Moon Dreams (The Jeremy Moon Trilogy Book 1)

by Brad Strickland

  “Very strong ones. Your mirror must be protected.”

  “I am glad you look after it so well.”

  The Hag smiled. Turning to the mirror, she pronounced a quick activation spell, and the surface clouded. “Now you will see what the Dark One has taught me to do,” she said. Her voice grew faraway and moody: “Ever did I love the dead more than the living, for the dead have no wills of their own, and they, at least, do not shrink from my face. Among the dead I can be queen or empress. But I can raise appearance only, not substance: ghosts that are powerless to do aught but look on without comprehension or understanding. The Great Dark One has taught me how to strengthen my powers. Look! Behold the hills outside of Whitehorn Valley!”

  The dark mirror wavered into a picture. Jeremy recognized the hillsides just west of Whitehorn, now green with springtime. But as he watched, shapes began to ooze from the earth, dark shapes, transparent in the sun. Stooped they stood, but each bore a weapon, and all had a fell and grim look. Like wisps of smoke wafted away by a breeze, the forms moved from their place of origin, and there others grew, hundreds of them. The picture changed, became a panorama of the whole countryside, and everywhere the creatures appeared, armed, apparently solid, and implacably advancing. “Tremien is besieged?” Jeremy asked.

  “Not yet. But he will be, by an army of the dead; and so will the other magi of Cronbrach. And this army cannot be defeated, even by magic, for it will be shielded by the power of the Great Dark One himself, power stolen from another world.”

  “The Dark One wishes to kill the magi,” Jeremy said.

  “No! Not to kill, but to corrupt; to bend to his own uses, that this land might fall to him, as long ago Relas of the south fell. With their magic added to his own, his might will be invincible. And almost all is ready.”

  “And you?” Jeremy asked. “Why do you help him?”

  The Hag gazed into the mirror. “For power, after. For Whitehorn itself, from which I will rule all the northeastern parts of the land. For the ability to torment my tormentors, to work my will instead of theirs, to mold the countryside as I see fit.”

  The picture shimmered, darkened, and died, and then the mirror was only a mirror once more. The Hag threw the blanket back over it. Jeremy took half a step forward—and felt himself stopped short by an invisible wall. “Come,” the Hag said, turning again to the corridor. Jeremy followed her. “The woman,” she said, “I thought at first to be the one you were once enamored of. She is not?”

  “No. I think she might know something, though, of the magi and their plans.”

  “Then we will have it from her. I am weary, Sebastian Magister. Summoning the dead from hell is dangerous work, even with the Dark One's aid. But we will have it from her.”

  Just in the doorway the Hag froze suddenly, her head jerking back on her thin neck. An instant later, Jeremy felt it, too, like a cold fist closing around his heart. He shuddered.

  “Magic in my realm,” the Hag hissed. “Magic in the Meres!” She stiffened, swayed a little, and her voice changed register: “Yesss, yesss. I sssee. It isss the old fool Barach. But it is hopeless! The wards are too ssstrong for him—” The witch jerked, and Jeremy realized that her mind had literally been elsewhere, that she had been seeing through the eye of a vilorg somewhere in the swamps. She turned on Jeremy suddenly. “I knew there were more!” She gave a shrill call and hurried into the throne room, Jeremy close behind her, his hand still working the hilt of his sword.

  Vilorgs poured in from the east corridor, filling the room, surrounding Nul, Kelada, and Jeremy. “We will have them here in an instant,” the Hag said from her throne. “Fools that they are!” She howled an incantation. “Back, Sebastian! Here they are!”

  With a noise like a thunderclap, Barach, Gareth, Syvelin, and Melodia appeared, weapons drawn, back to back, in the center of the room. Barach had already begun an incantation when Melodia cried out, “Oh, Jeremy, you're safe!”

  The Hag's eyes blazed at him. Gareth and Syvelin, their swords swinging and flashing, leaped forward. Nul spun to face the vilorgs, and Kelada brandished her dagger. Jeremy, his hand on the hilt of his own weapon, discovered that in the throne room the ward no longer held. With a shout he drew his sword, shining like daybreak.

  But already the Hag has leaped to her feet and was crying a dire spell in a voice like rolling thunder.

  Chapter 12

  The pain hit like a toppling wave.

  For a moment the whole world went red; then Jeremy fought his way back up—he had fallen to a kneeling position—and wrenched his sword free. Dimly he saw that the others, Nul, Kelada, Barach, all of them, had collapsed, but the sword in his hand seemed to leap at the vilorgs with a force that had nothing to do with him, and he merely followed it, wading in behind its slashing blows.

  “Stop him!” the Hag cried. Jeremy cut his way through, saw an opening, and dived for it. In the arch of the east passage, invisible hands held him back, dragged at his body. He lowered his head, strained, and tumbled through the ward, rolling forward, scrambling again to his feet. Behind him confusion yammered as the vilorgs piled in the passageway. Then the Hag's spell snapped, or was broken, and they spilled in after him.

  But by that time Jeremy was up and running. A closed door waited at the far end of the corridor. He shouted, “Open!” in English, and the door crumbled as he struck it, dissolving into splinters and powdery, throat-choking dust. Behind the door was a landing, with stairs up and down. Jeremy clattered down, found some vilorgs hard at his heel, and spun in his tracks. Three sweeps of the sword cut the beasts down and blocked the stair; then he was flying down again.

  He passed another landing, and then the stair ended at another closed door. Jeremy wielded the sword like a baseball bat, and the blade cleaved through the wood as if it met no resistance at all. A kick cleared the way.

  Jeremy found himself in the dripping garden, walled on all sides. A colonnade led to his right, and he fled down it. He kicked a door open and hurtled into a kitchen. Vilorgs, smaller and thinner than the warriors—these are the females, he thought—gaped up stupidly from stove and table. Jeremy ran through, found an outside door, and went through it.

  He stood in a woodlot piled high with cord upon cord of firewood, surrounded by a ten-foot wall broken at the far side by a great wooden gate. Behind him came the noise of pursuit. Hesitating only a moment, Jeremy clambered up a pile of wood, dislodging several chunks of it and almost toppling backward, leaped to the wall, narrowly escaped falling, and then let himself down. He landed in miry ground, but he was outside the Hag's castle.

  Something splashed in the muck a few feet beyond him. He ran, this time hearing the whizz of the arrow before it narrowly missed him. Voices again, behind him—the guard coming out of the castle, no doubt.

  His mind was working furiously. Already the sodden ground, clammy and chill beneath his bare feet, was slowing him. He flourished his sword as a great dark shape loomed out of the fog ahead—and then realized he had been about to assault a tree. It was a bent and black tree, but a few wan leaves sprouted from its twigs and its gnarled branches bent low before sweeping back upward again. Jeremy climbed.

  He got as high as he could and rested in the crotch of a great branch. He panted from exertion, but there was another feeling too, a kind of pins-and-needles tingling, the aftereffects, he supposed, of the Hag's spell. His mundane immunity had not kept the full force of it away from him, but at least he had not been struck down like the others. He began to doubt the value of the tree as a hiding place. The little spring leaves were not dense enough to conceal him, though he had at least some hope of escaping notice up here. A twig right by his face, sprouting directly from the trunk, boasted four pathetic leaves, pale green, like the unluckiest four-leaf clover in the universe.

  Struck with a sudden thought, Jeremy plucked the twig. “Everyone,” he recited quickly, softly, and in his own language, “occasionally wishes not to be seen. The four-leaf talisman is the answer. Yes,
as long as you have this incredibly lucky charm about you, you will not be seen. Only YOU will know where you are!”

  Something happened. For a moment the twig seemed alive, galvanized and twitching, and Jeremy had the same feel of some current flowing around and through him. Closing his eyes, he thought to himself that such an ad wouldn't have gone over very well at a staff meeting. But here—well, he could at least hope. He swallowed hard and tucked the twig safely inside his belt. A moment later, he winced as an invisible searchlight glared at him from the gloom. The Hag had felt his magic, and now she was seeking him. He swung down from the tree and landed with feet spread.

  Something else was happening: a wind had sprung up, and the fogs were stirring, thinning. Jeremy had the eerie feeling of great magic at work: the Hag wanted her warriors to see him. In moments the air began to clear, and a watery sun, already low in the sky, showed over a dismal world of slime, water, mud, and ruin.

  Vilorgs, a dozen of them, came pattering over a hill. Behind them, grim and shadowed even in the light of the sun, the stone castle of the Hag, its towers squared, its stones streaked and discolored, reared against the northern sky. Jeremy raised his sword.

  The creatures bypassed him entirely, snuffled and gabbled around the tree for a moment, then tore off southward. Jeremy took a deep breath. His incantation had worked. He toiled to the top of a rise and looked about him. It was a bleak picture. Beyond the forbidding pile of the castle was a vast circular body of black water, Illsmere itself, he guessed. To the east, toward the river, the landscape slumped away to barrens of mud, broken stubs of trees, rutted bare hillsides, occasional moss-grown stones. To the south, more meres glinted, and there away off was a party of vilorgs, either the one that had passed him or another. Squinting to the west against the low sun, Jeremy could just make out a dim, jagged line of purple mountains, the Wolmas range. If he could cross those and continue due west, he would sooner or later come to the River Ap; and if he followed that south, then he would arrive at Langrola, the fishing town where Nul and Kelada had rested.

  But that would take days, and help was by no means certain in Langrola. He shook his head. His task, whatever it was, lay here in the Haggenkom, the Hag's Vale—and, what was worse, in the castle of the Hag herself. He turned north and made his way back to the brooding structure.

  He came right up to the walls, seeing now that they were manned by vilorgs, the one nearest to him definitely a three-eye. The courtyard gate seemed to be a great drawbridge in the eastern wall, crossing not a moat but a veritable quagmire; or at least, if it were open, it would have done so. Invisible or not, Jeremy had no illusions about walking on that liquid surface, and he skirted it, moving away from the walls as he made his way north. Before long he stood on the edge of the great mere, a mile or more across, utterly still, dark, and forbidding. He glanced into its waters and saw something stirring there restlessly, as if waiting to get out, some large shadowy shapes, as of circling sharks well below the surface. He shuddered, reminded suddenly and strongly of the shadow-rider, a thing seeming as much dead as alive.

  On the mere side, the castle wall dropped bleak and unbroken straight down, a hundred feet he estimated, into the water. There, somewhere on the north side, would be the little room with the mirror in it. Jeremy pondered trying to put together a transportation spell of his own, but his mind touched barriers that told him it would be impossible.

  He took a deep breath. It was through the gate or nothing, as far as he could see, if he intended to reenter the castle from this side. It was not a prospect that pleased him, and he started back. What he saw before him froze him in his tracks, literally.

  He had left a trail plain for anyone not blind to follow: a set of deep footprints, unmistakably human, impressed in the mud. The vilorgs might not see him, but to miss that—inconceivable. What was worse, he found almost no firm ground where he didn't leave traces, at least not until he reached the south wall of the castle again. There, close against the wall, he found that he could walk, carefully, without leaving footprints.

  And not a moment too soon, for from the south came more vilorgs, or a smaller detachment of the same party, stooping low and babbling as they followed the track he had left. Jeremy eased to the west as they disappeared around the corner of the castle.

  He paused when he neared the woodyard wall, for now that the fog was gone, he could see something he had not noticed before: in the distance a body of water, too straight-sided to be natural, led to a short, broad, paved road, and this in turn led to the gate to the woodyard in the southwest corner, which was open, probably left open when the pursuers had come after him. The water was clearly a canal, leading west and south and glinting in the last light of the sun. Indeed, far down the watercourse he could make out the dark speck of a sizable boat, and smaller boats seemed to be tied at the pier that formed the far end of the paved course. For a second he contemplated stealing one and fleeing, but the memory of his task, and of his friends, pulled him to the open gate instead. He slipped in, stepping gingerly over a generation's supply of splinters soft and springy underfoot but sharp for the unwary, until he reached the flagstones outside the kitchen door. This, unfortunately, was closed. Jeremy sat resting with his back against the wall, pondering his next move.

  The sun had not been down long, for the western sky was still silver with its last light, when he heard a clopping of horses outside the wall. He carefully stepped across the yard again and peered into the twilight. A wagon had come from some entrance off on the western side of the castle, and two huge horses were pulling it down toward the pier. There the boat had tied up, and men labored to throw bundles and packages off. Jeremy darted out and caught up with the slow-moving wagon easily. The driver, a slack-faced man, turned round to stare over his shoulder, as if he had heard Jeremy's approach, but he turned back again almost at once. Something about him—Jeremy squinted: the shape of the head—of course. It was not a man at all, but a vilorg carrying an illusion spell. If he concentrated, Jeremy could see the form lurking beneath the appearance, could even make out the color of the third eye.

  But the boatmen were genuinely human. “Here it is,” one of them said in a gruff, strangely accented voice. “Ought to hold her ladyship for another week or two.”

  “Load it,” the driver said, and Jeremy felt his flesh creep, for he knew it was the Hag's voice speaking through her tool.

  “We brings the stuff. We don't have to—”

  “Load it!”

  The boatman looked at his crew and shrugged. “Put it on the wagon, boys,” he said. “Sooner that's done, sooner we're out and gone. That's five golders for the lot, food, wine, and all.”

  The disguised driver tossed a small sack down, and the boatman snatched it out of midair. He bent close in the dying light to count the coins, grunted his satisfaction, and dropped the sack into a pocket. Meanwhile his crew had loaded crates, kegs, and sacks aboard the wagon. None of them seemed to care for the driver, and they took a good many more steps than they needed just to avoid him. “That's it, chiefey,” one of them called as he leaped back onto the boat, a flatboat, Jeremy could see now, that the men moved by poling.

  “Same next week, then?”

  “Sssame.”

  “All right, then. Give her ladyship a kiss for me.” The man stooped to untie, tossed the rope aboard the boat, and jumped on himself. The crew leaned into the poles, the flatboat backed away from the pier, and in a few moments all was lost in the deepening dusk.

  The driver sat motionless until the boat was out of sight. Then he shuddered, softened, and slumped into his true form. He twitched the reins, turning the horses, and as the wagon swung wide, Jeremy clambered aboard. This time the vilorg didn't even look back. Jeremy crouched over a sack of onions, or something very onionlike in aroma, and braced himself against a dark, oil-stained keg that gave off a fishy smell. A dim yellow light burned ahead, showing him the gateway in the western wall through which the wagon had come, guarded by a portculli
s. The wagon rumbled through, the portcullis dropped with a crash, and Jeremy leaped down.

  More vilorgs came slouching out to unload the wagon. It had come to a stop in a cramped courtyard, with storage rooms on the right, a blank wall on the left, and what seemed to be stables straight ahead, though in the gathering dark Jeremy could not be sure. He had to step lively to keep from colliding with one of the work detail, and at last when the wagon was empty, he just managed to slip inside a door before the last of them came back into the castle.

  But once inside he was lost. He wandered, trying to find the stair, or any other way up, for a long while, stumbling along badly lit corridors and freezing like a statue at every noise along the way. Once he opened a promising door onto an overpowering odor like a heap of decomposing fish. Here too a few dim torches flickered, and water made yellow reflections dance on ceiling and walls. At first he thought he had looked into a cesspool filled, inexplicably, with floating heads of cabbage; then his eyes adjusted, and he realized he saw a vilorg dormitory, with dozens of the creatures crouched on their bellies in shallow water, heads and buttocks showing. He closed the door very carefully and retraced his steps.

  At length, in a room that seemed disused, huddled in a corner, hugging his knees—it was cold in the castle—Jeremy let his head sink forward. If only he could dream a solution, as he had in the Between. He let his mind reach out, seeking his friends.

  And in sleep he found one. “Jeremy?” Barach's voice, or his mind.

  Yes. Where are you?

  “A room, with Gareth and Syvelin. You?”

  Somewhere in the castle.

  “The Hag is planning something terrible.”

  I know.

  “Get out. Get away, and warn Tremien.”

  No.

  “Go, I tell you! No magic can reach him from here. Something damps it out, keeps it from operating properly. He must be warned.”

  No. I have to save you and the others.