From them —for they love him, he knows they love him —he gets warm dreams of the highway, all beauty and joy, all images converging into a single idealized view, majestic groves of wingwood trees and broad meadows through which clear brooks flow. They dream his own past life for him, too, feeding back to him nuggets of random autobiography mined in the seams of his being. What they transmit is filtered and transformed by their alien sensibilities, colored with hallucinatory glows and tugged and twisted into other-dimensional forms, but yet he is able to perceive the essential meaning of each tableau: his childhood among the parks and gardens of the Pure Stream enclave near the Inland Sea, his wanderyears among the innumerable, unfamiliar, not-quite-human breeds of the hinterlands, his brief, happy sojourn in the fog-swept western country, his eastward journey in early manhood, always following the will of the Soul, always bending to the breezes, accepting whatever destiny seizes him, eastward now, his band of friends closer than brothers in his adopted eastern province, his sprawling lakeshore home there, all polished wood and billowing tented pavilions, his collection of relics of mankind’s former times —pieces of machinery, elegant coils of metal, rusted coins, grotesque statuettes, wedges of imperishable plastic —housed in its own wing with its own curator. Lost in these reveries he ceases to remember that the home by the lake has been reduced to ashes by the Teeth, that his friends of kinder days are dead, his estates overrun, his pretty things scattered in the kitchen-middens.
Imperceptibly, the dream turns sour.
Spiders and rain and mud creep back into it. He is reminded, through some darkening of tone of the imagery pervading his dreaming mind, that he has been stripped of everything and has become, now that he has taken flight, merely a driver hired out to a bestial Dark Lake mercenary who is himself a fugitive.
Leaf is working harder to control the team now. The horses seem less sure of their footing, and the pace slows; they are bothered about something, and a sour, querulous anxiety tinges their messages to him. He catches their mood. He sees himself harnessed to the wagon alongside the nightmares, and it is Crown at the reins, Crown wielding a terrible whip, driving the wagon frenziedly forward, seeking allies who will help him fulfil his fantasy of liberating the lands the Teeth have taken. There is no escape from Crown. He rises above the landscape like a monster of congealed smoke, growing more huge until he obscures the sky. Leaf wonders how he will disengage himself from Crown. Shadow runs beside him, stroking his cheeks, whispering to him, and he asks her to undo the harness, but she says she cannot, that it is their duty to serve Crown, and Leaf turns to Sting, who is harnessed on his other side, and he asks Sting for help, but Sting coughs and slips in the mud as Crown’s whip flicks his backbone. There is no escape. The wagon heels and shakes. The right-hand horse skids, nearly falls, recovers. Leaf decides he must be getting tired. He has driven a great deal today, and the effort is telling. But the rain is still falling —he breaks through the veil of illusions, briefly, past the scenes of spring and summer and autumn, and sees the blue-black water dropping in wild handfuls from the sky —and there is no one else to drive, so he must continue.
He tries to submerge himself in deeper trance, where he will be less readily deflected from control.
But no, something is wrong, something plucks at his consciousness, drawing him toward the waking state. The horses summon him to wakefulness with frightful scenes. One beast shows him the wagon about to plunge through a wall of fire. Another pictures them at the brink of a vast impassable crater. Another gives him the image of giant boulders strewn across the road; another, a mountain of ice blocking the way; another, a pack of snarling wolves; another, a row of armored warriors standing shoulder to shoulder, lances at the ready. No doubt of it. Trouble. Trouble. Trouble. Perhaps they have come to the dead place in the road. No wonder that Invisible was skulking around. Leaf forces himself to awaken.
There was no wall of fire. No warriors, no wolves, none of those things. Only a palisade of newly felled timbers facing him some hundred paces ahead on the highway, timbers twice as tall as Crown, sharpened to points at both ends and thrust deep into the earth one up against the next and bound securely with freshly cut vines. The barricade spanned the highway completely from edge to edge; on its right it was bordered by a tangle of impenetrable thorny scrub; on its left it extended to the brink of a steep ravine.
They were stopped.
Such a blockade across a public highway was inconceivable. Leaf blinked, coughed, rubbed his aching forehead. Those last few minutes of discordant dreams had left a murky, gritty coating on his brain. This wall of wood seemed like some sort of dream too, a very bad one. Leaf imagined he could hear the Invisible’s cool laughter somewhere close at hand. At least the rain appeared to be slackening, and there were no spiders about. Small consolations, but the best that were available.
Baffled, Leaf freed himself of the reins and awaited the next event. After a moment or two he sensed the joggling rhythms that told of Crown’s heavy forward progress through the cabin. The big man peered into the driver’s cabin.
“What’s going on? Why aren’t we moving?”
“Dead road.”
“What are you talking about?”
“See for yourself,” Leaf said wearily, gesturing toward the window.
Crown leaned across Leaf to look. He studied the scene an endless moment, reacting slowly. “What’s that? A wall?”
“A wall, yes.”
“A wall across a highway? I never heard of anything like that.”
“The Invisibles at Theptis may have been trying to warn us about this.”
“A wall. A wall.” Crown shook with perplexed anger. “It violates all the maintenance customs! Soul take it, Leaf, a public highway is —”
“ —sacred and inviolable. Yes. What the Teeth have been doing in the east violates a good many maintenance customs too,” Leaf said. “And territorial customs as well. These are unusual times everywhere.” He wondered if he should tell Crown about the Invisible who was on board. One problem at a time, he decided. “Maybe this is how these people propose to keep the Teeth out of their country, Crown.”
“But to block a public road —”
“We were warned.”
“Who could trust the word of an Invisible?”
“There’s the wall,” Leaf said. “Now we know why we didn’t meet anyone else on the highway. They probably put this thing up as soon as they heard about the Teeth, and the whole province knows enough to avoid Spider Highway. Everyone but us.”
“What folk dwell here?”
“No idea. Sting’s the one who would know.”
“Yes, Sting would know,” said the high, clear, sharp-edged voice of Sting from the corridor. He poked his head into the cabin. Leaf saw Shadow just behind him. “This is the land of the Tree Companions,” Sting said. “Do you know of them?”
Crown shook his head. “Not I,” said Leaf.
“Forest-dwellers,” Sting said. “Tree-worshippers. Small heads, slow brains. Dangerous in battle —they use poisoned darts. There are nine tribes of them in this region, I think, under a single chief. Once they paid tribute to my people, but I suppose in these times all that has ended.”
“They worship trees?” Shadow said lightly. “And how many of their gods, then, did they cut down to make this barrier?”
Sting laughed. “If you must have gods, why not put them to some good use?”
Crown glared at the wall across the highway as he once might have glared at an opponent in the duelling ring. Seething, he paced a narrow path in the crowded cabin. “We can’t waste any more time. The Teeth will be coming through this region in a few days, for sure. We’ve got to reach the river before something happens to the bridges ahead.”