Moon Dreams (The Jeremy Moon Trilogy Book 1) Read online

  Nothing doing. The depths of sleep waited, cool and dark, and down he went again, slipping cool and vertical down into the welcoming oblivion. A nagging little corner of his mind, a remnant of the dream-Jeremy, knife shaper, cursed his stupidity and the weakness of his body, but still he went.

  And only later, when he was kicked awake by an angry Kelada, who held in her hand the wicked, effective curve of blade, did Jeremy fully realize the mistake he had made in not waking up.

  “You can't have dreamed it,” Kelada insisted. “And I know you didn't magic it. Come on, Sebastian. Tell me or—”

  “I did dream it,” Moon insisted. “I went to sleep and knew I needed a knife to get loose, and so I dreamed this one. I dreamed some food earlier, too.”

  Kelada got up and paced back and forth, making long strides, more like a gangly adolescent boy than a young woman. In the cloudy-bright light of this strange land, her face was suspicious, pinched, and sullen. “You don't even talk like yourself anymore,” she muttered. “And now you've gone crazy too.”

  “Just dreaming,” Moon said. “Lord, I wish I could wake up. That's the last time I take pills.”

  Kelada squatted near him. “Why did you cut your beard, Sebastian?”

  “I never had a beard. And nobody calls me Sebastian. It's Jeremy—Jeremy Moon.”

  “Sebastian Magister,” Kelada corrected. She reached out with the knife, touched its sharp point lightly against Jeremy's cheek. “The great wicked magician. He of the empty promises.” The blade bit, just a prick, but Jeremy winced away from it.

  “Hey!” he cried when she again nicked him with the tip of the blade. “Stop it. I'm not Sebastian Magister. I'm Jeremy Moon—Jeremy Sebastian Moon, but I never use my middle name.”

  “Jeremy.” The tone was mocking.

  “That's right,” Jeremy said. “But you can call me ‘Germy.’ All my enemies do.”

  Moodily Kelada began to chunk the knife into the strange, pliant ground. “I'm not your enemy, Sebastian. More your victim. Yours and that damned Niklas's.”

  “Well, let me loose and we'll be friends,” Jeremy said.

  She snorted with derisive laughter. “Let you loose and I'll be dead.” She looked around her, rubbed her right arm with her free left hand. “Be dead sooner rather than later here, anyhow.” Her voice was thick, and Jeremy saw with surprise that her eyes brimmed. A solitary tear spilled and ran down her cheek to her elfin chin, a chin very much like Cassie's.

  “Kelada,” he said softly. “What's wrong?”

  “Nothing,” she said, but her voice held heavy anger. “Nothing except being born without big magic to a poor family. Nothing except being taken apprentice by a bungling thief who gets us both banished to this hell. Nothing except a clever exiled magician who promises a way out and then goes loony. Oh, everything's fine, it is. Just wonderful.”

  Kelada had grown more agitated as she spoke, and the curved blade waved dismayingly close. “Watch it, watch it,” Jeremy cautioned, worming away. “I still don't know what you're talking about.”

  “It isn't important anyway.”

  “It is to me.”

  The woman studied his face for a long while. “You really don't remember, do you? You must have been caught in a dream-whorl of forgetfulness. It must have been a terrible one to affect a wizard like you.”

  “I'm no wizard.”

  Kelada drew in a deep breath and let it out again. “You know what I think is wrong? We can't dream in this place, none of us can. Back when I had nightmares about having my hands cut off I'd have given many a silver not to dream, but we need it, don't we? Without dreams we're nothing. We're only half of what we should be.”

  “I dream.”

  “You're the first, then.” Kelada looked around, taking in the little burst bubble of their fortress with moody eyes. “Look at this place. The stuff of dreams all around, and it won't hold shape. We had the walls twice as high when we first built them—and the building nearly killed us. Now they're sagging back to the primal stuff again. A really strong dreamer could come through the walls even now, or over them. I wish I could dream. I wish any of us could.”

  “I can, I tell you. I dreamed a meal back a ways, and just now I dreamed that knife.”

  Kelada dug a furrow in the gray ground with the point of the blade. It oozed apart, plastic, more like sliced and bloodless flesh than earth. “No one who's in the Between can mindshape this stuff. Like word magic barely works here. Only the outsiders can work the dream-stuff, and only if we steal it out of the dream does it last after their minds go back to the worlds. So don't give me any more about your dreaming, Sebastian. You can't do it here.”

  Jeremy had been holding himself tense on the ground. The arm beneath him throbbed with the effort, and he relaxed. “Okay, okay,” he said. “Have it your way. But I think next time I'll dream these cords on my wrists are tissue. Then we'll see, won't we?”

  “I like you better without the beard,” Kelada said, tilting her head to one side. “You look younger, not so evil.” She reached out a finger and touched Jeremy's cheek. He saw when she took it away that the tip held a drop of blood, drying already to a dull brown. “Sorry I hurt you.”

  “I've done worse shaving.”

  She smiled, and somehow the smile transformed her features just for an instant, made the pixie shape of her face innocent, young, yearning. Jeremy was moved—moved in the same way, he thought, that starving children on TV moved him, stirring pity but not real concern or even understanding. But then she got to her feet and walked away, leaving Jeremy to try to squirm into a more comfortable position. He tried to twist to look after her, but the curvature of the wall behind him prevented that. “Don't go,” he yelled.

  The voice came from overhead, from his horizontal vantage point: “Why not? Don't you want to dream yourself loose?”

  “I'm not sleepy.”

  She laughed, a mocking sound. “What did you do with the things?” she asked. “Niklas will kill you soon, you know, if you don't return them. Especially the speculum. That nearly cost both our lives.”

  “What's a speculum?”

  She had been closer than he thought. Her hand twisted in his hair, painfully, and jerked his chin up. “The mirror,” she said. “The damned mirror that was supposed to be our way out of this place. Remember it? It was hard enough to come by, the silver, the wood.”

  “Ouch,” Jeremy said. “Please, that hurts.”

  She was looking down at him. “Do you suppose the lady ever dreams of you now? You once said you could go back to Thaumia through her mirror, as long as she dreamed of you. Of course, Tremien would sense your presence at once and probably would do something even worse to you than this, if he could think of anything. But I swear, if I really thought you could do it, I'd force you to leap us both back there. Without Niklas I'd be free, and I don't think the magi would even notice my return.” She dropped his head. “No, forget it,” she sighed. “I'm doomed to die here, I guess, and rattle my bones around in the nightmares of the thousand worlds. Lie still, Sebastian. If you move too much, I may bury this dream-steel of yours between your shoulder blades.”

  She left him alone then, truly alone. Jeremy looked across the compound at the featureless opposite wall, just as gray and without character as the ground in front of him. Might as well dream myself loose, he thought. Something to do.

  He tried visualizing the tough cords that bound his wrists and legs, tried imagining them rotting away to nothing, but they still held just as firmly. Finally he determined to try to sleep—and of course sleep eluded him. After what might have been hours, Jeremy recalled an old relaxation technique he had occasionally used back in college. Matter of fact, he realized, Susie Barnes had taught it to him, Susie the psych major. He wondered what she was doing now. Probably shocking rats. She had had a cruel streak.

  But she had taught him a method of relaxing by dividing the body up into zones. First you told yourself that your toes were loose and relaxed, and t
hen you felt them becoming limp. Then the soles of your feet, your arches. It was amazing how loosening the tension there could spread relaxation up your calves and thighs—and that was the course he followed now, telling himself that each new group of muscles was relaxing, going to sleep. It worked: by the time he was telling himself that his jaw was no longer tense, Jeremy was already in the antechambers of sleep. Before too much longer, he was lightly dreaming.

  It was very irritating for a long while, because Jeremy could not quite get hold of the dream. It was less a dream, in fact, than a reverie, filled with idle, erotic thoughts of Cassie. Unfortunately, they kept getting mixed up somehow with angry, erotic thoughts of Kelada, whose face was generally structured like Cassie's but who lacked all the beauty that Cassie had—no sooner was Jeremy turned on than he turned himself off again. But after a while he began to get the hang of directing the dream, and soon he could concentrate on his bindings.

  Tissue paper, he told himself. The cords did not seem to change. Jeremy thought about dreaming the knife. Detail, that was the key—detail. He stepped outside his skull and leaned over to have a look at the cords. They were very crude, fibrous, more like unworked vines than real rope. He imagined the fibers swelling, becoming water-soaked and pliable. They actually seemed to change as he kept his eye on them, growing green and softer. Then it was easy to see them as tender springtime vines, as almost nothing. His wrists, distant as they were, actually seemed to feel the damp ooze of sap as the shoots broke under his testing tugs.

  This time the dream-Jeremy took no chance. He slipped back inside his sleeping self quietly, positioned himself close to his own ears, and screamed as loudly as he could.

  The shock brought Moon awake at once. He sat upright, gasping for breath. Across the compound, Kelada, staring moodily out over the gray plain, started at the sudden noise and whirled on him, bringing the knife up.

  “Wait,” Jeremy said, holding up both hands in a placating gesture. He blinked, disbelieving what he saw.

  Kelada dropped the knife, her mouth making an O of surprise. “You did it,” she said. “You dreamed them loose!”

  Jeremy said, “I did, didn't I?” But his dream had not prepared him for the magnificence of the flower garlands that, torn as they were, decorated his ankles and wrists. The blooms were of no color that he could name, and of no fragrance he could recall having smelled before.

  But both appearance and scent were intoxicating, maddening, beautiful beyond thought.

  “Dream-twin,” Kelada said, surprise lingering in her voice. “Sympaths, Sebastian called them. I've heard others speak of them, but I thought they were myths, legends. You're Sebastian's dream-twin from the mirror-universe.”

  “Whatever. Sebastian, I guess, is the bearded fellow who promised me my nightmares were over—” Jeremy broke off, blinking. “He was right, wasn't he? I can control what I dream in here, apparently. No more nightmares.” He looked around at the barren prospects. “I suppose I could even dream up a little paradise of my own here. House, sports car, women—”

  Kelada shook her head. “No matter what you dream, you can only control the things a little way around you, a few steps. And I don't know what would happen if a dream-whorl stormed across something you made. Kill you, maybe.”

  Jeremy ran a hand through his hair. “I think I'm beginning to get it. Finally. You come from a place where magic works—”

  “Thaumia,” Kelada acknowledged. “But magic comes hard. Only a few can master it. Once a great spell is spelled, it loses virtue. Nowadays, all the easy great spells have been spelled, so it takes an especially learned and talented man or woman to work the word bindings right. Of course the little spells everyone can do, make fire, understand speech, things that don't actually require great mana.” She cocked her head. Her short blond hair was ruffled up on the left side, giving her the look of a gamine. “You mean, magic doesn't work in your world?”

  Jeremy shook his head. “No. Not the kind you mean, anyway. We have tricksters who pretend, but, no, magic doesn't work in my world. As a matter of fact, it doesn't work in my universe, as far as anyone knows.”

  Kelada shook her head. “I've heard of theories about other universes, but a place where magic doesn't exist—do you dream of magic?”

  Jeremy picked up one of his dreamed flowers. He found it hard just to look at the thing, for its lovely complexity threatened to pull all his attention in, to trap him in contemplation. He closed his eyes. “We dream of magic,” he said.

  “The Between. This is where all the universes touch,” Kelada said softly. “This is the stuff all was made from in the beginning. Some parts of it give magic; some do not, I suppose.”

  Jeremy opened his eyes. “This is the borderland,” he murmured. “This is where we go when we dream. I can't believe it.”

  Kelada picked up his curved knife. “You have to believe it,” she said.

  “Oh, I do believe.” Jeremy smiled. “It's not that I don't—just that I can't.”

  A shrill whistle split the calm of the soundless plain. Kelada leaped to her feet, her hand flying to her broken nose. “Niklas!” she hissed. “He's coming!”

  They had been sitting against one of the bulwarks of the broken dome. Jeremy got up, wincing at the pain in his thigh from the metal ruler of Mr. Guest. “We'll have to tell Niklas that he's got the wrong man—”

  “He'll kill you at once,” Kelada said, and from her tone Jeremy knew she was right. He found himself shaky in the knees.

  “I could pretend to be still tied—”

  Too late. Niklas the many-colored had already vaulted one of the low walls, a lumpy bag slung over one shoulder, a staff in his right hand. Jeremy had not even time to speak before the thief took in the situation, dropped the bag, and charged him. The first sweep of the staff caught Jeremy glancingly on the hip, spun him away. He tripped on his own flailing feet, and that saved his head from a blow that surely would have killed him. Niklas's face was set in grim determination. Jeremy rolled and scrambled away from him, toward the dropped bag. He heard Kelada cry out wordlessly. Jeremy got his hands on the bag, found it was made of thick canvaslike cloth, half the size of a mailbag, and he lifted it as a makeshift shield.

  Niklas, the first surprise of his rush spent, circled warily, looking for an opening, the staff balanced. His wild eyes gleamed with more than a hint of madness. “Mighty magick,” he crooned, ending the word with harsh, exhalative “k.” “You more trouble than need, magickmaker. Put you under, yes, for good.”

  The staff whistled, and Jeremy was barely able to fend off the blow. The whump of the impact threatened to knock him off balance, even through the insulating cushion of the sack. He took two steps back. “Wait, Niklas!” he shouted.

  Niklas ignored him, circled to the right, feinting with the staff. From the corner of his eye Jeremy saw Kelada coming up behind him. “Out of the way,” he shouted, realizing only then how much his chest was heaving, how winded he was.

  “Hah,” Niklas breathed. “Wench and wizard? Break more than your nose this time, cow. Break you so you can't be fix.” Niklas leaped forward, struck out with several successive blows, some of them landing painfully on Jeremy's forearms, and suddenly crashed the staff straight down. Jeremy brought the sack up just in time, but the force of the blow brought him to his knees, and before he could recover, a sideways swipe struck the sack right out of his hands. He threw himself wildly backward, collided with Kelada, and fell to his butt as she rolled off to his right.

  Niklas was pressing in, staff raised. Jeremy, trying to scramble away, felt something hard behind him. He reached—and found himself grasping the handle of his curved dream-knife.

  He had no time to think: Niklas already was cocking the staff back for a skull-crushing blow. Badly balanced as he was, Jeremy lunged forward, coming inside the arc of the swing, and he brought the knife up simultaneously.

  It slipped in under Niklas's ribs with dismaying ease. The thief jolted as if from an electric shock
, cried out, and fell away. Jeremy kept his hold on the knife handle.

  The redheaded File clutched his belly with his left hand. Blood spilled through his closed fingers, spreading in a ragged stain over the silky, multicolored shirt, spattering onto the thighs of the white trousers, making pear-shaped blotches on the toes of the blue boots. Niklas's face contorted. Taking painful steps, holding himself with his left hand, brandishing the staff with his right, he advanced on Jeremy again. “Kill you now,” he grunted.

  Jeremy was appalled at his handiwork. He backed away. “I—I didn't mean—”

  Niklas cracked the staff against his legs, knocking them right from under him, and Jeremy rolled on the ground. Again Niklas raised the staff for a killing blow, but this time his own knees gave, and he crumpled slowly forward. “Kill you, kill you,” he rasped, trying to raise the staff again.

  Kelada appeared behind him, grabbed the staff on either side of his head, and pulled it tightly back against his throat. Niklas thrashed, grunted, kicked. Kelada wrenched back even harder on the staff, nearly raising Niklas off the ground. She had a knee against his neck. The redheaded man thrashed, his breath wheezing in his constricted throat.

  “Help ... me,” panted Kelada.

  Jeremy couldn't move. The thief's face had gone purple, and his eyes bulged, bloodshot and rolling. His hands, the left one crimson, clawed impotently at the air. The man was dying.

  But not yet. The right hand caught Kelada's tunic, held it, and the whole body bucked, pulling the girl up and over. Kelada hit on her neck and shoulder, the breath whuffing from her. Niklas, gagging and hissing, had the staff again, and he brought it down across her chest with a sickening smack.