Dreamstrider (22 page)

He arches one brow at me. “I won’t slip out of my body or anything like that?”

I press my lips together. “It’s possible, but it’s not very likely, unless you’ve become a dreamstrider yourself. Especially since you’ll have the advantage of being fully conscious.” I wave my hand at him. “Hesse started me off the same way. I’ll be there beside you, I promise.”

He taps his tongue to the lip of the uncorked vial and then recoils, lips snarled back. “Nightmare’s bones. That’s nasty.” When I give him a stern look, though, he takes a tentative sip.

I swoop in for the vial as his head hits the pillow, his body stone stiff. I position myself to lie flat on the floor and take a drink of my own.

A flock of crows shrieks and scatters away from us as I open my eyes, blinking away the haze. Without pulling free of my tether, as I usually do, I pull myself to a sitting position and let my loose dress spread around me. I’m in soft, loamy earth under a canopy of dark pines. Their tiered, needled skirts surge far overhead into a dull gray sky.

“Brandt?” I call, though not too loud; memories of the horrific beasts last time I visited Oneiros warn me from that.

A groan answers me to my left. He’s face-down in a patch of moss, attempting to flop himself onto his back, like a wallowing swine. He looks so ill at ease in his own skin that I have to laugh in spite of myself.

“S’not funny,” he mutters through a mouthful of dirt. “You could have at least warned me.”

“Sorry.” I offer him a hand. “Usually I appear upright.”

Brandt brushes dirt and moss away from his prim tweed suit while I survey our surroundings. If I’m not mistaken, this is the forest to the northeast of the city that slowly rises into the mountains. I listen through the trees: the shushing of pine boughs against one another in the breeze, the subdued chatter of birds. No thunderous wings. No stench of decay. Just the moist, earthy scent of the forest and a cool, distant stream.

“We’re looking for Professor Hesse’s cottage,” I tell Brandt, pointing north of the clearing. “I want to know if he left us any clues about the binding ritual. And once we’re done there…” I swallow. “We’ll investigate the building I saw.”

Brandt nods, trotting alongside me as I weave through the pines on a faded trail of tamped-down needles. “Are there people here? Awake ones, I mean.”

“They usually stay in the city, but a few priests have homes in the woods, or on the beach, or—anywhere, really. There’s a desert to the west, mountains to the north, the sea to our south…”

He laughs hoarsely to himself. “You dreamfolk are quite the wild bunch, aren’t you?”

I wince, guilt rippling through me. As if I deserve to be lumped in with the Dreamer’s true devout. I crunch along in silence, leaving Brandt to stroll wide-eyed.

Professor Hesse’s cottage spills out of another clearing in the forest, surrounded by an explosion of flowers: clematis, bougainvillea, roses, chrysanthemum, mothwood blossoms, tulips in every hue. None would grow together in the real world, but here they live side by side, craving no sunlight and demanding no rain. I push aside a sunflower the size of my head to unlatch the wrought iron gate and hold it open for Brandt.

“Madness!” he exclaims. “I love it. It’s all mad.”

“Wait until you see inside,” I say with a grin.

The whitewashed cottage, looking like a two-room affair from the outside, opens up into a cathedral of marble and glass within. A grand promenade cuts down the center of the foyer, a glistening reflecting pool at its heart, then branches off to a colossal five-story library to the right and a quaint rough-hewn kitchen to the left.

“He spent his whole life Shaping it.” My voice wavers—but how can I be sad? His dreamworld home brings me closer to his mind and his memories than I ever was in life. The filigree pattern carved into the columns reminds me of his stories of his time studying theosophy amongst Barstadt’s northern colonies; the library is bursting with the spines of all his favorite books on dreams, even those that were ruined when his old office flooded. Remnants of my earlier dream about that office flit through my mind, but I bat them away.

This is Professor Hesse, right here—not the shriveled-up specter of misery in his filthy office, or the careless, restless corpse. I let Brandt wander off, but I’m taking my time, running my fingers over every surface, trying to pay homage to the Professor Hesse who deserves to be memorialized in this way.
I should have come here earlier
, I think, but I wasn’t ready before. I’m not completely sure I’m ready now.

“Livia?” Brandt calls from somewhere in the labyrinth of the library. “You need to see this.”

I run into the library and wind my way around the gleaming mahogany shelves, though with each passing second they expand into an endless sea of books, Shaped into a massive piece of machinery forever in motion. I can’t see Brandt, so I close my eyes and let Brandt’s essence guide me—his breathing, thrumming
being
that I would know anywhere. In Oneiros, it calls to me like a lighthouse.

He stands in front of a parquetted wood cabinet, a golden key jutting from its face like a knife.

“A key,” I say, the wind rushing out of me. “You don’t suppose it’s…?”

“Nothing is coincidence in fieldwork.” Brandt throws the cabinet door wide.

But it’s empty. Three narrow shelves are lined with dust and nothing more. I trace my fingers through the dust and find a square where something must have sat until recently. A box? A book?

“You don’t suppose he kept some of his research here, do you? What he asked you to destroy?” Brandt says.

“Seems likely. But then who took it?”

“Odd,” Brandt says, fingertips tracing a painted drawing on the back of the cabinet door. It looks like an old star chart. A constellation of bright golden splotches stand out from the tinier flecks along the solid black wood, but I can’t decipher their shape.

“Any priest of the Dreamer could have come here.” I cast my gaze around the silent, cavernous room. “Do you honestly think one of the Dreamer’s faithful would have threatened Hesse, though? The note about the key…”

Brandt swings the cabinet door shut. “It’s an appalling thought, but anything’s possible. You don’t know any devious priests, do you?”

“Unscrupulous, maybe, down in Dreamer Square, selling interpretations for absurd amounts.” I shake my head. “But those sorts are rarely devout enough to serve as Shapers. This is … this is sacred ground. The thought of someone threatening an innocent old man, desecrating his—his memorial—” I choke back my words as a sob wrenches out of me.

Brandt tucks a lock of my hair back behind my ear. His face is serious, but tender; I can’t tell if he’s wearing a mask or not. Is it easier for him to modulate his appearance in Oneiros, or harder? “Livia. We’ll find whoever’s done this. Whatever they’re after—we won’t let them succeed.”

He’d said something similar to me, that day after Hesse’s death. Yet he left me then all the same. I want to sink into Brandt’s touch, however faint it might be. But I must be stronger than that. I’m not here to connive a tender moment out of an engaged man, no matter what I feel for him. My eyes meet his, a liquid shade of smoke with only the dimmest hint of green.

“Let’s check on that house you saw,” Brandt says, shifting awkwardly.

“Hold onto my hand.” We link our fingers together. “Try to forget that you’re not supposed to be able to fly.”

Within moments, I’m drifting into the air, but Brandt keeps bobbing, raising up for a few seconds only to tug me back down as he recalls he’s doing the impossible. “Dreams of death,” he mutters. “I don’t know how you manage.”

I tug hard and send him flying into the air with me, dangling from our joined hands. “You’re lucky you’re weightless here,” I say with a grin. I fly us to the city streets, in part so I can get my bearings before our next destination, but also so I can show Brandt this strange and wonderful landscape. We land on the cobblestones in the heart of the High Priest’s Plaza, right before my favorite dreamshaper structure of all: an undulating fortress covered in mosaic tiles of every imaginable color. I can taste its dazzling hues in my mouth like the bubbliest cider.

Brandt spins in a slow circle, a smile lacquered onto his face. “Liv. This is just amazing!”

“A far cry from the dreary black and white of Barstadt City, isn’t it?” I smile back.

He fixes his sights on the towering Temple of the Dreamer beyond us, but as he’s staring at its golden disc, a priestess rounds the corner and shoots us a fierce glare. “This isn’t a place for you.” She charges toward me, her index finger waggling. “It isn’t safe.”

I raise both my hands. “It’s all right. I’m not a lost sleeper—I can handle myself here.”

“Only the most devout are allowed in Oneiros. We’ll have to usher you back into your own mind—”

“Please! We’re doing no harm,” I say, but a crowd is gathering around us. Priests and priestesses, assuming all manner of surreal costumes, crowd around us. A hat has manifested in Brandt’s hand for him to worry over, which he does vigorously; he looks like he’s wringing it out to dry. “Listen.” I moisten my suddenly parched lips. “I think Oneiros may be in danger.”

“What do you know of it?” An older priest surges forward, his flesh pulled taut like leather around the smooth knobs of his joints. “Did you invite this darkness?”

“So you’ve seen it too. We think there’s a rogue priest out there, and…” I slump forward. “He may have killed Albrecht Hesse.”

“Hesse!” The word ricochets through the crowd, hissing and contemptuous.

“Hesse. Hesse! A disgrace to the Dreamer. May Nightmare chew his soul for eternity.” The old priest sneers at me—daring me to contradict him.

My face burns. “He only tried to do what was best for Barstadt. Why would the Dreamer give us Oneiros if not to use it to help our people?”

“You call it help, what you do? Stealing others’ bodies, tempting the Wastes with your soul? It’s a disgrace!”

I stammer, searching for a retort, but Brandt charges toward them. “Hesse and Livia have done more to protect Barstadt than you lot ever will. Hoarding the Dreamer’s world all for yourselves?
That’s
what’s disgraceful.”

I cringe as the priests’ gasps wash over us. “That’s not quite what he meant,” I tell them. Even if I’ve wondered the same. I want to believe the Dreamer has a reason for structuring this way, but after my last few conversations with Marez, I’m not so sure. I wonder if the Farthinger approach is better—let all those able to succeed to do as they please.

“It’s exactly what I meant. You treat her like an outsider, but what have you done to preserve this place?” Brant’s cheeks burn crimson; the hat he’s thoroughly strangled is stretching, long and sinuous.

The lead priest jabs a finger to Brandt’s chest. “Hundreds of years ago we stood against Nightmare. We shaped this all in the Dreamer’s name. Is it coincidence that this abomination, this…” He flicks his hand up and down the length of me. “This
dreamstrider
arrives in the same age as the winged beasts? Perhaps it’s her doing.”

I shake my head, even as their hands grasp for my curls, assessing me like they expect me to turn into one of those horrible monsters. “Please, no. I’m looking for the same villains you are—a renegade priest, making false promises to the Commandant—”

“Prove it!” the head priest cries.

“Prove it!” the crowd echoes, their words bouncing back at us from the tops of their buildings, from all around.

“Very well,” I say.
Dreamer, I know you’re not in the habit of answering my prayers, at least not in any way that’s clear to me—but please, Dreamer, show me what I need to see now.
“Come with me and I will.”

We surge north, Brandt and I, like a great comet with an icy tail of disbelieving priests in their white shifts. My hands tremble as I search the mountainside. The hulking bones of Nightmare loom on the hill, mirroring the ones in Barstadt City, but I school my eyes away from them as I search for that flicker I’d seen two nights past. There—how such solid stone can look so frail and soft, I’ll never know, but I recognize it in an instant. We land on the path.

“Livia?” Brandt asks, hand still tangled in mine. “This isn’t what I think it is, is it?”

“An alabaster manor house? A flawless replica of the one in the Cloister of Roses, recently vacated by one Sindra Twyne?”

He grimaces. “That would be the one.”

Please, Dreamer, let Marez’s informant be wrong.

That high-pitched humming again—fraying at my consciousness as we draw nearer. I feel it tugging me forward, across the steps, toward the entrance … The head priest pushes past us when we reach the front door. “What’s happened to this building? Is this your doing?”

It takes me a moment, standing perfectly still on the porch, to realize what he’s talking about. I sense a tremor in the bowels of Oneiros, an aching like a tunneler’s empty gut. Chill that stings from the inside.

“I didn’t cause any of this darkness to seep into Oneiros. I’m trying to stop it, same as you.” I meet his stare beat for beat, too terrified to blink. The earth rumbles under my feet as if some great beast has rolled over.

“Dreamstrider.” His lips pull tight against his teeth. “Denizen of Nightmare.”

“You think
I’m
in league with monsters? Which of your Shapers built this place?”

He grips the doorknob, but it rusts away clean in his hand.

We both stagger back as the door creaks inward. The darkness inside Twyne’s estate is hungry, threatening; I feel it tugging us toward the door like a living thing. The priest glares at me, takes an uneasy step forward, and pushes it open further. A stench like spoiled meat unleashes on us, hitting me square in the chest like a cruel memory—

And suddenly Brandt and I are gasping for air in the darkened cargo hold of the clipper. I claw at my arms, trying to rake away the fear I felt in Oneiros, before I realize I’ve left it behind. Brandt’s hand gropes for mine; he seizes the silver vial from my hands. “We have to stop it! We can’t just leave them there.”

I fumble for him in the pitch black of the cargo hold and jerk the vial back. “Brandt, don’t!”