Then, though, the nightmares began. Daymares, rather. He dreamed that he was floating toward the benevolent embrace of the Lady of the Isle, at the center of a sphere of pure white light; it was a vision of peace and joy, but gradually the imagery of his dream changed and darkened, so that he found himself marooned on a bare gray mountainside, staring down at a dead and empty crater, and awakened trembling and weak with fear and shock.
“Did you dream well?” Barjazid had asked him, then. “My son says you moaned in your sleep, that you rolled over many times and clutched your knees. Did you feel the touch of the dream-stealers, Initiate Dekkeret?”
When Dekkeret admitted that he had, the little man pressed him for details. Dekkeret grew angry at that, and asked why he should allow Barjazid to probe and poke in his mind; but Barjazid persisted, and finally Dekkeret did provide a description of what he had dreamed. Yes, said Barjazid, he had felt the touch of the dream-stealers: an invasion of the mind, a disturbing overlay of images, a taking of energy.
“I asked him,” Dekkeret told Varaile, “if he had ever felt their touch himself. No, he said, never. He was apparently immune. His son Dinitak had been bothered by them only once or twice. He would not speculate on the nature of the creatures that caused such things. I said then, ‘Do the dreams get worse as one gets deeper into the desert?’ To which he replied, very coolly indeed, ‘So I am given to understand.’ ”
When they moved on at twilight, Dekkeret imagined he heard distant laughter, the tinkling of far-off bells, the booming of ghostly drums.
And the next day he dreamed again, a dream that began in a green and lovely garden of fountains and pools but quickly transformed itself into something terrible in which he lay naked and exposed to the desert sun, so that he felt his own skin charring and crackling. This time, when he awakened, he discovered that he had wandered away from camp in his sleep and was sprawled out in the midday heat amid a horde of stinging ants. Nor could he find his way back to the floater, and he thought he would die; but eventually the Vroon came for him, bearing a flask of water, and led him to safety. There had been suffering aplenty in that adventure, more, in truth, than he was looking for; but the worst of it, he told Varaile, had been neither the heat nor the thirst nor the ants, but the anguish of being denied the solace of normal dreaming, the terror of having that cheerful and soothing vision turn to something gruesome and frightful.
“So there really is some truth to these travelers’ tales, then?” asked Varaile. “This haunted desert actually does have deadly dream-stealing ghosts in it.”
“Of a sort, yes, milady. As I will shortly explain.”
They were almost out of the desert, now, following the bed of a long-extinct river through a violent terrain that had often been fractured by earthquakes. The land here rose gradually toward two tall peaks in the southwest, between which lay Munnerak Notch, the gateway to the cooler, greener lands of the cattle-country beyond. In another few days he would be at Ghyzyn Kor.
But the worst dream of all still lay ahead for him. He would not describe it in any specific way to Varaile, saying only that it brought him face to face with the one evil deed of his life, the sin that had sent him on his voyage of penance to Suvrael in the first place. Stage by stage he was forced to re-enact that sin as he slept, until the dream culminated in a scene of the most horrific intensity, one that made him shiver and blanch even to think of it now; and at its climax he experienced a sudden piercing pain, an intolerable sensation as of a needle of searing bright light slashing down into his skull. “I heard the tolling of a great gong far away,” said Dekkeret, “and the laughter of some demon close at hand. When I opened my eyes I was almost insane with dread and despair. Then I caught sight of Barjazid, across the way, half hidden behind the floater. He had just taken off some kind of mechanism that he was wearing around his forehead, and was trying to hide it in his baggage.”
Varaile gave a little start. “He was causing the dreams?”
“Oh, you are quick, milady, you are very quick! It was he, yes. With a machine that enabled him to enter minds and transform thoughts. A much more powerful machine than those used by the Lady of the Isle; for she can merely speak to minds, and this Barjazid’s device could actually take command of them. All this he admitted, not very willingly or gladly, when I demanded the truth from him. It was his own invention, he said, a thing that he had been working on for many years.”
“And carrying on experiments with it, is that it, using the minds of the travelers that he took into the desert?”
“Exactly, my lady.”
“You did well to come to the Coronal with this, Dekkeret. This device is a dangerous thing. Its use needs to be stopped.”
“It has been,” said Dekkeret. A broad smile of self-satisfaction spread across his face. “I succeeded in taking Barjazid and his son prisoner then and there, and seized the machine. They are here with me at the Castle. Lord Prestimion will be pleased, I think. Oh, lady, I surely hope that he is, for I tell you, lady, nothing is more important to me than pleasing Lord Prestimion!”
5
“His name is Dekkeret,” Varaile said. “A knight-initiate, very young and a little rough around the edges, but destined, I think, for great things.”
Prestimion laughed. They were in the Stiamot throne-room with Gialaurys. It was only an hour since his return to the Castle and Varaile had greeted him with this tale as though it were the most important thing in the world. “Oh, I know Dekkeret, all right! He saved my life in Normork long ago, when some lunatic with a sharp blade came charging out of a crowd at me.”
“Did he? He didn’t say anything to me about that.”
“No. I’d be very surprised if he had.”
“The story that he told me was absolutely astonishing, Prestimion.”
He had listened to it with no more than half an ear. “Let me see if I have it straight,” he said, when she was done. “He was with Akbalik on an assignment in Zimroel, that much I know, and then for some reason that was never made clear to me he went on by himself to Suvrael, and now, you tell me, he’s come back from there bringing what sort of thing?”
“A machine that seizes control of people’s minds. Which was invented by some shabby little smuggler, Barjazid by name, who offers to guide travelers through the desert, but who actually—”
“Barjazid?” Prestimion, frowning, glanced at Gialaurys. “It seems to me I’ve heard that name before. I know I have. But I don’t recall where.”
“A shady fellow who originally came from Suvrael, with squinty eyes and skin that looked like old leather,” Gialaurys said. “He was in the service of Duke Svor for a couple of years: a very slippery sort, this Barjazid, much like Svor himself. You always detested him.”
“Ah. It comes back to me now. It was right after that little trouble we had at Thegomar Edge, when we caught hold of that smarmy Vroon wizard, Thalnap Zelifor, who made all those mind-reading devices and had no hesitations about selling them both to us and to our opponents as well—”
Gialaurys nodded. “Exactly so. This Barjazid happened to be standing right there at the time, and you told him to pack up the Vroon and his whole workshop of diabolical machines and escort him into permanent exile in Suvrael. Where, no doubt, he got rid of the wizard at the first possible opportunity and appropriated the mind-control devices for his own use.” To Varaile he said, “Where did you say this man Barjazid is now, lady?”
“The Sangamor tunnels. He and his son, both.”
Hearty laughter came from Prestimion at that. “Oh, I like that! A nice closing of the circle! The tunnels were the very place where I first encountered Thalnap Zelifor, that time when he and I were prisoners chained side by side.” Which brought a puzzled glance from Varaile. Prestimion realized that all this discussion of episodes of the civil war had left her baffled. “I’ll tell you that story some other time,” he told her. “As for this gadget of his, I’ll give it a look when I have the chance. A machine that controls minds, eh? Well, I suppose we can find some use for it, sooner or later.”