The Queen of Dreams (The Dashkova Memoirs Book 6)

by Thomas K. Carpenter

  "No. You're right. Nothing like that at all," I said, leaning against the building.

  "If the city was abandoned, it wasn't abandoned hastily. It was done so with planning and forethought. Those beetles couldn't have been the cause, otherwise there would be carriages on the street with bones at the steering," she said.

  Nasrine looked back to me. "Katerina, I'm sorry. I forgot you were injured in all that. Let's get inside and see if we can get that fixed."

  The flood of energy I'd had from the flight into the hut faded, and my knees buckled. Nasrine caught me, and together we stumbled into the hut.

  It was a modest dwelling, and my first impression was that a scholar had been living in it. Nasrine brought me to the simple bed in the corner.

  A brick chimney sat in the corner with old wood piled neatly next to the hearth and an iron stove for cooking. On one side, there was a writing desk covered in faded, yellow parchments and a black leather book. In the center of the room was a simple table upon which three porcelain plates were stacked with a lone fork set at twelve o'clock. There was only one chair.

  Nasrine found materials for a fire and got the stove burning. An old bucket of tepid water sat in the corner. She filled the iron pot to start it boiling.

  She prepared new bandages while she waited. When the water was hot enough, she took off the bloody cloth on my back and cleaned it with a hot towel. I was too exhausted to cry. After the wound was clean, she stitched up my back.

  With the loss of blood staunched, I fell into a dreamless sleep. When I awoke, the iron stove ticked from cooling. The hut was empty.

  I tried getting off the cot, but my limbs shook and I fell back on it. A cup of water sat by the bed, so I drained it with trembling hands, spilling some onto my bare chest. I wrapped the sheet around my shivering body and descended back into slumber.

  This time, I dreamt of Catherine. She stood on the other side of a glass wall. She was shouting something, but I couldn't hear.

  When I woke again, Nasrine had returned. She stood at the iron stove, which was hot again. The tangy smell of bacon filled the air, stirring pangs in my stomach.

  The perpetual dusk left me with no way to gauge time, and my pocket watch was in my jacket lying across a chair, too far to reach.

  Nasrine looked over her shoulder. "Good, you're awake. This place is too quiet."

  "Where did you find bacon?" I asked, mouth filling with saliva.

  "It's not bacon, but something similar," she said.

  "I...I don't understand. Where did you find food? Did you find people?" I asked.

  "No people. But I did some exploring. There's a well in a nearby courtyard and I found a grocer. To my surprise, there was a back room filled with frozen foods. I could find no means by which it maintained its temperature, so I assume it's by magic."

  "What if it makes us sick? This otherworld food?" I asked.

  She shrugged. "We'll find out soon enough."

  When the faux-bacon was finished, Nasrine sat at the table, while I stayed on the cot. There were lots of food-related noises going on while we ate.

  After I finished, I drained two more mugs of water and passed out again. This time, the dreams were of Catherine and I lying in bed after she overthrew her husband. We still wore our military uniforms and were laughing and kissing. It was one of the happiest moments of my life.

  When I woke again, Nasrine was seated at the writing table, reading the book that had been left there.

  I struggled to speak at first and had to take a drink to clear my dry throat. "Has anything happened while I've been convalescing?"

  Nasrine looked up from the book. Her hair had been pulled back with a piece of cream cloth. It took her a moment to answer, I assume because she was deep in thought about whatever was in that book.

  "Those beetles were the last bit of excitement. But I've learned a thing or two from this," she said, holding up the open book with two hands. "It's a diary, of sorts."

  "Any clues to...well, anything?" I asked.

  "Whoever wrote this was a traveler like us. She came here unexpectedly, and then spent her time trying to figure a way out," she said.

  "She?"

  Nasrine bit her lower lip. "I guess I've been assuming a she. It reads like a woman...I think."

  "Did she escape?" I asked hopefully.

  The skin around her eyes creased with thought. "Normally, I like to read my tales in order, but in this case I skipped to the end to find out what happened to our heroine. If she escaped, or not, it remains a mystery. The last entry is about taking another trip to the center of the city to visit something."

  Nasrine looked into the distance, a frown on her lips.

  I sat up, swallowing back a bit of bile. My limbs were weak, but I didn't want to lie down anymore.

  "Don't keep me in suspense," I said.

  "Well, it's not entirely clear. Part of the diary is written in English, but there are sections, phrases, whole pages in other languages, most I don't understand. Whatever she went to see she describes with the phrase toi-hazara. I can't figure out what it is, but these drawings must relate to it," she said, holding up the parchments with symbols on them. The one in her hand looked like a bird with two flat lines above its head.

  Nasrine shook her head. "She's a frequent traveler, that much is clear by the myriad of languages she uses. I even found some Turkish words."

  "Could this be the other Baba Yaga that we went after? The one who left the note?" I asked.

  Nasrine didn't quite understand my meaning, so I took a moment to explain how Morwen and the others existed in the hut, including the Da Vinci painting we'd found in the Library of the Dead suggesting a fourth witch.

  "Probably," she said, "though she makes no mention of Morwen or the hut."

  I glanced around the room. "Why wouldn't she have taken her notes when she left? Do you think she expected to leave, or did something happen to her?"

  "The tone suggests she was not planning on leaving yet, unless she wrote about it in another language. That's the problem. There's so much I cannot read," she said, grumbling. "When you're feeling better, you should try. Maybe you can glean a few things that I cannot."

  When I was well enough to climb out of bed, Nasrine took the cot and promptly fell asleep. She'd been lying on the hard wooden floor while I was recovering.

  The diary and drawings were an enigma. Nasrine's analysis of them was better than I could muster, since she had a better command of English than I. The symbols intrigued me. Not only the symbols, but the strange notations in the bottom right corner of each parchment. There were two of them: the first a series of dots—either one, two, or three; the second a line that faced various directions.

  I spent a lot of time studying them, feeling like I should understand somehow. They tickled something in my brain, but no matter how hard I concentrated, the truth never revealed itself.

  After a few hours of frustration, I threw the papers on the floor. One floated to the floor, flipping over on its way. I nearly fell out of the chair when I saw the words written in the corner of the parchment. The script was neat and matched the diary. The letters were unmistakable.

  The words read: "Who is Katerina Dashkova?"

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  The mystery of the message turned into a scavenger hunt. First we scoured the diary and parchments, looking for hidden messages within the writing, turning them over and holding them up to the flame to see if new writing would appear.

  I tried glazing the papers with my sorcery, straining not to annihilate the fragile parchment. We scoured the hut, examining every floorboard, every piece of wood.

  Once I'd seen the words "Who is Katerina Dashkova?" the whole place seemed like a riddle. It also threw into question the idea that the mystery woman was really part of Baba Yaga, since I had not met her. Which meant that it had to be someone else who had left the note.

  After a week, we were spent, having exhausted ourselves on hope that this mystery woman
might help us escape somehow since she knew my name. If the clues were hidden in plain sight, we were blind to them.

  That was when we realized we needed to head into the city center, to find out what our mystery woman had gone after. I was still a little weak from my wounds, so we decided to wait another week.

  Sick and tired of reading the diary for the fiftieth time, Nasrine left the hut and went in search of reading material. Not only did she not find any, she realized that there wasn't a single written word on anything: no shops, street signs, graffiti, or anything.

  Neither of us said it, but I think we both questioned reality at that point. Nasrine never voiced her concerns, but the way she reviewed the room, item by item, as if checking for the sign that nothing was real was as plain as the sky was blue. I worried that we'd somehow passed into the Queen of Dreams' realm, despite my concrete knowledge that we had not gone that way yet. Morwen had said that her realm did not extend into the place of the time pools.

  Unless Morwen had been false all along, but this point usually sent me into a loop, which was pointless and only left me frustrated. Better to assume that everything was real and forge ahead.

  We did that the very next day, packing supplies, including a rasher of cooked tangy bacon for our meal. We used a couple of bicycles that we found in a basement. They had wide handlebars, were heavier than a boulder, and the front tire was about half as big as the back. The wheels were wrapped in a leather-like material that cushioned the bumps better than expected. Nasrine was an expert, while I'd only ridden one a few times as a lark. In Philadelphia, there was never the opportunity, and the cobblestone streets would bruise one's rear from too much riding. So I practiced that morning, riding in slow, wobbly loops before feeling comfortable enough to make the journey.

  The bikes were a necessity in case we encountered the beetles again. We couldn't outrun them on foot. We'd heard signs of them in the last few weeks, like thousands of coins rubbing together, or distant constant thunder from at least a half a kilometer away. So we knew the creatures still haunted the city.

  "The sun's moved down a couple of degrees, don't you think?" I asked Nasrine, pedaling beside her, the effort burning in the back of my thighs.

  The dull orange-red blob in the sky circled us each day, staying right above the horizon. When we'd first arrived, the bottom edge had scraped the building tops. Now it had sunk lower.

  "I've been measuring its progress each morning, using a string and a piece of parchment with a hole. From the subtle changes, I've calculated that the sun will pass the horizon in forty-four days, leaving us in complete darkness," she said.

  "Forty-four days." I whistled, feeling the looseness of my teeth. Eating nothing but the tangy bacon and some other gamey meats had left my gums loose. We needed greens, but the dim sun had killed any plants long ago.

  "Already the wind feels colder," said Nasrine. "It'll drop quickly once the land stays in darkness for a few days."

  "Maybe that's why they abandoned the city," I said. "Because the sun would be going away forever."

  Nasrine made a clucking sound with her tongue. "Suns and planets operate on schedules. Even if it goes away, it will come back. I'd bet your life on it. And if they built a city, then they knew when and how much sunlight they would receive."

  "What's your hypothesis?" I asked.

  She arched an eyebrow in my direction, an acknowledgement that I was trying to speak her language. When I spoke that way in the Russian Academy of Science, the scientists never caught on that I knew much less than I let on. But being a good listener was a good substitute for knowing anything about their interests.

  "My hypothesis is that the people of the city have returned south, or north if we are in the south, where the sunlight will still reach them. This planet must have an irregular orbit, so its people cannot stay in the same latitude throughout the cycle. So they are forced to move from city to city while the weather changes."

  The idea intrigued me. It might explain the preserved nature of the city. They left things in their place and in an orderly fashion, moved.

  "That doesn't help us," I said.

  "No," she said, barely audible above the whirl of wheels. "It's quite a problem, in fact."

  A loud thud, like a cannonball landing on the roof of a steam carriage, startled me. My foot slipped off the pedal and I nearly crashed into Nasrine.

  It had come from ahead. We veered into an alleyway and climbed off our bikes. We leaned them against the limestone wall and peered around the corner.

  "It seems not everyone left," she whispered.

  "Or the wind is feeling frisky," I said.

  "That was too loud for..." her words trailed off and then she frowned in my direction.

  "I was only trying to lighten the mood. Things have been rather serious lately," I said.

  "Because they are. I don't want to die here," she said.

  "Neither do I. Let's go through this alleyway and take another way," I said.

  The street was narrower than the wide avenue we'd been on before, but we made good time into the city. I experimented with boosting my speed by sending jets of sorcery behind me. I felt like a hawk that had flattened its wings against its body and dove towards the earth. But I stopped the experiments when I lost control and almost hit a building, slamming my knuckles into the wall to stop myself.

  "There's a saying in the Ottoman Empire that fits you perfectly," said Nasrine with a smirk. "To dance at court is divine. To dance in battle is to die."

  "So you're saying we're at court?"

  She sighed heavily and pedaled ahead.

  When the buildings grew taller, four and five stories, we walked the bikes and stayed to the shadows on the sun side of the street. The feeling of being watched came back, the same as it felt the first day.

  It seemed we crossed some invisible line at some point where the city changed. The streets were narrow, buildings leered overhead, creating fields of shadow, and wind cut through the narrow passes at a high whistle. The outer city was warm and inviting, reminding me of long dinners at the cafés of Paris eating cheese and drinking copious amounts of wine. The inner area made me feel like cargo in the hold of a rat-infested transatlantic clipper.

  We rode slowly, as not to ride into an ambush. When something crashed on a nearby rooftop, like a cat fleeing a dog and knocking over a trash can, we parked the bicycles and proceeded on foot.

  "Did you see that?" asked Nasrine under her breath, whipping her head towards an alleyway.

  "I saw movement...I think," I replied.

  "What if not everyone left?" she asked.

  "Then we'll get answers. I'm tempted to announce in my loudest voice that we're here and we'd like to have tea and a bit of conversation," I said.

  Nasrine strained not to yell. "No...!"

  "I jest," I said. "Let's find a way up top. I think we need to get the lay of the city before we decide what we're going to do next."

  The locked door on the apartment building was no match for my picks. We climbed the narrow, steep stairs until we reached the top. With no obvious way onto the roof, I picked my way into an apartment.

  The furnishings were decorated in spring colors, light blues and soft yellows. The wooden furniture was expertly made, with intricate scrollwork. A child's toy—a wooden steam train in bright red—was left on the table, as if the child might return to claim it at any moment.

  After climbing out the window, we were able to take the iron ladder onto the roof. The tarry flat surface gave us a good view of the city.

  "Look!" said Nasrine, pointing to the trail of smoke reaching into the sky from a distant chimney.

  "I think that might be ours," I said.

  Nasrine blushed when she realized I was right. She oriented herself toward the center of the city and craned her neck around.

  After a brief inspection, we both came to the same conclusion about the shape of the city. It was a giant wheel. The wide avenue we'd been biking on before was a majo
r spoke. The hut sat on the far edge.

  Consequently, if we went a little deeper, maybe another quarter of a kilometer, we'd come to the center. The ten-story buildings formed a ring, the longer sides pointing outward, suggesting a space between them. They appeared to be granite and had no windows that we could see.

  Without comment, we returned to our bicycles and pedaled the remaining distance to our destination. Once again, when we neared, we stashed our bikes in an alleyway and went on foot.

  From the ground level, the ring of buildings looked like monoliths rather than places of occupation. I spied no entrances on the ground floor. My back kept tingling, but every time I spun around, nothing was there.

  Nasrine let a squeak out when I touched her arm to get her to stop, giving me a sheepish sorry-shrug when I looked at her. The knife in her hand looked feeble compared to the imposing structure ahead.

  As we passed between the buildings, the weak sunlight from the bloated sun stayed behind, except for a lone beam that shone through the gap. The air was much cooler, and I shivered in response.

  I called the magic to my mind, readying it should it become necessary. We went forward slowly. I kept checking behind us. When we crossed the threshold of the inner circle, stepping into the darkness between the buildings, something large with leathery wings flew at my head.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  The flapping of wings sounded like sheets being snapped in the narrow street. I threw myself down, back into the light. Something sharp whistled past my right ear. My knees slammed into the hard ground.

  Nasrine crouched down as she kept looking around for more flying creatures. "Are you alright?"

  "It missed me," I said. "Did you see it?"

  "It was a flash of movement and then it was past," she said. "It never came into the light for me to see."

  After I dusted myself off, we continued towards the center. Ahead, a ring of smaller monoliths copied the larger buildings surrounding us. The sun from outside illuminated the center area like a spotlight. The dark gray stones had been finely cut. They obscured something in the center.