I did not know whether my hope had any justice to it. I knew, among the staff, whose powers canceled out whose among the Uranians. But Vanity? She was a Phaeacian. Both Boggin and Mestor seemed to have the same space-distorting powers she did. But who had worked on her to blank her memory?
Maybe—and this was just a guess—it was a combination of two powers, and both were needed to stop her. Who had promised Vanity to Glum? He had mentioned more than once that she was 'promised' to him. If that promise had been made by Boggin, for the purpose of inflaming Grendel's desire to keep her here, then maybe Grendel was one of the two powers needed to suppress her power.
Who was the other? Mrs. Wren, I assume. Why else have her be the one to lead us in nighttime prayers for so many years? Unless it was Fell, who gave us injections once a month. Or Boggin? The Board had said explicitly that he was here to stop Vanity. Was that merely because of the green ring, or did he have an anti-Phaeacian power?
Maybe. I was speculating in midair at the moment.
But I did know that I could still use my sight powers, and had regained the limited ability to affect weight when I walked along the South boundary. Quentin complained that spirits could not hear him, i.e., he could not affect them, even though he could still see things in tarot cards; his version, so to speak, of my
'higher senses.' If I got Quentin to the North boundary, when the barrows pushed up their cold mounds, his ability to fly might come back. If he could fly without his walking stick. If, if, if…
We crawled in silence for a while. I took the risk of glancing through the walls again.
5.
I saw a long manlike shape in the waters. Its third eye rolled and shimmered in its forehead like an orb of metal. Telemus held me around the waist, high above the frothing wild waves, and driving rain formed black sheets, beating the water white. Waves like sudden mountains rose and fell to every side.
Telemus held a knife to my throat. 'Tell him to quell the storm.'
The sea giant—he looked like Victor—turned his head toward me, his eyes shining like lamps. 'I am embedding this message by means of cryptognosis into a preeon-sciousness level of your nervous system. The paradigms of Chaos have agreed only on this one point. We will wait for you to free yourselves. Once we have regained contact with you, we will descend down into the Cosmos and destroy its foundations. All biochemical-based life shall cease operation. Communicate on this frequency, by means of focused thought-energy signals directed at our outposts in the Hyades cluster. Longitude and Right Ascension notation follows…' There followed degrees, minutes, and seconds of arc.
An invisible signal—somehow in the dream, I was aware of it—sprang from the sea giant.
The clouds parted. Here and there, stars appeared in the gaps.
There were beings above the clouds. Far, far above. Their bodies looked like statues, hanging without weight, and coated with a gold metallic surface instead of skin. Only the smallest, little specks, were manlike; their faces were the faces of statues, stern and kingly.
Ten and one hundred times their size were a second group. These others were oval, like seeds from a metal tree.
One thousand to ten thousand times their size were even larger beings. This third group were shaped like serpents, mile upon mile of golden armor.
This third group were very large, and very high up in-deed. Sunlight, harsh and unfiltered from any atmosphere, glinted like solidified fire off their starboard sides. Their port sides were black with unsoftened shadow.
The giant in the water was not a giant; he was microscopic. He was a Telchine, a servant of much vaster beings. The Fallen were not fallen at all, but orbiting. I kept revising my estimate of how far away they must be, how large they were___
My dreams. We were crawling through my dreams now.
What sort of power did Vanity have? What were the Phaeacians?
6.
I saw two dreams up ahead. One showed a red lake, steaming beneath a desert sky. From the lake came a naked figure, rising, and a sensation of voluptuous passion and luxurious demand radiated from the figure. The sensation was so strong that it took my breath away. I could not see, in the dream, if the figure was male or female. As the figure rose, the blood-red fluid streamed down arms spread wide.
From it came a sound like a drumbeat, beats so loud that they seemed like gunshots, pounding, maddening.
The second dream showed a handsome old man seated on a crocodile. His beard and hair were white, and his expression was benevolent. On his wrist he carried a goshawk, hooded and in jesses. Next to him was a donkey, which, even as I watched, stood and became a donkey-headed man, and then a bearded man with a hoarse and coughing voice, who said, 'One comes, and, with her, another!'
A third figure was there, a bull with a man's face, and between his hooves were circles and epicycles drawn in the ground, and signs of the zodiac written around the edges. 'Sisters fair, yet sharing nor sire nor mother.'
The old man on the crocodile replied, 'Not hither crawls that which we stand to ward away; yet sound alarm, for so strict duties say. Wake, young Master, wake! Of liberal arts and sciences you shall dream more anon; but in no wise may we touch the world, now that your wand, our bridge, is gone.'
The second dream flared up and faded like a candle being snuffed.
7.
I whispered to Vanity, 'Quentin just woke up. He knows we're coming.'
'How do you know?'
'I can see through the walls. The tunnel runs out of normal space-time through a dreamscape and back in at another point. The distances are skewed.'
