The Dream Compass [Book 1 of The Merquan Chronicle] (12 page)

Takk returned to the light of the fire and bent his tired legs again to lower himself onto a stone perch. He unbound the paper and slapped a sheet onto the wood cover, knowing its hard surface would make the dull markings most legible.

Now, how did he remember it? “Thrown into the air,” he had asked, “would the lizard turn clear like the air and disappear?” Yes. He began scribbling. Pec-Pec had been driving and he had snorted his admonishment as they bumped across the prairie—”You crazy”—but his eyebrows had risen and the magic man had grown silent for hours as he seemed to take the proposition seriously—shaking his head, whispering to himself.

Crazy. Takk knew crazy. Outposts like Camp Blade were famous as homes of the befuddled and the berserk.

Pec-Pec was crazy: a braided wild man who had coddled a peculiar fish in his hands this evening, swallowed it, and had passed out perilously close to the campfire. Takk looked up from his writing. Pec-Pec had not moved for twenty minutes. Could the magic man, as he called himself, have choked on his slithery pet?

Takk decided to try to wake him.

When Pec-Pec saw the moving headlights from afar, he grew intensely attracted to them, a mothlike instinct. Disembodied, he flew through the blackness to the yellow discs and fluttered about them distractedly as rocks and rutted earth passed underneath.

The automobile was a new, government-issue jeep—fabric top, doors removed and stored in back. A man was at the wheel, a fellow with a hard-looking, angular face. Pec-Pec drifted to the man’s left eye and slowly, in a liquid motion, enveloped the orb. When the man’s eyelid blinked closed, and the eyeball rolled upward, Pec-Pec tumbled into the man’s head.

There he found a book, a sopping wet volume which Pec-Pec opened. The pages were thin and flimsy, turning fluidly at the slightest touch. The first pages were white, and carried childhood images—a rotund mother, a sour-looking aunt, apple juice, a willow tree from which switches had to be cut by the little boy himself as he faced punishment. The center pages of the book grew pink, then bright red with vivid accounts of sexual encounters.

Doubt was an unfamiliar emotion to Pec-Pec, but here, perusing this private, scarlet parade of women, men, and animals, the magic man questioned his own methods. He paused. Never before had the dragon fish led him into such a sordid encounter. He thought of the ancient words Curiouser and curiouser.

His hands began flipping pages again.

The final several pages of the book were black, and Pec-Pec turned impatiently to the last few.

The first page among them showed a large man strapped to a table with heavy tape over his eyes. His jowly face rolled from side to side, and in astounding bursts of energy he lunged upward at his leather restraints, only to fall back again, tears gurgling in his throat.

Three Badgers, bearded and uniformed, chortled at the effort. The Inspector, Mick Kerbaugh, was laughing too. He was unseen, of course, for these were his thoughts and memories.

At Kerbaugh’s orders, a Badger quietly unbuckled Ben Tiggle’s chest restraint. When Tiggle again bolted upward he flew from the table and crashed over the side, his feet still strapped in place and his head cracking against the plank flooring. More chuckles.

In that awkward position, Tiggle clawed at the tape over his eyes, groaning as it pulled away his eyelashes and eyebrows. In painful succession, hundreds of tiny volcanoes erupted on his face as each hair follicle burst. Finally the tape crackled down into a ring around his neck, and Tiggle squinted in the lamplight.

A Badger unstrapped his feet, and Tiggle’s knees banged to the floor. Shakily, the large warehouseman stood and staggered toward a washbasin mirror. He rubbed his eyes and desperately examined his face in the glass. His brow and eyelids were inflamed, bloody, and virtually hairless, but there were none of cruel cuts and abnormal healing that Kerbaugh had promised. His eyelids had not been grafted together.

Tiggle felt no relief. He began to sob and felt excruciatingly weary. The information he had given…

The room rang with hearty guffaws.

The next black memory page reeked of foul smoke. The Moberly Inn was a roiling mountain of heat and flame, and the shutter on a ground-level basement window exploded into a shower of splinters as an ancient typewriter hurled through it.

In the basement, two sets of flailing arms clawed for a hold on the shattered window frame. One of the panicked men, Kerbaugh, howled into the blackness a vile harangue of expletives and orders. The meeker, yellow-haired bureaucrat acceded and frantically boosted the Inspector out of the window. Kerbaugh rolled onto the dirt, surrendering to a crippling coughing fit.

A steady tubular cloud of smoke now gushed from the basement window, occasionally obscuring the face of Gould Papier, wide-eyed with terror. His bloody hands scrabbled over the frame of splinters and glass, looking for a grip.

Kerbaugh’s hacking subsided. He sat up and glared down at his lap, soggy and black with soot and urine, and he pondered shamefully the paralysis that had crippled him in the basement—how Papier had desperately searched the machine room for an escape and finally coaxed him into helping toss the typewriter through the shutter.

Kerbaugh stood and spat. He staggered to the typewriter and lifted it by its front bar, slipping his hand under the mangled keys. He let the machine pendulum at the end of his right arm as he tested the weight, and then he heaved it back into the basement window from which it had come. When Gould Papier’s face collapsed under the blow, the machine’s carriage return bell rang a tiny ping.

The third memory page was one of ecstasy and lust. With the reverence of an art connoisseur, Kerbaugh followed the languid swinging motion of an object suspended from the barn rafter. He scratched at his crotch, and then hoisted his tunic away from his thighs, hoping to hurry the drying process.

The wavering firelight from the outside illuminated a row of seventeen oak ale vats spanning the far wall, as well as the bottle-capping machine with its pumplike handle and several dozen wood cases of capped quart bottles. All of it illegal. Kerbaugh drew a dusty bottle from one of the cases and groped about in the half-light until he found the opener—a simple metal fixture screwed to the workbench that supported the bottle capper. The opener bore a peculiar cursive inscription across its crest, Coca-Cola. Kerbaugh could not recall such a metal-working company.

He popped open the ale and tipped the bottle back, savoring its muddy sting. The soot washed from his throat, and he pulled again at the bottle, hard.

When he stopped with a loud sigh, the bottle was half empty. Kerbaugh, growing calmer, turned again to the figure swinging, creaking from the rafter. His chest broadened and eased at the dual sight of beauty and justice. It was that desk clerk, he knew, that Moberly woman. Three empty crates were scattered at her feet, kicked away just minutes ago. She had torched her own inn, hoping to incinerate the Inspectors who had discovered her press, and then hanged herself. A mercenary wretch, spiteful of the order and protection that Government stood for.

Kerbaugh crossed the dirt floor and reached high, grasping her knees. The swinging stopped. He opened his pocket knife, but the noose was impossibly out of reach. He considered stacking the ale crates again, but they looked rather flimsy, barely acceptable support even for a suicide.

“Pig fuck.”

Kerbaugh glanced about on the off chance that there might be a long-handled tool with a blade of some kind on the end. Pruning shears or something. No. He began to breathe heavily.

He mounted the crude stepladder to the loft, and at the top found a rickety flooring covered with pigeon droppings. The loft had not been used for decades, the Inspector observed, and he edged carefully to the rafter from which Moberly had hanged herself.

Walking the rafter erect was out of the question—there was nothing to hold for support. So Kerbaugh nervously eased himself into a sitting position on the beam and, with one hand in back and the other in front, he pushed himself daintily along the support, trying not to pick up any more splinters than necessary. He coughed, and breathed even more rapidly.

Slicing through the rope was quick work, with the help of the tension from Moberly’s weight. When her body slammed to the floor, he grinned uncontrollably. It had been such a massively satisfying day: a fortress afire, a villain vanquished, and now he could have his way with her. He snapped his knife closed, replaced it in his tunic pocket, rolled over to hang from the rafter, and dropped to the floor.

Pec-Pec paused at the last page, the image of the hanging woman, and tore the page out of the binding. It came away easily. He ripped out another black page with a furious flourish, then another, then dozens more, several at a time, and wadded them into his right hand. When he reached the blood-red pages he yanked them out, too.

The magic man began to tear seven pages at once from the soggy book—the last three pink pages and four white ones—when there came a ghostly, excruciating blow to his right jaw. Pec-Pec’s vision blurred into a swirling cluster of stars, and then the stars gradually dwindled to just a few, which were set into a black background. He was gazing at the night sky as Anton Takk slapped his face.

“Hey, Pec-Pec,” Takk said, “you fainted.”

Pec-Pec felt as if he had fallen from a building onto concrete. Wincing, he forced himself up onto an elbow, scrambled for the empty glass bowl and belched the dragon fish into it.

As he lay back again, his gold-tipped braids flopping into the dirt, Pec-Pec whispered, “Takk, you pig’s ripe asshole, you almost killed me.”

“I was worried that—”

“I will tell you again: When I enter the trance, do not touch or speak to me. As things are now, my business is not finished, and I do not believe that I can return to where I have just been.”

“So I have done more damage, no?” Takk said meekly.

Pec-Pec’s eyes glowed a dull red. “Actually,” he replied, “you might have saved a man’s life. And stopped me from a murder.”

Ben Tiggle had taught his young charge Anton the constellations—a bawdy version of them anyway—and it was on this sleepless evening that Takk was admiring from his bedroll the star formation described to him as a large drunken woman crawling home from a tavern. She was named Ursala Major.

Takk imagined that she was humming to herself as she struggled up the boardwalk, an aimless droning that one would scarcely want to call a tune. And then in a sobering flash Takk realized that he really was hearing that sound. A car engine, obviously, not a humming drunk.

He wanted to stand up and … and what? Logic intervened. The car was far off, and it was much preferable not to disturb his blankets and lose the accumulated warmth. Whoever the motorist was, he would surely miss their off-road campsite. But who would try to navigate these crumbling highways in the darkness? Takk drew his arms up against his chest and returned his attention to Ursala Major.

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“That goddamned Rafer pissed on my hand! And now he’s part of our team? A team to do what, no one seems to know.”

“I want you to trust me on something: I have crisscrossed this territory two dozen times—”

“This is the Wise Ol’ Man speech coming.”

“—and the world works, or at least blunders about randomly, in ways I had never imagined—okay, I’ll say it—when I was your age. You may roll your eyes now. But we need Tha’Enton for our mission, I know that, though we may think of him as a barbarian.”

“We may need him, if he doesn’t chop our throats and drink our blood first.”

“When he boogies out like you’ve seen, well, he goes off into the woods like that at night to protect us. Those are his orders—he is titled a Defender of his people, and by Rafer law he must protect us as well—we’re important allies.”

“You have a few grunts and mumbles with those three half-dead pig pokers, and you come up with an awful detailed notion of their intentions.”

The older man sighed. “I have dealt with the Rafers for decades, know the language almost. I know these things by now, plumb. And those ‘half-dead pig pokers’ have not aged by one gray whisker since I first met them—the same three Rafers. They know something we don’t about time, aging, collective thought, I don’t know what else.”

“Oh, probably cannibalism, funeral pyres, nudity, tooth-sharpening—lots of things we could learn.”

Webb sank into thought and ran an index finger across his bristly chin. “Um, I promised to tell you about Hannibal,” he said finally.

“The town where we crossed the big river, the Oh-one-one.”

“Well, a man. A man born there, and also called Hannibal, maybe it was a nickname. In the old times, he needed a way to cross these mountains we’re coming to, the Rocky Mountains. He was a revolutionary, like us. He had an army and weapons and to win the war he had to get them across the Rocky Mountains.”

“To the Big Ocean?”

“Nah, farther. Farther to this huge porker of a city, Los Atlantis, well beyond the mountains. It finally sank and created the Big Ocean. But to get there, to cross this terrain, Hannibal had to find some unknown, unthought-of transportation.”

“He invented jeeps!”

“There were no automobiles at all then. They had not even conceived yet of the machines that would fight the Big War. The answer was elephants.”

“What?”

“Elephants. Huge plumb suckers, these animals. They used to roam these grasslands, and the Rafers back then would hunt them. They were like pigs, hunnerd times larger, if ya can gully that. With long windy noses to grab with.”

“Umm. Sometimes I think I’m just not as religious as you are.”

“Well, no. We’re speakin’ history, not religion. But you’re missing the point. Thing is, out of our home, away from the Blue Ridge, people, animals, the whole world is different. If we want to survive, we learn to work with the new worlds we find. Hannibal found the elephant herds and used them to carry him and his men across the Rockies. Out there”—he pointed—”the Rocky Mountains.”