The Dreamtrails (53 page)

“… I am Cassy,” said Cassy. She was smiling at a middle-aged woman.

“I am Hannah Seraphim,” the older woman said in a warm, soft voice.

I stared at her in wonder, for this was the first time I had ever seen Hannah Seraphim, leader of the Beforetime Misfits and the first woman to dream of me and my quest. She was shorter and smaller and more ordinary-looking than I had imagined her, but her mouth was full and smiling, and her eyes were extraordinary. They were brown. Not the opaque brown of stone and earth, but the clear transparent brown of a forest stream, a warm, dappled brown with moving glints of green and gold in their depths. Beautiful eyes, watchful and intelligent.

“I only got in this morning,” Cassy was saying. “I … I couldn’t wait until tomorrow.”

Hannah answered in her deep slow voice. “I’m glad you are here and gladder still that you’ve wasted no time in visiting us.” Hannah held out a small strong hand to Cassy, and after a slight hesitation, the tall younger woman laid her own in it and smiled nervously.

“Welcome to the Reichler Clinic, Cassandra,” Hannah said formally. “I am afraid this is a very grand building of which we have only a small part. Our patron, although he would laugh to hear himself described so, would happily give us the whole building, and indeed he has the means for it.” She smiled a private, rather lovely smile. “But what we have here
is sufficient and safer.” There was a slight grimness to her mouth now, and her eyes were stern.

“Please, call me Cassy,” said the younger woman as they began to climb a flight of steps. She looked around, prompting me to do the same, and at once I recognized their surroundings. They were in the entrance foyer of the building that contained the Reichler Clinic Reception Center, in the city of Newrome, under Tor. But I could hardly reconcile the dim, water-stained foyer within the crushed building in a submerged and ruined city into which I had dived, with this shining hall of marble and glass. Through the windows, I saw huge trees and shrubs growing where now there grew a dark submarine forest of waving fronds sunk in an endless emerald twilight.

Hannah and Cassy had reached the top of the steps, to the foyer’s main section, and I noticed the absence of the enormous glass statue of a woman surrounded by beasts. It was missing because it had yet to be created. Cassy gazed around, her eyes narrowing speculatively, and I wondered if this was the moment when the seed of the idea for that statue had been planted. “It seems so impossible and so wonderful to be here,” she said. “All those years ago when I was tested in one of your mobile units, I was so desolate to be told that I had no paranormal abilities.”

Hannah sighed in vexation, and after one swift assessing glance around, she said in a soft voice, “Those mobile units! Who knows how many like you were turned away because the equipment was useless. At the time, I thought William was just technically incompetent because, after all, he had written
Powers of the Mind
. Of course, he had not written the book at all, but it was not until later that I discovered it.”

“When will I meet the others?” Cassy asked shyly.

Hannah looked at her and, after another glance around, said very softly, “Cassy, listen to me carefully, because I won’t be able to speak like this once we enter the elevator. There are listening devices in it and also in our reception center. The other paranormal students are not here, because despite its name, this is not the Reichler Clinic. The government and the general public believe it is, because that is what we want them to believe. Our real work with paranormals is undertaken elsewhere so we can be sure there will be no repeat of what happened at the first Reichler Clinic facility. I have been unable to speak of this in our e-mails. I have often warned you to say little in our communications, citing competing factions and cyber pirates as the reason. The truth is that we must protect ourselves from the government.”

“But where …?”

“The true Reichler Clinic is not so far away, but we will not go there today. Now you are going to meet those who come here to maintain our facade. Some are paranormals and others are not. You and I are about to enact a performance for the spy eyes and listening devices planted throughout our rooms.”

“But why bring me here if we cannot speak freely?” Cassy said in confusion. They were approaching a bank of gleaming metal doors, and Hannah laid her hand lightly on Cassy’s shoulder as she reached out to press her palm against a glowing square on the wall beside the doors. Cassy’s eyes showed a fleeting look of astonishment, but she managed to turn a cry of surprise into a sneeze. Sensing what was happening, I entered her mind.

“… how we will communicate,” Hannah was farsending. “But it was necessary for you to come here because of our communications so far. You are, after all, the daughter of the
director of the institute at which kidnapped paranormals are being secretly held, and you have been communicating with and have come to visit the Reichler Clinic from whose destroyed compound they were taken. No matter what you sent me, I have been lukewarm in my enthusiasm. No doubt it frustrated you that I have many times suggested that you are likely to test normal, despite the fact that your e-mails made it clear that you were definitely paranormal.”

“My e-mails.” Cassy gasped aloud.

“Exactly,” Hannah farsent. “But don’t worry. After you communicated with us the first time, we knew there would be official consternation. We set up programs to alter all of your communications before they were logged, and we hacked into your computer to erase all traces of the original messages. What the officials monitoring our incoming e-mails read were the rather fatuous and romantic ideals of a girl who believes herself to be special. Not an uncommon feeling among young women, and one that might be expected of a neglected young woman who is the product of a broken relationship between two busy, rather cold parents with careers, who are less than attentive to their only daughter. Forgive me if this pains you.”

“It … it is only the truth,” Cassy said.

“I am sorry, but the truth is always the best shield for a greater truth. The e-mails I sent you were responses to those false e-mails. Of course, you were careful because the captive paranormals would have warned you to be careful. Nevertheless, we removed even your veiled references to the kidnapped paranormals and your communications with them, because although much time has passed, we do not want the government to guess that we know they destroyed the original Reichler Clinic.”

“It was not the paranormals who warned me to be careful, and it was not because of them that I contacted you …,” Cassy began, her mindvoice clearer as she forgot her self-consciousness in her urgent desire to communicate. “I did not know how to explain without sounding mad, but it was the flamebird—”

“I have some inkling of what you will tell me. But the elevator is coming now, and we must concentrate on our performance for this meeting. The output of the spy eyes and listening devices will be very closely scrutinized because of who you are, and we must give the government nothing upon which to hang their suspicions. You will take various tests that will reveal very slight latent paranormal ability—that you are basically normal. You, of course, will be terribly disappointed. And tomorrow you will console yourself by hiking in the mountains near the entrance to Newrome with a handsome young student of Newrome University who will come this evening to your hotel bar and offer to buy you a drink. But we will speak more of that later. Remember, guard your expression and play your part convincingly, lest you put all of us in danger.”

“Your voice is so … so clear,” Cassy sent.

“In part because I am touching you,” Hannah sent. She released Cassy and stepped forward to press at the panel with apparent impatience. Then her mindvoice came again, but with less strength and clarity. “The closer you are, the easier it is. But rest assured, although my mindvoice may seem strong and clear, with very little training, you will surpass us all.”

“How can you be so sure?” Cassy asked.

“I have seen it,” Hannah said aloud, but softly. Her face was suddenly ineffably sad, and her sadness lapped at me.

I became aware that I was floating. Somewhere in me was a terrible thirst, but before it could surface, I saw that there was a red-haired woman floating in the water beside me. The water about her was red with blood, and I recognized her from Dragon’s comatose dream as the betrayed queen of the Red Land—she whom sea creatures called
Mornir-ma
. In the coma dream, the dying Red Queen had summoned whales to smash the slave ship that had carried her and her little daughter from their land. Then she had called a ship fish to bear Dragon to the nearest land, the west coast. There was no sign of Dragon, though, and as the woman’s blood flowered into the sea about her, I understood that the ohrana of the sea was drinking her spirit.

“Is this the dreamsea?” I asked.

The red-haired woman opened her eyes and looked at me. Then she answered in the bell tones of Ari-noor. “The sea is without end. It ebbs and flows between. It is the place where all things meet and change. It is infinite.”

I am dreaming
, I thought. I began to rise again toward consciousness, but I had too little strength to maintain a shield against the drifting tendrils of dream stuff.

Suddenly I was kneeling in rustling brown and yellow leaves, cupping my hands under a rill of water that bubbled from a cleft in an outcrop of stone. The water was so cold that my palms grew numb as I scooped some to my mouth.

“Do not drink,” commanded a somber voice in my mind.

I spat out the salty water and turned to see the white dog Rasial, who had once been called Smoke. Her white coat glowed in a dappling of light falling through bare branches interlaced overhead, but even as I watched, the sunlight dimmed, mist rose and coiled about the trees, and Rasial
changed. Her coat darkened and roughened until she became dear shaggy Sharna, who had died so many years before, saving my life from Ariel’s maddened wolves at Obernewtyn. Almost before I registered his identity, Sharna’s fur and muzzle shortened, his color deepened, and his ears sharpened until I recognized Jik’s companion, the Herder-bred Darga, whose coming was to mark the beginning of the final phase of my quest as the Seeker.

“Where are you?” I asked, but he only blinked his dark eyes at me.

“Elspeth?”

I turned to find Matthew standing in the thickening mist. His gaze swept over me, partly in wonder and partly in disbelief. “This dinna feel like any dream,” he muttered.

My heart leapt as I understood that he was right. This was not a dream I was experiencing. “I think it is real,” I sent. “I am farseeking you.”

Matthew looked elated, stunned, then confused. “But how can your mind reach me when I am so far away an’ over the sea?”

“I am dreaming, but I think I have drifted onto the dreamtrails. Matthew, listen to me. I, and others at Obernewtyn, have true-dreamed of you, as you have of us. I know where you are and what you are trying to do. I know that Dragon is the Red Queen’s missing daughter, and we will bring her to you as soon as it is possible.”

“Dragon is in a coma,” Matthew said sorrowfully.

“No! She has wakened, though as yet she has no memory of her life before or after the ruins. She has no memory of me or … or you.”

“Perhaps that is best,” he said, and there was pain in his eyes before he vanished.

“Elspeth?”

I turned again in hope, but it was not Matthew this time. It was Rushton, smiling at me from the center of a hot spring veiled in thick white steam. Snow lay deep on the ground, and my boots crunched through it as I walked to the rim of the pool.
This is a memory dream
, I realized. I could have wrenched myself out of it, but how my heart yearned for him as he floated back in the water and bade me join him. For this was a memory of the last time we had been alone together before Rushton had been taken captive by the Herders. I had ridden from a meeting at the Teknoguild caves to meet him at the spring in the foothills of the highest mountains, and we had swum together. I allowed myself to merge with my dream self to more fully experience the memory. Stripping off my clothes, I entered the water, and Rushton’s arms closed possessively about me. But when he kissed me, I did as I had always done when we were so close, drawing back from final surrender, shutting up the core of myself, for how could I surrender my body without surrendering my mind? To lay that bare would mean opening up all that I was, to reveal the quest that lay at the heart of me like a black pearl that none must ever see.

There was hurt in his eyes at my withdrawal, but no reproach. And I saw in the memory, as I had not seen in the moment, that Rushton encompassed my resistance with a grace that I had never noticed, because I had been too busy protecting my secrets. He released me and drew away from me so the misty steam veiled him. Then there was only the mist, caressing my cheeks.

“Rushton!” I croaked.

Tears blurred my eyes, and I knew with sudden, utter clarity that I had been a fool to refuse him then and all the other
times. Was not the song of love like the song of the sea? One must surrender to it to understand it. What would it have mattered if I held my deepest mind apart and allowed him to make love to me? I could have taken comfort from his body, giving him the comfort of mine. What did it matter if that black pearl was kept in a hidden chamber? And the cruel final thought came to me that if I
had
loved him, the memory of that loving might have given him the strength to endure when the Herder priests delved so cruelly inside him.