Hero of Dreams - By Brian Lumley Page 0,4

picture would be better, he thought, if done as a night scene; with dim-glowing lights behind certain of the windows, friendly groups of small people in the streets and the occasional figure on a doorstep, lanthorn held high. It would lose none of its other-worldliness, but it would certainly be made more, well-true to life? After all, Dylath-Leen was like that now ... wasn't it?

He snorted derisively at his own fancies and turned to peer at a second, older picture where it hung in a cheap frame. This one was more lively, its highlights accentuated by the glinting sun striking into the attic room. Trapped in golden beams, motes of dust seemed to float like a thousand tiny drifting airships among faery towers, domes and turrets; and below, overhanging a blue crystal sea, the foundations of the city were set in an incredible promontory of green volcanic glass. In one comer of the canvas Hero had long since scrawled the legend: "Ilek-Vad."

Unwashed, unshaven, he frowned again, turned and seated himself at a small desk. His mind was usually strangely fertile during its first waking moments. Rapidly he sketched upon a scrap of paper. Heavy hills quickly formed a background to his sketch, and in the foreground-

He grimaced at the hairy, insect-like dog-thing he had drawn, then crumpled the scrap into a ball and tossed it in his wastebasket. Wherever the inspiration for that came from, today he could well do without it! No, today was a day for walking in the city-or perhaps a trip out to the Firth of Forth Bridge, whose massive cantilever of almost four thousand feet never failed to fascinate him-or better still a day on the coast at Dunbar, where the seagulls called and the boys collected and sold empty, fist-sized sea urchin shells washed in on the tide. There was a place where he liked to sit on the rocks at the edge of the sea and look down into deep pools, where tiny fishes darted in deeps of waving weed.

No sooner had this thought occurred to him than another, far stranger vision came. In his mind's eye he stared down from Ilek-Vad's cliffs of green glass into waters where the finny and bearded Gnorri swam and, with then-self-appointed and all-consuming industry, pursued the construction of intricate and utterly mazy labyrinths. This idea, coming so suddenly, startled David Hero. For this was surely inspiration! He had been commissioned to prepare a dust-jacket for an "Epic of Submarine Science Fiction," and the vision his mind had just conjured seemed near-perfect for his purpose: a scene of gentle, subaqueous beings going about their business among the caves of a fantastic seabed-and in the foreground, to one side of the main picture, weirdly-suited and armed intruders about to burst rapaciously upon the scene.

Excellent!

... But it could wait until later in the day, perhaps this evening. Right now Hero must wash and tidy up, make his breakfast and decide where the day's wanderings were to take him. Over eggs and bacon washed down with black coffee, he mentally reverted to his original choice: Edinburgh Castle. If ever a place were designed to create awe, wonder and inspiration in the eye of the beholder, surely this massive sky-climbing castle was that place. Yes, he would go there-and tonight he would start his sub-sea painting ...

To the polyglot tourists who thronged the Royal Mile as Hero toiled up steeply slanting pavements past public houses and souvenir shops, he would not be too impressive a figure. In old jeans spotted with paint and faded by sun and sea, and wearing his yellow hair long so that it lay on the shoulders of his dark, open-necked shirt, he might well be just another wastrel idling his time away in the hot summer days. And indeed, if such was the general suspicion, then it were not too seriously misplaced.

He was academically qualified, to be sure, but his tutors each and every one had found occasion to remark that he was "much too much of a dreamer," or "given to flights of fancy totally removed from his studies." The one field in which he felt truly at home-and in which he somehow managed to make his way in life-was painting, and this was really as much as he wanted to do. Oh, it would be nice to be rich, certainly, but not if that meant joining in the rat race. Since he was not without a degree of responsibility he could not be termed