The Shadowed Sun (Dreamblood) (35 page)

She nodded, getting to her feet. The Prince picked up the lantern and came to stand near enough that she could see by its light, but not near enough to touch her. She did not look at him. In silence, he led her back to camp.

There was a strange feel to the night air. Gatherer Inmu noticed it while leaping from one rooftop to another on his way back to the Hetawa. If the rooftop had been one of the sloped, tiled monstrosities favored by zhinha and others with exotic foreign tastes, Inmu would have ended up counting his bones in the alley below. Fortunately the roof was flat. Inmu landed badly, rolling once to dissipate the force of the impact, but unharmed aside from pride.

His pride took another blow as he looked up and spied Gatherer Nijiri’s still form in the shadows of the roof’s cistern.

Embarrassed, he got to his feet. But to his relief, Nijiri did not chide him for his clumsiness. In fact, though they had agreed to meet here at the end of their rounds, Nijiri had not seemed to notice Inmu at all. As Inmu stepped closer, he saw that Nijiri was utterly still, one hand braced against the cistern, his gaze turned inward and a look that was part anger, part fear, frozen on his face.

Nijiri may never know true peace
, Inmu’s mentor Rabbaneh had told him once.
He has enough for his petitioners, but I think he may never find what he needs for happiness. Not here in the Hetawa, anyhow.

It troubled Inmu, sometimes, to think that one of his brothers
suffered so. They all knew why: Ehiru. Yet Nijiri was a perfect Gatherer in every other way—swift and silent on the hunt, deadly in combat, tender in the taking of tithes. Was it his lingering grief that made him so competent? Inmu had no idea, but he had resolved to study this brother until he found a way to help him.

So he stepped closer still, into the shadows with him. “Nijiri-brother?”

Nijiri’s head whipped up, and for an instant Inmu feared his brother would strike him. Then the wild, defensive look faded from his eyes. “Inmu. Do you feel it?”

That strange sense of pressure, filling the night around them; it was what Inmu had noticed during the leap. It seemed to dim even the Dreaming Moon’s colored light. “Yes,” Inmu replied, frowning. “But I don’t know what it is.”

“I thought—” Nijiri faltered, swallowed. As Inmu’s eyes adjusted, he saw that Nijiri’s face was beaded with sweat. “For a moment—Sonta-i
is
dead, isn’t he? We burned him…” He closed his eyes and shuddered.

Alarmed, Inmu touched Nijiri’s shoulder, delicately. “Brother, are you all right?” He tried to remember the last time Nijiri had undergone the pranje, the ritual of cleansing and reaffirmation required yearly of all Gatherers. Wait, yes: Nijiri had put himself into seclusion around midsummer, only a few months before. Too soon for him to need it again. But what else could be causing his agitation?

Abruptly, Nijiri looked up. “No, I’m a fool, blinded by memories. This is something different.” He pulled away from Inmu’s hand and stepped over to the edge of the roof, his eyes narrowing. “Inmu. Come look.”

Even more confused, Inmu came over to stand with Nijiri, following his brother’s pointing hand. Another building, abutting the one they stood on. Through the window they could see a couple in bed, both asleep. The wife was whimpering in her sleep, her voice
faint but audible in the night’s stillness. The husband tossed and thrashed as if fighting some invisible enemy. As they watched, he groaned and flailed out with one arm, striking his sleeping wife. She did not wake; just kept making those pathetic, broken sounds.

Inmu frowned. Nijiri scowled, his earlier distress gone; now the cool, deadly Nijiri had returned. “Something is wrong in this,” he said.

Perhaps they’re just heavy sleepers
, Inmu considered saying. But he did not, because the ominous note in Nijiri’s words had frightened him—and because he worried Nijiri might be right. He could not say how, but he felt the same imprecise wrongness about the sleeping couple.

Then he recalled the woman whose dream had killed Sonta-i. Years of training kept him from gasping aloud, but when he looked at Nijiri, Nijiri nodded.

“We must help them,” Inmu whispered. Even as he said it, despair clenched his belly. Sonta-i had already proven there was nothing they could do. And Nijiri shook his head, though Inmu saw the same frustration in his brother’s eyes.

“There’s more to this,” Nijiri said. “This strange feel, the light, the taste of the air. I’ve almost forgotten it in the years since I became a Gatherer, but I know it now—I feel as if
I’m
dreaming.”

And Inmu realized Nijiri was right. Inmu had been a full Gatherer for eight years now, riding the edges of Ina-Karekh only with the aid of his tithebearers, but he had not yet forgotten how it felt to dream on his own. There were times when the land of dreams seemed so like waking that the only way to tell the difference was instinct. That was what he felt now—the subtle whisper of senses beyond the physical, warning him of unreality.

“
Are
we dreaming?” Inmu asked.

“I hope not,” Nijiri said, nodding toward the couple. “Or it’s only a matter of time before whatever killed Sonta-i takes us.”

Rabbaneh-brother would be most annoyed if we left him as the only Gatherer
, Inmu thought, then had to stifle the inane urge to laugh. Another sound at the edge of his hearing wiped away the momentary levity.

He rose and crossed the rooftop to its opposite edge. The Moonlight was stronger here, so he could see the source of trouble clearly: a young man not much older than himself, curled up on a doorstep sleeping. By his attire and the threadbare blanket that covered him, Inmu suspected that the man was a servant, being punished for some error by having to sleep outdoors for the night. Though the steps of his home couldn’t have been comfortable, he had fallen asleep—and he too stirred restlessly, groaning in the depths of a nightmare.

“I do
not
like this,” Nijiri said. Inmu jumped; Nijiri had come to his side so silently that Inmu hadn’t noticed.

“The dream passes by proximity,” Inmu said, troubled. “We’ve seen that. Merchant Bahenamin had it, then his wife, then their servant girl. And others among the victims have lived in the same household, or in houses adjacent. Anyone who sleeps while a carrier sleeps nearby.”

Nijiri nodded. “It would seem we’re witnessing another outbreak.” He sounded grim as he said it. The Sharers had collected all the victims of the plague they could find, isolating them together in the Hall of Respite. They could do nothing to help the victims, but they had consoled themselves with the knowledge that when those poor souls passed on, there would be no others. Now it seemed the Sharers were about to be robbed of even that small comfort.

But something else about what they had seen troubled Inmu. “Brother,” he said, “we
found
all the victims before. The Sentinels brought everyone who suffered the dream, and everyone who had contact with them, and everyone who
might
have had contact with them. They brought some even against their will.” Inmu and some
of the Sharers had gone with the Sentinels on those trips. It seemed wrong to use sleep-spells as a weapon, especially given the chance that some of the ones they put to sleep would never wake, but the maintenance of peace often required painful actions. “Our Sentinel brethren were so thorough that I can’t see how they missed anyone.”

“They must have. And there’s a greater problem: where’s the source of this evil dream, Inmu? No one has ever found that.”

As Inmu pondered this, yet another odd sound caught his and Nijiri’s ears. A woman’s voice? And something else, this louder than the rest, and familiar: carriage wheels, clattering on stone.

“Late for traveling,” Nijiri said.

“Some fellow heading home from a visit to his lover, or an alehouse.” Inmu shrugged.

Nijiri pivoted where he crouched, following the sound. “Did you hear which direction it came from?”

“There—” Inmu pointed, and was surprised to find that he pointed toward the Hetawa itself. The street that ran alongside the Hetawa, specifically, near the east complex wall.

But why did that make Nijiri’s frown deepen?

“It came
from
there,” Nijiri murmured, almost to himself. “Not from the streets around, where the houses are. There was silence, and then we heard it move…”

Abruptly he stiffened, his eyes widening with horror. “
Indethe—
” And before Inmu could ask what was the matter, Nijiri took off. He was over the rooftop’s low wall and halfway to the ground before Inmu could collect his startled thoughts. By the time Inmu reached the ground too, Nijiri had vanished around the corner.

Wondering again whether his elder brother was entirely sane, Inmu ran after him. But Nijiri had already vanished amid the narrow streets; even the sounds of his footfalls had faded.

But the sound of the carriage was not far at all. Inmu hesitated,
then turned in the direction of that sound and trotted on a course that would intersect it. As he jogged, drawing nearer to the rattle of wheels on bricks, he heard the woman’s voice again. Singing.

Just up ahead now. He had reached a cross street; the carriage would pass on the avenue before him in another moment.

“
Goddess, sweetest Goddess, no—
” Nijiri’s voice, raised to a most unpeaceful volume, echoed along the empty streets. Startled, Inmu skidded to a halt.
What—?

The carriage—a simple two-wheeled affair, drawn by a brawny servant-casteman who wore enough weapons that he was clearly a guard as well—passed on the street ahead of Inmu. The cab was open, though a mosquito-cloth hanging obscured any clear look at the carriage’s occupants. In a stray flicker of Moonlight and a breeze that stirred the light cloth aside, he caught a glimpse of movement and then spied a woman’s face, turning as she noticed him. They were the most beautiful eyes he had ever seen: black as the Dreamer’s dark side, captivating as a jungissa stone.

And sad. So terribly, achingly sad that Inmu wanted to go to her, offer any comfort she desired in order to take that look from her face. He would Gather her, if she wished, or just hold her, because he had never seen anyone bear such a stoneweight of bitterness and despair alone. Not bear it and still live, at least.

Then something stirred in the woman’s arms. A child, he realized, though he caught only the most fleeting glimpse. Five or six floods in age, boneless with sleep. The look in the woman’s eyes changed. Now Inmu saw warmth in her, and a tenderness so profound that tears sprang to his eyes. She drew back into the shadows behind the hangings, holding the child to her breast. As the carriage traveled on past, rounding a corner to head toward one of the bridges, he heard her voice rise again, singing that same soft song he’d half-caught before. A lullaby.

Longing for what he had never before missed, Inmu stared in the
direction the carriage had gone for a full five breaths before he remembered Nijiri.

Turning back toward the Hetawa, Inmu ran until he reached the street along the eastern complex wall. He found his fellow Gatherer leaning against the wall, his head bowed and shoulders heaving and fists pressed against the old stone as if they could somehow force it aside by will alone.

“Brother!” He rushed to Nijiri’s side. “Nijiri-brother, what in shadows—”

“Here!” Nijiri rounded on Inmu and gripped his shoulders; his eyes were wild. “It was here. It has to be the source, people are catching it right now, the source! It was
parked
here,
waiting
here, do you know what this means?” He stabbed a finger toward the wall. “
Look!
”

Inmu looked, uncomprehending, and saw the wall. “It’s just the eastern wall, Brother. I don’t—”

And then, suddenly, terribly, he understood.

Each group within the Hetawa had its section of the complex. North belonged to the Sentinels, and the Hall of Children. West was the Gatherers’ Hall, where classes in narcomancy were taught. South was the Hall of Blessings and the complex of offices, libraries, and classrooms used by lay servants of the Hetawa, the Teachers, and the Superior.

East held the cluster of buildings that housed those of the Sharer path.

The source, Nijiri had said. The source of the nightmare plague.
Had been parked near the Sharers’ Hall at night while they slept.