Dreamquake
Page 17
This gate had a sign on it: DETOUR ROUTE. CLOSED APRIL 1905 BY ORDER OF EUGENE PARKER, CHIEF RANGER.
“Break it open,” Laura said.
The second gate was far stronger than the first, and Nown had to resort to rushing at it, crashing into it with his shoulder. The trail at this point was so narrow that even though Laura stood in the middle of the intersection, the myriad slides set off by her sandman’s impacts on the gate spilled debris right to her feet. Every hillside was shivering and shedding stones and earth. The air filled with gray dust. Laura closed her eyes, covered her mouth, and crouched down, coughing. She felt the wind of Nown’s swift passage again. There was a louder crash, the squawk of iron tearing, the singing rattle of a chain unraveling, a series of ringing clangs, then nothing but the bubbling whisper of crumbling earth.
Laura staggered up and peered through the dust, her eyes streaming.
Nown was extracting himself from the fallen gate. He turned to her and held up the broken chain, which appeared to be giving off a fine blue smoke, quite distinct in the dust-filled air. “Smoke, without sparks,” he said, apparently impressed. “And the old saying has it that there is never smoke without fire.”
Laura laughed, then coughed and pulled her shirt collar up over her mouth. She went to her sandman and pushed him forward. He stepped onto and across the fallen gate, then turned back to give her a hand.
The supposedly abandoned detour route was narrow, its sides so close together that they seemed to arch over the trail. It was gloomy in the winding pit of the pass. Because there was no direct sunlight in the Place, there were never any shadows, only degrees of bright, misty obscurity. But here, between the close walls of The Pinnacles, shadows seemed to have pooled, a thin stain of gloom.
Laura followed Nown, one hand against his back, which was warm, as if, in his recent furious activity, the grains of sand in his body, chafing together, had woken heat. He felt the same as he did when sun-warmed. It was reassuring and kept Laura from—from whatever it was that seemed to live along that squeezed trail.
The dread Laura felt seemed alive, and to come from outside her. She’d felt it earlier, when she’d stood looking at the grave on the border. She had thought then that her dread was only the memory of the nightmare Buried Alive, and of the howling, thumping, flower-covered grave in The Water Diviner, the dream she’d caught with Sandy. But the atmosphere in the abandoned detour trail was exactly like that of the grave. It had a sense of something stopped, and powerless, and profoundly miserable, but still there, like the afterlife of despair.
“I hate it here,” Laura muttered to Nown.
He said, “I hope I won’t have to break another gate. The walls are too close.” Then he spun around, gathered her into his arms, and carried her. She closed her eyes and pressed her face into his neck.
After only another half hour, Nown came to a halt. He stood so still that it was as though he’d become inanimate, a real statue. Laura lifted her head and saw that he had stopped before a platform built of timber and bolted steel, and topped by some kind of apparatus. Laura wriggled, and Nown set her down.
There was a cage on the platform, a chest-high box covered in steel mesh. It had a gate at the front and rods rising from its top corners. The rods joined in an apex above the box. There was a hook attached to the apex, and the hook was locked to a cable.
Laura tipped her head back to follow the cable up from the platform to another identical platform, diminished and distant on the leveled summit of a high pinnacle.
The rangers had built themselves a cable car.
Lying around in the widening of the trail before the platform were chains, a small pile of rails bundled in thick straps, large, heavy canvas sheets with steel-reinforced eyelets at all four corners, and all sorts of other signs—an overlapping melee of boot prints, greasy rags, dropped work gloves—that rangers had been hard at work here lifting loads to that summit.
“The winch has two handles,” Nown said, “with double grips on each. Four men can work it at one time.”
Laura saw that he was right. She stood quietly for a moment, thinking. The cable car looked very sturdy. Nown was as strong as four men—at least—and could probably manage to winch up the slope as much weight as the cable could bear. She was slight. She’d be safe. She would only have to go to the top and take a look. Then she could come right back down.
Although Laura was thinking of a quick trip and a little look, she said to Nown, “May I have the water skin please?” Her words came out with brittle politeness.
“No,” he said.
“Nown!” Laura stamped her foot, sending up a small puff of dust that hovered around her ankles. “Look—there’s probably no way down the far slope. Or, I mean, there is probably another cable car and no one to wind it for me. You don’t need to worry.”
“If there’s no way down the far slope, you won’t need water.”
“You’re supposed to do what I say!” Laura said.
Nown didn’t reply to this.
“May I just have a drink then?”
Nown passed her the water skin. Laura screwed off its copper cap and took a long drink—more than she wanted or needed. She replaced the cap and wrapped her arms around the skin, cradling its sloshing, damp bulk. She knitted her brows at her sandman, then turned on her heel and went up the steps onto the platform. She opened the gate on the box cage, stepped in, and fastened it after her. “Now you will winch me up there,” she said.
Nown followed her up onto the platform and studied the winding mechanism. He didn’t touch it. He looked at her, waiting.
Laura glared at him. A minute went by, then she burst out, “This might be our only chance! I should go as far as I’m able!”
“Yes.”
“Well—get winding then!”
“I can be made again, you can’t. This is your only chance.”
Nown was telling her that this was her only life. Laura lost her temper. “Let me make the decisions! I’m in charge!” she yelled.
Around them again came the rustling whisper of falling earth. Laura’s knees gave way. She crouched down in the cage, her fingers gripping its mesh and the water skin pressed between her thighs and belly. She began to cry. She pressed her face against the grid of wire and sobbed. She cried because she was frustrated and tired, even of crying—she had spent a whole year in tears.
The cage quivered, then swung free. It was ascending. Laura stood up. Nown was winding the mechanism’s great drum. The handles squeaked, and the greased cable wound in on itself with a sticky kissing noise. The sounds gradually receded. Then Laura could only hear the cage creaking as it swung. Nown and the platform grew small, and the cage slid up above the gray slope. The ground below Laura was as pockmarked as a glacier honeycombed by sun-heated dust and pebbles. It looked treacherous.
Laura felt no wind. The air temperature remained the same—warm and dry. The view opened up around and then below her, revealing a series of peaks back the way she and Nown had come, then all around, to the eastern and western horizons along the border—but not extending beyond the border into that visible but inaccessible hinterland that all dreamhunters looked into before crossing back into their own world. The Pinnacles were clearly a feature of the border itself. Laura could see the opening to Sanctuary Valley, several hours’ walk along the branch of trail they hadn’t taken. Flanking the valley, and stretching away Inland, was a forked tongue of gray pinnacles thrusting out from the main mass of peaks. The farthest fork was thick, a real barrier, like the main range. The other was slender, in places perhaps only three peaks wide. From ground level this fork might appear to be a real barrier, but from high on the cable car it showed as not much more than a fence or screen. For these peaks did screen the eastern hinterland from anyone on level ground.
As the cage swung gently up, Laura looked into the land beyond the narrow barrier. She saw grasslands with, here and there, stands of dry trees like clutches of stilled smoke. And, as the cage bumpe
d against a wall at the back of the platform, Laura saw the rail line that ran, plumb straight, through the grasslands till it faded into the vaporous brightness of the Inland horizon.
Laura opened the cage door and got out onto the platform. She waved at Nown. He didn’t acknowledge her gesture.
Laura went to the far end of the platform and looked down. There wasn’t another cable car. Instead, there was an aerial cableway. The rangers could let gravity do the work of carrying down loads of rails and other goods bundled in the canvas slings. For themselves, however, they had built a steel tower that had many flights of steps. The tower stood out from the base of the pinnacle and could be reached from the summit by a twenty-something-foot span of bridge.
Laura went back to the cage and waved to Nown again, this time to say not “I’m all right” but “Goodbye, I’m going.” She thought she saw him shake his head, then knew he had, because he raised a hand to wave her back. Laura held up her wrist and touched her watch face. She spread her fingers, counted them off with the pointing index finger of her other hand. “Give me five hours,” she signed. She hoped he would know that she didn’t mean five minutes. Laura waited for her sandman to react, then turned her back on him and struck out across the bridge to the tower.
4
INCE FIRST COMING TO THE PLACE, LAURA HAD SEEN SOME ROADS SO SMOOTHLY SURFACED THAT BICYCLES COULD be ridden on them. She’d seen rudimentary steps on slopes, latrines, well-leveled camping grounds, and even one stubby lookout tower. She had never seen anything that showed the purpose or industry of the cable car, tower, and rail line. All showed signs of heavy use, so that, looking at them, she knew somewhere, at the other end of the line, there would be a settlement of some kind, buildings and people—for the railway was a supply line.
When Laura reached the foot of the tower, she found a handcar, sitting on the rails and up against buffers. It was a simple contraption, a platform with plenty of room for freight and two seats set facing each other with a couple of levers between them. The levers, if pushed back and forth, would make the wheels turn. Once the handcar built up momentum, Laura imagined that it would go quite fast—perhaps as fast as a sprinting man.
She set out along the rail line. She didn’t mean to go far. She was thinking she’d go just far enough to find herself even with some landmark, like a stand of trees, that she could later use as a sighting from the tower in order to make a rough estimate of the length of line she could see. If it took her an hour to reach—say— that stand of trees, the one that appeared to her novice dreamhunter’s eye to be about an hour away, then later she might be able to make a rough estimate of how many hours were beyond that. Laura knew that the Regulatory Body would never have bothered to build a rail line for anything that rangers would regard as a reasonable walking distance. The line must be at least longer than a day’s walk. Its final destination was, most likely, days away.
Laura ambled along, remembering the sorts of things that were at the ends of secret trails in books she’d read. “A diamond mine,” she thought, “something precious that they don’t want to share.” After all, there was no reason to suppose that there weren’t pockets of precious minerals in the Place, and that prospecting rangers might not have turned something up. She imagined Cas Doran and his friends with a growing reserve of undeclared wealth. She imagined a fortress and a vast army of soldier rangers training in maneuvers. A secret army. Then she remembered that guns wouldn’t fire in the Place, so the soldiers of her imaginary army would have to be lying on their bellies, pointing rifles, and making gun noises with their mouths.
She giggled.
The stand of trees Laura had picked as a landmark was getting closer, but only very slowly. She sighed and picked up her pace. She was hungry, but that was no excuse for dragging her feet and daydreaming.
A while later, when she’d raised a sweat and her mind was just idling, the thought that had been trailing her for days—possibly since Rose first told her about the “surplus rails”— finally caught up with her. She remembered that the Grand Patriarch had asked her about the “Depot.”
Laura raised her head and squinted up the line. The “Depot” wasn’t the name of a dream—it was a destination, where something was stored.
What else had the Grand Patriarch said? There was something else, a name from a rumor, because hadn’t the Grand Patriarch said that most of his intelligence came from rumors?
Contentment.
Laura stopped walking when the word came into her head. She stood still, shivering and short of breath. The world darkened around her as her pupils contracted. Dread had crept up and pounced on her. And, now that she was still, she understood that her footsteps had masked a vibration. A sound.
A steely rolling was coming from the line behind her.
Laura spun to face back along the line. She saw the handcar bearing down upon her, fast. Riding on it were six rangers.
Laura jumped down from the raised railbed and sprinted away across the meadow. She heard a shout, then the handcar braking. She looked back and saw four men pouring off it after her.
The rangers came tearing through the dry grass with a sound like a grass fire. They ran her down and grappled her. Laura fought them, punched and kicked. She was lifted up into the air and then dumped onto the ground. The wind was knocked out of her. For a moment her only thought was how to fill her lungs. They ached and struggled to expand again. She was making a sound like one of those enraged sea lions she and the lighthouse keeper’s girls had disturbed sleeping on the sands of So Long Spit. She drew breath in a prolonged, barking howl, rocking with pain and effort. She wheezed, and tears poured down her cheeks and into her ears.
One of the rangers tore her shirt open and grabbed her license on its chain. He put his head down to read the copper tags.
“We haven’t had anyone escape,” another ranger was saying, “and look at what she’s wearing.”
“She’s not one of ours,” said the one who had hold of her license. “This is Tziga Hame’s daughter.”
5
HEY TIED HER WRISTS AND ANKLES WITH THEIR BANDANNAS AND CARRIED HER BACK TO THE HANDCAR. THEY SET HER down among boxes and baskets and tall zinc milk cans that Laura guessed were full of water. She could smell oranges and apples and the sharp perfume of the cocoa and cinnamon in dreamhunters’ strong bread.
An argument was conducted over her head. Someone poked her with a boot, not hard but carelessly. “Who broke the gates?”
Another said, not to her, “Whoever it was must have heard us coming and run off along the trail to Sanctuary Valley.”
“That’s only conjecture. Still, I guess someone should go back and track them. Look—I’ll go. And you come with me, McIndoe. The rest of you go on and raise the alarm.”
Again the boot prodded Laura. “Who are they? Your accomplices?”
Another man said, “How did they know what they were looking for? What have you got to say for yourself, girl?”
“Let her alone,” another man said. “She’ll tell us afterward anyway.”
After what? Laura thought, and bunched herself up into a tight, defensive ball.
The handcar bounced as two men jumped off it. Laura heard the sloshing of water skins being settled. One of the men who was leaving said, “Be as quick as you can. Those gates will have to be fixed as soon as possible.”
Laura wondered where her sandman had hidden. The cage would have been on the summit when the rangers reached the cable car—after passing through two broken gates. Not just broken but exploded. Laura remembered the stretched-licorice look of the smoking chain. Nown would be burrowed in somewhere probably, with only his roughly made back exposed. He could look as natural as a big stone when he really needed to.
The four remaining rangers settled themselves on the handcar. Laura heard a spring squawk as someone sat on one of the seats, preparing to work the levers. She mustered her courage. She unclenched her body, rolled onto her back, and looked up at one of the men.
“How far is it if you go around the long way?” Laura asked him.
“How far to where?” one of the other men said, impatient.
The handcar was moving now. The landscape slid by, faster every second. None of the crankshafts or levers made a noise; all were too well greased. The only sound was the creak of springs in the seats as the rangers’ weight shifted while they worked. That, and the ponderous rolling noise of steel wheel rims on steel rails.
The man who was looking at Laura said, “She means, is there another way around The Pinnacles? She’s hoping her friends will be able to follow her on foot.”
The other man laughed. “There’s no long way, girlie,” he said. “Only a wrong way.”
Laura never did learn how long the journey was. They removed her watch, so she couldn’t tell the time. They didn’t try to talk to her anymore. She sat slumped against a basket.
The rangers worked the levers in shifts. The Pinnacles faded into mistiness before they fell behind the horizon. The plain across which the handcar moved was bald and seemed to swell toward the sky as though showing the curve of the planet. Hours went by, and Laura fell asleep. She ran through some colored rags of dreams, too fast to take in anything from them.
When she woke up, stiff, her face numb on one side and printed with a pattern of basketwork, one ranger remarked, “It would have been easier for you if you’d stayed asleep for just another half hour.” He pulled her to her feet. She stood propped and teetering between the stacked baskets as the handcar reduced speed and rolled in among some buildings.
The ground was dusty and lightly embossed all over by footprints—boot prints and bare feet. The compound consisted of a cluster of huts, several long, barrackslike buildings, and shelters with canvas roofs and walls, the walls rolled up like window blinds to reveal rows of pallet beds. Some of the beds were occupied by people, either sleeping or reading. They were all wearing yellow cotton pajamas. More yellow-clad figures sat around on benches, or stood where the grass began again, facing away from the buildings, or lay on their backs gazing up into the unremarkable white sky. There was even a group of pajama-clad young men playing a not very energetic ball game, all barefoot and scuffling in the dust.