VI. The Gimbal Cross

           The Trumpeter awoke to shouts and chaos, as always now that he travelled with the impetuous swordsman known as the Fencer.  Uiha moved with Hue’s frantic efforts to staunch the blood flowing from her chest, while the Fencer brought his addled head up to fix the scene with those damn reasonable grey eyes of his as the others scrambled to their parts in the mad production of life. 

            This was why the musician had envisioned a different setting than cold, violent Winter.  Looking past the dying and the conflicted the rolling hills showed white with snow and purple with the coarse grass capable of soaking in the anemic sunlight.  Distantly the sea, as calm and motionless as poor Uiha, mentioned itself in fits of grey, while the tall spire of singular Haga Ephos reached up its artificial peaks through the shrouded sky.  The Trumpeter could still remember the sands.

            The instrument for the telling floated before the mad musician.  The Gimbal Cross, as it had presented itself to him.  It had come and took their minds, those of his companions, but not his.  He would like to think that his was too unruly, too full of strange odds and ends to be easily processed by the dream machine.  As it turned out it wasn’t who he was, but what he carried.  The Trumpet, the instrument of solemn duty of his now-vanished people, was of the same make as the silver box, the enabler of the present scene.

            He had reached out and saw the light resonating in the endless space within the cube.  What it reflected it understood and what it understood it collected, going about this duty since forever.  Yet, with the silver Trumpet in his hands the Trumpeter had been shown these workings, and his broken mind saw the colors for what they were.  He descended into a past dream and took the others with him.  He was a sharing sort.

            Perhaps he had been carried away by the warmth of it all, the sand, the power, the perfumed cushions and pleasant company.  If he admitted this he would be admitting to a lie.  He enjoyed being in control of time for a change, rather than its subject.  Winter bore down on its hapless peoples, determining their lives, allowing little, granting less.  The Trumpeter determined to give each of his fellows the dream they wanted, within his own, as was sensible.  And how this went wrong.

            The Fencer rose bleeding, angry, desperate to not be in the wrong, yet unable to deny the dead woman.  The old man, in his role as the high priest, had brained him with his holy cane, but still the swordsman’s infectious words had done their damage.  Omya had believed and now sweet, marked Uiha was dead.  The Trumpeter shrugged with the pain of acceptance.

            “It was a mechanism for dreams, a collector of sorts,” said the Trumpeter as he sat down on a patch of dried grass and began cleaning the Trumpet.  “You are all welcome.”

            The band took a few beats to grow still in the face of the mad comment.  The Fencer, weakened from the concussion, swaggered against the fuming rage of the warrior woman Omya as she attempted to redress her own wrong by committing another, skewering the swordsman whose advice she had followed.  Hue had grown ashen as the life within Uiha had vanished and the old man Aglyss was busy ministering his worries to his invisible gods above.  Only the Fencer managed the smile a little.

            “After I make lawful revenge upon the cursed duelist I will give like to you, sorcerer,” hissed Omya towards the Trumpeter, infuriated at her own complicity in the act, feeling terribly used.

            “Shouldn’t we return to your village for another idiotic trial and sentencing?” grinned the Fencer sardonically.  “I would hate to be cause for any more broken taboo.”

            “Then you could be given the same punishment as I,” said Hue as he laid Uiha’s body on a half-melted snow bank.  The young man seemed amazed at the blood which now complemented his already crimson appearance.  “Perhaps we could be told to execute each other.”

            “I will now invoke the eighty beings to see after the likewise many-faceted parts of this child’s soul.”  With this old Aglyss began a frantic muttering which overran the party’s venomous silence.  In the end it was Omya who lost her nerve.

            The spear which the warrior woman brought up to the Fencer was heavy bladed, suited for downing large and dangerous prey.  So when she lunged the Fencer caught the crude iron end with a hand calloused and scarred.  Red showed as he turned the point away and drew his own weapon, swaying, a bit uneasy on his feet.  Omya swung the weapon now in a great cleaving arc, which the swordsman batted away with a sharp clang. 

            “I have no intention of accepting the blind judgments of your people,” smirked the Fencer.  “So if I have to kill you now just to prove this point then, well, better than succumbing to the brainless, punitive entertainments which your people inflict on each other in their ignorance.”

            Omya seethed with the insult and spun her spear upwards and suddenly struck again.  The Fencer’s instincts were quick; he blocked the swing but suddenly realized he faced the point of the weapon, which the brave fluidly jabbed at his face.  He moved enough that the blade didn’t find his skull but instead suffered a gash along his shoulder.  With a curse he snapped the haft of the spear and made to finish off the damned woman in front of him.

            “How did all this come to be?” asked Hue now that his shock had receded a bit.  Omya dropped what was left of her spear and drew a dagger; the two fighters made no indication that they could hear the strange man in red, but he continued on.  “How did Uiha get that wound?  Which one of you lunatics did this thing?”

            “Go on, I’m listening,” lied the Trumpeter despondently while he watched the duel.  Omya lunged for the Fencer, who sidestepped and let the flat of his weapon fall across one of her bare arms.  Her shriek of alarm and pain mingled with the ecclesiastical murmurs from the self-declared priest. 

            “At first all I saw or knew was a silver void,” shouted the red-clad man against the noises of continued hostilities.  “Then a center of things became clear, into which numerous rays of color descended, some indescribable with the language I have at my disposal.  I felt a presence insinuate itself upon me.”

            “A presence?” asked the Fencer, letting his curiosity get the best of him.  He only just managed to dodge another of Omya’s desperate attacks.

            “I can describe it in no other way,” said Hue.  “It is difficult to describe, like the colors the experience was groundless.  I know I interacted with the thing, though it wasn’t quite like speech, and not quite like artifice.  There was an alien quality to the experience; vast, strange concepts lay just out of my mind’s reach.”

            “And then what?” asked the Fencer, who by now had Omya disarmed and immobilized with the point of his sword against her neck.  She fumed at the state of things.

            “There was noise, blood, we were back here and this woman was dead,” he said, gesturing to Uiha’s cooling form.

            “Lies, he’s a murderer, this is all his doing,” said Omya.  “Phosians have strange powers, as is described by their cursed hair and eyes.  It is most likely that he brought the demonic cube, trapped us inside, and compelled us to kill each other.”

            “What do you say to that?”  The Fencer grimaced with renewed pain in his head from the wound.  Omya dashed free and pulled the blade of her spear from the wet snow, but was suddenly interested in different hostilities.

            “It’s his fault,” she gestured to Hue.  “His brain is warped by the strange energies of Haga Ephos and from communing with the frozen things found on the slopes.  To listen to his words is to allow in the same damnation which has mutated his form.”

            “I didn’t kill anyone,” began Hue sadly.  The fight was quickly leaving the young man and he seemed to resolve himself to whatever happened next.  “But what does that matter; you’ll believe what you’ll believe, frozen in the Riddle of Winter.”

            The reasoning took the Fencer by surprise.  He grew angry and solemn, but he couldn’t condemn the crimson man.  He was determined to know more before making any judgments, and even those thoughts were further cooled by the farcical trial which had brought them all together in the first place.

            “Let’s go then,” said the Fencer putting his weapon away and testing his bloody mat of hair gingerly.  “We can think along the way and maybe some sense can come of all this.”

            “Our lives grow ever more complicated,” smiled the Trumpeter as he stood up.  “You know the next moment will smash into us before we can ever fully grasp our situation.”

            “Yes, and by then we will have no cause to exact petty revenge on our fellow traveler, which is certainly in his favor, if not ours,” reasoned the Fencer.

            “Indeed, it wouldn’t do to drag another brightly plumed, though dead, bird into another village.”

            They buried their dead first.  Purple grass gave way to black, pungent earth.  The Fencer beheld a vision of his other memories, the garden soaked with rainwater and choked with flower petals.  Bittersweet, the recollection passed, and the marked woman was buried on the slope of a hill from which both distant seas could be seen.  Aglyss began a eulogy but the others tramped off in search of their destination.  Not much was said.

            At some point the cube unfolded itself from the group’s minds.  These memories, like any tactile medium, were easy enough to manipulate through the strange metaphysics it commanded.  It was memories it was after, strange light, paths glimmering to the past and winnowing the future from the raw Lattice.  The long task continued.  It had beheld strange new light paths, but after eons of collecting there was little for it to comment on and no purpose to the exercise.  Crossing back along its path of strange futures the Gimbal Cross continued on its way with a new passenger.  She wondered all the while at her body being left behind, the grand stretch of infinities being shown, debating which one she should explore first.

            Tumbling purple hills stretched out before them with soft blankets of snow clinging to the valleys and away from the sunlight.  The day showed overcast, though there were hints of blue sky beyond.  Wild clouds moved in layered procession all about the travelers.  Dark mote birds rode the updrafts and went about their business.  There was no sign of any habitation, though the lands were rich in tolem tubers, wild snow wheat, fey berries, and other, more exotic plants, unknown to the two men from the polar south. 

            That night they camped out under the stars, except Omya, who cowered on a far hill to avoid the unsightly stare of Haga Ephos.  The clouds had passed and only the strange lights above gave light, the moon yet to rise or merely absent, as was its want. 

            “Now is our chance Fencer,” whispered the Trumpeter after some consideration.  “We can leave our warden behind and make Phos on our own.  I’m certain they will welcome us after a proper introduction by Hue.”

            “I wouldn’t be so sure,” stated the crimson man flatly as he stared to the distant shores of night.

            “I was fair with you before and now you’ll be fair with us; what exactly was this murder they accuse you of?”  The Fencer was testing his bruised skull.  They had come across a small, fast stream an hour or so before making camp, and there he had cleaned the blood from his scalp, along with the help of a litany of curses. 

            “I was traveling south on an errand of whimsy,” began the young man carefully, choosing his words.  “After a few days I met the western sea and a coastline and a man fishing with a great net.  The net was of such size that one simply casts it out just before the tide recedes and then pulls it in after the waters return.  The action of the waves drags the thing far out into the depths, where the best catches lie.”

            Hue stopped his telling.  In the falling starlight his features grew troubled before he continued.

            “I hid and watched the man, trying to learn what I could of his actions.  Few in Phos need fish, convenience conspires to keep us well fed, and most would prefer to concern themselves with the Telling.”

            “The Telling?” asked the Trumpeter with an interest in all proper nouns.  Hue continued his story, ignoring the question.

            “Engaged in pulling in his catch the man found tragedy along with the fish.  There was a great frothing of the sea and the fisherman fought with his net.  Suddenly he was pulled off his feet, into the shallows and I ran after, which would prove to be my undoing.  When I arrived the fisherman was tangled in with his own catch, screaming warding words against his mindless taboos.  I tried to save him, but he was too caught up and the thing out at sea was too strong.  I lost him, but in turning back to shore I found the other village fishermen watching.  That was my crime.”

            The Trumpeter laughed at the absurdity of it all while Hue, drifted on the memory and glowered at the heavens.  Despite his throbbing skull he felt some sympathy for the youth; he too had been the victim of community madness and he scratched the scars on his neck where the stone of shame once was chained.
            “Why did you leave Phos in the first place?” he asked finally, jumping to the blank spot on the tale’s canvas.  “You yourself said there was no want there, then why leave?”

            “You will see shortly,” responded Hue as he snapped out of whatever cold place his heart had sunk.  “Right now we should escape while that hag Omya is resting.”

            The Fencer sighed at the delay.  He was intent on reaching the fabled mountain.  His taciturn ambivalence which had forced the pair northwards from the civilized lands was revealing its prescience.  A gut feeling told him that some portion of the Riddle of Winter could be found somewhere near the strange village of Phos.  Once before, when he was escaping his fellow narwhal hunters and meeting the Trumpeter for the first time, he had chosen a path out of sheer bloody-mindedness, up and over the Wondering Mountains and down into the forbidden lands.  Now he had that same inkling, though he could give no specifics. 

            They made their preparations for a quiet exit while the stars looked on.  Aglyss was awoken with little excitement and he nodded in understanding; he was a man well used to slipping away from authority.

            By now the moon was in full brightness, casting the dreaming hills into glares of snow and pools of darkness.  They hadn’t gone far when a tall shadow barred their path.

            “My ancestors came and whispered in my dreams,” said Omya with solemn rage.

            “You talk too loud Trumpeter,” sighed the Fencer before directing his voice at the warrior woman.  “Care to come along to the forbidden village of Phos?  I hear it is a cursed place, full of madmen and sorcerers.  It is to our deaths that we venture, but we have our punishments, and you are welcome to share in them.”

            Omya, partially disarmed, exhausted, alone against their gathered company, stood silent for a time.  It was obvious that her net of taboo, law and compulsions was pulling tight against her will.  Faced with such a conflict she responded with silence.  The Fencer smiled at the effect that a bit of travel and strange company has on one’s assumptions.

            “I still have a task to perform concerning you all,” she said with determination.  “So let us make for damned Phos.”

            The Trumpeter tried to explain that there were no more hells and hence very little chance of damnation, but it soon became clear that she was working on an entirely personal underworld.  The band tromped wearily to the north as the east grew in fire and color.  Caught, they had no reason to set out early, but each was increasingly anxious to make their destination, as if a strange force was pulling them forward one step at a time.

V. Box of Dreams

           A silver thing stood over the Fencer and plucked out his colors.  The swordsman didn’t know he had them until they were taken and glimmered amongst the tactile thoughts of the sterling entity.  There they were, not of any earthly hue, but radiant and other.  A sense of intense loss pervaded the man but he felt helpless to regain the abstractions as he drifted on this shapeless sea.

            The silver being let the stolen colors go, to dart as rays to the luminous center of things, mingling with other streams of light equally strange, all converging on a distant point so bright that the fencer felt scorched to the bones of his soul.

            Turning away from the glare the Fencer saw that it wasn’t a flat screen of empty space which surrounded him but an array of translucent cubic structures, invisible except for the high contrast of the burning singularity.  Within each box more colors played.

            The light died down and he turned back.  The shimmering entity now stood out like a sheet of folded mirror matter and raised an appendage.  Another cube winked into existence, resting within the graces of the being’s gravity.  The Fencer blinked.

            He wasn’t in the empty endless space and never had been.  Hot air jostled his loose garments.  The colors he saw were vivid, opulent, but those of the palace, the intricate gold filigree and silver mesh screens, were well within the normal spectrum.  Lavish silks adorned the wanton ladies of the court.  The mirror thing turned sideways and was gone, replaced by a new world.

            The great emperor Taruk, last of a very long line of decadents and somnambulists, lounged in the glow of his most perfect victory.  The great foe of the empire stood bound before him, captured the night before by his loyal captain of the guard, though none dared remove the bandit king’s cursed sword for fear of angering the spirits.  The empress waited on a cushion by her emperor, a lovely creature of blue gossamer and veiled intensity.

            “It is most auspicious that the vile Faud should be presented to us under the auspices of Simurs of the Blighted Eye,” warbled the high priest Gyallas, a thing more miter and jewels than man.  “I would think that having his sockets scourged with heated diamonds would be a fitting punishment for our most notorious criminal, my emperor.”

            The ruler reclined in consideration.  He was in no hurry and wished to savor the look of rage which smoldered on the vanquished man’s face. 

            “What are your thoughts on the matter Ayaom?” he asked the captain.  “You did capture him in the first place.”

            “Though I dare not suggest any particular course for the ruler of the gilded sands,” began the woman, shifting in her silk and steel.  “I’ve occasionally dreamed of setting this famed swordsman against a score of golden lemur-men in the arena.  Much has been said of Faud’s skills, though I have yet to see any proof.”

            “And you my empress?” asked the pompous monarch from his grand cushion.

            Removing her veil and revealing the turquoise mark on her dark face the lady responded simply, “throw a feast in his honor; few have entertained us as well as he.”

            At this the emperor fumed and laughed, shot up to his feet with a sound of clattering gems and gold and the echoes of the court which muttered and clamored in praise of the drama.  Their ruler drew forth his golden scimitar.

            “What have you to say to these things?” he said to the man before him while jealously watching the eyes of his bride.

            At first the man known as Faud the Fated thought to make a jest of the unlikely feast now being held in his honor but out of habit his bound hands fell to the hilt of his weapon.  A cold overtook him, a reality.  He wasn’t Faud, but at the same time was also this brigand king of the deserts of Chanaut.  The Fencer remembered two lives, one of cold, one of heat, one frozen, one of action, one real, the other a fiction.  He knew his answer.

            The trick wasn’t to cut his bonds; Dhala was sharp enough for that, but to do so without slicing open his wrists with the icy blade.  The thing, an icicle of black and indigo crystal, held also a metallic aspect and steamed evilly in the desert heat. 

            The court was too busy at the sport of the emperor’s antics to notice the captive free himself, though he kept the bonds around his wrists for now.  He was free but his companions still were held fast in the forms of the Diorama, though whose memories informed this dreamscape perplexed him.  Maybe it was that the Trumpeter’s vivid imagination was the cause.  The Fencer resolved to play the part of the bandit king until cold reason cut a path free from this prison of the mind.

            Without even shucking off the loosened cords Faud dashed to freedom.  The grand hall of the emperor held many terraced columns leading up several stories to viewing balconies above.  This is where the brigand aimed to escape.  With enough forward momentum he simply bounded back and forth between two supporting pillars.

            Arrows followed his progress, tearing up the opulent screens and curtains as they sought their quarry in vain.  After a time only the shouts and laughter of the court followed the escapee through the palace.

            Soon there would be too many guards for even Faud to manage and he raced through the various sitting rooms, reflecting pools, aviaries, harems and guest quarters towards what he knew to be the courtyards outside.  There he climbed down a fig tree only to find a trio of hussars menacing him with their wickedly curved blades, each blessed by the ruling pantheon, deadly in the hands of a master.

            A flicker of mercy passed over the dread brigand Faud’s soul.  He shouldn’t feel like this, these men were just images, shadows, moving pictures against the background of the mind.  The Fencer knew this to be the truth, yet again he didn’t like to kill without necessity, or at least he now had that virtue.  He frowned openly, a strange thing on his sand-weathered face, and this put some hesitation in those he now faced.  Then a solution from deep inside, from a place whose memories weren’t entirely his own to begin with, presented itself.

            Despite Sisyphean attempts by the imperial groundskeepers the courtyards where soldiers mustered and horses were kept was doused with glittering sands from the Chanaut.  Faud drew his weapon and struck a huge plume of particles into the air, which were caught by a favorable gust of wind and blew choking and frigid into the faces of the attackers.

            While the men howled at the alien cold infusing the sands he made good his escape.  He stole a horse and fought it free of the closing gates, away from the palace, the city, out into the endless deserts of the golden Chanaut where mystery and legend wandered the hills, or at least that was what sprung to the Fencer’s mind as he warred against the inclusiveness of this particularly addictive Diorama.

            By twilight, sure that he wasn’t followed by assassins, Faud arrived back at his secret stronghold hidden by the dunes.  This had once been the emperor’s father’s palace, but it was the tradition of the mad rulers of Chanaut to move the seat of power to a new location upon ascension.  It never took long for such abandoned places to be reclaimed by the sands, forgotten, turned into legendary sites haunted by specters, jinn, and bandits.

            He made the proper knock on a brittle piece of teak serving as the main gate and was admitted into the sanctum.  Fewer faces looked up at him than he would’ve liked.

            “Where is everyone?” he growled.

            “They thought you dead, or soon to be, after that ambush at the Lady’s Heart,” exclaimed a young bandit, describing the house of indiscretion which had been Faud’s undoing.  “I’m sure they will return once their purses run dry.”

            “No time for that,” said the Fencer, considering his words carefully.  He felt the pretender in this place, as this man.  “We must move this very night.”

            “Always eager,” smiled one fellow brigand evilly.  “Are we to plunder the palace itself?”

            “In a way,” reasoned the bandit king.  Strange realization dawned on him as the memories of this persona became clear.  “It is time we make a bid for the Gimbal Cross.”

            Silence took the smiles from these most loyal thugs.  Outside the endless wind-dance of sand clattered.  The Fencer feared he had overplayed his role.

            “I am as eager as any lunatic on the street to get my hands on the imperial artifact,” said a tall lieutenant of the band.  “But it seems premature to go after such a thing when we are at reduced numbers and the palace is presumably in an uproar over your absence.”

            Faud and the Fencer together felt that they were losing the band.  Whatever force dominated this fiction, which assigned the roles, did not approve of this course of action; which was precisely the reason the Fencer needed to do it.

            “Our long struggle against the Chanaut emperors has proved wearying and destructive.  If we are ever to be free of their despotic ways then it is only through the device of change that we can hope to manage.  Tonight we move,” he stated finally, and they did.

            At night the sands were bright with the collected glory of the clear stars shining down and the bandits had only to follow the smell of incense and perfume to make their way to the palace, which lay at the edge of the great city.  By the sounds a royal fete was in the later stages and along the walls bolstered companies of soldiers monitored the surroundings for Faud the Fated.

            The bandit had a plan, one which required nuance as well as sharp swords and bloody minds.  When gathered at the perimeter it seemed the bandits had lost some to the winding sands.

            “Where have the others gone?” the Fencer asked his dozen blades.

            “They heard great omens in the desert and went seeking their fortune elsewhere,” replied a tall brigand through the scarf over his mouth. 

            “Why do you all stay with me then?”

            “Omens don’t pay so well,” responded the man simply.

            The few and loyal moved to a tall dune upwind from the glittering palace while their leader alone snuck up past the watchmen and patrols into a murky shadow along the wall’s face.  The call of the star owl sounded out and the men lifted great tufts of sand into the air and let them fly.

            At first the guards merely murmured at the blowing sand but soon their number grew restless.  It was said that only when a sitting emperor was untrue to his people and his throne that the golden Chanaut would encroach upon his palace.  It wasn’t only brigands who followed foolish omens.  When the defenders were properly unnerved the Fencer made his move. 

            Long years of peace had made the rulers of the sands soft and decadent.  Taruk’s fortress had walls festooned and latticed in such a way that climbing was easy and in the furor Faud made the top just in time to see the Captain Ayaom take the finicky guards to task for their disruption.  Under long shadows Faud crept into the palace proper.

            Remains of the night’s festivities lay about as bodies drifting to unseen horizons on the wings of opiate dreams.  The air reeked with the smell of transcendent drugs, creating escapes not unlike the one which the Fencer sought to undo.  He knew falsehoods of the mind and how they might be slain, so he crept past slumbering guards, drunken servants and dreaming guests towards the emperor’s chambers.

            He waited at the threshold until the alarm was sounded; that meant his fellows had begun the entertainment in earnest and whatever conscious guards were to be found would be out front dealing with his cohorts, and, most importantly, that damned Ayaom and her spear.

            Once inside the hushed apartments, lush and overflowing with jewels and cushions, the thief still had far to go.  Over half the palace rooms were those of the emperor’s private kind and it was never sure which one the man himself would grace as he spent each night in different quarters.  By brute force it was improbable that an assassin would find the true royal bed for that night, but Faud knew a trick.

            It was a truth that the emperor himself was more often confused by his defenses than any assassin so a heuristic had been devised.  By a complex rubric founded on the position of the moon and the heavenly pantheon it was possible to know the despot’s room and this well guarded secret had fallen to the bandit king on the same night as his capture by one of the emperor’s most attentive concubines.

            Through long corridors the brigand moved with quiet steps.  Past rooms gilded, glimmering, shadowy and mysterious, around pools of moonlight spilt by latticed windows, he stepped.  The hum of the Gimbal Cross told him he was going in the correct direction.

            The device worried the Fencer and enticed Faud.  Once he had spied its glory on another occasion, as a disguised guest of the emperor.  It was a floating cube, translucent, larger inside than out, the various planes of its sides touched in geometries not meant for mortals to see, let alone possess.  Within the fine limits of the thing strange colors danced.  The wielder gained some form of power from these colors.  Legend said these were dreams.  To the man living the dream it was a worrisome artifact, an element which did not correspond to the rules of Diorama, as he understood them.  Despite this mystery, he made for the device.

            Kept always one room away from the emperor’s bed, the floating, spinning thing rested a few centimeters above a sweeping stand of marble.  The device’s strange light cast deep shadows where various cushions and screens rose up.  Finding it at last Faud broke his silence and moved out to take the treasure.

            The shadows cried and a long blade reached out for the Fencer’s heart.  It might’ve done, to accept the strike, to die and be free of the plot, but the man of the southern sound had too much pride for that.  He side stepped the lunge and had his own chilling weapon in his hands in a second.

            To his surprise Ayaom emerged from the dark, followed close by the blue-marked empress, the high priest and the emperor himself all in unfriendly welcome.

            “What did I say?  I said he would find a way to take what is most precious from me!” declared the emperor as he fought his scimitar free from its gilded scabbard.

            “You know me too well Trumpeter,” said the Fencer with a smile he stole from his old friend’s face.

            “What is he talking about?” asked the captain, hesitating.

            “I’m talking sense and reason against this mockery,” said the Fencer.  “This palace isn’t real, the desert outside an illusion, the guards and bandits frauds of the mind given form by sorcery.  Nothing here is real except us and even we are only passing shades of our true selves, such as in dreams, and in such dreams, when the dreamer dies, the dream is over.”

            With that he leaped at his addled friend, who shrieked as if he was facing true murder.  The captain interposed and the battle was on.

            In this other place the atom-edge sword clashed against the radiant spear of Ayaom as equals.  Again and again the Fencer’s sweeping strikes met the guarding haft of the spear and were rebuffed.  His target ran about, seeking cover behind the various furnishings and players.

            “Simurs, let this hideous creature not harm me!” squealed the Trumpeter.

            “No gods to save you here or anywhere,” commented the Fencer as he knocked aside another insidious attack.

            “He is a blasphemer too,” declared the high priest Gyallas.  “He would even declare the divinities to be fictions!”

            “Think on it, all of you, this is but a dream, a fantasy.”  He cast about his gaze looking for reason in any of their eyes, at last focusing his attentions on Omya’s.  “Think of all the taboo you are breaking at this minute.”

            Her focus rattled as a bit of truth glimmered in her dark eyes.  The Fencer did nothing to press the attack as her guard fell.  Cries and shouts told of more guards coming to end the dispute.  The swordsman was going to finish the hissing Trumpeter when a sharp pain rattled his skull.  The old priest had snuck on him and brained the man with his staff. 

            “All it takes is the death of the dreamer to wake us all up,” he mumbled as he collapsed, the fullness of his vision being overtaken by the glamour within the Gimbal Cross.  The colors became everything, even the scream that came forth some seconds or centuries later, its shrieking form stretching into another bolt of light heading towards the distant center of things, and then cold.

            Winter returned with the balmy blues of afternoon near the equator.  The Fencer sat up despite the protests from his skull and the ministrations of stars in his eyes.  The company lay assembled around the still floating silver cube, at the base of which lay the bloody and quiet form of the marked woman, crimson red now contrasting with the unearthly blue of her birthmark.