Authors: Max Gladstone
Kai avoided nightmare communication unless strictly necessary. Too much waited beneath the surface of her mind. The Order used professional dreamers for the most part: asleep gagged and blindfolded in warm caves under Kavekana’ai, scribbling messages on automatically turning scrolls. Suggest short-selling Mithraist Gamma Fund. Will require high liquidity next quarter. Concerned about long-term stability of emerging markets in Northern Gleb. So on, and so forth. When Jace took over he banned the gags, called them inhumane. That first week, a page who hadn’t got the earmuffs memo walked in on a dreamer mid-session. The screams ruptured his eardrums. The gags returned.
So Kai made herself hot chocolate and thought about everything and anything else. Mara’s visit on the balcony, in the blue dress, after it all went wrong. Teenage nights sneaking out to poetry slams, glorying in end, internal, initial rhymes. Emerging from the pool after she remade herself, whole at last in her own body. Her first years with Claude, before the joy bled out.
She carried her cocoa upstairs. Cup rattled in saucer. Bedclothes lay tangled halfway between bed and floor, from where she’d clawed herself awake that morning. She made the bed, smoothed the comforter, piled pillows at the headboard, and changed into her bathrobe. Smoothing the bedspread, she could almost forget what happened here last night, and what it meant.
Nothing, that’s what. You saw him today, and you were fine and he was fine. Use alcoholics’ wisdom: take life day by day.
Another sip of cocoa, and as she swallowed she let herself feel tired. She’d been tired for years, and only felt it now, as if exhaustion had hidden in the hollows of her bones until offered a chance to unfurl. A light turned on in her chest. She lay back. She wished she had a stuffed animal. She used to sleep with a stuffed dolphin. She threw him out before Claude moved in.
She removed her robe, and lay back, and kept lying back, the bed not beneath her but spinning away as she fell, faster. Walls of tan comforter towered above, miles and miles, the pit’s mouth shrinking to a point, vanished to leave her in a tense smooth cotton shell. A cold hand held her. Fingers locked tight, rigor mortis, tension of the dead. Cotton covered her mouth, but as she struggled she realized she was not falling but standing, and while the sky above was the color of a sunset cloud, beneath her feet lay good dank earth, jungle smelling, corpse nourished. Ghosts whistled past her ears as she walked, beneath her arms, between her fingers. She ignored them, because one could not hear ghosts in waking life, and if so why listen to them in dreams?
She caught the tail of that thought, which sped past her in kite form trailing a ribbon, so fast the tail’s edge cut her fingers. She was dreaming. Dreams of isolation and insignificance.
Not deep enough. A personal layer of dream, this. A path formed beneath her feet, expected, welcomed. Paths guided sleepers through dreams, and through meant out, which Kai didn’t want.
She stepped off the dream-path, and fell again through tan space into the gap between threads, following the beat of a distant heart no longer hers. She fell through vast chambers of creation.
No. To fall was to give herself to the nothing. She pointed her hands at the deep, and dove.
She opened her eyes, and sat up with a start, or tried to. Her arms moved a few inches then stopped, wrists bound. A gray ceiling spread above. A mask across her face forced air into her mouth, into her nose; she was made to breathe in. The pressure reversed, and air swept out of her lungs. She turned her head, but could not shake the mask loose. She pressed against the bars that lined her bed, her cage, but they were cold and strong. Overhead, a lamp swung slowly. When next the machines forced air into her lungs she screamed.
A door squealed open. Footsteps on a cement floor. The nurse whistled to herself as she approached, a lullaby. Sleep now, darling, sleep now, my boy. Let the wind sweep, and let the trees sway, and you’ll still be here, come the next dawning day. The whistle grew louder as the nurse neared. Immense, a round-hipped silhouette against the sweeping light. A spark: the needle, raised. Kai pulled against the leather cuffs, and knowing that she dreamed she knew she pulled against bonds she’d tied around herself. The needle descended, but she tore free, and ripped the mask from her face, and scrambled over the bars and ran down the long alley between beds, thousands all alike, holding all shapes of creatures and all sizes, birds the size of galaxies, their wings bound with leather straps, lizards with IVs dripping into their arms, women, men, angels, demons, tubes drawing rainbow-colored blood out to a vast net beneath the floor that beat like a heart. She ran, and the nurse followed. Search the faces. Mara’s here, somewhere. All fears touch, deep enough in dream, and so in a good nightmare you can find any other dreamer—even those who think themselves awake.
Find Mara, raven haired, in her blue dress. Mara, sleeping, to be woken with a kiss. Gods. Sweat soaked Kai’s hospital gown. The nurse’s footsteps were bass drum beats, drawing closer. Kai dared not look behind. She knew what she would see: a mountainous woman blocking out the sun, needle in hand, its point at once hair-fine and larger than Kai’s whole body, a point that would obliterate her if driven home.
Kai ran past the sleeping dead, through the caverns of her mind. Bound. Bleeding. She ran faster than the beat her heart made. No music, just bare feet on concrete, and footsteps following, and millions of forced breaths.
Don’t look back. Bend the dream to your will. Mara is here. Find her and leave. You are here because you chose to be here. (But she could not believe that whisper. To believe was to admit her control, break the nightmare, return to the branching gardens of her own mind. The nightmare telegraph’s other double-logic: you must accept that all nightmares are real.)
Mara was not here. An infinity of beds, endless beings endlessly dying but never dead, their suffering cultivated, and Mara lay in none of them. Impossible. She had to be here, awake or asleep. But Kai tired, slowed, and the nurse’s footsteps grew louder, even and inhuman as a metronome’s tick.
And as Kai ran, and drew her frightened breaths, another impossibility scraped the corners of her thought: how had she escaped the bed? She was bound. Tied so tight her hands could not slip free. She could not have broken the straps. She had not broken them. She had not escaped, and the nurse did not need to hurry, because she was already caught. This cavern was a single, massive bed, and Kai ran in it and the nurse loomed above mountainous, eyes shining, and oh god Kai ran and ran but there were straps around her wrists and ankles and she kicked against them and could not move and the bars were high as the stars and she ran she was running don’t let that tense shift she was fleeing escaping escaped not about to die but the nurse stood above her with the poison medicine I have just the thing for you dear the needle descended and she could not find Mara but she needed out but there were straps around her arms but she ran into the wall and clawing found a doorknob and the needle pressed into her skin and she was so small but she leaned into the door with all her weight and all she ever had been and ever would be and burst through into black.
She lay sweat-slick upon silk. She gulped cool air, swallowed it like water. She touched her face, but her hand felt heavy, as if gloved. The sheet had stuck to her, she saw by the almost-light cascading through the windows. Silk clung to her face as she tried to draw her hand away.
Not a sheet at all, but gossamer strands. Silk stuck her arm to her side and her hand to her face. She sat up, and the silk at her legs adhered to itself and to the silk that already covered her stomach. She recognized the web even as the spider swelled enormous at the foot of the bed, man-high. Mouthparts quivered with anticipation.
Kai met its stare.
The spider drew back and cocked its head. Fangs closed, tentatively, like a person chewing on her lip. Then the spider said, in Ms. Kevarian’s voice: “You just can’t win, can you?”
39
Izza watched Margot through the palm fronds as night fell. He worked fiercely. Before, as she spied on him, he’d seemed averse to the paper, as if he carved each line he wrote into his skin. Not tonight. Sweat soaked his shirt, despite the cool wind.
From the outside, she thought, writing looked as interesting as dying.
When the clock tower rang quarter ’til nine, Izza sighed relief, and lowered herself from the wall. She didn’t like leaving Margot, but that wasn’t why she ran down back alleys to the meeting place. She was more than her mind or eyes, and glad to feel it.
The Grieve was a broad open square near the docks, bayside on East Claw, not far from Margot’s. Here, in the centuries before the God Wars, an Iskari merchant colony built statues to their gods, and a gallows for their justice. Time had weathered the foreign gods’ squiddy faces; the gallows was torn down in the wars, after Makawe and his sisters left to join the grand fight against the Craftsmen. The platform still stood, though, and the young and poor congregated here to drink palm wine and toast the moon and smoke foreign weeds, to trade drugs caged off sailors in the Godsdistrikt, to dance to drums and poorly tuned guitars.
She found Nick in the square’s Palmside corner, kneeling at the feet of an ancient hurricane-worn spear god. A fat man twirled fire poi atop the gallows platform, and the flames danced in Nick’s eyes.
“Hey,” he said when he saw her.
“You find her?”
He nodded. “Weird woman.”
“What do you mean?”
“She went to a house first, which I thought was hers so I almost left, but she came out looking scared a few minutes later. Almost saw me, didn’t. So when she went to the next house I, you know, snuck up a tree outside, so I could watch and see if she was there to sleep or to whatever.”
“Just out of the goodness of your heart.”
“And she slept, right? And had bad dreams.”
“People have bad dreams all the time.”
“Not like this,” he said.
“Okay. Fine. Nightmares. Did you get the address? Or were you too busy trying to sneak a glance of the priest in her underwear?”
He told her, and she repeated it back to be sure she’d heard it right.
“Thanks.”
He didn’t answer.
She left him watching the spinning poi, and ran back through alleys to Margot’s house.
40
“What are you doing here?” Kai asked.
The spider reared on its hind legs, spindly limbs and body’s bulk silhouetted against the green moon. The form folded and unfolded at once, arms melding as the body slimmed and the head bobbed on an elongating neck. The body assumed a semblance of a thin woman in a black suit, but the head remained a spider’s, outsize fangs dripping poison. “I’m looking for a friend of yours,” Ms. Kevarian said. She placed her hands beneath the spider head and pushed; at first, Kai thought she meant to tear her head loose, but the spider-seeming came off like a mask, revealing Ms. Kevarian’s face beneath. The Craftswoman tucked the spider head under one arm, summoned a mirror from dreams, and checked her hair. Nodding, she dissolved the mirror. “And I noticed you looking for her, too. I thought we might chat, here, unobserved.”
“You want to torture me,” Kai said. The spider may have vanished, but the silk remained. She was balled in the center of a web, bound to herself by strands that stretched but would not break.
“Torture you.” Ms. Kevarian smiled. The effect was not reassuring. “This is your nightmare. I can do nothing here that does not come from your own mind.”
“My mind scares me.”
“You’re a wise woman,” she said, and set the spider head down beside her. She sat, though there was no chair in the dream, and leaned forward, elbows on legs, so her face was level with Kai’s. “You have no Craft to speak of.”
“Not everyone who matters does.”
“But most people who use the nightmare telegraph do. Craftswomen are warded against the nightmare’s dangers in ways ordinary people aren’t.”
Kai pushed against the spider silk again. It did not give. “If you don’t want to hurt me, why not set me free?”
“This is your fear,” Ms. Kevarian said, and raised a cup of tea that hadn’t been in her hand before. “Everything here comes from you. I’m just an echo of a dream.” She stood, and approached Kai. Her body passed through the spiderweb strands as if she were a ghost. “Would you like some tea?”
“How can an echo of a dream offer me tea?”
“I can manipulate unimportant aspects of your dreamspace, so long as you don’t fight back. The color of the moon, say.” She snapped her fingers three times, and the moon changed from green, to silver, to purple, and back to green again. “Or the presence or absence of a cup of tea.” She took another sip. “But those bonds are not a detail. They’re the substance of this dream. I can’t break them. Only you can.” She held the mug to Kai’s mouth. “Would you like some? I’m not physically here; you don’t risk catching my germs.”
“No thanks.”
“Suit yourself.” Ms. Kevarian walked away. “So. You want to find your friend Mara. And you were desperate enough to seek her through nightmares, even though you have no power here. What made you so desperate?”
“You were waiting for me.”
“Hardly. I also seek your friend, as I said. Our paths crossed.”
“I don’t have to tell you anything.”
“I have been unable to contact Ms. Ceyla. You are also, apparently, disturbed by her absence. If you have anything to share, I hope you will tell me. Perhaps I can help.”
“This is a trap.”
“Life is a trap,” she said. “As you have learned this evening.”
“I didn’t do this to myself.”
“Who did, then?”
“I can think of a likely candidate.”
“I have nothing against you personally. And if you care for your friend enough to seek her in dreams you are unprepared to face, then perhaps you might wish to cooperate with someone else concerned for her well-being.”
Kai pushed against the web again. It did not give. “What do you want with Mara?”