Dreamquake

by Elizabeth Knox

  “Oh—not like a flying horse?” Cas Doran’s voice dripped sarcasm.

  The ranger went red. “He went Inland, west, at a forty-degree angle to the rail line. He didn’t have any water with him. Or none we could see. He may well have had a cache of supplies somewhere. But we immediately posted guards at the tower, and over the cable car. He can’t possibly have gotten his film out again. There’s no danger of that.”

  “Laura Hame is out there in the ballroom, dancing, a picture of health. And yet I was assured that she couldn’t have used the cable car either.” Doran swooped on the ranger, slapped his hands down on the arms of the man’s chair, and leaned over him.

  The man cowered back into his seat.

  Doran shouted, “There is obviously another pass through The Pinnacles that you lazy incompetents couldn’t find! A route that wouldn’t have required years of work and thousands of dollars of engineering to open!” He snapped upright again, releasing the arms of the chair so quickly that it teetered and the man flailed for balance before the chair came down again on all four legs. His voice quiet again, Doran asked one of the officials to fetch Maze Plasir. “As for you,” he said to the ranger, “you can get back to the Depot, immediately. And I will arrange for you to supervise several months’ worth of supplies on your journey.”

  “Are we to be under siege, then?” the ranger asked, and flinched when Doran looked at him.

  “There you go again,” said the Secretary. “Imagining yourself surrounded by monsters.” He signaled to several officials, who helped the man up and led him out.

  Maze Plasir appeared, fanning himself with a lady’s ivory-and-rice-paper fan. He took one look at Doran’s face, sat himself down, and waited.

  Doran said to his men, “I want that Soporif you’ve been promising me.”

  One replied, “We’ve had him under constant observation since he began performing at Fallow Hill. But he’s never on his own. He’s even been sleeping in the same bed as the Hame girl.”

  “Ah, young love,” said Plasir. “How inconvenient.”

  “He dressed for the ball tonight at his uncle’s apartment. His uncle was there.”

  “You could always have taken his uncle too,” Doran said.

  “We didn’t have the manpower, Mr. Secretary.”

  “Tell your detail to be a little more daring,” Doran said. He dismissed them. When the door closed, Plasir said, “Are you about to put your plan into action?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you will tell me when you need me to go In and catch a master dream to provide your household with some shelter?”

  “My house and the houses of my allies are safe. Out of range. I’ll need you to have some strong dream as a safety measure. In case some dreamhunter actually thinks to go on the offensive. I imagine that a small capsule of one of your master dreams could withstand the wide sweep of Laura Hame’s?”

  “Yes. If you keep me close, I can keep you safe,” Plasir said. “But, Cas, I’d much rather we made a slow start and experimented with the dosage of Contentment. This has all been so long in the planning that you should act only on your timetable.” Plasir’s posture and tone were casual, but he was trying to warn his friend.

  “I don’t have time.”

  “This isn’t about Tziga Hame’s return, is it?”

  “No. I’ve made inquiries. He’s under treatment for epilepsy. There are no epileptic dreamhunters.”

  “True.”

  “The Tiebolds and the Hame girl are out there dancing,bending their knees to the seasonal social rituals. The Grand Patriarch is bestowing blessings on debutantes. Whatever measures they are taking against me, they must suppose they’ll work. They must suppose they have me somehow. The Hame girl may be simple. She might not have had the imagination to see what the dream at the Depot could be used to do. She might just have run back home wiping her brow with relief that she’d avoided charges of trespassing. She might believe she’s a naughty girl and be thinking nothing much about Contentment and what it can do. But I can’t count on that, can I?”

  “No.”

  “They’ve forced my hand.”

  9

  HORTLY BEFORE MIDNIGHT, THE ORCHESTRA STOPPED FOR A SUPPER BREAK. THE DEBUTANTES CAME OFF THE dance floor, and some found their mothers waiting for them with plates. Grace beamed at Rose and handed her one on which cold meats and salads were heaped in a perilous pile.

  “Ma!” Rose passed the plate to her father. “I have to go upstairs and cool off. This dress is magnificent, but it’s killing me.”

  Grace looked crestfallen. “We didn’t really think it through, did we?”

  “Never mind.” Rose squeezed her mother’s hand and smiled at her father, who was foraging through the green salad with a fork, chasing chunks of meat and potato.

  Rose left her parents. She spotted Mamie in the slow line making its way into the supper room. Mamie was with Ru, but Rose still went up and asked her friend whether she was enjoying herself.

  “I’m hungry,” Mamie said.

  “You stood up for nearly every dance,” Rose said, congratulating her.

  “That would explain why I’m hungry, wouldn’t it?”

  Rose glanced at Ru and saw that he had his back to them. She relaxed a little.

  Mamie said, “I know you want me to say it’s not so bad after all, and I’m having a fine time because, really, Rose, it’s you who persuaded me into all this.” Mamie gestured around her at the crowd in their finery.

  “You always intended to come out this year.”

  Mamie screwed up her face. Her cheeks began to show webs of red—her skin never flushed evenly. “Who says I intended to come out at all? Why would I want to? This ball is nothing but a way for a girl to declare that she expects to get married.”

  “Can’t it just be fun?”

  “It could be fun if it was fun,” Mamie hissed.

  Rose lost her temper. “Why do you always have to be above everything? You’re acting as though this whole occasion exists as a slight to you. You’re not enjoying it, so it must be no good!”

  “It’s easy for you, Rose,” Mamie said, with quiet contempt.

  “Yes, it’s true, some things are easy for me,” Rose said. Her voice was cool, but Mamie stepped back from her stare. “Nature has been kind to me. But I’ll be damned if I’m going to let my friends act like checks and balances to nature, when really they are only the social law of averages.”

  Mamie was on the defensive, and breathing hard, but she held her ground. “I don’t need your charity,” she said to Rose.

  “It was just help, Mamie. It’s what friends do.”

  Someone touched Rose’s shoulder, and she jerked, knocking whoever it was back.

  “Ow!” said Laura.

  “Watch it, Rose,” said Sandy.

  “Do you want me to go up to the powder room with you?” Laura asked her cousin.

  Rose looked at Laura sheepishly, and all the fight left her. “Yes. Thanks,” she said.

  “I’ll be down again to say good night before you go,” Laura said to Sandy. He was going to dream The Gate in the early morning hours at Fallow Hill. She had opted to stay for the whole ball. (“Rose will want to talk about it,” she’d explained to Sandy. “It’s a big thing. And I’d like to be there in the morning to see the first calling cards come in.”)

  The cousins strolled away, arm in arm.

  Mamie turned her face to her brother’s back, her lips pressed together hard.

  Sandy joined the line and shuffled along. He pretended he hadn’t heard a thing. He expected Ru to comfort his sister, but Ru kept on chatting to his new naval academy friends. Those young men were peering at Mamie, some embarrassed, some concerned, some spitefully amused—but no one uttered a word. Sandy tried to think of something to say. Something kindly. His mind was blank. If he meant to stay, he could ask her to dance, but he didn’t mean to stay.

  Chorley Tiebold went past, gave Sandy a friendly nod, then glanced at M
amie and stopped in his tracks. He came over. “You shouldn’t have to stand in line,” he said. “You girls are supposed to have plates waiting for you. And trainers who can toss a blanket over you so you won’t cool off too quickly while they walk you around.”

  Mamie snorted.

  “What can I get you?” Chorley said. “I’ve eaten. There’re plates all over the seats in there.” He jerked his thumb at the ballroom. “I managed to balance mine on the bust of President Broughton, with the help of his laurel wreath.” He drew a circle around the top of his own head, then mimed balancing something.

  “I’d like some trifle and cheesecake,” said Mamie. “My mother has had me on lemon and barley water for two days.”

  “Time for a mutiny,” Chorley declared.

  “Yes.”

  “You stay there, I’ll be right back,” Chorley said, and sailed off to the head of the line.

  “Mr. Irresistible,” Mamie muttered. But she was prepared to accept charity, so long as it came with cake.

  Laura unfastened the hundred small pearl buttons at the back of Rose’s dress. Rose sat slumped in front of one of the dressing room mirrors while Laura and an attendant fanned her face and bare back. Rose’s head felt impossibly heavy, weighed down by her high coif of humid hair. A drop of sweat trickled down behind one ear, and the attendant dabbed it away with a towel. Someone brought her an iced tea.

  Debutantes were in and out to make themselves comfortable and repair their looks. Some appeared with their mothers, girls who were already being debriefed about whom they had met, whom they had liked, and who had seemed to like them. Several sat miserably and listened to anxious motherly advice. Most didn’t stay long. By the end of suppertime, the powder room and cloakroom were almost empty. The attendants were gathering discarded towels and dropped hairbrushes. One senior from the Academy was lying on a sofa, her mother in attendance, overcome after dancing every dance. Another girl had a blistered foot. She had spent the supper hour soaking it in briny water. Her mother had bandaged the blister, and the seamstress was now busily unpicking a seam on the girl’s dancing slipper so that she could stuff her bandaged foot back into it.

  Rose told Laura she wasn’t yet ready to go. She’d wash herself a bit and splash on some witch hazel.

  “I’ll just go down and say good night to Sandy,” Laura said. “And be back to help button you up.”

  Laura hurried out to the second staircase and down one floor—where there was access to the main staircase and she could find her way back to the ballroom. Sandy was waiting for her in the entranceway. She grinned at him, grabbed his hand, and dragged him back to the stairs. “Surely I’m not allowed up there?” he said, but he went with her.

  She scampered ahead of him, sometimes going backward and holding him with both hands. They got to the second floor, and she took him along a hall and onto the secondary staircase. She led him down to the low-ceilinged hallway that all the debutantes had entered by earlier. Laura whispered, “Rose told me it might be quiet here, but it’s even better, there’s nobody at all!”

  The gas lamps on the stairs had been lit, but the ones near the street doors were out. Neither Sandy nor Laura wondered about this unguarded entrance; they only embraced it as an opportunity to be alone. They stopped to kiss, Laura with her back to the wall. They broke apart when they heard running footsteps on the stairs, but then, when no one appeared, they melted together again.

  “I wish I’d known more of the dances,” Sandy said.

  “But Captain Goodnough’s Useful Guide to Ballroom Dances says that good taste forbids a lady to dance too frequently with one partner.”

  Sandy stroked Laura’s curls. “You like dancing. I didn’t know that.”

  For minutes more they leaned together, sharing breath and not speaking, then Sandy said, “I’m late already.”

  “And I’ve left Rose all unbuttoned.”

  Sandy pushed her gently away. “Good night,” he said.

  Laura left him, skipped into the light, and, turning every few steps, went back to the stairs, then vanished up them.

  Sandy straightened his tie and checked that his shirt was tucked in—Laura had the habit of pulling its tails out of his trousers.

  He heard faint music, the orchestra striking up again.

  Light appeared on the dark street beyond the door, lamps carried low and making a grid of shadows on the cobblestones. Then there were men in the doorway, who held their lamps so that their faces were concealed and only their shapes could be seen, their suits and bowler hats.

  “Alexander Mason,” said one of the men.

  Sandy began to back away.

  “You are to come with us.” They advanced into the hallway. Their kerosene lamps reflected off the lustrous oiled-silk wallpaper and revealed their faces and shrewd, stony expressions.

  Sandy turned to flee and heard the men break into a run behind him. They caught him at the foot of the stairs. He struggled and yelled. The bar of an arm closed on his throat and silenced him. He grappled with it but couldn’t get his fingers under it. Someone hissed “Be still!” in his ear.

  But Sandy continued to fight; he kicked and threw his weight forward. He was wrenched upright by the arm pressing on his windpipe.

  “Subdue him!” a man ordered in a fierce whisper.

  “No!” said another—the only man among them with any sense or foresight.

  Sandy couldn’t breathe. He was blacking out. He clawed at the arm. His fingers fizzed, then went numb. Everything went white—like sheet lightning without a thunderclap to follow it.

  The man who’d remained at the door to watch the street wasn’t the one who had foreseen what would happen. He saw what did happen but, for several long moments, didn’t understand what he was seeing. The dreamhunter was putting up a fight. Five men were clustered around him, grunting. The man in charge was issuing orders. Finally the dreamhunter slumped—

  —and all the men around him dropped to the floor, like marionettes whose strings had been severed. The man at the door felt a stunning blow, violent lassitude that seemed to come from the core of his own body, a warm explosion of sleep. It struck him onto his knees. Nearer the floor, the air seemed full of the smell of flowers and freshly fallen dew.

  The man shook his head to clear it. When he looked up, he saw that two of the dropped lamps had shattered and spilled kerosene, and that the floor was on fire. A liquid fire crept toward either side of the corridor. It didn’t look dangerous. It looked like the flames over a pool of brandy-cradling crêpes suzette. Nothing bad could happen. Not in a world that smelled like a beautiful garden.

  The man shook his head again and staggered up. He could see a heap of inert bodies beyond the pool of fire. The flame reached the walls, licked at the oiled-silk wallpaper, then streaked upward and spread, flowing onto the ceiling.

  The man hurried toward the fire, his arms over his face. The corridor had become a squared tube of flame. The flames were bright, but black at their bases, consuming their smoke before it fumed from them.

  The man jumped over the fire. He fumbled at the fallen bodies, got hold of one by an arm and a thigh, hoisted it onto his shoulders, and stood up. He turned back to the exit and ran through the fire. The kerosene coated the soles of his shoes, so that he left fiery footprints behind him.

  10

  HEN LAURA ARRIVED BACK IN THE POWDER ROOM, SHE FOUND ROSE SITTING STRAIGHT WHILE ONE OF THE ATtendants closed her back into her pearly carapace of dress with the help of a button hook. Rose was relieved to see her cousin. She opened her dance card and found the name of her next partner. She showed it to Laura. “Could you find him and give him my apologies? I’ll be down shortly.”

  Laura took note, nodded, and rushed out again. She was enjoying this dashing around. She wasn’t hot, she was very fit, and she liked the way the gilded panels and mirrors and her own vivid reflection flashed past her as she ran. She liked leaping soundlessly down the carpeted stairs.

  Laura sprinted down
one flight of the lesser stairs, then along the hall that came out onto the main staircase. She loped down the wide steps of its outer curve, raced through Founders Hall and into the ballroom. She slowed down and looked around for the young man, saw him between the rows of a Scottish dance. The expression on his face suggested indigestion to Laura. She worked her way around the dance floor to him and touched his arm. “Rose says sorry. She’s still upstairs. It’s the heat.”

  “Oh,” he said.

  For a moment they stood awkwardly side by side, then it finally occurred to him that he could dance with this girl. “If you’re not engaged?”

  “No. I’d love to.” Laura beamed and held out her hand.

  For the next few minutes, whenever the open weaving figures of the Scottish brought them together, he’d babble about his university studies, the horse his father had in the Founders Day Cup, and so on. Then he remembered to introduce himself. Then he lost his tongue when he realized he was dancing with Tziga Hame’s dreamhunter daughter. Laura flew through the dance smiling at everyone, aglow with happiness.

  She had just come off the dance floor and caught her breath when another young man introduced himself and engaged her for the mazurka. During it Laura looked around for Rose, but it seemed her cousin had missed another dance and again left someone standing.

  Then the music faltered, a horn sounded a farting note, a violin swooped into discord. The dancers slowed and turned to the orchestra. Someone had hold of the conductor’s arm. The conductor’s baton was pointed at the floor. The musicians were setting aside their instruments, and some—those nearest the conductor, who could hear what was being said to him—were on their feet.

  The master of ceremonies released the conductor and turned to the crowd. “Ladies and gentlemen. I must ask you to leave the building immediately. Could you please make your way in an orderly fashion through the Founders Hall, down the stairs, and depart by the main doors. Would you then please assemble on the west side of People’s Plaza. Do not collect your belongings. Do not look for your family members. They will find you—this message is being repeated in every other room. Now go at once, and peacefully.”