Dreams of the Eaten Read online

  ‘This author can really write. If you loved Stephen King’s Dark Tower series – or even if you’re a hardened Cormac McCarthy fan – you will find this book right inside your wheelhouse. Living, witty dialogue, and a familiar-yet-strange world inhabited by vivid characters. I loved it. And I don’t say that about a book very often.’

  Paul Kearney, author of The Ten Thousand

  First published 2017 by Solaris

  an imprint of Rebellion Publishing Ltd,

  Riverside House, Osney Mead,

  Oxford, OX2 0ES, UK

  www.solarisbooks.com

  ISBN: 978-1-78618-064-3

  Copyright © 2017 Arianne ‘Tex’ Thompson

  Cover art by Tomasz Jedruszek

  The right of the author to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owners.

  For Jonathan Rafferty

  “There and Back Again”

  Thank you for going the distance with me.

  And for Sandy Thompson

  A kindlier wizard there never was.

  CONTENTS

  The Story So Far

  Prologue

  Chapter One – Faces in the Water

  Chapter Two – The Missing and the Dead

  Chapter Three – One of Many

  Chapter Four – The Glass Key

  Chapter Five – Meat

  Chapter Six – Unburied Alive

  Chapter Seven – The Most Odious of Sins

  Chapter Eight – Carried

  Chapter Nine – Amnesty for the Damned

  Chapter Ten – Creatures of Earth and Fire

  Chapter Eleven – A Man Imminent

  Chapter Twelve – The Wreck of Heaven

  Chapter Thirteen – The Black Mass

  Chapter Fourteen – The End

  Chapter Fifteen – A Man of the a’Krah

  Chapter Sixteen – The Long Way Home

  Chapter Seventeen – Spectacles

  Chapter Eighteen – A Day Not Promised

  Epilogue

  Glossary

  People and Places

  Acknowledgments

  Also from Solaris

  THE STORY SO FAR

  IF IT WEREN’T for the smell, one could mistake the coffin for a shipping crate.

  It’s compact, almost a cube, made of plywood too scarce to be called cheap. Inside, the body of Dulei Marhuk has been tied into a fetal position, his gruesomely-ventilated forehead leaking onto his updrawn knees. He’s been waiting there for over a week now, restless and rotting.

  But even in death, he is a prince, a son of the crow god, Grandfather Marhuk – and he must be taken home to the mountain city of Atali’Krah to receive his final rites. Escorting him is his young, childlike uncle, Weisei, and Weisei’s irascible guardian, Vuchak. They’ve brought an educated slave, Hakai, to serve as a minder and translator along the way – because the final member of the funeral party is their prisoner, Appaloosa Elim: the man whose blind, unthinking bullet ended Dulei’s life.

  Losing Dulei has been hard enough. Getting him home may be impossible. Parched, sickened, and robbed of their supplies, the funeral party has barely survived the trek across the drought-stricken wasteland. With the last of their strength, they made it to the All-Year River, the border that marks the beginning of Marhuk’s domain, and relative safety – only to be ambushed from the water by a cohort of fishmen intent on kidnapping Elim.

  They wouldn’t have hurt him, of course. They wouldn’t have hurt anyone. They had heard he was a powerful wizard, the son of the Dog Lady, and could call animals with his magic. Such a man would have made a fine gift for their prince, Jeté, to present to his intended bride. But the fishmen had scarcely stolen their prize before he was stolen from them in turn – by a monstrous great she-beast who tore through the cohort with a murderous fury.

  Día could have told them something about that. The young grave bride had been lost in the desert for days, guided by the strange, cheerful mother-dog who never left her side. As Día wandered in heat-sick madness, she began to hear canine thoughts, and feel maternal longings – but she didn’t realize the truth until it was too late. After following Elim’s scent for days, the dog found the place where his blood had soaked into the parched earth – and transformed on the spot. The mother dog became U’ru, the Dog Lady, the ruined goddess who once drove her own people to extinction in the hunt for her missing child, and who has now become a monster of revenge.

  Leaving a trail of thoughtless slaughter in her wake, she has ripped through the fishmen’s ranks, left Día to drown in the river, and disappeared into the foothills with Yashu-Diiwa – Elim – her beloved baby, her special puppy, the child who was stolen from her twenty years ago... and who now flees in terror at the sight of his mother’s beastly face.

  That is mostly Shea’s fault. Or Water Dog, as she used to be called. Or Champagne, as she was before. She’s had more names, more lives, than even she can keep track of – not bad for an amphibious old trickster. But her well-meaning plan to save the Dog Lady by stealing her child all those years ago backfired horrifically, and her penance now is a nasty one: do whatever it takes to get Elim to accept the truth, and acknowledge the Dog Lady as his mother. A little dose of hemlock seemed sure to do the trick: force his animal divinity to surface and save his life, and even he wouldn’t be able to deny his nature. But magic comes from identity, from continuity and belonging – and for as long as he can remember, Elim has belonged to the Calvert family. This time, Shea’s plan worked all too well: the boy lies unconscious, his animal divinity displayed for all to see. But there’s no dog in his face, and no place for the Dog Lady in his heart: Elim the horseman is now more horse than man.

  Now a sodden, gray day dawns on the wreckage of everyone’s best-laid plans. Hakai and Día have been stolen or drowned. Vuchak and Weisei struggle just to keep themselves alive as half a cohort of grieving fishmen plot revenge. Shea is alone and universally reviled, with no company but the malformed boy at her feet, and the eerie, mourning cries echoing from the mountain foothills.

  And Dulei’s coffin is missing. The crow god’s slain child is nowhere to be found.

  But the remains of another unfortunate young man have recently been sighted. A lone figure is still walking west, still searching for Elim, still calling itself Sil Halfwick in defiance of logic, probability and all the gathering flies...

  PROLOGUE

  AH CHE, A child of six winters, played in the fields of the Maia, and was happy.

  CHAPTER ONE

  FACES IN THE WATER

  THE PRINCE, JETÉ, squatted in the muddy shallows of the All-Year River, and grasped his prey by the neck. His free hand pressed between the human man’s shoulders, pinning him down; his webbed feet splayed out for balance, keeping his leviathan bulk upright. For a long, peaceful moment, there was no sound but the purling of the current around their bodies. Then the prince thrust out his arm, and shoved the man’s head underwater.

  The man, Hakai, awoke in a kicking, thrashing panic.

  The prince considered his victim for the length of a cold-blooded blink. Underneath his six hundred pounds of mildew-green flesh and amphibian muscle, the man’s struggles were nothing but the frantic, feeble windings of an earthworm in a puddle. Presently, the prince consented to take hold of the man’s hair, and pull his head from the water.

  The man gasped and coughed, water streaming from his nose. His sodden clothes clung to him,
as did the black cloth he kept tied over his eyes. He shivered in the cold, but did not speak.

  The prince did not speak either. He had a voice to do that for him.

  The voice, Fuseau, stood waist-deep in the river, facing the man and the prince. Human-sized, bald save for the gill-plumes at the back of its head, it watched the proceedings with no flicker of emotion in its black eyes or blue-white skin. At a glance from the prince, it spoke in Marín, the most common of the human languages. “You, earthling – tell us that you understand.”

  The man said nothing at first. His hands felt at the rocks and mud, and the water rushing past his chin. When he finally found his own voice, it emerged as a fearful quiver. “I understand.”

  “Good. Then tell us why you are still alive.” The voice spoke the words out loud, and made hand-signs to translate them for the prince.

  The man gritted his teeth and arched his back, straining to lessen the pain of the prince’s hold on his hair. “I am alive because... because I spotted your ambush, and gave Vu – and gave the a’Krah enough warning to arm themselves and start shooting when you rushed up out of the water. And, and they must have done a good job, too, because otherwise you’d be sitting on them instead of me. So I think I must be the only one you caught, and either you’re going to torture me as punishment for however many of you they managed to kill, or else you need me for something.”

  The voice signed this too. Around it, more bald heads peeped up from the river like so many amphibious prairie-dogs, their gill-plumes lifting with interest as they watched their sibling’s hands. None dared to emerge past the nose.

  The prince, Jeté, answered with a low, rumbling fffrrooooaak.

  The voice took this as leave to continue. “Very good. Now tell us about the monster.”

  The man frowned behind his blindfold. “What monster?”

  The blue-white flesh of the voice darkened in vexation. “The monster who – you know what monster!”

  The mountains around them might have known something about the monster too, but they watched unmoved: silent, slumped and sullen. The cold autumn wind cut between them, under a sky the color of a dead fish, and the only voice that volunteered anything was the mindless chatter of the river current.

  About half a mile downstream, silver minnows had begun to nibble at the body of the princess.

  The man tucked his arms under his chest and shivered harder. “I’m sorry, but I don’t.”

  The prince let go of the man’s hair, and allowed him to resume drowning. He kept his own royal personage still and serene: his globular eyes unblinking, his river-colored flesh unchanging – a model of composure for his submerged audience.

  The faces in the water watched in reverent silence.

  The man could not resist the huge, webbed hand that kept his chest pinned to the bottom, or hold his head far enough out of the water to breathe. But he could make a sign language of his own, and use his hands to draw wild, desperate promises in the air.

  The prince, Jeté, consented to hear them.

  “Tell me what it looks like,” the man gasped when he was pulled again from the water. “The monster – do you mean Elim, the two-colored man?”

  The voice resumed signing. “No,” it said. “That is the wizard. The monster stole the wizard. It is a horrible earth-creature, big and haired, that four-legs-runs, and makes howls, and –” Its grammar began to suffer as it struggled to simultaneously speak and sign the nature of an animal for which it had no name.

  “Like a wolf?”

  “Yes, a wolf,” the voice repeated, “if a wolf can grow big enough to carry you in its mouth.”

  It couldn’t. But then again, a frog couldn’t grow large enough to hold him down and play at drowning him, and yet here they were. “It might be a god, or the child of a god,” the man said. “I don’t know, but I’ll – let me help you look for it.”

  The prince wished to make a reply. But he needed both hands to sign an answer to his voice: the one that held the man’s face out of the water, and the one that kept his body pinned to the ground.

  So the man was plunged face-first back into the river – just as that terrible weight lifted from his back. In an instant, he pushed himself up out of the frigid water, heaving huge, shocked breaths. But he did not dare move out from under the prince’s shadow as the silent conversation played out over his head.

  “‘We will not look. You will not help.’” The voice, Fuseau, read its prince’s gestures aloud. “‘You will tell us where the monster is, and hope that we believe you.’”

  “Will you believe me if I tell you it’s over there?” The man pointed at a rumpled pile of rock to the southwest, and then at the slumping mountain to its left. “What about over there – is that better? Or will you believe me when I tell you that I don’t know where it is?”

  This insolence went unpunished as the prince and his voice considered the indicated places.

  “You knew where we were,” the voice said at last.

  The man looked down at the eddies between his hands, water dripping from his nose and chin. “I know where some things are,” he said. “Earth, stones, metals, wood, living plants, dead ones if they’re close enough...”

  As the voice’s hands translated, the faces in the water glanced at each other, unable to spot any of the named items on themselves or their neighbors.

  “Knives, for example, or rakes, shovels, nets...” the voice thought aloud. “Or bullets.”

  “Yes,” the man agreed. “Especially a bullet being carried in the body of a moving creature.”

  The prince looked from the man between his legs to the gestures of his voice. His skin flickered in a quick, violent spectrum of emotions; his throat-pocket pulsed. “‘Then you know where to find Champagne.’”

  There was a keenness to the voice’s translation, an intensity which suggested that this missing Champagne might have some relationship with the monster.

  The man chose his words carefully. “I did,” he said, “until I pulled the bullet out of her. You recall the blood in the water.”

  The faces in the water seemed to recall that all too easily, and traded dark looks between themselves.

  “The wizard, then,” the voice replied. “He had a gun of wood and metal, and plant-clothing, and the net we caught him in was made of agave fibers. Tell us where to find him.”

  The man turned his head. He might have been thinking. He might have been listening. For a long time, there was no sound but the wind and the chattering of his teeth.

  “... I’m s-sorry,” he said at last. “He must be at least a mile away, but I don’t know the direction.”

  The voice, Fuseau, did not begin to reply until the prince had finished signing.

  “‘You don’t know what the monster is, or where it came from. You don’t know where to find it, or the wizard, or Champagne. You don’t seem to know anything at all.’”

  The man, Hakai, flinched at the touch of the prince’s hands on his neck.

  “‘We, in turn, don’t know of any reason why you should continue living.’”

  The prince’s hands drifted up, their cold, wet palms closing around the man’s temples, their long, sticky fingers lacing together under his throat. It would be a messy way to crack an egg.

  “‘You may make a suggestion.’”

  THE BATH WOULD have been delightful, if it weren’t for the damned fishmen.

  It should have been a wondrous indulgence, as this was the one treat Vuchak reserved especially for himself. There should have been hot stones and steam, a bowl of fresh yucca lather and another one of warm water for rinsing. He should have been able to massage his scalp at his leisure, pleasantly recalling the way his grandmother’s hands had once done it for him, and make beautiful curtains of his glossy black hair as he poured the rinse-water just so, and afterward sit tweezing his chin-hairs and thinking loose, warm thoughts until he was as fresh and dry and perfect as an hours-old spring duckling.

  Instead, he
was here: naked and shivering under a sullen gray sky, doing his utmost to ignore the foot-biting sharp stones and the testicle-shriveling chill in the water as he braved the river just long enough to wash the blood from his arms and the grease from his hair. And all the while, he kept an anxious eye on the current.

  They had stolen Dulei, and Hakai, and probably Ylem too.

  They would almost certainly come back to finish the job.

  They didn’t need to surface to breathe.

  Which meant that any water too deep or too murky to show its bottom was a hiding-place for them, and the soft chattering of its flow more than loud enough to cover an ambush. And with no way to discover their wants, Vuchak was left with just his own: to finish cleaning himself and get back to camp before even one more awful thing could spring out of hiding and throttle him.

  “Excuse me, please...”

  Vuchak nearly jumped out of his skin.

  She was walking upstream along the bank, dressed in white and carrying a folded black garment and so dark herself that Vuchak might have mistaken her for a fellow a’Krah – but no, of course not. She was speaking Marín, for one thing, and wearing her hair in fearsome waist-length dreadlocks, and a moment’s longer looking showed him exactly what she was: not a’Krah, not native at all, but one of the Fire Tribe – Afriti, as they called themselves.

  But what was this one doing in a’Krah territory?

  She kept coming, her eyes averted. “I’m sorry to disturb you,”she said. “Please, can you tell me where I am?”

  Vuchak glanced between the woman and the water. They were allies, the free Afriti and the freshwater fishmen – and one would make a perfectly convenient distraction for the other.