I took a deep breath. If Atthis had not foreseen my success, she must have foreseen at least the possibility of it. It must be that there was no other way.
“Let’s go, then,” I sent.
The old cat curled up on the pillow beside Rushton’s head and bade me lay my body in a comfortable position.
I climbed onto the bed beside Rushton and lay full length against him. Taking his hand in mine, I looked over at Maruman.
“Must prepare/change to travel the dreamtrails,” he sent.
I closed my eyes, put myself into a light doze, and sank through the levels of my mind until I could hear the humming song of the mindstream. I locked myself in balance and visualized a tiny stream of the river flowing up toward me. This time, the response was immediate, but still it cost an enormous effort to bring it to me. When the gleaming thread was within reach, I took hold of it and gasped as the stream flowed into me. I willed myself to rise, and as the thread connecting me to the mindstream payed out, it occurred to me that what I was doing was oddly similar to diving, the silver cord as much a lifeline as the air hose.
Once I had willed myself to see through the eyes of my light form, the room was transformed into torrents of vibrating color. I concentrated until I could make out Rushton’s aura beside my own. His was dim, and the cord running away from his body seemed so smoky and insubstantial that a cold fear ran through me.
“Fly with me.”
The tyger of light that bore Maruman’s consciousness gathered itself and leaped up. I jumped instinctively after it. The air around us was filled with flowing color, but as before, this faded first to a pure white light and then to a brilliant blue. Now I could see the tips of the mountains I had seen before and wondered whether they were real or some sort of etheric echo.
Then we were approaching the glimmering road laid impossibly through the billowing clouds. Maruman landed lightly upon it, and I, clumsily beside him. Only when I touched down did I become aware of my nakedness. I visualized trousers and a loose tunic and sandals, and immediately I was dressed.
“You learn swiftly,” Maruman assayed a rare compliment. He was now fully a tyger in appearance rather than a light form, and his eyes glimmered like mismatched jewels.
“Let us go,” I sent, suddenly impatient.
“Look,” Maruman sent.
I did and found that the road was now crossed by the fortress wall. Black it looked to my eyes, not gray as it had been before.
“It becomes more and more solid. Soon, even Mornirdragon will not be able to cross.”
I was chilled, for he was clearly saying that Dragon was on the verge of being truly lost to us. “That is why the oldOnes summoned me back. Why didn’t they tell me sooner? I could have tried before.…”
“No,” Maruman sent. “Before, all possibilities were dark. Only now, at this last moment, is there hope of success. But only hope.”
Intuitively, I understand it was because Rushton was there. He was the Misfit I had needed to bring back from Sutrium so that his battered mind could be sucked into Dragon’s. Somehow, he changed things.
“I will bring them back,” I sent.
“Do not be overambitious,” Maruman warned. “Beyond this wall lies a world real/unreal. Memory and nightmare are grown strong by brooding on themselves. We must first summon dragonbeast, but will not be easy.”
I opened my mouth to ask why, then remembered that Dragon was at a passive state in her cycle of madness.
I looked at the wall. It was formed of great blocks that no man could lift. Such a wall could only be an unreal thing, no matter how solid it looked.
“Call,” Maruman sent. “Call Mornirdragon.”
I took a deep breath and shouted. “Dragon! Come out. I am here.”
“Call with mind,” Maruman sent with slight exasperation.
Feeling like an idiot, I focused my mind and called. There was no answer. I called again and again, to no avail.
“The wall grows ever more solid,” Maruman urged. “Use all of your strength.”
I meant to tell him that I was using every bit of my ability, but then I realized it was not true. But surely he could not mean for me to use the dark power coiled at the base of my mind?
He growled under his breath, and I knew that this was exactly what he intended. I took a deep breath and reached down into myself, summoning up the power that had so recently seared through me, praying I would be able to control it. It surged up, thick and potent, and I thought suddenly that it would be delicious to fly about using that power rather than to risk my life on an arduous quest.
I fought the insidious desire and managed to shape it into a probe. This done, I sent it rocketing up and over the wall, seeking Dragon.
“DRAGON! COME TO ME!”
And she came. Snarling and screaming her fury, she rose above the wall on leathery wings.
“Dragon, take me over the wall,” I commanded, this time using my dark power to coerce her. She fought me, but I could sense that part of her wanted to obey.
When she had landed on the road before me, I realized I was no longer afraid of her. I strode up to her, Maruman padding calmly beside me.
She snarled like a thousand cats as we climbed aboard her. Then she leapt into the air.
When we rose above the fortress wall, I looked beyond it expectantly. But I could see nothing but a dense roiling mist. As we descended into it, I felt its damp touch on my skin and shuddered.
And suddenly, with no sensation of movement, I was no longer flying on the dragon’s back but was standing on a road. It was night, and the land about was swathed in a light mist that coiled along the ground and licked up against a few leafless trees growing on the bare hills. It looked like wintertime, and yet it was terrifically hot. Sweat was already trickling down between my shoulder blades.
I willed myself to be wearing lighter clothing, but nothing happened. Shrugging, I removed my overshirt and slung it round my shoulders. Maruman was sniffing the ground in his tyger form, but he sent that there was no sign of Dragon.
“Mornirdragon does not dwell in dragonbeast form on this side of wall,” he added.
I tried to scry out Dragon’s mind, but I found nothing. I guessed this must be because everything around us was a product of Dragon’s mind; a probe could not locate her, because in a sense she was everywhere.
Broadening the focus of my probe, I let it run along the road, but I could not find Rushton’s mind either. It was hard to ascertain anything very clearly.
“Nothing stable here,” Maruman sent.
“I think I felt some sort of town or settlement ahead. We might as well go there as stay here. I don’t understand why I can’t feel where Rushton is.”
“OldOnes said Rushtonmind will lead you to sign,” the tyger sent, reminding me pointedly of the purpose of this journey.
We walked, and the mist thickened appreciably, hiding all but fleeting glimpses of the land on either side of the road. It seemed to change constantly and impossibly. One minute I would see a flat snow-covered plain, and then I would see a thick-forested cliff; two steps on, I would be looking at the shore of an ocean. But the heat was unchanging.
Eventually, I heard the sound of voices on the road ahead of us.
“I say we sell it,” said a man; or maybe it was a boy, I thought, for though masculine, the voice was curiously high-pitched.
“I say we train it and make it dance for the crowds,” a second man spoke. His voice was sharp and sly.
“It will never dance.” This was a third voice and sounded as if it belonged to a querulous old woman. “We ought to offer it to the queen. She will reward us for our goodness.”
“The best place for it is the arena. It’s been cut up pretty bad.” This was the first voice again, and now I was close enough for my eyes to penetrate the mist and make out the speakers. As I had thought, there were two men and an old woman, but all three were little people of the sort sometimes born to ordinary-sized Landfolk.
&nb
sp; Just as it occurred to me that a woman with a tyger might be judged a dangerous oddity, the three turned to stare at us.
“Who are you?” the smaller of the two men demanded, seeming untroubled by Maruman. But then the man held on the end of a leash an enormous muzzled black bear with a great silvery ruff at its neck. The bear did not look up, and I wondered if the poor thing had been drugged to keep it docile. Even at that distance, I could see whip scars all over its back and flank, and there was a cluster of scabs over one of its eyes, covering what looked to be a deeper wound.
“I am Elspeth, and I am a traveler on the road just as you are.”
“I have never seen you before,” retorted the younger of the men.
“Do you know all travelers on the road?” I asked, deciding I might as well be aggressive. The man shrugged and did not respond, but the old woman clacked her teeth irritably.
“I don’t suppose you want to sell your beast,” the other man called to me, goggling at Maruman.
“The tyger is not for sale,” I said firmly.
Maruman gave a low, rumbling growl and eyed the threesome as if he was considering his hunger. When his tongue swept out and along his teeth, they skittered back nervously.
“You will excuse us, mistress,” said the woman. “It has been pleasant speaking with you, but we have important business in the town.” She glared pointedly at her companions, and all three hurried away, tugging the bear’s leash to make it follow. It went meekly, and I wondered what had happened to the poor thing.
I tried to reach it, but its mind was utterly closed. “Maybe we should have made them let it go,” I murmured.
“It is not a truecreature but a dreamsymbol,” Maruman sent. “Everything here is part of Mornirdragon’s dreamings.”
We let a little gap open up between us and the strange group before continuing along the road.
Before long, we came to the town, and a strange place it was. The majority of the buildings were square and composed of reddish stone. I was irresistibly reminded of the place in my dreams where I had seen Matthew. But mixed in among these buildings were streets that reminded me of Sutrium and even of parts of Obernewtyn. Steam rose in plumes from holes in the ground, and the heat grew ever more intense. A multitude of people swarmed about, clad lightly in a bizarre assortment of clothes. I was fascinated and relieved to see that there were all manner of beasts walking about, many of them free from restraint as Maruman was. Far from appearing out of place, I realized we would have no trouble blending with the strange inhabitants of the town.
The trouble was going to be finding Dragon and Rushton in such a teaming throng, especially when they were not likely to look like themselves.
For a time, we simply went with the main flow, drawn hither and thither by our curiosity. Maruman was as fascinated as I, though he sent he could smell something bad underneath the city. “Something rotten,” he corrected.
Many of the animals I saw were completely unfamiliar to me. There was a plump skittish horse with black tyger stripes and some sort of beast with an incredibly elongated neck covered in velvety, spotted fur. I tried to greet them, but most of their minds were closed to me. Finally, I was able to beastspeak a tawny-eyed elk with a magnificent rack of antlers. Thinking of the conversation I’d overheard among the little people on the road, I asked if he had met the queen of this place.
“Of course,” he responded somewhat distantly. “When I first came to the town, I requested an audience with the Red Queen.”
I stared after the elk, openmouthed. The Red Queen?
My mind reeled, until I realized that Dragon could have absorbed the Red Queen from our dreams of Matthew, incorporating the figure into her disturbed mental universe.
“I think this Red Queen might be the key,” I murmured.
I stopped a plump, round-faced man with oiled curls and asked him politely how I could arrange an audience with the queen.
He gave me an incredulous look. “Go to the center palace, of course. Where else?”
Where else, indeed, I thought. And if the center of a dream is its dreamer, then Dragon would be there, too.
As we penetrated the strange town more deeply, the mist grew steadily lighter. At last we came to a cobbled road that ran along a red stone wall. I could see treetops beyond it and could hear enough birdsong to guess it was some sort of park, enclosed at the very center of the town. We followed the wall until we reached an ornate gateway with beautiful wrought-metal gates touched here and there with gold.
The gates stood open, but a very tall, bald man stood before them, clad in magnificent red robes edged in gold braid. He was smoking a long, thin pipe from which dribbled purple smoke. His eyes were slitted against it; this and a complex set of whorls and dots adorning his cheeks accentuated the hawkish cast of his features. He was enough to gawk at, but my attention shifted immediately to the people before him, for it was the trio we had met on the road.
In the real world, I would have put our arrival together at these gates down to coincidence. But this was a false reality constructed on mad dream logic. Kella had speculated that behind the walls of her mind, Dragon was reliving over and over whatever memory she had repressed, seeking to resolve it. She had been only half right. This surreal place was less a true memory than some tapestry of symbols, but whatever Dragon had repressed lay beneath it, and so there was a reason for every flourish, every strange feature of what was unfolding. This grotesque trio and their bear were part of it; of that I was sure.
The robed man was clearly some sort of elite gatekeeper, for he told them, “Your beast is badly marked and sullen-looking. Her Majesty loves beauty, and this bear lacks it. I suggest—”
A bell sounded a questioning note from somewhere within the walls, and a look of intense irritation flickered over the gatekeeper’s face. He stepped to one side and indicated a path running from the gate into the trees beyond. “Her Majesty will see you. Go along the path.”
The trio exchanged glances, then bowed and went past, jerking the bear’s leash to make it come. The robed man watched until they had vanished from sight before turning to Maruman and me.
“You bring the beast as an offering to the Red Queen?”
“No,” I said. “I do not own the beast. We are companions and wish to pay our respects to the queen.”
A brilliant but humorless smile lifted the man’s thin lips. “The queen will be delighted.” He reached over and rang a tiny bell suspended from a chain. It rang out a clear, lovely peal, and within moments, a slender woman wearing a simple red shift hurried forward.
“My Lord Gatekeeper?” She made a graceful curtsy to the robed man.
“These travelers wish to pay their respects to Her Majesty. Escort them to her.”
The girl curtsied again and gave me a shy smile before gesturing for us to follow her. I did so, wondering why we had warranted an escort.
Beyond the gate lay a truly lovely garden with ancient trees and great banks of vivid flowers. A path wound through them, bringing us to a small pavilion where a woman sat upon a golden throne, her long red hair unbound and falling to the ground about her like a veil. She was clad in a flowing white dress with sleeves slashed in red. Suspended from a white ribbon about her neck was a crimson jewel shaped as an immense droplet.
“The Red Queen,” the girl murmured unnecessarily, cautioning us to wait until the previous supplicants were dismissed before approaching.
The Red Queen looked very much as Dragon might in thirty years. In fact, she looked like the sleeping princess the coercers had summoned up during the moon fair. I tried to probe her mind. Though it was shielded, I was certain this was not Dragon. Whatever she had repressed had happened when she was a very small child, and children were seldom the center of anything.
“We would offer this bear for your collection, but the gatekeeper did not see fit to approve him,” the old woman was saying in a wheedling tone.
The queen’s face was grave. “My gatekeeper is a dea
r friend and my faithful protector, but he is wrong in thinking I love only the beauty that is in perfection. There is beauty in that which is pitiable as well. Even ugliness has its own radiance.” She looked at the bear. “You have been treated ill, but no one shall ever harm you again. Be welcome to my garden.”
The bear only stared at the ground.
The queen rose from her throne and approached it, her eyes shining with tears. “Poor thing.” She began to remove the bear’s muzzle, and the old woman backed away hurriedly.
“You … uh, Your Majesty, perhaps the muzzle …”
But it was off. The bear looked at the queen for a long time, then shambled away into the trees.
“Go now,” the queen said to the woman and the little men. “The girl will reward you for your troubles. Enjoy my city.”
Bowing and cringing, the three left, and the queen nodded for me to approach. I had no plan whatsoever. I curtsied as best I could in trousers and introduced myself and Maruman.
“You do not come from here,” the queen said in her lovely voice.
“I … we’re travelers,” I said.
“We?” Her eyes fell to Maruman.
“The beast is a free creature as I am,” I said.
The queen’s blue eyes widened. “From whence do you come, young woman, that you speak of free beasts?”
“I came from beyond the wall that surrounds your land,” I said, deliberately referencing the fortress to see how she would react.
“I do not know of this wall,” she said lightly, returning to her throne and waving her hand to a chair. “I would wish all folk would see that beasts are no less than humans. If I did not rule here, beasts would be slaves and chattels.”
“You have never been beyond the wall about your land?” I persisted, but the queen’s attention was now on Maruman. I was stunned to hear her mind reach out to his.
“You are very beautiful,” she sent.
Maruman made no response, but he purred deep in his throat when she reached forward to stroke his head.
“Mami!” a voice cried.
I looked up to see Dragon hurtling across the grass toward the pavilion.