Dream Finder

Chapter 1-2

‘No, not now, Tarrian,’ Antyr intoned wearily, leaning back. ‘I’m in no mood...’ He released the comment he had prepared for Avran. ‘... for another of your lectures.’

There was a more purposeful movement among the swaying shadows as the candle flickered. In the far corner of the room a dark shape stirred and began to move across the floor towards the Dream Finder.

‘Don’t speak to me like that.’ Tarrian’s voice was angry and the sound of it in Antyr’s head mingled with a menacing growl from the approaching shadow. ‘I can’t avoid your confusion, and it washes over me like a foul stench. You seem to forget that.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Antyr said hastily, sitting up. ‘It’s been a bad night. I...’

‘It’s been a bad decade,’ Tarrian replied pitilessly.

Antyr winced. He had had many quarrels with Tarrian, but they had been growing increasingly more unpleasant of late and there was a tone in his friend’s voice that he had not heard before.

Briefly the eyes of the approaching shadow shone a brilliant green as if lit from some unfathomable depth. It was only a trick of the candlelight, but it chilled Antyr, reminding him not only of the true nature of his companion but also of the dark strangeness of his own calling.

Tarrian emerged relentlessly into the candlelight. The luminous green eyes were now their normal cold grey, though they were only marginally less menacing for that: Tarrian was a wolf. Old, but wild and full of the muscular vigour of youth.

‘Ah,’ he said, catching Antyr’s momentary fear. ‘You still have some perception left, I see. You should remember more often what I am and how we’re bound to one another.’

Antyr turned away. He opened his mouth to speak, but no sound came. Almost plaintively he reached out and stroked the wolf’s sleek head.

Tarrian’s voice filled his head again, though now full of compassion and concern. ‘Avran was right. More even than he understood himself. The path you’re following will destroy you more terribly than it would an ordinary man. You must turn again to the disciplines of your calling or you’ll doom us both.’

There was another note in the wolf’s voice that Antyr had not heard before: fear.

‘Yes, I am afraid,’ Tarrian said, even before Antyr could clearly form the thought. Then, impulsively, ‘Here’s how afraid I am.’

‘No!’ Antyr cried, pushing himself back in the chair as if to escape. But the wolf’s powerful personality held him firm and suddenly his mind was filled with swirling terrors and the dark, flitting shapes of nightmare. He struggled to set them aside, but in vain, Tarrian’s anger was too great. Then he felt the presence of an unseen menace seeking him out. Its power swept hither and thither, like a flailing arm. Despite himself, Antyr urged his legs to run but, as is the way in dreams, they would not respond to his desperation, they were beyond his control.

Abruptly he was free; and angry.

‘Damn you, dog,’ he shouted. ‘Don’t do your party tricks on me.’

Tarrian’s mouth curled into a snarl and a deep growl rumbled in his throat. His voice burst into Antyr’s head. ‘You’re only fit for party tricks, Petran’s son,’ it said, scornfully. ‘Do you think you could face my true fears? I, who stood by perhaps the edge of the Threshold to the Great Dream itself, and felt your father slip away from me? Do you want me to show you that?’

Antyr stood up clumsily and pushed past the wolf, his eyes wide. He snatched up an oil lamp and lifted it towards the candle.

‘Enough,’ he said breathlessly. ‘Let’s have some light.’ His hands, however, were trembling so violently that after several unsuccessful attempts to light it, he had to put the lamp down on the shelf for fear it would slip from his grasp. The waiting shadows danced and jigged expectantly.

Tarrian watched him, his grey eyes unblinking.

For a moment, Antyr leaned forward against the wall until he had recovered some composure. Then carefully, but still breathing heavily, he lit the lamp.

As the shadows dwindled and the familiar commonplace of the room asserted itself, Antyr sat down again, holding out a pleading hand to the wolf.

‘No more, please, Tarrian,’ he said, withdrawing the hand and using it to support his head. ‘I need no demonstrations of your superior skill, nor reminders of my own failings.’ Then, angrily again, in spite of himself, ‘And I need no reminders of my father, nor your ramblings about his death.’

The wolf turned away from him and padded back to its corner of the room without replying. It flopped down heavily and, resting its head over its extended forelegs, stared at Antyr patiently.

A faint echo of the fog outside hovered yellow in the air between the two antagonists.

‘My father’s heart failed him,’ Antyr said defensively into the silence after a moment, returning the wolf’s gaze. ‘It troubled him constantly after his fever.’

Tarrian still did not reply, but his denial filled Antyr’s mind.

‘No,’ Antyr protested. ‘I’ll have none of it. The dream of a dying man is notoriously dangerous...’ His voice broke. ‘My father should never have attempted to search for it. And you... his Companion... his Earth Holder... You shouldn’t have let him go.’

The reproach was unjust and Antyr knew it: Tarrian could not have defied the will of the Dream Finder in such a matter and Antyr found Tarrian’s own reproach rising in reply. He raised his hand in apology.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I shouldn’t have said that.’

He massaged his forehead as if the deed would erase his casual and cruel remark. ‘But I won’t accept your... beliefs,’ he continued, after a moment. ‘I wouldn’t accept them from my father and I won’t accept them from you... They’re foolishness...’

Tarrian’s eyes closed. ‘Your acceptance or otherwise will have no effect on the reality, Dream Finder,’ he said. His tone was one of resigned indifference: it was an old argument, now far beyond any passion. ‘You may choose not to believe in falling masonry if the notion offends you, but when a piece falls on your head, it’ll kill you just the same.’

Antyr rebelled at Tarrian’s cavalier presumption of rightness. ‘That’s different and you know it. We’re not... masons... working with the solid and the real. We... we... we’re just... guides... helpers,’ he spluttered, gesticulating irrelevantly to the unwatching wolf. ‘We have a gift to comfort people, that’s all. The bewildered, the tormented...’

‘But you don’t even believe that any more, do you?’ Although Tarrian was apparently asleep, his voice brutally swept aside Antyr’s ramblings. ‘You think we’re all just charlatans, using our “party tricks” to gull pennies and crowns from anyone foolish enough to pay for our services, don’t you?’

Antyr reeled under this quiet but savage onslaught. ‘No... Yes... I...’

‘You don’t know,’ Tarrian finished his sentence for him viciously. ‘You’re so addled with ale and self-indulgence that you’re forgetting your own puling excuses. You’re beginning to scrabble round like a rat in a wheel. Going faster and faster to nowhere. Go to sleep you sot, you sicken me. We’ll talk in the morning when you’re sober.’

The sudden, blistering contempt in Tarrian’s voice struck Antyr like a blow and choked his reply in his throat. He struggled unsteadily to his feet, and snatched up the candle.

‘Go to hell, dog,’ he tried to shout, but the curse degenerated into a strained squeak as his voice, marred by fog and drink, declined to respond.

Leaving the room, Antyr lost the small remains of his dignity by colliding with the door jamb.

He had intended to go upstairs to his bed, but his sudden rising and his collision with the door released the forces he had set in train earlier that evening. His stomach took urgent and explosive charge of events.

Somehow, Antyr reached the kitchen and an empty bucket just in time, and a few retching minutes later he was sitting on the cold floor leaning miserably against the wall with his arm draped around the stinking bucket like a grotesque parody of a replete lover and his chosen.

His head felt a little clearer, though that merely served to accentuate his distress.

‘You have a rare gift, Antyr,’ his father had said. ‘Greater by far than mine. But it will bring you nothing but pain if you do not embrace and cherish it. We are Dream Finders. In some matters we have no choice. Some dreams seek us, not we them.’

‘You’ll doom us both.’ Tarrian’s words returned to him in the wake of the memory of his father’s anxious words. Antyr tried to curse the wolf again, but the oath died unborn as he gazed up at the kitchen window, etched a dim yellow in the darkness by the fog-strained torchlight outside. He knew that Tarrian was right and that even now the wolf would be silently prowling the dark edges of his addled mind to protect him from unseen dangers, just as its wilder fellows would prowl the woods in search of prey. No matter what Antyr did or thought, Tarrian would do what he knew to be his duty, waiting for that moment when his charge would accept the burden of his calling.

Antyr wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and stood up. His head ached with it all. He walked to the stone sink and took a ladle full of water from a bucket. After noisily rinsing his mouth he drank a little. Its coldness mapped out the route down to his rebelling stomach where it landed like retribution.

Then he dashed a handful into his face by way of penance. ‘Tomorrow, we will talk, Tarrian,’ he said to the yellow window.

A faint whiff of doubt and regret seeped reluctantly into his mind that he knew came from the watching wolf.

‘No, I mean it this time,’ Antyr said earnestly, well conscious of the fact that his protestation of good intentions was by no means new. ‘I mean it,’ he repeated, pointlessly.

‘Someone’s coming.’ Tarrian’s voice was suddenly awake and alert. Antyr started. It never failed to amaze him that the wolf could come from the deepest sleep to the fullest wakefulness in the blink of an eye.

‘No,’ Antyr said, shaking his head slowly. ‘The streets outside are as dark as any dream likely to be dreamt tonight.’

‘There’s several of them,’ Tarrian said, ignoring the denial. ‘I can smell no danger, but...’

Antyr felt Tarrian rising up and walking inquisitively into the hallway, but before he could speak again, someone beat a purposeful tattoo on the door.

‘Ye gods,’ Antyr muttered, frowning. ‘I don’t care who it is, I’m not turning out tonight for anyone.’ Then, as Tarrian’s comment registered, the concerns of the daily round impinged on him. ‘Several of them! It’s not the Exactors is it, Tarrian?’ he hissed, lowering his voice.

Tarrian’s voice was scornful. ‘Since when did you earn enough to warrant the midnight attention of the Exactors, Antyr? Just answer the door quickly, this is intriguing.’

Reinforcing Tarrian’s advice, the tattoo sounded again, echoing through the darkened house. Antyr picked up the lamp.

‘Are you sure it’s not the Exactors?’ he whispered again to Tarrian.

The wolf’s sigh filled his head. ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ came the irritable reply, then, with an unexpected touch of humour, ‘Besides, the Exactors are predators, they wear soft-soled boots so that you can’t hear them coming — and they don’t knock.’

‘Very droll, Tarrian,’ Antyr replied, as he cautiously opened the small sentry flap in the door. He was relieved that these unexpected visitors had set the mood of acrimony aside, at least for the time being, but he was a little concerned by the excitement he sensed surrounding the wolf’s thoughts. Tarrian had probably smelt an ‘interesting’ client and he really was in no mood for working tonight.

‘Who is it?’ he shouted as he peered through the small opening. ‘Don’t you know what time it is?’

By way of reply, a clenched fist appeared immediately in front of his face so that he had to withdraw a little to focus on it. On the middle finger of the fist was a signet ring. It was the seal of the Sened Watch.

‘Open the door,’ came a commanding voice.

Hastily Antyr drew back the bolts and opened the door.

He twitched an apologetic smile as it screeched its usual protest, then he stepped forward and peered, bleary-eyed, at the unexpected visitors.

The man who had offered him the seal of the Watch stepped deferentially to one side and raised a torch high to reveal another figure standing about a pace behind. Despite the large cloak wrapped about him and the hood hiding his face, this second figure radiated authority, and behind him again, merging into the fog, as Tarrian had said, were several others. Some were carrying torches. The others were carrying — Antyr peered further into the gloom, then his eyes widened in alarm — the others were carrying the lethal-bladed short pikes of the palace guard.

The Sened Watch? Palace guards? What...?

‘You are Antyr the Dream Finder, the son of Petran,’ said the man. His voice confirmed his posture, and cut through Antyr’s mounting confusion.

Antyr swallowed nervously. ‘Er, yes,’ he managed after a moment. ‘Who are...?’

‘Come with us. You are needed,’ the man continued, disregarding the half-formed question.

‘But...’

‘We will escort you,’ said the figure, turning away and indicating the men behind him. ‘Bring your Companion.’

Antyr was about to repeat his question when the man’s cloak fell open to reveal the insignia on his tunic. It was an eagle with a lamb in its talons: Duke Ibris’s insignia. And the only people who wore that were...

‘The Duke’s personal bodyguard.’ Tarrian finished the thought for him.