Dead Lies Dreaming

by Charles Stross

  “Um. I’m sorry, people? I really didn’t mean to—”

  “It’s all right.” Wendy smiled at him too brightly, spun round raising her hands, and unleashed half a dozen arrows in as many heartbeats. Her bow howled, a gut-throbbing brown note that cried death: the arrows flickered and faded as they pierced the mist behind them.

  Doc paled. “I’m really sorry,” he wrung his hands.

  “I doubt it, but that’s okay,” said Wendy. “Just don’t do it again, or you really will be sorry.” The bow vanished back to wherever it had come from.

  The silence gathered thickly around them for a few seconds, broken only by a faint giggle like glass windchimes tinkling in the breeze.

  “Did anybody else hear that?” asked Game Boy.

  “Guys.” Imp side-eyed the sunken road in either direction. “We shouldn’t hang around here, it’s not safe.” He cleared his throat and gave Wendy a significant look. “Also, don’t shoot unless you mean to kill? It pisses them off.”

  And all at once they were marching again, hurrying, almost running, really, desperate to get out from between the clutching embankments to either side; desperate to reach the end of the ghost road leading into a dream of London in the darkness.

  * * *

  The Bond made reasonable time.

  The idea of being eaten by magical horrors with too many teeth for the crime of stepping on a ley line did not appeal to him, nor did the risk of running into Eve’s minions. So he decided to make his own way, and outpace them in the bargain. He had certain advantages. For one thing he’d grown up in the rural Midwest before he enlisted, with horses and traps as well as tractors and crop sprayers. For another thing he knew London, and the layout of the main streets hadn’t changed so very much between the nineteenth century and his own era. And finally, he was a solidly built gentleman wearing a small arsenal. Nobody rational would want to mess with him.

  It was late evening when the Bond stepped out into the mist, and there weren’t many people about. It took him almost half an hour to flag down a hansom cab. He had no coin, but he paid for the loan of the cab with the most valuable currency of all: he spared its owner’s life. (A syringeful of flunitrazepam ensured the cabbie would spend the night comatose in the park.)

  The cab-horse was in poor shape, but the Bond wasn’t overly concerned so long as it didn’t go lame before he reached his destination. Wearing the cabbie’s cape and hat he blended in with the London traffic, and he drew the curtains closed around the passenger seat to obscure its lack of an occupant. He made good time until he reached White Church Lane where he abandoned the cab, hitching the horse to a railing outside an ostler’s yard on the edge of the slum.

  As a precaution he’d halted in the relative safety of Aldgate to review the treasure map. Now he stepped down from the cab, stretched his legs—he’d been sitting on the hard bench seat for three hours—and marched determinedly into the darkness and stink. He carefully avoided eye contact with the youths loitering on the street corners, the hookers sending come-hither looks from the sidewalk by an alley. There was a curious familiarity to the street life. Fashions and architecture aside, it could have been the wrong side of the tracks in half a dozen cities back home. The shape of the past left an eerie imprint on the present, and one slum was much like another.

  The Bond made his way through the warren of crooked alleyways and rubbish-strewn backyards. Nobody was rash enough to try and mug him. Beggars and whores were thin on the ground at this time of night. The few who were still working were plying their trade on better-travelled byways. He passed a few red-lit doorways, the classier ones guarded by toughs with stout sticks, and every street seemed to have a pub or two—identifiable by the drunks passed out in the gutter outside—before it gradually came to him that he’d lost locational awareness.

  The narrow streets were twisty and unadorned by signage. In the mist it was hard to tell whether he’d passed three alleyways or four, or whether the last one had simply been the gaping maw of a derelict building. He could wander in this maze for hours, or until some enterprising shitlord assembled a gang of jackals to take down the disoriented lion. He frowned. It looked like he was going to have to recruit a native guide.

  The cabbie whose ride he’d borrowed had carried a purse full of change. It was mostly copper, but there were some silver coins as well. The Bond didn’t know much about the weird-ass money here—some strange shit to do with pennies and shillings, tarnished copper coins with a weird number of edges, he couldn’t even figure how many groats made change for a tangerine let alone how many guineas there were in a florin—but a taxi fare was a taxi fare. If the cabbie had been out all day, then the purse was probably most of a day’s takings, which gave him a handle on what four silver crowns, a few shillings and sixpenny bits, and a bunch of coppers translated to in terms of wages.

  So the Bond stopped at the next pub he came to and went inside.

  For a Whitechapel dive bar it was reasonably well lit and clean: a couple of soot-stained gas mantles were lit, there was sawdust on the floorboards, and there were stools for the drinkers to sit on and trestles for them to prop their pints and their heads on. It wasn’t very busy, which struck the Bond as odd. The clientele was exclusively male, and apparently preoccupied with drinking themselves into oblivion.

  The Bond approached the bar and produced a small silver coin, a sixpence. “I’m looking for—” he began.

  The bartender slapped a tin mug full of villainously dark beer on the counter in front of him, grabbed the coin, and bit it. “Aye,” he said, “that’s good for two more, like. Unless ye be wanting change?”

  “Keep it.” The Bond raised the mug, took an injudicious swig, and choked it down: spitting might cause offense. It definitely tasted as if something had died in it. “I’m looking for a guide.”

  “Oh aye, out for a night on the tiles are we, sir?” The barman managed to sound disapproving, conspiratorial, and lascivious in the same sentence.

  “Not exactly.” The Bond gave him a hard stare. “I’m looking for a club that’s around here, a gentleman’s club called the Piers Gaveston Fellowship—they have a reading room—”

  It wasn’t clear exactly who moved first. The Bond was always alert, and unconscious reflexes set his arms in motion before the other guy did more than tense. He’d barely begun to raise the cosh from under the bar when the Bond grabbed his wrist with his left hand, and twisted. The barman cursed as he dropped the stick, then whimpered faintly as he saw what the Bond held in his other hand.

  “How about we calm down?” said the Bond, smiling: “You wouldn’t want my finger to slip, would you?”

  The bartender stared down the muzzle of the Glock 18 and swallowed. “We din’t want none of that kind in ’ere,” he said. “No trouble, like.” He swallowed again. “Folks is just jumpy.”

  “I didn’t say I was a member of the club,” said the Bond, smiling fixedly: “I just want somebody to show me where it is.”

  “Eh, let’s not be hasty, like? I can mebbe find you someone, for some ready? Don’t want no trouble ’ere.” His gaze drifted sideways. The Bond sidestepped abruptly and allowed the would-be white knight to see the pistol. Inebriated courage gave way to sudden sobriety. “Alf,” implored the barman, “Alf! Don’t—” Alf was already backing away, his hands raised and a rictus of fear on his face.

  “’E’s the Ripper,” Alf moaned, “’e’s Leather Apron ’isself come to butcher us all!”

  The Bond’s smile froze over. “Don’t be stupid, the Ripper doesn’t shoot people.” He raised his pistol and thumbed the selector to single-shot. “Go stand by the bar.”

  “Noooo—” The other denizens of the bar were either slithering towards the door or sitting very still in whatever shadows they could find.

  If vinegar doesn’t work, try honey … “Who wants to earn a silver crown?” asked the Bond. A shiny coin appeared between the fingers of his left hand.

  “’E wants someone to take ’im
to the molly-lord’s club ’ouse!”

  One of the lowlifes struggled to his feet. “I kin do’t,” he slurred. At first the Bond thought he was drunk, but then he noticed one side of his face sagging, the same side as his limp.

  “A crown when you get me there,” the Bond promised. Expression hardening, he added, “Don’t even think about crossing me.”

  “Ned would never,” began the barkeep, then thought better of it.

  “Gissa sixpence now?” whined Ned. He clutched a cloth cap so ingrained with dirt that its brim was shiny.

  “A crown when we get there,” repeated the Bond. He made the pistol vanish, but allowed Ned and the bartender a glimpse of his tactical webbing and holsters. “Let’s go.”

  Ned picked up his tin cup and chugged it frantically, dribbling when he put it back down. “Foller me,” he said, burping as he shuffled towards the door.

  The Bond followed, keeping the bartender in view until he was out the door. It wasn’t until he was alone in the mist with the shuffling Ned that it occurred to him to wonder just what the Piers Gaveston Fellowship had done to render themselves so peculiarly unpopular.

  * * *

  Alexei had a problem: none of their phones were working properly.

  “Come on,” he muttered, hitting the button to bring up the secure connection to Andrei back at Head Office for the umpteenth time. His phone flashed a loading animation at him, then crashed back to the home screen with a strangled squawk and a message about a connection timeout. “Who made this fucking junk!”

  They’d gotten up to the top floor with no sign of company, found the odd door where no door should be that the map indicated was the start of their route. Vassily and Igor had thrown the windows wide open at front and back, and after Alexei’s KO gas detector had shown a solid green LED for three minutes they’d taken off their respirator masks. The targets were clearly somewhere ahead, so Alexei made an executive decision to pursue.

  But by the time they’d gone along one corridor, then through an odd windowless hallway, along another passage, and down some stairs to a library, Alexei was seriously done with this Escher architecture shit. And the loss of signal was no joke.

  “Can anyone get any signal in here? Because my phone’s fucked,” he announced.

  “Sorry, boss…” Boris shook his head. “No signal here either.”

  “Anyone with signal?” No hands went up. “Well fuck.” Alexei pocketed his phone and took stock. “Close up.” He noted the chalk marks scrawled by the door they’d come through. “We’re on their trail. Yevgeny, Igor, take point. Boris, eyes on our six. Everyone on the map? Everybody clear we’re on node seven—any disagrees? No, good, let’s move out.”

  They flitted through the confusing maze of corridors and stairs like ghosts, touching nothing and making as little noise as possible. They were hampered slightly by the need to check every room they passed for ambushes, to seek the most minute clues that the man they pursued might have left as to his path. But they went fast and hard, for they’d trained since their earliest time as teenage conscripts in how to storm occupied buildings and leave the silence of a graveyard behind them. However they were a team, and so they were slower than one reckless assassin intent on getting to his destination ahead of a concerned executive assistant and her bodyguard: who in turn was trying to outpace a clown-car raid team of junior supervillains led by a theatrical impresario. By the time they came to the outside door leading to the misty streets of another version of old London town, the moon had set. Their quarry was already half a city ahead of them. And the tinkle of glockenspiel mirth stalking them grew ever-louder in the mist.

  * * *

  Even though she was still soft and untempered in those days, Eve wasn’t a screamer. Nor was Imp. But when Dad spread his arms wide and took on the physiognomy of a mummified corpse with blazing blue orbs of fire in his eye sockets, both his children were ever-so-slightly freaked out.

  “Magic,” Dad explained, “is real. And if you don’t know what you’re doing it will kill you, just like grabbing a live high-tension cable.” He sounded so matter-of-fact, standing there in his chinos and polo shirt as the green wormy threads writhed hypnotically in his eye sockets. “In case you were wondering this is an illusion, but a practical one: it’s a preconstruction of what I’ll look like in two hundred years’ time.” The litchfather rubbed his bony hands as if they were cold. “Dead, in other words. Like you’d be if you tried to handle the family spell book and weren’t of the blood descended, so that the ward recognized you. This is your first lesson: don’t touch the book, or let anyone else touch it, unless I’m present. And especially don’t try to use it until I’ve taught you how to do so without turning yourself into this—” he pointed at his gaping mandible—“in the here-and-now. Because there are no comebacks from death.”

  He made a strange gesture with his left hand then beamed at them as if he’d just accomplished a fine party trick, entirely himself again.

  “That includes your mother,” he added. “She has—had—her own kind of magic, but it isn’t ours.”

  So that was how magecraft came into Imp’s life: Sunday morning sessions with Dad and Evie while Mum went to church (for the social, she said at first).

  Magic, it turned out, was complicated, and involved quite a lot of equations in something like a cross between Boolean algebra and Aramaic graffiti. There was more than one way of doing magic, and more than one kind of effect it could produce, but their family was best at one particular speciality—oneiromancy, with a sideline in chronomancy. (Other stuff like mind control, telekinesis, and setting Marjorie Blake’s hair on fire when she had her big brother’s gang beat up Imp for trying to grope her in year four,1 were far less reliable.)

  Oneiromancy was the magic of dreams, which according to Dad weren’t just the brain’s glial system flushing out crap and resetting itself while fixing memories of the previous day. They were fragmentary ghost memories of other versions of reality, other timelines that had diverged from the one the dreamer inhabited. Dad taught them how to assemble a memory palace to store their dreams, and later to use it as an aide-mémoire for spells—the algorithms that produced effects in the dream palace. He taught them the dangers of attracting mindless feeders and mindful malevolent demons, how never to conduct even a minor working without first constructing a safety grid to hold hostile entities at bay, to always wear a ward (a compact defensive charm) in case of occult attack. He taught them about ley lines and ghost roads and the affinity of anonymous spaces for one another—closures, he called them—how you could use hotel passageways as a shortcut to buildings on the other side of the world, if you could avoid being eaten by the things that lurked in the emptiness behind the walls of the world. He taught them that history was formed from the collapse of a tottering Jenga-pile of paradoxes that edited each other into a neutral, anodyne paste of nobody assassinating their own grandparents because time travel was never quite discovered in time for them—

  Meanwhile, Imp’s regular schoolwork suffered, even though his memorization techniques and his facility with maths were amazing. He had the most peculiar lucid dreams: his school had an art department and still taught the subject to GCSE and AS level, but he was asked to drop it. (One of his teachers took a funny turn after inviting Imp’s class to try their hand at drawing something based on M.C. Escher’s tessellations: she was still signed off sick at the end of term.) This, paradoxically, pushed Imp towards other, related subjects. His ability to memorize his lines for a school theatrical production was prodigious, his performance at English was good, and he was outstanding in mathematics. But he seemed uninterested in IT skills and business studies (to Mum’s despair) and goofed off in science class.

  As for Evie, she was studying hard for her A-levels with next year’s university selection round in mind. Dad wanted her to study Accountancy; Mum leaned towards Law. In the event, she split the difference, getting into a former redbrick university to dutifully study Business and
Economics, her ticket to the paperwork entitling her to get into job interviews.

  There were special lessons, taught one-on-one by Dad, as they grew older. Dad would sometimes take Evie out for an afternoon or evening of what he called special training: it was all very mysterious and Evie refused to tell Imp about it, beyond a terse “When you’re older.” It had to be carried out at an undisclosed location that was difficult to get into. In his imagination, Imp built up a college of mages who ran open day sessions for amateur sorcerers, or maybe a crypt in a graveyard that had to be broken into after dark. Dad didn’t help by dropping occasional hints about Grandpa and his ancestors—the all-important bloodline—and the old family home. Apparently six (or more) generations of oneiromancers had lived in the big house and used it as their occult laboratory, trafficking with the inhabitants of dreams and building new imaginary rooms whenever they added a new spell to their growing inventory. When they’d been forced to sell the manse to cover death duties, they’d lost a lot of mysterious-but-unspecified stuff. Hence the memory palace. If it was encoded in your head, it would take more than a house fire or bankruptcy proceedings to take it away from you—nothing short of a death in the family could cost you knowledge.

  So things continued until Imp was eighteen. Evie had graduated the year before and was working as a management trainee at a large financial consultancy, hoping to get onto their promotion fast-track. (Evie was, as usual, eager to please.) Meanwhile, Imp was … not off course, exactly, but the course he’d chosen did not meet with his parents’ full approval. Imp was applying to art schools with the goal of pursuing a career in media production. Mum and Dad weren’t exactly opposed to it, but they didn’t understand what it involved, or how it could possibly work. He could quote figures about the creative sector’s financial output and the demand for video editing professionals and scriptwriting opportunities in the gaming industry until he turned blue in the face, but they still didn’t understand why he couldn’t try for law school, then take the Bar Vocational Course and get pupillage. He was a bird trying to explain air to fish, a fox cub raised among wolves.