Dreamseeker (19 page)

Drawing in a deep breath, I laid my hand on the first fetter and thought:
C'mon, fetter, do your stuff. Let's see what you've got.
Dr. Tilford had said that the glow lamp required both touch and intent to operate, so I offered it both.
Do something.

Nothing happened.

I tried a few more fetters, and it soon became clear that a general invocation was not going to trigger any of them. Which actually made my search much easier. If each fetter responded to a specific type of command, I wasn't going to set any of them off accidentally.

Drawing in a deep breath, I spread my hands out over the fetters so that my skin would make contact with as many of the fetters as possible. I had to lean forward to use my forearms as well, but once I did that I was able to make contact with the fetters in two of the boxes, all at once.

Give me your dreams,
I thought. My command wasn't in words this time; rather, I was calling to the fettered energy with my own Gift: soul to soul. I was willing it to respond to me, to commune with me, to reveal its true nature to me . . . whatever that turned out to be.

Still nothing happened.

Muttering a curse in frustration, I moved into position to test the next batch. Maybe this whole trip was a fool's errand. Maybe experimental fetters couldn't be activated by just anyone. Maybe you needed the Weaver's Gift to do it, otherwise they would just stay inert strips of metal.

Steady, girl. Keep it together.

Carefully I laid my arms and hands across the next two rows of fetters, shut my eyes, and tried to summon whatever residual bit of dream-power one of them might contain.

The castle is tall beyond measure, and shadowy figures can be glimpsed through its windows, each one of which reveals a different time and place. . . .

The tower looms overheard, the signatures of thousands of travelers spiraling around it, leading the eye upward, upward. . . .

The mausoleum is vast, grey and cold. So cold! Tier after tier of stone crypts stack up into the windswept sky, a plaque on each one identifying its occupant. The names are all different, but the same word is carved beneath each name, in identical letters: Dreamwalker. . . .

With a gasp I fell back from the fetters, the image of the Dreamwalker tomb seared into my brain. Was that the same shape-changing structure I had seen in the avatar's dream? If so, it had taken on a pretty dark aspect this time.

“Jesse!” Rita's voice was a hiss. “You okay?”

“Uh . . . I cut myself,” I muttered. I shook my hand and sucked at a fingertip, to lend the fiction weight. “These things have sharp edges.”

I waited until Rita had turned her attention back to her search before reaching out to touch the fetters again. Slowly I ran my fingers down the first row of plates, touching them one by one, attempting to summon back the vision that I had experienced so briefly. And I tried to lock my body in a rigid position, because I knew that if I moved
suddenly or made a suspicious sound when I found the thing, Rita would be on me in a heartbeat. And this time she'd want more than a lame story about a non-existent wound.

Fetter by fetter, my fingertips slowly caressed the stack, and I fixed the position of each one in my mind so that I would not forget which I was in contact with when—

Color bleeds from the sky, from the trees, from the ground. The world is dissolving into thick black muck, and it traps his legs like quicksand so he cannot run, he cannot run! Darkness rushes down from the sky as he struggles to envision the pattern he needs to escape this world, the maps that will open a gateway for him. Desperately he sketches out its shape in his mind's eye, but it's not coming out right, the darkness is skewing his brain, it's not good enough! So he tries another—and another and another and another—and the patterns start overlapping, details running into one another until all he can see is a vast mandala that contains all the patterns he needs, but gives access to none. Then the darkness closes in on him and he hears himself screaming, because he senses what it can do. The taste of death fills his nose and mouth as memories start to rush out of him, every thought and hope and fear and love that he ever knew, sucked out of him into the void and devoured until there is nothing left . . .

Suddenly the images were gone. Maybe I banished them. Maybe when you saw a vision so horrifying that your soul begged for it to end, the fetter interpreted that as an “off” switch. Or maybe there was nothing left to be seen. Maybe the boy's emanations ended when the dream-wraith devoured his soul, and that was why he became catatonic. His body had gone on living, but his soul was dead.

Tears threatened to come to my eyes as I removed the dream fetter from the box, keeping my movements as small as possible so that Rita wouldn't notice what I was doing. No one but a Dreamwalker should possess such a fetter. I would take it home with me, and I would explore its mysteries, and maybe learn more about the strange
castle which seemed to have such significance to my kind. And I would mourn this boy who had slipped through the Seer's net because they thought his Gift was not strong enough to manifest, who had left me this precious inheritance.

Suddenly my reverie was broken by what was, in our current context, a truly terrifying sound: a key turning in the lock.

“Shit!” Rita muttered.

Desperately we both looked around for cover. The room's interior door was too far away for us to get to it in time, and there were few hiding places nearby. Rita flattened herself against the wall behind a filing cabinet, scrunching down a bit to make sure her head couldn't be seen from the front door, but as soon as someone walked past the filing cabinet she'd be in plain view. I dove for cover under the desk, then realized that I'd left the safe door open, so I nudged it closed with my foot even as the doorknob began to turn. I tried to fit myself completely under the desk, but the space was too shallow for that, and my legs were stuck out the back. Like Rita, I would be vulnerable to discovery as soon as someone walked past my hiding place.

Things were not looking good.

Heart pounding, I peered under the desk's lower edge to see who entered. My view was limited to six inches above the floor, and all I could see was that the newcomer was wearing black shoes—nicely polished but with mud on them—and blue uniform pants. A guard, most likely. But why was he here? The guards didn't enter this building as part of their regular rounds. Our whole operation centered around that premise. Had someone seen us cross the compound, or heard us moving around inside the lab?

It could be my fault, I realized. I'd spent half the night crafting dreams for the head Weaver, in which her precious lab was threatened with destruction. She might well have felt uneasy when she woke up, and asked her guards to check in here, just to be safe. If so, it was a frightening lesson in the consequences of screwing with someone's dreams. If I survived this, I should learn from it.

The feet had stopped moving, and just in time; two more steps
and he would have passed Rita's hiding place. Thank God I'd thought to close the safe. I glanced back at it—and froze. Morgana's mandala drawing was lying on the floor beside it, in plain view. In my panic I'd forgotten about it.

I slid the dream fetter into my back pocket as I waited to see if the guard would come any closer, and I took out my knife, though I wasn't sure I could bring myself to use it on him. This wasn't some creepy servant of the undead, a monster who had helped kidnap my brother, maim my mother, and destroy the house I'd grown up in. This was just some working class guy trying to earn a living, at a low wage job in the middle of nowhere. Maybe Rita could stab somebody like that, but I didn't think that I could.

Maybe he wouldn't notice the paper. Maybe he'd just make a cursory check of the premises and leave without ever seeing us.

A beam of bluish light swept across the floor. It worked its way around the room, then stopped when it hit the safe. And paused there. It was centered on Morgana's drawing.

Shit
.

The guard began to move forward—and then suddenly there was a sickening thud and he fell to his knees, stunned. As I scrambled out from under the desk I saw Rita cast aside the metal lamp she'd struck him with, and lunge for the back of his neck. She didn't have her knife out, so I wasn't sure what she meant to do. Tear his throat out with her teeth? My own preference would have been to try to talk our way out of this situation, but that option was off the table now, so I rushed in to help.

Rita was a small girl, no match for the guard's six feet of beefy weight, but she was quick on her feet, and her surprise attack had gained her a few seconds to act. The guard was still struggling to get his bearings when she grabbed him from behind, wrapping her arm around his throat in a chokehold that pressed in on his windpipe, cutting off his air supply. That woke him out of his daze pretty fast. He reached up to try to break her grip, but she was squeezing so tightly he couldn't pry her loose.

Suddenly he lurched backward, slamming Rita into the filing cabinet with a crash. She held on tight, so he tried it again, pounding her back against the thing as hard as he could. But he was rapidly losing strength, and as I ran to help her, he collapsed to his knees. I saw him fumbling for the nightstick he'd dropped when Rita first attacked, and I tried to kick it out of the way. But he was faster than I was and he grabbed it first. The next thing I knew the heavy black rod slammed into my side with stunning force. Pain shot through my ribs, and then I was on the floor, struggling to get my bearings. He resumed his assault on Rita, so I stumbled to my feet and tried to help her, but it was no longer necessary. Lack of blood and air had drained him of strength, and even as I watched, his struggles ceased, and he closed his eyes and slumped down to the floor. Rita still held on.

“It's done,” I gasped. “Don't kill him.”

She didn't let go. Her expression was cold.