Dreamstrider

by Lindsay Smith

  “Nothing that’s any of your business.” Despite his purpling face, Retch manages a vicious grin.

  I seize one of the fallen guard’s daggers and press the tip against Retch’s gut. “Everyone knows how you treat your enemies, and I’ve seen how you treat your friends. I have no problems plunging this into you if you’re not willing to cooperate.” I tilt my head to one side with a smile. I’ve spent too long on the other side of blades like this, from Marez and all the rest—it’s time we gained the advantage. “Don’t be fooled by my aristocratic friends. I’m from the tunnels. I’m not afraid to fight to survive.”

  Retch’s eyes bulge dangerously from their sockets. “Fine, fine. They were after some artifacts.”

  “You’ll have to do better,” Brandt growls. I press the knife harder against his gut.

  A raw desperation gurgles in Retch’s throat. “All right! They were after Nightmare shards. To reassemble Nightmare’s heart. My—my smugglers have been hunting the shards for a while, and—”

  “And you gave them that information?”

  “Who cares? It’s just an old myth! Yes!” Retch slurps down a greedy breath. “There are five major ones. Lady Twyne smuggled one in from the northern colonies. The Commandant found one in one of his quarries; one belonged to Farthing pirates, and the fourth was in the monolith in the High Temple.”

  What Kriza must have stolen last night at the High Temple. My heart sinks.

  Brandt presses in. His knee plunges into Retch’s back now, grinding him into the corpse dust of the catacomb floors. “And where is the final shard?”

  Retch’s words are a chopped, minced mess. “I—don’t—know!”

  The rope squeaks as Brandt pulls it tighter. “You said five major ones.”

  “That’s right. Rumor has it some of the aristocrats wear smaller shards in their faces.” Retch manages a dry laugh. “Now that they’ve got the five big ones, the Farthingers were going to … ‘dream’ the shards into Oneiros somehow. Don’t ask me how. Once they’ve re-formed Nightmare’s heart in Oneiros, they can resurrect him and bind him to their will. But they need the blood of the Emperor and the Commandant to do it.”

  “So that’s the binding ritual.” I groan. My hypothesis was right: they stole the papers from the empty cabinet in Hesse’s Oneiros home. The research he wanted me to destroy. “It doesn’t just reassemble Nightmare’s heart? It gives him control over Nightmare, too?”

  “Oh, yes.” Retch laughs again. “A mighty weapon at our command. And there’s naught you can do.”

  “Where are the Farthingers?” Brandt asks, digging the rope tighter. “Where are they doing this?”

  “Restoration artisan shop. Borders the Palace Square. Not—not far from here.”

  Brandt nods, satisfied. “Then we can start with that. Sora?”

  Sora brings him a mothwood rag, and he shoves it into Retch’s mouth. Finally, Retch’s horrid noises stop as he falls unconscious, and Brandt sets to work tying him up. “We’ll bring him back to the Ministry, once it’s safe.”

  But Jorn’s still convulsing, fighting the wretched nightmares. I smell his panic thick in the air; a cold sweat clings to his forehead. “Please,” I whisper, stroking his forehead. “Stay with us.”

  The Lullaby! I plunge my hand into my coat and tear away the wax wrapper. Sugary nausea floods my nose, but I force myself to peel back Jorn’s lips and smear the wad of resin against his gums. His eyes cloud over, but his breathing flattens out; he ceases to struggle. He releases short, shallow breaths—stable ones.

  “He lied,” a woman groans.

  The woman in the bed. Dreamer’s mercy, I’d forgotten about her. We turn toward her as she dangles one wrist in the air with what must be the sum total of her will. She’s slender as a bird, with a halo of knotted blond hair shielding her face from our scrutiny.

  “The final shard. I know where it is.” She draws a long, slow breath—savoring it, perhaps, as the first breath today that’s been truly hers, and not another part of her debt to Adolphus Retch. “The girls who work at the palace whisper about it. It’s the ruby in the Emperor’s forehead.”

  “Bloody nightmares. Of course.” Brandt bashes his palm against his forehead. “So that’ll be their next target. And they have the whole Farthing army at their backs to take the palace.”

  “We’ll stop them.” I stand up, letting my fingers unravel from Jorn’s, and walk over to the woman. She’s sunk back into the mattress with her glossy dove-gray stare, but I take her hand and force her fingers around some heavy gold coins. Once the lieutenants take their cut, it may only buy her a week’s worth of meat, but it has to be better than dreamlessly wallowing in this monster’s bed.

  Sora dunks a rag into an ewer and presses it to Jorn’s brow. “Is it all right to wake him up, Liv?”

  “No! No.” Plucking someone out of a forced dreamless state is always risky. “Damn. We need him to stay here until he wakes up.” At least he’s in a shallow dream, not vulnerable in Oneiros. I silently hope Nightmare’s legions are chasing Retch down in Oneiros as we speak.

  Brandt nods. “All right. Sora, you’ll stay here. Keep Jorn safe. Livia, let’s get to that workshop where the Farthingers set up shop. Maybe we can stop them from transferring the last shard of Nightmare’s heart.” He joins me at the bedside. “Is there another way out of here?” he asks the woman.

  I thought she’d dozed off again, but she slings one arm across her chest. “You can go back out the way you came. Or you can climb the stargazing port.”

  Of course. Even deep in Barstadt City’s forgotten bowels, Adolphus Retch had to have his stars, to remind him of the greatest luxury that no other tunneler can afford—the sky, whenever he wanted it. “We’ll climb,” I say.

  “Behind the throne. Key’s on his belt,” she says, and her eyes flutter shut.

  I press a kiss to Jorn’s brow, which has thankfully returned to normal temperature, and cinch his shirt closed over the wound. It’s no longer a hungry shade of black but the green of fading bruises. It’ll have to be enough.

  “Be careful,” Sora calls as Brandt unlocks the stargazing tunnel door with a terrific groan and the shudder of countless weights and gears spinning into place.

  Without looking back, Brandt and I climb the iron rungs under the pinpricked tunnel’s roof of blackening clouds.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  We climb several stories, the rusty metal rungs tacky under our palms, and emerge into a narrow courtyard, hemmed in by sloping warehouses and grain silos, all of them doubtless under Stargazer control. It’s early morning, not that we can tell it from the thick stormclouds in the sky, tinged with reddish brown. My shoulders are on fire from climbing up the ladder of the narrow shaft, and Brandt looks similarly strained as he scans the buildings around us. “Let’s see … the warehouse should be this way.” I point toward an alley’s mouth and we set off.

  “So you think Marez’s been entering your subconsciousness,” Brandt says, words carefully sorted. I don’t like this Brandt mask, cool and far-afield, unlike any he’s ever worn when speaking to me before.

  “It has to be. I’ve had strange dreams lately, where I’m snooping around the Ministry, and other odd things. And you say our conversation last night was real—”

  He cuts me off with a finger to his lips, tilting his head toward the entrance to the alleyway. I don’t hear anything but the distant rumble of something—horses, maybe, or siege weaponry rolling through the street.

  “They’re advancing on the palace?” I ask, but Brandt shushes me again.

  He’s right. Something in the sound is off—a vibration so faint I nearly lose it in the gaps between my thundering heartbeats. Then it crescendos, vibrating faster and faster. It starts in the earth but roars up into the buildings that crowd around us. A window bursts high overhead, and shards of glass cascade onto our heads. Dirt rattles loose from the building frame.

  And then I see that there’s blood dribbling down the alleyway,
loping back and forth through the cobblestone channels. It’s boiling over the channels, sprouting up from the cobblestones into almost-human shapes—

  “It’s Nightmare’s minions.” I seize Brandt’s hand and yank him in the opposite direction. “They’re breaking through from Oneiros!”

  We tear through the alleys until we stumble onto the main boulevard, but the nightmares have already taken shape. Winged, featherless birds stride through the streets, talons grasping for Barstadters as they flee, screaming.

  One beast scoops up a man in its talons. The man deflates like a waterskin, sobbing and shaking as all color and life drains away from him. The beast, swollen and taller now, casts the body aside.

  Misery rolls over us in waves. Brandt’s grip on my hand slackens; his face sags like a melting candle. The sadness I feel is a more sinister, angry variety than I’d encountered before, when confronted with these monsters in Oneiros. I imagine striking out at Edina Alizard, slitting her throat, only to have Brandt witness it and turn against me. Rage burns me up from the inside.

  “Fight it,” I whisper, squeezing Brandt’s hand with all the strength I’ve got. “Think of something good. Something worth fighting for.”

  And then the earth stills, as though it was only rolling over in its sleep. The terrors turn to smoke mid-stride, like a mirage on the road.

  “What happened?” Brandt asks, panting, his hand still taut around my wrist.

  “They must be still partially trapped in Oneiros,” I say. “That means the final shard hasn’t joined the rest.”

  “But for how long?” he mutters.

  We take off and sprint across the square. The artisan’s shop that the Farthingers converted into their base of operations is a glassblowing studio, and half-assembled chandeliers, statues, and other oddities pepper the main floor like severed stumps. The forge is extinguished, but a lone guard circles the studio’s interior, his unimaginative patrol pattern visibly worn along the otherwise dusty floor. We lurk for a moment behind the spiraling chandeliers before we dart for the staircase when his back is turned. I say a soft prayer to the Dreamer that the stairs don’t creak and give us away.

  We wait outside the door to the upstairs office, and Brandt mouths a count of three before swinging it wide.

  From the gust of the door opening, papers skitter across the surface of the office desk, but nothing else budges. Our eyes adjust to the fuzzy gray dark, and we rove around the space. Brandt instinctively moves right, and I move to the left, back in our familiar pattern. Maps of Barstadt City are smeared across the walls—formal Imperial cartographers’ maps and hand-drawn scrawls and tunnel diagrams painted onto pressed boards. There’s a map of the Land of the Iron Winds and topographical maps of an archeological dig.

  The last map is roughly but delicately, lovingly, rendered on stretched canvas. I recognize it instantly from the golden spire piercing its heart.

  Oneiros.

  Brandt snatches up a fistful of letters bearing the seal of House Twyne. “I should have known earlier that they were all working together. Bleeding dreams, I knew there was something not right with those Farthingers.” I should have known, too, I think, but our shame won’t help us now.

  Brandt comes to rest beside me before the map of Oneiros, his gaze tracing that soaring spire, its gleaming golden crown. Brandt has never seen Oneiros as it should be—alive with the Dreamer’s faithful, not bloodied with Nightmare spawn. But Oneiros is crumbling, and if Marez and Twyne have their way, Barstadt will be next for Nightmare to devour.

  “What do you recommend, then?” He groans, slumping into a desk chair. “How can we stop them from resurrecting Nightmare?”

  Even as he says it, the truth is under his nails, like a splinter, but he can’t acknowledge it, can’t pry it out. He’s afraid, and I am, too. I would rather swallow the whole sticky wad of Lullaby that weighs down my coat than do what I know we must. I would infiltrate the Commandant’s stronghold at the Citadel or Birnau a thousand times if it meant never having to walk the path before me.

  I don’t have a choice, not really. I am not the only dreamstrider in the world.

  But I’m the only one who can set this right.

  “I’ll go back into Oneiros,” I say, trying not to choke on the words. “I’ll find a way to stop them in there.” Somehow. Dreamer, please help me. A sob worms into my throat.

  “But how?” Brandt asks.

  “I don’t know. I’ve tried to live my life in a way that honors the Dreamer. I know I’m not—I haven’t been strong enough, clever enough, to feel his embrace. But what other choice do I have but to trust in him right now? Barstadt needs us. They need the Dreamer, and me by his side.”

  Brandt sits up straight in the chair, and he doesn’t have to lift a finger for me to know he’s heard something. My thudding heart, my anxious breaths fade into background noise, and my every sense homes in on the muted voices in the workshop below us.

  And then boots clatter on the staircase.

  Brandt stands, quietly, just as quiet as when he’d prepared to strike at Adolphus Retch. He seizes a map tube lying in the corner, wielding it like a bludgeon, and creeps beside the door. I’m pinned in place at the center of the room, but at least I serve as a distraction. As bait.

  The door opens, and Kriza strides through. She stares straight through me, mouth just beginning to round on a vowel of surprise or a curse. But there’s no time for her to finish it. Brandt brings the tubing to bear at the base of her skull, and she crumples forward.

  But she doesn’t go down without a fight. She rolls onto her back and bends her knees to leap back up, but Brandt forces a mothwood kerchief over her face. I crouch beside her and jam my palm over her mouth and nose to keep it in place. She writhes once, twice, and then uncoils as her mind tumbles into the Nightmare-infested world of Oneiros.

  Whatever the nightmares do to her there, she deserves it.

  “We’ll have to smuggle her out of here. Take her somewhere safe for questioning,” Brandt says. He tears through the room, probably in search of rope.

  “You can’t be serious.” I stare up at him from my crouch on the floor. “She’s not going to tell us anything. And anyway, what could we do even if she did?” I tug on the cord around my neck and fish out the pendant that carries the vial of dreamwort. “What if I can use Kriza’s body?”

  He stops, hand falling limply away from the drawer he’d just opened. “Please, Liv. If Oneiros looks anything like those monsters we just faced…”

  “Do you know a better way?” I ask, nostrils flashing. “I don’t see any other choice. If I’m Kriza, then I can approach the Farthing army officers, learn the specifics of their plans. Maybe send them away from the palace gates. Then you can get my body somewhere safe, and find a way to send word to Minister Durst and the Emperor inside the palace.”

  Brandt shakes his head, stepping back. “No, Liv, please. I couldn’t bear it if you—I mean, when I thought—” His jaw shifts from side to side. “Livia, I have to know. What you said to me last night—” He stares at me, all semblance of masks vanished.

  I take a step toward him. I feel now the fire in my veins—the fire he’s always stoked in me, the one I refused to acknowledge. “I may have thought it was a dream, but I meant what I said.” I’m shaking; why do I fear these words more than Nightmare’s spawn? But I have to be strong. I need to tell him the truth. “I love you. I’ve always loved you. You’re like my other mind, my other soul. You always know what’s best for me, and I always want to know what’s best for you.”

  Brandt cups my face in his hands. “Dreamer, but I’m such a fool. I thought you couldn’t possibly feel what I felt … That you saw me as a reckless brother, a boring high-society clod.”

  “Because it wasn’t my place to see you as more!” I cry.

  He wraps his arms around my neck. “I’d do anything for you—give up my inheritance, my family’s support. I only resisted because I couldn’t believe…”

 
My lips find his in the dark room, in silence. They always belonged against mine, working with me as seamlessly as we carry out our missions and conduct our daily lives. He tastes so rich and warm, just like spiked cider, and now I want to gulp it all down. He coaxes me toward him, clinging tighter and tighter to this one thing that we never dared to grasp.

  Footsteps on the staircase send us ricocheting apart. Brandt’s eyes are wide, and his lips are puffy and flushed, like mine feel. He goads me to act with a nudge of his head. “Who is it?” I call out, trying to make my voice low and smarmy like Kriza’s.

  “Thought I heard somethin’. You okay up there, miss?”

  Nightmare’s teeth. I gesture toward Brandt, and we both crouch behind the desk, out of sight of the door. “I’ll be right there!” I shout.

  “Please be safe,” Brandt whispers.

  I kiss him again, fierce and hungry, but pull away as he reaches for my cheek. “I love you, Brandt.” The moment the words leave my lips, I chug from my vial.

  *

  The Nightmare Wastes are eating Oneiros alive. No sooner do I gain footing on the cobblestone of the city streets, than an elaborate filigree castle, someone’s life’s work and sanctuary, crumples to the ground in a heap of golden lace. A pile of rotting flesh climbs from the rubble, its gaping jaw swinging from left to right.

  Kriza. Kriza. Where could she be in this disaster? Somewhere smug, somewhere a little too confident, a little dangerous. I spot the tarnished double-pronged spire and take off at a sprint.

  The temple’s interior has been transformed into swampland. Humid air slithers around me like a wet scarf, sticking to my skin and making each step through the temple’s heart an excruciating slog. Leafless vines reach out for me from the cracks and crevices in the stone, snagging at my hair, snaking up my ankles. I wrap my arms tight around my chest and try not to inhale the filthy miasma of Nightmare as it consumes the temple.

  A massive lizard, three sets of spikes running down her back, her snout honed to a needle point, wallows in the murk just beside the elaborate design that contains the Nightmare shards. Teeth spangle the edge of her jaw—honed teeth ready to tear me to shreds. She’s Kriza—she has to be. Something in those narrowed, poison-yellow eyes and her slothful stance, too casual to deny her predatory gaze, warns me instantly. She won’t stay in the dreamworld for long. It’ll take great skill and stealth to merge with that lethal beast.