A small kindness.
Crouched upon the back of the blood-bay stallion, Ushahin Dreamspinner floated above the horse’s churning stride, borne aloft like a crippled vessel on the waves of a wind-tossed sea. And yet, there was power in him, far beyond the strength of his twisted limbs. Riding, he cast the net of his mind adrift over the whole of Urulat, and rode the pathways between waking and dreaming.
It was a thing he alone knew to do.
The Were had taught it to him; so many believed. It was true, and not true. The Grey Dam Sorash had taught him the ways of the Were, in whose blood ran the call of Oronin’s Horn. Because there was Death in their Shaping, there were doors open to them that were closed to the other races of Lesser Shapers.
Ushahin had heard Oronin’s Horn. It had blown for him when he was a child and his broken body had lain bleeding in the forests of Pelmar. Somewhere, there was a death waiting for him. But the Grey Dam had claimed him, grieving for her lost cubs, and whispered, not yet.
So she had claimed him, and taught him. Yet he was not Were, and their magic twisted in his usage. The Were, like the Fjeltroll, could smell Men’s fear; unlike the Fjel, they could hear a Man’s heart beat at a hundred paces and taste the pulse of his fear. Ushahin, in whose veins ran the blood of Haomane’s Children, could sense Men’s thoughts. And it was their thoughts—their dreams, their unspoken terrors and wordless joys—that formed the pathways along which he traveled. It was a network as vast and intricate as the Marasoumië, yet infinitely more subtle. He had walked it many a time. This was the first time he had ridden it.
Ushahin-who-walks-between-dusk-and-dawn.
Thus had the Grey Dam Sorash named him in the tongue of the Were, who had no other words for what he was. It was his name, the one he had borne for many times the length of a mortal lifespan. Although the Were reviled him and the Grey Dam Vashuka had repudiated his claim upon their kinship, it was the name he would keep.
It had been given him in love.
Once, he had had another name; a Pelmaran name, given him by one long dead. His father’s mother, he thought; there was some vague memory there. A widow of middle years, with hair gone early to grey, a lined face and a sharp tongue. After all, we’ve got to call him something. His father, a tall shadow, turning away with averted face. The Pelmaran lordling, his life ruined for a moment’s passion, did not care what his son was called. He retreated into memory, reliving the moment. It was something few Men could claim, to have expended a lifetime of desire on Ellylon flesh.
That, Ushahin remembered.
Not what they had called him.
When he tried, he saw light; bright light, the light of Haomane’s sun. It had stood high above the marketplace in Pelmar City the day the other children had run him down and held him at bay. He’d stood his ground for a long time, but in the end there had been too many of them. The children of Pelmar City did not like his bright eyes, that saw too keenly their squalid thoughts; they did not like his pale hair, the way his limbs moved or his sharp cheekbones; slanted, strange and unfamiliar. It made them afraid, and they knew, in the way children know things, that his father’s guilt would keep his lips sealed, and his mother’s people had gone far, far away.
Better none of it had ever happened.
So, with cobblestones wrenched from the market square, they had set out to make it so. The first few were thrown, and he had dodged them. If they had not cornered him, he would have dodged them all; but they had. They had run him to ground.
He remembered the first blow, an errant stone. It had grazed his cheek, raising a lump and a blueish graze, breaking his fair skin. Had it cracked the bone? Perhaps. It didn’t matter. Worse had come later. They had closed in, stones in fists. There had been many blows, then. Ushahin did not remember the ones that had broken his hands, raised in futile defense. He had curled into a ball; they had pounced upon him, swarming, hauling his limbs straight. A trader’s shadow had darkened the alley, and withdrawn. There would be no intervention in the quarrels of children. Someone—he did not remember who had done it, had never even seen their face—had stomped gleefully on his outstretched arms and legs, until the bones had broken with sounds like dry sticks snapping in half.
The last blow, he remembered.
There had been a boy, some twelve years of age. Kneeling on the cobblestones, a mortal boy on scabbed knees. A rock in his fist, crashing down upon Ushahin’s temple. At that blow, bone had shattered, a dent caving the orbit of his eye. The boy had spat upon his broken face and whispered a name. What it was, he didn’t remember. Only the long crawl afterward, moving his broken limbs like a swimmer on dry land, and the trail of blood it left behind him in the marketplace; the gentle succor of the forest’s pine mast floor, and then the Grey Dam, giving him a new name.
Ushahin-who-walks-between-dusk-and-dawn.
The blood-bay’s muscles surged beneath him, compressing and lengthening, stride after stride. It should have grown weary, but there was no weariness in dreams. Somewhere, distantly, Ushahin felt its astonishment. His power had grown during his sojourn in the Delta. He wondered why Satoris had never returned to the source of his birth, if his Lordship had ceded it to Calanthrag the Eldest as the price for the dragons’ aid during the Shapers’ War. Whatever regenerative mystery remained, it had infused him with strength. Even now he felt it course through his veins. The bay’s nostrils flared, revealing the scarlet lining; still, it ran, its strides consuming the leagues. Beneath the dim starlight the marshes of outer Vedasia fell behind them, and they continued onward.
They ran as swift as rumor, following the curve of Harrington Inlet. The road was pale dust under their hooves, and before them flew ravens in a wedge. To their left and to their right ran a riderless horse; one ghost-grey, and one night-black. In their wake, they left nightmares, and along the coast the Free Fishermen of Harrington Inlet tossed in their beds, waking upon sweat-dampened pallets to their wives’ worried faces and the cries of fretful children.
It made Ushahin smile.
But there was bigger game afoot. Casting his nets, he caught Men’s dreams in a seine, sifting through them. Behind him, yes. Behind him was that which was known, Aracus Altorus and his company, riding hot toward the west. Ellylon blood and Ellylon pride ran high and hot, as did that of the Men of Curonan. Still, they would not dare to cross the Delta. Their thoughts veered away from it, filled with fear. They would lose time crossing open water rather than chance the Delta. Thinking of Calanthrag the Eldest, who dwelled in its heart, Ushahin smiled again. He spared a moment’s hate for Aracus Altorus, who had won a bitter victory from the Were. He spared a moment’s pity for the Sorceress of Beshtanag, doomed to rot in mortal flesh. He spared a moment’s curiosity for Blaise Caveros, who so resembled his ancestor, Tanaros.
Then, he gazed ahead.
To Meronil, he did not dare look. Ingolin the Wise kept its boundaries with care, maintaining all that remained of the old Ellyl magics, and even Ushahin Dreamspinner dared not walk the dreams of the Ellylon who dwelt within. But before Meronil was Seahold, a keep of Men, and north of Seahold lay the fertile territories of the Midlands.
There, rumor stalked.
It came from the north; from the mountains of Staccia, winding its way in a whisper of thought, passed from lip to ear. Curious, Ushahin followed it to its source, tracing its path through the mountains, back to the ancient battlefield of Neherinach, where a node-point of the Marasoumië lay dead and buried. Dead, yes, but no longer buried. The node-point lay raw and exposed, granite cooling in the northern sun. Something had disturbed it, blasting it from the very earth.