Hero of Dreams (5 page)

“We could live like kings for a three-month!” Hero murmured. “But what do you want of us for your money?”

“He wants someone murdered,” Eldin granted. “Isn’t it obvious?”

Ebraim Borak shook his head and smiled. “No, I’m not hiring assassins,” he assured them. “Not tonight. If murder was what I wanted I could get it cheaper than this, I promise you. All I want is your attention, to know that you’ll hear me out. The money is payment in advance for that alone. Then, if I can interest you in my proposition-” he formed his next words carefully in a voice little louder than a whisper: “Five hundred tonds each as a retainer- ten thousand when the job is done!”

‘Ten thousand tonds,” Hero whistled softly. “That’s five thousand each!”

“No, no, my young friend,” Borak quickly corrected him. “You misunderstand me. I meant ten thousand … eachl”

After a period of stunned silence, Eldin grunted and scooped up his pile of money. “Oh, we’ll listen,” he nodded his head emphatically. “You may be sure of that!”

“Aye,” agreed the younger man, letting his pile of tonds lie. “But listening is a thirsty game, eh? So-taverner!” he called out. “Another skin, if you please. No, better make it three-and some meat to soak it up!”

Of Omens and Night-gaunts

CHAPTER II

In the foothills of the Great Bleak Mountains, two hundred miles north of Theelys and three weeks later, as evening settled in and a pair of great kites soared on high, eyes sharp for unwary rabbits, the dreamers added their own lengthening shadows to the greater darkness beneath an overhanging outcrop of rock and spread their blankets in preparation for the night.

They freed their single yak from the trappings of its light-framed travois and tethered it where the new spring grass stood green in the fading light. It was not an especially cold night but Hero threw a blanket over the yak anyway. The animal was his, Eldin’s mount having fallen foul of a rock viper’s bite five days gone; and since then the dreamers had walked while the animal pulled the weight of their various necessaries upon its rough but sturdily constructed travois.

This last day had been harder than the rest of the journey, for they had climbed constantly up through the steep foothills until now, with the night, they were come at last to the feet of the Great Bleak Mountains. Tomorrow would be that much harder.

So, to fortify themselves in advance, they roasted a rabbit over a wood fire and brewed up a pan of sweet tea from the Ossaran Steppes, talking in low, weary tones while the silence of die night deepened and the stars began to show beyond the Up of the overhang. As they rested on their blankets a shooting star raced down across blue-black heavens of dreamland.

“An omen,” murmured Hero.

His companion merely grunted. “A star,” he answered after a while. “Only a star, falling out of the sky.”

“An omen nonetheless,” the younger man insisted.

Again Eldin grunted. “As you wish,” he said. Then: “A good omen-or a bad one?”

A shrug in the fire-flickered darkness. “Who can say?”

Disgruntled, the older man snarled: “Then why worry about it?”

“Oh, omens are worth watching out for.”

“Huh!”

A moment or two later, as Hero settled himself down and pulled his blanket up to his chin, Eldin began to cough. Long and wrackingly he coughed, and when it seemed that he might never stop his companion stirred himself to ask: “Are you all right, old friend?”

The coughing subsided. Eldin spat onto a rock beside the guttering fire. He dabbled his finger in the spittle and showed it to Hero. In the dying light from the fire the younger man saw traces of frothy red.

“Now that’s what I call an omen,” said Eldin, and he laughed low and bitterly.

At noon the next day they set the yak free and with a slap on its rump Hero said his farewell to the animal. It trotted away back down the slope that had steepened all through the morning, only pausing at a defile to turn its head and look back. Then it snorted, tossed its head once and was gone, around a rocky spur and lost from sight.

From now on it was to be a climb, not sheer yet by any means but steep by any man’s judgment. High overhead were the snows, melting on the lower slopes but still heavy in the peaks of this section of the Great Bleak Range. Icy water rushed down from above, a wide waterfall in the main, for way up ahead in the peaks the Tross had its secret source.

Midway through the afternoon they took a break, ate a meal, drank tea and talked as they had talked a hundred times since leaving Theelys after a week’s debauchery at Ebraim Borak’s expense. Of money they still had plenty, were rich by any dreamer’s standards, but Borak had promised much more. This was the topic of their conversation: “I can understand the Ossaran paying good money for this mysterious wand-which must after all be worth many times what he’s willing to pay for it-but how can he be sure we’ll ever bring the thing back to him?” Eldin squinted at his younger companion, scowling through the smoke of their small fire.

“Where else could we sell it-and who could afford to buy?” Hero answered realistically. “A wand, that’s all it is-a stick or a rod-and you can’t eat wands, you know. And damned if I’d know how to use it. But when we take it back to Ebraim Borak, then we’ll have money for life. And we do know how to use that! Oh, Borak’s sure enough we’ll deliver it … if we ever get it.”

“Maybe,” the other dreamer grunted, “but there are plenty of rich Lords in dreamland. If we were dishonest men” (at which Hero chuckled), “we might easily-“

“Easily what, Eldin? Sell Borak out to some rich Lord? Do you know what that rich Lord would do? Throw us in a cell and have us tortured until we told where we got the wand, that’s what! And then, when we told? He’d have us put to death! How do you suppose these rich Lords got to be so rich?”

“Yes, I know, I know,” Eldin rumbled, “but they’re not all bad. Still, there’s that about this quest that worries me sorely. I mean, if the job’s to be so easy, why didn’t Borak come and do it himself?”

“What? A cultured city gent up here in the heights of the Great Bleak Mountains? Battling the elements and venturing along unknown ways and all-“

“All rubbish!” Eldin finished it for him. “An Ossaran, ‘cultured,’ indeed!”

“Spoken tike a true expert,” Hero laughed derisively. “And what, pray, would a bloodstained thief of a marooned dreamer know about culture?”

“Huh! I’ve a suspicion I’m a pretty smart fellow in the waking world,” Eldin muttered.

“Oh? Well I wouldn’t know. But anyway, I think your questions are all easily enough answered. No, this job Bor-ak’s given us will not be the simple thing he made it sound. And yes, there are certain dangers other than those he mentioned. If there weren’t, someone else would have stolen the wand long ago.”

“But that’s just it! What dangers can there be? A few cliffs to climb and maybe a gaunt or two to wing us away in the dead of night? A handful of snow leopards and a doddery old priest guarding a stone god in a cavern temple? To dreamers such as you and I, surely these are mere irritations?”

Hero nodded. “Aye, so it would seem. And yet I’m sure that it won’t be at all easy. And don’t scoff at such things as night gaunts. In Celephais I talked to a prospector who once had a brush with gaunts when he was climbing in the Heights of Lerion. He was panning streams for gold at the time.

“Well, he camped one night in a saddle between two ridges-and woke to find himself already aloft, in a great flapping of leathery wings! Two of them had him between them, and they were heading north. He put up such a fight in the dark that he soon made them lose height, and before very long he felt his feet dragging over solid ground.

“He broke free from one of the gaunts, got out his knife and stabbed the other, wounding it. He was winded when the injured creature fell with him, but not much. He jumped up and cut the head off the gaunt, then hid in a cave till morning. When it was light he went out and found the carcass of the one he’d killed-its carcass and its head …” Hero paused to pull a sour face.

“Go on,” again his friend prompted him. “And?”

“There was no face on the gaunt’s head!”

Eldin grunted and nodded. “I’ve heard that said of gaunts before: that they have no faces.” He shuddered involuntarily.

“Well,” Hero continued presently, “finally the old prospector got down out of the hills and made his way back to Celephais. He’d been away such a long time that his wife gave him hell!”

Eldin grunted again. “Huh! Precipices and snow leopards-old priests and secret temples-bitter cold mountain heights and faceless night-gaunts … what in the names of all the gods are we in this for, David?”

“Money, old friend,” the other reminded him, pouring out two more tiny cups of tea with one hand and buttoning his brown jacket more warmly about this throat with the other. “We’re only here for the money …”

The Cave in the Mountains

CHAPTER III

Three days and nights later-three days of finger-skinning, back-breaking, nerve-wrenching climbing and clawing up precipitous walls of crumbling rock; three nights of camping-down on narrow, bitter, blustily-exposed ledges overhanging thousands of feet of empty air-then …

. .. Wearily hauling himself up onto what seemed like the thousandth crest of the thousandth ridge a few paces in front of Eldin, Hero gave a low, breathless whistle and paused to stand and stare, mouth agape and sucking hungrily at air, in awe of the titanic monolith which now reared its monstrous, featureless cube before him. One of the Keeps of the First Ones: its foot dimly shadowed and wreathed in late morning mist, its towering summit stained, mottled and weathered by the passage of nameless centuries.

The vast stone block was set back from the sheer, freshly-conquered face, looming in the final fold of mountain that went up, white-crested, to the ultimate ridge of snow. Neither door nor window showed, nor indeed any evidence at all to show that the structure had ever known or been capable of knowing habitation of any sort, and yet patently it was not a natural feature; it had been fashioned by intelligent beings.

Hero stared a moment longer; then his eyes went to the distance that separated him from the base of the massive keep. His jaw dropped farther yet when he saw that the foot of the keep, far from being close at hand, was at least a quarter-mile away from him across this rocky and snow-patched penultimate plateau. Suddenly the keep seemed to loom even larger in the eye of his imagination, and he wondered at the nature of its builders, starting violently when Eldin’s heavy hand fell upon his shoulder.

“Nervous, my friend?” inquired the latecomer in his deep bass rumble.

“Aye,” Hero answered; then, catching sight of a white, moving blur in the corner of his eye: “And rightly so! Guard yourself, brother!”

Out of a large patch of snow that dazzled with its myriad reflections of sun-sparkle, the white blur-springing apart and forming two blurs, two pure white, snarling, furious snow leopards-shot straight at them. The creatures, each as heavy as a small man, covered the distance between in the merest twinkling of an eye, but that was as much time as the wandering dreamers needed.

As the first beast sprang at Hero he fell to his knees, his curved blade leaving its scabbard with a steely whisper, slicing upward to slit open the great cat’s belly in one clean, deep, killing cut. Behind Hero, the snow leopard hit the ground, scrabbling yowlingly for a split second in its own steaming entrails, then skidded in a white and scarlet blob over the lip and into space.

Springing to his feet the lithe dreamer whirled-in time to see Eldin behead the second cat with a single swing of his long, straight blade. This was an act of mercy, for with a blow unseen by his companion, the gruff Wanderer had already almost sliced the beast in two parts Now, the short hairs of his neck a-bristle, Eldin poked at the cat’s carcass with the tip of his sword.

“Did that one of yours wear a collar?” he asked of the younger man.

“I can’t honestly say that I looked,” Hero replied.

“Well, this one wears a collar.”

“So I see. A welcoming committee, d’you think?”

Eldin shook his head negatively. “No. See over there?” He pointed to where the snow showed pink, where a broken shape lay huddled in death. “They’d caught a goat when we disturbed them. They’d been let out to find food for themselves, that’s all.”

“Huh!” grunted Hero. “Well, they’ll not be going home again, that’s for sure …”

“Home?” repeated the other, making it a question, his voice a low rumble as he shielded his eyes against snow-glare and scanned the false summit with its looming, featureless keep. “Home, aye-and where might home be, I wonder?-and who the master there, that runs hounds such as these?”

“What did the Ossaran tell us?” Hero inquired, and immediately answered himself, intoning: ” ‘Behind the keep, where the mountain overhangs, there in a deep cave-‘ “

” ‘That’s where you’ll find Yibb-TstH’s temple, and the idol of stone fashioned in his image-and Thmistor Udd and his magic wand,’ ” Eldin finished it. “Well then, do we approach head on, all caution to the wind? Or should we sidle around the great keep and follow the foot of this last rise to the cave’s entrance? Or perhaps-“

“We should wait for evening,” added Hero, equally adept at interrupting. “That small and extremely comfortable-looking cave we passed a minute ago on the way up will suit us ideally. Snow leopard steaks, hot tea, an afternoon’s sleep all snug in our blankets-and after that we’ll feel more like facing whatever’s ahead. Come evening we’ll get into the shadow of the keep and from then on trust to luck and a pair of bright blades!”

Eldin approvingly patted his companion on the shoulder. “You’re a clever lad,” he growled, “for all that you still use your waking world-name. Right, you go on back down and I’ll lower this poor dead pussycat down to you.” He rubbed his great hands briskly together and smacked his lips. “By Koth’s awful sign, I can taste those steaks already!”

Eldin’s painfully wracking cough woke Hero up. The older dreamer sat in his blanket, holding his chest, rocking to and fro and coughing fit to die.