Waking in Dreamland (43 page)

“You must be exhausted, my dear,” said Colenna.

“Oh, I am,” Leonora said. The arm she had wrapped around Roan’s ribs tightened for a moment in a quiet hug. Then she nestled in more closely. “I’m also a bit sorry to have missed the inn he said we were to have stayed at this evening, with real baths! But I had to get back. I’m part of the group, am I not?”

“Of course!” Roan exclaimed, holding her to his pounding heart with a mixture of delight and dismay. The regret he’d felt at having her depart had changed to guilt. She was at risk again. Should he try to persuade her to turn back on her own? He sought Captain Spar’s eye. The chief guard shook his head no, slowly but sadly. It was no use.

“But you wait until I see Brom again,” Leonora said, and the tone of her voice boded no good for the renegade scientist. “Just wait.”

“How far to this hill?” Felan asked, a few miles down the road. It was growing darker by the moment. “I haven’t galloped at double time all the way from Reverie, but I’m sore, too.”

“Not too far ahead,” Bergold said. “It says it’s just the other side of a small town. Ah! And there’s the town.”

Felan peered at the few little cottages with warm, flickering lights showing in the windows and tiny curls of smoke winding up from the chimneys.

“That’s the minimum definition of a town, as far as I’m concerned,” he said.

“I came from a place like this,” Misha said, defensively. “It functions in every way as a community. You can’t say fairer than that.”

“Ah, well, that’s all that counts,” Bergold said. “It’s as well to live simply, since one never knows what the Sleepers will give or take away next.”

Almost as he said it, the little huts swelled suddenly into huge mansions with gleaming carriage lights and paved areas in front of them, and crowded the small road. Roan caught a glimpse of a big black disk of metal with a skinny metal arm sticking out of it, mounted on a pole in the back yard of one establishment, and a swimming pool in back of another.

“Good heavens,” Leonora said. She was back on her own steed, restored after an application of Roan’s healing salve. “Is this modern, or old-fashioned?”

“Modern, dear,” Colenna replied. “No ornamentation to speak of, you see.”

A man and a woman heard the sound of their passage, and came out to see what was going on. In spite of their grand homes, they were dressed in simple, loose clothes, carefully patched, suitable for working in the field. The man had a peaked cap and a beard. The woman wore a kirtled gown and a cotton scarf on her hair. They stood on the stoop of their great house and watched the party go by as if it were a parade.

“Evening,” Roan called to them.

“Evening, sir,” they called back.

“Brom came this way, sir,” Lum said, scanning the ground. “But we’d better stop soon. I can hardly see the signs.”

“We’re not far away,” Bergold said. “There’s a crossroads, and then the hilltop is along a little way after that.”

“What’s that up ahead?” Colenna said, peering ahead. She lifted her lantern to see, but hardly needed its help. The orange object on the road gleamed brightly, and it had a round barrel light on top that flashed on and off.

“Why, it’s a sawhorse,” Bergold said, as they approached it. “What’s it doing here? There’s no road repairs beyond it. Look.”

“Warning us that there will be some soon?” Felan asked. But the road appeared to be perfectly smooth and in good repair.

“Wait a moment,” Roan said. He spotted something else on the side of the road just short of the barricade, and spurred Cruiser to the front of the line and urged them to halt. Swinging out of his saddle, he went to retrieve the object.

“It looks like a button, dear,” Colenna said over his shoulder.

“It is,” he said, fingering it. There was a strand of thread still caught in the holes. “I wonder how it got here.”

Roan pondered it for a moment longer. He started to put it in his pocket, when a body landed heavily on his back.

“Down, sir!” Lum shouted in his ear, pushing his head down against the pavement. “Everyone, down!”

The others scrambled to the ground, and pulled their beasts with them as a noise like a hundred thunderstorms roared overhead. Roan glanced back to make certain that the other guards were protecting the princess, then buried his head under his arms. Something impacted against the ground not six feet from him with a sucking, devouring sound. He squinted out from under his arm. Where there had been bushes and grass, there was a huge, jagged hole in the ground.

“There it goes!” Misha cried.

Roan and Lum sprang up to see. Roan had seen visible waves of influence before. He’d been inconvenienced by nuisances, and skirted holes in reality, but this was the first time he’d seen one that looked like a hole turned inside out. Against the darkness of oncoming night, it was a greasy mess of glowing color: green, orange, sickly brown and gray, all tied together by a swirling mass of black. It skittered along the ground like a tornado, picking up trees, rocks, grass, and anything else it touched.

“It’s heading toward those houses,” Bergold said.

“Great Sleepers, you’re right!” Roan leaped onto Cruiser, and spurred the steed toward them. “We have to warn those people!”

Cruiser leaped over the trench carved in the road, with only the backward twist of his ears betraying his fear. Roan was too concerned for the fate of the villagers to be worried about himself or his beast. They could always dodge the dancing hunger. The villagers were on foot, and unaware.

“Get out!” Roan shouted, trying to make himself heard over the roar of the wind. “Danger! Get out of your houses! Run away!”

“What?” The man who had come outside to wave at them appeared at the door of his house with a lantern, and leaned out to look. His mouth dropped open. “What in Nightmare’s name is that?”

“Run!” Roan shouted at him, as the hole veered sharply right and made straight for the house. “No, not that way!” he cried, as the man, frightened and disoriented, dropped his lantern and started toward the hole itself. “Stop! Turn away!”

The whirling vacuum split a tree and swallowed half, leaving the torn remainder standing at a cockeyed angle. It carelessly wrenched the corner off a nearby house. Then, it bore down upon the man, who stood looking up at it helplessly as it picked him up. With a wild cry, he disappeared in the swirl of angry color.

“Damon!” His wife ran out of the door to where he had last been standing. She stood on the spot, wringing her hands and crying. “Damon, no! No!”

The hole in reality passed her as if she had been a stranger on the street, and tore through her house. The building shuddered, then exploded outward in a hail of splinters and shards. Roan reached the woman, pulled her up onto Cruiser’s back, and turned the steed out of the path of the debris.

Pieces of house rained down upon them, but the woman didn’t seem to notice. She muttered to herself when Roan set her down in the midst of the group, not looking up at any of them.

“Are you all right?” Leonora asked, coming up to put an arm around the woman’s shoulders.

“He’s gone,” the woman said, staring back over her shoulder at the ruin of her house. Her face was pale with shock.

“He’s gone.”

“You couldn’t stop it,” Leonora said, in a soothing voice. “There’s nothing you can do about influence.”

“Sleeper’s will,” the woman said, blankly.

“That’s right. Someone, find her something to drink,” Leonora said, leading her toward Golden Schwinn. The steed obediently became a bench, and the two of them sat down on it. “How long were you together?”

“All our lives,” the woman said. Then she burst into tears. “Oh, I can’t believe he’s gone!”

“There, there,” Leonora said. She reached into the air for a handkerchief. The woman sobbed into the square of cloth. The princess patted her shoulder and murmured kind words. Colenna filled a tiny silver cup with brandy from her bag, and Leonora urged the woman to drink. She choked down the liquor, and color returned to her face. She had looked forty before. Now she looked eighty.

Roan stood by, speechless in the face of such a tragedy. What could he say to someone who has just lost the most important person in her life? He knew how he would feel. He had had a taste of desolation when Leonora had been taken away from him in Reverie, and never wanted to feel worse than that in his life.

“Let’s find your neighbors, dear,” Colenna said, always ready to cope in a crisis.

“I’ll go,” Spar said, wanting to take any kind of action to help.

“No, send Alette,” Leonora said, appearing plump and motherly. She rocked the grieving woman against her shoulder, letting her cry. The guard sped off in the darkness. “The rest of you, will you find her things?”

Roan hurried off at once. Other villagers started to come out of the other big houses, lanterns and torches in hand. Roan explained the situation to them.

“We’ll take Jennet in, of course,” one woman said. She seemed to be about the same age.

“Better,” said a tall, thin man. “We’ll build her a new house, nicer than the one she had. It’s the least we can do. I’ve got wood I was going to build an addition on with.”

“I’ve got a raft of extra shingles,” another said.

“We have paint,” a woman put in. Suddenly, they were bubbling over with plans as they bustled around picking up Jennet’s scattered possessions. Roan listened to them with admiration. He knew that even if the donations were insufficient, they would burgeon into the right amount for the job to match their donors’ generosity.

When he returned to the others, a couple of neighbor women had taken Leonora’s place, and were comforting their friend.

“That
thing
cannot have been an accident,” Leonora whispered to Roan. “It was waiting for us, wasn’t it? It was Brom’s doing.”

“Almost certainly,” Roan said. “These traps are getting more dangerous each time. I think he’s going mad.”

“It’s full dark, Your Highness,” one of the neighbor women said, coming up and bobbing a curtsey to her. “You ought to come and stay with us. It’d be an honor.”

“Thank you, but we have to go on,” Leonora said, exchanging glances in the torchlight with Roan. He knew the same thought was in her mind as in his. If any more traps had been set for them, she didn’t want them sprung on innocent bystanders, not with such grievous results. She leaned over, took Jennet’s hand and kissed her.

“You have good neighbors,” she said. “They’ll have a new house for you in no time. You’ll be able to pick up and keep going with your life.”

“What’s life without him?” the woman asked, not really caring. “My son has always nagged at us to come and live on the border, where it’s safe. We can get away from Changeover, he said. It’s too late. If Changeover comes, I’ll let it take me.”

“You can’t think that way,” Leonora said, firmly, shifting back to her girlish figure for travel. She squeezed Jennet’s hands. “Please. Don’t let your negative thoughts affect your life. What about your influence? You have some, too. Everyone does.”

“There’s that,” the woman said, drying her eyes. She stood up. “Don’t want to make the crops fail by being negative. My husband would never have stood for that. He always worked so hard.” Her eyes started to well up again, but she dried them, and set her chin, firmly. “Thank you, Your Highness. You’re as good as you are beautiful.”

She kissed the girl on the cheek. The neighbor women led her into another house, where inviting amber lights burned in the ornate glass windows.

“Will that be enough to help her?” Misha asked, watching her shut the door.

“No,” the princess said, sadly, “but it’s all we can do.”

Chapter 28

The action of setting up camp was beginning to settle into a routine, almost pleasant because one knew exactly what was expected of one. Taboret took her assignment from Basil, who was the officer of the day, and began tying together branches for torches to put around the perimeter. Crucible power would soon make them into beautiful iron sconces. The neat and orderly parts of her mind that Taboret knew were indeed her own took pleasure in creating something from raw materials in ways that had been hitherto unknown in the Dreamland. In spite of her misgivings, she was enjoying the use of great power.

The site Brom had chosen for that night’s camp was very comfortable. It was a rounded gully that had been the oxbow joint of a river long ago in some Sleeper’s deep dream. Now the riverbed was dry and full of saplings as narrow as her finger. The ways in and out were very close together, easy to watch and guard.

The fact that they needed to be on guard reminded her that she had once again betrayed the cause. That button she had left behind—who knew what it might have become by way of warning. She hoped someone would see it. Would the police in Reverie have put Roan in jail? Or worse? She’d heard of Durance Vile. Although she didn’t know where it was, the pictures the name had always summoned up in her mind were horrible. Taboret forced the memory of the lost button to the back of her mind, and made herself think harder about her job. Blend with the others, and no one would notice any discrepancy in her thoughts. It was hard, though. Every time Brom turned her way, she expected to hear an accusation. He’d had his eye on her for some time, now. No, she admonished herself, think
sconce
.

She spotted Glinn in the kitchen area. He was piling stones together to make the refectory table and benches. Taboret watched him fondly. They’d been working together for almost a year, and she had never seen him as more than a colleague. How blind she’d been.

He must have sensed her regard even all the way across the camp, because he looked up and smiled directly at her. She felt that little, warm tingle run up and down her skin. Then she felt a surge of panic. What would Glinn do if he knew she was a traitor?

Glinn straightened up and beckoned to her. She shook her head, pretending to have trouble tying up some of the twigs. This was the last torch. When she finished with it, she’d have no excuse not to go and help him. He gave her that silly sideways grin that she had always liked. All right, she’d go, but she promised herself she’d keep a tight rein on her thoughts.