Dreamseeker's Road

by Tom Deitz

  He certainly saw something—but not his roommate. Rather, he beheld a complex lattice of straight lines superimposed upon the black, along which a point of light raced faster than his eye could follow, like Alec’s computer creating, then solving, a maze. But instead of reaching a terminus, the light slowed, then stopped—as another light flared to life a short way ahead of it. The woman’s light promptly switched directions and fled back the way it had come. The other light followed doggedly, but far more slowly.

  The woman gasped, then jerked her hand from the ground as if burned. Aikin grunted and knocked the other away. “Sorry,” he mumbled instantly, slapping at his leg, from which steam—or smoke—was rising. “Sorry, but that hurt!”

  “Sorry I am too,” the woman echoed, as she rose shakily to her feet. David braced her, for she seemed on the verge of fainting. “Sorry, I am,” she repeated. “For I bear doubly ill tidings. First, he who shed that blood is not on the Tracks, or surely I would have sensed him.”

  “Not on the Tracks?” David groaned. “Then where the hell is he?”

  “I do not know,” the woman gasped, with a tremor in her voice. “But something else most certainly is, and is coming this way very quickly.”

  Chapter XVII: Childe Alec to the Dark Tower Came

  (An uncertain place—no time)

  Behind gleamed the white tile walls of a bathroom in Jackson County, Georgia: before him a black tower loomed in a nameless land: a cutout of jet against a silver sky.

  Likewise at his back, someone was rapping on the front doorjamb—but someone more beguiling beckoned beyond heavy oak portals ahead: unheard, unseen.

  The image still swam in Alec’s inner eye: the focus he’d tried to hold firm while he ignited certain herbs in the tub and drizzled certain others atop the ensuing flames, then primed the ulunsuti lavishly with his own blood (the slice in his left palm still throbbed unmercifully), and, when the fire blazed high, thrust the oracular stone within and watched the gate between Worlds arise: a borderless shimmer of otherness where a wall and window had been. He’d not conjured the tower, though, but the face of a beautiful dark-haired woman: wing-browed and ivory-cheeked, slender but nigh as tall as he, dressed gypsy-hippie style, and with a dimple in her right cheek when she smiled.

  More knocks rattled the screen door. This was it, then. Holding his breath, he twisted awkwardly around, reached back through the gate, and snatched the ulunsuti from where it glowed and sparked within the fading fire that was still scorching iron-stained porcelain a World away. The image faded instantly, struck from his mind by the double trauma of hot quasi stone against injured flesh. The air of two Worlds thickened with the stench of hair crisping on his fingers.

  Another round of knocks vanished with a hiss like a TV switching channels—and the gate dissolved.

  The pain promptly pushed past overload. With a flinch, he dropped the ulunsuti. A sparkle fountained up where it hit: gray-silver and glittering, as though a billion antique mirrors had been ground to dust and spread across the land. “Shit!” he spat, having almost damaged his only means of returning—his only means of rescuing Eva, of quelling the principal demon that had haunted him for nigh on four years now.

  He bit his lip, lest further curses disturb the thin dry air. Already he was sweating—though that could’ve been from nerves or pain as easily as heat, which was as pervasive as a desert’s. Dropping to a wary squat, he retrieved the crystal with his undamaged hand and fumbled it into a backpack, where it joined certain supplies. That accomplished, he wiped the other on his jeans and dared a look at it. Logic promised one thing, experience another; but experience won, and showed neither an inch-long gash at the base of his thumb, nor burn blisters across his palm; merely a pale white line centering a splotch of red: the mirror image of the ulunsuti.

  The dust was still stirring, too, and found its way into his nostrils, prompting a sneeze. It smelled like glass and silver, like stale memories flaked away so that only impressions remained to prickle inside his head.

  As he rose, his good hand brushed the hilt of the sword thrust through his belt—not that he knew how to use it, of course, beyond the bare minimum of blocks and parries David had tried to teach him. Not that it mattered anyway, for the sword was mostly a prop their artist friend Myra had acquired at Scarboro Faire and presented to David on whim. David had real swords, real Faery swords in fact, but he’d dared not appropriate one of them. Something told him not to: something that said a weapon conferred with honor, belonging to someone honorable, should not be used for covert activities, nor to rescue someone who perhaps had no honor at all.

  So why had he brought the damned thing?

  As a comfort, foremost, he supposed; he wasn’t fool enough to roam Otherworlds without some kind of protection, some minimal intimidation factor. And because it was three feet of solid steel—and if there was anything Faeries feared, it was ferrous metal.

  Impulsively, he yanked it out and flourished it—spinning in place to slash at the air where the gate had stood—then felt foolish and lowered it again, but did not sheathe it. Better to take stock of his environment—such as it was.

  He stood upon an endless flat plain, though it could as easily have been the bottom of a vast sphere, for there was no obvious horizon and the sky was the same color as the gray-silver sand he bestrode, save that it seemed somewhat brighter.—Certainly bright enough to reveal a single shattered stump of black and blasted tower rising like defiance an indeterminate distance before him: the tower from his dream. Nothing living moved in that landscape, but a steady wind hissed and whispered and raised strangely shaped dust devils from the plain. Between him and his goal was emptiness, save a smattering of slender man-high stones that rose like angular fingers probing their way up from underground. Best give them a wide berth, he concluded, though the direct route to the tower ran among them.

  From habit, he checked his watch, but the LCDs showed nothing useful; the numbers flickered faster than he could focus one instant, froze in place at some incomprehensible time the next. Not good. He’d hoped to have this over quickly. In and out had been the plan: gate through to Eva’s prison, grab her, then gate back. Less than five minutes max, and most of that spent building another fire to raise that second gate. Assuming Eva cooperated. Assuming she hadn’t lied when she’d told him as she lay dying in Dale Sullivan’s yard that while she’d only pretended to love him initially, she’d discovered at last that she loved him clear and true.

  As, he thought, he still loved her.

  He hadn’t counted on arriving outside the tower, though, and wondered why that had occurred. Perhaps because the stone didn’t always respond to what you thought you were asking; perhaps because he’d assumed he’d been thinking of Eva when the stronger image in his mind, being more recent, was of the tower itself.

  But he’d come this far, no way he’d go back now; not when there was no obvious threat.

  And so he strode toward his goal, skirting the first of the faceted stones by a healthy distance, yet near enough to determine that they were columns of fractured obsidian. Sharper than the finest steel weapons, he reminded himself. Something against which he dared not let himself fall.

  But while he was squinting at the next one, his gaze drifted away from the tower: and when he looked back again, it was far, far closer.

  In fact, it filled a quarter of the perceived vertical height of the sky—near enough to show fissures and a shattered crown and deeper darknesses along its shaft that might be windows and doors. There was an organic feel about it too: as though it had not been drawn by architects and made of blocks set one by one, but had been spun up from the liquid stuff of the under-earth itself into a shape like a vast tree trunk wrought of frozen obsidian wrapped with ropy lava.

  Another few steps, and it was suddenly much nearer. He was still tracing the broken dragon’s teeth of its battered battlements when they attacked.

  Fortunately, he heard them first: the jingling hiss of the cryst
al sand as they rose from underneath it, the glassy pingy rattle of their armor as they scurried forward.

  They were man-shaped but knee-high, slender even in their armor, but with longer fingers and wider feet than any of human kind. Mostly he saw scales: armor—he hoped—gray-silver and vitreous, as though each dime-sized plate had been flaked from obsidian and set into silver leather from throat to biceps to thighs. Or maybe that was their flesh! Maybe those weren’t helms at all: those knobbed and spiked affairs that covered their heads to cheekbone level, revealing only wide mouths with pointed teeth and the glitter of feral red eyes. Maybe those odd excrescences at shoulder and elbow and knees weren’t armor either, but outgrowths of vitreous bone.

  But those were definitely swords those warriors—perhaps a dozen of them—were wielding as they rushed to encircle him from ten yards out. Swords with a thousand razor-sharp edges of flaked obsidian primed to slice to the bone, to pare meat away before he even felt it.

  Alec’s brain went numb. Reality tunneled. Those guys really were out to hurt him, quite possibly to kill him thoroughly dead. There’d be no second chances with these lads, not like swapping broomstick blows with Aik or David. And they were small and quick and surely had amazing reflexes, and by the look of them were used to killing things, and were clearly playing for keeps.

  And he was standing there as if frozen, as though waiting for someone to change the channel, or call foul or hold, or roll more dice. And while reality suddenly seemed remote and distant and dreamlike, the first time one of those swords bit into his body it would suddenly be very real indeed—and too late.

  None of which Alec even knew that he thought, so quickly did it flash through his mind before fight-or-flight took over.

  He was taller—a giant to them—and was wearing thick clothing and carrying a sword of steel. He had height and reach…

  Screaming for no more reason than tension release, he leapt into the air and dashed toward the tower.

  The two warriors who blocked his path on that side hesitated—likely because they’d not expected him to move at all, and certainly not so abruptly. Probably not used to fighting someone as big as me, he thought, and slashed out at the nearer.

  The dwarf jumped back, dropping his shorter weapon as he flipped backward, landed badly, and sprawled. The follow-through caught his mate, and Alec heard a chirp of pain and the tinkle of shattering glass as his blade smashed into the little being’s side. He wasn’t sure if it bit, and secretly hoped it hadn’t, but the momentum alone was sufficient to sweep the fellow off his feet and hurl him into the next two warriors down. They collapsed into a pile—and strident, angry voices from behind rose into a howl that made every hair on his body prickle to full alert.

  He ran—had somehow made an opening, and used it. Steps whispered across the sand in his wake: scurry, hiss-hiss, scrape. The air smelled like red-hot glass. Faster, he pounded, but two were closing in to the right, big feet skimming across the sand. Faster yet, and he knew he’d been a fool to turn his back on armed warriors, no matter how diminutive. Any second one of those glassy swords would stab into his back—or slash his knees or ankles and hamstring him.

  Suddenly, he could stand the stress no longer and pivoted around on one foot, aided by the slippery sand. The sword arched out—and caught the closest pursuer across the chest. Blood scribed a counterarc in the air, but Alec felt sick enough to vomit—and before he could stop himself yelled, “Go away, goddammit! I don’t wanta hurt you!”

  The one he’d struck staggered backward, showing an unprotected throat. His fellows to either side caught him as he toppled. “They did not tell us we would face the Death of Iron,” one cried.

  “Then stay the hell away!” Alec gasped breathlessly. “Neither of us wants to die.”

  “They said to guard the tower,” another voice muttered. “They did not say we had to succeed.”

  And with a hiss like a serpent slithering over paper, the men slid their feet into the sand, ran a few steps, and slipped back into the earth, leaving a splatter of broken scales where the injured one had stood—and a chain of wet red cogwheels: the only color in all that gray land.

  Alec swallowed hard and wiped his sweating brow, then turned and jogged onward—to the tower.

  That was too easy, he told himself, as that titanic black mass loomed closer with each step. Way too easy.

  It had to be a trick.

  Or did it? The little guys had seemed disgruntled—stuck with a rotten post, they’d implied. And even without that, wasn’t the mere fact that Eva’s incarceration depended on a preposterously unlikely set of conditions more than sufficient to ensure her continued captivity? How many mortals had she even met, after all—unless she’d gone a-whoring in the Lands of Men, as was also possible. But even so, how many would’ve loved her? None, by her own admission—which was probably true; otherwise Lugh would’ve been aware of it. No, he’d been clever, the High King of Tir-Nan-Og had: too honorable to base Eva’s release upon an impossibility, he’d also known that only one mortal man loved her—a person, safely based in another World he was loath to leave, and unaware that Eva’s release hinged on him.

  But Lugh hadn’t counted on the ulunsuti. Not because he was stupid, Alec bet, but because he was simply unused to thinking that other races might possess means to access Faerie on their own, that there might be magic free in the Lands of Men that had no part of Tir-Nan-Og.

  This was it then: walk in, take the girl, and boogie—and they’d all be satisfied.

  Or maybe not, for part of Alec knew that he had no idea what would happen once Eva was free. Would she still love him? Would he find that he no longer loved her? Would she be willing to hide out in Athens, or would she urge him to come to Faerie? Would her release open a whole new box of difficulties for himself and his friends, or free him to get on with his life?

  He didn’t know.

  And he had no better notion when he found himself facing the first of a sprawling tide of low half circle steps that angled up to the tower’s door. Not until he’d gained the top did he see the guards.

  They stepped from hidden alcoves to either side of the deep fissure there: two of them, and they made Alec shiver in a way that the sand-skimming wee folk had not.

  These were man-sized.

  Man-shaped too—in part.

  Equal parts, in fact: sleek-muscled in the way of Faerie men, and handsome.

  —That’s how half their bodies were: the right side of the one to his left, and the opposing portion of the other.

  The remaining halves were more hideous than anything he’d ever seen, with only the proper number of limbs, digits, and orifices to mark them as even vaguely human. Those parts resembled warped tree branches left to rot, and overgrown with moss and fungus. Bark-rough brows abutted Faery-smooth ones on their faces; lips like knife-torn gashes merged with softly curved ones. Red squinty eyes followed his movements quickly, even as wide green ones did more slowly. It was as if two beings—a warrior of the Sidhe and some troll or ore or goblin—had been cleft in twain from crown to crotch and rejoined with the matching half of the other.

  At least they were clothed—in porcelained mail corselets and cap helms of dark green metal that gave some unity to their disparate sides.

  Each also held a naked sword crossways before him.

  Still giddy from his adrenaline high, Alec swallowed but held his ground, though sweat that had nothing to do with heat broke out across his wire-taut body. So far the guards had offered no more than passive threat—and bluster had stood him in good stead just now. So what did he have to lose by seeking parley first?

  “I don’t wanta fight,” he called hoarsely.

  “Then you are wise, for you would surely not emerge the victor,” the guard to his left replied, in a voice both clear and rough.

  “This is an iron sword,” Alec continued. “I guess I oughta warn you.”

  “We can see that it is,” the other guard responded gravely.

&nbs
p; “Think you could let me by?”

  “Do you love she who dwells within?”

  A curt nod. “I do.”

  “Yet you will not fight for her…”

  “I can’t love her if I’m dead.”

  A delicate brow kinked upward; a misshapen one slammed down in the adjoining head.

  It struck Alec then that these guards seemed to relish their post as little as their smaller analogues. So maybe he could bluff his way through here as well. “Well,” he began slyly, “it seems to me that the lady in there’s not the only one who’s under a fairly major curse; like maybe you guys are on somebody’s list too: maybe you’re stuck here ’cause of some screwy condition the same as Eva is.”

  Two sets of mismatched eyes sought each other. “We cannot speak of it,” one muttered.

  “So what’s the deal, then?” Alec asked, wondering why he was going along with this screwed-up fairy tale. On the other hand, he wasn’t making the rules or setting the agenda.

  The guards neither put up their swords nor moved away from the door, but finally the right-hand one spoke, and it seemed as though the distorted part moved his lips more freely.

  “We were not always as you see us,” that one began. “Elf and troll we were, and alike from side to side. We were also friends, for though of different kindred we learned to look beyond each other’s skins and see that our souls bore one likeness. We grew up together on the fringes of Tir-Nan-Og where the Daoine Sidhe come but infrequently and do not tarry long. Neither of us had brothers or sisters; we only had each other. As I said, we were friends.”

  “And eventually,” the other continued, “we became lovers. Such things are not censured in Faerie, and no one objected, until a woman from the court at Tir-Nan-Og chanced our way while hunting. I met her—my elven-self did. She looked at me and fell in love—or lust. I repulsed her, not because she was a woman, and certainly not because she was not fair, but because it seemed she would claim for free that closeness which is too precious to be casually conferred. She did not take kindly to my rebuff, yet went her way. But then a day later, she saw me and my friend…together, and could not contain herself. She cursed us, and with a sword one of her fellows carried, smote us in twain—and rejoined us, saying that we two should at once be together and apart forever, so that if we kissed each other or held each other, we would only grasp ourselves.”