When the Brothers Ashiun reached the rooftop, they found me standing with my back to my dead brother, gazing out across the city to where the Mound had taken root.
“There,” I told them. I did not try to explain the death of my brother, the sudden oncoming of dominion that filled me with physical potency. I merely pointed. “There he lies, and there he sucks at the blood of my demesne. Root him out!”
The child in the darkness.
Alistair saw it standing on the brink of the chasm, bathed as always in white light. Next, the monster from the darkness that bayed in the voice of a wolf would leap upon him and devour him.
And then he would wake. As he always did.
But this dream was deeper than ever before. He ran toward the child and the light, never drawing any nearer. There was a stench too that had never been there before: a rank, poisonous, rotten stench, like the breath of some dead thing come to life. His shoulder hurt like fire, but he ran anyway, pursuing the child and the death that must come.
For years now, he had experienced this same dream, sometimes for many nights running, sometimes not for months at a stretch. But it was the same dream, and he knew the pace of it and the violent end. He must reach that end before he could wake.
But he was running and not catching up. He would never reach the child. He would never reach the light. He would run in darkness forever, without death, without end.
“No!” he cried. “Come and kill me, monster! Kill me as you must!”
The baying of the dogs was too far away. The light was too distant.
“Help me!” he cried.
A golden voice sang. He turned to it as to a light, and the song became a Path at his feet. A new Path, one he had never before trod in this darkness of his subconscious. This wasn’t how the dream was supposed to go, but he was desperate now. The voice sang, and he pursued it, changing course and running.
———
Suddenly his eyes opened and he looked upon uncut stone in a dimly lit tunnel, and the sound of flowing water filled his ears. And a voice. Not the golden voice he’d pursued. No, a chattering, swift, high voice, speaking unintelligibly.
This was not what Alistair last remembered of waking life.
He closed his eyes, and his throat constricted but was too dry to make a sound. Where was he supposed to be? What should he remember? He tried to lift his hand, and pain shot through his shoulder. He grimaced and was still. Why was he in this damp tunnel? Why was he so cold?
Why didn’t that unseen person stop babbling?
The second time he tried to groan, he managed to make something close to a noise. More like a grating in his throat. He decided to risk opening his eyes again and still found himself looking at the stone and shadows.
His uncle was dead.
That memory crashed through his consciousness, dragging with it everything else. His uncle . . . his cousin . . . his lost future. He ground his teeth, and the groan this time was a little stronger. But there was something else he needed to remember, something on the edge but not quite within reach.
Why was his shoulder on fire?
A voice he felt he should recognize cried out in a burst of anger, interrupting the foreign babbler. “What? Etanun is here?”
The first speaker replied, sounding anxious. Alistair, after a battle of wills against his own body, turned his head. He saw Mouse, the scrubber urchin, dressed in rags and ill-fitting shoes, kneeling beside a large orange cat. The cat was listening and watching as though he understood.
Then the cat opened his mouth and the golden voice from Alistair’s dream fell from his lips. “And he stood by and watched goblins march into the Near World? Let them break through the gate and come right in? Well, that goes to show—”
Alistair screamed.
The cat screamed and arched his back, spitting feline curses.
Mouse screamed and fell off the ledge into the running water below.
Perhaps, Alistair decided, he’d been a bit premature. Yes, he’d had a shock, and one couldn’t expect a fellow to lie down and take a world that inflicted talking cats upon him. But then again, this could only be a continuation of his dream.
Suddenly relearning to move, he sat up straight and his hands clutched at the cold ground. A dripping Mouse climbed back onto the ledge, glaring daggers his way. The cat, tail slowly smoothing back to a respectable size, mirrored that expression. Then he sat, licked his chest and paws a few times to prove how unafraid he was, and said in the coolest tone:
“So you’re awake. What have you to say for yourself in all this, eh?”
Alistair’s shoulder throbbed, and he put his hand to it, feeling the distinct pucker of a scar. “A dream,” he whispered. “It’s all a dream.”
“How metaphysical of you,” said the cat. “But we’re neither of us impressed.”
Alistair looked up and down the tunnel and realized where he was, though he had never before been in his uncle’s famous passage. He saw how it wound away into rock, how the water flowed through a gray-lit opening. The smell of smoke and death lingered from his dream.