The thing she noticed before seeing the faces in the wall was the noise. At first quiet, like spring frogs peeping, then louder and more terrible. The wails of parents holding their dead children. The shock and despair of knowing that your life was over and there was nothing but bleakness in the future. Thousands and thousands of voices.
"Strange," Adahni observed as the walked among blighted, skeletal trees, "This feels different than the other dreamscapes. Do you think we are here, in truth?" Her question was cut short by a sharp scream.
"I'm not entirely sure," Gann said, "I have the same sense as you, this feels… more real than dream. I believe we walk here in spirit."
"The fuck does that mean?" Addie asked.
"When you walk in dream, you enter the headspace of other people and creatures. Walking in spirit is entirely different. Our bodies are still asleep beneath Coveya Kurg'annis, but our spirits are entirely on the Fugue Plane. Not someone's imagination of it."
"And so that is the actual Wall?" Adahni asked.
"I believe so."
"Then why have we been walking in a straight line for fifteen minutes but passed that one massive ogre soul three times?" She paused, pointing to the figure of the ogre, spreadeagled like a spider in the rottish green of the wall.
"There is something here someone wants you to see," Gann said, "I don't entirely know who."
"I have my suspicions," she said, "Say Gann, you don't think that the others can hear what we're saying, do you?"
"I doubt it," he said, "Do you talk in your sleep?"
"No," she replied, "Then let's talk about it here. It's not like anyone could hear us above this infernal screaming anyway. Safiya. I think she's behind all of this."
"Really," Gann, "That is not what I expected you would say. But I see your point. I do not know if she speaks to herself or if another Safiya - a small spirit - spaks to her, but it is a question only she can resolve. Perhaps it is her conscience that whispers to her, but Red Wizards are said to have that stripped fromthem at an early age."
"I see," she said, "I just think it's too much of a coincidence. Something happened to me, before I found myself in Okku's barrow. I encountered a woman who was nearly Safiya's spit and image in Bezantur. She healed me, put me back together. I had been lame from an old injury. She laid hands on me and she... fixed me. Not just my leg, either. It was as though every scar I ever had, every tendon or ligament that was out of order from years of fighting and hard living was put back. I don't think I've ever been so healthy as when I walked out of that tent."
"And you think..."
"Like fattening a goose you're going to eat for Midwinter dinner," she said, "They did it on purpose. They fixed me up to be in good fighting condition, gave me a curse, and dropped me into Safiya's lap with a few doses of the legend of the Betrayer's Crusade.
"So you don't trust her," Gann said, "She is a thing of puzzle pieces to be certain."
"I think she, or someone at the Academy of Shapers and Binders is..." She stopped talking as her gaze fell upon something in the wall. She stood stock still, her eyes fixated. After a long minute, she approached robotically. As she moved towards the wall, its occupants appeared to writhe and twist.
He was standing, in the wall but not yet of it. His limbs were twisted at odd angles as if broken. He struggled to speak, but speak he did.
"Addie, you've finally..."
"You died?"
"No, I..." His face twisted as though a wave of pain or nausea swept through him. She took momentary comfort in the fact that head said "no," but knew that this fate might be even more terrible than if he had, indeed, perished.
"I have seen him before," Gann said, "In your dreams."
Addie turned to her companion, her face betraying everything.
"It's him isn't it," the hagspawn said.
She nodded coldly.
"I don't belong here," Bishop said, "They're playing you. But I hear things, I know things now." His voice was hurried and his thoughts scattered. He reminded her of Dayven, when Dayven was high. "You're here to bring it down. They're manipulating you, can't you see? Can't you..." he convulsed then, and Adahni flinched. "I've been stricken with it, this false hope, this news of a Crusade. And they've done it to you, too, you're here, they've replaced you, whatever walks before me now is not entirely… not you. There's something wearing you like a mask. Look!"
He turned his head painfully and looked above him. She followed his gaze and saw, with horror, her own face staring back at her. As she looked into the grotesque sculpture of herself, she was suddenly in two places. At once looking at her own healthy brown face standing towards the wall and the abomination that wore her visage within it. She felt the horrid sense of loss and pain she had felt when she'd gone out of her body in the Ashenwood.
"Who's "they"?" Gann demanded.
At the sound of her lover's distorted voice, she snapped back into her body. "He's seen you, the God of the Dead... they're coming. Turn and look... if you don't get out of this one, you're not getting me out of here..."
She whirled and it was as though the very hells had opened and their hordes spilled through. She willed her leaden limbs to go through the motions, to fight to live another day. She didn't feel the demons' claws as they cut into her flesh, she just kept moving, dodging what she could, but sustaining injuries she would have worried about if she could feel them. The demon host broken, she turned her bleeding body back towards the wall.
"Who's they?" Gann asked again.
"The two red wizards. The bald ones." Addie and Gann looked at each other.
"Where did they take you from?"
"Thaymount," he said, "I was looking for you."
"And you've found me," she said.
"Take this." Bishop croaked. She followed his gaze to one hand, which was clutched around something pale and maggot gray. She pried it from his grip, shuddering at the clammy touch of his ghastly hand, "They thrust it into my hand as they put me here. They knew you were coming. Take it and come back for me."
"Well that settles that, then," Gann said. He took the object from her and turned it over in his hands. It was a third hunk of mask like the two they had gotten from their dreamwalking in the Wells of Lurue and beneath the Mossstone. "I suppose we ought to be going now."
"If you don't mind, I'd like to stay, just a bit," Adahni said, "I'm wounded. I would heal myself. Five minutes."
She sat, her back to the wall. It was hard to get into the right mindset, the wails of the wretched damned around her, but she did anyway. A song of loss to quell the pain. You could not heal pain with happiness, only with a song that told you that you were not alone. That someone else knew your suffering and would walk hand in hand with you.
I wandered again to my home in the mountains
Where in youth's early dawn I was happy and free
I looked for my friends but I never could find them
I found they were all rank strangers to me
Her wounds closed, but more miraculously, the screams lessened. It was as though they had paused in their agony to listen to her. She poured more magic into the song, to make it a balm not just to the sting of her injuries, but to the pain of those in the Wall.
Everybody I met seemed to be a rank stranger
No mother or dad not a friend could I see
They knew not my name and I knew not their faces
I found they were all rank strangers to me.
The screams stopped. The Wall fell silent. She felt the part of herself that was trapped there too relax, a momentary break in her suffering. All the souls doomed to spend eternity in agony had a split second of relief.
Now they've all moved away said the voice of a stranger
To a beautiful home by a bright crystal sea
And some day I'll meet them in the next life
Where no one will be a rank stranger to me.
Her wounds closed, and she wiped the blood off.
"You can't stay here," said Gann, "As great as your magic, you cannot spend eternity sitting by the wall, singing lullabies to the dead. You must move on if you are to save them."
She nodded. She turned to Bishop. "I'm coming back," she said.
"I know," he said.
She turned and walked away, knowing if she looked again, she would not be able to.