Behind Cassidy the purple sky crackled with green light as he opened fire on the last fighter. The Albatross dove and he dove with it. He glanced over his shoulder to see the Nubigena making its way into the gate. Almost to the gondola now. He needed to leave now, or miss his window. But the fighter was so close. Cassidy fired again, clipping the tailfin. This pilot was better than most. The Armada had sent a good pilot this time. Perhaps they’d taken to sending the dreams of real people instead of their own constructs.
A fluttering began in Cassidy’s chest. It felt good. So good to have an opponent who really knew how to fly. The Albatross turned and engaged. The flash of his guns blasted between the blurring props and Cassidy rolled to avoid the burst of screaming bullets. His new Fokker responded with gentle ease, rolling and diving in one smooth motion.
Cassidy dove and spun. The Albatross flew above the water island, using the ocean as a shield. Cassidy tried to fire through, but the bullets wouldn’t penetrate. He cut his throttle and turned the Fokker over to fly inverted to the water, making himself a mirror image of the fighter above. His landing gear skimmed to the bottom of the ocean. The edge of the water neared and he pushed the throttle all the way forwards.
As the Fokker’s nose passed the ocean’s edge, Cassidy dipped the landing gear into the water. The plane shuddered as the dense ocean yanked on the rear wheel. He gritted his teeth as the manoeuvre flipped the Fokker end over end, flipping him into a straight line with the Albatross.
The other pilot panicked and tried to nose himself under the Fokker. Cassidy fired as the Albatross’s own landing gear caught the water and flipped its tail in the air. The Fokker rolled around it with a gentle touch on the right pedal.
That Albatross spun out of control. Cassidy made his way back around and emptied another barrage of gunfire into the plane. It burst into flames and shattered into a shower of sparks across the blue water.
Cassidy turned back to the Nubigena. It was gone. So was the gate.
Chapter 23
Cassidy flew through the space where the gate had been. A spike or two of residual energy arced over his instruments, but the air was empty. In the real world, in the storm, he’d felt the gate, but how Banner managed to find them in nothingness, he couldn’t imagine.
Whatever the case, it did Cassidy no good now. He couldn’t tap, or notice anything except how empty the world could feel when there was no planet below, no islands on the horizon and he was flying a fighter with limited fuel.
Cassidy throttled back to conserve as much as possible and aimed at a random spot in the sky. If not for gravity, he wouldn’t have known up or down in the blue soup of the Twilight. Was there a planet somewhere out of sight below, or did the Twilight simply possess its own inner physics?
It mattered little as the silky clumps of condensation blew by. Brewster had told him islands appeared at all levels. The very concept of horizon meant nothing either as the clouds appeared at various heights as well. The fuel gauge read just over half, though he’d found it difficult to judge gasoline consumption in this variant reality. Even time seemed to stretch and bend a little, though there was no way to tell whether or not the effect was only his mind.
After what felt like several hours of straight flight dots appeared in the distance. One by one, they got bigger, but proved to be no more than large rocks floating through space. Towards the far edge of the cluster, a larger one came into view. As he flew farther, it kept growing. A huge one, Cassidy thought. It looked like an upside down mountain, with smaller mountains jutting from its centre.
On the near side he saw structures and a host of airships circling, docking and leaving. The point of no return edged closer as the docks themselves came into view. Run or land? He checked his fuel. The Fokker still had a quarter tank, but the next island could be a few miles away, or a thousand. He considered flying an eighth tank out and using the rest to return, but he didn’t like the thought of relying on the Twilight’s idea of consistency.
Cassidy grimaced and nosed down towards the docks. He recognized the main structure on the edge. He recognized the docks. Arcadia.
His chest tightened at the thought of flying in without Banner and whatever luck or protection came with being crew of the Nubigena. The only advantage was that perhaps he’d be less sought after, even flying his real fighter, which probably stuck out to Twilights the same as if he’d been riding a flying horse. He hoped he could fuel and take off before anyone gathered enough force to bother him.
The Arcadian runway ran along the edge of the island and ended just short of the docks. He brought the Fokker in easy and taxied into one of the free spaces. “I need fuel,” he yelled to a young Twilight in overalls and a greasy red cap.
“Damn, Mister,” the young man said as he came up the ramp and approached the fighter, “this thing’s real.”
“I know,” said Cassidy. “Can I get fuel for her?”
The young man nodded. “Sure you can. We keep some special, but we’ll have to bring it from the tunnel. That’ll take some time.” He motioned to the stairs. “Might as well go in and have a drink while you wait.”
Cassidy took a deep breath. The last thing he wanted to do was walk into the hotel. The other last thing he wanted to do was look suspicious. He couldn’t begin to imagine how many bounty hunters might lurk in a port this big, and Armada agents could be just about anyone. He stuffed a wad of Arcadian bank notes into the young man’s hand. “I’ll do that,” he said and tried to give a confident smile. “That would hit the spot right about now.”
The stairs looked more like a ladder. Each step had been cut no more than four inches into the mountain and he found himself using both hands and feet to climb. His glance darted in all directions as he breached the top and crossed the docks. He’d almost been killed once less than six yards away, and Banner had been with him. So had Richthofen.
Pilots, dock crew and a variety of other sundry people covered the vast wooden planking. Some looked like mercenaries or soldiers of some other kind. Twilight police? He didn’t know if Arcadia had any kind of authorities or not.
The lounge and bar looked exactly as he remembered. He’d already paid the young Twilight most of the little money he had in his pockets, and what remained would be lucky to bring him a drink.
He sat down and waited for the exotic barkeep to approach. Just one beer, he thought as the same, almost effeminate blonde Twilight with spiky hair he remembered from last time walked over and set a slim empty tumbler to the side. Beer, he thought. I want a beer. “Whisky, on the rocks,” Cassidy said, through gritted teeth.
The barkeep looked taken aback for a moment, but recovered his pristine composure. “Shall I put this on Captain Banner’s tab?”
Cassidy flicked his glance around again. Did everyone here know him? He gave a begrudging nod.
The barkeep gave a knowing wink and reached for the whisky. “Will you need a room tonight, sir? And will you require company?”
Cassidy shook his head. “No thanks,” he said, “and no. I don’t have long.”
The barkeep dropped several cubes of ice into a cut crystal glass with a pair of silver tongs and poured four fingers of amber whisky over it. “Too bad. Shea still talks about you.” He set the glass down in front of Cassidy with an elegant flair and leaned in. He gave a flirtatious, conspiratorial smile. “I think she’d like to see you again.”
“Maybe next time,” Cassidy said. He lifted the rich liquid to his lips and took a long sip. It was good whisky. Very good whisky. Single malt. He’d forgotten what a difference a nice bar made. How superior whisky could be. Still, he would have given anything to order anything else.
“It’s you again,” came a voice from behind. No other voice could have made those words sound the way they did. They didn’t say, “It’s you again,” as if it were a question. They didn’t say it as if the words even meant what they stated. Instead, they curled into his ears like smoke and drew him back towards the mouth that made them. The
syllables even arched like a woman’s smooth spine. They rubbed into him and hooked into him and stroked their way down his chest.
Cassidy turned just enough to see Shea as she moved to the bar and leaned against it. The wood seemed to mould around her body and tremble at her touch.
The green leaf markings snaked down her neck, over her chest and down the soft valley between her breasts where the curves peeked out the V cut of her green gown. The leaves continued to the sharp angle of the reverse V, just above her navel, and continued down to the shaved crevice between her legs, down her inner thighs and ended in the tapered vines around her delicate ankles and…Cassidy tried to bring himself back.
For a moment he did, but then something soft, an almost transparent smell wafted in. The green odour of young saplings, dew in the morning, cut grass after the rain. Her green eyes. Her red hair.
Cassidy moved a trembling hand back to his drink. She was different this time. Trying harder. Prepared for some reason. Why? Had she been paid to torture him? He pulled the glass to his lips and knocked back the rest of the drink. The cold ice hit his lips and the burning amber tore down his throat and up into his head, flared across his skin in a sudden rush of alcoholic heat. “Sorry, I don’t have long,” he said, and set the glass back down. The cubes rattled as the glass struck the counter.
Shea slipped onto the barstool beside him. Her eyes looked moist, her lips drawn. She stared at her hands and a tear ran down her cheek. “Why?” she asked, and looked up at him. She was no less beautiful, but her allure faded as if a mask slipped off and shattered to the floor. “Tell me it’s because you’re a dream. Tell me it’s because you just weren’t dreamed with that part of you.”
Cassidy gave a single slow nod and stared back at his empty drink. “I thought that for a while,” he said, and flicked the glass with his index finger. “But the truth is I’m still waiting for someone.” He met her shining emerald eyes as if for the first time. They weren’t calling him to bed, or trying to wrestle him into it. They were just pleading for an answer. It was a look he, if anyone, could understand.
“How do you know it’s not me?” she asked. All seductive nuance was gone. It was a real question. A quivering, almost childish question, one he doubted she’d ever asked before. “Is it just because I’m…a professional?”
“No,” Cassidy said, shaking his head. “And I guess I don’t know. I don’t know anything at all. But I am waiting ‘til I recognise it.”
Shea nodded. She attempted a smile which turned to something eminently more sad. “Perhaps next time, Cassidy,” she said, and pulled coy playfulness back into her voice as if recovering her nature, or at least the nature she’d adopted. Her soft footsteps padded away.
Cassidy turned back to his empty drink. It was strangely appropriate: a hollow glass with ice slowly melting. He missed Shea. Wanted her back just for the conversation.
“Another drink?” The barkeep asked, as he passed by.
“I could use a smoke,” Cassidy said. He held the empty glass in his hand and rolled it between his fingers.
The barkeep opened a wide cigarette case and offered it to Cassidy. “How about that drink?”
Cassidy slid out a single cigarette and put it between his teeth. He lit it with a glass-encased lighter from the bar. A thin stream of smoke blew out his lips. “Sure,” he said. “It’s a day for drinking.”
The barkeep filled another glass with ice and four more fingers of whisky. “In Arcadia,” he said, as if reciting an age old mantra, “we only water it down if you ask us to.”
Cassidy nodded and sipped the second drink.
“You can put that one on my tab,” a man several stools down said, and toasted Cassidy with a shot of red scotch. The man hadn’t been there a moment before. He wore a black snap-brim Fedora and a three-piece banker’s suit. The pocket watch fob glittered against his pin-striped waistcoat and his boots looked military shined. Cassidy recognized him as the same man he’d met his first night in Arcadia. “On second thought,” the man said, “throw that out. Get him a single malt Scotch, no ice. Real stuff. None of that Twilight shit.”
The barkeep gave a quick nod and reached beneath the counter. “This costs more than twenty of any other drink in the bar,” he said, and drew out a crystal cut bottle with a burgundy label. It looked old. More importantly, it looked real. The dark crusty label shone brighter than anything around it, to say nothing of the liquid inside. Cassidy grimaced at how subdued the colours of the Twilight were, but as the Scotch poured, the glass filled with a deep, vivid liquid. The barkeep put the bottle away as if ashamed of the contrast.
Cassidy stared at the liquid. It looked as if it might burst out of the dingy prison of a glass and escape across the counter.
“Never had anything but whisky, have you?” the man said. It was hard to place his accent. It could have been American. It could have been English. It could just as easily have been Polish or Czech.
Cassidy shook his head. “Not often.”
“That’s a shame,” said the man. “Try it.”
Cassidy lifted the glass to his lips and took a light sip. The warmth and flavour erupted in his mouth. It burned like fire through gas-soaked paper. He’d tasted real liquor, but the reaction was much more severe in the Twilight where his senses reacted less to the dull environment.
The man rolled the remains of his own Scotch around in his glass and put it down. “My name is Barnabas,” he said, and put out his gloved hand.
Cassidy shook it with a hesitant grip. “Cassidy,” he said.
“I know,” Barnabas said. “That man you fly with isn’t all he seems.”
Cassidy took another mouse sip of scotch and rolled it around in his mouth. “Tell me something I don’t know.”
Barnabas broke out in a smile. “I will.”
Cassidy lifted a single eyebrow.
Barnabas nodded. “I’ll tell you what he really is. I’ll tell you where he comes from. I’ll tell you how to walk around in the real world, outside of storms. And I’ll teach you how to order something other than whisky on ice.”
Cassidy returned to his cigarette, which had burned half-way down and left a tube of ash on the table while he was lost in the taste of Scotch. “Can you teach me about love?”
Barnabas drew his lips into a sour pucker. “Women,” he said. “I can teach you all you want to know about the flesh, but what you’re wanting to know is outside my realm of…” he paused as if trying to find the right words. “Outside my realm of expertise.”
Cassidy took another sip. “I have no reason to trust you.”
Barnabas shook his head. “In this place, I could be anything. Hunter. Police.”
“No,” Cassidy said, blowing out more smoke. “You don’t look Twilight. And you don’t look Armada.” He was about to say, you do remind me of a lunatic with an umbrella, but decided not to. Something about the white of his teeth. Too white. He took another sip to cover it. “What do you want?”
“Your expertise,” Barnabas said, flashing those self-same bone-white teeth. “I need a dream to do things I can’t.”
“Hard to imagine something I could do that you couldn’t do yourself.”
Barnabas smiled again. “Perceptive of you. But there are limits.”
“Do I need my fighter?” Cassidy asked.
Barnabas smiled. “Won’t even need a ship.”
“Then I’m bringing my sidearm.”
“As you wish,” Barnabas said, extending his hand towards the staircase.
Cassidy finished off his last sip of scotch and followed the well-dressed man. The drink still made his head spin. Real Scotch must also have a stronger effect here, he thought. Much stronger. He fought hard to concentrate on not stumbling. He scanned the room for dangers as they crossed the lounge and ascended the stairwell. Barnabas didn’t even look over his shoulder to see if Cassidy was following. The man seemed so sure of himself, Cassidy thought. Too sure.
He touched the wooden holster w
ith his left arm.
Barnabas twisted the handle of his hotel room door and walked through. Cassidy edged in behind him, checking left and right for a possible ambush. “It’s just my room,” Barnabas said.
It wasn’t just his room. Though Cassidy got a good look at it as he entered, it changed the moment he passed the threshold. The light dimmed to almost nothing. The walls were closer now. No carpet. No bed. Rows of shelving lined the walls, stacked with thin corked phials.
“Where are we?” Cassidy asked. His gun was already in his hand and levelled at Barnabas’ head. The man looked odd, thin and pushed together as if seen through curved glass.
Cassidy realized he was standing in a transparent cylinder and he was moving upwards. Above him, a hole just bigger around than himself filled with a brown plug. A giant hand pushed the plug in firm. A large eye stared in at him.
“I’d appreciate you not firing that thing in there. It’ll bounce around and tear your little body up before I get a chance to use it.” The voice of Barnabas boomed in on him and the giant hand set him up on a shelf between two other phials. “Keep tight. I’ll be needing you soon.” Barnabas moved out of Cassidy’s line of vision and was gone.
Chapter 24
Around Cassidy gaunt figures slumped against the inside curve of their own glass prisons. The dream to his left appeared asleep. He wore a blue gown and royal headdress. To Cassidy’s right, a naked white body lay on its back, mouth open as if gasping for air. Cassidy couldn’t tell if the body was alive or dead. Man or woman.
Cassidy sighed, holstered his weapon and sat down. He deserved this. Not half an hour in Arcadia and he’d already met something far worse than anything he’d planned on. Worse how, he couldn’t say, but this creature in the fancy suit was nothing native to the Twilight. He should have pressed Banner further for more information when he’d had the chance, but doubted it would have made much difference. Barnabas had lured him with the things he truly craved: answers, freedom. Freedom? Now there stood irony like a dark angel waiting to cleave him in two.
Storm Dreams (The Cycle of Somnium Book 1) Page 18
