The Killing Moon (Dreamblood) (49 page)
If you liked writing the Dreamblood books so much, why are there only two of them?
There might be more. I have many tales of the Dreaming Moon in my head. But I have more ideas than I have time to write them in, alas.
That’s because you’re lazy and disorganized and have no
discipline—
SLAP.
U R so meen.
Are you done yet?
Okay, last question. Is that a gas giant in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me?
…
Don’t hit me again!
… Yes, the Dreaming Moon is a gas giant. The world of the Dreaming Moon is one of its moons; Waking Moon is another. The Gujaareen are aware of this, as their astronomy is about as developed as that of ancient Egypt, but the habit of referring to the Dreamer as a moon is something that long predates these discoveries, so it stuck. I did actually try to work out the astrophysics, for which I thank the instructors and my fellow attendees at NASA’s Launch Pad astronomy workshop for science fiction/fantasy authors and other creative types, which I was privileged to go to back in 2009. Not much of that made it into the duology—maybe one day it will, if I write a story about the Teachers—but it was fun to play with. Any errors are mine.
I didn’t ask you all that. You just like hearing yourself talk, don’t you?
Oh, for—That’s it. I’m done.
You suck as an interview subject, you know that, don’t you? Hey, that’s a question!
Wait, you really did go? Ah, c’mon. You’re no fun. Come baaaaaack…
In retrospect, I don’t think I liked being the one doing the interviewing. Ah, well. In peace, y’all.
If you enjoyed
THE KILLING MOON,
look out for
Book Two of the Dreamblood series
by N. K. Jemisin
There were two hundred and fifty-six places where a man could hide within his own flesh. The soldier dying beneath Hanani’s hands had fled to someplace deep. She had searched his heart and brain and gut, though the soul visited those organs less often than layfolk thought. She had examined his mouth and eyes, the latter with especial care. At last, behind a lobe of his liver, she found his soul’s trail and followed it into a dream of shadowed ruins.
Piles of rubble loomed out of the twilit mists—crumbling structures so titanic that each single brick would dwarf a man, so foreign in design that she could not fathom their purpose. A palace? A temple? Camouflage, regardless. Beneath her feet the dust gleamed, something more than mica: each step displaced a million stars. She took care to put them all back in her wake.
To find the soldier, Hanani would have to first deal with the setting. It was simple enough to will the ruins into order, which she did by crouching to touch the ground. Threads of dreamichor, yellow-bright and gleaming, laced from her fingertips and etched the ground for a moment before vanishing into it. A breath later, the dust skittered up to seal cracked stone; the harbinger of change. Then the earth split and the ground shook as great bricks righted themselves and flew through the air, clattering together to form columns and walls. All around her, had she chosen to watch, the outlines of a monstrous city took shape against the gradient sky. But when the city was whole, she rose and moved on without looking. There was far more important work to be done.
[“This takes longer than it should.”
“The injury is healing.”
“That does no good if he dies.”
“He won’t. She has him. Watch.”]
After first passing a stone archway, Hanani paused and turned back to examine it. The arch was man-height, the only thing of normal proportions in the dreamscape. Beyond the arch lay the same shadows that shrouded all—no. The shadows were thicker here.
Prowling carefully closer, Hanani attempted to step through the archway.
The shadows pressed back.
She imagined illumination.
The shadows grew thicker.
After a moment’s consideration, she summoned pain and fear and rage instead, and wrapped these around herself. The shadows’ resistance melted; the soldier’s soul recognized kindred. Passing through the arch, Hanani found herself in an atrium garden, the kind that should have helped to cool the heart of any home—but this one was dead. She looked around, ducking splintered palms and wilted moontear vines, frowning at a suppurating mess of a flowerbed. Then she spied something beyond it: there at the garden’s heart, curled in a nest of his own sorrow, lay the soldier.
Pausing here, Hanani shifted a fraction of her attention back to the waking realm.
[“Dayu? I’ll need more dreambile soon.”
“Yes, Hanani—Um, I mean, Sharer-Apprentice.”]
That done, Hanani returned to the dream of the hidden garden. The soldier lay with knees drawn up and arms wrapped about himself as if for comfort. In the curve of his body, a gaping wound spilled his intestines into a hole at the nest’s heart. She could see nothing beyond the hole, only that perverse umbilical connecting him to it.
Death
, said the air around him.
“Not here, petitioner,” she replied. “These are the shadowlands. There are better places to die.”
He did not move, hungering again for death. Again she demurred.
Memory
, she offered, to entice him.
Anguish flared up in cold, purple-white wisps, wreathing the area around the nest as a new form coalesced. Another man: older, bearded in the way of those who bore northern blood, also garbed as a soldier but clearly of some higher rank than Hanani’s soldier. A relative? Mentor? Lover? Beloved, whoever he was.
“Gone,” Hanani’s soldier whispered. “Gone without me.”
“May he dwell in Her peace forever,” she said. Extending her hands to either side, she trailed her fingers through the ring of mist. Where she touched, delicate deep red threads blended and pulsed into the white.
[“She uses
more
dreamblood? She’ll run out at that rate.”
“Then we’ll give her more. The desert scum have nearly cut him in two, man, what do you expect?”]
Hanani’s soldier moaned and curled into a tighter ball as red threads stretched forth from the walls, soaking into his skin. Abruptly the mists flickered, the bearded soldier’s image growing insubstantial as shadows. New scenes formed instead, appearing and overlapping and fading with each breath. A lonely perch atop a wall. Sword practice. A barracks bed. A river barge.
Hanani coaxed the memories to continue, inserting gentle suggestions to guide them in a new direction.
Loved ones. Life.
The scenes changed to incorporate the bearded soldier and others—doubtless the petitioner’s comrades or caste-kin. They laughed and talked and worked at daily tasks. As the images flowed, Hanani reached carefully around the man and into the hole that was devouring him. The first contact sent pain slamming up her arm like a blow—but cold, so terribly cold! She gasped and fought the urge to cry out as her fingers stiffened and froze and cracked apart—
No. She formed her soulname’s syllables within her mind and clarity washed through her, a reminder that this was a dream and she was its master.
This pain is not my own.
When she drew her hand back, it was whole.
But the man was not; the pain was devouring him. She focused on the images again, noting one of a tavern. The petitioner was not there, although his dead beloved and other comrades were, laughing and singing a lusty song. There was
danger in this, she realized abruptly. The petitioner had been injured in a raid, his beloved killed. She had no idea whether the rest of his companions had been cut down as well. If so, then what she meant to attempt might only increase his death-hunger.
There was no choice but to try.
[“—As though you
want
her to fail, Yehamwy.”
“Of course not. The Council simply wants to be certain of her competence.”
“And if
the Council
knew the first thing about healing, that would be—”
“What is that noise?”
“I’m not certain. It came from the tithing alcoves. Dayu? Everything all right, boy?”]
Distractions could be dangerous, even deadly, in narcomancy. Focusing her mind on the task at hand, Hanani reshaped the tavern scene around her soldier. His comrades stopped singing and turned to him, offering greetings and reminiscences and sloshing cups. The beer shone a warm deep red in the dreamlight. Behind them, Hanani quietly faded the bearded soldier away.
“Look here,” she said to the petitioner. “Your fellows are waiting. Will you not join them?”
The man groaned, uncurling from his nest and straining up toward his comrades. A great wind soughed through the dreamscape, blowing away the city and the shadows. Hanani exerted her will in concert with the man’s and the garden swirled away, its shadows suddenly replaced by bright lanterns and tavern walls. The nest lingered, though, for the man was bound fast to his pain. So instead Hanani touched the edge of the nest and caused it to compress, shrinking rapidly into a tiny dark marble small enough to sit in his palm. He gazed
mournfully at Hanani and clutched the marble tightly to his breast, but did not protest when Hanani caused the rope of intestine to fall free, severing his linkage. She pressed the dangling end against his belly and it vanished, as did the wound itself. Lastly she summoned clothing, which blurred for a moment before his mind shaped it into the gray-agate collar and loinskirt of a Gujaareen city guard.
The soldier nodded to her once, then turned to join his companions. They surrounded him, embraced him, and all at once he began to weep. But he was safe from danger now—and
she
had made him so, made him whole again, body and soul alike.
I’m a Sharer now!
But no, that was presumption. Whether she’d passed the trial to become a full member of the Sharer path was a matter for her pathbrothers to decide, and the Council to confirm, no matter how well she’d done. And it was utter folly to let her emotions slip control while she remained in dreaming; she would not ruin herself by making a child’s mistake. So with a deep sigh to focus her thoughts, Hanani released the soldier’s dream and followed the faint red tendril that would lead her soul back to its own housing of flesh—
—But something jolted her awareness.
She paused, frowning. The dreamworld of Ina-Karekh lay behind her, inasmuch as such things had any direction at all. Hona-Karekh, the waking realm, was ahead. She opened the eyes of her dreamform to find that she stood in a gray-shadowed version of the waking realm, where the tension and busy movement that had filled the Hall of Blessings a few moments before were suddenly still. She stood on the dais at the feet of the great, looming nightstone statue of Hananja, but her petitioner was gone. Mni-inh and Teacher Yehamwy, who had come to oversee her trial, were gone. The Hall was silent and empty, but for her.
The realm between waking and dreams. Hanani frowned. She had not intended to stop here. Concentrating, she sought her soul’s umblikeh again to complete the journey back to waking—and then stopped, hearing something. There. Over near the tithing alcoves, where Sharer-Apprentices and acolytes drew dreams from the minds of sleeping faithful. A slow, deep sound, like nothing she’d ever heard before. Grinding stone?
Or the breathing of some huge, heavy beast.
[“Hanani.”]
Nothing in the between realm was real. The space between dreams was emptiness, where the soul might drift with nothing to latch onto—no imagery, no sensation, no conceptualization. An easy place in which to go mad. With her soulname and training, Hanani was safer, for she had long ago learned to build a protective construct around herself—the shadow-Hall in this case—whenever she traveled here. Still, she avoided the space between if she could help it, for only Gatherers could navigate it with ease. It was troubling to say the least that she had manifested here unwittingly.
Squinting toward the alcoves, she wondered: had she forgotten some step in healing the soldier, done something wrong in the transit from Ina-Karekh? A man’s life was involved; it was her duty to be thorough.
[“Hanani. The healing is complete. Come forth.”]
Something moved in the stillness near an alcove’s opening. Emerged from it, behind one of the Hall’s flower-draped columns, which occluded a clear view. She perceived intent and power, a slow gathering of malice that first unnerved, then actively frightened her—
[“Hanani.”]
The shadow-Hall shivered all over, then turned bright and busy with people and breezes and murmurs. Hanani caught
her breath, blinking as her soul settled back into her own flesh. The waking realm. Her mentor stood beside her, a troubled look on his face.
