Dreamstrider

by Lindsay Smith

  I lean back, head swirling. The binding ritual? Hesse had never mentioned any such research to me. What is it he was trying to bind? And what did he mean about Nightmare’s death?

  Despite his slow progress, 39 has all the makings of a skillful dreamstrider, but his earlier piety has been replaced by an insatiable quest for power. I will take him off the experiments for the rest of the month and see if that cools his heels. If he survives what is to come, the Ministry will be thrilled. But it is too much to hope for at this stage.

  So Minister Durst is “satisfied” with me, but was continuing to look for someone better. What sort of someone? A man? An aristocrat? Someone with strength, a strong voice, a keener mind and quicker wit than mine? I can’t even refute it. I’m at best an instrument on operations, a somewhat cumbersome tool that must be brought to the site but only performs adequately. But as everyone on this ship knows, I’m a disaster, a liability, the stuck cog in an otherwise fluid device.

  Why can’t I be more?

  “Livia?” Brandt asks, lifting his head. “Did you find something?”

  “No.” The page blurs before me; I squeeze my eyes shut and try to steady my breathing. “Well … yes. Maybe.” Calm down, Livia. After a count of three, I open my eyes and am composed once more. “These mentions of Nightmare’s remnants. What I’ve been experiencing in Oneiros of late…”

  And that horrid dream I had after Lady Twyne’s execution. Surely it was a rebel priest, playing a prank on me. Or maybe I was not in Oneiros at all, and only believed myself to be.

  “Hmm,” Brandt says.

  I lift my chin. “Hmm.” But it stings my heart to jest with him like we always have. I don’t know how I will continue like this, acting as if our connection is what it’s always been. I force myself to frown.

  “This is an odd one,” Brandt says, bending back the cover on another treatise. “‘The Echoing Soul: Efforts at Preservation Via Oneiros.’”

  I sputter, thinking of what the informant told Marez and me about Lady Twyne. “Go on.”

  “Joint research by Professor Hesse and an unnamed assistant on whether one’s soul can be preserved in Oneiros after death. Their conclusion is that it is possible, but imperfect; they were unable to test it on any live subjects.” He wrinkles his nose. “Too speculative for my tastes.”

  “And yet we hear that Lady Twyne attempted it all the same,” I say.

  Brandt rubs at his chin as he studies the notes before him. “So if Lady Twyne found a way to preserve her soul inside Oneiros…”

  “But she couldn’t have done it alone.” I cast my thoughts back to Marez’s and my conversation at the Dreamless den. “She had to have someone helping her. Someone who knew Hesse’s research.” I suddenly catch myself wishing Marez were here, to help me parse through the informant’s tale for further clues, and my face flushes.

  Brandt sits up straighter. “One of his students at the university, maybe. Or another professor. I know he kept the dreamstriding research a secret, but these other treatises—we don’t know how many people know of them.”

  I wrack my memory for the names and faces of some of Hesse’s top students over the years. Two are priests in training at the High Temple now, and a handful more at the other temples throughout the city. Then there are the aristocrats who went back to their families after they completed their studies. None leap out at me as prime suspects to take part in such an awful conspiracy as this.

  Edina pokes her head into the cabin. “Ahh, there you two are. The sun’s about set. Mind helping out with dinner? Jorn’s fished us up a few snapjacks.”

  Brandt swings his legs over the side of the cot. “As my lady requests.” He swirls his arm and sweeps into an exaggerated bow. I stifle a giggle, and Edina regards him with a faint twist on her lips; I feel jealousy’s prickle once more.

  “Your lady requests fewer theatrics and more actual work. You can gut and dress the fish with Vera,” she tells Brandt. “Livia, won’t you help me prepare the tartlets?”

  I catch Brandt’s gaze out of the corner of my eye. “As my lady requests.”

  Brandt joins Vera and Jorn on deck while Edina and I duck into the mess. She pulls a wad of dough from the storage casks and spreads it out on the counter. “Forgive me if I come off as too harsh,” Edina says as she rolls the dough with a pin. “Brandt can have all the fun he likes with his work, but I don’t have that luxury. It’s no easy feat for us, proving our worth to the Ministry as women.”

  “Minister Durst’s fairer than most I’ve seen,” I say, automatic as a ritual prayer. But I wonder if there’s truth to it. I’m sent on countless missions because I’m the dreamstrider, but operatives like Vera are confined largely to parlor chatter and masquerades. Edina’s rarely out in the field, instead left to tug at her puppets’ strings from far away. She seems to enjoy that work, but if she wanted to be an operative, would Durst even give her the chance?

  “He has his moments. I’m honored he’s finally given me a chance to accompany you all this time, rather than trying to manage the mission from afar.” She shakes her head. “A pity it’s now, when I’m preparing to depart the Ministry.”

  To marry Brandt. I imagine Marez’s voice in my head, how he might react to Edina’s situation. Doubtless he’d condemn the minister’s treatment of women the same way he condemns all the other rules of Barstadt society. Marez enjoys forcing people to confront uncomfortable truths, and I’ve yet to decide if it’s a virtue or a nuisance. I’m certain he’d force me to confront my feelings for Brandt, if he knew. But there’s no use, I keep telling myself. I keep rubbing that reassurance until it’s raw.

  “I know how much you mean to Brandt.” Edina’s speaking slowly now. “How he hates that he’ll have to leave the Ministry. I can’t imagine it’ll be easy for you, either. But I hope you understand that it’s not my choice. His parents, my father—” Edina rips the thin dough in half, and squashes each half into a new wad. “Well, it’s for the best. We all must do our part for the Empire.”

  Not long ago, I would accept this without question. But now my mind is churning on thoughts of the looming war and Nightmare’s possible return—of faraway lands and the Dreamer’s silence and Hesse’s reckless experiments and … Marez. Marez, who urged me to question the way things have always been done. To decide for myself.

  “Brandt told me what happened to you, before,” I say. Edina’s shoulders tense. “I know it isn’t my business, but … perhaps love is worth the risk.”

  Edina hands me a wad of dough to form into a tartlet. “I once thought so. But this is—it’s safer. I’ll be content with Brandt. I hope he feels the same about me. No, it isn’t the sparks and passion I felt before, but I got burned plenty before, as well.”

  As if I’d expect anything less from Vera. “I do hope you find happiness,” I say, because it sounds like something I ought to say.

  “We’ll be content. A solid enough life.” Edina raises her chin. “But will you be all right?”

  Her look—it isn’t harsh, but it’s unmistakable. She knows what I feel. My earlier confidence that I’d shoved down my feelings for Brandt fades away under that gaze. “I don’t know what you mean,” I say stiffly.

  Edina sighs, and leans over to fix my lumpy tartlet’s shape. “All right, Livia. We’ll speak on other things. What did you learn in the journals?”

  I tell her about Hesse’s other research projects—the binding ritual. The Treatise on Transference. But my mind turns over and over on her question. Will I be all right without Brandt? What will I do once my citizenship papers are secured?

  I’ve used my tunneler instincts thus far to survive. For a long time, I thought the ministry was key to my survival. But there’s a whole world out there—beyond Barstadt and its colonies, beyond all of the Central Realms. Perhaps there’s somewhere where survival won’t seem such a struggle to me.

  Perhaps, as Marez suggested, it’s in Farthing.

  Chapter Seventeen

  I awaken t
o a scratching noise, and at first I draw my blanket tight around me, thinking the ship’s rats have come out to play. But there’s something too rhythmic in the sound, and it’s nearby, not deep within the ship’s innards. My eyes adjust to the fuzzy gray darkness, and I see light glinting off the whites of Brandt’s eyes as he stares at the wooden post where he’s scratching patterns with a pocketknife.

  I swing my legs over the edge of my cot, ropes creaking, and stand slowly. I’m in loose trousers and a tunic, which must gleam like the moon in this darkness. Brandt’s eyes flicker toward me, and I’m sure he’s seen me up, but he turns his attention back to his lazy scratches.

  I sit down on the floor beside his cot and rest my head against the post, just below where he’s carving. He slowly folds up his penknife and lets his fingers dangle over the side of his cot, near my shoulder.

  “You’re afraid of something,” Brandt says after a while. His voice rumbles through me, even though it’s soft enough the others shouldn’t be able to hear.

  I’m afraid of a great many things. Nightmare, and the Commandant, and, most of all, losing Brandt. But I can’t be afraid. Like Brandt said, fear is how I ruin a mission—how I don’t push hard enough to reach for what we need most. Fear will only get me hurt. I have to build a thick wall between me and Brandt to keep out the pain and fear.

  “I’m afraid of whatever is to come.” It isn’t a lie, but I can’t tell him the whole truth. About my feelings for him, or my specific fears of Nightmare and the encroaching Wastes.

  “You shouldn’t be. You’re going to do great works. You’re the strongest person I know, Liv—truly. The Iron Winds should think twice about blowing against you.”

  That elicits a weary smile from me, despite my best efforts to the contrary. I hide it behind my knees. “But I’m not as strong as when I’m with my—my partner,” I say.

  I want to be angry at him because it’s far easier than accepting the truth: that not all of my dreams can come true. That if I’m losing him, it must be because the Dreamer wills it. I can feel it itching under my skin, the delicious righteousness of my anger, carving a path like a whirlwind and smashing all my other feelings for him to bits. But it’s not fair. Brandt’s only doing his duty; he’s done nothing wrong. I can’t blame him any more than I could blame a hound for killing a rabbit; he’s only done what he, as a son of an aristocratic House, was bred to do. Perhaps it’s the Dreamer I should hate.

  I love you, Brandt. The words wash ashore in my thoughts as the tide of anger recedes. I love you, and it’s torture to me.

  But what I say is, “Dream with me.”

  He raises his head up off the cot. “Are you certain?”

  I nod. “If Lady Twyne hid her soul in Oneiros, then we should investigate.” I finger the silver chain around my neck and fish the vial dangling from it out of my tunic. “If you drink the dreamwort potion, it will put your consciousness in Oneiros while you’re fully awake.”

  He arches one brow at me. “I won’t slip out of my body or anything like that?”

  I press my lips together. “It’s possible, but it’s not very likely, unless you’ve become a dreamstrider yourself. Especially since you’ll have the advantage of being fully conscious.” I wave my hand at him. “Hesse started me off the same way. I’ll be there beside you, I promise.”

  He taps his tongue to the lip of the uncorked vial and then recoils, lips snarled back. “Nightmare’s bones. That’s nasty.” When I give him a stern look, though, he takes a tentative sip.

  I swoop in for the vial as his head hits the pillow, his body stone stiff. I position myself to lie flat on the floor and take a drink of my own.

  A flock of crows shrieks and scatters away from us as I open my eyes, blinking away the haze. Without pulling free of my tether, as I usually do, I drag myself to a sitting position and let my loose dress spread around me. I’m resting on soft, loamy earth under a canopy of dark pines. Their tiered, needled skirts surge far overhead into a dull gray sky.

  “Brandt?” I call, though not too loud; memories of the horrific beasts last time I visited Oneiros warn me from that.

  A groan answers me to my left. He’s facedown in a patch of moss, attempting to flop himself onto his back, like a wallowing swine. He looks so ill at ease in his own skin that I have to laugh in spite of myself.

  “S’not funny,” he mutters through a mouthful of dirt. “You could have at least warned me.”

  “Sorry.” I offer him a hand. “Usually I appear upright.”

  Brandt brushes dirt and moss away from his prim tweed suit while I survey our surroundings. If I’m not mistaken, this is the forest to the northeast of the city that slowly rises into the mountains. I listen through the trees: the shushing of pine boughs against one another in the breeze, the subdued chatter of birds. No thunderous wings. No stench of decay. Just the moist, earthy scent of the forest and a cool, distant stream.

  “We’re looking for Professor Hesse’s cottage,” I tell Brandt, pointing north of the clearing. “I want to know if he left us any clues about the binding ritual. And once we’re done there”—I swallow—“we’ll investigate the building I saw.”

  Brandt nods, trotting alongside me as I weave through the pines on a faded trail of tamped-down needles. “Are there people here? Awake ones, I mean.”

  “They usually stay in the city, but a few priests have homes in the woods, or on the beach, or—anywhere, really. There’s a desert to the west, mountains to the north, the sea to our south…”

  He laughs hoarsely to himself. “You dreamfolk are quite the wild bunch, aren’t you?”

  I wince, guilt rippling through me. As if I deserve to be lumped in with the Dreamer’s true devout. I crunch along in silence, leaving Brandt to stroll wide-eyed.

  Professor Hesse’s cottage spills out of another clearing in the forest, surrounded by an explosion of flowers: clematis, bougainvillea, roses, chrysanthemum, mothwood blossoms, tulips in every hue. None would grow together in the real world, but here they live side by side, craving no sunlight and demanding no rain. I push aside a sunflower the size of my head to unlatch the wrought iron gate and hold it open for Brandt.

  “Madness!” he exclaims. “I love it. It’s all mad.”

  “Wait until you see inside,” I say with a grin.

  The whitewashed cottage, looking like a two-room affair from the outside, opens up into a cathedral of marble and glass within. A grand promenade cuts down the center of the foyer, a glistening reflecting pool at its heart, then branches off to a colossal five-story library to the right and a quaint rough-hewn kitchen to the left.

  “He spent his whole life Shaping it.” My voice wavers—but how can I be sad? His dreamworld home brings me closer to his mind and his memories than I ever was in life. The filigree pattern carved into the columns reminds me of his stories of his time studying theosophy amongst Barstadt’s northern colonies; the library is bursting with the spines of all his favorite books on dreams, even those that were ruined when his old office flooded. Remnants of my earlier dream about that office flit through my mind, but I bat them away.

  This is Professor Hesse, right here—not the shriveled-up specter of misery in his filthy office, or the careless, restless corpse. I let Brandt wander off, but I’m taking my time, running my fingers over every surface, trying to pay homage to the Professor Hesse who deserves to be memorialized in this way. I should have come here earlier, I think, but I wasn’t ready before. I’m not completely sure I’m ready now.

  “Livia?” Brandt calls from somewhere in the labyrinth of the library. “You need to see this.”

  I run into the library and wind my way around the gleaming mahogany shelves, though with each passing second they expand into an endless sea of books, Shaped into a massive piece of machinery forever in motion. I can’t see Brandt, so I close my eyes and let Brandt’s essence guide me—his breathing, thrumming being that I would know anywhere. In Oneiros, it calls to me like a lighthouse.

&nbs
p; He stands in front of a parquetted wood cabinet, a golden key jutting from its face like a knife.

  “A key,” I say, the wind rushing out of me. “You don’t suppose it’s…?”

  “Nothing is coincidence in fieldwork.” Brandt throws the cabinet door wide.

  But it’s empty. Three narrow shelves are lined with dust and nothing more. I trace my fingers through the dust and find a square where something must have sat until recently. A box? A book?

  “You don’t suppose he kept some of his research here, do you? What he asked you to destroy?” Brandt says.

  “Seems likely. But then who took it?”

  “Odd.” Brandts fingertips trace a painted drawing on the back of the cabinet door. It looks like an old star chart. A constellation of bright golden splotches stand out from the tinier flecks along the solid black wood, but I can’t decipher their shape.

  “Any priest of the Dreamer could have come here.” I cast my gaze around the silent, cavernous room. “Do you honestly think one of the Dreamer’s faithful would have threatened Hesse, though? The note about the key…”

  Brandt swings the cabinet door shut. “It’s an appalling thought, but anything’s possible. You don’t know any devious priests, do you?”

  “Unscrupulous, maybe, down in Dreamer Square, selling interpretations for absurd amounts.” I shake my head. “But those sorts are rarely devout enough to serve as Shapers. This is … this is sacred ground. The thought of someone threatening an innocent old man, desecrating his—his memorial—” I choke back my words as a sob wrenches out of me.

  Brandt tucks a lock of my hair back behind my ear. His face is serious, but tender; I can’t tell if he’s wearing a mask or not. Is it easier for him to modulate his appearance in Oneiros, or harder? “Livia. We’ll find whoever’s done this. Whatever they’re after—we won’t let them succeed.”

  He’d said something similar to me, that day after Hesse’s death. Yet he left me then all the same. I want to sink into Brandt’s touch, however faint it might be. But I must be stronger than that. I’m not here to connive a tender moment out of an engaged man, no matter what I feel for him. My eyes meet his, a liquid shade of smoke with only the dimmest hint of green.