Robert Redick - The River of Shadows

As a rat he had once plunged from a moving ship into the sea. This was infinitely worse: the air current blasted him straight upward, head over heels; the door became a dim rectangle that shrank to nothing in the darkness. He rose like a cannonball fired at a midnight moon-and then the current vanished, and he became weightless, and started to fall Only for an instant. The next blast shot him faster, farther upward. Do not wake. Do not panic. Now there were windows, and cave mouths, and luminous insects somehow surviving the wind. Felthrup had lost all control of his dream. He perceived the wall of this great black tunnel, ten times the width of any mineshaft, and no sooner had he seen it than he collided, scraping along the wall shaggy with vines, while somewhere within the leaves tiny voices cursed him, You great oaf, that’s my property, you’ve knocked my mailbox into the River.

The River of Shadows. That is what the innkeeper called this place. And his name, and his tavern? Think of it, remember. Orfuin. The Orfuin Club. Anyone whose need is sincere can find his way to my doorstep.

No sooner had the thought occurred to him than he saw it: the little terrace and the wide stone archway, the scattered tables, the potbellied man at his tea. As if he had waited all these weeks for Felthrup to return. But how could he possibly get there? Felthrup spread his arms, the way he had seen Macadra and her horrible companions do, but his cloak only billowed about his head, and like a tossed playing card he flew spinning across the shaft, rising still, leaving the terrace behind. No control. He could almost hear Arunis laughing, though he knew the mage could not see or hear him in this place. He flailed, he kicked, he crashed again into a wall. He sank his hands into the vines. They were deep, but not deep enough. Fistfuls of the waxy leaves tore away in his hands as his body tried to lift away once more.

He should not have attempted this journey. You’re failing, rat. Still just a rat, with a rat’s small soul, even if he could dream himself into the body of a man or bear.

Then it came to him, like a gift from some mind beyond his own. Still a rat! He had that choice, too. Closing his eyes, he willed the change to happen, and it did. His fur, his half tail, his dear old claws. All at once the vines closed over his whole body. The wall of the shaft was rough, scabrous; better than the walls he scaled with ease on the Chathrand. And the wind sheared past him, deflected by the vines.

He crawled straight down. He veered left and right following the smells of the place, dark beer and gingerbread. Rat, man, bear, yddek: he could be any of these. He was Felthrup Stargraven, and for the first time in his curious life he knew with certainty that he was something more. He thought of Arunis, stalking the Chathrand like a murderous fog, killing through mind-enslavement and yet afraid to meet him, Felthrup, in dream. I am, he thought with a totally unfamiliar pleasure, a dangerous foe.

“Do you mean that you had no assistance whatsoever?” said the innkeeper, filling a saucer for the rat.

“On the contrary, sir,” said Felthrup, seated on the table beside him. “I had the assistance of the written word, and an exceptional sort of help it was. The thirteenth Polylex often leads one astray, I grant you; and it is certainly biased in favor of the Northern half of my world. There is no entry whatsoever for ‘Bali Adro,’ tragically enough; one proceeds directly from Balhindar, a Rekere dish made with green rice and termite larvae, to Baliacan, a dance in honor of the Firelords, the poor execution of which was punished-do excuse my redundant vocabulary, sir-with execution.”

“But something in this Polylex,” said Orfuin, unruffled by Felthrup’s nonstop chatter, “showed you the way to my door, though you’d never dipped so much as a finger into the River of Shadows?”

“Master Orfuin, I had no inkling that such a River existed.”

A gentle smile spread over the innkeeper’s face. “One day you may long to recover such ignorance. Then again, you may not. For now, let us celebrate your skill. Few dare to leap into that stream who are not born to it, or committed to a lifetime’s practice. You, Felthrup, are a natural swimmer.”

“How very ironical,” said Felthrup, beaming. “All my life-my woken life-I have lived in fear of drowning. But I suppose one cannot drown in a river of air.”

“There is more than one sort of drowning,” said Orfuin. “But come: tell me how you managed this miracle, and what need brought you to attempt it.”

Felthrup reached to adjust his spectacles, then laughed: they were still gone. “Cross-references, Mr. Orfuin,” he said. “I began with Dreams, an entry that ran to some forty-eight pages. Around the thirtieth, I learned of the theory of Occulted Architecture, which states that the objects in a dream-land, like those in any other world, are made of smaller building blocks: atoms, cells, particles too small for any eye to discern-except the mage’s, and those of magical creatures. They, being able to perceive the building pattern, can also learn to change it-to turn a rat into a man, candies into worms, a damp tunnel into a castle corridor. Arunis used this ability to torture me for several months, once he discovered my dream of scholarship.

“But the Polylex goes on to say that dream-lands are not exactly infinite. Like countries in a waking world, they do possess edges: frontiers, borders, watchtowers, walls. Some of the mightiest walls are those erected between dreamers. They are invisible even to the dreamer himself, but they are also essential: they prevent us from wandering, by accident or ill design, into the dreams of others.

“Mages, however, can pass through these walls as though they do not exist.”

“If that were not so I’d have fewer customers,” said Orfuin, “though not everyone who comes here does so in a dream.”

“Well, Mr. Orfuin,” continued Felthrup, “at that point the Polylex suggested I consult the entry for Trespass, Magical. How fortunate that I did! For that entry described at some length the consequences of dream-invasion for the one so violated. They are mostly horrible. Because Arunis trespassed so often and so aggressively into my dreams, I may eventually come to suffer from insomnia, sleepwalking, fear of intimacy and verbal reticence.”

“Surely not the last?” said Orfuin with concern.

“Oh, it is likely, sir, and narcolepsy, and excessive familiarity too. But that is all beside the point. What matters is this: that those whose dreams have been invaded sometimes find that they have been bestowed with an equal but opposite ability-that is, to enter the dream of the one who invaded them.”

“That is true,” said Orfuin. “The wall between two dreamers, once transgressed, is never afterward a perfect barrier.”

“So it proved with me,” said Felthrup. “My great benefactor Ramachni, wherever his true self has gone, passed into my dream and gave me the power to fight back against Arunis. That act saved my life: for sleep had become such misery that I was performing the most extreme acts of self-torture to keep myself awake. And when at last I had the courage to dream again, I made a shocking discovery: my dreams no longer just started, with a bang as it were, in the middle of a fight or dance or bowl of soup. Not at all. Since Ramachni’s visit, I see my dream coming. Like the doorway to your club, it begins as a tiny square of light in the darkness. Very quickly that square grows into a window, and before I know it, the window crashes against me, and I tumble into the dream. Strange, and useless, I thought: for I was as helpless to control this process as I was tonight, flailing around out there.”

Felthrup lifted his head, indicating the rushing blackness beyond the terrace. “The River of Shadows,” he said, musing. “What is it, Mr. Orfuin? Through which world does it run?”