Waking in Dreamland (36 page)

Misha shook his head. “In a city this size, travelers come and go all the time.”

“That big a group and that thing they’re carrying will be hard to forget,” Felan said. “And, there’s the distortion it causes.”

“Easier to hide in a town than in the countryside,” Misha argued.

“I won’t forget those daisies,” Leonora said, with a shudder.

“It’s a matter of distance,” Bergold said, reasonably, closing the map down to show a larger scale of the area. He pointed out several routes with his fingernail. “If he does pass through Reverie instead of skirting it, he’ll cut down his travel time. We’d have to go all around the perimeter and hope we find his trail. In town, his exits are finite. We stand a better chance of finding him.”

“All we can do is ask,” Roan said. “We can always backtrack if we are wrong.”

They asked a woman wheeling a baby carriage, but she shook her head no, and kept walking without looking up. The baby shrugged and offered Roan a look of sympathy. The party reached the end of the street near the church without finding anyone who had seen Brom, the litter or a gang of motorcycles.

“Perhaps we should find out where the marketplace is,” Colenna said. “If they’re buying supplies, it’s the most logical place to try.”

“We’re on the way to it,” Bergold said, struggling with the map. Hutchings took it out of his hands and folded it to the correct plate. He handed it back, trying not to look triumphant. “Thank you. That’s better. You can only go one way on this street. Do you see? There are no other outlets. Straight up this street, and first right.”

“We should get valuable leads there,” Spar said.

“And we can get some supplies for ourselves,” Colenna said. Felan looked daggers at her. They fell short, clattering to the ground. Bergold stopped suddenly and put out his arms to halt the others.

“Uh-oh,” the senior historian said, despair in his voice.

“We’re in trouble now.”

“Do you see Brom?” Roan asked, squinting into the crowd.

“No, it’s worse,” Bergold said. “Look. It’s a bookstore. A big one.”

“Oh, no!”

Roan stared up at the brightly colored sign hanging over the sidewalk only twenty yards ahead. A bookstore! It was the biggest hazard of any town. What could they do? The route they needed to take to the market led directly past it. He made as if to turn the party back and lead them on a more circuitous route, when the expandable aura of pleasure and joyful anticipation the bookstore exuded engulfed him. The smell of coffee wafted past his nose. He rotated on his heel, facing the bright sign again, his mind clouding.

How nice it would be, he thought, just to browse for a while, perhaps sit and drink a cup of coffee and read . . . No! What was he thinking? He was on an important mission! He had to save the Dreamland! Perhaps there were how-to books on heroism in the sociology section. . . .

The others were falling under the spell, too. The pupils of Leonora’s green eyes spread across the irises as she stared at the sign. Bergold was shifting his shoulder bag as if to judge whether there’d be some room in it for a volume or two. They all moved a step closer, and had the opposite foot raised to take the next step. Roan tugged them back, and the spell broke momentarily.

“This must be a very good store,” Leonora said, clasping her hands around Roan’s upper arm. “I can feel the urge from here. Hold on to me or I’ll fall in.”

“So will I,” Bergold said. “We’ve got to help one another.”

The urge to go inside was overwhelmingly powerful. The siren call of the books was such a loud howling in his ears that Roan put his hands up to stop them. Leonora put her head down against his shoulder, her eyes screwed shut. If they fell into the bookstore, they’d be trapped for hours, pulled along by sheer curiosity to scan every title, or draw an especially tempting book off a shelf and read, lulled by a hypnotic, lazy atmosphere to forget about the cares of the outside world. Their cause would be lost.

Roan felt himself inching forward again, his feet moving of their own volition on the pavement. Stop! he thought at them. Stop! They could not afford to lose the day. Brom was near, Roan could sense it. The Dreamland, he had to think of the Dreamland, and the threat of the Alarm Clock! But no, his feet refused to pass, started to turn in towards the doorway.

“We’ll all join arms,” Roan said, taking Colenna’s elbow. She attached herself to Spar. Bergold took Leonora’s other arm, and Misha held on to him. “We’ll run across quickly. That way, we won’t get sucked inside.”

“Hold tight,” Lum said, as the other guards linked arms.

“Ready?”

“Ready!” Bergold said. They were within inches of the glass-and-green-paneled doors. The pull was so strong. “One, two, three,
go
!”

Roan launched himself forward. As the group hurled themselves past the doorway, they caught the full brunt of

the attraction.

Succumb, the wordless song said. You know you want to. Everything else can wait. The smell of coffee tantalized, cushions beckoned, the bright colors danced, book blurbs whispered in their ears. Roan nearly hesitated in mid-dash. He could feel the others faltering.

“Help,” Colenna moaned.

“Right, then,” Spar said, stoutly. As usual, the guard captain seemed unaffected by the unseen forces that paralyzed everyone else. Spar marched firmly to the other side of the bookstore entrance, pulling his end of the line of people with him. He set his heels against a paving stone, and heaved. The others came flying toward him like corks out of a bottle. Roan stumbled to a halt, trying to cushion Leonora from running into the wall. He panted with the exertion, a bead of sweat running down into his eyes. Felan stood, gasping.

“There, now, you’re safe,” Spar said, putting an arm around Colenna. “Are you all right? My lady?”

Colenna leaned on his arm with a wordless smile, and Leonora nodded.

“My gratitude, Captain,” Roan said. His throat felt dry from the cappuccino fumes.

“All part of the job,” Spar said. He tucked Colenna’s hand into his elbow, and marched forward, his spine proudly erect.

It was only a little easier to walk away from the entrance than it had been to resist walking toward it. All around them on the street were dozens of others without the captain’s iron self-control. Roan feared for them. Some were clinging to lampposts, fire hydrants, and each other, in an attempt to resist. A woman, innocently walking a poodle on the other side of the street, was swept up by the seductive force and carried helplessly inside, the dog yelping behind her.

“It could have been us,” Felan said, sadly, watching her sail past.

“Come on,” Roan said, striding onward. “We shouldn’t tarry. It could pull us back.”

The outside wall of the bookstore was full of small glass display windows. In the case just ahead of him, Roan noticed a title out of the corner of his eye, and turned his head to see. “The Book of Love,” the gaudy cover read. A good omen, Roan thought, squeezing the princess’s hand in the crook of his arm. He continued to step purposefully forward, then had a sudden and irresistible urge to see the author’s name. He stopped in front of the window. The title was perfectly clear, but the bottom of the book was fuzzy, as if someone had smeared soap across it. He started put his hand through the glass of the window to open the cover and read the title page, when a cry startled him, and the glass turned invincibly solid. He snatched back his hand.

“Come on,” Bergold called. “The bookshop’s just eaten another pedestrian!”

“Don’t go back,” Leonora pleaded, holding on to him.

Now I’ll never know, he thought.

Chapter 23

“No, haven’t seen any strangers but you,” said a man on the street corner. The light changed, and the box on the opposite corner said Don’t Walk, so he ran across, and every car, carriage, and bicycle missed him, clearing the crosswalk just as he reached them.

“No one like that,” said a flower woman, offering them each a daisy. Roan accepted his and handed it to Leonora. Spar looked sharply at the flower seller, and back at each of his guards to make sure they wouldn’t do anything so nonmilitary as taking a flower from an unvetted civilian. The woman gave them a beautiful smile anyhow.

“Oh, yes, I saw them,” said a seller of bread, changing a French loaf into breadsticks for a woman customer. “They asked me where to find a bicycle repair shop. I told them to go that way.” He pointed a breadstick toward a street leading west.

“Thank you,” Roan said, shooting an eager glance at his companions. The baker nodded and handed his customer a handful of breadcrumbs change.

“The weirdness, sir. It’s fresh,” said Lum, in great excitement. He indicated light-colored bricks full of holes in the wall at the opening of an alley. Roan examined them, and took a sniff. Yes, they were made of fresh Swiss cheese.

“The crucible must have passed by very recently,” Bergold said, looking about, “since no one has yet noticed the damage and repaired it.”

“Very recently,” Roan exclaimed. He had caught movement out of the corner of his eye and turned to look at it. He pointed down the alley. “There!”

Several hundred yards ahead, but still unmistakable was the humped silhouette he had been seeing in his nightmares: the Alarm Clock on its litter.

“Right! After them!” Spar said, drawing his sword. He whistled for the bicycles. “You ride straight that way, sir. Alette, with me to the left. Lum, you take Hutchings around the right. We split up, and we’ll have ’em. Go!”

They swung into the saddle, and started pedaling. Roan, Misha, and Bergold were right behind them, pumping for all they were worth. Brom would not escape them this time.

“Hey, wait for me!” Felan shouted.

“We’ll stay here!” Colenna called after them.

The guards peeled off in opposite directions at the first corner, leaving the four men riding along the narrow lane after the bobbing shape of the litter. Roan felt a moment of dread, remembering the last time he had faced the power of the gestalt. Did even eight brave souls have the strength to defeat Brom?

Reverie was a different proposition than Hark. The people who lived here had more influence, and therefore more command over their surroundings. Roan passed through sections of quiet where his tires and even his breathing made no noise on the brick street. Those passages were brief, however, and Roan feared that the noise they made would alert Brom that he was being followed. He kept the dread shape in sight. They would catch Brom now.

They came closer and closer to the litter. The lane opened up into a street, and Roan could see the group ahead of him more clearly. He counted between eight and a dozen people, all on motorcycles. Roan had seen motorcycles before, but never so many of them in one place at one time. The gestalt, again, altering the Dreamland’s reality by concentrating too many modern things in one place. In a moment, dinosaurs would start walking the quiet streets of this town, to try and rebalance the proportions of nature. They must stop Brom and break the Alarm Clock up.

The silhouette of the litter veered to the right into a wide square full of neatly clipped grass and large buildings. Women in short uniforms and men in high-collared white tunics pushed invalids to and fro in Bath chairs. A sign on the side of the street advised,
Quiet, Hospital Zone
. The loud motors and wide tires disrupted the very air as Brom passed, shaking reality until some of the nurses were in the wheelchairs, and the patients, clad in short hospital gowns, were pushing them. Flowers were plowed up from the gardens in the square and flew in all directions.

By the time Roan and the others came through, the silence had reasserted itself aggressively. Even though the air was still filled with flying blossoms and dirt Roan thought had never been anywhere so quiet. Every sound they made was exaggerated. Their breathing was the rasping of saws on wood. Roan could swear he heard Bergold blink. When Misha raised a hand to bat away an airborne rose, it sounded like he’d hit a fly ball out of a park full of sports fans. The whine of their narrow racing tires roared as loudly as Skor’s truck engine. Roan willed the air onto the outside of his tires so as to make them run silently, and gestured to the others to do the same.

Ahead of them, only three blocks ahead, the litter bearers rolled to a halt. The gaunt figure that was Brom stood up on his pedals to look both ways along the intersection.

Roan felt a thrill of anticipation. Riding on air, he knew he could catch them by surprise. He dodged a bunch of flying daisies. Where were Spar and the guards? Were they near enough to prevent the Alarm Clock from escaping? Two blocks. One block. Roan readied himself to jump off Cruiser’s back onto Brom’s motorbike. Catch the ringleader, and the others would be easily subdued. Could he get close enough to spring? Half a block. Six houses.

Only yards away from their quarry, Felan reached over and tapped Roan on the shoulder.

“I’m going to sneeze,” he whispered, holding his nose.

“Don’t!” Roan whispered back urgently. “Not a sound!”

“I can’t help it,” Felan hissed. “I’m allergic to flowers. I know I’m going to. I . . . uh . . . I . . .”

“Get out of this street,” Roan said, looking for an alley or a doorway to push the man into, but there was nowhere to go where he couldn’t be seen or heard. Felan’s face wrinkled up, his nose twitched, and his mouth opened. “Don’t do it!”

“Too la—” Felan sputtered. “
HACHOO!
”

The sneeze sounded like an explosion, even drowning out the idling motorcycles. In unison, all of Brom’s minions turned their heads to see what was behind them.

“That’s done it,” Roan said, abandoning stealth. No time to wait for the guards. “Charge!”

He and the others pumped their pedals to catch up with the bearers. Before Roan crossed the twenty yards separating them, a flash of white light flared, blinding them. He threw up his arm across his eyes. Cruiser squeaked alarm. When his eyes recovered, there was no one on the street but them. Roan pedaled to the intersection, but it was hopeless. The Alarm Clock was gone.

“Did you see them?” Glinn said, urging his steed up beside Brom’s. Taboret was close enough behind him to see the glow in Brom’s eyes turn to red flame.