"Ss-sam has taught you the trade and all its tricks-ss-s! I play you ss-square, don' I? Were it not for old Ss-sam, Psycho Billy would have you in his palm — he's top here, save for me! He would diddle you and cuff you and nick your victuals right to nothing. I feed you as I would a dog, food I cannot eat, so I never cheat you. Must you cheat each other?"

  Fader scowled. "Tomorrow I want to take Lightfoot and Jinx with my group, since I mean to cog the tatt-monger up northside. Meanwhile, Jinx here is holding the swag for the filching we all did today. A team effort. We were all as one."

  Jinx flipped her long tail of hair and presented Sam with the coins. "This is from all of us. No one has a better prize. No one has a worse."

  Clam spoke up. "None of us gets switched!"

  Sam the Lizard sat slowly back down, and lowered his head. He was silent for so long, the children thought he might have fallen asleep, for lizard sleep with eyes open. But then he lifted his head and lashed his forked tongue in the air.

  "My precious eggs-ss-s! My wee little brats-ss-s! Have ye finally learned to ss-share and ss-share alike? It comes-ss by nature to the Iss, who are the greatest of the great races-ss. You monkeys are low ss-scut, but you can be ss-scrubbed hard enough to ss-shine like glass-ss!"

  And that evening, Sam ordered a rasher of bacon, a food he could not eat, and stirred it into the stew, so everyone had a mouthful of meat. He called them all into the upper room, which was heated by a fire grate, and propped an old door hatch on four crates to make a feast-table large enough for all to crowd around. His physiognomy was similar enough to metabolize the same alcohols as theirs, and so he passed out jacks of grog to his underage child-crooks.

  Before the meal began, Sam brought out the switch he used to beat the children in the gang. It was a long rod, slim and flexible like a whip, able to bruise and welt tender flesh without breaking bones. They all hated and feared it, even Fader.

  "We Iss are born from eggs-ss which our mothers leave behind. We fend for ourselves-ss from the moment we hatch, but we always-ss aid each other. We have no families-ss, no brotherhood, but this means we have no ss-strangers, none who are not brothers-ss. You ss-see? What is Iss by nature, the younger races-ss must learn. Today, I ss-say you are as good as lizards-ss!"

  With these words, Sam snapped the dreaded switch in two, and tossed the fragments into the fire grate, where they burned merrily. Lyra looked on in awe, wondering if this were a dream.

  Over the feast, Lyra whispered to Jinx, "He does not hate girls."

  "Who?"

  "Fader! He is sweet on Gypsy, and thinks she is safer swindling and sharping than mixing it up with brawlers and louts. And how did you snaffle his take?"

  By way of answer, Jinx closed her eyes, pointed with her chopsticks. A juicy bit of bacon leaped from the plate of Fader while his head was turned, sailed silently through the air, and landed neatly in Lyra's bowl.

  Jinx said, "I have been practicing all those things you said from your mother. Hearing starlight, thinking without words, reaching beyond your fingers. I have been trying to teach Gypsy. She says it gives her bad dreams."

  Lyra said. "I can tell her the names to keep bad dreams away. I remember what mother taught me."

  Jinx said, "It must be nice to remember your mother."

  Lyra scowled bitterly. "It is not nice."

  "I have nothing. I have no memories of my mother. Gobble says I am a clone trooper."

  Lyra suddenly was blinking tears. Maybe the curse of her young memories was a blessing. She had never thought of this before. At once, she was ashamed of all the cold or angry things she had thought or said about Jinx. She was no longer irked by the way Jinx flung her hair back.

  Lyra said, "You saved me tonight from a broken leg, or worse, and from an empty bowl. Why are you so nice to me?"

  Jinx said, "Because you are good luck. I am bad. That's my name. I was not born a princess with magic powers. I never flew through space. I never had a friendly robot save me. I've never had a robot. Only the swellest of the swells have those. You are so strange with your highborn ways and strange eyes! You must be a witch! I want to be one, too."

  Lyra was moved. "If we vow upon the stars to be sisters, the stars themselves will tilt fate and twist it, and make sure we see each other's eyes again."

  Such was the feast night when the children became Lizards, and Lyra and Jinx became sisters. The gang was not fated to eat together many more times after.

  That winter, Old Sam would be brutalized by hatchet-men from Psycho Billy's Gang, dropped into a canal, and pulled under by the weight of the iron blades and axes wedged into the scales of his stiff hide. Fader and the boys were forced to work for Psycho Billy. Gypsy and the girls, fleeing, were scattered and lost each other. Lyra would spend the yule season in the maze of old tunnels, freight-tubes, and winecellars beneath the Rushlight Opera House in the Candlemaker's District.

  She was all alone for the first time in her life, without stepfather, without gang-leader, without anyone. She lived by thieving.

  By night she hid among the roofbeams above the grand chandelier. She could peer down through a knothole at the swells and grand ladies in the audience, picking out likely targets, tipsy dames with fat purses. While the strange music and arias floated up from tableaus of ancient sorrows, Lyra beheld tales of mystery and wonder; of curses and kings, of whales uttering prophetic riddles, of artificial men and evil Templars, of insane machines outwitted by wise horses, of Underdwellers mining gold, lions burning worlds in wrath, and stars assuming human shape. These images would enter her dreams, and she would visit other lands and other lives in visions at night.

  3. Shapes of Nightmare

  Dream-Time, Astral Realm, Adrift

  Ksora was gone.

  In deep space, with icy and uncaring stars staring at her from each direction, dark emotion overcame Lyra, a black tide of grief. The stars vanished from her eyes, and she lost her way. This was one of the dangers of dream-travel in the abyss of interstellar space.

  Out from dream an old memory had ambushed her, overcame her, and sorrow banished serenity. Without serenity, without a physical body to house her spirit, the naked soul can lose location, become disoriented and detached from time and space.

  Woe smote her. The thing she had vowed to prevent, she had let happen. Again. Every world she stepped upon had died. Family or friends or even strangers who offered her any aid were doomed to die. Or when she came to the aid of another — such as the young pirate hunter she'd met, dressed in masquerade, Athos Lone — fate decreed a fiery death for him, even though by some miracle he escaped it.

  Lyra forgot her shape. Her body became as a shadow. She curled into a ball, as if trying to surround and contain a pain in her inward parts, hands over her face, holding back sobs.

  She twisted and shook and threw back her head. Her long locks of black hair burned with red sparks. A wild sob, almost a scream, escaped her.

  The cold stars watched silently. The stars were said to carry the messages of a Star-maker, who was more remote, more sacred, older and greater than any living being, higher than any sovereign power. The stars were said to arrange fate as decreed.

  But why was this Lyra's fate? What had she done as a child to have such punishments visited on her? What had provoked the wrath of the stars against her, and the malice of the Star-maker?

  The roaring and titanic suns of space were so large and old. She was small, so very small: why should hosts of undying giants seek out and torment a single, shortlived mouse?

  She shouted her questions at the stars.

  Silence was the sole answer.

  Time passed, much time, before she came to herself again. Slowly, very slowly, she grew aware of the danger she courted. The stars were no longer showing themselves to her, and so she could not see the shapeless forms swelling and swaying in the dark abyss gathering around her, and growing darker. Already she heard a muffled whine of a cracked flute, and the maddening pounding of drums larger than worlds. The fabric of timespace groaned beneath the pounding, awkward, shambling steps of lurking figures, moving in absurd dance, blind, dim, and forever locked in shadow, forever roaring, forever wailing.

  With no stars to guide her, and no memories of Ksora leading anywhere but to yet another planet of icy desolation, Lyra sought some thought, some scrap of poetry, some image from a dream, which would guide her back toward the sanity of three-dimensional time and space, the epoch and eon of her home. But what?

  Then she knew. She recalled. There were other memories touching Ksora, related to Ksora, memories powerful enough, strong enough, to reach from heart to heart and across spacetime. For not only the great sorrow and pain of those murdered was soaked into the name and spirit of Ksora, but also of the murderers.

  She had seen a dream-image, if only from afar, of the Great Eye of Darkness, in the seeming of a vast wheel. The Empire had slain Ksora. Some admiral or evil prince, centurion or legionnaire must have actually done the work, deployed the weapon, thrown the switch. The guilt of the great, dark deed, the footsteps of dark ghosts of the slain, must lead somewhere, to someone.

  As best she could, from memory or lore or invented fancy, she recalled all she knew of the Empire, of Centaurus, of Ksora, and of the evil wonder of which the Extant Analects dared speak, a weapon as large as the orbit of a planet, which the master dreamer Argalia saw in the Black Nebula of Nastrond, being forged from the neutron-matter of dead stars by living men and unliving demon-lords.

  Then she shot an arrow from her shining bow. The arrow burned like a comet, and descended into the distance. Robed figures that had been drifting toward her, gigantic, crowned in dark stars and dead worlds, now drew aside. She chased the arrow.

  A river of light brought her to an island of light, which became a galaxy, spread like a carpet beneath. Only then did real fear grip her heart: Lyra had been much farther from life and light and sanity than any dreamer was allowed to stray.

  What strange grace had saved her soul from certain destruction, she did not pause to wonder, but she sang a song of thanksgiving, and some of the images she had just seen ceased writhing and growing in her memories, and became memories alone, still and harmless.

  Now she drove into dreams, past the gigantic shapes of ancient saints and primal fears, the images of strange lights, falling towers, sacrificial fires, world-floods, pictures of the twins of light and darkness murdering and being murdered, the first woman holding the holy child, the first serpent being trampled beneath her foot. These were reflections from the common dreams of ancestral mankind.

  Now she saw the light from her flying arrow in the distance. She followed. Then she came upon what she sought: scraps of memory, dreams of worldly destruction, the vision of a yellow sun flickering and going dark, swift as a snuffed candle, and the echo of that unmistakable sound. It was a sound that Lyra had heard, and lived. Everyone else who heard that sound had died. It was the sound of a cry. It was the cry of all the voices of a globe, all the city and surrounding countryside, countless voices wailing in wonder and fear at once as their sun died, and their doom was set.

  But here was another who had seen the sight and heard that sound, for a scrap of the horror was in his dream also. Here was another eyewitness who had seen the Empire slay a world.

  Was it Fader, perhaps, or Fingers? Was it Gypsy?

  Could it be Jinx?

  Had the girl seen the world of Ksora die, but survived?

  Lyra followed the dream, seeking the dreamer.

  4. Old Wounds

  Flint seemed to be standing once again on a narrow, unrailed bridge leading to the great gold doors of the Sacred Spire of the Dark Will. The crown of the spire also served as the emanation alignment tower, with its circular coronet of parabolic dishes pointing each direction. It was, in fact, the decrypted signal from this very tower that the dreadnaughts Colossal and Cyclopean had followed to make their rapid-deorbit assault from hyperspace.

  Through the open doors of the temple, Flint could once again see the nave of the shrine. All was amiss and askew. The starbursts were golden, not black, and the goat-headed statues of arch-nephilim had been replaced by winged ophanim, the blood bowl with a baptismal font. Living light from seven-armed candlesticks shined from hangings of purple and scarlet. The black smokes and stenches from burning strange fires, as commanded by the Dark Will, were absent.

  Flint knew what all these witchy symbols meant: This was adoration of the stars. These were emblems of the Golden Order.

  It was rank superstition, grossly illegal.

  In his hands, as before, as it always was, trembled the black wand of his nerve-lance, twin forks ablaze with poisonous blue energy. As always, he tried to cut the power, turn the wand aside, break it, throw it down. As always, the black wand of the black tech weapon was glued to his hand, stuck to palms and fingers by layer upon layer of innocent blood. The blood had formed a crust, cold as ice, like a solid glove, trapping his hands, forcing his thumb against the firing switch.

  As always, the lash of blue-white energy from the nerve lance gushed from the forks of the wand in the shape of a long, snakelike dragon-worm, which seemed to pause smirkingly, mockingly, above Flint's head, before extending to strike the beloved figure of Elissa.

  She was the bride of Sir Orgulus, not his. Never his. Clone troopers were not allowed to wed. They were given comfort women only. Fatherhood was forbidden.

  But in the dream, she was his lady, his dear, his own.

  She was visible through the door, in the nave, hanging in midair, floating like an angel. In her arms was the small corpse of a child that should have been his child. The screams of the dead child never ceased, but followed him forever, a thin, eerie wail. Why? Why did you kill her?

  Elissa was dressed in the forbidden garments, blasphemous and superstitious, of the enemy. The witch garb was simple and severe: a white blouse, with long draping sleeves, and split skirt with pleated legs, belling wide, of unadorned blue. A red sash cinched her waist. Her black hair was confined in a single tail in the back, held in place by a simple ribbon of rice-paper. No rings nor jewels were present, and no paint. No liner or blush touched eye or lip.

  Sir Orgulus was also there, with sword and shield of ethereal crystal made more real and solid than matter, and burning with golden fire. But the figure was a corpse, his face empty with the emptiness of death, frozen beneath layers of ice, unburied, not at rest. The empty eyesockets rested on Flint, full of questions. Why? Why did you kill her?

  All around Flint, it was snowing. The sun was a black ball in the sky, and the sky was filled with the screams of fear of the whole city, and the countryside beyond. It was an unmistakable sound. In so many nightmares, he had heard it so often.

  It had been to combat and escape this one repeated night-vision that Flint had discovered and so diligently practiced the lucid dreaming arts of his ancestors. The people seen in dreams were often messengers of stranger things from deep, forgotten realms where no dreams reach. Flint had found that, at times, by speaking to the images in his dreams, he could unmask their purpose and meaning.

  He called Elissa's name, or tried to. Sobs blocked his throat.

  Nonetheless, somehow, she heard, she knew. Elissa approached, gliding on silent footsteps, but the writhing snakelike gushes from his nerve-lance made a wall of blue fire between them, shattering the slim bridge on which he stood.

  The wall of deadly fire was between them, and she was lost.

  Suddenly an arrow made of golden light, blazing like a comet, fell down from the black sky, smote through the fires, and struck the ground between his feet, quivering.

  Flint came awake, shouting, startled out of his dream. He was in his cabin aboard the Hasty Sluggard, which had once been a horse stall. Before leaving Coma Berenices, he had swept away the straw and replaced it with a carpet of cork, brought in a high-capacity atmosphere filter, a bunk, a telltale, a desk, an acceleration chair, and bolted them in place. He had fallen asleep in his chair, which was more comfortable than the bunk, and left the lamps burning.

  But no, he must still be asleep, for the arrow with its glowing crystal arrowhead of spirit-alloy was stuck in the carpet between his feet, and the bulkhead he faced parted like mist, and Elissa came forward on silent footsteps.

  She was younger, no older than twenty years, and her hair was longer, falling past her hips.

  The sight was so shocking that Flint froze, unable to speak. Was he asleep? Or was he awake, but seeing into the realm of dreams?

  And whose dream was this? The Grandmaster of Templars was sleeping in a horse stall at the other end of the barge, if indeed he still were capable of sleep. This shape could have been summoned by Jaywind Starquest and projected or sent into the dreams of Flint, as some sort of trick, or trial, or test.

  "Where is Arcadia?" The young image of Elissa asked.

  "Surely it is dead," said Flint. "If it were ever real to begin with. If the Dark Overlords are real, then the Arcadians cannot be real, for the darkness cannot tolerate the light."

  Flint decided he must be asleep, since those words came so naturally from his lips, and yet he would never have thought nor said such a thing. He stared at his hands silently, and recited an autohypnotic mantra to clear his wits, to be more awake even while asleep.

  This time the words from his mouth were his. "Did Lord Starquest, the Grandmaster of Templars, send you here to haunt me? To remind me of my past? In his name, I charge you to tell the truth, and the whole truth."

  "I am sent by him and seek him," said she, "For he charged me, and all of us, with the quest to find Arcadia, and by finding it, I shall find him."

  He said, "That is not true. The Grandmaster is seeking for the Greatest Empire. The knights sent to find Arcadia took a vacation on planet Chara. Because it has good weather."

  Her eyes flashed like red fire. "Outrageous! Watch your words, evildoer!"

  Evildoer? Him? Was he not a loyal soldier of the Empress?

  The thought stung. Actually, he was not. He was a deserter. He was aboard ship with an enemy of the Empire, eating his bread, and mucking his stalls.

 

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