(eng) Marjorie B. Kellogg by A Rumor of Angels

Author:A Rumor of Angels [Angels, A Rumor of]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 23

The huruss cannoned smoothly down its bedrock tunnel, but Jude tossed in her berth and moaned, then jerked awake, sweating and shaken, when Ra’an touched on the light above her head.

His dark faced frowned. “Nightmares? Still?”

She shivered. “This one had real people in it. James, your… James Andreas, and that man who takes care of him, in a huge cave with a lot of Koi.”

“But you’ve never seen any other Koi.”

“I knew who they were, as you do in dreams.”

His frown deepened. “What were they doing?”

Outside the small pool of light around her berth, the car was shadowed, earth-brown and mysterious. Jude gathered the bed quilt around her knees, grateful for his questioning, for the compulsion to tell him her dream was this time too strong to resist. “There was a carved stone bier and a little shrouded corpse, a child or like a child, with hair so blond it shone like silver through the shroud. The… James stood beside her, then turned his head and… looked at me, as if I were there, then there was a great burst of flame and I heard the gulls…”

Ra’an lowered himself to the edge of the berth. “He looked at you?”

Jude nodded and shivered again. “As if he wanted to make sure I was watching.”

His long fingers tied speculative knots in the silken fringe of the quilt. “This is a traditional Koi funeral rite that you have dreamed, a ritual you could have no knowledge of. Your other dreams, were they like this?”

“Not so… real, so complete, as if I were there. The others were like watching from a distance.”

“I attributed the dreams to the influence of the Wall, but we’re free of that now.” He fell silent, staring at the carpeted floor, then spoke again, wrapping himself in a cool didacticism. “One of the properties of halm is that the shock of a traumatic event befalling one portion of the population is instantaneously transmitted to the rest… or so they tell me. As a still-unpracticed telepath, your mind is most receptive during sleep. Thus it is possible to assume that you dreamed the truth, as it was happening. Describe it to me again.”

As neutrally as she knew how, Jude said, “Ra’an, I could show it to you.”

“No.”

“As you wish.” She began slowly, resurrecting her dream in meticulous detail from out of the obscuring gauzes her brain had already laid over the painful memory. Talking, building the picture in her mind, she saw again the circle of mourners, the swooping gulls. Perhaps I can just send it to him, like a videgram. It can kind of play in his brain without violating privacy, be there before he knows any better.

Ra’an listened to her careful words describe the taut profile of James Andreas bending over, lowering the yellow shrouded bundle to the bier, while internally Jude focused the image and thought hard of sailing it at him like a glider. Is this how they do it?

“… and the old man pulled aside

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