Dreamwalker. Part 16

Like us.

"You understand now, don't you?" His words were soft in the darkness "Shadows of alien realities are glimpsed through invisible portals. Dreams bleed over from one world to the next. Tourists with magical Gifts show up in places where those Gifts don't exist, doing things that the natives think are impossible. So the natives make up stories to explain it. They anchor their religion in places where the visions are strongest, they train their seers to listen for the echo of other worlds, they weave fictions to try to make sense of the unexplainable . . ." He paused. "We are the legends of your world, Jessica."

I wrapped my arms around myself, but they had no power to banish the chill that had suddenly invaded my soul. I looked away from him but couldn't banish unwanted images from my mind.

"You want to see what the Guilds are about?" he asked. "Their summer a.s.sessment fair is going on right now. I'll take you there tomorrow, you can see them in action."

"The Green Man may come," I whispered. "We have to wait for him."

"It will take him a while to get here. If he comes at all. You have time."

But did my brother have time? I wondered. Would the Shadows put off whatever they were going to do to him, until we showed up? Tears of frustration welled up in my eyes. It wasn't this hard in the movies. You showed up, you located the evil castle, you invaded it. Good won out over evil in the end-though a few good people might get hurt along the way-because that was the way such stories always ended. Then you got to go home. The house lights came on. Everyone lived happily ever after.

What those stories didn't tell you about was the waiting. How it bled you of strength, drop by drop. How it wound your nerves so tight that you wondered if, when the time came to act at last, you'd be able to trust your own judgment. Focus, Jessica. I drew in a deep breath. Focus.

Isaac said that dreams could cross over from one world to another. Was that what my door dreams were all about? Were they visions from another world? I remembered Miriam Seyer showing particular interest in my art. No, in my dreams. That's why she came to me, I realized suddenly. Not to buy my art. To learn about my dreams.

I chose my words very carefully, not wanting to reveal too much to someone whose primary ident.i.ty was still creepy stranger. "You said something about dreams crossing over. Are there people who are especially sensitive to that?"

His eyes narrowed. "There was a Gift related to dreaming, once. Centuries ago. It drove its users insane, and ultimately was judged to be so dangerous that anyone who showed signs of having it was destroyed on sight. They called them dreamwalkers." He looked at me curiously. "Why do you ask?"

"Just trying to make sense of it all," I muttered. My heart was pounding in my chest so loudly I was afraid he could hear it. "So much to absorb at once."

"Come with me tomorrow, then. You'll understand more of how it all works once you see it with your own eyes."

I managed to nod in a casual manner. Or tried to, anyway. "When?"

"Early morning. There'll be a wake-up call. They try to keep the Warrens in sync with the world above. Makes foraging easier."

I looked up at his face in the darkness. Skin pale as alabaster. Eyes black as midnight. From somewhere I managed to dredge up a fraction of a smile. "You go out in the sunlight?"

He looked startled for a moment, then smiled broadly. "Yeah. I go out in the sunlight. Don't tan worth a d.a.m.n, though."

Do you sparkle? I wanted to ask him. But I wasn't sure he'd get the reference. Or consider it funny if he did.

We are the legends of your world, he'd said.

So what did that make me?

After I left him, I wandered for awhile in the dimly lit corridors. No guide, no chalk marks, no sense of self-preservation. Fortunately the larger tunnels all connected to the main chamber eventually, and I was able to use the echo of distant conversation to orient myself. But it was awhile before I was ready to rejoin human company.

All kids have a secret fear of discovering that they aren't who they're supposed to be. Maybe they were adopted, or abducted from their parents at birth, or else their dad wasn't really their dad; those are normal childhood nightmares. Everyone has them. But even the worst of those fears couldn't compare to our reality. Not only weren't our parents our parents, but the world we'd grown up in wasn't really our world.

My little brother wasn't really my brother.

I remembered what I had promised Tommy that night while he was sleeping. And suddenly the tears I had been fighting so hard to repress while I was with Isaac, started to flow, and my heart ached with a pain so vast it felt like it would swallow me whole.

You will always be my brother, I promised him silently. Always.

19.

LURAY.

VIRGINIA PRIME.

THE WOLF WALKED through the city without looking up. People who saw it coming quickly got out of the way, and a few riders pulled their horses over to the far side of the street, afraid that their mounts might panic if it came too close. One pedestrian, too preoccupied to pay attention to where he was going, almost b.u.mped into it. The wolf raised its head long enough to bare its teeth and growl, sending that person fleeing for safety. But it had no interest in pursuing human prey. It watched the man long enough to be sure that he wouldn't get in the way again, then put its nose to the ground again, striving to distinguish three specific scent trails from the thousands that clung to the street.

Everyone in Luray knew what it meant when a creature from the wild behaved like that, and they steered clear. No one wanted to tangle with a Hunter.

The scent of its quarry was fresh enough that it was still strong, and despite the hundreds of people who had walked down the same street since then, the wolf had no trouble identifying the trail of its prey. The smells of the surrounding city failed to distract it, though it looked up briefly as it neared a sausage stand and watched the owner quickly put a few links on the ground. But it did not accept the offering, and the vendor moved hurriedly out of the way as it resumed the task at hand.

The wolf paused outside a cafe, where two of its targets had lingered for awhile, then followed their trail down a side street, away from the heart of the business district. There it discovered a place where the three of them had rested on a wall, leaving behind trace scents of food, sweat, and fear.

It was there that a fourth scent trail joined them, one that the wolf knew from previous hunts. It growled low in its throat as it continued moving.

Children in the slums ran away when they saw the wolf coming.

Cats and small dogs bolted for cover.

Rats p.i.s.sed themselves in terror.

Finally it came to a narrow alley strewn with garbage, in the center of which was a manhole leading down into the city's drainage system. The wolf sniffed the cast iron lid just long enough to confirm that the fourth scent was all over it. Its three targets had come here, led by someone who had opened the manhole for them then led them down into the undercity.

Into the Warrens.

With a huff of satisfaction, the wolf set out at a loping pace to rejoin its human handler.

20.

LURAY.

VIRGINIA PRIME.

THE SUNLIGHT HURT. It must have been a psychological effect, since we'd only been in the Warrens for a day, but knowing that didn't make it hurt any less. The sudden exposure to the blinding light made my eyes burn, sunbeams rasping like steel wool on my flesh. Is this what the locals went through each time they emerged from their underground haven?

At least our hosts had decided that we were trustworthy enough to travel the route that their foraging teams used, a path infinitely more direct (and less odiferous) than the one we'd taken on the way down. No smelly sewers this time, or streams of muck thick enough for creepy things to hide in, just a quick trip through several abandoned utility tunnels and one short climb up a steel ladder. That brought us to a hidden door, which in turn led into someone's abandoned cellar. It was a messy place, and we picked our way across a floor littered with broken bottles and rusted cans that looked like they'd been there since the beginning of time, finally reaching a pair of battered storm doors. They were locked from the inside. Isaac had the key, and after a few seconds of fumbling with the rusty lock he managed to get the doors open. Sunlight suddenly flooded the small s.p.a.ce, its searing intensity hitting us in the face like a physical blow.

Like I said: Ouch.

Once my eyes stopped stinging, and I could see clearly again, I discovered that Isaac didn't look nearly as disturbing in the full light of day as he had underground. His pale skin actually had a healthy undertone to it; give him a few days at the beach and he'd probably tan up nicely. The eyes that had seemed so ominous in the Warrens were still compelling, but now in a different way. I felt a warmth when he looked at me that raised a flush of guilt in my cheek, and for some reason I thought of Devon. It didn't really make any sense. The kiss he and I had staged to distract the locals had no real meaning. There was no reason for me not to look at other guys. But I guess when you're a fugitive in an unfamiliar world, you feel a sense of loyalty to those who are fugitives along with you. Something about being chased by aliens together.

But Devon wasn't with us right now. Despite our best efforts to get him to come along with us, he'd opted to stay behind in the Warrens. He said that his skin color made him too conspicuous, and his being with us would put the whole operation at risk. But neither Rita nor I was fooled by that. Something the locals told him the night before had shaken him badly, and he needed time alone to digest it.

Last night when I'd come back from meeting Isaac, I'd found Devon sitting off in a corner, just staring at the wall. He wouldn't tell me what was wrong, and Rita just shook her head in a kind of don't ask way, when I looked at her. Later on he came back to life a bit and helped us arrange our borrowed blankets into makes.h.i.+ft beds, but every now and then I caught a glimpse of terrible emptiness in his eyes. Haunting. Frightening.

Finally we all settled down to sleep, with only a small night lamp left alight to ward off the terrifying cave-blackness of the place. When my sight adjusted I could see Devon staring into s.p.a.ce, its tiny flame reflected in his eyes, and I knew that whatever had shaken him so badly was not going to allow him to sleep peacefully.

Rita scrunched over to me, close enough that we could whisper in each other's ears. Not that Devon was likely to hear us anyway; he looked as if some circuit in his brain had disconnected, leaving his body unoccupied while his brain wandered down roads of nightmare, alone. My heart ached to see him like that, but I didn't have a clue how to comfort him. Maybe I was afraid I'd make things worse if I tried.

"It's the abbies," Rita whispered.

"What about them?" I whispered back.

It turned out that while I was gone the locals had explained to Rita and Devon about the diminutive hominids we'd seen in the woods. Turns out they weren't from around here at all. And by here, I mean this world. Someone had discovered them on a parallel earth and decided they had good market value, so he brought back some specimens for mating stock, established a local population, and then sold them off. They turned out to be the perfect servitors-human but not human, intelligent but not too intelligent-and a few dozen generations of selective breeding had guaranteed the proper submissive spirit. End result: the perfect slave species.

That's why there were so few black people in this version of America. The millions of Africans who'd been brought across the ocean in shackles in my own reality had never arrived in this one. They hadn't been needed. Stocky abbies from one hominid species labored in southern fields beneath the blazing sun, while their more diminutive cousins served as housemaids and manservants in the halls of the northern aristocracy. Meanwhile slave traders continued to scour the worlds for proto-humans to breed and sell; there were at least five types in common service now.

What was it the Declaration of Independence said? All men are created equal. Only here they weren't equal, and no mere doc.u.ment could ever change that.

I could understand why that revelation hit Devon so much harder than the rest of us. I also understood why he didn't feel comfortable talking about his feelings with any of us, and just wanted to be alone for a while. Sometimes guys are like that.

Most of the time, actually.

"You okay?" Isaac asked.

Startled back to the present moment, I blinked and nodded.

He'd dug up a pair of wide-brimmed sunhats for Rita and me and a visored cap for himself, for protection from overhead scrutiny. He pulled his own hat down until the visor rested right above his eyes, casting them into shadow. The brim of mine drooped low enough that someone talking to me would have had to lift up the edge to see my eyes, but even so I felt dangerously exposed. As we stepped out into the sunlit street I had a sudden impulse to dive back underground, to bury myself in the womblike safety of the Warrens while enemies scoured the city looking for me. Maybe in a few days they'd stop searching for me. Maybe in a month.

Maybe not ever.

Pull yourself together, girl. Tommy's depending on you.

Isaac explained that for a few weeks during the summer the Guilds camped out in Luray's main plaza, providing testing stations where any child who showed signs of Talent could be evaluated. Mostly this was a service for the lower cla.s.ses. Aristo families arranged for private viewings for their own kids soon after birth, and apparently they were big social events, to which all the leading families in town were invited. Gifts were exchanged, food and wine flowed freely, and at the end an infant swaddled in pure white cloth was given over to the Seers to evaluate. The aristos had been interbreeding with the Guilds for centuries, so the odds of one of their offspring being born with a substantial Gift were reasonably high. Among the poorer cla.s.ses such births were one in a million.

Yet such children, when they were born, were worth their weight in gold. A poor family whose child was accepted for apprentices.h.i.+p in a Guild would be richly rewarded, and if the child eventually earned the t.i.tle of Master, they'd be set for life. So every summer families made pilgrimages to the Guild Fair in Luray, to present their children for a.s.sessment and set the dice rolling.

Isaac glossed over the part of the story where the children with potential were taken away from their parents and given to strangers to raise. Depending on the nature of the apprentices.h.i.+p contract, they might never see their birth families again. Because if you call it fostering it's all right, yes?

The whole system seemed so dismal to me that the festive smells that wafted toward us as we approached Guildmaster's Plaza were totally unexpected. Roasted pork, fried chicken, honey and b.u.t.ter and fresh lemonade . . . it smelled as if we were approaching a county fair rather than a place where children were bartered like livestock.

Then we turned the last corner and the Plaza was spread out before us-and indeed, it looked exactly like a county fair. There were colorful little kiosks all over the place, some offering games of chance, others serving up the kind of junk food you only find at a fairground. Never mind that there were no giant polyester pandas anywhere, no Mylar pinwheels, no plastic balloons. What the locals lacked in polymer technology they made up for in architectural excess: every available surface was decorated with arabesques and scrollwork, painted in festive colors.

On the surface it was all quite cheery, but there was a disconcerting sense of artificiality to the place, and I half expected stagehands to come in and start peeling away the colorful facade, exposing its rotten armature. Evidently Rita was also uneasy, for she stayed close by my side as Isaac led us on a cursory tour, pointing out items of interest as we wended our way slowly through the crowd.

The plaza was filled with people. Families, mostly, with a few lone children darting in and out between the kiosks, playing games. At first glance they all seemed happy enough. But if you looked closely, you got the sense that, for some of them, it was just a facade. One family that pa.s.sed us had obviously come from a very poor quarter of town, and probably spent their last dime to get here. What I saw in their eyes was not joy, relaxation, or any variety of happiness. It was desperation. I caught sight of a boy who had tucked himself into the shadow of a kiosk, and his eyes were filled with a haunting sadness that made my heart lurch in sympathy. Had he failed his a.s.sessment? Been forced to stand by as a beloved brother or sister was handed over to strangers? Or was there some other misery a.s.sociated with this place?

None of this bothered Isaac at all. He led us past those kiosks without stopping, and Rita and I followed in solemn silence. Soon we came to a place where the colors were a bit more muted and the crowd a bit less noisy. Families walked quietly here, and the children who trailed behind them made no attempt to play. This was the place where Guild business was conducted, Isaac told us.

It was also the place where magic was performed.

The first time I saw it, a little girl was responsible. She was standing in the shadow of a great tree with an older woman-her mother?-and holding her hands out in front of her, palms cupped toward each other as if she were holding an invisible sphere. It was hard to say whether the strained look on her face reflected great effort or great pain. The woman was urging her on, but her manner wasn't encouraging so much as demanding. You could see the girl's hands trembling as she strained desperately to satisfy her, to do-what?

Then, suddenly, fire appeared between her hands. There was only a tiny spark of it, that flickered for a moment and was gone, but the implications of it were mind-blowing. I stopped walking and just stared at her, struggling to come to terms with what I'd just seen.

"Longer!" her mother snapped angrily. "You have to hold it longer!" For a moment my sense of wonder was overwhelmed by sheer indignation. I wanted to walk over and smack the mother. Not just because of how she was treating the little girl, but for the sake of every kid in the universe who had ever brought home an A on a test, only to have angry parents demand to know why it wasn't an A+.

Without turning, I stammered to Isaac, "What . . . what is that?"

"Elemental control," he said. His tone was totally casual, as if people conjuring fire out of thin air was something he saw every day. "Pyromancy's a lucrative Gift, and it rarely manifests so young; the Guild of Elementals will snap her up." He pointed. "They're over there."

I didn't want to stop watching the little girl, but there was nothing I could do to make the situation with her mother better, and Isaac was urging us to move on. Eventually I let him guide us away.

Each Guild that partic.i.p.ated in this event had its own encampment where it received candidates and admirers. He led us to the one belonging to the Guild of Elementals. Along the way I caught sight of other children struggling to accomplish strange mental tasks, staring at cups of lemonade or handfuls of leaves or invisible objects with an intensity that made my heart quiver. But would I have struggled any less hard, if I had been in their place?

The Guild of Elementals was operating out of a colorful pavilion, with some kind of heraldic banner flying from the center pole. Very Renaissance Faire. The surrounding area had been marked off with velvet ropes, and people lined up at each of several openings, waiting their turns to enter. Servants in matching livery moved back and forth between the lines, taking down names and information, occasionally moving a visitor from one queue to another. Central to the whole arrangement was a grand fountain, with four stone angels pouring water down into a wide basin, in which flames burned brightly.

Yes, that's right. There was a ring of fire surrounding the angels, and though water was being poured directly onto it, the flames didn't even flicker. At first I thought it might be some kind of chemical fire that water couldn't extinguish-dramatic but plausible-but then I saw that the water wasn't affected by the fire at all. Droplets pa.s.sed through the flames and then splashed down into the basin as if nothing unusual was going on. Shouldn't they have turned to steam, or . . . or . . . or something?

"The Elementals like to show off," Isaac said. The look on my face seemed to amuse him.

"But how . . . ? I mean . . . is that a Gift?" I shook my head incredulously. "You can't just change the laws of nature like that. This isn't a videogame-"

I stopped myself, but too late. I held my breath, dreading the questions that were sure to come. But if my use of a high-tech Earth term drew Isaac's notice, he didn't remark upon it. "Natural laws are never suspended," he said, "though I've heard there are spheres where they function differently. Gifts simply channel energy into the natural system, giving it form."