"Do what you have to. Starting now. We don't mark time. We don't let them catch their balance. Go."
I climbed a platform that had been erected near what would become the camp's north gate, surveyed the countryside. My men were as busy as ants.
Their industry hadn't communicated itself to anyone else. Only the builders across the river, and the Gunni women, were doing much.
Smoke curled up from one of the ghats. When the flames were roaring a woman threw herself in. I had to believe it now.
I retired to the shelter Ram had built, settled to stretch the limits of my talent. I'd be needing it soon.
Chapter Eighteen
The dreams worsened. They were dreams of death.
We all have nightmares but I'd never recalled so many so clearly after I wakened. Some force, some power, was summoning me. Was trying to enlist or subject me.
Those dreams were the creations of a sick mind. If they were supposed to appeal to me, that power didn't know me.
Landscapes of despair and death under skies of lead, fields where bodies rotted and stunted vegetation melted down like slow, soft candlewax. Slime covered everything, hung in strands like the architecture of drunken spiders.
Mad. Mad. Mad. And not a touch of color anywhere.
Mad. And yet with its taint of perverse appeal. For amongst the dead I'd see faces I wished amongst the dead. I strode that land unharmed, vitally alive, its ruler. The ghouls that ran with me were extensions of my will.
It was a dream straight out of the fantasies of my dead husband. It was a world he could have made home.
Always, in the late hours, there'd be a dawn in that land of nightmare, a splash of color on a poorly defined horizon. Always in front of me, it seemed the dawn of hope.