Dust of Dreams

hillsides to the left.
    Yan Tovis stood at the shore, not seeing the river sweeping past the toes of her boots. Her gaze had lifted, vision cutting through the mottled atmosphere, to look upon the silent, unlit ruins of a vast city.
    The city.
    Kharkanas.
    The Shake have come home.
    Are we . . . are we home?
    The air belonged in a tomb, a forgotten crypt.
    And she could see, and she knew.
Kharkanas is dead.
    The city is dead.
    Blind Gallan—you lied to us.
    Yan Tovis howled. She fell to her knees, into the numbing water of River Eryn.‘You lied!
You lied!
’ Tears ran from her eyes, streamed down her cheeks. Salty beads spun and glittered as they plunged into the lifeless river.
    Drop by drop.
    To feed the river.
     
    Yedan Derryg led his horse forward, hoofs crunching on the stones, and relaxed the reins so that the beast could drink. He cradled his wounded arm and said nothing as he looked to the right and studied the kneeling, bent-over form of his sister.
    The muscles of his jaw bunched beneath his beard, and he straightened to squint at the distant ruins.
    Pully stumped up beside him. Her young face looked bruised with shock. ‘We . . . walked . . . to this?’
    ‘Blind Gallan gave us a road,’ said Yedan Derryg. ‘But what do the blind hold to more than anything else? Only that which was sweet in their eyes—the last visions they beheld. We followed the road into his memories.’ After a moment, he shrugged, chewed for a time, and then said, ‘What in the Errant’s name did you expect, witch?’
    His horse had drunk enough. Gathering up the reins, he backed the mount from the shore’s edge and then wheeled it round. ‘Sergeant! Spread the soldiers out—the journey has ended. See to the raising of a camp.’ He faced the two witches. ‘You two, bind Twilight’s wounds and feed her. I will be back shortly—’
    ‘Where are you going?’
    Yedan Derryg stared at Pully for a time, and then he set heels to his horse and rode past the witch, downstream along the shoreline.
    A thousand paces further on, a stone bridge spanned the river, and beyond it wound a solid, broad road leading to the city. Beneath that bridge, he saw, there was some kind of logjam, so solid as to form a latticed barrier sufficient to push the river out to the sides, creating elongated swampland skirting this side of the raised road.
    As he drew closer he saw that most of the logjam seemed to consist of twisted metal bars and cables.
    He was forced to slow his mount, picking his way across the silted channel, but at last managed to drive the beast up the bank and on to the road.
    Hoofs kicked loose lumps of muck as he rode across the bridge. Downstream of the barrier the river ran still, slightly diminished and cutting a narrower, faster channel. On the flats to either side there was more rusted, unidentifiable wreckage.
    Once on the road, he fixed his gaze on the towering gate ahead, but something in its strange, alien architecture made his head spin, so he studied the horizon to the right—where massive towers rose from sprawling, low buildings. He was not certain, but he thought he could detect thin, ragged streamers of smoke from the tops of those towers. After a time, he decided that what he was seeing was theeffect of the wind and updraughts from those chimneys pulling loose ashes from deep pits at the base of the smokestacks.
    On the road before him, here and there, he saw faint heaps of corroded metal, and the wink of jewellery—corpses had once crowded this approach, but the bones had long since crumbled to dust.
    The mottled light cast sickly sheens on the outer walls of the city—and those stones, he could now see, were blackened with soot, a thick crust that glittered like obsidian.
    Yedan Derryg halted before the gate. The way was open—no sign of barriers remained beyond torn hinges reduced to corroded lumps. He could see a broad street beyond the arch, and dust on the cobbles black as crushed coal.
    ‘Walk on, horse.’
    And Prince Yedan Derryg rode into Kharkanas.

Book Three

Only the Dust
Will Dance

 
     

The dead have found me in my dreams
Fishing beside lakes and in strange houses
That could be homes for lost families
In all the pleasures of completeness
And I wander through their natural company
In the soft comforts of contentment.
The dead greet me with knowing ease
And regard nothing the forsaken awakening
That abandons me in this new solitude
Of eyes flickering open and curtains