Through the Ice (11 page)

Then he became aware of something. Her shoulder, under the pink frill of her nightie, was rigid. In fact, it was cold—freezing cold.

He touched her hand. It was as stiff as an icicle. He clasped it in both his own, horrified, trying to warm it—and felt cold liquid. Aghast, he stared.

Her hand was melting. It was nothing but ice.

"Ferne!" He reached across to touch her face. It melted in the pattern of his fingers, becoming misshapen.

She had turned to ice!

He lurched up and ran to his mother's room. She lay similarly, and he knew without touching her that she too was frozen. The shadow of the glacier had fallen across her, and enchanted her into ice.

It had turned the whole town to ice.

Then he felt the shudder of the glacier, as it overran the town, crushing the buildings. The town was lost, but maybe he could still warn the world. For somehow he knew that the ice was destined to bury all of it, unless they rallied and stopped it immediately.

There was a short-wave radio transmitter in his room, from his hobbying days. He rushed to it. If he could call out, alert the hams, so that some sort of resistance could be organized—

The house shuddered. The ice was right up against it, pushing over the building! The power cut off, and the house began tumbling over, slowly.

Seth scrambled out through a shattered window, dropped to the ground, and ran clear just as the house collapsed. But there was nowhere to go! Mountains of ice surrounded the town, and the remaining houses were being crushed. He couldn't get away! He couldn't warn anyone! His world was being destroyed, and he couldn't do anything about it!

But at the same time he knew that this didn't make any sense. This wasn't the Ice Age! A whole world couldn't be destroyed like that! Even if there were enough ice, it would move so slowly that there would be plenty of time for action. This was a dream, and he knew it—but it still terrified him.

He reached out to the others.
Get me out of this! be
thought.

He felt a hand clasp his, and/

/The sky was turning red, like sunset, but this was no normal closing of day. Something was coloring it. There was a tremendous amount of dust aloft, as if the worst sandstorm of history was in the making. The red was reflected in the roiling surface of the nearby lake, beyond the vague outlines of houses.

Seth squinted, to keep out the blinding dust. He sighted along his own arm to see what was beyond, because he still held someone's hand.

It was Tirsa. "Oh, no!" he exclaimed, the dust seeming to muffle his words as they emerged. "I got out of my dream—and into yours!"

She became aware of him. "Oh, Seth, I'm so glad you're here!" she cried. "Pull me free!"

"I can't! My dream is just as bad! Ice is destroying the world!"

"But look at this!" She used her free hand to point.

Seth looked up—and saw what was causing the dust. There was a planet in the sky, a monstrous ball of rock that loomed larger even as they watched. There was going to be a collision!

Her nightmare of being suffocated and crushed, deep in the earth. This was similar, but enlarged to encompass the whole world! Just as his dream of the icy lake had became a dream of a glacier destroying the whole town, and the world. They had not escaped the awful sendings! In fact, their mental linkage only seemed to expand the scale of disaster.

He had drawn her out of it before—but could he do it again? He had to try!

"It's a dream!" he said. "We're in our tent! All we have to do is wake! Concentrate with me, and step out of it!"

They tried. He felt her effort, as a surge of emotion, and he joined in with his. But nothing happened. They remained standing in the swirling dust, while the sky reddened further, and the oncoming planet swelled larger yet, its craters and cracks manifesting. Now it filled a third of the sky—no, two fifths—and it was growing faster.

"We can't escape it!" Tirsa cried, appalled. "My world is to be destroyed, and I can save neither it nor myself!"

"I couldn't save mine either!" Seth admitted. "Everything was turning to ice! But I called to you, and caught your hand—"

"And joined my world, no better off!" she finished. "It is to be crushed under rock, a collision!"

Somehow they both knew that when that happened, it would be over for them, in reality as well as in the dream.

"But maybe we can catch another hand!" he said. "There has to be some way to wake up, before—"

"Before we get killed in our dreams!" she finished. "Nefarious is doing this, I'm sure! Trying to kill us in our sleep!"

"We won't let him!" he said, but it was bravado, for they seemed to be powerless against this awful thrust of the distant sorcerer. "Maybe if the four of us can link again, we'll be too strong for him."

"Yes! We must link up!"

They concentrated. Seth's free hand flailed, but swept through nothing but dust, while the onrushing planet filled half the sky. He felt the awful tug of its gravity, and knew that the end would come much faster than the beginning.

Then Tirsa connected. "I've got a hand!" she exclaimed. "I think it's/

/They were back in flames, but not as close as they had been when they had rescued Vidav from his prior dream. This was Vidav's vision, surely; Tirsa had caught his hand and drawn them into the other dream.

Seth looked. He was holding Tirsa's left hand, and her right was holding Vidav's left. They formed a line of three, standing on the pavement of a city street.

It was the surface of the world, but it was burning. There was a forest fire in the distance, beyond the city. But the houses were burning too. Columns of smoke roiled up, thinning, merging above to become one huge dark haze that smudged out the sky. Seth had seen the fringe of a forest fire once, and it had been something like this: hell on Earth.

"The lake!" Seth cried, somehow knowing that the layout was the same as on his own world. It had been the same in Tirsa's dream, he realized: the town, the lake, the forest. They were all from the same place but different planes. "We can get away from the fire there!"

They ran for the lake, hands linked. They knew they had to stay together, and their physical linking in the dream was the only way they could be certain of their mental linking beyond it.

But already the fire had reached the lake, and was spreading across it. No—it was the water itself that was burning, Seth saw with amazement. And, at the edge, the ground itself! This whole world was burning!

"I know it's a bad dream," Vidav said. "Crafted for me, bringing the fire I fear. Nothing will put it out; it will burn our flesh too, as if it is dry wood. Something else I could fight, but how can I fight when my weapons and flesh burn too?"

"We have to escape the dream," Seth said. "That's the only way we can fight—to unite, and in our strength defeat Nefarious!"

They concentrated again, as the fire closed on them. Seth extended his left hand, seeking Rame, who he knew had to be close. As close as a nearby sleeping bag. Somewhere, not visible here, but in the adjacent plane of the dream—

He brushed something. He moved his hand back, and found it another hand. He clasped it, and/

/The wind smote them with gale force. Rame's dream was of air, a storm, a tornado, sweeping the faun away.

But this was worse. The wind was rising rapidly, sweeping up not only dust but sticks and bricks and water. The lake was being scooped out as if by a giant hand, its water splashing into the sky. The bushes and trees beside it were being ripped out of the soil. Buildings were flying apart. The wind was not circular in the manner of a tornado; it was moving straight across. This was a wind that was passing across the entire world!

Seth did not need to question Rame. He knew that this was the faun's dream of destruction, an extension of his fear of the air, the storm that had nearly killed him. They had thought it enough just to escape their prior dreams, but Nefarious, having zeroed in on them, was now giving it all he had. This wind would rise until it blew away the land itself, and made of the planet nothing but a great cloud of dust, a nebula in space.

"Now we are linked!" Seth cried. "Now we must make our stand—together! We must fend off this sending and wake, and that will save us!"

"But how can we do that, when Nefarious controls our very dreams?" Rame asked, the wind making him almost inaudible.

"Well, united we have four times the strength we have separately. That may be enough to overcome his power."

"Yes," Vidav said. "Unity is strength. We are four, and he is one. We must overcome!"

They curved their line into a circle, Vidav and Rame clasping hands to complete it. The wind battered at them, but they drew together, concentrating. "Wake, wake!" Seth cried.

"Wake, wake!" the others chanted.

But the wind only tore at them harder, threatening at any moment to sweep them off their feet and throw them into the sky along with the other debris. It wasn't working.

Seth struggled to think of something better. He had honed his martial arts ability to a fine degree, both on his home plane and here in training. What was a person to do when confronted by superior strength?

That gave him the answer. "Yield to it!" he cried. "Make it worse!"

"What?" Rame asked, dismayed.

Seth didn't have time to explain. "All of you—concentrate on intensifying your dreams! Destroy your planes! But keep linked!"

Tirsa started to protest, then read his intent. "Yes! Make it worse! Do your utmost!" she cried.

Vidav and Rame exchanged a glance, then shrugged. "We're doomed anyway," Vidav muttered. "Might as well make it fast."

They concentrated, each on his or her own horror. Seth pictured the glacier not only covering his world, obliterating everything on it, but piling up so high that the very planet was offbalanced and spun out of orbit, wobbling toward the sun. He knew this was impossible, in real life, but this was his dream, and he could dream what he wanted. Maybe the ice would overrun the sun itself! "Flaming iceball!" he cried. "Frozen nova!"

"Burning cosmos!" Vidav agreed.

"The stars blowing away!" Rame cried.

"Crushed universe!" Tirsa exclaimed.

There was a jolt. The dream-framework shuddered, then flew apart. Fragments of ice and rock mixed with windblown fire, swirling erratically.

"It's off balance!" Seth cried. "Now push it back! Back where it came from!"

"Ah!" Vidav cried, comprehending.

They concentrated again, willing the dream, full-strength, back toward its origin. It was as if it were a world-size medicine ball; when they pushed together, it moved, slowly, then faster, until they heaved it away from them. It would fly back to the one who had sent it, Nefarious, who would then have to deal with the destruction unleashed within it.

They had overcome the dream, not by opposing it directly, which was beyond their ability because it had been formed of their own fears, but by pushing it the other way. Like an aggressive man who, braced for action, suddenly finds no resistance, it had stumbled, losing its bracing. Then they had pushed it back, and it had gone. They had, almost literally, gotten around it.

Seth knew they had won. Their effort might not hurt Nefarious directly, for he surely had ways to deal with his own sendings, but it signaled their effective counter to his attack. If he sent another sending, he would get it back in his face, like a huge stone that bounced back at the thrower. His chief weapon against them had been countered.

Thanks, Seth.
It was Tirsa's thought, suffused with genuine relief and a certain dawning warmth.

He sank gratefully to sleep, knowing that this time his dreams would not be horrors.

It seemed only minutes from the time of the dream to the time Seth woke, but the sun was beginning to rise. The others were still asleep, and he could understand why; it had been a most adventurous night, even if their bodies had not moved at all after the first siege of dreams.

He climbed quietly out of the sleeping bag, crawled past the others, and walked outside. The day did not seem as nice as the prior ones, but he realized that this might be because he was no longer in the comfort of the castle. There were numerous clouds, and a cold wind was rising. Or was it an echo of the wind of Rame's dreams?

Seth peered at his reflection by the lake's edge. He looked awful! He had hardly looked in a mirror during the last week, and he was now working on a burly beard. It was time to do something about that.

He reached into his pocket for Rame's knife. It was magically sharp, though it never cut the pocket itself, and would probably suffice for shaving. He knelt down at the edge of the lake and dunked his head in the chill morning water. Hoo! What a sensation! If he hadn't been sure whether he was awake before, there was no doubt now!

He brought the knife up to his cheek and began to shave. The impromptu razor stung, but it felt good to clean off the beard.

"You have a lovely face," a voice said behind him. "I never knew there was one, under that hair."

Seth looked through the ripples in the water at Tirsa's reflection. The alternate bands of her hair were overlapping as the water moved, but then they became clear. What a pretty sight she was, even in morning disarray!

How many times must I chide you about the obvious?
But the current of annoyance was muted this time, if not actually playful. Her prior aloofness had eased significantly.

"Good morning," he said, continuing with his uncomfortable task. "Are the others ready to leave?"

"After we eat."
What do you think it meant?

Seth had to keep straight what was spoken and what was thought. He doubted that there was any spy to listen here, but he appreciated her caution. It was best not to speak aloud of their experiences of the mind.

I'm not sure, now that I'm truly awake,
he thought.
We all dreamed of the destructions of our individual worlds. This couldn't really have happened, because something just as bad would have occurred here. Anyway, Rame dreamed too, and this is his world. So I can't take it literally. But I can take it as a warning, or as Nefarious's effort to kill us in our sleep. Something like it well may happen if we don't succeed in our mission.