Hero of Dreams - By Brian Lumley Page 0,3

stones and in the palm of my hand. And he said:

" 'Eldin, you'll meet a man one evening in the northern uplands, and he'll save your life. Then ... he'll join you on a quest-on several quests-which will take you to the farthest corners of dreamland.'

" 'Quests?' I said. 'What sort of quests?' But he'd say no more."

Fascinated, Hero asked: "Nothing else? That was all he told you?"

"I'm afraid so," Eldin nodded ruefully. Then he brightened and added, "Oh, yes! He did say that if we lived through these quests, how then that you'd have earned yourself a dream-name. That's how I know you're the one."

"Because I have no dream-name?"

Eldin nodded.

"Well then, I reckon I'll have to get along without one."

"You won't come with me?" Eldin seemed disappointed.

"Hero by name," the other reminded him, "but not necessarily by inclination. And I don't much care for the way your seer foretold the future. 'If we live through it, you say? There's one sure way to live through it, my friend, and that's not to go questing in the first place! Sorry, Eldin, but you can count me out. Anyway, it all seems rather vague to me. We're to go a-questing, you say? Where to? What for?"

Eldin shrugged. "I never did discover. But what does it matter, since you're not interested?"

Now Hero frowned. He turned his face away and gazed out of the cave's mouth into the night. "Let's sleep on it," he said, without looking at the other.

Eldin grinned. "I'll take first watch," he said.

David Hero
Chapter Two
David Hero awakened to sunlight that burned through his eyelids and warmed his face. He briefly wondered how this could be, for he remembered that the cave he shared with Eldin faced south and away from the rising sun. Then, shielding his eyes, he opened them to squint up at latticed windows where they sloped down and formed the east-facing roof. Through the small panes he could see the morning sun rising over Arthur's Seat.

Arthur's Seat?

Eldinburgh! Of course it was Eldinburgh. No, Edinburgh, without the "l"! Now why on Earth had he called the city Eldinburgh? And this was his studio-flat in a converted attic in the Dalkeith Road.

In that split second of confused realization, David Hero was once again a man of the waking world. All accumulated memories of that other world-life shrank and receded into those half-suspected regions of mind at which students of the human psyche have occasionally hinted and upon which they frequently conjecture. Earth's dreamland, in that moment, ceased to exist for him, or at least became a shadow in his subconscious.

Except ...

Eldin? Now what or who in hell was Eldin? And why had Hero been so surprised upon awakening to find himself in Edinburgh? He sat up in bed, yawned and shrugged. The mind's natural confusion in the transitory moments between dreaming and waking, he supposed. He had always had trouble waking up. Now what did he have planned for today?

A walk on the castle's esplanade? He always enjoyed that: the view of the olden city from on high. He loved the marvelous silhouettes, which always seemed to remind him of-other places, beyond memory. And perhaps that was how he might explain the inspiration for his outre art.

He got out of bed and crossed scrubbed floorboards to peer at yesterday's work. There, on an easel, a newly-daubed canvas was given a certain perspective as the morning light just failed to strike it. Basalt-towered and myriad-wharved, a gray and eerily fantastic city with leprous cobbled streets seemed to gloom back at him through the bleary, small-paned windows of its houses. Buckled pavements made dark-shadowed humps in subsided roads, and deserted wharves crumbled into a soulless sea. There was no sign of life at all and the whole scene was distinctly gloomy and disquieting.

Looking at the painting, Hero cocked his head on one side and frowned. The thing looked too damned dismal. Something utterly hideous had happened to that city, and he felt he should know what it was. He was not at all sure now that this was the effect he had wanted. There was nothing wrong with the painting itself; indeed, the work was good. No, the fault lay with the subject matter.

"Dylath-Leen," he muttered to himself. "Yes-but much too dreary. A good name, though!" And he picked up a pencil and quickly scrawled "Dylath-Leen" in one corner of the canvas. "There, now I won't forget it."

Then he stepped back and yawned again, scratching his tousled yellow hair. The