Through the Ice by Piers Anthony, Launius Anthony, Robert Kornwise Page B

seemed to expand the scale of disaster.
    He had drawn her out of it before—but could he do it again? He had to try!
    "It's a dream!" he said. "We're in our tent! All we have to do is wake! Concentrate with me, and step out of it!"
    They tried. He felt her effort, as a surge of emotion, and he joined in with his. But nothing happened. They remained standing in the swirling dust, while the sky reddened further, and the oncoming planet swelled larger yet, its craters and cracks manifesting. Now it filled a third of the sky—no, two fifths—and it was growing faster.
    "We can't escape it!" Tirsa cried, appalled. "My world is to be destroyed, and I can save neither it nor myself!"
    "I couldn't save mine either!" Seth admitted. "Everything was turning to ice! But I called to you, and caught your hand—"
    "And joined my world, no better off!" she finished. "It is to be crushed under rock, a collision!"
    Somehow they both knew that when that happened, it would be over for them, in reality as well as in the dream.
    "But maybe we can catch another hand!" he said. "There has to be some way to wake up, before—"
    "Before we get killed in our dreams!" she finished. "Nefarious is doing this, I'm sure! Trying to kill us in our sleep!"
    "We won't let him!" he said, but it was bravado, for they seemed to be powerless against this awful thrust of the distant sorcerer. "Maybe if the four of us can link again, we'll be too strong for him."
    "Yes! We must link up!"
     
    They concentrated. Seth's free hand flailed, but swept through nothing but dust, while the onrushing planet filled half the sky. He felt the awful tug of its gravity, and knew that the end would come much faster than the beginning.
    Then Tirsa connected. "I've got a hand!" she exclaimed. "I think it's/
    /They were back in flames, but not as close as they had been when they had rescued Vidav from his prior dream. This was Vidav's vision, surely; Tirsa had caught his hand and drawn them into the other dream.
    Seth looked. He was holding Tirsa's left hand, and her right was holding Vidav's left. They formed a line of three, standing on the pavement of a city street.
    It was the surface of the world, but it was burning. There was a forest fire in the distance, beyond the city. But the houses were burning too. Columns of smoke roiled up, thinning, merging above to become one huge dark haze that smudged out the sky. Seth had seen the fringe of a forest fire once, and it had been something like this: hell on Earth.
    "The lake!" Seth cried, somehow knowing that the layout was the same as on his own world. It had been the same in Tirsa's dream, he realized: the town, the lake, the forest. They were all from the same place but different planes. "We can get away from the fire there!"
    They ran for the lake, hands linked. They knew they had to stay together, and their physical linking in the dream was the only way they could be certain of their mental linking beyond it.
    But already the fire had reached the lake, and was spreading across it. No—it was the water itself that was burning, Seth saw with amazement. And, at the edge, the ground itself! This whole world was burning!
    "I know it's a bad dream," Vidav said. "Crafted for me, bringing the fire I fear. Nothing will put it out; it will burn our flesh too, as if it is dry wood. Something else I could fight, but how can I fight when my weapons and flesh burn too?"
    "We have to escape the dream," Seth said. "That's the only way we can fight—to unite, and in our strength defeat Nefarious!"
    They concentrated again, as the fire closed on them. Seth extended his left hand, seeking Rame, who he knew had to be close. As close as a nearby sleeping bag. Somewhere, not visible here, but in the adjacent plane of the dream—
    He brushed something. He moved his hand back, and found it another hand. He clasped it, and/
    /The wind smote them with gale force. Rame's dream was of air, a storm, a tornado, sweeping the faun away.
    But this was