When the Skepers Wake!

Chapter Twenty-Five

They stood atop the castle's tallest turret in the morning sunlight, all three of them clean, bright and rested after four days and nights of leisurely living as Nyrass' guests and at his expense. The wizard would have it no other way, for in his own words the adventurers had given him "a new lease on life!" Truth to tell, they had given all of Earth's dreamland a new lease on life; or at least extended indefinitely the one it already had. Dreamland-the waking world-the Universe itself owed them a debt, which probably never would be acknowledged and certainly never repaid.

The least Nyrass could do was to offer them his hospitality, which they had gladly accepted for four near-idyllic days. The season of mists was past and the spring sun warm; the castle's gardens were expansive and its grass soft and lush; their apartments had been more than adequately appointed and their food the very best that Nyrass could conjure. Indeed, they believed he had conjured it from somewhere, for never before in all the towns and cities of their wanderings had they known the like of such wonderful meats, fruits and wines.

Now, replete and revitalized, packs upon their backs, they were ready to move on; but the last leg of their journey-their mode of conveyance-was to be the strangest yet. Their nightmare ride on the reed-tree raft, even their flight on the Great Tree's life-leaf would be as nothing by comparison. For this time, with Nyrass' aid, their trip would be sheer magic. Not the magic of wizards and sorcerers, no, but the "Magic of Science," the science of the First Ones. Quite simply, they would return to the great keep in the mountains via the three Wands of Power!

As to how this could be achieved: Nyrass gave die adventurers his complete assurance that the trip would be painless, trouble free and instantaneous! One second they would be here atop this high turret, and the next ... All that was required of Hero and Eldin was that they close their eyes, open their minds and think of that secret room deep in the heart of the keep. Nyrass would do his bit, of course (coordinating the effort, so to speak), and the wands-they would do the rest.

Now the three said their farewells to Nyrass (Eldin somewhat edgily, displaying a typically suspicious attitude toward magic, be it scientific or esoteric) and formed a triangle. They linked arms, each holding tight to a wand, and witii a final glance at the old magician closed their eyes. The men concentrated on the keep's inner room; Aminza simply centered her mind upon staying with them; and Nyrass unified the forces.

AH three adventurers felt a moment's dizziness. They staggered a little, opened their eyes-

-And staggered again, but much more violently this second time!

"WHO DARES ENTER THE KEEP UNBIDDEN?" roared the Keeper, the lights of his panel tinged red with anger and moving in jerky agitation.

"OH, NOT YOU AGAIN!" Eldin roared back almost as loudly, though more from shock than bravado.

"For goodness' sake relax, Keeper!" cried Hero, his ears ringing. "It's only us. Oh, and Aminza, too."

For a moment there was a sort of stunned silence as die lights on the voice-panel rapidly ran dirough the entire range of the color spectrum. Then-

"David Hero and Eldin the Wanderer," said the Keeper in a kind of half-mechanical astonishment. "And the girl of whom you spoke, Aminza Anz! You've returned, and not through the door. Which means-" and the Keeper's voice rose almost to a whine, "-which means-!"

Aminza's eyes were wide and worried as she stared all about. "You'll do yourself an injury!" she was moved to cry. "Whoever you are ..."

"An injury!" the Keeper cried in a delirium of color. "/'// do myself an injury!"

"You will!" she asserted, nodding her head,

"That doesn't matter," answered the Keeper. "Nothing matters except ... you have the wands?"

"We have the wands, yes," said Hero.

A sudden hiss of compressed air heralded the opening of a small door in the room's central control panel. In the opening thus revealed, electrical fires like miniaturized bolts of forked lightning crackled continuously in a darkness deep as the spaces between the stars. Just inside the door, however, where the metal frame ended and the alien darkness began, three evenly-spaced, empty sockets were visible, holes that merged with die inner nothingness and went ... nowhere.

"The wands," urged the Keeper in a blaze of gold and green. "Place the wands in the sockets, one at a time, starting at the left. First Thinistor's wand-"

Almost of its own accord, as if the wand moved Hero and not the reverse, Thinistor's wand slotted into its hole and was instantly gripped and held fast. Hero released its knob, jumped back, stood well away from that bottomless pool of darkness and its lightning-flash denizens. And immediately those small lightnings lost something of their aimlessness and crackled more certainly.

'Wow the source-wand!" cried the Keeper in a throbbing pulse of purple. "The wand with the golden glow."

Aminza stepped forward, her hand trembling as she placed the naked end of Lathi's wand into its socket-until she too felt the stem gripped as the wand was accepted. Hero caught her as she stepped backward, a little off balance.

"Finally," the Keeper's voice was now a whisper of dull red and yellow, "the warp-wand!"

"No," answered Eldin, backing away with Klarek-Yam's wand gripped tight in his hand. "Not yet, keeper."

"Do it now-at once!" the Keeper roared in a blaze of white anger.

"And what of your promise?" shouted Eldin in return. "What of our reward? More to the point, what happens when I place this last wand in its socket?"

"Why, then I wake the sleepers," said the Keeper. "As for your rewards-you shall have them, never fear. Now- the wand."

Eldin looked at Hero and they both turned to the girl. "It's what we're here for," she said.

Again Hero and Eldin exchanged searching looks, but at last the older dreamer stepped forward, approached the open door and held out the third wand. The alien energies were alive now and full of purpose. Crackling in their cave of ultimate darkness, the weird lightnings seemed to guide the stem of Klarek-Yam's wand into its slot, almost snatching it from Eldin's fingers.

The door in the control panel hissed shut with an impossible speed and Eldin, falling back away from it, was grabbed hold of and steadied by his friends. A tremendous rumbling purr now welled up in that room of strange metal, setting the soft-textured floor a-throb beneath their feet. In the wall of the room the great entrance gave a hiss which the dreamers remembered of old, and now the exit gaped open as it had when the Keeper first sent them upon their quest.

"Go," said the Keeper. "Leave the keep at once."

"What?" howled Eldin, outraged almost beyond reason. "What of your promise?"

"Ask no questions-simply OBEY!" ordered the Keeper, his voice full, strong and sure.

"Damn you to hell, Keeper!" cried Hero as he and Aminza dragged Eldin forcibly toward the open portal. "You lied and cheated and robbed us!"

"Fools!" came the Keeper's answer. "My masters are stirring. Would you wish to be here when they start awake?"

Now the anger went out of the faces of the dreamers in an instant, was replaced by the pallid mask of fear. To be here when the sleeping First Ones awakened. To see them walk abroad. Benevolent they may well be-but on whose authority? The word of the Keeper? Of an old, friendly wizard in Theelys? And their almost limitless power, their otter alienage .. .

"GO!" roared the Keeper again as they crossed the door's threshold and it hissed shut behind them; and in the exterior tunnel the echo of that final command, co-mingled with the steadily increasing hum and throb, came back to them again and again where they trembled in darkness.

"Stand still both of you," grunted Eldin, recovering from his rage. He slipped out of his pack, found his fire-stones and quickly fashioned a torch of rags tied to the blade of his straight sword. Then, by the uneven light of Eldin's makeshift brand, the three set about to make their exit from the keep.

Knowing the way-urged on by a rumbling which set the entire keep shaking, and by the thought of the First Ones, probably awake and moving in the keep even now-they made light work of the maze of pitfalls and traps. Suddenly speed was of the essence, and the faster they went the faster they wanted to go. Mercifully the gravity-pit had lost its dreadful pull, so that they were able to cross its bone-strewn, previously muscle-wrenching valley at a run; and Eldin's expertise with a tossed grapple never faltered when they reached the far wall.

Then more of the maze, and the lighting of a second torch; more pitfalls and pivoting slabs and echoing rock-cut tunnels; and the rumbling growing to a roar of barely-constrained power, and pictures in the minds of the three of sentient, corrugated, upright gray shapes with yellow pits for eyes and-what?-for souls. And at last the blessed light, and the vertiginous climb down to the surface of the plateau; and for all their haste never a slip or a foot wrongly placed as they completed the climb and set off at a breathless, stumbling run for the cave under the overhang, where once they had battled Thinistor Udd and the monstrous living idol he worshipped.

And finally, as they ran, so Hero gasped out what all three were thinking. "We're fools, fools! What did we ever really know, eh? The tenth First One, mad: Well, he may have been-but who can say for certain? What is madness to a First One anyway?"

"You're right, lad," Eldin grunted. "For all we know, Klarek-Yam might have been the only sane one!"

"And mad or sane, how do we know how the nine feel about Klarek-Yam?" gasped Aminza. "I mean-I mean-"

"We know what you mean, Aminza," said Hero. "We killed him-or at least we had a hand in it."

Now, where the overhang of the cliffs sheltered them, they stopped running and turned to look back at the Keep of the First Ones, Even at that distance the rumbling could be heard and faint tremors reached the adventurers through the plateau's rock. Great boulders were dislodged from the keep's face and thundered down onto the shuddering plateau's shelf like so many pebbles. The very air seemed to jounce and tremble, and dust-devils rose up everywhere in weirdly-dancing spirals.

"Look!" gasped Aminza a moment later, but her companions were already looking-

-And the hair on their heads prickled in preternatural dread as down from the keep snaked something which they had thought never to see again, something last seen here in this very spot at die end of the running battle with Yibb-Tstll. It was a greenly weaving ribbon of light, a snakelike stream of glowing, phosphorescent particles that moved like a blindworm over and across the vast rocky shelf. Nodding, the "head" of the eerie stream came to an abrupt halt as it crossed the path taken by the adventurers when they ran from the keep.

Then the throats of the three grew dry, for like some great hound on the trail of blood the blindly glowing snake of green light began to follow their track, moving faster as it sped toward them across the plateau. In another moment it reared over them, dipped-enveloped them!

"You are fearful," said a voice from nowhere, a voice sweet and gentle as Klarek-Yam's had been harsh and evil, an ethereal yet vibrant voice which seemed to have its source all about them and inside them at one and the same time. "We do not wish you to be afraid. The Keeper made certain promises. They shall be kept. Eldin the Wanderer- what do you most desire?"

"Me?" Eldin licked his lips and nervously thumbed his chest. "You want to know what I-"

"Come, come, Eldin! Name your reward," commanded the voice.

Slowly the older dreamer's eyes widened and a grin spread over his face. "I want-" he began.

"Riches?" prompted the voice.

"No," he slowly shook his head. "I've no real use for riches. I want... a city at my feet! Where the people will love me, the lords greet me as an equal, and the younger men-" (and he glanced at Hero), "envy me!"

"Is that all? Then you shall have it-soon. And you, Aminza Anz? What is your wish?"

"Only to go back where I belong," she answered immediately and in a small voice.

"Where you belong?"

"Home," she nodded.

"You too shall have your wish-soon. And you, David Hero? How may we reward you?-but be quick, for we may not linger here now."

"I want ... a dream-name!" said Hero.

"Nothing more?"

"Nothing," he shook his head. "I'm sick of being just .. . just any old dreamer! I feel I'm a part of Earth's dreamland now, and so want to belong .. ."

For a moment there was only the weaving of the green glow all around, and then that all-enveloping voice said: "You are three rare people, and through your actions all of your dreamland is safe once more. You are adventurers, but more than that you are heroes. Real heroes ... You desire a dream-name, David? Very well, you shall have one ..." The voice paused for a moment and Hero waited expectantly.

"Occasionally, rarely, a man from the waking world is allowed to keep his waking name for proper use in Earth's dreamland. So be it. Henceforth you shall be David Hero-Hero of Dreams! "

The green light disappeared, blinked out in a moment and left the three stumbling on a plateau which trembled and shook as if in the grip of an earthquake. They hung onto each other, gazed at the keep, saw the gigantic crack that widened all along the sides of its base. More boulders tumbled loose and fell thunderously from keep to rock-strewn shelf. And the keep-that entire titanic cube of rock-lifted slowly into the air in a massive shimmering of energy. One moment it was there, clear of the ground by at least a quarter of its own height and still rising, and the next- Gone!

"Gone!" Hero gasped. "Back through the gates." "They used the wands," growled Etdin, "the keys we brought them."

"Gone," whispered Aminza. "But gone where?" Although they stood for a long while and stared across the flat and empty plateau, Aminza's question remained unanswered.