Dust of Dreams

blasted, unrelieved emptiness revealed in the toneless light of the rising sun. ‘Where then,’ she muttered, ‘are my hands of fire?’ She turned to her two exhausted companions. ‘You understand, don’t you? I cannot do this alone. To lead your kind, I need my own kind. I need to look into eyes little different from my own. I need to see their aches come the dawn, the sleep still in their faces—spirits fend, I need to see them cough the night loose and then piss a steaming river!’
    The K’Chain Che’Malle regarded her with their reptilian eyes, unblinking, unhuman.
    Kalyth’s beseeching frustration trickled away, and she fixed her attention on Sag’Churok, wondering what he had seen—those fourteen undead Jaghut, the battle that, it was now clear, completely eradicated their pursuers. This time, anyway.Was there something different in the K’ell Hunter? Something that might be . . . unease?
    ‘You wanted a Destriant,’ she snapped. ‘If you thought that meant a doe-eyed rodara, it must finally be clear just how wrong you were. What I am given, I intend to use—do you understand?’ Still, for all the bravado, she wished she had the power to bind those Jaghut to her will. She wished they were with them right now.
Still not human, but, well, closer. Yes, getting closer.
She snorted and turned back to study the south.
    ‘No point in waiting round here, is there? We continue on.’
    ‘
Destriant,
’ Sag’Churok whispered in her mind, ‘
we are running out of time. Our enemy draws ever closer—no, not hunting the three of us. They hunt the Rooted, our final refuge in this world.
’
    ‘We’re all the last of our kind,’ she said, ‘and you must have realized by now, in this world and in every other, there is no such thing as
refuge
.’
The world finds you. The world hunts you down.
    Time, once more, to ride Gunth Mach as if she were nothing more than a beast, Sag’Churok lumbering at their side, massive iron blades catching glares from the sun in blinding spasms. To watch small creatures start from the knotted grasses and bound away in panic. Plunging through clouds of midges driven apart by the prows of reptilian heads and broad heaving chests.
    To feel the wind’s touch as if it was a stranger’s caress, startling in its unwelcome familiarity, reminding her again and again that she still lived, that she was part of the world’s meat, forever fighting the decay dogging its trail. None of it seemed real, as if she was simply waiting for reality to catch up to her. Each day delivered the same message, and each day she met it with the same bemused confusion and diffident wariness.
    These K’Chain Che’Malle felt none of that, she believed. They did not think as she did. Everything was a taste, a smell—thoughts and feelings, the sun’s very light, all flowing in a swarm of currents. Existence was an ocean. One could skate upon the surface, clinging to the shallows, or one could plunge into the depths, until the skull creaked with the pressure. She knew they saw her and her kind as timid, frightened by the mystery of unplumbed depths. Creatures floundering in fears, terrified of drowning knee-deep in truths.
    But your Matron wants you to slide into the shallows, to find my world of vulnerabilities—to find out what we do to defeat them. You seek new strategies for living, you seek our secret of success. But you don’t understand, do you? Our secret is annihilation. We annihilate everyone else until none are left, and then we annihilate each other. Until we too are gone.
    Such a wondrous secret. Well, she would give it to them, if she could. Her grand lessons of survival, and only she would hear the clamouring howl of the ghosts storming her soul.
    Riding Gunth Mach’s back, Kalyth’s hands itched. Destinies were drawing close.
I will find my hands of fire, and we will use you, Sag’Churok. You and Gunth Mach and all your kind. We will show you the horrors of the modern world you so want to be a part of.
    She thought of their dread enemy, the faceless killers of the K’Chain Che’Malle. She wondered at this genocidal war, and suspected it was, in its essence, no different from the war humans had been engaged in for all time.
It is the same, but it is also different. It is . . . naïve.
    With what was coming, with what she would bring . . . Kalyth felt a deep, sickening stab.
    Of pity.
     
    In an unbroken line from each mother to every daughter, memory survived,