The Jasper Forest

by Julia Gray

  'You're the one who came to Fenduca with the Collector, aren't you?' Terrel said, walking up to him.

  'What if I am?'

  'I was there. I—'

  'I know who you are,' the acolyte said shortly.

  Although Terrel could sense the other man's hostility, he didn't know the reason for it.

  'Do you still travel with the Collector?'

  'No. Nor is he the Collector any more. We were both demoted because of you.'

  'Me? Why?'

  'We should have recognized your talent, the signs of power. We failed. I would have been a sharakan by now, but thanks to your duplicity, I've been apprenticed to the Keepers.'

  'I did nothing—' Terrel began.

  'You hid the star from us,' the young man cut in angrily. 'And you made sure the boy was nowhere to be seen.'

  Terrel could understand the reference to the amulet, even though he hadn't hidden it deliberately, but he had no idea why he should be held responsible for Davi's absence. He was glad the little boy hadn't been there, but his disappearance had not been his doing.

  'Don't look so innocent,' the acolyte scoffed. 'They'll all see the truth tomorrow - and then maybe I won't have to be a gardener any more.'

  Terrel felt a wave of nervousness at the mention of the following day. That was when the Amber Moon would be full - and his fate would be decided. But his curiosity had been aroused.

  'The Keepers are gardeners?'

  'It's the lowest form of trading.' The acolyte paused, looking sceptical.

  'Don't tell me you haven't noticed,' he added disdainfully.

  'Noticed what?'

  'That our tiny gardens produce so much food? That our wells never run dry, even though we're on top of a dry mountain? That the air inside the walls is always warm and full of the scents of flowers you can't see? For someone with so much talent,'' he said bitterly, 'you're not exactly observant, are you? Or are you just stupid?'

  His outburst left Terrel speechless. Was it possible that the sharaken used their magic solely to make their own lives more comfortable? Surely there had to be more to it than that, something worthwhile, a long-term purpose? In Vadanis, the Tindaya Code had provided such a purpose for the seers, linking their work to the fate of the entire population, but here the sharaken were isolated and no such connection existed.

  'Is that all you use dream-trading for?' he asked eventually. 'Nothing else?'

  'Read the oracles,' the acolyte replied. 'If you can.'

  With that he strode away, and Terrel wondered what he had meant. His few glimpses of the sharaken's manuscripts had been enough for him to know that they were beyond his comprehension — something the acolyte almost certainly knew.

  That evening, Terrel returned to his quarters - he'd been assigned a new room well away from the one in which the fox had died - feeling more apprehensive than ever. Reader was still locked in his dream-trance, to the consternation of his fellow mystics, and no one could predict what would happen when they joined him the next day. The moment of truth was fast approaching.

  During this period of waiting, Terrel had been hoping that Alyssa would return to him in another form — to prove that she was still alive - but she had not come, and each day of her absence increased his anxiety. He'd even begun to wonder whether the ghosts might have foreseen some of the events within the castle, perhaps after noting

  some clue in the Code, and that was why they'd been so reluctant to give him any advice. This didn't make much sense, but then not much did at the moment.

  About the only thing that was certain was that his story was soon to become part of the dream-oracles. And it seemed likely that he would learn of Alyssa's fate at the same time.

  Chapter Forty-One

  The change came over the castle slowly. The day had seemed like any other, but as dusk approached and the moment when the Amber Moon would rise drew near, all movement gradually came to a halt. Each sharakan had chosen his place to dream. Some gathered together in groups while others preferred to be alone, but they were all in the open air, in view of the sky. Each one sat in the same position - cross-legged on the ground, with their robes tucked in beneath them and their hands cupped together as if they expected to be given some offering. One by one they closed their eyes, so that their tattoos stared ahead of them.

  The only exception to this was Reader who, accompanied by several acolyte attendants, was to be placed in the dome above the Amber Tower. His continuing trance made it impossible for him to sit as the others were doing, and it had been decided that the dome offered the best chance for his dreaming to become accessible to the other sharaken.

  Terrel was very nervous, aware that his fate hung in the balance, but his curiosity outweighed his fear of disturbing the ritual. Unable to settle in his room, he wandered around the fortress, trying to keep as quiet as possible. He seemed to be the only one on the move. Even the acolytes had either retired to their own quarters or were reverently observing the night's events — without moving, and in absolute silence. Terrel's own sense of awe grew by the moment as he watched the sharaken all slip into a dreaming-state.

  It was a clear night, and the Amber Moon had never looked more beautiful. When he first caught sight of it Terrel almost gasped, but he managed to stifle the sound as he gazed into the sky. He felt as if he could reach out and touch the golden sphere, which seemed to glow with an inner light of its own rather than merely reflecting the rays of the hidden sun.

  Terrel had just entered one of the larger courtyards, and when he was able to drag his attention away from the hypnotic pull of the moon, he saw the largest gathering of sharaken so far. They sat motionless near the centre of the quadrangle, their bald heads glinting in the orange twilight. Eleven pairs of sightless eyes stared at the boy, and even though he knew they were only tattoos, the combined effect was both eerie and frightening. Terrel was just wishing that he could tell what they were seeing inside their dreams when all eleven men twitched simultaneously. It was only a small movement, a slight upward motion of the right shoulder and a corresponding jerk of the right arm, but the extraordinary thing was that it affected each of the sharaken in exactly the same way. They had all been responding to an unseen stimulus, and it was immediately obvious that they were all sharing the same dream.

  After a few moments it happened again, but this time their left hands all clenched suddenly and then relaxed slowly once more. Then the sharaken were perfectly still again, as though their bodies had been paralyzed by an invisible force. The trance enveloped them all.

  Terrel shivered, realizing that he was cold for the first time since he'd entered the fortress. The chill of the mountains had infiltrated the night air

  - but that was not all. He became aware of several unpleasant smells drifting on the sluggish breeze. The sweet floral scents had gone, and had been replaced by the odours of smoke, dust, sweat and rotting vegetation, as well as traces of another, even less palatable stench. It was as though the real world had reclaimed its hold on Terrel's senses - and that, he realized, was exactly what had happened. Now that they were enmeshed in the communal dreaming, the Keepers had evidently stopped trading, allowing the true nature of the place to reassert itself.

  This realization quickly led to another, prompted by the thought that it was not only the warmth and smell of flowers in the air that had been produced by the dream-traders. Terrel began to wonder if he'd been able to trust any of his senses for the past seven days. The food he'd eaten had been real enough -

  but had it really tasted as good as he remembered, or looked as appetizing?

  Glancing around, he noticed other discrepancies. The stonework of several columns was crumbling in places, although it had seemed perfect before.

  Patches of dark green mould were spreading over one of the courtyard walls, and many of the flagstones were cracked or worn.

  He knew that for the first time he was seeing the castle as it really was. All trading had ceased, and it was clear that Alyssa had bee
n right. The sharaken's whole world was masked by a layer of illusion.

  Thinking of Alyssa made the boy's stomach lurch violently, and for a few moments he felt nauseous again as he wondered what had happened to her. He had just realized that he might be able to leave the castle now -the gateways would no longer be hidden - but he knew that he couldn't go until he'd learnt all he could of Alyssa's fate. And yet the idea of simply waiting for several hours until the Amber Moon set again - when the joint dreaming would presumably come to an end - was intolerable, and Terrel wished again that there was some way of knowing what was going on now.

  Maybe we do.

  Hearing Alyssa's words again brought another pang of longing, especially as he realized that it had just been a memory and not her real voice. Nevertheless, it gave him an idea that both excited and frightened him. What if there was a way for him to see into the sharaken's dream-world? After all, as a healer he'd been able to experience many of the sensations of his patients' waking dreams. Why shouldn't he be able to glimpse at least a part of a real dream?

  Especially one as powerful as this?

  Having made up his mind, Terrel knew that he could not approach the problem in haphazard fashion. He had to go to the best source of knowledge, to the heart of the dream. Turning abruptly, he left the courtyard and made his way towards the Amber Tower.

  *

  Without anyone to show him the way, it took Terrel longer than he'd hoped to reach the top of the tower, and when he climbed the final flight of stairs and came out onto the battlements, he was breathing heavily and plagued by shooting pains in his twisted right leg. Along the way, he'd noticed more signs that not everything in the castle was as it had seemed, but the amber dome still appeared perfect. The craftsmanship and eye for detail that had gone into its construction was genuine and needed no enhancement.

  After taking a few moments to catch his breath, Terrel walked around the shrine until he found what he thought was probably the door. Because he had no idea how to open it from the outside, he was left with no alternative but to tap on the glass and hope that the acolytes attending to Reader would let him in. The moonlight wasn't bright enough to reveal anything inside the stained glass, but after he'd knocked the boy thought he glimpsed some movement. A few moments later he caught a few fragments of a whispered conversation. Although he couldn't hear what was being said, he guessed from the tone of the voices that some sort of argument was taking place. Without any of their masters to tell them what to do, it sounded as though the acolytes were unsure of themselves. Terrel rapped on the glass again and called out, putting as much authority into his voice as he could.

  'It's Terrel. Let me in. This dreaming concerns me, and I wish to join Reader.

  We began this trance together. Let us end it in the same way.'

  A short silence was followed by more whispering and then, somewhat to Terrel's surprise, the door was pushed open and he was able to step inside. There were four

  acolytes in all, none of them much older than he was, and they were all staring at him with fear in their eyes. He had no idea why they should be afraid of him, but he didn't really care about that at the moment.

  Reader was lying on his back in the middle of the circular floor, his head resting on a pillow. His attendants had arranged his hands so that they rested on his chest, one on top of the other. The old man's face was peaceful, the tattooed eyes gazing up towards the night sky, and his breathing was so shallow that it would have been easy to imagine he was dead.

  'I will sit with him,' Terrel said quietly, as one of the acolytes closed the door behind him.

  He went forward and sat down on the floor. His damaged leg made it impossible to adopt exactly the same position as the other sharaken, but he did the best he could and tried to look properly reverent.

  'Is this permitted?' one of the attendants asked nervously.

  'I am part of the oracles,' Terrel replied. 'Reader would not have called me here if it was not permitted.'

  His bluff seemed to work as none of the onlookers made any further objections, until — with his own nerve ends jangling - Terrel reached out and laid his own good hand upon the sharakan's.

  'Wait!' an acolyte said. 'You must not attempt to influence the dream.'

  'I wouldn't even know how,' Terrel replied. 'I'm here to observe, not to—'

  But he got no further, because in that instant everything - the tower and its dome, the acolytes, Reader, even his own body - simply vanished. Terrel's vision spiralled

  out towards the stars so that he seemed to be flying past the moons, becoming part of their stately dance across the sky. Simultaneously, he plunged down into the fires that raged beneath the earth, down to the burning heart of Nydus. Fighting to retain his balance - and his sanity - amid such contradictory images, Terrel saw to his astonishment that there were traces of the Ancients in both these alien realms, memories of their presence and their passing imprinted upon the framework of existence. Their swirling darkness had been converted into starlight and into molten rivers of fire, but he recognized them nonetheless.

  Even though he knew he had glimpsed only a minute fraction of the sharaken's dream, the boy found the contact both breathtaking and terrifying. It bore no comparison to the dreams he'd shared in his healing, and he was certain this vision was not meant for him. He clung on for a few moments, hoping in vain for something simpler, something that he could grasp and that would give him a clue to Alyssa's fate. But it was hopeless, and he withdrew. As he lifted his hand, breaking the link, the rush of sensations as the real world rebuilt itself around him made him dizzy, and it took him a few disorientated moments to realize that even back in his own realm, not everything was as it had been.

  The first thing he noticed was that even though they were still atop the tower, and Reader lay just as he had done before, the dome was no longer there. They were all exposed to the sky. The four acolytes were on their knees, three of them with their heads buried in their hands, cowering in an attitude of abject terror, while the fourth looked up with an expression of awe-struck

  wonderment on his face. Terrel followed his gaze and discovered, to his own utter amazement, that they were no longer looking at the heavens. The heavens had come to them.

  The Amber Moon hovered directly over the tower, and seemed to be no more than a few paces above them. It was bright and astonishingly beautiful, the variations in its golden-brown colouring making it appear almost translucent, while the distinctive markings of its mountains and plains, its craters and ravines, were clearer than Terrel had ever seen before. Through his fear, he knew it could not be real - and yet how could it be anything else? Illusions were not so solid, so luminously perfect. Logic insisted that this must be a phantom, an exact replica, but logic had little chance in the battle against such wonder.

  Instinct made Terrel wrench his gaze away from the mesmerizing sight and look around. Even though he'd expected it, the spectacle that greeted him was still spellbinding in its grandeur. Each of the other three moons was floating above their respective towers, each matching the phase of their real counterparts in the sky above. This was magic beyond anything he had ever seen before, and Terrel realized that the trading had not stopped. It had just been put to another purpose.

  He watched and waited for what came next and, just when it seemed that this was to be the limit of the night's sorcery, a new drama unfolded. The entire sky flickered with a ghostly light, as if it were full of silent lightning, and in that moment the moons changed. It took Terrel only a few moments to realize what had happened. Time had slipped forward, so that the White Moon, rather than

  being halfway through its cycle, was now almost full; the Red Moon was no longer three-quarters full but a thin new crescent which was waxing rather than waning; and the Dark Moon — even though it could not be seen with normal eyesight - was now new instead of being just short of full. By then Terrel had no need to look up to confirm that the Amber Moon had remained full, because he knew what this
set of phases meant. This was the configuration from his dream, the time — exactly one hundred days from now — when the earthquake would strike. The sharaken had received confirmation of his prophecy.

  The lightning flashed again, and the illusory moons returned to their current phases before gradually fading from sight. As they disappeared, the glass domes made the reverse transformation, reconstituting themselves so that Terrel and his companions were encased once more. Somewhere below them, in the labyrinth at the heart of the castle, a bell began to ring. The acolytes slowly recovered their wits, looking around with a mixture of relief and bewilderment on their young faces.

  Terrel was not really surprised to see that some considerable time had passed since he'd climbed the tower, and that the Amber Moon was now setting beyond a distant mountain range. The dream was over, and the sharaken's fortress was coming back to life.

  'It's over,' Terrel whispered to himself.

  'Indeed it is.'

  Startled, the boy turned to see that Reader had sat up.

  'And we have much to discuss, young man.'

  Chapter Forty-Two

  'Just tell me about Alyssa' Terrel demanded. 'Is she alive?'

  'I don't know how to answer that,' Reader said.

  'Was she still there when Jax killed the fox?'

  'We have no way of telling.'

  'But I thought... You don't know?' Terrel was almost incoherent now, his frustration at boiling point. Being told that Alyssa was dead would have been devastating - the worst thing he could imagine - but being left in limbo was unbearable too. 'I don't believe this,' he muttered.

  As soon as Reader had revived, the acolytes had fussed over him, preventing Terrel from talking to him while they assured themselves that the sharakan was all right. Then they had insisted on taking the old man back to his own quarters - which was where he and Terrel were now. Even then the boy had been forced to wait until several of the other sharaken had been in to see their leader. Terrel's increasing belligerence had finally gained him admittance, only for him to find that the one question he most needed an answer to was the one the dream had passed by.