The Edge of Worlds
(The Books of the Raksura #4)
by Martha Wells
To my husband Troyce, for everything
CHAPTER ONE
Moon knew he was dreaming.
In the real world, he was in Jade’s bower, lying on the furs near the metal bowl of the hearth, just close enough to feel the heat of the warming stones on his skin. Chime lay nearby, breathing deeply, a book unrolled across his chest. Jade was up in the hanging bed, and he could hear the faint rasp of her scales against the cushions as she stirred in her sleep. The damp night air was laced with the familiar scents of the court, the flowers floating in Jade’s bathing pool, and the ever-present musky sweetness that was the scent of the mountain-tree that housed the colony.
In the dream world, he was watching the Fell destroy the Indigo Cloud court.
He could see the central well, spiraling up through the heart of the great tree, lit by the soft glow of snail shells that were spelled for light by the mentors. Fell stench was thick in his lungs and the walls were alive with hundreds of dark shapes as dakti swarmed up the polished wood walls. Three massive major kethel climbed up from the greeting hall, their claws catching on the carved balconies, gouging through the stairs that curved up the walls, cracking the delicate pillars. They plunged their clawed hands into the bower doorways, and Arbora screamed and blood splattered against the wood and jeweled inlay.
The perspective changed and Moon watched dakti flow through the passages of the teachers’ levels. He tried not to see faces and couldn’t help it. There were Rill and Bark and the soldier Ginger, piled up at the mouth of a chamber they had tried to defend, their eyes blank with death but their mouths open in snarls of furious terror. And the warrior Vine, lying in a junction of bowers, caught between his scaled form and his groundling one, half soft brown groundling skin and half-scaled, one wing twisted under him, his stomach ripped open and guts spilling out. A scream of rage rang out from further up in the central well and Moon knew it was Pearl, the reigning queen.
Where’s Jade? Moon thought. Where am I? Where’s Stone? Why aren’t we doing anything? That thought almost broke him out of the nightmare, and for a moment he lay on the furs again. He could see his favorite carving, the one of the Raksuran court that covered most of the bower’s ceiling. In different colored woods and gemstones it depicted queens, consorts, warriors, and the wingless Arbora, all their bodies entwined or flowing apart, separate pieces making one whole.
He tried again to turn the dream into something else, tried to wake, but the rulers flowed down the stairs to the teachers’ hall, past the mutilated, blood-streaked bodies of Arbora and warriors, took the passage that led toward the nurseries—
“Moon, wake up,” Balm said.
He snapped out of the dream. He was on his feet, breathing hard in terror and fury. Chime yelped and shifted, sat bolt upright, dumped the book off his lap, and kicked a stray piece of pottery across the room. Jade flipped out of the hanging bed and landed on her feet, spines lifted for battle.
Balm leapt back a pace, dropped her spines and held out her hands. “Sorry! I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to startle you!”
The relief was so intense, Moon’s knees almost gave out. He said, “No, sorry, no, it was me.” He shifted back to his groundling form, scales dissolving and reforming as soft skin, and he felt a chill cold enough to make him shiver. It was the thwarted fight-urge from the dream, still running through his blood. He had had plenty of nightmares but he rarely shifted while he was asleep. It was a long ingrained habit from all the turns of self-control while he had been living in groundling settlements, pretending to be anything but a shapeshifter. “I was having a nightmare.”
Chime struggled to his knees and rescued the book and the cup. “So was I,” he said, following Moon’s example and shifting back to his groundling form. His hand trembled as he set the cup next to the others beside the hearth bowl. “It must be something in the air.”
“I wasn’t sleeping well, either.” Jade settled her spines self-consciously. Queens didn’t have a groundling form, shifting to a smaller Arbora-like shape with softer scales, no wings, and fewer spines. That was the form they slept in, and Jade must have shifted to her winged form at some point between leaping out of the hanging bed and landing on the floor. Moon’s heart was still pounding. The relief of seeing her and Chime alive and well was almost as intense as if the dream had been real.
Balm should have been looking at them as if they had all lost their minds. Moon knew he was still twitchy from his turns of living like a feral solitary, but waking him usually didn’t cause this much of an outburst. Especially considering it was Balm, Jade’s warrior clutchmate and one of Moon’s oldest friends in the court. But Balm looked worried, the gold scales of her brow furrowed. She said, “Were you all having nightmares? About the Fell attacking the colony?”
Startled, Moon said, “Yes.”
Jade flicked her spines in an affirmative, then glanced at Moon. “What, you were too?”
Rolling the book back up into its cover, Chime looked up. “Uh, so was I.”
They didn’t have a moment for the strangeness of that to settle in, because Balm said, grimly, “So did almost everyone down in the teachers’ bowers, and maybe everyone in the court. Some of the younger mentors woke up screaming. Heart wants to talk to you and Pearl right away.”
“I know it’s odd,” Chime was saying as they went out into the queens’ hall, “but it’s theoretically possible for a mentor or a queen to share a dream with the rest of their bloodline and related bloodlines.”
“Theoretically possible doesn’t mean any mentors or queens know how to do it, or if they have, they never mentioned it to me.” Jade’s spines and expression were somewhere between appalled and angry.
As sister queen of the court, she should know. Of course, Moon was her consort, and technically he should know too, but he hadn’t been raised as a Raksura, and most of the time it seemed everything he learned about his own people had to be acquired the hard way. “I think if Pearl could do it, we’d know by now,” he said. It might be theoretically possible, but the idea made his skin creep.
The queens’ hall, meant to impress visiting queens and consorts, was still quiet except for the water falling into a fountain pool against the far wall. The huge sculpture of a queen, her scales set with bright sunstones and her outspread wings stretched out to circle the hall and meet tip to tip, was suddenly an uncomfortable metaphor, at least for Moon. The open gallery of the consorts’ quarters was above the sculpture; Moon, Stone, and Ember, the only adult consorts currently in the court, had bowers up there, but they seldom slept in them. From the well that led down through the center of the tree came the faint sounds of movement and voices. Raksura, especially Arbora, didn’t always sleep through the night, but this was the noise of disturbance, uneasy voices and people calling out to each other.
Jade stepped to the edge of the well and unfurled the deep blue expanse of her wings. “Balm, you wake Pearl. Chime, find Stone.” She jumped off the ledge and cupped her wings to control her fall.
Chime looked uneasy at the prospect of disturbing Stone. “If he’s having the same nightmare we were . . .”
“Just make sure he’s awake before you get close,” Moon told him. Stone was the court’s line-grandfather and could be cranky at the best of times, let alone when he was caught in a vivid dream about the Fell eating all his descendants.
Balm went toward the reigning queen’s bower to wake Pearl, saying, “I think I’d better stand in the doorway and call to her.”