by K Childs
“You’re not one of my students.” An ageing man with grey hair stopped me as I prowled the area, watching students and noting the landscape.
I frowned at him. “No. I’m Detective Inspector Rose Beaumont of the Oneironautic Crimes Agency, from London.”
He took his hand off my shoulder. “We’re just training Oneironauts—not up to anything illegal.”
I waved off the concern. “Not at all. You’re training them, aren’t you?” I gestured to shades and people actively trying to walk through walls.
“Yes, I’m Professor John Hardigan.”
We shook.
“What brings you here?”
“Idiots,” I growled.
“I’m sorry?”
“I am supposed to be in Cardigan. You know about Duke Montagu?”
“Not personally, but yes, I know about Cardigan’s resident nobility.” No doubt it was hard not to in the country like this.
A professor at a university might be useful right now. I needed to dig into my lore on dragons.
“I’m on protection with him.” I found a bench and sat down. “But one of the Ladies in his care was killed. The local constables think I did it.”
“Did you?”
“I’m afraid not. It was a dragon.”
“A dragon?” he spluttered.
“Yes.” I summoned up some cupcakes and cream because it was a cupcakes sort of day, they were my favourite comfort food, although tasteless and without scent in the Dreamscape. “I thought they were extinct as well. I might take some time and write about it. If I don’t die first. But as to the original question, I’m here because of idiots.”
He sat down, clearly fascinated and took one of the cupcakes. “This is probably the most stimulating conversation I’ve had in weeks; please, a real live dragon?”
Waiting for Ben to cool down and slip into the Dreamscape might take a little while… I could indulge the professor. “I can’t tell you much. I recognised the shape mainly. A behemoth—two big demon’s wings, four legs, a long snake’s tail. Not sure what else it could be.”
“Incredible. What colour was it? I’ve seen the red one of the heraldry.”
“I’m hesitant as to colour—the creature is always covered in shadows—but dark.”
“And it is in the Dreamscape? Are you sure it isn’t something else from the Ether?”
“I’ve fought plenty of the nameless horrors that spill from the Ether. This was nothing like them.”
“Aren’t dragons extremely intelligent? Do you know what it wants?”
That was a good question. “I am afraid I can’t say.”
I had been thinking that Elizabeth was merely in a rage over the Duke’s philandering. Now… well, now I was back where I had started: the Duke’s best friend, his mother, or his mistress.
Hardigan said, “You know, one of our former professors did a study of dragons.”
“Do you have anything pertaining to them?”
“We might,” he said.
“Inspector!” Ben’s frenzied voice called over the landscape.
I stood. “I need to speak with my colleague. Will you be here for a little while?”
“Yes, yes.” Hardigan might well have been an eager puppy.
I left the professor and went to attend to Ben. The university was uphill from the place Ben had slipped into the Dreamscape. He placed a hand on my shoulders as soon as he saw me, “I cannot believe this Sergeant Coates. Bastard called me a—” He cut himself off, too angry to say the slur.
“Calm down,” I held up my hand, “We will deal with him as we can. A bunch of idiots are going to slow us down if we get stuck on the locals. Did you see anyone else at the inn?”
“I didn’t see anything, Rose. I was waiting to see someone walking past, no one came and then I heard screaming inside. What happened to Lady Winchester? Did she attack you?”
“No. She was there—and she had a knife. So she was there to confront the Duke as I hoped, but the dragon ambushed me, and her. It forced me into the Dreamscape.” Much the same way it had forced Lady Howard out of the Dreamscape the
previous night.
“What about Coates?” Ben snarled.
He’d really gotten under Ben’s skin.
“Ring the Chief Inspector. And stay on the Duke. The dragon knew about the plan. If Lady Winchester was innocent, we’d have just been fools today. But I can’t help feel this played to the beast’s intentions.”
“If it isn’t Winchester, who?”
I didn’t have an answer.
The beast had found out about the trap, somehow, and used it.
Was my incarceration the desired outcome, or just happy providence for the killer? I gnawed on the thought.
Ben took my silence for a long while. “Watch yourself with this Coates, Inspector.”
“Do you know something about him I don’t?”
“No… just, I’ve seen Sergeants like him before.” Ben’s tone of experience was there. He let me forget he had twenty years of service under his belt.
“I’ll stay in the Dreamscape if I have to,” I said.
“His constables were too quick to paint you as a murderer.”
“Yes, that bothered me. They were awfully fast getting to the inn.”
Ben nodded.
“Go. Ring the Yard. Keep the Duke alive.”
He left.
It was getting earlier and earlier. People began waking and the Dreamscape slowly emptied until the university building was deserted.
I had a lot of time to think.
I’d been hoping to avoid this quiet since I’d woken up on Monday.
I’d welcomed the chaos and danger. Now, I was alone in a wild Dreamscape with nothing to distract me.
Walking along the shore wasn’t helping; there were terrible, indescribable things in the ocean Dreamscape along Aber’s coast. Horrors that ate ships, creeping tentacles that belonged to an ancient, nameless dread.
The beach was warm, and the sky was red and pink, eternally sunset. It was misleading. Dreamscape water always looks perfect from a distance, but it was the most treacherous substance I knew.
I was stuck in Aber, an awe-inspiring Dreamscape with an ocean and a university, and Charlie’s killer was free.
Frustration knotted in my stomach.
I’d been on the hunt so furiously; now I was suddenly stalled and all the hurt and pain that had been so much easier to keep at bay was there.
I’d let emotion blind me.
I crumpled down and screamed all the fury and sadness inside my body into the deserted landscape. I screamed and cried until I was raw. It is hard to become exhausted in the place of dreams, but I was.
Emotionally exhausted.
Charlie was dead and I was no closer to finding the monster that had killed her.
My mind kept flashing on her corpse. I wanted desperately to think of her memories. I wanted to think of all the life we’d shared. But all the happy memories of our childhood together melted into that chilling moment.
Charlie’s mother had never been very good with her children, and Charlie had spent most of her time in my house. My own relationship with my parents had deteriorated over the years until it had broken with my admittance into the Yard. But I’d always had Charlie.
I slammed my fists into the gravel of the beach until they bled.
When I was finally done crying and raging, I began to re-examine everything from start to finish. I had time to think, so I needed to use it.
Time does not flow differently in the Dreamscape from the waking world. The primary theory as to why it feels that it does is that Ether interferes with one’s ability to judge that flow. I have seen monsters use this sort of interference to prevent prey from escaping. I’ve never quite understood how they did it, but Oneironauts are immune to the effect.
I was sitting on the beach when I felt the shift of perception. Time slowed. Th
e water turned a murky, starless black. The sky went from a creamy pastel orange and melted carnation into something pock-marked and livid with blues and greys. The wild Dreamscape shifted and restructured itself. The beach fell away, a great, hungry maw of jagged rocks sprung from the depths. A cliff-face far, far above the water and a great doom spelled out right below me.
Suddenly falling, I reached out to catch the edge of the cliff. The rock that I grabbed threatened to crumble until I sank my power through its ethereal core and hardened it. The rock
stabilised and I clambered around it with both hands.
I was sitting on the edge of a yawning drop. The water below, black and inky, roared to life, slamming against the rock with tremendous force.
This was what made the Dreamscape dangerous enough on its own. Emotional turbulence and fears would manifest themselves in this place.
The ocean current was wrong. Not just in the same way that physics demanded the world behave, but in a turgid, angry fashion I’d never seen before. The cliff began to sink into the sea; something heavy hit it besides the waves and the world under my feet shook and trembled with each whack.
I saw it there, a murky shadow in the dark waters. Ether spilled into those waves, reshaping the Dreamscape with violence and unfathomed hungers.
For a long while, I stared in mute, frozen terror as I observed the vaguest of shapes.
I was reminded that a dragon was a much smaller, more manageable issue than what dwelled in the depths off Aber’s Dreamscape coast.
My father and I spent most days butting heads, but late one night when I was young, he had told me a story that still left chills on my skin. He told me that during the War, some of the Oneironauts had the bright idea to try to point these sorts of enemies at foreign borders.
The creatures that came from the pure Ether in the Dreamscape were not angelic beings or harbingers of a happy god. Nor could we consider them demons or beings of condemnation. They were things. We had no more hope of coming to an understanding with these things than an ant to a human.
Thirty men had been lost in the experiments to try and yank these queer beings from their slumbering dark holes, glimpsed in the half-mad minds of dreamers.
The Central Powers had tried their own madness in this way—loading up many of their best Oneironauts and sending them by dirigible to summon something from the dark abyss and drop it on a town: Verdun.
The airship had burst apart from the inside. It landed to the north of the town, where the French battle lines had been drawn.
The casualties of that fight, the number of souls and steam-cannons that had fought whatever nameless horror had been dropped on them, were perhaps the worst in history.
The monster had broken free of the ship and rampaged through much of the battle. It had nine arms, each hooked, barbed, and dripping with venom, although big enough that a single jab to a man would split him in half.
The two sides had refocused fire. The French had been supplying their troops in Verdun with the electro pressure cannons that combined hardened water and electricity to spread a blanket of pain over an area. It was designed during the Franco-Prussian Wars as a means of crowd control, and they’d been finding it particularly effective until the thing from our nightmares was upon them.
The thing hadn’t distinguished between sides, and the war had turned into a layer of hell.
The French pressure cannons did little more than annoy the shadow of death that swept through their ranks. The Germans had a few cannons, but these were some of the first things to go.
In the end, with over a thousand lives lost in the first few hours of the monster’s arrival, both sides had combined forces for attack. They’d called a brief armistice and laid down an impressive spread of fire and death.
The nameless horror had retreated into the Ether. Merely shooed away by their efforts.
No one had tried to replicate Verdun since then.
Three years later and my Father’s voice had been hollow and cracked with the weight of the story of success.
I didn’t know what the beast was or what had drawn it out of the Ether, but I was not the sort of prey that was easy picking like most souls lost in the Dreamscape.
I manifested wings and leaped off the ledge.
Flying is one of the first things you are taught when you’re learning Oneironautic study. You can propel yourself around with two methods: pure energy or manifesting something that enables you. Ben liked to sit on a carpet and fly like some Arabian folk-tale. I personally preferred the angelic approach.
I left the beach and the water behind.
The thing in the sea didn’t emerge. Didn’t follow me. Just as well. I wouldn’t be a good meal for it.
I woke up to someone shaking me and yelling.
It wasn’t the best way to wake and I smacked them away, blinking at the torch that was shining on my face and the man whose breath smelled like beans and eggs.
I was still lying on the bench I had gone to sleep on, but one of the constables had entered the cell and looked vaguely
panicked.
I sat up too fast; my head swam and I winced. The constable was on his ass, glaring at me. He hadn’t been asleep on a stone bench for who-knew-how-long. Everything hurt.
“What?” It wasn’t my most eloquent of questions.
“You’ve been asleep for two days. Figured you was dead.”
Disgust curled in my stomach.
Someone was going to come down on Aber locals like the hand of God Almighty.
“DI Beaumont.” Outside of the jail cell was my Chief Inspector. He must have arrived recently to have crept into Aber without entering the Dreamscape.
I stood up straight and nodded. “Chief.”
“You’ve seen better days, Beaumont.”
I had indeed.
He said, “What happened?”
“The dragon outmanoeuvred me, sir.” I accepted the cup of tea that one of Caudroy’s constables handed me. I didn’t know the man’s name. “I thought that Elizabeth Winchester was the beast. It made sense: she was wealthy, savvy and had studied both Oneirology and Tenebrology. From an old family. The perfect cover for the monster. She was at both events and she had every reason to want the Duke dead. His death would ensure she could marry one of his younger, more amicable siblings or even pick a new groom.”
“But she wasn’t the dragon?”
“No. Elizabeth was lured into the trap, the beast ambushed us, and she died.” I cleared my throat. “I failed to protect her.”
“So the dragon is still at large, the Duke and his retinue are returning to London and my best officer is moping in a cell instead of fixing the problem?”
The Duke had gone back to London? Why hadn’t anyone contacted me?
I straightened. His best officer, huh? I didn’t feel like it right now. “These imbeciles think I killed her.”
“It would have taken a lot longer to sort that out, but we had some unexpected help in that area. I am only sorry I had to come in person.” Caudroy shot a glare across the station. “Tell me you have something good to share. Who is the dragon? How do you plan to trap and kill it?”
Two days in Dreamscape and I wasn’t sure. “Sir, can we discuss this after I clean myself up?”
Chief Caudroy turned to Sergeant Coates with an eloquent raise of his eyebrow, “We discussed this little… misunderstanding, to your satisfaction, Sergeant?”
Sergeant Coates looked like he had swallowed a rock. His tongue worked around his mouth, lips bulging, face red, eyes spitting venom at Caudroy and myself. “Y-yes,” he choked out, “Detective Inspector Beaumont is free to go.”
I wished I had been awake for that conversation. I’d seen my Chief break some truly impressive folk, but I’d lost two days here. Coates deserved everything he got after pulling this stunt.
Two days with no calls? No visits, nothing? Why had it taken Caudroy so long to get here?
; I felt a little hurt that the Duke hadn’t come to visit. He’d paid me all that attention, made a show of it, but dashed off the second there was trouble. I hadn’t thought it was his character to act in such a manner.
Caudroy ushered me out of the cell and I followed, stiff and wanting to give the two local constables who stayed behind a piece of my mind, but instead I held my tongue. I’d write their unit a nasty report later. They were a problem for a later date.
The Yard didn’t afford us the sort of grand hotels that nobility were probably used to. We had a small, serviceable room. I took the clean clothing that Caudroy had thoughtfully brought for me and locked myself in the bathroom.
It didn’t do to keep your boss waiting, but I needed a shower. They only had a bath, but I wasn’t complaining. I washed my hair and body, scrubbing dried two-day old blood from under my fingernails and cleaned the cut on my face. It bled a little, but the skin wasn’t bloated or hot, so I decided it wasn’t infected.
The cut ran from my ear to my nose, ragged and brown. Probably should have been stitched, but two days and a shiny skein was healing over the wound. I’d scratched a little of it in the cleaning, but otherwise, it didn’t look too good. I would have an unpleasant scar. The scar bothered me. I wasn’t so vain that I placed all my self-worth in my appearance, but it still hit me. I’d thought myself handsome or pretty; the scar didn’t outright ruin that, but it wasn’t going to help me win any hearts.
I dressed and braided my hair. It was good to wear slacks again; I’d been wearing more dresses than I was used to lately. I was in danger of becoming a woman again. Charlie always used to say I needed to apply more feminine charm to my wardrobe if I didn’t want my ovaries to shrivel. Ovaries be damned, I’d told her. But I’d bought a new skirt. One day, I told myself, I’d meet someone, and I might care about my ovaries.