“Where are we going, Umeer’s daughter?” he asked.
“To the Dream,” she replied.
“Are we not now dreaming?”
To this she made no reply. Silently they walked through the still-more-silent Wood. Now and then, through the branches, Jovann believed he glimpsed other worlds, worlds too fantastic for comprehension, worlds beyond the Wood itself. Jovann had never seen such things before, had never guessed what the Wood contained within its vastness. But why should he be surprised? Had he not always known it was far too great an entity for his humble comprehension? Had he not always feared to step into its shadows, to uncover even the smallest of its secrets?
The girl led him on as though she knew exactly where she wished to go. They could have walked like this for hours, and perhaps they did, though it did not feel so long. To Jovann’s surprise, he began to notice something strange—stranger than all the other strange things he had encountered that day.
The Wood was beginning to thin around them. It was no less thick than it had ever been. The trees grew as close together, their roots covered in undergrowth. But their very substance faded, becoming ghostly and insubstantial. As Jovann and the girl progressed, the trees gradually faded away.
And then vanished.
They stood upon a bleak landscape of misty gray—mist on the horizon, mist in the sky, and mist curling around their feet. Jovann, his eyes very round, turned in place, searching for any sign of the Wood, which he had believed would never end, could never end! But there was nothing. Only mist.
“Where are we?” he asked.
“The Dream,” said the girl. “We are on the edge of the Dream.” She gripped his arm with both her hands. “Walk with me,” she said.
He could not disobey. He did not wish to disobey, no matter the fear that flooded his heart. No fear he could experience here, through whatever unimaginable horrors, could possibly equal the fear of losing her. So he obeyed without question, and they proceeded into the mist.
Within a few paces the gray swirling began to move strangely in patterns of flowers and oceans and strange, elongated hilltops covered in animals or trees or something not quite like either. Jovann glimpsed colors deep inside, behind the gray, colors he did not see with his eyes but perceived clearly nonetheless.
“What is that?” he gasped, a thrill darting through his heart.
“Don’t ask. Don’t talk,” the girl said. She walked a few more silent paces. Then she said in a whisper, “Or you’ll go mad.”
The mist began to fade, taking with it the images it created. Now Jovann beheld distant mountains, but mountains unlike any he had ever seen in the waking world. These were taller by far, staggeringly tall so that one felt tears gathering in the eyes and the heart at the sight of them. Although they were tall, green growth covered their slopes and gold tipped their summits, which looked warmer and richer than anything Jovann had ever before seen or imagined.
“What are those mountains?” he asked.
And the girl gasped as though, when he spoke, she saw them herself for the first time. Then she whispered, “The Highlands, I believe. I have never—” Her voice gave way, and her footsteps faltered. When Jovann turned to her, her head was bowed and her shoulders shook. He wondered for a moment if she wept.
Then she looked at him, and he saw that her eyes were dry and distant. “I have never seen them,” she said. “I have heard, but never seen.”
Was that anger lacing her words? But then she was pulling him on, and he followed her lead without resistance. Who would want to resist one such as she?
The great mountains vanished after a time, replaced by a different range of mountains altogether. And these looked much more like the snow-capped peaks bordering his homeland, save that the sky above them was orange and pink and purple, moving like liquid in gorgeous swirls. Jovann drank in the beauty of them, but the girl scarcely saw them. She dragged him on with increasing urgency.
“Where are we going?” he asked at length, for they were now moving at a near-run, though there was no need for running in this place. “Do we search for something?”
When she spoke, he could hear a lie in her voice. He hated to admit it, for he did not like to think of someone so beautiful as capable of lying. But when she said, “The Gate to Hulan’s Garden,” he knew it was not the truth.
Even so, the moment she spoke, he felt a certainty rise up in his heart. Once more he recalled the wood thrush’s promise: A Path will be given you.
It was just as the wood thrush had said; for no sooner did the girl mention Hulan’s Gate then Jovann felt a tugging on his soul, a knowledge that he had not possessed a moment before.
“The Gate is this way,” he said, and altered their course, turning the girl to the right. How he knew to do this, he could not say. It was as though a voice called to him across the unknowable distances of the Dream, and he knew what he would find.
They turned and saw in the middle-ground between them and the faraway mountains, standing alone on a solitary plain, a gate. A round Moon Gate which, from that distance, looked no bigger than any humble shrine decorating the landscape of Noorhitam. Nothing more.
The girl gasped. If not for her grip on his arm, Jovann thought she would have sunk to her knees.
“What is wrong?” Jovann asked, concerned. He reached for her upper arm, but she shook him off, releasing her hold on him and backing away to stand on her own, swaying like a young tree in a gale. “What is wrong?” Jovann repeated.
“That gate,” she said. Then she whispered, and her voice was very young. “It is like the shrine in my mother’s garden. I have not seen it since . . . since . . .”
And she was running. One moment she stood swaying; the next, as is the way of dreams, she was many paces ahead of him, running, her long white sleeves and black hair billowing behind her.
“Wait!” Jovann cried, and set off after her. But the ground seemed to grab his feet, to hold him, and the air became thick and clinging. He scowled and shook himself, shook the shape he had assumed. His limbs were freed, and he ran harder, no longer hindered. The girl was far ahead of him, but his legs were long, and he thought he could catch her.
The gate grew. Or rather, the closer they came, the bigger they saw it was. This was no simple shrine. It was a giant’s portal, as great as the Lady Moon herself, each stone perfectly carved to set into the next. And through it, he could see, not the landscape of the plain surrounding them, but brilliant, many-colored light. But it was still so far away, so unreachably distant.
The girl stopped. She stood frozen in place, still as stone. Jovann, panting, though he did not think it right to pant in dreams, caught up and turned her to face him. “Umeer’s daughter?” he said urgently. But she would not look at him. Her eyes rolled this way and that.
“Do you hear them?” she said.
As soon as she spoke, Jovann heard a dark, deep chanting. At first he thought it was the drone of a low horn blowing to call the worshipful to prayer. Then he realized it was no horn but many voices surrounding them. Human voices.
He turned. In the distance, approaching through the far gray mist, he saw dark figures. He spun in place and saw more of them on all sides. They were far away as yet, but their chant was as close upon his ears as though they stood mere inches from him.
They blocked the path to the gate. And they were coming closer.
“Anwar blast it!” The girl spat out the curse like poison.
“Who are they?” Jovann asked.
“Devils. Blights,” the girl said, her face distorted by a snarl. “Always they come. Always, the fools!”
“Should we turn back?” Jovann suggested. The chanting was unnerving and, he thought, evil. It was also, in a horrible way, familiar. But he could not—or would not—place it.
“I’ll not turn back,” said the girl. “I’ll not turn back!” she repeated with more vehemence. She pulled herself free of Jovann’s hands and marched toward the gate, toward the advancing phantom
s.
Jovann’s heart lurched in his breast. He knew, though he could not say how, that whoever the chanting phantoms were, they meant her harm, terrible, terrible harm. They were closing in, still distant, but an ever-tightening snare. He hastened after the girl. “We must go back,” he pleaded.
“No!”
Suddenly the chanting vanished, overwhelmed by a potent scent, a spice Jovann did not recognize. It filled his nostrils, filled all his senses, drowning out sound, sight, taste, touch, leaving room for nothing but that scent.
He heard the girl scream a long, inarticulate wail as though lashed by great pain.
Jovann’s head cleared. The scent vanished, and he sought the girl. He found her beside him, but she was no longer solid. When he reached out to her, his hand went through her shoulder, through her arm.
“No! No!” she screeched like a wild bird of prey.
She was vanishing from the Dream.
“I’ll find you,” Jovann said, though he knew she could not hear him above her own screams. “I’ll find you! In the waking world! I’ll find you on the other side, I swear!”
Then she was gone.
He stood alone on nothing. Absolute, white nothing. Even the chanting phantoms had disappeared.
Acolytes and priests startled in surprise as the handmaiden tore past them, out the infirmary door and across the temple grounds. They leaped from her path as though avoiding an oncoming stampede, then turned round-eyed to each other and shrugged. Women! Who understood such creatures?
Sairu pounded down the winding paths, back to the hall extending from the main temple building, where Lady Hariawan’s quarters were found. She remembered each twist and turn as though she had spent all her life in Daramuti rather than having just arrived earlier that same day. The sun was setting fast, and the white stones beneath her feet glowed orange in its fading light.
My mistress! My mistress! her mind cried out, though she could not say why. Something was wrong. Terribly, terribly wrong! Why had she left Lady Hariawan’s side? Why had she allowed herself to be pushed away? She should have resisted even the direct orders of her lady. She should have insisted, should have stayed nearby, especially now, in this unknown place, surrounded by strangers, however holy those strangers were purported to be!
She burst into the building and charged up the corridor, ignoring the young acolytes pressing themselves against the wall to give her room. She reached the first door of Lady Hariawan’s chambers and prayed she would find it bolted from the inside, forbidding her access.
But it opened.
“Anwar’s elbow!” she hissed through her teeth and raced across that first chamber, ignoring the stares of Tu Syed, Tu Domchu, and the others as she darted past them to the door on the far side. That door was open as well. Despite her urging, Lady Hariawan had not bolted a single one behind her departing handmaiden. Anyone could enter her chambers, anyone at all!
Within the second chamber, Sairu found Dumpling and his fellows huddled in a corner, trembling, whimpering, their bellies pressed flat to the floor. Her brave lion dogs who never showed fear, reduced to such a state.
Without pause, she hauled open the final door to her mistress’s sleeping room and dashed inside, her hands up her sleeves to remove the daggers hidden there, prepared for anything. She whipped her weapons free and stared around the dark room.
Lady Hariawan lay upon her bed, the curtain drawn back, allowing the last of the fading sunlight to fall through the window and touch her sleeping face. Otherwise, the only light in the room came from two low braziers. The unmistakable scent of harimau filled the room like a living presence.
All was silent. The room was empty.
Sairu stood still, her heart ramming in her throat. She did not believe it. Not for a second. Her senses were too alive, too full of shouted warning. Something was wrong. She knew it. She knew it!
Someone was right behind her.
She whirled around. But there was nothing. No one there. Not a breath, not a moving shadow.
Whatever it was, it was still behind her.
She whirled again, lashing out with one of her knives, ducking low to the floor in a deep crouch. Still nothing. No one.
“Don’t trust your eyes, Sairu.” The voice of Princess Safiya came to her as though across the leagues. And she saw in her memory that great lady approaching, a blindfold in her hand. “Don’t trust your eyes, or you will surely die.”
Despite all the years of careful training, Sairu felt her spirit rebel against what she knew she must do. But her training won out.
She closed her eyes and crouched in the darkness. One by one, she turned off her other senses, allowing the unexplored senses of the brain and the heart to take over, to tell her what she needed.
And she heard without her ears a deep, low chanting. Across her mind flashed the image of the hand-shaped burn that marred her mistress’s cheek.
The next moment Sairu was across the room, overturning the braziers of harimau. They fell and scattered their delicate embers across the floor, and she grabbed a cushion from off Lady Hariawan’s bed and beat them out. The scent was almost overwhelming, so full of heat and wildness and distance. She beat the embers and kicked one of the braziers across the room.
Suddenly a hand grabbed her wrist, twisting painfully. Sairu turned, a knife upraised, and found herself looking into Lady Hariawan’s furious, torch-lit face.
“What are you doing?” Lady Hariawan screamed.
“My mistress!” Sairu cried. “Were you dream-walking? You should not do it! You mustn’t! It’s dangerous!”
Lady Hariawan screamed again, inarticulate in her rage. She dropped Sairu’s wrist and scrambled on all fours across her bed, bending down to grab the second of the braziers. It was hot, and Sairu knew her lady’s fingers must burn at the touch. “Don’t!” she said.
But Lady Hariawan picked up the brazier and flung it at Sairu with all the force in her slender arms. It did not hit its mark but fell with a clang upon the floor, rolling and echoing as it landed. “Get out!” Lady Hariawan roared. “Get out of my sight!”
Sairu stared, horrified. Then, bowing low, she backed from the room and slid the door shut.
Anwar shone gently down upon the mountain temple, smiling at the comings and goings of the priests. His rays peered through the windows of Lady Hariawan’s chambers but could find no glimpse of the lady herself, secluded away in the deepest shadows. He sought instead the white head of the abbot, who put up his hood and, cursing the brightness, hobbled away to the sanctuary of his prayer chamber where the very orb to whom he allegedly prayed could not find and annoy him.
Thwarted again, Anwar turned his languid golden eye to the face of the girl standing at the infirmary window, and he thought she smiled up at him a smile full of secrets and—sad to witness in one so young—cynical disbelief. Of the wounded man in her care, Anwar could see nothing at all.
He moved on across his sky, blinking slowly whenever clouds should chance to drift across his face. Then he opened wide his great eye and stared. Any observer paying attention (it is amazing how few, even among his worshippers, pay any heed to the Lordly Sun flying in blazing glory overhead) would have thought that he shone a little brighter, that his flames lashed and burned with laughter in a voice indiscernible to mortal ears. For Anwar did indeed laugh loud and long at what he saw:
A pack of waddling dogs pursuing an orange cat across the grounds of Daramuti.
They ran through the kitchen garden, the cat screaming out feline curses, the dogs responding in vicious snarls. The cat used the bent back of an unlucky acolyte at work as a springboard to gain himself access to the kitchen window. And so he would have achieved his escape, save that a priest opened the kitchen door at that very moment, and all three dogs darted through between his feet, nearly tripping him up so that only his grasp on the doorframe kept him upright. The chase was hidden from Anwar for a few moments, though he heard, even from high in his heavens, the ringing and clatter of
kitchenware.
Back out into the garden streaked the cat, between the legs of the poor priest just righting himself in the doorway. The dogs followed in close pursuit, moving with much more speed than their size and shape might suggest. Lettuces flattened, squashes squished, and acolytes threw their gardening tools after the furious furry terrors.
The cat gained the garden wall, up and over, pausing on the other side in the few moments granted him to slick down the fur between his ears (for these things are important, even on the very brink of yipping death). But the dogs found a crumbling low place, and they were through in trice, redoubling their snarls.
“Dragon’s teeth!” yowled the cat, and he was off again, making for the nearest open window. He leapt through, landing squarely in the lap of Brother Tenuk, whose already less-than-holy prayers were made less holy still by his cry of “Anwar’s bruising elbow!”
Anwar himself took no notice, however, intent as he was upon the dogs barking beneath the window. They had lost their quarry for the time being, but they sniffed and snorted, running back and forth under the window, determined not to give up. Their determination was rewarded when, the next moment, the cat appeared in the window again, this time held by the scruff in the trembling hands of the enraged abbot. Brimming with righteous wrath, Brother Tenuk dropped the cat into the midst of the dogs, who leapt upon him, teeth bared.
The cat shook them off and was again a streak of orange, like rippling sunlight himself, dashing across the temple grounds and making for the last shelter available to him.
There was one place in all Daramuti where the dogs dared not go. For their mistress—their beautiful, their beloved, their deified mistress—had stood in the doorway and told them, “Stay out!” in tones that defied all but one interpretation. They never forgot her commands, and they would not disobey.