She was sure that she had nothing to fear.
The chunk was the size of her little fingernail, surely not enough for the sleeping miner to miss. She sniffed at it, enjoying the sweet aroma, and dabbed it to her tongue. The taste sat in her mouth and then seemed to spread, sinking through her cheeks and across her face in a warm, glowing sensation. It was nice. The sun did not change, the landscape around her remained unaltered; there were no adverse effects.
Trey had chewed a lump of fledge the size of his closed fist. Surely a negligible piece such as this would do her no harm. She was an explorer now after all, and as Ro Sargossa had written, experience is the mother of knowledge.
She glanced at the sleeping miner. He had shivered a few times, moaned in his sleep, groaned once or twice. He seemed calm now. She looked up again, across the plains at Noreela City. Even in the warmth of the afternoon sun that place seemed cold and distant, like a memory cast in heat haze instead of a real place.
Alishia lay down on the grass and chewed the fledge into dusty fragments.
SHE DID NOTtravel, but she did dream.
Alishia dreamed of secrets. She knew many supposed secrets, gleaned from the books and maps and diaries and other ephemera she had read through her life, but she did not understand them. To her, they were simply knowledge. So much of what she had read was forgotten, lost in the mists of time and degradation since the Cataclysmic War. The words she had read changed now into pictures, the pictures into rich images, the images into dream memories: the Violet Dogs stormed ashore in a time gone by, screaming and whistling and eager to consume; a man passed a box beneath a table, inside the box a charm, inside the charm a spell of death, and the fate of a long-dead Duke was sealed; a soulless shade cried in the dark, a place without sun. There were many more, dreamed together into a miasma of experience that Alishia thought little of knowing. In her fledge-fueled dream these things simply were.
Erv was there in her dreams, so awkward and pathetic and far less frightening. He was the guide walking her from one image to the next, holding her hand like the Duke guiding the Duchess down a dangerous path. There was no real threat here; he was Alishia’s idea of what he always should have been. There was no surprise when she told him she loved him, because maybe in a much different world-a world where safety was assured, not craved, and where people lived instead of merely existed, with time for leisure and pleasure instead of filling their hours with the fight for survival-maybe in that world, it could have been so. Alishia’s dreamland made that world, speckled as it was with the precious yet deadly stones of arcane memory, her naivete finding succor in the fact that perfection could still exist above and around all the things she knew. Terrible things, some of them. So terrible, so heinous, that their memories had been all but lost, locked away between dusty age-yellowed covers and buried in the deepest piles of books. History, befuddling itself with terrors of the present, had no real import for people fighting day to day to stay alive. The austerity of Alishia’s existence made her a natural receptor for such knowledge.
She passed from one time to another, one place to the next, distance proving no barrier, though time was spelled out for her. Shifting from three centuries pre-Cataclysmic War to the first few years following that dreadful event was exhausting, as if for a few seconds she herself had lived those times. She toured the deserted battlefields of the Cantrass Plains and the islands of The Spine, seeing the giant war machines already rotting into the poisoned ground, sensing the skewed influence of the Mages as nature struggled to right its wronged self.
More time passed. Alishia’s dreams continued, laying her knowledge out for her own inspection. She was aware of the astounding passage of time, and also the meager couple of hours she had spent sleeping on the foothills of the Widow’s Peaks. She was content in the knowledge that she was safe.
But things were changing.
Because as dream-Erv loved and guided her around the labyrinthine landscape of her own understanding, Alishia sensed something impenetrable in the distance. Past the realms of her own mind and intelligence, way beyond knowledge, a black space had opened up in her mind. She understood its emptiness. She understood that it was a potential nothing, not even a nothing itself, less substantial than total darkness, which was merely an absence of light. And for the first time, she was afraid.
She turned her back on this inscrutable absence and tried to walk away, but Erv held her back. He had changed now. He was no longer the innocence she craved, the naivete she admitted, even to herself. Now he was something else entirely.
Something came out of the dark.
ALISHIA SCREAMED HERSELFawake. She had not cried out like that since she was a little girl. It hurt her throat, terrified her. In the distance a rage of skull ravens took flight, and nearby the fledge miner rolled from his front onto his back and sat up, looking around in obvious distress.
Alishia immediately knew where she was, but she could still feel that impenetrable nothingness seeking her out, searching across mountains and through valleys for her vulnerable mind.
“All gone,” Trey muttered through a slew of tears. “They’ve come and taken them all.”
They’ve come… Alishia thought, and although she had stopped screaming, her fear was just as rich and bright.
The questing thing was a dream memory, fading as the hot sun sought to burn it away. But that did not soothe Alishia. In the comfortable, passive landscapes of her memory, something had actively opened its eye and seen her, something hiding away in a place she thought was safe.
And now it was searching her out.
Tim Lebbon
Dusk
Chapter 10
THE SHADE WASbuilding on instinct. Experience was not yet available to it, but knowledge and, more importantly, understanding increased with each successive moment. As a thing of prospect and latent existence it craved a fixed point of reference, something it could home in on and investigate, examine, with a view to making its own. Let loose by its god, the shade’s potential was staggering, an all-enveloping pressure that required expending and exercising.
It knew whispers, but none of them hinted at the object of its search.
It dipped more frequently out of the planes bordering existence, and the shock became less intense each time.
Time and distance juggled with the shade, shifting it by esoteric travel until it sensed a true solidity around it, the material of reality, where the inanimate and the long-dead swarmed with teeming life. Here, the shade knew, it would find a home.
Twisted as it was, any home would suit. It was stronger than a shade should be, more capable in its potential madness, more able to drive out a previous life to make room for its own pending existence. And it could do that here, a tumbling mind in a valley, alone and free, seeking something enriching; or there, a great consciousness floating much as itself, old and wise but perhaps too removed. Because whatever actions the shade took were informed by its god. It could lose itself, find a permanent place and plant its seed of wrongness, but that would mean betrayal. And if it weren’t for its god, it would not even exist as it did now; it would be less than nothing, a total absence of potential, memory and intent. At least now it knew of itself. Given success, the rewards from its god would be greater still.
So the shade passed by a multitude of hosts, dipping past some and causing a brief frisson of fear, ignoring many more. Searching. Seeking the perfect home. Hunting for a place where whispers were rich and rumor was rife. Here it would create itself at last. And when the time came, it would return to nothing.
The shade felt fear at that, a vague emotion filtered down like a whisper from the future.