Adept (The Essence Gate War, Book 1) - By Michael Arnquist Page 0,142

to hear it.”

CHAPTER 18

Through the velvet folds of the dream, grasping hands reached for him. He spun away, trying as he did so to discern their owner, but the phantom figure faded back from him like smoke before the wind. Alert for the next attack, he strove to bring the distorted milieu of the dream into focus, but focus was elusive as well; reality wavered and shuddered, but refused to converge. Angry now, he sought identity instead, and this at least came more readily. His name, he knew upon reflection, was Amric. He was warrior and warmaster, and he would not be denied. With identity came purpose, and he peeled at the intervening layers of the subconscious. Hazy at the forward fringe of his vision, the figure whirled and fled. His swords flashed into his hands, and he leapt in pursuit.

He sped after the darting shadow, racing through a realm of mist. Obstacles reared from the fog, forcing him to hurdle and dodge, and his quarry, seeming more familiar with the terrain, drew steadily away from him. He redoubled his efforts, but still the figure dwindled in the distance. Grinding his teeth in frustration, he pressed on. Sentinel shapes pressed forth from the mist, resolving into huge trees, and sunlight pierced the grey ceiling above to speckle the matted ground before him. A thick, verdant forest coalesced about him as he ran, and its appearance tugged at his memory. It bore a striking resemblance, he realized after a moment, to the sprawling woodlands surrounding Lyden where he had spent his youth among the Sil’ath, hunting and exploring.

The sights and smells slipped easily about him, familiar and comforting as a long-worn glove. It was like returning home, and he could see why he might have summoned these remembered environs in a dream, but the forest seemed determined to prove a hindrance to his progress. Every rock tilted beneath his boot heel, every upturned root caught at his passing foot, every wind-waved branch swayed into his path. At the same time, his quarry seemed to suffer no such difficulties, and even as he struggled past he wondered at how the land he loved could so favor another.

The shadow melted from sight far ahead, and Amric ran on, following on pure instinct. The towering trees whipped by as he ran, and several times he would have sworn they shifted somehow to shoulder him from his path. Twisting and darting, he wound his way among them, his fury undiminished.

He slid to a halt in a sunlit clearing, his skin prickling with warning. His eyes narrowed. He tightened his grips on the swords until the muscles of his arms stood corded in sharp relief, and he began a slow circuit of the clearing, moving with a panther’s stride. He reached his arrival point and stopped, frowning. Something was amiss here, he could feel it. He scanned the ring of trees and saw nothing out of place. His gaze fell then upon the grassy center of the clearing, and he froze. He saw his trampled path circumscribing the glade, except for one side where it veered gently inward, away from the perimeter. He had not meant to do that, and did not remember altering his path in that manner. He stalked toward it, and found himself abruptly at the edge of the clearing. He whirled and saw that he had swerved again, away from that spot.

Setting his jaw, he took slow steps in that direction, pausing after each stride to assess his progress. Resistance rose against him, as if he walked against a river’s steady current. He concentrated upon the forest ahead, refusing to allow his eyes to slide to either side. He thought at first he was looking at a portion of the forest draped in deepest shadow, and then it seemed that it must instead be a looming, amorphous wedge of rock. His mind struggled to fill the void in his perception. He growled to himself. Damn it all, but this was his forest, in his dream, and he would not be deceived. He concentrated, reaching for what he could not see, and like a parting veil it finally yielded its secrets to him in halting stages.

It was no natural structure, but a cottage or small house of some kind, nestled back amid the trees and sheltered in the lee of the hill behind it. He could not place the architecture, with its strange, almost delicate flowing lines, and yet somehow it struck him