The Dream Compass [Book 1 of The Merquan Chronicle] (5 page)

Loo was stretched along a branch of a spruce tree like a large cat dozing. From the tree, she could meditate on the world. The river whispered below—so far down that its red-brown banks appeared misted slightly, even on such a clear day with a shocking blue sky. To the east, the forested gorge walls marched stern and erect; to the west, the walls relaxed and widened, and the river spread into a finger lake, pushed up by a dam miles downstream. The sunlight, mottled by the branches above, warmed Loo’s bare skin, countering the cool breeze pressing steadily at her face.

Out of habit, Loo’s gaze followed a gust of wind traveling up the canyon wall in a dark, fluttering swath across the sparse treetops. She imagined diving into the burst of wind at just … the right … moment … there. The gust rattled the branches of her spruce and quickly subsided.

Her attention returned dutifully to the waterfall emptying into the foot of the finger lake directly below. To the untrained eye it was a pristine monument to nature, untouched by mankind. But the boulders bordering the river at the top of the waterfall were the first clue to the work of a calculated hand: They formed, a little too neatly, a funnel that channeled the river into a concentrated, powerful stream of water and foam gushing over the waterfall’s crest. More discreet, however, nearly invisible through the spray, was a cylindrical paddlewheel spinning under the cascade, a turbine whose shaft disappeared into the gorge walls on either side.

A dark flickering caught Loo’s eye, and she squinted. There was something in the protective net spanning the length of the turbine, not a log or branch. Something, some things squirming in the manmade spiderweb. Maybe something for dinner?

Loo drew herself up to her knees, dragged her harness out of the branches below, and strapped it to her shoulders and waist. She slipped her arms through the loops under the pair of skin-covered wing frames and twisted the grab-handles to check the steering action. Satisfied, she bounced once on the branch, dived headlong into the gorge, and spread her wings.

In more casual circumstances, when pride could be a factor, Loo would spend two hours circling her way to the gorge bottom, finally coming to rest only as the result of fatigue or boredom, not for lack of skill at catching new updrafts. But this was urgent, possibly, and she cocked her wings back and tilted into a steep downward spiral, covering the same distance in minutes.

As she fell, Loo opened her lungs and released a repeating birdlike howl: “Oo-ooong, oo-ooong, oo-ooong…. “The echoes caromed back from the north and south gorge walls and overlapped each other. To those who knew the language, it was a warning, probably more of an alarm than the situation merited. But to Loo the resounding call added another layer of exhilaration to the rapid descent, quite worth the admonishment that she risked from the elders later on.

Loo ended her flight with a dive toward the center of the waterfall, an attack she cut short with a sharp dip up to kill her air speed. She settled lightly on the outermost rope of the net guarding the turbine—a precise move she hoped had been noticed from the banks of the lake. When she unbuckled two shoulder straps and removed her arms from their loops, the wings fell flat against her back, giving her the look of a large, slender insect. Loo crouched and grabbed the netting for balance. The ropes, slippery and green with algae, were woven hemp the thickness of her wrists.

A dozen yards down the slope of netting the white column of water pounded through the rigging and sent up through the ropes a perpetual vibration. Loo quickly surveyed the captives: several pack llamas wriggled helplessly but safe, their cries inaudible amid the water thunder; a figure under the cascade lay inert, possibly already drowned; and a monstrous human, a woman easily twice Loo’s size, was awkwardly crawling toward the net’s rim. She wore clothes—impossibly confining garments, Loo observed—in the way of all outsiders.

So the woman giant was the only immediate problem: For one thing, she carried a rifle in one hand as she scrambled and slipped and clawed up the net. Second, and most important, once she reached the edge of the net would she have the poise not to fall into the turbine and damage it? Loo, not willing to take this risk, pulled a leather sling from a narrow slot in her right wing frame. From inside her right cheek she drew a green, moist object, which she placed in the sling’s pocket.

Loo’s lilting bird cry “Oo-oong” caught the giant’s attention. The crawling woman’s head jerked up and she pulled her matted red hair out of sight’s way. Oddly, the face brightened, seemingly out of relief or recognition rather than surprise. Loo had thought her prey might bolt for the net’s edge and dive. There was a whish-snap of leather as Loo flailed the sling, and the outsider scratched at her neck, where a tiny, slippery thing clung to the area of her jugular. The large woman pulled the object away and had barely enough time to focus on it—a minuscule snake with oversized fangs—before she collapsed into the slimy netting.

Loo returned the sling to its slot and stepped nimbly down the net, quite adjusted to the quivering of the slick ropes. She took the rifle first, having to pull the large woman’s clammy fingers from the stock. Loo found the little snake in the woman’s other hand, stroked the tiny animal until it seemed numbed, then returned it to the wet warmth of her cheek. With her free hand, Loo set about a complex series of maneuvers to turn her limp captive around. She yanked first at one soggy pant leg and then the other until, finally, the giant’s legs were elevated higher than her head. In that position, with one simple slice at the neck, the body would drain itself neatly into the lake. It would be many pounds lighter when it came time to lower it to the beach.

From a slot in her left wing frame Loo drew a slender blade. It was a flier’s knife, thin, lightweight, and easy for a careless user to break—nothing near the heft of the cutters to be found in the town below. Loo took pride in the longevity of her knives, and this one had lasted her months despite all of its use. The giant body lay facedown, and Loo planted a bare foot on the woman’s shoulder, forcing the chest back and exposing the neck. She studied the hammy arms and large breasts rolling under the wet shirt. No waste in this, she thought. Never could this one fly.

There was a leather collar in the way, with a smaller strip of leather wound over it several times. Inured to the peculiar costuming of the outsiders, Loo worked her knife under the collar with no thought to saving it. She pulled up, and the strapping separated and fell away.

As Loo crouched to make the final, neat slash across the throat, she spotted something on the woman’s chest that stung like an electric charge. It was a red metal rectangle, undoubtedly a sign of the Government, pinned crookedly to her shirt. Suddenly near tears, Loo stood and glanced up and down the banks in fear that someone might have witnessed her mistake. The slim knife fell from her hands, bounced on a green rope, and fell into the whirling turbine.

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Pec-Pec sat cross-legged on the cot in the back of his truck, surrounded by the intricate tapestries. His head was nodded, the braids forming curtains on either side of his face.

Outside were the rolling plains that stretched south of New Chicago. On the other side of a nearby rise ran a ribbon of ruined interstate highway. It was barely passable during the day; now, with the sun falling, there would be no more passersby, no sane ones anyway.

A slate of low, swirling clouds was sliding across the early summer sky unnaturally fast. Occasionally a twisting gray cone would lower itself from the flat cloud layer, a crosswind threatening to grow into a tornado. Pec-Pec had seen the baby cyclones and decided to ignore them, pulling the truck doors closed.

Balanced before him on the stretch of cot canvas was a large bullet, standing on end five inches high. He had purchased the ghastly banger just this afternoon. Driving out of New Chicago, in pursuit of Anton Takk, he had passed a row of salvagers’ booths—box after box, bin after bin, table after table laden with metal and plastic scraps of a civilization long since erased from the continent.

He had fallen instantly ill as he passed the booths, as if there were a putrid gas in his stomach, and he stopped. Instinctively, he pawed through the mounds of tarnished and dirt-caked objects, feeling sicker the closer he came. In that way, he homed in on it quickly, at once repulsed and yet determined to find the foul source—a single, ugly rifle bullet among the bent gears and nameless twisted shards in the bottom of a cardboard carton.

“Ah doubt she’d a bang off, even if you’d a found a proper firing instrument for her,” said the salvager behind that table, a ragged woman with a cancer eating at her nose.

Bullets not far different from this one, newly manufactured ones, had done much harm to his people—land wars, mostly, and enslavement for the Southland farms. But this vile piece had seemed to have an evil unto itself, burning cold as he rolled it between his fingers. What it meant, he did not know yet, but he had to have the bullet. Pec-Pec paid the hag twenty centimes.

So now he meditated over the bullet in the back of his truck. He had surrounded it with four tiny clay figures, carefully sculpted and painted, human-shaped dolls scarcely an inch in height. The burly, red-haired doll with the bulb nose was the wanderer named Nora Londi. She was the key, the spearhead. The slender, rangier doll with the graying beard was the antsy Northlander Anton Takk. He would have to follow Londi, and in so doing would draw out the other two—the grayhead with the mangled hand, Rosenthal Webb, and the young one, the blond assistant Gregory. He had chosen each carefully for their parts like a chef devising a new recipe. It was not so much a scientific method of selection. It was more like satisfying an inner hunger that he could never put into words.

Pec-Pec stared at the circle of dolls around the bullet, hoping for a meaning. His eyes did not move from one to another, but he took in all of the figures at once, as a whole.

The minutes lapsed into hours, and still the magic man did not move. As he stared, a series of shooting stars streaked across his vision until he saw nothing but a mesh of fine tracer lights. The lines then melded together into a pulsing ball of glowing red, rhythmic—bright, then dark, bright again, dark.

When Pec-Pec’s vision finally cleared that night, the pulse remained in the form of sound, a throb so low that it was almost beyond human perception. It faded until he could not distinguish it from his heartbeat.

And Pec-Pec had his answer—not a big one, a small answer. Rhythm, sound. Music.

The magic man fell to his knees on the truck floor and pulled a jar from under the cot. He spun off the top, pulled out a tiny wad of clay, and rolled it in his hands. He pinched into the clay a head, two arms, two legs. With a small wooden stylus he began shaping a face he did not yet know.

Music. Hmmm. Where would he find a musician willing to lay siege to the Government?

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It was a thundering and wet morning when Anton Takk pulled off the road—two lanes of asphalt chunks, gravel, and mud—and followed red-on-white hand-painted signs to the Moberly Inn. Takk’s eyes burned. The rolling hills were becoming more pronounced in this territory, and a lapse in concentration could be fatal. The driver’s-side window was lowered two inches (the temperature had risen ten degrees since he had left New Chicago), and the cool air and spray of rain on his face were all that kept him from sleep. He rolled down a drive even more poorly maintained than the highway he had just left. Thorny branches slapped at the front of the truck, leaving teardrop-shaped leaves to be brushed aside by the windshield wipers.

When Takk chugged into a hilltop clearing he found what appeared to have once been a farmhouse. The ancient central structure was a staid two-story wood frame building with several haphazard additions spoking off from it. A barn on the far side of the house seemed to serve as the motor shed. On the barn roof, a haphazard antenna wavered in the wet wind. There was a fuel pump and a squat water tank with thick steel legs sunk into concrete. A truck with Government license plates was parked beside the barn, flanked by two jeeps, a van, and a pickup truck. Takk was not as far from the mainstream of traffic as he had hoped.

“I’m Moberly,” said the woman behind the counter inside. “Ain’t no ‘mister’ here t’all … Mister.”

“I really am sorry,” Takk said, leaning his duffel against the front of the counter. “I need a room for a while.”

There were four tables spread about a large threadbare Oriental rug in the front room, which had once been a living room. Three of the tables were occupied with people consuming breakfast—grits, ham, eggs, coffee, biscuits. Takk heard a snicker behind him, but he did not turn to look.

“You’re driving Supply, are you?” asked Moberly. She had streaks of gray in her black hair, not unlike Takk, and wings of fine wrinkles flaring out from each eye.

“Yes.”

“Fifteen centimes a day. Room five’s down yonder.” She pointed toward a dark hallway leading into one of the newer additions. She handed him a key, and Takk decided to use it this time.

Takk unzipped his pants and withdrew the wallet. He counted out three five-notes and lay them on the counter. Moberly’s eyes rolled toward the ceiling. She quickly folded the notes in half and discreetly tucked them into a pants pocket. She cocked her head toward the door behind her.

“If yer needin’ a spare fuel pump, we’ll have ta junk around for a minute in the workroom,” she said, disappearing through the door. “Come around,” she shouted.

Fuel pump? The truck was running fine. Or had some one been tampering with it already? Was this another shakedown of some kind? He grabbed his duffel and followed the woman into the work room. Moberly closed the door behind him.

“How you got this far, Mister, I dunno,” Moberly said. “But you’re a runner and a liar and a thief.”