Full Fathom Five

by Max Gladstone

  He gathered all this into a large sack, and after consideration returned to his bookshelves to add more. If the woman Kai was right, then soon history might weasel into his garret. Newspapermen would archive this scene for posterity. The room was his colophon, his epilogue. Best edit now, for he would have no chance after he went to press. He hoped to offer friendly biographers no embarrassments, and unfriendly biographers no ammunition. He added his Velasquez and Keer hardcovers to the stack, that post-mortem reviewers not sneer his verses were sentimentalized by a taste for swashbuckling romance. A few Alt Selene flimsies too joined the pile. A deck of well-shuffled cards, that he not be seen as frivolous. Of course the slender folio of Shining Empire prints he had bought in a back-alley shop in Chartegnon, a simple brown leather edition without label or insignia—the covers gave no hint at their contents, which was hint itself he supposed. The folio’s curvilinear beauties deserved better than a trash heap, but perhaps some passing patron would rescue them before they reached such extremity.

  Editing complete, he hefted the sack downstairs, almost spilling its contents first over the balcony, then onto the street. A crepe seller on the corner stopped mixing batter and stared at Margot, who nodded gruffly in reply and waddled past under the weight of his cast-off life. Three blocks should be distance enough, on the sidewalk beside a few trash cans, the sack’s drawstring loose to display the riches inside. He stopped at the crepe wagon on the way back, and ordered one with mango and powdered sugar, and a coffee.

  “You moving out,” said the man as he spiraled batter onto the griddle, “or cleaning?”

  “Both,” Margot said, and laughed as if he’d said something funny. The man laughed, too. Mostly Margot took meals in his room, but the sun felt less furious today. He stood by the cart and ate the crepe, which the man cut into rolls for him. Mango juice glistened on his knife.

  “I don’t remember seeing you here before,” Margot said after eating half the crepe.

  “We move around,” the man replied, and stroked the cart with his full hand, like Margot had seen men pat their horses. “Don’t like to stay in one place long.”

  “People don’t get to know you if you move, though.”

  “Maybe it takes longer for them to know you. But if you want to be famous, you have to leave home. Who wants to stand on the same block forever?”

  “Some people might,” Margot said.

  “Sixty years ago my family lived in an orange grove. Forty years ago we were one house in a field of houses, with few orange trees between. Twenty years ago we were one of many houses in a row in a rich neighborhood. Ten years ago, mainlanders bought up all the houses, all but my family’s, because my father didn’t sell. So now we have a hotel to the left of us, and a surf shop to the right, and two bars on the street, and three mansions, and no orange trees. My father sits on the porch and rocks, as he’s done all my life.”

  Margot ate the last piece of crepe, and finished the coffee. “Is that so.”

  “Even if you live sixty years on one block, the block moves around you.”

  “It does at that,” he said, and paid the man. “Will you be here tomorrow?”

  “I’m always here,” the man replied, and patted the cart again. “Where you are, is the question.”

  He climbed the stairs back to his room. Coffee burbled in his stomach, and grated his nerves. He felt drained, and wired. He needed more lunch, or dinner, he supposed, with a glance at his watch. Then again, he might as well work. If the Watch came, they would feed him in prison. If assassins, he would not need food.

  He unlocked his door and entered an empty room. Bedclothes heaped in disarray. A few books on the shelf: poets, mostly, last-century Iskari and a few from the lost generation of Camlaan, broken remnants of the God Wars. Several dictionaries. A suitable library. A suitable room. Its contents bespoke poverty and dedication, a man striving against the limits of his own mind and life. His last work of art.

  No. Not his last.

  He caressed the surface of his desk. Stroked the pen in its stand. Opened a drawer, removed a fresh notebook, spread notebook on table, savoring the soft crack of glue and string and leather. Wind blew through the window. His fingertips drank the cream of the fresh page.

  He reached for his pen, but did not draw it from the stand. He pushed back his chair and stood. The notebook drifted closed.

  He paced his room as the sun declined. Three more times he sat. Three more times he stood. He wrote a doggerel verse on scrap paper. No help. He wadded the paper in his pocket, sat again, and bent to work. Palm fronds rustled. He looked up, sought the bruised sky for oncoming doom, and saw none.

  He’d always thought waiting for death or prison would terrify him. He was not afraid. No control of his future, and no expectation of one, either.

  He drew his pen and sat down to work. Outside, the sun set and the stars rose.

  38

  Kai always made herself hot cocoa before a nightmare. The routine soothed her: heat milk on the stove, stop just before it boils, mix milk and cocoa powder to form the paste, pour the remaining milk, and whisk. Dust cinnamon on top. She needed calm. She needed to stand in her kitchen and forget for a moment, forget Claude and Margot, forget Jace and even Mara. Remember home. Remember soothing candlelight. Remember warm blankets, and towels, and good sex, and pancakes, and the clear sky after a storm.

  This was the doublethink of the nightmare telegraph: if you were scared, you couldn’t sleep unless you tired yourself to the brink of exhaustion, and then you might sleep too soundly for dreams, or not soundly enough. Kai couldn’t afford delays. She had to speak with Mara, now.

  Kai avoided nightmare communication unless strictly necessary. Too much waited beneath the surface of her mind. The Order used professional dreamers for the most part: asleep gagged and blindfolded in warm caves under Kavekana’ai, scribbling messages on automatically turning scrolls. Suggest short-selling Mithraist Gamma Fund. Will require high liquidity next quarter. Concerned about long-term stability of emerging markets in Northern Gleb. So on, and so forth. When Jace took over he banned the gags, called them inhumane. That first week, a page who hadn’t got the earmuffs memo walked in on a dreamer mid-session. The screams ruptured his eardrums. The gags returned.

  So Kai made herself hot chocolate and thought about everything and anything else. Mara’s visit on the balcony, in the blue dress, after it all went wrong. Teenage nights sneaking out to poetry slams, glorying in end, internal, initial rhymes. Emerging from the pool after she remade herself, whole at last in her own body. Her first years with Claude, before the joy bled out.

  She carried her cocoa upstairs. Cup rattled in saucer. Bedclothes lay tangled halfway between bed and floor, from where she’d clawed herself awake that morning. She made the bed, smoothed the comforter, piled pillows at the headboard, and changed into her bathrobe. Smoothing the bedspread, she could almost forget what happened here last night, and what it meant.

  Nothing, that’s what. You saw him today, and you were fine and he was fine. Use alcoholics’ wisdom: take life day by day.

  Another sip of cocoa, and as she swallowed she let herself feel tired. She’d been tired for years, and only felt it now, as if exhaustion had hidden in the hollows of her bones until offered a chance to unfurl. A light turned on in her chest. She lay back. She wished she had a stuffed animal. She used to sleep with a stuffed dolphin. She threw him out before Claude moved in.

  She removed her robe, and lay back, and kept lying back, the bed not beneath her but spinning away as she fell, faster. Walls of tan comforter towered above, miles and miles, the pit’s mouth shrinking to a point, vanished to leave her in a tense smooth cotton shell. A cold hand held her. Fingers locked tight, rigor mortis, tension of the dead. Cotton covered her mouth, but as she struggled she realized she was not falling but standing, and while the sky above was the color of a sunset cloud, beneath her feet lay good dank earth, jungle smelling, corpse nourished. Ghosts whistled past her ears as she wa
lked, beneath her arms, between her fingers. She ignored them, because one could not hear ghosts in waking life, and if so why listen to them in dreams?

  She caught the tail of that thought, which sped past her in kite form trailing a ribbon, so fast the tail’s edge cut her fingers. She was dreaming. Dreams of isolation and insignificance.

  Not deep enough. A personal layer of dream, this. A path formed beneath her feet, expected, welcomed. Paths guided sleepers through dreams, and through meant out, which Kai didn’t want.

  She stepped off the dream-path, and fell again through tan space into the gap between threads, following the beat of a distant heart no longer hers. She fell through vast chambers of creation.

  No. To fall was to give herself to the nothing. She pointed her hands at the deep, and dove.

  She opened her eyes, and sat up with a start, or tried to. Her arms moved a few inches then stopped, wrists bound. A gray ceiling spread above. A mask across her face forced air into her mouth, into her nose; she was made to breathe in. The pressure reversed, and air swept out of her lungs. She turned her head, but could not shake the mask loose. She pressed against the bars that lined her bed, her cage, but they were cold and strong. Overhead, a lamp swung slowly. When next the machines forced air into her lungs she screamed.

  A door squealed open. Footsteps on a cement floor. The nurse whistled to herself as she approached, a lullaby. Sleep now, darling, sleep now, my boy. Let the wind sweep, and let the trees sway, and you’ll still be here, come the next dawning day. The whistle grew louder as the nurse neared. Immense, a round-hipped silhouette against the sweeping light. A spark: the needle, raised. Kai pulled against the leather cuffs, and knowing that she dreamed she knew she pulled against bonds she’d tied around herself. The needle descended, but she tore free, and ripped the mask from her face, and scrambled over the bars and ran down the long alley between beds, thousands all alike, holding all shapes of creatures and all sizes, birds the size of galaxies, their wings bound with leather straps, lizards with IVs dripping into their arms, women, men, angels, demons, tubes drawing rainbow-colored blood out to a vast net beneath the floor that beat like a heart. She ran, and the nurse followed. Search the faces. Mara’s here, somewhere. All fears touch, deep enough in dream, and so in a good nightmare you can find any other dreamer—even those who think themselves awake.

  Find Mara, raven haired, in her blue dress. Mara, sleeping, to be woken with a kiss. Gods. Sweat soaked Kai’s hospital gown. The nurse’s footsteps were bass drum beats, drawing closer. Kai dared not look behind. She knew what she would see: a mountainous woman blocking out the sun, needle in hand, its point at once hair-fine and larger than Kai’s whole body, a point that would obliterate her if driven home.

  Kai ran past the sleeping dead, through the caverns of her mind. Bound. Bleeding. She ran faster than the beat her heart made. No music, just bare feet on concrete, and footsteps following, and millions of forced breaths.

  Don’t look back. Bend the dream to your will. Mara is here. Find her and leave. You are here because you chose to be here. (But she could not believe that whisper. To believe was to admit her control, break the nightmare, return to the branching gardens of her own mind. The nightmare telegraph’s other double-logic: you must accept that all nightmares are real.)

  Mara was not here. An infinity of beds, endless beings endlessly dying but never dead, their suffering cultivated, and Mara lay in none of them. Impossible. She had to be here, awake or asleep. But Kai tired, slowed, and the nurse’s footsteps grew louder, even and inhuman as a metronome’s tick.

  And as Kai ran, and drew her frightened breaths, another impossibility scraped the corners of her thought: how had she escaped the bed? She was bound. Tied so tight her hands could not slip free. She could not have broken the straps. She had not broken them. She had not escaped, and the nurse did not need to hurry, because she was already caught. This cavern was a single, massive bed, and Kai ran in it and the nurse loomed above mountainous, eyes shining, and oh god Kai ran and ran but there were straps around her wrists and ankles and she kicked against them and could not move and the bars were high as the stars and she ran she was running don’t let that tense shift she was fleeing escaping escaped not about to die but the nurse stood above her with the poison medicine I have just the thing for you dear the needle descended and she could not find Mara but she needed out but there were straps around her arms but she ran into the wall and clawing found a doorknob and the needle pressed into her skin and she was so small but she leaned into the door with all her weight and all she ever had been and ever would be and burst through into black.

  She lay sweat-slick upon silk. She gulped cool air, swallowed it like water. She touched her face, but her hand felt heavy, as if gloved. The sheet had stuck to her, she saw by the almost-light cascading through the windows. Silk clung to her face as she tried to draw her hand away.

  Not a sheet at all, but gossamer strands. Silk stuck her arm to her side and her hand to her face. She sat up, and the silk at her legs adhered to itself and to the silk that already covered her stomach. She recognized the web even as the spider swelled enormous at the foot of the bed, man-high. Mouthparts quivered with anticipation.

  Kai met its stare.

  The spider drew back and cocked its head. Fangs closed, tentatively, like a person chewing on her lip. Then the spider said, in Ms. Kevarian’s voice: “You just can’t win, can you?”

  39

  Izza watched Margot through the palm fronds as night fell. He worked fiercely. Before, as she spied on him, he’d seemed averse to the paper, as if he carved each line he wrote into his skin. Not tonight. Sweat soaked his shirt, despite the cool wind.

  From the outside, she thought, writing looked as interesting as dying.

  When the clock tower rang quarter ’til nine, Izza sighed relief, and lowered herself from the wall. She didn’t like leaving Margot, but that wasn’t why she ran down back alleys to the meeting place. She was more than her mind or eyes, and glad to feel it.

  The Grieve was a broad open square near the docks, bayside on East Claw, not far from Margot’s. Here, in the centuries before the God Wars, an Iskari merchant colony built statues to their gods, and a gallows for their justice. Time had weathered the foreign gods’ squiddy faces; the gallows was torn down in the wars, after Makawe and his sisters left to join the grand fight against the Craftsmen. The platform still stood, though, and the young and poor congregated here to drink palm wine and toast the moon and smoke foreign weeds, to trade drugs caged off sailors in the Godsdistrikt, to dance to drums and poorly tuned guitars.

  She found Nick in the square’s Palmside corner, kneeling at the feet of an ancient hurricane-worn spear god. A fat man twirled fire poi atop the gallows platform, and the flames danced in Nick’s eyes.

  “Hey,” he said when he saw her.

  “You find her?”

  He nodded. “Weird woman.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “She went to a house first, which I thought was hers so I almost left, but she came out looking scared a few minutes later. Almost saw me, didn’t. So when she went to the next house I, you know, snuck up a tree outside, so I could watch and see if she was there to sleep or to whatever.”

  “Just out of the goodness of your heart.”

  “And she slept, right? And had bad dreams.”

  “People have bad dreams all the time.”

  “Not like this,” he said.

  “Okay. Fine. Nightmares. Did you get the address? Or were you too busy trying to sneak a glance of the priest in her underwear?”

  He told her, and she repeated it back to be sure she’d heard it right.

  “Thanks.”

  He didn’t answer.

  She left him watching the spinning poi, and ran back through alleys to Margot’s house.

  40

  “What are you doing here?” Kai asked.

  The spider reared on its hind legs, spindly limbs and body’s bulk silhouet
ted against the green moon. The form folded and unfolded at once, arms melding as the body slimmed and the head bobbed on an elongating neck. The body assumed a semblance of a thin woman in a black suit, but the head remained a spider’s, outsize fangs dripping poison. “I’m looking for a friend of yours,” Ms. Kevarian said. She placed her hands beneath the spider head and pushed; at first, Kai thought she meant to tear her head loose, but the spider-seeming came off like a mask, revealing Ms. Kevarian’s face beneath. The Craftswoman tucked the spider head under one arm, summoned a mirror from dreams, and checked her hair. Nodding, she dissolved the mirror. “And I noticed you looking for her, too. I thought we might chat, here, unobserved.”

  “You want to torture me,” Kai said. The spider may have vanished, but the silk remained. She was balled in the center of a web, bound to herself by strands that stretched but would not break.

  “Torture you.” Ms. Kevarian smiled. The effect was not reassuring. “This is your nightmare. I can do nothing here that does not come from your own mind.”

  “My mind scares me.”

  “You’re a wise woman,” she said, and set the spider head down beside her. She sat, though there was no chair in the dream, and leaned forward, elbows on legs, so her face was level with Kai’s. “You have no Craft to speak of.”

  “Not everyone who matters does.”

  “But most people who use the nightmare telegraph do. Craftswomen are warded against the nightmare’s dangers in ways ordinary people aren’t.”

  Kai pushed against the spider silk again. It did not give. “If you don’t want to hurt me, why not set me free?”