Book 2 - She Is The Darkness Read Free Page B

powerful as Soulcatcher would not notice the misdirection unless
she was really focused on finding something like it.
    I told them, “I just talked to the Captain. He said the
headquarters group will leave tomorrow or the next day.
You’re still determined to go?”
    Uncle Doj nodded. He did not seem emotional when he reminded me,
“We too have a debt to repay.”
    The few material possessions the three shared were packed and
piled by the apartment door already. They had been ready to go for
days. I was the one who needed to focus and finalize my
preparations. I had lied to Croaker when I had said I was ready to
travel.
    “I’m going to bed now. Don’t wake me up for
anything but the end of the world.”
     
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4
    Sleep is not an escape from pain. In sleep there are dreams. In
sleep I go places more horrible than those I walk when I am
awake.
    In dreams I still go back to Dejagore, to the death and disease,
the murder and the cannibalism and the darkness. In dreams Sarie
still lives, whatever the horror of the place she walks.
    That night my dreams did not restore me to the wonder of
Sarie’s company.
    I remember only one. It came first as a shadow, an all
enveloping malice full of playful cruelty, as though I was sinking
into the soul of a spider that enjoyed tormenting its victims. The
malice did not take note of me. I passed through to its other side.
And there the dream wrenched sideways, twisted, and took on life,
though it was a life entirely of black and white and greys.
    I was in a place of despair and death. The sky was lead. Bodies
rotted around me. The stench was strong enough to drive the
buzzards away. The sick vegetation was coated with what looked like
thick grasshopper spit. Only one thing moved, a distant flock of
mocking crows.
    Even amidst my horror and revulsion I felt that the scene was
familiar. I tried to hang on to that thought, to pursue it, to
sustain my sanity by ferreting out why I would know a place I had
never been. I stumbled and tripped across a plain of bones.
Pyramids of skulls were my milemarks.
    My foot slipped on a baby’s skull that spun and went
rattling off to the side. I fell. And fell. And then I was in
another place.
    I am here. I am the dream. I am the way to life.
    Sarie was there.
    She smiled at me, then she was gone, but I clung to her smile as
the only thing capable of letting me keep my head above the waters
of a sea of insanity.
    I was in that other place. It was a place of golden caverns
where old men sat beside the way, frozen in time, alive but unable
to move so much as an eyelash. Their insanity slashed the air like
a million dueling razors. Some were covered with glittering webs of
ice, as though a million fairy silkworms had spun them into cocoons
of delicate threads of frozen water. An enchanted forest of icicles
hung from the cavern roof.
    I tried to dash forward, past the old men, to get out of that
place. I ran as you run in dreams, slowly going nowhere.
    And then the horror worsened as I realized that I knew some of
those mad old men.
    I ran harder, into the treacly resistance of animate evil
laughter.
    I swung wildly at whoever was touching me, flung my hand under
my pillow to recover the dagger hidden there. A powerful blow
slammed my wrist as it came into the light. A strong voice snapped,
“Murgen.”
    I focused. Uncle Doj stood over me. He looked grave, troubled.
Thai Dei stood near the foot of my bed, where he could take me from
behind if I jumped up at Doj. Mother Gota stood in the doorway,
agitated.
    Uncle Doj said, “You were screaming in a language none of
us knows. We found you wrestling with the darkness when we
arrived.”
    “I was having a nightmare.”
    “I know.”
    “Hunh?”
    “That was obvious.”
    “Sarie was there.”
    For one instant Mother Gota’s face became a mask of rage.
She muttered something softly and too quickly for me to follow, but
I did catch the name Hong Tray and the word “witch.”
Sahra’s grandmother