The Sunset Warrior - 01 by Eric Van Lustbader

to his voice now.
    ‘I will not let you turn this back on me. You’re the one who—’
    ‘K’reen, this is not the time—’
    ‘Not the time?’ She sat up too. ‘You must be joking! There is nothing more important for us to do.’
    ‘Yes, there is,’ he said sharply.
    She glared at him for an instant and he felt the charge build within her. She lunged, her open palm striking him across the face with considerable force. ‘Chill take you!’ she hissed.
    He caught her extended arm at the wrist, pulled it forward and down with some violence so that she was suddenly on her back beneath him. He lowered himself. The soft light gleamed off the whites of her eyes. Her breasts heaved under him, the nipples hard, and she brought her knee up into his hip on the edge of the pelvic bone, but he pressed the nerve on the inside of her thigh, numbing it. ‘Frost!’ she breathed, and pulled his head down to hers, arching her body against him, thighs open.
    He made love with a strange kind of desperation, trying, in his confusion and anguish, to lose his mind in his body. And so involved was he in this that he failed to notice a similar despair in K’reen.
    He rolled away from her sleeping form, sat on the edge of the bed, and lit the lamp. Its pale flame sent the darkness skittering away in all directions. He kept the light low so as not to wake her. He heard nothing but the white noise of silence in his ears as he stared into the flame and saw again the dream from which he had awakened …
    He is in the Freehold, yet it is of a different construction from that of the real Freehold. It is under the earth but it is a City, with massive structures that rise through the air to such heights that they almost touch the rock vault above. Dreamscape: suprareal.
    He is in one such structure, high up, with K’reen. They are preparing to leave; he cannot think where they are going to. Suddenly the structure trembles heavily. Cracks appear in the walls, and he feels the rumbling in his bones. He looks outside. Structures all around are coming apart and collapsing as the earth continues to heave and split. He hears screaming and sees the red belch of columns of flame.
    He cannot find K’reen. He runs out into the Corridor and is met with the choke of smoke and falling rubble; the structure is tearing itself apart. He calls her name. Over and over. He hears echoes, echoes only. He runs then down the Stairwell, fearing at any moment it will collapse under him.
    He reaches the Outside at last and finds—He is in a cool glade of green foliage, dark and moist. A rich, unfamiliar scent comes to him from the earth. His face is wet. And his arms. Drops of water from above hit him all over. Across a river he sees the Freehold disassemble itself and come crashing down amidst huge fires. Bright sparks twist in the air. But he is not there and he wonders at this as he opens his eyes and finds that he is lying beside K’reen in the dark …
    He sighed now, once, a long inhalation and exhalation of breath, to help rid himself of the last strands of the dream. It had been very vivid. He lay back in bed, put a pillow behind his back, and thought about Borros. For half the length of a Spell he replayed over and over in his mind what the Magic Man had said.
    And at the end of that time he thought that perhaps his dream had not after all been dispelled.
    Time, Ronin decided, to see the Salamander.
    In the Sector the Lift was out, its sliding doors frozen irretrievably half open. Deep parallel lines were scored down one door, as if some large and angry animal had been frustrated by its stasis. The other one was crumpled like an old Bladesman’s Combat wound. So he took to the Stairwell and, on the way Upshaft, had time to recall his first meeting with the Salamander.
    Combat had always been a game to him. Like every other element in his young life, it was too inconsequential to be taken seriously. On what had come to be known as the Combat Level, the