Roger Taylor - The Return of the Sword

‘What can I say to so apt a student of so wise a teacher?’ Andawyr retorted. ‘If Yatsu or Jaldaric want to spend the night in my pit, they’re welcome. And I’ll make sure you get a chance to instruct Oslang in the do’s and don’ts of Dream Finding. The only other problem I can see after that is where I’m going to put you all. I think I might have mentioned that tidiness isn’t my strongest point.’

Some time later a paw gently prodded a sleeping Antyr into wakefulness.

‘It’s time,’ Tarrian whispered.

Antyr could not suppress a twinge of regret as he followed the two wolves along the softly lit corridor. It had been a long time since he had lain in a proper bed and though he had reached a stage where sleeping in a tent or in the open air was not without its own satisfaction, even importance, to him in its spartan demands and simplicity, the softness of the bed had been more than alluring.

The corridor was thickly carpeted and their progress was very quiet. There was no hint of sound reaching them to indicate that the rest of the Cadwanen was anything other than completely at rest.

‘Come on, hurry up,’ Tarrian urged.

‘I am hurrying,’ Antyr yawned. ‘And the pair of you can just control your impatience.’

‘Don’t know what you mean.’

‘Yes, you do.’

‘We’re here.’

Tarrian nosed open a door that was standing slightly ajar and he and Grayle walked straight in. Antyr entered a little more discreetly, noting as he did so that there was nothing about the door that was materially different from any of the others they had passed. Nothing that said it was the room of the leader of this enormous place and all its inhabitants. And, in marked contrast to his experience in Serenstad, there was no gauntlet of suspicious, hard-eyed and heavily armed guards to run. He found the absence of such restraints strangely disorientating.

The room itself, however, brought him sharply to the present. Two low lights illuminated it sufficiently to confirm Andawyr’s admission that tidiness was not his strongest point.

‘This place is a tip,’ Tarrian announced bluntly as he and Grayle began arbitrarily searching through the various articles of clothing and bedding scattered about the floor.

‘Behave yourselves,’ Antyr snapped.

He caught a faint stream of grumbling abuse as the two wolves pulled away from him.

Already inside the room were Oslang and Yatsu. They were sitting by the door in large comfortable chairs that had obviously been imported into the room for the night’s vigil.

‘Young Jaldaric needed his beauty sleep,’ Yatsu whispered mockingly as he stood up and acknowledged Antyr.

‘You don’t have to whisper,’ came a voice from a rumpled bed at the far end of the room. ‘I’m not asleep yet. Nor likely to be with all this din. I must say I hadn’t bargained on such a crowd gathering.’

‘I’ll be with you in a moment,’ Antyr said professionally. He crouched down in front of Oslang.

‘I remember what you told me,’ Oslang said before he could speak.

Antyr spoke softly and urgently. ‘I’m sure you do,’ he said, recalling Andawyr’s accurate and perceptive retelling of his own story to Usche. ‘But no one here knows anything about Dream Finding and for my peace of mind I need to remind you.’

Oslang did not argue.

‘Tarrian and Grayle may make some strange noises, possibly quite frightening ones, as perhaps might I or Andawyr, though that’s less likely. Whatever happens, remember that there’s no danger here to anyone, except you. And only to you if you intervene. You must not come near us and still less must you make any attempt to touch either of us. If you do, Tarrian and Grayle will attack you and there’s every chance they’ll kill you. I doubt even Yatsu here could cope with the two of them. Just stay where you are. You’re here out of curiosity, I appreciate, but your job is to intercept anyone who might come in unexpectedly. Do you understand this?’

‘Yes,’ Oslang said, though he was patently taken aback by Antyr’s sudden authoritativeness.

Yatsu grinned and patted him on the arm in a fatherly manner as Antyr went over to the bed, carefully trying to avoid Andawyr’s scattered clothing.

A chair had been placed by the bed for him. As he sat down in it, Andawyr turned over with a peevish grunt. The two wolves were each circling repeatedly prior to lying down. Antyr smiled. Small, familiar rituals were closing about them all.

His mind reached out to touch Tarrian’s and Grayle’s. They both looked up at him.

Their eyes were bright burning yellow, penetrating and profoundly wild. He was vaguely aware of Oslang drawing in a long breath.

Then, briefly, he was Tarrian and the wolf was him. As always, countless scents and sensations pervaded him, but he ignored them. He looked up to see himself staring down, a looming figure with eyes that were now entirely black. ‘Pits of night,’ they had been called. It was a sight that few could look on with ease, but that was as it should be. All was well. And, as suddenly, he was himself again, as was Tarrian, though, as usual, the wolf was momentarily unsettled by its temporary occupation of what it regularly denounced as an ungainly, unresponsive and claustrophobic frame.

Slowly Tarrian and Grayle closed their eyes and lowered their heads. Antyr turned to Andawyr. ‘Close your eyes and give me your hand,’ he said.

‘It’s no good. I’m not asleep,’ Andawyr protested, though doing as he was asked.

Antyr did not reply, but took the offered hand in his right and gently passed his left over Andawyr’s face.

‘Sleep easy,’ he said, very softly. ‘Whatever befalls, nothing can harm. Dreams are but shadows and you are guarded in all places by a great and ancient strength.’

He felt the Cadwanwr drifting into sleep immediately. Then he, too, was drifting after him. The room faded and the night that filled his eyes seemed to spread inwardly through every part of him until there was nothing but darkness and silence. Nothing save his awareness, hard as diamond yet as insubstantial as a summer breeze.

Then there were faint sounds all about him, like distant voices and strange instruments carried on an uncertain wind. Mingling with them came lights, twisting, flitting, swelling and star-bursting through the darkness, iridescent and hued beyond the rainbow, some jagged and lightning-fast, others hovering, drifting, watchful.

And then he was whole again, as solid as the figure sitting by Andawyr’s bed and holding the Cadwanwr’s hand, but other than he. Tarrian and Grayle were there too, but not to be seen. As he always did, a remnant of his earliest apprentice days with his father, he touched the wolf’s soft, unseen fur. It was a mutual reassurance. Here, in this strange other place, surrounded by countless shifting sounds and insistent, luring lights, a Dream Finder was lost. For this was the Dream Nexus of Andawyr, leader of the Cadwanol, and all around were the Portals of his many dreams; dreams forgotten, dreams remembered, dreams waking, dreams sleeping, dreams undreamt. And here only a Dream Finder’s Earth Holder could guide.

Yet here there was a newness, still unfamiliar to Antyr, for he had not one, but two Earth Holders. It was one of many changes that had come about since he had been drawn along the way that eventually brought him into his terrible confrontation with the blind man and set him on his long, hard journey from his homeland. Unlike many of those changes, however, this one did not disturb him, for his trust in Tarrian and Grayle, as theirs in him, was absolute. But it still puzzled and intrigued him. It was a commonplace in his profession that a Dream Finder could have only one Earth Holder. But why should that be? How an Earth Holder roamed the dreamways was knowledge far beyond the reach of any human inquirer; it was something hidden deep in the wild nature of such creatures. And, too, though he still felt a need for Tarrian and Grayle to be with him, how had it come about that he no longer truly needed their guidance at the Nexus? He let the questions drift away; he could not answer them, he knew, that was why he was here. And this was neither the time nor the place for them. Now, he had a client to attend to and it was sufficient that all was well.