pathian while his face drained of blood, eyeing one of the bodyguards raising a scratch-glove with its poisoned blades extended from each finger.

  ‘No,’ Mokabi snapped at the guard, and glared at the youth until he caught his frightened eye, saw the glint of defiance still burning there. ‘Put a slave collar back on him. Have him sent to one of the pleasure houses when we reach the camp. Maybe he’ll be less clumsy with his hands after a hundred soldiers have had their way with him.’

  The boy’s expression flared red as he was led away.

  A shame, in a way, but there were a thousand more where he ha
d come from amongst the slaves accompanying the army.

  ‘Oh father and mother, forgive me,’ the Dreamer beseeched to the sky, mockingly. ‘For your seed has fallen far, far from the tree.’

  General Mokabi stared at him, perplexed. Once more he wondered how much he could rely on this man who had fled the Free Ports, and once more decided not at all, not beyond the fortune in gold he was paying for his services. A traitor working against his own people? Mokabi trusted him even less than his own peers.

  Seech frowned and pinned Mokabi with a fierce glare, as though he had heard his thoughts.

  ‘I just erased two rooks from my old Academy for you,’ the Dreamer said thickly. ‘Not to mention rolling a storm across the Free Ports.’

  ‘You read thoughts too?’

  ‘No need. I have eyes.’

  Then I hope you become food for the crows after this is done. I hope I get to spit on your grave, you arrogant self-righteous piece of dung.

  The Dreamer inclined his head, saying nothing, staring instead along the road they followed north towards the Lansway and the city of Bar-Khos.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The Cats of Istafari

  The old man was so focused on his task that it was a surprise when he glanced up and saw the cat crouched there on the edge of the desk, its round green eyes staring at him as though in provocation. It was one of the hostile ones, one of the big scarred fighters that seemed to bully the rest of the feral cats living here in the ancient sea-cliff Hermitage of Istafari, and which were now sizing up even the newly arrived Rōshun.

  Ash stared back at the grey-haired animal’s gaze. These creatures had indomitable wills, he knew by now, and they were fearless too. They’d been getting into everything since the Rōshun had inhabited the chambers and passageways of the Hermitage a handful of days earlier, the deserted spaces carved through the rock of the sea cliff, draughty with the fluid breezes from the sea.

  ‘I’m not your enemy, you fool,’ he told the cat perched on the edge of the desk. It was clearly willing to stare at him all day.

  Maybe it didn’t speak Honshu, because it only growled at him softly. Ash raised a single eyebrow. Without warning, he hissed at the animal fiercely enough that it bounded from the desk and fled through the flap in the door.

  With a smile Ash sat down again, gladdened that he felt only a twinge in his lower back today. He’d been suffering from back pains on and off for weeks now, though this morning Meer the hedge-monk had administered his hot needles and stones again, while reciting more recollections of the Isles of Sky, which Ash had barely registered amongst his own grunts of satisfaction. Afterwards, he’d found that the shooting pains had mostly gone at last. A miracle worker, no doubt about it.

  Relaxed and feeling good, Ash picked up the stylus once more and waited until he had regained the thread of his thoughts.

  It was so long since he had written anything down – a letter, a poem that he had heard, a list of things to aid his memory. Ash had trouble crafting the words he needed now while he still had a chance to write them. With the stylus held stiffly in his inky fingers, he muttered and scratched away at the sheet of paper as best he could.

  When he was finished, he peered down at the words scrawled upon the page and saw how they were little more than a short and simple list of instructions.

  Upon the event of my death:

  Return half my shares to the coffers of the Rōshun order. Give the remaining half to Reese Calvone, mother of my late apprentice, Nico Calvone, who resides near the city of Bar-Khos. If she cannot be found then see that it is given to someone else belonging to his surviving family. Burn my body.

  Ash

  Such words of testament should contain some flair in them, Ash thought as he read them over; some sense of who had written them. For a while he reflected on what words he might use to convey some sense of spirit or sentiment to those who would read them after he was gone, but he discarded them all quickly with a shake of his head.

  Such pretensions in your old age. Who will care what it says? Who will even remember this sheet of paper after the shares are divvied up and you are gone and their lives carry on?

  Still, even so . . . Ash snatched up the stylus with a flourish, and using the last of the ink on its nib he wrote, beneath his name:

  With heart.

  Finished, Ash stared down at the ink glistening in the morning light, then leaned forward and blew across it lightly, watching the gleam fade as the ink cured.

  Death, his eyes read.

  Body.

  The farlander chewed on the leaves even harder and noticed the stylus shaking in his hand. He set it down, and lay his trembling hand on the desk too. Another symptom of his illness.

  He rose and approached the thin tall window where the new shutter was still to be fixed into place. A soft sea breeze played across his face. Far below, the blue-green sea of the Sargassi filled his eyes, its surface blown about by the winds into a wintry froth.

  The view faced south in the direction of his forthcoming voyage. From here it was easy to imagine the Sargassi extending all the way beyond the horizon to the lands of the southern continent, now under the heel of the Empire. And then to push beyond those lands, on to the Aradèrēs mountains, the Broken Spine of the World, over which they would pass into the emptiness of the Great Hush in hopes of gaining enough Milk for his later task in the Isles. If he did not die first. If he did not get them all killed.

  The swells were still rough down there from the winter storm that had just passed over this small island of goats and overhanging cliffs. With pounding force the waves crashed against the rocks at the foot of the cliff, releasing their foamy tangy hiss into the air.

  Further out towards the horizon, he spotted one of the mammoth coral trees standing like a tower in the water, topped by what looked like a tangled crown, hints of white at its base where the swells broke upon it. Another tree was barely visible further to the west. Living things seeded a thousand years ago or more, old enough for corals to mass against their submerged flanks, even for certain unique species to clad the trunks which rose into the air, seeming to feed off them. Vertical reefs then, some grown intentionally to support lighthouses in the shallow sea of the Sargassi, the richest waters in all the Midèrēs. Ash could just make out a triangle of sails approaching the most distant of the trees. Perhaps it was one of the great rafts of the sea gypsies, who sometimes used the coral trees for homes during the wilder months of winter.

  He had once spent a month living on one of those rafts in his fortieth year, rescued from the waters of the Sargassi near-dead and raving by a clan of sea gypsies who called the shallow sea their home. Traders in pearl and shark skin, Ash had listened with keen ears to the stories of their hallowed ancestors, people who sounded much like the travelling Tuchoni, having fled from the pressures of growing states all around them by adapting to a nomadic lifestyle; though instead of roaming the roads they had taken to the sea, never to return to land again.

  In the morning light Ash breathed it all in, allowing the moment to engage his senses entirely. He wondered if he would have liked it here in this Hermitage that was to be the new home of the Rōshun order, this little islet known as Breaker’s Island, now that their old monastery of Sato was gone.

  A log cracked in the fireplace. A wave thundered far beneath his feet. Ash blinked and leaned a fraction closer towards the view beyond the window. There was something in the sky out there; wings sweeping alongside a great bulbous form. A skyship was approaching.

  Lightly, Ash slapped his palm against the sill.

  At last.

  *

  Turning from the window, Ash surveyed all the things he intended to take with him in one easy glance, for they were already piled against a wall. He inclined his head, hearing the sound of footsteps stamping towards his room.

  Ash knew who it was even as the door thudded open and Baracha strode in snorting anger.

  The first thing he took in was the wooden tr
aining sword gripped in the man’s hand, and then he met Baracha’s hostile glare with an eyebrow raised in curiosity. The skin under the man’s lower lip was extended by the pressure of his tongue, something he did when the heat of rage was upon him. Ash looked into the Alhazii’s brooding black eyes amongst all the swirls of tattooed script, and was reminded of the touch of insanity in Baracha whenever his temper was flown.

  ‘You mean to do something with that stick, Baracha?’ Ash enquired of his fellow Rōshun quietly, nodding to the wooden sword in the Alhazii’s grasp.

  More footsteps in the corridor outside.

  ‘Father!’ he heard Serèse call out, Baracha’s sharp-tongued daughter. But the big man slammed the newly fashioned door closed behind him without taking his eyes from Ash, and threw across the bolt.

  ‘Beat some sense into you, I was thinking.’

  Ah, Ash thought, stepping over to face the man, knowing what this was about.

  ‘They’re not going with you. My daughter nor my apprentice. Not on some fool’s notion of bringing back the dead.’

  ‘Your daughter is a grown woman. Aléas a grown man. I will not stop them if they wish to travel with me. Will you?’

  ‘You know that I will.’

  ‘Nonsense. It is out of your hands.’

  ‘I tell you I won’t allow it. This whole scheme of yours is insane. You’ve finally cracked, Ash, and I don’t mind saying it to your face. Grief has broken you in two.’

  Ash took a step closer, close enough to see the bloodshot flecks in the Alhazii’s eyes, and Baracha rocked on the balls of his feet, an animal readying to strike. Would he do it this time? Ash wondered. Would he finally step over the line and attack?

  ‘Baracha,’ Ash tried, for he had no wish to harm this man. ‘You are the new leader of the order, all have agreed on it. And you must lead now by listening to the voices of others. Not as a hot-headed father, nor as a tyrant. You know they will not stand for anything less. Now put the stave away. This is no way to hold a conversation between us.’