Waking in Dreamland (8 page)

He snatched back his hands, clutching the stinging gouges. If he’d been an ordinary Dreamlander, he could have stretched his own skin over the scratches, closing them instantly. Instead, he plucked a leaf off a nearby tree and formed it into a bandage and plastered it on. The maze was determined to keep him trapped. It would force him to use influence until he was exhausted. It might never let him free. The scientists would reach the Hall of the Sleepers in the Mystery Mountains, and the party that was supposed to be following him would never know what had become of him until the day they found his pitiful skeleton hidden in the maze, if the Dreamland wasn’t destroyed in the meanwhile by Brom’s heinous experiment. He heard faint voices coming from the direction of the castle. Others were coming out to aid in the search. He cried out for help. Oh, why hadn’t he left the trail of stones, as he’d promised?

The hollies, sensing his panic, rustled fearsomely and began to close in on him. Mustering his strength, Roan made the hedge in front of him solidify so that he could climb it. Ignoring the pain in his hands and face where more sharp branches lashed him, he gained the top, and stood swaying on the twigs, trying to see the way out. Another hedge, a foot higher, hemmed in the one he was standing on. Roan leaped onto it, swayed, then jumped down onto the next row of bushes, several feet shorter. It immediately started to grow taller. Roan bounded off and onto the springy twigs of a rectangular-clipped yew that soared upward, flattening him against the sky.

The maze had gone mad, Roan thought, peering down over the edge of the yew. He had been thrust so high up the rest of the garden looked like an embroidery pattern on green linen. Raising his eyes, he gazed out of the castle grounds. The desert motif persisted beyond the gates. The city of Mnemosyne seemed to have vanished. And, among the undulating sand dunes and knots of palm trees to the east, he thought he could see the darker line of a trail, but not close to the castle. He strove to make out more, but the yew continued to push him upward, maybe clean out of the atmosphere. The sky darkened as the air grew thinner. Roan gasped for breath.

“All right!” he rasped. “You win! I offer respect to your . . . to your superior strategic abilities. You’ve made a puzzle I can’t escape from. Now, put me down! Please!”

His last word came out as a squeak. The yew stopped growing so abruptly that inertia almost propelled Roan up and off his precarious perch. He squeezed his eyes shut and dug his fingers into the mass of sharp-smelling needles as the yew began to drop. Roan’s stomach turned over twice on the long descent. He’d never known the gardens to behave like this before. He wondered if it was a reaction to the power of the crucible, or another trap left behind by Brom.

Just above ground level, the yew tilted, and Roan tumbled off into the grass, which fluffed itself up to catch him. Brushing himself off, he rose to his feet. The yew was already scampering off toward the other end of the garden to fill in a gap between two others of its kind, and the grass settled back to its normal inch-and-a-half height like a bird flipping its feathers into place. Before Roan, the rest of the hedges opened into a straight aisle, leading directly for the castle gates, which lay open.

“Just like that, eh?” he asked. The grass rustled to itself, seeming pleased.

Without further hesitation, Roan dashed to get out of the maze before it changed its mind.

The riddle of the missing sentries was solved as soon as Roan set foot beyond the walls. Two huge dogs charged toward him, barking furiously. He jumped back and threw up his arms to protect his face. Just before they reached him, each dog seemed to be jerked sharply backward by its neck. They fell to the ground, whimpering. Roan gawked, then realized their collars were fastened to very short, heavy chains attached to bolts in the wall. They had just enough slack to work up speed without being able to reach anyone who walked between them.

Recognizing Roan, the sentry-dogs rose to their haunches and whined for help. Roan tore at the buckles on their collars, but found that they had been welded shut, as had the links of the chains, and the bolts holding them to the walls. No amount of influence seemed to budge either steel or leather. Brom had used crucible power stronger than any one being’s strength. Roan could not open them. Time was fleeing before him. He had to go.

“I am sorry, my friends,” he said, looking into the dogs’ sad brown eyes. He could see their embarrassment and disgrace. “I can’t stop to help you. I have to catch the ones who did this to you. The Dreamland itself is at stake.”

As one, both dogs sprang up and stretched out noses and forepaws, pointing to the east. Roan stood up and squinted under his hand into the lengthening shadows. The tracks he had seen before were just visible as dark depressions on the sand.

“Thank you!” he said, patting both sentries on the head. “Others will follow me soon to help you.”

Roan pulled a handful of colored pebbles from his pocket and dropped one on the threshold. He pitched three back toward the castle door so there’d be something for others to follow when they came out at last. He started walking east.

The soft, fine sand made the going unexpectedly difficult. At each step, Roan’s boots sank in to the ankle, making every yard an effort, and every mile an agony. The sun was no longer directly overhead, but the sand and the sky were still hot and dry. His face was hot, and his lips were dry and beginning to crack. Roan’s only consolation was that his quarry would find it harder going than he did, burdened as they were with the Alarm Clock. He hoped the Sleeper’s mood would pass soon, and leave the landscape a nice open grassland, or something, so he could catch up faster. It was already late afternoon. He had little time to find them before dark.

As if teasing him for his thought, a stray breeze whipped up a small sand cloud. Roan covered his face with his arm and squinted out over the top of his sleeve. A shadow on the crest of a dune to his right caught his eye, and he stumbled forward.

The scientists had managed to eradicate their trail close to the castle, but they had given up disguising their tracks after some ninety paces. Roan had to do some to-ing and fro-ing to find the first trace. Yes, here again was his old friend the Alarm Clock bearer with his slippery shoe. The dust devils were erasing the trail less energetically now, but most of it, leading roughly southward, was still easy to discern. Roan hurried his pace, driving his feet deeper into the sand, until a stitch in his side reminded him that he had a long way to go. Surely, the bicycles would return soon, and the others could catch up with him.

Roan dropped a blue glass pebble to mark his trail, then hurriedly stooped to retrieve it when a passing breeze buried it under a film of sand. That wouldn’t do. He molded the glass bead between his hands until it formed an arrow-shaped sign on a post, and set it firmly into the path. His worried thoughts became a litany as he ran. The whole fabric of life as he knew it could be destroyed. Precious life, sweet as birdsong, as honey-scented as hay and wildflowers, as exciting as wind in the face as he hurtled down a snowy slope on skis. Roan sighed with a desperate feeling in his belly, wondering if he would be too late. What would discontinuation feel like? He’d lived unscathed through regional Changeovers, but what would happen when all of reality was rent asunder? His hands shook a little, and he nearly dropped the arrow he was making.

Brom’s audacity still astounded Roan. Was such a thing as he proposed possible? No one had ever dared to find, let alone approach, the Hall of the Sleepers with such a purpose in mind. If, that is, it existed at all. Indeed, the Hall had become a legend. But considering the power of people to shape their own reality, were the scientists merely creating the Hall from sheer will? No, Roan corrected himself. He must not let circumstances lead him to question his faith. He believed in the Sleepers. He’d had plenty of time to think while out on the road by himself, and nothing else he had ever heard would explain the randomness of life. Reality was so strange that it couldn’t have happened by accident.

Now past the initial shock of Brom’s abrupt disappearance, Roan began to reason logically. Where could he be going? In all of history, no one had ever reported stumbling upon the secret place of the Sleepers. For the sake of their creation, the Sleepers needs must be well sheltered from intrusion. But Roan had heard conflicting learned arguments about their location, and assumed Brom knew the same ones. The Sleepers couldn’t be in the midst of the mutability they inflicted upon the landscape. In thousands of years, the Hall had never been revealed by shifting terrain. Therefore, in Roan’s opinion, the Hall almost certainly had to be somewhere in the Mystery Mountains, the only thing that had never changed—but where? Whole ranges in the skyscraping massif that circumscribed the Dreamland were still terra incognita. But to outrun pursuit, Brom would have to make as directly for the theoretical location of the Hall as the terrain permitted.

Roan could understand overwhelming curiosity; he himself was afflicted with it. It was more difficult to comprehend always wanting to break something to see what it was made of. Surely there were other ways to test the theory. The lack of regard that Brom and his apprentices had for the lives of others in the Dreamland made Roan’s blood chill. They would happily sacrifice everyone else just to satisfy their
own
desire to know what happened.

Roan’s feet started to ache. He opted for more comfortable shoes, trading his black boots for sandproof, white running shoes that cradled his feet and gave more support to his arches. These shoes had changed so many times in his travels that he had trouble remembering that they’d been made as riding boots years before. He mentally tied the laces and double-knotted them for security, then glanced down, all the while walking. Much more comfortable. He pitied the people who couldn’t form dreamstuff for their convenience. He saw them all the time. They lived in strange, stilted houses made of leftovers that mutated whenever the winds of change blew through. These were the people who came and went when Changeovers occurred. They didn’t have influence enough to control what happened to them. In theory, the strong might survive, but would be altered beyond recognition. What would become of them if all the Sleepers were awakened? What would happen to him, the changeless one? Would he float, unaltered, in space, waiting for a new reality solid enough for him to stand on? Could he die of suffocation? Would the very air vanish? It was fascinating to speculate, but it simply must not happen. The Dreamland must be preserved. Roan vowed to use everything in his power to prevent disaster from coming true.

The lengthening shadows actually made it easier to follow the tracks in the sand. It was so quiet he heard a drop of perspiration creep from under his hair and roll down his neck. Roan took off his hat and stretched out the rear and side brim so it shielded the back of his neck and right ear from the sun. How silent the sky was, and how strange that he still hadn’t seen another living soul, except the plants and the two dog-sentries. It seemed as if everything had been frightened away by the Alarm Clock.

How long could the bearers keep going under the obvious weight of their burden? Even if they were possessed of new and extraordinary power, they were still human beings. They tired. Was this a weakness in the crucible that Roan could exploit? Sooner or later they would have exhausted all their physical and mental strength, and stop to rest. He would catch them then. Roan stumbled to a halt at the top of a dune and surveyed the rolling desert ahead of him.

In the meanwhile, the scientists were revealing their considerable power. That they had led him along a substantial detour through the maze, walked hidden in plain sight, altered the sentries and attached them by unbreakable bonds to their posts, while all the time maintaining creditable speed overland showed impressive reserves of strength. All this had been accomplished in at most an hour since Brom’s startling presentation and pronouncement. Roan felt that he would almost like to try the crucible process once to see how it felt. The younger scientists had looked frightened, exalted, amazed, and proud all at the same time. And they had summoned a dragon, something no single person except possibly the king could have done on his own! Was the sum of the parts that much greater than that of each individual? What a wonder they had discovered! It was a pity that they chose to use it for such an ill purpose.

The trail was more marked on the leeward side of the high, dun slope. Roan took the steep path downward with his weight on his heels. It seemed clear now that the scientists were making south for the Nightmare Forest. Roan felt the familiar uneasiness rise as he contemplated having to pass through the forest, even on a desperate mission. He wanted badly to catch them before they reached it. He could see no one ahead of him, but as they were capable of making themselves invisible, the fact didn’t distress him. He would know them by their footprints.

The terrain flattened out into a sculpted, undulating, endless plain made of harder sand that held footprints better. His quarry’s steps were growing shorter. They were already tiring in the heat. So was Roan. His mouth was dry, and a crust of light sand had begun to form around his eyes and nostrils. He brushed at his face with a dusty hand.

The air ahead shimmered like the steam over the mouth of a kettle. He couldn’t fail to catch up with Brom now, unless—

The end of the thought, “. . . unless they had left guards behind on the trail,” was cut off when something heavy dropped upon him from behind. Roan stumbled forward onto his hands and knees. He was too late to see the trap before he fell into it.

Chapter 7

Roan felt a certain measure of admiration for Brom. Once again, the chief scientist had proved he had thought two steps ahead of everyone else. If anyone had managed to see through the subterfuge of the maze, there was a backup plan in place. The scientists had prepared well. They must have been watching Roan come ever since he crested the last dune.