Moon Dreams (The Jeremy Moon Trilogy Book 1)

by Brad Strickland

  “You're lying,” Jeremy said.

  “Perhaps I am. Yes, I am a liar. Or am I? If I lied when I told you that, I'd be telling the truth always, would I not, except when I lied to tell you that I lie. But if the mirror is a liar, I suppose that I am, too. Like the mirror, I turn right to left and left to right, I render what you find in all your books backward and unreadable. Do you know how you really look? I wonder. A mirror cannot show you, for a mirror tells lies. If a book is backward in a mirror, so is your face! A picture cannot show you how you look, for by the time you see the picture the person in it is gone, drifted away down the river of time itself. That's why you don't dare to look in this mirror, whether you know it or not. You cannot bear to see the way you really look.”

  Jeremy did not answer. He knew, or at least he felt, that if he did not listen, did not speak, if he saved his energy, he would grow stronger, for the alien magic filled this room, drifted in it lazily and hung in the air like an invisible smoke. He seemed to draw it in with every breath, and when he concentrated on it, the magic seemed to gather and grow in his chest.

  “What are you doing now?” The light was silver and soothing on the stones, soft light like moonlight on a fine summer evening back home. The stone looked almost soft, like a beach, and Jeremy found himself recalling a hotel balcony, a full moon, with luminous waves rolling in to die on the dark and glittering sand. The voice purred on, insinuating: “It's a shame about your companions, isn't it? Did you feel the travel spell a moment ago? They're on their way to Whitehorn right now.”

  Jeremy blinked, all thought of moonlight and beaches out of his head. “I felt nothing.”

  “Ah, so you are still there. Do you know why you felt nothing? Because there was nothing to feel. No, no one used a travel spell. I am a terrible liar, as you said. You find that contemptible? You scorn me? What about you? Have you ever told a lie? Made a living from telling your lies? I sense that you have, though I do not understand how.” After a long silence the voice added, “Not talking anymore? Too bad. It's a pity, isn't it, that not all your companions will return to Whitehorn. Not the soldiers whose bodies lie in the mud outside the castle, or the one struck down inside on the stones. And not the little skulking black rat of a creature that the Hag played with.”

  “Nul?”

  “Is that its name? Nul? Null, nothing. A good name for such a sneaking thing. The Hag gave it to me, you know. I swallowed it quite up, and barely noticed that I had eaten it. It's here still, somewhere. Let me look. Ah, here we have the beast, yes, barely alive. I think it has no mind left. Look, its arms and legs are all broken.”

  A sound split the quiet of the mirror room: a hopeless gurgle, a ratchetlike groaning cough, a moan. “Oh, I think it's dying right now. Look at the blood coming from its nasty mouth. I could save it, you know. But such a filthy, beastly thing should die—”

  “Nul!”

  “Oh, look, it heard you. It must be a pet. Look at it! Oh, it's so funny to see, you'd love this. It's trying to crawl toward you. Look at how its broken arms flap, at the bloody splinters of bone sticking through! Oh, you would laugh—”

  “Nul! Are you there?”

  A wrenching little cough. Jeremy could stand no more. He stepped in front of the mirror and saw—

  Darkness only.

  “I am such a liar,” the voice purred. “I'm quite ashamed of myself. And there you are. You are very like Sebastian Magister, our beloved pet, aren't you? And now, of course, you cannot move.”

  The silver light pressed against him, held Jeremy against the wall as tightly as shackles. “I'm looking,” he said. “I see nothing.”

  “You see yourself. You are nothing. You will be nothing.”

  “Then show me something different. Show yourself!”

  “Oh, my dear boy, I'll do much more than that. I'll shake your hand, I'll embrace you, I'll have a chat with you face to face. After all, we are going to be very close, you and I. Come toward me now.”

  Jeremy felt himself being dragged forward, toward the mirror. Now he could make out a figure in its depths, a wizened man-sized figure, a mere silhouette against the deeper blackness. “Yes, that's good,” the voice said as he stopped inches from the mirror's surface. “Oh, you do have some magic about you, and a very interesting type. I've never seen it before, not even in Sebastian. I wonder what it is and how I'll like having it when I am you.” The figure had come closer, too, and now was almost like Jeremy's reflection standing just behind the glass, its head tilted just as his was, its attitude mocking his own.

  He remembered a nightmare he had had—when? Ages ago, in another life. In that dream he had been facing a mirror, just like this one, when—

  Hands came through the glass, grasped his shoulders, pulled him forward. He screamed. It was happening, just as he had dreamed. He was being pulled into the mirror, falling into nothingness, caught in the clutches of his own reflection.

  And this time it was real.

  Chapter 14

  Jeremy fell as he had fallen in dreams, with what seemed to be terrifying speed. An instant after he screamed, he crashed through a round opening, landed on his feet—and realized he was unhurt.

  “There,” the old man said, grinning at him toothlessly. “You came through safe enough.” He stepped back, a bald, ancient mummy of a man, his nearly fleshless arms projecting from great, floppy sleeves. He wore a robe like the one Sebastian had worn in the Between, but this one was of no color Jeremy could name. It seemed darkness gathered rather than fabric, and the old man's head floated above it like a death's-head moon.

  Jeremy took a step forward. “No,” the old man said. “I'm afraid you cannot hurt me. As a matter of fact, I am not even here. This, you see, is illusion.” He vanished. “Look around,” his voice said in Jeremy's mind. “This will be your home, for many, many long years, I hope. Even for centuries, if you respond well to certain spells we have learned in our time. Look around! I am busy with other thoughts and more powerful enemies, but I will spare you enough light to see by. I do without light myself.”

  Light came from somewhere at that, though not from the sun or the moon. Jeremy stood in the open, on an enormous flat platform of stone, of a single stone, as far as he could tell, hundreds of yards across. Behind him was the oval mirror—no, not the Hag's mirror. This one, in a plain frame of ebony, was a bit larger. He took a step toward it and found himself held in place. He would not be allowed to touch this mirror either. Its surface swirled with layers of black within black, and it reflected nothing, not even his face. He walked away from it, a hundred steps, to the edge of the platform and looked down. He was three hundred feet high at least, the stone dropping away in a sheer, unbroken wall. He paced to a corner of the platform and discovered that he stood on a gigantic cube high above an arid land.

  It reminded him of the Between, and of the Hag's domain too, in its desertion, but it was different. Overhead the sky was dark, not with night, but simply darkened, as if clouds too thick for the sun to penetrate hung heavy over the countryside. They had lifted a little from the far horizons, Jeremy saw, and that was where the light came from: a bare rim of clear sky all the way around him. He could see mountains on one side, tapering away to hills on his right. Behind him a plain stretched far away, and to his left he saw deep cracks and fissures branching as if a river had once run nearby. Nothing stirred and nothing lived here, and the only sound was the stony lament of the wind as it fingered the sands far below.

  Relas, Jeremy thought, and knew he was correct in so thinking. The southeastern continent of Thaumia, once a land of fifty kingdoms, a land of men and women, now the empire of the Great Dark One. It was an empire of desolation. He walked all the edges of the great platform and saw no way down. Impatient, thinking of the rope he had conjured from his belt, he began to work a spell but then stopped. No, he told himself. That's what he's waiting for. He wants to see what I can do, and how I do it. The cure for that was simple enough: Jeremy would use no magic. He conte
mplated the landscape again. Not even on the gray plain of the Between had he seen anything so utterly forlorn, so empty.

  Jeremy thought, This has been a home for people. That's the difference. The Between is no one's home, and those you encounter there aren't really there, no more than the Great Dark One was here a minute ago. In the Between, people are only visitors. There the dreams live and the dreams are real, but the dreamers themselves touch the land only in mind and are themselves illusions. But here people lived once upon a time. Water flowed in that river and children swam in it. Boys climbed the trees that once grew on those hills, and little girls ran barefoot through the grass that grew there. Husbands buried their wives in this soil and wept at the parting. The people are gone, dust long ago, but they were here, and the land remembers.

  He walked back to the center of the platform, circled the mirror, trying to find some weakness in the wards around it. Again he felt he could almost see the magic: deep-colored this time, purple, the hue of a black light, and solid rather than meshlike. A stronger spell than any the Hag had at her call, surely. If he could push the mirror to the edge, topple it over, it might break. But he could not even approach the mirror.

  Now wait. He had come through the mirror, that much he knew. The experience was nothing like the travel spell, but he had traveled, had been pulled from the Hag's castle to Relas. And that meant that he had been inside the ward at least once. He swept his hands over the all-but-invisible shield of the spell, feeling nothing under his palms except air, yet unable to press his fingers through the barrier, to move one centimeter toward the mirror. But there was a way. Something told him there was a way.

  He thought. The mirror was not of the Great Dark One's making, that was the first thing to remember. There had been only one maker of mirrors in Thaumia. The mirror from the Between, Melodia's mirror, the Hag's, and now this one. They had been shaped by Sebastian—and why?

  Because the Great Dark One could not make a mirror like this. That had to be the reason. Jeremy raised his voice: “Are you here?” Nothing answered him but the wind, and it seemed only to sigh. Relas, alas...

  “You could not make the mirrors,” Jeremy accused. “You had not the knowledge or the power to create a simple mirror. For that you had to use Sebastian.” Still no answer, though somehow Jeremy sensed a listener now. “Oh, you taught him techniques, I'm sure. You gave him directions and watched as he worked. But you lacked the talent, didn't you? And now you can only use the mirrors, not create more. What did you do? Supply some of your mana to Sebastian, as I gave Barach my power? For much of your magic is tied to the mirrors, Dark One. Through Sebastian you have put some of yourself in each of them. How much less would you be without the mirrors?”

  Nothing. Anger boiled in Jeremy. If only the Great Dark One would come out of hiding, if he would purr and sneer and mock as he had done in the witch's castle, then Jeremy would have an enemy to fight. As it was—ah.

  As it was, the Great Dark One was still probing, still studying. He did not know Jeremy's powers, could not guess what threat the Earthman might bring. When the obvious temptations the voice had suggested failed, the Great Dark One simply moved to more subtle temptations: let's bore him, let's make him decide to act on his own. We'll see a sample of his magic, and then he's ours. Then we'll know how to handle him. That's why the Dark One did not seem to be here. He was here, of course, concealed somewhere. Jeremy could almost feel his gaze.

  “The devil's best trick is to pretend he does not exist,” Jeremy said. The words died on the dead air. He sat cross-legged before the mirror, chin on hand, gazing at it. Jeremy was prepared to be as patient as a brass Buddha if need be. Nothing that he had thought he needed at Erst proved to be important, really. He did not need to escape; he did not need to fight. He needed only to think.

  Now. Sebastian made the mirrors because he had some talent, some quirk, that the Great Dark One lacked. Jeremy had seen that in Thaumia: Melodia's specialized healing talent, working on animals but not on humans; or Barach's ability to see the magic in a person, something that even Tremien could not do without his enchanted spectacles. Talent in magic, it seemed, chose definite pathways sometimes, like streams meandering to a sea they all reached eventually but by different routes.

  Sebastian's powers must have run in a similar course. He could trap magic, put it into material things, mirrors especially, and hold it there. But alone, Jeremy was sure, Sebastian could never have created mirrors with so much power. Possibly he could have made them into speaking devices, communicators, but surely not into transportation devices, or devices to transfer magic from one spot to another. No, that had the stamp of the Great Dark One on it. Sebastian had forged the tools, but the ancient magician had used them.

  Sebastian and mirrors. Sebastian was Jeremy's mirror image, his dark twin. Jeremy Sebastian Moon Magister. Words chased themselves in Jeremy's thoughts. Then he laughed. He had it: he sensed the connection, and he thought he had a chance of breaking the mirrors and escaping the Dark One; a chance, should the opportunity present itself and should inspiration strike. A ghost of a chance, in fact.

  “Dark One! I grow tired of waiting for you!” Jeremy called. After waiting perhaps half a minute, he yelled again: “Come and let's have that talk you promised. You could tell me much that I want to know!”

  Silence and darkness. It takes a specially baited hook to catch a very old fish. Jeremy decided to give back what he himself had had to take earlier in the Hag's castle. “What? Afraid, you? The magician who juggles skulls like rubber balls? Who wallows in evil as a pig wallows in mud? You, the all powerful, the omnipotent, the conqueror of a continent? Where are you hiding, brave one?”

  No answer. Jeremy got up and began to pace the platform, began, in fact, to strut. “I am here, Dark One! Where are you? Who are you? No answer? I'll tell my name, my whole, full, and secret name. Are you listening? I am Jeremy Sebastian Moon, Dark One! Do you know what my power is? Do you? I reach up into the sky and pull down the lightning to light my way. I speak in one corner of the world, and my voice is heard continents away. I ride horses that no one can see, that drink but never eat. My brothers have leaped off the face of the world and into the dark sky. They have walked on the moon, Dark One! And I do more: I speak with the dead. I hear their words and know their thoughts. My own words have lives of their own and will go on after me. I have left my world for many months now, and yet the force of my words has not failed. Can you say the same, O Dark One? And do you know the greatest wonder of all the wonders? Can you guess the secret within my secret?”

  Jeremy felt something, a tension in the air. So, you crafty old cat, some curiosity still lives in that shriveled brain of yours. Still, no voice answered him. “I will give it to you as a present, O Great Liar. And you know I am not myself lying, don't you? You can sense that, I know. Yes, you realize that I speak only the truth, don't you? Are you ready for my secret, you great dark fool? Here it is:

  “I did all these wonders without magic!”

  At last an answer, booming from all around in a voice like an earthquake: “Impossible!”

  Jeremy threw his head back and laughed. “Is it? Is it not true? Can you not tell?”

  He thought this time there would be no response, so long did the silence drag on, but at last it came: “You speak the truth. But how? How can you do these things without magic?”

  “Show yourself. And not in illusion but in person; ward yourself as well as you please, but I will not speak to the air any longer.”

  “Wait.”

  He came through the mirror and passed through its ward. Jeremy walked over to the ancient man, looked into bleary, red-veined eyes. “Welcome,” he said.

  The Great Dark One smiled. “You are impertinent! I welcome you, for this is all my land, my possession. I have been here all along, as you guessed. You are a canny one, aren't you? Our Sebastian fancied himself clever, oh yes he did, but you have him all the way across and six from the bottom, don't you, Jeremy S
ebastian Moon?”

  Jeremy shrugged. “I do have my moments,” he said.

  “Oh, modest, modest, we are. A silly virtue, boy, one you should learn to master. Modesty will be the ruin of you yet if you let it run untrammeled. And now you will tell me how you perform these wonders without magic, I have no doubt.”

  “Possibly. If you will answer me, question for question.”

  “Who are you to make bargains?”

  “You know who I am. Oh, come on, G.D.”

  The Great Dark One blinked. “What did you call me?”

  “Well, you won't tell me your name, and Great Dark One is so melodramatic. Stuffy, don't you think? You don't strike me at all as a stuffy person, you know. Will you tell the truth, just once? If I ask you an innocent question? Never mind, I'll ask it anyway: you enjoy this, don't you? You find me a puzzle, and trying to solve me stimulates you and makes you feel alive. Confess it.”

  The old man wrinkled his forehead, though he had no eyebrows left to raise. “You are a character,” he said.