Chapter Five
He woke up.
Only it wasn’t really like waking. It was like closing his eyes on the clout of pain in the back of his head, then blinking them back open to find himself flat on his back, staring up at the soft rustle of very tall trees.
He crooked his head toward his shoulder and narrowed his eyes against the sunlight that streamed through the leaves and lent the green foliage a strangely silver cast. Hanging moss, thin and gray, wafted in the breeze, and the sun shone through it in a way that made it seem to almost glow. It was pretty. Beautiful, really. If this was his latest serving of dreams, it definitely beat getting shot at. He inhaled the same organic spicy smell from the dream of the waterfall.
A face slid into view and blocked out the sun. Shriveled and brown and not too far removed from the underside of a mushroom, the face stretched in surprise, the eyes goggling at him.
“Ricotée,” scratched a surprised little voice.
“Whoa.” He recoiled and scrambled back, crab-like, on his hands and feet, until he smacked into a tree. He blinked hard and willed himself back to the surface of sleep, back to face whatever danger he was in on Hunter Street. For all he knew, Harrison’s assailants might be dismembering him right now.
In front of him, the creature stared, head cocked to the side. “Ricotée,” it breathed again.
Basically human in form, it stood only a little higher than Chris’s knee. Spindly limbs jutted from beneath a long canvas shirt belted at the waist. The legs ended in bare, knobby feet and the long-fingered hands held the glint of stiletto blades. Framed all about by a mop of mud-colored dreadlocks, the face was the size of Chris’s fist, with musty little eyes and a long upper lip.
If this was supposed to be the new-and-improved version of his fair lady on the warhorse, it was a definite misfire.
The creature lifted its lip to reveal two rows of long yellow teeth. It waved its knives in what was either excitement or a threat. “Ma ta bé?”
Chris hauled himself to one knee, hands in front of him in a placating gesture. “Just take it easy. I don’t know what you want from me. I don’t know where I am, I don’t know what you are—I just—” His insides eddied. This wasn’t real. This couldn’t be real. He’d been knocked out. That was what was real. He was dreaming, dreaming.
He leaned away from the knife, carefully lifted one hand, and slapped himself in the face. He still didn’t wake up. He pinched the skin of his biceps. No go.
His breath came fast. What was it they always told you to do when you were having a nightmare? Tell yourself to wake up? “Wake up, Chris. C’mon, you need to wake up from this one.”
He stared around him. Gone were Mike’s orange Volkswagen and the gray heat of forsaken Hunter Street. Instead, he knelt on a rocky hillside, shadowed by trees whose trunks twisted around like whorls of wet caramel taffy. His brain tilt-a-whirled.
“Ma ta bé?” The creature flicked one blade toward Chris’s chest and shouted over its shoulder. “Raz! Ci lodden don a tosl Laeler. Eck sit cis rotodon!”
Chris inched a hand out to ease the blade aside. “How about not stabbing me? Because I really don’t need to be stabbed right now.”
The little figure thrust the blade nearer to Chris’s chest. His teeth flashed still more.
A few yards to the left, the underbrush cracked open to reveal his captor’s twin. The newcomer thrashed free of the vines and stomped over to stand beside his compatriot.
“Tuch pua.” Heavy brows loomed over his eyes, and dark stubble prickled his face. He glared at Chris. “Ma ta bé?”
“I come in peace, or whatever it is you want to hear. But I can’t understand a word you’re saying.”
The older one batted his friend’s shoulder. “He doesn’t speak Cherazii, halfwit.”
“Oh.” The younger, abashed, lowered his blades a little. “Sorry.”
Chris sat back onto his heels and let himself release a long breath. “Okay, then. I really should be going.” Somewhere, anywhere.
The blades came back up. “Stay where you are! I have found you, and you are my prisoner!”
“No offense, but I don’t quite see how that’s going to work.” He pushed to his feet. “I’m four times your size and I could squash both of you.”
The creature began swaying and parrying the air with his blades. “I have taken your sword while you were sleeping!” This time he was definitely grinning. “It is Riever law. Take a sleeping Laeler’s sword, and he is your servant forever!”
“Right.” He sidestepped. “I don’t want to be rude here, and I really have no desire to squash you, but I don’t have a sword, I’m not a Laeler, and I don’t know what Riever law is.” He took his eyes off his supposed captors long enough to look around.
He was standing on the slope of a wooded hill. Moss sheeted the flat slabs of stone, and a thick fern-like profusion obscured everything else, save for the occasional glimpse of rich black soil. The chittering of little woodland creatures punctuated an almost metallic warbling. In the branches overhead, a flock of sooty-blue birds, about the size of ravens, with carnelian-tipped wingspans twice again as long, hopped and cawed.
He rubbed the smooth, spiraled twist of a tree trunk. “Where am I?”
“Bah.” The older one shrugged at his partner. “Pitch, you’re an idiot. You would pick the stupidest of the lot.”
“Doesn’t matter. He’s mine, I found him.” The one called Pitch bounced around, still brandishing his swords. “Don’t be jealous, Raz.”
“Where am I?” Chris repeated.
The older one, Raz, replied, “The Thyra hills.” He crossed his arms. “If you don’t know where you are, how’d you get here?”
Chris managed a laugh that escaped the edge of hysteria. “I’m not here. I’m dreaming. This is all a dream. Just one big fat crazy soon-to-be-woken-up-from dream.” He circled the tree. He’d never seen a tree like this in his life. Why would he dream about a tree he’d never seen? “It’s a really incredible, convincing dream, but it’s just a dream.”
“It’s not a dream,” Pitch said. “If it was a dream, you’d be sleeping. And you wouldn’t dream about us. You’d dream about the other world.”
Chris came full circle around the tree. “What other world?”
That, finally, seemed to slow Pitch down a bit. He lowered his blades. “The other world. The one you go to in your dreams. When you sleep here, you dream about the other world. When you’re awake here, your body in the other world is dreaming about here.”
“You’re telling me I have two bodies?” He touched his face. Under a day’s growth of whiskers, his features felt the same as always, except . . . He ran his tongue over his lower lip. The copper tang of blood and the sting of saliva in an open cut weren’t there.
He slid his hand higher up his face, and his fingers bumped over an unfamiliar knot of bone in the bridge of his nose. “I broke my nose?”
“Stupid and delusional,” Raz said.
“I broke my nose.” He rubbed his fingers against the scar. “I never broke my nose. This is not my nose.”
“Could’ve fooled me.”
His hands worked higher. Cheeks, eyes, forehead—everything seemed in order. His hair was longer than when he’d blacked out, just full enough for him to grab a handful on either side. He inspected the rest of his body. Two arms, two legs. Clever of him not to dream about having an amputated limb.
But his clothing was entirely foreign. Instead of T-shirt, jeans, and sneakers, he wore a flowing blouse-like shirt with a wide, unbuttoned collar and voluminous sleeves that were stitched tight at the elbows and the wrists. His pants were made of some kind of dark brown homespun. Heavy leather boots reached to his knees, where they were cuffed down to mid-shin. His belt held a leather pouch and a long thin sword sheath, which, true to Pitch’s word, was empty. He made himself keep breathing. At least he had clothes. And money. And, apparently, a sword somewhere around here.
“So let me get this s
traight,” he said. “You’re telling me everybody moves back and forth between these worlds when they sleep?”
Pitch nodded. “Exactly.”
“And you visit my world when you dream?” This was where he proved to himself this couldn’t possibly be real. The likes of these two had never visited Earth, waking or sleeping.
Raz threw up his hands in disgust and turned back to the hedge.
“No, no.” Pitch put both blades in one hand, so he could gesture in the negative with the other. “Rievers don’t dream. Neither do Cherazii. Only humans.”
“Only humans.” So his theory had a loophole. “Why’s that?”
“Because Rievers and Cherazii only live here. You have to live in both worlds to dream.”
Somewhere in the trees in front of Chris, a rhythmic clatter echoed beneath the forest’s canopy. “What’s that?”
“A horse.” Raz glared at Pitch. “Orias said to stay in the thicket until he got back. You want him to find you out larking about?”
Pitch pointed up at Chris. “But he won’t fit in the thicket.”
“Then leave him. If he’s too stupid to take care of himself, you don’t want him anyway.”
With a flourish, Pitch sheathed his blades. Arms crossed, hands on his hilts, he dropped his head in a bow. “You are my responsibility now, so I will take care of you.” He caught two of Chris’s fingers in his tiny hand.
“Thanks.” Chris looked in the direction of the approaching hoofbeats. “But this sword you say you took from me—maybe it wouldn’t be a bad idea for me to have it back.”
“It’s in the thicket. Come, I’ll show you.” Pitch ran in a strange, loping pace, doling out three or four strides for every one of Chris’s. “I’m Pitch. That’s Raz.” His remaining blade gestured to the older Riever burrowing into the brush ahead of them. “What’s your name?”
“Chris. Chris Redston.”
The Riever tilted his head back and forth, blowing air in first one cheek, then the other, as if tasting the words. “Strange name. Your accent is strange too. Where do you come from?”
Before he could answer, a big red horse rounded the corner. On its back rode a giant of a man with skin the color and translucency of an egg white, veined with blue. Sun-bleached brown hair hung past his chin, veiling but not hiding the batwing ears that rose two or three inches above his head. Shoulders and chest swelled against a sleeveless leather tunic that revealed intimidating biceps and corded forearms. Deep scars wormed across the right arm and collarbone.
Eyes of pale, almost luminescent green darted from Chris’s face to his hold on Pitch’s hand, and, in an instant, the stranger had dropped the dead gazelle-like creature he had dangled from one hand and snatched a battle axe from his belt. “Dougal!”
A black cat, about the size of a wolfhound, bounded up from behind the horse. The muscles in its forequarters bunched and its short white-tufted tail whipped back and forth.
Chris backpedaled, caught his heel on a vine, and fell down flat on his back.
Behind him, Pitch hollered, “Tulle sit giharde! Eck sit cis rotodon!”
The hesitation before the newcomer responded could have lasted Chris the rest of his life.
“Dougal! Eider fon!”
Chris rolled over and scrambled to regain his feet. Then he dared a look over his shoulder.
The big cat sat on its haunches, blinking rust-colored eyes. Striped ever so faintly in a lighter shade of black, it sported white tassels of fur at the tip of each ear and a beard of white trimmed in black. It licked four-inch fangs.
Its master had returned his axe to his belt. He sat the horse straight-backed, one hand on the reins, the other leaning against the axe head.
Two things were abundantly obvious. First, this hulk could kill Chris, using any number of unsavory methods, in less than a minute. And second, he wasn’t going to.
“I apologize.” The stranger’s voice was deep without being gruff, his inflection weighting the consonants and lengthening the vowels. “In these days, a Cherazim can’t afford to mistake an enemy for a friend.”
Raz ducked out of the thicket. “Especially humans with strange accents.”
The Cherazim’s face, with its long planes and sloping jaw, was difficult to read, but something flickered in his eyes, some tiny knitting of the skin above his nose. “I know what my enemies’ speech sounds like. And I’ll be forsworn if I’ve ever heard the likes of you.”
Pitch ran back to Chris’s side and grabbed his hand. “Orias, this is my prisoner Chris Redston. I found him while he was sleeping, and I took his sword. Raz will bear it out.”
Raz reached Orias’s stirrup and jumped to hook a skinny arm around his boot. “I’ll bear out he’s near kin to an idiot.” He clambered up Orias’s leg to stand on the horse’s rump, one hand clamped on the baldric across Orias’s back. “He doesn’t know where he is or how he got here.”
Pitch shook his head. “Just because he is not from Lael does not mean he is a worthless find.”
The crease between Orias’s eyes deepened. “If not from Lael, then where?”
Chris opened his mouth to explain, then closed it and shook his head. “I doubt it’s any place you’ve heard of, even in your wildest dreams.”
“He doesn’t know anything about the dreams,” Pitch said.
“Is that so?” Orias stared on. “Well then, welcome to Lael, Chris Redston. You’ve chosen a bad time for it, I’m afraid. But that’s the way of things.”
“There wasn’t any choosing in my coming here. I just came. And if I knew how to leave, I would. Like that.” He snapped his fingers, part of his mind hoping that would be enough to wake him up.
“My name would be Orias Tarn, and I’ll offer you a ride, if you’ll take it. But first—” The Cherazim swung his off leg over the horse’s neck and slid to the ground. On the ground, his height was even more imposing. “Tell me.” He studied Chris. He seemed to be having just as difficult a time believing in Chris’s presence here in dreamland as Chris was himself. “Did what you now see as Lael began for you as a dream—and grow into reality?”
Chris nodded. “Not just one dream. All my dreams.” That thought caught him up short. All his dreams. Why hadn’t he realized it before? He’d been so focused on the dreams of the battles and the woman on the black horse that he hadn’t given a second thought to the other dreams—the hazy, disjointed dreamlike dreams he’d dreamt all the rest of the time.
They’d all been different enough, random enough. But, really, they’d all been the same. Golden threads had always woven through the entire tapestry of his dreamscape and joined them in the common unity of a place. This place. This world with its spicy trees and silver leaves and strange beings. Had he dreamt a dream in his life that hadn’t taken place here?
What did that mean? That he was lost inside some imaginary world his subconscious had dreamed up? Maybe he was schizophrenic. He was delusional. He was having visions. He was seeing and hearing things that didn’t exist. His mind had conjured them up, building them slowly, from his childhood onward, spurred by the catalyst of his mother’s and sister’s deaths, until suddenly they had taken over his mind.
Sudden sweat slicked his palms, and he forced the air to keeping moving in his lungs. Though what did it really matter if he kept breathing? Dream bodies only needed dream air, right?
Pitch’s fingers loosened their grip on his hand and slipped away. He stared up with wide eyes. “You’re the Gifted?” A grin split his face, and he danced around in a circle. “I have found the Gifted! My servant is the Gifted!” He stopped short and looked at Orias. “Does that mean I can’t keep him?”
“A Gifted?” Chris said. That’s what Harrison had called him. From the exuberant look on Pitch’s face, the bored scowl on Raz’s, and the stunned stare Orias was giving him, that might make him anything from a prophet to a plague carrier. “Is that a good thing or a bad thing?”
Orias took a breath. “That depends.”
“On what?”
“On the man. But it can’t be any coincidence you landed here, right in the lap of a Keeper.”
“A Keeper?” Chris shook his head.
“I’m a Keeper. The Tarns have been Keepers of the Orimere for generations.” He touched the oval buckle that secured his baldric’s chest strap. An upraised wing had been stamped into the burnished silver. “The wing of the Garowai is the Tarn crest. The Searcher sent word two months ago that you were coming.”
“The Searcher’s the woman on the black horse?”
“Yes. The Searchers are connected to the Gifted. They can feel them. They can sense where they are in the world. You saw her in your dreams before you crossed?”
He rubbed the side of his fist up the center of his forehead, right where the Searcher’s bullets always caught him before he woke up. “Yeah, I’ve seen her.”
Orias stepped toward him. “Two months ago, I joined one of the many Cherazii caravans fleeing persecution in Koraud. I came to bring you the Orimere. I never expected to have to bring the Gifted to the Searcher as well.”
“We could skip that part as far as I’m concerned.”
“You’re in a different world now,” Orias said. “Takes some getting used to, I suppose. You need to relax, let your subconscious tell you what to do. You’ll get used to it. It’s a world you’ve known all your life.”
“Get used to it?” He forced a laugh. “This is a dream. I’m going to wake up, and this is all going to be nothing but a long nightmare.”
What might have been half a smile raised the corner of Orias’s mouth. “Your world is ages behind in understanding the true nature of dreams, but for us here it’s common knowledge.”
Chris snorted. “It’s common knowledge I’m crazy? Of course, if this is some manifestation of my subconscious, it would make sense everyone in it would know I was insane before I did.”
The smile turned into a grin. “You’re not insane.”
Raz grunted. “I’ll give you good odds.”
Pitch shot him a glare.
“This happens to all humans,” Orias said. “It’s just that most people don’t remember it. Each of you lives two separate and distinct lives. And dreams,” he tapped his temple, “dreams are the only link. They’re your only memories of your life in this other world.”
Pitch peered up at Chris, thumbs tucked under his opposite arms. “Only the Gifted can cross the worlds.”
“Only the Gifted are able to remember both worlds,” Orias said. “For everyone else there are only dreams—just as there were for you before today.”
Chris looked around. What he needed right now was some speck of incontrovertible proof that this was a dream. An inconsistency, a flicker in the wall, a crack in the scenery. Even better, he needed to find the magic words that would wake him up.
He faced Orias. “If everyone is living doppelgänger lives, how come don’t you live in my world?”
Orias glanced back to where Raz stood on the horse’s broad rump. “Perhaps he’s not as stupid as you think.”
Raz rolled his eyes.
He turned back. “Once, we might have lived in your world. Species, races, countries, they eventually disappear, some never to return. Who is to say the Cherazii were not one of those fatalities of time?” He shrugged. “Only the God of all knows. But it is true the Cherazii dream no longer.”
“Okay, fine, so let’s say I am the Gifted. My lotto number comes up, and I’m the lucky one who gets an express pass to Dreamland. What does that mean? What’s the point of a Gifted?”
“That’s for you to find out. The Gifted are called into our worlds to change something. Their gift—their destiny—is to launch and sometimes to end epochs.”
Pitch’s snub-nosed face wrinkled into a smile. “I think your gift is to bring peace to Lael.”
“And how am I supposed to do that? I just show up, is that it? I’m here, so now Lael’s at peace?” He spread his arms and looked around. “Sounds good to me. So now that the job’s done, please point me to the turnoff back to home.”
“Stupid and arrogant,” Raz said. “What do you think you are, human? The blithering Garowai straight from heaven? You don’t get nothing for nothing in this world.”
“Then what do you want me to do? Find a soapbox and start preaching peace and love?” He glared back. “Just tell me what I’m supposed to do, and I’ll do it. I’ll follow the ten-step plan, whatever it takes. Just show me what I have to do to wake up.”
He would not go crazy. He would not end up drunken and slobbering in the gutter like his father. Maybe he’d stopped living life here lately. He was tired—and why not? Life was nothing but a fight, and if you had to come out swinging when you were only twelve, it left you with broken knuckles and missing teeth by the time the real battles started.
But this wasn’t where it was going to end. If he had to care about something, like Mike said, then the first thing he’d start caring about would be waking up and getting his head on straight. Then he’d write stuff worth selling. Pay his rent. Maybe even move into a place decent enough to be worth paying rent for.
But first he had to play the mind games. He had to stop the dreams.
Pitch reached up and patted his leg. “Don’t worry. The Searcher will find you and tell you what you have to do.”
Orias’s chest lifted with a deep breath. “These are dangerous times into which you’ve stepped, Chris Redston. Complicated times, and all the more so if you’re the Gifted. You find us a weary, war-torn country. I’ll explain it to you later. Right now, we’ll have to return to my caravan, gather gear, and take our leave.”
“And where are we going?”
“The sooner we get you and the Orimere to Réon Couteau, the better.”
“What is this Orimere thing anyway?”
Orias reached into his jerkin and pulled out a small green pouch. He tugged loose the drawstrings, then upended the pouch into his palm and closed his fingers over whatever had fallen out. “Only a handful of people in the worlds have ever seen this.”
He extended his fist, and his fingers opened to reveal a translucent white stone the size of a turkey egg. Its milky color pulsed with an energy of its own, sometimes veining with green, sometimes deepening to crimson or purple.
“If you are touching it when you sleep, it and anything else your body is in contact with will cross over. The Orimere is the key to the door between the worlds. Only the Gifted are given the power to use it.”
Tentatively, Chris held out his hand for the stone. It touched his skin with an electric shock, and he jerked back, nearly dropping it. It purred in his hand, like a kitten curled into a ball. The harder he clenched it, the harder it purred, warming his skin, tingling his nerves.
“Feels like it’s going to eat my hand.”
“It feels that way only to a Gifted.” Orias gave a little nod and touched his fist to his shoulder. “Welcome. I hope your dedication is greater than your predecessor’s.”
Chris opened his hand. The stone pulsed, a sleepy orange. “What am I supposed to do with it?”
“Keep it. I’m entrusted to deliver it to the Searcher. I’ll deliver it and you.” Orias circled the horse to reclaim his dead gazelle.
The animal, a little bigger than Dougal, was a steely gray, almost bluish, with a swash of white on both sides of its belly and two sets of antlers, one pointing up and one pointing down. Biceps bulging, Orias lifted it by one hind leg and mounted the horse. As he gathered his reins, Pitch ran to the horse and scrambled up the stirrup to sit in front of the saddle. Raz swung around Orias’s body to sit behind Pitch and make room for Chris on the horse’s hindquarters.
Orias guided the horse a few steps to the side until it stood next to Chris. He hesitated, staring into the forest. “Before we go, I’d like you to know something about being a Gifted.”
“Like what?” At this point, Orias could tell him they were all on the fifteenth moon of Jupiter, and he wouldn’t be surprised.
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br /> “What you do as a Gifted will either destroy lives, or it will save them. My people’s lives.” Orias turned to him. The fierceness in his face softened ever so slightly to reveal a glint of pain. “If you fail, they will die. Hundreds of them, thousands maybe.”
That wasn’t what Chris had been expecting at all. Whacked-out, convoluted mind games, yes. But not this. This wasn’t weird at all. This had the ring of truth. Desperate, pleading, knocked-out-on-its-feet truth.
That was a kind of truth he knew backwards and forwards.
So now he had to choose whether it was better to stay where he was or journey deeper into the rabbit hole. If he stayed here, what then? He’d wander around until he either woke up or one of those big cat things decided to eat him.
Of course, if it was a dream, what did it matter if the cat ate him? Maybe it would just speed things along. Staying here, focusing on waking up, that was the most sensible plan.
But he couldn’t make himself look away from the hurt in Orias’s face. If he went with Orias, at least he might get some questions answered and actually come up with a notion of what was wrong with him.
“All right.” He took hold of Orias’s callused palm and swung up behind the saddle.