Dreams Underfoot: A Newford Collection (18 page)

Everything seemed normal. There wasn’t even a hint that behind the facade there was another world that held talking monkeymen and bizarre dogs that appeared out of nowhere.

Sighing, Lorio squared her shoulders and went upstairs to bed, trying not to think about the weird turn the night had taken. She didn’t have much luck.

She kept seeing that dog-like creature and worried about one finding its way into her apartment. Or to the Zoo where Elderee was. Then she worried about Elderee. When she finally nodded off, she fell into a fitful sleep, all too full of disturbing dreams.

At first she was in the alleyway again. For all that it was very real around her, there was a distancing sense, a feeling of dislocation in her being there. As she looked around, the pavement underfoot began to fracture. Cracks went up and down its length, then webbed the sides of the buildings. She started to back away onto Yoors Street when everything shattered like a piece of dropped glass.

Shards of the alley, like images reflected in a broken mirror, whirled and spun around her. When they settled down, drifting slowly around her like feathers after a pillow fight, she found herself on a roadway—more of a farmer’s track, really—that stretched on to either horizon. On both sides of the track were rolling hills dotted with stands of trees.

“A pretty scene,” a voice said from behind her. “Though not for long.”

The man she saw, when she turned around, was a good head taller than her own five-four. His hair was black, his eyes glittery bright, his mouth an arrogant slash in a pale face. He was dressed all in browns and blacks, his clothing hanging in a poor fit from his too-thin frame.

“Who’re—” Lorio began, but the man cut her off.

“This I claim for the Dark, while you—” he shook his head, taking in her hair, her clothes, with a disdainful look “—will be my gift to Mahail.”

He made a motion towards her with his hand and sparks flew from his fingertips. She stumbled as the road dissolved under her and she began to drop through grey space. There was light far below her. In it was a writhing mass of tentacles that reached up for her from a dark heart ofshadow. As she rushed down to meet it, the darkness resolved into a monstrous bloated shape with coal-eyes and a gaping maw.

It didn’t take much speculation to realize that this thing had to be Mahail.

“Tell him Dorn sent you!” the pale-faced man cried after her.

She dropped like a bullet, straight for Mahail, her mouth open, but the scream dying before it left her throat. The monster’s oozing tentacles snatched her out of the air. They squeezed her, shook her, held her up for inspection to one eye, then the other.

The soul studying her behind those eyes was like something dead. The air was filled with a reek of decay and rot. The tentacles tightened around her chest and lower torso, squeezing the breath from her as they brought her up to the monster’s mouth. Slime covered her, burning and painful where it touched her bare skin. She flailed her arms, slapped at the creature’s rubbery lips. The scream building up in her throat finally broke free, shrill and rattling and—

—it woke her to a tangle of bedclothes that were wrapped around her. Cold sweat covered her from head to toe.

She lay gasping, pushed aside the sheet and blankets, and stared up at the dark ceiling of her bedroom. Her heart beat a wild tattoo. Slowly the fear drained away.

Just a dream, she thought. That was all. Maybe the whole night had been just a dream. But as she finally drifted off again, she remembered Elderee’s warm eyes and the long winding track of a road that went uphill and down, and this time she smiled and her sleep was dreamless.

The next day it all did seem like a dream. She checked the papers, tried the news on both TV and radio, but there was no mention of the Zoo acquiring a mysterious new animal. It wasn’t until she called Terry to confirm that they
had
taken Elderee to the Zoo that she was willing to believe that she hadn’t gone crazy. Things were weird, sure, but at least she hadn’t totally lost it herself.

She spent the day in a state of anxiety that didn’t go away until she got on stage at the club and No Nuns Here went into their first set. The chopping rhythms of the music, her guitar humming in her hands, her voice soaring over the blast of the instruments, let her escape that feeling of being lost. By the time they got to the last song of the night, she was filled with a crackling energy that let her rip through the song and make it not just a statement, but an anthem.

I hear your whistle when I cross the park, you make me nervous when I walk in the dark, but I
won’t listen—I won’t scream, you won’t find me in your magazines

‘cos

I don’t need nobody staring at me, stripping me down with their 1-2-3....

The song ended with a thunderous chord that shook the stage underfoot. She helped pack up the gear once the crowd was gone, but left on her own, not even taking her guitar with her. Terry promised to drop it off on Sunday afternoon, but she only nodded and made her way out onto Yoors Street.

The sidewalks were crowded, overfilled with a strutting array of humanity from the trendy to punks to burnouts, everyone on their own personal course and all of them the same. They made the city come to life, but at the same time they drowned it with postures, and images like costumes. It was all artifice, lacking depth. Lorio turned to look at her own reflection in a store window. She was no different. Any meaning she meant to communicate was lost behind a shuffle of makeup, styling and pose.

Mahail fed on hearts, she thought, not knowing where the thought had come from. He fed on them and left the shells to walk around just like we walk around.

She turned from the window and made her way through the people to the alley where she’d found Elderee. Without a pause, she turned into it and walked straight to its end. There she stopped and looked back at the sidewalk she’d just left. Cars flickered by on the street beyond it. On the sidewalk itself, every size and shape of Yoors Street poseur walked by the mouth of the alley, leaving echoing spills of conversation or laughter in their wake. But here it was quiet, like a world apart. Here it was ... different.

Your people know the roads ....

You need only walk it ... with intent ....

She sighed. Maybe the Rom of old had known hidden roads, but nobody had taken the time to show her any—not even Palko. Besides, her Gypsy blood was thin, a matter of chance rather than upbringing, and these days there were as many Gypsies in business suits as there were those following the old ways.

Gypsy magic was just something the Rom used to baffle the
Gaje,
the non-Gypsies. Magic itself was just parlor tricks. Except ...

She remembered the polrech, appearing out of nowhere, dissolv-ing into smoke when she’d killed it.

And Elderee ... like an orangutan, only he could talk.

Magic.

She moved closer to one side of the alley, studying the brick wall of the building there. This alleyway was the last place in the world that she would ever expect to find a marvel. The grime and the dirt, the plastic garbage bags torn open in their corners, the refuse heaped against the walls—this wasn’t the stuff of magic. Magic was Tolk-ien’s Middle Earth. Cat Midhir’s Borderlands. This was ... She ran a hand down the side of the wall and looked at the smudge it left on her fingers. This was an armpit of the real world.

Turning, she faced the mouth of the alley again, only to find a tall figure standing there, watching her.

Fear made her blood pump quicker through her veins and for the first time in her life she knew what it meant to have one’s heart in one’s mouth. She knew who this was.

“Dorn.”

The name came out of her mouth in a spidery croak. The man’s face was in shadow, but she could still see, no, sense his grin.

“I warned you not to involve yourself further in what doesn’t concern you.”

He’d warned her? Then she remembered the dream. The thought of his sending her that dream, of his being inside her head like that, made her skin crawl.

“You should not have come back,” he said.

“You don’t ... you don’t scare me,” she said.

No. He terrified her. How could something she’d only dreamed be real? She took a step back and the heel of her shoe came up against a garbage bag.

“Elderee’s road is
mine,”
he said, moving closer.
“I
took it from him.
I
set the hound on him.”

“You—”

“But I felt you drawing on its power, and then I knew you would try to take it from me.”

“I think you’re making a—”

“No mistake.” He touched his chest. “I can
feel
the bond be-tween you and that damned monkey.

He gave it to you, didn’t he? Heart’s shadow, look at you!”

He stood very close to her now. A hand went up and flicked a finger against the stubble on the shaved part of her scalp. Lorio flinched at the touch, but couldn’t seem to move away. She was weak with fear. Spark’s flickered around Dorn’s fingers. She stared at them with widening eyes.

“You’re nothing better than an animal yourself,” he told her.

Strangely enough, Lorio took comfort in that remark. She looked up into his eyes and saw that they were as dead as Mahail’s had been in her nightmare. Nightmare. If Dorn was real, did that mean the road was too? Could she shatter this alleyway, as she had in her dream, to find the road lying underfoot—behind its facade?

An old straight track ... there for those who know to see it.

Something sparked in his eyes. It wasn’t until he spoke that Lorio realized it had been amusement.

“You don’t know, do you?” he mocked. “You couldn’t find a road if your life depended on it.”

‘‘I .9)

“Let me show you.”

Before she could do anything, he grabbed her, one hand on either lapel of her bomber’s jacket, and slammed her against the wall of the alley. The impact knocked the breath out of her and brought tears to her eyes.

“Watch,” he grinned, his face inches from hers.

He held her straight-armed and slowly turned from the wall. He made one full circuit, then dumped her on the ground. Lorio’s legs gave away from under her and she tumbled to the dirt.

Dirt?

Slowly the realization settled in her. He’d taken her back into her dream.

The silence came to her first, a sudden cessation of all sound so that her breathing sounded ragged to her ears. Then she looked around. The city was gone. She was crouching on a dirt road, under a starry sky. The hills of her dream were on either side, the road running between them like a straight white ribbon.

Dorn grabbed a handful of her hair and hauled her to her feet. She blinked with the pain, eyes tearing, but as she turned slowly to face her captor she could feel something shift inside her. She had no more doubt that magic was real, that the road existed, that Elderee had offered her something precious beyond compare. There was no way she was going to let Dorn with his dead eyes take this from her.

On the heels of that realization, knowledge filled her like a flower sprouting from a seed in time-lapse photography. Eye to eye, mind to mind, Elderee had left that seed in her mind until something—the promise of this place, the magic of this road, her own understanding of it, perhaps—woke it and set it spinning through her.

There was not one road, but a countless number of them. They made a pattern that webbed not only her own world, but all worlds; not only her own time, but all times. They upheld a fragile balance between light and dark, order and chaos, while at the center of the web lay a sacred grove in that valley that Elderee had called Lankelly.

And I know how to get there, she realized.

I know that Wood. And it was home.

Her understanding of the roads and all they meant took only a moment to flash through her. In the same breath she knew that the magic that Elderee and others like him used was drawn from the pattern of the roads. A being like Dorn was a destroyer and gained his power from what he destroyed. It was a power that came quickly, draining as it ravaged, leaving the user hungry for more, while the power Elderee used worked in harmony with the pattern, built on it, drew from it, then gave back more than it took. It was a slower magic, but a more enduring one.

Dorn saw the understanding come into her eyes. Its suddenness, the depth of it filling her, shocked him. His grip on her hair slack-ened for a moment and Lorio brought her knee up into his groin. His hand dropped from her hair as he folded over.

Lorio stood over him, staring at his bent figure. She raised her hands and gold sparks flickered between her fingers. But she didn’t need magic to deal with him. She brought doubled fists down on the nape of his neck and he sprawled face forward in the dirt. He turned pained eyes to her, hands scrabbling at the surface of the road. His magic glimmered dully between his fingers, but Lorio shook her head.

He wouldn’t look at her. Instead he concentrated, brow fur-rowed, as he called up his magic.

Whatever spell he was trying to work made the light between his fingers gleam more sharply. Lorio stepped quickly forward and stamped down hard on his hand. She was wearing boots tonight. Bones crunched under the impact of her heel.

“That’s for Elderee,” she said, her voice soft but grim.

Dorn bit back a scream and glared at her. He sat up and scuttled a few paces away, moving on two bent legs and one arm, sideways like a crab. When he stopped, he cradled his hurt hand against his chest.