Chapter 54
Something has changed. The snow, which has fallen upward all this time, slows. Hangs in the air. Then, flake by flake, it begins to fall down.
staring up, lantern trembling.
The sky-sized golden dog, whose breathing has been the warm wind of the whole world, is breathing slower. Each breath is longer apart. The wind is dying. The upside-down forests creak, and frost creeps across the sky.
third eye on the cabin on its hill, a mile off. Between it and them, filling the valley, the Nightmare army: thousands. The full country of her fear, all of it gathered in one place.
hefting his mast-sized axe, grim.
bandaged, eight blades out.
His third eye looks inward, down, through the dream's floor.
A black ship in a storm. Vigolas on the deck, soaked, gold coins sliding past his boots. The wave rises over him, a wall of water as tall as the sky.
He's lived this a hundred times tonight. He knows how it ends. He's on his knees.
almost out. Barely warm.
The wave crashes down. Black water. Bodies. His crew, tumbling past him into the dark.
Vigolas sinking, eyes open. Around him in the black water, the drowned faces of his first crew drift past… and then, one by one, they raise their hands. Two fingers to the brow. The sailor's salute from the Arena. The old bosun with the ring in his ear.
underwater, eyes widening. He remembers.
underwater, a stream of bubbles rising from his mouth. He's almost smiling.
flaring bright gold. He remembers he's asleep. The water around him stops. The wave freezes, a black wall paused like a painting.
reaching up through the frozen black water with one hand, toward a light far above.
The crew and the Lucid charge down the valley into the Nightmare army. Lanterns swinging, axes, rolling pins, bedposts, eight blades, three shadows.
It's a meat grinder. The Lucid are pushed back, lanterns knocked out one after another. The old man in the bathrobe goes down. The twins' sled is overturned. The troll in the nightgown falls asleep inside the dream and fades away.
lifting her lantern high over her head, both hands on the pole.
Her lantern blazes like a sunrise, gold pouring across the whole valley, lighting every one of the Lucid at once: every crew member and every dreamer in the field. Hundreds of eyes catch fire with gold.
on her knees, the lantern still raised, grey-faced. She has just paid hundreds of mornings.
The newly lit army surges forward, everyone suddenly lucid, each one dreaming as hard as they can:
Drekk's axe becomes a lighthouse, swung like a club.
Trollmage, lucid, realises that in a dream he can imagine he's already waited, and his MACRO casts: a hundred small spells at once, popping like fireworks. "I WAITED IN MY HEAD! IT COUNTS! IT COUNTS!"
Rougeina Swaps across the valley like silver-rose lightning.
Smurjan walks the Sightline, and in the dream his crimson line is a mile long.
It isn't enough. The Nightmares keep coming, endlessly. Above them, the sky-dog's breathing slows… slows… The snow falls harder. Down.
The sky-sized golden dog. His breathing stops.
Silence across Sömnen. The wind dies completely. Everyone in the valley, crew and Lucid and Nightmares, stops and looks up.
the size of a lake. It twitches.
It opens. Warm. Brown. Kind. The same eye that looks up at Kompis every morning, just bigger than a sunrise.
The sky-sized golden dog lifts his head off the edge of the world. Snow pours off his fur in avalanches. His ears go up. He has heard something.
very small, whispering.
Mingus stands up.
A golden retriever the size of the sky rises over the dream-country, his head above the clouds, his tail sweeping a whole forest flat with one happy, furious wag. He looks down at the valley, at the thousands of Nightmares between him and his person, and puts one paw down.
The paw comes down on the Nightmare army like a mountain falling, soft and gold and absolute. When it lifts, the valley is clean. Nothing left but snow and a paw print a mile wide, with the crew and the Lucid standing at its edges, staring up, mouths open.
Then he dips his huge head toward the ground and, gently, like picking up a pup, plunges his snout into the dream's floor.
Vigolas, hand raised, sinking. Through the frozen black water comes a huge golden muzzle, warm as a hearth. It takes him by the collar, very gently, with the very front of its teeth.
Mingus lifts Vigolas up out of the wave, out of the floor of the world, dripping, coughing, dangling by the collar from the mouth of a dog the size of a mountain, the way you'd carry a puppy.
Mingus sets Vigolas down at the crew's feet in the paw print, as delicately as a kitten. Then he lies down across the valley with his huge chin on the snow, right in front of the cabin hill, and whines. The whine shakes the clouds.
still dripping, putting both hands on the giant dog's nose, which is the size of a house.
The crew climbs the last slope through the falling snow to the lonely cabin: small, wooden, one window lit warm orange, smoke rising from its chimney.
trying the door. Locked. He puts his shoulder to it, then his mast-axe. The axe bounces off like a stick off stone.
catching up, leaning on her lantern, exhausted.
Through the frosted glass, warm orange light. Inside, two figures sit on either side of a cold, empty hearth: a grey woman with floating black hair, and a man with a braided beard and one strand of lake-weed in it. Neither of them is moving.