Dawn of the Dreamsmith (The Raven's Tale Book 1) (40 page)

CHAPTER 17

T
he forest burned. Bright orange flames licked up blackening trunks and spread across every branch, consuming everything they touched. The heat was immense. Cole held his hands up in front of his face, attempting to ward it away. All around him, the air shimmered. Wood crackled as it burned and above the sound he could hear the petrified cries of the forest creatures as the fires engulfed them.

Cole looked desperately about him, but there seemed no way out. Every path was blocked by hungry, dancing flames. They seemed alive, sending out red hot tongues to caress him. Taunting him.

Above the din he began to make out other noises. The ring of metal on metal, a man’s shouts. The sound of battle. He was running out of time.

I can’t do it!

Cole, you must! This fever... it burns too hot. He won’t wake.

I... I will try.

He closed his eyes and took a deep breath. He tried to calm his mind. Panic was a greater enemy in this place than the fires. When he felt his heart begin to slow, he opened his eyes again and looked around him once more. It was hot, that he could not deny. He could feel the sweat rolling down his face and back. But the danger did not seem immediate. He stood in a small clearing; hardly big enough to make a camp but, without anything to feed the flames, he would be safe for the time being.

He knelt on the ground, the heat blasting his face, trying to ignore the clash of swords somewhere up ahead. For now, none of that mattered. He cupped his hands in front of him and concentrated. For a minute that seemed like an eternity he stayed there, staring into his empty palms. Nothing happened.

What can I do?

I don’t know, Cole. Something. Anything! Speak to him. Tell him to come back.

But I can’t do anything there. The fires are too strong.

You have to. He’s...

Raven?

Just... just do whatever you can, Cole.

She hadn’t needed to say out loud what they both already knew. Harri was dying. With a moan of frustration, Cole flung his hands down. One of them still stung, from the last time he was here, when one of the malevolent flames had licked too close and burned his flesh. Even when he went back, to the room lined with odd-smelling jars, he still felt the pain.

“I can do this.” He was trying to convince himself, he knew. But perhaps, in this place, that was enough. He cleared his mind, and then cupped his hands again. He concentrated on the space in between them, focusing all his energies on a single point. With every ounce of effort he could muster, he
pushed
with his mind.

This time, the air just above his palms flickered. It lasted less than a second, but it had been undeniably there. Cole grinned, triumphant. Perhaps this could work after all. There was a chance, one he needed to take.

When Raven suggested it, he had been dubious. He had never attempted anything like it before, was not sure at all that it could even be done. But seeing her so distraught, half-collapsed over the prone form on the bed, he had been determined to try. If the village healer heard them, he didn’t respond. He merely busied himself at his workbench, preparing a variety of potions and tinctures. But not for Harri. By then he had done all he could for the young hunter.

An hour earlier they had burst unannounced into his house, carrying an unconscious Harri between them. Sensing the urgency of their situation, without stopping to ask who they were or what they wanted, he directed them to a cramped back room that appeared to serve as an infirmary. He glanced at the wound as they lowered Harri onto the straw-filled mattress. “What attacked him?” the healer asked, his voice grave.

“A soulcreep.”

“I feared as much.” He glanced up at the doorway, where their guide hovered uncertainly, still holding the lamp he had used to light their way from the road. “You may go, Emmett, you can do no more for this man.” With a nod, he vanished, leaving them alone with the healer. There were similarities between the two, but the one who now began to search among the jars and bottles on his shelves was greyer, balder. His closely cropped hair formed a crown around the smooth dome of his scalp. Heavy bags sagged under his eyes and he seemed weary, but not unduly annoyed despite being woken at daybreak by their arrival.

He located the bottle he was looking for and decanted some of the dark liquid inside into a small bowl. This he lifted to Harri’s lips and held there until the liquid had all been swallowed. “That will halt the spread of the poison around his body,” he explained. “But the venom of a soulcreep is pernicious. I hope that it is already not too late.” As they watched, he cleaned the wound with water, but Harri gave no outward sign that he felt the pain such an operation must surely have caused. With that done, the healer smeared a pale green salve over the area, and carefully wrapped a bandage around the hunter’s midriff. “I have done all I can,” he told them. “All we can do now is wait.”

For a long time, Raven had simply sat silently beside Harri on the mattress as he slept. When his temperature started to climb she wetted a cloth with cold water and held it against his brow, but it was not enough. As his skin began to burn, the young hunter thrashed on the bed, striking out at them both and himself, until they had little choice but to restrain his limbs. The healer had tried other potions in an attempt to lessen the fever, but to no avail. Harri had grown so hot that Cole began to worry he would burst into flames where he lay.

That was when Raven suggested that he use his power, that he enter Harri’s fever-dreams and attempt to calm him there. “What help will that be?” he asked.

“I don’t know what else to do, Cole,” she cried desperately. “We’re losing him. I won’t let that happen!”

Cole took hold of the crystal around his neck. He glanced across to the leather pouch, still on the nightstand where he had placed it earlier. Grume sat watching him interestedly with twinkling eyes. Cole turned away, concentrated and went to the place of grey sand and dreams. It was becoming easier for him, each time. Where before it had taken all his focus to make that journey, now it was just like walking from one room into another. He entered Harri’s sleeping mind easily enough, but was soon beaten back by the flames, his hand burning where they had come too close. He retreated hastily, back to the healer’s room.

Raven simply looked up at him, sadness etched into her features. That stung him more than a slap to the face. And so, after a brief discussion, he tried again. This time, a new idea had come to him. It seemed preposterous... impossible, even. But it might be the only option left to them.

And now, as Cole knelt down on the forest floor in the midst of the conflagration, it seemed as though there might be cause for hope after all.

The question was, where to begin? It needed to be small, he decided, but also something that he knew well. He racked his brains for a few moments, before the perfect answer came to him. Once again, he spread his palms open in front of him. This time he closed his eyes, to help him remember.

Growing up on the Crag, he had owned no toys, no mementoes, no books of his own. Without ever having the chance to experience such things, it did not occur to him to question their absence. It was the only way of life he had ever known.

Yet, not sharing the Brothers’ beliefs, there was an emptiness to that existence that he’d never really been able to identify. Perhaps that was part of the reason why he’d acted out as he had. His transgressions had seen him regularly banished to the draughty garret at the top of the keep’s highest tower. His stays there had been lonely. All but one.

It had been three summers ago. By this time he was used to the periods of temporary confinement, but the loneliness and boredom of isolation still rankled. For two days, in the tiny garret-room he had whiled away hours lying on the bed, counting the bricks of the walls and ceiling-slabs, until he knew their number off by heart and had given names to half of them. He had spent hours more pacing the floor, or studying the cracks between the flagstones, just for something to occupy his mind.

When the creature had landed on his windowsill, he noticed it immediately. A tiny shape, it sat there slowly opening and closing its wings, as if unsure of its new environment. Cole approached it cautiously, afraid of scaring it away before he could examine it closely. He crept nearer, step by step, until his shadow fell over it. The creature was aware of him, he thought, but it seemed not to care. In the keep library was a book detailing the native fauna of the north, and he recognised it readily enough. A hawkfly, with tawny wings shaped to look like feathers, its snout curved and pointed like the animal from which it took its name.

It had stayed with him in that garret for a day and a night. He never knew from whence it had come, or why. Hawkflies were most often found in meadows, where they preyed on the miniscule midges and gnats that gathered in summertime. Why this one had decided to fly out to sea, he could not begin to guess. But he was grateful for its presence and befriended it, after a fashion. It had flown away when old Merryl had climbed ponderously up the spiral steps to bring him back down to the keep. But in that time he had become quite familiar with the little creature.

As Cole remembered, he felt something tickling his palms. He opened his eyes, and had to stifle a whoop of celebration. A nut-brown hawkfly sat perched in his hands, its antennas waving curiously about its tiny head. It did not seem bothered by the fires that still raged around them.

“You will probably never realise this, little fly, but today you saved a man’s life,” said Cole. Still cupping the hawkfly, he climbed to his feet. It might have been his imagination, but he felt as though the air was less of a furnace than it had been previously. “You see, in all the times I have visited the dreams of another, everything I have seen there has been conjured from their memories, their thoughts,” he went on. “I’ve been able to walk among the pictures from their past, touch them even, but no more. It never occurred to me that I might be able to create something here from my own memory. Perhaps I couldn’t, until now. When I needed to.”

Gently, he placed the little fly onto his shoulder. It seemed quite content. He paused, taking in the burning trees all around him. “Logic tells me that it is harder to move a mountain than it is a grain of sand, but I wonder. I’m not certain there is a place here for logic.”

Cole held his hands out in front of him, and concentrated again. He pushed out with his mind, just as he had before when bringing the hawkfly into existence. He stared intently at the flames, until it felt as though his brain would be squeezed out through his ears.

And then, slowly at first, the crackling fires began to recede. As he continued to push outwards, he felt his power swell, as if feeding on itself. It became easier, the flames dying out faster and faster until every last red tongue had been extinguished. All that remained were charred tree trunks and scorched earth around them. Out of curiosity, he placed his fingertips against the ashen bark of a nearby tree. To his surprise it was cold to the touch.

Now that the flames had died, taking with them the sound of crackling and popping wood, the forest was filled with the noises of the battle he had heard earlier. He listened for a moment, gathering his bearings, and then ran off through the trees in the direction of the fighting.

It didn’t take long to find Harri. The hunter was only a short distance away, surrounded by foes. The shapes that assailed him were blurry, indistinct. They moved like shadows, but seemed to be armed and wearing dark plate. Harri wielded a broadsword and was laying about him on every side, screaming incoherently. The sound of his sword beating against the blades and armour of his foes rang around the forest, but Cole could see that he was fighting a losing battle. Every time he dealt one of the shades what should have been a mortal blow, it dissipated like a puff of smoke, reappearing somewhere else around the raging hunter. Harri had begun to stagger with exhaustion, and the creatures bore down upon him hungrily.

Cole didn’t panic. He stood his ground just outside the ring of figures, none of whom had yet noticed his presence. Again, he held his hand out before him and focused his mind. It came to him more easily this time. A wave of energy seemed to emanate out from him, scattering the black forms before it like ashes in the wind.

Harri looked around, momentarily baffled. Then, he caught sight of Cole and charged, sword raised, screaming like a wounded beast.

This time, Cole panicked. He didn’t dare try his new-found powers against Harri, here in his own dream. Besides that, he didn’t have the time to do so. Mere seconds after the wraiths had vanished, the furious hunter was upon him and swinging his heavy blade in an arc towards Cole’s neck.

Cole dived desperately backwards, rebounding off a tree trunk a heartbeat before the steel broadsword chopped deep into the bark where he had been. He staggered away, his boots kicking up flurries of black earth and forest detritus. Behind him, he could hear Harri’s footsteps crashing through the trees, and the swish of his blade. The hunter continued to yell, throwing a torrent of obscenities at his retreating back.

Cole had often wondered what would happen to him if he died during one of his sojourns into the dream-realm. Would he die in the real world as well, or merely awaken in the same spot he had been before? With the frenzied hunter fast on his heels, Cole quickly decided he didn’t want to find out.