Chapter 1. The Dream that was Not

You may often learn from questions that which you would never have known to ask.

--Shavier Proverb

“Your name?”

“Talis.”

“Your nationality?”

“Canadian.”

“You are a wolfling?”

“Yes.”

“Why did you come to the Pendalons?”

“I’m a mercenary recruit. You know this.”

“We have no record of you.”

“I signed papers.”

“We do not have them.”

“I spoke with your ambassador in Danda-lay—“

“At present we have no ambassador in Danda-lay. How did you get here?”

“I have told you again and again! What do you want from me?”

“The truth.”

The prisoner strained against her chains, trying to get a look at her interrogator beyond the fire, but all she could make out was a dim, distorted shape. The torch burned before her face with blinding intensity, smothering all scents in its acrid smoke, making her cough and sweat. The truth indeed! I don’t even know the truth about you. “You’ve given me a drug,” she said aloud.

“To dilate your eyes, yes.”

The speaker—he always hesitated. Talis had an idea that he was consulting someone, that he was only the mouthpiece of that voiceless figure in the dark. “I want to know who you are,” she growled, angry in spite of her exhaustion. “You’ve kept me here three days without food and with little water. I’ve told you everything I know and everything I don’t! I came to these mountains to fight in your army, to serve your cause, to make your enemies my enemies. Of my own free will I came, and you’ve arrested me without reason, abused me without purpose, and interrogated me without mercy. If my queen ever discovers what you’ve done--!”

“Your queen,” came the calm monotone, “is not here. One thing you should remember, Talis: the Shavier Pendalons belong to pegasus and their shelts. We are the masters here, and you were ours the second your body took our air.”

“Why?!” The wolfling almost sobbed with frustration. She’d not slept in two days. “Why are you torturing me? I tell you I’ve done nothing wrong!”

“That is not true.”

To Talis, it seemed that the shadowy form differentiated into a larger and a smaller shape. The smaller shape came nearer until the vague body beyond the flame materialized into an arm that reached into Talis’s tiny universe. Something rattled. Talis cursed the drug that slowed her senses, preventing her from understanding what was happening. All at once, the torch moved and then disappeared. Sand. A bucket of sand. Talis forced her mind to grasp it. Creator be praised, they’ve put out the fire.

In the total darkness her wolfling ears picked out the separate movements of several creatures in the cell. She smelled them now without the screen of the torch smoke, but had not enough experience to identify them. She had an idea that a little light was coming in through the bared door, which meant that her tormentors could see, but her over-dilated eyes saw nothing. Talis stood in a tiny boxed alcove, her hands chained behind her, a cord around her neck keeping her head perfectly aligned with the bracket in which the torch had sat. What will they do to me now?

Something touched her lips, and she flinched.

“Drink.” The voice was new. Talis obeyed, nearly snapping the clay cub from the jailer’s hand in her thirst. If it’s poison, at least it’s in water.

When she had drained the cup, a delicious warmth seeped through her. A voice spoke again, but this time she could not tell if it was the first voice or a new one, male or female. Sounds echoed in her head. For the first time in many days she did not feel hungry or sore or even very frightened.

“Get her out of there.”

Arms moving around Talis. Her body as though suspended in space, falling. Walking. Or floating.

Talis became aware that the cord around her neck was no longer choking her and that her arms were no longer behind her back. She thought that lights whirled around her briefly. Then she was in the dark again, horizontal. She thought that she lay on softest fur and that she had never been so comfortable. Just before she went to sleep, someone covered her and spoke above her head. “You have been fortunate, my friend, in that you did not lie to me. Although you did do wrong, you told the truth. Now, however, you would be wise to let my drug erase this incident from your memory. Best is never to have known. Second best is to forget.

* * * *

Talis’s nose woke up first. While the rest of her senses swam in a half dream, her nose marked feathers and bamboo, then the scent of fauns—wood fauns mostly, as well as cliff fauns and Shavier. Wolflings? Perhaps. Nervous excitement, sweat, food, leather, oil for steal blades. The thick, stiff smell of burnt wicks and tallow and soap.

Then the fierce, secret whispers in her head began to resolve themselves into an incoherent murmur of voices. Many voices in a big place. Mostly male, some female—laughter and conversation. A whistle of wind in the middle distance, a clip of hooves over stone. Then quite close: “I don’t see how she’s sleeping! In a place that reeks of fauns . . . after a meal as scant at that and with tests tomorrow!”

“I’m not sure she’s asleep. They carried her in a quarter watch ago and laid her there.”

“Who carried her?”

“Shavier guards—said she’d had a rough time getting here.”

“You think she’s unconscious?”

“I don’t know.”

Talis opened her eyes. A terrifying smear of light and colors made her shut them again with a moan. She felt with her hands: a bed stuffed with feathers, a coverlet above.

She put her hands over her face and forced herself to open her eyes again. Slowly she focused on her palms, then moved her hands outward until she could see them fully extended. She examined the gray coverlet, the bamboo bed frame, the bunk that made a roof over her head. Slowly, she reminded herself. The drug is still with me.

Drug? Talis shook her head. What kind of drug? Thinking was so difficult that she opted to look at the room instead. Turning slowly, Talis perceived the blurred outline of a large room with a towering ceiling, full of bunk beds and bustling with shelts. Her own bed was the lowest on a stack against one wall, allowing her a tiny bit of privacy in the shadowy alcove beneath. Focussing on the bunks across the isle, she paused at the sight of two wolflings—a female dangling her legs over the edge of the second bed and a male leaning against the bed post—watching her. The two who were talking . . .

Talis opened her mouth as though to say something, but she could not think what it was she wanted to say. “Remember . . .” she muttered. “I need to remember.” And with that she shut her eyes and fell soundly asleep.

* * * *

Talis woke the second time as she was accustomed—the quick, full wakefulness of a hunted animal, without the luxury of degrees. She sat up and looked around: a huge, shelt-made cave, elongated, with bunks piled in stacks of six either side of an aisle, doors at both ends, the far wall filled with ragged holes like a warn-out cloak. Some of the openings were twice the size of a pegasus, and the wind whistled faintly through them—gentle teeth that chewed and chewed... Through the holes, Talis caught a glimpse of the mountain pass—a windy canyon between towering peeks, illuminated by a quarter moon hanging low against the far cliff.

The wolfling rose soundlessly, sniffing. She reached instinctively to her hip and confirmed that her dagger was still sheathed at her belt. The bunkers were quieter now, although a general rustle told her that a thousand shelts are never all asleep at once. Occasionally a patter of hooves carried to her across the stone floor or a shadowy figure moved between bunks. Still, the noisy, chaotic world of the morning seemed to have mellowed.

The morning? Talis shook her head. Or was it afternoon? Did I wake the first time yesterday or today? I saw a torch and . . . The incident hovered dreamlike in her memory, and Talis knew that, like a dream, she would forget it if she did not sort fact from fiction immediately. Something warm and dark offered to swallow the cluttered, painful images. Better to forget.

Talis stood up straight. A voice cried in her head like a sentinel: No! I will remember. She clenched both fists and started walking—between the bunkers on her side of the aisle, slipping across the open space with involuntary stealth, through the maze of posts and hulking beds, until she stood before the patchwork wall of stone, riddled by the complaining wind.

Talis walked along the wall until she found a hole that was a little lower than the rest. The wolfling gagged the distance, twitching her bushy tail in a way that meant she was solving a problem. Then she crouched, sprang, got her hands firmly around the lip. The next second she was sitting in the aperture, looking down the far side. There was a ledge and on it a pegasus--directly beneath her.

Talis frowned. She looked both ways in the moonlight and saw that the broad path continued along the wall for a great distance, empty. In front of her loomed the nothingness of the canyon—a dizzy, dark expanse, with only a couple of tiny lights to give meaning to the shadowy hulk that was the far cliff, going up and up into the blackness. Talis looked above her and saw that the cave she occupied with its high ceiling and hundreds of beds was nowhere near the top of the canyon wall, which curved out of sight. The moon emerged fitfully from a nest of clouds, shining patchwork patterns on the gray cliff. Looking up made Talis dizzy, and she turned her attention back to the pegasus.

How to get around him? The hole she sat in was not much larger than her crouched body. She could jump down on top of him. She could go back and look for a hole further down. Or . . . Talis glanced at a crevice to her right and a little further down the wall. She was an excellent climber. I could make that. It never occurred to the wolfing that she might ask the pegasus to move.

Talis ran an experimental hand over the roughed stone, found some holds, and then twisted her body around backwards. With the practiced grace of a climber, she eased down and out of her crevice, feeling with her paws, bracing her hands on the lip of her old perch.

But now that she was outside the wall, Talis felt the wind. She was surprised at its persistence. Inside the wall, she had thought of it as a relative of the gusty zephyrs that played along the cliffs on the edge of the forests where she grew up. Now, however, Talis realized that this was a fiercer sort of creature—a solid tug that pulled her left and down. Not that I can’t fight it, she thought, but I will have to be very careful . . . It wasn’t until she was fully out of the hole and fumbling for the lip of the next that she decided that being “careful” in this wind was like trying to tip-toe over a snake so as not to wake it. She made one desperate attempt to drag herself back to her starting point and failed.

Down from the wall she flew, barely missing the pegasus’ right wingtip, and although the impact her hurt, Talis silently thanked the Creator that she’d landed on the ledge at all.

The pegasus whirled, one hoof raised, ears flat against his head. He was huge. Looking at him from her position at his feet, Talis decided that he was just about the largest animal she had ever seen, and he was certainly about to smash her into oblivion. Sprawled on her belly with her chin against the ground, she was in no position to flee or fight, so she did the only thing that she could think of: she delivered her most threatening snarl.

The monster stared at her. Slowly his watermelon-sized hoof came down, and his ears moved forward. Then he laughed.

Talis kept growling.

“They’ve been bringing soldiers from everywhere today,” he said, “and is it now raining mercenaries?” The huge head descended to sniff her.

Talis stopped growling as his main and rich, warm scent fell around her. She struggled up on her haunches, and the pegasus moved his head even with hers. “Well, you don’t smell like a soldier,” he murmured. The huge, watery black eyes held no aggression now, merely curiosity and a mild humor.

“I’m not,” Talis admitted. She noticed that the pegasus was a dappled gray and that his smoky nose, so near her own in the moonlight, was frosted white. His calm, dark eyes looked old and tired.

“What are you, then?”

“I’m a healer and also…a Raider.”

He raised his head to the great height of his shoulders and shook his main. “Indeed. We’re in need of the first. I’m not sure I know what the second is.” He paused. “Why are you out here?”

“I wanted to think,” said Talis.

“Being outside the bunkers so late is not usually permitted.”

The wolfling said nothing.

“My name is Admiral Linsy.”

“I’m Talis.”

“Well, Talis, do you want to tell me what’s on your mind?”

The wolfling paused. She remembered that one of the best ways to keep from forgetting a dream is to tell it. “Alright.”