Read Dreams That Burn In The Night for Free Online

should die." He held up the ruined hand. "But
for this. Be­cause of what you have done, I shall tame you. Cage you and shame you. You shall be
my dog, cringing beneath the feet of my women, tormented by the children. Gnawing on scraps,
eating food not good enough for people to eat."
    Uhlat raised his war shield, and a lightning
bolt crashed down from the darkened sky, striking the shield, turning it into a blue whirlwind
which left Uhlat's arm, spinning in a fiery, sizzling hoop toward the old one.
    The old one let it come close, then opened his
mouth and breathed upon it. Winter came out of his mouth. Snow and ice and winds of winter caught
the shield and froze it in the air. The spinning blue flame froze; the shield dropped like a
stone to shat­ter into a thousand pieces upon the hard ground. Where it fell, the ground froze,
frost blue-white upon the broken shield frag­ments.
    Screaming like an angry banshee, Uhlat ran
toward the old one, his stone weapon upraised. His hand went back, and he swung the hammer with
all his might through the air. A dead warrior sprang out of the ground, its bones sticking
through the skin, sharp as knives. It danced on rotten legs toward the old one.
    Again the shaman from the north swung his stone
hammer. A dead buffalo bull, reeking of death and decay, rose up out of the ground, its great
horns red with blood, its eyes dead and sightless.
    It pawed the ground and charged, smashing a
fallen log to bits beneath its thundering hooves. It came rushing down on the old one like a
great heaving mass of black death.
    The dead warrior and dead buffalo rushed at the
old one.
    The old one drew his hand above his head. A
spear made of writhing snakes, green and red with eyes of black and bodies hard as stone,
appeared in his upraised hand. With a quick thrust, he threw the spear.
    The snake spear hit the dead warrior, and the
snakes wrapped around the moving body of bones. The body shuddered, its bone arms and legs pinned
to its side by the mighty coils of the great snakes. The body staggered and fell.
    The snakes swarmed across it, pressing it down
into the ground. The body seemed to sink into the ground. Grass shot up through it; roots reached
up to pull the body down into dust and oblivion. The snakes vanished into holes that opened in
the ground. The dust from the dead warrior's cracking bones blew into the holes, sealing them
after the snakes as they vanished.
    Alone, the great bull thundered down on the old
one. The old man stood calmly in the path until it was almost upon him, the great horns flashing
down toward him.
    The old man waved his hands across his chest. A
great tree shot up at his feet, between him and the charging bull. A thick tree as solid as the
world. The bull hit it head on, its gore-bespat­tered horns driving deep into the living
wood.
    The tree grew and grew. The bull, its horns
pinned deep in the hard wood, felt himself lifted off the ground as the tree went higher and
higher into the sky. Branches shot out from the trunk, driving like hard arrows into the side of
the dead buffalo. It writhed in agony, its rotten flesh pierced again and again by the living
tree. The branches grew through the buffalo, leaves thick and shining, an avalanche of riotous
green life.
    The dead animal rose higher and higher into the
air. The tree sucked the essences of the dead buffalo into its being. The dead flesh fed it. The
hungry roots and branches stripped the buffalo of all its flesh. Soon only the moldering hide
remained and the white bones. The tree stretched and grew, tearing the bones apart, until the
white skull rested at the top of the tree, hidden almost by the great rush of green life that
surrounded it.
    The old one stepped out from behind the
tree.
    "You have lived too long upon this earth. I rid
the earth of poison, and you are what was once poison. I now take your life and make it nothing.
Your name is gone from this world." With those