Dreamhunter Duet: Dreamquake Part 14

Nown pointed at a single skin on the ground nearby. "When the train came, I flung them over onto the far sh.o.r.e. One burst."

"d.a.m.n."

"And you've lost your pack and bedroll, Laura."

"Yes."

"Then shouldn't we go back?"

"Oh, no! Let's go on to the Doran property. Rose said there was an orchard. I can steal some fruit. We should at least take a look In to see where those rails have gone."

Nown picked up the surviving water skin, then Laura, and began to make his way around the sh.o.r.e of the Inlet.

Near dawn they crossed the ironwood trestle over the braided channels of the Sva mouth-without encountering another train. Then they turned toward the back of the Inlet, walking on the hard-packed sand beside a channel through reedbeds, where the warmth of the previous day was still trapped in the thick fur of stalks.

At sunup they found the Dorans' jetty, and the beginning of the narrow-gauge railway. A little while later Laura spotted the orchard. She asked Nown to put her down and sprinted toward the trees. She could see cl.u.s.ters of apricots and black plums with a white bloom on them.

But before she reached the orchard, she ran through the border and into the Place. She swore. Her voice came back at her instantly, a single flat reverberation, from a ma.s.s of crumbling gray landforms that rose abruptly about a quarter mile from the hummocky meadow where she stood.

The Pinnacles-eroded, crooked spikes-stretched out along the horizon, a barrier made, apparently, from heaps of sculpted ash. The peaks looked as fragile as piles of old leaf litter held together by spiderwebs.

Behind her Nown said, "I can't climb that."

Rose had said there was a gate. Laura guessed that she and Nown had come In beyond where it was, simply by turning off toward the orchard rather than continuing up the avenue of plane trees. She asked, "How much water do we have?"

Nown handed her the water skin, and she weighed it-it was several days' ration. But she was without food.

Laura fished in her pockets and found only a tin of Farry's Extra-Strong Licorice Pellets (Recommended for Regularity). "Oh, great," she muttered. Why couldn't she have been carrying mints or barley sugar? She said, "I'll have another nap here, then see how far we can get on this much water and without food." Laura stared at Nown, her finer-limbed and slightly less overbearing sandman. "And I suppose I could send you on farther to take a look for me."

"You could," he said.

"We'll see."

"Yes, we will see what you decide," he said.

Laura hadn't expected him to respond at all. And she was even more surprised when he expanded. "You are the one who needs to eat, Laura. And you are the one who needs to know."

Perhaps he was chastising her for saying "we"-saying it and not meaning it, because she was the one with a mission, and he only had to look after her. She said, "Are you angry with me?"

"I'm never angry."

"Then I don't understand what you're trying to say."

Nown was silent, and Laura knew he was thinking because the iron sand gathered in his eye sockets and on his brow. After a time he said, "If you send me to look, you may not be satisfied with my report. You and I see everything differently."

Laura nodded. She was only partly paying attention while casting around her for a bit of ground without b.u.mps, somewhere to bed down. The gra.s.s was in very bad condition, not just flattened but shredded. As she scuffed at the humps on the ground, Laura listened to Nown once more giving examples of things he saw. Because she was listening with only half an ear, it took her a while to realize that he was almost singing. Singing without a tune.

"You are a web of light," he said. "You are the shape you are. Trees stream upward, gra.s.ses lance, fire billows and makes a flaw of light. The sea is where there isn't anything, but gannets go like spears into it, and fly up again from nothing-"

"You made a poem!" Laura said.

"-sometimes with a fish," Nown concluded, less poetically.

Laura chose a relatively even patch of bare ground. She asked for the water skin, swallowed a few mouthfuls, and lay down. She yawned till her jaw joints cracked. She tried to remember the poems she'd learned for examinations in elocution lessons, and those she'd learned at school. She lay with her eyes closed and recited the few fragments she knew by heart. "A slumber did my spirit seal; / I had no human fears ..." And "She is coming, my own, my sweet; / Were it ever so airy a tread ..." Then, as she drifted off to sleep, she heard Nown repeating it all back to her, word perfect. And she thought, "He really does remember everything I say."

Laura woke later, in the Place's unchanging light. Nown was standing sentinel beside her, facing west, the direction from which people could most likely be expected to appear. She got up, said, "Stay here," and wandered off to find a bush to squat behind.

Instead, she found a grave.

It was a long, low mound, of the same size and shape as earth piled up on a fresh grave.

Laura shouted for Nown. Her shout echoed from The Pinnacles.

Nown came at a swift run. He saw that she wasn't in any danger and stopped beside her, anxiously searching her face till he noticed the direction of her gaze.

They contemplated the grave together.

"Why would anyone choose to be buried in the Place instead of being taken back to their family?" Laura asked, haunted and horrified. "To their family," she thought, "and trees, gra.s.s, rain, day and night, church bells and birdsong."

"This might not be choice, Laura."

"Do you mean that someone was murdered? But this isn't a secret grave. It's here in plain sight-even if only dreamhunters and rangers can see it."

"There's no marker."

"No." Laura's skin was clammy and her scalp tight. "Nown-could you see if there was someone alive in there? Could you see their ... web of light, under the earth?"

"No. I can't see the gannets once they go into the water. I couldn't see your body in the river, only your head, and your arms moving in and out as you swam."

Laura moaned.

"Are you thinking of your nightmare?"

Laura clenched her jaw and nodded once, sharply.

"Shall I dig it up for you?"

Laura grabbed her sandman's arm, though he'd made no move to start digging. She shook her head. She didn't want to see any corpses. Since gra.s.s didn't grow in the Place, there was no way to tell how long ago the earth had been piled up over whatever lay beneath it. "Let's just go," she said. She turned away to find somewhere else to make herself comfortable. She didn't look back. She didn't see Nown pause, long, his gaze apparently penetrating the disturbed earth as if, perhaps, he could see what lay there.

Who lay there.

3.

HE GATE TO THE Pa.s.s THROUGH THE PINNACLES WAS CLOSED. THERE WAS NO ONE BEYOND IT ON GUARD - NO ONE ANYwhere around. The gate was made of black iron, a plain, workmanlike thing, bolted together and set into two short walls of mortared brick. The walls were pressed right up against the sides of the pa.s.s.

The Pinnacles themselves were perhaps only a hundred and fifty feet high, but steep and unstable. No one with any sense would think to set foot on their mealy gray slopes. There was no gra.s.s or scrub on them. It was as though they, like the grave, had come into existence after the gra.s.s had grown (and had stopped growing), as if they had bubbled up through the ground and set, a belt of brittle peaks.

A length of chain was wrapped around the joined sides of the gate. The chain was fastened with a padlock.

Laura put her face to a gap in the bars and looked along the pa.s.s at a road sprinkled here and there with hunks of fallen earth but otherwise swept smooth.

Behind her Nown said, "If you step out of the way, I'll break it open for you."

Laura took several steps back. Nown seized hold of the bars and began to shake the gate, pulling back and thrusting forward with his whole weight. At first he moved as if he were a body with muscles; then he began to move faster than any human body could. The gate clanged and boomed. The noise set off slides on the sides of the pa.s.s. It looked as if The Pinnacles were melting. Laura glanced around but saw no one. The din the gates were making would be audible for miles.

Finally, in the racket, there came a sharp, metallic crack. One of the hinges had broken, so that half of the gate sagged. Nown said, "Can you climb that?"

She nodded.

He picked her up and boosted her into the gap. She scrambled, then lowered herself over the top of the gate, hung on for a moment, and dropped. She backed away and waited for Nown to join her. He tossed her the water skin, then swarmed up the slope of the bars and tumbled over, landing with a thump that shook the ground at Laura's feet. He got up. They stood still for a moment, listening to pattering falls of earth. Before them the surface of the road was no longer smooth but blistered with debris.

Nown and Laura began along the path, she now and then jumping and scuttling aside from small rushes of dislodged pebbles. They walked softly for fear of shaking down the walls above them. They didn't speak.

Laura thought it was reasonable to a.s.sume that the gate was closed only for safety, when The Pinnacles Pa.s.s was in poor repair, or when the Body was transporting materials for the secret railway of Rose's theory. So, Laura realized that, because the gate was closed, she and Nown were likely to encounter other people-making repairs or carrying rails. At any moment, they might round a corner and run into a party of rangers hurrying back to see what had made all the awful noise. She should have a plan in case someone appeared. Things had been going badly-she'd lost her bedroll, her food, one water skin; she'd missed the fruit; and Nown had lost part of his feet-though the ones on which he was walking looked almost exactly the same, if a little smaller. She should decide what to do if she and Nown did run into rangers. She racked her brain. Eventually, she spoke. "Nown?" she asked.

"Yes, Laura?"

"If we meet any rangers, could you-um-render them unconscious?"

He was silent.

"Could you-?"

"Are you sure?"

"Unconscious. Yes." Laura was annoyed. Nown was acting like a responsible adult again. "Do you have any other suggestions?"

Nown was quiet for a long time, then he said, "You could shout at them: 'Run for your lives, my nightmare has gotten loose!'"

Laura laughed. It was silly but seemed less chancy than her plan.

Her sandman added, "I'm not sure that I know how hard to hit a man to make him unconscious. I could try putting a hand over his mouth, but then I could deal with only one man at a time." He sounded practical.

"All right. We'll try your idea. Maybe that should be a contingency plan if we meet another dreamhunter or ranger."

"Even your friend Sandy?"

Laura fell silent, thinking of her unanswered letters. She was going along with her head down and so missed the branch in the path. She stopped only when Nown called out to her. She looked up and saw that he was standing beside another closed and locked iron gate while she was paces along the open path.

The path they had already traveled had twisted and turned so much that Laura had lost her usual vague east-west orientation (the feeling that, since she was on this border of the Place, and facing In, Tricksie Bend lay somewhere west on her right-hand side). Laura was sure that the path she was on was the trail from the map she'd studied. A trail that led to Sanctuary Valley, a spread of open gra.s.sland containing a handful of commercial dream sites, the only official destination beyond The Pinnacles, and the only reason the Regulatory Body maintained a pa.s.s through those dangerous peaks. There'd been no sign on the map Laura looked at that the trail branched anywhere beyond the gate. And yet Nown was standing by another gate, which blocked the way onto another trail.

This gate had a sign on it: DETOUR ROUTE. CLOSED APRIL 1905 BY ORDER OF EUGENE PARKER, CHIEF RANGER.

"Break it open," Laura said.

The second gate was far stronger than the first, and Nown had to resort to rus.h.i.+ng at it, cras.h.i.+ng into it with his shoulder. The trail at this point was so narrow that even though Laura stood in the middle of the intersection, the myriad slides set off by her sandman's impacts on the gate spilled debris right to her feet. Every hillside was s.h.i.+vering and shedding stones and earth. The air filled with gray dust. Laura closed her eyes, covered her mouth, and crouched down, coughing. She felt the wind of Nown's swift pa.s.sage again. There was a louder crash, the squawk of iron tearing, the singing rattle of a chain unraveling, a series of ringing clangs, then nothing but the bubbling whisper of crumbling earth.

Laura staggered up and peered through the dust, her eyes streaming.

Nown was extracting himself from the fallen gate. He turned to her and held up the broken chain, which appeared to be giving off a fine blue smoke, quite distinct in the dust-filled air. "Smoke, without sparks," he said, apparently impressed. "And the old saying has it that there is never smoke without fire."

Laura laughed, then coughed and pulled her s.h.i.+rt collar up over her mouth. She went to her sandman and pushed him forward. He stepped onto and across the fallen gate, then turned back to give her a hand.

The supposedly abandoned detour route was narrow, its sides so close together that they seemed to arch over the trail. It was gloomy in the winding pit of the pa.s.s. Because there was no direct sunlight in the Place, there were never any shadows, only degrees of bright, misty obscurity. But here, between the close walls of The Pinnacles, shadows seemed to have pooled, a thin stain of gloom.

Laura followed Nown, one hand against his back, which was warm, as if, in his recent furious activity, the grains of sand in his body, chafing together, had woken heat. He felt the same as he did when sun-warmed. It was rea.s.suring and kept Laura from-from whatever it was that seemed to live along that squeezed trail.

The dread Laura felt seemed alive, and to come from outside her. She'd felt it earlier, when she'd stood looking at the grave on the border. She had thought then that her dread was only the memory of the nightmare Buried Alive, and of the howling, thumping, flower-covered grave in The Water Diviner, the dream she'd caught with Sandy. But the atmosphere in the abandoned detour trail was exactly like that of the grave. It had a sense of something stopped, and powerless, and profoundly miserable, but still there, like the afterlife of despair.

"I hate it here," Laura muttered to Nown.

He said, "I hope I won't have to break another gate. The walls are too close." Then he spun around, gathered her into his arms, and carried her. She closed her eyes and pressed her face into his neck.

After only another half hour, Nown came to a halt. He stood so still that it was as though he'd become inanimate, a real statue. Laura lifted her head and saw that he had stopped before a platform built of timber and bolted steel, and topped by some kind of apparatus. Laura wriggled, and Nown set her down.

There was a cage on the platform, a chest-high box covered in steel mesh. It had a gate at the front and rods rising from its top corners. The rods joined in an apex above the box. There was a hook attached to the apex, and the hook was locked to a cable.

Laura tipped her head back to follow the cable up from the platform to another identical platform, diminished and distant on the leveled summit of a high pinnacle.

The rangers had built themselves a cable car.

Lying around in the widening of the trail before the platform were chains, a small pile of rails bundled in thick straps, large, heavy canvas sheets with steel-reinforced eyelets at all four corners, and all sorts of other signs-an overlapping melee of boot prints, greasy rags, dropped work gloves-that rangers had been hard at work here lifting loads to that summit.

"The winch has two handles," Nown said, "with double grips on each. Four men can work it at one time."

Laura saw that he was right. She stood quietly for a moment, thinking. The cable car looked very st.u.r.dy. Nown was as strong as four men-at least-and could probably manage to winch up the slope as much weight as the cable could bear. She was slight. She'd be safe. She would only have to go to the top and take a look. Then she could come right back down.

Although Laura was thinking of a quick trip and a little look, she said to Nown, "May I have the water skin please?" Her words came out with brittle politeness.

"No," he said.

"Nown!" Laura stamped her foot, sending up a small puff of dust that hovered around her ankles. "Look-there's probably no way down the far slope. Or, I mean, there is probably another cable car and no one to wind it for me. You don't need to worry."

"If there's no way down the far slope, you won't need water."

"You're supposed to do what I say!" Laura said.

Nown didn't reply to this.

"May I just have a drink then?"

Nown pa.s.sed her the water skin. Laura screwed off its copper cap and took a long drink-more than she wanted or needed. She replaced the cap and wrapped her arms around the skin, cradling its slos.h.i.+ng, damp bulk. She knitted her brows at her sandman, then turned on her heel and went up the steps onto the platform. She opened the gate on the box cage, stepped in, and fastened it after her. "Now you will winch me up there," she said.