Dreamseeker's Road (42 page)

“No!” Liz shouted. Then: “Oh, God, there he is!”

Alec whirled around. Liz was already running. He paced her shadow, overtaking her halfway up, as they both strove to reach that figure who, scant seconds before, had appeared in the sudden gap between the barrow's stone portal and one massive doorjamb, looking like nothing so much as a wraith escaped from ultimate night. It—David—had stared out, stepped forward—and collapsed, lost, for the nonce, to sight.

The ground shook again. Alec was flung forward onto all fours, in which mode he scrambled the remaining yards to the summit. Liz was right beside him, as was the cat. Dimly—distantly—he heard the trampling of hooves, the neighing of frightened horses, and the Morrigu screaming at them from the base of the hill: “Fools!”

Alec ignored her. Reality had tunneled down to instinct and reflex and the single desire to drag his best friend to his feet and get as far as they could as fast as they could and trust luck, which seemed so far to be their ally, to see them through.

And then he was off the turf and onto the quarter arc of pavement before the now-closed door, and Liz was with him, and they were kneeling by David's either side, where he sprawled facedown, shirtless and barefoot upon those cold, trembling flagstones, while the whole world growled and groaned as the tectonic plates of dreamstuff ground each other to glowing dust.

“Is he…?” Alec panted, reaching for David's nearside arm to hoist him up.

“Thank God, no,” Liz sighed, as she followed his example. And then he caught the slight rise and fall of his buddy's shoulders. Yet that breathing was shallow—so shallow—and escaping in something between a gasp and a moan.

“Fools…fools…fools…” came the Morrigu's frantic chant—or was that merely an echo of her earlier cries, or thunder playing mimic from cosmic spite?

Somehow they got David onto his knees. A nod at Liz, a jerk, and they wrested him to his feet. He swayed there unsteadily. His eyes were closed, though his lids twitched constantly. His breathing was better, however, and his lips worked. Between gasps, he managed to rasp out what might have been “…weak.”

“Yeah, man, I know,” Alec gritted, as he dragged his friend forward. “C'mon, Davy,” Liz urged in turn. “Oh, Davy, come on—you've gotta! I know you're weak, but we've gotta get outta here, gotta go just a little farther.”

“Yeah,” Alec took up as they reached the edge of the slope and started down.

The ground promptly shook once more, tumbling them into a jumble of arms and legs a dozen yards down the hill. When Alec righted himself, it was to see the fire-tree in the east rear up again—this time with a crackling roar and the scent of ozone—and the far more welcome sight of the Morrigu on horseback charging toward them with two other mounts in tow. The third was nowhere around. Likely she had shied.

Alec regained his feet and pulled David up with him, though he recalled neither grip, tug, nor effort. Liz took up the slack as they stagger-ran toward their Faery companion.

The Morrigu met them halfway down, and a moment of utter confusion ensued in which it was determined that David wasn't able to sit a horse alone, and that the Morrigu was the only one competent to manage someone on the verge of unconsciousness
and
a near-panicked stallion at once. In the chaos another horse bolted. The Faery's Word of recall was lost in a clap of thunder, and then it was too late.

By the time they were all reseated—David ahead of the Morrigu, and Alec hanging on to Liz, with the cat squeezed in between—lightning had conjured the world-tree twice more, and the aftersparks had claimed three-fourths of the horizon, leaving only the west unassailed. Fewer ridges than ever showed to the east—south of which the gate to the Crimson Road lay.

“If we can gain Dreamer's Gate before this World dissolves, we will have a little time,” the Morrigu shouted, as they galloped down the hill.

“Be faster to head straight overland,” Liz advised, nodding to the right. “We cut across this field and a couple of pastures and save a quarter mile.”

“And maybe our lives,” the Morrigu added—and dug in her heels.

Though he mistrusted horses like the plague, Alec had no choice but to hang on for dear life as Liz did likewise, and the next few moments were the most frightening—and jumbled—of his life.

Reality had gone insane. The lightning was constant now, and so intense it really was like a vast strobe light distorting everything: landscape, distance, even Liz's head and their mount's flowing mane as it stretched out its neck before him. Nor was that all: the ground shook constantly, and the rise and fall of the terrain further screwed his sense of location, as did the spinning clouds and the glowering mountains to the right, which themselves had now begun to grow lines of dancing blue fire around their edges. The east was almost gone: the black-light nothingness having eaten its way much closer in just the last few seconds, so that it now seemed centered no more than one valley beyond that which cupped this World's Sullivan Cove.

Never mind that he'd just seen a cow acquire a crackling halo around her horns, that quickly spread across her body—until, in a clap of thunder, she dissolved. A tree beside the Sullivans' house did likewise. Black light showed in the earth where its roots had been.

The Morrigu was still pounding onward, however, with Liz and Alec right behind. And as best he could tell, there was only one pasture to go, and then a fence to vault and they'd be on the road to the gate. Already he'd caught a flash of crimson uphill to the right. Or maybe that was a trick all this pulsing light played on his poor tortured eyes.

Never mind the jolting and the effort it took simply to keep his seat—no smooth-gaited Faery steeds now!

And then they were careening downhill, and the barbed wire fence at the bottom was rushing toward them, and he had just time to recall that he'd only ever jumped a horse twice in his life, and both had been on Faery steeds too, when he felt the horse's body tense and stretch and fly smoothly into the air, only to touch down far harder than he'd expected.

Almost he flew from his precarious seat, and was certain his tailbone would never recover; but by the time he'd snatched a stronger hold, the mare was scrabbling for footing as she sought to follow Liz's frantic yanks on the reins and turn uphill.

Blessedly, they made it, and the gate was there: no more than an eighth-mile distant.

But the speed of dissolution was increasing rapidly, and worse, seemed to be eating its way toward their particular piece of road faster yet, as though it sought to cut off their escape. It had crossed the main highway now, and was reaving the woods where, in another World, a certain Straight Track lay.

But there was the trilithon!

—Only…something was wrong! No darkness laced with bloodred chasms lay beyond; rather, that landscape was lit with white so bright Alec could scarce bear to look at it. Yet even as it rose up before them, he saw a shape moving in there: moving quickly—

—A shadowy figure on the back of some kind of preposterous huge-horned animal galloping straight toward them. And even as the Morrigu yelled out a frantic “Ride for your lives!” that figure burst through.

—And resolved into a wild-eyed Aikin Daniels astride something between an elk and a moose.

“Turn now, you fool!” the Morrigu hissed, and kicked her stallion savagely.

Alec heard Aikin swearing at his unlikely steed, and the crunch of gravel as he got it slowed, and then, much more clearly, a desperate, “Oh bloody fucking shit!” and then they were all charging the gate, with the Morrigu in the van.

By the time the Faery had passed through, Alec had realized that his glance back at Aikin had shown the Viking dream that had transfigured Sullivan Cove now on the ragged edge of dissolution. The lightning was a constant flash, and every building, tree, and blade of grass wore Saint Elmo's fire around its edges—but
this
phantom ornamentation also consumed. The mountains across the road were gone, the road thin as gauze in spots, and the house a blue-black silhouette limned in cobalt neon—and then…
not.

Lightning struck a tree right in front of them. The cat yowled. Their horse reared. Alec slipped back over its haunches, grabbing for Liz frantically.

No good. Fabric tore. Liz screamed, and then he was falling, and all he could see was the aft end of a white horse rising to fill the sky, and Liz fighting to retain her seat—

—And failing, as she too slipped off.

And then he struck the ground with a force that drove the air from his lungs and made him see stars dance across a stroke of lightning—whereupon Liz landed atop him, evoking yet another constellation. His butt hurt like hell, as did his hands where he'd scraped them raw; there was also something up with his elbow. Claws dug into his chest as Eva found him. Liz kicked him as she struggled to rise.

A dark shape loomed above: Aikin, reaching impossibly far down to yank Liz to her feet, even as she tugged at his own torn and bloody hands.

“Run, you fools!” the Morrigu cried from safety. “Forget the beast! Make for the gate—or die!”

Alec did, vaguely aware that the ground felt uncomfortably insubstantial, as it had not when he'd landed on it, and how his every step left a web work of glowing cracks.

And then the gate rose ahead, and hooves were thundering past, and Liz was gasping along beside him, and the cat was clutched to his chest with his one good arm.

Abruptly he was under the stone arch—and through. The thunder vanished; the world turned cold. “Thank God,” Liz gasped, slowing to a stagger. “We made it!”

“No,” the Morrigu called back, “we did not!”

Chapter XXVI: The Last Gate

(The Crimson Road—no time)

“What do you
mean
we didn't make it?”

Those were not the first words Aikin would've chosen to hear from Liz after far too long on the back of a beast he'd never in his wildest dreams expected to
see,
much less ride. Certainly not what he'd have chosen after dealing first with the weirdness of the Tracks themselves, then with a screwy stone gate that had jerked him from twilight into the insane glare of an endless blasted white plain fissured with crimson, all beneath a sky whose impossible brightness transcended color yet was lit with flickers of something brighter still. Never mind another gate beyond which black, blue, white, and whatever color lightning was strobed across what
might've
been a version of Dave's folks' farm, and then passing that gate and seeing his friends, only to be ordered to a return engagement in what he'd termed the Fucking White Hell!

“Yeah,” Alec echoed Liz. “What's the deal?” It was strange, Aikin realized distantly, to hear conversation again. “Oh crap,” Liz added, with a groan. “The horse didn't make it.”

The Morrigu reined her steed to a halt and twisted around to regard the three who followed her: one on elk-back, two plus a cat panting along afoot. “The dreamworld is all but gone,” she announced. “Before long, dawn will devour this place as well, and if we are here, we will also be devoured.”

“Huh?” Aikin blurted out, likewise halting his mount as he finally blinked reality back to some sense of stability; his eyes—shoot, his whole head—aching from the glare and the noise and the insistent pounding of his interminable ride. “Oh Jesus!” he added, having finally gotten his act together sufficiently to make a body count and come up missing Dave—until he'd noted the figure lolling ahead of the Morrigu; clad, it seemed, in some odd mix of the running shorts he'd worn earlier and baggy checked sweatpant-things.

“Welcome to hell, preacher,” Alec called, quoting
Paint Your Wagon.
He sounded, Aikin thought, totally fried.

“Been there, done that,” Aikin retorted from reflex. “What's up with Dave?”

“Too much dreaming,” Alec breathed, gaze flitting from Aikin to his cervine mount and back. “That's the short form. We'll save the long one for later, if you don't mind. 'Scuse me while I catch my breath.”

“Yeah, but is he gonna be all right?” Aikin persisted. One look at Liz staring fixedly at the witch-bitch showed that she, at least, was bloody concerned.

“He gave his life to raise the dead,” the Morrigu retorted. “He gave all but the last drop of blood he could give.”

“Christ!”

“—Gave all he could too,” the Morrigu observed, unexpectedly.

“And us?” From Liz.

“We double up—or triple up—and maybe we reach the gate, and if we do not, this brightness waxes until it transcends light, and then this place will vanish, and us with it, until it manifests next year to point the way to some other poor fool's dream—without us.”

“But—”

“We must
ride,
mortal, if any are to survive! One of you sit behind me, the other go with Aikin! I dare not shape-shift here.”

Liz and Alec exchanged glances, obviously torn between choices. Alec took a deep breath. “You're lighter,” he told Liz. “You go with the Morrigu, so her horse won't have to carry as much.” Without waiting for reply, he jogged toward the elk, his face a mask of despair as he realized just how high the beast's back was.

“Grab hold and jump,” Aikin advised, and when Alec caught his hand, jerked with all he had. It took two tries, but Alec made it. And as soon as he'd settled into place, the Morrigu kicked her stallion to a gallop.

Aikin had no choice but to follow, but even flat out, the pace was less than his mount had dared once or twice—which was the first thing that had gone right in ages. And at least it bought him leisure to puzzle out what in blazes was going on. “Got your rock back,” he called over his shoulder to Alec, patting his vest where the ulunsuti lurked in an inside pocket. “Pot was gone, though.”