The Dream Compass [Book 1 of The Merquan Chronicle]

by Jeff Bredenberg

  The third memory page was one of ecstasy and lust. With the reverence of an art connoisseur, Kerbaugh followed the languid swinging motion of an object suspended from the barn rafter. He scratched at his crotch, and then hoisted his tunic away from his thighs, hoping to hurry the drying process.

  The wavering firelight from the outside illuminated a row of seventeen oak ale vats spanning the far wall, as well as the bottle-capping machine with its pumplike handle and several dozen wood cases of capped quart bottles. All of it illegal. Kerbaugh drew a dusty bottle from one of the cases and groped about in the half-light until he found the opener—a simple metal fixture screwed to the workbench that supported the bottle capper. The opener bore a peculiar cursive inscription across its crest, Coca-Cola. Kerbaugh could not recall such a metal-working company.

  He popped open the ale and tipped the bottle back, savoring its muddy sting. The soot washed from his throat, and he pulled again at the bottle, hard.

  When he stopped with a loud sigh, the bottle was half empty. Kerbaugh, growing calmer, turned again to the figure swinging, creaking from the rafter. His chest broadened and eased at the dual sight of beauty and justice. It was that desk clerk, he knew, that Moberly woman. Three empty crates were scattered at her feet, kicked away just minutes ago. She had torched her own inn, hoping to incinerate the Inspectors who had discovered her press, and then hanged herself. A mercenary wretch, spiteful of the order and protection that Government stood for.

  Kerbaugh crossed the dirt floor and reached high, grasping her knees. The swinging stopped. He opened his pocket knife, but the noose was impossibly out of reach. He considered stacking the ale crates again, but they looked rather flimsy, barely acceptable support even for a suicide.

  “Pig fuck.”

  Kerbaugh glanced about on the off chance that there might be a long-handled tool with a blade of some kind on the end. Pruning shears or something. No. He began to breathe heavily.

  He mounted the crude stepladder to the loft, and at the top found a rickety flooring covered with pigeon droppings. The loft had not been used for decades, the Inspector observed, and he edged carefully to the rafter from which Moberly had hanged herself.

  Walking the rafter erect was out of the question—there was nothing to hold for support. So Kerbaugh nervously eased himself into a sitting position on the beam and, with one hand in back and the other in front, he pushed himself daintily along the support, trying not to pick up any more splinters than necessary. He coughed, and breathed even more rapidly.

  Slicing through the rope was quick work, with the help of the tension from Moberly’s weight. When her body slammed to the floor, he grinned uncontrollably. It had been such a massively satisfying day: a fortress afire, a villain vanquished, and now he could have his way with her. He snapped his knife closed, replaced it in his tunic pocket, rolled over to hang from the rafter, and dropped to the floor.

  Pec-Pec paused at the last page, the image of the hanging woman, and tore the page out of the binding. It came away easily. He ripped out another black page with a furious flourish, then another, then dozens more, several at a time, and wadded them into his right hand. When he reached the blood-red pages he yanked them out, too.

  The magic man began to tear seven pages at once from the soggy book—the last three pink pages and four white ones—when there came a ghostly, excruciating blow to his right jaw. Pec-Pec’s vision blurred into a swirling cluster of stars, and then the stars gradually dwindled to just a few, which were set into a black background. He was gazing at the night sky as Anton Takk slapped his face.

  “Hey, Pec-Pec,” Takk said, “you fainted.”

  Pec-Pec felt as if he had fallen from a building onto concrete. Wincing, he forced himself up onto an elbow, scrambled for the empty glass bowl and belched the dragon fish into it.

  As he lay back again, his gold-tipped braids flopping into the dirt, Pec-Pec whispered, “Takk, you pig’s ripe asshole, you almost killed me.”

  “I was worried that—”

  “I will tell you again: When I enter the trance, do not touch or speak to me. As things are now, my business is not finished, and I do not believe that I can return to where I have just been.”

  “So I have done more damage, no?” Takk said meekly.

  Pec-Pec’s eyes glowed a dull red. “Actually,” he replied, “you might have saved a man’s life. And stopped me from a murder.”

  Ben Tiggle had taught his young charge Anton the constellations—a bawdy version of them anyway—and it was on this sleepless evening that Takk was admiring from his bedroll the star formation described to him as a large drunken woman crawling home from a tavern. She was named Ursala Major.

  Takk imagined that she was humming to herself as she struggled up the boardwalk, an aimless droning that one would scarcely want to call a tune. And then in a sobering flash Takk realized that he really was hearing that sound. A car engine, obviously, not a humming drunk.

  He wanted to stand up and … and what? Logic intervened. The car was far off, and it was much preferable not to disturb his blankets and lose the accumulated warmth. Whoever the motorist was, he would surely miss their off-road campsite. But who would try to navigate these crumbling highways in the darkness? Takk drew his arms up against his chest and returned his attention to Ursala Major.

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  22

  Hannibal

  “That goddamned Rafer pissed on my hand! And now he’s part of our team? A team to do what, no one seems to know.”

  “I want you to trust me on something: I have crisscrossed this territory two dozen times—”

  “This is the Wise Ol’ Man speech coming.”

  “—and the world works, or at least blunders about randomly, in ways I had never imagined—okay, I’ll say it—when I was your age. You may roll your eyes now. But we need Tha’Enton for our mission, I know that, though we may think of him as a barbarian.”

  “We may need him, if he doesn’t chop our throats and drink our blood first.”

  “When he boogies out like you’ve seen, well, he goes off into the woods like that at night to protect us. Those are his orders—he is titled a Defender of his people, and by Rafer law he must protect us as well—we’re important allies.”

  “You have a few grunts and mumbles with those three half-dead pig pokers, and you come up with an awful detailed notion of their intentions.”

  The older man sighed. “I have dealt with the Rafers for decades, know the language almost. I know these things by now, plumb. And those ‘half-dead pig pokers’ have not aged by one gray whisker since I first met them—the same three Rafers. They know something we don’t about time, aging, collective thought, I don’t know what else.”

  “Oh, probably cannibalism, funeral pyres, nudity, tooth-sharpening—lots of things we could learn.”

  Webb sank into thought and ran an index finger across his bristly chin. “Um, I promised to tell you about Hannibal,” he said finally.

  “The town where we crossed the big river, the Oh-one-one.”

  “Well, a man. A man born there, and also called Hannibal, maybe it was a nickname. In the old times, he needed a way to cross these mountains we’re coming to, the Rocky Mountains. He was a revolutionary, like us. He had an army and weapons and to win the war he had to get them across the Rocky Mountains.”

  “To the Big Ocean?”

  “Nah, farther. Farther to this huge porker of a city, Los Atlantis, well beyond the mountains. It finally sank and created the Big Ocean. But to get there, to cross this terrain, Hannibal had to find some unknown, unthought-of transportation.”

  “He invented jeeps!”

  “There were no automobiles at all then. They had not even conceived yet of the machines that would fight the Big War. The answer was elephants.”

  “What?”

  “Elephants. Huge plumb suckers, these animals. They used to roam these grasslands, and the Rafers back then would hunt them. They were like pi
gs, hunnerd times larger, if ya can gully that. With long windy noses to grab with.”

  “Umm. Sometimes I think I’m just not as religious as you are.”

  “Well, no. We’re speakin’ history, not religion. But you’re missing the point. Thing is, out of our home, away from the Blue Ridge, people, animals, the whole world is different. If we want to survive, we learn to work with the new worlds we find. Hannibal found the elephant herds and used them to carry him and his men across the Rockies. Out there”—he pointed—”the Rocky Mountains.”

  Gregory did not reply for a moment, and then remembered a conversation he had heard inside a fortified compound far back east, weeks ago. “Your point, then, is something like what Mr. Faiging was saying about Pec-Pec?” he asked.

  “Yes. The Rafers just look at the world differently….”

  “Back’ards.”

  “From most. To them, civilization—goodness, art, security, the whole plumby thing worth living for—is spread across the wilderness. Cities are disease.”

  “Pec-Pec thinks like that? We’re hauling into scrubland to find a man, some poking magic man thief who thinks like that? Like a Rafer?”

  “Um. He not only thinks like that, but he is a Rafer, technically. I gully he’s something like the king of Rafers. Not that he ever lived among them—no. Visits now and then, fades in and out. They think of him as an itinerant god, always on the fringes where he can never be seen fully, never grasped as a whole.” Rosenthal Webb laughed. “The more I tell about Pec-Pec the more he sounds a bollocks. But believe, Pec-Pec would not have sent us to find Tha’Enton just to get our throats dillied. Any bugger who’s spent a lifetime eluding the Monitor can’t be all bad, eh?”

  “You mean, the Monitor’s tracking this Pec-Pec, an’ we’re going to meet up with the man? Oh, poke—”

  “No. I meant totally eluding the Monitor. My word is that—up to now, anyway—the Government doesn’t even know he exists.”

  “But ho up a minute! You said you hadn’t seen Pec-Pec in a year. And when you asked Cred Faiging about him, you were barely trustful. How is it now that Pec-Pec sent us to pick up this bone-rattler?”

  Rosenthal Webb had to stop and think, staring up from his sleeping bag into the nighttime star blanket. The memory was there in his mind clear as the moon: The dark-skinned magic man with his knotty little mustache telling him to visit the Wise and ask them about the warrior who also is a musician. But no, he hadn’t met with Pec-Pec since a year ago, long before this mission had been set in motion. So why was he so damned sure he and the magic man had recently had a conversation?

  Webb propped himself up on his elbows and stared into the red coals of the camp fire long into the night.

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  23

  Flying Machines

  Nora Londi followed the monster through the blackness of the rocky tunnel until it widened into a massive, dimly lit cavern. Her first impression was that she was overlooking a city at night. Below there were orderly legions of yellow and red lights in precise patterns. Neighborhoods and thoroughfares more expansive, even, than New Chicago’s.

  As her eyes grew accustomed to the illumination, she saw that the lights were not so distant. This was a cavern the size of twenty tobacco barns, and its floor was filled with rows of blocky cabinets, machines dotted with innumerable bulbs and gauges, some of the little lights winking on and off as their functions were called into play.

  The dreadful beast stood in the center of the “city,” near a horseshoe-shaped desk laden with control panels and keyboards—an assemblage that gave Londi a sickening apprehension. The large bull-faced man was waving her on, beckoning and mumbling unintelligibly under the whir of machinery. His muscular mounds of skin glistened in the odd light—perhaps a little greasy from too many cannibalistic meals, Londi told herself. She descended the stony slope until she hit the polished stone flooring and looked back: The llama Diego and little Loo had emerged from the black tunnel and were following.

  “…and stand right here in the center of the universe,” the hunched man was saying when she came within hearing range. “I don’t expect you to understand all of this, Nora. But these are thinking machines. They collect information, store it, assimilate and analyze. The way … just the way a brain does.”

  “You thought there was a real Government? Well, not in New Chicago, no.” There was a wet hiss as he breathed deeply. He motioned grandly around the dark room. “There is a town of note takers and taxers, builders, Badgers, Inspectors. Bureaucracy. Mmm, to carry out my orders, but most of those groundlings have no idea I really exist. Or, at least, where I exist and in what form.”

  “From here, one man—with assistance from little Loo—can control every population center on the continent. We monitor, regulate, all use of teletype, telephone, wireless. You won’t believe this, because you can’t see them, but there are actually ancient flying machines high above us. So high up that there is no air there. My flying machines. I found ‘em, figured them to be. One even has a meanly powerful camera. There is not much my machines don’t see or hear.”

  Londi leaned against the rounded desk, feigning nonchalance. She poked at the nearest keyboard. It was made of worn plastic and carried the sheen of a well-used knife handle.

  “These thinking machines,” Londi said, “that’s Old Age talk. They had the thinker boxes and the flying machines. There’s none of that now.”

  The big man laughed. “There’s none of that, maybe, except mine! The computers have been here for centuries, perfectly preserved in the cool and dry of these caves. I had to build the turbine to power them. Then took another ten years to gully the machines themselves.”

  Diego clopped up beside Londi and sniffed at the keyboard. Loo pulled him away by his neck.

  Irritated, Diego asked, “Fly, hooma, machine? No … ooom, not legal.”

  The monster’s bovine face brightened with pride. “I made that illegal!”

  “So you would have the only ones?” asked Londi.

  “Oh, don’t say it so sour. We must have some control! Technology, the reading and the writing.” He shuddered. “These things are for me. For the Government. That way the Government embodies all good, all progress. It cannot fail.

  “But those flying machines, not even I actually have one to ride in, as the ancients used to. Mine are all in the sky. To bring them down would destroy them.”

  Diego murmured pensively, “Hoooorma.”

  “And what’s this little stick woman got to do with running the Government?” Londi asked gesturing at Loo.

  “She talks to the computers so well that it saves me weeks of time, weeks of typing out the thinker box talk. It all has to do with that language she developed once she, uh, misplaced her tongue.” The man smiled, his thick lips twisting grotesquely, and pulled the cover off of a microphone on the counter. “She speaks into this instrument with that ooonga-oooonga talk—you’ve heard how she speaks? It’s a language based on tone levels and changes in pitch. Think of it as a language that climbs up and down stairways, while ours remains on the ground. Vertical, as opposed to horizontal.”

  Londi stared blankly, but he continued, “Loo’s language is much more suited to binary logic, which is how these machines think. When I command the thinker boxes, the computers, it takes me twenty times the effort.”

  Londi shook her head, understanding little of the explanation. “I suppose there’s a reason you’ve shown us?”

  “Oh, you killed one of my Transport men, and while doing that blundered into the center of Government. You are bright and strong, and you are either an asset to me or a danger. Mmm, now. You owe me a body.” He scratched at his belly. “You will either work with me and, humph, join the gene pool, or you will die. Either way, you will never leave our community. You see that, don’t you? That you owe me a body—one way or another?”

  “Not much of a choice.”

  “Then in the spirit of cooperation, you will tell me about
your friends.”

  “I don’t have any friends.”

  “The friends you spoke of earlier. Knights, you called them, using chess terminology. Yes, I was aware of them. But they can’t know you are here, can they? They must think you are at Blue Hole. They will be captured there—easily. It’s not only my largest prison camp, but also a training ground for Security. I like to have them refine their, uh, interviewing techniques on the prisoners.”

  Londi was at a loss. She had mentioned companions as a bluff, and now she was told that someone actually seemed to be on the follow. But then she had a wry thought: There was one bastard’s name she didn’t mind giving.

  “It’s probably Anton Takk.”

  Loo groaned, disappointed. Londi turned and saw that the little woman had her razorlike flier’s knife in hand.

  “She’s buggered,” said the large man. “We already knew the answer. And if you lied, I had promised Loo she could have a little nick of your tongue. Let’s hope you continue to cooperate. Or you might have to learn Loo’s language.

  “You see, we take visitors from the outside quite seriously. No one must know where we are. If the location of this canyon became known all across Merqua, we would have to move immediately. And I hate moving—every forty or fifty years is often enough.” He sighed. “And now I’ve got the thinker boxes—a whole cavern full of thinker boxes, which would not be a simple thing to transport surreptitiously.”

  The Monitor’s jaw muscles bulged nervously. “If I had to move now because of your friends, I would get quite upset,” he said sternly.

  Londi felt queasy, and as her vision began to blur, she heard Diego’s hoofs clatter nervously. She put a hand on the desk for support. Anton Takk. That Northland rube—out here? Oh, bugger. “Yeah I’ll, uh, cooperate. Course I will.”