This is a dream.
This where the future calls to her.
This is a place where the sky meets the land. A rancid yellow line where one would be indistinguishable from the other if not for the languid movement of the yellow clouds crawling across the sky, desperate, but too sickly, to escape.
This is the sourlands slave auction and she is here to kill a man. She has hounded him through the Tired Lands. He is the last, one of many cruel men who use others as they see fit. This one is special to her. She has left behind her a trail of bodies. Of facilitators, of hangers-on, of useful contacts, of family members. Little by little she has whittled away at the network he has built up, at the places which bring him bits to spend, at the people who will do him favours and at those he loves until he has become a pariah.
None will deal with him because death follows him.
And he is scared.
She is glad he is scared.
She wants him scared.
She was scared, that day long ago when he ripped her world apart with a knife.
She slips through the crowds as the slave-father sings his song of selling: ten bits, twelve bits, eight bits, nine bits. The market is full of the men and women of Festival in thick triangular clothing which insulates them from the sickness of the souring, a smell like a wall. She watches for her quarry but she cannot concentrate. She is distracted. Distracted in a way she has never been before and in a way she does not understand. There is a feeling in the air and it is more than the dust and stink of the souring. It is more than the inevitability of a death. It is something she hasn’t felt before but knows as intimately as the scarred body hidden behind the wraps and clothes that cover everything but her eyes.
It draws her.
But she has a purpose. She has a long-held purpose and the feeling has to wait. They have almost finished with the girls now. Most have gone to Festival and she is glad. They will be cared for there—as much as anyone in the Tired Lands is cared for. She would save them all if she could, the Tired Lands grind up women and girls, suck the life from them even as they produce it for the men who rule. Older ways are forgotten, trampled. Lost for ever.
Some girls do not go to Festival. Some go to the blessed hanging around on the outskirts of the crowd and she notes them. Remembers them. Asks quiet questions as to who each one is and where they come from while she buys food, drifts through the people like a shatterspirit.
The slave-father sings his song of selling: nine bits, ten bits, twelve bits, fifteen bits.
Boys come up and go out. They hang from the rope. Hands go up. Hands go down. Money is produced and crying children are exchanged for coins.
She would end this here if she could, destroy it all. But she cannot. She is not the cure for all ills, she can only cure what ails her and she has come a long way to do that. Another boy sells—he screams a name she does not recognise as he is dragged away—she does not care about the boys.
She cares about her quarry.
He sits alone by a fire, shunned, as if the fear that comes off him in waves can be sensed by those around him and they cannot stand to be near it. The fire is of burning dung and a column of black smoke rises from it to mark the place where her quest will come to an end.
And the slave-father sings his song of selling: nine bits, ten bits, twelve bits, fifteen bits.
“It’s brave, to sit with me,” he says as she sits by the fire. Around them people are leaving. The slave market is drawing to a close.
“Last lot. I know he’s a cripple but as you can see he’s got plenty of fight in him. Bright too, from what I’ve heard.”
An angry wind pushes the wisps of hair that have escaped the wraps around her face into snakes that bite at the smoke.
“Brave, why?”
“People who sit with me die.” He stares into the fire. “Friends, family, all gone.”
“There is just you now?”
Members of the crowd start to drift away in ones and twos. “Ten bits, ten bits for a boy? I’ll take ten bits for a boy,” the man sings out in a deep baritone.
“Just me. And even that, not for long.”
“Oh?”
“Xus follows me.” He looks up. He was round-faced, once. Young and handsome on the day he tried to kill her. Now he is hollow-cheeked, teeth missing, eyes red from chewing too much miyl and never sleeping enough. Never being allowed to rest.
“I am safe from Xus,” she says. The man stares at her, but now—now—he really looks.
He drops a tone. “Eight bits for a boy? Five? Five bits for this boy, five bits for this boy and we can all go home.”
“So, it is you, finally,” he says. He sounds calmer than she expected, accepting even. “I met a priest in Maniyadoc who said you would skin me alive. My father’s ex-wife, she’s a queen now, she said you would castrate me and make me eat what you cut off. Another man said you would take my eyes. So, which is it to be?” She turns away, looks into the fire.
The wind begins to howl. Small bits of wood and bones from food cartwheel across the dirt between the few woebegone tents.
“All of them,” she says. She expects him to run but he does not. She notices he is shaking slightly. The hand that holds his miyl stick is wavering but he does not run. Does not even try to.
“Why?” he says.
She untwists knots, unties lengths of material, unwinds the cloth that covers her face and throws it into the fire. An end catches just as the wind grabs it, and it is caught up, twisting and writhing in agony through the air as the flames consume it.
He stares into her face.
And there is nothing there. Nothing in his eyes. No recognition for the hurt he caused her, for the pain, for her family, for her child. His eyes search her face and there is nothing. Then a twitch, not of recognition, not of knowing, but as if there is an itch in the back of his mind.
“I knew a dark girl once,” he said. “I killed her. Are you her mother?”
She doesn’t know what to say. Behind her the slave-song starts to end and her fingers itch to apply the touch of sleep to this man. To take him back to the place she has prepared and carry out her slow vengeance on him.
“The Tired Lands are hard,” he says, and she knows he is right. She knows that from his blood a hundred others just as cruel will spring up. She is surrounded by them. She would destroy it all if she had the tools.
“Come on, any less than five bits and I’m better off selling him to the swillers as animal feed.”
She glances over her shoulder at the last boy on the stage as he screams and cries and spins on the rope.
And he burns.
He burns.
He burns with a power like she’s never seen before. It is held within him and it may never rise. She is caught up in it, this wave of destruction, this crumbling of the world, this unthinking, unreasoning and uncaring annihilation. Unless someone teaches him. Unless someone shows him how, and then? Her knife darts out into Gart ap Garfin’s throat. Her single-minded quest for revenge is suddenly forgotten in a swift killing blow. The man who killed her child and her lover and her family doesn’t make a sound as he dies. He simply falls face first into the fire and the air fills with the stink of singeing hair followed by the smell of roasting flesh.
That was small vengeance.
Real vengeance is on the stage. Up there, crying and spinning. There is an end to all she’s grown to despise, the unthinking cruelty and the hate. Up there is the tool she needs to wipe the Tired Lands clean. She stands, walks toward the stage. The slave-father sings out.
“Three bits. Three bits and I’ll break even. No? Then the swillers’ pigs will eat well tonight …”
“Does he have a name?” she says and the boy’s screaming stops.
The world stops.
She is about to change the world.
Everything will change.
“Five,” she says, because he is what she needs and she does not intend to lose him. “I’ll pay five bits for him.”
This is a dream.