Dreaming Death

by J. Kathleen Cheney

  “Not in his office,” Messine answered, not making sense. “He’s wanting to take you down to the city’s morgue. On the sly, I think.”

  The city morgue? That was odd. “He thinks they have one of the people I dreamed about?”

  It was the only explanation she had for Kassannan wanting to take her down there, where he had no authority.

  “One of them?” Messine asked, mind clicking away now. “Did you dream again last night? That would be why the brown’s so cranky.”

  The brown was his way of referring to a child. A rude noise came from where Melanna sat. Shironne smiled. She would bet that interchange involved Melanna sticking her tongue out at Messine. While Perrin worked hard to be a perfectly behaved young lady, Melanna had a very long way to go. Verinne, her sisters’ elderly governess, claimed that Melanna would drive her to her death.

  Cook brought her a plate then that smelled of flatbread, potatoes, and onions. Shironne removed her gloves and set them in her lap before carefully touching the plate with a finger to locate the flatbread. Cook had filled the bread for her, making it simpler to handle.

  This was the hardest part of her day, facing food. She picked up the stuffed flatbread and took a large bite, chewing and swallowing before too much information from her overly sensitive tongue reached her mind. The water the potatoes and onions had been cooked in was clean, though, and she was accustomed now to the spices Cook used.

  It hadn’t been that way at first, when she’d abruptly become sensitive to everything that touched her skin. She hadn’t been able to eat, since her tongue and lips had been even more sensitive than her hands. Fortunately, Cook had thought to boil milk for her. That helped tremendously, eliminating many of the impurities she’d sensed in it. In time she’d learned to stomach foods again, although she still balked at most meats.

  She’d managed to consume four bites when she heard her mother coming down the stairs. Shironne laid down the flatbread and found the warm, damp cloth Cook had laid next to her plate. Her mother’s hand touched her shoulder. “Is this something you want to do, sweetheart?”

  Her mother’s concern was held tight around her, like a shawl. Shironne thought she must have a headache, given her unusual agitation. “I think it would be best, Mama. Kassannan wouldn’t ask if he didn’t think it was important.”

  “I’ve asked Kirya to bring your coat and your leather slippers.” Her mother touched Shironne’s braid, her bracelet tinkling. “You’ll be especially careful down there, won’t you?”

  “Of course, Mama.” Her mother had always insisted on her remaining independent. That didn’t mean her mother didn’t want to protect her. “Kassannan will look after me.”

  “The colonel asked that I accompany them as well, Madam Anjir,” Messine said, provoking a flash of jealousy from Perrin. “We’ll keep her safe.”

  Feet descending into the kitchen heralded Kirya’s return, and she carried with her the familiar smell of Shironne’s coat. After a moment of wrangling with her garments, Shironne was ready to go. She tugged on the leather gloves that she’d left in one of the coat’s pockets.

  Messine helped her up into the coach that waited in the house’s back courtyard. Shironne thanked him absently and arranged her petticoats and coat about her on the seat while she exchanged greetings with Captain Kassannan. The carriage shifted and creaked as Messine climbed inside, choosing the opposite corner from her, next to Kassannan. She reached up and found a hand strap, and the carriage lurched into motion. “Are we actually going to the city morgue?” she asked.

  “Yes,” Kassannan assured her. “My friend there says a body was brought in during the early hours, dragged out of the river by some fishermen. He says we should hurry, though.”

  “Why?” She could feel Kassannan’s puzzlement, so she didn’t think he knew the answer.

  “He didn’t say—or rather, the beggar boy he sent with the message didn’t—but the boy did tell me the police were disturbed.”

  “He didn’t die in the river,” she said. “Not in the dream. I’m sure of that.”

  Kassannan made a humming sound that meant he was thinking.

  “And I had another dream last night. It was very similar, so it had to be the same killers.”

  Kassannan’s concern rose. “Why didn’t you tell me that?”

  “I just did,” she pointed out, asperity in her voice.

  Filip Messine’s mind laughed, but he quickly tucked that emotion away, returning to listening to the traffic. Shironne clutched the hand strap as the driver took a curve more quickly than she’d expected. The carriage slowed, though, as they headed into traffic. The sounds of horses and pedestrian bustle assailed her, all the noise of the morning rush into the Old Town. The streets smelled of manure and mud, and the buildings of moldering stone. The air reached damp and chill fingers into the carriage, brushing her sensitive skin.

  Eventually, they came to a halt somewhere not far from the low rush of the river. She could smell the green dirtiness of downstream, the river’s water fouled with sewage. The Lower Town, Shironne reckoned, or the edge of it, where the poorest citizens of Noikinos lived. That was surely the reason the morgue was down here; no one would notice another building with a foul odor.

  Messine leaned past her to open the door, his sleeve brushing her coat. He stepped down, helped her from her seat, and then set her hand on his arm and led her inside. Even though she was blind and needed some guidance, touching an unrelated man in public was still forbidden, but since Messine dressed as a servant, it would be ignored. Kassannan walked behind them, his mind already occupied with whatever waited for them inside.

  The outer door closed, leaving them in some manner of anteroom where an officious-minded man surveyed Shironne with disdain. “Are you here to claim a body?”

  “To identify one,” Kassannan answered. “Can I see Officer Harinen?”

  The man reflected an irritation that Shironne suspected was accompanied by a rolling of his eyes. A wooden chair scraped across softer wood—tired floorboards. Then his footsteps moved toward their right. Another door swung on its hinges, and the man hollered Harinen’s name down along an echoing hallway.

  The movement of the door had carried with it a draft of air from farther back in the building. The scents of decay and ammonia and death billowed into the room about them. This morgue lacked the cleanliness the army insisted upon in theirs, Shironne decided, or possibly the ventilation.

  She heard another man’s approach, his heels ringing on a stone floor, coming up along that long hallway. A mind worrying, furtive. The door swung open again, and something caught Kassannan’s attention. “Come with me,” he said.

  She could feel Messine’s resignation. “You could stay here,” she offered. “I’ll be fine with the captain.”

  Messine’s relief was palpable. Dead bodies turned his stomach. “I’ll wait right here, then.”

  With that settled, Kassannan lifted her hand onto his sleeve and led her after the other man, holding open the door so she wouldn’t have to touch it. The floor under her feet changed from wood to stone, and the smells grew stronger as he escorted her down the echoing hallway. He opened a well-oiled door, and they came to a halt in a larger room. Harinen reflected worry. “Should she be in here?”

  “She’s my assistant,” Kassannan lied. “Don’t worry, she’s done this sort of thing before.”

  “Isn’t she a bit young?”

  “I’m seventeen,” Shironne answered him. “But I’ve been . . .”

  A warning blared through Kassannan’s mind, almost taking the form of words, and she stopped speaking.

  “It’s better you forget she was here,” Kassannan said softly.

  Officer Harinen contemplated that for a moment, mind spinning amid a sea of worries. This situation must be terribly uncomfortable for him, and Shironne suspected it wasn’t merely due to h
er presence. “Yes, that’s best,” the officer said. “The faster you’re out of here, the better. Come look at him.”

  “Do you have an identity yet?” Kassannan asked.

  The man moved about, pulling back the sheets that covered a nearby body. Smells roiled into the room with the motion. Shironne breathed through her mouth, forcing herself to ignore the stench. The corpse had to be two days dead, but she wasn’t smelling the body nearly as much as she was smelling the scent of downstream, the area where sewage emptied into the river.

  “We don’t have a name, and he came out of the river only wearing trousers,” the officer said, “but those were dove gray.”

  Shironne pressed her lips together. That wasn’t actually a comment on the color of the man’s trousers. The officer meant instead that the man’s trousers were part of a police uniform. The distinctive color had earned the police the nickname of pigeons.

  They were looking at the body of a police officer.

  “Oh Hel,” Kassannan swore softly.

  Kassannan had stepped away from her when the officer uncovered the body, but she carefully stepped closer to the spot from which he’d spoken. He apologized, took her gloved hand, and laid it on the edge of a table. “Give me a moment,” he told her, agitated now. “Stay here.”

  He was concerned about something. It was more than just that their victim was a police officer, so she did her best to be patient. Kassannan opened up his bag and a second later Shironne smelled ink. For a short time, she heard the nib of Kassannan’s pen scratching across paper. Then it stopped.

  “I’ve got it,” he said. “Now let’s see what you can tell me.”

  Ah, now it’s my turn. “May I touch him?”

  That brought another flare of worry from Officer Harinen. It was bad enough that she was facing what must be a nude body, but now she wanted to touch it. “Should she be doing this?”

  “She’s perfectly fine,” Kassannan said. “Go ahead.”

  Shironne reached out her hand and touched a familiar surface. Recognizing the rubbery texture of a corpse’s skin, she took off her right glove, tucked it into a coat pocket, and laid her hand on the body. The feel of river water reached her first through the light contact. She pressed her hand more firmly against the side of the man’s chest. His skin shifted slightly under her fingers, already losing its fragile hold on muscles and bone. The impulses of his dead mind flooded through the contact, though, immediately overriding the physical impressions. Faint memories lingered in this body: of whom he’d been in life, of how he had died.

  “His name was Liran Prifata and he was a police officer,” she said.

  “How does she know that?” Officer Harinen whispered, not quietly enough.

  “She’s simply does,” Kassannan replied.

  “The body still holds traces of memory, even though the spirit is gone. The memories are like leaves fallen off a tree. They don’t know they’re dead yet. So this told me,” she said, laying her bare hand against the man’s torn chest. She concentrated, sifting through the disordered fragments of memory. “Three nights ago. He didn’t know why they took him, I think. He asked over and over why, but they never answered him.”

  That reinforced her impressions from her dream.

  “They? More than one?” the officer asked.

  She’d been sure about that beforehand, given what she recalled of the dreams. “Yes, but I’m not sure how many. They pulled him into a coach and took him somewhere near the river. The memories that still exist are hazy, though, much more so than normal for a body this long gone. I don’t know why.”

  She stood there for a time, considering those dead leaves of memory, trying to determine what from among them she needed to know. Their dry whispers echoed in her mind, reflecting fear and protesting the senseless death. A blasphemous death.

  One leaf told her of a sense of protection, though. At the end, the police officer had felt a presence with him. Shironne smiled, recognizing the angel’s presence. Every time she touched a body from one of his dreams, she found that sense of protection in the fragments of the victim’s mind.

  Shironne set that leaf aside, sifting again through the dead man’s thoughts. Other memories vied for her attention: falling dazed in the street, the sound of his wife’s voice, the scent of spiced tea on a chilly morning, the sharp sting of a late mosquito, a strange numbness in his lips. All were clear images, imprinted on the fading fragments of the man’s mind, which made her curious about the vagueness of his last memories.

  There were no mosquitoes this time of year, she realized, not after the early frost they’d had. “Is there a mark on him? Like, um . . . a pinprick, or a dart?”

  “Good eye,” Harinen answered. “There’s a small puncture wound on the side of his neck.”

  The muddiness of the memories near to death suddenly made sense. “That’s how they captured him. They drugged him.”

  She slid her hand toward the man’s neck and heard the wet sound of the body shifting as the officer turned it to allow her access to the sting. Her fingers found the spot. A ghostly memory surfaced of the officer brushing his neck before falling down in the street.

  Shironne pressed her fingers against the mark, sensing an odd, venomous presence there, collected in the tissues of the skin. It was one she hadn’t encountered before, but powerful in its virility. “I can’t tell you what they used on him. I don’t recognize it, but it reminds me of snake venom—fast and strong. He didn’t live long enough for it to dissipate.”

  Putting names to things she’d never encountered before often confounded her. She had some idea as to their properties, but that wasn’t the same as naming them. It was the reason she spent so much time identifying things in Kassannan’s office—so that she’d know all the names.

  “I wasn’t certain whether it was a sting or a puncture,” the officer admitted. “No noticeable smell or color to it.”

  Shironne slid her hand back down to the man’s, touching one of the breaks in the skin, forcing herself to listen for the substance, the body, rather than the impulses of the mind. Silt, algae, and other matter fouled the torn flesh, along with the tiny living creatures that dwelt in dirt. “This came from the bottom of the river,” she said. “The current pulled him along, and these injuries must have come from branches or rocks or . . . um, something else on the river’s bottom. There are probably other cuts on his face and feet, I think. Those happened after he died.”

  “There are marks,” the officer said, curiosity beginning to replace his worry. He’d clearly moved past his concerns over propriety. “What else, miss?”

  Shironne laid her fingers on the man’s bloated abdomen and slid them upward until she found the gaping mouth of a slash crossing the man’s chest. She ran her fingers along the edge of it, leaning over the table to do so. “He bled from this wound. He watched his life bleeding out of him.”

  “And what of the carvings?” The officer awaited her answer, apprehensive about that part.

  Shironne remembered the strange mutilations from vague snatches of her dream. A word ran from one shoulder to the other across the man’s chest; letters carefully carved into his flesh to announce something. What, she couldn’t tell. She reached up to touch the marks. “The cuts were made by a knife with a short blade, but I can’t read them.”

  “Pedraisi,” Kassannan said softly. “You wouldn’t recognize it if you could see it.”

  “You’d rather not see him at all, miss,” Officer Harinen added.

  On rare occasions, being blind had its advantages. Shironne supposed the man’s body must look ghastly, having lain in the grip of the river for two days. On the other hand, Harinen likely had no idea of the depth of the changes the river and its denizens had wrought upon the body, changes far beneath the skin. Its spirit stolen away, the corpse had begun the swift progress from man to meat.

  Shironne had
encountered a good number of corpses in her time working for Colonel Cerradine. There were nameless things she didn’t want to contemplate at work in the bodies, especially because she knew they existed in her own body as well. She tried not to think about that.

  A door banged loudly in the hallway outside, followed by the sound of footsteps pounding on the stone floor. Harinen abruptly began to worry, and Shironne could sense Kassannan thinking fast. He buckled his bag. She lifted her hand from the body and turned halfway toward him, wondering who had set them both off. She opened her mouth to ask, but the door to the room opened, slamming back against a wall.

  “I gave orders that no one was to view this body,” the newcomer snapped, agitation spreading around him. “Who are these people?”

  Shironne felt it coming a split second in advance, but there was no way for her to get away, not with the table on one side and the man on the other. A fleshy hand locked about her jaw, turning her chin this way and that. The improper contact brought with it a lust that shocked her, the man’s thoughts tumbling in a disordered manner into her consciousness.

  She gasped and stumbled back, then tripped over an uneven spot in the tiles. She tumbled toward the floor, slamming her cheek against a wall in the process.

  “Shironne!” The captain’s hands grasped her arms, and he lifted her to her feet amid a cloud of anger and worry. “Are you hurt?”

  Shironne tried to catch her breath, her head spinning. Not only from hitting it against the wall; that hurt enough to make her eyes water. No, even worse, she still felt that man’s hand against her skin, his right hand, carrying with it traces that said he hadn’t washed his hands since he last ate. She could still feel the oily sense of his lust at the edges of her mind too. His touch had left a clear impression of the man’s psyche, a connection she didn’t want. She felt dirty just having had his fingers on her skin. “I’m fine,” she whispered anyway, holding the hand that had touched the body away from her clothing. “Cloth?”