Free Dreamseeker's Road by Tom Deitz Page B

ground, yet above it and within it,” Dave had said. “That’s what a Track looks like when it’s activated. It’s kinda like dust in a shaft of sunlight,” he’d added. “And seems like it gets thicker the more…magical the place you’re near. Otherwise…watch for long strips of barren ground—and briars.”
    But Aikin saw no golden glimmer. Then again, he didn’t have Second Sight. Dave did. His eyes burned when they were near an activated Track. They burned in the presence of the substance of Faerie or the powers thereof. Magic came to Dave unasked. Was it, therefore, too much to expect that someone who wanted magic as desperately as he did be granted this one small boon?
    …closer, and he almost touched it, then relented. Suppose the same thing happened to him as had happened to Dave and his brother? Suppose the Track held him bound, unable to escape?
    Stupid, Daniels, he argued back. No way folks don’t walk over this all the time.
    And with that, he closed his eyes, took a deep breath—and laid his hand upon the Track.
    Did a spark jump between his fingers and the earth as he closed those last few millimeters? Maybe. Probably it was a prickling of pine straw. And was the earth warmer there? Possibly again. But the sun also lay in long beams across the fallen leaves, so they could’ve been heated longer. And had the wind picked up, bringing the scent of strange flowers? Again, that was possible. But the wind had been gusting all day, and his hands were sticky with the sap of a dozen plants he’d collected in passing, some of them quite fragrant.
    No, he just couldn’t tell. Not this way. Reluctantly, he rose.
    One final test remained, however, which he both longed for and dreaded. Steeling himself, he took a deep breath and stepped full upon the Track.
    Nothing.
    Merely the warmth of the sun on his shoulders. Another breath, and he took a pace.
    Again, nothing.
    Another of each, and still no response.
    Finally he took fifteen strides one way, then fifteen back the other. Nothing changed. No energy awoke beneath his feet, though they were bare, the better to feel such things. And no visions came to him; no gold glittered on the needles. Nothing altered at all.
    But this had to be the place. Had to be.
    Sparing one final glare for the blasted oak, he stepped off the Track. A briar snared his leg in passing, leaving straight red scratches across his calf. “Fuck you,” he snapped. “I can’t do shit on that Track beside you, but you can have a friggin’ field day with me!”
    The briars did not respond. Aikin retrieved his pack, found a place in surveying distance of both Track and oak, reactivated Tori, chose a book from his stash, and commenced to read.
    It was not botany that occupied him, or Wildlife Management or Orienteering. Rather, it was every single book he had found in the library when he’d claimed a terminal and called up Ley Lines and Straight Tracks in the subject data base—all three of ’em. He’d chased ’em down anyway, and raided their bibliographies, and from them gleaned a couple more. And then by browsing the stacks to either side of that assembly, he’d finally accumulated a pile. The View Over Atlantis was one; The Old Straight Track— anew, annotated, edition—another. Probably he should have checked the periodical indices as well, and the folklore journals. And he would—tomorrow. But even the arcanely compromised could stare at CRTs only so long when there were actual pages to be read. It was, therefore, with a keen sense of anticipation that Aikin opened The Old Straight Track.
    Most of an hour later, he closed it again. There was interesting stuff in there, no doubt; mostly about how a man named Watkins had noticed how sacred sites in England tended to line up with distinctive natural features and locales significant to prehistoric Britain. From them (so the annotations read) later, less pragmatic folk had hypothesized a system of lines carrying the “earth