Fractured Dreams Page 6

  Her bodyguard nodded before heading to the side of the ship. “The water is in the galley.”

  He made his way over the side, and Zorra stared at the opening that led to the lower decks. She closed her mind off to the horrors that might wait for her. Her hesitation gave Joti enough time to let the bag drop safely into their small boat. Before she moved to the lower levels, he stood next to her.

  Joti touched her shoulder when he reached her side. “I will get the water, I know where it is. There is no sense both of us being exposed to that… to the bodies.”

  He bolted down the stairs before she could give him a reason not to. She would have had a hard time thinking of one. The dread of going belowdecks overwhelmed her. The thought of more death was too hard for her to fathom.

  The mutt calmed, and with effort she scooped the animal into her empty arms. She carried it to the side and lowered the dog into the sailboat.

  Only one thing left to do. Near the bow stood the forward running lantern. In short order she found it still held oil. The flint and steel that hung by the cord were old and well used, but it quickly caught a flame.

  Joti came from below, a small keg under his arm. “It isn’t water but a weak ale. It should help us along.”

  She couldn’t hold back the intake of breath when she thought of her father, Zar’s master brewer, and his death. She missed his love more than all her family combined, except maybe her younger brother Fox. She knew it would be hard to drink that keg and not think of him.

  Joti motioned to the lantern. “What’s that for?”

  “We need to destroy this ship. This sickness can’t spread. I will not let it fall into the hands of pirates… or worse.” Before he could comment, Zorra threw the lamp down the steps. Hitting with a crash, the lower landing burst into flames. “We should leave.” She moved swiftly to their waiting craft.

  Zorra watched as the ship burned, their little sailboat heading due west.

  Chapter 8, Saunders Coleson:

  The pony neighed behind him. Saunders stopped in the knee-deep snow to make sure none of the demons stalked him. Lost in the inhospitable mountains, he had no wish to fight his way to safety. It was hard enough battling the snow. The twin spears he carried were no staff of the Brotherhood. He could fight with one, but it would be sloppy at best.

  He would have ridden the pony, but he decided better time would be spent if he walked ahead and led the animal where he wanted to go. With no training or skill at riding, he supposed they would end right back at the stables they ran from. Nothing could make him return to that dead city under the mountain. Besides, the woman that lay across the animal’s back took up the saddle space. There was no room for him with her along for the ride.

  If asked why he saved the woman, Saunders would have found no good answer. The demons that murdered her people had clearly won the day, so the only choice was to escape the carnage through the massive double doors they entered the halls by. When Alegria had moved to charge into the fight, Saunders reacted before he thought. A rock the size of his fist made an effective weapon and dropped her without a sound.

  His weeks with her people returned his strength. The Brotherhood training pits in the city of Abaraka had taught him well. He knew how to fight well enough. Fighting was never his problem. Over time, he simply questioned the Brotherhood’s dogma of fighting, the first and only answer to every problem. He wasn’t ready for the training pits of the city, but he felt ready to defend himself against an inbred mountain woman.

  The snow and cold made him long for the warmth of the library. He even missed his priest’s cell and the austere furnishings carved from the stone of the cliffs. He might be free now, but the cold made his body ache. The layers of clothing restricted him more than any cell ever would.

  With little choice, he led the horse north, the direction the valley followed and traveled downhill. He knew the lower he went, the warmer the conditions would be. Warmth lay in lower elevations, warmth drew him north. Unfortunately, he assumed the way north was not towards his city. But he wanted to be as far away from the home-hold’s gates as possible when night fell.

  The pair shouldn’t be alive. Once he knocked Alegria unconscious, he should have left her to feed the monsters. That simple act would have given him more time to escape. Instead, he dragged her from the hall. The doors were too massive for him to close alone, and the beasts attacked too swiftly. He tripped and fell backward into the snow. While waiting there for his death, the strangest thing happened. The beasts refused to leave the shadows of the cavern.

  Saunders realized “refused” might not be the correct word. One monster tried to attack the pair as they lay easy targets in the snow. However, as soon as it hit the weak sunlight, it let out a horrid scream and quickly retreated to the safety of the shadows deep in the cavern.

  The sunlight… it had to be something about the sunlight that kept the creatures at bay and saved their lives. As long as the sun remained in the sky, they should be safe from attack. Saunders knew once the sun went down, all bets were off.

  His escape fleeing the mountain home-hold might only have gained the pair a few hours of life. Long ago, Saunders decided he wasn’t ready to give up in the caves under the shard. He survived at the hands of the mountain woman. He would rather meet the One Son in the flesh before he gave up his life to an army of demons.

  The time in the Brotherhood’s archives had been well spent. The tomes and records gave Saunders reading material to pass his days away. Even if the normal priests shunned the information, Saunders devoured it. He was certain in all his reading, he had never run across a single tale of the monsters that attacked the mountain people. There was no surprised there, he never came across any information about the endless caverns under the shard, either.

  It seemed the people of his city, perhaps the entirety of the shards, ignored a great danger that simmered under the ground. He had witnessed strange creatures that survived in the dark caverns. What else might live unseen under the ground? He was no expert concerning Alegria’s world, but if he understood her people correctly, there stood only one exit from the city to the outside world, while there were several connections to the underworld. He also assumed the underworld was massive, with several cities attached by tunnels. Called home-holds, the name misrepresented the number of people in the caves. Saunders estimated the size of Alegria’s home-hold to be near the same as the population of Abaraka.

  The lack of knowledge concerning the world they lived in frightened Saunders. Perhaps that was why he risked his life to save the woman that caught him. As proof for himself, and others, he didn’t imagine the whole experience. He assumed there was a chance he was still lost in the darkness of the caverns. Maybe one of the falls knocked him out, and everything he experienced since was created in his mind as a way to pass the time before he died.

  The more gruesome thought was that he had passed all the way into Sinead’s realm of the dead. He was dead, Alegria was dead, the demons were feeding on the dead souls…

  Both of those made little sense to him. Better to focus on the here and now. The struggle to survive a few more hours needed to be his concern. He must warn the Brotherhood and Abaraka of the new unseen threat.

  The woman he secured to the mount stirred. Great, something else, he thought. He still held her two spears in his hand. He needed them as walking sticks. They were the size of the holy staff he trained with, though the wooden spear carried none of the weight of the metal staff he was used to. The single blade of the woman’s spear was deadly but quaint, nothing like the twin retractable blades on a Brother’s staff. He preferred a more balanced weapon, but the primitive spear would be more effective than his bare hands.

  Late at night, locked in the stables, he questioned why he did not kill his captor and escape long ago. That was what the Brotherhood required of him, to become another’s slave was the lowest form of degradation, but the woman proved alien to him. Her ways and customs foreign, it took several days for h
im to understand her speech patterns. At first, he thought she spoke some strange language never heard before, but over time he discovered they spoke the same language, hers was just altered and slurred, pronounced differently in places he never heard before. Saunders understood that each city and every shard displayed small differences in the way the words were spoken, but the sounds that came from this woman’s mouth became nearly unintelligible.

  One night while awake in his stable, he came to the conclusion that everyone he knew on the shards spoke the same language. He theorized that at one time there was no difference in the spoken words, time and distance altered the language. The greater the time and distance of separation, the larger the change in the mother tongue. If his theory was correct, the differences started merging once again when exploration and trade picked up just over one hundred years ago.

  This truly made little sense. What could have happened in the distant past to separate the people of the shards? He knew there was a legend of the Brotherhood forcing the citizens of Abaraka into the mountains when they invaded, but that wasn’t more than two hundred years ago, only a handful of generations. Something different was at play here, something Saunders didn’t know about. Information absent from his knowledge base, and that left him and his city vulnerable.

  It wasn’t long after their trudge through the snow until the unthinkable struck Saunders. If he was able to stumble his way from his city to Alegria’s front doorstep, and her home-hold was connected to other settlements, and the demons attacked from the tunnels that interconnected both, there was nothing to stop the demons from attacking Abaraka. Even with the Brotherhood standing watch over the city, Saunders estimated Abaraka would fall as quickly as the home-hold did. He could think of no way to keep the monsters out. If there was one secret connection to the catacombs, there were probably more.

  Walking as he was trying to ignore the woman that roused behind him, he had a darker thought. If these tunnels cover such an impressive distance from the coast deep into the mountains, what would keep them from connecting the different shards themselves? Might the cities of Perdition and Zar be under the threat of invasion as well? If there were secret cities deep in the mountains on his shard, might it be the same on the others?

  Perhaps his and the population of the shards’ understanding about the nature of their world was about to change. If they didn’t come to grips with the upheaval, from what Saunders witnessed, none might survive.

  “Why am I tied to this horse, slave?” Alegria shouted. Her head dangled over the saddle, the top of her head barely missing the snow.

  Saunders ignored the string of obscenities that followed. Several weeks ago, he’d discovered the key to understanding her words. It took great willpower not to tell her off once he learned the secret to the language barrier. It was one thing to listen and understand a rant. The context was everything. It was another to put his thoughts into words she would understand with the correct tones.

  Now he just needed to. “Shut up,” he barked. The words had been used on him often enough, they were the first ones he learned.

  The shock of him speaking in her tongue must have been considerable, as she did as she was told. For a few moments, before she growled through her teeth and tested her bonds. “Release me, and you still might be spared the honor of having me remove your man-sack before I skin you alive.”

  She’d never shown an aptitude for negotiation. Saunders could not fault her anger. Once he recovered from the weeks in the caverns, he resented her control over his freedom. He assumed her ire would only grow with time. The horse stopped when he did.

  His choices were limited. He’d rather not kill her, though it would be the simplest solution. In a few paces, he stood next to her and lifted her head so they looked eye to eye, even if she was somewhat cocked to one side. Speaking as slow as possible and with the best use of her pronunciation he said, “Your home is dead. We might be chased. Shut up, or you will die.”

  He might have said the words incorrectly, but he was certain the meaning sank into her thick skull. She must not have understood the simple concept of death.

  Her earsplitting screams started instantly. Maybe she didn’t believe him. Right now he didn’t care. Saunders did not want to end up in the belly of one of the beasts he was certain would be after them after sundown.

  Standing next to the horse, he looked at the deep trail marked in the snow. The blind could follow that trail. The screaming would matter little if they were followed by something meant to eat them.

  He could have let her scream. Her throat would wear out, or her head must hurt from the last time he knocked her out. His decision came quickly, though, since he didn’t want her attracting other animals in the area.

  Her spear still held tight in his right hand, he did a quick spin and brought the spear shaft in contact with the top of her forehead. It made a resounding hollow thunk when it struck home. The silence was nearly instant. Only the echo from the sounding valley walls remained, but even that was deadened by the fresh snow.

  With exceeding care, he walked around Alegria’s unconscious upper half. Slung over the horse’s haunch hung a set of baskets, and inside each, he had placed a kit he carried from the cavern where the mountain woman caught him. He considered them his more than hers since he spent so much time caring for the creatures. If he needed to kill her, they would give him some proof to support his story. He didn’t want to return to Abaraka with no proof. He would be put to death as a deserter and possibly a heretic. That was not the way he wanted to be remembered.

  Now he needed to mask their trail if they had any chance of surviving the night. A few steps and he returned to the head of the horse. The animal was quick to follow his lead. The cold sapped its energy. Reins still held tight, he worked his way around the snow-covered rocks that littered the valley floor.

  Before long the sound of running water reached his ears. The snow had not covered a small stream completely. He stood there and stared at the water, remembering an incident in the cave. He shivered from more than the cold. It was the time the flying creatures attacked him, and he fell into the shallow lake. Once he was under the water, they stopped their attack. The water somehow masked him from their senses. Unfortunately, shortly after that, the eel creatures attacked him from under the water, and he needed to run for his life, but the water seemed to be the key.

  There was no way he could hold the horse under the water, but maybe he didn’t need to. If he could throw the demons off his trail, he might be able to last long enough to see the dawn, or what might pass for dawn in this overcast gloom.

  With great care, he slipped his foot into the water and almost immediately regretted his decision. Pins and needles from the cold assaulted his flesh, the covering on his foot and lower leg doing little to offer protection. He knew once he removed his foot from the water it would only get worse.

  Bracing himself, he placed his other foot alongside the first. “They should be numb before too long.” He now spoke to his only friend, the horse.

  Oddly enough, it neighed back when he pulled the animal into the water after him. Thankfully the water only rose to his mid-ankle, but his foot burned from the cold.

  “We can do this,” he said. Saunders was unsure if it was to bolster his courage or the horse’s, but it seemed to work for both.

  Chapter 9, Captain Dusty:

  Dusty had never been one to be spooked by a dream. In his line of work, nightmares were an occupational hazard. That was the major reason he paid little attention to the people his crew once captured and sold into slavery. If he didn’t remember their faces, they could not come back to haunt his dreams.

  He figured the chances of meeting any of the survivors in real life dwindled each passing day they spent in captivity. His customers supplied workers for the worst and most dangerous work in the cracks. They wanted simple folk they could work like draft animals. Feed them little and replace them when they died.

  When the slaves visited h
is sleep, they were nameless, faceless creations of his mind that stalked him, arms outstretched to drag him to the hells he knew waited for his soul.

  The visit from the gods felt different. The message left him on the wall probably came from his own hand while under the influence of the vine, but he couldn’t risk it. If Harper drove him north and Sinead waited for him south, he would risk his life with the god of chance long before he would gamble with the goddess of death.

  The day after waking from his dream, he pushed his raft away from the haunted shard and out into the crack. His course was easy to set. Due north like the gods instructed him to do.

  It might have been a dream, but Dusty wasn’t cocky enough to risk the gods he didn’t even believe in. Unfortunately, he should have spent a few more days preparing.

  He found the raft stout enough. It held together well, considering it was lashed together with pieces of flotsam. His lack of water and food became his greatest worry.

  With no chart and in strange waters, his plan was to skirt the shard as he escaped north until he reached a void. From there he would gather supplies for the dangerous trip out of sight from the black cliffs. The god of chance followed different plans.

  The first night, the wind out of the south blew strong, and the rains fell hard. Without the twin moons Minor and Major nor the stars overhead, he had no bearing in the tossing water. Dusty quickly became lost in the inky black.

  When the water calmed and the sun rose, he spotted no land to gain his bearing. The clouds continued to darken the sky. The only thing that drove him forward was the wind from the south.

  It had been three days. His food and water didn’t last long. He had assumed, like normal, he would pull onto land on some deserted beach each night and have a chance to resupply his needs.

  Without the aid of the normal heavenly bodies, the best he could do was continue north. Let the wind and the gods carry him to safety. Dusty was certain the winds would push him into a shard or even the Great Beach eventually. There just wasn’t that much open water between the shards, and the farther north he traveled, the narrower the cracks between the shards grew.