Five
days in the waking world translates, in dream-time, to something very
much like five months. It's not a little span. Even so, my presence
meant that they could drop people down into dreaming at almost any
time, and I could train them, place them, drive about with them, and
so on.
The
city grew, and grew more complex, as we practiced, and imagined up
new defenses, and recruited a few others. By the end of their five
days, we had five more members in the 'inner circle' of the group.
Pillars belonging to others were banished away across the hills, so
that they wouldn't need to suffer for our audacity. We were readying
ourself to challenge a thing that had long been worshipped as a god;
the possibility that we were complete fools had occured to us.
I
spend a fair bit of my time with the mist-things, in their glowing
crystal caves. Gina and Ray hadn't expected them to come along as
part of the package with the ward. Still their caverns had moved, to
a position just beneath the silver city we were all building. They
quite liked Ulla, and we drank very deeply indeed of the wise waters.
From that day to this, I never learned if those waters did anything,
but it was comforting to simply perform the act.
I
had plenty of warning for when the bomb went off, though the
detonation didn't cause the slightest ripple where I was – trying
to learn to play a wooden flute, urged on by Ulla. Almost everyone
was due to arrive over the next two hours of waking time, only Kimble
was in the city at the time. When the other arrived, they would be
sleeping in hotel rooms all across town, and would be 'talked down'
by listening to a recorded clip. The shop was empty, just in case.
Ulla
informed me when the bomb exploded. But, rather than describing the
conversation, here is a pieced together synopsis of events.
The
entrance to the cult cavern was underneath a crypt. It was locked,
of course, and even once inside, a sarcophagus had to be slid back to
allow access to those same rough steps I had seen in Laurent's mind.
At
about two in the morning, a rented moving truck pulled up to the
cemetery. Gina had jumped out, and rolled up the back door; Clara
and Ray had run out a skinny ramp from the back, and then just kept
walking. When they arrived at the crypt, they had cracked it open
with crowbars swung back the doors, wedged them. Everyone else,
meanwhile, was coming down that same ramp, each guiding a wheelbarrow
piled with taped-up squishy tubes made of trash bags. Half of these
bags were stacked in the crypt; the rest in two other piles about
twenty feet outside of it, forming a triangle of three dots. They'd
then tipped the wheelbarrows on their sides, and each of them had
walked out of the graveyard in a different direction.
Two
minutes later, the entire city woke up to what they thought was an
earthquake, as the bombs went off, and half of the cemetary fell
almost a hundred feet straight down. The hopital next door had
severe cracks in the foundation, and ultimately would be abandoned as
a result, but it stayed standing that night. The sudden subsidence
played merry hell underground, though; one of the outward cracks from
the sinkhole split a water main, and several million gallons of water
went down into that hole and into the connecting tunnels over the
next few hours. Several buildings around town faltered on their
foundations, as they had been too close to, or even connected to,
those tunnels.
In
short, we had not only dealt the cult a terrific wound, but it had
been even more severe than we had expected.
Knowing
that Kether-Kinal would be coming for us, and knowing that it would
be able to find us, we had decided that it would be better if we
chose the time and place. Ulla had beleved that it would take at
least two days of subjective time in the dreamlands before Kether
would have mashalled its forces; around two hours in reality. Then,
it would begin searching, and most likely sometime between the third
and sixth day of subjective time (around the third hour in reality),
it would sniff us out. It would arrive within hours, dreaming time.
In
real time, everyone had hit their beds with a heavy dose of Ianathos
within an hour after the bomb went off; in the dreamlands, they
arrived one after another over the course of about seven hours.
With
everyone present, we whipped up one of the symbols of our enemy,
reluctantly taught to us by the mist things, and proceded to perform
a simple ritual of defilement. In effect, we hoisted up an effigy of
Kether-Kinal where it could see, and then lit it on fire. There's a
pretty fair chance that it had never, ever been the target of the
level of disrespect we had spit into it's face.
We
heard it coming a full hour before we saw it. We went out to meet
it.
