Dust of Dreams

Breathing made his throat sore, and the bitter chill of the morning had given way to blistering heat. Eyes stinging, feet dragging, he followed in Si

‘Will you now be mute to me as well?’ he asked her.

She glanced back over her shoulder. Momentarily.

It would soon grow cold again-he’d lost too much fluid to survive a night of shivering. ‘We need to camp, Si

She barked a laugh, but did not turn round. ‘Fire,’ she said. ‘Yes. Fire. Tell me, Grub, what do you believe in?’

‘What?’

‘Some things are more real than others. For everyone. Each one, different, always different. What’s the most real to you?’

‘We can’t survive this place, that’s what’s most real, Si

He saw her nod. ‘That’s what this warren is telling us, Grub. Just that. What you believe has to do with surviving. It doesn’t go any further, does it? What if I told you that it used to be that for almost everybody? Before the cities, before people invented being rich.’

‘Being rich? I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

‘Before some people found other things to believe in. Before they made those things more real than anything else. Before they decided it was all right even to kill for them. Or enslave people. Or keep them stupid and poor.’ She shot him a look. ‘Did you know I had a Ta

‘I don’t know anything about them. Seven Cities priests, right?’

‘He once told me that an untethered soul can drown in wisdom.’

‘What?’

‘Wisdom grows by stripping away beliefs, until the last tether is cut, and suddenly you float free. Only, because your eyes are wide open, you see right away that you can’t float in what you’re in. You can only sink. That’s why the meanest religions work so hard at keeping their followers ignorant. Knowledge is poison. Wisdom is depthless. Staying ignorant keeps you in the shallows. Every Ta

His mouth was too dry, his throat too sore, but even if that had been otherwise, he knew he would have nothing to say to any of that. He knew, after all, about his own ignorance.

‘Look around, Grub. See? There are no gifts here. Look at these stupid bodies and their stupid wagonloads of furniture. The last thing that was real for them, the only thing, was fire.’

His attention was drawn to a dust-cloud, rising in a slanted shroud of gold. Something was on a track that would converge with this road. A herd? An army?

‘Fire is not the gift you think it is, Grub.’

‘We’ll die tonight without it.’

‘We need to stay on this road.’

‘Why?’

‘To find out where it leads.’

‘We’ll die here, then.’

‘This land, Grub,’ she said, ‘has generous memories.’

The sun was low by the time the army arrived. Horse-drawn chariots and massive wagons burdened with plunder. The warriors were dark-ski

They cut across the track of the road as if blind to it, and as Grub stared he was startled to realize that the figures and their horses and chariots were vaguely transparent. They are ghosts. ‘These,’ he said to Si

‘Yes.’

‘Can they see us?’

She pointed at one chariot that had thundered past only to turn round at the urging of the man behind the driver, and was now drawing up opposite them. ‘See him-he’s a priest. He can’t see us, but he senses us. Holiness isn’t always in a place, Grub. Sometimes it’s what’s passing through.’

He shivered, hugged himself. ‘Stop this, Si

‘No, we’re not. We’re’-and she laughed-‘more like divine messengers.’

The priest had leapt down from the chariot-Grub could now see the old blood splashed across the spokes of the high wheels, and saw where blades were fitted in times of battle, projecting out from the hubs. A mass charge by such instruments of war would deliver terrible slaughter.

The hawk-faced man was edging closer, groping like a blind man.

Grub made to step back but Si

‘Don’t,’ she murmured. ‘Let him touch the divine, Grub. Let him receive his gift of wisdom.’

The priest had raised his hands. Beyond, the entire army had halted, and Grub saw what must be a king or commander-perched on a huge, ornate chariot-drawing up to observe the strange antics of his priest.

‘We can give him no wisdom,’ Grub said. ‘Si

‘Don’t be a fool. Just stand here. Wait. We don’t have to do anything.’

Those two outstretched hands came closer. The palms were speckled with dried blood. There were, however, no calluses upon them. Grub hissed, ‘He is no warrior.’

‘No,’ Si

The palms hovered, slipped forward, and unerringly settled upon their brows.

Grub saw the priest’s eyes widen, and he knew at once that the man was seeing through-through to this road and its litter of destruction-to an age either long before or yet to come: the age in which Grub and Si

The priest lurched back and howled.

Si

Grub did not think he had any tears left in him. He was wrong.

The army and its priest and its king all fled, wild as the wind. But, before they did, slaves appeared and raised a cairn of stones. Which they then surrounded with offerings: jars of beer and wine and honey, dates, figs, loaves of bread and two throat-cut goats spilling blood into the sand.

The feast was ghostly, but Si

‘And he has done that, has he not, Grub? Oh, he has done that.’

The Errant stepped into the vast, impossible chamber. Gone now the leisure of reminiscences, the satisfied stirring of brighter days long since withered colourless, almost dead. Knuckles trailed a step behind him, as befitted his role of old and his role to come.

She was awake, hunched over a scattering of bones. Trapped in games of chance and mischance, the brilliant, confounding offerings of Sechul Lath, Lord of the Hold of Chance-the Toppler, the Co

The Errant walked up and with one boot kicked the ineffable pattern aside.

Her face stretched into a mask of rage. She reared, hands lifting-and then froze as she fixed her eyes upon the Errant.