Poison Sleep

by T. A. Pratt

  This was sorcerers’ business. But the tower was so ridiculous, like the comic-book idea of a dark lord’s keep. It was the architectural equivalent of those idiots who put on long black trench-coats and dark glasses and think the wardrobe makes them into badasses, when actually becoming a badass required working very, very hard. Gregor’s fortress was a modern skyscraper with reasonable functions, doubtless magically enhanced, but still. Zealand couldn’t help but think Reave’s castle was the fortress of someone with an overdeveloped sense of the dramatic. What the hell were the ordinary people down there on the street thinking in the face of this apparition?

  His hand had stopped itching. But now it pulsed, strangely warm, and when Zealand held his hand before his face he saw the green had spread across the back of his hand, tendriling up to his fingers and around his palm. “What the hell,” he muttered, and then the light burst in on him again, the tower abruptly vanished. He shaded his eyes against the onslaught of sunlight, blinking reflexively.

  “It’s almost there,” came a grating voice at his back.

  The door hadn’t opened. Zealand would have heard it. More sorcery. He turned to see Reave, with his long shiny coat, his soft-boiled-egg features.

  “Before long, it will achieve immanence. We just need to stabilize certain conditions.” Reave smiled. His teeth were yellowed, and bits of something leafy and green were stuck between them.

  “Do let me know if I can be of service,” Zealand said. Without thinking about why, he kept his green hand in his pocket. The itching was gone, but the warm pulse was intensifying. Something to worry about later. Had he caught some strange disease in that other place? “I’m between jobs at the moment, and my rates are competitive.”

  Reave sniffed. “I suppose we might let you guard a door, later. Once we’ve got something to lock up behind it. Now run along. You aren’t supposed to be here.”

  “I love your coat,” Zealand said, utterly deadpan. “Wherever did you find it?”

  “In her dreams,” Reave said, and flicked his hand toward the door. “Go away. Wait to be useful.”

  Zealand bowed his way out of the room. In her dreams. Well. That certainly failed to clear anything up.

  A great wind rushed down the street toward Marla and Ted, a channeled blast that whipped stinging snow toward them. “Shit!” Marla shouted—even with her eyes slit against the wind she could see the huge black tower, suddenly just there, in the middle of the street. It was Reave’s tower, the tower from her interlude with Genevieve, but she hadn’t entered the woman’s dream world—this was a real street in a real city, her city. This made a few spontaneously appearing orange trees look like nothing.

  “That—that—that…” Ted sputtered. Marla grabbed his arm and tugged him along after her. “What is that?” he finally asked.

  “A big pile of dog shit right in the middle of my day,” she said grimly. This was bad. It was the middle of the day, downtown, and even snowbound, the city was alive. Hundreds of ordinaries were going to look out their office windows and see that impossible thing rising up in the middle of the street. There were no pedestrians in sight, and traffic was light on this particular side street, but a couple of streets over it would be a different story. She could already hear the sound of honking horns, and that oddly soothed her—even confronted with an impossible fortress of black stone materializing in the street, the people of Felport were mostly annoyed by the way it held up traffic. Gods, she hoped it hadn’t crushed anyone.

  As she got closer to the tower, Marla saw that things were both better and worse than she’d expected. From the size of the tower, she’d assumed it must be pressed tight up against the surrounding high-rises, but it actually had plenty of room around its base.

  Unfortunately, it had plenty of room because it had hacked away at Euclidean space. It had somehow…made room for itself. The street was split on either side of the tower, just as wide as ever, but divided in two. The tower hadn’t just popped into existence in her city. It had brought a little of its own reality with it, a bit of ground from Genevieve’s dream world.

  Materializing a tower in the middle of a city was big magic, but Marla could have done it, with some prep. Altering physical reality to make space in the middle of a city to set the tower down without disturbing the surrounding area…that was way beyond her. It was way beyond anybody, except a reweaver, somebody who could make reality roll over and play dead. Somebody like Genevieve.

  “Marla, what should we do?” Ted was staring up at the tower. People were getting out of their cars and staring up. This was exactly the sort of thing Marla was supposed to keep from happening. They were being invaded by a madwoman’s nightmares. A few orange trees, and even skittering things that kept to the shadows, could be ignored. But a tower appearing downtown was a pretty hard-core intrusion into consensual reality. There wasn’t enough forget-me-lots potion in the city to dissolve this problem.

  Marla had no idea how to fix this. She needed to find Genevieve, but the immediate problem, the big dose of unreality in the middle of Felport—where to begin? Fuck it. There was a tower in front of her. She’d just storm it, and deal with whatever she found inside.

  Then the tower disappeared with a huge rumble of thunder, air rushing in to occupy the space where the building had been. “Oh, thank the gods.”

  “What are all these people going to think?” Ted said.

  Marla shook her head. “It was there for less than a minute. They’ll think mass hysteria. They’ll think it was an illusion, a weird weather effect, viral marketing for some new video game, who knows? They’ll come up with some explanation. People always do.”

  “And if it had stayed there for an hour?” Ted said.

  “Then we’d be in trouble. I’m going to get a call from the mayor and the other sorcerers anyway. I wish I had something useful to tell them. But it’s not too dire, as long as there aren’t any more—”

  Another tower appeared, and where the first had been a blunt instrument bludgeoning reality on the skull, this one seemed almost to sidle in, precipitating out of the air and gracefully easing the surrounding buildings out of the way, the only change in the air a gentle breeze. People gasped and pointed, and a few even—bizarrely—applauded, as if the tower were an impressive special effect. It was made of opalescent stone, rising high, with arched windows and silver flagpoles protruding irregularly, flying yellow banners. A fairy-princess sort of castle.

  Marla had let one castle disappear in front of her. Not again. “I’m going in,” she said.

  “I’m coming, too,” Ted said.

  “I don’t know what I’ll find in there. You could get eaten by giant spiders or something.”

  “I’m your assistant,” Ted said, and since Marla didn’t dare waste the time it would take to restrain him, she just sighed and ran, hoping she’d outrun him. But Ted was pretty spry—the cancer cure must have worked—and he kept up with her. She rushed through the wide-open archway, into a hall of gleaming prismatic marble dotted with pillars, the floor so highly polished it mirrored the vaulted ceiling. Ted puffed after her, sliding to a stop, and they both looked back toward the archway in time to see the street and the baffled citizens and their cars disappear, replaced by a rolling field of clouds under a clear blue sky. It wasn’t winter here, too warm for the heavy coats and gloves, and Marla shed hers immediately. Ted followed suit. They could always get new coats when—if—they made it back to Felport.

  “We’re in it now,” Marla said, turning away from the pile of discarded clothes. “Come on.”

  Ted just stared at her. “What—we—how do we get back?”

  “We worry about getting back after we finish up here. One thing at a time.”

  He looked around. “Where do we go?”

  “It’s a tower, Ted. We climb.” Not that she saw any obvious place to begin. She walked through the chamber, her boots clicking on the floor, and did a mental inventory of her assets. She had her dagger of office, and her boots—w
hich were reinforced with steel toes and enough inertial magic to allow her to kick a hole in a concrete wall if necessary—and her wits, and that was about it. “See if you can get a signal on the cell phone,” she said.

  “Ah, one bar. And it’s flickering.”

  “Crap. That phone’s got magical augmentation. Langford told me it could get a strong signal on the moon.”

  “So what does that mean?” Ted said, pocketing the phone.

  Marla shrugged. “It means we’re a lot farther away than the moon, I guess. I think this is Genevieve’s place in the country. The dream country. I’m hoping she’s here, and that I can talk to her, get her to chill out, come back to the Blackwing Institute, and put a lid on all this craziness.”

  “You think that will work?”

  “Dunno. She wasn’t too lucid last time we talked. Maybe she’s more sane here, in her own castle. We’ll see. I wish Joshua was here—he’s good at talking to people.”

  Ted grunted. “So where are the stairs?”

  Marla spied another archway, beyond a rank of smooth columns. In the absence of other options, she would take whatever presented itself. “Come on.” She walked through the arch into an open courtyard filled with orange trees, the smell of fruit strong and somehow heartbreaking. The courtyard went all the way to the top of the tower, with walls rising to the vanishing point on all sides, dotted with occasional windows and balconies. She sighed. “Remember when we floated up above the city, Ted? That was pretty cool, right?”

  “Sure.” He looked worried.

  “Well, that was fake. Just illusion. Now we’ve got to fly for real. I don’t do it much, because it makes me puke, usually, and I don’t think having a passenger will help. It’s not as cool as it looks in the movies. Throwing off the constraints of gravity pisses off reality, and it’s not much fun for me, either. Maybe the rules are…looser here. I hope. Come, grab on.”

  “Do I just…hold your hand, or…”

  “This isn’t Peter Pan. You have to do more than touch me. I’m going to rise up in the air, and if you don’t hold on as tight as you can, you’ll fall off and go splat on the ground. I’m not going to try to go all the way, just to that balcony.” She pointed to a protrusion about three floors up. “Let’s hope there’s a staircase in there, or at least a freaking intercom.”

  Ted awkwardly approached her from behind and wrapped his arms around her waist. Marla wished she’d brought some rope or a grappling hook, or something, but she hadn’t expected to be storming a castle. “Hold tight.” She bent her knees, closed her eyes, and whispered a bit of incantation that she was told translated into an incredibly graphic and cruel insult to gravity itself, in the flutelike language the fundamental forces of nature spoke. As always, she didn’t so much rise from the earth as get thrown, and Ted gasped and clung to her way too tightly, his locked hands digging in above her pelvic bone. She gritted her teeth and tried to exert some control over her flight, lurching hard to the right, almost crashing into the balcony she’d been aiming for. She grabbed the edge of the railing with both hands and felt her legs rising up, like a balloon lifting away on a tethered string. Ted scrambled off her and grabbed the rail, heaving himself over the edge, and Marla shouted the ritual apology to make gravity embrace her again. She slammed down hard against the edge of the balcony, the rail hitting her rib cage just below her breasts, hard enough to bruise. She groaned, and Ted helped pull her over the side. “See?” she said, leaning on the rail. “Superman is full of shit.” The balcony led to another archway, to a library of high dark shelves and dusty old tomes, with a deep armchair beside a brass lamp, and a decanter of brandy on a small side table.

  “I could use a drink,” Ted said.

  “Neither eat nor drink here,” Marla said. “First rule of traveling in dreamlands, fairy realms, the underworld, all those places. Food and drink can have weird and terrible consequences. Besides, for the moment, we’re housebreakers, not guests, so we don’t get hospitality. In the normal world, we have manners and etiquette to grease the wheels of social interaction. In places like this, there’s etiquette to keep you from being killed or enslaved.” She went to the big table in the center of the room and flipped open one of the books there. She whistled when she read the neat penmanship on the inside cover. “Property of St. John Austen. He was Genevieve’s teacher. She made his whole house disappear and replaced it with an orange grove. But maybe she just took his house away, and put it here, inside the palace.”

  “That’s right, more or less,” said a cultured voice. Marla turned, her dagger in her hand, expecting the bald man with the knives, but finding instead a thin man with gray hair in a ponytail, sitting in the armchair.

  “Who the fuck are you?”

  “St. John Austen.” He paused. “More or less.” He poured himself a glass of brandy and sipped, never taking his eyes off Marla. “Thank you for coming. Genevieve is waiting upstairs. She’d come downstairs and see you herself, but down on these levels, there are…bad memories. She’s more comfortable at the top of the tower.”

  “You didn’t die?” Marla said. “You’ve been, what, living here, in her dream world?”

  “Oh, no. I died. Starved to death here, actually. There’s nothing to eat in this library, just an eternally replenishing decanter of brandy. My bones are secreted around the room, behind books, on top of shelves. Genevieve feels guilty about killing me, but she couldn’t help it. She was asleep when I passed away.” He shrugged. “But no one Genevieve gets to know well really dies. We get into her mind, and she can’t get us out again. We lodge there, like bits of shrapnel, and because of her powers, we are occasionally…expressed. Some of us have limitations. I have some of my memories, and most of my mind—as far as I can tell—but I exist only occasionally, and cannot leave the palace. Unless Genevieve pays particular attention to me, I can’t even leave the library. Ultimately, I’m just a dream Genevieve has sometimes. Reave, though…”

  Marla sat on the edge of the big mahogany table. “Take notes, Ted,” she said, and he pulled out his PDA. “Reave. He was the man who assaulted her, who drove Genevieve crazy?”

  “Not exactly. The man who attacked her was named Terrence Reeves. It was…a terrible experience.” He shuddered delicately. “Genevieve is a very sensitive psychic, but her power opens a two-way conduit. She gets into your head, yes, but you also get into hers. When Terrence raped her, she learned his name, and felt his emotions, even his physical sensations, losing her sense of self, blurring the distinction between victim and attacker, and the horrible intensity of that experience made a stronger-than-usual impression on her. A version of Terrence got stuck in her mind, but he was also amplified there, the cause of her most terrible trauma, the source of her worst pain, the bringer of nightmares. The reality of the rapist—just a squalid, terrible man—was merged with her image of him as a monstrous destroyer of worlds, implacable, merciless, villainous, misogynistic. He became an epic villain, and after some years of living in her mind…he declared his independence. He renamed himself Reave, king of nightmares, and turned some measure of Genevieve’s power to his own purposes. He created a tower. He created nightmares to serve him. Now he assaults this beautiful castle, the home of Genevieve’s heart, on a regular basis, and it’s all she can do to hold him at bay. Of course, she’s not here all the time—sometimes she wakes up and finds herself in the real world, where she’s vulnerable in other ways.”

  “How can he have any power of his own, if he’s just a figment from her dreams?” Marla said.

  “He only has the power Genevieve gives him,” St. John said. “But haven’t you ever been hurt so badly by someone that they gained power over you, took up space in your mind, stole your sense of well-being away? Hasn’t anyone ever rooted themselves so deeply into your soul that nothing could tear them out?”

  “Yes,” Ted said softly, and Marla nodded, too. “But what’s his goal? Why is he trying to get to her?”

  “He wants to lock her up, I imagi
ne. Her real, physical form. Keep her alive and torment her to increase his own power in her mind, and, thus, in reality. He wants to crawl out of her mind and into the real world. Genevieve is usually good at fighting him off, but something happened to her, something woke her up all the way and disoriented her, sent her wandering. There was snow, and snow is terrible for her, as it reminds her of the night she was attacked. Now the barriers between her dreams and reality are flickering. Reave is taking advantage of that, and moving at large in the world, looking for Genevieve, for her real physical form. If the walls between dream and reality crumble totally, I have some small hope that I might be able to walk out of here, into the real world, and regain my life. But I don’t think I have enough independent agency.” He sighed. “Even now I wonder if I’m really myself, or just a mouthpiece Genevieve is using to tell you things more clearly and lucidly than she could manage on her own.”

  “I’ll do what I can to help you,” Marla said, though she doubted that was much. “But tell me—how do I stop Reave? I mean, really stop him? How do I help Genevieve?”

  St. John shook his head. “I have no idea. If I did—if we did, if she did—don’t you think we’d try to do it ourselves? How do you kill a nightmare, Marla, without killing the dreamer as well?”

  Marla didn’t twitch a muscle when he said that, but perhaps her stillness was a giveaway of its own, because St. John widened his eyes. “No,” he said. “No, no, no, you can’t kill her, she’s an innocent, she doesn’t deserve execution—”

  “She’s infecting my city,” Marla said, deciding honesty was the only course—Genevieve, who was doubtless listening, could read minds anyway. “She’s taken a wrecking ball to reality. If I can’t get her quarantined…we’ll have to do something else. Otherwise, she could unravel everything. She’s a Typhoid Mary, spreading some kind of dreaming sickness, making people fall into her world, letting bits of her nightmares out. I want to help her. I’ll do everything I can. But…I’ll do whatever’s necessary to stop the infection.”