Dreamquake: Book Two of the Dreamhunter Duet (7 page)

“Your daughter told me that Laura didn’t sleep. But we are looking for her,” Doran said.

“Good,” said Grace, and turned her face away.

“That will be all for now,” said the Director of the Regulatory Body. “Some of my people will escort you to your house, then take you on to Doorhandle.”

“Thank you.” Grace Tiebold got up and nodded to the Detective Inspector, who said that he’d like her to come and see him once she was back. At the door the dreamhunter turned and asked, “How is President Wilkinson?”

“He is recovering well,” Doran said.

“I’m glad to hear it. We need him,” Grace said.

Doran smiled again, his mouth performing a kind of spasm of involuntary glee that opened the wounds on his lips. Here was evidence that, despite the nightmare, Plasir’s apprentice Gavin Pinkney’s little bit of “coloring” had been absorbed and remembered. Doran risked saying, “Yes, we do
need Wilkinson, and it’s such a pity his term is nearly up.”

“Yes.” Grace hovered in the doorway, frowning. “Eight years does seem far too short a term for such a constructive President. Or, at least, that’s what
I
think.”

Grace was feeling very foggy when she left Cas Doran’s office, but once she was out in the cold morning air, she remembered something she’d noticed while she was there. Something much more important than what a shame it was that Garth Wilkinson was shortly to retire. She had recognized the stationery on which Lazarus’s letter was written. The paper was expensive, and probably plenty of well-off, or very particular, people liked to use it. It was expensive and elegant, like everything of Chorley’s—for it was Chorley’s. Grace’s husband wasn’t much of a letter writer and tended to make all his plans on drawing paper in his workshop. So the stationery sat in a boxed block on the desk of Summerfort’s library, in full sunlight, often for weeks—and for months once the family packed up at the end of summer and went back to Founderston. The paper of the letter had been yellowed, and printed with a paler mark, a star shape, where Chorley’s fossilized starfish paperweight had sat while the sun shone and turned the page yellow around it.

“Laura,”
Grace thought, again. For the letter showed her niece’s lack of punctuation and, as Doran had so descriptively put it, her “schoolgirlish false officialese.”

But the handwriting was not Laura’s.

4

T WAS AFTERNOON WHEN THE CAR SENT FOR LAURA AND HER AUNT MARTA REACHED ITS DESTINATION. IT
passed through an open arch into the courtyard of the Grand Patriarch’s palace. Laura had a glimpse of Temple Square—of sunshine on damp cobblestones and people strolling about in their feast day finery. She could hear the music of an accordion coming from one of the cafés in the square. These signs of life came to her through a hot mist of fever and exhaustion.

The running boards of the car were slick with mud from country roads. Laura climbed out carefully. She had slippers on her feet and one of her aunt’s coats over the borrowed nightgown.

There was a priest waiting to meet them. Aunt Marta called him Father Roy. Marta and the priest fell into step, their heads together. As they were climbing the steps to the side entrance to the palace, Father Roy turned and gave Laura a sharp, wry look. Laura was led into a chilly room with dark wood-paneled walls and ceiling. Father Roy asked her to wait. He and Marta went out. A few minutes went by, then Laura heard several people hurrying back along the passage. Father Roy returned with a couple of black-clad religious sisters.
They got Laura up and conducted her out. Aunt Marta was nowhere in sight.

Laura was marched up several flights of stairs, along corridors, then out a door onto a rooftop walkway, which crossed from the roof of the palace to that of the Temple, and to a small door beneath the deep masonry lintel around the base of the dome. One of the sisters behind Laura tapped her back to urge her forward. Laura stooped and went on. The door led into a short tunnel, at the end of which Laura glimpsed a grille and, beyond that, a place she recognized, the gallery that ran around the inside of the dome, which was as far up as she’d ever been on visits to the Temple with her schoolmates. The sister behind Laura seized her arm and turned her in the narrow space to face a dark opening in the wall of the tunnel. “Wait,” the woman said. Laura heard a match struck. The sister edged past Laura, carrying a candle, and stepped up into darkness. She was standing on a stone staircase that disappeared upward in a tight spiral. She gestured for Laura to follow her.

The dome of Founderston’s Temple was eggshell smooth but was set into a four-tiered crown of decorated masonry, topped by an ornate turret. The turret had blind arches, window-shaped recesses filled with mortared stone. The stone was coated with gold leaf.

Like every other child in Founderston, Laura had wished she was allowed to climb high enough to stand on one of the little iron balconies below the dome. She had occasionally caught sight of someone up that high. And she—like every other child in the city—had noticed that a ladder ascended from one of the balconies to the golden turret on its top.

Laura remembered her childish wondering when she emerged from the long climb up the spiral staircase and found herself on the balcony below that ladder. The balcony
wasn’t big enough to hold four people, so one sister lingered at the top of the stairs while Father Roy edged around Laura and stepped onto the ladder. “Please follow me,” he said.

The dome was like a horizon. Laura felt that she was nestled up to the moon. Below, the accordion music and the metallic slither and clanging of a streetcar sounded far away. All noise was sucked up into the blue air surrounding them.

“It’s completely safe,” said the sister behind Laura. “Just go carefully.”

Metal loops enclosed the ladder at every fourth rung. Laura saw that she would be inside this protective spine of iron. She began to climb. Father Roy’s black coat flapped and crackled above her. The ladder vibrated. They ascended the curve till they weren’t climbing but crawling.

Laura put her head down and watched her hands. The more shallow the slope became, the more precarious she felt. When the curve had been steeper, gravity had seemed to hold her on the ladder; now it seemed all too easy to slip through the protection of the bars beside her and slide away down the smooth marble skin of the dome. Laura stopped. She clutched the ladder and closed her eyes.

“Come on, you’re nearly there,” the woman behind her said.

“What’s the holdup?” said the sister bringing up the rear; she sounded anxious.

“Lift your head, Laura,” said Father Roy.

Laura raised her head and opened her eyes. She saw that Father Roy had emerged from the ribbed tube and was standing at a doorway in the gold wall. There was light in the room behind him. A room! An enclosed space. Safety.

Laura scrambled toward him. He gripped her by the collar of her coat and drew her into the room. There was a step down, and Laura stumbled and caught herself on the edge of
a big round table. The sisters piled in behind her, the second with a basket on her back filled with bundles, blankets, candles. The woman heaved the basket off her back and tipped it out onto the table, then lunged to catch the candles as they rolled toward its center.

In the little bit of light coming through the door, Laura saw that the table was about ten feet in diameter, so big that it nearly filled the round room. Its surface was concave, so anything set on it slid into the middle.

The sister sorted some candles from the pile of blankets. She placed them on the ledge above the door and lit one. Then she began to arrange the blankets into a bed on top of the concave table.

Father Roy faced Laura. “You’ll be safe here, and sufficiently removed that other people should be safe from you.”

Laura looked out the door at the blue air, then down at the floor, as if it were transparent and she could measure the distance between this isolated, elevated room and the nave of the cathedral below. She considered how far she’d climbed but still wasn’t sure if it was far enough.

Father Roy said, “Someone will come to wake you before everyone else’s usual bedtime. Any parishioners nodding off during the sermon will just have to take their chances.” The priest studied Laura’s face. “We can’t warn them,” he said, then, “His Eminence has spoken to your aunt and has read your letter. It
is
your letter, isn’t it? Anyway—we know what dream you have.”

The nuns were waiting at the door, flanking it like black sentinels, their hands concealed in the folds of their habits.

“Sleep now,” said Father Roy.

“Don’t lock me in,” Laura said.

He nodded and went out, followed by the sisters. The door was closed. Laura walked around and checked it—it gave when
she pushed the latch. She fastened it again, then peered around the cylindrical chamber. There was a mirror suspended in one corner of the room, high on the wall, angled down, a round mirror about forty inches in diameter. Beside the mirror was a handle and meshed cogs and wheels.

Laura went closer to inspect this machine and experimentally pushed the handle. It was stiff but slid half a turn. She heard a rolling noise of machinery moving in the ceiling and thought she saw a colored shadow swimming on the surface of the mirror. She leapt back. The whirring stopped, and the mirror showed her only the tabletop and the blot of her makeshift bed.

Laura took her aunt’s coat off and added it to the bedding. Then she pushed down the rolled sleeves of Marta’s nightgown. The sleeves dangled from the ends of her arms; they would do to trap her hands and save her face from scratches. Laura pulled the nightgown off, knotted the ends of the sleeves, then put it back on. Then she clambered onto the table, burrowed into the blankets, and closed her eyes.

Before long she was drowsy. She could sense the nightmare suspended in her sleep like a monstrous fish hanging motionless beneath the surface of a dark pool. It wanted to swallow her. She was afraid but so worn out that she simply gave in and went under.

Laura struggled up in pain. Her tongue hurt, and the roots of her nails, which she’d bent back by clawing at the tabletop. She lay still. There was salty blood in her mouth. She opened her eyes. The room was filled with bright light. By the light she saw first the small tears in the sleeves of her nightgown, and her fingers hooked through the cloth, nail tips split and
nail beds white with prolonged pressure. She closed her hands, hid her abused fingertips in her palms. Then Laura saw that the sleeves of her nightgown were covered in color—blurred scales in warm terra cotta—and that there was movement in the color, a tiny, flapping splash of vivid red and shapes that crawled in a grid of brown and gray, through which—
within which
—she could see the shape of her own arm.