Dust of Dreams

or, as it turned out, was unwilling to answer. Questions and unknowns were the deadliest foes for one such as Mortal Sword Krughava, who thrived on certainty regardless of its relationship to reality. He could see how she was rocked, all purchase suddenly uncertain beneath her boots; and the way her left hand twitched—as if eager for the grip of her sword, the sure promise of the heavy iron blade; and the way she instinctively straightened—as if awaiting the weight of her chain surcoat—for this surely was news that demanded she wear armour. But he had struck her unawares, in her vulnerability, and this might well constitute its own version of betrayal, and he knew to be careful at that moment, to display for her a greater helplessness than she herself might be feeling; to unveil in his eyes and in his seemingly unconscious gestures enormous measures of need and need for reassurance. To, in short, fling himself like a child upon her stolid majesty.
    If this made him into something despicable, a dissembler, a creature of intrigue and cunning manipulation, well, these were dire charges indeed. He would have to consider them, as objectively as possible, and withhold no judgement no matter how self-damning, no matter how condign.
    The Shield Anvils of old, of course, would not have bothered. But absence of judgement in others could only emerge from absence of judgement in oneself, a refusal to challenge one’s own assumptions and beliefs. Imagine the atrocities such inhuman postures invited! No, that was a most presumptuous game and not one he would play.
    Besides, giving the Mortal Sword what she needed most at that moment—all his apparently instinctive nudges to remind her of her noble responsibilities—was in fact the proper thing to do. It would serve no one to have Krughava display extreme distress or, Wolves forbid, outright panic. They were sailing into war, and they had lost their Destriant. Matters were fraught enough in bare facts alone.
    She needed to steel herself, and she needed to be seen doing so by her Shield Anvil in this moment of privacy, and in the wake of presumed success she would then find the necessary confidence to repeat the stern ritual before the brothers and sisters of the Order.
    But that latter scene must wait, for the time had come to greet the Bolkando emissaries, and Tanakalian was comforted in the solid crunch of his and her boots on the strand of crushed coral that served as a beach in this place of landing. One pace behind the Mortal Sword—and while curiosity and wonder at the Destriant’s absence might trouble the crew of the skiff and the captain and all the others aboard the
Listral
, now firmly anchored in the broad disc of a slow eddy in the river mouth, neither Krughava nor her Shield Anvil seemed to be displaying anything untoward as they set out for the elaborate field tent of the Bolkando. And such was their faith in their commanders that minds settled back into peaceful repose.
    Could such observations be seen as cynical? He thought not. Comportment had value at times like these. There was no point in distressing the members of the Order, only to pointedly delay resolution until after this parley.
    The air was sultry, heat seething up from the blinding white strand. The shattered carapaces of crabs were baked red by the sun, forming a ragged row at the fringe of the high-water line. Even the gulls looked beaten half-senseless where they perched on the bones of uprooted mangrove trunks.
    The two Perish worked their way up the verge and set out across a silted floodplain that spread away in a broad fan from the river on their left. Bright green tufts of seasonal grasses dotted the expanse. A long column of Bolkando sentries stood lining the bank of the river, about twenty paces back from row upon row of short, tapering logs stacked in the mud. Oddly, those sentries, tall, dark-skinned and barbaric in their spotted hide cloaks, were all facing the river and so presenting their backs to the two Perish guests.
    A moment later Tanakalian was startled to see some of those logs explode into thrashing motion. He tugged the eyeglass from its holster and slowed to examine the river bank through the magnifying lenses.
Lizards. Enormous lizards—no wonder the Bolkando warriors have their backs to us!
    If Krughava had noticed anything of the scene at the river bank, she gave no sign.
    The Bolkando pavilion sprawled vast enough to encompass scores of rooms. The flaps of the