The Dreaming Hunt (42 page)

As advertised, they slid the first part of the slope, picking up speed as they went. Rosana screamed as Will bodily dragged her forward, forcing her to run beside him as they kept pace with the sliding scree.

All four of their friends fetched up on the valley floor beside the mound burying the hounds. Raina looked frazzled, but Rosana looked up at Will, her eyes sparkling. “That was fun!” the gypsy declared.

Sha'Li, however, was more circumspect. “Down we are. Now. How to cross all that grass and no tracks leave?”

Rynn spoke reluctantly. “I do not believe that tracks will be the worst of our problems. In spite of slowing the hunter down by some days, he will free his hounds eventually and heal them. And then they will come after us with double the intensity of before. Next time, we may not be lucky enough to have a cliff at our backs that the hounds do not know of.”

“Water,” Will declared abruptly.

The others looked at him.

“Water throws regular hunting dogs off the scent of their prey. Why not elemental hounds? If we head for a body of water and cross it, that may confuse them. Or at least slow them down long enough to let us get away.”

Rynn did not explain that there was no getting away from Imperial hounds. They would run themselves to death before they gave up the chase. Better to let the party have hope and do their best to elude the beasts instead of simply giving up and surrendering Eben to the hunter.

“It's worth a try,” Eben said hopefully. “So where's the nearest big body of water?”

“The Estarran Sea,” Raina said immediately. “But instead of going north, we will have to turn west.”

“It takes us off Tarryn's trail,” Eben objected.

“The necessity now is to elude the hounds, not find your friend,” Rynn responded. “If we do not throw yon beasts off your scent, we will not live long enough to find Kendrick and Tarryn, anyway.”

“No time have we for debate,” Sha'Li declared. “Those mangy beasts and their master will not sleep forever.”

“What if they perish of their wounds or starve before anyone finds them?” Raina asked, eying the stone mound doubtfully. “I cannot leave them here to die.”

“Never fear,” Rynn replied grimly. “The soldiers will find the hunter, and he will see to his hounds, even if he has to hire every person for miles around to dig. If we are lucky, this will buy us maybe half a week at best.”

Rynn did not voice his fear that this hunter might have some sort of mental link to the second hunter they knew to be in the area. With a White Heart member in their midst, though, they could not kill the hunter on the ridge above nor the hounds below as his instinct told him to do. They must take their chances and hope the hunters were not connected.

The party turned its attention to the grassy valley stretching away from them. In the moonlight, it looked like a silver lake, its surface rippling gently in the night breezes. Far in the distance, rocky cliffs rose in a long line marking the other side of the valley.

Sha'Li shook her head. “Never will we without a trail cross all that fragile grass. Follow us without hounds a blind man could.”

Rynn swore under his breath. She would know. She was as fine a countertracker as he'd ever seen.

“All night it will take to go around it, but tracks aplenty we will leave if through the valley we pass. Hours will we lose.”

“Hours we cannot afford to lose,” Eben added grimly.

“How long would it take us to walk across the valley if we had no care for leaving tracks?” Raina asked no one in particular.

Rynn gauged the distance quickly, using his third eye to triangulate the distance to within a few body lengths. “It is half a league plus or minus a few strides. A person could walk it in, say, thirty minutes were the land flat. But given the terrain, I would estimate the walking time to be an hour or more—”

“The terrain is not an issue,” Raina interrupted. “Everybody line up, and I will cast spirit forms upon all of you. I will have to renew the spells several times as we cross the valley. But if I can find a rock to stand upon where I will not leave tracks, I will drop my form, cast new spells upon you, and then recast one upon myself. Once you are in spirit form, you will drift over the ground, neither rising nor falling. Think of moving forward and you will glide forward almost as if you are walking. Pretend you are a ghost. It helps. You will get the hang of it soon enough.”

“Magic I like not!” Sha'Li declared.

“Tolerate it you will,” Raina retorted. “Unless you have a better plan for crossing that valley quickly without leaving an easy trail for our friends, the Imperial hounds, to follow.”

Sha'Li commented direly, “Track spirit forms they probably can.”

Will added, “Yes, but following a non-corporeal trail should be slower than if we leave physical tracks.”

Rynn did the math and was shocked by the amount of magic Raina was proposing to cast in this endeavor. Apparently, she had done the calculations, too, and felt it was within her ability. Aurelius had said she was an arch-mage, but it was hard to credit just how much magic she could summon until she casually proposed to keep six people in spirit forms for upward of a half-hour.

In short order, she cast spirit forms upon them. They were still vaguely visible, but their bodies took on a disconcerting transparency. They did, indeed look like a pack of ghosts.

Will spoke first. “Let us not waste the magic. Follow me.”

Traveling in this manner was actually quite easy once Rynn accustomed himself to it. Sha'Li asked, “If into one of you I bump, what happens? Pass through you do I, or something else?”

“I actually do not know,” Raina answered. “Will, do you have any knowledge of how this magic works?”

“No, and I do not care to find out,” he declared stoutly. Rynn shared the sentiment.

Not quite five minutes had passed when Raina called out low, “I found a good rock. I'm going to drop my form, and then as I call out your name, come to me and I will renew your spell.”

The operation went smoothly, and they glided forward again. Four more times they had to stop for her to recast the spirit forms upon them. Gads, approaching three hundred simple healing spells she had just cast, and she didn't seem even the slightest bit fatigued or drained.

Somewhere in the middle of the valley, they crossed a river that looked swift and deep enough to cause them difficulty in crossing it. At best, it would have been a cold, drenching swim. At worst, it could have been a dangerous maneuver. As it was, they drifted over the black, roiling surface like wisps of fog, never slowing, never stopping.

They reached the first trees on the far side of the open valley and stopped, staring up at an imposing wall of boulders and broken stone. “Now what?” Rynn asked.

Raina answered, “Spirit forms will not float. We'll have to come out of our forms and climb the cliff, or preferably, move along its base and find an easier spot to ascend.”

Rynn much enjoyed rock climbing, and he was a bit disappointed at not getting to try the cliff face. But he did not relish the idea of trying to get five amateur climbers with no climbing ropes or harnesses safely up the steep valley wall.

“Oh, dear,” Rosana groaned as her legs collapsed and she fell in a heap on the ground.

The others staggered and stumbled around Rynn. Raina was the last to reform, but she was already sitting down on the ground when she did so. As Will helped her to her feet, she explained, “It's not usually that bad to come back into your body. It's just that we stayed in forms for so long that the transition back to normal hit us harder.”

Eben replied, “It is the opposite coming out of my stoneskin form. I feel so light when it ends, it's as if I could fly.”

“Like not these strange forms do I,” Sha'Li grumbled.

Rynn grinned over at her. “Admit it. You're glad to be across that valley and not to have had to countertrack all of us through that dead grass.”

Sha'Li shot him a credible scowl through her scaled features. “Fine. Admit it I do, ugly pinkskin.”

His grin widened. He'd been called a lot of names in his life, but ugly had never been one of them. He rather enjoyed the sensation of being repulsive to someone.

“Well, that was fun,” Will commented. “I'll keep that technique in mind the next time we encounter nasty terrain I'd rather not walk across.”

Rosana glared at him. “Magic is no excuse for laziness.”

Will grinned at her and tucked her under his arm, pulling her close to his side. Sha'Li rolled her eyes at the pair, and Eben wrinkled his nose at their obvious affection for one another.

As for him, Rynn didn't begrudge them their young love. It was pure and innocent, and stars knew, few enough things in this world were either. Besides, his mentor, Phinneas, had foreseen troubles aplenty for both Will and Rosana before their quest was complete.

For that matter, Phinneas had foreseen trouble for them all. This group had attracted all kinds of attention on the dream plane already, and various factions were lining up, some to hinder them and some to help them. The fact that they'd drawn the notice of the Oneiri, who had sent their greatest warrior to protect these children, spoke volumes of the struggles that lay ahead of them.

So young they were for the heavy responsibilities upon their shoulders. So cursed naïve. He was precious little bulwark to protect them from the coming storm, and he had only his mind and his fists to save them from disaster. Which was not reassuring in the least.

 

CHAPTER

21

The next two days were a nightmare race for their lives. Will stumbled along as quickly as his feet would go, so exhausted he could hardly see to place one foot in front of another. They barely stopped to eat, let alone to rest, and they snatched sleep in short naps that only seemed to make them all more tired. He was worried about Rosana and, from time to time, snuck equipment out of her pack and into his to lighten her load. But truth be told, she kept up as well as everyone else.

The terrain was rough, the forest thick with brambles, brush, and downed trees. But ever-present fear of Imperial hounds closing in on them spurred them to press on relentlessly. They all scratched their skin and tore their clothing, twisted ankles, and were bitten to pieces by swarms of gnats. Every noise in the forest made them jump and reach for weapons in fear that one of those massive hounds was about to leap out of hiding and tear their throats out. All in all, everyone was roundly miserable.

If only they knew how close the hounds were behind them. But there was no way to find out, so they could only assume the worst and flee as if the hounds were nipping at their heels.

On the morning of the third day, they woke up to rain. It made for cold and soggy going, but Sha'Li thought the rain would help mask their scent.

They had been walking for mayhap two hours when suddenly, the forest abruptly gave way to leaden gray sky. Rynn, who was leading the way, came to an abrupt halt at the edge of what turned out to be a breathtakingly enormous cliff.

Far below, a huge black body of water stretched away from them. No shore was visible in the distance. Just water and more water, draped in silver curtains of rain. They had reached the Estarran Sea. Now to find a way down the gigantic cliff and thence across the sprawling gulf that slashed inland into Haelos for a thousand miles or more.

Arcing gently out into the water to both their left and right, great stone cliffs towered in the misty rain, slate gray rock interspersed with veins of opalescent color. On the tip of the headland far to their left, a cottage sat like a tiny toy, dwarfed by the enormity of the cliff upon which it perched. Will estimated that the water lay at least a thousand feet below them.

To the right was some sort of massive timber structure jutting out over the cliff with pulleys and heavy chains dangling.

“That looks like a dock at the bottom of yon lift system,” Rynn commented.

Will took a cautious step forward toward the edge and stared down in the direction Rynn was looking. There was no shoreline where water met stone, just a narrow strip of boulders and scree shed from the cliff face upon which great waves crashed angrily. But a broad, low wooden jetty poked out of some sort of dark opening in the cliff face between a particularly large pair of boulders.

He started walking to the right, paralleling the cliff in search of a way down. “There has to be a path for people to get down there.”

“Steps I see,” Sha'Li called.

Through the rain, Will made out a faint line of stripes descending diagonally down the cliff.

“What worries me,” Rynn said, “is why there are these signs of civilization but no signs of people. Where are they?”

“Foul day it is. Inside soft humans stay, by fires huddled,” Sha'Li answered scornfully.

The stairs turned out to be carved directly into the cliff face. They were broad and even, worn into smooth, shallow arcs by the passage of many feet and rendered treacherous by the rain. Each tread was wide enough for perhaps four men to walk abreast. However, there was no hand railing guarding the edge, and Will noticed he was not the only one hugging the cliff wall as they started down. Gusts of wind buffeted them as the rain pelted at their exposed skin, and it felt as if nature itself was trying to tear them off the cliff and throw them to their deaths.

Rosana, who was walking behind Will, mumbled fearfully, “I do not like heights.”

Normally, they did not bother him, but today his stomach twisted and turned nervously like the wind swirling around them. “Do not look down. Concentrate on my back and watch the steps.”

Perhaps it was fear firing his imagination, but the storm seemed to be getting worse. Rumbles of distant thunder rolled along the cliffs above, and the crashing waves roared below in a deafening cacophony of nature's fury.

Without warning, Rynn pulled up sharply in front of him. Will had to grab for an outcropping of rock beside himself to keep from running into the paxan's back. “What the—”