“It has passed,” Colenna assured her. “It’s a time effect; very unstable. We’ve nothing to fear from it.”
“We could go around the area,” Roan suggested, glancing at the princess to see if the suggestion made her feel better. As soon as she caught him looking at her, she turned up her nose. Roan sighed.
“That’s the road, though, sir,” Lum said, glancing up with a puzzled look on his mild face.
“Never mind,” Roan said, embarrassed. “It was just a thought. We turn back.”
They found the turnoff for the eastern road without trouble. Roan immediately recognized the heavy tread of the Alarm Clock bearers, and wondered how he had ever mistaken tree roots for those footprints. Spar didn’t say a word. He just pedaled stolidly at the head of the line. Colenna, bad back and all, was more gracious. Her eyes traveled over every feature they passed, observing everything. Occasionally, when she looked back over her shoulder at Roan, she gave him a comradely smile. He was grateful to her. Her philosophy of accepting what couldn’t be changed was much easier on his nerves than the guard captain’s blanket disapproval.
“Do you smell that?” Lum asked, as they left a deep valley and began their way up a long, low hill. “Something burning. Something big.”
Roan sniffed the air, and a sharp odor curled the hair in his nostrils. It didn’t quite smell like firewood or cooking. It had a metallic heaviness that made him uneasy. The tang grew stronger as they crested the hill and rode into a small glade, where it was gaggingly strong. They had found the scientists’ camp.
“Not five miles off from where we lost them!” Spar growled resentfully, and coughed. “We could’ve been done with this last night.”
“They’re long gone, sir,” Alette said, gazing about her as they rode into the clearing.
“Nightmares!” Misha said, staring about the glade.
Roan, too, was shocked at the condition of the grounds. The grass had been thoroughly trampled, and there were burned patches on dozens of trees around the center where lanterns must have been slung. He found two more scorched places, both of substantial size. One, near a long, clinical-looking stone table, was surrounded by spatters of fat and charred particles of food, in the center of a pile of stones that must have been used as a makeshift cookstove. The other, rectangular in shape, lay at the opposite end of the clearing. Fumes still rose from both sites.
Beside the stream which ran near the table, the ground was churned up into a stiff ring of dirt that looked as if a cylinder of earth had melted down. A curtain of dead and rotting moss lay draped over all.
“They had to have camped here last night, but it feels as though it has been abandoned for years,” Roan said. “It’s like a ghost town.”
“All the vitality has been sucked out of this place,” Bergold said, his round nose twitching. “It’s rotting away.”
“Conservation of energy,” Misha said, shaking his head. “They use a lot of power for their tricks, don’t they? It has to come from somewhere. What they do pulls the life right out of the land.”
Colenna was looking at the boulder table and shaking her head. “They built this for one night’s use. Wasteful!”
“Others can make use of it,” Felan said, coming over to look at it. “Very nice design.”
“It’s cold,” Leonora said, in a small voice, standing by herself in the center of the ruined clearing.
“Now, all of you stop trying to scare my lady,” the nurse said, bursting in between them like an angry pigeon. “She can’t take this kind of fright. She won’t sleep. Stop it at once.”
“Drea, don’t,” Leonora said. The nurse put her arm around her charge.
“I’m just trying to protect you, my sweet.” Leonora pulled away.
“I don’t need protection!” she said, a little wildly. “It’s the Dreamland that needs protection, not me!”
“You’re not thinking of yourself,” Drea said.
“I’m not supposed to be! Leave me alone.” Leonora set her chin and hugged her arms around her more tightly. She turned her back on Drea. “Yes, leave me. Go away.” The nurse shook her head and made as if to hug her.
“You don’t want me to leave you now, pet. Not in all this desolation.” Leonora shook loose.
“Yes! Yes, I do. Now, go away. Don’t come back,” the princess said. There were tears in her eyes. Roan took a step towards her, wanting to hold her, but the stiffness of her posture kept him from coming close. “I don’t want you any more, Drea. I don’t need you.”
“Well, my kitten, if that’s what you say. . . .”
“It is what I say,” Leonora snapped. “I mean it. I can get along on my own. And don’t call me baby names.”
The old nurse looked sad, but there was a kind of satisfaction in her wrinkled eyes. “All right, Your Highness. You know best. You’re all grown up now, aren’t you?”
“Yes!” Leonora snapped, without really listening. “Now, go away!”
Shaking her head fondly, Drea vanished in a puff of steam that smelled of fresh ironing and cinnamon oatmeal. Leonora’s eyes spilled over, and tears ran down her face.
She stood beside her bicycle in the midst of the ruin, looking stricken and lost. The air seemed colder than ever. The spell broken, Roan and Bergold hurried to her side to reassure her. She leaned into Bergold’s arms, shivering, not a remote symbol, but a frightened young woman.
“Oh, Bergold, they’ve destroyed this glen,” she said, forlornly.
“It will be all right again in no time,” the historian said encouragingly, patting her back. “The Sleeper will clean it up just as soon as his mood shifts again.”
“Or an influence will come through,” Roan suggested. “You know how quickly things change. It won’t take long.”
“But it’s so desolate,” Leonora said, with her face buried in Bergold’s jacket shoulder. Roan put a comforting hand on her arm. He understood what she meant. It wasn’t only that the scientists had left a mess. There was something wrong with the area. The colors were dulled. The leaves and flowers were thin, paperlike, artificial in feel. Like the desert in the first hours Roan had pursued Brom and his minions, the camp lacked life. He didn’t even hear insects buzzing. Leonora must have felt the destruction even more keenly than he did. The king was the heart of the Dreamland, and she was the king’s daughter.
The Sleeper must have felt a twinge of discomfort in this area of his dream, because a light wind began to blow, stirring the grass around their feet.
“There, do you see that?” Roan said. “He heard you.” The princess looked up. Her face was tragic, with eyes larger than before and colored a deep, mournful blue, but she watched where he pointed.
As the wind passed slowly, the mossy glade shifted into an open field full of daisies, like a curtain being pulled over the scene of an accident. The sun broke through the clouds, and brightened the grass to an astonishing emerald green. A trill of birdsong startled them with its clear beauty, and the singers wafted above them on open wings. The horrid stench thinned away. In its place, Roan smelled wildflowers and the rich scent of earth after a rain.
The people were not unaffected by the winds of change. The palace guards’ uniforms changed to bright scarlet tunics and black trousers, their hats became flat-brimmed and high-crowned, and their faces grew more noble. The rest of the party transmuted slightly to become more beautiful or handsome, and their bicycles took on a polished gleam. Roan, as always, remained the same, but he felt cleaner for the blessing of the wind. The sorrow in the princess’s eyes lifted a little.
“That’s better, isn’t it?” Roan asked her anxiously.
A good deal of the damage had disappeared, but some of the daisies still had a fundamental wrongness about them: too many petals or the wrong color eye. It would take more thanone healing touch by the Sleepers to correct what had been done here. Over the princess’s head, he and Bergold exchanged glances. They ought to get her away before she saw that the blight had not been cured.
>
“We must go on,” Roan said, putting his hand under Leonora’s elbow and escorting her quickly back to Golden Schwinn. Once out of sight of the blight, Leonora recovered her dignity, and pulled away from Roan’s grasp.
“Thank you for your courtesy,” she said coldly. “Schwinnie!”
The golden steed withdrew its front tire from where it had been nuzzling up against Cruiser’s, and rolled over to her hand. Leonora put the bicycle between her and Roan and wheeled it away.
Roan gawked at Leonora’s back in dismay, and Bergold pulled him away.
“She’s still not talking to me?” Roan said. “It’s been hours since this morning. What can I do? What should I have done?”
“Oh, come, come, boy,” Bergold said, patiently, hands folded on his round belly. His hair had faded to red and lay slicked back on his head, and his cheeks were pink and plump. “She’s used to better treatment from you. You should have defended her.”
“But she did hold us all up,” Roan said, helplessly. “She made us a promise.”
“And you a man in love,” Bergold said, shaking his head, ambling over to look at the ring of mud, now covered with leggy grass seedlings. Felan sidled up to them.
“What do you suppose this was?” he asked.
“Some kind of privy would be my guess,” Roan said. “It’s handy to the sleeping area—at least, I would guess this is the sleeping area—and downstream from the cooking.”
“Do you suppose they destroyed it to keep us from seeing it, or did it self-destruct on its own?”
“I think that when the energy is used up, their constructions will collapse in on themselves,” Colenna said, standing in the middle of the clearing with her arms wrapped around herself.
“Beware the arrogance of waste.”
“And what do you think about all this?” Felan asked Roan, indicating the area around them with a very small gesture, so as not to alarm the princess further. Leonora was by herself at the end of the glade. Very casually, Captain Spar had gestured to Alette to stay behind the princess and keep an eye on her. Roan approved.
“Something Brom is doing is perverting the landscape wherever they go,” Roan said, keeping his voice low. One of the daisies near his feet abruptly dropped all its petals. Roan and Felan exchanged a glance, and Roan exerted a modicum of influence to reattach them. “I observed it when I was following him before,” he said. “Things twist where they have passed.”
“But will this mess ever go away?” Felan asked. “You saw the wind of change. It erased very little of this desecration! I’m afraid of something that can cause damage even the Sleepers can’t undo.”
“It’ll take a while for it to heal,” Bergold said, placidly. “If not today, then one day.”
“Most alarming,” Felan commented. “What if they do this to the rest of the Dreamland, Mistress Colenna? They’re natural beings, too. Isn’t what they do part of the Sleepers’ plan?
“If we are meant to stop them, we will,” Colenna said, heavily, with a lecturer’s air. “If we do not, then that is also the Sleepers’ intention. But I believe that if we do not meddle, we will see the Sleepers’ design more perfectly.”
“It must be very comforting to have everything set out so clearly for you,” Felan said, disgustedly. “Brom doesn’t seem to buy into your view of the world. What if they make the Sleepers wake up?”
“That, too,” Colenna said, sadly. “It’s not our choice, nor our right to change things.”
“But it is Brom’s?”
“I didn’t say that! We will try to stop him. If we can’t, that is fate.”
Roan had been brought up by a strictly traditional historian, but he was encouraged to think his own way. He did not agree with Colenna, but now was not the time to say so.
“Look!” Bergold said, uncovering a small nest in the grass.
Hidden under a broadleafed weed, it resembled a small, gray, folded box formed of chewed fibers. Inside it were scores of tiny paperclips the length of Roan’s fingernail. Bergold picked a few out of the box and squinted closely at them. The others, hearing the outcry, clustered around Bergold and his discovery.
“What is it?” Lum asked.
“Paperclips!” Roan said. “Brom picked up bicycles here. Look for a trail. Not footprints—tire prints. They aren’t on foot any more.” Bergold peered at the box closely, then opened his pocket gazetteer.
“What’s curious is that these aren’t native to this area,” the historian said. “They’re not mountain bikes at all. See?” He showed them colored plates of comparable species. “These are all-terrain clips. They’ve been newly laid.”
“Couldn’t some passing bird or a picnicker have dropped a single clip in the grass . . . ?” Leonora began, but let her voice die away. She knew better.
“There has to be a significant mass of clips,” Misha reminded her, gravely, “otherwise, nothing will happen. One is not enough to engender others.”
“They brought the progenitors with them from Mnemosyne,” Roan said, his heart sinking. “Matured in a single night.” The advantage of speed he hoped to have over the group of scientists was lost.
“My respect for Brom grows,” Bergold said, tucking the tiny wires back into the box and shutting it. “I hope that he’s not as good at waking people up as he is at planning an expedition, or we’re doomed.”
Without another word, Spar, Lum, Felan, and Misha ran for their bicycles, and pedaled hastily off in opposite directions to seek out the trail. But it was Colenna who found the way, leading away northeast behind the table rock.
“Wasteful,” she said, shaking her head, as she looked back at the clearing. “They destroy so much, and for so little reason.”
“They want to wake up the Sleepers just to answer a question,” Roan said, pedaling after her.
“I didn’t want to go on a cross-country journey,” Felan said, once the party was well on its way. This new road was bound on both sides by eight-foot-high hedges, rendering invisible anyone who passed. “We should have caught up with them by now. Where in the Seven’s names are they going?”
“The Hall of the Sleepers,” shouted Spar. “Or so they said.”
“But where is that? It isn’t on any map we have.”
“I’ve been thinking that over for the past twenty-four hours,” Roan said, pedaling hard. “I have a theory. We have to think as Brom did where the Hall must lie. What do we know about the Sleepers?”
“There are seven of ’em,” Lum said helpfully. “Not the same ones all the time. Each of them dreams a province.”
“Yes,” Bergold said. “From the earliest records we have, once humans began to differentiate between the provinces, they discovered that there were seven overminds. That has never been disputed. Seven is an important number in the Dreamland. Er . . . observers found that the provinces suffered Changeover independently, that those who fled over the ravines and rivers from a changing land to a stable one remained as they had been. In a Changeover transition, the whole character of a province alters. All the provinces are different from one another except where they are the same, generally indicating similar experiences.”
“The Sleepers, their number and their character, if not the individuals themselves, have remained unchanged in all of history, correct?” Roan asked.
“Correct.”
“So we are looking for something that hasn’t changed,” Roan said.
Felan blew out his lip derisively.
“But everything in the Dreamland alters over time. Gold mines become sandstone caves; houses, palaces, and hovels interchange freely; birds and bees can mate because they’re both airborne creatures.”
“But what doesn’t change?” Roan urged him.
“Nothing,” Felan said, flatly.
“What?” Misha asked, becoming interested in the story.
“The borders,” Roan said. “But most significantly of those, the mountains. I would bet that the Mysteries haven’t altered substantially since the
beginning of time. The Dreamland, for all its mutability, has a fixed, natural boundary.”
“We have visitors all the time from the other realms,” Felan pointed out.
“Yes, one can cross the Mysteries, but I’d bet you can’t change them,” Roan said. “They’re as eternal as . . .”
“. . . As your face,” Felan said, offensively. “So what?”
“Brom is going to the mountains,” Roan said, ignoring the man’s supercilious grin to address the others. “The Hall of the Sleepers must be beneath them.”
“The mountains!” Leonora exclaimed, surprised into speaking. She gave Roan a withering glance, and looked away hastily, her lips pressed together.
“Yes, but which ones?” Colenna asked. “Toward which range are they headed?”
“Surely the ancient names hold some significance,” Bergold said. “Those, too, have remained constant in the historical records since the beginning of recorded time. Let me see, there are the Deep Mysteries, the High Mysteries, the Sacred Mysteries, the Dark Mysteries—”
“—The Great Mysteries, the Lesser Mysteries, and the Forbidden Mysteries,” Misha interrupted, eagerly. “They’re all as different as the Seven themselves.” He glanced back and ahead at the others. “Right?”
“Yes, of course. We all took geography in school. So which one is the Hall in?” Felan asked.
“I haven’t a clue,” Bergold said, simply, raising his palms. “They’re all equal and equally different.”
“I don’t know, either,” Roan said. “I was hoping some of you could offer suggestions.”
“Oh, that’s fine,” Felan said, in disgust, dropping back in the file. “I’m none the wiser.” At the head of the line, Colenna snorted.
“Did no one ever observe a difference in the amount of influence issuing from a particular mountain range?” Roan asked.
“There’s nothing like that in the history books at all,” Bergold said, consulting his book. “No records. That’s why I was surprised you suggested such a thing, but it makes good sense.”
“Think, everyone,” Roan said. He brooded over Cruiser’s handlebars, trying to recall all the things he’d learned in school. Bergold paged through his small book, muttering to himself.
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