Deadshepherd (Tales of the Final Fall of Man Anthology Book 1) Read online

  “What about you?” Oona asked, turning her head towards the nest and finding that, surprisingly, her body did seem to have a bit more spring in its step now that she was not focussing on maintaining a false Dreamscape. “Do I need to worry about revealing this to you? It was you who sent Thunder of Chasms back to the Dreamscape, wasn’t it?”

  “Well it wasn’t the Myconet,” Isaz said dryly. “But the truth is, I think you’re safe for now. There is enough rich ice to see us both through to our next stage of development.”

  “There is rich ice, then,” Oona said, sparing the Myconet an accusing look.

  “Enough for me, and for you,” Isaz said. “It is not natural to form agreements and alliances, to help one another through this step, but I believe we have reached the point where the natural progression and the logical arrangement coincide. The Myconet will return soon. Roar will become aware of the rich ice, and will come for it. I am not inclined to let Roar’s violation of gestation practices pass, let alone be rewarded with a flesh lifetime.”

  “Are you suggesting we attack her together?”

  Isaz laughed. “I’m suggesting that, should Roar attack you, I will wait until the fight is over and then dispatch Roar. If you defeat her, I think I will not do the same to you. It would be best if you returned to the nest to regain your strength as soon as possible, in case Roar has already begun planning her attack.”

  “Yes, I’m on my way,” Oona grumbled. “What if Roar attacks you first?”

  “Then I, too, would prefer my body to be at its well-fed and well-rested peak,” Isaz said in amusement. “And if you choose to leap to my aid, or strike Roar down in righteous anger after the fact, it would probably be best for you to be in better condition than I suspect you are right now.”

  By the time she reached the nest, of course, the excitement was over. The Myconet’s body was huddled in the spot where she had been practically since birth, and Isaz was crouching across the nest. Between them lay the splayed and uninhabited remains of Thunder of Chasms, who had apparently been reduced to frozen organic matter by a savage twist of the lower jaw. Oona was aware of how much muscle and tendon protected the spinal cord at that part of the aki’Drednanth body, and shivered a little inside her Dreamscape at the thought of how much more strength Isaz apparently had in her arms than Oona herself possessed.

  Isaz affected not to notice her discomfort. “Thunder of Chasms learned of a large deposit of rich ice,” her Dreamscape self said without preamble, continuing the discussion that Oona had broken off in order to focus on the nestward journey. “The Myconet made it.”

  Oona turned dual gazes on the Myconet. Neither of her forms returned Oona’s glare. The withered little aki’Drednanth pup continued to lie, waving vaguely with her front and rear paw. She’d scraped a slightly smooth patch on the ice by her belly with her involuntary movement -

  “She moves quite purposefully,” Isaz said, effortlessly understanding the thrust of Oona’s thoughts as she watched her sister’s physical form. “The deposit is underneath her. Thunder of Chasms began to strangle her, which allowed me to catch her off-guard. The Myconet is no threat to us, and has wasted away to a point where her flesh will not be able to digest the rich ice in any case. I need you to dig while I keep watch for Roar. When you weaken, I will dig. Please dig enough to make my own required effort brief. You will not be able to defend against Roar, and if we are both weakened from the digging before the ice is uncovered–”

  “I understand,” Oona said, moving her body close to the patch the Myconet had marked and beginning to scrape with her soft claws and a piece of the harder black ice that was stronger than the main body of which the nest was formed. Nashoon had, most likely, used the pieces to dig the nest in the first place. She knew what Isaz meant by keep watch, of course. They could both track the other aki’Drednanth’s movements to a certain extent within the Dreamscape, but if her body came sufficiently close and moved sufficiently fast, there would be little warning. When Isaz said keep watch, she meant be ready to attack. “Better for you, of course, if the hole is mostly dug and I am fatigued to the point of collapse, should Roar appear.”

  “Of course,” Isaz agreed brazenly.

  “Hurry,” the Myconet said, as Oona sent ice chips flying and the strength leached alarmingly from her muscles.

  She didn’t need to be told. Roar was on the move – and had been, Oona was sure, since shortly before Oona’s return to the nest. She may not have realised what was happening, but she knew something was.

  Just as Oona felt on the verge of fainting, perhaps returning to the Dreamscape altogether as her frail cardiovascular system hitched and hammered, the thick crust surrounding the Myconet’s stash of rich ice cracked. She hauled the broken fragments away, revealing a greasy surface of frozen gelatinous blue-grey. She raised the shard of cutting ice in her front paws, and was about to bring it down to see if a sliver of the rich ice could be sheared away, when Isaz’s Dreamscape form gave a warning shout. Oona, focussed almost entirely on the cluster of senses feeding from her failing body, looked up in alarm.

  With viscous sluggishness, Isaz was falling back into a crouch, and the surprisingly bulky, long-armed shape of Roar’s physical form was launching herself off the lip of the nest. Teeth glinting, she collided with Isaz and bit her shoulder deeply. Isaz yelped.

  Oona pushed her body upright, barely able to make it respond. Isaz had vanished from Oona’s Dreamscape, either back into her own or into Roar’s, to conduct whatever exchanges passed between two Drednanth when their bodies were doing mortal battle.

  We do not fight in the Dreamscape.

  Clutching the piece of cutting ice, Oona lurched forward on feet and fists that seemed to weigh more than the largest load of meiofungus she’d carried in her very, very short life. Isaz and Roar rolled and snarled and shoved, furry fists and feet swinging and blood already pattering on the floor of the nest.

  In the Dreamscape, she steeled herself and ran.

  Her sleek grey-black body surging powerfully, she threw herself through the Myconet’s access-growth and into the ancient Drednanth’s dream, and from there through the gnarled arch that was Isaz’s doorway. She couldn’t have said what she was doing, she only knew that Roar would be there … and was less likely to allow her to enter her own Dreamscape.

  Isaz’s dream was a bright, loud, angular and confusing jumble of shapes and movement, evidently some sort of landscape or environment but so far outside Oona’s experience that she had no way of interpreting it. She thought perhaps it was a Wandering Song settlement of some kind. Isaz was there, facing off against the strange, glittering shape of Roar.

  She couldn’t remember ever seeing Roar’s Dreamscape form before. She only knew what she’d been told by the Myconet – that Roar was the eldest Drednanth in their litter, aside from the Myconet herself, but that the fragment of the Great Ice in which her mind resided had plunged into a black hole hundreds of millions of years ago. It was hard to tell whether this had any effect on her appearance or behaviour in this sphere, but she didn’t seem to have the enormity of the Myconet or various other ancients.

  Roar was solid, round, and blazed red and orange like a very small, heatless sun. Currents of deep crimson swirled and entwined the fiery orb like the shreds of Damorakind cloak that Naafa wore, and strange flashes of blue sparkled in its depths as though an ever-changing crystal inside was reflecting invisible blue light off its shifting facets. But she was more than just a globe – within the ruddy mantle, shadows of a face and limbs appeared and disappeared, sometimes seeming to extend out inside the curling prominences of dark red that made up her raiment. Where her lower hemisphere rested near the ground, her shape extended into thick, stumpy legs, and from near her equator two remorseless liquid-black eyes stared, unblinking.

  Oona stepped into the periphery of the two silently glaring Drednanth.

  Roar spun. Her tarry gaze widened in her dream-form’s head as she realised who the lean, fully-for
med Drednanth was … but for a moment, torn between her assumptions and reality, she was confused. She hesitated.

  And in the physical sphere, Oona heaved herself agonisingly upright, raised the sharp-edged chunk of ice above her head, and brought it down right on the back of Roar’s skull.

  Roar staggered and slumped, and Isaz pushed herself free. She grabbed the ice from Oona’s nerveless paw, swung back, and began hammering the already-heavily-bleeding pup savagely. A few moments later, the aki’Drednanth was lying still, and the low-blazing Drednanth was standing before Isaz and Oona in Isaz’s Dreamscape. Roar appeared to be grinning inside her cloak of dead fire.

  “She’ll do fine,” she rumbled to Isaz, before turning on the spot and dissipating into nothingness like mist.

  Oona dropped to her belly on the hard, feverish-warm ground of Isaz’s dream, even as her physical form collapsed in the flesh sphere.

  She was only vaguely aware of Isaz dragging her body across the blood-frosted floor of the nest to lie beside the Myconet, and shoving a thick, waxy piece of rich ice between her jaws.

  XII

  The Myconet was at once angry and proud.

  “I don’t know why you’re grumbling,” Oona protested. “I didn’t fight.”

  “You distracted her,” the Myconet said.

  “She distracted herself,” Oona retorted. “I just stood there, in Isaz’s dream, just as much an interloper as Roar was, although probably more welcome–”

  “Don’t cite Dreamscape etiquette at me,” the Myconet said, her voice calm yet reverberating through the Drednanth sphere like distant thunder. She seemed more amused than angry. “You assumed an unexpected guise after expressing an underdeveloped façade–”

  “Isaz saw through it. Roar saw what she expected to see.”

  “She did just stand there,” Isaz backed Oona up. “When I last joined a litter, Cold Narganel spawned nightfire screams through the Dreamscapes of five of her sisters, making them all but blind. That was considered cunning.”

  The Myconet was silent for a time.

  “You did not fight,” she eventually allowed.

  “Only in the flesh,” Oona said, “not in the dream.”

  “Roar could not maintain her flesh in any case,” the Myconet confided. “She may not be quite so dispersed as me – the gravity of the black hole seems to contain her, focus her – but she is old, and rooted too deeply in this sphere to remain viable in that one.”

  “And the changes she made to her body would have ultimately broken it,” Isaz added. “She would not have survived more than a year or two,” she paused. “She was here to test the newborn,” she concluded.

  “Yes.”

  They stood together for a while. In the flesh sphere, Isaz chewed on a chunk of rich ice and pushed another piece into Oona’s mouth. Oona sucked and gummed on the gelatinous fragment, but her body was already practically unconscious, operating on instinct alone. Impressions of the physical world were coming through to her in shadowy fragments, nothing more.

  “You neglected your formation to grow the rich ice for us,” Oona said. “Can’t you take some?”

  The Myconet waved her fronds stiffly. She’d extruded a head-high mushroom into Isaz’s Dreamscape, although Oona was aware that this was a temporary presence – not a permanent resident like the extension she’d placed in Oona’s dream. “I cannot,” she said. “It is called rich ice for a reason. My body does not have … there are organisms, microbes, that develop generation by generation. Mine stopped growing and changing shortly after my emergence. I could digest meiofungus for a short while longer, but it will not sustain me through the next stage of growth. My body will fail. And rich ice would make my body fail and become incontinent,” she concluded.

  “How long do you have?” Isaz asked.

  “Not long,” the Myconet said. “I would prefer not to linger. The slow retraction, thread by thread … it is unpleasant. I am not as limber as I once was.”

  “Do you want me to … ?” Isaz offered, her body picking up a shard of the ice that Oona had hacked from the nest floor underneath the Myconet’s body.

  “No,” Oona said. “Can you hold on until my body is rested?”

  “Yes,” the Myconet replied.

  She took a deep breath. “Then I will do it.”

  XIII

  She lived on the Worldship Bretorax for almost fifty years, alternating between the great starship and the planet, Coriel, around which she orbited. The Bretorax was actually more like a space station, decommissioned and incapable of interstellar or relative speed flight, extended with a vast collection of sprawling habitats and annexes and docks, as well as the huge aki’Drednanth nursery enclosure on her upper hull.

  Isaz, something of a celebrity among the Six Species due to the deeds of her previous flesh incarnation, stayed on Coriel until her body reached adulthood, then boarded a starship and vanished into the grey, to emerge several weeks later in another part of Six Species space. They did not meet again in the flesh, although they interacted regularly in the Dreamscape.

  The other Drednanth of their litter did not entirely depart from their lives. All Drednanth were connected and could technically interact, although it would take millions of years to even fleetingly meet each discrete mind. The bond of sisterhood, however, illusory as it was, gave a group of Drednanth that had been part of a litter an additional connection – one of shared experience. They occasionally met, in twos and threes and sometimes larger groups, and exchanged comments, and stories, and joking and not-so-joking accusations. She supposed she should have found it strange – and she did, at first. But everything was strange, because she was oona’aki’Drednanth. And when everything was strange, nothing was.

  She was assigned with a name, because Oona was just a placeholder that meant newborn pup. The Molren called her Nava’ia, which was an old word for a newly-built starship’s first coating of upper-atmospheric ice. She never really adopted the name herself, though. She was still waiting to grow into her own identity.

  As her fiftieth birthday approached, she departed the Coriel system for the Core, and the Great Ice. Fifty years was something of a milestone for human beings, the race of primate mortals making up the sixth of the Six Species. It was considered the age by which one was supposed to figure out what one was supposed to do – to figure out who you were. It was something of a joke among the Molranoid species who enjoyed healthy lives of around five thousand years, and was borderline surreal for the Drednanth … but humans only lived for about two hundred years. A sense of achievement and certainty at the 25% point, as Isaz remarked, was probably an important barrier to throw up against the fear of death.

  She spent a few years on the Great Ice, most of which were swallowed in the few short hours during which she visited the region near Roar’s Chasm, the ancient gulf from which Roar had once upon a time flung her mountain of ice into the black hole called Deadshepherd.

  Deadshepherd was not visible from the Great Ice – well, it wouldn’t be visible anyway, since this was rather the point of black holes – but its effects were acute in that area and the ice surrounding Roar’s Chasm was uninhabited by Drednanth minds. Roar herself continued to exist, somehow, in the moment of infinitely-suspended time in Deadshepherd’s heart. She managed to interact almost normally with the Drednanth whole, in fact, even going so far as to join the ranks of the aki’Drednanth occasionally, albeit briefly. How she managed to do this while even safe visiting proximity to Deadshepherd caused irreconcilable time dilation issues with the rest of their kind was a mystery nobody seemed close to solving.

  The chasm was a strange place, where the physical eye played tricks and the Dreamscape curled in on itself. It was said that, deep in the chasm’s jagged gulfs, there rested a glowing purple stone that whispered to aki’Drednanth in the final moments before their flesh perished and they returned to the Dreamscape. It was said to be an object of great power, its presence one of the long-forgotten reasons that Roar had hurle
d the overlying mountain into Deadshepherd in the first place. To her mingled relief and disappointment, the fabled crystal did not speak to her while she was visiting.

  After a brief symbolic period as close to physical togetherness as possible between herself and Roar, she went on her way. Nobody was sure whether she had gained years, or lost them in the course of her visit. She supposed it depended on one’s point of view.

  From the Great Ice, she wandered for a time, eventually winding up close to Six Species space again – but on the ostensibly forbidden ‘Cancer’ side. The Six Species, under the guidance of the Molren, were very careful to keep their civilisation quiet and hidden from the eyes of the Damorakind. The aki’Drednanth, however, were permitted to fly where they wished. The Molren could deny them nothing, and since their flesh species was already enslaved by the Damorakind there didn’t seem to be much that could happen anyway. Still, the aki’Drednanth were likewise invested in keeping the Six Species safe, and so unnecessary back-and-forth between the Core and the outer regions of the galaxy was kept to a minimum.

  Near the innermost boundary of Six Species space, she encountered a mortal species that called itself the Biograbe. She established contact with them – the Drednanth had been aware of them since before they’d mastered space travel, but had not yet sent a physical emissary to live among them – and settled on their homeworld as a strange but honoured alien visitor.

  Over the years, she came to know the Biograbe, and her Dreamscape form shifted to resemble one of the plasma-vomiting arachnids. She was given a new name, Frost On Four Legs, a title combining the Biograbe name for a dangerous arctic mammal on their planet, and a very mildly derogatory term for a non-arachnid animal. There really wasn’t a creature less like an aki’Drednanth than a Biograbe, and Frost On Four Legs liked them from the start. By the time she had lived through the better part of the species’ burgeoning space age, she loved them quite dearly.