Dust of Dreams

chamber, such a scene made sense now to Taxilian. The machine mind had come to its inevitable conclusion. It had delivered the only possible justice.
    If only he could awaken it once more, perfection would return to the world.
     
    Taxilian could sense nothing, of course, of the ghost’s horror at such notions. Justice without compassion was the destroyer of morality, a slayer blind to empathy.
    Leave such things to nature, to the forces not even the gods can control. If you must hold to a faith, Taxilian, then hold to that one. Nature may be slow to act, but it will find a balance—and that is a process not one of us can stop, for it belongs to time itself.
    And, the ghost now knew, he had a thing about
time
.
     
    They came upon vast chambers crowded with vats in which grew fungi and a host of alien plants that seemed to need no light. They stumbled upon seething nests of scaled rats—orthen—that scattered squealing from the lantern’s harsh light.
    Dormitories in rows upon rows, assembly halls and places of worship. Work stalls and low-ceilinged expanses given over to arcane manufacture—stacks of metal, each one identical, proof of frightening precision. Armouries bearing ranks of strange weapons, warehouses with stacked packages of foodstuffs, ice-rooms filled with butchered, frozen meat hanging from hooks. Niches in which were stored bolts of cloth, leather, and scaled hides. Rooms cluttered with gourds arranged on shelves.
    A city indeed, awaiting them.
    And still, Taxilian led them ever upward. Like a man possessed.
    ______
    A riot had erupted. Armed camps of islanders raged back and forth along the shoreline, while mobs plunged into the forests, weapons slick and dripping, into the makeshift settlements, conducting pathetic looting and worse among the poorest refugees. Murder, rapes, and everywhere, flames lifting orange light into the air. Before dawn, the fires had ignited the forest, and hundreds more died in smoke and heat.
    Yan Tovis had drawn her Shake down on to the stony shoreline, where numbers alone kept the worst of the killers at bay.
    The ex-prisoners of Second Maiden Fort had not taken well the rumour—sadly accurate—that the Queen of Twilight was preparing to lead them into an unknown world, a realm of darkness, a road without end. That, if she failed and lost her way, would find them all abandoned, trapped for ever in a wasteland that had never known a sun’s light, a sun’s blessed warmth.
    A few thousand islanders had taken refuge among the Shake. The rest, she knew, were busy dying or killing each other amidst grey smoke and raging flames. Standing facing the ravaged slope with its morbid tree-stumps and destroyed huts, her face smeared with ash and sweat, her eyes streaming from the smoke, Yan Tovis struggled to find her courage, her will to take command once more. She was exhausted, in her bones and in her soul. Waves of ash-filled heat gusted against her. Distant screams drifted through the air, cutting through the surly growl of the motley rabble edging ever closer.
    Someone was pushing through the crowd behind her, snarling curses and dire warnings. A moment later, Skwish scrambled forward. ‘There’s near a thousand gulpin’ down o’er there, Queen. When they get their nerve, they’re gonna carve inta us—we got a line a ex-guards an’ the like betwixt ’em an’ us. You better do somethin’ and do it fast . . . Highness.’
    She could hear renewed fighting, somewhere down the beach. Twilight frowned. Something about that sound . . . ‘Do you hear that?’ she asked the witch cowering at her side.
    ‘Wha?’
    ‘That’s an organized advance, Skwish.’ And she pushed past the old woman, making her way towards that steady clash of iron, the shouts of commands being given, the shrieks and cries of dying looters. Even in the uncertain flickering light from the forest fire, she could see how the mob was curling back—a wedge of Letherii soldiers was pushing through, drawing ever closer.
    Twilight halted.
Yedan Derryg. And his troop. My brother—damn him!
    She saw her ex-guards shift uneasily as the wedge cut through the last looters. They did not know if the newcomers would attack them next—if they did, the poorly armed islanders would be cut to pieces. Twilight hurried, determined to throw herself between the two forces.
    She heard Yedan snap an order, and saw the perfect precision of his thirty or so soldiers wheeling round, the wedge dispersing,