‘Fine, fine. It’s Serena.’
Teyo was immediately alert. ‘What? Is she all right?’
‘Ohh, yes. She’s fine. At least, I think so. How am I to know what goes on in her head? But you barely spoke to her yet.’
‘Hasn’t been a whole lot of time,’ Teyo pointed out. ‘Anyway, we spoke.’
‘Yeah, but only as part of the whole group-chat thing. Weren’t you anxious to see her?’
‘She’s a much better leader than I am,’ Teyo said. ‘It’s good for the team when she’s around.’
Iya nodded slowly. ‘So it’s just about the team?’
Teyo mustered his most severe frown, which probably wasn’t very scary, and aimed it in Iyamar’s direction. ‘Just what are you driving at, young lady?’
Iyamar gave him an appallingly innocent smile. ‘Nothing.’
Teyo put away his knitting. He disturbed Jisp in the process, who responded with disgruntled muttering until she realised that Iyamar was nearby. Then she leapt at the girl with unbecoming eagerness and swarmed up Iya’s shirt to her shoulder, taking up residence there with her tail curled around Iyamar’s neck. Teyo tried not to feel hurt at this enthusiastic desertion.
Teyo caught the drift of Iya’s questions easily enough, and cursed himself for any unguarded comments he might have made about Serena. By now, he’d had ample opportunity to witness how appallingly observant Iyamar was. Time to head off any speculations she might have been making.
‘Serena,’ Teyo said after a moment, ‘Would probably like me a lot more if I was a woman.’ He waited to see what Iyamar’s reaction to that might be.
Raised eyebrows, to begin with, and lips parted on a soundless oh. ‘I see,’ she said.
Teyo nodded. ‘So whatever might be in your head, you’d best get it out again.’ He’d spoken with uncharacteristic severity, but he really didn’t want Iyamar poking around in any of that.
‘Sorry,’ said Iya, and she did sound genuinely contrite. ‘Um... she and Egg...?’
‘Not to my knowledge. Why are you so interested in everyone’s private lives all of a sudden?’
Iyamar shrugged. ‘Maybe I’m bored. Everyone’s gone off to plot and plan, but they didn’t seem to want or need the likes of me. Egg stomped off somewhere to sulk by herself, and Bron’s strutting about trying to lord it over everyone else and generally failing. That was amusing to watch for a while, but it got old.’
Teyo’s frown reappeared, which Iyamar, with her cursed perceptiveness, didn’t fail to spot.
‘What did I say? Bron?’ She rolled her eyes. ‘Yeah, he’s a pain. I think he’s driving Serena nuts.’
‘Oh?’
Iya shrugged. ‘Following her about, showing off all the time. I think he likes her, but he doesn’t seem to get that undermining her authority and trying to look cleverer all the time is just irritating her.’
Teyo blinked. ‘Bron likes Serena? Surely not. He’s horrible to her.’
Iya nodded wisely. ‘You know how there are some people who are really clever about a lot of things, but completely stupid about people? I think he’s one of those.’ She paused, considering. ‘Also he’s too happy with himself. Not sure it’s occurred to him that Serena might not like him, considering how he’s obviously soooo much better than everyone else.’
Teyo shrugged. ‘Well, he’s out of luck either way.’
Iyamar giggled again. ‘Yeah! I wonder if he realises?’
‘Probably not.’
Iyamar hopped down off her bucket and went to the door. ‘Hang on, I hear something.’
Teyo listened, and discerned the faint, distant sounds of running feet. Damnit, did the girl have to have infinitely superior hearing as well? Getting older hurt.
Iyamar flung open the door to the cupboard and bounced through it, returning a few moments later. ‘Something’s up!’ she said with glee. ‘Fabian and Egg are coming.’
Teyo hauled himself out of his nest of cloths, ignoring the way his back creaked and cracked as he straightened up. ‘Something exciting, or something catastrophic?’ he enquired.
‘The former, I think,’ Iya said. ‘Nobody looks like someone died.’
They both emerged from the cupboard and met Fabian and Egg in the process of dashing past.
‘Oh,’ said Fabian with a puzzled frown. ‘There you are. What were you doing in there?’
‘Knitting,’ said Teyo.
Fabian blinked. ‘Okay. Well, we’re needed. The Glour site’s been found, and Mae wants every warm body she can get her grimy little hands on to go. She reckons it might get messy, this being the last key.’
Teyo nodded. ‘Iya, stay with me.’
‘Boss.’ Iya saluted and fell in with Teyo as he dashed up to the main deck. Lady Glostrum and her husband were up there, together with Mae, Ayra, Wrob, Serena and Bron. The latter was standing a little too close to Serena, Teyo noted, and appeared to be paying more attention to her than to Mae, who was attempting to hold court in the middle. Iya’s right again, thought Teyo. The girl really had remarkable discernment; he ought to listen to her hunches.
‘We’re in two groups,’ Mae shouted over the bustle and chatter. ‘Half with me, half with my charming descendent. It’s going to be a long hop, so you might be a bit disoriented at the other end. Don’t worry about it! It will soon go away.’ She paused to direct a beaming smile at her little audience. ‘When we get there, it’s — what is it that you say? — all hands on deck to find the key. I don’t care what it takes, and I don’t care about the site either, because you can be sure Ylona won’t. Whatever you have to do, get me that key.’
There was a fair amount of nodding and a quiet chorus of agreements. The response struck Teyo as a tiny bit lacklustre, but Mae seemed satisfied. ‘All right. Wrob, Ayra, Bron, Iyamar and Egg with me. Serena, Fabian, Teyo and Tren, with Eva. Off we go!’
Her allotted passengers all joined hands — Bron with a reluctant glance cast in Serena’s direction — and they soon blinked out of sight.
‘All ready?’ said Eva, with a reassuring smile. ‘It won’t be too bad, I promise.’
Teyo doubted that, but he gamely took the hand she held out to him. Serena took his other hand. He barely had time to brace himself before the world dissolved around him and he hurtled into blackness.
‘It’s a tree.’ Fabian said it flatly, in the tone of a person both confused and wholly unimpressed.
Their group stood huddled together in some distant corner of the realm of Glour. Teyo wasn’t sure exactly where. Tren had said “far north”, which meant they were somewhere in the midst of the largely uninhabited areas of the realm. It was Darklander territory, of course, and these parts of Glour were darker than most; the valleys and mountains of the north, largely uninterrupted by human settlements, were extensively farmed for a variety of plants (and some animals) which only thrived in darkness.
It made no difference to Teyo. Though not a Daylander himself, he was used to the daylight, and he had spent the last few years of his life living primarily in Irbel where night never fell. He stood in silence, struggling with a persistent feeling of nausea courtesy of the abrupt and disconcerting journey, and an equally unpleasant sense of disorientation. He couldn’t see a thing, and it was taking his eyes a damned long time to adjust.
‘It’s not just a tree,’ Tren said from somewhere ahead of Teyo. His nocturnal eyes revealed a great deal more of the terrain than most of his companions were ever going to be able to discern for themselves; they were collectively relying on the Glostrums to orient them. ‘It’s about the size of several ancient trees put together, as far as I can judge from down here. And it’s varied. The part we’re standing in front of right now? It looks like a glostrel tree, all silvery bark and white leaves. But if I walk a bit this way...’ There was a pause, and the sounds of footsteps. ‘Round this side, the bark is much darker and the leaves are a different shape. And also purple. And higher up, they turn green, and then red and rounder, and the bark turns gold.
In short, it’s like at least five different types of tree all in one, and that’s just the part I can see from the ground.’
‘That’s more or less inkeeping with the other Dreams,’ said Serena. ‘Although... it’s a tree. Not an underground cave, or a bubble in the air, or something. Is there a way in? Is it a site or an object?’
‘How do we know this is the place?’ added Mae. Teyo was slightly reassured to hear a note of doubt and confusion in her tone; even the lofty Lokants could be befuddled, sometimes.
‘Not sure,’ admitted Tren. ‘The report didn’t say. Have to assume, though, that Ylona has something to do with it. She probably knew that one of the Dreams was a tree, even if she didn’t know where it was.’
Teyo’s eyes began to adjust a tiny bit. He received the impression of something pale and towering perhaps ten feet in front of him, which must be the tree. Other than that, he could hear, feel and sense a great many other people around, but he could see little of them. It was unnerving. He inched a little closer to Serena, anxious not to lose her in the confusion. The scent of her hair reached him, and he felt a tiny bit better.
‘I had word on that,’ Lady Glostrum put in. ‘Some scholar in Glour City found an obscure passage in an ancient, half-rotten book. You know the routine. Apparently it didn’t make any sense until now.’ She paused, and added, ‘As I recall, people have noted this tree before, but nobody could figure out what it is, why it’s here or how it works.’
‘Is there a way in?’ said Mae.
‘Not that I can see,’ said Tren, but he was interrupted by the faint, distant sound of bells. Eerie and mournful, it wasn’t a pleasant sound, and it gave Teyo the shivers.
‘What just happened?’ he said.
‘A ladder came down,’ replied Tren.
Teyo blinked. ‘What?’
‘More than one. They’re dropping all around the tree.’ Tren’s voice became more distant. He was probably walking around the trunk, and if it was as vast as he’d said, that would take him a minute or two. ‘I’ve no idea how,’ he called back, ‘but they seem sound.’
‘I called them,’ said a new voice: female, powerful and pitched a little low. ‘The tree is part of the Dream, but what I want is at the top.’
‘Ylona,’ said Mae, flatly.
She was answered with a soft laugh. ‘I remember this one, a little bit,’ said Ylona. ‘My sister Treah’s work. She had a more vivid imagination than some of us. Dear father never would tell me where he put it. Wasn’t that disobliging of him?’
Her voice faded steadily as she spoke; Teyo thought that it was disappearing in an upwards direction. She was climbing.
Everyone else reached much the same realisation at the same time, and activity exploded around Teyo. ‘Up, up!’ yelled Mae, in the kind of hearty shout which could rally armies. Teyo was moving before the command had even registered with his brain. He was still largely in the dark, but his eyesight served him well enough to identify a ladder not far from him. He swarmed up it, aware every second that he was far too handicapped by his lack of night vision to be of much use. Mae had said all hands on deck, however, and their employer, Lady Glostrum, seemed to be in support of this venture. As such, it was his job to obey.
Someone swung onto the ladder directly behind him. ‘Serena?’ he called.
‘It’s me,’ she confirmed. ‘Up, up! Keep going!’
Teyo climbed. He didn’t need to see very far in order to stay on the ladder, especially since, a little way up the tree, some kind of moss or lichen clinging to the strange tree’s branches began to exude a soft, silvery glow. The scene enlarged. He could see colours: spiky, pointed leaves in pale, sky blue, and then fat, juicy round ones coloured rich jade; frondy foliage painted crimson-red; leaves as large as his head, sunny coloured and spotted with blue. Some of the leaves began to glow, too, as he ascended, until he felt adrift in the midst of an endless sea of branches twinkling and gleaming in every imaginable colour. So much beauty met his wondering gaze that he began to forget the urgency of his mission, lingering longer and longer on his way up the vast, endless trunk.
‘Tey?’ Serena called at last. He was holding her up, he realised with a faint blush and a hurried apology.
‘Why don’t you fly?’ she added, and he blushed even harder. Why hadn’t that occurred to him before? Hastily he transformed into a bird — some bird, any bird, he wasn’t even sure if the slight, sleek, nocturnal form he’d adopted was any kind of recognised species at all — and soared upwards. His progress was much faster this way, but the sense that the tree would go on for ever didn’t lessen one bit.
He saw nothing that hinted at any end at all. The branches kept on going and going, turning ethereal and glassy and then richly painted by turns. Tiny light-globes, or something of the kind, hovered in the air higher up, drifting there like dreaming glowflies, and Teyo began to feel distracted again. Their gentle, swaying motions were mesmerising, truly dream-ridden...
He flew into a branch. The impact broke the peculiar spell of the tree, and he snapped back to himself. Was this all part of the Dream? A defence of some kind, designed to divert all but the most determined before they reached the top? Or perhaps he was just being a dreaming idiot, and letting down the team. He flew on, trying not to focus too hard on the lights, until the branches abruptly ended and the sky filled his vision.
He’d reached the top. The ladder ended just above a large, circular platform of woven branches. Teyo landed carefully upon it, horribly aware of how far away the ground was, and shifted back into his human form.
He stood, panting a little after his exertions, and waited while his human-again eyes adjusted a little to the gloom. A nebulous haze of colour and light hung in the air on the other side of the platform, rosy pink and then sun-gold and then seawater-blue and on and on through an endless array of colours. The form it took was vaguely door-shaped, but it looked too insubstantial to be opened.
There was no sign of Ylona, though somebody Teyo didn’t recognise hauled himself onto the platform moments later and made straight for the door, or whatever it was. She’d brought associates.
Teyo paused in brief indecision. Should he follow the man immediately, or wait for Serena? This dilemma was resolved moments later when Serena herself appeared, swinging up onto the platform with enviable grace. She paused a moment to examine the strange doorway, then set off at a near run.
‘Come on!’ she called, and Teyo followed. She reached the coloured haze ahead of him; as soon as her body came into contact with the ethereal substance, she vanished.
Teyo didn’t hesitate. He ran straight into the stuff, and with a sickening lurch he found himself elsewhere.
Compared to the splendour and magnificence of the tree, the Dream itself was a little underwhelming. It was a bubble of some kind, or so it seemed. The walls were the same misty swirl of colour as the door they had stepped through, if it was a door? Teyo had the odd feeling that they were actually standing inside the thing; that it had become a great deal larger as they had entered, or they had become a great deal smaller. Or, even more disconcertingly, that relative size was somehow irrelevant in here. The patterns of rainbow light threatened to mesmerise him once more, and he hurriedly averted his gaze.
Ylona stood in the centre of a knot of people on the other side of the bubble. Teyo recognised none of them. A group began to form around himself and Serena, too, as Egg and Ayra appeared, and then Wrob and Bron and Iyamar. No one had any idea how to proceed, not even Ylona. They stood in an awkward face-off with a palpable air of confusion.
The floor was obscured by a thick golden mist. Teyo couldn’t tell what they were standing on, if anything. He tried not to think too hard about that, either. The air was filled with white, softly glowing motes, which cast just enough light for Teyo to see a little. The light was too much for Tren and Eva, who appeared soon afterwards. They each took their characteristic shadowed glasses out of their pockets and hurriedly donned them, mouths twisting in annoyan
ce.
Teyo crouched down and felt the ground beneath the mist. It was glassy and smooth. He walked about a bit, and found nothing secreted there. Where could the key be? The bubble was uncluttered with objects of any kind; there was nothing but light and colour and mist. Perhaps it was like the Orlind bubble: someone would trip over the thing, sooner or later, and perhaps another vision of Rhoun Torinth would appear.
‘I don’t see—’ began Mae, but the bells sounded once more and all conversation ceased. The two groups waited, spellbound, for the next occurrence.
A key appeared in the air, two inches from Teyo’s nose. It bore the characteristic spiral shape of the others, and it was the same size. This one was marked with a marbled pattern of yellow and cream. Teyo grabbed at it, and caught — nothing. The thing was insubstantial; he couldn’t grip it.
More appeared, all identical in size and myriad in colour and pattern, filling the air all around him with ghost-keys. He watched, arms folded, as half of his group and most of Ylona’s went into a frenzy of eagerness, clutching and grabbing at every key they could reach. The logic seemed clear enough: one of these floating temptations was the real key, and the rest were decoys. It merely fell to a matter of chance, as to who would get their hands on the prize.
Teyo wasn’t sure. Neither were Serena and Fabian, for they, too, abstained from the chaos. Fabian stood with his hands in his pockets, frowning, and Serena chewed absently on her lip.
‘I recognise this trick,’ she said at last.
‘Yep,’ said Fabian. ‘Classic.’
Teyo nodded. It was a kind of double-bluff. Keep the target distracted with supposed decoys in some clearly apparent place, and they would never question the “obvious” assumption that one of the decoys was real. You could do it with anything: jewels, gold, people. They’d pulled that very trick on Bron, essentially, and even he had swallowed it.
The real key was somewhere else entirely, tucked away where no one would think to look for it.
‘Where would I put it, if I’d built this thing?’ mused Serena.
Seven Dreams Page 23
