Dust of Dreams

Gesler snarled. ‘I’m the Mortal Sword—’
    ‘Good. Glad we got that settled. Now get her to cook us something—’
    ‘Oh, is that what Destriants do, then? Cook for us?’
    ‘I’m hungry and I got no food!’
    ‘Then ask her. Politely.’
    Stormy scowled at Kalyth.
    ‘Trader tongue,’ Gesler said.
    Instead, Stormy pointed at his mouth and then patted his stomach.
    Kalyth said, ‘You eat.’
    ‘Hungry, aye.’
    ‘Food,’ she said, nodding, and then pointed to a small leather satchel to one side.
    Gesler laughed.
    Kalyth then rose. ‘They come.’
    ‘Who come?’ Gesler asked.
    ‘K’Chain Che’Malle. Army. Soon . . . war.’
    At that moment Gesler felt the trembling ground underfoot. Stormy did the same and as one they both turned to face north.
    Fener’s holy crotch.

Chapter Twenty-Three
    I am the face you would not own
Though you carve your place
Hidden in the crowd
     

Mine are the features you never saw
As you stack your thin days
In the tick of tonight’s straw
     

My legion is the unexpected
A forest turned to masts
Grass blades to swords
     

And this is the face you would not own
A brother with bad news
Hiding in the crowd
    H ARBINGER

F ISHER

    S
he’d had an uncle, a prince high on the rungs but, alas, the wrong ladder. He had attempted a coup, only to find that all his agents were someone else’s agents. Was it this conceit that had led to his death? Which choice made it all inevitable? Queen Abrastal had thought many times on the man’s fate. The curious thing was, he’d actually made his escape, out from the city, all the way to the eastern border, in fact. But on the morning of his last ride, a farmer had woken with crippling rheumatism in his legs. This man was fifty-seven years old and, for thirty-odd years, each month through the summers and autumns he had taken the harvest of his own family’s plot up to the village a league and a half away. And he had done this by pulling a two-wheeled cart.
    He must have awoken that morning in the turgid miasma of his own mortality. Wearing down, wearing out. And studying the mists wreathing the low hills and glades edging the fields, he must have held a silence in his hands, and in his heart. We pass on. All that was effortless becomes an ordeal, yet the mind remains lucid, trapped inside a failing body. Though the morning promised a fine day, night’s cold darkness remained lodged within him.
    He had three sons but all were in the levy and off fighting somewhere. Rumours of some uprising; the old man knew little about it and cared even less. Except for the fact that his sons were not with him. In motions stiff with pain he had hitched up the mule to a rickety flatbed wagon. He could as easily have chosen the cart, but the one mule he owned that wasn’t too old or lame was a strangely long-bodied specimen, too long for the cart’s yoke and spar.
    The efforts of preparation, concluding with loading the flatbed, had taken most of the morning, even with his half-blind wife’s help. And when he set out on the road, quirting the beast along, the mists had burned off and the sun was high and strong. The stony track leading to the section road was more suited to a cart than a wagon, and so the going was slow, and upon reaching the section track and drawing close to the high road, he had the sun in his eyes.
    On this day, in a heap of stones in the corner of a field just next to the high road, a civil war was erupting in a wild beehive. And only a few moments before the farmer arrived, the hive swarmed.
    The old man, half-dozing, had been listening to the rapid approach of a rider, but there was room on the road—it had been built for moving armies to and from the border, after all—and so he was not particularly concerned as those drumming hoofs drew ever closer. Yes, the rider was coming fast. Likely some garrison messenger carrying bad news and all such news was bad, as far as the farmer was concerned. He’d had a moment of worry over his sons, and then the swarm lifted from the side of the road and spun in a frenzied cloud to engulf his mule.
    The creature panicked, bolting forward with a bleat. Such was its strength, born of terror, that the old man was flung backward over the low seat back, losing his grip on the traces. The wagon jumped under him and then slewed to one side, spilling him from it. He struck the road in a cloud of dust and crazed bees.
    The rider, on his third horse since fleeing the city, arrived at this