“That we could have guessed,” the Felans said in unison. Their eyebrows were thickly shaggy on their foreheads. The right brows climbed up toward their hairlines in emphasis.
“That’s also why we can’t touch one another. We are the mirror as well as what is reflected in it. This has happened before. It’s recorded in the royal archives. For example, I know that the duplicates, whichever you are,” the owl nodded its beak at the two Roans and the two Mishas, “can touch both of anyone else, though not each other, so it will be difficult to decide who was originally with whom.”
“Fascinating stories of mistaken identity,” the other owl said, warming to his topic. “In one really interesting record—”
“Are they around here forever?” Felan shouted, interrupting Bergold.
“Certainly not,” the owls told him sternly. “Don’t shout. Our hearing is excellent, even though we have no external ears.”
“The doppelgänger effect is temporary,” the righthand Bergold said. “That is why we can’t act as two groups. Sooner or later the doubles will vanish, possibly stranding some of the “real” party who got mixed up with them. I beg your pardon,” he said to the left-hand Bergold, who bobbed his feathered head to show no offense was taken. “We’d best go on all together.”
Eighteen people and two owls set out again, each side by side with his or her double. At first, Roan thought the road seemed crowded, then he began to see advantages in redundance. The Lums rode ahead, watching for “weirdness.” Both Roans looked for signs that had been left for him from ahead. Six guards, instead of three, kept watch for threats, with hands on sword belts. The others talked among themselves, some shyly, others with animation. An occasional traveler, passing by on foot or steed, stared openly at the long file of identical faces, and stepped up the pace, lest the effect be contagious. The other Roan must have caught his thought, because he gave him a sidelong grin. Should they pretend to menace the next person they saw, and curse him with twinness? It was really rather nice. Roan almost wished the effect would last. If Brom’s power was growing stronger, they would need more help to defeat him when they caught up with him at last. On the other hand, there were two Leonoras and two Colennas they’d have to protect, dividing their attention unnecessarily.
The princesses were carrying on a lively discussion about fashion, upon which, not surprisingly, they agreed completely. Roan only listened with half an ear. He was still hoping to find clear indications of Brom’s trail. The other Roan met his eyes occasionally to offer a silent shake of the head. He wasn’t seeing anything, either.
“. . . But I think the Nodite custom of printed headbands for babies is quite silly,” Leonora said, drawing an armful of draperies across her own forehead in illustration. “When they can’t even read them yet. . . . She’s gone!”
“She merged with you,” Misha said, hoarse with surprise. “Just now. When you had that cloth over your face. Horse and all, just moved toward you all of a sudden, and then there was only one of you.”
“Oh,” Leonora said in a small voice, her hands coming to rest on her saddle horn. “We were having such fun.”
Roan looked up and down the line. All the duplicates were gone. Ten had seemed such a large number at first. After the crowd and the double effect, the party looked so small and lonely. He felt vulnerable, out in the middle of nowhere virtually alone. Leonora urged Schwinn forward to ride beside Cruiser, and offered her hand to him. He took it, and gave it a grateful squeeze. What a wonderful woman she was. How terrible it would be now if she left to go home. He still worried about putting her in danger, but how he would miss her!
“Am I the right me?” Lum asked, prodding his arms uncertainly. “Nothing like that’s ever happened to me before.”
“I feel the same way, Corporal,” Roan said.
“It’s a good sign when you can enjoy your own company,” Colenna said, in a soothing manner.
Bergold said, scratching his feathered belly with a claw, “He knew everything I did. How very strange. I’ve never had such a meeting of minds with anyone before. I rather enjoyed it.”
Spar was very worried. “Could this be a sign that we’re about to ride into a Changeover?”
“No, it was a nuisance,” Bergold said with a sigh. “A friendly one, but a supreme time-waster on the whole.”
“It feels as if it was dragged here,” the continuitor said, testing the air. “Or pushed. There’s a strained sensation in the very fibers of the air.”
“It’s artificial, all right. Brom’s picking away at our psyches,” Colenna said.
“But how’s he getting here and going away again without leaving a trace?” Lum asked. “We’re not getting the constant thread of weirdness that we were getting before. I saw some distortion near where we ran into the nuisance, but that’s all. They’ve got to ride on the road, right? And they aren’t. Most things are normal, and they’re not leaving tire tracks.”
“If these distractions were pushed towards us, we don’t have an idea of from how far away,” Bergold said. “We’d have to search the whole wilderness, and we might never find the point of origin.”
“It could be natural. This might be connected to a very active part of the Sleeper’s mind,” Felan said, staring up at the sky and squinting at an invisible document in his mental archives. “I’ve heard of as many as five simultaneous . . .”
“Unlikely,” Colenna said, flatly.
“Well, it isn’t like when we were following the trail before,” Spar said, although visibly unwilling to contradict his beloved. “And we haven’t seen tire tracks since we passed near that cliff face.”
“I suppose it’s too much to hope that that rockfall was on top of them,” Felan said, sourly.
“Certainly not!” Colenna said. “These two nuisances so close together prove they’re still alive and active, and we are behind them. Isn’t that right, young Roan?”
Roan was grateful for her air of confidence. He felt very uncertain of himself. If they lost faith in him, they might turn back. Spar would insist that the princess accompany him back to Mnemosyne for safety. Roan would have the wish he had made a couple of days before of going on alone. He didn’t want that wish any longer, and didn’t care for the prospect of facing the gestalt on his own.
“We must have come too close to Brom,” Bergold said, half-lidding his orange eyes. “But when? Why didn’t we know he was nearby?”
“It doesn’t matter,” Leonora said, with absolute conviction and a confident look for Roan. “Now we’re certain he’s still ahead of us. That’s what we needed to know.”
“Hurry up, can’t you?” Basil shouted.
“I’m moving as fast as I can,” Taboret snapped, without looking at him. She dropped a block of nebulosity into place. “Think you can do it better?” She spurred her motorcycle smartly away from the front end of the road in a wide circle so she couldn’t hear Basil’s retort.
Short-handed because of Bolmer’s injury and Mamovas’s absence, the apprentices were having to work twice as hard as before. The Countingsheep brothers’ obduracy had put them hours behind Brom’s schedule. The chief was fretting, wondering if they would now make it to the road before Roan in spite of the traps laid to delay him. Because of the difficult terrain, the mercenaries had stayed away all afternoon. Brom had had no new message from his spy. He didn’t like lacking information, and they all knew it.
Anger bounded up and back through the mental link until Taboret felt if anyone even looked at her cross-eyed, she would embed them in the pavement. They could not finish their road today, no matter how much the chief shouted. It was nearing twilight. Power, strength, and tempers were stretched to their utmost, and they were still miles from the main road.
At least six times during the afternoon they had felt the aching exhaustion that meant Mamovas had drawn upon them to create traps and distractions. The last one had been over an hour ago, and so strong that Taboret had to sit down and gasp for breath. There had been no
theft of energy since. Surely that meant that Mamovas and the mercenaries were on their way back?
Yes, she felt an answering echo in her mind to the question. Within a few minutes, she heard three motorcycle engines approaching. Brom signaled them to a halt. It wasn’t long until they could see the three riders. Mamovas just looked tired, and Acton vacant, but Maniune’s face was grimmer than usual.
“Bad news, boss,” he said. “We heard from our friend behind us. They’ve got a spy in our group.”
Brom was so surprised the red spark in his eyes went out for a moment. “What? Impossible!”
“Not impossible,” Maniune said shortly. Taboret guessed that Mamovas had been drawing on him, too, and he wasn’t used to it. Weariness had even dulled his aggression. “They’ve been getting help from one of us. I don’t know who, but I’ll guarantee the message wasn’t garbled.”
“All right,” Brom said, turning to the apprentices and clapping his hands. “Everyone! Stop what you are doing. I want your attention. Someone among us is sending information to our pursuers. That is not an approved-of activity. The spy will step forward at once. Now!”
Taboret felt Brom’s superior force of will surge through the link, subduing her own. He bore down harder, grinding into her conscious thoughts like a drill. Confess! Taboret clutched her temples, trying to squeeze the headache out of her head. She wished she had something to confess, if only to make the pressure stop. And then she remembered that she had. Could they have found out about her aberration? It was only the one little time, one tiny little mark on one tree that could have been an accident. She tried hard not to think about it, and sought to suppress her feeling of guilt by concentrating on suspecting others. It could be Lurry who had blown the gaff, she thought. Or Gano. Now, there was a suspicious character!
Her efforts seemed to work. She saw Glinn looking at her with a curious expression in his eyes, and attempted to stare coldly back in her turn, but she was worried.
“No one will step forward? No one will spare his friends and comrades the pain of interrogation? Very well. I shall learn the truth of this later on,” Brom said, raising his hand in the signal to move on. “Proceed.”
Chapter 21
After an early breakfast at sunrise, Roan had the others out on the road. No one was sorry to leave the most uncomfortable campground in his memory. Everyone was groggy and fractious, like tired children.
Since the weather remained autumn-cold, Leonora had had to choose between her tent and her clothes. Roan and Misha helped fashion a new pavilion for her out of leaves and vines. It was very hard work to make anything using influence that worked together with something someone else made. The result wasn’t nearly good enough for her, but she hadn’t said a word. For a moment, Roan regretted that the gestalt would have to be destroyed when they caught up with Brom, because being able to combine strengths was a terrific idea.
It had been a hard night, full of random noises and creatures that, although strange in appearance, were ordinary Dreamish beasts, such as tangle-bats that always got tied up in one’s hair, and young Monsters-In-The-Closet, who sought to make nests in the party’s backpacks and panniers. Sleep had not come easily, despite their long day’s ride, and when it did, it was full of broken dreams and nightmares. Then, they’d had to get up in the middle of the night to move camp from the top of the hill they had chosen, when it turned out to be an anthill, and nocturnal insects at that.
They still saw no reliable signs of Brom’s trail. After twilight, Bergold the owl had flown several times over the general area, looking for Brom’s group. The desert and savannah were crisscrossed with tire marks, but no concentrated pattern to suggest the Alarm Clock had ever come that way.
In the tentative light of morning, the party galloped down the road hoping to run into another sign of artificial interference, a distortion or a nuisance. Roan hated that feeling of constant anticipation, as if someone was going to jump out from behind a tree at any moment and shout “boo!”
“There may be a problem ahead,” Bergold said, poking his head out of a cocoon of map sheets. He was human again, after a good night’s sleep, although he still had big round eyes and downy hair. “About three miles from here is a crossroads.”
Roan noted three other routes intersecting their path. One turned west, but the other two, north and east by northeast, were possibilities. “And then again, we might find more indicators.”
“Certainly we may,” Bergold said, with an encouraging nod.
Automatically, he handed the map up the line until it came to Colenna, who folded it neatly, and stowed it in her handbag.
The older woman’s mudcloth dress looked slightly different that day, as indeed did she. Her skin was darker, and her hair was piled high on her head. The effect was very fashionable. She was a remarkably good traveler, and Roan could tell that Leonora was learning a lot by observing her. When they reached the next town, he would have to make certain Leonora communicated with her family and let the king know where she was. It was odd that no message had caught up with them yet. He knew Felan had sent several communiqués back to Mnemosyne.
“Look, there’s a man sitting at a desk,” Leonora said, as the crossroads came into view.
“Hold!” Spar said, reining in before the man, who was dressed in a dinner jacket and black bow tie. He held a neat sheaf of paper in his hand. “Sir! Have you seen a large group of people pass through here? They would have been riding motorcycles. You know, bicycles with engines?” Spar mimed revving handlebars. “Which way did they go?”
The man looked up at them politely. “Good afternoon,” he said. “In our directions today, north, that way, is the main road to the city of Reverie. South, in the opposite direction, leads to the towns of Hark and Lark, and eventually to the main road leading to the capital city of Mnemosyne. Northeast, a scenic road to the Dark Mysteries. West is the main road to the city of Barbandion, passing through numerous small towns. Updates as construction or Sleeper’s whim occurs. Thank you for listening.”
“Listen!” Spar shouted, swinging down from his horse and putting his face very close to the man’s. “Did a large group of people ride through here with a covered litter? Which way should we go? Did they head for the Dark Mysteries?”
The man looked at them blankly. “Good afternoon,” he began, shuffling his papers. “Your directions for today. To the north . . .”
“He’s only a signpost,” Roan said, disappointed.
“Of all the useless imbeciles . . .” Spar growled.
“He’s not an imbecile,” Bergold said. “He isn’t even a person. He’s a noninteractive, specific information source. It simply means we have to decide for ourselves where to go. Which way did they turn, do you think? Towards Barbandion?”
“Doesn’t feel like it, sir,” Lum said, squinting at the western turning. “I think it’s this way.” He looked at the signpost, who regarded him with a friendly expression but offered no more information. Spar pointed up the road.
“Look, sir, we want to know—”
“Good afternoon, said the signpost amiably. “To the north . . .”
“Never mind!” Spar shouted. “I heard you the first time!”
“No need to yell, dear,” Colenna said.
“I can’t help it. I feel as if I’m sleepwalking.”
“I think everyone’s is still groggy from dinner last night,” Misha said, yawning widely. “Let’s stop and have some lunch.”
“You’re always hungry, aren’t you,” Colenna said, fondly. “You’re still a growing boy.”
“Just taller,” Misha said, patting the top of his head.
“Lunch is a good idea,” Roan said. “I’m hungry, too. Felan, you’ve got our supplies.”
They walked the horses to the northeast side of the crossroads where lush grass grew. As soon as Roan took out Cruiser’s bit, the horse pulled up mouthfuls of fodder, and tossed his head eagerly. He welcomed the break. Roan found he was walking with a side-to-
side roll as if he was still in the saddle. It was warmer here than it had been farther south, a relief to his aching muscles.
“I’ve got something special for lunch,” Felan said, showing the first signs of animation Roan had ever seen in him. He flipped out a cloth with a flourish and set it on the ground full of dishes, napkins, and flower vases. “You’re going to love it.”
The others all gathered around the picnic cloth. Bergold spread a napkin over his tidy shirt front and tucked the tip into his collar.
“Here we are! It’s lamb stew.” Felan produced the steaming dish proudly from a basket. “My mother’s very best recipe. It took a while to turn the herbs into the ones she used, but there you are. Enjoy it!” Felan set down the casserole and lifted the lid. The steam that issued from the food was fragrant, but heavy.
“Lamb for lunch, too?” Bergold asked, surprised. “We had lamb chops last night. Surely you know from the Books of Concordance that mutton is a soporific. It makes you drowsy. We need our senses sharp, not dull, lad. You should have bought chicken. A good bit of rooster wakes you up nicely.”
“Mutton was reasonable in Hark, and chicken was outrageous,” Felan said grumpily, setting down the pot lid with a clatter. “If you don’t like it, change it. Surely you can countenance altering your food,” he said to Colenna, who opened her mouth and shut it, refusing to allow him to bait her into another argument. But this time Spar leaned in between them.
“Listen to me, you pup,” he said, shaking a finger under Felan’s nose. “I may only be an old soldier, but it seems you’re pressing your luck to the point where not even a Divine Intervention will save you. You don’t have a nice bed you can settle down on for a nap, so mind your tongue.”
“What else did you buy?” Misha asked, politely. “Perhaps we can save the stew for later tonight when we are ready to sleep.”
With ill grace, Felan offered his marketing basket. All the food he had bought was as boring as the mutton. There was a large container of egg salad, unornamented loaves of bread, mild cheese, and a tub of boiled celery salad.
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