Waking in Dreamland (18 page)

“That’s better, isn’t it?” Roan asked her anxiously.

A good deal of the damage had disappeared, but some of the daisies still had a fundamental wrongness about them: too many petals or the wrong color eye. It would take more thanone healing touch by the Sleepers to correct what had been done here. Over the princess’s head, he and Bergold exchanged glances. They ought to get her away before she saw that the blight had not been cured.

“We must go on,” Roan said, putting his hand under Leonora’s elbow and escorting her quickly back to Golden Schwinn. Once out of sight of the blight, Leonora recovered her dignity, and pulled away from Roan’s grasp.

“Thank you for your courtesy,” she said coldly. “Schwinnie!”

The golden steed withdrew its front tire from where it had been nuzzling up against Cruiser’s, and rolled over to her hand. Leonora put the bicycle between her and Roan and wheeled it away.

Roan gawked at Leonora’s back in dismay, and Bergold pulled him away.

“She’s still not talking to me?” Roan said. “It’s been hours since this morning. What can I do? What should I have done?”

“Oh, come, come, boy,” Bergold said, patiently, hands folded on his round belly. His hair had faded to red and lay slicked back on his head, and his cheeks were pink and plump. “She’s used to better treatment from you. You should have defended her.”

“But she did hold us all up,” Roan said, helplessly. “She made us a promise.”

“And you a man in love,” Bergold said, shaking his head, ambling over to look at the ring of mud, now covered with leggy grass seedlings. Felan sidled up to them.

“What do you suppose this was?” he asked.

“Some kind of privy would be my guess,” Roan said. “It’s handy to the sleeping area—at least, I would guess this is the sleeping area—and downstream from the cooking.”

“Do you suppose they destroyed it to keep us from seeing it, or did it self-destruct on its own?”

“I think that when the energy is used up, their constructions will collapse in on themselves,” Colenna said, standing in the middle of the clearing with her arms wrapped around herself.

“Beware the arrogance of waste.”

“And what do you think about all this?” Felan asked Roan, indicating the area around them with a very small gesture, so as not to alarm the princess further. Leonora was by herself at the end of the glade. Very casually, Captain Spar had gestured to Alette to stay behind the princess and keep an eye on her. Roan approved.

“Something Brom is doing is perverting the landscape wherever they go,” Roan said, keeping his voice low. One of the daisies near his feet abruptly dropped all its petals. Roan and Felan exchanged a glance, and Roan exerted a modicum of influence to reattach them. “I observed it when I was following him before,” he said. “Things twist where they have passed.”

“But will this mess ever go away?” Felan asked. “You saw the wind of change. It erased very little of this desecration! I’m afraid of something that can cause damage even the Sleepers can’t undo.”

“It’ll take a while for it to heal,” Bergold said, placidly. “If not today, then one day.”

“Most alarming,” Felan commented. “What if they do this to the rest of the Dreamland, Mistress Colenna? They’re natural beings, too. Isn’t what they do part of the Sleepers’ plan?

“If we are meant to stop them, we will,” Colenna said, heavily, with a lecturer’s air. “If we do not, then that is also the Sleepers’ intention. But I believe that if we do not meddle, we will see the Sleepers’ design more perfectly.”

“It must be very comforting to have everything set out so clearly for you,” Felan said, disgustedly. “Brom doesn’t seem to buy into your view of the world. What if they make the Sleepers wake up?”

“That, too,” Colenna said, sadly. “It’s not our choice, nor our right to change things.”

“But it is Brom’s?”

“I didn’t say that! We will try to stop him. If we can’t, that is fate.”

Roan had been brought up by a strictly traditional historian, but he was encouraged to think his own way. He did not agree with Colenna, but now was not the time to say so.

“Look!” Bergold said, uncovering a small nest in the grass.

Hidden under a broadleafed weed, it resembled a small, gray, folded box formed of chewed fibers. Inside it were scores of tiny paperclips the length of Roan’s fingernail. Bergold picked a few out of the box and squinted closely at them. The others, hearing the outcry, clustered around Bergold and his discovery.

“What is it?” Lum asked.

“Paperclips!” Roan said. “Brom picked up bicycles here. Look for a trail. Not footprints—tire prints. They aren’t on foot any more.” Bergold peered at the box closely, then opened his pocket gazetteer.

“What’s curious is that these aren’t native to this area,” the historian said. “They’re not mountain bikes at all. See?” He showed them colored plates of comparable species. “These are all-terrain clips. They’ve been newly laid.”

“Couldn’t some passing bird or a picnicker have dropped a single clip in the grass . . . ?” Leonora began, but let her voice die away. She knew better.

“There has to be a significant mass of clips,” Misha reminded her, gravely, “otherwise, nothing will happen. One is not enough to engender others.”

“They brought the progenitors with them from Mnemosyne,” Roan said, his heart sinking. “Matured in a single night.” The advantage of speed he hoped to have over the group of scientists was lost.

“My respect for Brom grows,” Bergold said, tucking the tiny wires back into the box and shutting it. “I hope that he’s not as good at waking people up as he is at planning an expedition, or we’re doomed.”

Without another word, Spar, Lum, Felan, and Misha ran for their bicycles, and pedaled hastily off in opposite directions to seek out the trail. But it was Colenna who found the way, leading away northeast behind the table rock.

“Wasteful,” she said, shaking her head, as she looked back at the clearing. “They destroy so much, and for so little reason.”

“They want to wake up the Sleepers just to answer a question,” Roan said, pedaling after her.

“I didn’t want to go on a cross-country journey,” Felan said, once the party was well on its way. This new road was bound on both sides by eight-foot-high hedges, rendering invisible anyone who passed. “We should have caught up with them by now. Where in the Seven’s names are they going?”

“The Hall of the Sleepers,” shouted Spar. “Or so they said.”

“But where is that? It isn’t on any map we have.”

“I’ve been thinking that over for the past twenty-four hours,” Roan said, pedaling hard. “I have a theory. We have to think as Brom did where the Hall must lie. What do we know about the Sleepers?”

“There are seven of ’em,” Lum said helpfully. “Not the same ones all the time. Each of them dreams a province.”

“Yes,” Bergold said. “From the earliest records we have, once humans began to differentiate between the provinces, they discovered that there were seven overminds. That has never been disputed. Seven is an important number in the Dreamland. Er . . . observers found that the provinces suffered Changeover independently, that those who fled over the ravines and rivers from a changing land to a stable one remained as they had been. In a Changeover transition, the whole character of a province alters. All the provinces are different from one another except where they are the same, generally indicating similar experiences.”

“The Sleepers, their number and their character, if not the individuals themselves, have remained unchanged in all of history, correct?” Roan asked.

“Correct.”

“So we are looking for something that hasn’t changed,” Roan said.

Felan blew out his lip derisively.

“But everything in the Dreamland alters over time. Gold mines become sandstone caves; houses, palaces, and hovels interchange freely; birds and bees can mate because they’re both airborne creatures.”

“But what doesn’t change?” Roan urged him.

“Nothing,” Felan said, flatly.

“What?” Misha asked, becoming interested in the story.

“The borders,” Roan said. “But most significantly of those, the mountains. I would bet that the Mysteries haven’t altered substantially since the beginning of time. The Dreamland, for all its mutability, has a fixed, natural boundary.”

“We have visitors all the time from the other realms,” Felan pointed out.

“Yes, one can cross the Mysteries, but I’d bet you can’t change them,” Roan said. “They’re as eternal as . . .”

“. . . As your face,” Felan said, offensively. “So what?”

“Brom is going to the mountains,” Roan said, ignoring the man’s supercilious grin to address the others. “The Hall of the Sleepers must be beneath them.”

“The mountains!” Leonora exclaimed, surprised into speaking. She gave Roan a withering glance, and looked away hastily, her lips pressed together.

“Yes, but which ones?” Colenna asked. “Toward which range are they headed?”

“Surely the ancient names hold some significance,” Bergold said. “Those, too, have remained constant in the historical records since the beginning of recorded time. Let me see, there are the Deep Mysteries, the High Mysteries, the Sacred Mysteries, the Dark Mysteries—”

“—The Great Mysteries, the Lesser Mysteries, and the Forbidden Mysteries,” Misha interrupted, eagerly. “They’re all as different as the Seven themselves.” He glanced back and ahead at the others. “Right?”

“Yes, of course. We all took geography in school. So which one is the Hall in?” Felan asked.

“I haven’t a clue,” Bergold said, simply, raising his palms. “They’re all equal and equally different.”

“I don’t know, either,” Roan said. “I was hoping some of you could offer suggestions.”

“Oh, that’s fine,” Felan said, in disgust, dropping back in the file. “I’m none the wiser.” At the head of the line, Colenna snorted.

“Did no one ever observe a difference in the amount of influence issuing from a particular mountain range?” Roan asked.

“There’s nothing like that in the history books at all,” Bergold said, consulting his book. “No records. That’s why I was surprised you suggested such a thing, but it makes good sense.”

“Think, everyone,” Roan said. He brooded over Cruiser’s handlebars, trying to recall all the things he’d learned in school. Bergold paged through his small book, muttering to himself.

“Look, sir,” Lum said, his brows drawn down in thought, “no matter what, if you ride outward from the center, you’ll hit some mountains. What if they’re all alike, like that Déjà Vu we went through? Can’t we just head for the perimeter of the Dreamland, and it won’t matter where we arrive?”

“The mountains
aren’t
all alike,” Spar put in, speaking for the first time. “I was brought up near the Ancient Mysteries, in Elysia province. My dad took us to see the Dark Mysteries, and the big Sea there. You couldn’t mistake one for the other.”

“But form only follows function,” Misha argued, pedaling up beside the guard captain. “There are many influences on a geographic feature, including the mood of the Sleepers themselves. Inside, they might be all the same as each other.”

“The mountains
don’t
change,” Spar said. “They are as they are, and always have been.”

“That brings me to a most unfortunate conclusion,” Roan said, glumly, staring at the nut that fastened Cruiser’s handlebars. “It won’t be possible to beat Brom to his destination, because we have no way of guessing where he’s going. We simply have to keep following him. I hope we never find out where they intend to go, because I mean to stop them before they get there.”

“Seconded,” Captain Spar said. “
That’s
something I can understand.”

“Hear, hear,” the others chimed in.

“But I don’t want to go on another wild-goose chase,” Felan said. “Are we absolutely sure they went this way?”

A small creature flashed across the road and into the underbrush as the bicycles approached it. Before it disappeared, Roan caught a glimpse of a cardinal’s red crest and belly and yellow beak, and the brown paws and fluffy tail of a squirrel.

“Yes,” he said. “I’m sure.”

As they rode on, Roan tried to make small talk with the princess. She may have been riding beside him, but she occupied the precise middle of her lane as if the road was only that wide and nothing existed to her right but the hedgerow. Even Golden Schwinn stayed aloof from Cruiser, and the two of them had been fast friends since they were coat-hangers. Leonora continued to make vivacious conversation with the others—but she sounded
too
bright and cheery. She was still angry with him, and wanted him to know it.

Roan felt sorry for himself, but he began to wonder if he was the most at fault. Considering they had vowed eternal devotion to one another, she had a right to be angry that he didn’t defend her in front of the others. He wished she would give him a chance to earn her forgiveness. Though the day was sunny, it was a cold ride for him. He felt the temperature of the air drop farther every time she glanced his way.

This behavior of hers was odd. He knew Leonora had suffered worse snubs over the years. Her lessons in diplomacy had forced her into situations with visiting dignitaries that were outright insulting, and yet she carried herself with friendly aplomb. He knew she knew he hadn’t meant to hurt her feelings. There had to be more to her mood than one tiny, inadvertent pause.

With a mental slap to his forehead, he understood. The princess was scared. She was frightened and overwhelmed by Brom’s threat, and must have been terrified at leaving the safety of her home for the unknown. He’d agreed to allow her to come along, but hadn’t been any help to her in adjusting. Roan felt even worse than when he’d only believed she was angry. For many years he had traveled all over the Dreamland, encountering perils and relying upon his wits to escape them. She never had gone anywhere with fewer than ten servants and a whole train of baggage animals. She had willingly brought only her nurse with her—almost more of a security blanket than a host to care for her. This was the first night out from under a roof she had ever spent without her own pavilion, a beautiful tent as well-appointed as the palace, and without being surrounded by her father’s courtiers. And now, she had dispensed even with her nurse. It was an act of the utmost faith in his leadership.