Dreamlands (8 page)

Returning
from an errand one afternoon, I saw that he slept peacefully.  The wounded arm
was flexible again and, aside from an ugly spray of dime-sized scars, apparently
no worse off.

With
that burden relieved, I noticed my knife, which I had been whetting earlier,
had gone missing when I was out.  It took but a few minutes to search my room,
and less time to figure out who was responsible.  Having established the dwarf
wasn’t stupid enough to be waiting in his apartment, I belted on my cutlass and
made for High Street.  My neighbour was an inveterate gambler, and the joke of High
Street was that it housed the broadest range of low enterprises in Zij. 

I
found the thief in the first house of chance I came to, sitting with five
others at a scarred and unsteady table.  The pearl-handled dagger sat like a
queen atop the pot, mostly of copper and silver pieces, with a couple of rings
thrown in.  The dwarf affected not to see me until I rested my hand on the
empty sheath at my belt.

“Ye
should have taken my offer when I was flush,” he growled in a voice like a mill
grinding corn.  The hatchet was hooked on the table near his elbow.  “That
bauble is fair trade for the lump you gave me.”

“That
fancy dagger is in the game,” said a one-eyed man, not looking up from his
cards.  “Come back when we're done and you can barter for it with the winner.” 
He paused, and I realized the hall had gone silent and watchful.  "Or stay
and get gutted.”

I
leaned forward to place my hand on the knife.  The odds looked foul, but they
all sat while I stood, and I had my cutlass should any bluffs need answered.  But
I did not anticipate the man who crept up behind me.  A single warped board underfoot
betrayed his approach.  He would nevertheless have had me, if the black man hadn't
been quieter yet.  He dispatched the backstabber with his staff, leaving a
stiletto vibrating point down in the floor, and stood by my side, toothily grinning
at the table of gamblers.

At
sight of him, voices raised in protest were hushed, the scraping of chair legs
stopped, and hands which had gripped weapons returned eagerly to their cards.  I
sheathed my knife, giving the mad dwarf one last look.  His lips bled where he gnashed
at his black beard, but said no more.

* * *

The
fighting man’s name was Ajer Akiti, and after the scene in the gambling house, we
fell without a word into fast friendship.  I say without a word for though he
was literate and his hearing was keen, he was completely mute.  When I
discovered he had crewing experience, I took my new friend to the captain of
the Asphodel.

“What,
this giant?” Harrog said in mock horror.  “He’ll devour our stores the first
day out of port, and we haven’t men to spare for cannibalism.  Akiti, where
have you been?  And don’t tell me it’s working for Xavier.”  The captain gave a
brash laugh.  “Sloan, the question isn’t whether we’ll take him on, it’s
whether he’ll replace you, and one or two other idlers besides!”

Ajer
grinned hugely and clapped Harrog in a bear hug.  They tussled, Ajer making as
if to throw the captain overboard.  If he hadn’t been in a jesting mood, he easily
could have.  It was good news indeed to find Ajer Akiti so welcome aboard the
Asphodel and, luck following fortune, a cargo of salt pork and tools meant we
would ship for Hlanith with the early morning tide.

When
Isobel called on me that evening, I was too cheerful to return to the subject
of her father’s brooding.  Pigheaded as he was, there was nothing I could do
for Solomon, or so I told her.  In truth I was full of my recent victories and
new friendship.  Pride had been rare in my past life, and just then I found it
irresistible.

Everyone
on the Asphodel seemed to know Ajer, by reputation if not by sight, and his
system of signs and gestures served him well.  His inability to speak was no
impediment between us, for when two men are of the same mind there is little
need for talk.

I
sailed the Southern Sea on a ship full to overflowing with work and song, salt
water and sweat, among men who did not sip timidly at Life, but as the bard
said, drank it to the lees.  I will remember those days as the best of my
existence, for they were the last without care.

* * *

Not
until a month later, when the end of our voyage loomed on the horizon, did I reflect
upon my behaviour towards Isobel, which now seemed callous and ugly.  When next
I saw her, between the market and the apartment, tracks of tears seemed to have
worn lines into her pretty face.

“Isaac,
he’s gone, he’s gone,” she cried nonsensically, clutching me as if she might in
the next instant faint.

“Easy,”
I said, hugging her close.  “I can’t understand you.”

“It’s
Solomon,” she said, sobbing.  “My father has disappeared.  You must find him,
Isaac.”

“How
long has he been gone?” I asked, cold dread congealing around me.

“Three
days now.  He had been home all day, had been for weeks, then left one evening without
a goodbye, without money or anything else.”

“He
said nothing?  You have no idea where he might go?”

She
shook her head mutely. 

I
quizzed her on Gorice and his other friends, but in the past month Solomon had become
committed to his own isolation, his fey moods often keeping even Isobel away.

Starting
without the merest clue, I decided first to visit the Shipwrights Guild.  A taciturn
bunch, and secretive by nature, they showed little surprise at the news of
Solomon’s disappearance, and shared none of my urgency in finding him.  After
this disappointment, Ajer joined me in canvassing the docks, where my enquiries
among the workers and sailors also proved fruitless.  No one had seen Solomon,
nor knew of any special business which might have taken him out of town.  The
disappearance of a respected man should have been an exciting topic, but everyone
I spoke to was unusually reserved, and spent longer than I liked thinking on
their answers.

Ajer
suggested that a drinking binge, though out of character for him, might explain
Solomon’s absence.  We were almost at the Brass Coin when a hooded figure stepped
deliberately into our path.  His cloak hid his features, but did nothing to
conceal a solid, deep-chested frame.  I grabbed at my blade, but the end of Ajer's
staff already rested on the man’s sternum.

“Show
yourself,” I said.  “I've no patience for cowled figures.”

“Put
down your weapons, you fools.”  He jerked back his hood in case the sound of
his voice wasn’t enough.  “It’s Gorice.”

“What
are you doing skulking around in alleyways?” I said, sniffing loudly.  “You
don’t smell of drink, and you’re too big to make your living as a thief.”

“It’s
lucky I stumbled on you two,” Gorice said, covering his face again.  “You’ve
been searching for Solomon.”

“What
do you know about it?” I asked, then, tempering my tone, “Did you speak to him
before he vanished?”

“I
did not.  He’s been in a terrible sulk for weeks, but Erik found something out. 
Come with me.  The street is no place to discuss these matters.”

He
guided us by back ways to his work place, a plank shack adjacent to a massive
forge.  Erik was sitting inside, tossing up and catching a bronze spearhead,
along with Gorice’s apprentice Cal.  Gorice nodded to the young man, and he
moved behind a partition to begin sharpening a pile of farm implements.  The
grindstone’s racket would make discussion difficult and eavesdropping
impossible.  Erik began.

“I
discovered what compels the crews that work the black galleys.  They are all
addicted to some sort of poisonous herb, a drug called
wilt
.”

“I’ve
never heard of it,” I said, though my ears perked up at what sounded like news.

“I
have,” Gorice said, “but I’ve also watched the sons of dogs for months.  They
traffic in everything under the sky, but never drink or drugs.”

“They
do not sell it,” Erik replied, “but their underlings use it.  You’ve seen the
look of their guards and labourers, always restless, nervous with unspent
energy.  They are using wilt, and I’m certain it is being produced somewhere near
Zij.”

“I
don’t know, Erik,” I said.  “I’ve never heard of a drug that would help an oarsman. 
It’s the most demanding sort of labour.  Men will sometimes fall dead right at
the sweeps.”

“Hear
me out,” he said.  “This wilt calls up hallucinations, but instead of leaving a
man idle, drives him on.  When he works, in his mind it will be for a great
cause, or gold if that is what he most desires.  When he fights, it is for his
life or that of his mother or child.  If he cares little for life or anyone
else, he will be driven by someone who exists only in his fantasy.  It is a
drug made for slaves.”

“Isobel's
father has been sick, half in a trance, for weeks," I said, considering, "but
I wouldn’t call him energetic.  You think wilt is to blame?”

“Solomon,
use the drug of those yellow-eyed blackguards?”  In answer to his own question,
Gorice barked out, “Ha.”

“A
week back,” Erik said softly, “I came upon Solomon crouched by the pit at the
end of Eel Street.  He was shivering all over and working two fingers in his
mouth as though to pull a tooth.”

“Fingers
in his mouth,” I said, not wishing for an answer.

“That’s
how you take it,” Gorice said, tugging his lip.  “You rub it on the inside of
your cheek, under your tongue, or on your gums.”

Ajer
shook his head glumly.

“Supposing
Solomon did use this wilt,” I said, feigning exasperation to conceal my foreboding,
“what has it to do with his disappearance?”

“He
wanted the yellow-eyed merchants banned from port,” Erik said.  “He thought he
could prove a connection between them and these wilt dealers.  Now he's been
put aside someplace, I'm sure of it.”

“Kidnaped,
you mean,” I said, just as Gorice was saying, “The merchants of Dylath-Leen
won’t have had a direct hand in it.  They never leave the docks, except by
their infernal galleys.”

“There
is a certain group which is not allowed in the city,” Erik said.  “They call
themselves coal burners, though I doubt that is their true profession.  They
appear sometimes outside the Groaning Gate, to trade.”

“I’ve
heard of these men.”  Gorice strode nervously about the room, pausing to check
the door and window for spies.  “And I have a mate among the coal burners.  He
mentioned a working camp out in the woods, not far east of town.  And I’ve seen
Solomon myself by the Groaning Gate, though it was long before he disappeared.”

“We’ve
done all we could to find him in Zij,” I said.  “This camp seems a sensible
next step.”

Everyone
agreed.

The
sky was a lead platter when we exited by the Groaning Gate, promising a tepid
gloom but no rain.  There were eight of us in total, including Gorice, his
apprentice Cal, Ajer Akiti, Erik, and three others we knew from the Asphodel.  The
trail was well traveled and the walking easy, but there was little appetite for
talk.  A little over an hour later, Erik signaled us to hunker down behind a
rocky outcrop.

“This
is it,” he said.  Men were shuffling back and forth in a polluted glade about
thirty meters distant.  The clearing was spotted with tents and lean-tos and there
were several small fires going, but the shallow pits used to produce charcoal were
all cold.  The old forest had been cleared for a league around, while the younger
trees near the camp had all been stripped of branches and bark almost to the
crown.  The trunks, instead of being harvested for charcoal, or any other
purpose, had been left standing and dead.

“It
has the look of a coal burning camp,” Gorice grunted, “but not enough smoke.”

What
is the plan?
Ajer signed.

“I
will talk to whoever’s in charge,” I said.  “Stay together and call out if you
see anything unusual.”

“Remember,”
Erik said, “no violence unless it comes from them first.”

We
walked forward.  The camp’s inhabitants were an unnerving bunch, uniformly squat
and misshapen.
 
Even at a distance I could see their limbs were
mismatched, their features lopsided and irregular.  A few carried large
tumours. 
So pervasive were the deformities, I wondered if they were
all one inbred clan, and if their camp was a kind of leper colony.  Here and
there I noticed a two-handled implement with a shallow blade like a carpenter’s
plane.  This would explain how
the trees had been stripped of their
bark, if not why.

“What
if their affliction is catching?” Cal asked, hanging behind.

“As
long as you don’t go kissing any of them,” Gorice replied, “you should be all
right.”

They
showed no reaction to our trespass, except for one who quickly concealed an
icon hanging round his neck.  As he did so,
I saw that his eyes and
those of his fellows were filmed white with what looked like cataracts, though they
did not appear to be blind.

Since
no one greeted us, I walked up to the sole unmoving individual, the right side
of whose face sagged like a wax effigy melting away.  He waited like a rich
trader by his wares, a pile of scrap wood and metal rods.  My friends spread
out behind me, studying the other deformed ones with obvious unease.

“We
sell at the Groaning Gate.”  His ruined face did not impede his speech, which
was without intonation, as if he were reciting words in a foreign language. 
Everything he said was spoken this way.

“Is
that so,” I said.

“We
do not trade here.  Wait for us at the Groaning Gate, at sundown.”

"What
do you trade at the Groaning Gate?"

He
looked at a point off to my right and tugged at his collar where a ring of old
sores peeped out, but did not answer.  I felt a prickling at the nape of my
neck, and turning to study his fellows confirmed that they too worried at themselves
in the same way.

"My
friends and I are looking for someone,” I said, reminding myself that however
irritating their mannerisms, we had not come to fight.  “I am Isaac Sloan.  Do
you have a name?"

He
gave me a quizzical look, then cast about the camp as if searching for something
misplaced.  Finally he answered, "Ash."

"Ash,
I’m not here to trade for coal, or whatever it is you produce.  I am looking
for a man named Solomon.  He is older and thin, with hair going grey from jet
black.  He wears the guild insignia of the Shipwrights on the breast of his
shirt.”

“There
are no men here,” Ash said, smirking at a joke known only to himself, “excepting
my brothers and I.”

“There
is no coal burners’ camp, either,” I said, as if to accuse him of something.  “I
see some fuming pots, but precious little evidence of charcoal.”

He
squinted slightly, and shook his head to indicate it was as much a mystery to
him as to me.

“All
right,” I pronounced, “I am going to search this camp for Solomon the
shipwright.  I trust you won’t try to stop me.”

“You
will search, will you?”

Though
he had spoken in the same uninflected monotone as before, every ill-favoured
coal burner stopped his work at these words.  My men tensed, watching all
quarters.  The camp dwellers had no weapons in the proper sense, but as any
sailor will tell you a pickaxe or awl will do in a pinch.  Ash pointed to a low
canvas tent, which I presumed was used for stores.

Cautious
that Erik watched my back, I unfastened the leather tassels and parted the
flaps.  Inside was a row of eight sackcloth-wrapped oblongs, between five and
six feet in length.  I bent to peel open the first, the smell anticipating the
corpse within.  The body was brittle, the skin drawn tight and shiny where the
bones jutted underneath.  My trepidation grew as I revealed the others, all
stricken with the same disease.  The eyes of the last corpse were squeezed
shut, the face twisted in a careworn frown.  The Shipwrights’ crest confirmed
what I already knew.

My
companions continued to glare in all directions as I withdrew into the sunlight. 
Seeing my blanched face, Ajer switched to a two-handed grip on his staff.  The
one calling himself Ash looked on blandly, offering no explanation or plea.  I picked
up one of the two-handled planes I had spotted earlier and tossed it to Erik.

"What
do you make of these?" 

He
turned it over, examining it.  "It’s for wilt,” he said.  “They must render
it from the bark."

I
looked down at my feet and gathered my breath.

"Solomon
is dead,” I said.  “Gorice, Cal, gather up these tools.  You can melt them down
in the forge."  To the sailors I called, “Burn it down, all of it!  Burn
them out!”

My
order was answered by the sound of a sickening thud.  Gorice had clubbed down one
of the coal burners with his hammer.  Brains wet the dust in a perfect fan.  Another
of the creatures raised a shovel, too slowly, and was likewise swiftly killed. 
He writhed soundlessly on the ground where he fell, a bubbling, creamy stuff, like
half-rendered fat, emitting from the wound.

“He
took a swing at my knees with that mattock,” Gorice protested at my severe look. 
“I did just what anyone would.”

The
eight of us were wound tight for we were outnumbered by a significant margin,
but our remaining foes stayed unmoving and passive.

Gorice
was staring at the one he had felled, and bent over to recover the chain broken
from his neck, from which hung a small toad cast in iron.  I could see as he
passed it to me that he found it repulsive.  Though crude in design, it
conveyed something decidedly unnatural.  Not wanting to think on its import right
then, I pocketed it.

“Let’s
get on with it,” I said to him.  “I assume you’ve got the most experience
lighting fires.”

My
friends moved warily at first, but were eager to take up any job that would
break the enveloping tension.  With brands from the few small fires already
burning, they began to light up the tents.  The wilt harvesters did not move,
except those who shifted aside to avoid being burned themselves.  I smouldered
along with the ugly little village, part of me hoping for a reason to cut one
of them down.  As Cal was about to set the corpse tent alight, it occurred to
me Isobel would want to see her father’s body.  I went to shift Solomon’s
desiccated remains outside.

Erik’s
shrill whistle gave me just enough warning to keep my feet when the captain of
the mutants grappled with me.  The two of us staggered in an ungainly
pirouette, Ash clinging to my shoulders, and to my hips as well, with monkey-like
claws in place of feet.  His teeth snapped at my cheek.  Seizing him in turn I
butted him in the face, but instead of the expected crunch of a nose breaking,
the center of his head folded in, as soft and pulpy as a rotten melon.  Having tempered
his bite, I grabbed his wrists to throw him off, but not before he had hooked
up a shank from the ground with one of his claw feet.

Though
I knew what was to come, I was helpless to prevent it.

He
drove the sheared metal rod into my abdomen, just under the ribs, and out my
back.  The sensation was one of an indescribable cold, at first around the
shank, then radiating throughout.  Ash disappeared and the world turned on end as
Ajer Akiti’s shocked expression filled the sky.

I
knew no more.