Роджер Желязны - Warriors of Blood and Dream

Then there was only light.

And then there was darkness.

David sat up, slamming from sleep to wakefulness in a fraction of a second. Elk sat ten feet away, still smoking his pipe. The sun was cresting the eastern mountains. The sand painting around him was complete, immense, twelve feet in diameter. There were no signs of footprints, no smears or smudges. He checked his right arm. It was badly bruised.

"This is a story." Elk gestured toward the painting.

David stared at him.

"It tells of a young warrior. One who accidentally became a doorway to a great and ancient evil." He set his pipe down, and lit another of his clove cigarettes.

"Did you sit there all night?"

"We are out of time, David," he said. "The moon is almost full." He drew deeply. "In two days your mother will come for you." He shrugged. "The rest is up to you."

David watched as Elk gathered his bundles and pots. David stood in the middle of the circle. Elk said nothing to him. David looked down. There were spots of sand with a shiny look. Sort of like the rock in the previous night's dream. He stepped out, stepped directly onto the patches that felt right. Onto a hawk. Onto the sun. Onto the image of a boy.

None of the sand smeared.

Elk smiled. "Well done, Little Hawk."

David stood on an ice plain, the cracks projecting in all directions. The clouds overhead were things of frozen foam, casting cold shadows upon the frozen ground.

Something moved beneath the ice. Something huge and dark, something silhouetted against the ice like a gigantic bat wing. David stood there, his spear at the ready.

He had always been here, and as the shape came closer and closer, it covered the underside of the ice, until everything in the entire frozen world was this one shape, this one living darkness.

He turned his collar up around his neck. Something was trying to speak to him, something at the corner of his mind.

But he ignored it. He had to concentrate. There was so much fear here, and such importance. Was it the village at stake? He couldn't remember. It was vague. He had a strange and distant sense that he was young to be carrying so much responsibility on his shoulders, but carry it he did.

The shape loomed up, a whale. It had to be a whale. Enough food to last his family for a month. But there was something wrong. He thought that he was hunting it.

But ... it was ...

Hunting him?

Am

David watched by the hole as it swooped around under the water, reared back—

Am I

And headed up to the hole, and now David could see its teeth. They were too large, and something shot through David now, something more than adrenaline, more than mortal fear.

Am I dreaming

And the face of the whale wasn't a whale's face at all. It was more like something octopoid. Some mollusk form, and as he watched it shifted. Now wolf. Now tiger. Now mantis. He knew this thing, knew it, and it thrust up through the ice, shattering it in slow-motion, and David knew that he had made a horrible mistake, knew that he was not the hunter at all. He had never been.

Am I dreaming NOW ?

As if an electric cable had been rammed up his spine, David jolted to wakefulness within his dream. And in the moment that he knew it, he also knew that he was well and truly screwed.

The whale was coming down at him, looming with unimaginable speed and force and—

It's mydream !

The harpoon. He took a step to his left, set it into the ice and pole vaulted, just the way he'd seen on television a hundred times. He sprang out of the way of the thing, and whirled to see it leaping across the floes, crashing through sky and ice with every jump.

He fought to control the images. This was his dream, he could make anything anything he wanted, right? So why was this image, this thing in his own mind, fighting back, almost as if ...

Almost as if it wasn't his dream. As if it was a shared dream. Both of them were dreaming. Both of—

His focus was off, way off. The thing was almost on him. Then he remembered again, realizing that it was coming at him from the left, arcing down ...

A number one stroke. Huge, powerful, unstoppable.

But still just a number one stroke.

He saw the flare of light, the arc of the movement, and knew exactly where it would land. Even as he thought, the harpoon sucked ice from beneath his feet, became an angled wall in the shape of one of Elk's blocks. The creature smashed into it at an angle so that it glanced away, glanced off and thundered into the ice, and it flopped and twisted and looked at him and snarled—

So. You have learned Chulakua. The old man is a charlatan, trying to teach what he has never experienced. The woman Trias is a child, finger painting with the blood of gods. I will deal with both. Next time. Soon I take you, and through you, your mother —

The thing's mind opened, and suddenly David saw , and it was like dropping into a sea of raw, flaming sewage, evil and need and hunger ancient as the stars, and vaster still.

He screamed —

And sat up in his sleeping bag, in the gym, in the circle of white sand. He sobbed, hiccoughed, and vomited all over his bag. When his eyes focused, he saw that Elk was seated there, watching him. "It—it almost, almost got me."

"Did you fight back?"

"I tried. I tried."

"What happened?"

"I stopped it once. First I remembered that it was a dream, and I started changing things."

"Wasn't that better?"

"Yes ..."

"And when you fought back, you actually turned it away ... ?"

"Yes," he said. Elk tossed him a cloth, and David swabbed at his mouth. "But only because he didn't expect it. It's as if there is something actually alive in there, and it knows all about Chulakua. And it was waiting."

"Tell me the truth now, David. Tell me everything."

Haltingly and in a very small voice, he told Elk about the night in New Mexico, stealing out of the room, the climb, and the entrance into the cave.

"Mimbrino," Elk said soberly. "You came into contact with something which has entered your dream."

"It's not my dream!" he screamed. "It's his dream. He said ..."

"What did he say?"

David could barely speak.

"David? What did he say?"

David told him everything, even the most terrible things, and by the end of it, was sobbing incoherently.

"David," Elk said slowly, "I was wrong. I thought this was a demon. I think that it is a man, an evil man. I think that his tribe killed him while he was asleep, and in the dream world. Do you understand? He is dead, asleep, dreaming that he is still alive."

Elk lit a cigarette. His hand was shaking.

"Elk?" David asked. "Is what he said true? You've never dealt with a demon?"

Elk's expression was dark. "It's the truth, Little Hawk. Grandfather trained me. I've prepared all my life for something like this." He exhaled a long stream of smoke. "Maybe in my heart I thought that the world had moved on. That such things didn't happen. The Great Spirit has a sense of humor. Maybe you're just here to show me how wrong I was. You're being punished for my sins."

Back in the mountains, a coyote howled. David wiped his hand across his forehead. It was clammy with a thick, foul perspiration. "Do I have any chance at all ?" His voice cracked on the last word.

Elk stared off into the sky, eyes fixed, body very still except for the arm that took the cigarette to his mouth again and again. Finally, with a very measured voice, he spoke.

"Life must have been sweet for this Mimbrino. He has clung to it for a very long time. He may have lost ... perspective. He may be afraid to release life. If he fears, that will be your moment."