Dust of Dreams

flavours were ambitious, indeed, brilliant. Was such creativity implicit in madness? Perhaps.
    Did that possibility engender hope in Gu’Rull? No. Hope was not possible.
    The assassin soared through the night, high above a blasted, virtually lifeless landscape. Like a shred of the murdered moon.
     
    The Wastelands
     
    He was not alone. Indeed, he had no memory of ever having been alone. The notion was impossible, in fact, and that much he understood. As far as he could tell, he was incorporeal, and possessed of the quaint privilege of being able to move from one companion to another almost at will. If they were to die, or somehow find a means of rejecting him, why, he believed he would cease to exist. And he so wanted to stay alive, floating as he did in the euphoric wonder of his friends, his bizarre, disjointed family.
    They traversed a wilderness ragged and forlorn, a place of broken rock, wind-rippled fans of grey sand, screes of volcanic glass that began and ended with random indifference. Hills and ridges clashed in wayward confusion, and not a single tree broke the undulating horizon. The sun overhead was a blurred eye that smeared a path through thin clouds. The air was hot, the wind constant.
    The only nourishment the group had been able to find came from the strange swarms of scaled rodents—their stringy meat tasting of dust—and an oversized breed of rhizan that possessed pouches under their wings swollen with milky water. Day and night capemoths tracked them, waiting ever patient for one to fall and not rise, but this did not seem likely. Flitting from one person to the next, he could sense their innate resolve, their unfailing strength.
    Such fortitude, alas, could not prevent the seemingly endless litany of misery that seemed to comprise the bulk of their conversation.
    ‘What a waste,’ Sheb was saying, clawing at his itching beard. ‘Sink a few wells, pile these stones into houses and shops and whatnot. Then you’d have something worth something. Empty land is useless. I long for the day when it’s all put to use, everything, right over the surface of the world. Cities merging into one—’
    ‘There’d be no farms,’ objected Last, but as always it was a mild, diffident objection. ‘Without farms, nobody eats—’
    ‘Don’t be an idiot,’ snapped Sheb. ‘Of course there’d be farms. Just none of this kind of useless land, where nothing lives but damned rats. Rats in the ground, rats in the air, and bugs, and bones—can you believe all the bones?’
    ‘But I—’
    ‘Be quiet, Last,’ said Sheb. ‘You never got nothing useful to say, ever.’
    Asane then spoke in her frail, quavering voice. ‘No fighting, please. It’s horrible enough without you picking fights, Sheb—’
    ‘Careful, hag, or you’re next.’
    ‘Care to try
me
, Sheb?’ Nappet asked. He spat. ‘Didn’t think so. You talk, Sheb, and that’s all you do. One of these nights, when you’re asleep, I’m gonna cut out your tongue and feed it to the fuckin’ capemoths. Who’d complain? Asane? Breath? Last? Taxilian? Rautos? Nobody, Sheb, we’d all be dancing.’
    ‘Leave me out of this,’ said Rautos. ‘I suffered enough for a lifetime when I was living with my wife and, needless to say, I don’t miss her.’
    ‘Here goes Rautos again,’ snarled Breath. ‘My wife did this, my wife said that. I’m sick of hearing about your wife. She ain’t here, is she? You probably drowned her, and that’s why you’re on the run. You drowned her in your fancy fountain, just held her down, watching as her eyes went wide, her mouth opened and she screamed through the water. You watched and smiled, that’s what you did. I don’t forget, I can’t forget, it was awful. You’re a murderer, Rautos.’
    ‘There
she
goes,’ said Sheb, ‘talking about drowning again.’
    ‘Might cut out
her
tongue, too,’ said Nappet, grinning. ‘Rautos’s, too. No more shit about drowning or wives or complainin’—the rest of you are fine. Last, you don’t say nothing and when you do, it don’t rile nobody. Asane, you mostly know when to keep your mouth shut. And Taxilian hardly ever says nothing anyway. Just us, and that’d be—’
    ‘I see something,’ said Rautos.
    He felt their attentions shift, find focus, and he saw with their eyes a vague smudge on the horizon, something thrusting skyward, too narrow to be a mountain, too massive to be a tree. Still leagues away, rising like a tooth.
    ‘I want to see