The Last Dream by Gordon R. Dickson
He was the one lying on the pavement, wings spread out behind him and staring up at the descending spurs of his enemy.
A dizziness like the after-effect of a heavy blow on the head clouded his thinking, but not his reflexes. Twenty years of practice in legal and illegal sports had made him a maverick among his own people—but a maverick who could react. Reflex sent him rolling out of the way of the descending spurs.
The down-stabbing spur-points aimed at Doug slammed into the pavement where he had been, sending sparks flying. His opponent crumpled on the flat surface, moaning, clutching a broken leg.
Reflex still drove Doug like a set of emergency controls. Without thought, he scrambled up and started running.
He careened blindly into the packed throng. They parted conveniently before him, leaving an avenue through which he could see streets between stony buildings five to ten stories in height. Still operating on instinct, he pounded down the corridor of escape opening before him and turned into the closest street.
As he rounded the corner, the roar of the crowd behind him diminished. The cliff-like buildings on either side swam past him as he turned right at the first cross-street, left at the next.
Gradually his blurred vision was clearing, bringing his surroundings into focus. The monolithic buildings were like giant slabs of gray rock. He passed no openings, no doorways or windows at street level. It was only at two or three stories of height above him that he saw openings piercing the walls—unglazed openings which were the only evidence that these shapes he passed were not solid blocks of stone.
He turned down another street and staggered, almost falling. He was close to the end of his strength.
He stumbled to a halt at the intersection. Leaning against a building wall in a little patch of sunlight, he looked back. There was no one to be seen behind him and he had passed no one since he had left the crowd at the fight. It should be safe to rest for a moment.
Strangely, it was not his breath that had given out but his legs. He was not even breathing hard. His chest pumped as slowly as if he were sitting in a chair, reading. But his legs trembled uncontrollably and threatened to fold at the knees.
He looked down at those legs. They were thin brown limbs almost lost in the shadow thrown by the huge wings on his back. As he noted the wings, he became aware of a deep ache in their joints— the toll of his rolling over upon them. And he realized the top-heaviness of his body he now inhabited—wings, powerful shoulders, deep chest, all supported by the thin, trembling legs. He shivered, conscious suddenly that he wore nothing more than a thin pair of trunks and here, in the deep shadow between the building walls, the air was chill—
“Kath—ang! Kathang duLe—in!…”
Faint and sad, like a wild bird’s cry of two notes repeated in descending series, a voice sounded high overhead.
He looked up. Outlined against the white-blue, cloudless sky in the crack of space between the buildings was a small figure soaring on great gray wings.
“Kathang duLe—in . . .”
He bolted to the end of the street and around a corner into another way between high buildings. Staggering to a stop against the nearest wall, he looked up and saw only cloudless sky.
For a moment he felt the relief of having escaped. Then, without warning, the figure swung again into view above and steeply dived for him.
Sideslipping into the narrow space between the buildings, the flying figure reached to the pavement perhaps three yards in front of him, turning up sharply at the last moment to land on its feet. For the first time he saw that it seemed to have no arms. There were only the undersides of the great spread of dove-gray wings that filled the street, their feathers reaching to the shoulders, and a pair of legs like his own—but even shorter and more fragile. He looked at the body and saw it was female. It was clothed, except for the wings, in close-fitting silver-metallic cloth and a wide black belt from which things like medals dangled.
The flyer stared up at him with enormous eyes. She was a good head-and-a-half shorter than he. Now her arms appeared, unclothed, from among the feathers, where apparently they had been stretched out and moving as part of the wings. As he watched, the wings themselves folded up slowly on her back.
“Kathang!” Her voice was musical, low-pitched in the contralto range, but tense with concern. “You can’t just run around the streets like this. The Cadda Noyer will have men out after you any minute now.”
Doug stared at her. Her features were tanned, small and narrow, with enormous dark-brown eyes.
She was not pretty by any human standard—but, just as he made that judgment about her, he felt his body expressing a strange disagreement. His human mind might not find this female attractive but his winged body clearly did.
“Kathang—” she said again, and started toward him.
He stepped back. She halted, cocking her head to one side.
“I’m not Kathang,” he said without thinking, and was shocked by the hoarse bass voice that came booming out of his chest.
“Not—” She stopped. “Kathang, are you out of your mind? I was there at the fights! I saw the soul transfer when the fighter you’d bet on went down—” She broke off, staring narrowly at him. “Don’t you know me?”
“No,” he said hoarsely.
“The transfer spell must have been incomplete,” she said. “Your soul isn’t firmly bound yet. But can’t you remember? I’m Anvra—Anvra Mons-Borroh, Water Witch, your contract-mate. Kathang, don’t you remember anything?”
He shook his head.
“My name is Bai—Bai—” His different lips and tongue stumbled over words they had never before formed. “I’m DougLass Bai—”
“You’ve had a reaction, all right.” Anvra Mons-Borroh stepped forward quickly before his trembling legs could back him away again. She caught him by the arm. “Never mind. My self-obligation to you holds. I’ll get you hidden away somewhere. I’ll call on my own Water Witch Aerie for temporary mate-sanctuary for you. Now, you see what it comes to—gambling away your Brotherhood rights? Come on! The Cadda Noyer is probably after you already. There’s a catapult just two streets away—”
Stumbling along on his worn-out leg muscles,
Doug let himself be led down another street to the right.
This new street was short and buildings flanking it were no more than three stories tall; thus a narrow strip of white sunlight reached one side of the pavement. Suddenly that sunlight was momentarily interdicted by two shadows flickering across it.
Automatically Doug stopped and stared up. Overhead, above the buildings, he saw two soaring figures, male-sized, wearing tight suits in a sort of livery pattern of red, black and orange squares.
“Cadda Noyer,” cried Anvra sharply. “Run!”
She set off down the alley. Doug followed, willingly now and at a better speed than before. The pause had rested his legs.
Jogging, Doug and his guide passed one intersection, arrived at another that broadened into a kind of plaza. In its center was a strange-looking structure with a track projecting into the air and a small platform at the foot of the track. The other end of the street opened into a wide square of pavement on which a number of figures were walking, wings folded, while flyers soared in the air above them. Anvra caught Doug’s arm and pulled him toward the deserted plaza with its strange mechanism.
Doug jerked free. If the two figures circling above were indeed enemies, he wanted to meet them out where there was room to dodge and run—and possibly where the presence of other people would make the hunters cautious or slow them down. He ran for the large square, Anvra calling him back.
She ran after him, but in a burst of speed he pulled away from her. Once out in the square, however, he stopped. What energy was left in his legs clearly must be hoarded for the fighting—if it came to that.
And clearly it was going to come to that. The strollers in the square were making no effort to interfere. They had drawn into a loose circle around him. As he paused to lo
“Water Witches!” she was trilling as she swung about to face the watchers. “Water Witches…”
She whistled again, despairingly. Doug detected no response from anywhere. A shadow flickered over him. Glancing up, he saw the two pursuers zoom lower. They looked a little like clowns in their checkered tricolor suits. But they were both heavy-chested males. They wore no sharp metal spurs on their heels. But where the spurs might have been were what looked like blunt dowels of dark wood, some eight inches long and an inch in diameter.
Doug was sure an assault would soon begin. But it was on him so swiftly that he barely had time to brace himself. The two hunters swooped suddenly, one a little in advance of the other, like hawks upon a rabbit. And Anvra, spreading her wings and leaping upward, tried valiantly to beat her way into the air and intercept them.
“Mount, Kathang!” she cried. “Mount—”
It was clearly all but impossible for her to take off from a level surface. Yet she managed to gain half her own height in the air and meet the first attacker. He struck out at her—not with the polished dowels on his heels but with one of his wide wings. His wing and hers came together with a booming sound like the note of an enormous kettledrum. Anvra tumbled backward in mid-air, fell to the ground.
She was out of the fight. But at least she had diverted one of the enemy. The second came diving through the air, dowels-first, at Doug’s head.
He ducked, crouching under the driving dowel-ends, then leaped swiftly to catch a sweeping wingtip in both hands and swing his weight on it.
The attacker floundered and fell, giving a hoarse, gargling shout. He rolled on the pavement, threshing reflexively with the wing Doug had not touched. The other hung rigid, propped at a strangle angle, half-dragged out of its socket.
Doug looked for the first attacker, could not see him. Once more he ducked—and probably saved his life. A tremendous double hammer seemed to smash into his head sending him half-unconscious to the pavement. On hands and knees he saw the first attacker, still airborne, circling to strike again.
Doug was recovering his wits. Crouching, he saw the attacker swooping upon him now, swelling suddenly large before him. Gathering himself for a supreme effort, Doug waited until the last second— and sprang.
He cleared the in-driving dowel-ends, his body slamming hard against the attacker. The creature’s flailing wing caught on the pavement. Both went down. Rolling over on the winged man, Doug stiffened his hands for a karate blow and chopped downward with it, edge-on.
He had aimed at the point where the side of the other’s neck met the collar bone, but he missed his target and slammed hard instead into the ribs of the upper chest. A sudden wave of agony shot up his arm.
He looked at his hand in amazement as he rolled free of the attacker. The smallest of three fingers was bent in against his palm at an unnatural angle. When he tried to move the other fingers, a needle-like twinge of pain ran up his arm.
The man he had struck was now lying back on his half-folded wings, shuddering slightly. The whole right side of his chest was caved in, as if by a sledgehammer. A bloody froth showed on his lips.
Staring from the obviously dying man to his own ruined hand, Doug made an effort to get to his feet, remembering something about birds back on Earth…
“Bones…” he croaked to himself. “Hollow…”
Now upright, he moved toward the dying enemy to find out if this were true. But at the first step, sky and square tilted and went around him as if he were on a carousel. The next thing he knew, he was lying on the pavement, looking up into the face of Anvra. On his other side stood an old winged man dressed in black, his face lined and narrow.
“… he bet himself on one of the fighters,” Anvra was saying, looking up at the man in black, “and the fighter was forced to the pavement. So they prepared Kathang for transfer. But after his soul was transferred, he dodged the kill-blow and the other fighter hurt himself on the pavement. The other wasn’t able to rise but Kathang was—and that made him winner. But he was in the body of the fighter he bet on.”
“Nonetheless, mistress,” said the old man, slowly and deeply, “the body he wears belongs to the Cadda Noyer. It’s their fighter’s body.”
“It was a beaten body—a dead body until he saved it.”
“That goes beyond present discussion.” The old man shook his head. “It will have to be decided by a full panel of the Magi. I’ll set a date.”
He looked down at Doug.
“Kathang DuLein,” he said, in his deep voice, “the Cadda Noyer can’t be restrained from attempting to recover the body you inhabit. As a Magus, I can give you no protection. I recommend you to the protection of your Aerie Brothers.”
“He has none,” said Anvra quickly. “He gambled away his Brotherhood rights in the Sorcerers. But I’m a Water Witch—I can find him mate-sanctuary temporarily in one of our Aeries.”
“Then I recommend you, DuLein,” said the old man, “to the protection of your contract-mate, Mistress Anvra Mons-Borroh.”
He turned and stepped away, revealing two other winged men wearing silver and black, like that of Anvra’s costume.
“Can we help you, Sister?” one of them asked.
“Where were you when I whistled?” began Anvra sharply, then checked herself. “Forgive me, Brothers. I’m still wound up from the attack. Help me get him to our nearest Aerie, will you? I can’t carry him alone.”
Anvra’s voice and the scene about him was lost in a sudden flooding of nothingness, with only a brief shadow-glimpse of the Walker watching him.
II
He woke gradually. He squinted and raised his right hand to brush the haze from his eyes.
But his right hand was heavier than it should be. With an effort he heaved it up and saw a clumsy lump of something that looked like a ball of cloth soaked in concrete. A cast, he realized.
He remembered the fight with the two winged men then, and jerked himself up on one elbow to see about him.
He lay on what seemed to be a bed in a semicircular room open to the air all along its flat side. Several backless armchairs stood about and from the chipped stone of the wall extended objects looking like water-faucet handles in either silver or black. Nowhere in the wall was any door visible.
His bed was at the open edge of the room—almost overhanging it in fact. There was no barrier or guard rail. He turned to look out…
He stared down at the tops of toylike buildings several hundred feet below him, stretching away like a sea as far as the horizon. Rising out of this sea at something like quarter-mile intervals were huge towers—and it was plain that the room where he lay was a tower.
It was an impossible scene, like something discovered in a nightmare. Were those buildings below him the structures among which he had been running?
A faint click made his head turn.
The wall had opened to reveal a door. Coming through it was Anvra Mons-Borroh. The door closed behind her, its outline becoming invisible once more.
“You woke early,” she said. Her voice was rather cold. It lacked the concern that had been in it when she had first warned him about the Cadda Noyer. “Kathang wouldn’t have recovered from the sedative that fast.”
“You know I’m not this Kathang, then?” he asked, gazing up at her curiously.
“I don’t know anything!” Her voice sharpened. “Except that Kathang was my contract-mate, and that my self-obligation holds until I have proof you’re someone else.”
“You don’t need proof,” he said emptily. “I’m not your Kathang.”
“You could be, and not in your right mind.” She stared at him brilliantly out of wide brown eyes. “Who did you say you are?”
“My name’s Bai—” Once more the pronunciation defeated him. “Anyway, I don’t know how I happened to be in what’s-his-name’s… Kathang’s… body. But whe
He told her all of what had happened to him as he remembered it. She listened patiently. When he was finished, she nodded.
“Yes,” she said. “It’s what you said under sedation.”
She turned from him and walked back to the wall, which opened before her.
“Sirs,” she said. “Will you come in now?”
Two winged men answered her invitation. The first was small for a male, and dark-haired, his right wing deformed and patently useless. Doug’s vision seemed to blur again as he looked at the smaller winged man. But it was not a general blurring, he noticed. The others, the rest of the room, remained sharp and clear. Only the small man was blurred in features and outline—and stayed that way. Doug looked over at the larger newcomer. His body was as big as the one Doug himself was now inhabiting. Both visitors wore close-fitting suits of dark red with a yellow lozenge over the heart.
“Mistress…” said the smaller one, bending his head briefly to her. “May I present our Master of Aerie 84? Master Sorcerer Jax duHorrel.”
“Sir.” She bent her head. “Will you both sit?”
The two picked up backless armchairs and carried them to Doug’s bed. They sat down, staring at him. Anvra remained standing.
“Kathang,” said the smaller man with the deformed wing, “don’t you know me? We’re Aerie Brothers. You must remember me—Etam duRel? And Jax, our Aerie Master?”
“No Aerie Brother of ours, Brother. No longer,” said the man called Jax grimly. “Remember that, Etam!”
He turned to Anvra.
“I could wish you a better contract-mate, mistress,” he said.
“Thank you,” she said. “You heard him tell about himself?”
Jax nodded. “It’s the planet of the damned he’s fantasy-making about, all right,” said the big Aerie Master of the Sorcerers. “It’s real enough, even if it is on another plane. They’re all wingless there, slaves crawling about the surface just the way he describes it. It’s exactly the sort of self-torturing fantasy a weak man like Kathang would pick.”