A Dream of the Heaven

Chapter 22 (Part 1 of 2)

Chapter 22

Imlon

*

Even as he ran, desperate thoughts thumping through his head, Imlon could not help thinking about one old legend.  Don’t follow the lights; they’ll lead you to your death in the dark woods, or into a pit, or into the lair of a wolf.  In the thick dark of Pekderzhun, the astronomer could only follow the lights, and the wolves were following him.

More men had joined the guards a little distance ahead.  There were fifty of them now, their massed torches burning through the fog as they hurried on, leaving Imlon to stagger through the smoke-singed air in pursuit.  A harsh shout rang out and the astronomer leapt into an alleyway as another contingent of guards appeared from a side street.  The main group hardly stopped running.

“Under your command, sir,” cried the leader of the new group.  “Twenty here, thirty more on the way from Verikhez.”

“Keep with us, wait for my command,” shouted the captain, his voice receding into the distance.  “House by house, block their way out.”

Whose?  Imlon rushed on again, drawn to the lights and the shouts as the terrifying silent dark at his back threatened to swallow him up.  The streets opened out as large, stagnant waterways wound through the city ahead.  He passed over them, turned a corner, and stumbled on a colossal nest of fireflies.

Hundreds of torchlights were gathered before him, encircling some part of the city that lay in a deep depression in the ground.  Mudwater – for, from the evidence of the pitiful shacks on its edge, it could only be Mudwater – must have been several hundred metres across, but the torches on its borders were so numerous that all the fog seemed to have retreated away into the very depths of the besieged district.

“Hard and fast!” cried a guard captain to his men, as Imlon watched from a shadow.  “Check each house, then move on quick, and watch behind you!  If you find them, keep them alive!  May the martyrs’ wrath find them, may the drowned men drown them!”

The call of a high-pitched, whining horn went up from somewhere across the district.

“You, sound the call, sound it!” said the captain to one man, who lifted his own instrument and blew.  “Root them out!  Go, go!”

To the sound of the horns, the fireflies swarmed into the dark of Mudwater.  Screams and shouts arose from the outermost houses as the guards kicked their way in, smashing down the doors and even the walls of the worst-built huts, before dragging the terrified occupants out into the dirt.

Imlon gasped for breath.  Horror gripped his veins and starved his body, pressing him in on all sides.  It could only be for the fugitives.  They would never escape the trap.

“Give me spirit, that I might be sustained!” he whispered, collapsing to the floor of the alley and gripping his necklace.  “Grant me strength, that I might stand for right.  Grant me hope, grant me...descend and take me, lift and save me, descend and take me, lift and...”

Sweat pouring down his ashen face, his eyes were drawn to the street he had come from.  Several men, seven or eight of them, were approaching.  They were not guards.  In a bare flash of torchlight, he saw Barcha’s face, murder in his eyes and a cleaver in his hand.

The terror gripping his veins went for the killer blow and knifed Imlon Held in the heart. 

He stumbled backward with a choked shriek as the screams and shouts of Mudwater somehow became louder, even as he moved away.  He tripped and fell into the mud, foul water splashing in his face.  Scuttling on all fours, he buried himself into the utter black shadow of the houses, clasped his hands around his knees and, quaking, wept.