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  OTHER BOOKS BY WAYNE THOMAS BATSON

  THE DREAMTREADERS SERIES

  Dreamtreaders

  THE DOOR WITHIN TRILOGY

  The Door Within

  The Rise of the Wyrm Lord

  The Final Storm

  PIRATE ADVENTURES

  Isle of Swords

  Isle of Fire

  THE BERINFELL PROPHECIES

  Curse of the Spider King (with Christopher Hopper)

  Venom and Song (with Christopher Hopper)

  The Tide of Unmaking (with Christopher Hopper)

  THE DARK SEA ANNALS

  Sword in the Stars

  The Errant King

  Mirror of Souls

  IMAGINATION STATION

  #8: Battle for Cannibal Island

  #11: Hunt for the Devil’s Dragon

  OTHER ENDEAVORS

  Ghost

  Search for the Shadow Key

  © 2014 by Wayne Thomas Batson

  All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, scanning, or other—except for brief quotations in critical reviews or articles, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  Published in Nashville, Tennessee, by Thomas Nelson. Thomas Nelson is a registered trademark of HarperCollins Christian Publishing, Inc.

  Excerpts are featured from The Prince and the Pauper by Mark Twain.

  Thomas Nelson titles may be purchased in bulk for educational, business, fund-raising, or sales promotional use. For information, please e-mail [email protected].

  ISBN 978-0-7180-1947-1 (eBook)

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Batson, Wayne Thomas, 1968-

  Search for the Shadow Key / Wayne Thomas Batson.

  pages cm. -- (Dreamtreaders ; #2)

  Summary: As the only living Dreamtreader, fourteen-year-old Archer must protect the waking world from the evil lurking in the Dream, but when his family and friends begin to disappear, unexpected help comes from the Wind Maiden, a mysterious angelic being who seems to know how Archer can rescue his loved ones and defeat the new Nightmare King.

  ISBN 978-1-4003-2367-8 (pbk.)

  [1. Dreams--Fiction. 2. Fantasy.] I. Title.

  PZ7.B3238Se 2014

  [Fic]--dc23

  2014031874

  14 15 16 17 18 19 RRD 6 5 4 3 2 1

  CONTENTS

  The Laws Nine

  Chapter 1 · Seeing Things

  Chapter 2 · Whac-A-Mole

  Chapter 3 · The Inner Sanctum

  Chapter 4 · Snow Falls Gently

  Chapter 5 · No More Nightmares

  Chapter 6 · Visis Nocturne

  Chapter 7 · Old Wounds

  Chapter 8 · Broken

  Chapter 9 · Ice-Fire

  Chapter 10 · The Silentwood

  Chapter 11 · The Paravore

  Chapter 12 · A Wake-Up Call

  Chapter 13 · The Darkening

  Chapter 14 · The Shadow Key

  Chapter 15 · The Third

  Chapter 16 · Taken

  Chapter 17 · First Priority

  Chapter 18 · Search and Rescue

  Chapter 19 · Hourglass Sands

  Chapter 20 · Demands

  Chapter 21 · Powers

  Chapter 22 · Master and Student

  Chapter 23 · The Price

  Chapter 24 · The Deepest Wells

  Chapter 25 · Enslaved

  Chapter 26 · Dinner Is Served

  Chapter 27 · Just Desserts

  Chapter 28 · A Dark Impasse

  Chapter 29 · Stone Cold

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Ex Misericordia Dei

  THE LAWS NINE

  Law One: Anchor first; Anchor deep. Construct an anchor image that is rooted in a deeply powerful emotion. It must be dear to you.

  Law Two: Anchor where you may find it with ease, but no one else can. If your anchor is destroyed or otherwise kept from you, your time may run out.

  Law Three: Never remain in the Dream for more than your Eleven Hours. Your Personal Midnight is the end. Depart for the Temporal . . . or perish.

  Law Four: Depart for the Temporal at Sixtolls or find some bastion to defend against the storm. The Nightmare Lord will open wide his kennels, chaos will rule, and the Dreamtreader shall be lost.

  Law Five: While in the Dream, consume nothing made with gort, the soul harvest berry. It is black as pitch and enslaves your body to those of dark powers.

  Law Six: Defend against sudden and final death within the Dream. Prepare your mind for calamities that may come or else be shut out from the Dream forever.

  Law Seven: Never accept an invitation from the Nightmare Lord. Not even to parley. He is a living snare to the Dreamtreader. There is no good-faith bargain. With him, the only profit will be death.

  Law Eight: By the light of a Violet Torch, search yourself for tendrils, the Nightmare Lord’s silent assassins.

  Law Nine: Dreamtread with all the strength you can muster, but never more than two days in a row. To linger in the Dream too often will invite madness. Temporal and Dream will be fused within you and shatter your mind.

  ONE

  SEEING THINGS

  THE TERRAIN IN THE DREAM ON THIS NIGHT WAS LIKE the ocean’s surf during a riptide, only twice as violent.

  “This is crazy!” Archer shouted. He kicked out his surfboard, carved a hard left on the Intrusion wave, and nearly wiped out. Relentless Dream winds whipping his dark red hair into his eyes, he circled back to see what had caused such a jolt in the Dream surf.

  There it was: a breach the size of a manhole cover had burst right off the tip of his board. This rip in the Dream fabric, the layer of matter between the sleeping and waking worlds, spewed glowing blue, purple, and crimson particles. The thing was huge, like a giant wound gushing . . . or a mini-volcano erupting. Only this volcano was spewing right in the middle of a dense Dream forest, strobe-lighting all the sloped trunks and gnarled limbs with a flickering sheen of creepy. As a Dreamtreader, one of three human beings selected each generation to patrol this realm, Archer was duty-bound to sew up this breach—and fast.

  The shockwave from the breach surged beneath him, tossing his board sideways. Archer stumbled to one knee and almost fell off. Somehow, his grip on the board held.

  “Enough of this!” Archer growled. He leaped off the board, used his sheer will to batten down the waves, and landed next to the gushing breach. “Razz, I need you again!” Archer cried out into the air.

  “Coming, boss!” a shrill feminine voice answered from the air. There was a double puff of smoke, a scattering of swerving sparks, and Razzlestia Celeste Moonsonnet appeared. A twin-tailed flying squirrel with an acorn hat and a fashionable gray pinstripe ensemble, Razz flew to Archer’s shoulder.

  “Like my new outfit? It’s perfect for the season—” Then she spotted the raging breach and squeaked. “Ewww, ugly one!”

  Archer thrust a fist into the satchel he always wore, pulling out his favorite barb needle and a spool of ether silk. He went to work, binding up one lip of the breach. “Razz,” he said, “thickest gauge thread, spiral technique!”

  Razz might be mercurial, but when she showed up, Archer knew he could count on his little Dream assistant. And now that he was the only active Dreamtreader—and just fifteen years old—Archer needed Razz more than ever.

  “Got it!” she squeaked. With a flap and snap of her tails, Razz leaped from Archer’s shoulder and shot high into the air above the breach. Then, the barb needle already threaded, she plummeted around and around and around,
jamming the needle into the loosely flapping fabric and creating a kind of loose seam.

  “Great, Razz! That’s perfect!” Archer yelled, feeling like the roar of the surging Dream matter would steal his voice. He pulled his first thread tight, strained to get as tight a seal as possible, and knotted it.

  It wasn’t over, though. This breach was powerful. Beastly, even. The knot held, but served only to make the Dream matter’s only escape point that much narrower. Now, it shot into the sky like a mighty torrent.

  “Cross breach!” Archer cried out. “Gotta be now, Razz!”

  Razz zigzagged like a shooting star, driving the needle within loops of thread and then pulling taut across the opening. She flew in and out of the violent blast without seeming to care for herself. By the time she handed off the thread to Archer, she glistened and pulsed as if dipped into stardust.

  “I think I’m going to be sick,” Razz muttered, gliding in a slow circle through tree branches and coming to rest on a hillock nest of tangled roots and waving purple grass.

  Archer had no time to check on her or he’d completely render her efforts worthless. He held Razz’s thread, what he called the boss thread, and took a deep breath. He had a job to do. This task would cost a glob of Archer’s mental will—the creative energy of the mind that enabled a Dreamtreader to do just about anything in the Dream—but it had to be done. Fortunately for Archer, he had plenty of will left in the tank. He hoped.

  Archer secured the boss thread with a two-fisted grip and called up his will. In response, the flesh of his hands and wrists turned gray and knobby. He felt the hardening as his lower arms became stone. The thread anchored, Archer turned his will to generated pure aggressive power.

  For a moment, the Dreamtreader drew a mental blank. What will give me the thrust I need to seal this off? He thought about wings. But no. That wouldn’t do it. He thought about dropping himself into a Lamborghini. But on the Dream terrain, traction would be iffy. Besides, he couldn’t afford a spinout with a huge breach at stake. That’s when the perfect concept came to mind.

  Archer concentrated. He’d never created this exact combination before, so it would cost him something extra. With a groan, Archer let his will loose. His surfboard melted and morphed into the caterpillar treads of a bulldozer. Archer fell backward into the machine’s cockpit, the thick glass canopy immediately closing over top of him. With a rush, the rocket engines he’d imagined appeared on either side of the vehicle and burped white-blue flames.

  The machine lurched forward, pulling the boss thread taut. The breach spouted and spewed like a fire hose, but Archer hit the thrusters. They responded with a slow but relentless creep forward. Slowly, the stitches grew tight, cutting off the flow of Dream matter to a trickle . . . and, finally, to nothing. Archer ejected from the cockpit, and the machine vanished. He dove for the now-sealed breach and tied it off like a rodeo jock hog-tying a steer.

  Archer took a peek over his shoulders as he worked. Fortunately, he saw none of the breach-eating, beetle gub-esque scurions in the area. They’d apparently eaten their fill of matter in the process of chomping open that massive breach. Given the size of it, Archer figured the scurions would be in a food coma for at least a week’s worth of Dream time.

  “Good riddance,” he muttered. Packing up his ether thread and needle, he raced to Razz’s side. “Hey, you okay?”

  She lifted her squirrelly head and blinked her big dark eyes. When she spoke, the words came out a little slow and slurred. “Aye, aye, chief,” she said, saluting weakly. “Sergeant Razz, zzhu-reporting for duty-shhhh.”

  “Look at you,” Archer teased gently. “You get splashed with Dream matter and you go all loopy.”

  “Sszh . . . sorry, Archer,” she squeaked. She sat up and adjusted her acorn beret. Ever so slowly, she got back on her feet. “I’m beat, tuckered, whooped! Other than the quick snooze break you gave me, we’ve been at it nonstop. Covering two Dream districts, alone? This is nutball Looney Tunes! How many more breaches tonight?”

  “No clue,” Archer said with a deep sigh.

  Little paw-hands on her little hips, Razz frowned and asked, “Well, when is Master Gabriel waking up two new Dreamtreaders?”

  Archer’s answer was the same: “No clue.”

  “What?” Razz blurted. “How can he just—I mean, that is, what’s he doing? Leaving the whole Dream to one Dreamtreader? That’s . . . unprezzy . . . uh, unpresidential . . . er—”

  “Unprecedented,” Archer said, smiling in spite of the stinging reality. “You’re right: this hasn’t happened before. We’re spread too thin, and we’re going to miss breaches. The breaches will multiply, and every breach not sewn up will push the Dream closer and closer to a rift.”

  “Don’t say that,” Razz said, shuddering. “Please don’t say that.”

  Her reaction gave Archer a gut check. He knew what a rift would do to his world. The fabric of the Dream would be torn. The Temporal and the Dream would begin to mix. People would begin to confuse dreams and reality. They’d gain abilities they wouldn’t know how to use and wouldn’t have the safety net of simply waking up. It would be chaos.

  Ten thousand heart-stopping rift scenarios played out in Archer’s imagination. Little kids thinking they could fly and diving from rooftops; an angry employee suddenly causing his boss to burst into very real flames; wars being waged over illusions—it would be absolute chaos.

  But Archer had never given any thought to what would happen in a rift to the beings who inhabited the Dream. Beings like Razz. They were made of the same stuff as the Dream fabric. If the Dream were completely torn by a rift? Archer looked down at his little companion and couldn’t let his thoughts go there. “Don’t worry, Razz,” he found himself saying. “Even if we have to do it alone, we’ll handle it. We’ve got each other, right?”

  Razz nodded. “I know,” she said quietly. Then she took off her acorn beret and held it over her heart. “But I miss Duncan and Mesmeera.”

  He felt it too: an ache, the creeping sadness of fraying emotions. Duncan and Mesmeera were his previous Dreamtreading partners. They were efficient, hardworking Dreamtreaders, to be sure. But more than that, they were friends. They’d stayed far too long past their Personal Midnights in the Dream—trapping themselves, seasoned Dreamtreaders who should have known better.

  But, mistakes aside, Duncan and Mesmeera didn’t deserve their ultimate fate. The familiar leaden cold pooled in Archer’s stomach. He’d never forget his friends . . . or his own role in their ultimate loss.

  He shook those guilt-laden thoughts away and said, “We’ve covered Verse District and Forms now . . . in record time too. But we’ve still got Pattern left, and that could be the worst. You never know with the Lurker roaming free.”

  Razz bounced twice and looked warily over her shoulder. “But the Lurker’s no threat now . . . right, chief?”

  Archer didn’t answer.

  Razz frowned. “Right, chief?”

  “I don’t know, Razz,” Archer grumbled, a little more bite to his words than he’d meant. “I’m sorry. Just frustrated. All I know about the Lurker is what Rigby tells me . . . and honestly, I know I can’t really trust him anymore. With the Nightmare Lord gone, the Lurker is no longer under his control. He’s acting on his own will . . . but that might not be a good thing. Master Gabriel is still very concerned about the Lurker. Therefore, so am I.”

  Razz crossed her arms. “And now we have to go patch up the breaches in the Lurker’s backyard? You sure we have time?”

  Archer looked up, scanned the darkening crimson sky, and found the ancient tower clock, its pale face looming in the haze to the northeast. “Old Jack says we have three hours left,” he said. “Might be enough. It’ll have to be. We can’t let breaches go unchecked. If a rift forms, then it’s game over. We won’t . . . we, uh . . . won’t. . .”

  Archer’s words trailed off. He’d spotted something odd through the trees.

  “Boss?”

  “Just a se
c, Razz.” He raced forward, ducking low boughs and leaping roots, but always keeping his eyes riveted ahead. Eighty yards later, he broke the tree line and found an unobstructed view of the horizon.

  Razz leaped into the air and came buzzing after him, dropping awkwardly onto Archer’s shoulder. “What’s the deal, boss?”

  “The horizon,” he muttered. “It look strange to you?”

  “Most days,” she said. “The Dream is kind of big on strange.”

  Archer nodded absently, staring. Old Jack loomed on high, as usual, and there were many crimson vortices, the tornadolike entry paths used by Dreamtreaders as portals. But there was something else, a kind of silvery shimmer following the line of the horizon. It was faint and spidery, and Archer wasn’t altogether certain he was seeing it.

  “What . . . what is that?” he asked. “You see it, right?”

  “That? It?” Razz grumbled. “You use too many pronouns.”

  “The silver shimmer!” Archer growled, pointing emphatically. “Right at the horizon. I’ve never seen that before.”

  Razz twirled in the air once and then hovered, stretching her tiny neck out. “I think I see it, boss,” she said. “Kind of sparkly like.” She crossed her arms and rubbed her shoulders. “Makes me feel chilly.”

  “Yeah,” Archer said. “I felt it too. Have you ever seen it before today?”

  “I don’t think so,” Razz replied. “But I find something new in this place every day.”

  “True,” Archer said, turning reluctantly away. “Anyway, we have bigger problems to deal with. Let’s get back to work.”

  Razz leaped into the air, and her twin fuzzy tails twirled. “Well, all right then. Off we go.”

  Archer summoned his Dream matter surfboard, flexed his will, and found an Intrusion wave to ride west.

  Like a sea of mist with islands of craggy rock, the moors of Archaia stretched out before Archer’s board. He and Razz had been searching the villages and territories of the Pattern District for just over two hours, but they’d found no breaches. Not a single one.

  “I don’t like this,” Archer said. “This happened before, when the Nightmare Lord was still on his throne.”