“Who is he?”
His smile grew more pointed, more dangerous. “Wouldn’t you like to know?”
“What will happen to him if I don’t?”
He bent to whisper into her ear, “Do you really want to find out?” His breath stirred her hair, the words laced with menace so profound that tears filled her eyes. She edged away from him; his chuckle sent a shiver up her spine.
Then he vanished.
“What?” she muttered. Then “What?!” more loudly as she stood, turning in a circle. “This is ridiculous! This has to be a dream.”
She kicked the ground with one bare foot, grimacing at the bite of the grit. “Or maybe not.” Once she’d read that if you questioned whether something was a dream, it generally wasn’t.
The air was cool, though not cold, and she had the impression it was mid-morning. To her left stretched endless hills of yellow-grey rock scattered with faded bushes low to the ground. Wind gusted past her carrying the hint of smoke, and she turned to look the other way. A city spread out below her, but it wasn’t like any city she’d ever seen before. The streets were cobblestone, the buildings all small and made of stacked stone or wood with dark slate roofs or wooden shingles. A few fires sent up smoke, but none were close to her. The city looked desolate and forbidding, despite the distinct lack of anything overtly frightening.
She turned again to squint at the nothingness of the hills behind her, and then began to pick her way down the slope, bare feet already stinging from the abrasive rock. She shivered. Her pajamas, thin shorts of a grey and pink heart print and an old tee shirt, comfortably threadbare, were entirely unsuited to trekking any distance, especially in the wind. She growled in frustration as she walked, glaring at the city and the barren ground around her. “I should have worn shoes for this,” she grumbled. “This is a stupid dream! I want to wake up now.”
Much to her own disappointment, she did not wake up, even after stubbing her toe on a sharp stone. She pinched herself, which didn’t work either.
As she approached the city, the shadow of a wall grew above her, tall and obsidian. She glowered at it resentfully. “You weren’t there before,” she muttered.
For a moment, the thought gave her pause. The wall hadn’t been there before. Such a huge edifice couldn’t have simply grown up at her approach. Had it? Or had it been there all along, merely invisible?
There was a massive gate made of some unidentifiable metal embossed with intricate scrollwork and inlaid with blood red enamel. She banged on the door, hoping that somehow, miraculously, someone would open it for her. The sound died away into pregnant silence.
“Tryin’a get kilt?”
The rough voice startled her, and she whirled to see a tiny, irritable-looking man half her own height. He had a sharp, angular face and suspicious eyes. His hand rested on the handle of a long, curved knife at his waist.
“Who are you?” she breathed.
“No one.” He grinned toothily at her, his eyes glittering with malice. “Breakin’ into His Majesty’s city is a good way to get skint.” Then he looked at her more closely, and his eyes suddenly widened. “You’re human!” he breathed. “Oh. Oh!”
Claire watched him cautiously. He glanced at the door, then at her, then back at the door. His stubby fingers caressed the hilt of his knife.
“You don’t know what you’re doin’, do you?” he murmured at last. “Not a bloomin’ hint of a clue.”
“I…” Claire hesitated, wondering what she should tell him. Would he help her? Could he help her?
“Course you don’t,” the little man spat. “That explains a lot.” He glanced at the door again. “You need to get in, don’t you?”
Claire hesitated, then nodded.
“Come with me.” He sprinted away, following the wall to the left. He glanced over his shoulder, and Claire belatedly jogged after him. She quickened her pace after a moment, realizing the little man was unexpectedly swift, and found herself panting, her legs burning, after only a few minutes.
A painful stitch in her side forced her to slow. “Wait!” she gasped.
“Hurry!” he barked, and she forced herself onward.
When Claire thought her heart was going to beat out of her chest, the little man stopped abruptly at an unremarkable spot beside the wall. He glanced back behind them, then up at the top of the wall. With a grimace, he flopped on his stomach and slithered beneath the wall.
Claire frowned after him. There didn’t seem to be space for even a tiny person to shimmy between the stone and the wall. The wall was solidly planted in the stone; the foundation was buried deep within the earth.
The man’s small hand emerged from the wall. He grabbed her ankle and yanked, and Claire fell to her buttocks with a painful jolt. “Duck,” he muttered and jerked her feet first through an impossibly small hole.
She fell some six feet to land in a jumble of a bruises and scrapes. “Ow!”
“No time for that. Sentries were coming.” The little man’s voice came out of the dark.
Claire caught her breath. “How did you… how did I fit through there? There wasn’t space for you, much less me! And…”
“Not enough space? What… oh. You know even less than I thought. You see a wall and a hole of a certain size, like everything is physical or something. Right?”
She nodded slowly.
“You need to learn everything. A hole is, well, a hole. What goes through it has more to do with how much it wants to go through than the size of the hole or the size of the thing.” He must have seen the look of bafflement on her face, because he muttered, “This is never gonna work.”
“What are you, anyway? Do you have a name? Where are we?”
He huffed angrily. “I’m an imp. And because I’m not an imbecile, I’ll not be telling you my name. Not my real name, in case he catches you, and not the one my friends use, because even a false name used often carries more power than I’d give you.” He struck a match, and his eyes glittered an eerie green in the light. “You can call me Feighlí.”
“Fayley? Like a girl’s name?”
He gave her a withering glare. “Exactly.”
“Can I trust you?” Claire’s question stuck in her throat. In the flickering light, his green eyes looked wild. His teeth were too sharp. He clutched the hilt of his knife as if he ached to use it.
His toothy grin widened, and his eyes glittered. “Not my problem how you feel.” He cackled softly. “I have my own reasons for offering my assistance.”
“Where are you taking me?”
“To the dungeon under the castle at the center of the city, of course.” He gave her a sidelong glance. “That is where you’re going, isn’t it?”
“Um… well, yes, but how do you know that?”
He smirked. “As if I’d be telling you that!” He shook out the match and grabbed her hand, his short grubby fingers unexpectedly strong. “Come on.”
He pulled her through interminable tunnels.
If what he’d said about the hole was true, maybe she was right about the wall. Maybe there was a barrier, and she had perceived it somehow, but her mind only supplied a form that made sense when she got closer to it.
At last, when Claire had begun to wonder whether her eyes would ever see light again, he stopped. “Up we go.” He scrambled up ahead of her while she fumbled around in the pitch black until she found a rickety wooden ladder. A splash of yellow light from above her lit the dusty rungs, and she blinked owlishly. She followed the imp’s bony rump up the ladder, emerging just behind a tiny wooden hovel.
Feighlí closed the trapdoor through which they had emerged. He muttered under his breath, and the edges of the trapdoor seemed to waver and disappear into the bricks.
The imp turned and studied her. “Afraid, are you?”
Claire shook her head, pretending her heart wasn’t about to beat out of her chest. He leered at her. “Not very good at lyin’, that’s sure. You’d think that’d be one thing a human would be good
at. Maybe you’re not a very good human.” His eyes narrowed. “Don’t lie to the chimeras.”
He grabbed her hand with his strong, grubby little fingers and pulled her around the corner of the wooden hovel. They were confronted by a long, narrow corridor; both walls and the floor were brick, and the top was open to the copper sky. Feighlí hauled her forward. “Can’t stay still in His Majesty’s lands. Have to keep moving.”
She jogged after him. He darted through an opening she hadn’t noticed and sprinted down another long corridor, then a gap in the bricks so narrow she sucked in her breath to shimmy through, then another tunnel through a dense thicket of long thorns.
Her eyes were drawn inexorably to the thorns. They were two inches long, and each one seemed to have the tiniest, almost unnoticeable glimmer on the tip. She hesitated, and then raised one hand and put a finger out.
“Don’t touch them!” Feighlí barked.
She jumped, and the imp grabbed her hand again. “No sense at all,” he hissed at her, yellowed teeth bared. “Use the noggin you got, even if it’s a bit slow for the task you been given.” He jerked her out of the thicket and into a tiny stone courtyard, and shoved her away from the edge of the thorn bush. “These are His Majesty’s lands. Don’t trust nothin’ in here!” He waited until she nodded, her eyes wide, then muttered, “’Specially not things with pointy bits.”
A movement on the other side of the courtyard caught Claire’s eye.
She raised a trembling hand to point at the behemoth lumbering to its feet. “What’s that?”
Feighlí glanced over his shoulder and made a strangled noise. “Rock thrower. Hurry!” He yanked her across the courtyard toward a wooden door in the stone wall to their left. The wall towered over their heads, spikes curving from the top of the wall down toward the ground, as if to keep the creature contained. The monstrous beast lumbered toward them. “Run!” Feighlí’s voice cracked. He slammed his shoulder into the door, breaking the latch out of crumbling wood and careening into another stone corridor.
“That didn’t seem very secure!” Claire cried as she sprinted after Feighlí.
“Magic barrier,” the imp huffed. “His Majesty won’t be pleased I broke it.”
The immense creature lumbered into the corridor behind them.
Claire’s heartbeat pounded in her ears. Feighlí flew down the corridor, short legs pumping. With considerable effort, she caught up with him and kept pace for a moment before edging ahead.
A rock the size of a softball hurtled past her head, and she flinched. She glanced back, and tripped on an uneven brick. She tumbled to her knees and scrambled up, her heart pounding with terror. The creature was upon her, one enormous finger barely catching the back of her thin tee shirt.
Then the imp screamed in fury. He plunged his dagger through the beast’s foot and into the dirt between the bricks of the tunnel floor.
The rock thrower roared, swinging both enormous fists wildly. Claire stumbled away, barely out of the creature’s reach. One fist hit Feighlí, throwing the imp into the air only to come crashing down beside Claire.
Her breath came too fast, fear rising in prickles of chill and nausea. She felt frozen, like in a nightmare, imagining her limbs unable to move in the face of certain death. She forced herself to look at Feighlí, his eyes wide and dazed, dark blood coming from his mouth.
Claire forced herself to reach for his hand, intending to pull him out of the rock thrower’s reach.
The rock thrower grabbed Feighlí’s ankle, and he cried out, twisting away from Claire’s hand. The monster jerked him closer, his wide maw opening in a bellow of inarticulate rage. Feighlí pulled a short dagger from an unseen sheath.
“Run, you idiot human!” The imp’s voice was almost lost in the rock thrower’s roar.
Claire turned and fled.
The desolate brick tunnels twisted upon themselves so that Claire couldn’t tell which direction she was running. The sun seemed to hang at the apex of its arch for hours, beating down from a cloudless bronze sky.
At times the wind seemed to gust above her, dry and cool, despite the harsh light. It carried odd sounds, a clashing of metal and a few unidentifiable cries. Once she heard a long, high-pitched wail above a lower roar from larger throats, as if a cat were being ripped apart by a pack of dogs.
What a horrible mental image! She frowned at herself, determinedly brushing the dried crust of tears from her cheeks. It’s Feighlí. The rockthrower is killing him.
No! It’s probably nothing. Just a fox or something. Foxes make strange sounds, don’t they? She’d read that in a book once, and clung to the thought as if it would assuage her guilt.
The tunnel at last gave way to a grassy expanse with soft rolling hills spread out before her. She let out a sigh of relief.
Claire looked around, noting that the brick walls turned to stone at apparently random intervals to both her left and right. The grass was green but dry; the spikes pricked the tender soles of her feet. She began climbing the nearest hill, hoping to regain her bearings.
A small cluster of stone pillars and tumbled-down walls perched at the top of the hill, and she glanced up at it occasionally. The ruins seemed peaceful in this strange, desolate land. Something about them reminded her of a castle she had seen once in a book about Ireland. Or was it Scotland? Definitely somewhere far more interesting than the outskirts of Richmond, Virginia. She scowled at the grass as she walked, her thighs burning with the constant upward motion and her skin prickling with the chilly wind.
The climb seemed to take far longer than it should have. She stopped to pick spiky bits of grass out from between her toes several times, then clambered higher. Higher and higher.
Claire stopped, panting, and looked upward. How much farther could it be? The ruins seemed no closer than before, and she scowled at them. Then she put her head down and continued climbing. She was hungry, thirsty, tired, and cold, but focusing on the next step was easier than letting her mind wander.
Feighlí’s scream echoed in her mind, and she pushed the memory away.
Chapter 3
Claire stumbled into the ruins, her throat parched, dizzy with exhaustion. She explored half-heartedly, the silence broken only by the faint song of the wind through the broken columns and fallen walls and arches. The stone was pale gray, and the edges were rounded with age, as if the wind had been tearing at the stone for uncounted millennia.
She found a corner in the lee of the wind and sank against the wall, letting her eyes close. Will this ever end? When will I wake up?
“What are you doing?”
Her eyes snapped open and she looked up at a dark silhouette. “Who are you?” she breathed. “There was no one here!” She pushed herself to her feet, shifting so she could see him better.
He looked to be no more than eight or nine years old, with pale silvery skin and white-blonde hair that stuck out from his head like dandelion fluff. His shirt was ragged and stained with dark rusty streaks. For some reason the stains made her think of blood. She pushed the disquieting thought away.
His lips lifted in an irritated smirk. “Wrong question. You should be asking ‘where’s a charcoal?’”
She blinked. “What?”
“Cats! You need cats.” He produced a piece of charcoal without appearing to reach into a pocket. “This is not a place of safety.” He sketched a hurried cat on the wall. “Draw.” Command filled his voice, and he shoved the charcoal into her hand.
Claire found herself drawing a cat on the cracked stone wall. Her mind felt fuzzy with exhaustion, and she blinked again, studying the wall as she pictured the next cat.
“Draw! Now!” the boy barked.
She turned to him. “Why?”
He bared his teeth at her and snarled, and Claire stumbled backward, her heart thudding. He snatched her hand, his small fingers cold on hers, moving her hand in quick strokes to draw another cat, a massive beast with a maw filled with teeth. “Another!” He shouldered her down the wall
and started drawing again, his hand tight around hers. “Faster!”
Claire was trembling. “All right!”
He stepped back. Claire tried to keep an eye on him over her shoulder, her cat drawings hurried and sloppy.
“More teeth,” he muttered. “Give them teeth and claws. Think fierce thoughts!”
Claire swallowed. “Why?” Her voice was weaker this time, fear curling up her throat and nearly choking her.
He produced another piece of charcoal and began drawing on a nearby wall. His strokes were quick and sure, his cats huge and feral, more akin to lionesses than house cats. “Keep drawing!” he growled. “Cats and cats and cats.”
Claire shuddered at the menace in his voice and drew again, the charcoal rasping in her fingers. Black stained her fingertips. “Who are you?” she whispered. The pale gray stone had become nearly black in the shadows, reflecting orange and pink in the fading sunset.
“Time’s up.” The words rang out, clear and sharp as a gunshot. “In here.” One small hand on her arm, he hauled her bodily across the room and flung her into a cold, narrow space. “Lock the door. Be silent. Don’t come out until the sun comes up.” He pressed something cold into her hand. “Put this around your neck. Fierce thoughts!”
A heavy wooden door closed in front of her face. With trembling fingers, she found the hefty lock on the inside and let it fall.
The solid metallic clunk was lost beneath an unearthly screech that made Claire’s every hair stand on end.
“What is that?” she breathed.
Her stone refuge was little larger than a coffin, a smooth marble rectangle three feet deep and six feet tall, perhaps two and a half feet wide. She trembled with her back pressed against the cold stone behind her. The angular pendant dug into her palm, and she hurriedly slipped it over her head. The pendant briefly caught on the neck of her shirt and then fell with a soft, comforting thunk against her chest.
The Lord of Dreams Page 2
