Waking in Dreamland (45 page)

The road led out of the broad glen and into a narrow passage between high walls of gray stone that squeezed them from both sides until they were riding single file. Gradually, the file slowed to a stop. Roan stood up in his stirrups to see what was happening, but all he saw was the back of Spar’s head. The way was too constricted for the steeds to pass.

“What’s the holdup up there?” Felan shouted from the back. His voice echoed up the stone passage.

“I can’t get through!” Spar called back. “There’s a bar across the road. We might have to back out of here.”

“What’s around you?” Roan asked.

“Well, nothing!” the captain said, feeling the walls with both hands. “The sides are flat stone—no, wait a moment. There’s a metal slot here on the side, about as wide as my thumbnail.” Roan looked at his own thumbnail.

“The pennies,” he shouted. “Try the penny Hutchings gave you, Spar.”

“Yes, sir,” the guard captain said dubiously, putting his hand into his saddlebag with difficulty in the tight space. But there was a grinding sound, followed by a rusty screech. “It’s lifting!”

He moved forward. There was a heavy
THUNK!
and Colenna stopped next. “My turn,” she said. Roan watched her elbow shift to the left, and heard the mechanical whirring. “That’s it,” she said. “Like an entry gate.”

“I knew those pennies’d be lucky for something,” Hutchings said happily, as they rode out of the narrow passage and into another valley.

The sky had changed from sunny on one side of the gate, to breezy and damp. The ground around them was wet, as if it had just been raining. A mountain with a forked top lay immediately to the west, and Roan saw a distant line of mountains just over the horizon to the north. The land they had just left was no more than rolling hills.

“Where are we?” Lum asked.

Bergold produced the map, and surveyed the surroundings.

“I would say that we’re here,” the historian said, pointing to a spot not far from the border of the next province.

“How’d we do that?” Spar demanded. “We should still be clear back here.” He put his thumb on the map on a spot

farther to the south.

“We wanted transportation,” Bergold said. “We have been transported.”

“So the Sleepers still favor us,” Misha said, his boyish face in a grin. “This is better than the Déjà Vu.”

“None of their favor is free,” Bergold reminded them. “We still have to strive onward. If we grow lazy, they could change our luck to the worse just like that.” He snapped his fingers, and a flower fell out of the sky. He looked up. “Ah, it’s a tree shedding blossoms.”

“Another hole in reality,” Colenna said, with satisfaction. “All according to the Sleepers’ will. This time it was a good one for us. Brom can’t cause them to destroy, unless the Sleepers will it. He can only steer us into them, or if that evil power of theirs is so great, push them our way.”

“So that man who fell through the hole . . . ?” Leonora asked, tentatively, recalling the horror of the night before.

“Might still be alive, my dear,” Roan said, as positively as he could. “He might even be able to get home again.” Leonora looked relieved.

“If the dreamers dreaming him don’t wake up,” Felan said, always ready with the negative alternative. The princess frowned, starting to worry all over again. Roan turned to glare at him. “Or if he doesn’t get killed where he landed. . . .”

“Shut up, you!” Spar snarled. “All happy and positive, remember?”

“There’s hope,” Bergold said, reassuringly, patting Leonora’s hand. “There’s always hope.”

Roan nodded solemnly, and rode beside them in silence.

For him, the most difficult part of keeping a positive attitude was that small, nagging doubt that still remained in his heart. It was hard to focus on saving the world when a part of him didn’t really believe that Brom could put an end to the world. No matter what grandiose plans he had, he was still a creation of the Sleepers, and they had power over him. And yet, Roan had to believe in the threat. He had to force himself to believe that Brom’s success could mean the end of everything he knew and loved. To his surprise, he didn’t fear the coming catastrophe, but he was angry about it, angry that Brom and his minions would dare to terrify those people Roan loved for the sake of a question. It wasn’t that there were things Man was not meant to know, but there were some with such a high price that Man was not meant to test them. Brom should have taken into account the potential for danger that would befall others.

If he admitted the truth to himself, Roan did not know what he would do when he finally caught up with Brom. He worried what he would do to him. He was so angry . . . could he kill? But he must control himself. He couldn’t break the law just because Brom had. He was Roan, the King’s Investigator, a representative of the crown and people of the Dreamland. If he did something as evil as that, the king would be disappointed, and he would no longer deserve Leonora’s love. But he honestly wouldn’t know how he would behave until the situation was in front of him. He had learned a lot about himself so far on this journey, but not that, not yet.

Chapter 29

Taboret didn’t feel her saddle bruises, sunburn, or any of the verbal barbs that the Countingsheep brothers kept shooting her way. She was happy. Every time Glinn looked her way or even thought about her, she felt warm inside. She knew at once what he was thinking, and knew he did the same. The landscape looked more colorful. The trees were taller. Birdsong was sweeter, and all because he was with her. She knew she was being terribly subjective, and didn’t care.

Their romance was the subject of much amusement among the other apprentices.

“Think it’s a side effect of the gestalt?” Carina asked, playfully, as they rode northeast into the worsening weather. “Who’s next?” Taboret turned back her parka hood to make a face at the older woman.

“You are,” she said, lightly. “You’ll fall in love with both of the Countingsheeps at once.”

“I hardly think so!” Carina called back, and laughed. The brothers glared at them, and Taboret felt dark thoughts from them.

Taboret was glad she and Glinn were helping to raise the company’s mood. Brom had been sour since the morning, when he had tried for the third time to change the motorcycles into an efficient truck. He had not been able to make the gestalt raise enough power to complete a lasting structure. Even with Glinn’s input, the transformation into a single unit was not working as Brom had planned. He didn’t know why, and that upset him. His feelings permeated the link, making everyone else uneasy. He kept muttering about controlling the individual will, which worried Taboret. They were scientists, not mindless, long-haul transport workers. The steeds were protesting the harsh treatment, and she was afraid they would reach the end of their strength before they reached their destination. She tried hard not to think that having to stop short would be a good thing.

However, Brom had succeeded in having the gestalt upgrade the motorcycles to a higher technological level than before. Their engines ran more quietly and smoothly, reducing the number of times the Alarm Clock bells chimed by accident. Taboret found that to be a minor comfort.

“This is the step before complete integration,” Brom said, half to himself, half to Lurry, who was riding beside him. Lurry was a good conduit. Taboret could hear the conversation as perfectly as if she was inside him. “It is only a matter of time. I will fine-tune the parameters still further. We will end up with not only a supertransport, but a superhuman to drive it! One being! One unit!”

The gestalt energy changed almost from hour to hour. Taboret was aware of a growing oneness in behavior among the apprentices. At lunch, all of them reached for the same plate of food. They all stood up when one of them drove over a bump in the road. At first they did it in sequence, but now they did it each time in unison. The increasing physical coordination worried Taboret.

Glinn, riding beside her, must have sensed her concern. He put out a gloved hand to squeeze hers. She mimed a surreptitious kiss in his direction, and he tilted his head, as if catching the kiss on his cheek. Gano caught sight of the interplay, and teased them. Taboret felt her cheeks turn hot, but she knew Glinn didn’t really mind.

She’d never had much patience before with lovers who constantly mooned about their “one and only,” but she’d never left herself vulnerable to affection before. She had thought married life and families, like those of the villagers whose small town they were riding through, were ordinary and dull, never something she wanted for herself. Now, a little of the ordinary would be a nice, new experience if only she lived to have it. When the Sleepers woke up, everything would change or die or go away. It hadn’t mattered to her before.

Why had she valued her own life so little? Now that it was almost over, there was someone else to care about. She wanted to see what happened over time when two lives joined. The experiment would prevent it, not only for her, but for all the couples in the Dreamland. And families, she thought with a blush and a growing curiosity to see what it would be like to have her own.

A child’s shout made her and all the other apprentices look to the right in unison. A little girl was running through a cottage garden, laughing. Taboret felt her heart sink at the sight. She wanted desperately to stop the experiment, but she feared it was too late. Glinn gave her hope. He thought he knew what to do. She clung to that. Someday, the two of them might have a little lab of their own, maybe in a place like this. A junior scientist or two, blowing up retorts on the kitchen table. . . .

She stopped staring at the little town and turned her attettion forward. To her shock, Brom was looking back at her, his red eyes ablaze. She realized she had been thinking without filtering her thoughts through the usual haze of obedience and optimism. Oh, no! What had he heard? Had anyone else been listening? But Brom turned around again and kept riding, without his usual sour comment. Perhaps he’d just caught the edge of her discontent, and was saving a lecture for her later. She hunched over her handlebars, and tried to review her thoughts.

She was still feeling distracted when they came over the headland and saw the bronze bridge leading to Rem. It was very handsome, with ornamented arches and spans, standing on granite pilings stained green with algae around the water line. The road ran past it, rather than to it, and two pairs of shiny rails spanned its length. It was a railway bridge.

“That has to be half as old as the Dreamland,” Bolmer said. “Metalwork like that hasn’t been common for ages.”

“You have the soul of an architect,” Basil said. But Taboret knew they all saw the image in their minds and admired it with Bolmer’s interest and expert knowledge. She hoped that if she survived the experiment, she would retain some of what the others’ minds had put in her memory.

To either side along the bank overlooking the gap, she could see numerous small villages, each with its own little footbridge spanning to the other side. Some of them were as uncomplicated as a few ropes and some planks, some more elaborate. Did they indeed help as escape routes in times of Changeover? She also wondered, guiltily, if they would serve any function at all when she and the Alarm Clock reached the Sleepers. It was funny to see palm trees on the far side and icicles on the near one.

Brom signaled them to the left.

“We will cross here!” he said. He rolled forward, and the tires of his motorbike widened and became ridged to fit over the left rail. Lurry hastily caused the same alteration to his steed, and rode the right rail.

As she and Glinn passed side by side over the bridge, Taboret took a brief look down into the deep gorge, and experienced a surge of vertigo. That was one of the facets of shared intelligence that she didn’t like, since she was not normally this afraid of heights.

Halfway across, the weather changed from winter to summer. It was a hot day in Rem. All of the apprentices began to shed layers of clothing. And, as usual, when passing from one Sleeper’s influence into another, their bodies changed, too. Once she had shed the sweaters, thick pants, parka, and boots, Taboret was pleased to see that she’d acquired a more shapely form than her usual practical body type. Had it been wishful thinking on her part? Was this a subconscious, nonintellectual attempt to attract Glinn’s attention? It worked. Glinn’s warm thoughts were more ardent than before. If they stopped in a while for a meal, she’d make sure they found themselves a little privacy.

They rolled down the gravel bed of the railway cut until they found another road, and bumped up onto it. Brom directed them to the right, so they were heading north again.

A few miles later, a broad, sharp-edged shadow veered in over their heads. Taboret was just in time to see the huge, white-headed bird zoom in for a landing on the ground beside Brom before it turned into a small square envelope with an eagle stamp in the corner. Lurry jumped off his bike to retrieve it for their master.

Brom tore open the envelope and read the single page within.

“They are close behind us,” he said, and no one had to ask whom he meant. “We need another deterrent set.” He glanced up and down the line, and his glowing gaze lit on her. “You.” His head swiveled until he found Glinn. “And you. Go with Acton and Maniune. Roan has not yet crossed the bridge. We can use that to our advantage. Men, here are your instructions.”

He turned to the pair of mercenaries and started to talk to them in a low voice. Taboret, through Lurry, tried hard to eavesdrop. What kind of nefarious trap did Brom want them to set? She found that the chief had thrown up a privacy barrier, in exactly the same way she and Glinn had the night before. Drat. She wondered why he was blocking them out, then decided he must have been doing it all along, but the link hadn’t been strong enough before for her to have detected it.

Brom looked up at last. “Glinn, hand Basil your nuisance detector. We do not want to encounter any snags while you’re gone.”

“Yes, sir.” Glinn undid the gold chain and handed over the watch-sized object. Taboret found Brom’s expression puzzling. He looked disappointed. Could it be that he felt Basil was not as adept at Glinn at reading the little indicator? True, the philosophical device was a complex piece of machinery, but it was as easy to use as a compass. She felt a surge of pride, to think that in the eyes of their employer Glinn was not considered to be easily replaceable.