Waking in Dreamland (27 page)

“Well done, everyone,” Roan said, turning in his saddle. But he had spoken too soon. Felan, the last to pass through the gap, brushed a tree band with the edge of his sleeve. Roan only half-heard the clang, as he and all the others were repelled hard enough to send them tumbling off the road toward another group of trees. Head over heels they rolled, caroming into protruding rocks and each other, causing meadow flowers to light up like candles. Roan scrambled to his feet, then turned at the princess’s scream just in time to see an object like a triangular gate swinging down toward them. It caught them hard on the backsides, tumbled them helter-skelter into a very complicated tree clump, which scattered them in several directions. Rocks, hillocks, and even bushes were surrounded by the bands of force. Anything they touched shot them across the meadow again. Helplessly, they ricocheted around like marbles.

“Stop moving,” Bergold panted. “Grab anything. Stop. Hold on.”

Roan managed to clamber to his knees as Leonora was catapulted toward another of the triangular gates. It opened back, preparing to deal her a mighty swat that would send her flying. He sprang, making a tackle just in time, and landed half on her, half on Golden Schwinn. He helped her up, and they stood clinging to one another for a moment. Schwinn leaned against their legs, emitting a creaking whimper. The gate screeched forward into its original position, as if disappointed.

“Are you all right?” Roan asked. Leonora nodded, clutching the bicycle handles. She was quaking. As soon as he was sure she could stand alone, he ran to help the others.

Bergold and Misha had managed to catch hold of one another’s legs like a live hoop. As they rolled past Roan, he stood ready, then pushed them over so the hoop fell on its side, bringing it to a halt. The two men sprang to their feet, and Bergold reasserted his normal, rounded body type.

“Whew!” he said, patting his belly. “There’s no advantage to being a beanpole like you.”

Misha grinned, and the three of them split up to save the rest. Spar was caught between two clumps of trees. They threw him back and forth, like a giant tossing a bag from hand to hand, accompanied by deafening jingling and clattering. Roan rushed at him while the guard captain was in mid-air, and brought him to the ground beyond the reach of either copse. Together, they rescued Colenna, trapped in the exact center of a triangle of ringing bands. She stood with her arms wrapped around her body, afraid to move. With Roan’s help, Spar extended long arms into the enclosure, and plucked her out. She clung to him for stability.

“What are we looking for?” Roan asked, when the party had reassembled at a safe distance from the nearest band.

“The gates,” Bergold said, casting around. “If this is a true Arcade Pinball dream, we have to pass through a pair of gates to get out of here. From the data I’ve read in the Akashic Records, the ground tends to slope downward toward them. That’s a clue.”

“There’s a downslope that way,” Lum said, nodding toward the southwest. “And along that way, too. I got tossed about there a bit, so I know.”

“Which way, then?” Spar asked Roan.

Roan studied the land. The ground was packed hard under the light sward of grass. There’d be no trace of Brom in this fold in reality. They would simply have to find the trail again once they got out of here.

“That way looks most likely,” he said, pointing down the long axis of the meadow.

“Now, don’t you touch anything else,” Spar told Felan. The young man glared.

“Do you think I did that on purpose?” he demanded. Spar just looked at him.

“Success!” Bergold cried, pointing ahead. Before them, at the bottom of a long, gentle slope, were two triangular constructions, banded like the trees, and studded with glowing flowers. Roan eyed them. As he approached, the gates started to move closer together.

“We won’t make it,” he said. “The gap will be too narrow to slip through.”

Just as he said that, the gates reversed their motion and drew outward again, but colored rocks with lit flowers rose from the earth in their path, preventing a clear run.

“It’s rhythmic,” Misha said. “See that? If we time our dash properly, they won’t touch us.”

“Everyone be careful,” Bergold said. “I don’t want to go careening into any more trees.”

The noise near the paddles was almost overwhelmingly loud. Whenever one of the party stepped on a new patch of ground, more flowers and trees lit up, accompanied by jangling, clicking, whistling and the now familiar clanging. All these factors were meant to confuse intruders. Roan was concerned that they would distract him from dashing safely between the gates. It also worried him that he couldn’t see what lay beyond them.

“Shall I go first, sir?” Hutchings said, squaring his shoulders until he looked more of a mathematical construct than a man.

“No,” Roan said. “I will.” He stepped astride Cruiser, who was dancing at the noise. Roan observed that there was a moment when it was possible to get all the way to the gates without hitting a single band. It would take very careful timing. Steadying the steed with the pressure of his knees, Roan took a deep breath, and started pedaling.

As soon as he began to move, the gates started to edge towards one another again. The gap narrowed more and more until it was less than six feet wide. Roan pumped harder. If his observations were correct, then it would reach its perigee moments before he reached it, and would be increasing again when he passed through. If they were wrong, and it kept closing, he’d be trapped between the paddles. An impact at that short a range might easily break his back.

All seemed to be well, until he rode over a shallow depression in the turf. Cruiser bumped right out of it, but the pressure appeared to have triggered some kind of reaction in this strange forest. A round pillar as wide as a house sprang up from the ground between him and the gates. Cruiser squeaked in alarm and reared high on his back tire. Roan struggled to control the steed, wheeling him in a circle to avoid falling off. They veered around the banded pillar, which jangled loudly at him. The gates had opened as wide as they would go, and were closing again. Roan put on a burst of speed, wove between the glittering rocks and hummocks, and hurtled between the gates into the darkness.

At once, the ground dropped away from under them. Cruiser let out a shrill squeal. Roan hung on tightly to the handlebars. They dropped several feet, where Cruiser bumped to a stop on a smooth floor. Roan looked up, and realized the mouth of the pit was perfectly round. He hadn’t been hurt at all, although the fall almost made his heart stop. He opened his mouth to shout a warning, when Felan fell in almost on top of him.

“Phantasms!” Felan swore, clutching his steed’s frame. He landed upright, and the surprised bicycle bounded to a halt.

“Look out,” Roan shouted, pushing Felan off the spot where they’d been standing. The rest of the party slapped down one by one into the pit, heralded by more jangling, sounding like music played so loud it distorted the very atmosphere in the pit.

“My stars!” Bergold said, as soon as his steed stopped bouncing.

When the last person arrived, there was a fusillade of clicking, and the ceiling lit up with enormous red and yellow letters: “revO emaG.” Roan couldn’t read them. Then he realized that they were backwards.

“It says ‘Game Over’!” he said.

“Good!” Bergold said, pleased. “We’re free.” The sound of clicking continued on, and the senior historian listened with dismay. “Oh, dear. That sounds ominous.” More letters appeared. Roan read “emaG eerF” on the ceiling.

“Run, everyone,” Bergold shouted. “We’ve triggered a free game!”

“Oh, no,” Colenna said, hopping onto her steed. “I’m not going through all that again. Which way?”

Now that Roan’s eyes were accustomed to the dark pit, he could see the shadow of two tunnels that led off the main chamber. He shone his bicycle lamp down them. They looked equally uninviting, but a loud rumbling started to come from the tunnel on the left.

“Come on,” he said. “I don’t want to find out what that is.”

He led the party through the tunnel on the right, another perfectly smooth, perfectly round passage, until they came to a slotlike opening in the earth. At the top, Roan heard the sound of falling rain.

“I knew it was too good to be true,” Spar said, pulling his hat brim down to his eyebrows. “That Arcade thing took us right out of our way, didn’t it? The only question is, did we fall, or were we pushed?”

“Brom, do you mean?” Colenna asked. Bergold frowned.

“That would mean a huge amount of power,” he said. “The Arcade is a natural phenomenon. It comes and goes throughout the Dreamland. Could he harness something like that?”

“I think it’s possible,” Roan said. “Or if he couldn’t before, he can now. It may be that the influence of the crucible is increasing.”

“That’s terrifying,” Leonora said, her eyes wide and blue. “We have to catch him before they get so powerful we can’t stop them if we tried.”

“On, then,” Spar said, grimly, leading them out into the rain. “Where to?”

The only prospect that offered itself was a single-lane track that wound its way up into the hills above the pinball valley. It ended at a road that led back the way they had come. They followed it.

The first turning they took, on a slight downhill slope, led them to a dead end at a rockfall on a jutting lip of land that overlooked unbroken forest below. Neither Roan nor Lum was satisfied that they going the right way, though there was enough distortion in the countryside to justify the attempt. They dismounted beside a blank cliff-face with a pool pouring out of a small crack at its base. It appeared as if at one time wheeled transport with the right kind of tire patterns had passed by here, but left no clear trace of where it had gone after that. The trail stopped near the cliff as if it had been turned off. There was even half a footprint. Roan tested the gravel beside it with a toe. His mark filled at once with rainwater. Nothing had passed here in the last several hours.

“Could they have flown from here?” Colenna asked.

“I doubt it,” Roan said, peering this way and that from under his hatbrim. “If they didn’t fly before, they must have some good reason for continuing to travel on the surface. But where did they go?”

“The land could have shifted,” Misha said, examining the tracks. “I’ve seen something like this in property settlements, where each partner gets half of everything.”

“I don’t think Brom negotiated a divorce right here in the middle of Wocabaht in the rain,” Felan said, scornfully.

“I don’t like it around here,” Leonora said, huddled in her cape. “It feels . . . spooky. There’s something wrong with the land.”

“That’s the distortion,” Lum said. “It seemed stronger up there, before we turned off.” He pointed up the last rise.

“Then they stayed on the road,” Felan said impatiently. “We went the wrong way. What about it?”

Roan was puzzled. “I would swear that we did come the right way,” he said.

Bergold lifted the edges of his big poncho cape, and unfolded the map. Water slicked off it in sheets as he held it up for them to see.

“Well, this is the only big road for several miles east or west. They have to take it to continue northward. If we stay on it we can catch them.”

“My corporal isn’t stupid, as you’re all implying,” Spar said, with an impatient gesture. “They might be here somewhere.” He wiped rain off his face. “Guards! Start looking for clues.”

“Chief!” Maniune shouted. The yell woke Taboret woke out of a sound sleep. She sat up in alarm. Everyone else had turned to look at the big mercenary, who was standing sentry at the door. “They’re outside! They’ve found us!”

“Roan? Here?” Brom’s long lab coat fluttered behind him as he hurried over to see. He put an eye to the peephole in the right-hand door. “Tenacious man. They’ve managed to get by the first puzzles we set them.”

“They’ll try to get in,” Acton said. He drew his sword.

“Put that thing away,” Brom said, with his face against the door panel. Acton resheathed the sword, but not without an expression of resentment. “They don’t know we’re here. This stronghold looks like a mountain on the outside. It’s pure chance that they’re here.”

“Yeah, but they’re
looking
.”

“We ought to take ’em out,” Maniune said. “Finish them now.”

Taboret stared at the mercenary, horrified. Finish off the princess? All those innocent people?

“Nonsense,” Brom said, to her relief. He pulled away from his observations to glare at his henchman. “An inappropriate use of force? How then will we continue with our little game?”

“Yeah, but look at them,” Acton said, staring through the left-hand peephole.

“What about them?” Brom said.

“What if they sniff us out? We ought to, like, dissuade them.”

“Well, then,” Brom said, with amusement in his voice if not in his face, “let us use subtlety. Why use a Buick when a flyswatter will do?”

“What’s a Buick?” Acton asked.

Brom waved the question away impatiently. “We’ll make minor use of the gestalt. That should be adequate to drive them away before they discover our creche. Dowkin, Doolin, you’ll do. Come here.”

The Countingsheep brothers, in the middle of another one of their private grievance sessions, looked up.

“Why us?” Doolin asked. “How come we have to do extra work? Why not everyone else?”

“Because you have sufficient strength to carry out a minor task. Come here! Now!”

The brothers, looking more like a pair of donkeys than usual, shuffled over to Brom. The two mercenary soldiers moved well out of reach. They were learning respect for the power of the gestalt, as they saw it demonstrated again and again. Taboret had begun to understand the two men better. Where she had been terrified of them as bullies before, in a remote part of her mind—which she guessed belonged to Brom—she knew that they could be mastered by a show of confidence.

Reluctantly, Dowkin and Doolin offered their joined right fists. Brom covered their hands with his own, and the white cloud appeared overhead. Taboret felt a drawing upon her own energy, and concentrated on giving instead of resenting the interruption to her sleep. She did think hard about making the effort a benign one that wouldn’t hurt the princess or anyone with her, and hoped her will would have an effect on the results.