A Bait of Dreams (44 page)

They rode until Horli began to set, rode with eyes squinted and watering until Horli was a ruby fire between two great rocks leaning toward each other in an inverted vee taller than the great tower of the Sayoneh Hold. They forded the stream and turned into the small side canyon Vannar had called a ravine.

Night descending around them, they wound through the barren rocky canyon, on and on, an endless slow shuffle, struggling to cope with the treacherous footing, the flows of scree, the knife-edged blow-holes that could snap a horse's leg or cut it to the bone.

Gradually the canyon opened out into a tortured plain, an ebon desolation that sucked light from the stars and swallowed it. Wind blew across the stone and through the hollows in stone pillars, making wild, eerie sounds. The horses were jumpy and ready to shy at shadows though the long day had left them dragging.

Shounach stopped his horse and stood in the stirrups, head turning; Gleia could hear his breathing, short, sharp, uneven, the ragged rhythms infecting her until the lifeless landscape began to throb with the expectation that beat fiercely in him, to grow ominous, uncanny. His head turned slowly, his body was stiff and motionless, he was a looming hieratic figure, a sign if she wanted him to be—like the sign of the leaf, having no meaning but what she chose to assign to it … to him. Experience and her sea-father Temokeuu had long ago taught her there was neither volition nor malice in the natural world. The Forest had sneaked up on her and confused her reason with its huddle, heat and the thick humid air it kept collected and hushed and motionless. That unpleasantness she'd translated into hostility, a response to her own suppressed anger. This morning discomfort had disrupted her imaginings instead of underlining them, a sort of return to sanity. The lava plain was eerie and unwelcoming, but there was no evil in it, no more hostility than there was in the Forest. Whatever she felt she put there herself. Yet—something deep within her denied all her rationality and insisted on being frightened by the black rock, the howls of the wind, the string of grit against her face and hands.

Saddle leather creaked as Shounach settled himself and kneed his horse to a slow, steady walk. He said nothing to either of them; his mind-body-spirit was focused too intently on what lay ahead for him to remember he had companions.

Irritated with him and with herself, Gleia went back to playing games, rejecting the weirdness around her and the fear it evoked, telling herself it was only rock and wind and starlight. We're in a saga of sorts, she thought. The hero penetrating into the deadlands, seeking the heart of death, seeking the death of his death—no, not his, but his brother's—going into the womb of the world to find it. Wise woman in a tower tells him how to get there. Wise woman, witch woman, eater of men, spitting out the hero because he was too tough and stringy for her gums. She giggled, wiped at her face, glanced quickly around. Nothing had changed. They were winding through slender black pillars, past humps of once molten rock folded in on itself in elaborate convolutions, over welts and corrugations where the rock streams had cooled and blistered.

If Shounach is the hero of this saga, what about me? Who am I? But she wasn't ready to think about that, not yet.

Deel. She turned and frowned at the Dancer who was little more than a dark lump on the horse's back. She faced forward again, rubbed at the back of her neck. Damn her for … never mind. Deel's role in this what? tragedy? comedy? this whatever. Not the Lady. That's not me, but it's not her either. I won't let her have that, not even in play. The Flawed Apprentice. Not quite right, but close enough. The young one who wins redemption through the hero's acts, venturing with divided spirit, half-unwilling and more than half-afraid, to lay her ghosts and win her long-delayed vengeance. I'm getting too serious, have to change that. It's the wind, I think. The witless witness. Her mouth twisted into a half-smile. Hard on poor Deel. She's rather more than that really, but who's talking about reality.

The wind grew stronger. The whistles, groans and shrieks increased in number and intensity.

And what am I? The fool, I suppose. She chuckled. The hero's guardian fool, that's me, the one who waits on the periphery until the danger becomes horrendous and jumps in, horns and hoof, to save the silly hero. Ay-Fox, here I am, your bodyguard, your fool, your spirit guide. She giggled again.

A blackness rose before them, blocking out a good portion of the sky, a great sweeping cone of a mountain, blank and barren on the side that faced them. She saw the three piles of pillowstones after she'd seen the mountain. the tops of the piles were tilted together, melted into one another. The wind was making noises through a flock of irregular open spaces near the ground.

Shounach stopped his mount, sat staring at the cone; he rubbed thumb against forefinger, glanced at Aab appearing above the mountain, exploded his breath out. He slid from his mount, emptied his waterskin into a hollow for his horse to drink. Still without speaking, as if he didn't trust himself to speak, he dropped onto one of the single pillow-stones scattered around the piles and sat facing the mountain, watching it, waiting. Silently, Gleia and Deel watered their mounts and went to sit beside him.

Time passed. Aab's fattening crescent crept higher. There were no clouds; the smear of stars lay like glittersand across the clear dark of the sky. The wind died sometime during the wait, the grit settled, the sky continued to burn over them.

Gleia laced her hands behind her head, arched her back so she could look at the moon. Aab's light seemed absurdly meager to affect that massive monolith in front of them and littler Zeb was laggard tonight. She freed one of her hands, pointed at the sliver of moon. “Think that'll be enough?”

Shounach started as if he'd forgotten she was there, as if her voice had called him back from far away. “What? Oh? If it isn't, we wait here till she's full.”

“Mmm. I think … maybe … something's following us.”

He turned to look at her. “Think?”

“It's like a shadow you can only see out of the corner of your eye. Sometimes I thought I was imagining it, sometimes not. It's back there now, not strong enough to drive a pin through, enough to make the skin itch between my shoulderblades.”

He swung around, scowled at the shapeless dark plain, shook his head, swung back. “I can't get anything.” He reached out, put his hand on her shoulder, left it there a moment, squeezed a little, dropped it onto his thigh. “You're picking up range, Vixen. The dreamsinger in you coming out.” He scowled at the mountain. “It doesn't matter if there's someone there or not. They're welcome to the shards we'll leave behind.”

“Long as he, whoever, doesn't try making shards of us.”

More time passed, slow time, achingly slow. She glanced now and again at Deel, but the Dancer was as relaxed as a sleeping cat, eyes glistening occasionally as she shifted her head and they caught the moons' light. A slightly fatter though smaller lune, Zeb was hastening after his slim mistress.

Then Aab was sliding into the last quarter of her glide across the sky.

Tendrils of light vague and indistinct as lamp-lit mist began to gather low on the mountainside, blowing uncertainly over the rough black stone. They began to move faster, they thickened and grew brighter, their ragged spasms settled to a steady pulse, a harder form took shape about their center, a pointed arch.

The whispers began.

She remembered

huge black eyes soft as soot and as shineless, butterfly wings opening and closing with slow hypnotic sweeps, the swoop of laughter in her blood, cool wine air slipping along her body.…

She closed her hand hard about Shounach's arm as if the touch of him could anchor her in the real.

The whispers came louder.

She forced herself to look away from the swirling light, to look at Shounach instead.

His face was rapt; his arm muscles were hard under her digging fingers. She didn't know what he saw or what he was hearing, but it had to be as compelling to him as her images were to her.

“Alahar.” Deel twisted up with a powerful surge of her body and raced for the light. Before Shounach and Gleia could move, she disappeared through the arch.

Shounach wrenched loose from Gleia and plunged after the Dancer.

Gleia sat frozen. The opaline light changed subtly; translucent sheets of color danced on the mountainside, crept toward her, reaching for her.

The whispers came louder, she could hear words now.
Come, sister, come, lover, your companions are with us now, come to them, come to us, why are you alone and chilled out there? We are warmth and love and beauty, leave that monstrous land and come to us, your heart's desire waits here.…

A bait of dreams, dangled before her. But she was older now, she could see the hook behind the promise. She wanted to run from the lying teasing tempting light, but she could not. Shounach and Deel had gone into the mist, she had to go after them. She was afraid, so afraid she was sick with it, but she forced herself up from the stone, forced her feet to move; she took one step, then another, then she was walking stiffly toward the mountain. She drove herself to step into the mist, shutting her ears to the whispers, refusing to acknowledge the images it thrust at her.

The air thickened about her until it was like a gel: she couldn't breathe. Then the constriction was gone and she was standing in veils of colored light that swayed and circled like tall flat figures filling the great echoing chamber.

At the center of the chamber was a pulsing soap bubble, delicate, ethereal, translucent pastel colors playing over its filmy surface, counterpointing the utter blackness contained within the film. It was a shimmering loveliness that filled an empty place within her she hadn't known was there. She wanted to go to it, touch it, let it warm her, sing to her, love her. She took a step toward it. Her foot came down on a small hard round that almost threw her. She looked down. The floor of the chamber was strewn with tiny duplicates of the bubble, glittering crystals that she knew were buds cast off from the Mother Eye. She forced herself to laugh, felt a loosening within as the laugh took hold. “The womb of the world,” she said aloud. “The game is on. My point, I think.” As if in answer, drums began to throb. “You move, I see. What.…”

Deel is dancing with a handsome smiling youth, his eyes gleaming with admiration and desire; his splendid brown body circles hers in a swaying, foot-stamping dance; she moves with him in a separate dance, her echoing and countering responses stimulating him to further extravagances. Hip brushes against hip, swings away, hands touch and part, eyes meet, cling, shift away. They dance on beige sands, other, less defined figures dancing about them, a dark blue sea crashing green and white behind them, feather-topped trees swaying on multiple trunks to a wind that blows nowhere else. They circle round each other, moving in a lazy arc along the trampled sand, coming closer and closer to the glimmering bubble.

Gleia took a step toward her, stopped. No, there's time yet. She swung around, looking for Shounach, fearing what she'd see when she found him.

He stood a few steps from her, smothered in shimmering light veils that swooped at him and clung to him as if they fed off him. He ignored them, despair, desire and hate like a darkness about him as he glared at the bubble. She felt the pain and fury in him as if they were her own; when she looked at the bubble, she saw what he was seeing.

A woman sits tired and unhappy on a hard bunk in a hazily sketched room. Her hair shines like fire in the fan of light coming through a half-open door. Resting one ankle on her knee, she wipes mud off her foot with a bit of rag. When she finishes the second foot, she sits staring into the dark.

Beside her on the bunk is a bundle of blankets. It stirs. A small fist thrusts up, the baby in the blankets gives a tentative whimper.

“Sharl-mi, baby-mi,” the woman croons. She lifts him to her breast and rocks him while she scrubs a corner of the blanket over her nipple. Then she lets him suck. She is not really beautiful but has a face it is impossible to forget, strong and sensuous and compelling. Dreamily she reaches up and brushes strands of that bright silky hair from her nose and mouth, tucking them behind her ear. Her face is filled with love and contentment; the baby is sucking with a desperate intensity, small fists kneading at the soft golden flesh. She touches his wispy hair, red as her own, then looks up.…

The baby is suddenly gone, the bunk and all the rest melted with him into the veils. The woman stands; her cafta drifts like smoke about her body as she walks toward Shounach, her bare golden feet appear and disappear beneath it, her slim golden hands reach toward him, her mouth opens.…

Gleia shivered under the impact of the emotions whirling in Shounach. She fumbled in her trousers pocket and brought out the rod, her hands tremling as she watched Shounach fighting the compulsion and losing, watched him take one faltering step toward the woman, then another. She flipped the cover off the sensor. Hoping it was set again in the cutting rod, she pointed it at the image and touched the smooth black spot.

The white light sliced through and through the image, but neither stopped nor disrupted it. The woman turned her blue-green eyes on Gleia, held out her hands. “Please,” she murmured, “Please, it hurts.…”

Shounach wheeled on Gleia, screaming obscenities. He lunged at her. She leaped away, scrambling backward, thrown off balance by surprise and the rolling of the Eyelets under her feet. He lunged again, so fast she had no time to catch herself and could only fall.

She hit the floor and skidded painfully, skin tearing on one hand, her elbow stinging, the laser rod flying from fingers jarred open, clattering down somewhere in the darkness.

Shounach stumbled to a stop, looked dazed; he passed his hand across his face and started to turn back to the image.

“Shounach! Fox!” She got shakily onto her knees. “Help me.”