The Shadowed Sun (Dreamblood) (61 page)

So she veered out of the courtyard, darting instead into one of the many other buildings in the Hetawa complex. A corridor; some stairs; a curtained entrance. She found herself in a tiny room, with an unmade pallet on one side and a few shelves and chests holding personal effects. Some templeman’s private quarters.

Laying Tantufi on the pallet, she went to crouch beside the curtain, turning and turning the knife in her hands.

With her mother standing guard, Tantufi dreamed on.

*  *  *

She had not hated Azima.

She knew this now, as she walked toward the fallen monstrosity that was the Wild Dreamer, her red-coated hands held out from her sides. Azima had been a stranger to her; she had killed him out of fear and anger and the simple desire to survive. But she had not
known
him. He had done nothing to earn her wrath but be a hate-twisted fool.

The Wild Dreamer swung a vast fist at her, snarling in its inhuman voice, but she did not fear this. She had walked the nightmares of a goddess; why would a mere mortal trouble her? So it was a simple matter to raise a wall of blood around herself, which caught the swinging fist and held it fast. Yes, that was always the trick with working a healing in the shadowlands, though once she’d had trouble understanding this. The soul of a petitioner did not want
healing
in such a circumstance; it wanted more pain and ugliness. It wanted someone to acknowledge the filth of life, its foulness and bile. To enter a soul trapped in nightmare, one had to
become
a nightmare.

That was why Sonta-i had failed to kill it; he’d had no emotions, no way to understand. And Mni-inh, for all his skill and quick temper, did not have much of what this dreamer needed: slow-burning, long-simmered, helpless fruitless rage. Knowledge of what it meant to be betrayed (
given away disrespected exploited
) by those who should have nurtured and protected. Familiarity with being weak among the strong, with receiving not even the basic respect due another living being. Knowing how it felt to be a low and unworthy
thing
in the eyes of others.

(Sonta-i? Mni-inh? Azima? For a moment the memory of who they were slipped away, but then it edged back, hesitant.)

But even if Mni-inh had understood how to get through the beast’s defenses, he would not have had enough hate in his soul to outmatch it.

“You took him from me,” she said. She touched its straining fist, and it crumpled beneath her touch, flesh crisping and bones turning to ash. It screamed, and she began walking down its length, killing it as she went. (Did the beast cringe further, at her words? Hard to tell. Harder to care.) “Mni-inh. And you took my—” She faltered for an instant, trying to remember the name. It came sluggishly through the red and bones in her mind. “My Dayuhotem, him too. You’ve destroyed so many people, corrupted so many souls.
You will take no one else.
”

“Hanani.”

She ignored the word. It did not matter who she was in this place. All that mattered was hate. She slapped a broad patch of the creature’s flank and watched its skin turn gray and mottled like a swiftly spreading infection. It writhed, trying to escape, but she kept her hand there, baring her teeth and pressing down until its dead flesh puckered between her fingers. Hard to control, so much dreambile. There was too much of it in her, churning up from the grieving cur
rents of her soul. It needed to suffer; she would have to be careful not to kill the thing too quickly.

“You should never have been born!” she cried. The creature twitched again, unmistakably this time, shivering and moaning in its sudden helplessness. Good.

The voice again, behind her. “There’s no peace in this, Hanani. This cruelty, it doesn’t suit you.”

She did not care what suited her. “Go away.”

“Will you kill me, if I don’t?”

She shook her head to shake off the voice’s distraction. Kill? Yes. It would feel good to kill anyone who got in her way. No. There was only one soul here who had earned her hate.

“It killed Mni-inh!” she snapped, trying to focus. “It has to die.”

“Not like this.” There was a pause. “Remember who you are, Aier.”

A jolt.

She stopped pouring dreambile into the beast of hands, blinking. “Aier? Who is—”

Dancing red drapes red wax red carnelians st-st-stammering a nightstone statue closed eyes Mni-inh’s smile Wanahomen’s mouth her hair unloosed incense beeswax the sound of bells the taste of sipri jungissa Dayu a rippling grain field her parents’ half-forgotten voices.
I vow in Hananja’s name to cause no harm.

Hanani gasped, and looked down at the beast.

Which suddenly curled at her feet, no longer a beast at all but a tiny, spindly figure whimpering in the wake of torment. When the Wild Dreamer looked up at her, Hanani looked into the face of Mni-inh’s killer and saw:

A child.

Just a child. One who might have become a bright, cheerful little girl, if someone hadn’t broken her soul and ground the shards to
powder. One who moaned and cringed from Hanani, raising hands that had been broken too many times already, as if to ward off a blow.

What had she done?

“To hurt another, one must teach the soul to crave its own torment,” the voice—Wanahomen, he was Wanahomen—said behind her. Some quality of his words reminded Hanani of Mni-inh, and she flinched anew, staring down at the child. Wanahomen continued, his tone sad now. “I think perhaps this one has had enough, Hanani.”

“Oh, Goddess,” she whispered, dropping to her knees. The girl was trying now to crawl away—and failing, her weak limbs useless in the soft muck that her own soul had conjured. And suddenly Hanani knew there had been other times, other tormentors whom the girl
hadn’t
escaped. Other cruel words and beatings and the endless, aching, desperate yearning to rest, just rest for a little while—

“Mama,” the girl whispered. A plea for someone to
save her from Hanani
. Hanani reached for the child, but the child made a high fluting sound of distress, and she dropped her hand.

“I’m sorry,” she said at last, when she could think through her horror. “I’m sorry, I didn’t think, I’m so sorry, please, I didn’t mean to hurt you.” That was a lie. She had meant every destroyed limb. “I didn’t mean to hurt
you
.” That much was true. The beast of hands—a manifestation of the child’s fears, born from all the violence inflicted on her; Hanani had rightly hated that. But she had forgotten the most important rule of Sharing: a person was not her dreams. And no narcomancer could face the dreaming conjurations of the soul without a calm heart—or else she would become lost in the dream and forget herself. Those had been the first lessons Mni-inh had taught her.

Wanahomen drew near. “Hanani?”

“I don’t know what to do,” she whispered. “There’s no peace left
in me. I don’t know how to be—to be what she needs.” She could not bring herself to say
a Sharer
. She was not that, not anymore. “I can’t think how to help her.”

Wanahomen sighed and crouched beside her, putting an arm around her and drawing her close. “It’s all right. You can find a way.”

From the corner of Hanani’s eye, she saw the child stop crawling and turn to stare at them with great round eyes.

“I, I have never felt such anger, Wanahomen—” She still trembled with it. She had enjoyed it: stalking the beast, inflicting pain, thinking to herself
I need no weapon
because her hands were deadly enough. They were still coated in red wax—No. Was that wax at all? Her gorge rose; frantically, she scraped at her arms and wrists to get the stuff off, using her nails and not caring about the bloody streaks this left behind. Wanahomen scowled and caught her hands to stop her.

“No touch,” said the child. Startled, Hanani saw that the Wild Dreamer had risen to her feet. Here in dreaming the girl was not crippled, not if she willed herself otherwise. Now she stood, though waveringly, watching them. Watching
Wanahomen
, her small face filling with lethal hatred. “No touch no sleep
you do not touch you do not hurt
.”

Wanahomen opened his mouth to say, “I’m not hurting her, you fool—”

But in the next instant his mouth was gone.

He inhaled, eyes widening, reaching up to touch where it had been. But his hands vanished then, shriveling until only the stumps of his wrists remained. There was no blood; the stumps were smooth, sealed flesh, as if there had never been hands to begin with. Then the forearms split apart and disappeared, to the elbow. Wanahomen made a sound, quick, panicked—

“No!” Hanani leaped to her feet, moving in front of him. The Wild Dreamer twitched, glaring at her, and Hanani felt her awareness
blur, her sense of herself shivering and retreating again. She was not Hanani, she was Mother, full of rage—

No! I am Aier!
She clenched her fists and fought to remain herself. This was the Dreamer’s power, here in this world she had created in the realms between. In Ina-Karekh, dreams reflected the self, as the Goddess Hananja had decreed. But in the Wild Dreamer’s construct, the self reflected
her
—what the Dreamer saw in her victims, or wanted them to become. Did the child even realize she was killing people, total strangers who’d done nothing to merit her wrath? Hanani did not know—but as Wanahomen fell to the ground behind her, uttering an animal howl as his legs twisted into nothingness, all her fear disappeared as well.

“Hush,” Hanani said, stepping forward. The Dreamer’s will pushed at her again, and this time she let it change her, at least on the surface. Within, she was still Aier. Without, her appearance shifted, becoming taller, darker, willowy, more beautiful than she could ever be in waking. “There, now,” she said, and her voice had become low and soft. A mother’s croon. “Don’t be afraid.”

And the Wild Dreamer’s anger faded. She twitched back a step, then forward again, and a look of desperate anxiety came over her pinched face. “Mamamama?”

Hanani reached her and folded both arms around the child, holding her close. The child shivered and then buried her face in Hanani’s breast. “Mama,” she said again—and smiled.

“Yes,” said Hanani. She stroked the bony shoulders, her fingers trailing delicate red threads. So much pain in this one, more than any mere magic could ease. The Wild Dreamer’s soul soaked up dreamblood as the desert swallowed water—and then Hanani had nothing left, save her own dreamblood, which would cost her life. It did not trouble her to pay that price, but it would not solve the problem. The Dreamer needed too much. Hanani could pour her whole life into the child and never make a difference.

Her soul was damaged beyond the ability of magic to repair
, Yanassa had told her once, speaking of grief and loss—and mercy. Her brother Sharers had killed that woman, Yanassa’s great-aunt. And what Yanassa had not said, what she had perhaps not even known, was that those Sharers had likely also obliterated her soul rather than letting it travel to Ina-Karekh. A soul so corrupted could never find peace, not even with a woman’s innate magic, not even with a Gatherer’s help. It would only drift to the pain and darkness within the Goddess’s mind, like calling to like, there to suffer nightmares for all eternity. Kinder to end the soul than leave it like that.

Yanassa would probably have understood, if she’d known.
We were glad for it.

So when the red threads ran out, Hanani closed her eyes and sent forth black instead.

But not to cause pain this time. “Stillness,” she whispered in the child’s ear. “Silence.”

In a muzzy voice, so weary that Hanani’s eyes stung with tears, the Wild Dreamer asked, “Sleep?”

“Sleep,” she replied. “Yes. You may sleep now. As much as you like.”

And the Wild Dreamer sagged against her with a deep, contented sigh. It was a simple matter for Hanani to weave dreambile into that sigh, spinning it into a longer one, drawing the child’s breath out of her until it stopped. Simple, too, to then unravel the soul itself.

The ugly world of blood and bones vanished. They floated, Hanani and Wanahomen, in the cleaner darkness of the realms between. Of the Wild Dreamer’s soul there was nothing. She had ceased to be.

“Prince,” Hanani said softly, into the darkness. “Go back to waking now. Tell my brothers, if they don’t already know, that the nightmare plague is done.”

After a moment’s pause—probably counting all his parts to make sure they were still there—Wanahomen exhaled. “Thank the Goddess for that.” A pause; in that bodiless space, she felt his sudden suspicion. “But surely you can tell them yourself.”

She sighed. “No, Prince. I can’t.”

Silence and shock—and sudden fear. He did not want her to die. He wanted
her
, but that was not surprising. As Yanassa had warned her, Wanahomen held too tight.

You shared your strength with me, Niim, when I needed it after Mni-inh’s death. But this you cannot share.

“My soul is corrupt too,” Hanani said. In the soft darkness her voice echoed, hollow. “Twice now I’ve killed with hands that were meant to heal, and even enjoyed another’s suffering. Again and again, I have broken my oaths. But I still love Hananja; I know my duty.”

His anger made the darkness ripple, trying to become some other place—but his will was too scattered and frantic to shape anything specific. He did not have a Gatherer’s control, just the power. “No, no, you will not do this, Hanani, I forbid—”