I found Murgen waiting when I got home to dreamland.
“You seem surprised. I told you I’d see you on the plain.”
“You did. But I don’t need it to be right now. Right now I need to sleep.”
“You are. You’ll wake up as refreshed as if you hadn’t dreamed at all.”
“I don’t want to be drifting around loose from my body, either.”
“Then don’t.”
“I can control it?”
“You can. Just decide not to do it. It’s pretty basic. Most people manage it instinctively. Ask around tomorrow. See how many of these people even recall being loose from their flesh.”
“It’s something everybody does?”
“Up here. It’s something everybody can do. If they want. Most don’t want it so emphatically that they don’t even recognize that the opportunity is there. Which doesn’t matter. It’s not why I’m here.”
“It matters a bunch to me. That stuff is scary. I’m just a simple low-class city brat—”
“Cancel the old whine-and-toe shuffle, Sleepy. You’re wasting time. I probably know as much about you as you know about yourself. There’re things you need to know.”
“I’m listening.”
“Till now you’ve dealt with the plain well enough by letting the Annals guide you. Stick with the rules you’ve already made and you won’t have any trouble. Don’t dawdle. You didn’t bring enough water—even if you slaughter your animals as you go, the way you planned. There’s ice here that you can melt but if you waste time getting here, you’ll end up having to kill more animals than you want. And take good care of them while they’re still alive. Don’t let them get so thirsty they start charging around looking for water and go busting through your protection. That’ll heal itself but it does take time. The shadows won’t give you time.”
“Then we’re safe from the break that killed Sindawe and some of the others?”
“Yes. You’ll find Bucket tomorrow. I warn you now so you’ll have time to prepare yourself.”
I was prepared already. I had been prepared for a long time. Actually seeing Bucket dead would be difficult but I would get past it. “Tell me what I should do now that I’m here.”
“You’re doing it. Just don’t do it slowly.”
“Should I split the group? Send a strike force forward?”
“That wouldn’t be wise. You wouldn’t be able to manage whichever group you weren’t with. And that’ll be the one where somebody screws up and gets us all killed.”
“You, too?”
“There’s nobody else who can get me out if you fail. There isn’t even anyone else out there who knows that we’re alive.”
“The Daughter of Night and Narayan Singh know. Probably.” They had overheard enough to figure it out, certainly.
“Which means Soulcatcher does too, now. But you know, I don’t really see those people developing an interest in raising the dead. Not to mention that now the Shadowgate can only be opened from this side. This is the last cast of the dice, Sleepy. And it’s for everything.”
I did not remind Murgen that Narayan Singh and his ward had a very strong interest in resurrecting someone who was practically his grave-mate. He was right about the Shadowgate, assuming there were no more Keys outside. “How did I know you were going to say something like that?”
He gave me the smile that probably won Sahra’s heart.
I told him, “You should go see Sahra.”
“I already have. That’s why I was so late getting around to you.”
“What can I say? Oh. I saw those creatures . . . the . . . ” I did not know what they were called, so I tried to describe them.
“The Washane, the Washene and the Washone, collectively referred to as the Nef. They’re dreamwalkers, too.”
“Too?”
“I’m a dreamwalker. You can see me but only with your mind’s eye. In some way that you remember me. The Nef are out here all the time. They may be trapped, or they may no longer have bodies to go back to. I’ve never been able to tell. They want to communicate so badly because they want something badly but don’t seem capable of learning how. They’re from one of the other worlds. If they no longer have bodies they may even be skinwalkers, so be very careful around them.”
“The . . . duh . . . what are you blathering about?”
“Oh. We haven’t talked about any of that yet, have we?”
“Any of what?”
“I really thought you’d figure most of it out by reading between the lines. The Companies had to come from somewhere and it would be hard to scratch out a living on a tabletop of bare stone. So they must have come from somewhere else. Somewhere very else, since the plain isn’t so big you can’t walk around it and discover that there’s nowhere for armies to come from. The land just gets colder and more inhospitable.”
“I’m real thick, boss. You should’ve drawn me some pictures.”
“I wasn’t keen on having anyone outside know. I didn’t want anybody getting scared to come get me.”
“You’re my brother.”
He ignored me. “I haven’t slept here, so I have a lot of time on my hands. I’ve used some of it exploring. There are sixteen Shadowgates, Sleepy. And fifteen of them open onto places that aren’t our world. Or did at one time. Most of them are dead now and in my state, I can’t see what used to be on the other side without actually going out there. And I don’t have the eggs to do that, because I like my own world just fine and I don’t want to take a chance of getting trapped any farther away from it than I already am.
“Only four of the gates are still alive. And the one to our world is so badly hurt that it probably won’t last many generations more.”
I was lost. Completely. I was prepared for none of this. And yet he was right when he hinted that there were bells I should have heard ringing. “What does all that have to do with Kina? It isn’t in her legend anywhere. In fact, what does it even have to do with us? It’s not in our legend anywhere.”
“Yes it is, Sleepy. The truth is just so old that time has totally distorted it. Examine Gunni mythology. There’s a lot there about other planes, other realms of reality, different heavens and whatnot. Those stories go way back before the coming of the Free Companies, a thousand years or more. Near as I’ve been able to find out, when the first Free Company came off the plain, almost six hundred years ago, that event marked the first time our Shadowgate had been used in at least eight centuries. That’s a lot of time for truth to mutate.”
“Whoa. Whoa. You’re starting to imply things I can’t quite get my mind around.”
“You’d better open it up and spread it out wide, Sleepy, because there’s a whole lot more. And I doubt I’ve discovered even a tenth of it.”
I have a dark, cynical, untrusting side that at times even doubts the motives of my closest friends. “Why is it that none of this ever got mentioned until now? This isn’t fresh news to you, is it?”
“No. It isn’t. But I told you, I want out of here. Badly. I chose not to pass on any information that might handicap you.”
“Handicap me? What the heck are you talking about?”
“Kina and the Captured aren’t the only things sleeping up here. There’re also a lot of truths that would shake the foundations of our world. Truths I have no trouble imagining wholesale slaughters and holy wars arising to suppress. Truths I have no trouble seeing getting my family and the Company obliterated, they’re so threatening.”
“I’m trying to open my mind but I’m having trouble. I feel like I’m about to plunge into an abyss.”
“Just hang on. I’ve been out here forever and I still have trouble with it. I think the way to start is, I should outline the history of the plain.”
“Yes. Why don’t you do that? That might be interesting.”
“You still have that edge on your tongue, don’t you? Maybe Swan is right and what you really need is a good . . . all right. All right. Listen closely. The plain was created so far back in antiquity that nobody on any of the worlds has any idea who built it, how, or why, though you have to believe that it was meant to be a pathway between the worlds.”
“Why the shadows and standing stones and—”
“I can’t tell you anything if I’m not the one doing the talking.”
“Sorry.”
“In the beginning there was the plain. Just the plain, with its network of roads that have to be walked a certain way to get to other worlds. For example, every traveler has to enter the great circle at the center of the plain before he can leave the plain again. Back then there were no shadows, no Shadowgates, no standing stones, no great fortress inside the great circle, no caverns beneath the stone, no sleeping gods, no Captured, no Books of the Dead. There was nothing but the plain. The crossroads of worlds. Or possibly of time. One rogue school of thought insists the gates all open into the same world but at times which are separated by tens of thousands of years.
“At some time still in unimaginable antiquity, human nature asserted itself and would-be conquerers began to charge back and forth across the plain. During a period of exhaustion the wise men of a dozen worlds combined to make the first modifications to the plain. They built a fortress in the great circle and garrisoned it with a race of created immortal guardians whose task it would be to prevent armies from passing from world to world.
“Then we pass to the edge of proto-history, the age now recalled poorly as it is distorted in Gunni myth.
“Those driven to conquer will try to do so, whatever the obstacles. Kina apparently started out as your run-of-the-mill, dark-lord type that arises every few centuries, as Lady’s first husband was, only she was another in a line and association of many such, some of whom are now recalled as gods because of the impact they had on their times. The whole cabal decided to beef Kina up until she could overcome the ‘demons’ on the plain. In the process she did become what, for want of a better descriptive, we would have to call a god. And she behaved every bit as badly as her associates should have expected, with results more or less like those recalled in the mythology. Once Kina was asleep, her associates opened the maze of caverns under the plain and buried her way down deep somewhere. Then they created Shivetya, the Steadfast Guardian, to keep watch. Or they conscripted a surviving demon of the same name and strengthened him and bound him to do the job, if you prefer a less common version of the story. Then, apparently too exhausted to recover their greatness, they faded away. So Kina came out on top even if she ended up imprisoned.”
“Why didn’t they just kill her? That’s something I’ve never understood about these squabbles amongst the gods. There’s only one version of the Kina myth where her enemies do anything but just tuck her in. And in that one, even after she’s all chopped up and scattered around, they leave the pieces alive and trying to get back together.”
“My guess would be she had some kind of deadman spell that entwined the fates of the other gods with her own. Those people wouldn’t have trusted one another for a second. All of them would have had some protective mechanism like Longshadow used when he tied his fate into the well-being of the Shadowgate.”
“But the Shadowgate doesn’t depend on his health anymore. Not as long as he stays inside.”
“I was just posing an example, Sleepy. Let’s stick to the history of the plain. What followed Kina’s downfall isn’t documented at all, but more conquerers came and went and further efforts were made to dissuade them while keeping the plain open for commerce. The gates and Keys were created. One world gathered its sorcerers and had them steal the souls of millions of prisoners of war, creating the shadows and endowing them with a bitter hatred of everything living. They meant to close down the plain entirely. Which naturally led some other race to create the shields that protect the circles and roads. Nobody knows for sure how or when the standing stones began to appear but they’re the most recent addition to the plain, probably put out by the precursors of the multiple-worlds’ religious movement that produced the Free Companies. I understand that the stones aren’t quarried, they’re created things. They’re immune to the shadows and indifferent to the protective shields but they’re attuned to the various Keys carried away during the Free Companies’ age.”
“It’s too much to grasp. It’ll take a long time to digest. Kina is real, though?”
“Absolutely. Buried right down here under me somewhere. I’ve never been tempted to go look for her. I wouldn’t want to accidentally cut her loose. I don’t know how I could manage that but I definitely don’t want to find out the hard way.”
“What about Rhaydreynak and the Books of the Dead? Where do they fit?” Rhaydreynak’s war on the cult of Kina antedated the appearance of the Free Companies by several centuries supposedly, yet there were scary similarities suggesting shared origins.
“The rise of the Free Companies is actually one of the least well known despite its being closest in time. There were many Companies over several hundred years. They came from several different worlds and went off into several more, representing almost as many different sects of Kina worshippers. Most seem to have been sent out to explore, not conquer or to serve as mercenaries or even to bring on the Year of the Skulls. What their true mission seems to have been was to determine which world should be awarded the honor of being sacrificed in order to bring on the Year of the Skulls.”
“Then a bunch of worlds decided to gang up on ours?”
“Kina spanned many worlds. Her deviltry was almost universal, apparently.”
“And we lost the toss and got to bury her in ours?”
“You’re not in our world anymore, Sleepy. This’s the in-between. Where you are depends on what gate you walk out. And these days you have only one choice. Its Shadowgate lies straight ahead, on the far side of the plain. It’s as if the plain itself is closing down the alternate ways.”
“I don’t get it. Why would it do that? And how?”
“Sometimes its seems like the plain itself is alive, Sleepy. Or at least that it can think.”
“Is it where we came from? Is it where the Captain spent most of his life trying to go?”
“No. The Company can’t go back to Khatovar. Croaker will never reach the promised land. That Shadowgate is dead. The world where you’re headed is very much like our own. To other worlds it’s known by a name that translates into Taglian somewhat vaguely as The Land of Unknown Shadows.”
Without thinking I responded, “All Evil Dies There an Endless Death.”
“What?” Startled. “Yes. How did you know? They were the people who committed the murders that produced the shadows.”
“I heard it somewhere. From a Nyueng Bao.”
“Yes. Nyueng Bao De Duang. In current Nyueng Bao usage that means something like ‘The Chosen Children’ colloquially and nothing whatsoever that’s sensible literally. In the days when their forebears were sent out from The Land of Unknown Shadows it meant, roughly, ‘the Children of the Dead.’“
“You’ve been busy,” I observed.
“Hardly, considering how long I’ve been trapped here. Try it for a decade, Sleepy. You won’t have to put up with any of the distractions you complain about when you aren’t getting everything you want to do done.”
“No kidding? Seems to me I’m all of a sudden having to work even while I’m sleeping.”
“Not for long. Whoever has control of that mist-making thing is trying to get me to answer him. Why don’t you sneak around there and smash that sucker so I don’t have to get dragged into it every time somebody wants my view on how to crack a walnut or whatever else the crisis of the moment happens to be.”
“Not hardly, former boss. I’m carrying a whole bag of nuts myself.”
“You would—” Murgen departed as though yanked away.
I could have sworn I heard the laughter of an eavesdropping white crow.