The Shadowed Sun (Dreamblood) (42 page)

Yanassa spied Wanahomen and made an apologetic gesture to her companions before rising and coming to meet him. “You’re going to see her?”

He nodded. “Did you? How is she?”

“She let me in for a while, but wouldn’t speak of her pain.” Yanassa
lowered her eyes. “We had words before, about the Shadoun woman, and I think she no longer trusts me. Perhaps you’ll do better.”

Things were dire indeed if that was the case. “I’ll go now.”

There was an immediate stir within when he tapped Hanani’s tent flap. She pushed it open to see who it was. “Prince. Have you come for your next lesson?”

He started; that had been the last thing on his mind. “Tonight seems hardly the time—”

“Yanassa told me the tribe leaders vote in two days. There isn’t much time left for me to teach you. Come.” She slipped out of the tent and went around it to the back, heading for the fire circle again.

The
an-sherrat
still had four tents, Wanahomen realized. He would have his men remove Mni-inh’s in the morning.

The woman carried herself better now than she had that afternoon. There was no outward sign of pain in her movements or demeanor; no sign of any emotion whatsoever. She looked better physically as well, although that was probably Yanassa’s doing. Her hair had been redone into curling twists, the weighted ornaments replaced by tiny ornamental gold coins that jingled faintly as she walked. Banbarra used the tinkling of coins to keep away ill fortune in times of mourning.

Sighing, he sat down on one of the stones beside the fire. She sat down opposite him.

“I’ve tended your mentor’s body as best I could,” he said. “I didn’t remember all the rites, and I had no wrappings, but I’ve treated him with dignity. My men are gathering wood tonight; in the morning we’ll take him to a place to set a pyre. Do you want to come?”

She said nothing for a moment, her body language as unreadable as her face. “No.”

Not a tear, not a tremor, not a single sign of grief. If he hadn’t already come to know the peculiar combination of strength and
uncertainty that was normal for her, he wouldn’t have known anything was wrong. “Did you find tithebearers?”

“Yanassa,” she said. “And Charris as well, when he came to visit. A few others.”

“Do you have enough now?”

“Enough of everything but dreamblood, but that is to be expected without a Gatherer’s aid. The living can spare very little of their own.”

Wanahomen had hoped to steer the conversation away from death. “This lesson. Will it be as unpleasant as the last one?” He mustered a smile, which she did not return.

“That depends on you,” she said. The flatness of her voice was truly unnerving, compared to her usual compassionate tone. “Please go to sleep now.”

Easier said than done
, he thought sourly, but nevertheless shifted to sit on the ground, propping his back against the rock. Though he was exhausted, sleep was long in coming. He was all too aware of her eyes on him, the crackling of the fire, the discomfort of the ground.

“You cannot sleep.”

The sound of her voice. “It will happen eventually,” he snapped. “If I’m taking too long for your tastes, we can always finish the lesson tomorrow.”

“Imagine something important to you.”

He frowned. “Like what?”

“Some object, or a symbol that has meaning to you. A pictoral, perhaps. Imagine it. Contemplate its contours in your mind.”

He considered for a moment, then carefully, reverently, drew the image of the Aureole of the Setting Sun in his mind. Not his mother’s imitation, but the true thing: the staff, carved from white nhefti, a wood used only for holy objects. The brass frame, crafted by an artisan so long ago that his name had been forgotten. Plates of pol
ished amber, each carved whole from chunks that must have been the size of melons, and each worth the entire treasury of a lesser kingdom, to represent the sun’s overlapping rays. Eight red amber, eight clear yellow. He remembered listening as a child, enraptured, while his father explained that the central plate—the semicircle of gold two handspans wide and nearly as red as blood—represented the Sun, who had founded their lineage on a pretty mortal girl who’d caught his ever-roving eye. It had been mined on a mountain where snow lay thick enough to drown in—

“Niim.”

The woman’s voice did not disturb him this time. Something shifted within him. Suddenly his skin prickled with a chill far deeper than that of the desert night, and the air tasted dry and bitter, like metal gone to rust. He opened his eyes and found the
an-sherrat
in shades of white and gray. Even the fire that smoldered at his feet had gone oddly colorless. More whiteness, glimmering and strange, covered the tent walls and every surface. He touched a mass nearby, and the cold of it stung his fingers. Snow? He had never seen it before, but he had been thinking of it, remembering his father’s tales—At once he understood. “I’m dreaming.”

“Yes. But not in Ina-Karekh.” The templewoman, when he looked around, stood a few feet away. There was something odd about her dreamform, which shimmered now and again as if trying to warp into a different shape, but for the moment she had it under control.

“This is the realm between waking and dreaming,” she said. “Your soul has brought me here again and again, rather than into Ina-Karekh. I believe this is a sign that some part of you has gone out of true.” She paused. “Do you have visions often?”

Wanahomen flinched, and lied. “No.”

She was silent for so long that he knew she saw right through him. But he had no intention of admitting the truth to her.

“It’s no matter,” she said at length. “I mean to teach you how to heal yourself, anyhow.”

He frowned in confusion, wrapping his arms around himself; the cold was going right through his robes. “I don’t like this.”

“Then change it,” she said. “This is your realm.”

“I don’t understand.”

“A Gatherer is one whose mind creates new worlds via the act of dreaming. Doing so is natural to them. Indeed, if not for the balancing power of dreamblood, some would spend
all
their time in the worlds of their mind’s creation. You would call that madness.”

He shuddered, or shivered.
She
seemed unaffected by the cold for some reason, though she wore less. “I’m not a Gatherer.” When she said nothing in reply, he scowled and changed the subject. “How do I leave this place?”

“Create another. As you created this one.”

He had remembered his father’s tales and imagined a dreamscape draped in snow. He decided to try another memory of his childhood: the gardens of Kite-iyan, palace of his mothers and siblings. In his mind’s eye he saw the delicate miniature palms, smelled the fragrance of the vineflowers and the nearby river, felt the soil between his toes—

His toes. He had been wearing sandals, but now his feet were bare. The air was warm. He opened his eyes to Kite-iyan—colorless, shadowed, but unmistakable.

Hanani looked around, nodding in what might have been approval. “Your will is strong. But that has never been in question.” She moved through the garden then, incongruous in her barbarian finery and Hetawa discipline, trailing her fingers over plants, boulders, a stone wall. “What do you see here? Is everything in order?”

He frowned, wondering what in the gods’ names she was talking about. “It’s as I remember it, yes, except for this ugly grayness.”

“Nothing out of place? You’re certain?”

“Of course I’m not certain, I haven’t been here for ten years.” Oh, but how he had missed it! He had played in these gardens as a child, hide-and-find with his brothers and building sand castles with his sisters. He had listened to his mother, in the days long before sickness and age had weakened her voice, sing the songs of the homeland in ancient Sua. He had listened—

A sound. Something in the garden sounded wrong.

Pivoting to orient on the sound, he began to move through the palms and ferns. Water. Yes, the old fountain; he had almost forgotten it. Set into the wall, a sculpted leopard’s head poured water into the open mouths of three cubs, which then spilled into a pool underneath.

“It’s too soft,” he murmured, half to himself. “There’s not enough water, it’s trickling too slowly.”

“Set it right.” In silence, the woman had come to stand beside him. Had she even walked, or simply manifested there?

Wanahomen looked around the fountain, searching for some mechanism, though the fountain had been built centuries before and he’d never known how the damn thing worked. But Hanani touched his arm.

“This is your world,” she said. The odd blurring of her dreamform had stopped; she was wholly focused on him now. He felt obliquely flattered. “Set it right.”

Abruptly Wanahomen understood. He had no need of mechanisms and construction lore when he controlled everything he saw by will alone. So he concentrated on remembering how the flow of water had gone, tuning his imagination. When the sound of the fountain matched the sound of his memory, a shiver passed down his spine that had nothing to do with the flecks of ice still melting in his hair. By pure instinct he looked up, his gaze drawn to the sky. That was wrong too. He had given it the seared, cloudless sky of the deserts around Merik-ren-aferu. Instead he willed a deeper blue, and
thin wisps of moisture that would vanish by midday, but always return at night.

The shiver passed through him again, stronger now, and with it came a sensation of
rightness
so powerful that he caught his breath.

“What you feel is balance,” said Hanani. “Peace. Remember it. When that feeling shifts or fades, come back to this place and do what you just did. Or create a different place; it doesn’t matter. When you invoke your soulname, you shed the artifice of your waking self. When you create a realm in this empty place, everything—all that you see—
is you
. Change it, and change yourself.”

He took a deep breath, savoring the sensation of rightness. It amazed him that he had not noticed its absence before. Did that mean he had been slowly slipping into madness? A frightening thought. “I don’t understand how this works.”

“You don’t need to. No one else does.” When he looked at her in surprise, she smiled, though there was little humor in it. He had the sense that the expression was more of a reflex. “This is dreaming, Prince. These are the realms of the gods. Only the strongest Gatherers have any hope of understanding: they are born to the Goddess’s power in a way the rest of us can only struggle to imitate. This is why they lead us—and why we have such hope for you, Avatar of Hananja.”

Wanahomen frowned at this—but even as he did, he realized the signs had been there all along, as obvious as the circles under the Shadoun’s eyes. He’d thought the Hetawa’s interest in him was purely political. They needed a new figurehead, and military help in ridding themselves of the Kisuati. But now he knew: they actually believed he was
one of them
. Cursed with their magic, untrained and uncontrolled—but blessed with the Goddess’s favor too. To the Hetawa, that was everything.

Wanahomen had never truly believed in Hananja. Oh, he dreamed, and he had seen the power of the Hetawa’s magic, but the
notion that a goddess could possibly care about the tiny creatures who crept into Her dreams seemed ludicrous. The avatar business had always been just another title to him, more meaningless than the rest. But if it was the reason the Hetawa had agreed to aid him, then that title indeed had real power. And what if there was truth in it? What if the power these priests kept saying that he had—power that should have made him a Gatherer—had some other, holier purpose? What was it? And why had She given it to him?

Wanahomen shook his head and got to his feet. He would think on all this later. “So that’s it, then? Now I’ll be able to keep myself from going mad?”

“You can use this method to keep your humors in balance, yes. But stay vigilant, for madness takes many forms, and not all are affected by dreamblood. Your father’s corruption was the proof of that.”

He stiffened, and a sudden sharp wind blew through the garden. “He wasn’t mad.”

“Then you believe he was simply evil? Even we don’t go so far, Prince.”

He turned on her, scowling. “I don’t believe that either.”

“You know what he tried to do. He tortured a Gatherer, twice over, until that Gatherer became a monster. He unleashed those monsters on his enemies and allies alike, sentencing all to fates far, far worse than death—”

“It wasn’t like that!
He
wasn’t like that! He was—”

The garden changed, washing over with bright—though still colorless—sunlight. Now he was in the upper levels of Kite-iyan, standing on the balcony of the sumptuous, many-roomed apartment that once had been his. He looked down at himself and saw the clothing of a different life: his once-favorite leopard-skin loinskirt and a loose shirt of imported silk, the latter overlaid with the jasper collar that his mother had given him for his adulthood ceremony.
His hands were softer, his arms less muscled than they had become in ten years as a hard-living warrior—

“Wanahomen,” said a voice behind him, and his heart went still. Then he turned.

Eninket, now King on Gujaareh’s Throne of Dreams, crossed the room in the broad strides that had been his habit in waking. A smile was on his face, his arms held out to embrace his favorite son. Nearly paralyzed by shock and memory and still-fresh grief, Wanahomen returned the embrace, his eyes welling with tears as the dream supplied so many important details he’d all but forgotten. His father’s scent, sweat and frankincense and clove oil. The tinkle of tiny gold cylinders woven into his hair. The strength of his arms, which back then—even as a young man well past the delusions of youth—Wanahomen had believed could never falter.