Dreaming Death

by J. Kathleen Cheney

  In the years since, Shironne had worked hard to develop her odd powers into tools that could be used to find killers. She watched her dreams now with a more careful eye. She paid attention to everything she touched, knowing that each item she could label increased her effectiveness. “Yes, I’m sure the captain has things for me to identify,” she answered Messine. “He always does.”

  “I’ll stay in the office, then,” Messine said. “Help Pamini look over the reports from Andersen.”

  Ah yes, the man missing out in Andersen Province. Shironne didn’t think she’d ever met the absent Paal Endiren, but the others were worried about the length of time he’d been gone. Messine walked her down to the army hospital’s basement and left her there with Captain Kassannan.

  “The squads the colonel sent out to comb along the river’s banks haven’t found anything,” Kassannan said, getting down to business immediately. “They did, however, retrieve a bunch of soil samples for me.”

  He was always finding new challenges for her. She’d spent the first few months working with him learning all the proper names for the anatomy and all the things that could go wrong in death. Then she’d moved on to learning minerals and metals, plants and woods and fabrics. Evidently this week’s visits would entail the study of soil samples . . . unless they found that body.

  Sometime later, she sat on a tall bench before one of the worktables, Kassannan handing her samples and one of the orderlies silently taking notes. She dipped one finger gingerly into the small glass dish, the essences within sparkling into her inner vision on contact with her skin. Sand, hard and cool in her mind, washed by the familiar water of the Laksitya River, tiny bits worn down from granite: quartz, mica, and feldspar. She felt no stain of sewage on the grains, which told her the sample had been taken upstream of the city. Black soil, rich with humus, probably carried off from a farm farther upstream. Fibers from the stems of stiff plants like those used to make baskets. A scale from a fish nestled among the grains and silt, totally different in composition, with a shining durability she could only imagine now. A memory of the iridescent fish swimming in the clear pool in a garden somewhere drifted into her mind, evoking a smile. It had been summer, warm and green, the countryside, and she’d been a little girl.

  “Well, Miss Anjir?” The captain’s voice intruded on her concentration. “What do you think?”

  Shironne took a deep breath. “This sample’s from upstream. Probably a place where people fish. There’s green matter in it, something tough and fibrous, so I suspect it’s close to, or downstream from, that shallow edge of the river with all the reeds.”

  His approval wrapped around her like a warm smile. “Very good,” he said. “But why the people fishing?”

  As the orderly’s pen scratched on paper, Shironne spun her finger about in the grains again, double-checking her conclusions. “I feel a fish scale in here. Just one, but it’s there. It could be from something else, but fishing is the most logical explanation.”

  “I’ll have to look at that sample again,” he noted. “It is from upstream, south of the reeds, but I didn’t spot the scale. Corporal, make a note of that.”

  “Yes, sir,” the young man said from off to her left.

  Shironne felt the glass bowl easing away from her, so she lifted her hand. She laid her hand back in her lap to grasp the crystal lying there and focused her powers on it. “Do you need to stop?” the captain asked, concern welling about him.

  Shironne drew a slow breath and retreated from her focus. “No, I’m fine. A bit cold.”

  “Want your jacket?”

  The basement room was always cool, but as the ground grew colder with the onset of winter, so did Kassannan’s office. Since the series of rooms he ruled occasionally held the bodies of army personnel who’d died in questionable ways, the chill was a welcome quality. It suppressed smells that could be quite horrid in the warmer seasons.

  “No, I’ll be fine.” She heard the faint scrape of another glass bowl being pushed toward her along the marble surface of the tabletop and shifted on her tall metal stool. They’d been working for more than an hour now, and her rump was getting numb.

  “Try this one, then,” he said.

  One of the good things about Captain Kassannan. He never treated her like a helpless child, the way some adults persisted in doing. Despite being nearly two decades older than her seventeen, the captain treated her like a colleague, even a friend. He had worked with her on enough investigations that they’d developed a solid working relationship.

  Shironne lifted her hand from her lap and held it over the small bowl. Even without touching it, she knew the sample contained remnants of living matter. Blood. This soil had been drenched in it. She wrapped her other hand—still gloved—around her focus to help mitigate the initial shock. “There’s blood in this sample.”

  “I wasn’t aware of that.” His alarm jarred her determination. “You can skip this one.”

  Shironne licked her lip, a nervous gesture that she’d never managed to quell. She tasted smoke from oily house fires on her tongue and humidity from the river on her lips. She cringed, ingesting sooty particles left by the smoke. Someday she would learn not to do that. “No,” she told him. “I’ll do it.”

  One of the odder aspects of her powers was that she could tell if blood came from a man or a woman, and if it was someone she knew, she might even recognize whose it was. While that might seem a trivial thing, it had been pivotal in solving the murder of an army lieutenant only a few months past—that of Captain Kassannan’s wife, Hanna, one of the office’s lieutenants. At first her death had been seen as an accident, the result of an exploding gas line. But Shironne had recognized a puddle of blood some distance away from Hanna’s body as hers, which meant her body had been moved. Her killer had tried to make her death look like an accident when it wasn’t.

  The difference in the blood from man to woman, or from person to person, was impossible for her to describe, but she always knew.

  Before he could slide the bowl away, she touched her finger to the soil in it. The feel of the blood welled through her senses, redness creeping up that finger to cover her hand and then crawling up her arm under her sleeves. It became colder in the office, far colder than it truly was, sending shivers through her thin frame despite her wool tunic, undershirt, and layers of petticoats. She clenched her jaw, forcing herself to remain calm, to master her reaction rather than letting it control her. She tried instead to feel the soil and its remnants of river water and plant matter and the leavings of fish. “This came from the very edge of the river. There was blood there, but then it washed away.”

  “And you can still sense it?”

  Even when he couldn’t verify it under his magnifying lenses, she could still feel things with her powers. Unfortunately, it meant he had only her word for it. Fortunately, he never doubted her. “Yes. The blood is a day or two old. Human. A woman, so it can’t be from the man in my dream. It has . . .”

  How could she explain the glow the blood had taken on in her mind? It was hot and hostile, angry. Licked up by a hungry river, mostly borne away on its tongue. “It has the feel of magic about it,” she finally admitted. “I think she made a blood sacrifice at the river’s edge.”

  She could sense the orderly’s disgust as clearly as if he’d spoken it aloud. Shironne pushed the man’s reaction to a distance.

  Kassannan found the idea of blood magic curious but didn’t react otherwise. He had little tolerance for superstition, possibly one of the reasons he was so good at his work, but neither did he judge others for it. The surgeon slid away that bowl, his mind turning in ordered thought that reminded Shironne of the ticking of a clock. “Make a note of that site,” he said, and the orderly’s pen scratched on paper again. “There’s a new cloth in front of you.”

  The captain kept new cloths on hand just for her, knowing that every time a piece of fa
bric was laundered, the wash water deposited matter from other items on it. Bits of lint from the machine that wove the cloth and a hint of oil from the surgeon’s hand clung to the new fibers anyway, but it was far purer than anything that came from a public laundry. Shironne took the cloth in her gloved hand and began rubbing her finger, scrubbing away the remnants of the blood- and magic-stained soil.

  “I wonder if it happened in the same place where the victim in your dream died,” Kassannan mused.

  “I don’t think so. That seemed like a field, and this soil is too sandy to be anywhere but the edge of the river.” Shironne shook her head. A stray lock of hair, loosened from her braid, drifted across her forehead, bearing with it the touch of the soap she’d used to wash it the previous night and the lemon water she’d rinsed it in afterward to make it shine. Both familiar to her, so it wasn’t troubling. She tucked the strand behind one ear with her gloved hand, the threadbare cotton tickling her skin. Her own possessions rarely bothered her any longer. She was accustomed to the feel of her well-worn clothes. Unfamiliar things—those were far harder to deal with. If they were clean, she could accept them easily, but if they’d been handled by others, worn, or even laundered, they would have distracting contaminants on them. She focused her attention on the captain again. “Why can no one talk to me about him?”

  Kassannan didn’t pretend not to know whom she meant. Not the victim in the dream, but the dreamer himself. “People like him,” Kassannan said gently, “can be dangerous. They tend to overpower those who are receptive to their will, so you, especially, shouldn’t go near him.”

  Especially. This was part of the childhood thing.

  The Lucas Family had strangely strict rules about who could interact with a child. Many of the colonel’s personnel had been raised in the fortress, and they retained those beliefs even now that they lived outside the fortress. The rules were meant to keep young sensitives from being influenced by the thoughts of an adult who might try to take advantage of them. She understood that logic. That didn’t mean it didn’t irritate her. Even though she was seventeen now, they wouldn’t consider her seventeen—an adult—until the New Year. They grouped all their children by age at the beginning of the year, apparently to save confusion, but it seemed silly to think she didn’t have the strength of will to fight off an intrusive mind today, but would after the first day of the year.

  “So he’s loud,” she noted. “Anvarrid always are.”

  “He’s a broadcaster,” Kassannan said mildly, his uniform jacket rustling as he shrugged. “Not just loud. That means he can influence others. He pushes his dreams off on you. Does that not bother you?”

  Shironne thought for a moment and then realized that her mouth was hanging open. She shut it. “I think he’s only desperate for someone to hear him.”

  She had Kassannan’s full attention now. “Is that what it seems like to you?” he asked. “That he wants to be heard?”

  Shironne dropped one hand to her lap, where the crystal lay. She chased the captain’s question through her mind, trying to reassemble all her impressions of the dreams over the last few years. They’d slowly become easier for her to follow, but much of that ease came from understanding what it was she was experiencing. She’d made an effort to recall the dreams, but they were still fuzzy and veiled. It was almost like he was trying to be heard, and trying not to be heard. She explained that to the captain, who listened to her verdict with his mind clicking away like clockwork.

  “What reason might he have for not wanting to be heard?” Kassannan asked.

  “I guess he’s trying to protect people.” She could hear the orderly writing that down, as if what she said was actually important.

  “Wouldn’t it be easier, then, not to broadcast his dreams at all?” Kassannan asked.

  “I don’t think he can help that,” she said. “I mean, if you had a choice whether to dream those dreams, would you?”

  “Hmm . . .” The captain paused before answering. “I suppose not. Shall we move on?”

  The truth was, though, she might. If she had those dreams, she probably would try to use them. As overwhelming and awful as her own power had been at first, laying her open to everything around her, she had learned to use it. She didn’t know if she would give that up.

  Kassannan pushed another bowl in her direction. Shironne took a deep breath and set her finger into the contents, her attention only halfway on the mixture of minerals.

  After they finished working through the exercises Kassannan had planned for her, he escorted her back to the main office, where Messine was working, helping Ensign Pamini—one of the office’s newest workers—sort through a large folder full of reports that had come in from their agents working in Andersen Province. Before she could collect Messine and leave, though, the colonel asked her to come back to his office.

  Shironne walked behind him along the paneled halls, terrain familiar enough that she didn’t need anyone to direct her. When she reached the doorway, she stepped inside, felt for the high back of one of the wooden chairs, and sat, tugging her braid out of the way first so she wouldn’t sit on it.

  She’d always liked the colonel. The very first time he’d met her, he’d listened to her talk about that quick promise made to her maid. He’d listened while she’d discussed her powers and hadn’t dismissed her as insane. But what had actually won her over was his reaction to her mother. The colonel had noticed a bruise on her mother’s cheek and, rather than asking what she’d done to earn her husband’s ire, had been furious. That had raised the colonel to a very lofty position in her mind, and he had yet to disappoint her.

  Although it was uncommon for a Larossan widow to remarry, Shironne suspected her mother was considering it. Given her mother’s dislike of scandal, it said a great deal that she was willing to face censure for his sake. Of course, neither of them had said anything to her, but Shironne could hardly miss the way the colonel reacted to her mother, or her mother reacted to his presence.

  But today, she was sure the colonel wanted to talk about something else.

  “I wanted to talk to you about your father,” he began, which presaged something unpleasant.

  Anything to do with her late father was unpleasant. Her father had been abusive, unkind, and unfaithful to her mother. Only after Shironne had started working for the colonel’s office had she learned that her father was using his position as one of the city’s aldermen for personal gain. Blackmail seemed to be his preferred source of income, earning him enemies, and although his close ties to the police had always protected him from charges before, evidence had surfaced that beggar children had been disappearing off the street. That had caused the city’s religious leaders to pressure the authorities into an investigation. The police had been on the brink of arresting her father when he’d died in an inglorious fashion, stabbed by his young mistress.

  “What is it this time?” she asked, resigned to more bad news.

  He shifted. It sounded to her like he was sitting on the edge of his desk again. “You recall that we had a man who followed the trail of the child-transportation scheme all the way out to Andersen Province, don’t you?”

  Child-transportation scheme was a polite way of saying that her father had been selling those children stolen off the streets of Noikinos to Pedraisi clans, either for slave labor or for other purposes that she didn’t want to examine too closely. “Endiren,” she said. “Kassannan told me about him. He’s been missing for a while now, hasn’t he?”

  “Since shortly before your father died. Endiren was following the trail of a caravan bearing children, possibly the last one that left Noikinos. Since the victim in your most recent dream was likely killed in some form of blood magic, there might be a relationship between the two. A very slim chance, but I wanted to ask if your mother has received any correspondence addressed to your father.”

  As a widow in mourning, her mother shoul
d not receive male visitors outside her own family, so the colonel couldn’t ask her those questions directly. “I will ask, sir, although I suspect if she had, she would have already forwarded it to you.”

  “It is . . . a delicate subject,” the colonel said, pushing a sense of wanting to be trusted at her.

  Shironne smiled. He hadn’t had an opportunity to speak with her mother since her father’s death, and she suspected that he wanted news of Savelle Anjir more than he wanted any letters. “I understand, sir.”

  “You always do,” he said.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Mikael’s sparring session with his student, Eli, helped work out some of his frustrations with his inability to do anything about the death in his dream. Teaching was one of the ways he felt he actually could earn his place in the Lucas Family. If they ever let him have more students, that was.

  But he had a couple of leads to pursue, so after he went off duty, Mikael headed down to Below to find Jannika. It was shortly after the shift change, so while she ate, he sat with one leg folded beneath him on the wooden chair, sipping an overly hot cup of tea.

  Jannika had chosen a table on the far edge of the mess and sat stirring her soup—a bean soup this time that smelled exceptionally meaty. The mess was crowded with tired sentries, so Mikael’s emotions weren’t likely to stand out above the ambient in the room. It was currently the overwhelming group feeling of relief and pleasure at having come off a long, chilly shift. The comfort of bootlaces loosened, jackets and overcoats set aside. No one even gave Mikael a second glance at this hour, but he held his thoughts quiet to keep it that way.