The Dreamer Stones (24 page)

They looked at
each other.
Hope
, he sent.
You gave me hope and I trusted
it. I was wrong, for you were a child.

She still did
not understand, watched his face for a clue. Contrite, ashamed.
Why?

I put too much
pressure on you.

Oh. And that
led to this. The reason I am here now.

I am
sorry.
He asked it of her, the woman of the present, and the
child of the past.

She shook her
head, but saw the image leave. In acknowledging his error, treating
her as an equal when she deserved to be a teenager, he put the
child away. She shook visibly.

Then he reeled
back. Tymall. Image after image. Tymall, the baby, the toddler, the
boy, the teenager, the young man. Tymall revealed, Tymall
transformed. Cruelty, sarcasm, murder. Saska whipped. The twins
fighting to near death. Tymall with Lycea, Raken, Vannis, Taranis,
Margus, his father.
No
- a silent plea.

I cannot
forgive.
He was then what he is now, only degree is
different.

Torrullin
straightened.

Redemption, is
it? I must forgive myself for procrastination, my selfish delay, to
be redeemed?

Yes!
Lowen screamed wordlessly.

Fine! I
forgive myself, for I
know
I did what I did out of
love.

Tymall
disengaged into the gathering dark.

Lowen sagged.
There cannot be more - let him rest now.

Again she was
wrong.

The flatlands.
A battle. Sorcery. Margus. Fifty thousand soldiers vanished in the
blink of an eye.

A brothel.
Margus again. Watching the Enchanter with a redheaded whore. Who
was forgiven there, Lowen could never know, but she knew then the
invisible realm left an indelible mark.

Valaris again.
Fay. But he snarled out loud and that image vanished. Obviously he
thought there was nothing to put aside and obviously something
agreed for it to leave.

Torrullin
sagged. There could be no more.

This time
he
was wrong.

One more.

Lowen. The
woman.

Empty of
guilt, of pain, of joy, of happiness, he stared at the image.

Chapter
Twenty-One

Well, the
bells toll and confetti litters the pavements. Did someone get
hitched here this day?

Tattle

Fresh from his
encounter with Margus, Tymall returned to the castle in a foul
temper, but one look at Fay amid a pile of gowns and his mood took
an upturn.

She greeted
him with a distracted smile.

“What are you
up to, Fay?”

“A wedding
dress, Ty …” she muttered, fingering a gold brocade, then a blue
satin.

“Do you want
my opinion?” he asked with a laugh.

“Um … maybe
…”

“Ah, it’s
meant to be a surprise?”

She grinned
and nodded.

“I have a
surprise for you as well.”

“Yes?”

“I have
arranged a formal ceremony on Beacon. The full works.”

“How?” Her
eyes were uncertain.

“Relax. A
glamour to hide my features and an assumed name. We’ll go in under
guise, but the ceremony will be conducted in our true names.”

She looked
away. “The priest will be terrified.”

“I’ll not harm
him, I assure you, and I’ll make it worth his while.” He knelt
beside her, crushing an emerald watered silk. “I know it’s not
perfect, Fay, but I would marry you in a beautiful little chapel on
a clean world using our real names in the ceremony, and thus a
little initial subterfuge is not so bad, is it?”

He bent
further to look at her face under her bowed head. “It will be
lovely. You and me, the priest and a musician, and no one will get
hurt, especially not you. I don’t want to wed in this terrible
place, abducting a priest to conduct the ceremony and then have to
kill him after.”

“Do we need a
priest? What is in our hearts …”

“I want it
formal, Fay. Beacon’s nuptial requirements are much the same as the
Valleur, and our marriage will be held true in those ranks. No one
must deny our bond.”

She looked up
and smiled. “Okay, I’ll marry you in a beautiful little chapel on
Beacon. It will be a special day.”

He drew her to
him. “That’s my girl.”

“When?”

“Is tomorrow
too soon?” he asked, and smiled broadly when her face lit like a
yuletide tree.

The following
morning she awakened him with a wet kiss, and then whispered, “Get
up, Ty, time’s a-wasting.”

He opened one
eye and then snapped the other open as well. She was a vision in
silver and white, a gown he definitely did not see on the floor
yesterday. A tight silver bodice with a loose white skirt, so long
it trailed out behind her. Her golden hair was pulled back from her
face, plaited into a single thick rope in which she cleverly
entwined silver stars. Cheeky silver slippers peeked out. Truly a
vision, a bride.

Tymall sat up,
goggling. “Fay, you’re gorgeous.”

She laughed.
“Why, thank you, sir!”

He shook his
head in amazement. “Dare I ask how did you manage that dress?”

She winked. “A
bride does not tell. Now, your outfit …”

“My
outfit?”

Fay giggled.
“Indeed, sir! Over there!”

She pointed to
the wall behind the bed and when he turned to look, he found silver
breeches and a short, tight white jacket. A pair of silver boots
stood on the floor.

“You’re
joking, right?” he said after a minute.

Fay burst out
laughing. “Come, Ty, get into the spirit of things! It matches with
my dress, don’t you think?”

That it
does,
he thought,
and I will look like a pansy,
but he
smiled and nodded. “We’ll make quite a pair.”

She smiled and
sat. “Now I know you love me. You don’t have to wear it; I wanted
to see your reaction - priceless!”

“Hell, Fay …”
he muttered and rose. He went to the outfit. Looking it over, he
decided it was not that bad. “I like it.”

“You do?”

His turn to
laugh. “Actually, yes, and I like the idea of us matching
today.”

A silence. He
turned with raised eyebrows.

“I love you,
Ty.”

An hour later
they were on Beacon.

Beacon was
ordered, clean, and populous. It was a giant city world or a world
city, depending on your view. Platforms, highways and bridges laced
the oceans. Every few blocks a public area was given over to grass
and trees, meticulously cared for, a concrete jungle’s redeeming
feature, and likewise space was allocated on the oceans, the
breathing room like dark swimming pools. Beacon was regimented,
formal and strictly governed, and births were by dispensation of
the state. The planet had the largest law-enforcement agency in the
universe and the most expert and specialised waste-disposal
systems.

Millennia back
Beacon laid claim to a sister world in its solar system, a world
that became a hungry nation’s breadbasket. Known as Beacon Farm, it
was sparsely populated, as available land was relinquished to
farming. Farmers rotated through the system and permitted no casual
emigration from Beacon to Farm. Still, produce from Farm was
insufficient and imports were of paramount importance.

It seemed to
work; Beacon was a clean, well-governed world with no poor and
hungry. But there was a dark side.

Manufacturing
was done under license on other, less congested worlds, with no
qualms about pollutants and no compassion for those exploited.
Beacon’s powerful business cartels strip-mined, denuded forests,
and quarried with no thought for the future. They paid high prices,
yes, but left nothing but sterility and poverty behind, and moved
on to the next proposition. Beacon was hated by other worlds.

Space faring
for eons, they were also arrogant and superior. What was once
regarded as a survival necessity, those pathfinders to other
worlds, transformed into greedy business practice. The might of the
cartels respected only two other human worlds - Valaris, for
limiting Beacon to normal, healthy trade, and Xen III, for denying
them access to long dormant minerals and ores after the domes were
brought down.

Despite the
alien aspect of billions of closely packed buildings, some towering
fearsomely into the sky, Beacon was still beautiful. It was not the
grey, sooty, dirty and polluted horror one would expect from a
crowded city, but colourful, lyrical in cleanliness, and the crowds
were ordered, polite, if distant and distrustful of strangers.

Transport over
greater distances was via air-shuttle, while a network of
sky-trains serviced shorter hops. Goods great and small were
ferried along subterraneous routes. Beacon worked for Beaconites, a
gigantic metropolis once foreseen by antiquated science fiction
writers.

Naturally
there was internal dissent, for without it a world was stagnant,
declining by degrees often so infinitesimal that the crunch came
when it was already too late to alter the momentum.

Dissenters
kept a government alert, and free thought was the backbone of a
healthy civilisation.

In a square, a
man stood on an overturned crate and held court to a number of
listeners, speaking with great passion about underground smuggling
routes, their government pulled the wool, lying about the legality
of the goods ferried quickly from prying eyes.

Whether he was
right or wrong was not the issue - he was likely a bit of both -
rather it was the presence of two men on the fringes of the small
crowd, two with sharp eyes and quick movements.

Those two
immediately clocked the arrival of the man and the woman in white
and silver, an arrival that was not by conventional mode.

Word went out,
communications on their cuffs and lapels, and within a block of the
square Tymall and Fay were shadowed by a team of twelve hardened
men.

They wandered
unaware.

Beaconites
broadcast no aura-signature unless intent focused, and Tymall left
the square with Fay believing they blended into the crowd. Their
dress did raise an eyebrow or two, but it was soon clear they were
to be married, or were just married, for the two were totally
wrapped up in each other.

The chapel lay
three city blocks from the public park and it was mid-morning on
the eastern half of Beacon, a sunny day. The slanting rays found
the chinks in the skyline and shone down, occasionally finding the
ground, lighting the two lovers with erratic spotlights.

It was busy
with Beaconites on the streets going somewhere and more leaning out
of windows on high. A number of older folk were out walking pets,
largely dogs, although cats were also leashed, if unhappily.

Young mothers
strolled aimlessly with young children in pushcarts, and business
executives both male and female hurried in silence with great
purpose.

It was as
familiar as the streets of Galilan without the rowdy noise, but
neither Fay nor Tymall had wandered those streets in a while, and
they felt strange, conspicuous, staring at window displays like two
barbarians. They started to giggle and felt almost free of cares on
that sunny morning.

For once, it
was good to be alive, and it was good to be loved. A good day to
wed.

“Any word?”
the man in a dark suit, six paces behind, whispered into his
lapel.

“First visit
to Beacon, we think, for they aren’t on file,” the answer came.
“We’re checking now for interstellar connection.”

“Keep me
informed,” Dark Suit muttered, picking up his companion in a blue
suit on the opposite side of the street. He inclined his head, and
casually they swapped positions.

A third man
wandered further back, watching the move, without losing sight of
the targets. Two men were a mere two paces ahead, listening in on
the giggling conversation, until one ostensibly parted company and
turned into a side street.

“Seems above
board,” Side Street whispered into his communicator. “Talk of
wedding, laughing over the window displays - I don’t know, maybe
we’re wasting our time here.”

Dark Suit,
from the other side of the road, said, “They’re sorcerers and I
don’t trust to laughter. Keep at it until I say otherwise.”

The lone man
ahead of them stopped, feeling his pockets with irritation,
muttering under his breath.

As Tymall and
Fay came abreast of him, he cursed out loud and then apologised,
asking in the same breath, “I seem to have left my phone at home …
I wonder if you’d be so kind …”

The shadows
slowed to see how the ruse would play.

Tymall gripped
Fay’s elbow, smiled and, shaking his head, moved past.

“Ten seconds,
for pity’s sake!” Lone Man hissed in righteous anger. “It won’t
beggar you!”

Ty glanced
over his shoulder at the man, said, “I have no phone; I’m a
stranger here, sorry.”

He continued
walking. The chapel lay a block distant.

“I apologise
then,” Lone Man called out and halted another passer-by to complete
the ruse.

“Where do you
hail from, strangers?” another man asked, also a shadow, leaning
under an awning a number of paces along. At his back, jewellery
display.

“Valaris,” Fay
answered and then winced when Tymall squeezed her arm. “Er, we came
to be wed …”

“Quiet,
Fay.”

“Wed, you
say?” the man said, detaching himself from the display.
“Congratulations, I say! Have a good one!” He winked and went the
other way.

“You’re too
paranoid, Ty.”

He smiled down
at her. “You’re right. Come on, the chapel isn’t far.”

“Fay and Ty,”
Display Man whispered into his cuff as he walked away. “From
Valaris according to the woman, and he was none too pleased.”