Storm Dreams (The Cycle of Somnium Book 1) (5 page)

Cassidy stared up at the
Nubigena
again. She stared back, her long round body nodding to him in the silent wind. Not the home he would have wanted, but it seemed better than this island. Compared to the hotel with cold women and the distant existence of the
real world
, as Banner called it, the great Zeppelin was loving by comparison.

Do I have a purpose in this world? he thought, then wondered which world he meant.

Cassidy watched the storm through the porthole of his quarters. After six months, life aboard the
Nubigena
had become
something akin to normal. Since he had no memory of what normal really was, he supposed this must be it. Despite a wish to break out and see the world, perhaps find the one who’d dreamt him, Cassidy had decided this was good a place as any to learn the ropes of this reality. Today he was playing yet another game of stymied chess with Brewster, an exercise which always ended in frustration.

“Just try, Old Boy,” Brewster said. “
Pretend
you know how to move.”

The Englishman had spent weeks trying to teach him how to move pawns, but he couldn’t hold the knowledge long enough to use it. The game simply wouldn’t stick. It was as if his mind refused to create certain types of habits.

“It’s like riding a horse. One never forgets.”

Cassidy sighed without turning around. “How do you know I used to play?”

“Everyone plays chess. Besides, you’ve told me you see aerial battle like a board game.”

“Yes, I see the concept in my mind, but I can’t connect it to the pieces.” Cassidy watched the Englishman mull over the board. “And explain why you can’t play both sides yourself. You remember how the pieces move, but you can’t play the game without an opponent.”

Brewster took a deep breath and rubbed his chin. “I know. That one bothers me too. I play fine with Franz.”

“Yes, but he always has to make the first move.”

Brewster nodded, still staring at the perfectly set pieces. “I can set them up though. And I
do
usually win.”

Cassidy moved to his bed and began field stripping and cleaning his Mauser. It was one thing he could do without thinking, and the actions made him feel like something made sense. Everyone showed holes in their behaviour; like Ned, who ate all day but never drank anything, or Jayce who no one had ever seen use the head, unlike Franz who everyone knew just couldn’t. They were all a patchwork of half memories and quarter lives. Everyone except Banner. “Where’s he taking us now?” Cassidy asked.

Brewster pushed the chessboard aside and smoothed the short brown hair beneath his cap. “Well, we’ve spent as much time in the Twilight as we usually dare. Longer, really. You might get to see the
real
world very soon.”

Cassidy finished his gun-cleaning, slid a fresh line of shells into the external clip and chambered a round. He hadn’t wanted to admit it, but the thought of visiting the
real
world filled him with more anxiety than joy. His feelings ranged from hope that the elation of being there might make him feel more
real
himself to the intense fear that it might not.  He settled on the latter.

“You’ll like it.” Brewster stood. “It’s a good deal more dangerous for us in some ways, but it’s a tough journey for the Armada. They’ve got nothing like this girl,” he said, thumping his fist against the
Nubigena’s
hull. “Their ships are made of dreamstuff. They steal real fighters, like the ones you shot down, but they, themselves, can’t hold their bodies together where we’re going.”

“Why are you so loyal to him?” Cassidy asked.

Brewster paused. “He rescued me. What else would I do?”

Cassidy shrugged. “Go somewhere. Have a life.”

Brewster shook his head. “I wouldn’t know how.” He glanced at his watch. “Blast. Gun duty. Cheers.” He left for his post at the new gun platform Karl had constructed atop the Zeppelin.

Cassidy sat back and eyed the chessboard from his bed. It felt so foreign and familiar at the same time, like a country he’d studied in books, but never been to. On the other hand, there was also a déjà vu about it. He felt like he’d all but won tournaments of some kind, but doubted it had ever actually been chess.

Brewster burst back through his door minutes later. “Come on, Old Boy. You’ve got to see this.”

Cassidy leapt to his feet and followed Brewster to the bridge. When he got there, the Englishman nodded to Banner at the helm. “He’s never seen one, Captain. Thought he might enjoy.”

“Enjoy what?” Cassidy asked, and then he saw it. Miles in the distance a coloured aura floated towards the ship. At a distance it looked like a curtain of rainbow, but, as it neared, it looked more like a cloud of colour.

“Usually, we just see them in the real world, but sometimes they float out beyond it,” Banner said, his mouth widened in an excited smile. “Here, there’s a lot more colour. And they’re a lot more solid.”

“Northern lights,” Brewster said.

“Aurora borealis,” Banner said, preferring the more exotic term.

“Is it safe?” Cassidy asked.

Banner nudged the throttle forward. The
Nubigena
sped up and tipped its nose several degrees towards the glowing mass of gasses. In moments colour filled the sky and the ship slipped into it as if it were a solid cloud. The cloud penetrated the gondola, filling the bridge with a rainbow vapour that cast the controls, deck and the airmen themselves in bright shades of shimmering colour. Cassidy looked down at his own hands. They shifted through the spectrum as he wiggled his fingers. “Is it always like this?” he asked.

“This side of reality,” Brewster said, his mouth breaking out in a wider grin. “There are entire worlds in some of them.”

As he said it, wraiths of men began sliding through the walls from the front of the ship. They didn’t float, but stood in mid-air as if the deck were moving beneath them, picking them up from whatever plane they had occupied moments before. The spectres hardly regarded Cassidy or the rest of the crew as they chattered in languages he couldn’t understand, but they sounded Slavic of some kind. Their clothing ranged across the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and most of them appeared to be aristocrats or royalty of one country or the other.

“Prussians,” said Brewster.

“And Russians,” said Ned.

“Guests!” said Banner with glee in his voice. He cut the engines, checked the buoyancy and belted the helm and pedals, letting the craft drift through the borealis. “To the galley,” he said, and led the crew aft.

Cassidy brought up the rear. He paused and watched more spirits speed through the gondola’s hull. Banner certainly knew his craft, but letting the Zeppelin drift without a pilot seemed absurd, even for him.

When he arrived in the galley the party was already in full swing. Banner had Ned bring in all the champagne he could find and ordered Karl to make something appropriate for the occasion. The old German, however, had begun preparations at the first sign of colour. He’d been the unofficial ship’s cook for years and knew that job almost as well as mechanics.

The guests exchanged jovial banter with their host. Their English was spotty at best, but Banner didn’t seem to care. Neither did he mind that none of them could eat or drink anything but their own spectral food and ale. He had decided to make up for what they could not.

“Cassidy,” Banner bellowed over the volleys of foreign tongues, “eat, drink. Enjoy.”

Cassidy sat down as Karl placed a meal in front of him and a flute of champagne by his left hand. The shimmering colours ran through the liquid, tinting it into a layered drink of bright hues.

“Is good, no?” a man in a Russian jacket and hat said. He sat down and regaled Cassidy with stories of war, royal pageantry and conquests of the fairer sex. Cassidy nodded as best he could, and made polite exclamations when they appeared necessary. “You’re a pilot, no?” the Russian said, after a story of the first time he’d fired a musket. “You fly?”

Cassidy nodded.

“Yes,” the Russian said, slapping the table, surprising Cassidy that the man could actually
touch
the surface. “You look like a pilot. I mean, you look like one who would be a pilot.” He shook a bony finger. “I’ve seen you before.” He shook his head. “No, I mean, I’ve seen pilots like you before. You,” he said, wagging the finger in Cassidy’s face, “not you, but—ah, is good food, no?” The Russian slapped Cassidy on the back. It felt like a soft electric jolt. “Is strange. I am ghost.
You
are ghost too, eh?”

“I’m a dream,” Cassidy said. He still hadn’t touched his food and the champagne was going flat in his flute.

“Ghost. Dream.” The Russian shrugged. “You fly,” he said, giving a strong drunken laugh. “You fly to the stars.”

Cassidy poked his steak with the tines of his fork. The Russian got up and joined several others in a conversation in his mother tongue. Cassidy couldn’t shake the coldness the phantoms brought with them. Nobles, rogues, gypsies and escaped convicts, riding their own invisible vessel, whatever it was, through the coloured lights. They could be
real
, in a sense, within the floating rainbow. Here they stood talking and drinking aboard a ship just passing through as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

He looked up to see Banner staring at him from across the table. The boisterous captain lifted his flute in cheers. Cassidy lifted his and tried to match Banner’s smile. He sipped and let the silver bite of alcohol sting the back of his throat. Just be young, the captain seemed to be saying. Why do I feel so old? But he emptied the flute and dug into the steak. Damn the doubt, he thought and wiped his mouth with a linen napkin. He smiled and laughed a genuine guffaw.

Banner gestured wildly, slapping everyone who came near on the back. He motioned for Karl to bring more champagne. Banner’s appetite was as ravenous as his hunger for laughter and conversation. Though he never stopped talking, he still managed to down plate after plate of food. Not even Brewster, who seemed a bottomless pit when it came to pork chops, ate a tenth as much.

The coloured fog thinned and the phantom guests began departing. One by one, they bowed their farewells and whisked away through the back of the galley and off towards the tail of the Zeppelin and beyond, where they no doubt remained within their floating cloud as the
Nubigena
drifted out of its boundary.

Most of the crew returned to their duties as the crowd thinned, leaving only Cassidy, Banner, the thin haze of the outer Borealis and a lone man at the end of the table. The man stood, leaning on a pair of crutches. His brown jacket cast a sharp contrast to the blurring blues and greens slowly fading from the air. Even now, the reds and yellows washed from the surface of the table and chairs.

Banner stood, his face white.

The man in the brown coat wore an expression of indignation and pain, but as he opened his mouth, it turned to one of pleading. “Why did you leave me?” he asked. “Why?”

The skin at the edge of Banner’s eyes tightened and quivered. It was as if only the two of them existed now. Cassidy felt like a mere observer floating in the air. “I did what I had to do,” the captain said, but it came out as a whisper Cassidy could barely hear. “You gave me no choice.”

There was something familiar about the man Cassidy couldn’t put his finger on. Something in the eyes, perhaps, or just the general visage. The man clenched his fists against the crutch’s handles and wept as the colours faded completely, and the Borealis yanked him away with the rest of its ghostly prisoners.

Banner slumped to his chair, letting his elbows dangle over the arms. He looked up at Cassidy with desperate eyes that reminded him of the man’s eyes. “I’d no choice,” Banner repeated.

Cassidy nodded. “An old crew member?” he asked, trying to keep the bitterness from his voice, but it was probably true. Some dream that had been sacrificed for whatever was necessary at the time. He met Banner’s eyes though, and gazed into them, unblinking. For a moment he saw Banner for who and what he was. A wave of sadness ran through Cassidy and tears rolled down his cheeks. “I’m sorry,” he said, but didn’t know why.

Banner gave a deep sigh and forced a thin smile. “I think it’s time you saw the
real
world.”

Cassidy stood by the girders, out of everyone’s way, or beside the helm where Banner pointed things out as they slipped between various layers of the Twilight.  It was a region more vast then Cassidy had imagined at first.

Banner always wanted Cassidy on the bridge now, though he hadn’t been assigned any specific duties. Upside down worlds, crystal caverns and regions of pure light passed by as the ship moved from gate to gate. Thousands of floating islands like Arcadia dotted the landscape, but so did floating trees, giant boulders and buildings with no ground on which to stand. Other islands looked man made, dangling from a series of giant gas bladders that made them look beautiful but fragile, the taught lines all but invisible at a distance.

“We’re having to go a back way,” Banner explained, as the sky shifted hues and the crackles of the last portal faded. “Better for our situation.”

Something about the colours told Cassidy they’d gated into a dream. How these strange paths through the Twilight and the Everdream worked was still beyond him. “The Armada?” he asked.

“What else?” Franz said from one of the consoles.

Cassidy looked up to see if Banner had anything to say on the matter, but the steely eyes remained fixed on the horizon, his jaw set. He wasn’t smiling.

“At least it’s a pretty day,” Cassidy said sarcastically, trying to break the awkward silence.

“Dammit,” Banner shouted.

Cassidy thought he was being reprimanded, but a moment later the captain spun the wheel hard to the starboard and an Armada skyship banked beyond the port windows. Cassidy looked over at Franz as if to say, ‘how did he know?’ Franz shot back a look that seemed to reply, ‘he just does’.

“Shall I take out the Fokker?” Cassidy asked.

Banner shook his head. “Too late. This is an ambush.”

Cassidy glanced wildly out the windows as fighters banked and dove. Twenty. Perhaps forty. A fleet. “But how?”

“Someone tipped them off.” Banner’s tone was flat and even. He took a deep sigh and dipped the
Nubigena’s
nose. A fantastic city spread out across the world below. Its black spires and tall pyramids stretched towards the sky.

“How do we fight?” Cassidy asked.

“We don’t.” Banner gritted his teeth and motioned Franz to push the throttle all the way down. “There’s a sleeper dreaming now,” he said, and aimed the ship between two of the twisting spires. “One who has the same dream every night.”

Cassidy braced as the Zeppelin shuddered and the Armada’s guns rattled around the Gondola’s hull. “Won’t they follow us?”

“Damn right, they’ll follow us,” Banner said and slammed the right pedal to the floor, jerking the ship upwards again as it reached the two spires. It wasn’t enough. The trajectory still appeared to take them into the ground just past the towers. But as they slid between, the sky crackled and the world changed.

***

Blackness. Only blackness. Not dark. Not a lack of light, but thick tangible black.

Banner opened the flap on the speaking tube and addressed the crew, his voice loud but calm. “Gentlemen,” he said, as the Armada ripped its way into the reality around them. The bridge looked hazed, as if seen through a darkened lens. “I need you to listen carefully.” He glanced at Cassidy. Banner’s grey eyes looked like steel, but fear played behind them. He spoke into the tube again. “I need you all to close your eyes, lay flat on the floor and concentrate on anything you can, as hard as you can. Anything as solid and
real
as possible. Don’t let your mind become blank.” He nodded to Cassidy. Cassidy began lying down. “This will be bad,” he said. “I’ve been here before.”

Before Cassidy put his head to the floor, he noticed a man with a thick grey moustache which seemed to cover half his face floating out in the black void. The man floated in the murk naked, his grey skin wrinkled. His arms flailed, features twisted with fear. The expression on the old man’s face made Cassidy want to hide. He closed his eyes.

All sound spun through his ears and leaked away as his stomach sank to the bottom of an infinite well. Thinking felt like trying to climb a mountain of mud and every concept he tried to lock onto slipped out of his head. Planes. He thought of planes and sank his nails in. It was as though he were being dragged through the sky by the tail fin, whipped left and right by an agile pilot who rolled and dove as though trying to shake the devil.

The control stick. Cassidy locked onto the control stick. He gripped it with both hands. Dug both feet into the pedals, not caring which way they steered him, only that they were
real
and solid.

Was anything
real
, or solid?

The plane vanished, and he spun through space without a body. Fingers gripped for ledges a thousand miles away and feet thrashed empty air for footing, but they were far below, fathoms down in a black sea.

Chess. He was a black knight on a wooden checkerboard. That image vanished as well. He flailed, his hand slipping from the chess piece, back to the control stick of his fighter, the handle of his Mauser. Like the brittle rungs of a ladder collapsing, he fell from one to the next. The
Nubigena
sailed off without him, leaving his consciousness spinning in space. Banner’s eyes stared back at him from somewhere in his recent memory. Steel. Grey steel. Something about the man was more real than anything he’d ever seen and the captain’s iron hands gripped his shoulders and slammed him downward. Cassidy’s feet struck ground. His boots met a solid floor.

He blinked, taking in the world with short shudders of sight from where he lay on the cool aluminium. Banner stood at the helm, fists gripping the wood spokes, knuckles white. His knees had buckled several inches and sweat poured down his face, but his gaze appeared to remain locked on some horizon far beyond the void.

Franz lay on the floor beside Cassidy, eyes closed, body fading to nothing, to solid, to nothing, to solid again. Everyone else on the bridge was gone. The Armada had vanished. The Void became a series of concentric circles that reminded him of rubbing his eyes through his eyelids.

Cassidy gripped the floor as the ship lurched from side to side, jerking at the helm and pedals. Banner yanked the wheel back to level, but he slumped forwards against the wooden spokes, having to use the force of his whole body to right the floundering vessel.

Cassidy stumbled towards him and caught the wheel with both hands. Banner glanced over, and blinked, his eyes raw and glassy. The eyes returned to a steel grey. He nodded and together they held the helm straight. Cassidy put his weight into the right pedal to keep the nose up as Banner put his on the left to keep it down.

The blackness broke around them, turning the sky crisp as the colours returned more vibrant than Cassidy had ever seen. The atmosphere crackled, and he realized they had just slid through another door and into the centre of a grey electric storm.

Banner collapsed to the floor. Cassidy belted the helm and set the pedals as he’d seen the captain do. He knelt and held Banner by the shoulders.

“Shouldn’t have cut through that dream,” Banner said. “How many did we lose?”

“I don’t know,” Cassidy said. “Franz is here.” He glanced back to make sure the young German had remained solid. “The Armada’s gone.”

Banner closed his eyes and opened them again. A tear ran down his cheek. “I’m sorry,” he said, and passed out.

***

“Nietzsche,” Brewster said. “German philosopher. Rough life, from what I hear. Deep fears. Probable madness.”

Cassidy nodded. “To think he dreams of that every night.” Clouds drifted in gentle strips across the sky like pieces of smooth silk rippling around the new gun platform atop the Zeppelin. It was Brewster’s turn at watch and Cassidy had come to keep him company.

“Not just that,” said Brewster, “he’s also dead. His fear, his
dream
was so strong that it burnt itself into the Everdream. The damned thing never went away when he woke up, and so it remained after his death.”

“Damn,” was all Cassidy could think to say. “But I saw him.”

Brewster grunted. “Dream ghost. Strange creatures. Solid as hell, but mostly mad.”

The Englishman fidgeted with the pair of Maxims Karl had fixed to a swivelling turret. Thank God the old engineer hadn’t been one of the crewmen lost to the void. Chester, Charlie and Jayce hadn’t been seen since the journey through Nietzsche’s dream. Ned had been presumed lost until they found him huddled beneath a table in the mess, babbling about “the darkness of his soul.”

“Are the others dead?” Cassidy asked as his friend searched the skies for any signs of Armada fighters through the narrow windows in the gun turret.

Brewster raised an eyebrow.

“I mean
our
guys,” Cassidy said.

“Wish I could say, Old Boy. Still back in the Void, for all I know.”

“Can’t we rescue them?” Cassidy asked. The thought of the three men drifting forever in someone’s nightmare made his stomach queasy. The darkness. The drifting isolation. He didn’t want to ever shut his eyes again.

Brewster shook his head. “You were there. It would be like sailing into a whirlpool to save someone already at the bottom.”

“But the point is, he’s leaving them,” Cassidy said, searching the sky along with his friend.

Brewster didn’t say anything. He kept peering into the grey sky as if hoping to see a bird, or some other form of life.

Cassidy pulled his cap down over his head. Perhaps he was being unfair to the captain. He’d seen the look in Banner’s eyes as they cleared the nightmare. It was the only thing that had ever visibly shaken the man, other than the strange ghost from the party in the Borealis. The clouds changed to cottony masses, reducing their visibility by hundreds of yards. “So where is he taking us now?”

“Don’t know, but he’s set on it like nothing I’ve ever seen. Once, I remember—” Brewster cut off as the distant clouds crackled with green electricity. “This isn’t just a stop. He’s after something. And we’re close to something.”

“Another gate?”

“Gate of all gates,” Brewster said. “Open the windows.”

Cassidy furrowed his brow, but opened the two windows in the boxy canopy Karl had constructed atop the gun platform to shield them from the wind. The smell of ozone hit him full in the face as wind gusted in. It brought his senses to full as the
Nubigena
struck the web of light. The aluminium structure shuddering as it pushed through. Other gates had been without turbulence, but this one rattled the struts and girders as if the Zeppelin were skimming the rift’s shockwave.

As the
Nubigena
passed through, reality brightened. It was difficult to explain, even to himself, but the dull grey of the canvas shone as if the light itself were more
real
. The ozone faded and fresh air filled the gun-box. It felt warm as his lungs filled with the new air. Cassidy’s head swam as if he’d never breathed oxygen before. “This is
real
,” he said, almost laughing. “It’s
real
.”

Brewster grinned. “It’s
real
, alright. More
real
than you or I will ever be, but it’s dangerous, too. If we don’t find a storm soon, the ship will continue, but we won’t. We need the energy or we’ll fade out.”

The
Nubigena
seemed to breathe the
real
air as well. It moved faster, almost joyous, like a schooner catching a quickening gale. Cassidy braced himself against the sudden acceleration. “She likes it.”

Brewster nodded. “It’s her world.”

The airship sliced through the cumulous formations, speeding towards a patch of darkness in the distance. “Why can’t the Armada follow us here?” Cassidy asked, as they neared the storm. The
Nubigena
picked up more speed as if anticipating the black clouds.

Brewster shrugged as they entered the nebulous mass. “Same reason
we
don’t do well here. If it weren’t for this ship—”

Thunder shattered the still air and lightning gave the clouds veins. The rumbling clouds enveloped the ship like a clutching hand. Cassidy felt the difference immediately. His skin livened. He felt solid. Strong. He felt like he could fly on his own.

“I need to head down,” Brewster shouted, over the rush of howling wind that gusted in the open windows.

Cassidy stopped him from closing the windows. “I’ll be there in a few,” he said. The wind brought a menagerie of new sensations. His skin was on fire with a kind of warmth he’d never felt, despite the cold of the air. His mind felt alive. It was as if he’d been flying a crippled plane all this time. He laughed out loud. His thoughts were more detailed. The lines in his hands were deeper and more distinct. This is reality, Cassidy thought.

My God, I’m an alien here.