Wakeworld (6 page)

T
hey stood in the open doorway of a one-room cottage. Stone walls, straw roof, an earthen floor. Not at all the sort of place Vivian would expect the Chancellor to spend his time, but maybe that was the point. One glassless window let in light, but also wind and dust. A herd of about twenty goats grazed nearby, and something that looked more or less like a chicken squawked inside the cottage, running out between their legs to join the flock scratching and pecking in the hard dirt outside.

There was nothing inside the cottage other than a narrow platform bed with a worn blanket, a wooden table, and a single chair. Clean. Barren. Nowhere here to hide anything. No disturbance of the packed-earth floor.

Vivian’s senses were all on high alert. She had clearly felt the presence of a dragon but had been unable to read anything at all—whether it was male or female, its age or size, or its intentions. All she had been able to pick up was a clear sense of power.

Zee too was on edge, like a stalking cat, deceptively relaxed but ready to pounce. This did nothing to set her at ease, and she just wanted to find the Key and get out of this place.

“Where do we look? Not a lot of hiding places.”

“Under the bed, maybe,” Zee said.

“Try the garden.” All eyes swung toward Jared.

“Traitor!” Gareth spat. “Whose side are you on?”

“The side that gets me out of this place and back home.” Jared crossed the small room and sat down on the chair.

“Aren’t you going to show us where to look?” Vivian asked, trying to contain her irritation at his erratic mix of cowardice and courage.

He shook his head. “Dig up the potato plant, fourth row in, fourth plant over. Watch out for the chicken things.”

Gareth took a step toward the bed, but Zee stopped him. “You are coming with us.”

“You don’t seem concerned about him—”

“He didn’t do this. You did.”

The Chancellor drew himself up to his tallest height, exuding all of the imperial authority he’d flung about in Surmise. “And if I refuse?”

“Please do.” Zee’s face was impassive; his agate eyes showed no emotion. But there was a quiet note of warning in his voice. “This is not Surmise, Gareth. You are no longer the Chancellor and I am not the Warlord, bound by your command or Jehenna’s. I won’t attack you, since you’re injured, but if you press me . . .”

The warning was clear. Gareth’s green eyes sparked outrage, but he said, “Oh, very well then.”

Vivian led the way, out the door and around back, where a neat garden was bounded by a white picket fence. She had little experience with gardens, but she recognized cabbages and tomatoes. She didn’t have a clue what potato plants looked like and hesitated right inside the gate.

“There.” Zee pointed to the far end of the garden.

A chicken scratched in the dirt on the narrow path in front of her, blocking her way. Its neck was too long, and it was yellow like a canary. Vivian didn’t think she’d ever seen a yellow chicken, but then her experience was pretty much limited to what she bought in the grocery store, mercifully feather free. Dreamworld. It figured.

Jared’s warning saved her. Instead of shooing it with her foot as she might have done, she flapped her arms and kept her distance. The chicken squawked and came at her in a flurry of wings and extended claws. Poe stepped between her and the attacker, his own neck extended, hissing.

And then Zee was there. A silver flash and the chicken’s head hit the earth, while the body continued to run around in meaningless circles.

Vivian managed to get her breath back, taking in Zee with the sword in his hand, the body of the chicken now careening through the garden, and the head lying at her feet. The eye staring up at her focused in. The pupil contracted, the position shifted. The beak snapped open and closed, revealing a double row of sharp teeth.

She couldn’t take her eyes off the horrid thing or bring herself to walk past it. “It’s not dead,” she said.

Zee came up to stand beside her. “You’re the Dreamshifter.”

Right. There had been something in the books about changing the contents of a dream. Vivian concentrated. She pictured the chicken head as belonging to a real, ordinary chicken. Just a beak. A normal eye. White feathers. No teeth. And the thing on the ground in front of her changed to match what was in her mind. She performed the same thing for the body still running around, giving it white feathers, and then laying it down on the earth, still.

She shivered. The thing was now dead, needed to be dead, but she was the one who had stopped its heart with her thoughts. This was a power she wasn’t sure she wanted to possess.
Only in dreams,
she reminded herself. Which was small comfort, but she would take whatever she could get.

“Can you do the rest of them?”

It seemed possible. Vivian turned her mind on the rest of the flock, focusing on plain white feathers, normal-sized necks, beaks with no teeth. Exhilaration flooded through her. Power. Dreams weren’t so scary after all—not if she could shift the contents into something harmless. She picked out one chicken and made it a rooster—gave it the long tail, turned its feathers red and green and gold, and then for fun added a blue topknot.

She grinned at Zee, but he wasn’t looking at her. His eyes were scanning the horizon, still searching for something she couldn’t see. But she felt supercharged and no longer afraid. If some new nightmare thing came along, she could shift it. They could do this. Get the Key and the spheres and fix the mess that began long before her birth.

“Which are the potato plants?” she asked.

“City girl,” Zee said. “You’ve never seen a potato?”

“Well, potatoes, yes.”

He pointed. “Those plants.”

She followed the path through the middle of the garden to the plants he’d pointed out. Gareth followed, sullen and silent, with Zee behind him, ever watchful. Vivian glanced back at the cottage to see Jared framed in the open window, watching.

The moment of euphoria she’d felt after shifting the chickens faded. She wanted only to secure the Key and the dreamspheres and get the hell back home. Potato plants, thank all the gods, were not all conjoined and woven together like the other vegetables in the garden. Each stood alone in a little mound of earth, so it was easy enough to count four rows back and four plants over.

“Should have brought a shovel,” she said.

Zee grinned and lifted an eyebrow. She smacked the back of one hand to her forehead. “Right. One shovel coming up.”

Not so strange, really. Lucid dreaming, only here the things were real. She pictured in her mind the implement she wanted—a spade, with the sharp rounded end and a smooth wooden handle, splinter free. It appeared in her hands, solid and real. She dug awkwardly into the dirt at the base of the plant she wanted.

“Here,” Zee said. “Let me.”

She stepped back and watched as he grabbed the base of the plant with one hand and thrust the spade into the earth at the edge of the mound with the other. In one smooth movement he brought a clump of earth and roots up into the light, including five or six fist-sized potatoes. “Shame to waste them,” he said, but he tossed them aside and kept digging. Two more strokes and the spade clanged against something solid.

Vivian sank down onto her knees, plunging her hands into the bottom of the hole. Her fingers found a rectangular shape, hard and smooth. She scrabbled at it, trying to get a grip. At last she pried it loose from the dirt and lifted it into the light. A box, plain, wooden, without ornamentation. There was no catch or lock, and it opened easily, revealing a cylinder carved from black stone. The Key. Her Key.

A shadow crossed the sun.

Poe hissed.

The rush of power struck her like a blow. Before she could shout a warning Zee was already in motion, turning to meet the five men who flowed over the fence. There was a subtle wrongness about the way they moved, as though they were not limited by flesh and bone. Their skin was gray, the sockets of their eyes empty, save for a glowing spark of red. Each wielded two blades, black as death, ten shadow blades against Zee’s one.

Gareth, standing closest to the fence, fell before he could run or scream, blood spurting from a gash at the base of his throat. Vivian felt weighted, as though somebody had filled her feet and brain with iron. She must do something but couldn’t think what that might be.

The men were almost on her and she was going to die, standing here stupidly with the Key in her hands.

Zee stepped between her and the attackers, sliding into a smooth and deadly rhythm. Vivian watched him parry the blows, the ring of sword on sword an assault to her own senses, still unable to think what to do.

Something was here, powerful enough to turn her brain to mush. Nothing moved, other than the fighting men. Jared was still visible in the window, watching, too far away for her to be able to read his expression, but she knew there would be no help from him.

A lurch in the rhythm of the swords, a cry, the thud of something heavy hitting the earth. Her heart convulsed in an agony of fear, but it was one of the attackers who had fallen. The death dance resumed, Zee still on his feet. He fought brilliantly, but there were too many.

She had to help him, had to fight this heaviness that immobilized her.

Shift them, change them. If she could eliminate even one of them, it would help Zee. A moment later one of the men held only sticks in his hands, futile against Zee’s sword. There was time for fear to cross his face, and then he was dead. Two down. She turned her mind to the next, hope springing up in her breast. They could do this, she and Zee. She would disarm them, he would kill them. The third man fell after his weapons just vanished, leaving his hands empty. And then the fourth, without her having done a thing. Zee and his last opponent stood a distance apart, studying each other, holding off before making the final move.

Dead bodies lay sprawled in the dirt, limbs tangled in vegetation. Blood spattered Zee’s face and clothing, and it wasn’t all the blood of his enemies. An ugly laceration ran from shoulder to elbow of his right arm. He’d shifted the sword to his left hand. His breath came too hard and he moved slowly, as though gravity had increased its pull on him.

The gray man didn’t even look tired. He spun his swords up into the air and caught them. White teeth flashed. Vivian shifted his swords to sticks, but they shifted back before Zee could make a move.

The man whirled, the two blades dancing. Zee blocked and parried one, but the second got past him and traced a line of crimson down his side.

“Surrender!”

Zee managed another blow. It drew blood. His opponent staggered and one of his swords dropped to the earth.

Vivian’s heart leaped in hope as she again focused on a shift, this time making the remaining blade disappear altogether.

And then, so unfair, more warriors swarmed over the fence, an army of loose-jointed figures with fresh blades.

“Surrender!” the swordsman facing Zee shouted again, brand-new blades shining in his hands, as the wave of reinforcements swept up behind him.

“Vivian, go!” Zee shouted, bracing himself for a hopeless defense. One last swing, and the onslaught bore him to the ground.

There had to be a way to fix this. Vivian grabbed the first image that came to mind and started the shift. The men began to sprout white feathers, to shrink. Their noses grew sharp and beaklike, their necks elongated.

The transformation was almost complete when an override struck her brain with an agony that nearly blinded her. Her legs felt like rubber; nausea surged in her belly. But Zee was going to be killed and she tried again. This time the pain dropped her to her knees, whimpering.

“Pitiful,” a woman’s voice said. “And stupid. Now give me the box.”

Vivian couldn’t move. Breathing was an agony that threatened to blow her head apart. Even the blood traveling through her veins created too much sensation. She willed herself to run, to do something to save the Key, but movement was beyond her.

She felt the box taken from her hand.

No more clanging of swords, no thudding of fists or grunts of effort. Nothing but her own too-loud breath.

When the voice spoke again, she tried to get her eyes open, but the light stabbed like daggers and the first attempt turned her stomach inside out.

“Get her out of my sight,” the voice said, dripping with disgust.

“It would be easiest to kill her.” A male voice now, accented and unfamiliar.

“Leave her alive. She may yet be of use. The rest of you—bind the warrior before he wakes.”

Hard hands grasped Vivian’s arms and dragged her to her feet, sending brand-new daggers of agony stabbing into her brain. The Voice of command was too far away for her to reach; her muscles didn’t belong to her. Bracing herself against the pain, she managed to stiffen her knees, force her eyes open, but then the hands lifted her and flung her through an open doorway.

The pain was beyond enduring and all the world went dark.

T
he sun had already dropped behind the mountain, laying heavy shadows beneath the trees. Soon it would be full dark. Morgan was racked by indecision. If he kept going, he risked losing the trail, blundering through the forest with nothing more than a blind hope that he’d somehow stumble across his quarry. But every time he thought about stopping he saw Jenn’s hands stretched out to him, the hope fading out of her eyes.

His fault—because he had been too slow to act today, and because of what he’d allowed to happen a year ago.

He’d been short on funds, and against his better judgment brought a young hothead hunter out looking for bear. After a long day of hunting and coming up empty they’d stumbled across a dying Sasquatch. What had happened to bring the creature down, Morgan couldn’t tell. Maybe it was wounded; maybe it was just sick, or old. It lay on a creek bank with its legs and feet trailing in the water, stinking to high heaven. When it saw them it struggled, briefly, trying to get to its feet but falling back and staring up at them with damn near human eyes.

And the imbecile hothead killed it. Not a mercy shot to end its suffering, or even a quick knife kill. No, the idiot began carving away at the neck with his hunting knife, carried away by the idea of lugging the head home as a trophy. Morgan had time to hear a near-human scream emerge from the creature’s throat, to see the eyes cloud with pain and fear before he’d put his own shotgun to one of those eyes and pulled the trigger.

He’d been uneasy ever since then about the man-beasts, and now the innocent were paying the price.

Trying to keep his emotions locked up tight so that his mind would be clear, he’d pushed himself all day long, moving as fast as he could without risk of losing the trail, not stopping to rest. He ate power bars from his backpack to keep up his energy. Drank water from the canteen. Welcomed the pain of overworked muscles and the creeping fatigue as a small punishment for an unforgivable failure.

At the edge of a small meadow he paused as his nostrils caught a hint of skunk gone bad. There were several large depressions in the grass and another smaller flattened area that could have been made by Jenn’s body. He saw no signs of blood. Maybe the creatures were more humane than the humans and his worst fears would not be realized.

Fingers tightening around the shotgun, he searched through the gloomy shadows for the trail. At first, his eyes passed right over the thing half buried in moss beside a decaying cedar. Just another bit of log, or an earth-covered rock. He had begun to follow the trampled grass out of the cleared space before his brain registered what he had seen.

Sick with remorse and dread, Morgan retraced his steps and knelt beside the body half buried in the leaves. He brushed away the debris to reveal Carpenter’s face, eyes open and staring blankly at the darkening sky. The old man’s face and hands were the color of a ripe plum. Dried blood clotted around a jagged piece of shrapnel embedded in his forehead, gift of the exploding gun. Blood matted his once-white hair.

The cause of death could have been brain injury and loss of blood from the head wound. If he had actually died hanging over the beast’s shoulder as his swollen face implied, then they hadn’t deliberately murdered him, had only dropped him off when they found him dead and even had the decency to cover him.

Which meant Jenn could still be alive.

Morgan’s weariness lifted in a burst of hope and renewed energy. Maybe he could still find her before dark. He didn’t want her to spend the long night hours as a prisoner, startling at noises in the dark, terrified of what her captors might do. He shut his mind against all of the possible harm that could come to her, willing his nerves steady and his mind clear. He could not afford to make any more mistakes.

Carpenter deserved a decent burial and his granddaughter would need that sort of closure, so Morgan took care to register the landmarks that would enable him to find the place again. He hadn’t gone far before a sound that had been just at the edge of his hearing became audible.

Running water.

Somewhere nearby there was a stream, and his quarry was headed toward it.

Morgan abandoned the trail and picked up his pace. Too dark now to catch the signs, but if he lost the trail he could backtrack to the clearing and try again by daylight. If they were heading for the water, it would be easy to find footprints in the soft earth at the margin of the stream.

As the sound of the water increased so did the stink, the air seeming to thicken with it. It spurred him to greater speed. He was on the trail; he had a chance to rescue the girl and at least partially pay for what he had done. This time he wouldn’t freeze if the hairy man-monkeys looked at him wrong. If they threw his shots off target, he’d tackle them with his bare hands. And if they killed him, what was death to him? A small thing, his life. He would be more than willing to trade it for the girl’s safety.

It was a noisy little creek, maybe ten feet across, cut deep into the earth. A pool about twenty paces downstream was edged by shallow muddy banks, lousy with footprints that would have given a Squatch hunter wet dreams, but Morgan didn’t even look at them.

Jenn lay half in, half out of the pool. A ray of light shafted through the trees and illuminated her face. She was moving, thank God, and her dark eyes were open. During the endless seconds it took for him to reach her they seemed to follow him, judging. One of her boots was caught under a branch that had lodged against two submerged rocks, anchoring her body in the stream with torso and head floating in the pool. Her long hair rippled with the moving water. Her arms were spread, palms open, much as they had been hours earlier when they had been stretched out to him, beseeching.

Coward.

Morgan waded out to her, icy water seeping into his boots, numbing his legs. Seen up close, the eyes were not looking at him, were not looking at anything. No breath animated the chest. The movement of her arms was an effect of the flowing water.

His own breath kept hanging up on a snarl of something that felt like barbed wire. He knelt beside her, heedless of the icy water and the sharp rocks tearing into his knees. Tilting her head back, he sealed his mouth over hers and blew air into her lungs. Her skin was cold and clammy and he knew even as he breathed breath after breath into her that it was far too late.

This was his fault. His. He had brought her to this place, had failed to protect her. Had been too slow—too slow—to find her.

Coward.

Grace’s face flashed before his mind’s eye, her face spattered in blood. It was not something he could bear to think about. Not now, not ever, and he shoved it away as he always did.

Jenn’s body was heavy with water, his arms rubbery and weak. It would have been easier to put her over his shoulder, but he wouldn’t do that to her, not after what she had been through. Instead he pressed her head onto his shoulder, the long wet hair tangling around his arm, and tried to warm her against his heart. He caught himself rocking her as though she were a frightened child and forced himself back to sanity.

His feet sloshed inside his boots as he splashed onto dry land. His arms ached with the weight of his burden. Pain was only the beginning of the penance that he would pay, and he embraced every signal of discomfort that his nerves sent him. One slow step at a time he retraced his path. It was now dark in earnest under the trees, and he stumbled over rocks and fallen branches, moving more by instinct than by landmark.

But it wasn’t far and his sense of direction was well honed. At last he collapsed onto his knees in the clearing and laid the girl on a bed of moss beside her grandfather. As he knelt over their bodies, still struggling to breathe past the tangle in his throat, a memory long suppressed fought its way past all of the guards and wards he had built against it.

Blood, everywhere blood. The sick sweet smell of it, thick and clotted on his own face, slick on his hands. The walls—whitewashed once by his own reluctant labor—now patterned with an indelible splatter of crimson. The bodies, so many of them, like empty containers discarded on the floor, emptied of their souls. Underlying the smell of blood the bitter tinct of gunsmoke. Only one living face, besides his own, dark eyes staring accusing into his.

His body shook with a sick palsy that wouldn’t permit him to take refuge in physical flight. The one scene played in his memory, over and over again, an old-time movie reel broken and spinning, tick, tick, tick. The room, the blood, the dead, Gracie’s face, alternating with flashes of light and dark.

Guilt was an unbearable torment.

He could put the barrel of the shotgun in his mouth and end it now, but that was a death too easy for the sins he had committed.

His hand went to the leather thong around his neck. In Wakeworld a pendant hung from it, a raven in a dream web, carved from strange black stone. He was a Dreamshifter. He had the power to re-dream this nightmare, to cast himself as a hero able to rescue both the girl and the old man. Or he could dream a dream in which the Sasquatch had never appeared. He could dream himself and the girl into ravens, flying high above the forest and looking down at a miniature Sasquatch far below.

One small problem.

In all the years of his life, Morgan had never used this power, not once, and had no idea how to do what needed to be done. Right now he would gladly have given up his life to know how to change this story, but that didn’t help a damned thing. The knowledge that would have helped him was buried with all of the rest of the memories from his childhood.

He’d spent more than eighty years avoiding anything that reminded him of his childhood, his family, or the Dreamshifter lore. It was too late to do anything to save Carpenter or Jenn, but as penance for his sins the least he could do was face up to his demons.