I dreamed strange
dreams.
Of course I did. Was not Shivetya in my mind? Was I not in
the haunted place of glittering stone?
Stone remembered. And stone wanted me to know.
I was in another place, then, in a time not my own. I was
Shivetya as the demon experienced the world, everywhere at once, a
pale imitation of God. I could be everywhere at once because by
staring at the floor surrounding my throne, I connected with my
realm as a whole. We became one knowledge, the singer and the
song.
Men were moving across my face, a large band. I knew time
differently from mortals but I understood that it had been ages
since this had happened last. Mortals did not cross me anymore. Not
often. Never in numbers like this.
There was enough Sleepy there for me to recognize
Shivetya’s memory of the coming of the Captured, before they
stumbled into Soulcatcher’s trap. Why would the demon want me
to see this? I knew this story. Murgen had shared it with me
several times, to make sure it got recorded in the Annals just the
way he wanted.
There was no solid feeling of a personality surrounding me, yet
I felt a mild pressure to abandon curiosity, to turn outward from
questions, to cease being a viewpoint, to let the flower unfold. I
should have paid more attention to Uncle Doj. The ability to
abandon the self would have been a useful talent at a time like
this.
Time was different for the demon, definitely. But he tried to
accommodate the ephemeral mortal, to get to the point, to provide
the information he thought I would find useful.
I watched the whole adventure, including the great and desperate
escape that had devoured Bucket and had allowed Willow the chance
to remain in the story as a pawn of wickedness. And I did not
understand immediately because at first I observed only the finer
details of a story already known in outline.
I was not completely stupid. I caught on. The question had
occurred to me before but had not been critical. Now I just needed
to reclaim enough self to recall that I had asked it.
The question was, what had become of the one member of that
expedition for whom there was still no account? The incredibly
dangerous apprentice shapeshifter Lisa Deale Bowalk, trapped in the
form of a black leopard, had been carried onto the plain in a cage,
as had the prisoners Longshadow and Howler. She had vanished
during the excitement. Murgen never discovered what had become of
her. That he mentioned.
I learned the truth. According to Shivetya.
Not every trivial detail became entirely clear. Shivetya had
trouble focusing that tightly in time. But it seemed that
Bowalk’s cage had gotten damaged in the panicky rush to
escape by brothers of the Company unfortunate enough not to be
included amongst the Captured.
Panic mothers panic. The great, wicked cat caught the fever. Her
violence was sufficient to complete the demolition of her cage. She
ripped her way out, injuring herself in the process. She fled on
three legs, carrying her left front paw elevated, allowing it to
touch stone only when absolutely necessary. She whined horribly
when she did. Nevertheless, she covered ground fast. She traveled
nearly thirty miles before nightfall—but had chosen a direction at
random and apparently did not recognize that she was not headed
toward home until it was too late to change her mind.
She chose a road and ran. And in the night one small, clever
shadow caught up, just short of the end of that road. It did what
untamed shadows always do. It attacked. I found the result
difficult to believe. The shadow hurt the panther but did not kill
her. She fought it and won. And stumbled onward. And before a more
powerful shadow could overtake and finish her, she staggered
through a derelict shadowgate and became invisible to Shivetya.
Which meant that she was last seen alive entering a world
neither our own nor the Land of Unknown Shadows. I hoped that that
crippled gate had finished her, or that it had injured her beyond
recovery, because she was possessed of a hatred as dark as that
which impelled the shadows, but hers was a hatred much more
narrowly directed. And the Company was its object.
The fragment of Sleepy-self never entirely subsumed into the
Shivetya overview wondered what the Captain would think when he
learned that Bowalk had reached Khatovar by accident when it was
supposed to be impossible for the Company to get there by
intent.
The Sleepy-self did not see why this news was important enough
for Shivetya to have hijacked my dreams, but significant it must
be.
Significant, too, must be the Nef, the dreamwalkers, that Murgen
had named the Washene, the Washane and the Washone.
I became more Shivetya, pulling away from the point experience
of tracking the shapechanger. I became more one with the demon
while the demon became more one with the plain, more purely a
manifestation of the will of the great engine. I enjoyed flickers
of memories of golden ages of peace, prosperity and enlightenment
that had reached across silent stone to many worlds. I witnessed
the passage of a hundred conquerers. I saw portions of the most
ancient wars now recalled in the Gunni and Deceiver religions, and
even in my own, for being Shivetya and embracing all times at the
same time, I could not help but see that the war in Heaven, which
was supposed to have occurred soon after God created the earth and
the sky, and which ended with the Adversary being cast down into a
pit, could be an echo of the same divine struggle other religions
remembered according to their own predilections.
Before the war of the gods, there was the plain. And before the
plain, there was the Nef. The plain, the great machine, eventually
imagined Shivetya as its Steadfast Guardian and servant. In turn,
the demon imagined the
Washene, the Washane and the Washone in the likeness of the Nef.
These dreamwalking ghosts of the builders were Shivetya’s
gods. They existed independently of his mind but not of his
existence. They would perish if he perished. And they had had no
desire to be called into being in the first instance.
Bizarre. I was caught amongst the personifications of aspects of
religion in which I could not believe. Here were facts my faith
forbid me to accept. Acceptance would damn me forever.
Cruel, cruel tricks of the Adversary. I had been gifted with a
mind that wanted to explore, to find out, to know. And I had been
gifted with faith. And now I had been gifted with information that
put fact and faith into conflict. I had not been gifted with a
priest’s slippery dexterity when it came to reconciling the
philosophically irreconcilable.
But perhaps that was not necessary. Truth and reality seemed to
be protean on the plain. There were too many different stories
about Kina, Shivetya, and the fortress in the middle. Maybe every
story was true at least part of the time.
There was an intellectual exercise of a sacerdotal magnitude.
What if my beliefs were completely valid but only part of the time
and only where I was located myself? What then? How could that be?
What could that mean?
It meant unpleasant times in the afterlife if I persisted in
relaxing my vigilance against heresies. It might be difficult for a
woman to achieve Paradise but it would be no trouble at all for her
to win a place in al-Shiel.
I dreamed strange
dreams.
Of course I did. Was not Shivetya in my mind? Was I not in
the haunted place of glittering stone?
Stone remembered. And stone wanted me to know.
I was in another place, then, in a time not my own. I was
Shivetya as the demon experienced the world, everywhere at once, a
pale imitation of God. I could be everywhere at once because by
staring at the floor surrounding my throne, I connected with my
realm as a whole. We became one knowledge, the singer and the
song.
Men were moving across my face, a large band. I knew time
differently from mortals but I understood that it had been ages
since this had happened last. Mortals did not cross me anymore. Not
often. Never in numbers like this.
There was enough Sleepy there for me to recognize
Shivetya’s memory of the coming of the Captured, before they
stumbled into Soulcatcher’s trap. Why would the demon want me
to see this? I knew this story. Murgen had shared it with me
several times, to make sure it got recorded in the Annals just the
way he wanted.
There was no solid feeling of a personality surrounding me, yet
I felt a mild pressure to abandon curiosity, to turn outward from
questions, to cease being a viewpoint, to let the flower unfold. I
should have paid more attention to Uncle Doj. The ability to
abandon the self would have been a useful talent at a time like
this.
Time was different for the demon, definitely. But he tried to
accommodate the ephemeral mortal, to get to the point, to provide
the information he thought I would find useful.
I watched the whole adventure, including the great and desperate
escape that had devoured Bucket and had allowed Willow the chance
to remain in the story as a pawn of wickedness. And I did not
understand immediately because at first I observed only the finer
details of a story already known in outline.
I was not completely stupid. I caught on. The question had
occurred to me before but had not been critical. Now I just needed
to reclaim enough self to recall that I had asked it.
The question was, what had become of the one member of that
expedition for whom there was still no account? The incredibly
dangerous apprentice shapeshifter Lisa Deale Bowalk, trapped in the
form of a black leopard, had been carried onto the plain in a cage,
as had the prisoners Longshadow and Howler. She had vanished
during the excitement. Murgen never discovered what had become of
her. That he mentioned.
I learned the truth. According to Shivetya.
Not every trivial detail became entirely clear. Shivetya had
trouble focusing that tightly in time. But it seemed that
Bowalk’s cage had gotten damaged in the panicky rush to
escape by brothers of the Company unfortunate enough not to be
included amongst the Captured.
Panic mothers panic. The great, wicked cat caught the fever. Her
violence was sufficient to complete the demolition of her cage. She
ripped her way out, injuring herself in the process. She fled on
three legs, carrying her left front paw elevated, allowing it to
touch stone only when absolutely necessary. She whined horribly
when she did. Nevertheless, she covered ground fast. She traveled
nearly thirty miles before nightfall—but had chosen a direction at
random and apparently did not recognize that she was not headed
toward home until it was too late to change her mind.
She chose a road and ran. And in the night one small, clever
shadow caught up, just short of the end of that road. It did what
untamed shadows always do. It attacked. I found the result
difficult to believe. The shadow hurt the panther but did not kill
her. She fought it and won. And stumbled onward. And before a more
powerful shadow could overtake and finish her, she staggered
through a derelict shadowgate and became invisible to Shivetya.
Which meant that she was last seen alive entering a world
neither our own nor the Land of Unknown Shadows. I hoped that that
crippled gate had finished her, or that it had injured her beyond
recovery, because she was possessed of a hatred as dark as that
which impelled the shadows, but hers was a hatred much more
narrowly directed. And the Company was its object.
The fragment of Sleepy-self never entirely subsumed into the
Shivetya overview wondered what the Captain would think when he
learned that Bowalk had reached Khatovar by accident when it was
supposed to be impossible for the Company to get there by
intent.
The Sleepy-self did not see why this news was important enough
for Shivetya to have hijacked my dreams, but significant it must
be.
Significant, too, must be the Nef, the dreamwalkers, that Murgen
had named the Washene, the Washane and the Washone.
I became more Shivetya, pulling away from the point experience
of tracking the shapechanger. I became more one with the demon
while the demon became more one with the plain, more purely a
manifestation of the will of the great engine. I enjoyed flickers
of memories of golden ages of peace, prosperity and enlightenment
that had reached across silent stone to many worlds. I witnessed
the passage of a hundred conquerers. I saw portions of the most
ancient wars now recalled in the Gunni and Deceiver religions, and
even in my own, for being Shivetya and embracing all times at the
same time, I could not help but see that the war in Heaven, which
was supposed to have occurred soon after God created the earth and
the sky, and which ended with the Adversary being cast down into a
pit, could be an echo of the same divine struggle other religions
remembered according to their own predilections.
Before the war of the gods, there was the plain. And before the
plain, there was the Nef. The plain, the great machine, eventually
imagined Shivetya as its Steadfast Guardian and servant. In turn,
the demon imagined the
Washene, the Washane and the Washone in the likeness of the Nef.
These dreamwalking ghosts of the builders were Shivetya’s
gods. They existed independently of his mind but not of his
existence. They would perish if he perished. And they had had no
desire to be called into being in the first instance.
Bizarre. I was caught amongst the personifications of aspects of
religion in which I could not believe. Here were facts my faith
forbid me to accept. Acceptance would damn me forever.
Cruel, cruel tricks of the Adversary. I had been gifted with a
mind that wanted to explore, to find out, to know. And I had been
gifted with faith. And now I had been gifted with information that
put fact and faith into conflict. I had not been gifted with a
priest’s slippery dexterity when it came to reconciling the
philosophically irreconcilable.
But perhaps that was not necessary. Truth and reality seemed to
be protean on the plain. There were too many different stories
about Kina, Shivetya, and the fortress in the middle. Maybe every
story was true at least part of the time.
There was an intellectual exercise of a sacerdotal magnitude.
What if my beliefs were completely valid but only part of the time
and only where I was located myself? What then? How could that be?
What could that mean?
It meant unpleasant times in the afterlife if I persisted in
relaxing my vigilance against heresies. It might be difficult for a
woman to achieve Paradise but it would be no trouble at all for her
to win a place in al-Shiel.