Moon Dreams (The Jeremy Moon Trilogy Book 1) Page 6

  Jeremy cried out, staggered forward, and kicked as hard as he could, intending to knock the staff out of the thief's hands, but his aim was bad: his bare foot caught Niklas in the lower chest, knocking the man back. The staff, swung wildly and with no aim, stung Jeremy's left arm, numbing it from halfway to the elbow downward. Niklas was on his knees, still bleeding, still holding the staff. “Kill you,” he muttered in a weak, hoarse croak.

  “You're hurt,” Jeremy said.

  “Kill you!”

  If Niklas had had an ounce more strength, he might have done it. But he couldn't handle the leap and the blow too, and instead of striking, he merely slammed against Jeremy. They rolled down together, and Jeremy felt the thief's hands scrabbling for the blade. He brought it up, struck, cut himself pulling it back, and then flung it away. Niklas rolled off him and began to crawl toward the knife.

  Kelada was on her feet again. She had the staff, and she brought it down in a resounding crack across Niklas's shoulder and neck. The thief collapsed.

  Jeremy sat up. He had a cut, not deep, about three inches long on his left forearm. He was sticky with blood—most of it the thief's but some of it his own. “You killed him,” he said.

  “He was crazy,” Kelada said. “He would have killed both of us.”

  Jeremy crawled over to Niklas, rolled the man onto his back. The left eye was closed, the right open but rolled up so only the white showed. The red hair, matted with sweat and blood, spiked out wildly in every direction. Jeremy pulled the tunic up. One slash, the first, began next to Niklas's navel and went up to the bottom of his ribcage. The second was higher, beside the sternum. Both still bled.

  Breath rattled in Niklas's throat. “Oh, God,” Jeremy said. “He's still alive.”

  “Dying,” Kelada replied. “It takes a while. Better tie up your arm. Some cloth over here for bandages.”

  She limped away. Niklas rattled again, horribly. Jeremy didn't know what to do. He wanted to run, but something—the knowledge that he was responsible for this man's death—kept him there fascinated. In a few minutes Kelada was back. “I don't think he broke anything,” she said, holding her side. “He marked me, though. Here.”

  Jeremy raised his arm as she tied a quick bandage. She held his forearm under her left arm as she finished the knot. “You're cold,” she said.

  “Can we help him?”

  “Cut his throat, make him die quicker.”

  Jeremy shuddered. “That's not what I meant.”

  She looked at him with flat eyes. “That's the only way to help him now.” Disdaining to say more, Kelada turned on her heel and walked away. Jeremy backed off from the body. The thief took a great, wheezing breath, held it for ages, and groaned it out again. Jeremy wanted to follow Kelada away then, wanted it more than he could remember ever wanting anything.

  But instead he dropped to his knees beside the body. “I'm sorry,” he whispered, his soft words lost in the other man's repeated groan.

  Niklas File was a long time dying. But at last the body twitched restively once or twice, the breath—coming now at agonizingly long intervals—rasped harsher and rattled, and then the body went limp. Jeremy, keeping vigil, had the unmistakable impression of something—soul, spirit, the breath of life—vacating the body, leaving a wreck of flesh and bone. He closed the mouth and eyes, stood up, and found Kelada just outside the semicircular walls, sitting with knees drawn up, eyes on the gray line of the immeasurable horizon. “He's gone,” Jeremy said.

  “So are we.”

  Jeremy eased down beside her. “I've never seen anybody die like that. It's different on TV, in the movies.”

  She looked at him, though beneath their heavy brows her eyes did not focus on his. “I don't understand.”

  “There it's quick,” he said. “One blow and it's over.”

  She shook her head. “Death is seldom that quick, unless dealt by magic. Niklas was tough, too. Hard to kill.”

  “Did he hurt you?”

  “Bruises and aches. Be better before long. You?”

  “The one cut. Like you, I've got bruises. My legs and side.” Moon paused, then blurted, “He would have killed us.”

  Kelada's laugh was dry and thin, and it held no mirth. “Oh, yes. Niklas has gone mad in here, in the Between. He was mean enough on the outside, but in here, with nothing to do but scramble to live—something broke in his head, I think. A thief dreams of power, of wealth. What are wealth and power in here?”

  “But you keep going.”

  She lifted one shoulder. “I'm different. I stay alive because that is what I do—what I have always done. Niklas had to have a purpose in life—to become rich, to outwit his enemies. All that is gone in the Between. He was living, the last while, to help Sebastian Magister find his way out. Wanted to get out with him. I think he knew you were the wrong one, knew Sebastian had tricked him. That was too much, that broke his mind.” Kelada rested her pointed chin on her knees. “Now we die, too.”

  “Why?” Jeremy asked.

  She shrugged. “Niklas was the master thief. He had the secret of getting in and out of the dream-whorls with the loot. I'm only the finder. My one talent, I'm never lost. Even where there are no landmarks, like here. But I can't keep the dream-goods from fading, as Niklas could, and I can't even steal from dreams without being caught. The dreams, you know, can kill you. While you're inside one, the dreamer can do anything to you, anything at all.” She shivered. “Some things are worse than dying. I'm afraid to go in the dream-whorls alone. We'll starve.”

  Jeremy stared at her. “But I can dream,” he said.

  She blinked at him. “I forgot!”

  All at once her arms were around him, her face pressed against his throat. He held her as she shook with crying, awkwardly patted her back, caressed her neck. Her tears flowed warm against his neck, her breath puffed hot and moist against his shoulder. He was himself shaking, breathing in deep gulps of air. “Now, now,” he mumbled. “It's all right. Now, now.”

  “I—I'm glad we killed him,” Kelada said, her voice throbbing.

  “We had no choice.”

  She shook her head. Her short hair ruffled against Jeremy's cheek. “No, not because of that. He—he wasn't what he used to be. His spirit had already gone.”

  They sat holding each other for some time. At last Kelada pushed away and wiped her hands over her cheeks and eyes. Jeremy had been thinking. “There must be a way into my world,” he said. “If Sebastian could do it, so can I.”

  Kelada snuffled. “No. Only a great mage could do such a thing. You have to have the ability of seeking dreams, of finding the right dreamer. You have to know the times of exaltation. You have to make and invest a speculum. In here, in the Between, magic hardly works. It takes someone with a great store of it, with much mana, like Sebastian, to do such a task of magic. You have no skill for it, no training in it. You could not spell our way out of the Between.”

  “Didn't you say something about a lady and her mirror?”

  “Oh,” Kelada sniffed. “Her.”

  “Sebastian's friend?”

  Kelada nodded, looking away. “Back in Thaumia, Sebastian was beloved by a great lady, Melodia. He gave her a present of a magic mirror—a travel portal, I think, like the one he built here. He could communicate with her through the mirror, when he was back in the real world. His image would appear to her, speak to her, through it. He hinted more—that he could physically pass through the mirror to visit Melodia.”

  “Ah. A forbidden love,” Jeremy said.

  Kelada half-smiled. “Not a politic love, let us say. But anyway, something Sebastian said once made me think that he might be able to use it to get back to Thaumia. It would be most difficult—he would have to find Melodia during one of her dreams, have her open the way. He lacked the ability to find her, and I refused to try.”

  “Try now. It may be a way out,” Jeremy said.

  “You would leave me alone?”

  “No.”

  Kelada
laughed. “I do not think Melodia would welcome another woman into her dreams.”

  “We'll find a way.”

  She looked back at him. Her broken nose made her face seem blunt and tough, but her eyes were those of a frightened fawn. “I could take you to the place where the Lady Melodia's dream-whorls appear, when she dreams. But how can I trust you not to abandon me?”

  Jeremy found no ready answer. “I don't know,” he said slowly. “I can only tell you that I wouldn't do that.”

  Her eyes studied his face for a long time—for almost as long, he thought, as Niklas File's dying. At length she said, “I think I must believe you. It will be a journey of some time, of several sleeps.” She stood. “We will need Niklas's staff, the things in the camp. We should see what he brought back this time, too. Let's go.”

  They spent what on earth would have been several hours packing. Jeremy lashed together the effects Kelada and Niklas had ransacked from others’ dreams—most of it cloth, or rope, or bits of wood and metal, some of it so bizarre that Jeremy wondered what alien dreams had been plundered. At last Kelada said, “We should look at the body, too.”

  “There's nothing,” Jeremy said.

  “Maybe you're right.”

  They had left the ring of the camp when Kelada paused. “I think,” she said, “I should at least cover him. Maybe with the empty sack.”

  Jeremy looked at her. “All right,” he said.

  “I won't be long.” She went back into the circle, out of his sight. He stood looking off into the meaningless gray distance. After a minute or so, he heard her come up behind him. “Here,” she said. “You'd better have these.”

  She held in her hands a pair of brilliant blue boots.

  Chapter 4

  “Your part of the Between,” Kelada explained on the fourth or fifth leg of their march, “is better for dream-raiding. Your people and mine are very much alike in the things we eat, the way we are made. That is why Niklas and I came here first.”

  “But why didn't you just stay in the part—uh, owned by Thaumia?” Jeremy asked, edging away from the nearest dream-whorl with some apprehension.

  “Be still,” Kelada said. She sat very still herself, legs drawn up, her pack beside her. She looked little-girlish, a teenager waiting for a school bus. She kept a wary eye on the haze of the dream-whorl as she answered Jeremy: “Niklas wouldn't stay there. He has—had—too many enemies in Thaumia, too many chances of finding himself in the dream of one of his victims, and at the victim's mercy.”

  “And now,” Jeremy said, looking with some despair over the gray landscape, broken in dozens of places with the purple mists of dream-whorls, “we have to march back to the part that belongs to Thaumia. Is it far?”

  Kelada scratched her head, ruffling her untidy blond hair. “Far? A march of two weeks or more, I suppose, back on Thaumia. Distance has little meaning here.”

  Wherever here is, Jeremy added mentally. There was some geographical consistency: at least, one of the dreamers whose dream he had invaded on his first arrival came from Atlanta, too. But the landscape, in addition to being featureless, seemed malleable, plastic in the large sense as well as in the small, and as far as he could tell it had no north or south, east or west. Yet Kelada stuck to a line of march—her talent, she insisted, gave her an unerring sense of direction—and they made, Jeremy assumed, some progress.

  Right now they were in an eddy of dreams, all but surrounded by the dangerous whorls, the ungoverned, amoral nighttime realities of Earthly sleepers, and so Kelada had called a halt. Jeremy had not ventured inside a dream-whorl at all since meeting Kelada, and the more he heard from her, the less he was interested in doing so. The nearest fumed now perhaps sixty paces away, stationary but threatening. From it drifted choking acidic vapors that brought tears to Jeremy's eyes and a cough to his lungs.

  “Can't we move away from it?” he asked.

  Kelada shook her head. “Sometimes they follow and engulf you if you're moving,” she said. “No sense taking a chance.”

  Jeremy sighed. “How was Niklas able to get in and out of the things so easily?”

  “Not so easily.” Kelada turned her gray eyes away from him. “He was found out more than once. I think some of the dreamers changed him. They do that, you know. When we first came—” She shivered and broke off abruptly.

  After a long pause, Jeremy prompted her: “What happened when you first came?”

  “We met someone,” she said tightly. “Someone from Thaumia, another exile. It—never mind. I don't want to talk about it. That whorl's clearing up. Time to go.” And she stood, hefting her pack. Jeremy rose, too, feeling every creak in every joint, burdening his already aching back with his own roll of dream-goods.

  “At least our supplies are holding out,” he grunted as they began forward again.

  “All but the water. Are you sure you can get us some water?”

  Jeremy nodded. “I think so. There doesn't seem to be any real trick to it, once I concentrate.” He did not add that the concentration itself was the trick. Dreaming, he thought. The only real magic we humans know—and it's too magical for us to control it fully.

  As Kelada led the way, Jeremy fell into the same mindless rhythm of stride he had known for what seemed to be days, and he let his mind wander to the times he had slept and dreamed here, in the Between. The knife and the bonds increasingly seemed like flukes to him, perhaps made possible by the stress he had been under. At any rate, so far on the trek he had dreamed up nothing substantial. He had tried, a couple of times, to dream himself back home, back in his own bed, to no avail. Though he could see the room, could hear its sounds and almost smell its smells, something kept him away, apart from it: and when he awakened here, no trace of the bedroom lingered.

  After these failures Jeremy had tried to dream himself up a comfortable nylon backpack and some hiking boots, but airy musings had taken him before the job was done, and again he awoke with nothing—although, to be sure, he had dreamed an alteration into the blue boots that made them more comfortable. But as for creation—no, that had been a failure.

  And now their water was getting low.

  Jeremy turned his mind to other considerations. With no water to spare, he had not bathed in—what? Days, certainly. Yet he didn't seem to get any dirtier, and though he sweated from the exertion of the walks, he wasn't aware of what one of his predecessors in the field of advertising had once delicately christened B.O. Probably because there were no bacteria here in the Between, he concluded. Nothing alive here, except the exiles from Thaumia—and possibly from other, more exotic magic-using worlds. Yet there seemed to be oxygen to breathe. Or was there? He had once, just from boredom, begun to hold his breath while he counted his paces. At fifteen hundred he had exhaled, more from panic than from a need to breathe, and had felt none the worse. Still, his lungs pumped as they always had, and he had enough wind to talk when he wanted. Jeremy had more than once had the giddy sensation that his physical existence here was next to nothing, a candle flame in a dark void, ready to flicker out at any time, to subside to the gray primal material of this world.

  Primal stuff. The world itself provided the substance for the dreams. The dreamers shaped it, transmuted it at need or at whim, and ordinarily, once the dreamer's mind lost contact with the Between, the dreamed items slipped back into plastic gray anonymity. The matter could be cut and worked, true—witness the fortress Niklas and Kelada had labored over—but within a short time it sagged, slumped, melted back into the featureless, empty expanse that seemed to go on infinitely.

  “We'd best swing wide here,” Kelada said. “Very dark whorl ahead, maybe five thousand paces. We'll avoid it.”

  Jeremy grunted, shifted the weight of his pack from its old uncomfortable position to a new uncomfortable one, and swung his steps into the subtly curving path that Kelada took. The blue boots pressed into the gray world, lifted, swung forward, and pressed in again, endlessly. Endlessly.

  A time in camp, and at Kela
da's urging Jeremy quested in his dreams for a source of water. It slipped away from him, and, angry, he commanded it to be still!

  He awoke shivering, sleeping on a round platform of ice, with more ice frozen on his covering like a white carapace. It crackled and shattered as he pushed the stiff blanket off, ice cascading to a pile of shards and fragments. Jeremy was so chilled that Kelada held him close to her, warmed him with her body heat until his teeth stopped chattering, until feeling returned with stabbing pain to his hands and feet.

  The ice melted into the needed water.

  Another time, Kelada stopped, lifted her chin, and considered. “We have crossed,” she said. “We are out of your part of the Between. Thaumia's part begins here.”

  Jeremy saw nothing to distinguish this part of nothing from any other part. He took her word for it. “What happens,” he puffed, “if we cross all the way and go on? What's after the Thaumia part?”

  Kelada shook her head. “You don't want to hear about the other parts,” she said. She walked on ahead, Jeremy following, musing on the sturdy roll of her hips, the assured stride of her long legs. Without looking back over her shoulder, she said, “The other exile we met here. He had wandered far. Into an alien dream. The alien dreamer reshaped him, made him into something the alien knew, was familiar with.”

  In the unchanging temperature Jeremy felt as cold as he had when encased in dream-ice. “And?”

  “It had its old mind left, or part of it. It begged Niklas to kill it.” Step, step, step. “It took three tries. Niklas couldn't tell what part should have been the head.”

  And finally.

  Kelada dropped her pack. A few dream-whorls showed, dim and blue, off in the distance. “Here,” she said. “Melodia's dreams will appear somewhere around here, somewhere within our sight. I don't know exactly where.”

  “How do we find out?”