Dreamseeker (21 page)

No! No! Please, God, not that!

There was no mistaking it now: this was the creature from my dreams, the void-wraith, devourer of dreams, whose wound I still bore on my arm. Somehow, the terrible forces we'd unleashed had enabled it to cross into the real world, and now it hovered over the compound, feeding on the chaos. Its presence was an icy wind that sucked all the heat from the world, and I could see a film of frost spreading across the treetops beneath it, the leaves curling and dying as a glistening white shroud enveloped them.

Then the wraith looked at me. I wasn't sure how I knew that, when it had no eyes, but I could feel its scrutiny in every fiber of my being. “Run!” I screamed. But a crack of thunder split the night, drowning out my warning. I could see children strung out along the length of the road, the frontmost ones lost in shadow as they fled for safety. But not fast enough. If I ran in that direction too, following them, the dream-wraith would come after me, and then they would be vulnerable. I thought of the trees behind me, now sheathed in ice, and shuddered. Even if the thing didn't attack the children outright, its mere proximity
to them might cause damage. I needed to flee in a different direction, and that meant only one thing: into the woods. I wouldn't be able to run as fast there, but at least I would be running alone, and if the wraith followed me, the children would be safe from it.

So I turned to the north and ran by the side of the fence until I passed the end of the compound, then I dove into the forest and kept running. I had left the fire behind, and the moonlight coming through the trees was minimal, so I ran in near darkness. I tripped and stumbled over various obstacles, struggling to keep on my feet. Lightning struck and for a moment everything was starkly visible, trees looming overhead like hostile aliens—and then that light was gone, too, and in its wake I was left blinded, and had to stumble through the darkness based on the memory of what I had just seen, until my vision cleared.

The wraith was getting closer, its presence a chill wind, each gust colder than the last. I dared to look up when the tree cover thinned, and I saw it looming overhead, its unnatural darkness devouring the stars. Despair gripped me. Where was I running to? What kind of refuge could protect me? This wasn't just a dream, like the last time; I couldn't just wake myself up to make it end. No little brother would hear my screams, shake me by the shoulders, and banish this thing. Sooner or later it
was
going to catch up with me, and not all the running in the world could save me.

Suddenly the trees were gone, and I was sprinting across open ground. I dared another glance overhead; the wraith was so large it looked like it had devoured half the sky, and it was bearing down on me. I turned back just in time to see the ground fall away before me, and I skidded to a stop, desperately trying to save myself. But the earth was too soft, and I couldn't get traction. Dirt crumbled away beneath me and I fell, landing with half my body on solid earth and half of it dangling over a chasm. It was probably the same crevice we'd followed on the way here, but in the darkness it looked ten times as deep. Desperately I grabbed onto an exposed tree root and tried to pull myself back to safety before the wraith fell upon me. Somehow I
managed to get back onto solid ground, and as I did so I felt something sharp stab me in the butt. The fetter in my pocket.

The
dream
fetter in my pocket.

The whole world was losing heat now, and frost began to coat the treetops surrounding me. I couldn't see the wraith any more, only a terrible blackness in place of the sky. Why was it coming after me? It had only done that before when I used my dream Gift. It never showed up in my regular dreams. So why was it hunting me now, when I was awake?

I dug the dream fetter out of my pocket. It looked like a piece of inert metal, but I knew the power that was in it. I had seen the wild energies of the other fetters crackling through the air of the compound, warping the very forces of nature. Maybe the wraith was responding to the energy in this one. Maybe it could sense the Dreamwalker's essence in it, the same way Morgana's Seers had.

Twisting around, I tried not to think about all that this fetter could have taught me, all the mysteries it could have revealed, all the powers it might have unlocked. None of that would do me any good if I was dead. With a cry of anguish I threw the thing as far I possibly could, and I watched it arc high over the chasm and then begin to fall. Lightning flashed, turning the smooth piece of metal into blazing fire, just for an instant. Then a dark and terrible presence rushed down into the chasm, passing so close to me that it left a film of frost on my hair. Ice formed along the edges of the crevice as it swept down its length, until it reached the falling fetter and enveloped it. Then the darkness began to draw into itself, blackness folding in upon blackness like some hellish origami. And an instant later it was gone. Half-blinded by the lightning, I couldn't identify the exact moment it vanished from the waking world, but I could feel the frigid weight of its presence lifting from the universe, and overhead the stars returned.

And then there was silence. I waited, breath held, to see what would come next.

Melting icicles tinkled softly overhead. A patch of frost broke from the chasm's rim, crumbling as it fell to the bottom, landing gently.

Nothing else.

Numbly I lowered my head to my arms, and I wept. I wept for the dead horses and the terrified children and even for the Weavers who had just lost all their work, because that was my doing. But most of all I wept for myself, for the loss of that precious hope I had enjoyed so briefly, when the key to knowledge was in my hand, and the future had appeared to be within my control. Now gone.

I was not consciously aware of the moment when this world gave way to the next, nightmares of the solid world morphing into nightmares of an imaginary one. But Rita found me shortly after dawn and woke me up, so sometime during the night that moment must have come.

Sometimes it is merciful not to
know.

S
HADOWCREST

V
IRGINIA
P
RIME

I
SAAC

I
SAAC WAS ASLEEP
when the spirit returned. He sensed it in his dream first: a presence in the shadows that was not quite visible, an unnatural breeze that chilled his skin whenever he looked in a particular direction. By the time he was fully awake, he knew that the event he'd been preparing for was finally at hand.

He squinted as he peered into the corner of the room where the spirit seemed to be. Struggling to see it. His teachers said his Gift was too weak to allow true death vision, but as he was beginning to discover, not everything his teachers taught him was correct. Whether they were deliberately hedging the truth to make him behave in a certain way, or just doing the best they could with the limited information they had, he didn't know, but the end result of both paths was the same: the only sure way for him to discover what his limits were was to test them.

He'd spent the last few days researching the techniques that the
umbrae majae
used to bolster their Gift, and now, as he peered into the darkness, he whispered the spirit's name over and over again, envisioning a ritual design he'd discovered in one of his father's books,
something called a
death codex.
Concentrating on it was supposed to help open a window into the world of the dead.
Jacob Dockhart,
he chanted mentally
. Jacob Dockhart. Jacob Dockhart.
He tried to visualize the boy's face, superimposing it over the shifting shadow that was in front of him, but it proved surprisingly difficult. The last time Isaac had seen Jacob, the boy's face had been contorted into a mask of pure horror; it was not the kind of image the mind naturally wanted to recall.

But slowly the darkness in the room seemed to coalesce, until there was a single human-sized shadow. While it lacked any color or detail, and there was only emptiness where its face should have been, it was vaguely human in shape, and Isaac felt a rush of pride at having managed that much. Most apprentices could not conjure a vision of the dead at all.

“Jacob Dockhart.” He spoke the spirit's name firmly, because it was important for the dead to know who was in charge. “Why are you here?”

He sensed that the spirit was responding to him, but the ritual that had allowed him to see it did not help him make any sense of its speech. Shutting his eyes for a moment, he envisioned another codex he'd found, which supposedly would open his mind to the voices of the dead. It was a dangerous pattern to invoke, especially for a mere apprentice. If some malevolent spirit decided to take advantage of the fact that he was now opening his mind to the influence of the dead, there was little he could do to stop it. Only a Shadowlord had the power to cast out a possessing spirit.

But no spirit tried to take control of him, and after a few moments of concentration he found that he could make out fragments of the spirit's speech. It wasn't that he heard actual words, so much as he sensed their meaning. The tide of ghostly sounds chilled his skin, it stirred his blood, it made his eyes burn and left a strange taste in his mouth. And in the wake of that came understanding. There was no real sound.

Help me
, the spirit seemed to be saying. Isaac's skin prickled as he
absorbed the words, not just through his ears but through every cell in his body. Even for a boy who was accustomed to the presence of the dead, the sensation was eerie.

Help me.

“I can't,” he said quietly. His voice was pitched low so that no one outside the room would hear him. “You've been bound to a Shadowlord. There's no way I can undo that, I'm sorry.”

Again he sensed, rather than heard, the ghost's question.
Forever?

Isaac hesitated. He knew that such slaves often became free when their masters died, but he also knew that Shadowlords who accepted Communion could claim the bound spirits of their predecessors. He didn't know enough about the process to give the boy's ghost any kind of definitive answer. “Why are you here?” he demanded.

For a moment there was silence. The air around him began to take on weight and substance; he felt as if the darkness were pressing in on him. Fear fluttered in his stomach, and for a moment he was tempted to try to banish his visitor—though God alone knew if he was capable of that. But instead he drew in a deep breath and waited.

After a few seconds the sensation eased a bit.
Unfinished,
came the ghostly flesh-whisper. A bit clearer this time.
Help me.

“Do you mean, you left something unfinished? From your mortal life? Is that it?”

The spirit's affirmation was a wordless sensation that raised the hairs on the back of his neck. But what sense did that make? The dead couldn't remember their former lives in any meaningful way. Details from that time were just disjointed shards, devoid of the neural connections that were needed to stir living passion. A physical brain was required to make any kind of emotional connection. Wasn't that what they taught in his
Introduction to Necromancy
class? Wasn't the whole point of the Shadows' wretched training program to teach their children how to live without passion, so they could be closer to the dead in their mindset?

Mae.
The name was a whisper of ice, of fire. Terrible frostbite yearning.

“You left her behind?” Isaac asked. “Is that it?” He hesitated. “You can't be with her again. I'm sorry, it doesn't work that way.”

As the next words were spoken the sensation of pressure returned, twice as suffocating as before.
Three steps from our mark.
A vision of a rising sun flashed in Isaac's mind. Or perhaps a setting sun? The image came and went so quickly he couldn't be sure.
Please,
the ghost begged.
Tell her.

Then the pressure eased. The spirit fell silent.

Isaac didn't know what to say. This situation was so bizarre that he didn't know how to respond to it. The spirit in his room wasn't just an ordinary ghost, it was a bound spirit, theoretically incapable of independent thought or action. It shouldn't be in his room at all, much less be reminiscing about lost loves and asking him for favors. That was so out of line with everything he'd been taught about spirits that if he told his teachers about Jacob's visitation they would tell him he was imagining things.

But what if his intense concentration on the boy during ritual had screwed things up? Maybe this spirit was not only bound to the Shadowlady in red, but had some kind of connection to Isaac as well. If so, his father would be pretty damn angry when he heard about it.

But his father didn't know about this yet. And neither did anyone else.

Best to keep it that way.

“Where would I find her?” he asked.

The spirit's gratitude rushed over him like hot burning ashes; for a moment he found it hard to breathe.
Where I died
, the ghost said.
Soul death. Not flesh death.

The death of the boy's flesh had taken place at the ritual, but what did
soul death
mean? Maybe he was referring to the moment when they'd fed him drugs to render him helpless, and he'd lost his last hope of freedom. No, it couldn't be that, because no outsider would have been present. Maybe this Mae was someone he'd known at the orphanage—someone he'd loved—and when he was sold to the Shadows, and separated from her forever, that was a kind of
death. The moment at which his former life ended, and he lost control of his fate.

Clearly the trail began at the orphanage. But did Isaac want to follow it? The fact that this spirit retained enough living memory to yearn for closure was all very well and good, but a Shadow was under no obligation to indulge the dead in their last whims. In time—probably very little time—Jacob's final memory of Mae would fade on its own.

But.

Whatever ritual bond had been established between Isaac and the ghost, it seemed to make his Gift stronger. And that had value to him. So did having a spirit indebted to him. As an
umbra mina
Isaac couldn't bind a spirit to him with one of the normal rituals, but that didn't mean he couldn't control one by other means. If the ghost of Jacob Dockhart was coherent enough to beg for closure, it was coherent enough to owe Isaac a favor. A damned big one.

“Do you think she's still there?” he asked.

But the boy's ghost was no longer in the room. Maybe its mistress had summoned it, to do whatever slave spirits did when they weren't visiting other Shadows. Maybe it had just communicated all that it could and felt no more need to manifest.

Jacob's ghost doesn't belong to me,
he reminded himself.
There are rules about this kind of thing. My father would never approve.

For the first time in his life, he wondered how much that really mattered.

The orphanage was a few miles outside of Luray, two train stops south of the place where Jesse and her friends had dropped Isaac off on their way into town. That day he'd had trouble finding a ride, and had wound up tucked between baskets of smelly produce on a cart heading to Luray's central market. Now he was wearing the robes of an apprentice Shadow, and that changed everything. People fought for the honor of transporting him, taxi-drivers jostling each other as they
tried to get his attention. Whether that was out of respect for his Guild or fear of a Shadow's displeasure, or simply because they assumed that a member of such a rich and prestigious Guild would tip them well, was anyone's guess.

No one questioned his presence at the orphanage. The minimum-wage security guard standing duty at the gate looked pointedly at the sigil of the Shadows embroidered on his robe and waved him through, then went back to reading his dog-eared novel. Isaac caught sight of the title as he passed:
Seven Guildmasters in Hell.

He probably could have gone to the main office and asked for help finding Mae, but that would increase the odds of this visit being reported to the Shadows, who would ask why the girl mattered to him. He wouldn't take such a step unless he had to.

He skirted the office complex and headed to where two large, featureless dorms were located. Most of the orphans worked during the day, in factories and workshops elsewhere on the property, so if he found someone to talk to there shouldn't be dozens of other people listening in. After walking around a bit he spotted a couple of skinny boys mowing the grass, and he approached them.

“Your Lordship!” The nearer of the two boys made an awkward gesture that was probably intended as a bow, but he stumbled doing it, and there was no mistaking the edge of fear in his voice. “How can we help you?”

His use of the wrong title wasn't worth the trouble of correcting. “I'm looking for a girl named Mae,” he said. “Do you know her?”

The boy looked back at his companion. Whatever silent communication passed between them, it was clear they were both suspicious of the request.

“I just want to talk to her,” Isaac said. He shouldn't have to give them any kind of explanation, but their fear was rational, and he respected it.

The younger boy hesitated, then pointed east. In the distance, Isaac saw a low building with smokestacks. “She's working at the mill.”

He nodded curtly, thanked them for the information—which
seemed to surprise them both—and headed that way. It was a bit of a hike, but long before he got to the building he could smell it. Even diluted by the open air, Its faint chemical odor was enough to make his eyes sting. As he got closer, he could hear the rumbling of machinery inside the building, probably steam driven.

There was no security, only a heavy door with a lock as big as his fist. He raised a hand to knock, then reconsidered and let himself in. There was no antechamber, just a vast workroom with a row of steam-driven looms running down each side. Some of the girls and boys running the machines were so young they had to stretch to reach the controls, while the smallest children of all darted underneath the machines, dodging shifting combs and flying shuttles to retrieve fallen objects and pull gobs of lint out of the machinery. It looked hellishly dangerous.

The overseer spotted Isaac immediately and climbed down from his elevated platform at the far end of the workspace to talk to him. Though his manner was polite, it was hardly welcoming; Isaac guessed he was suspicious about why a young Shadow would show up in his mill. Or maybe the man was just territorial by nature, and the arrival of any stranger in his workspace made his fur bristle. “Your visit honors us, Sir. May I ask what interest the illustrious Shadows have in our facility?”

“I've come to talk to one of the orphans here. Her name is Mae.”

The overseer's eyes narrowed suspiciously. “On what business, may I ask?”

“Guild business,” Isaac said shortly. He could tell that the overseer wasn't satisfied by that answer, and for a moment the man just stared at Isaac, waiting for him to offer more information. After a moment of silence the man glared resentfully and gestured toward the machines. “This way.” He led Isaac to where a young girl was working, and she was so fixated on her work that when the overseer prodded her she jumped.