A jagged glow lent its flame to his escape. In a frenzy of pain the undead corpse scrambled through Remis’s dream, following the man, aching for explanation, aching for the thing that dogged his path. The roughness of the road went unnoticed beneath the corpse/Remis’s feet. The man limped around a corner as the undead thing reached out, smashing the worn timber of a narrowing fence-line.
“What do you want of me?” the man yelled.
Corpse-Remis roared. The man held out his hand and there appeared between the creature and the man a specter, burning with unseen flames as its fingers snatched at the corpse’s empty chest. It stepped back, afraid.
In sleep, Remis went rigid. Her muscles twitched as though her body were pricked by pins of fire. When the tension dissipated, the peacefulness of night infused her.
Her eyes flickered open. For a moment she saw only the night-dimmed forms of furniture and the wood-frame of the room. She puzzled briefly over the strange vividness of the dream, searching through her study-memory for some way to interpret its meaning. But movement swept these conceptions away before they were formed. A dim figure stood near the door, barely visible among the shadows. Remis gripped her blanket tightly, but the shade did not move. Remis blinked, doubting her eyes. Clear contours were lost in the speckled darkness.
“Who’s there?” she asked it.
No answer. She sat up, straining to focus her eyes on the place where she imagined the shape to be. Was it possible it was just an after-image of vivid dream?
Then the figure was near her, leaning. She had not seen it move. She stifled a scream in the base of her throat. “Please!” she whispered instead, fearful that her voice might goad the phantom into some ghostly act.
In the faint light that drifted through the window, carried on a breeze that chilled the sweat on her skin, Remis could see the phantom’s face, white and bony, framed in a distinctive square-cut beard, the lips moving in silent speech. When she saw the opaque whiteness of its eyes she knew it was no mortal visitor. Numinous terror tightened her neck muscles. “What do you want?” she whispered.
The specter said something, but it was dim and without force, not driven by fleshly lungs. There was pain in it. Her shock and involuntary superstition dissipating, Remis realized that this was no ghost either, but rather an image sent to her from elsewhere. It was a message. “You want my help?” she said. It nodded. “Why did you come to me?”
The figure made hand-movements in the air, speaking in study-signs. It spelt out the words, “You are Valarl—blood-link.” What did that mean? Was she related to this phantom? But there was no time; she let speculation pass. Later. The sending was barely visible in the gloom.
“How will I find you?” she asked.
The figure reached out a translucent hand and touched her. In her mind she gazed along a darkened alley, the road-stones wet with dew and mist. Beyond the alley ran another, larger thoroughfare. A painted sign, unclear in the distant fog, read: “Telfith’s Mast”.
“I’ll come,” she said. Instantly the image faded.
Remis rubbed her eyes, which were sore and strained. Her mind felt dried out, as though its edges had been brushed by the passing of some dusty desert wind. She wondered whether she had dreamt the encounter, though she knew quite well she hadn’t. Someone was in an alley off the Street of Telfith’s Mast; they had called to her, psychically, seeking aid. They were, or had once been, her kin. These things seemed clear.
Quietly she slipped out of bed and dressed.
iii.
Night in Koerpel-Na was generally a dreary, sordid thing—a poor substitute for the clean expanse of natural darkness that night became in the outer lands where he’d been born. Arhl Mogarni lay on the flat baked-clay roof of his workrooms and let nostalgia and sorrow take him.
Life had not been easy of late. Talking to his neighbor, Remis Sarsdarl—even if briefly and without much engagement—had brought the difficulty of it to the forefront of his mind again. Now he was having trouble sending it back into a darker place where it could be accepted without morbid self-loathing. What was his life? Little work, no money, few prospects. His landlord was threatening to have him evicted. He’d had to lay off his apprentice, though he’d kept the lad on beyond his ability to pay proper wages, hoping the situation would change. It hadn’t, and fulfilling his obligations to the youth had been hard. He had to face the truth: his business was almost dead. All in all, Arhl felt strongly that he had failed, as he always failed, and could see no clear way forward. This fact saddened and infuriated him.
Yet he knew that thinking this way was pointless.
Despite himself, however, he let the worries and self-doubt continue to surge through his thoughts, giving them free rein. Sometimes it was necessary to experience the full gamut, to allow emotions to grow, to rage against the inevitable, even though in the end such indulgence might be a sign of weakness. Arhl was tired of being strong. In that, too, he was a failure. So, for a while, he would let himself be weak; he would succumb to self-indulgent recriminations and pathetic complaint, and after a time it would pass, returning him to his life of stoic acceptance.
Wind guttered through the eves below him and rattled at some loose metal sheeting there. A dog barked in the distance, the sound wild and ominous. Above, the sky grew suddenly clearer than usual, free of smoke and the filth of local industries. Residual light snaked through the blackness, forming into patterns he couldn’t decipher.
Breathing slowly and more easily now, Arhl felt his body closing down toward sleep.
But something—a movement nearby—jerked him awake again. Skin across his scalp tingled. The night seemed thicker about him, its breath plucking at his face.
“Who’s there?”
Silhouetted against the sky, a figure sat on his roof with him, knees drawn up, staring out across the City. How had his visitor climbed up without Arhl noticing? Instinctively he made to draw himself further away, but some familiarity in the size and shape of the figure stopped him. It was a woman, he saw. Her hair was long and plaited, and her clothes made of fur and roughly woven dyeless fibre, after the tribal fashion of his own people. Leather strapping around her waist and over her shoulders were the accoutrements of a hunter. Arhl sniffed at the air, which should have carried her human scent to his sensitive nostrils. But there was only the smell of coming rain and smoke residue from his own forge.
He swallowed back a groan. He knew this woman and he knew what her appearance here, now, might mean.
“Mother?” he whispered.
The woman turned. At that moment night-light shimmered above and lit her features dimly. She had the hard, pale youthfulness Arhl remembered from so long ago. Within her eye sockets, however, there lay an ancient darkness.
“You’ve come to me again,” Arhl remarked, his voice weak with ghostly anticipation.
You are my son. The bond between us is infinite. Why wouldn’t I come to you when danger stirs about you and your world is threatened?
The fear Arhl harbored grew more resonant in the hollow of his chest. Mogarni had come to him like this before, several times, since her hunting death long ago when he had been a mere cub. Each time, the comfort she offered had done little to bring him peace. Were others haunted by their dead kin like this? He didn’t know, because he was always too afraid to ask them. He suspected it was not common. There was a strain of psychic doom within his people that would have marginalized him even further had the inhabitants of this City known about it—a link to the Deep Powers of the world that led, inevitably, to death or madness. It had destroyed his father…in the end it had fractured his tribe. Perhaps, too, it had driven Arhl himself to come to Koerpel-Na, seeking a purpose that was tangible and this-worldly. Why must his past haunt him like this?
“What do you want?” he snapped, annoyed at the injustice.
I know what you fear, my son. I know I am not welcome in your life—not like this, not as a ghost. But I’m in you and can’t be ignored.