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of answers would be lost with him.
So Damon always came back, to pace and brood and contemplate the
river, because the only man in Ankhana he could still trust was
himself.
    Because this is my dream.
    His stomach had been troubling him, and now in the green storm his
guts twisted, and he retched: a brown-traced milky fluid spilled from
his lips. How long had it been since he’d last eaten?
    What had he last eaten?
    The streaks of brown in his vomitus looked like blood.
    He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, and its touch stung him
sharply. His lips had cracked and split and smeared his hand with
fresher blood. He was thirsty, dreadfully thirsty . . . He knelt and
cupped river water to his mouth, but his tongue turned the cool water
to nails and broken glass. He could feel it tearing open his throat,
shredding him inside—
    Maybe what I need isn’t water.
    He looked back at the pool of his vomit, at the swirls of brown; he
looked down at the smear of red across the back of his hand. Blood, he thought.
    Blood.
    He would have to hunt.
    A flash of furtive motion caught his eye. He rose to a stalking
crouch, parting reeds with his hands, then slipped forward through
the stand of corn. There it was again—was it again? Was it the
first time? Had he seen this before, or was he remembering an older
dream?
    The flash of a boot heel, as it vanished behind the trunk of an ash;
a startled glimpse of a woman’s face, eyes wide and staring for
one brief second until screened by rustling corn, the smell of
unwashed crotch and armpit, the mouthwatering earthmetal savor of
blood—
    His dreaming jungle was full of people.
    Slowly, his jungle came to life in his ears. Grunts and growls,
screeches and screams, all manner of bellows and howls and shrieks
echoed near and far: calls not of beasts, but of men. Calls of the
beasts that men had always been.
    He followed a crackle of motion and was brought up short by a yell
that was chopped to a thin moan. Thrashing a clearing in the reeds
was a tangle of human flesh: a man and a woman and a knife struggled
together near the river, and Damon couldn’t make his eyes
interpret who was doing what to whom. He could see only limbs, and
metal, and blood.
    Blood—
    The blood pulled him forward, and he followed, thirsting. This was
only a dream, after all.
    He entered the reeds, and something struck him from behind.
    Overborne, crushed to the ground, he tasted the viny resin of the
broken reeds that jabbed his face, while what might have been a knee
dug painfully into his back and frantic hands scrabbled at his
clothing. He lay unresisting, abstractly wondering how this
happenstance figured into his dream, until dully ripping teeth
latched into the joining of his neck and shoulder and gnawed at his
flesh. The pain—real pain, too-real pain—woke him from
his daze. This is no dream of mine.
    Damon reached back and gripped with one hand the head of the man who
chewed on him, while his other hand sought the man’s eyes with
stiffened fingers. The fellow grunted into Damon’s trapezius,
and his fists flailed ineffectually. Damon’s fingers drove
slowly deeper into his eyes, and the man stopped punching and started
trying only to get away, thrashing and pushing and moaning. Damon let
him go, and heard a grunt of impact and a wet gurgle; before he could
roll over and sit up, one of his Esoterics had tackled the man,
pinned him, and cut his throat.
    â€œMaster Damon!â€

NINETEEN
    WITHIN ITS SMOTHERING blanket of sudden jungle, Ankhana writhed.
    This was an instant holiday, a festival, a Carnevale: a suspension of
the ordinary rules of life and society. How could one go to work or
to the market, when the streets were choked with trees? Grain bins
had burst across the city as mills vomited sprouts, and shoots sprang
from drying seeds. Door planks shot forth branches that burgeoned
with leaves; dungheaps transformed instantly