This is a dream.
She is standing on the black battlements of Maniyadoc, a keep that squats on a hill like a worn old tree stump, defying time and landscape. Wind whips her hair about her face and it whispers in her ear.
You were never here.
To the south a forest carpets the land, a jagged wavescape of pinetops undulating in the wind as they climb the escarpment, a huge evergreen breaker about to smash down on the fields below. Those fields are another sea: a sea of life. Of mounts and men and women all arrayed and gleaming for war. So many she can’t count them, and where the forest is an angry mass of angular vegetation the war host is like the placid surface of a lake. Flashes of sunlight are cast up from armour, like wavelets on blue water. But lakes, she knows, can be as deep and dangerous as any sea.
Beside her stands Adran, not dressed as a queen, dressed as a serving girl—though the queen is there too: she is beneath the rags and sacking, beneath the dirty face and tangled hair. She stares from the battlements with all the hauteur of a ruler. She stares at the same landscape, but what does she see? What does she feel? Does she know something terrible is about to happen? Does she feel the flutter in her breast? The coldness in her swelling belly?
She was never here.
Merela’s belly will never swell again.
The land bulges, the air becomes a lens and she sees movement. On the banks of the lake of life there is colour and change. Riders dart back and forth. Mettel chanters step forward, swinging their whistlers through the air. Pretty flags fly in the same breeze that whips her hair around her head. She hears shouts but not words. She hears the whoops of the chanters. Whipping up the troops, getting them ready. And she knows she watches giants. Men and women brought from the land of dances and stories to fight the terrible foe, the one who must be brought down or he will bring them all down with him. They are the heroes that will be spoken of for years to come.
This is the day Doran ap Mennix rode to end the Black Sorcerer.
“They are all going to die,” she says.
“I know,” says Adran, and her voice is husky, excited.
You were never here.
She was never here.
A horn blows. Or a voice shouts. Or a chanter shrieks. It is difficult to tell because of the way the wind plays about them on top of the great black battlements of Maniyadoc. But with the noise the lake of life convulses, as if some great beast moves underneath, throwing forward a bow wave of armoured men and women. It opens its mouths, gives out a furious, animal roar.
“They are all going to die,” says Adran.
“They know,” she says.
“And yet they go anyway.” Adran curls a length of brown hair around a dirty finger. “That is true power.”
The land bulges, the air becomes a lens and Adran fades away. It is as if she becomes the only person left in the entire Tired Lands who is not on the field. At the edge of the forest, above the curl of the escarpment, she can see a small group who stand around a man. He is nothing much, small but stocky, dressed in the black robes of a priest of Xus. Behind him are shadows in the forest. Words are exchanged and the black-clad figure lifts his arms, shouts “No!” and it is a cry of grief as much as anger.
A pause. A thought. A single second of utter and unreal silence. The only other time she has ever known a world so quiet was when—
When?
… a tiny, almost unformed hand is in hers …
She can feel what he does. Feel it as sharp as the knife that cut her womb from her. And if the armoured men were a great creature beneath a placid lake then this is a creature so many times greater as to be unmeasurable. It denudes the trees. It sucks life from the grass, from the earth. The armoured wave running towards them falls: every man and woman and mount dead in an eyeblink. From there the power runs on, ravening like a war hound off the leash, out of control and hungry until, with a cry of agony, the man who holds it loses control and it is released. And the release shudders through the earth Raising the land in jagged peaks Ripping the dried sod from the stone. Tearing Maniyadoc apart with a noise like a hundred thousand storms all at once. The wave of destructive power runs on. She is caught up in it. This wave of destruction, this crumbling of the world This unthinking, unreasoning and uncaring annihilation and, for the first time since the day the knife went home, she stops hurting.
The power is unmaking them all. Unmaking the cruelty. Unmaking the killers. Unmaking those who hurt her and all those who are like them.
As the castle below her falls apart, riven, block from block. As the sword falls on the Black Sorcerer, sending him to Xus’s black palace. As she falls into a place that is luminous, formless and void, she thinks: “No, Adran. This is power.”
And with power.
Comes revenge.
Revenge on them all.
This is a dream
This is her dream.