Session 50: Have Fun Storming the Storm

The Dreamlands Express left Sonanil beneath the late light of a world that had no right to be beautiful.

Behind it lay the Land of Fancy, with its pleasant airs and sublime promises; ahead waited Serranian, cloud-built and remote beneath the high stars. Between the two, the train took up its appointed course with the serene inevitability of a thing obeying laws older than iron, steam, or sleep. Its passengers had already learned that the Express was only incidentally a train. It wore the shape of one because human minds required rails, timetables, polished wood, and ringing dinner bells. Beneath that courtesy there moved something alive, something vast and obliging, bearing them not merely through distance but through conditions of existence for which waking language had only poor and borrowed words.

Even so, the hour had the softness of evening. The train ran along high cliffs above an ocean of crystalline blue, where dolphins raced in flashing pods below and twin rainbows interlinked overhead like the joined rings of some celestial covenant. Far beneath, the sea foamed against headlands of clear crystal that rose from the water and met in a shining arch.

Arthur watched the spectacle with the guarded suspicion he brought to all marvels. Wonder had never wholly disarmed him. Beauty, in his experience, was often the lacquer applied to something sharp.

Then the Express mounted the crystal arch.

For a moment there was only the upward surge, the terrible knowledge of height, the certainty that no honest train could proceed farther. The track seemed to end in light and air. The engine-creature leapt.

The sea fell away.

No crash came. No plunge into the jeweled waters below.

The train had simply forgotten to fall.

It soared onward into the sky, steady as a thought held too firmly to dissolve. The cliffs vanished behind them. The ocean blurred, then disappeared beneath banks of amber cloud. The evening deepened through red, purple, and blue, and at last the first stars opened their cold eyes.

Arthur found Walter, as he so often did when presented with the impossible and denied the satisfaction of shooting it.

“Walter,” he said, looking out at the clouds through which the train now sailed, “do you have any insight? I mean, certainly we are purportedly in a dream, but a train taking flight…”

Walter regarded the view with the sober discomfort of a man who had made room for miracles in his theology but not for every insolent imitation of them.

“This is not even truly a train,” he said. “It is a living caravan of creatures. Train-like, yes. Especially within. But much here cannot be explained, and perhaps that is the nature of dreams.”

Arthur gave him a dry look. “I tend not to try to remember mine.”

“I have a feeling I will remember this one,” Walter said, though hesitation crept into the words. “I am curious to see whether we have had the same dream. This is quite vivid.”

“Yes,” Arthur said. “You are acting just as I would expect you to act in my own dream.”

Walter inclined his head with clerical gravity. “You as well.”

There was a thin comfort in that, and a deeper unease. Each man saw the other and wondered, perhaps not for the first time, which of them the dream had made and which it had merely trapped.

At half past seven the pre-dinner bell sounded, gentle and civilized, as though the Express had not just ascended into the heavens. It gave them half an hour to dress and compose themselves, and the passengers obeyed.

Dinner was a banquet, arranged in honor of King Kuranes, who had boarded as judge and arbiter in the ancient dispute between the Sarnathians and the beings of Ib. The dining car had somehow been enlarged to accommodate the gathering; the table stretched farther than memory allowed, and the car itself had made room for it with the untroubled courtesy peculiar to dreams.

The king sat at the head of the table, regal without ostentation, thoughtful rather than theatrical. The Sarnathians attended him with practiced respect, though Per, with his careful eye for the machinery of manners, saw calculation beneath their deference. They wished to flatter him before judgment, to be seen as refined and reasonable and the wronged party. Beauty had not made them subtle.

The beings of Ib did not dine. Their place in the evening would come later, when the table was cleared and the matter of justice brought forward.

The meal itself was extravagant even by the standards of the Dreamlands. There was potage à la reine, braised flamingo tongues with truffles from the eastern fungus forest, royal venison from the slopes of Mount Elarion, and peacocks roasted and dressed again in their own feathers upon golden platters set with rubies and diamonds. For dessert came a spun-sugar castle in the shape of Serranian, delicate and gleaming as if the city itself had consented to be devoured in miniature. Fruits, nuts, spices, and sauces of astonishing subtlety completed the feast.

The wine flowed freely. The train flew on.

When one of the Sarnathians attempted, with smiling casualness, to begin rehearsing the merits of their cause before the appointed hour, Kuranes cut the effort short. This was not the time, he said, nor the place. The matter would be heard soon enough. Until then, they would share food and stories, not arguments disguised as conversation.

Per found in that restraint an opening. He spoke not of the case itself, but of judgment. Of fairness. Of the strain placed upon the mind when one party in a dispute was difficult even to endure, when sympathy had to cross not merely custom or grievance but species, scent, texture, and the deep instinctive revulsion of the body.

Kuranes listened with interest.

“The ability to empathize,” the king said, “to see from another’s point of view, is important in understanding how to resolve a dispute. To understand what they want, and why they want it, even if they do not necessarily know.”

He admitted the difficulty. There were beings so different from himself that taking their perspective required conscious discipline. He had practiced for many years to recognize his own reactions, acknowledge them, and set them aside. When he could not, he said, he must abstain.

Per received this with the gravity it deserved. In his own work, empathy had always been both instrument and hazard. It was difficult enough to enter the suffering of another human mind; harder still to approach the mind of something utterly other. He thought, inevitably, of the entity with which he himself remained in conflict, a presence he had failed to understand though he had not ceased to oppose it.

Perhaps, he admitted, he had been too quick to accept enmity as comprehension.

His questions impressed Kuranes. When dinner ended and the proceedings approached, the king invited Per to witness the arbitration. Kuranes had knights to bear witness already, but there was no harm, he said, in adding another observer, especially one who studied the minds of thinking beings and knew that humanity was only a narrow province of thought.

Walter received a different invitation.

He had been seated beside Besweet, who had shed whatever earlier frost had clung to her manner and now treated him with warm, agile charm. She was witty, attentive, and far too pleased with his discomfort. Walter, seeking refuge in businesslike conversation, pressed her about the coming proceedings. Who would speak for the Sarnathians? What was their strategy? What precisely did they intend to argue?

Besweet answered what suited her and flowed away from the rest. Theophed would speak before the king, she said. She herself was merely present for the glory of the train.

But her true interest was Walter.

She praised his stature as a holy man, his reputation as a judge of character, his presumed capacity to discern pure motives where others had maligned them. Slowly, sweetly, she brought the matter around. Would he stand before the king and speak to the kindness, intelligence, and refinement of the Sarnathians? Would he contrast them, by implication if not by direct accusation, with the loathsome beings of Ib?

Walter would not promise to flatter the Sarnathians. He agreed instead to speak truthfully, which was the more dangerous gift.

Besweet took this for victory, which was perhaps the most damning thing about her. Walter made clear that he would include all that had passed: their conduct in the baths, their overtures, their persistent carnal provocations, the noise, the temptations, the prank by which one of the beings of Ib had been shoved toward his companions for sport. Besweet heard none of this as condemnation. To her, these were acts of generosity, vitality, even kindness. The Sarnathians had offered pleasure; Walter had declined. Surely everyone had behaved admirably.

So the dining car was prepared for judgment.

When the beings of Ib entered, the atmosphere changed.

Their entourage came with a waddling, squeaking motion, wet and unpleasant. Their odor filled the car, thick enough to command the body before the mind could mount any defense. Per and Walter had prepared themselves and endured it. One of Kuranes’s knights looked strained; even the king’s eyes watered, though he mastered himself and pressed onward with grave impartiality.

Per, remembering certain practical methods from less rarefied horrors, produced a small pot of strong-scented salve and placed it discreetly within the king’s reach. Kuranes observed the gesture, nodded almost imperceptibly, and touched a little of it beneath his mustache.

Then Henri stated the matter.

A thousand years ago, the city of Sarnath and the gray stone city of Ib stood as neighbors on the shore of Lake Nahr. Ib, it was said, had descended in a single night from the moon, bringing with it its strange inhabitants. The Sarnathians of that age had judged the beings primitive, repellent, verminous. Unable to bear their nearness, they entered Ib and drove its people into the lake with spear points. They took the city, dug mines beneath it, stripped it of precious metals, and seized the statue of the lizard-like god the beings revered.

The beings of Ib claimed that for them only a week had passed.

The Sarnathians answered that a thousand years had gone by. That the perpetrators were dead. That the city and its wealth were now theirs. That the beings of Ib were grotesque. The last they were wise enough not to say plainly, though the thought clung to every polished sentence.

The beings sought damages, apology, and the return of their god’s statue to the place where Ib had stood.

The Sarnathians called Walter Lake as witness.

He rose as a priest, and he spoke as one.

He said that he had interacted with both parties. The Sarnathians, he allowed, had been polite to him, both at first and recently. They had also provided numerous temptations by which he had been able to demonstrate restraint and the true mettle of his faith. Their persistent carnal interests had made rest difficult. Their loud indulgences in the adjacent compartment had disturbed him. Their invitation in the bathhouse had required him to avert his eyes and decline overt pleasures of the flesh. One of them had also shoved a being of Ib into a corner near the others as a prank.

A Sarnathian protested that it had been a jest meant to break the ice.

Besweet, astonishingly, attempted to recast the whole indictment as charity. Walter, she said, had needed opportunities to prove himself before his Christian God. The Sarnathians, recognizing this, had placed challenges before him out of care, even for a stranger.

Kuranes turned to Walter and asked whether his faith had been strengthened by the experience.

Walter considered the question with painful sincerity.

He would have preferred, he said, that all follow the path of Jesus Christ, who would have acted very differently. Yet Christ had been tempted by the devil in the desert, and those trials had shown His strength. In that sense, perhaps the Sarnathians had done for Walter what the devil had done for Jesus.

The Sarnathians took this for praise. Walter had meant it otherwise.

His words did not move the chamber as he might have wished, but truth had still been entered into the record. He also spoke of the beings of Ib and the aid they had rendered during the attack upon Madame Bruja, when Mironim-Mer, possessed or controlled by some malign force, had assaulted her. The beings had given tangible help in combat and investigation. Whatever they were, however difficult their presence, they had not been merely objects of disgust.

Kuranes took note. The attack upon the train troubled him. Such violence was against the laws of the Express, and those laws were enforced by powers greater than himself. When Walter named Mironim-Mer, Kuranes asked whether the passenger remained aboard. Learning that he had disembarked, the king’s attention sharpened into future consequence.

Then Kuranes rendered judgment.

He did not pretend the beings of Ib were pleasant. Even among the varied peoples of the Dreamlands, he said, many would find them difficult to share a room with. But revulsion was not evidence. Disgust was not injury. The beings had done nothing to threaten the Sarnathians, and the Sarnathians, even in their evasive retelling, could not prove any danger beyond the offense of proximity.

The Sarnathians had been the aggressors.

They would meet the demands of Ib. They would pay restitution. Their king would apologize. The statue of the god of Ib would be returned to the place where the city once stood.

Then Kuranes gave warning, and the words fell with the weight of prophecy.

There were many gods in the Dreamlands, he said, and not all were content with tactful prayers. There was a wide gulf between something forgotten and something faded from existence. Sarnath, decadent and proud, had flouted gods and flirted with treachery and blasphemy too often. If it did not see the folly of its ways, doom would come.

The Sarnathians heard him with dejection and petulance. The beings of Ib had won justice, or the nearest thing to it that could be won after a thousand years and one week.

Afterward, as the train neared Serranian, Walter approached Kuranes privately. He thanked him for the justice of the matter, then spoke of his waking quest: the search for the Sedefkar Simulacrum, and the need to rid the world of it.

Kuranes did not know the name. It was, he thought, a relic of Walter’s world, not his own.

But when Walter spoke of Madame Bruja, the king knew more.

A witch, Kuranes called her. Once a walker between worlds. She had originated, he believed, in the waking world as a dreamer, but bargains made in life had debts payable beyond death. She still possessed no small power.

He told Walter a tale called “The Sorcerer and the Crone.”

A sorcerer, married late and foolishly, discovered his young wife with her lover. In rage he summoned dark powers, tore the pair apart, ripped the hearts from their bodies, burned them to ash, and vowed they would have no rest even in death. Their broken remains were thrown to dogs.

But the dead girl’s mother, a crone of terrible malevolence, prayed daily before a church for vengeance. Whether heaven answered was doubtful, for the church stood upon older, grimmer foundations raised in Roman days. One day the crone appeared holding a ruby the size of a clenched fist, shaped like two lovers’ hearts entwined. The sorcerer desired it at once and ordered it seized, but the crone hid it in her breast. When searched, the stone was gone. Even under torture she would not reveal it.

Condemned for witchcraft, she burned in the square before the church. As fire consumed her, the sorcerer demanded the stone. At last she opened her lips.

Hate is stronger than love, she cried, and death is stronger than life.

Only in dreams would he find it.

The sorcerer went mad with desire. In his last days he locked himself in his tower, believing he had solved the taunt, and burned himself alive in his own crypt. Some said the pair knew no rest, but still chased each other amid storm clouds on dark nights: the crone holding her glowing prize aloft, shrieking delight at the sorcerer’s vain pursuit.

Walter understood more than he wished. Madame Bruja’s heart-shaped valise. The red-eyed figure who sought her. Mironim-Mer’s attack, his monstrous hands clawing not merely at her but at the case she guarded. The empty interior when she had opened it. A hidden ruby. A sorcerer who had abandoned death and perhaps humanity in pursuit of it.

Around him, the others weighed their own burdens.

The end of the journey approached. Those who rode to the Gulf of Nodens would be required to cast something away. To pay tribute. To unburden themselves. In doing so they would be marked forever as passengers of the Express and would never ride it again in mortal life. To refuse was possible, but refusal meant leaving the train before the Gulf, waking elsewhere, with the final mystery unentered.

Arthur would remain aboard. So would Claire, Per, and Viola. Each had reasons, some spoken and some held close. Claire carried, perhaps, the shadow Henri had sensed upon her: a dark presence, a menace in her aura, tied to the horror that had come at her in Paris. Per and Arthur had already shaped dream tokens for the coming tribute. Viola had manifested a walking cane, an object heavy with thoughts of infirmity and time.

Walter would not.

The others tried, gently and not so gently, to persuade him. Per suggested that he might cast away something spiritually trivial, such as the burden of paying for luxury hotels across Europe. Arthur suggested his terrible credit. Claire, with mischievous insight, wondered whether pride itself might be the thing. Viola observed that pride was the root of other sins.

Walter did not deny temptation. He admitted the danger of being proud of faith. But to him the answer was confession, not sacrifice to whatever power waited at the Gulf. What mattered was what one did consciously, waking, with one’s single life turned toward God’s purpose. He hoped his reward would lie in how God judged his deeds aboard the train, not in the casting of some idol into the abyss.

The others read it as stubbornness. Walter believed it was fidelity.

Serranian received them in splendor.

The Dreamlands Express arrived at a platform set amid a vast celestial city of pink-veined marble and gold beneath an infinite starry sky. Towers and terraces rose as if architecture itself had learned to praise. Almost all the remaining passengers disembarked there: King Kuranes and his knights, the beings of Ib, the chastened Sarnathians, and the cats, who leapt from the rear of the train and dispersed into the city with the independent purpose of creatures who acknowledged no king.

Henri busied himself with trade. The strange cargo loaded earlier in Ulthar—cabbages, wool, sealed crates, humble and earthly things—was exchanged now for glittering treasures, illuminated books, golden scrolls, and impossible works of art. The commerce of the Express had its own logic, a ladder of value ascending through dreams. Viola received the heavenly pedigree Henri had promised her, another impossibility folded neatly into the train’s accounts.

Before leaving, Walter warned Henri that the assault upon Madame Bruja had arisen during the proceedings. He had given a truthful account, and he did not want Henri blindsided should the matter return upon him.

Henri’s porcelain mask betrayed nothing. In his usual polite, faintly cheerful tone, he thanked Walter and told him not to concern himself. Such burdens belonged to Henri, not to his passengers. He would tuck that little piece of information away for later.

Walter offered the only aid he trusted.

“I will pray for you, Henri.”

For once, the conductor’s thanks seemed to hold something behind it.

Then Walter stepped down onto the platform of Serranian, choosing to wake rather than ride to the Gulf. The others remained aboard. Through the window they could see him standing in the luminous city, a priest alone beneath a sky that was not Heaven, watching the Express prepare to depart.

The train pulled away.

At first there was only the usual gathering of motion, the living cars taking up speed. Then Walter looked beyond it, above the city, where the clouds had begun to darken — and not merely to gather. They roiled, and shaped themselves, and a black skull formed in the heavens ahead of the train, vast and hollow, its sockets kindling with red light. The Dreamlands Express angled upward toward it, toward the open darkness of that impossible face.

Walter’s blood chilled. Around him, others on the platform pointed and stared. This was no private vision, no fever of doctrine: whatever it was, every eye on the platform could see it.

He cupped his hands and cried after the departing train.

“Beware the dark skull and red eyes! The train is headed toward them! I pray for your safe journey!”

His words were torn by distance and wind. Those aboard saw his posture change, saw him point beyond them, saw alarm transfigure farewell into warning. Per caught only fragments — beware, skull, clouds — but the fragments were enough.

Remembering that the roof of the Express could be reached, Per climbed upward. The wind that met him was unlike the earlier gentle currents of the journey. It battered him, urgent and hostile, as though the train had passed from dream into nightmare and the air itself wished to fling him away. He held fast and looked ahead.

There, above Serranian and before the flying train, the skull waited.

Its mouth yawned open into a tunnel of black, swirling cloud. In the depths of its eye sockets burned two red stars.

The Express soared toward that devouring maw, carrying Arthur, Claire, Viola, and Per onward to the Gulf of Nodens, while Walter stood behind them in the city of marble and gold, praying beneath a heaven that had just revealed its teeth.