Charles De Lint - Dreams Underfoot

Mahail fed on hearts, she thought, not knowing where the thought had come from. He fed on them and left the shells to walk around just like we walk around.

She turned from the window and made her way through the people to the alley where she’d found Elderee. Without a pause, she turned into it and walked straight to its end. There she stopped and looked back at the sidewalk she’d just left. Cars flickered by on the street beyond it. On the sidewalk itself, every size and shape of Yoors Street poseur walked by the mouth of the alley, leaving echoing spills of conversation or laughter in their wake. But here it was quiet, like a world apart. Here it was ... different.

Your people know the roads ....

You need only walk it ... with intent ....

She sighed. Maybe the Rom of old had known hidden roads, but nobody had taken the time to show her any—not even Palko. Besides, her Gypsy blood was thin, a matter of chance rather than upbringing, and these days there were as many Gypsies in business suits as there were those following the old ways.

Gypsy magic was just something the Rom used to baffle the Gaje, the nonGypsies. Magic itself was just parlor tricks. Except ...

She remembered the polrech, appearing out of nowhere, dissolving into smoke when she’d killed it.

And Elderee ... like an orangutan, only he could talk.

Magic.

She moved closer to one side of the alley, studying the brick wall of the building there. This alleyway was the last place in the world that she would ever expect to find a marvel. The grime and the dirt, the plastic garbage bags torn open in their corners, the refuse heaped against the walls—this wasn’t the stuff of magic. Magic was Tolkien’s Middle Earth. Cat Midhir’s Borderlands. This was ... She ran a hand down the side of the wall and looked at the smudge it left on her fingers. This was an armpit of the real world.

Turning, she faced the mouth of the alley again, only to find a tall figure standing there, watching her.

Fear made her blood pump quicker through her veins and for the first time in her life she knew what it meant to have one’s heart in one’s mouth. She knew who this was.

“Dorn.”

The name came out of her mouth in a spidery croak. The man’s face was in shadow, but she could still see, no, sense his grin.

“I warned you not to involve yourself further in what doesn’t concern you.”

He’d warned her? Then she remembered the dream. The thought of his sending her that dream, of his being inside her head like that, made her skin crawl.

“You should not have come back,” he said.

“You don’t ... you don’t scare me,” she said.

No. He terrified her. How could something she’d only dreamed be real? She took a step back and the heel of her shoe came up against a garbage bag.

“Elderee’s road is mine,” he said, moving closer. “I took it from him. I set the hound on him.”

“You—”

“But I felt you drawing on its power, and then I knew you would try to take it from me.”

“I think you’re making a—”

“No mistake.” He touched his chest. “I can feel the bond between you and that damned monkey.

He gave it to you, didn’t he? Heart’s shadow, look at you!”

He stood very close to her now. A hand went up and flicked a finger against the stubble on the shaved part of her scalp. Lorio flinched at the touch, but couldn’t seem to move away. She was weak with fear. Spark’s flickered around Dorn’s fingers. She stared at them with widening eyes.

“You’re nothing better than an animal yourself,” he told her.

Strangely enough, Lorio took comfort in that remark. She looked up into his eyes and saw that they were as dead as Mahail’s had been in her nightmare. Nightmare. If Dorn was real, did that mean the road was too? Could she shatter this alleyway, as she had in her dream, to find the road lying underfoot—behind its facade?

An old straight track ... there for those who know to see it.

Something sparked in his eyes. It wasn’t until he spoke that Lorio realized it had been amusement.

“You don’t know, do you?” he mocked. “You couldn’t find a road if your life depended on it.”

‘‘I .9)

“Let me show you.”

Before she could do anything, he grabbed her, one hand on either lapel of her bomber’s jacket, and slammed her against the wall of the alley. The impact knocked the breath out of her and brought tears to her eyes.

“Watch,” he grinned, his face inches from hers.

He held her straightarmed and slowly turned from the wall. He made one full circuit, then dumped her on the ground. Lorio’s legs gave away from under her and she tumbled to the dirt.

Dirt?

Slowly the realization settled in her. He’d taken her back into her dream.

The silence came to her first, a sudden cessation of all sound so that her breathing sounded ragged to her ears. Then she looked around. The city was gone. She was crouching on a dirt road, under a starry sky. The hills of her dream were on either side, the road running between them like a straight white ribbon.

Dorn grabbed a handful of her hair and hauled her to her feet. She blinked with the pain, eyes tearing, but as she turned slowly to face her captor she could feel something shift inside her. She had no more doubt that magic was real, that the road existed, that Elderee had offered her something precious beyond compare. There was no way she was going to let Dorn with his dead eyes take this from her.

On the heels of that realization, knowledge filled her like a flower sprouting from a seed in timelapse photography. Eye to eye, mind to mind, Elderee had left that seed in her mind until something—the promise of this place, the magic of this road, her own understanding of it, perhaps—woke it and set it spinning through her.

There was not one road, but a countless number of them. They made a pattern that webbed not only her own world, but all worlds; not only her own time, but all times. They upheld a fragile balance between light and dark, order and chaos, while at the center of the web lay a sacred grove in that valley that Elderee had called Lankelly.

And I know how to get there, she realized.

I know that Wood. And it was home.

Her understanding of the roads and all they meant took only a moment to flash through her. In the same breath she knew that the magic that Elderee and others like him used was drawn from the pattern of the roads. A being like Dorn was a destroyer and gained his power from what he destroyed. It was a power that came quickly, draining as it ravaged, leaving the user hungry for more, while the power Elderee used worked in harmony with the pattern, built on it, drew from it, then gave back more than it took. It was a slower magic, but a more enduring one.

Dorn saw the understanding come into her eyes. Its suddenness, the depth of it filling her, shocked him. His grip on her hair slackened for a moment and Lorio brought her knee up into his groin. His hand dropped from her hair as he folded over.

Lorio stood over him, staring at his bent figure. She raised her hands and gold sparks flickered between her fingers. But she didn’t need magic to deal with him. She brought doubled fists down on the nape of his neck and he sprawled face forward in the dirt. He turned pained eyes to her, hands scrabbling at the surface of the road. His magic glimmered dully between his fingers, but Lorio shook her head.

He wouldn’t look at her. Instead he concentrated, brow furrowed, as he called up his magic.

Whatever spell he was trying to work made the light between his fingers gleam more sharply. Lorio stepped quickly forward and stamped down hard on his hand. She was wearing boots tonight. Bones crunched under the impact of her heel.