The wounded man thought he was trapped in a drug dream. He'd been a physician. He knew drugs did strange things to the mind. Dreams were strange enough... . He couldn't wake up.

Some fractured shard of rationality lodged in a corner of his brain watched, sensed, wondered vaguely as he drifted eternally a few feet above a landscape he seldom saw. Sometimes branches passed overhead. Sometimes there were hills in the corners of his eyes. Once he wakened while drifting through tall grass. Once he felt he was passing over a broad expanse of water.

Occasionally a huge black horse looked down at him. He thought he knew the beast but couldn't assemble the pieces in his mind.

Sometimes a figure in shapeless robing bestrode the beast, stared down out of an empty cowl.

These things were all real, he suspected. But they fell into no meaningful pattern. Only the horse seemed familiar.

Hell. He couldn't recall who he was. His thoughts wouldn't sequence. Probable pasts kept intruding on the apparent now, often as real.

Those intrusions were shards of battle, uncertain on the jagged edges, bright as blood in the center. Great slaughters, all. Sometimes names attached themselves. Lords. Charm. Beryl. Roses. Horse. Dejagore. Juniper. The Barrowland. Queen's Bridge. Dejagore again. Dejagore often.

Infrequently he recalled a face. The woman had marvellous blue eyes, long black hair, and always wore black. She must have been important to him. Yes. The only woman... Whenever she appeared she vanished again in moments, replaced by the faces of men. Unlike the bloodlettings, he could put no names to them. Yet he had known them. He felt they were ghosts, waiting to welcome him among them.

Occasionally pain consumed his chest. He was his most alert when it was most intense. The world almost made sense then. But the creature in black would come and he would tumble back amongst the dreams.