This was not a village, nor yet a fortress. It was a boat, so big you could of put the whole of Mythen Rood on the deck of it. And it was a boat that had been through terrible trials. Some of them towers I told you of had tumbled down and lay across the deck like people at Summer-dance that had drunk too much beer. Parts of the big open space was blackened with fire, with great pits here and there where the solid metal had been staved clean in or else burned and melted away by a great heat. I didn’t know how something that was floating in all this water could catch fire. But then, I didn’t know how something as big as a whole village could float on an ocean in the first place.
I would of yelled out in surprise when I seen all this, but I still had mostly water inside of me and could only make a kind of a bubbling sound, like a pan on a hot stove. Then someone put the lid on top of the pan and all was turned to dark.
3
“It’s nice to be able to show you these things,” Monono said. “They’ve been like ghosts inside me, all this time.”
We was in Ueno Park, in Tokyo, sitting next to the pond called Shinobazu. It was night, and there was herons on the water. I could see the tocsin bell though, and the steps of Rampart Hold, so at the same time I guess we was in Mythen Rood, where I used to live until I was made faceless and sent out of gates to fend for myself.
So I had got the two things I wanted most in all the world, it seemed like. I was with Monono, in a place where I could see her and touch her, and I was home again among my family and friends with all my crimes forgot. A sense of peace come over me, like my wanderings and hard labours was brung to good at last and there wasn’t nothing else I needed to do.
“Come on with me,” I said to Monono. “I’ll take you to the mill to meet my mother and my sisters. You’ll like them a lot.”
“We can’t do that, Koli,” Monono said. Only she wasn’t Monono now, but had turned into someone else in the way that sometimes happens in dreams. Now she was Catrin Vennastin, Rampart Fire, Mythen Rood’s protector and the leader of the Count and Seal. She was looking at me all solemn-stern. Her two hands was closed on something that I couldn’t see. “Jemiu and Athen and Mull was all of them hanged long since,” she said, “on account of what you done. The mill’s underwater, like lost London, and won’t ever be found again.”
I was filled with grief and dismay. In real life, Catrin had promised me no harm would fall on my mother and sisters. She said nobody would bide the blame of what I done but only my own self. Here in the dream though, I knowed it was true. They was all dead on account of me.
“Well then,” I said, choking on the words, “I’m going to whelm the whole of Mythen Rood and bring Rampart Hold down on your head. I’ll make you sorry you hurt them, Dam Catrin.”
She didn’t answer me, but only opened her hands to show me what she was holding there. It was the DreamSleeve, with its little window all lit up. I looked for Monono’s face, but she wasn’t in there. It was my own face that was looking back at me instead.
“Idowak, bidowak,” Rampart Fire said. “Ansum, bansum.”
And then I was inside the DreamSleeve, looking out.
“I don’t see you whelming very much from inside there,” she said.
Then she drawed back her hand and throwed me far and away.
4
I scrambled up out of the dream the way you climb out of a deep pit when there’s something else down there with you and you don’t know for sure what it is.
That thought didn’t come out of nowhere neither. Wherever I was, it was as dark as a moonless night, but I knowed I was not alone. I had heard a scrape of movement right up close to me. I was lying on my back, with something soft and warm throwed on top of me. Maybe I ought to of felt comforted by that, but the nightmare was still heavy on me. I felt like I was in the throat of some big beast, mouthed but not yet swallowed.
“Who’s there?” I called out. I was scared out of my wits, but I tried to sound like if I got the wrong answer I would do something about it. I grabbed for the DreamSleeve to keep it safe by me.
The DreamSleeve wasn’t there. The sling I made for it wasn’t there. What I was wearing felt too thin and too soft, like it was made out of spider-web instead of cloth.
I give a real yell at that, and sit up quick as anything. As soon as I did, the darkness turned into a light so bright it felt like it poked me in both my eyes. I throwed up my hand to keep the light out of my face.
Someone run out of the room. I seen them go, but only as a dark shape in among all the dark spots left in my eyes by the brightness. I heard a thud as a door opened, another as it closed. There wasn’t no other sounds after that. I was alone.
And I was in bed. Sitting bolt upright on a high, narrow divan in a room where the ceiling was all one bright light. I had to shield my eyes from it until them dark spots faded. Then I could look around me.
I still could not make no sense of what I was seeing though. I thought at first the room was a little one, no bigger than my bedroom back at Jemiu’s mill in Mythen Rood, which was just about big enough for a bed and a cupboard. Then, as my eyes got used to the light, I seen it was not little at all, but only full up with lots and lots of things. There was boxes and chairs and tables and rolls of cloth all piled on top of each other, and a great big mirror that had gold round its edges. Most of all, there was tech – more tech than I ever seen in my life before. Strange engines of every size was all throwed together in the room, like they had been let to lie wherever they fell. In Mythen Rood, tech was treasure – even the bits of it that didn’t work no more. This tech, though, was broke past all mending. Some of it was ripped open, with wires and plates and pieces hanging out of it. Most of it looked like it had been in a fire, streaked and smeared with black soot. Some of it was halfway melted.
All of these things was crammed in so tight, there wasn’t much space left in between them. There was even a kind of a doll the size of a growed man, that didn’t have no skin but just all flesh and muscle showing as if it was meat that had been skinned for dinner. It made me feel sick just to look at it. This wasn’t any kind of a bedroom I was in, so far as I could see, for all that it had a bed in it. The bed was just there the way the other stuff was there.
The walls of the room was painted white, and instead of corners there was a roundness where they met up as if they was all the one wall bent over on itself.
I was white too, mostly. The clothes I had been wearing was gone, and what had took their place was a long white gown like a woman’s shift, made out of a cloth so thin you could almost see through it. I should of been cold but I wasn’t, for the room was very warm. Almost too warm.
I throwed off the covers and climbed down out of the bed. The bed was a strange thing now I looked at it, made all out of metal rods and struts and levers that locked each into other. It had wheels on it too, which was a thing I never seen on a bed before. Where would you wheel your bed to? The other side of the room? In any case there wasn’t no empty space in here to wheel it anywhere.
My reflection in the big mirror, with my dark skin showing through the thin white cloth of the shift, looked like nothing I ever seen. As my eyes went up and down, trying to take in this strange sight that was just myself, I seen something that wasn’t. Lying at my feet there was a folded-up piece of paper like you might use to wrap jerky or hard-tack if you was going hunting. I bent and picked it up. It was covered in the signs of the before-times that Monono and Ursala called letters. I couldn’t read them, and I didn’t know if the paper was left there for me – maybe by whoever it was that run out of the room when I sit up – or had been there before. If I’d had the DreamSleeve with me, I could of asked Monono to read it to me, but the DreamSleeve was gone. Maybe them that took it wanted to keep me from knowing what was on the paper.