Once the mischief bug had bitten them, the clique couldn't seem to resist playing practical jokes on innocent passersby. Juele went along with them at first, but she became worried the longer the mood went on.
"Look!" Cal said, pointing to an old lady walking a huge brown and gray dog just ahead of them. The old woman stopped to look into a shop window full of lamps, and the dog sat down next to her feet. Cal grinned, looking feral. "Perfect." He spun together a ball of light between his palms and flicked it over the dog just as he walked past. The others huddled in a shop doorway, looking around the edge to watch. The dog was swallowed up in an envelope of illusion that shrank its image to that of a small ginger cat. The dog, not knowing it was a cat, stretched up a hind leg to scratch its ear.
"She's going to be so surprised," Sondra said, a feline grin on her own face. "Wait, look!"
Ahead of them, a couple of smaller dogs wandered along the pavement. They spotted the cat and galloped toward it, teeth bared and growling.
"Oh, this is better than I thought." Cal clutched his ribs, giggling. Juele stared as the strays attacked the "cat." To their surprise, instead of running or puffing up into a hissing fluffball, it grabbed one of them by the scruff and shook it, tossing it into the gutter. With a look of bewilderment, the stray ran away. The clique howled with laughter. The other dog barked fiercely, circling. The defender tracked it, eyeing its movements. The strange dog leaped, and the two of them clutched each other, rolling up and down the sidewalk, snarling. The "cat" sprang loose, grabbed its opponent, and with a mighty twist of its frail-looking little neck, slung the other dog two storefronts away. The loser scrambled up and fled, yelping. Cal laughed so hard he went boneless like a slug and started to slide down the wall.
The old woman ceased her window shopping and turned a pleasant face toward them. Cal hastily pulled back his illusion and favored her with an innocent smile. She turned to pat her dog, who had resumed his seat behind her as if nothing had happened.
Flushed with this success, the group spotted another dog lying on the pavement beside a post outside a shop across the street. The fluffy terrier had been tied up with a leash by its master or mistress, who must be in the store.
"My turn, my turn," Daline cried, her wings rattling with glee. She whipped up a ball of light between her hands. This one flew out and surrounded the dog, but instead of changing, the dog vanished!
Juele stared at the empty place. What had Daline done? Had she destroyed it? Then she listened. She could hear the dog panting. It was there, but invisible. Not that Juele had never seen people walking invisible dogs, but this was different. The leash lay slack as if it was abandoned. The group clustered together on the pavement, waiting.
Within a few minutes, a man with fluffy hair similar to the terrier's came out of the shop door. He saw the empty leash and started looking about. Soma and Sondra jumped up and down and patted Daline on the arms with glee. Juele giggled at first, but became concerned as the man grew more frantic.
"Shep! Shep! Here, boy!" His face turned into that of a small boy's, and his lip quivered as if he might cry. The leash stood up and whined. Juele's companions were slapping each other on the back and guffawing.
"All right, I saw that," said a booming voice behind them, clapping a hand on the nearest winged shoulder. "You all put that back like it was. Give the man back his dog." Juele spun on her heel to see a huge, broad man in a blue uniform with shiny buttons down the front. He was big enough to block out the sun. His face was shadowed by a tall, dark helmet.
"A copper," Cal said, alarmed. He bolted off the curb into traffic, which whined and veered to avoid him. Daline and Bella opened their batlike wings and flew upward. The others started away in several directions. Not knowing why she was doing it, Juele found herself running away, too.
She didn't know where she was going. Her feet slapped down on the pavement to the rhythm of her thoughts. I'm sorry sorry sorry. . . .
A long, blue streak came from behind, circled around to her left side and arrowed in front of her. Unable to tell what it was, Juele skidded to a halt as it arced back around her right side. She turned on her heel to see. At the very end of the blue streak was a gloved white hand. It was an arm! The arm contracted on Juele, drawing her back the way she had come at a rapid pace until she bumped into the others, who had been herded into a little knot by some unseen power. The long arm of the lawman reeled in like a rope being coiled up until it was the same length as the other, the hand of which was holding a small notebook. The empty hand reached into his breast pocket for a pencil.
"All right, that's enough," the policeman said, as he wrote on a page. "Interfering with private property. Interfering with public property. Resisting arrest."
"We're not under arrest, are we?" Colm asked, his pale cheeks bleached alabaster white.
"Not if you put things back the way you found them," the policeman said. "I shall have to report you to the chancellor at your school." He tilted his helmet up so Juele could see his face. His features were large, not unfriendly, but, at the moment, very serious. "Your audacity is going to land you in hard trouble one day."
"Our audacity," Bella said, "is how our creativity comes to be expressed. We're artists, above mundane considerations like the law. Like you."
"Watch your lip, miss," the officer said. "Now, restore things to the way they was."
"Oh, how dreary," Erbatu said, tilting her head back to look at the lawman, who was unmoved by her reaction. "How pedestrian." The rest of the clique still attempted to look bored, but Juele felt the strong bond around them and pushed at it. They were powerless to get away.
The policeman noticed her gesture. "You aren't going anywhere until you undo your damage. You illusionists, you like your games, but you can't do much compared with really influential people."
"You don't know the power of illusions," Daline snarled at the policeman, flexing her claws. "You have no idea how much more powerful illusion is than reality."
Juele thought Daline was talking just to make herself feel less helpless. Not only had the officer prevented them from getting away, he was able to keep them from doing anything but what he instructed. They were only artists. They could influence people's emotions and thoughts, not their bodies or their surroundings. Art had little practical application in the real world. As real as the Dreamland was, she amended.
Acting as though they were condescending to do the policeman an immense favor, the clique undid all the pranks they had perpetrated. The officer trailed along behind them, keeping track of their actions in his notebook. The man with fluffy hair was overjoyed to see his dog again, and the little animal jumped up into his arms. They became surrounded by a rosy glow. Juele shot a look at her companions to see if any of them was creating it, and decided that it was the man's own Dreamer's idea of bliss and contentment.
"Now, that there light post," the policeman said, checking off the last deed in his notebook. A look of mischief passed among the clique. Tanner pointed up the street.
"Over there!" he cried. At the end of the block, a plume of fire licked up out of the pavement toward the skies. The policeman put his whistle in his mouth and ran toward the blaze, hooting in alarm. The clique laughed as the influence holding them drained away.
"How easy it is to fool the poor idiots in the civil service," Tanner said, shaking his head scornfully. "Come on, before he figures out it's a sham."
"But what about the streetlight?" Juele asked.
"It'll change back to normal by itself in a while," Erbatu said, with an elegant flourish. "It'll be good for the townies to experience our talent in the meantime."
"Are we going home?" Juele asked.
"Certainly not," Bella said, springing to life again. "I haven't finished my shopping yet."
The interruption by the policeman had actually been good for breaking Bella's fit of temper. Her fury had abated. Her wings shrank away, leaving her looking fairly ordinary in her camel-colored smock and smart clothes. They'd passed through another wave of influence somewhere: her hair was black instead of blond, and cut just below the jawline in a smooth line. The other furies slowly resumed their reality as art students, each of them new versions of their former selves. Juele peered sideways into a shop window. The red light had faded entirely from her eyes. She was glad.
Juele lost count of all the twists and turns that Bella took. They emerged into a broad square with a small garden and a fountain in the center. Juele jumped as she looked up. Looming over them were the turrets of the Castle of Dreams. They must be very close to it. The walls were of brilliant white again today, but a different shape. The building was still huge.
"It's so beautiful," Juele said, gazing at the sunlit windows. "Is it true that the castle is always a thousand paces by a thousand?"
"Mere facts," Daline said, impatiently, picking up baskets from a shopfront barrow, then putting them down again. "Shopping is much more interesting than politics." With a look of regret at the gleaming tower, Juele followed the group into a small a small cul-de-sac lined with shops. Most of the store facades were adorned with cutout trim under the eaves and multiple colors of paint, as if they were wearing too much makeup.
"It's . . . quaint, isn't it," Juele said, with what she hoped was the right amount of tolerant amusement.
"We like it, dearie," Soma said, the glint of her eyes warning Juele from making any more comments. It was hard to tell what they liked and what they didn't. Let strangers beware of mixing up the two! Juele said nothing more.
"Here it is, darlings," Bella said, slowing to a stop before a wooden door that stood open. Juele peered inside the dim shop. It was very small. She could see small spots of bright color and light and the silhouette of a face that turned toward her. "Wait for me. I won't be a tick."
As soon as she was gone, the others separated into twos and threes to talk, leaving Juele by herself to study the street. If she'd had to pick a word for it, she'd choose "cute." The gingerbread cottage in the heart of the loop was a bakery. Its wicker displays were tilted forward, full of pretty cakes and cookies that tempted the eye. The flower shop next door tried to outdo its rival's appeal with colors so bright they overlapped into the next spectrum. The scents of both shops vied for her attention, shoving one another out of the way under her nose. Juele smelled first flowers, then sweets, then flowers again, until it blended into a fragrant muddle. But it was the shop just opposite her that caught her eye. It gathered all the sunshine in the short block in its bright windows. The glass was cut to reflect the morning light off in a thousand different directions. One bit in a corner particularly attracted her attention. A narrow prism gleamed diamond bright, casting a thin rainbow down off the window and onto the pavement.
Curious, Juele went over to look at it. She picked up the dainty strand, which relaxed and lengthened in her hands like soft putty so that it maintained contact with the glass and the ground. Such an interesting bit of light. It would be very pretty as the accent in one of her askance reality illusions. She twisted the rainbow around so that the length crossed over itself and pinched the resulting loop loose. It glowed brightly in her palms with a brilliance like nothing she had ever seen before. She started to put it in the pocket of her smock when a huge hand reached down and grabbed her wrist.
"Well, well, well, wot's all this, then?" Juele looked up in horror. A huge policeman in a blue uniform with a tall black helmet stood over her. He had just appeared out of nowhere. Were the police following them now, just because of the incident with the stop sign? He frowned down at Juele, the big black mustache under his nose drooping disapprovingly. "You can't just take something because you sees it sitting about, my girl!"
"But it doesn't belong to anyone," Juele said, alarmed. She gestured at the rainbow, now flowing like a waterfall against the wall of the shop. "It was just here in the window."
"You can't remove something from a shop window," the policeman said, blowing out his mustache to either side like a party favor. "That's stealing! You 'and that over and don't do it again, and all will be well."
"I'm sorry," Juele said, chastened. In trouble twice with the police, and she'd been in the city such a short time! She dropped the gleaming hank of light into his white-gloved palm.
"Run along, then, run along," the policeman said, not unkindly, waving a black club slung from a thong on his wrist. He walked off, whistling.
She slunk back to where the others were waiting. Fortunately, Bella had come out of the store and they were all clustered about her, so nobody had witnessed Juele's humiliation. Juele made her way back into the group to see what they were all exclaiming over. Bella displayed an ornate paper fan.
"Where did you say it was from?" Sondra asked.
"Oneiros," Bella said, flicking the fan open with a quick jerk of her wrist. "Isn't it pretty?" As she moved it, different images emerged on the thin surface.
"Very pretty," Juele said. She watched a donkey cart carry a woman and a boy in plain clothes with big hats to protect them from the sun across a picturesque, sunbaked landscape. "How do they make an illusion like that?"
Bella snapped it shut. "It's not an illusion, child. Illusions are created. This is real. It's a sight someone saw. It's a scenic view, captured on specially treated paper. A record. An archive. They make thousands of these in vacation beauty spots."
"Totally representational," Daline said, with a sly look at her friend. Bella raised an eyebrow and gave her friend a catlike smile.
"But if they captured the view, what's left there?" Juele asked, trying to grasp the idea of a bit of captive reality.
"Not much," said Cal, with a shrug. "That's why the landscape's so bare. The more people who visit a beautiful location and take in the sights, the less that's left. That's why I never tell anyone where I've been. Don't reveal your sources, that's what I say."
"No one would dare poach one of your sources, dearie," Erbatu said, batting her eyelashes at him. "They wouldn't want to." Cal twisted his lip at her.
"But, even bare, it continues to be beautiful," Bella said. "Its function doesn't really change. I require inspiration from reality for my illusions, and I prefer beauty. I like it."
"Oh, we like it too," the others chorused, including Daline, who had only been teasing her friend. A clique was a clique, and they stood together.
"Me, too," Juele agreed, but she spoke too late. Her admiration fell into a pit of silence and hit bottom almost audibly. Cal snickered. No one jumped to her defense or tried to ease her embarrassment. She wasn't yet a part of the group. One day, she thought. If she was more careful, more observant, and had more experience, they'd accept her fully.
"One more stop, darlings," Bella said, putting the fan away in her bag. "I want to see how Davney is getting along." She turned to Juele with a casual air. "You haven't visited the castle, yet, have you. Come along."