Waking in Dreamland (30 page)

“They have their own job to do,” Brom said. (“Slacking off,” Basil muttered.) “When we are a little closer to the road, they will go and stop Roan from passing us until we’re on it. It will be an exercise in distractions.”

“If they can get to the main highway,” Glinn said, glancing back the way they had come. Since they had been carrying the road with them, no surface remained behind on which to drive. It would be slow slogging, although not as slow as the road crew were moving. Brom caught the edge of the frustration, and scanned them all. Everybody bent energetically to their tasks, avoiding his eye. Not for the first time, Taboret wished she was back in Mnemosyne, measuring the Castle of Dreams.

“Mamovas,” Brom called, “I want you to accompany Maniune and Acton. We require delaying tactics so that Roan is prevented from coming up on that part of the main road until we have reached it. You will have the ability to draw upon us for power. Use your ingenuity.”

Mamovas grinned, lifting her thin black eyebrows. Taboret knew she would enjoy herself setting traps for the unwary followers. She had a wicked sense of humor that bordered on the sadistic, and would see the situation as an elaborate game.

“Why not me, sir?” Taboret asked, suddenly, raising her hand.

“You?” Brom said.

“Yes, sir. I’d make good roadblocks. I have lots of ideas.” She tried to look businesslike and think precise and logical thoughts. Brom looked upon her almost kindly.

“Your ambition does you credit, but perhaps another time,” he said. “I want to use Mamovas’s particular talents in this instance.”

“Thank you, sir,” Taboret said, accelerating away to go get another block. She didn’t want anyone else to see the worry on her face. How could she warn the princess of danger if she wouldn’t even be there? She hoped Roan was as good a survivor as rumor around the palace had it. She hoped he used all his skills to keep the princess from getting hurt.

Many more blocks later, Taboret again saw the mental picture of the map. The “X” was much closer to intersecting with the road.

“Time to go,” Brom instructed the mercenaries. He beckoned to Mamovas, who placed her last section of nebulosity and spurred her mechanical beast to the chief ’s side. “By the time you do your tasks and return to us, we will be within a very short distance of the main highway. I need to be assured that we have plenty of time, plus an additional factor for error.”

“Yes, sir,” Mamovas said. She openly enjoyed the importance the assignment gave her, and the tingle of anticipation tickled Taboret as well. Mamovas would be the first one to try remote control of the crucible.

The feeling lessened slightly as the three steeds bumped away over the rocks. In a way Taboret was relieved to have Acton and Maniune no longer looking over her shoulder, but it meant that the remaining apprentices had that much more work to do without Mamovas. The chart showed plenty of hard going between them and the main road.

“Time to change,” Doolin announced suddenly. Brom glanced up from his perusal of the map.

“It isn’t time yet.”

“Yes, it is,” Doolin said. He took his hands off the handlebars and folded his arms.

“That’s right,” Dowkin said. “We put in extra time in the gestalt last night, and no one else had to do it.”

“We calculate that the discrepancy in effort means that our shift ought to be shortened by an hour and twenty minutes,” Doolin said. He pulled a watch out of his pocket and consulted it. “That was five minutes ago, so we worked overtime for a while without complaining.”

Brom’s strange steed bore him in a loop back to the brothers. Its tires grew taller or shrank in the extended fork so that the chief scientist was always riding at eye level to the brothers. Taboret thought it was so he could glare at them more effectively. His eyes were rubies lit from behind.

“Gentlemen,” he said, in a dangerously even voice. “You are not being cooperative. Think of your fellow apprentices, and how hard they are laboring.”

“No one thinks good of us,” Dowkin said. “I can hear ’em. So can you.”

“That’s right,” Doolin agreed. “Now, don’t you stare at us that way, chief!” He squared up his shoulders to Brom, making the litter on his shoulders shift. “We don’t like having everybody looking into our minds like that.”

“It is part of the project,” Brom said, still looking calm and sounding reasonable, but there was a storm raging through the link. Taboret felt her nerve endings withering. “Gentlemen, you agreed to the terms long ago. You had plenty of time to consider all the details. In fact, you were enthusiastic about the concept.”

“Well, that was before we experienced the advanced form,” Doolin said, drawing down his brows. “There’s no privacy anymore! You’re all listening to every single thing we think!”

“It’s not true,” Glinn said. “We receive emotional impressions and the very occasional visual image, but that is all.”

“Hah! We bet you’re reading our personal ether,” Dowkin said. He blushed and turned his head into a drape of canvas. Taboret
didn’t
get any images, but she guessed it had something to do with his love life. Of all the tedious prigs . . . As if they had the interest in snooping out that kind of details!

Glinn’s eyebrows went up. “Are the two of you experiencing a more advanced form of thought transfer?”

He’d hit the nail on the head, to judge by the shade of red Doolin turned.

“None of your business!”

“How very interesting. Isn’t it, sir?” Glinn asked.

“Yes, it is. The ramifications, hmm . . .” Brom stroked his chin, momentarily distracted. Then his face turned beet red and steam poured out of his ears. “Nonsense! We don’t have this time to waste!”

“Don’t care, do we?” Doolin asked, tilting his head back toward his brother.

“Nope,” Dowkin said, emerging as belligerent as ever. “Fair’s fair. Someone else takes over, or send us home.”

“Gentlemen,” Brom said, once again under iron control. The emission of steam seemed to have done him some good. He was back to his persuasive old self. “We can’t send you away now. You’re part of the gestalt. You’re a part of this group. We need you.”

“Then show us you value our efforts,” Doolin said. “As of now, we’re on strike.” He didn’t budge. Taboret could tell that if Brom wanted to move them, he’d have to give in. A twitch of agreement down the link told her everyone else thought so, too. The brothers, sensing the same thing, grinned obnoxiously.

“And we don’t want to ride bicycles,” Dowkin added. “We want ours made into motorcycles like the rest. It’s too much work to pedal and carry this thing at the same time. Meaning on our next shift, that is.”

Taboret felt the justice in their request. By now all of the steeds had been motorized except for the brothers’. But she doubted the gestalt had any extra power to spare, between the dirty tricks Mamovas had gone to plant on the princess’s path and making their own road.

“We will relieve you of your burden,” Brom said, at last. “The next pair in the rotation will take your place.”

Gano and Lurry groaned. Brom merely raised his eyebrows, and the two subsided at once. They spurred their cycles onto the paving stone beside the brothers, who carefully edged their steeds over to make way. There was little room on the stone for the others to help transfer the litter. Taboret made the mistake of glancing over her shoulder at the ravine far beneath. The lurch in her stomach broadcast at once to all the others.

“Don’t do that!” Carina pleaded, gripping her handlebars with white knuckles. “It’s bad enough doing this on a tightrope.”

Once free, the brothers stood working their shoulders and necks to get the blood circulating again. Their backs and arms narrowed to more normal proportions.

“Okay,” Doolin said, clapping his hands. “Now for motorcycles.”

“That won’t be possible at this moment,” Brom said. “Please mount so we can continue on.”

“We don’t like being treated like second-class technicians,” Dowkin said, frowning until his eyebrows thickened and met over his nose. “Come on, we have reserves of power.”

“May I explain, sir?” Glinn said, with a nod to Brom, who gave a magisterial wave. Glinn addressed the brothers with sincere focus. “We are stretched to our limit at this moment. If a nuisance or a change in a Sleeper’s mood came along, we would need those reserves. Why, look,” he said, pointing at their feet. “In the time it’s taken us to have this . . . conversation, the nebulosity has started to shift again.”

Taboret hadn’t even noticed, but Glinn was right. The paving stone on which they were standing had begun to grow grass right under their feet. Some of the others had warped completely out of shape. One had become the statue of a woman with her arms cut off, one looked like the prow of a wooden ship, and two of them formed golden arches.

One had vanished from its place completely. Taboret looked down at the valley floor. The nebulous stone had broken apart into a hundred dozen doughnuts.

“Oh, no,” Basil groaned, surveying the litter. “We’re going to have to form these all over again.”

“We have lost hours because of this ridiculous argument,” Brom said. His face filled out wider than his usual death’s-head gauntness so that the jowls could sag. He swept an arm at the sections of nebulosity. “This could set us back another day! Start flattening those out at once.”

“Yes, sir,” Glinn said. Always the good example, he dismounted, descended to the valley floor, and started to pick up pieces and reassemble them. Taboret gave him a fond look before following him. They started placing the paving stones again, and the procession moved forward.

There was nothing enjoyable about laying road in the hot sun, but Taboret suddenly experienced a sensation of wild glee. Just as abruptly, her cycle’s engine sputtered and cut out, then vanished. In the space of moments, the bike went from powered to unpowered to powered again.

“Oh!” Gano exclaimed, although it sounded more like a groan. “What’s happening?”

They spun to look at Brom, who had a look of inner bliss on his face. “Mamovas has just laid her first trap.”

Taboret felt her heart constrict. She tried hard to picture what Mamovas had done, but the other woman must not be as strong a visual projector as Brom. Her mind was a disheartening blank. She shifted guiltily on her saddle. Brom turned his heavy gaze on her, taking her discomfort for impatience.

“You will have your chance soon,” he promised.

Taboret smiled at him uneasily.

Chapter 19

The crowd of animals bounded up out of the ochre-yellow ravines almost underneath the hooves of Spar’s steed. The guard captain threw up a hand and hauled back on the reins until his mount reared up and danced on the dusty road, barely in time to avoid a collision. The other riders skidded to a halt behind him, staring at the oval-eared, tan-coated beasts hopping across the road.

“What are they?” the princess wanted to know. “I’ve never seen giant rats on pogo sticks carrying handbags!”

“Looks like yours,” Felan said to Colenna, pointing to the brown leather clasp bag one animal was clutching in its paw. “Somewhere around here there’s an illusionary rat looking for his purse. You ought to give it back.”

“Impudent boy, those are natural creatures,” Colenna said. “I’ve been here in Wocabaht before. They carry their young in those cases.”

“Natural! Surely not,” Misha asked hopefully. “They must be a sign of the distortion. Aren’t they?”

“There’s none here,” Lum said, definitely, looking over the ground. He stiffened, as if aware he had unintentionally insulted Roan. “It’s been a long time, now, sir. Everything looks too natural.”

“I know, Corporal,” Roan said, confidently, refusing to take offense. “We’ll pick up the trail again soon.”

“Well, all right, sir,” Lum said, uncertainly. Roan liked the young man. Lum was honest and thorough, and he had the gift of loyalty. He’d done Roan the honor of offering that loyalty to him, though Roan hardly thought he deserved it. Privately, he was getting worried. There hadn’t been a trace of Brom or the Alarm Clock for miles. Had the scientists learned how to mask its passage? Or was Roan going the wrong way, as Spar and Felan kept insisting? He had only vague indications given him by that mysterious contact ahead of them. Had he been wrong to trust? Roan hated to think he was disappointing one of his most fervent supporters, but what could he offer in return but hope and a handful of air?

“Ride on, sir?” Spar asked, impatiently.

“Yes,” Roan said. “It’s too cold here to let the horses stand.” He kicked Cruiser to a trot, and the others followed suit. It might look like a savannah or a desert plain here, but the season was late autumn or early winter. The wind was chilly. His steed liked warm weather, and so did he.

“Oh, no,” Leonora said. She veered close and tugged Roan’s elbow. “Look at that!”

Roan turned to see, and his eyes widened. Off the left side of the road, a cloud of gray dust rolling towards them resolved into a whirling cluster of furry animals like small bears with very large black noses. Weren’t they . . . ? No, they couldn’t be. . . . But they were waltzing, in pairs, and in time to music only they could hear.

“It’s another nuisance,” Bergold said. “It’ll intersect the path ahead of us in a moment, and hold us up for who knows how long. Ride faster, and we can avoid it.”

“Hurry!” Leonora said. She kicked Golden Schwinn to a trot, then a fast canter. Roan and Cruiser kept pace with them. Colenna and Spar galloped ahead. The cloud of spinning animals gained on them rapidly.

“Look out!” Spar called hoarsely. Roan gawked at an advancing mass of yellow. “Sandstorm!”

The storm came on too quickly for them to avoid it. The swirling dust engulfed Spar and Colenna. Three paces later, Roan’s vision was blocked out by a blank yellow wall. He held up his arm to shield his eyes from the stinging grains but he felt only the cold wind beating against him that seemed to pierce right through his thick coat and riding trousers. He shivered mightily, and held tight to Cruiser’s reins.

The storm was not very dense. In a few moments, he had passed through it. He was glad to see that the others were safe, too. Spar and Colenna appeared unharmed, with one notable alteration. They were riding . . . bareback. All of their clothes were gone. Colenna looked down at herself, squawked, and clutched her handbag to her large bosom like a shield. Spar pulled his horse up, and spun to stare indignantly at the others, as if they were responsible for this outrage.