Waking in Dreamland
Waking in Dreamland
Roan began to reexamine the courtyard with more care. He doubted Brom and his minions had set off underground, because no one had sensed any seismic disturbance, neither in the midst of the crucible's demonstration, nor in the uproar that followed. Carrying the Alarm Clock, they had to have taken the train, flown, or walked. If they went by train, it would be no trouble to send a message ahead and have the locomotive stopped at once, so Roan knew Brom would never risk that mode of transportation. If the scientists had chosen air, he should be able to find the spot where their trail ended as they boarded their craft. Signs of their departure must be here for him to discover. All he had to do was put the clues together. They had to pull reality around themselves to hide, but he was sure they hadn't thought to hide their footprints. As soon as their clouding influence had passed, such things would emerge. He walked, bent over, scanning the expanse of crushed stone.
Out of the corner of his eye, he noticed a deeper depression than most in the gravel. Roan guessed, by digging his own foot into the gravel beside it, that it must have been made when one of the bearers of the Alarm Clock slipped, twisting his heel. The tracks around that single print were a jumble, but it gave him a direction in which to search. Carefully, he followed the pointing foot outward, toward the palace gardens. He kept the colored stones in his pocket. Within the grounds, he would call for help if he managed to corner the scientists. He was no coward, but the prospect of trying to handle Brom and his crucible alone was daunting. Such seemingly limitless power! Roan was the equal of some of the most powerful minds in the Dreamland, but how could he withstand the combined strength of a group? Such a thing had never been known, in all of history.
The path Roan was following stopped at a chest-high hedge that formed a T-junction to the left and right. The left led to the ornamental rose gardens and to the kitchen garden beyond. The right went only to the Royal Maze. But it was possible they hadn't taken either path at all. Two people bearing a heavy load between them couldn't possibly step over the hedge and keep their balance unless they lengthened their legs accordingly. That was something Roan himself was incapable of doing, but he could alter his surroundings to an extent to achieve the same end. With an act of will, he hardened the top of the hedge so it would bear his weight, and vaulted over.
The ornamental flower beds on the other side showed no other footprints than the ones he made upon landing. Roan had thought it unlikely his quarry had come this way, but it was best to be thorough. He leaped back, and returned the hedge to pliability, although it would have changed back to normal once his influence had passed.
Roan dropped to his hands and knees on the path, hoping the springy grass would have retained some impression from passing feet. Too resilient, alas. Wait-here, in the border of sandy soil along the edge of the walkway was a twisted smear, proof of passage of the bearer with slippery shoes. Roan crawled close for a good look. Yes! There were faint tracks on the grass turning toward the maze. Roan sprang up to follow them. The case for an airship began to look better and better.
As if the scientists had ceased to care about pursuit, the marks of a dozen pairs of feet appeared in the border and printed in sand on the grass within ten yards of the first. At the sculpted archway into the maze, which was clipped out of dark green hedges eight feet high and woven with creepers bearing huge fuchsia flowers, Roan trotted through and found fresh tracks of two pairs of feet, paces identical in length, carrying something heavy. The lighter tracks that followed obliterated parts of the prints, but most of them were intact, and undoubtedly heading inward. Roan followed the trail into the maze, turning where the grass was trampled, until he found himself standing before the fountain and the small marble bench that marked the center.
The grassy sward was free of marks of any kind. The trail had ended. They must have taken to the air here. Their transport had awaited them while they made their presentation to the king, knowing all the time that their experiment would be forbidden. How could no one have noticed such a thing? Roan sat down heavily on the bench in the shade of an alabaster statue with blank eyes, and wiped the sweat from his forehead and neck. Leave it to the scientists to invent a reliable airship and keep the news to themselves. That invention would have been welcomed as being of real use. Now the king would have to scramble a flying beast of some kind to pursue them, and hope that it didn't eat the rescue party on the way.
The sculpted hedges around him, having sensed his presence in the manner of plants used to construct mazes, were busily shifting position and color to confuse the pattern. In a moment, he'd have to figure out afresh how to get out of the maze. That'd be no trouble; he'd done it thousands of times over the years. But as one low-lying, red-leafed bush moved past him and started to change to green, Roan saw something flutter. He sprang up, and chased the shrub until he could seize the fragment from among the thorns on top. It was a thread, of the pale gray-blue that the Ministry of Science favored for formal attire and the party had all been wearing in court. In another moment, the bush's natural chameleonic properties would have hidden the clue forever.
The thread had been on the far side of the shrub from the clearing, outside of the path, as if someone's garment had caught on the thorns when they stepped over it. That meant the scientists hadn't left by air, at least not from here. The entire trip through the maze had been a blind meant to confuse anyone who followed. The shifting bushes would have hidden any evidence in a matter of hours. Roan was lucky that the bush hadn't moved far from its original position when the scientists had been there. Only a stroke of good fortune had prevented the disappearance from the center of the maze from being a unsolved mystery. No, wait, Roan admonished himself. Think! That would have meant that the trail leading into the maze would also have been altered-and it hadn't been. Brom had assumed someone would follow them, and wanted him to believe they had vanished from here. They'd caused the maze itself to hold its place until someone else came, so all the clues would be in place. Roan wondered that Brom could be so profligate with influence. The crucible was a new power in the land, one that had to be reckoned with. Brom and his minions must be stopped until the phenomenon could be studied.
So, where had they gone from here? Roan stepped around the bush, now settling itself in a new hollow at right angles to its old position. A few more paces, and he found what he had been hoping for: another heavy footprint. Roan dodged among mobile box elders and yew hedges shifting to new places, picking up the trail here and there, sometimes having to wait until the maze hedges shifted again. Roan was satisfied that Brom had come this way, to lose his pursuers. But the trick hadn't worked. Roan should be able to catch up with them in no time. Therefore, they couldn't be far ahead. Might they still be in the palace grounds? That would be ironic. The castle stood where it had, wattle and daub or granite and marble, for thousands of years. What if the Sleepers slept right here, beneath it? But, no, Roan thought, the historians would have known that, and Brom wouldn't have needed to sneak away to set off his infernal device. Which way had he gone?
A screen of yew five feet high dodged directly into a passage Roan was about to take, and settled down, sinking its roots into the sandy soil with an air of triumph. Roan shrugged, and sidestepped toward a wide gap that led into a range of juniper bushes. The bushes let him get among them, then playfully closed about him in a ring. The grass under his feet began to conform to the new shape of the enclosure.
"Come, now, this isn't fair!" Roan said, patting the prickly top of a juniper. "It's too hot to play games. I must go on."
The bushes ignored him and began to take root. Roan sighed. He pointed his hand at the base of one bush, and poured influence into the ground, making it buckle, pushing the juniper backward. It protested, waving its branches, and the other shrubs crowded tighter around him. Roan shook his head ruefully as he broke free. "I am sorry. Some day, when we have time, you can confuse me as much as you like, all right?"
This promise did not appease them; the maze liked its little measure of power and hated being ignored, but Roan moved faster than any single component of it did. The trouble was that there were so many of them. It was difficult for him to negotiate his way out. If he appeared impatient, the plants would try harder to thwart him, and he was afraid the scientists were getting farther and farther ahead of him.
Contrarily, the plants figured out that he was trying to follow the trail that lay just inside the high stone wall. The maze closed passages in front of him and opened others, diverting him away from his objective. Lawns altered their shapes in front of him, distorting the footprints into weird configurations. A solid row of holly six feet high stretched itself across the garden from west to east, daring him to force his way between the tight branches full of shiny, scratchy-thorned leaves. He could just see over it, but not walk through. Roan used influence to open a way through that row, and found beyond it a second row, taller and more dense than the first. It loomed over him, threatening to blot out the sun. Roan reached out to push the nearest tree aside, and the leaves raked his skin, drawing blood.
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.
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