Mists of Everness (The War of the Dreaming) Read Free Page B

to greet the descending sun.
    Meadow Mouse said, “I say, I’ve just had a thought. Shouldn’t there be a way I can also get you your old name back, while I am out there trying to get the name of the Princess?”
    Pigeonhawk did not look down, but stared with his fierce eyes into the sunset. “That question, also, I truly wish I were allowed to answer.”
    Meadow Mouse thought about that for a while. “Well, I’ll try to get it if I run across it.”
    “That is kind of you,” said Pigeonhawk solemnly.

2
    The Nemesis of Evil
    Emily slowly came awake, her mind still drugged and dimmed by nightmare-images of her son, leaning over her, fire in his hand. And later, when the other men had come …
    Memories slowly came back to her. Her son, Galen Waylock, had been in a coma for months. The doctors had given up hope. But then, unexpectedly, he had woken. But his eyes were strange: dark and magnetic. His voice had been like the voice from another world, majestic and inhuman.
    Galen came back to life with someone else inside him, some strange and archaic phantom from the Dark Ages. A man with strange knowledge, strange powers—why not use the word?—a warlock.
    The Warlock served a darker power yet, something he feared and hated and feared to disobey; something the world had forgotten, or had been made to forget. He had spoken of this power briefly to his minions, briefly, while Emily lay paralyzed at his feet. The Black City called Acheron was rising from the waves, he said; and when it rose, darkness would cover all. Emily made a small, strangled noise from paralyzed lips, for she had heard the name of Acheron before, in the nightmares her son described to her. The Warlock, glancing darkly down, made the merest gesture, whispered a name of power: there had come a smothering pressure inside her brain that drove her into sleep.
    She dreamed of a dark and windowless city drowned beneath the waves, seven towers of imperishable metal rising into the sunless gloom of the abyss, while blind and transparent fish sported among the tombs and monuments, or shapeless squid, mute and grown to monstrous size in the eternal night, floated near the barbicans and gates, their pale hides trickling with firefly light, their eyes like lamps.
    From the city rose a dim and broken sobbing, and she was terrified to recognize it. It was the voice of her ex-husband’s father, Lemuel, that odd old man who lived alone in a deserted mansion on the coast. Lemuel had been calling out to her, telling her to warn someone, something. What was it?
    The memory was gone. Only the sick, sharp sense of overmastering terror remained.
    Only a dream. Now she was awake. Or was she?
    Blearily, she looked about her. She was lying where the horrible person who was impersonating her son had dropped her, on the carpet before the fireplace. It still was dark in the house, but the first rays of red sunlight were streaming through the upper branches of the trees outside, wreathed in mist.
    She was still benumbed and could not move her arms or legs, but there was a tingling sensation, as if her limbs were returning slowly to life.
    Emily heard snoring from down the hall; she recognized it as belonging to Wil, having heard it for many nights these past few years.
    After Peter, her first husband, had returned from his post overseas wounded, unable to stand or walk, Emily had remarried, as was only sensible. It was sensible to avoid a life as a crippled man’s nursemaid, wasn’t it? Sending Galen off to live with Lemuel had also been sensible. The old man, odd as he was, was rich and could afford to see to the boy’s education.
    Heaven knows, Wil, her second husband, had not wanted Galen around. He’d made that plain enough.
    But now, paralyzed, she wished Peter were here. He always knew what to do in a moment of danger. Usually it was something brutal, involving gunfire and broken bones, but he knew. Many evenings, back when they were first married, Peter had spent