Dreamseeker's Road (7 page)

And at a thrice-barred door, and
a
staircase leading to it, that spiraled around an open, dim-lit core…

And a tower, ancient, scarred, and broken, in which the love of his life was imprisoned, for whatever space of days Lugh Samildinach deemed just…

And a blasted plain around it, and beyond that a border of
nothing,
beyond which lay
nothing
save one Straight Track, along which the Winds between the Worlds both screamed and sang.

And one wind found him and caressed him with a touch like a certain lover's and spoke to him with her voice.

“None may come here but through Tir-Nan-Og, my Alec—unless Mortal Men have learned to pierce the World Walls. And because my crime was born
of love misguided and buried by love misused, I am doomed to remain in this tower until a mortal man who loves me finds his way here. And since but one mortal man has ever loved me, it is you alone, my Alec, who can accomplish this.”

“Eva!” Alec cried to a cool but cloudless sky on an autumn afternoon. No one heard, though close by either hand his best friends likewise dreamed…

*

…Bloody Bald, Aikin thought sourly, was simply a mountain—a well-nigh-perfect cone, steeper-sided than most Georgia mountains, and solitary, as most were not—with sheer quartzite cliffs athwart its summit that caught the rays of sunset and dawn and blazed red as the blood that bestowed its name. Water lapped around it, encircling it with cold and dark and a man-made lake: one of those R.E.A. jobs that had claimed so many valleys, so many homesteads; displaced so many folks who were his and David's kin…

Yeah, it was simply a mountain, and no more. He'd been nuts to believe Dave's stories, however elaborately wrought, of a castle that crowned it all unseen, cloaked from the eyes of men by Faery glamour. A man
would be a fool to believe such crap, and Aikin Carlisle Daniels was no fool. If there was magic in the world, he'd know
it by now; God knew he'd read enough on
that
topic to fill a good-sized library.

But suppose Dave's tales were true?

Suppose magic was rampant in the north Georgia woods and he had missed it? Had missed the Seelie Court riding in procession four times a year, had missed Faery critters that watched his friends, and Faery runners that ran races with them and kidnapped their brothers and shot elven arrows into their uncles. Never mind journeys to those other Worlds, whose names themselves conjured dreams: Tir-Nan-Og and Annwyn and Erenn; Galunlati and the Lands of Fire and the Realm of the Powersmiths.

He wanted to believe it all, dammit! Did not want to brand his best friends as crazy, fools, or liars. Yet to believe, one needed proof, had to
see
the Faeries riding, had to
hear
the horns of Elfland saluting dusk and dawn.

And one
odd-coated, queer-horned stag glimpsed in the woods of a foggy morn was not sufficient.

He had to have more; had to see the castle on that mountain, had to find his way to Faerie and all those other realms.

But how could he? He who, though hungriest, had longest been denied that wondrous feast?

But then his subconscious lodged against that most stubborn and deepest-set desire, and the force of that soulfelt need set fire in a certain stone.

And so the dreamshape that was Aikin Daniels stood on the most perilous edge of the precipice that looked on Bloody Bald, and wished most fervently to see what was hidden there.

And Aikin saw: Lugh's mountaintop citadel, and the perilous peak beneath it, and the wide green country that spread about its base, where in the Lands of Men was only mountains and lakes. And he saw a webwork
of gold laid upon those meads and meadows,
upon
those forests and streams. And he found he could follow those strands, away from Tir-Nan-Og and through countless other Worlds that layered 'round it like the chambers of some complex seashell, some more alien than the Lands of Men and some achingly familiar, for he had chanced on them before in less potent dreams.

One Track in particular intrigued him, for it swept farther afield than the mountains. He traced it: south—and east, over hills, over ridges, into the rolling Piedmont. Settlements blazed by—Helen, Cleveland, Gainesville, Jefferson, Arcade—sensed but not truly seen. And then Aikin came upon one particular town.

He pronounced its name.
Athens.
Oz Upon the Oconee. The place he lived. The place he went to college.

But the magic ran there as well: a glitter of Track far less than a mile from his cabin in Whitehall Forest. He had only to locate it in
his
World, and somehow, someway, he would walk there.

All he required was
a
landmark: something to mark it past mistaking.

He sought one, even as the Straight Track vanished save for the merest glimmer, even as the rest of the world grew hard and dirty and…
real.
Real as that lightning-blasted oak beside the maple with the bifurcated trunk. Them he would remember; them he would seek when he awoke…

* * *

David dreamed of guns. He dreamed of the rifle he had hunted with that morning, and he dreamed of he who had bestowed it, who had died seven years gone by, and in whose honor he had dedicated that day's kill. David-the-Elder, he'd been styled, after David himself had been born. David Thomas Sullivan: his father's youngest brother.

David-the-Younger's role model, who had taught him how to affect the good-ole-boy facade a guy needed to survive a rural mountain high school—and those more sophisticated skills a college man must possess so as not to be thought a hick or a geek or a dweeb; so that he could ride a horse, drive a tractor, chop sorghum, dig 'taters, pour concrete and weld—and run almost forever, swim well nigh that long, hold his own at wrestling in spite of being not very big, drive a twisting road without brakes, and shoot anything that walked, crawled, sat still, or flew. But he'd also read all of Shakespeare before high school—and Malory, Milton, Tolkien, Lewis, and Poe; and could write passable iambic pentameter, transliterate Norse runes and the Hebrew, Greek, and Sindarin alphabets; as well as identify almost every song played on the airways more than twice during the last nine years, and drink anything alcoholic, however foul tasting, without coughing or making a face. All because David-the-Elder had said that was what a man who was really alive should do.

…
guns…

He'd rehearsed that awful afternoon once that day already, the one when Uncle Dale had appeared at his bedroom door to proclaim his nephew's death. And he'd relived his private salute after the funeral.

And he'd
certainly
recalled how none of it was fair, that someone as accomplished as David-the-Elder should die so ignominiously. That, in fact, no one should really know how he had died at all. No one had seen it—or admitted as much; and the report from the Rangers had been frustratingly vague. But he would find out one day, would write the Pentagon for the full report. Shoot, he'd get Alec to hack into the government's files, as he was perfectly able to do.

But no mere report could relate everything that had transpired; none could fully convey David-the-Elder's final hours.

But a red-septumed quasi stone in a blood-filled bowl beside his head could. And as fatigue and regret clogged David's reason, magic from another World revealed that fateful day…

It was like watching TV, David thought, and thought no more, but witnessed.

…
a young man in the jeans and Nikes and T-shirt that proclaimed him a Ranger off-duty, prowling the narrow
cobblestoned length of a Middle Eastern street. His hair, white-blond like his namesake nephew's, was a beacon of difference in the harsh sunlight—and possibly a mistake to reveal; but he'd given his Atlanta Braves cap to a brown-faced street boy in trade for a wide white grin and directions to where the best pomegranates could
really
be found. Pomegranates: the word had the same root as grenade (as in hand grenade), because the two looked alike. He hoped to buy a couple dozen, ship 'em to a friend in Granada, Spain, and have him send 'em to the younger David, with a note not to pull the pins—which his brilliant nephew would understand and appreciate.

Trouble was, he'd taken a wrong
turn somewhere between the barracks and the bazaar, and smiling boy directions notwithstanding, very much feared he was lost. Which was not necessarily cool for tow-haired American servicemen in Middle Eastern cities, however ingratiating their honest mountain smiles might be.

But speaking of smiles, here was that kid again, still with his baseball cap,
only now it perched atop one of those complex turban-things the locals affected.

With a flourish the lad removed the latter
and
passed it to him. “Trade,” he said, solemnly. “Trade.”

“Lost,” the elder David countered, as he gamely donned the headpiece. The boy's grin widened. “Pomegranates,” he called, pointing down a narrow side street.

David-the-Elder thanked him and followed his directions, ambling toward a slit of light glimmering at the end of the alley, where a tinkling splash of water and a half-seen spray of palms hinted at pleasantry. His hiking stick clicked upon the cobblestones.

But as he stepped into the brightness, something small and dark thumped to the pavement before him.
Rock…
or—

But he had no more time for thinking, as the world first went loud, then very white—and then traded all trace of noise for a greater, more infinite light.

“No!”
the younger David screamed.
“No!”
But the ulunsuti was not finished, for it knew in its way that what he
really
wished to know was where that grenade had come from, that had erased a good man's life.

And so he saw that small plaza, and centering it the fountain, in which a fragment of undifferentiated human flesh was weeping blood. He did
not
see the body—what remained; and in that the ulunsuti was merciful. But he did note a splatter of red across yard upon yard of stucco and stone.

And on a
balcony one level up and four narrow buildings away, he saw a young man's eyes go wide beneath their cammo and khaki. “Ooops!” that youth exclaimed, his voice as slurred as his eyes were unfocused and his movements clumsy and vague.

“Friendly fire,” his companion across a tiny table opined, through a thickening veil of hashish fumes. The voice was ambiguous: familiar and foreign, at once that of man and woman
.
“One should
never
treat weapons casually,” that one continued, “lest one take friend for foe and fling one in lieu of an orange—which you just did. And without the
pin,
too—or did you assume that was the stem? What must you have been thinking? That he wore the headgear of a well-known terrorist? That the hiking staff he carried was a gun? They will blame the rebels, I suppose.”

“I'm gonna be sick,” the clumsy one announced—and lurched to his feet.

“No,” said the hashish smoker. “Come, let me heal you. Let me make you forget that you hated that man because he beat you at poker, Risk, Jeopardy, and Joust; and everybody liked him, but thought
you
were impulsive and clumsy and stupid and rude. Let me make you forget that you should never have brought that weapon
with you, for such like do not impress me, who have witnessed more war than a thousand like you could ever imagine.”

The Ranger stared crookedly at the drifting smoke that rose from the hookah, at the lambs'-eyes-in-honey in silver bowls upon the table. At the plaza below
that was already clogged with gawkers come to point and stare at what
might
have been a young American.

“Nobody can forget killin' a man,” he spat, sounding stone-cold sober.

“I can
make
you forget,” the other gave back, voice more like
a
woman by the second.

“Nobody c'n
do that,” said the soldier. “Nobody c'n cut a memory outta your mind.”

“No one…
human…

“Ooops,” sighed the soldier. “I forget.”

“I know!” the other laughed—and drew him away from the balcony and the noise and the oddly inept search—and thence to an inner room, where she removed her androgynous outer robes.

“My angel,” said the man, when she was naked. “My mortal lover,” the woman
replied, and reached for him.

And when she turned to face the man who in a hashish haze had casually slain David Thomas Sullivan, David
Kevin
Sullivan likewise saw her. And shouted where he dreamed on that stony mountainside.

Angel,
the drugged-out man had called her. And so one so fair might seem to such as he. But it was no angel the younger David had seen; no sirree. He had seen that face before, though, far too many times; and he
now
knew who'd been first cause of his hero-uncle's death. Not an angel, but one of the Sidhe: the flame-haired battle goddess called the Morrigu, som
e-
time advisor to Lugh Samildinach, High King in Tir-Nan-Og, whom David almost called friend. Occasional companion as well to Nuada Airgetlam, whom David
did
consider one.

Well, she was bloody well no friend to him! And if those others also knew what she had instigated…well, that was downright betrayal!

“You goddamned bitch,” David whispered.

And with that last word he blinked into the harsh light of midday.

And for an instant thought he was still in the Middle East. His heart was thumping like mad, and he was hyperventilating, as he briefly lodged between two Worlds. Blue sky there; blue sky here. Stone pavement; stony ground. A fountain tinkling in a foreign land; a waterfall murmuring by his shoulder.