Dust of Dreams

she had been for most of what must have been an entire day, maybe longer, as they wandered this terrible world.
    Windswept desert stretched out in all directions. The road they walked cut across it straight as a spear. Here and there, off to one side, they spied fields of stones that might have once been dwellings, and the remnants of sun-fired mud-brick pen or garden walls, but nothing grew here, nothing at all. The air was acrid, smelling of burning pitch—and that was not too surprising, as black pillars of smoke stalked the horizons.
    On the road itself, constructed of crushed rock and, possibly, glass, they came upon scenes of devastation. Burnt-out hulks of carriages and wagons, scorched clothing and shattered furniture. Fire-blackened corpses, limbs curled like tree roots and hands like bird feet, mouths agape and hollow sockets staring at the empty sky. Twisted pieces of metal lay scattered about, none remotely identifiable to Grub.
    Breathing made his throat sore, and the bitter chill of the morning had given way to blistering heat. Eyes stinging, feet dragging, he followed in Sinn’s wake until her shadow lengthened to a stretched-out shape painted in pitch, and to his eyes it was as if he was looking down upon the woman she would one day become.He realized that his fear of her was growing—and her silence was making it worse.
    ‘Will you now be mute to me as well?’ he asked her.
    She glanced back over her shoulder. Momentarily.
    It would soon grow cold again—he’d lost too much fluid to survive a night of shivering. ‘We need to camp, Sinn. Make a fire—’
    She barked a laugh, but did not turn round. ‘Fire,’ she said. ‘Yes.
Fire.
Tell me, Grub, what do you believe in?’
    ‘What?’
    ‘Some things are more real than others. For everyone. Each one, different, always different. What’s the most real to you?’
    ‘We can’t survive this place, that’s what’s most real, Sinn. We need water. Food. Shelter.’
    He saw her nod. ‘That’s what this warren is telling us, Grub. Just that. What you believe has to do with surviving. It doesn’t go any further, does it? What if I told you that it used to be that for almost everybody? Before the cities, before people invented being rich.’
    ‘Being rich? I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
    ‘Before some people found other things to believe in. Before they made those things more real than anything else. Before they decided it was all right even to kill for them. Or enslave people. Or keep them stupid and poor.’ She shot him a look. ‘Did you know I had a Tanno tutor? A Spiritwalker.’
    ‘I don’t know anything about them. Seven Cities priests, right?’
    ‘He once told me that an untethered soul can drown in wisdom.’
    ‘What?’
    ‘Wisdom grows by stripping away beliefs, until the last tether is cut, and suddenly you float free. Only, because your eyes are wide open, you see right away that you can’t float in what you’re in. You can only sink. That’s why the meanest religions work so hard at keeping their followers ignorant. Knowledge is poison. Wisdom is depthless. Staying ignorant keeps you in the shallows. Every Tanno one day takes a final spiritwalk. They cut the last tether, and the soul can’t go back. When that happens, the other Tannos mourn, because they know that the spiritwalker has drowned.’
    His mouth was too dry, his throat too sore, but even if that had been otherwise, he knew he would have nothing to say to any of that. He knew, after all, about his own ignorance.
    ‘Look around, Grub. See? There are no gifts here. Look at these stupid bodies and their stupid wagonloads of furniture. The last thing that was real for them, the only thing, was
fire
.’
    His attention was drawn to a dust-cloud, rising in a slanted shroud of gold. Something was on a track that would converge with this road. A herd? An army?
    ‘Fire is not the gift you think it is, Grub.’
    ‘We’ll die tonight without it.’
    ‘We need to stay on this road.’
    ‘Why?’
    ‘To find out where it leads.’
    ‘We’ll die here, then.’
    ‘This land, Grub,’ she said, ‘has generous memories.’
     
    The sun was low by the time the army arrived. Horse-drawn chariots and massive wagons burdened with plunder. The warriors were dark-skinned, tall and thin, bedecked in bronze armour. Grub thought there might be a thousand of them, maybe more. He saw spearmen, archers, and what must be the equivalent of heavy infantry, armed