Dreamquake: Book Two of the Dreamhunter Duet (3 page)

Grace Tiebold knew that she was caught in a nightmare and wasn’t really in her coffin. She was a skilled and experienced dreamhunter who’d had to free herself from nightmares before. She fought to be free from this one. At first she fought it on its own terms—she struggled with the shroud, tore at the padded satin lining of the coffin, and finally with its undressed wood. She made the futile repeated movements—the
clawing, thrashing, hammering—of the person she was in the dream.
In the dream
, she reminded herself, and kept in mind, as the spark of her experience, her mastery of other dreams, brought her back to herself.

Grace finally burst right out of the battered limbs and welter of blood and filth—out of that miserable, suffering self. She jumped like a specter out of the trapped body, the grave, the dream. For a moment she was paralyzed by sleep, then she struggled free from the silk quilt, panting, and found that her face and fingertips were torn and slick with blood.

She fell off the bed, got up, and looked around the auditorium.

The balconies were empty. Electric candles around the walls of each tier, and the unsteady glow of the gas jets beyond the stained-glass dome, showed Grace her beautiful Rainbow Opera—just as it always was, but as though turned inside out. Its beauty looked ghastly. The men of the fire watch looked monstrous. George, lying rigid, his face contorted, mouth alternately straining open and snapping shut, looked monstrous too.

Grace shouted at the fire watch to sound the alarm bells. She could barely hear her own voice over the storm of screaming that came from the closed bedchambers.

A door was open on the second tier, the door to the Tiebold suite. Grace saw her daughter, Rose, lean over the balcony, her hands gripping its rail. Grace felt herself swoop toward her daughter. She nearly jumped from the dais, stopping herself just in time. As Rose’s face came into focus, Grace saw that her daughter was pale and confused, but not bloodied or maddened.

Grace turned back to George Mason. She picked up the water jug and tipped it out over him. Then, for good measure, she slammed the jug itself down onto his chest. The
Soporif woke, then rolled onto his side to spit out blood and a piece of cracked tooth.

Grace turned back to Rose, who wasn’t looking at her. Grace followed her daughter’s gaze and saw someone running toward the fire watch control room.

It was a man in a long coat and broad-brimmed hat. He moved fast but as though he was skating, his limbs seeming to stretch and blur. He jumped into the control room, among the fire watch.

Then, it seemed, Grace momentarily lost her grip on wakefulness, and the dream came back to change the shape and sense of events she was trying so hard to follow. She saw the coat and hat float to the control room floor. Had the ceiling collapsed? The men of the fire watch appeared to have been knocked flat and were struggling under something that had fallen on them—something dark and heavy. Then one body got to its feet, although it seemed to be covered from head to foot in some crumbling substance, as if it had been in the ground and had emerged contaminated by earth. The body moved toward the power board, put out a hand, and was suddenly caught in a cascade of blue sparks. The control room went dark. The bells didn’t sound.

Mason was still struggling to get up, but kept flopping back as if stunned. Grace didn’t wait for him to recover. She left the dais. The turns in the spiral stairs forced her to lose sight of her daughter several times as she descended. When she was only halfway down, she felt the dream leave the building. It didn’t disperse but departed all at once, like a flock of birds breaking from a stand of trees.

Grace reached the bottom of the dais, located the nearest staircase, and scrambled up it. From above her came the sound of timber splintering.

Halfway up the stairs, Grace was knocked back against the
wall by a phalanx of men—the President’s bodyguards. They were carrying President Garth Wilkinson on their shoulders, like a body on a bier. Bloody foam spilled from Wilkinson’s gaping mouth.

Grace Tiebold was used to being treated with respect, to being
somebody.
It was years since she had been shunted aside by anyone. These men did just that—shoved her aside. Worse, she
was
noticed by the last man, the one following those who carried the President. He was rushing too, but he stepped aside to avoid bowling Grace down the stairs. Then he recognized her, his face filled with disgust, and he struck her across the mouth. It was an open-handed slap, but it knocked her down. She clung to the handrail, her ears ringing. She thought: “He thinks the nightmare was me.”

Once she’d had this thought, another followed it: “If it wasn’t me, then who was it?”

Then,
“Laura,”
Grace thought, though she couldn’t think where her niece might have gone to catch a nightmare like that. It was like something from the “shadow belt”—a region in Band X, four days’ walk into the lifeless desert of the Place. Grace knew that an eight-day walk In and out again was beyond Laura’s stamina, that her niece was simply too small and weak to carry enough water for a journey of that length. So where had the nightmare come from? How had Laura managed to catch it? And
why
would Laura bring a dreadful thing like that to the Rainbow Opera on St. Lazarus’s Eve?

Grace collected herself and went on. She reached the top of the stairs and saw her daughter. Rose’s jaw went slack, and she took a step back, apparently appalled at her mother’s appearance. Grace ran to Rose, took her hands, and scanned her face. Rose was unhurt—her lips were mauve, but, Grace recalled, that was only the stain of the musk creams she had been nibbling since lunch.

The terrible howling had stopped. Behind the Opera’s doors, people had begun to call out for help—a sane, human clamor. A few started to spill out onto the balconies.

The door of the Hame Suite opened, and Laura emerged, her face white and mouth bloody. She was clumsily unwinding bandages from her hands.

Grace called to her. Laura looked at her aunt, her expression closed and remote.

There was a loud crash from the auditorium. Grace turned and saw that George Mason was in trouble. A group of men were making their way up the spiral stairs with murder in their eyes. Mason had hurled his own water jug at them. For a moment they fell back, shielding their faces with their hands, then they continued on up.

The control room was dark, but the power board was cascading sparks, by the light of which Grace could see several men from the fire watch leaning across the sill of the window that looked out over the auditorium. They appeared stunned and battered.

Grace ignored the sounds behind her—of breaking glass, and her niece calling to someone—and shouted across the auditorium to the fire watch. “Please help him!” She gestured toward Mason.

A long moment went by. The Opera’s rooms disgorged retching, staggering people. Grace yelled some more. She still had hold of her daughter, who was trying to pull away from her. Grace hung on to Rose but kept her attention on the control room and the dithering fire watchmen. She urged them to do something. In another moment George Mason would be overwhelmed. The staircase was so packed now that Grace imagined she could see the dais swaying. Finally the fire watchmen seemed to see what she wanted, and, lit by blue flashes, they began to move and act.

Grace turned back to her daughter as Rose broke away and rushed to the stairs that led to the dreamer’s door. Rose stopped, clinging to the doorframe, and peered down into the dark. The lights seemed to have failed in the stairwell. “Rose!” Grace called, and her daughter turned and came back. “Are those stairs clear?” Grace asked—she was thinking how they might avoid the angry crowd.

“No. Laura went down there.
It
took her,” Rose said. She was stammering with shock. “Did you see it?”

Grace frowned at Rose and touched her forehead, as though testing for a fever. “Darling, we have to hide,” Grace said gently. Then she grabbed Rose and propelled her toward the balcony of the Presidential Suite. These balconies were usually locked, but Grace was hoping that, since the President had been carried to safety, his bodyguards hadn’t bothered to close the door behind them when they fled.

The first door was not only open but broken and hanging from one hinge. The balcony was empty except for an overturned chair. Grace hustled her daughter into the suite. She pulled the door closed and bolted it.

For the next five minutes Rose and Grace hid; they cowered as an enraged crowd beat on the bolted door. Then they heard police whistles.

Rose tried to talk in stops and starts. She said to her mother, “Did you see it? What was it? Why did Laura want
that?
Why was she calling it to her?”

And to these incoherent questions Grace could only reply, “It was a dream, darling, just a dream. It must have seemed like that to Laura too. Just a dream. She’s not like you and me.”

When he was finally able to drag himself free from the nightmare, Sandy staggered out of bed and into his room’s cramped bathroom. He ran the cold tap and rinsed his mouth. Ribbons of blood spiraled down the drain in pink-tinged water. It was only once he’d stopped running the water that he became aware of the racket coming from the balcony beyond his door. He went out to look.

The doors of rooms around the third tier were flung open. It seemed that many people had come out only in search of a less confined space. Near Sandy two women in torn silk pajamas were leaned over the balcony rail, one gasping for air, the other scrubbing her lacerated face with blood-slick palms.

People were heading toward the stairs. Some wept and staggered as they went, others were more purposeful, pushing their way through, their faces injured and contorted, but wrathful too.

Sandy looked at himself. There was blood under his fingernails. His pajama top was open, its buttons gone or dangling by threads.

From below came sounds of a melee, crashes, shouting, and police whistles. Sandy went to the rail, leaned over, and saw his uncle. George Mason was at the top of the dreamer’s dais, facedown on churned-up bedding. Two men had hold of him by his legs and were trying to drag him into a crowd of enraged people who were fighting for space on the spiral stairs. Sandy saw a few members of the Opera’s fire watch among the crowd and, at the foot of the stairs, a bunch of police officers fighting their way up, swinging their truncheons.

Sandy stood frozen, gripping the rail, till the police managed to reach his uncle and wrap both a quilt and their uniformed bodies around him.

Another clutch of police came into sight in the main auditorium. They fought their way through the crowd toward the
main exit. Grace Tiebold was in their midst, the train of her opulent gown in tatters, her cheeks and throat smeared with blood.

Reinforcements arrived. Police poured onto the auditorium floor. Sandy heard a gunshot and saw glass rain down from a hole punched in the Opera’s stained-glass dome. He flinched back from the rail and joined the crowd pouring down the nearest staircase.

There was a press of people on the stairs. Sandy was surrounded by the sound of weeping. For a brief moment he was snagged in a group of men in suits who seemed to be trying to decide whether to continue up or turn and follow the crowd back down. Sandy caught snatches of their talk.

“The police have her already …”

“But was it her? I think that nightmare was Hame’s Buried Alive …”

Someone elbowed Sandy in the ribs, and the men slipped ahead of him. He followed, stumbling over a dropped bowler hat.

Outside, in the Crescent Plaza, there were more bowler-hatted Regulatory Body officials. Most of them stood in little groups, turned away from the throngs of distressed people. There were ambulances and paddy wagons in the plaza, and a fire truck, the firemen passing out blankets.

Suddenly Sandy spotted a head of unmistakable bright hair. He ran toward Rose Tiebold, calling her name. He couldn’t see Laura with her. Rose turned to him. Her face was pale but unmarked. Someone grabbed Sandy by the collar of his pajamas and held him. Sandy grappled with the hand but concentrated on Rose. “Where’s Laura?”

Beside him a voice said, “This boy is a dreamhunter. You should make sure to catch any who were here.”

Sandy looked around. The man who held him was a police
captain. The other man, the one issuing instructions, was the Secretary of the Interior, Cas Doran. Doran had his hand under Rose’s elbow, to comfort rather than detain her it seemed. His lips were bitten and bleeding. He didn’t look calm, but he did have an air of command, of mastery and self-mastery.

Sandy heard Doran tell the police captain that any dreamhunters who had been at the Opera would be reproducing the nightmare when they next slept.

It hadn’t occurred to Sandy that he’d taken a print of the nightmare, but now that he knew, he thought he could feel it inside him, a capsule of terror and airless darkness. He moaned.

Rose touched his hand. “Sandy, your uncle is with my mother at the city barracks,” she said.

“But where is Laura?”

Rose glanced at the man beside her. “Laura ran off. She was scared. I had bare feet, and there was glass on the stairs—or else I’d have followed her.”