Read Dreams That Burn In The Night for Free Online Page A

words, the old one flung his arms out, turning
slowly in the wind, calling in all four directions to the four winds.
    The living world danced in his song, which came
tumbling from his lips like a raging mountain stream heavy with the melted snow of
winter.
    The wind danced around him. A great whirlwind
raged on the palm of his left hand. Lightning and thunder raced up into the sky, splitting the
dark, held like a great spear of fire in his right hand.
    Uhlat drew his hand up into the sky, and out of
the ground rose dead men and great beasts of ages past. They stood in front of him, rotten and
decayed, creatures of the nightland. They stood before Uhlat, an unliving shield, a last
desperate charm against the old one's magic.
    But the whirlwind shot out from the old one's
hand and tore the dead ones up from the spawning ground, sent them spinning like feathers in the
wind. The great dark whirlwind leapt up into the sky with them, ripping their bodies into pieces,
scattering their bones across the land.
    As each shattered bone and bit of decayed flesh
fell to earth, new grass sprang up underneath, its thick roots dragging the dead things deep into
the earth, to the dust they would soon become.
    Uhlat turned then, and with the last of his
magic he would have become a great hawk, with wings as fast as thought. On mighty wings that
could speed him back to the north faster than anything on earth, he would have made his
escape.
    But as the feathers formed on his arms, as he
tried to leap into the air, the lightning and thunder shot from the old one's hand. It went
across the ground like a great fire dance. It burned every­thing it touched, dead logs turning to
ash, the ground heaving as it scorched the very earth itself.
    Uhlat strove to rise, to fly above it, but there
was no escape. The flame encircled him, went across him like a great wave of the big
water.
    For a brief instant a great bird-shape ringed in
flame danced above the ground. All was flame; all was burning.
    Uhlat did not even have time to
scream.
    The fire was so great, nothing was left, not
even ash or cinder. The lightning took his smoke up into the sky. The dark clouds drank the
lightning that carried dead Uhlat's smoke and disap­peared as quickly as they had come across the
summer sky.
    In the fire-ruined place, where all was once
brown and black­ened and withered, new life arose, green and strong in every place but one. The
spot where Uhlat had stood when the great fire overtook him was still black and ruined, still as
dead as the crea­tures of night Uhlat had summoned.
    The old one looked up into the sky and saw
something on the wind very, very high in the sky. It came slowly and gently down toward him. It
was a single great black feather, carried on the clean summer breeze.
    The old one smiled. It was the last thing of
evil that remained in this spot. The feather came closer and closer to earth. The old man cupped
his hand against his mouth and blew upward into the air. His breath caught the feather and sent
it spinning away from him.
    The feather came down on the ruined spot where
Uhlat had once stood. It turned to dust as it touched the earth.
    Wild flowers with all the colors of summer
pushed their way through the living earth where Uhlat the eater of flesh had died.
    Their great beauty cleansed the place of the
evil that had once stood there.
    And Uhlat was only a bad thing, an evil thing in
the mind of the old one.
    "His evil and his name are gone forever from
this world," said the old one, but in his heart there was a tiny doubt even as he said
it.
     

4
     
    It was the morning
of the sadness. Natina was the first one to awaken. The white-head hawk lay sleeping in the crook
of her arm. He awoke as she did, yawning and stretching his neck. She set him on her
shoulder.
    She rose slowly
from her blankets, her mind still slow with a dream. What a strange dream it had been. It seemed
that there were whirlwinds