Waking in Dreamland (7 page)

King Byron leaned forward, his noble eyes full of concern. Roan shook his head, and the king sighed. Roan explained what he had found.

“They must be stopped, Roan,” the king said. “You must go after them.”

“I will, Your Majesty,” Roan said. “I will follow Brom at once on foot. The steeds will come back soon, but we cannot risk waiting. I’ll try and pick up the trail.” He started to shift out of his colorful court robes and back into a practical traveling suit. “It’s a good thing I didn’t unpack yet.” He felt in his pocket for his all-purpose knife.

“Go,” Byron said, his noble brow creased with worry. “I and the whole of the Dreamland are relying on you!”

Roan bowed. He was honored to be trusted, but his thoughts were troubled. He was already thinking ahead.

“You’ll need help,” Bergold said gravely, appearing at his elbow. His floating clothes became a sensible tweed suit with a gored skirt, and his silk slippers turned into brown leather brogues. “I’d better get some traveling things together. Bless me! What does one pack to save the world?”

“Everything,” said Thomasen, throwing up his hands in a rare show of agitation. “Great Night! I don’t know what to do! How many of them were there? Should we send men-at-arms?”

“The radar on the roof shows nothing,” a guard panted. “I ran up to look, but they haven’t seen a thing.”

“They’ve pulled reality around themselves with the crucible,” Roan said. “They’re going to make it as hard as possible to find them.”

“But where are they going?” demanded Micah, wringing his hands around the head of his staff. “I have no records for the Hall of the Sleepers. Brom has made his assumptions from innuendo, not fact.”

“May we see the map?” Roan asked the Royal Geographer. She opened up the huge chart, and they scanned it.

“I see nothing that indicates the location of the Hall,” Micah said, elbowing between Roan and Romney. “What is it that Brom thinks he sees here?”

“We must stop them long before they get there,” Captain Spar said. “You can ask Brom where it is when I haul him back in chains.”

“You, you, and you, prepare food, supplies, tents, and weapons,” the king said, pointing at his guards. “This is a serious act of premeditated mayhem. We do not know how far they are prepared to go to defend this unspeakable behavior. I will welcome volunteers to accompany Roan.” There was a chorus of voices, and dozens came forward. Princess Leonora stood up, too, towering above the others on her pedestal.

“I want to go, Daddy,” she said.

“No!” Roan exclaimed, then realized by the startled look on her face that he had failed in tact. A storm began brewing in her eyes, changing them from hazel to a darkly dangerous gray. Roan had to defuse her temper, and quickly. He had embarrassed her before her parents and her people. He knew she would not stand for that.

“Your Highness,” he began, stressing her title and bowing deeply before her, “it’s too dangerous for you to abandon the capital. You’re the heir to the kingdom.”

“One that won’t exist for me to inherit if Brom and his idiots destroy it!” Leonora said, dismissing danger with an angry wave of her hand. She appealed to her father. “Daddy, please! I want to help.”

“Your Majesty,” Roan said, equally insistent, “there’s no time.”

“My dear, you can’t go,” the king said, reaching up and taking his daughter’s hand. “It’s impossible.”

Leonora looked from one to the other, disengaged her hand from her father’s. The marble pedestal shrank into the floor, and she stalked off it, her face a stiff mask. She threw open the silk curtains and marched through them. Her train of courtiers bustled away behind her. The king and queen exchanged glances, and Her Majesty slipped off her throne to follow her daughter, clucking maternally to herself as she went. Her doctors and ladies streamed away in her wake.

Roan’s heart sank. He knew he’d have to face a flood of recrimination and accusations of overprotective chauvinism when he returned, but he couldn’t let the one he loved so dearly risk her life on a rash venture. He was expendable, and she was not. She had no experience in tracking, combat, or indeed, sleeping rough. If there had been time, and if he had dared think such an icon would want to acquire rude skills like those, he would have been honored to teach her. In the meantime, the kingdom had to be preserved, even at the cost of his personal happiness. The king met his eyes, and gave him a sympathetic look. He understood his daughter and her suitor’s dilemma.

“With your permission, I had better go now,” Roan said, grateful for the king’s kindness, but his mind was already back on the problem at hand. Inspiration struck him, and he made his way through to the fountain. Scooping up handfuls of the small colored stones that lined the bottom, he filled his pockets.

“I’ll leave these as I go,” Roan called out. “Anyone who is willing to come along, follow my trail as soon as you are ready.” The crowd closed in on itself behind him, shouting plans to one another. Roan hurried toward the door. He could imagine the land itself urging him forward.

Chapter 6

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 for bidden. 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.