“I can wrap this, if you want to see to her,” Nhen-ne-verra said.
Hanani nodded and rose. She looked a sight with her skirts drenched in blood from the knees down; her own red drapes, she thought bleakly. But she peeled the wax from her hands and gave it to the waiting acolyte, then went to the woman.
“Pardon me,” she said. The woman looked up, her eyes wide with a taut, flaring protectiveness that made Hanani stop in her tracks. Standing over them, Hanani could see then what Nhen-ne-verra meant: the child was obviously ill, though with no sickness Hanani could recognize. She was nearly bald, and although Hanani guessed by her size that she had seen five or six floods of the river, her skin was as thin and papery in texture as an old woman’s. Her bones showed so starkly that Hanani could see where some of them had been broken in the past, then had healed crookedly, or in knots. It was equally obvious that the child had never been well nourished.
All troubling enough on its own. But even worse, the child was asleep.
Forcing her eyes away from the child’s appearance, Hanani focused on the—mother? Sister? Mother, she decided on instinct. “If you like, we can tend her for you,” she said to the woman.
“She’s fine,” the woman snapped.
Hanani shook her head slowly. “This sickness is a thing of magic,” she said. “Your child will not wake on her own. But we can at least make her comfortable.” She gestured toward the other sleepers.
The little girl moaned then, her face tightening in sleep so that she looked even older. Her whole body tensed, frail as it was, and she tossed her head as Wanahomen had done, reacting to some inner torment. A nightmare. Hanani looked away. This was how Mni-inh had died.
But a sound, soughing through the Hetawa like a wind, startled her out of melancholy. She turned, confused, and realized: the sleepers. Some of them were shifting in their sleep, moaning just as the little girl had. The sound was the massed voice of their suffering.
“Oh Goddess, protect us.” Nhen-ne-verra got to his feet, his wax-coated fists clenching. “Please, not again.”
The Kisuati soldiers were equally unnerved, some of them lifting weapons. Hanani saw their commander come into the center of the room, frowning around at the suddenly stirring sleepers. “What?” Hanani began, but suddenly she understood. Nhen-ne-verra had spoken of something that swept through the sleepers from time to time. Now she saw that it was a nightmare: the same nightmare, attacking all of them at once.
But—
“Nononono,” whimpered the child in her sleep. “Nono, Papa.”
An instant later:
“No!” cried a woman nearby, her words blurry with sleep but intelligible. “No, Father, please!”
An old man uttered a weak, shaken moan. “My father, I beg you … no, no …”
“Don’t,” wept another man, a heavyset fellow who had the look of a soldier or guard. “No, gods please—no!” The last was wrenched out of him, a startled, agonized cry. His eyes flew open as he arched upward, seeing nothing. One of the Sharers who had been tending the sleepers ran over to him, but before he could get there, the warrior gasped and clutched his chest. A great shudder passed through him and a moment later he sagged, his eyes rolling back. The Sharer crouched and examined him, then groaned in an echo of the sleeper’s own anguish.
The skin along the back of Hanani’s neck prickled. She turned, slowly, back to the woman and the strange child.
The woman—Tiaanet, Wanahomen had called her—was watching Hanani, crouched and tense as a wild animal. In the interminable breath that passed, Hanani suddenly understood what was happening, and what the child had to do with it. In that same instant, the woman saw that Hanani knew.
The child stiffened in her arms, choking back a cry. A breath later all the sleepers cried out, some screaming at the tops of their lungs. As if this had been a trigger, the woman bolted, leaping to her feet and deliberately slamming into Hanani with the child in her arms. Hanani fell to the floor, and the woman ran past her toward the back of the Hall of Blessings.
The Kisuati soldiers, distracted by the screaming sleepers, did not react to the fleeing woman at first. Hanani scrambled to her feet and cried a warning, but it was lost amid so many raised voices. Only when the screams began to fade—some of them stopping with ominous abruptness—did Hanani manage to make herself heard. “My brothers, that child!” She pointed after the woman. “That child is the source of the dream!”
The soldiers finally noticed, but none of them were near Tiaanet. The templefolk reacted more quickly, some of them gasping and starting after the woman at once. The woman ran through the heavy-curtained door that led to the inner Hetawa.
The Kisuati commander gave a round curse and shouted something over the din of the sleepers. Four soldiers immediately jumped and went after the woman. There was a scuffle at the door as the soldiers shouted at three Sharers who were also running to follow the woman. Hanani wanted to follow as well, but duty stopped her; until Wanahomen was healthy, she had no business leaving him. So she went back to Wanahomen’s side and knelt, taking his hand.
“Tiaanet,” he murmured. “That was Tiaanet. I’m certain of it.” He frowned, looking troubled. “She saw me. Why did she not …?”
“She was afraid for her child, I think, whoever she was,” Hanani said. One of the acolytes had cleaned up the spilled blood and was bandaging Wanahomen’s leg. The other was placing a pad of leather and herbs over the chest wound. Hanani nodded approval at the boys, who returned her nod with great seriousness. “Though if that child is indeed the source of the nightmare that’s killed so many, it explains much. Do you know her?”
Wanahomen nodded slowly. Hanani was troubled by the fact that he was still sweating, and now shivering faintly. She touched the boy applying the poultice and signaled for him to fetch water and a blanket. “Shunha. Her father—one of my allies. I had hoped—” His frown deepened. “Her child, you said?”
“I believe so.” She paused then, startled, as someone pushed quickly through the crowd around Wanahomen: Teacher Yehamwy.
“Apprentice, what did you see? Are you certain about that child?”
Hanani blinked, as thrown by the councilor’s appearance as the questions. Yehamwy looked drawn and deeply weary, as if he had not slept well in days—as perhaps he had not. But there was a feverish intensity in his expression now that unnerved her.
“I’m not certain, no,” she said. “But it seemed to me the sleepers were reacting to the child’s dreams.” Hesitantly she added, “The Prince says the woman is Tiaanet, of shunha caste. The child is her daughter.”
Yehamwy caught his breath and turned to another Teacher whom Hanani did not know. The Teacher nodded grimly and said, “Insurret’s lineage. That was one of the motherlines we meant to investigate.”
“She’s a snake,” said a voice from amid the pillars, and they all turned to see a woman of middle years crouching against the far wall. The resemblance between her and Tiaanet was immediately discernible, as was the glitter of madness in her eyes. “Always hissing, hissing in my mind, worse when I slept. I knew she was poison even in the womb. Couldn’t wait to get away from her. Now she has birthed her own viper-child, and may it kill her. May it kill her!”
Yehamwy threw a look at the other Teacher. “Insurret?”
“So it would seem.”
Yehamwy took a deep breath and went to the woman, crouching before her. “I give you greeting, Lady Insurret,” he said. “Tell me: what did you mean about your daughter ‘hissing in your mind’?”
Insurret abruptly grew sullen. “Why do you ask about her? Everyone asks about her. Everyone wants her, not me.”
Yehamwy looked uneasy, doubtless wishing he could call a Sharer to heal the woman’s madness. But he leaned forward, speaking urgently. “We need to find her, lady. If what we believe is true, she and the W—She and her child may hold the key to saving many lives.”
“So you want her too.” The pure vitriol in Insurret’s voice sent a
shiver down Hanani’s spine. If she had not seen madness in the woman’s eyes before that, she would have known it by that tone. “Take her then, if you like; I don’t care. Comes weeping to me, she does, comes weeping and tells me that her father—Her father has—” Insurret began to rock back and forth, her face tightening. After a moment she fell silent, rubbing her hands on her knees. Abruptly she shook her head. “Lying, spiteful whore! If he did, it was her fault. Her fault!”
Yehamwy drew back, his face reflecting the same shock and revulsion Hanani felt. Then he visibly steeled himself and tried again. “Be that as it may, lady, we need to understand the sickness that plagues her child. Will you tell us? Can the child release the people she captures with her dreams?”
“Why are you asking about her?” Insurret glared up at him. “That abomination should have been strangled at birth. But always, always, he does as she pleases. ‘Let me keep it,’ she says, and he indulges her, always, such a pretty girl, so much prettier than me, the child is her burden to bear so why should I care about that whoregotten demon child?”
And before Yehamwy could react, Insurret surged up from her crouch and shoved him. With a startled cry, Yehamwy tried to rise and stumbled back, and although Hanani saw what was coming, she could not react fast enough to prevent it. Flailing his arms, Yehamwy fell across Wanahomen’s legs.
Wanahomen screamed, stiffening in agony, and before the last breath had left his lungs, his eyes rolled back, the lids fluttering shut.
“No!” With no regard for propriety Hanani shoved Yehamwy off him, but it was already too late. All around them were sleepers, the survivors still moaning and thrashing. Wanahomen would fall right into the worst of the horror.
And Hanani would lose one more person she cared about to that Goddess-damned dream.
No, I will not.
Without another thought, Hanani put her fingers on Wanahomen’s eyelids and flung herself into nightmare.
44
The Battle of Soul
The world was made of red and bones. Tumbling as he fell, screaming, the man who had been Wanahomen found himself reduced to a cipher. The memory of waking was still in him, though distant and faded, as with childhood. He was no longer a prince. The red world had remade him. Here he was a weak thing, lowest of an unfathomable hierarchy, and he knew without question that there was no hope for his survival. For this was not the imperfect mirror of the realm between, or even the necessary shadow of Hananja’s brilliant soul. This was another place altogether, someone else’s place, and within it hope was a word with no meaning.
He did not so much land as mire himself. The red was thick and clotted in places, not solid enough to stand on but sufficient for crawling. So he crawled, up to his chin in warm, redolent filth, his arms and legs straining to make their way past bones that made no sense: human skulls with extra jaws, hands with ten fingers, unidentifiable jointed masses. And he wept, for his heart was filled with despair such as he had never known in the waking realm. He was alone. He was afraid. He felt so weak. And soon—the taste of imminence was like bitter apples on his tongue, or perhaps that was the muck—he would meet this realm’s master.
For endless seasons, the man struggled. When light and heat blazed toward him from on high, he thought it was death come at last, and part of him rejoiced. But the fire that seared through the red had a cleanliness to it that he knew instinctively was not of this place. Where had it come from? He did not know, but he felt only dull envy—until it enveloped him and lifted him free of the muck.
“This place rapes the soul,” said a familiar, female voice. Who was she? He did not know, but he clung to her bright, shapeless presence, pathetically grateful to no longer be alone. “I’ve never seen a construct so foul! Protect yourself, Prince.”
He did not understand what—or who—she meant at first. Was he “Prince”? And what was a construct?
But then there came a great pulsing stir in the red, and the bones underneath them heaved as a great mass crawled from within the landscape. He beheld a long, sinuous shape, like a snake, if snakes grew to the thickness of rivers. Down its length sprouted marching, matching limbs—like those of a scorpion or centipede, though each ended in massive hands the size of buildings. Most were balled into fists, and as they lifted and fell with the creature’s movements, the man spied rings on some of the fingers. These left blood-filled imprints in the spongy flesh of the ground as the hands walked.
But it was the creature’s head, which rose from the muck on a long, thick shaft of a neck, that made the man begin to scream—for it was his father.
The face was the same, though distorted with a kind of gleeful, sadistic hunger. In that face the man saw all his father’s madness made manifest. This was the monster who had nearly destroyed his own nation to feed his ambition—and who had devoured his son’s future with the same ruthless greed. A more terrible monster than ever the Reaper had been, for both ate lives, but only one did so knowingly. Lovingly.
But as the man screamed, the woman blazed bright with sudden fury. “You,” she snarled.
Startled out of terror, the man flinched silent as the woman beside him took shape—but it was not a shape that matched his memories of her. When he sought those memories, what came to mind was softer, somehow: gentle fingers, a flood of coiled hair the color of wet sand, a stammering voice, ripe brown-nippled breasts that tasted of sea salt and sweetness—though how he knew all this he could not recall. But the woman who appeared was different from his imaginings. She had dressed herself as a man, in loindrapes too starkly straight for her curving hips, a collar too broad for her narrow shoulders, with her flood of hair dammed away behind bindings and bun. And some things about her actively bothered him, for they felt wrong somehow. The loindrapes she wore were red, but there were darker wet spots all over them. Thick redness coated her gentle hands—blood? The thicker, bitter stuff of this place? He could not tell, but it flexed like fine gloves when her hands became fists.
“Take that face off,” she said. Her voice was a whisper—but so filled with rage that it made the whole of the red world ripple. A wind, sudden and cold, swirled out of nothingness and whipped across the bone plain. The woman’s face blurred with it, doubling. Beneath her angry face: a weeping, wailing figure. When she shrieked the next words, there was a scraping edge of madness in her voice. “How dare you pretend to be Mni-inh-brother when you killed him? Take that face off, you abomination!”
She is forgetting herself, the man thought. He knew it was true, even if he did not know how.
And the woman was gone, running across the red muck as if it were packed earth, toward the monster. Which reared up—it was a hundred times her size—and raised its many fists, roaring challenge in a bull elephant’s trumpeting voice.
Leaving behind the man, who stared after her from the muck, distracted from his own misery. But as his earlier despair faded, he began to understand.
Not just his father. The beast wore the faces of all fathers, any father, the void left by a father’s absence, for whoever dared to look upon it. It used those faces, and the memories they elicited, to strike silent blows and leave unfading bruises. But beneath this nightmare face—
—nightmare, nightmare, gods, wait, this is a dream—
—What face did it truly wear?
The beast’s fists struck the earth. The red substance quaked and heaved beneath the man, throwing him onto his back into the muck. When he struggled upright, he was shocked to see that the beast had gone down. Several of its dozen arms on one side had crumpled beneath it, shriveling even as the man watched. And there—moving among the monster’s flailing limbs, screaming like a beast herself, was the woman. She touched another arm and it went dead, the muscles knotting and snapping with a sound like cut rope. When she set her feet and shouted at the thing’s face—“TAKE IT OFF! TAKE IT OFF!”—something rippled forth from her mouth, and her very voice made the thing’s neck twist and turn black with gangrene. Its head sagged to the groun
d, its face—
—my father, no, no, not him—
—Contorting in agony. She was killing it with every touch, making its flesh sicken and die by will alone.
And that was wrong. The man felt it down to the core of his being. She was not the soft thing he had considered her, that had been a mistake—but neither was she this wild, avenging death-bringer. He knew as well as anyone how grief could flense the soul, leaving wounds that festered until nothing eased the pain but anger and violence. But this was not her. She was—
—the stone within a ripe fruit. Flint and metal, blood and tears. A prayer at the height of lovemaking—
—Aier. She was Aier.
And he, he was not some nameless coward; he had not been lost in this realm for seasons, centuries, eternities. In waking he was a warrior. He lifted a hand, made a fist, remembered the feel of a sword-hilt within it. As he did so, the sword appeared. Yes. His father’s sword, Mwet-zu-anyan. The sword of the Prince of the Sunset Throne.
His sword. Because in waking he was Wanahomen, leader of the Yusir-Banbarra hunt. And in dreaming—
(Hanani. Her name was Hanani, and she was his lover and his healer.)
—In dreaming he was Niim.
And Niim was a dreamer of portents and omens, nephew of Gujaareh’s greatest Gatherer, scion of brilliantly mad and madly brilliant kings. He was the Avatar of Hananja. He would be Prince someday, and when that ended he was destined to sit at the right hand of the Goddess of Dreams Herself.
The Prince of Gujaareh got to his feet, sword in hand, and headed across the red world to bring Hananja’s Servant back to herself.
Yanya-iyan’s garden was the secret stronghold of the palace. It was accessible only by a single glass door—an actual door rather than the useless open entryways Gujaareen thought of as doors—that could be locked shut. It contained a small shed full of gardening implements: sharp-bladed hoes, wicked-tined pitchforks, axes, long knives. Its walls were lined with thick plates of obsidian, meant to hold the garden’s warmth at night—but also too hard for any battering ram to easily break. The plates allowed the growth of exotic plants from faraway lands, including poisonous herbs that could be used against an enemy or for a final escape, should all other defenses fail.