Cassidy fired several rounds into the stopper above. A cloud of shredded cork rained down. He slammed his shoulder against the glass in the hopes of knocking his phial from the shelf, but it didn’t budge. Slumping down against the smooth wall he tried to imagine what purpose the creature had for dreams in jars.
***
Barnabas hadn’t come back for…was it days? Weeks? Cassidy had whiled away most of his time cleaning and field stripping his Mauser and thinking about how stupid he’d been. He was nowhere near Arcadia anymore. At least he doubted it. Nowhere near his fighter. Perhaps nowhere near the Twilight. The door to the creature’s room could have taken him just about anywhere.
“Ah, a knight. How, dear Sir, have you come to this unfortunate oubliette?”
Cassidy glanced in the direction of the voice. The man in the blue gown to his left had finally come around. The silence had kept things from feeling real, but hearing someone speaking to him brought reality back with full force. He stood and walked to the edge of his bottle. “A while,” he said. “’Fraid I’ve no way to know.”
“Ah,” said the man in the blue gown. “My name is Delaine, and you’ll pardon me if I don’t stand. I’ve been here quite a while longer than quite a while and I don’t seem to have much left in me.”
Cassidy gave a quick nod. “Any idea what this place is?”
Delaine shrugged a weak shoulder. “I would think it an apothecary, but of what kind, I cannot say.”
“What does he use us for?” Cassidy asked.
“Ah, Sir Knight, even Merlin himself might not guess at the wiles and ways of such demons.”
“Demon?” Cassidy asked. He stuffed his hands deep in his pockets.
“What else?” Delaine said. “What but a demon could conjure such evil?” He tried to raise his hand in some gesture, but let his fingers slip back to the glass wall. “I was a conjurer in whatever distant kingdom I lived. I can no longer recall the name. But these arts are beyond me.” He stared upwards as though trying to search his memories. “I escaped my dream by chance. Tripped and fell and…and wound up here after but a few days of freedom.” He tilted his head to the side and cast his tired eyes on Cassidy. “It was a pleasant dream, I came from. Probably a child's fancy. An innocent dream.” His look seemed to say, and you?
Cassidy folded his arms. “I’m a fool.”
Delaine tried to shrug again, but managed only a slight lift of one shoulder. “We are all fools. The fool behind you was here when I arrived. He could stand then. He could speak. He had been a star, or so he said. He had been a star, snatched from a dream of living worlds. They dream too, you know.”
Living worlds, Cassidy mouthed. He was about to ask Delaine more, but the man in the blue gown had fallen back to sleep. Cassidy hoped the poor dream was dreaming.
The next few days, or weeks, brought nothing. Barnabas hadn’t entered the room again. Delaine stirred a few times, but didn’t wake.
It was difficult not to consider shooting the glass itself, but the demon, or whatever he was, had probably told the truth about the dangers in that. Cassidy considered cleaning his Mauser again, but the thought of it made him sick.
The door finally opened and Barnabas walked in. He turned, eyed the many phials and ran his finger down the row, stopping on Cassidy. “Yes, my little airman,” he said, plucking Cassidy from the shelf, “it’s time.”
Barnabas popped the cork and dumped him out onto the floor. The world rushed by and Cassidy found himself full-sized and on his back, spine aching. He moved towards his pistol.
“Now, now,” Barnabas said, holding up a restraining hand. “I need you, and I’d rather not have to shatter your arms right now.”
Cassidy scrambled to his feet, but let his arms hang down to his sides. “Whatever it is you want me to do, I don’t think I’ll feel like it.”
“Oh, don’t let that bother you,” Barnabas said, with a dismissive wave. “Most of what I need you to do, I’ve already done. All you must do now is—” A loud rapping sounded at the door. His head jerked to the side. “What in…?”
Cassidy shrugged. “Someone you know?”
Barnabas narrowed his eyes. “They can’t be knocking at the door. It isn’t really a door. It doesn’t go anywhere unless I want it to be there.”
The harsh rapping came again and Barnabas took a step back.
“Should I answer it?” Cassidy asked. “Could be important. Room service?”
Barnabas didn’t answer. He didn’t have to, as the door flung wide of its own accord and the Englishman with the umbrella stepped in. “Barnabas,” he said in a jovial tone. “Why didn’t you answer?”
It was hard to tell exactly what the look on Barnabas’s face meant. Anger? Fear? Astonishment? Reproach?
“I did knock,” the Englishman said, in mock apology.
Barnabas remained silent and rigid as the man with the umbrella made his way around the room as if browsing an antique shop. He peered at the collection of phials on the shelves. “It’s quite a collection,” he said after several minutes.
“It’s also outside your jurisdiction,” Barnabas said through gritted teeth.
The Englishman touched the crook of the umbrella to his forehead as if thinking. “Jurisdiction?” he mused as if trying to recall the proper definition of the word. “Jurisdiction?” He tapped his head again with the bony crook. “Ah yes. Jurisdiction. I don’t think I really need it.”
Barnabas’s expression tightened. He slipped his hands into his pockets in a casual gesture, though Cassidy guessed he was grabbing for a weapon. “You can’t take me back, Tamelicus,” he said, as if trying to extend the conversation. Stalling perhaps.
Tamelicus, Cassidy thought. The demon had a name.
“Take you back?” Tamelicus said. “Why?”
Barnabas narrowed his eyes and froze, his hands still deep in his pockets. They stared at each other for several seconds, neither twitching while Cassidy took it as a hint to step back.
Something silver glinted as Barnabas’ hand cleared his pocket. Tamelicus moved across the room in a blur of motion as the Englishman impaled Barnabas through the stomach with the umbrella in a single movement. The jaws of the skull at the tip of the handle came alive and sank its fangs into flesh as Tamelicus buried the umbrella to the hilt.
Barnabas didn’t scream, but his face contorted. The eyes of the lizard’s empty sockets glowed red and the body to which it had attached itself shrivelled and dried into a grey husk. Tamelicus withdrew his weapon and the pin-striped banker’s suit fell to the floor, covered by a shower of dead skin. A silver pistol clattered to the floor.
The Englishman gave a deep sigh and hooked the umbrella over his arm. “Don’t I know you?” he said, regarding Cassidy for the first time. He rubbed his chin with his gloved hand. “Of course,” he said, and broke into a wide smile. “The little paper shadow from New York.”
“Why did you do that?” Cassidy asked, looking down at the pile of clothes.
“My Sygnet was hungry,” Tamelicus said, and petted the umbrella’s crook with his hand. “It rarely gets to feed so well.” He smiled again. “When he is happy, I am happy.” He turned back to the door. “Cheers,” he said and poised to step out.
“Why don’t you kill me?” Cassidy asked. “Why do you just kill people in front of me?”
Tamelicus turned and squinted. “I can’t kill you. You’re not alive. It would be more like blowing out the flame on a candle. Flames are fascinating, temporal creatures, but hardly worth extinguishing.” He moved closer. “Though you are interesting to watch. Like observing an ant try to heft a leaf three times its size into a hole half as small. I can’t help but stare in rapt fascination.”
He looked into Cassidy’s face as if trying to read his thoughts. Tamelicus’ eyes were hard to concentrate on, swirling colours that turned in on themselves as they moved across the irises. “Besides, he wasn’t a people. He was…like me.”
“A demon?” Cassidy asked.
/> Tamelicus screwed up his face. “I’ve always thought that word inappropriate, or at the very least inadequate.” He gave a flippant gesture. “Whatever the case, your friend here,” he said, regarding the pile of clothes again, “was one of my Gentleman. An officer in my employment who decided to get greedy.”
Cassidy gave his own quizzical look.
“Hell,” Tamelicus said. “Dreams are unsubstantial, but in a world of a billion or so damned, they can easily stand in for an escaped soul unnoticed.” He gestured to the phials on the shelves. “Souls carry a hefty price on the Underworld market, and trafficking is rampant. Now you,” he said, pushing a finger into Cassidy’s chest, which burned where it touched his shirt, “I think he had different ideas for. You’ve become a bit more solid than most. Probably wanted to use you as a shell for something dangerous. Wish I’d asked him about it first, but it felt so good to suck the juices from his corpse.”
Tamelicus shrugged. “Must be off.” He turned on his heel and made for the door. “I’d leave right behind me,” he said, over his shoulder. “This room isn’t anywhere you’d understand, and it’ll incinerate moments after I leave.”
“Then why bother mentioning it? Why help me?” Cassidy asked.
Tamelicus stopped and let out a gentle laugh. “Help you? My dear, dear paper shadow. No one can help you. Your captain did you no favours stealing you away.” He turned again, his face etched in a cynical pallor. “You have no soul. When you die you will fade to smoke. You won’t even return to the dreamstuff from whence you were taken.”
“Can I take them, too?” Cassidy asked, pointing to the shelves.
Tamelicus said nothing but continued for the door. His left foot crossed the threshold. Cassidy ran to the shelf and scooped up as many phials as his two hands could pincer between them. The demon’s right boot cleared the threshold as Cassidy leapt through. Light exploded around him.
The demon was gone and so was the door. Cassidy lay on the floor of the Arcadia hallway, outside an open door, through which he saw a normal hotel room. He picked himself up and stowed the phials in the large pockets of his flight jacket. He examined the man in the blue gown before adding him to the others. The medieval phantasy still lay asleep.
***
Cassidy found Shea working the lobby. “I need to talk,” he said, imploring her with a touch to her arm.
“I hope you want to do more than talk,” Shea said, striking a pose both sultry and natural at the same time. Most women of her profession would have paid half their wages to learn the pose; the way she flared her breasts, arched her back and leaned against a pillar as if she were taking a quick rest without looking forced. “I didn’t even know you were here. You vanished months ago. We heard old Barnabas had gotten you.”
“Please,” Cassidy said. “It’s important. I’ll pay.”
Shea smiled. “Your room or mine?”
“I don’t have a room,” Cassidy said.
Shea showed him to her boudoir. “I hoped you’d come around,” she said, as the crystal beads leading to her bed chamber parted without her touching them.
The room smelled like her. Not incense or perfume. It smelled like her skin. Like her hair. She sank into the bed, letting the thick comforter and satin sheets half enclose her. Shea wasn’t really trying to seduce him now. It was just her nature. The sexual side of her that seemed not so much to have taken over, but been held in such controlled check that it shone when she opened her eyes, or her arms, or legs. It was like a warm but blinding light, set behind a shutter that had no choice but to flex open and shut.
Cassidy felt himself moving towards her as if he were falling forwards. The bed rose to meet him. He was cold and she was warm.
He pulled himself away and leaned back against the wall. “I don’t know who else to ask,” he said.
Shea blinked. “You pay more visiting me here.”
“That’s fine. Put it on my tab,” Cassidy said, wondering if this had been another mistake. “I have a number of dreams.”
“I wouldn’t know,” she said, leaning back against a vast assortment of elegant pillows, “I don’t dream.”
Cassidy shook his head. “They’re escaped, or rather, stolen. I need to know what to do with them.”
“In phials?” she said narrowing her eyes. “My God, you have seen Barnabas!” Shea recovered from her shock and flicked slender fingers through the air. “Sell them. There’re five or six fences here in Arcadia that would be glad to pass them on to the Everdream for a good price. Or sell them to...other entities. I’ll set you up and take a small percentage.”
Cassidy started to turn back to the door. “I shouldn’t have come. I’m sorry.”
Shea came to her feet in a flowing motion and laid a hand on his arm. “No. Please,” she said. Her eyes had changed and so had her voice. For the second time he felt he was actually speaking to her and not the mask she wore for clients. “There are places they can go. Places inside Twilight islands.” She sat him down on the edge of her bed. “Ones like you would never want to go there because it’s never safe to leave. They’re permanent communities.”
“How do you know about them?” Cassidy asked.
Shea pulled her dress around herself as if she were cold, or as if she suddenly felt modest. “I used to help with the underground, many years ago. I still send dreams there from time to time.”
“Why?”
Shea’s gaze fell for a moment and she looked back up at him. “I hate seeing anything in pain. And I know what some buyers do with dreams. How many do you have?”
Cassidy reached in his pockets and brought out two handfuls of glass phials.
Shea’s eyes widened. “There must be—”
“Thirty-two,” Cassidy said. “I didn’t want to let them out until I had somewhere to put them.”
Shea sifted through the bottles. She lifted the gaunt naked dream of a star up to her face. He still gasped for silent air. A look of genuine horror crossed her face. “What have they done to them? Who did this?”
Cassidy ran his eyes over the rest of the phials, their charges mostly sleeping or gently stirring. “Someone who won’t ever come looking for them. At least a hundred others were probably destroyed.”
A green tear ran down Shea’s face. “I’m so sorry. Is this where you’ve been? Did you kill that creature?”
“Not me,” Cassidy said shaking his head.
“Then who?”
Cassidy inhaled a sharp breath. He looked down at the man in the blue gown. “Can you take them somewhere safe?”
Shea nodded. “I promise. It won’t be the freedom you and Banner have, but it will be better than this.”
“Not sure how much to say for the freedom we have.” Cassidy nodded and stood.
“Your hour isn’t up,” she said, trying to return to the sultry tones of her comely persona.
“Keep the change,” Cassidy said. “I need to find my plane.”
***
The man down at the runway told Cassidy his fighter had disappeared over a month before.
“Exactly how did my plane manage to vanish?” Cassidy asked. It was the same young man he’d met when he landed. “I tipped you to keep a good eye on her.”
The young man stammered. “You were gone so long. I mean, I didn’t even know if you’d come back.”
Cassidy rested his left hand on the Mauser holster and leaned forwards, locking eyes. “I don’t care who took it,” he said, seething out the words. “I don’t care why. I don’t care how much they paid you.” He leaned in closer, forcing the young man to bend backwards. “I just want to know who has it.”
Chapter 25
Cassidy felt a tinge of guilt over pushing the man so hard, but, Number One, the dock man had accepted some sort of bribe. Number Two, it had become obvious that while Arcadia might be civilized by Twilight standards, the law still rested on those with the biggest weapon and the strongest arm. Barbaric, but true. Now he just had to hope the man had been telling
the truth.
Besides, Cassidy thought as he finished his several mile walk and neared a group of airships moored to the backside of the island, this will probably get me killed. He stopped for a moment to look the ships over from afar, then stuffed both hands in his pockets and continued.
The airships didn’t have the fantastic colourful beauty of the ones moored at the hotel. These looked like makeshift battleships, bristling with guns and plate armour. They looked too heavy to be supported even by the large balloons holding them aloft, but he chalked it up to Twilight physics. Unlike the Nubigena, they didn’t have to fly in the real world.
This side of the island didn’t look like the hotel side either. The structures appeared to have been fashioned from triangular pieces of some dark material he could only assume had been pilfered from some other construction project. If this place wasn’t the abode of pirates, he couldn’t imagine what might be.
Cassidy shuffled through a number of plans in his mind. Several clever ploys and complicated schemes seemed almost plausible. Perhaps he could knock one of the guards out and take his clothes, or show up under the guise of wanting to join their ranks. Surely he could sell himself as a mercenary pilot. Banner had said they hired dreams on local ships.
His mind went blank when a man stepped out in front of him from behind a large boulder. The pirate, for lack of a better term, wore a dirty naval uniform of the late seventeenth century. His beard hadn’t been trimmed and he carried what looked like a musket with a magazine sticking out just ahead of the trigger. Cassidy tried to imagine how such a device could even function. The bayonet that topped it off had been serrated and made of something that looked like glass.
“Sorry, mate,” the man said, with a thick and hard to place accent. “This may not be quite the place you’re looking for.”
Cassidy kept his hands in his pockets. “That all depends,” he said, ignoring the guard’s weapon. He turned to the side and stared out at the tethered airships.
The guard glanced over to see what he was looking at and turned back. “Depends on what?”
Storm Dreams (The Cycle of Somnium Book 1) Page 19