The Keeping Place Page 13

  I brought myself close to waking as he had done, then tried to coerce a silver cord out of myself. Nothing happened.

  “Must draw on mindstream,” Maruman’s voice whispered.

  I did not know what he meant, for surely the mindstream could only be accessed from deep below consciousness, yet he had remained close to wakefulness. Then I remembered that in Maruman’s strange mind, all levels merged and flowed. I sank swiftly through the levels of my mind—too swiftly to attract the dragon, I hoped—stopping only when I could hear the humming song of the mindstream. I locked myself in balance between the pull to rise and sink.

  I thought of the way the silver light had run up the snaking spirit cord like water up a tube. I thought of how bubbles of past existences rose from the stream and concentrated on visualizing a tiny tributary flowing up toward me.

  At first, nothing happened. Then a silvery thread rose from the mindstream. It moved very slowly toward me, and each fraction of its journey cost me a tremendous outpouring of energy, as if I pulled the entire stream from its natural course. I became afraid as the tendril approached, for to merge with the stream was death, and maybe this was just another form of merging.

  Steeling myself, I reached out a hand to grasp both my courage and the silvery thread. A cold clarity filled my mind, as if I stood atop a mountain buffeted by icy gusts of air. I let the stream flow into me until I felt as if it were running through my veins in place of blood. Heady delight filled me, but instinctively I forced myself to remain passive and very slowly willed myself to rise until the upward urge to consciousness was strong enough to overcome the urge to sink. The thread linking me to the mindstream paid out behind me as I ascended through the levels, thinning until it was no more than the wet glimmer of moonlight on a spiderweb. I became aware of my flesh again and vaguely sensed Maruman’s presence nearby, but I dared not let it distract me.

  I concentrated on calming myself and then tried again to coerce the thread to run from my being. This time, I felt it slip through me and rise like a snake from my belly, wavering and coiling. I had the distinct sensation of the mindstream and all of those levels of my mind that it ran through. It was like hearing the distant prattle of many voices, and I realized this must be what Maruman heard constantly, this mad seductive babble.

  Steadying myself, I felt the distant mindstream flowing upward and spilling light out the end of the cord. For some reason, the gathering whiteness made me think of the soft downiness of Kella’s owlet. I waited until it seemed the form of light was complete—humanoid but somehow indistinct—knowing I must now take the final step and transfer my consciousness to it. I was not sure how to do this, but the light-tyger had opened its eyes when it assumed Maruman’s consciousness, so I willed myself to see through the eyes of the silver shape.

  There was a rushing sensation, and I opened my eyes.

  I gasped, for now I was floating above my body, which slumped awkwardly sideways in the chair before the dying fire. It took some time to realize what I was seeing, because it was not so much a body as a human-shaped shadow surrounded by a shifting halo of light. Everything in the room was thus, glowing in a wash of shimmering color, although far brighter halos surrounded other forms, perhaps because my will was now contained within the detached spirit shape. Though my body’s aura was dullish, it was chiefly gold and a deep violet, with a single flash of white marred by a seam of dark crimson.

  “That is the life you took,” Maruman sent, his voice now quite clear.

  “Life?” I echoed, but even as the question formed in my mind, I understood that the red stain had been caused by my killing Madam Vega when she would have cut Rushton’s throat.

  The halo’s various colors gradually merged into the thread of light that connected me to my sleeping form.

  “If the link/cord is broken, mindspirit will flow into stream and you will be longsleeping,” Maruman warned. “Ride on me. I will fly to dreamtrails. Mornirdragon will not be able to follow/smell/see/distinguish you from me.”

  I moved awkwardly onto the tyger’s back and wondered if in time my use of this strange new form would be less clumsy. I seemed to have no proper feeling for it, but the second I touched Maruman, I felt myself absorbed by his form and grace. He gathered himself, leaped, and went on rising. It struck me suddenly that I had never used my Talent to rise from the point of consciousness before. Always I had descended. How much would our minds be capable of, I wondered, if we only knew them better?

  The air around us was full of colors merging and reforming, but as we ascended, they faded into pure white.

  Then all at once, I was indeed sitting on Maruman’s broad furred back, my hands wound in the ruff of thicker fur at his neck, my legs locked around his belly. We were flying through the blue sky, and the wind tugged my hair and chilled my flesh. I seemed to be naked except for some sort of heavy cape weighing me backward. I would have liked to shrug it away but dared not loosen my hold on Maruman.

  Thinking about the gradual shift from flowing, weightless color and light to this semblance of solidity, I reasoned that we had reached a place so light and high that even our current evanescent forms gained substance by comparison.

  “See,” Maruman commanded.

  I lifted my head and saw a broad glimmering pathway set into the clouds like a road through undulating hills. Maruman landed lightly upon it, and at his bidding, I climbed gingerly down. At once, my sense of individuality and separateness established itself as clearly as the unfamiliar drag of the heavy cloak down my back. Irritated, I reached up to unfasten it from my neck, but I could not find cloth or fastening. Instead, my hand encountered a hard bony protrusion covered in feathery down. I twisted my head and gaped to find I was looking at a set of wings.

  “Things take their shape from your mind on the dreamtrails,” Maruman sent complacently. “You may change if you wish/will it but must first master trick of it.” His tyger shape darkened to pure black and became longer and sleekly lean. “No time now for you to practice shape-shifting.”

  I wondered at the wings. I had no particular affinity to birds, except for my relationship with the Agyllians. I had thought very fleetingly of Kella’s little owl, and that might have been enough to give me wings, but I had had no conscious choice or desire for them. Thinking of the wings caused them to shift fractionally as a hand might flex its fingers. They were as much a part of me as a hand. With a flash of wonderment, I thought I might even truly fly.

  “Come,” the now shadow-hued Maruman sent impatiently. The path was solid underfoot, but the dust glittered unnaturally. On either side, clouds swirled, as insubstantial as smoke.

  “This is a dreamtrail?” I asked. My mental voice had a strange echo, as if I whispered underneath speaking.

  “Many trails there are,” Maruman sent cryptically. His almond eyes glowed gold and diamond white. “Think of the doors now, ElspethInnle. I remember them not, and so you must recall. Think of looking at them….”

  I thought of them as I had last seen them, and at once I became aware of the heat and sound of flames. A huge bonfire with the doors in the center began to take shape.

  “No,” Maruman sent sternly. “Think of before burning. Think of first time you saw.”

  The sensation of crackling heat faded, and the skies darkened dramatically. I cried out in fright, but Maruman merely stood by my side, swishing his midnight tail. All around us, clouds ran through the sky at an impossible speed. They boiled and churned as though an entire day of slow progress through the skies was crammed into a few seconds. The sun set in an instant, the clouds dimming rapidly from wild rose and crimson to violet and deepest blue. Then it was night.

  The moon rose and was lost in cloud, then showed again through a ragged patch of darkness like an eye peering through a tear in cloth. A cold wind blew, and I heard the rustling of leaves and branches. Trees began to materialize around me, full of creaking gestures. They formed up along both sides of the road behind us, but ahead, on one side, th
ey gave way to a high, neatly trimmed hedge.

  Everything slowed and was all at once so real and solid that I truly felt myself to be standing on a road at night. I could hear the howl of a wolf in the distance. The chill in the air told me it was not far from wintertime.

  “Come,” Maruman sent, and padded swiftly up the road, a black shadow barely visible in the night. He stayed close to the high, smooth-trimmed hedgerow and frequently lifted his black muzzle to sniff the air. I followed, leaning forward to compensate for the weight of the wings.

  “Be swift,” Maruman demanded. His lambent eyes shone back at me. I hurried as best I could, and when I stood by him, I saw that, around the bend, the road vanished into what seemed to be a mass of dark cloud. But even as I watched, a building took shape. It was enormous—more like a number of buildings awkwardly joined together than a single construction. In some places, it was two or three stories high, and on either side, turrets rose up, with steep little roofs ending in spires.

  Obernewtyn, I thought, incredulous. It was Obernewtyn exactly as I had beheld it the very first time. The road ran around in a loop, circling the now familiar fountain and lantern. Its flame shuddered in the wind, casting shadows that lurched fitfully along the walls.

  “This is—” I began, but Maruman threw himself hard against my hip, forcing me to stagger sideways.

  “Away,” he snarled with enough urgency to make me obey without question. I slipped between the trees opposite the hedge and dragged the wings through after me. Turning back to face the road, I heard the sound of horses’ hooves and the grinding scrape of metal wheel rims against stone and gravel. A coach drawn by two horses burst into sight just as Maruman leaped into the trees beside me.

  “Whoa, there!” the driver cried softly, pulling on the reins with a practiced hand. The coach slowed, and my mouth fell open—for the driver was Enoch, but a younger Enoch, his unbuttoned Council livery jacket flapping untidily about him. I saw fleetingly the dull flash of an enameled Council emblem on the window of the coach door and above it a girl’s pale face pressed to the glass.

  Only then did I understand, for I had seen that face too many times in the mirror not to know it. The girl peering out was little more than a child to my sight now, her green eyes enormous in a thin, remote face. Yet she was me as I had been the night of my arrival at Obernewtyn.

  The shock of realizing that I was seeing my own past caused the world about me to waver, and the dark trees took on a vague and cloudy look.

  “Hold to dreamtrail,” Maruman warned me urgently.

  “In the carriage…,” I sent. “It was…”

  “Yes. ElspethInnle comes to mountains,” Maruman agreed. “Dreamtrails hold all things. Look. Remember.”

  The carriage had lurched to a stop beside the broad entrance steps, and the tall, too-slender girl that I had been climbed out. She stood, and I saw fear and loneliness in her rigid stance. The girl’s hair fluttered freely in the rising wind.

  My hair, I thought.

  I watched myself look around, remembering vividly how forbidding Obernewtyn had seemed that first night. I watched myself study the stone walls, the fountain, and then the trees, full of blustering wind and murmurous hissing. Momentarily, my own moss-green eyes looked right at me, and an irrational fear smote me.

  She can’t see me, I assured myself, not really knowing why the thought of being seen by my younger self unnerved me so. But I also remembered how, on that first night, the trees had seemed to whisper of incomprehensible secrets.

  “She/you could see you if you desire it,” Maruman sent. “But if she/you did, all would distort/take on new form. Dreamtrails are not keeping place for untouchable memories. Imprints of life they are, but have their own existence and can be affected/changed.”

  I did not understand. “I was really watching myself when I arrived back then?”

  “Yes and no,” Maruman sent. “We visit past on dreamtrails. The past passed. It was.”

  “But…,” I began.

  “Watch,” Maruman sent again.

  The younger Enoch’s passengers mounted the broad, low steps to the front doors to Obernewtyn. The inconsistent lamplight played over their backs as the guardian who had escorted me reached up to ring the bell. I heard it very faintly, or perhaps I was only remembering how it had sounded. There was a long wait; then the doors opened to reveal a tall, bony older woman carrying a candelabrum: Guardian Myrna.

  They were speaking now. I could not hear as the door closed behind them, but I could remember. The guardian had dismissed me as defective. “You’ll get no sense out of her….”

  “Do not remember this way, or you will merge,” Maruman warned, and the sound of his voice pulled me back to an awareness of the trees shivering and rustling around us.

  The door banged open and the plump guardian emerged. She crossed to Enoch, who opened the coach door to let her inside, then climbed back onto his seat and took up the reins. The carriage lurched forward, and the horses drew it back down the drive and out of sight.

  I glanced at the huge building, conscious that, somewhere inside its walls, I was now being conducted to a stone cell and a night of frightened dreams.

  But I was not here out of nostalgia, I reminded myself. “I must see the doors,” I sent. Hurrying by the fountain and lamp, I halted before the steps and gazed up at the deeply recessed doors. It was too dark to see them clearly, and I wondered if, after all, they were the plain ones with which we had replaced the originals after the burning.

  “Hold to the moment,” Maruman warned, padding up beside me.

  I pictured the doors as they had been the night of my arrival. By the time I reached the top step, I could make out the scrolled panels and the shallowly carved borders. Marisa had hidden directions to a cache of Beforetime weaponmachines in the borders, but I concentrated my attention on the panels, shifting to one side to allow the lantern light to illuminate them. Now that I was looking for it, I could see clearly that the wood of the central panels and that of the border and outer frame were quite different. The panels were formed of a darker, more finely grained timber, and studying the queer half-human beasts they featured, I felt absolutely certain Kasanda had carved them. The intricacy of the work resembled the sculptures in the Earthtemple in too many ways for it not to have come from the same hand. I squinted, trying to see if there were any words written within the figures.

  “If only it was daylight,” I murmured, frustrated.

  At once, the wind rose, and I turned to see the clouds speeding up again. In an instant, the sky lightened to a deep violet, and the distant mountain peaks brightened to a paler blue. Realizing my wish had hastened the night, I focused on the blue-black chilliness of predawn, and the clouds slowed.

  “Commands on the dreamtrails send out loud signals,” Maruman sent in stern disapproval. “Mornirdragon will hear/smell/come soon. Must go/fly.”

  “But now that it’s near morning, I might be able to see.” I turned back to the doors and saw there were letters inscribed on a banner behind the figures. They were incomprehensible but similar to the exotic lettering I had seen in Sador. Could the message possibly be in gadi?

  “If only I had some paper,” I muttered frantically, reaching instinctively for my nightdress pocket. To my amazement, I discovered I was clothed, and my hand closed around Dameon’s letter. Paper! But of course I had nothing to write with. Remembering what Maruman had said about thoughts being answered on the dreamtrails, I visualized the stick of black charcoal the girl Cassy had been using to draw with. Immediately, I was holding a stub of burned stick. I laid a page of the letter over the carved script on one door and brushed the burned end of the stick gently over it, hoping the makeshift rubbing would take over the pricked lettering.

  “I smell Mornirdragon,” Maruman warned. “She comes.”

  “One second more,” I said, laying a second sheet of paper over the lettering on the door and rubbing the stick over it.

  “No more time!”
Maruman urged. He sank his teeth into my clothing and tugged me back from the doors as a screeching cry rent the air. Then I felt a sickening pull that seemed to wrench my guts inside out.

  It was blazing daylight, and I was standing with Maruman on the gleaming cloud-road. I was naked again and carried neither stick nor letter, but there was no time to lament, for the red dragon appeared, hovering above us on huge scaly wings. I was thunderstruck by its sheer enormity. Its eyes stared into mine, and it gave a guttural scream of such hatred that all strength seemed to run from my legs. I was too terrified to move, but Maruman leapt forward without hesitation, butting me roughly from the path. I fell through the clouds with a scream of terror.

  I tumbled mindlessly over and over before remembering that I was now a winged thing. The wings flexed, and I thought about opening them wide. I felt them move and went from falling like a stone into a flat, gliding trajectory.

  As I slowed, I was overcome by a vision.

  I was standing somewhere outside, and it was a chill, pitch-black night. All at once, I had the distinct sensation that someone was behind me. I whirled, and there was Ariel as he had been when I first encountered him: a boy with a face like an angel and eyes bright with malice. I could see him, because he glowed with an eerie pallid light.

  My skin crawled at the nightmarish vision as Ariel gave a high-pitched child’s giggle, then dissolved. Before my eyes, his shining matter reformed into an exquisitely handsome young man with long fair hair and a lithe form. He looked exactly as I had seen him on the deck of the Herder ship that had carried Matthew away, even down to his cloak.

  “What do you want?” I demanded.

  “Want?” he asked, and now his voice was deeper, and his features shifted slightly, growing older. If it were possible, he was more beautiful than he had been as a child. Despite all I knew of him, I was dazzled. His eyes flashed with amusement, as if he heard my thoughts and reveled in them. “I want you, of course,” he whispered, and a warm wind blew softly, as if his words and breath swelled to fill the air around me, caressing my face, playing with my hair.