The Soul Weaver

CHAPTER 10

Sometime after freeing Paulo and before the two of us rode off together, Vroon and his friends had vanished. Perhaps I hadn’t thanked them properly for saving my life twice in one night. I dared not wait around for them, so, as the moon rose, I set a brisk pace through the winding lanes to the highroad, and then headed northward at a canter. We didn’t stop until dawn.

As the light crept over the countryside, we searched for a place to rest and water the horses. I picked a spot where the road crossed a wide, sluggish stream, riding a few hundred paces upstream along the marshy bank in hopes of finding cleaner water to fill our empty waterskins. As soon as we dismounted, Paulo settled himself on a hummock of grayish grass that seemed to be the only dry spot within half a league of the stream. From the scowl he had worn since we had left Windham, I saw that asking to share the seat would be of no use.

So once I had filled the waterskins, I stood stupidly in the mud, stroking Jasyr’s neck and rummaging in my saddle pack, hoping to find my cloak and something to eat. The morning felt chilly, as my shirt was soaked and muddy from my adventures in the damp Windham gardens. All I found in the pack was one spare shirt - an ugly, useless green silk thing my mother had dug out of Tennice’s attic - a change of undergarments and leggings, the silly-looking hat I’d worn as part of my “disguise,” a blanket, two cups, one spoon, a small pot, and my flint and steel. No cloak and not so much as a dry biscuit to eat. Then I remembered I’d left the cloak in the gatehouse at Windham wrapped around a pile of leaves. And as for the food -

“You won’t find nothing in my kit, neither,” said Paulo, as if he had read my mind or heard my stomach rumbling. “All in the gray saddle pack. You threw it into the corner of the gatehouse. Remember?” He wasn’t finished being angry with me yet.

“We’ll just have to figure out something. Stop in a village and buy what we need, I suppose.” I turned out my pockets and found exactly twelve coppers. About enough for half a dozen mugs of ale or three loaves of stale bread. I glanced at Paulo.

“At least you didn’t steal from the Lady before you stabbed her,” he said. “I gave her the silver from selling the horses and the pony trap.”

No point in arguing guilt or innocence again. “So you don’t have any money, either?”

“Not a copper. Looks like if we want to eat, I’ll have to go begging. Most people will give you something if you look sorry enough. Bad as I look, that ought to be easy… unless they see you with me, wearing your own mother’s blood.”

“I’ll go hungry before I beg a stranger for a meal.”

“Then you’ve never been hun - holy great demons!” Paulo just about jumped out of his skin when Vroon popped out of a willow thicket just beside him, bowing and chuckling. The other two followed right after him.

“We’ve come to accompany you on your way,” said Vroon, gaping at a pair of moorhens skittering across the sluggish water. He waved his small hand away from himself and his friends. “Pay us no mind.”

Tired of Paulo’s surliness, I tried asking Vroon a few of the questions that had been bothering me, such as where he’d come from, why he was looking for me, and how he got into my dreams. But no matter how loud I spoke, the three acted as if they couldn’t hear me. It was so annoying that I soon turned my back on all four of my companions.

But Paulo wasn’t finished with his grumbling. “Too proud to ask for help. That’s nothing new. Serve you right to starve.”

“We can’t be seen until we’re farther from Windham. The Prince is not going to give up finding me so easily.” But he wasn’t likely to come searching until my mother was all right… or dead. Even as I voiced the thought, I was disgusted with myself. Vile… what kind of creature was I even to think such things?

“That leaves stealing, then, if we’re going to eat. You’ll make a thief of me. Get me hanged or worse. I didn’t steal even when I was a nub in Dunfarrie! Curse this day everlasting!” He threw a rock into the stream so hard it startled a flock of lapwings, who flapped their way noisily upriver, and Jasyr, who almost stepped on my foot.

I dodged the horse, but ended up on my knee in the mud. As if I weren’t wet enough… filthy enough… vile enough… “Blast it all, you pigheaded oaf! Just leave, then.”

“Better an oaf than a murdering sod.”

“I swear I didn’t hurt her. I couldn’t.” Powers of night, couldn’t he understand how I felt about my mother? The two of them - my mother and Paulo - were the only reasons I was a human person. And I didn’t even know if she was alive.

“Cold-hearted bastard… just leaving her like that.”

“What good would I have done her, staying there to get my throat slit? If anyone in any world can help her, it’s my father. You know that better than anyone. He won’t let her die. He can protect her.” I had risked using sorcery to call him.

“Who else could have done it? You had the bloody knife in your hand.”

“I pulled it out of her after she was down. I don’t know why.” Stupid to pull the weapon out of a wound like that. “Everything was dark… confusing. I was walking up to her. I heard the strike” - felt the strike deep in my own gut - “and she fell. I just don’t know. I didn’t see it.”

“Lying coward.”

“Thickheaded dolt!”

We traded insults and curses for half an hour. I told him he should stay here and soak his head in the stream while I went looking for the truth. He told me I wasn’t going to throw him away like a gnawed bone. That got us back to how hungry we were and how ridiculous it was that we didn’t know what to do about it.

Meanwhile, the wide, leathery man and the scrawny black runner examined our horses. They didn’t touch the beasts. Just sniffed at their skin, studied their legs and flanks, their hocks and tails and hooves, and stared into their eyes as if trying to read their thoughts. Vroon was more interested in Paulo and me, poking his head in between us and watching our faces as we yelled at each other.

When Paulo and I finally ran out of anything new to say, we mounted up as if we had thought about it at the same moment and started back along the muddy bank toward the road. Vroon and his friends trailed along behind. As I turned northward on the highroad, the three of them vanished.

Paulo shaded his eyes and stared up the road, as if the three might have just sped away exceptionally fast, rather than disappearing in midair. “Maybe they don’t like our prospects. Looks like the wide one eats pretty regular. Do you figure they’re gone for good this time?”

“I don’t think so. They came for more than just getting me out of a scrape.”

I just had no idea what that reason might be, and I was too relieved at the moment to figure it out. Foolish to get so angry over nothing. Careless. Dangerous. Why did meaningless things bother me so much? It didn’t matter what Paulo thought of me.

Before we’d covered another league, a streak of green light split the air above the road just in front of us. I wasn’t too surprised to see our three friends show up again. But now Vroon and the wide leathery man rode horseback, while the runner jogged along beside us on his long, thin legs.

The brown man offered me a wad of cloth. “Yours?”

I reined in Jasyr and took the bundle. Everyone else pulled up, too, and gathered around as I shook out the cloth. It was my cloak. “Yes,” I said. “Thank you. How did - ?”

“And this to be the other’s?” said the runner in his rumbling voice, holding out a bulging gray saddle pack to Paulo.

“How did you get these?” I asked, suspicious. I didn’t see how they could have sneaked past the Prince or Radele. “Were the people still there? What was happening? My mother… a woman with hair the same color as mine… was wounded. Did you see - ?”

“Great magics were happening,” said Vroon. “We could not see into them.”

Great magics… healing, I hoped. I ignored the hard look from Paulo and tried to stay focused on the present. I could do nothing for my mother. “So you just walked in and took our things without anyone noticing?”

“We are skilled at acquirings,” said Vroon, and the three joined in their now familiar wicked chuckling. “None saw us.”

Paulo had already opened the bag and pulled out a handful of flat biscuits. One was halfway to his mouth, when he stopped and offered it to the runner who was staring at the dry lump with his glittering amber eyes even wider than usual. “Are you hungry, too… uh… sorry, I didn’t get your name?”

The runner waved the biscuit away and bowed his head. His skin glowed blue-black like polished onyx. “No name belongs to me as yet. No gift of a name.”

Paulo took a bite and chewed for a moment, watching the long-limbed man draw circles in the dirt with his toe. “Everybody ought to have a name. In this land we got names even if we’re nobodies.”

“If I could have a name, I think it would be Zanore,” said the runner, cocking his head thoughtfully. “I feel that name. But it has not been granted to me. Perhaps someday, if I live well.”

“Nobody has to grant you a name here. If you want to be called it, then just say so.” Paulo passed me the food bag. “Don’t you think he should be called Zanore if he wants?”

I chose two biscuits and shrugged. “I’ll call you Zanore. Whatever you like.”

The black runner seemed to grow two hands taller right there in front of us. He bowed first to me and then to Paulo, scraping the dusty road with his spiky silver hair. “I am honored beyond tellings by your naming, great Master. And I thank you for your goodwill, Horseman Mighty.”

Paulo turned pure scarlet. “My name is Paulo. Does Zanore mean something special, or is it like mine… just a name?”

“Oh, sir, Zanore is not ‘just a name.’ No name is ‘just a name.’ Names are realness. Hereness. Names are bounded.” He grinned hugely, as if he had explained everything.

Once I had swallowed the last crumbs of biscuit and drunk a bit of the tepid, murky stream water from my waterskin, my disposition was much improved. I offered the waterskin to the leathery man. He was so much wider than his bony horse, he looked like an owl astride a twig as he sat gaping cheerfully at his two friends. “I suppose you have a name you’re interested in, too.”

I would have sworn the red tufts of hair on his brown head wriggled in delight. “Ob.”

“Well then… Ob… I thank you for your help. Have a drink if you want.”

“Honor.” Though he spoke only one word at a time, his words seemed to have a great deal more bulk than other people’s. He declined the water, but he bellowed a laugh and tipped sideways, making the deepest bow he could manage without toppling from his horse.

The three begged us to say what else we might need that they could acquire for us. I didn’t want to be greedy, for I had a feeling that their “acquirings” would be at the expense of some terrified villagers. The two horses they rode, though not exceptional, were surely being missed by someone.

“Nothing just now,” I said. “Unless you could transport us farther away as you did before. I want to go to the dream place, the place you’ve shown me with the black-and-purple sky.”

The three gave a huge, satisfied sigh.

“Ah, not so far can we carry you,” said Vroon, grinning so widely it crinkled the skin over his missing eye.

“You will find your own way there… if you are the one. If not, you will fail.”

“If I’m the one what?”

“The One Who Makes Us Bounded. Who gives us names. His coming is awaited most eagerly.”

“I’ve no idea what you’re talking about. I’ve seen you three in my dreams - you know that?”

They looked at each other with unreadable expressions. “We came searching for the dreamer. For such a long time we have searched, listening for tales of kings and rulers. Following. Hoping to recognize the dreamer. We felt urgently to come to the fallen fastness, and there we find you! You were not fearful, and so we believe you are the one we have been waiting for. You have… ”

“… wholeness,” said Ob. His broad brow wrinkled into deep furrows, as if his thoughts were as ponderous as his body.

Silly. I pulled my cloak around me and nudged Jasyr to get moving.

The day grew warmer. We continued northward. I tried a few more questions, but our companions held their tongues and shook their heads. They just weren’t going to tell me what I wanted. Part of their game must be making me guess.

“So how far can you take us?” I said as the road narrowed and curved into the shadowed ravine between two brown hillsides.

Vroon thought for a moment. “Next topland, anywards. Or mighty treeland sunwards traveling. Or stonewalled fastness coldwards.”

I puzzled at the odd descriptions as we rode in and out of the patchy shadows and sunlight of the rolling hill country. Topland anywards… Hilltops? In any direction? Mighty treeland… A forest, most likely… a big one. Sunwards traveling. East? No, west, following the sun. The forest of Tennebar lay west of us. And there were a number of stone-walled fastnesses hereabouts - fortresses and castles built to control the approaches to Montevial. And coldwards would be north. Comigor was perhaps five leagues north…

Of course! Vroon must have picked up the destinations directly from me, not reading my thoughts exactly, because I’d not voiced them even to myself. But he had offered hilltops because I was worried about pursuit, and we couldn’t see more than a half a league in any direction from where we were. He considered Tennebar because that was the route to the Vallorean highlands where the shepherd’s son had disappeared. And Comigor, because I could not ride these hills without thinking of the castle where’d I’d grown up always afraid, and where I’d first met my mother without either of us knowing it.

The choice was easy. “The mighty treeland,” I said. “Sunwards traveling.” The time wasn’t yet right for going back to Comigor. But a fast journey to Tennebar would give us a terrific head start on any pursuers, putting us two days closer to Valleor and the shepherd’s lay.

“As you say.” And with no more fuss than if they were preparing supper, Zanore jogged up between Jasyr and Molly and grabbed my right arm and Paulo’s left, while Vroon and Ob rode to the outside, taking my left arm and Paulo’s right. Then we fell off the edge of the world again. The last thing I saw was Paulo’s puzzled stare at Vroon and me. And the last question on my lips was answered before I could blurt it out. The horses could indeed come with us, for after some indefinable, unsettling instant. I sat on a nervous Jasyr under the green shadowed eaves of Tennebar.

“Bloody hell!” Paulo and Molly were backing in nervous circles, and Paulo had to use all his particular skills to quiet his big-hearted mare. Truthfully, I think Paulo was more disconcerted than Molly.

“Can you take us across this treeland?” I said. “ ‘Sunwards traveling’ yet again?”

“No more,” said Vroon, grinning. “Your own way must you make. Ob, Zanore, and I will beside you watch, for acquirings you need or guardings. But the way must be your own.” He bobbed his brown beard. “We believe you are the one we hope for.”

“So what do you make of them?” said Paulo, after the three winked out again, leaving us to ride alone through the forest in the bright noonday. “They’re not from Avonar, are they? I didn’t see nobody like them there.”

“No. And they’re not from Zhev’Na, either.” Paulo’s face didn’t change when I said that, but he fixed his eyes on me as if he might see something different if he looked long enough. I watched the road. “No one in Zhev’Na had any deformities. Think of the Zhid warriors, still Dar’Nethi in form, but all very much alike, even the women. Perfect variations of the same mold. Similar in stature and strength. No weaknesses. They never transformed Duke into Zhid. The Zhid considered them too short, too small.” I hated thinking about Zhev’Na, much less talking about it.

“Then are these three from yet another world?”

“I don’t know… though I’m beginning to have an idea.”

“What’s that?”

“Not yet. You’re hard enough to convince of things I’m sure of. Let’s get closer and see.”

“Closer to where?”

“The place where the shepherd’s son disappeared. I think it’s a portal to the world I see in my dreams.”

At sunset, we stopped somewhere in the middle of the forest and made camp - if rolling off a saddle into last year’s leaves and Paulo telling the horses not to go away could be called making camp. It had been two days without sleep for both of us, and little enough for me before that. On that night in Tennebar, we slept from sunset to sunrise, and only at the end of the long night did I fall once again into dreaming. But the dream was as strange as everything else…

When I heard him screaming, I knew I’d best get Jasyr saddled. He’d be wanted within the hour, and me and Molly, too, I guessed, no matter it was the time when nobody but wolves and owls and highwaymen had any business abroad. The moon was half grown and half risen, so I couldn’t claim it was too risky. Never could get myself out of it on that account anyway, but the young master wouldn’t take the horses if it was full dark. He used to want it so, but I pointed out that Jasyr didn’t have no magic in him to make him see better in the dark, and if he was to break his leg, we’d have to put him down. So on those nights we’d run on our own feet down the forest tracks until one or the other of us dropped from it. It was always me dropped first. I’d only had two good legs for a bit more than five years, since the Prince had healed me with his magic, and I’d never yet figured out why running on ‘em had any great attraction.

“C’mon, Molly. Don’t know why you can’t saddle yourself by now, we’ve done this so much.” She blew in my ear nice and warm.

The three of us - Molly and me and Jasyr - would always be in the stableyard, when he came.

“Don’t you ever sleep?” he said. I don’t think he knew how wicked his screams were, or maybe he just didn’t like to think about it.

“Thought it’d be a good night for a ride,” I said back to him.

“You don’t have to.” He always said that.

“You know there’s nothing I like better’n riding - even if it’s the middle of the night.”

Like always, we rode an hour or so as hard as Jasyr and Molly could go. We came to a lake we knew of, and I slowed Molly down to a walk. She had a big heart and good wind, but not as strong legs as Jasyr. We’d cool ‘em down and rest ’em before we rode back. The young master always listened to me about horses.

We let the horses drink and feed a bit while we flopped on the ground in the moonlight. Lots of times we did that and never said a word, but on this night, the young master told me again about his dreams. Before I’d thought about it, I said, “Are you sure…?”

He wouldn’t even let me get the question out any more. “It’s not the Lords. I’d know it. It’s not! It’s not!”

“It’s not!” I shouted, and sat bolt upright, causing a shower of dead leaves to fall all over Paulo, who was waving a knife in the air blindly while trying to extricate himself from his blanket.

“What’s happening?”

“Nothing,” I said, and flopped back against the tree. “The usual.”

“Dreams again?”

I nodded, and closed my eyes against the bright sun, and didn’t mention to Paulo that it appeared I’d been dreaming his dreams for a change, instead of my own. I was going crazy.

We rode west and north as hard as we could get the horses to go. Paulo could coax a horse to do anything he asked, and he coddled and pampered them, staying up every night talking to them, rubbing them down, and feeding them any special tidbits he’d found along the way.

Once the gray bag was empty, Vroon, Zanore, and Ob kept us supplied with food, so we could avoid villages and towns, leaving no evidence as to our course or destination. The three would pop in and out so often that after a while we scarcely blinked at their odd comings and goings. I commanded them to pay for whatever they took with a copper from my dwindling hoard, but they didn’t understand the concept at all. Trading made some sense to them, but when they bit the coins, examined them, and spun them up in the air, they couldn’t come up with any use for them and told me I must be mistaken. I insisted, and, though I couldn’t be sure, I think they complied with my wishes at least in that matter. They still wouldn’t answer any more questions.

On the twelfth day of our flight, we rode into the highlands of Valleor, climbing unending slopes of grass littered with white rock and detouring around a thousand cold lakes and a few scattered sheep lays. The sky stayed thick and gray, and it rained every day. Our boots were sodden and our feet cold, but just when I was ready to beg Vroon to find us dry boots, the three vanished and, this time, failed to return. By the chilly sunset when Paulo and I lay behind a scattering of giant, smooth boulders tumbled on a grassy hillside, observing the shepherd’s lay, we hadn’t seen Vroon and company for three whole days. Paulo’s stomach was rumbling like a herd of oxen.

“It won’t behave,” he whispered, when I motioned him to be quiet. Sound carried amazingly far in rocky places like that. The pounding of a hammer from one of the sheds below sounded as if the anvil were sitting between my feet. The bleats from the flock grazing in the valley, and the gurgling and whispering of fifty trickles of water across the slopes, echoed sharply through the thin air.

We had been watching the lay since early afternoon when I spotted the shepherd - easily identifiable as the storyteller from Prydina. When he had finished mending a holding pen, we followed him home. Both the shepherd and his son carried bows. I didn’t want to test how quick their hands would move if they thought we were wolves or thieves, so I decided we would wait until dark and slip around the dale without bothering them. The moon would be up soon after, and though it was still young, it was big, and the night was clear. It would show us the way to our destination. Then we’d see what we could see.

The sturdy-looking younger man milked the goats, carrying the pails into the sod-roofed hovel that squatted in the middle of the valley. Fine smells floated up from the chimney. When a girl called out that supper was ready, my own stomach growled. The valley got even quieter after the burly shepherd laid down his hammer and went into the house. Paulo and I shared out the last cold, hard bits of a meat pie that Vroon had acquired for us three days before. But the meat smelled bad and we weren’t willing to risk it, so we threw that part away and ate the stale, greasy crust.

As dusk faded into night, the family reappeared only briefly: the girl to empty a bucket onto a little garden and fill it again at a catchpool, the younger man to relieve himself out by the sheep pen, and the gray-bearded shepherd to smoke a pipe. A short while later they were all inside, and the house was dark.

Paulo slipped back up the hill to retrieve the horses, and we led them quietly around the edges of the lay, keeping downwind of the sheep and the dogs. The gibbous moon was huge and yellow over the southeastern horizon, and we used its light to find the stunted fir tree the shepherd had told me marked the entrance to a steep rocky defile. We scrambled up, leading the horses, glad the earthen banks along either side weren’t high enough to cast the treacherous path into deeper shadows. The defile led to the top of a low, narrow ridge that stretched northward.

“Are you sure this is right? This don’t look like any road to anywhere.”

“This is exactly what he described to me. He was very precise. I think he wanted to prove he wasn’t just making the whole thing up. Watch for a patch of junipers that looks like a giant cocklebur. A hundred paces past it, the track and the ridge will angle east. That’s where we start looking.”

And there, where the ridge abruptly joined the shoulder of a craggy mountainside, we found the rock pile and the wide flat rock where they’d found the one-handed boy’s things on the day he vanished.

“I don’t see nothing here,” said Paulo, whispering for no reason as we examined the rocks and the soft flat ground in the moon shadows.

A few scrubby bushes poked out of the rocks. Only a goat could climb up the steep hillside behind the boulder pile, and in every other direction were endless slopes covered with short, stiff tuck-grass, and endless clumps of sheep’s folly, and endless night. No road. No black-and-purple sky. And the stars were their familiar white, not at all green.

“Maybe it’s the wrong place or the wrong time.” What had I expected? I’d been so sure…

Paulo snorted, pulled a scant handful of oats from a cloth bag and began apologizing to Jasyr and Molly for the long hard riding on a wild-goose chase.

Nothing to do but sleep and rethink everything in the morning. I could talk to the shepherd, perhaps, to make sure of the story, the place, the season. It had to be right. I had no other clue.

We rolled out our blankets on the damp ground, and Paulo was snoring in seconds. He could sleep in a tree limb or a saddle… or tied to a stable wall half dead, like that night in Zhev’Na when we’d become friends.

I hated thinking about Zhev’Na. I had lived there only a little more than a year, yet I could still close my eyes and feel the desert sun on my skin and smell the dust and smoke and blood from the Zhid practice fields. Life before Zhev’Na seemed unreal, as if it had happened to someone else - as I suppose it had. Comigor was like a castle in a story. It was easier to recall the flowery scent of Philomena’s ugly apartments than to remember her face. It hadn’t been at all difficult learning she wasn’t my mother. She’d never acted like my mother. She’d never felt it, nor had I.

It was easier to remember Papa’s face - Tomas’s face - though it kept blending into my real mother’s face. The brother and sister had resembled each other closely. I had always liked occasions when Tomas first came home from his travels, because he smelled like horses and leather and the oil he used on his swords. After he’d been home a while, he smelled like Philomena’s bedroom.

I owed Tomas a great deal. He had never known that Ziddari, the Exile, Lord of Zhev’Na, had switched his sister Serf’s doomed infant with his own child. He had tried to be a good father, but I’d been terrified he would find out I was a sorcerer and have me arrested. Ziddari twisted Tomas’s mind for ten years and lured Tomas into a battle that was never his. What would have become of me if he hadn’t thought of me when he was dying and asked his sister to tell me how much he cared for me? Maybe none of this would have happened, and I would be the Duke of Comigor right now, fighting for King Evard, betrothed to the king’s daughter Roxanne, perhaps. That’s what Tomas and Philomena had planned. Or maybe I would have been found out by the Leiran sheriffs and burned to death like my real father. More probably, Ziddari would have discovered the magic that had joined my dead father to Prince D’Natheil and taken me to Zhev’Na anyway. Then my mother wouldn’t have been there to stop me from destroying the Bridge. Enslaving the world to the Lords.

I pulled my blanket up over my cloak and around my back between me and the rock. The night was getting cold. I wished very much that I could talk to my mother. Ask her advice. She was good at puzzles and knew so much about so many things. A few times I’d been tempted to tell her more about how it was with me. But she would have felt awful and sorry, when there was nothing to be done. And I hadn’t wanted her telling the Prince everything; she didn’t like keeping secrets from him. Now I didn’t know if she was even alive.

I sat up long into that night. I’d had more sleep these last few days traveling with Paulo than I’d had on any night since Zhev’Na, so sleep just wouldn’t come. Instead I went over everything again and again, worrying about my mother, and about the Prince, who wanted me dead, and the Lords, who just wanted me.

By the time the moon had crept across the sky and dropped low on the horizon in front of me, my thoughts weren’t making sense any more. I was just staring at the moon that got bigger and brighter as it fell, until it filled the entire span of my vision. As the light swelled and filled me, the world receded. Paulo’s snoring sounded soft and distant. The chilly wind no longer made me shiver, and the hard, cold ground seemed only remotely connected to me. Only the moon was in my eyes… the moon… What had the shepherd said? Tom come late to the hold, and the moon was in his eyes…

“Paulo! Wake up!” Without turning my head, I reached out for him, and his arm seemed farther away than the moon. I felt him stir. Careful not to let anything distract my glance, I closed my eyes and turned exactly a half circle to face the rock at my back. I opened my eyes again… and there was the path of moonlight, leading straight into the hillside. Only the hillside wasn’t there any more. I was looking into another place altogether. Night, yes, but a very different night. The sky was purple and black, and unlike those that burned behind and above me, the stars were green.

“Hurry,” I said, my voice emerging at some vast distance behind me, barely audible though I made no effort to whisper. “Untether the horses; leave everything. Take my hand.” And from that same vast distance, I heard Paulo, answering me. “Good Jerrat, save us! Your eyes are yellow. What’s happened? Are you - ?”

“Don’t worry about it. I can see the way. Hurry. And hold on tight. I can’t feel your hand.”

Moments later, the lightest brush of a feather touched my fingers, and I set foot on the hard-packed road that led into the dream world. His words came so faint that I felt them more than heard them. Oh, cripes. You’re halfway into solid rock… and you want me to come with you. Until I pulled him after, and we stood wholly in the place of my dreams.

“We found it,” I said, my voice quite normal again. Paulo stood quite solid beside me with a crushing grip on my hand. “Welcome to the Breach.”