The Stuff of Dreams (5 page)

But if both of them were D, just how would the real one defeat the false? The glittering sword reflected in an unseen mirror would doubtless cut both of them clear to bone.

Step by step, the first D advanced. His opponent followed suit. Though it may have been her imagination, Nan thought she caught a cruel smile on the other D’s face. It was only a second later that the same face donned a perplexed expression. Without breaking his stance, D had turned his back to him. His foe didn’t move. The thread linking the false to the true had suddenly been severed.

“Hey, what’s wrong?” a voice spat mockingly. “Why don’t you try getting some help from the other me?” the voice spoke to the other D—the one frozen behind the Hunter’s back.

Nan got the impression that the words had spilled from the end of D’s left hand, and no sooner had her eyes snapped wide with shock than the other D kicked off the ground without a sound. His blade ripped through the air, snarling like the breaking surf.

Making no attempt to parry that slash, the black darkness of D’s coat spread its wings before the attacker. A blow that should’ve severed bone merely ripped the cloth on the Hunter’s sleeve, and was no match for the blade that shot up from below and ran deep into the torso of the shaken and despairing attacker.

D dodged the body as it dropped in a bloody mist, and backed away. Though the corpse was the very image of him, it didn’t seem to stir any deep emotion in the young man. As he put his sword away and turned to Nan, his face was completely devoid of sentiment.

“D, what in the world—” Nan finally managed to say, but the Hunter cut her short.

“Why did you come here?”

Cold was the only way to describe his question. Her eyes were trained on the shafts above her. All movement had stopped. “I thought I’d talk to you . . . about my dreams, since we never got to finish our conversation back in the bar.” Nan’s voice caught in her throat. Though she was a child of the Frontier, she’d never seen someone die up close like that before.

“The sun will be setting soon. You’d better go home.”

D’s curt dismissal finally drew a recognizable human emotion out of Nan’s heart. Anger.

“You’re awful. After I came all the way here—” she began to say, but no further words came from her mouth. Just what did she mean to this Hunter? Though she was fully aware it wasn’t much, she certainly didn’t want to be reminded of that fact.

“The night doesn’t belong to mankind yet,” D said quietly, as if the deadly encounter moments earlier had been merely a dream.

“That’s not a problem in our village. I think . . . I can’t say for sure, but it really should be safe. In the century since the last of our Nobility disappeared, no one’s ever fallen victim at night.”

“Maybe tonight someone will.”

Nan was dumbstruck. Her eyes were hot and they stung, though this time not from sweat. “I’m going home,” she said, trying to sound self-assured, even as she had little confidence it’d come out that way. Her voice quavered with anger.
Just turn and walk away and that’ll do it
, she thought. She’d dreamt of him two nights more than the rest of the town. What was that supposed to mean? Didn’t that count for anything with this young man?

Nan raised her face. Almost glaring, she said to D, “I have to finish telling you what I didn’t get a chance to say back in the bar. You want to know why I’m concerned about Sybille? Because I used to be in the hospital room next to hers.” And having said it all in a single breath, she turned herself around and walked away.

Going out into the corridor, Nan was on her way down the stairs when the tears spilled out. She tried to think about something else. Kane, a childhood friend who lived just a few houses from there, came to mind quickly enough. Though she could picture his face, no particular emotion was attached to his memory.

Outside was a land of darkness. At a loss for words, Nan came to a standstill and hugged her own shoulders. The autumn night had been lying in wait for her, armed with a terrible chill. It was a coldness that pierced her to the very bone, and she couldn’t recall another like it. Without knowing why, Nan looked up to the heavens. Stars glittered in the night sky, each as sharp as the point of an awl. The wind whisked across a grove in a scene that hadn’t changed at all since she was a child. It greeted her the same way now.
It’ll be hard-cider season soon
, Nan thought hazily. But before she knew it, the chill was gone and she was left all alone.

.

III

.

Old Mrs. Sheldon’s house was at the west end of the orchards. All of the evergreen grass bowed in unison with the breeze, changing the shape of the ground and hills every time they bent. The dilapidated old house with a weathervane on its red roof looked like the perfect place for a one-hundred-and-twenty-year-old crone to pass her lonely later years.

Mrs. Sheldon was sitting in a rocking chair on her front porch. Years must’ve passed since the last time anybody came to see her. Aside from the fact that her last callers had been schoolchildren, the old woman couldn’t recall anything about that visit. From time to time the face of a gray-haired old man flitted through her mind, but she didn’t understand why it made her feel strangely nostalgic. The fact that he was the man whose gravestone stood on the top of the little hill out back was something she’d long since forgotten. Thanks to a cyborg-conversion procedure she’d undergone more than a century earlier, all she needed now was to have her nutrient-enriched blood changed once every thirty years. Perhaps that was the reason people from town rarely called on her. That morning, as the old woman rocked back and forth for the two thousandth some-odd time, she saw someone for the first time in who-knew-how-many days.

Dismounting, D headed over to the old woman sitting in her antiquated but sturdy-looking rocking chair. “Mrs. Sheldon?” he asked.

“That’s me. And you are?” the woman replied without a second’s delay, watching D’s face for a while before she smiled at him. “I’ve lost my touch. Back in the old days, I used to catch everyone off-guard when I shot back an answer real quick like that, whereas now they all take me for some sleepy old dotard who don’t know which way is up no more.”

“I came out here to ask you about something. They call me D.”

“A name like that seems to say you come from somewhere else, and you’ll be moving on soon. Of course, before you turn to leave, I reckon a lot of folks will be dying or crying. Step inside.” Slowly getting up out of her seat, the old woman opened the door before her.

The interior was well-kept. Motes of dust dancing up in the morning light glittered like flecks of gold.

“Have a seat over there,” the old woman said, indicating a chair as she headed for the kitchen. “I’ll fix us some tea.”

“Thank you.”

The old woman disappeared, letting the door bang shut on its own, but soon enough she returned with a pair of steaming cups on a tray. “I got this from a merchant from the Capital fifty years ago. You know, I’d never use it for any of the folks from town. It’s just for special visitors from far away.”

“How do you know I’ve come far?” D asked, looking not at the cup her light brown and thoroughly creased hand had set in front of him, but at a face that seemed wrought entirely with wrinkles.

“You figure any man with the look you’ve got in your eye could stay put in just one village?” Pounding the small of her back a few times, the old woman settled into a chair. “You see, human beings pull around a whole heap of chains that the eye can’t see. The other end of ’em is set in the earth, so folks can walk a mile or two, but they just can’t go no further than that. Sometimes the chains are named ‘home’ or ‘belongings,’ and sometimes we call ’em ‘sweetheart’ or ‘memories.’ When we’re young, we try to pull ’em out of the ground, but ten or twenty years go by and those chains just get thicker, and you’ve got more of ’em than ever. And when that happens, all you can do is set yourself down wherever seems proper. Once you do that, those chains start looking like solid gold to the human eye. What most people don’t know is that it’s just a thin layer of gold plating. See, the good Lord made it so humans can’t see ’em for what they really are. You follow what I’m saying? What it comes down to is, people who aren’t like that—whose eyes aren’t clouded, and don’t have a single chain on ’em —they must be made by someone other than God. Now, I wonder who
that
could be?” And with that she cast an all-knowing gaze directly at D and set her cup down on the table. “I’m sure you’re in a hurry, so I thank you for indulging me in a cup of tea and listening to the ramblings of a foolish old woman. You’d probably cut anyone else’s head off for saying what I did, so I reckon I have bragging rights there.”

“Actually, I’d like to hear about the days when humans and Nobility coexisted,” D said when he finally opened his mouth. “Anything at all. If you’d be so kind as to tell me about that time.”

The old woman squinted a bit and folded her hands on top of the table. After sitting like that for several seconds without moving, she said, “There’s too much to tell. So much that it’d be the same as me not telling you a blessed thing. But the lot of ’em went somewhere far away back when I was just a wee toddler. No one knows whatever became of ’em all. And after that, there was only one time they ever came back—and that was thirty years ago. If something’s going on here now, I suppose that’s the cause. Looks like when you come right down to it, Nobles can’t change what they are.”

“A girl was bitten,” D said. “She sleeps even now, never aging. And as she sleeps, she makes other people dream about me.”

The old woman picked up her cup. When she tipped it to her mouth, the steam seemed to billow from her lips. Pulling the cup the tiniest bit away, she said, “Thirty years ago, that girl was found lying in the woods just north of the village. There was a pair of bite marks on her neck. Truth be known, they were supposed to banish her on the spot, but they didn’t. It’s still anybody’s guess which course of action would’ve been better. And she’d never met you before, is that right?”

D nodded.

Gazing steadily at the Hunter’s face, the old woman continued, “As good as you look,
I suppose she’d want to see you even if she couldn’t
. But, you know . . .” And then the old woman caught herself.

D didn’t say a word.

“If it was me,” she continued, “and I’d met you a million times, I still wouldn’t want to dream about you because in the end, I’d wind up crying—no two ways about it. I doubt you can find a woman on the Frontier who’s not used to shedding tears, but it doesn’t get any easier—it still hurts just as much every time we do it.”

And yet, Sybille dreamt of him. A man she’d never met.

“What kind of man was the Noble who bit Sybille?”

This time, D’s question brought results.

“There was someone who actually spotted him. Sybille’s grandmother. She passed away twenty years ago, but she used
to tell people every single day how she’d seen
him
while she was searching for Sybille. Why, she made me listen to it so much I practically needed me a set of earplugs. Yes, he was a giant of a man dressed in black.” And there the old woman stopped. Her eyes held a mysterious spark, and the spark became twin beams of light that could have bored a hole through D’s face. “As for his features . . . he looked too good to be of this world—like you, you know.”

D brought the cup to his mouth. His eyes seemed be gazing at Old Mrs. Sheldon, watching something else, and not focused on anything all at the same time.

“Why did he have to bite Sybille?” the old woman asked, the light in her eyes growing more intense, flickering with a touch of madness. “Why did he have to go and make her dream? And what kind of dreams did he give her, anyway?”

Of course, there were no answers so D answered with another question, because, after all, that was the whole reason he’d come. “Who was closest to the girl?”

“Let me see . . . Ai-Ling.”

“Where is she?”

“Her home’s a farmhouse a little over a mile southwest of here. I wager she’ll be around at this hour.”

D stood up, prepared to leave.

“Wait—” the old woman said, and the Hunter stopped. “Have another cup of tea, won’t you? I don’t want to let my first chance at conversation in a long time run off so easily. For all I know, it may be another ten years before I get a chance to chat with anyone again. The children don’t even come out here to catch the sticky bugs anymore. This may be a peaceful village, but I’m lonely.”

D reluctantly took his seat again.

“Not only are you handsome, but you listen to people, too. Someday I’m sure you’ll settle down somewhere. Find yourself a good wife.” And leaving him with those words, the old woman went into the kitchen.

“A peaceful village, isn’t it?” D muttered.

“That it is,” a hoarse voice responded from his left hand as it rested on his knee.

“Is it a good village?”

“That I can’t tell.”

“We’re in the same boat then,” D said.

“Just because it’s peaceful doesn’t mean I’d call it
good
. The same can be said for villages that aren’t so peaceful. There’s nothing good in this world. Not in Nobles, or in humans—or in you, for that matter.”

D turned his face to look out the window. The plains changed from minute to minute; each and every verdant leaf was charged with the vitality of morning, declaring that there was still more of the blazing season of fall to come. In contrast to the white light that surrounded him, D alone was a wintry shadow.

Accompanied by a faint aroma, the old woman returned. “Here you go!” she said, setting down his cup. In the middle of the cup of thin, amber fluid floated a single blue petal. The petal was like a tiny blue sea.

D brought the drink to his mouth with his left hand. Needless to say, he kept his right hand free to be ready for any sudden attacks. Though his left hand stopped, it didn’t seem like an interruption to his fluid movements.

“What is it?” the old woman asked, smiling happily.

“Drink some,” D said.

“Huh?”