“I wish I could do more for you,” the tattooed man said.
Tetchie merely glared at him, thinking, haven’t you done enough?
The tattooed man gave her a mild look, head cocked slightly as though listen
ing to her thoughts.
“He calls himself Nallorn on this side of the Gates,” he said finally, “but you would call him Nightmare, did you meet him in the land of his origin, beyond the Gates of Sleep. He thrives on pain and torment. We have been enemies for a very long time.”
Tetchie blinked in confusion. “But…you…”
The tattooed man nodded. “I know. We look the same. We are brothers, child. I am the elder. My name is Dream; on this side of the Gates I answer to the name Gaedrian.”
“He…your brother…he took something from me.”
“He stole your mortal ability to dream,” Gaedrian told her. “Tricked you into giving it freely so that it would retain its potency.”
Tetchie shook her head. “I don’t understand. Why would he come to me? I’m no one. I don’t have any powers or magics that anyone could want.”
“Not that you can use yourself, perhaps, but the mix of trow and mortal blood creates a potent brew. Each drop of such blood is a talisman in the hands of one who understands its properties.”
“Is he stronger than you?” Tetchie asked.
“Not in the land beyond the Gates of Sleep. There I am the elder. The Realms of Dream are mine and all who sleep are under my rule when they come through the Gates.” He paused, dark eyes thoughtful, before adding, “In this world, we are more evenly matched.”
“Nightmares come from him?” Tetchie asked.
Gaedrian nodded. “It isn’t possible for a ruler to see all the parts of his kingdom at once. Nallorn is the father of lies. He creeps into sleeping minds when my attention is distracted elsewhere and makes a horror of healing dreams.”
He stood up then, towering over her.
“I must go,” he said. “I must stop him before he grows too strong.”
Tetchie could see the doubt in his eyes and understood then that though he knew his brother to be stronger than him, he would not admit to it, would not turn from what he saw as his duty. She tried to stand, but her strength still hadn’t returned.
“Take me with you,” she said. “Let me help you.”
“You don’t know what you ask.”
“But I want to help.”
Gaedrian smiled. “Bravely spoken, but this is war and no place for a child.”
Tetchie searched for the perfect argument to convince him, but couldn’t find it. He said nothing, but she knew as surely as if he’d spoken why he didn’t want her to come. She would merely slow him down. She had no skills, only her night sight and the slowness of her limbs. Neither would be of help.
During the lull in their conversation when that understanding came to her, she heard the howling once more.
“The dogs,” she said.
“There are no wild dogs,” Gaedrian told her. “That is only the sound of the wind as it crosses the empty reaches of his soul.” He laid a hand on her head, tousled her hair. “I’m sorry for the hurt that’s come to you with this night’s work. If the fates are kind to me, I will try to make amends.”
Before Tetchie could respond, he strode off, westward. She tried to follow, but could barely crawl after him. By the time she reached the crest of the hill, the longstone rearing above her, she saw Gaedrian’s long legs carrying him up the side of the next hill. In the distance, blue lightning played, close to the ground.
Nallorn, she thought.
He was waiting for Gaedrian. Nallorn meant to kill the dreamlord and then he would rule the land beyond the Gates of Sleep. There would be no more dreams, only nightmares. People would fear sleep, for it would no longer be a haven. Nallorn would twist its healing peace into pain and despair.
And it was all her fault. She’d been thinking only of herself. She’d wanted to talk to her father, to be normal. She hadn’t known who Nallorn was at the time, but ignorance was no excuse.
“It doesn’t matter what others think of you,” her mother had told her once, “but what you think of yourself. Be a good person and no matter how other people will talk of you, what they say can only be a lie.”
They called her a monster and feared her. She saw now that it wasn’t a lie.
She turned to the longstone that had been her father before the sun had snared him and turned him to stone. Why couldn’t that have happened to her before all of this began, why couldn’t she have been turned to stone the first time the sun touched her? Then Nallorn could never have played on her vanity and her need, would never have tricked her. If she’d been stone…
Her gaze narrowed. She ran a hand along the rough surface of the standing stone and Nallorn’s voice spoke in her memory.
I speak of blood.
It needs but a pinprick—one drop, perhaps three, and not for me. For the stone. To call him back.
To call him back.
Nallorn had proved there was magic in her blood. If he hadn’t lied, if…
Could she call her father back? And if he did return, would he listen to her?
It was night, the time when a trow was strongest. Surely when she explained, her father would use that strength to help Gaedrian?
A babble of townsfolk’s voices clamored up through her memory.
A trow’ll drink your blood as sure as look at you.
Saw one I did, sitting up by the boneyard, and wasn’t he chewing on a thighbone he’d dug up?
The creatures have no heart.
No soul.
They’ll feed on their own, if there’s no other meat to be found.
No, Tetchie told herself. Those were the lies her mother had warned her against. If her mother had loved the trow, then he couldn’t have been evil.
Her thumb still ached where Nallorn had pierced it with his long silver pin, but the tiny wound had closed. Tetchie bit at it until the salty taste of blood touched her tongue. Then she squeezed her thumb, smearing the few drops of blood that welled up against the rough surface of the stone.
She had no expectations, only hope. She felt immediately weak, just as she had when Nallorn had taken the three small drops of blood from her. The world began to spin for the second time that night, and she started to fall once more, only this time she fell into the stone. The hard surface seemed to have turned to the consistency of mud and it swallowed her whole.
* * *
When consciousness finally returned, Tetchie found herself lying with her face pressed against hard packed dirt. She lifted her head, squinting in the poor light. The longstone was gone, along with the world she knew. For as far as she could see, there was only a desolate wasteland, illuminated by a sickly twilight for which she could discover no source. It was still the landscape she knew, the hills and valleys had the same contours as those that lay west of Burndale, but it was all changed. Nothing seemed to grow here anymore; nothing lived at all in this place, except for her, and she had her doubts about that as well.
If this was a dead land, a lifeless reflection of the world she knew, then might she not have died to reach it?
Oddly enough, the idea didn’t upset her. It was as though, having seen so much that was strange already tonight, nothing more could surprise her.
When she turned to where the old gnarlwood had been in her world, a dead tree stump stood. It was no more than three times her height, the area about it littered with dead branches. The main body of the tree had fallen away from where Tetchie knelt, lying down the slope.
She rose carefully to her feet, but the dizziness and weakness she’d felt earlier had both fled. In the dirt at her feet, where the longstone would have stood in her world, there was a black pictograph etched deeply into the soil. It reminded her of the tattoos that she’d seen on the chests of the dreamlord and his brother, as though it had been plucked from the skin of one of them, enlarged and cast down on the ground. Goosebu
mps traveled up her arms.
She remembered what Gaedrian had told her about the land he ruled, how the men and women of her world could enter it only after passing through the Gates of Sleep. She’d been so weak when she offered her blood to the longstone, her eyelids growing so heavy….
Was this all just a dream, then? And if so, what was its source? Did it come from
Gaedrian, or from his brother Nallorn at whose bidding nightmares were born?
She went down on one knee to look more closely at the pictograph. It looked a bit like a man with a tangle of rope around his feet and lines standing out from his head as though his hair stood on end. She reached out with one cautious finger and touched the tangle of lines at the foot of the rough figure. The dirt was damp there.
She rubbed her finger against her thumb. The dampness was oily to the touch. Scarcely aware of what she was doing, she reached down again and traced the symbol, the slick oiliness letting her finger slide easily along the edged grooves in the dirt. When she came to the end, the pictograph began to glow. She stood quickly, backing away.
What had she done?
The blue glow rose into the air, holding to the shape that lay in the dirt. A faint rhythmic thrumming rose from all around her, as though the ground was shifting, but she felt no vibration underfoot. There was just the sound, low and ominous.
A branch cracked behind her and she turned to the ruin of the gnarlwood. A tall shape stood outlined against the sky. She started to call out to it, but her throat closed up on her. And then she was aware of the circle of eyes that watched her from all sides of the hilltop, pale eyes that flickered with the reflection of the glowing pictograph that hung in the air where the longstone stood in her world. They were set low to the ground; feral eyes.
She remembered the howling of the wild dogs in her own world.
There are no wild dogs, Gaedrian had told her. That is only the sound of the wind as it crosses the empty reaches of his soul.
As the eyes began to draw closer, she could make out the triangular-shaped heads of the creatures they belonged to, the high-backed bodies with which they slunk forward.
Oh, why had she believed Gaedrian? She knew him no better than Nallorn.
Who was to say that either of them was to be trusted?
One of the dogs rose up to its full height and stalked forward on stiff legs. The low growl that arose in his chest echoed the rumble of sound that her foolishness with the glowing pictograph had called up. She started to back away from the dog, but now another, and a third stepped forward and there was no place to which she could retreat. She turned her gaze to the silent figure that stood in among the fallen branches of the gnarlwood.
“Puh—please,” she managed. “I…I meant no harm.”
The figure made no response, but the dogs growled at the sound of her voice. The nearest pulled its lips back in a snarl.
This was it, Tetchie thought. If she wasn’t dead already in this land of the dead, then she soon would be.
But then the figure by the tree moved forward. It had a slow shuffling step. Branches broke underfoot as it closed the distance between them. The dogs backed away from Tetchie and began to whine uneasily.
“Be gone,” the figure said.
Its voice was low and craggy, stone against stone, like that of the first tattooed man, Nallorn, the dreamlord’s brother who turned dreams into nightmares. It was a counterpoint to the deep thrumming that seemed to come from the hill under Tetchie’s feet.
The dogs fled at the sound of the man’s voice. Tetchie’s knees knocked against each other as he moved closer still. She could see the rough chiseled shape of his features now, the shock of tangled hair, stiff as dried gorse, the wide bulk of his shoulders and torso, the corded muscle upon muscle that made up his arms and legs. His eyes were sunk deep under protruding brows. He was like the first rough shaping that a sculptor might create when beginning a new work, face and musculature merely outlined rather than clearly defined as it would be when the sculpture was complete.
Except this sculpture wasn’t stone, nor clay, nor marble. It was flesh and blood. And though he was no taller than a normal man, he seemed like a giant to Tetchie, towering over her as though the side of a mountain had pulled loose to walk the hills.
“Why did you call me?” he asked.
“C-call?” Tetchie replied. “But I…I didn’t…”
Her voice trailed off. She gazed on him with sudden hope and understanding.
“Father?” she asked in a small voice.
The giant regarded her in a long silence. Then slowly he bent down to one knee so that his head was on level with hers.
“You,” he said in a voice grown with wonder. “You are Henna’s daughter?”
Tetchie nodded, nervously.
“My daughter?”
Tetchie’s nervousness fled. She no longer saw a fearsome trow out of legend, but her mother’s lover. The gentleness and warmth that had called her mother from Burndale to where he waited for her on the moors, washed over her. He opened his arms and she went to him, sighing as he embraced her.
“My name’s Tetchie,” she said into his shoulder.
“Tetchie,” he repeated, making a low rumbling song of her name. “I never knew I had a daughter.”
“I came every night to your stone,” she said, “hoping you’d return.”
Her father pulled back a little and gave her a serious look.
“I can’t ever go back,” he said.
“But—”
He shook his head. “Dead is dead, Tetchie. I can’t return.”
“But this is a horrible place to have to live.”
He smiled, craggy features shifting like a mountainside suddenly rearranging its terrain.
“I don’t live here,” he said. “I live…I can’t explain how it is. There are no words to describe the difference.”
“Is mama there?”
“Hanna…died?”
Tetchie nodded. “Years ago, but I still miss her.”
“I will…look for her,” the trow said. “I will give her your love.” He rose then, looming over her again. “But I must go now, Tetchie. This is unhallowed land, the perilous border that lies between life and death. Bide here too long—living or dead—and you remain here forever.”
Tetchie had wanted to ask him to take her with him to look for her mother, to tell him that living meant only pain and sorrow for her, but then she realized she was only thinking of herself again. She still wasn’t sure that she trusted Gaedrian, but if he had been telling her the truth, then she had to try to help him. Her own life was a nightmare; she wouldn’t wish for all people to share such a life.
“I need your help,” she said and told him then of Gaedrian and Nallorn, the war that was being fought between Dream and Nightmare that Nallorn could not be allowed to win.
Her father shook his head sadly. “I can’t help you, Tetchie. It’s not physically possible for me to return.”
“But if Gaedrian loses…”
“That would be an evil thing,” her father agreed.
“There must be something we can do.”
He was silent for long moments then.
“What is it?” Tetchie asked. “What don’t you want to tell me?”
“I can do nothing,” her father said, “but you…”
Again he hesitated.
“What?” Tetchie asked. “What is it that I can do?”
“I can give you of my strength,” her father said. “You’ll be able to help your dreamlord then. But it will cost you. You will be more trow than ever, and remain so.”
More trow? Tetchie thought. She looked at her father, felt the calm that seemed to wash in peaceful waves from his very presence. The townsfolk might think that a curse, but she no longer did.
“I’d be proud to be more like you,” she said.
“You will have to give up all pretense of humanity,” her father warned her. “When the sun rises, you must be barrowed underhill or s
he’ll make you stone.”
“I already only come out at night,” she said.
Her father’s gaze searched hers and then he sighed.
“Yours has not been an easy life,” he said.
Tetchie didn’t want to talk about herself anymore.
“Tell me what to do,” she said.
“You must take some of my blood,” her father told her.
Blood again. Tetchie had seen and heard enough about it to last her a lifetime tonight.
“But how can you do that?” she asked. “You’re just a spirit….”
Her father touched her arm. “Given flesh in this half-world by your call. Have you a knife?”
When Tetchie shook her head, he lifted his thumb to his mouth and bit down on it. Dark liquid welled up at the cut as he held his hand out to her.
“It will burn,” he said.
Tetchie nodded nervously. Closing her eyes, she opened her mouth. Her father brought his thumb down across her tongue. His blood tasted like fire, burning its way down her throat. She shuddered with the searing pain of it, eyes tearing so that even when she opened them, she was still blind.
She felt her father’s hand on her head. He smoothed the tangle of her hair and then kissed her.
“Be well, my child,” he said. “We will look for you, your mother and I, when your time to join us has come and you finally cross over.”
There were a hundred things Tetchie realized that she wanted to say, but vertigo overtook her and she knew that not only was he gone, but the empty world as well. She could feel grass under her, a soft breeze on her cheek. When she opened her eyes, the longstone reared up on one side of her, the gnarlwood on the other. She turned to look where she’d last seen the blue lightning flare before she’d gone into the stone.
There was no light there now.
She got to her feet, feeling invigorated rather than weak. Her night sight seemed to have sharpened, every sense was more alert. She could almost read the night simply through the pores of her skin.
The townsfolk were blind, she realized. She had been blind. They had all missed so much of what the world had to offer. But the townsfolk craved a narrower world, rather than a wider one, and she…she had a task yet to perform.
The Very Best of Charles De Lint Page 17
