Dreamstrider

by Lindsay Smith

  “But she’s working with the Commandant as well.” Durst looks from Vera to Brandt to me, his scowl deepening. “So she’s a traitor to the Empire and the Dreamer both.”

  “Is it possible Nightmare is the warbeast the Commandant mentioned?” I ask, though an icy fist closes around my heart at the mere thought. “That he was working with someone who believed they could bring Nightmare back?” It shouldn’t be possible. The Dreamer can’t let it be so. But the way Lady Twyne spoke didn’t sound like mere wishful thinking.

  Vera gives me a disgusted look. “Bring Nightmare back to life? Are you joking? Even if that were possible—which it can’t be, the Dreamer wouldn’t allow it—how would he even know about the shards, know where to find them—”

  “Anything is possible, Vera,” Edina says, though her tone is much softer than usual. “Even defying the Dreamer’s will.”

  “Oh, as if you know anything about defying someone,” Vera huffs.

  Brandt steps forward, shoulders thrust back. His frock coat is rumpled; the collar I’d turned down for him has ridden back up. “If there’s a whole underground movement of Nightmare worshippers, it’s our duty to expose them for their heresy. Someone must be leading them. I don’t know how the Land of the Iron Winds plays into it, but they must be based here—in Barstadt.” He tightens one hand into a fist. “I’ll start with the temples in the seamier parts of town. Look for disillusioned priests—”

  “That’s rather hasty, don’t you think?” Edina asks with a tiny frown. “One ranting aristocrat is hardly an indicator of a deeper conspiracy. Lady Twyne may very well be working with the Commandant alone. Why upset the priesthood?”

  “We’re just trying to get answers! The sooner we can stop Twyne and her allies, the better,” Brandt says.

  I nod at Brandt. “If someone’s found a way to bring Nightmare back to life, we have to stop them immediately.”

  “Then we should approach the priests as allies, not charge in accusing them of conspiring against the Dreamer himself,” Edina says. “We might need their aid to stop Lady Twyne. They’re suspicious of … our usage of the dreamworld”—Edina’s gaze darts toward me—“as it is. We want them to trust us, and that means presenting them with hard proof.”

  Vera’s laughter slices through the room. “Oh, that’s rich, coming from you of all people.” I cringe; Vera’s always been short with Edina, but tonight, she’s in rare form. Vera flops into a chair with a crackle of stiff satin. “As if anyone would trust you again!”

  “Enough,” Edina snaps. “Let’s focus on what we do know—it’s more than enough to keep us busy. Lady Twyne is conspiring against the Emperor with the Commandant.”

  “Precisely,” Vera says, “so let’s just arrest her and be done with it—” Then her face turns deep scarlet; she narrows her eyes at Edina. “Wait. You’re trying to trick me into agreeing with you.”

  Edina sighs. “It isn’t a trick.”

  “If we arrest Lady Twyne right now,” Brandt says, talking over them both, “then her allies will vanish, like a mirage. I’d rather we let her continue to operate for a bit longer, and see where it leads us.”

  “Brandt is right. Let the rats continue to scurry. We’ll put a stop to it before they can do any damage.” Minister Durst finishes the drink he’d been nursing, straightens his own coat, and runs his fingers through his bed-mussed hair. “I must report this to the Emperor, however. In the meantime, I want the rest of you hunting for anyone who might be working with Twyne.”

  “I can do some legwork in the Cloister of Roses. Find out her closest associates,” Vera says.

  Brandt nods. “And I’ll look into her business ventures. My informant mentioned she’d dealt with the Stargazers before.”

  Edina steps forward, tapping her pen against her teeth. “I’ll pull records of Lady Twyne’s business dealings.”

  I say nothing, for I’m not expected to know how to help. Only to wait for the next order to arrive.

  “Good, good.” Durst rubs his goatee. “See if she’s been talking any heresy to her friends—any of this Nightmare business. Someone must know—”

  “Minister Durst.” Durst’s oldest secretary slips into the room, eyes red with sleep deprivation. “The Farthing representatives are here to see you.”

  Durst groans. “What the nightmares do they want? It’s not even dawn yet. Tell them it’ll have to wait, and ready me a carriage for the Imperial Palace.”

  The secretary’s jaw quivers. “They insist it is of the utmost urgency, Minister.”

  Durst looks toward me as if for clarification, but I shrug my shoulders. “Last I knew, they were hunting down leads at the docks,” I say.

  “Five minutes.” Durst pinches the bridge of his nose. “And get that carriage ready.” The secretary bows and scurries out the door. “Vera, Brandt, track down those leads. Edina, pull those financial records you mentioned. Livia, stay here to meet with the Farthingers.”

  I bite down on my lower lip and smooth the skirts of the shift I’d donned after we’d left the ball. Dreamer, give me strength to serve your people well.

  The secretary ushers in Marez and Kriza, both of them dressed head to toe in dark clothing, with kohl smeared around their eyes. Marez’s gaze finds me immediately, and he grins briefly, as if he and I share a secret. I catch myself returning the smile before I force my expression blank.

  “Minister Durst.” Marez drops into a deep bow. “Or am I supposed to kneel to one of your rank? I find Barstadt’s endless social customs so confusing.”

  Durst folds his arms across his chest. “Just tell me what you’ve found.”

  “One of the ship captains we were watching at the docks,” Kriza says, “had the most fascinating conversation with us.”

  “You went to the docks again without Silke’s accompaniment?” Durst steps toward her. “Our agreement was—”

  “Yes, believe me, we know the terms, but when we visited the Ministry this afternoon, we were told Silke was indisposed,” Marez says. Of course I was—I was preparing to infiltrate Twyne’s ball.

  “We’re more interested in results than protocol,” Kriza says. “So, yes, we continued our investigation.”

  Marez plucks a small dagger from his belt and slides the blade’s tip under his fingernail, cleaning it. Minister Durst opens his mouth again to protest the weapon, but Marez speaks too loudly. “Turns out, this ship captain’s been making short trips up and down the coast, strictly off the log books, on behalf of one of your aristocrats.”

  Durst’s frown deepens. “Did he tell you which one?”

  “Eventually.” Kriza smirks. “After some persuading.”

  I tighten my jaw; I’d rather not find out what sort of persuading Kriza is capable of.

  Marez finishes with the nails of one hand and moves to the next. “Lady Sindra Twyne. Anyone you’re familiar with?”

  Durst keeps his calm, but my lungs are burning from trying not to cry out. “I know of her, yes.” Durst shifts his weight. “She’s first cousin to the Emperor.”

  “Well, she appears to be searching for something. According to this captain, every few weeks she’d come to him with a set of coordinates, and he’d carry a small entourage of her thugs to the location. Fortunately for us, he kept a record of everywhere she sent him. We’ve just come from her estate, where the records in her office confirmed it.” Kriza pulls a battered scroll from her pocket. I’m relieved we rushed back to the Ministry after interrogating Lady Twyne instead of heading for her office as well—we might have crossed paths with the Farthingers. “Don’t suppose the pattern means anything to you?”

  She unfolds the scroll on Durst’s desk and we all crowd around it—a map of the Central Realms, riddled with circles, some of them with crosses through them and some not. They speckle along the coast of Barstadt, mainly, but some are inside the city, some deep into the Land of the Iron Winds, and even a few in Farthing’s territories.

  “What about the ones in the city?”
I ask.

  Marez nods at me. “Excellent question. Apparently, those are locations of some of the fences she employs to off-load illicit goods—whatever it is she’s buying and trading, her associates do their business there. He helpfully provided us with a list of their names.”

  “We’re thinking we should pay them some visits next,” Kriza says.

  “Tomorrow,” I say, blood pumping loud in my ears. Brandt’s right—we have to find out what Twyne is up to, whatever she means to do, and stop it.

  Marez looks at me with an eyebrow raised. “Eager to get back into the field, are you, little secretary?” His smile spreads like a stain. “Tomorrow is too soon, in case Lady Twyne notices anything amiss in her office. We don’t want to raise any suspicions. But don’t worry. We’ll go after them in due time.”

  After the Farthingers leave, Durst turns toward me, red-rimmed eyes narrowed. “Did you happen to notice the Farthingers at Twyne’s soiree tonight?” he asks. His tone is calm enough, but I suspect there’s a warning below the surface.

  “Brandt spotted Kriza at the ball, but I never crossed paths with her, I swear it. We were careful.” Yet my voice shakes; I’m not sure whether I’m trying to convince Minister Durst or myself. “Both our hunts brought us to Lady Twyne. As far as I’m concerned, that only further cements her guilt—not just of conspiring with the Commandant, but of actively aiding his invasion.”

  Durst forces a tight nod. “Get some rest, Livia. I suspect we all will have long days ahead of us.”

  I stagger into bed as the first rays of sun peek over the mountains in the east. Foul dreams find me, but whether they are portents or dormant memories stirred up by my fear, I can’t say. A wolf stalks me in slow, loping circles. I often dream of wolves beyond the tree line in the forests of Oneiros, but this one seems like a human in costume, like the tumbler we saw at the masquerade ball.

  I follow the wolf through the forest, feeling drawn toward some unspoken goal. Before I even see it, I feel its call in my bones: Nightmare’s Spine. It looks just like it does in the waking world: the vertebrae hang fifty feet in the air, suspended on ribs wider than a man, large enough to encase the entire Ministry of Affairs building within its great rib cage. Birds wheel around the spine’s peaks, but even they know better than to land.

  I see the massive skull from behind. I never want to see its shape, to know the face of Nightmare. Yet in this dream, I am drawn toward the skull’s front like the face of a flower to sunlight. Drums are beating in my ears, in time with my own heartbeat: Nightmare’s shattered heart, made whole once more.

  No, I try to scream, but my words turn to ash in my mouth. I have to stop it. Nightmare cannot rise again.

  I’ve always held control in my dreams—if not of the dream’s contents, then at least over my emotions and reactions to whatever horrors I face. But when Nightmare’s skull turns toward me, panic seizes me in a stranglehold. Rotten skin, like fish scales hammered onto diseased flesh, drips from the desiccated jawbone of the massive reptilian beast—Nightmare made manifest. My mind is screaming. My body revolts. I open my mouth to shriek, but my voice is like a nest of wasps inside my throat, buzzing around furiously but never breaking free so someone can hear.

  Finally my legs obey me. I run. I have to reach the Ministry building, though I don’t know what support it can offer me if Nightmare’s shattered heart is whole once more. I run down the slope of Nightmare’s Spine, sailing over jagged rocks and fractured cliffs long since collapsed. I need the Dreamer to save me, but the Dreamer is silent as always.

  I burst through the Ministry doors and launch straight into the records hall. This dream again—the one where I’m searching for knowledge forever beyond my grasp. Nightmare, Nightmare. I scour the endless shelves. Who could do such a thing? Where did they find the shards? I have to stop it, and somehow, I feel certain I will find the answer in here, in a red leather journal. I flip through file after file, from waterlogged shipping manifests to coded transmissions to fragile, frantic maps scrawled in the field centuries before, which crumble in my hands. In the dream, my quest to find the truth of the Nightmare fragments makes sense; it is the most important thing that I could do.

  And like all dreams, it dissolves at last, without resolution. I awaken tangled in sweat-slicked sheets with nothing but broken questions and the throb of dread in the back of my mind.

  Chapter Nine

  Over the next several days, Brandt infiltrates a half-dozen temples, and Vera attends endless tea parties and formal dinners in search of leads on Twyne’s associates, but they turn up nothing further. Minister Durst, Marez, and Kriza are busy readying the city’s defenses and coaching the Barstadt navy on the Commandant’s plans we had found in the Citadel. They’re stymied, however, by a rash of tunneler protests, calling for the Writ to pass; one group even manages to break into the Imperial Palace through the tunnels before the palace guards subdue them and order those tunnels sealed. I know they just want their citizenship—access to respectable work and living quarters, not the indentured servitude of tunnel life—but I worry for the tunnelers. For how the aristocrats might lash out in fear.

  No such excitement for me. I dig through the archives with Edina, play Stacks with Sora, and wait—for there’s nothing more I can do, even as my dreams taunt me with the horrible possibility that Nightmare is returning to life. But there’s not much I can do in Oneiros without a hint of whom I could use to gain the knowledge we need. I dream of returning to the archives at night, searching for answers, but in dreams and in the waking world, I have no proof. I have no clues. Finally, when I can take it no longer, I decide to try Professor Hesse once more, despite how our last conversation went.

  As I wind the interminable stairs of the Theosophy Tower, I wrack my mind for a new joke to tell Professor Hesse—anything to ease the bad blood between us after our last conversation. The cheesier, the better. Brandt had found one for me on a recent mission—what was it? A corrupt constable and the Dreamer’s High Priest walk into an alehouse …

  Hesse’s office door on the twelfth floor is shut. I’d already checked the lab, but it was locked. Perhaps he’s deep in a fresh thesis. I test the handle: unlocked, but the door fights me as I lean into it. “Professor Hesse?” I call timidly, once more feeling very much the naïve little girl I’d been when Hesse and I first met. “I’ve brought more honeycakes from Kruger’s.”

  The office floods me with the stink of mildew and sweat as soon as I open the door, as if I’ve unsealed a tomb. Tears spring to my eyes, and I bury my nose and mouth in the crook of my arm as I enter, leaving the door open to air out the room.

  “I told you I don’t want any cleaning,” Hesse growls from somewhere behind a pulpit of manuscripts, books, scrolls. Then I see one eye flicker toward me. “Oh. Livia. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean…”

  I scramble over the stacked trays of half-eaten bread crusts and chicken bones buzzing with flies that guard the doorway like a moat. “Dreamer bless, what’s happened to you?”

  Hesse is swaddled in a patchy blanket on the window seat, staring down at the main plaza. The closer I draw toward him, the more overpowering his stench becomes. An overflowing chamber pot languishes beside him; his usually shiny white hair hangs in clumps about his face. I pull a kerchief from my sleeve and press it to my nose. When we spoke just a few weeks past, yes, I’d noticed a fog of weariness around him—a tremor in his voice and a world-weary scent. But this is extreme. Has he even bathed since we last spoke?

  I throw open the window; the sunlight bursts free into the room, no longer suppressed by the grimy diamond-patterned glass. Professor Hesse flinches and leans away from the light. “I wish you wouldn’t do that,” he says, but his voice is thinner than a tunneler’s broth, and I can barely hear him.

  “What’s the matter with you?” I ask once I’ve taken a deep gulp of the outside air. Even after his wife’s death, Hesse never stopped teaching, never halted his research. I scan the mad scribbles of paper he has accu
mulated on his desk, like he was searching for something.

  Professor Hesse tilts his head back against the stone wall. “It’s all my fault. I should have destroyed it. No lock is good enough. Shouldn’t have researched it in the first place.”

  A shudder tears through me as I wipe the dust and grime away from his bookshelves. Surely he doesn’t mean the dreamstriding theorem. Me. My nails dig into the rag in my palm, and I scrub furiously. He gave me a new life when he unlocked the secret to dreamstriding. How can he regret that?

  I dig through his reams of papers. I’m still cleaning for him—I will probably spend my life cleaning up after this man, tunneler or no—but I’ll make damned sure he knows how unhappy I am about it. Great clouds of dust swirl around me as I sort, shake, stack.

  I fight to keep my voice contained, like the meek, silent servant I once was. “You know what my life was like when I met you. Before you dared to give me a chance. Would you have me surrender everything we’ve discovered and the far better life I live now?”

  “What? No, no. But I shouldn’t have forced you into this life. Maybe I saved you from far worse, but my motives were…” He cracks. “Impure.”

  A chill down my spine momentarily slows my frenzy. He can’t possibly mean that. That word brings to mind what happened to some of the other maids my age when they were assigned to cleaning professor’s offices. Professor Hesse never closed the office door, never reached for me, never even bore a dark sliver in his eye that I’ve seen in other professors. He gave me a new life—what could possibly be impure about that?

  “You told me you dreamed so strongly. How could I resist that? The perfect test subject for my greatest theorem yet. And you were so tiny … no one would miss you if my experiments went wrong.”

  Professor Hesse collapses into a dry sob. It sounds like the air rushing from a corpse’s lungs as its body constricts. But I am frozen in place. Not by what he has said—for it’s true, all of it. My father disappeared into the Dreamless dens, or so I’m told; my mother had energy only for tunneler work and crumpled into her pallet each night long before my siblings or half siblings were fed. No one to miss me, indeed. No one but those endless hungry mouths, with no one to hear their cries.