Dreamquake: Book Two of the Dreamhunter Duet (37 page)

AS DORAN WAS STILL IN HIS OFFICE, HIS BACK TO HIS OVAL WINDOW WITH ITS VIEW OF THE ISLE OF THE TEMPLE AND
its three domes. Nearest was the green copper-clad dome at the top of the offices of the Dream Regulatory Body. In the middle distance was the scintillating skin of the Rainbow Opera. Farthest off the Temple shone, so pale that the sky seemed to show through it, as the bruise of a slight tumble will show on a petal of fallen plum blossom.

Doran had for some minutes been peering out from under a steeple made of his hands at a telegram on his otherwise clean and empty desktop. He looked as if he was developing a headache.

“Are you going to tell me what it says?” Maze Plasir was sitting across the desk from the Secretary and sipping wine.

“Laura Hame has finally signed in at Doorhandle in the intentions book. I’ve already had reports from St. Thomas’s and Pike Street. I knew she was back in Founderston, dream-hunting, peddling Convalescent One with her friend the Mason boy.”

“Why is her signing in worse than her continuing to hide?”

“She’s mad,” Doran said. “She escaped from the Depot—God knows how. She was threatened, deprived of liberty, and
she simply comes back to Founderston and picks up where she left off late last winter. She’s insane. Or she’s very simple.”

“I’d love to talk to her,” said Plasir.

“Why?” Doran looked up, sharp.

“To sound her out. She’s not simple, Cas, though she may be mad.”

“Is she trying to draw me out somehow? Is this the advice they’ve give her?”

“They
, Cas?”

“Them—my opponents.”

“Do you mean ‘Lazarus’?”

“I mean the Grand Patriarch,” Doran said.

Plasir nodded. He twirled his glass, looked at the lozenge of light spinning in the wine. “How did the Hame girl escape?”

“Incompetence,” Doran said. “My allies are incompetent.”

“Not all,” Plasir said, mildly.

Doran scowled. He thought of Rose Tiebold in the library at his summerhouse, tearful but cool underneath. Rose asking him about the surplus rails in the Awa Inlet. Rose after the riot, saying of her cousin, “She didn’t sleep. We were talking.”

“Courage isn’t cleverness,” he said, thinking aloud. “They can’t outwit me.” He opened one of his desk drawers and produced the rolled map of Founderston. He spread it open and peered at the circles that represented the penumbras of dreamhunters—dreamhunters loaded with Contentment. None of them were in place yet, but soon could be.

Plasir said, musing, “I remember how I would sometimes see people stop Tziga Hame in the street, to kiss his hands. Do people like Hame ever need to resort to anything as vulgar as cunning?”

Doran studied his map and thought of the fortress that was
the Temple—how he hadn’t been able to buy, or rent, any property in its vicinity, so couldn’t get one of his dosed dreamhunters near it. “What I need is a Soporif,” he said.

“Then we must acquire one, by all means,” Plasir said, and sipped, then smacked his lips. “Perhaps we should separate Miss Hame from her friend the Mason boy. The reports from St. Thomas’s seem to suggest he is one, like his uncle. What do you say to that, eh, Cas?”

6

FTER THE DREAM LAURA AND SANDY WERE STILL IN ITS DEEPS, WAITING TO SLEEP AGAIN. THEY TALKED AND KISSED;
they rested and slept and went back to The Gate. After a time, hard to measure how long with no night and day, they exhausted their food supply and their ability to sleep. They got up, groggy, and began stuffing their rubbish of wrappers and empty cans into their packs. Laura stepped off the muddled blankets, and Sandy began picking them up, one by one, to shake them. Together they folded each blanket. When the last one was lifted, Laura looked down on the bared earth. At that moment it seemed to her the most significant things that had ever happened to her—The Gate, and Sandy—had happened in this uncomfortable spot. She stood looking reverently at the ground, her face soft with serenity and bodily tiredness.

There was a circle carved in the dirt. Much of their discomfort had been because of this deeply scored mark. Laura frowned at it. “What’s this?”

“Foreigner’s West,” Sandy said. He was busy fastening a belt around the bundle of blankets so they’d be easier to carry.

“Pardon?”

“You know how rangers have their own legends, like we dreamhunters do? Theirs are about exploration rather than
dreams.” Sandy got up. His knees creaked. “Rangers talk about the Foreigner as though he’s a good story rather than a historical fact—a pioneering ranger who didn’t make maps but left compass marks.”

“I don’t get it,” Laura said.

“Does it matter? All it means for us, Laura, is that no one tries sleeping here because it’s too uncomfortable. And since The Gate is on just this confined site, no one else has ever caught it. Your father said he only found it because he was always able to sense where healing dreams were. When he walked by Foreigner’s West, he knew the dream was here.”

Laura began to twist her hair. Her curls were matted at the back, she had been lying down for so long. “But this isn’t a compass mark,” she said. She spoke so softly Sandy had to lean forward to hear her. Finding himself near, he kissed her on her earlobe. He said, “The idea that these are compass marks is the only reason rangers suppose the pioneer was a foreigner.
French.
They think the marks stand for north and west in French. The dream Quake is right on top of Foreigner’s North. Foreigner’s North is an N carved in the ground. ‘Nord.’ This is an O, for ‘Ouest.’”

Sandy went on with what he was doing, lengthening one shoulder strap of Laura’s pack so that he could carry it for her. It took him a moment to notice how still and silent she had become. He looked up at her.

“It’s a Nown,” Laura said. “The Place is a Nown.” Her voice was almost inaudible.

Sandy tried to figure out why she had chosen this moment to correct his grammar. He reviewed what he’d been telling her and couldn’t recall having mentioned the Place at all.

Laura still stood as if entranced. The color had drained out of her face.

Sandy put his hand under her elbow. He was afraid that
she was about faint. But she didn’t sway or crumple, she simply stood frozen in place.

Nerves made Sandy giggle. He said, “Love, you are looking like Lot’s wife, white and fixed to the spot.”

Laura could hear Sandy only as a murmur through a wall, one of those sounds that wakes you—a late-night conversation, or muffled crying. She was lost in the past.

She remembered the day she had made Nown. He had stood up out of the dry streambed and shown her his true face, a face she had longed to see. He had gotten onto his knees before her and made his pledge and introduction: “Laura Hame, I am your servant.” She had been exhausted after making him and had slept for a time. When she woke up, she had lain admiring him. He’d stood, surveying the grasslands Inland, engrossed. When she’d asked him what he was doing, he had answered, “Listening.” When she’d asked what he was listening to, he’d said, “I can hear now.” And she had stupidly, wooden-headedly, imagined that, just as she’d made a more handsome sandman, she had also managed to make one with better hearing. He had even repeated himself in an effort to explain what must have bewildered him. “I can hear now,” he’d said. “I am here with myself.”

I can hear Now. I am here with myself.

They were
all
his selves—the Nowns, and speechless Nows. He’d come alive again and discovered he was standing
inside
himself—another self—a speechless Now, a Nown who hadn’t had its final letter added, the letter that, in the spell, “gives speech.” He’d tried to tell her, but she hadn’t heard him. She hadn’t heard his name when he used it. “Now” was only a word, and Sandy had just heard her say that “the Place” was a
noun. It was an easy mistake, an obvious mistake. One word for another: “noun” for “Nown.”

And to invent some surveying French ranger to explain an N and an O carved on the ground was an irresistible mistake. Because whatever logic such mistakes lacked, they still made some kind of daft sense.

What was the alternative? That someone had walked in a long loop around miles and miles of ground, singing “The Measures” and stopping occasionally to inscribe the letters of the spell: N O W. Someone had brought the land itself to life and tried to make a slave of it.

Sandy found himself holding Laura up. She was overcome, by exhaustion or the elixirlike power of the dream, or with trepidation about how far they had gone. Sandy couldn’t tell exactly what it was that had thrown her into a state of shock. He didn’t know what he could do to help.

She clung to him. Her skin was cold, and she was shivering. Sandy coaxed her to sit back down, and she all but collapsed on him. But then she was asking questions again, and her voice sounded rational. “The N on the site of Quake—is it in one piece?” she asked.

“Never mind that now,” Sandy said, soothing.

“Please tell me.”

“No, it isn’t. The letter is cracked straight across. There really was a quake there at some point.”