Waking The Dreamlost

CHAPTER One-2

“Follow me,” he said.

Some of the sounds he’d heard earlier made him think that the family was being held in the room next to theirs, and he found the door quickly and listened at it to make sure that there were no guards in there. Then he unlocked it.

The husband was gone—killed on video as a traitor to the Collective, probably. The wife sat huddled in a corner, shielding her daughter with her body. They had not been tied up.

Marish held a finger to his lips to keep her from talking.

“Are you and the girl able to move?” he asked.

The woman nodded.

“Good. Stay with Itana. I need to leave for a moment, but I will come back for you.”

From what Marish had seen earlier, this was an ordinary Borderland house that happened to belong to terrorists.

The most common floor plan in these mountains involved a square, two-story house with a basement to store perishables and a group of workrooms and storerooms along the chilly outer walls of the ground floor.

There would also be a front door and a back door to the outside world, both contained in vestibules about as deep as the storeroom he and Itana had been held in, but much narrower.

Each vestibule would have an inner door leading into a hallway like the one he was in now, to keep out the cold in the wintertime. In the middle of the ground floor, there would be a dining hall that doubled as a kitchen, with a massive woodstove.

The hallway he was in wrapped around the dining area in a square shape. The second floor would have sleeping quarters surrounding a mezzanine that gave onto the central hall to take advantage of the hot air rising from the stove below.

Marish found the door of the central hall and listened for a moment. It sounded like five or six, maybe more, of the terrorists were in there eating.

They would be armed, and Marish knew that on the ground floor he would be at a disadvantage, so he swept the outer rooms instead.

At first, he only found more prisoners. He unlocked their doors, untied their hands if they were tied up, and warned them to stay put until he came back for them.

Then he closed the doors again to keep the terrorists from realizing that their captives were about to break loose.

The trapdoor to the cellar lay in a nook beneath the staircase leading to the second floor. Marish crouched there for a moment and listened. He didn’t hear anything.

The cellar would be a good hiding place for the leaders of the group in case of an emergency, but apparently even in late spring it was too chilly to be appealing.

Finally, he came to a workroom on the eastern side of the building, next to the staircase.

When he listened at the door, he could hear two men bickering about their video camera, which apparently had an extremely short cord and had to run on batteries when it was mounted on a tripod.

“You shouldn’t have taken so long to kill the traitor,” one of the men was saying.

“If you had stuck to the plan, we would be done by now, instead of waiting for the blasted thing to recharge before we can make the next set of videos.”

“Sure, it took a long time to make, but that video will scare the guts out of those whining Jaiyans,” the other man said.

“Not like what the boss wants for the girl in the miniskirt. Take her into the room, make it clear she’s not hurt. Make a speech. Boom, one, last thing she knows.”

“Yeah, what’s the point of that?”

Marish wanted to kick the door in and put a dozen rounds apiece in them. But he forced himself to listen a little longer to get a feel for their positions inside the room and to make sure there was no one else with them, like a less talkative colleague or an unconscious hostage.

As he listened, he thought: For Itana’s sake, I’m glad they didn’t plan anything uglier for her. But why would their leader arrange things that way?

When he was sure the two men were alone, he kicked the door open and swept the room with an arc of machine gun fire from right to left. The two men jumped in their seats and then fell over.

The video camera had been caught in the spray of bullets, and Marish caught a glimpse of it sparking and hissing out of the corner of his eye as he turned away from the room and ran up the stairs at full tilt.

He got to the sleeping quarters just as the only terrorist up there reached for the gun beneath his pillow.

A burst of metallic chatter from Marish’s machine gun stopped him, and the terrorist slumped back onto his bed.

Hearing noises behind him, Marish whirled and shot two more men coming up the stairs.

There was no door at the top of the stairs to close, so he ducked to the other side of the staircase, closer to the eaves of the house than to the wooden railing at the edge of the mezzanine.

There was a gun rack there, and, fortunately, the terrorists did not keep it locked down. Marish found a rifle there, which he slung over his shoulder, and a spare clip for the machine gun.

Then he lay down on the varnished wood floor and crawled on his belly to the railing at the edge of the mezzanine. He kept the top of the stairs at the left edge of his line of sight, and the machine gun close to his left hand. Three more men came up the stairs, and he shot them left-handed with the machine gun.

Then he picked up the rifle with both hands and focused on the dining hall below. Someone was crawling around there, using the tables and chairs as partial cover and trying to get to the woodstove, which would give the terrorist better cover.

With one eye on the doorway, Marish waited for the man below to show himself and was rewarded with a glimpse of the leader’s head. His first shot hit just above the ear, and the man collapsed. He waited for a moment to see if anyone would return fire or panic after the leader’s death, but all was quiet in the hall below.

If all the men he’d shot on the staircase had been in the dining hall, then he’d accounted for all the terrorists he knew of. But what if there had been more outside the house?

They would have come inside to investigate, and they would probably not venture into the dining hall, especially if they had heard shots coming from the upper story of the house.

Marish slung the rifle over his shoulder and crawled to the staircase. No one shot at him when he peered down the stairs or when he walked slowly and quietly down them. He edged down the stairs as quietly as a cat and checked the hallway.

The back door to the outside was along this angle of the main hall that ran all around the perimeter, and he thought he could hear sounds in the small room that served as a vestibule between the inner and outer doors.

The inner door swung open, and he shot down another terrorist. After waiting to see if anyone else would come out, he swept the back door vestibule and found no one. Then he checked the front vestibule. No one.

Marish made another circuit of the storerooms, retrieving hostages as he went. So far as he could tell, the young married man who had been tortured to death in the video room was the only hostage who had died.

You can relax now, he told himself. You saved most of them, and you looked after Itana, just like you promised her brother. But how on earth can I keep my promise to her and her brother when the trail’s gone cold?

“Is it safe?” Itana asked him when he caught up with her and the young widow.

“Safe enough for now,” Marish told her. “We need to search this place and find either a radio or a cell phone that we can use to call the nearest military outpost.”

“Ladies and gentlemen, we are now on approach to Rivertown Airport,” the pilot announced over the intercom. “Please fasten your seatbelts.”

Itana looked out the window next to her seat. So far, there wasn’t much to see, just the plane’s wing and a thin veil of clouds beneath it. She could just about make out hints of brown and green through the white veil, but the ground still seemed far, far away.

Itana leaned her head back and sighed.

“Don’t worry,” Marish told her. “Almost there.”

“I know,” she said. “It doesn’t make it any easier.”

“It beats giving the same statement to fourteen different members of the counterterrorist task force, one at a time,” he said.

“No, that wasn’t fun,” she said. “But I’d almost rather be doing that than what comes next.”

“Paperwork? That’s always the worst part. I left the army just to get away from it.”

Itana giggled.

Then she said, “That’s still not the worst part. The worst part is my heart-tugging reunion with Sekheret in front of you and his personal assistant and about a hundred TV camera crews when we get off the plane.”

“If you feel like you need to talk with him about what happened in private, but you want me along, I can gave you my phone number.”

“If you mean talk to him about what happened right after you untied me, then no, I wasn’t going to tell him,” she said fiercely. “Don’t you take it on yourself to tell him!”

“It’s not my job to say anything if you aren’t going to,” Marish said. “But it does seem like something you might need to discuss with him.”

She shook her head.

“We don’t have that kind of a relationship,” she said. “We’re getting married because our mothers arranged it.”

And now my mother’s dead, and his mother isn’t lucid anymore, she thought sadly.

“He’s never found anyone else—at least, not anyone his family liked—and I could use the financial security and the status boost for my clothing design business.”

“Sekheret doesn’t mind you continuing your work after you get married?” Marish asked. “That’s good, at least. It means he’s not too possessive.”

“Sekheret wouldn’t care about... that kiss. He would just laugh and say I was trying to make him jealous. And he would tease me about it until I was sick of hearing about it.”

“You said he had never found anyone else,” Marish said, his voice pitched low. “What about you?”

“If I had found someone else, it definitely wouldn’t be you,” Itana retorted.

She felt herself blushing, with a heat in her lips that reminded her of that kiss she was trying so hard not to remember.

“Woe is me, for no one can ever replace you,” Marish said with a perfectly flat voice and a twinkle in his eye. “I will have to follow the river down to the Western Sea and become a white-sash monk in the Island City.”

“Ha, ha, very funny,” Itana said. “Can we talk about something else? Anything else?”

“Hmm, let me think. Have you ever met someone who claimed to have strange powers?”

Well, that was certainly random, Itana thought. But I did ask for a change of subject. Aloud, she said, “I bought into a clothing store recently, equal shares with the two original owners. They’re Rina and Kajjal, from Mount Snarl.”

His expression changed slightly, and Itana added, “I see you know the name. Well, Rina’s fiancé is a little...different. Smart and good-looking, but with kind of an otherworldly quality.”