Dreamseeker's Road by Tom Deitz Page A

blood that bestowed its name. Water lapped around it, encircling it with cold and dark and a man-made lake: one of those R.E.A. jobs that had claimed so many valleys, so many homesteads; displaced so many folks who were his and David’s kin…
    Yeah, it was simply a mountain, and no more. He’d been nuts to believe Dave’s stories, however elaborately wrought, of a castle that crowned it all unseen, cloaked from the eyes of men by Faery glamour. A man would be a fool to believe such crap, and Aikin Carlisle Daniels was no fool. If there was magic in the world, he’d know it by now; God knew he’d read enough on that topic to fill a good-sized library.
    But suppose Dave’s tales were true?
    Suppose magic was rampant in the north Georgia woods and he had missed it? Had missed the Seelie Court riding in procession four times a year, had missed Faery critters that watched his friends, and Faery runners that ran races with them and kidnapped their brothers and shot elven arrows into their uncles. Never mind journeys to those other Worlds, whose names themselves conjured dreams: Tir-Nan-Og and Annwyn and Erenn; Galunlati and the Lands of Fire and the Realm of the Powersmiths.
    He wanted to believe it all, dammit! Did not want to brand his best friends as crazy, fools, or liars. Yet to believe, one needed proof, had to see the Faeries riding, had to hear the horns of Elfland saluting dusk and dawn.
    And one odd-coated, queer-horned stag glimpsed in the woods of a foggy morn was not sufficient.
    He had to have more; had to see the castle on that mountain, had to find his way to Faerie and all those other realms.
    But how could he? He who, though hungriest, had longest been denied that wondrous feast?
    But then his subconscious lodged against that most stubborn and deepest-set desire, and the force of that soulfelt need set fire in a certain stone.
    And so the dreamshape that was Aikin Daniels stood on the most perilous edge of the precipice that looked on Bloody Bald, and wished most fervently to see what was hidden there.
    And Aikin saw: Lugh’s mountaintop citadel, and the perilous peak beneath it, and the wide green country that spread about its base, where in the Lands of Men was only mountains and lakes. And he saw a webwork of gold laid upon those meads and meadows, upon those forests and streams. And he found he could follow those strands, away from Tir-Nan-Og and through countless other Worlds that layered ’round it like the chambers of some complex seashell, some more alien than the Lands of Men and some achingly familiar, for he had chanced on them before in less potent dreams.
    One Track in particular intrigued him, for it swept farther afield than the mountains. He traced it: south—and east, over hills, over ridges, into the rolling Piedmont. Settlements blazed by—Helen, Cleveland, Gainesville, Jefferson, Arcade—sensed but not truly seen. And then Aikin came upon one particular town.
    He pronounced its name. Athens. Oz Upon the Oconee. The place he lived. The place he went to college.
    But the magic ran there as well: a glitter of Track far less than a mile from his cabin in Whitehall Forest. He had only to locate it in his World, and somehow, someway, he would walk there.
    All he required was a landmark: something to mark it past mistaking.
    He sought one, even as the Straight Track vanished save for the merest glimmer, even as the rest of the world grew hard and dirty and… real. Real as that lightning-blasted oak beside the maple with the bifurcated trunk. Them he would remember; them he would seek when he awoke…
    * * *
    David dreamed of guns. He dreamed of the rifle he had hunted with that morning, and he dreamed of he who had bestowed it, who had died seven years gone by, and in whose honor he had dedicated that day’s kill. David-the-Elder, he’d been styled, after David himself had been born. David Thomas Sullivan: his father’s youngest brother.
    David-the-Younger’s role model, who had taught