Chapter One

Dreamquake

Elizabeth Knox

On St Lazarus’s Eve in 1906 over one thousand people were at the Rainbow Opera to share a traditional feast-day dream. A dream named Homecoming, performed by the dreamhunter Grace Tiebold.  Grace had told the Opera’s manager that she’d been having trouble falling asleep, and that it wouldn’t do to keep her audience awake and staring at the ceilings of their bedchambers. She’d arranged for another dreamhunter, George Mason, to lie in with her. He had caught Homecoming too and so would boost her already famously powerful performance. Also, Mason was a Soporif. He often worked in hospitals, enhancing the effects of anaesthetics. He would enter the operating theatre before the surgeons and their assistants, and bed down near the prepared patient, for anyone who was close to a Soporif when he fell asleep would fall asleep with him.

At ten that evening Grace and George Mason were settled head to feet in the dreamer’s bed, a silk-upholstered platform at the top of the dais in the centre of the Rainbow Opera’s huge auditorium. The Opera had a full house. Founderston’s fashionable people – magnates, generals, politicians, and the President himself – were all in attendence.

The manager was happy and, at the time, looked on the dreamhunter’s change in the evening’s arrangements as a good thing.

By midnight the Opera’s four tiers of balconies were empty, and waiters had collected the cups, liqueur glasses and bonbon trays from the little tables and ottomans around each balcony. The padded doors to the bedchambers were fastened shut. Everyone was in bed – all but the President’s and Secretary of the Interior’s bodyguards, and the men from the fire watch, who were either patrolling balconies and backstairs in their soft-soled shoes, or were at their post in the window of the Rainbow Opera’s  control room. The fire watch was awake and vigilant. The building was secure and peaceable. A stage was set in the thousand drowsy heads of the Opera’s patrons. Grace Tiebold lay under the thick, down-filled quilt of the dreamer’s bed. She could hear Mason breathing quietly. She waited to fall through the trapdoor of his sleep into their shared dream. It was nice at least not to have to worry about when she’d drop off.
Instead, Grace worried about her husband, Chorley.

Chorley had packed a bag and left the house a week before, and hadn’t told her where he was going. Grace worried about her daughter, Rose, who had been boarding for two terms at Founderston Girls’ Academy, a school that was less than a mile from her home. She worried that Rose, having been sent away by her parents, wouldn’t want to come back and live with them again. Grace wanted to do something to reassure her daughter that they were interested in her. Perhaps she should arrange for Rose to come out at the next Presentation Ball, instead of having to wait another year and a half.
Grace worried about her dreamhunter niece, Laura. Since Laura’s father Tziga had disappeared earlier in the year, Laura had been quite distant from her family.

But at lunch that afternoon Laura had behaved beautifully. She was polite and affectionate. She had even remembered to bring her aunt and cousin St Lazarus Day gifts – the kind of nice gesture that was usually beyond her. Not that Laura wasn’t nice – only solemn and wrapped up in herself.

At lunch Grace had watched Laura smiling as Rose opened her present, a box of musk creams from Farry’s, the family’s favourite confectioner. Grace had thought:

‘She’s finally growing up.’ Rose, even when biting into a musk cream and moaning loudly in delight, didn’t give her mother a moment’s doubt about her maturity.

As Grace waited to fall asleep she mused on that lunch. She fretted. True, Laura had brought gifts and behaved herself, but, as Grace gazed into her memory and studied the face across the restaurant table, she could see that Laura had a look in her eyes, a dangerous look – like those her dreamhunter father had often worn – a kind of dark haze made of desperation and determination and power.

Lying in the white cloud of bed at the pinnacle of the Opera’s dais, Grace thought: ‘What is Laura planning?’ She turned her head and looked over at the second storey balcony, and the doors to the Hame and Tiebold suites, where Laura and Rose were sleeping. Firmly fastened, the quilted doors gave Grace no clues. A moment later she was drifting. Something passed through her mind, a proud happiness about her home, her city, her country, the golden age in which she was living, the fine people she’d chosen to manage her world. The thought pleased her – and amused her too, since it was so unlike her. Why should she be thinking of President Wilkinson when she had so much on her mind?

Then Grace saw the crisped, brown, late-summer leaves of oaks in a grove by the road that would take her home. George Mason had fallen asleep and had dropped her into her dream.

And then – suddenly – she wasn’t at home. She was in a coffin, and under the ground, and she could not get out. The Rainbow Opera was oval in shape. One of its longer curves faced the River Sva, the other a paved, crescent shaped plaza. The building and plaza were enclosed in a high fence, built to keep out anyone hoping to get near enough to the auditorium to pilfer dreams. But the Opera patron’s chauffeurs and coachmen parked overnight in the plaza could go to sleep if they needed to, for dreams very rarely spilled beyond the Opera’s walls.

A dreamhunter’s projection zone was known as his or her ‘penumbra’ – a term borrowed from astronomy, where ‘penumbra’ describes the partial shadow the moon casts on the face of the earth during a total eclipse. (The ‘umbra’, or totality, was the dreamhunter him or herself, asleep, and haloed by the shade of a dream.) Grace Tiebold’s three-hundred-and-seventy-five-yard penumbra could comfortably fill all the Opera’s rooms and spill only a little beyond its walls. If one of the Opera’s security men, patrolling between fence and walls, did happen to hunker down and doze off, he might well find himself involved in one of Grace Tiebold’s dreams. Grace’s brother-in-law, the great dreamhunter Tziga Hame, had had a four-hundred and-fifty-yard penumbra. Dozing guards or chauffeurs could find themselves immersed in any dream Tziga Hame performed at the Opera. However, city ordinances and cautious supervision by the Dream Regulatory Body had, for years, guaranteed that none of the households above shops in the streets surrounding the Opera would ever feel the faintest bit of colour from any of the Opera’s performances.

That was until the early hours of St Lazarus’s Day, 1906, when sleepers in those houses found themselves snagged by the rim of a great screeching wheel of nightmare.

Only its edge – and although they woke with their hearts pounding, and gasping for breath, their distress quickly passed, to be replaced by something else. Fear. They sat up in bed and strained to hear. Some ran to their windows and threw them open and looked towards the festively lit Opera, from which came the sound of screams – a hellish howling that filled the still, chilly spring night.

Grace Tiebold knew that she was caught in a nightmare, and wasn’t really in her coffin. She was a skilled and experienced dreamhunter who’d had to free herself from nightmares before. She fought to be free of this one. At first she fought it on its own terms – she struggled with the shroud, tore at the padded satin lining of the coffin, and finally with its undressed wood. She made the futile repeated movements – the clawing, thrashing, hammering – of the person she was in the dream. In the dream, she reminded herself, and kept in mind as the spark of her experience, her mastery of other dreams, brought her back to herself.

Grace finally burst right out of the battered limbs and welter of blood and filth – out of that miserable, suffering self. She jumped like a spectre out of the trapped body, the grave, the dream. For a moment she was paralysed by sleep, then she struggled free of the silk quilt, panting, and found that her face and fingertips were torn and slick with blood.

She fell off the bed, got up, and looked about the auditorium. The balconies were empty. Electric candles around the walls of each tier, and the unsteady glow of the gas jets beyond the stained glass dome, showed Grace her beautiful Rainbow Opera – just as it always was, but as though turned inside out. Its beauty looked ghastly. The men of the fire watch looked monstrous. George, lying rigid, his face contorted, mouth alternately straining open and snapping shut, looked monstrous too.

Grace picked up the water jug and tipped it over him.

For good measure, she slammed the jug itself down onto his chest. The Soporif woke, then rolled onto his side to spit out blood and a piece of cracked tooth. He struggled to rise, but kept flopping back as if stunned.

Grace shouted at the fire watch to sound the alarm bells. She could barely hear her own voice over the storm of screaming that came from the fastened bed chambers.

A door had opened on the second tier, the door to the Tiebold suite. Grace saw her daughter Rose lean over the balcony, her hands gripping its rail. Grace felt herself swoop towards her daughter. She nearly jumped from the dais, stopping herself only just in time. As Rose’s face came into focus Grace saw that her daughter was pale and confused, but not bloodied or maddened. Rose had looked at her mother, then away. Grace followed her daughter’s gaze and saw someone running towards the fire watch control room. It was a man in a long coat and broad-brimmed hat. He moved fast, but as though he was skating, his limbs seeming to stretch and blur. He jumped into the control room, among the fire watch.

Then, it seemed, Grace momentarily lost her grip on wakefulness, and the dream came back to change the shape and sense of events she was trying so hard to follow. She saw the coat and hat float to the control room floor. Had the ceiling collapsed? The men of the fire watch appeared to have been knocked flat and were struggling under something that had fallen on them – something dark and heavy. Then one body got to its feet, although it seemed to be covered from head to foot in some crumbling substance, as if it had been in the ground and had emerged contaminated by earth. The body moved towards the alarm board, put out a hand, and was suddenly caught in a cascade of blue sparks. The control room went dark. The bells didn’t sound.

George was still struggling to get up. Grace couldn’t wait for him to recover. She left the dais. The turns in the spiral stairs forced her to lose sight of her daughter several times as she descended. When she was only half-way down, she felt the dream leave the building. It didn’t disperse but departed all at once, like a flock of birds breaking from a stand of trees.

Grace reached the bottom of the dais, and sprinted across the auditorium to the nearest staircase. She ran up it. From above her came the sound of timber splintering. Half-way up the stairs Grace was knocked back against the wall by a phalanx of men – the President’s bodyguards. They were carrying President Garth Wilkinson on their shoulders, like a body on a bier. Bloody foam spilled from Wilkinson’s gaping mouth.

Grace Tiebold was used to being treated with respect, to being somebody. It was years since she had been shunted aside by anyone. These men did just that – shoved her aside.

Worse, she was noticed by the last man. He was rushing too, but he stepped aside to avoid bowling Grace down the stairs. Then he recognised her. His face filled with disgust, and he struck her across the mouth. It was an openhanded slap, but it knocked her down. She clung to the hand rail, her ears ringing.

She thought: ‘He thinks the nightmare was me.’

Once she’d had this thought, another followed it: ‘If it wasn’t me, then who was it?’

Then, ‘Laura,’ Grace thought, though she couldn’t think where her niece might have gone to catch a nightmare like that. It was like something from ‘the shadow

belt’ – a region in Band X, four days’ walk Into the lifeless desert of the Place. Grace knew that an eight-day walk In and out again was beyond Laura’s stamina, that her niece was simply too small and weak to carry enough water for a journey of that length. So where had the nightmare come from? How had Laura managed to catch it? And why would Laura bring a dreadful thing like that to the Rainbow Opera on St Lazarus’s Eve?

Grace collected herself and went on. She reached the top of the stairs and saw her daughter. Rose’s jaw went slack, and she took a step back, apparently appalled at her mother’s appearance. Grace ran to Rose, took her hands, and scanned her face. Rose was unhurt – her lips were mauve but, Grace recalled, that was the stain of the musk creams she had been nibbling since lunch. The terrible howling had stopped. Behind the Opera’s doors people had begun to call out for help – a sane, human clamour. A few began to spill out onto the balconies.

The door of the Hame suite opened and Laura emerged, her face white, and mouth bloody. She was clumsily unwinding bandages from her hands.

Grace called to her. Laura looked at her aunt, her expression closed and remote.

There was a loud crash from the auditorium. Grace turned and saw that George Mason was in trouble. A group of men were making their way up the spiral stairs, with murder in their eyes. George had hurled his own water jug at them. For a moment they fell back, shielding their faces with their hands, then they continued to climb.

The control room was dark, but the alarm board was cascading sparks, by the light of which Grace could see several of the fire watch leaning across the sill of the window that looked out over the auditorium. They appeared stunned and battered.

Grace ignored the sounds behind her – of breaking glass, and her niece calling to someone – and shouted across the auditorium to the fire watch. ‘Please help him!’

She gestured towards Mason. A long moment went by. The Opera’s rooms disgorged
retching, staggering people. Grace yelled some more. She still had hold of Rose, who was trying to pull away. Grace hung onto her daughter but kept her attention on the control room and fire watch. She urged them to do something. In another moment George would be overwhelmed.

The dais was so packed now that Grace imagined she could see it swaying. Finally the fire watch pulled themselves together and, lit by blue flashes, began to move, and act.

As Grace turned back to her daughter, Rose broke away and rushed to the stairs that led to the dreamer’s door. Rose stopped, clinging to the door frame and peered down into the dark. The lights seemed to have failed in the stairwell.

'Rose!’ Grace called, and her daughter turned and came back. ‘Are those stairs clear?’ Grace asked – she was thinking how they might avoid the angry crowd.

‘No. Laura went down there. It took her,’ Rose said. She was stammering with shock. ‘Did you see it?’
Grace frowned at her daughter and touched her forehead.‘Darling, we have to hide,’ Grace said, gently.

Then she grabbed Rose and propelled her towards the private balcony of the Presidential Suite. These balconies were usually locked, but Grace was hoping that, since the President had been carried to safety, his bodyguards hadn’t bothered to close the door behind them when they fled.

The first door was not only open, but broken and hanging from one hinge. The balcony was empty but for an overturned chair. Grace hustled her daughter into the Suite. She pulled the door closed and bolted it.

For the next five minutes Rose and Grace hid, cowering, as an enraged crowd beat on the bolted door. Then they heard police whistles.

Rose tried to talk in stops and starts. She said to her mother, ‘Did you see it? What was it? Why did Laura want that? Why was she calling it to her?’

And to these incoherent questions Grace could only reply, ‘It was a dream, darling, only a dream. It must have seemed like that to Laura, too. Just a dream. She’s not like you and me.’

Secretary Doran wasn’t carried off by his bodyguards. For one thing he had only two of them, men in opulent silk dressing gowns worn over evening dress, who might be mistaken for his guests. For another, unlike President Wilkinson, Cas Doran wasn’t incapacitated by the nightmare. He’d sampled nightmares before. Once he managed to drag his consciousness and his intelligence free of it, Doran first checked on all his people – his bodyguards, who had been awake throughout, and who had stationed themselves at the door to the suite, where, they reported to their employer, they’d heard someone smashing through all the doors that sealed off the row of private balconies. Doran checked on his son, Ru, who was vomiting into a basin in the bathroom. He checked on Maze Plasir’s apprentice, who had been invited to the Opera because Plasir had loaded him with a dream doctored to colour the few moments of sleep before Grace Tiebold’s dream commenced, to fill the Opera patrons’ drowsy brains with the impression that they were in the hands of a very good government – an irreplaceable government. Doran found the young Colourist uninjured, but rigid with fright – he had wet his bed. The boy was too shocked and ashamed even to attempt an apology. He stood by the bed, shivering so hard that the silk of the drooping crotch of his trousers made a wet flapping noise. Doran stripped the quilt from the bed and wrapped it around the boy. He took him into the suite’s sitting room and sat him beside Ru, who had stopped being sick and had some of his colour back. One of Doran’s bodyguards told him that his lips were bleeding and passed him a towel. Doran pressed it against his mouth and went to the door of the suite, where he stood listening to shouts and breakage and pounding feet. Then, distant at first, but coming closer, police whistles. Doran and his bodyguards exchanged glances, then Doran unbolted the door. The balcony was empty, but the doors at either end were wrenched out of their frames, timber splintered around latch and hinge.

A phalanx of blue uniforms was thrusting its way up the spiral stair of the dreamer’s dais. The stair was packed with struggling bodies in torn silk nightwear. Doran spotted several members of the Opera’s fire watch among them, on the stair and trying to defend the platform on top of the dais. George Mason was on his stomach on the dreamer’s bed. Two men had hold of his kicking legs and were dragging him towards the maw of the crowd. Mason clung with both hands to the headboard.

Another cluster of police emerged from the main staircase into the auditorium and fought their way through, striking at all about them with their black truncheons. In their midst Cas Doran glimpsed the slight form of Grace Tiebold. The dreamhunter was hustled out of the building. The police on the dais had secured Mason. They threw a quilt over his head and gathered themselves around him and defended the bed till reinforcements arrived – another fifty or so constables who erupted into the auditorium through every entrance. Several were carrying rifles.

The mêlée blew apart everywhere the armed police appeared, people scattering from the sight of the guns and truncheons, those who were staggering suddenly fleet.

The crowd began to press out of the Opera into the surrounding streets. Doran turned to his bodyguards, his son, and the shivering Colourist. ‘I think we might venture out now,’ he said.

Rose emerged from behind the door of the President’s suite, where she’d hidden with her mother for a terribly long time – though it was perhaps only five minutes. The police had appeared and carried Grace off. The mob had poured away after them.

Rose took a seat on an ottoman on the balcony. She was quietly beside herself. Her mind was in good working order, but her feelings seemed to have gone to sleep. She’d been shocked before in her life, when she’d failed her Try and found she couldn’t enter the Place and wouldn’t become a dreamhunter. But this, she supposed, was what it was like to be in shock. She had discovered that her cousin Laura was on friendly terms with a monster.

Laura had called on the monster’s help and had fled the Opera wrapped in its glistening, inhuman arms.

This discovery was such a dislocation in Rose’s sense of what she knew about Laura – never mind the world – that Rose had the impression that, if the world wasn’t quite itself, then she wasn’t herself either.

Any moment now she’d do something strange, like poke out her own eyes or jump off the balcony. She would do so solely out of a crazed urge to check that what she had always thought was true – Rose
and Laura, Laura and Rose, together in a world without monsters – was still true.

To make matters worse, it seemed that Rose’s mother hadn’t seen the monster. Grace had been too intent on the fire watch and George Mason. When Rose told Grace that a monster had carried Laura off, her mother had touched her forehead as though testing for fever.

Rose wound a lock of her long hair around her fingers and dragged on it. The steady pressure made her tilt her head, then stoop. She concentrated on the fiery patch of pain. Then someone near her said, ‘It’s Rose, isn’t it?’ Cas Doran and his party made their way from the balcony of his suite, through the smashed, skewed doors of the suite belonging to the Speaker of the House, and onto the President’s balcony. There they found a girl sitting slumped and knock-kneed on an ottoman and tugging severely on a lock of her long golden hair.

Doran removed the towel from his bleeding mouth and said, ‘It’s Rose, isn’t it?’ Rose Tiebold was a friend of his daughter, Mamie. The girls were in the same class at Founderston Girls’ Academy. Rose let go of her hair and her head bobbed up. She straightened and looked at him, his son Ru, the bodyguards,
Plasir’s apprentice.

‘The police took my mother away with them,’ she said.

‘For her own protection,’ said Doran. ‘But – did they just leave you here alone?’

Rose glanced over her shoulder at the door to the President’s suite. Its surface was dented and gouged.

‘The crowd followed the police. They were throwing things at Ma. Mostly only their slippers, thank God. I was behind the door when it opened. Suddenly everyone was gone.’

She rubbed at her scalp. ‘Ouch,’ she said. ‘I think I’ve pulled my thoughts into line.’

‘I’m glad to hear it,’ said Doran. The girl was a little hysterical, he thought. It was to be expected. He caught her under her elbow and helped her up. She flopped against him, then said, ‘Oh – Mamie’s father.’ She sounded as though she were making a note of it, her tone musing and cautious.

‘We’ll get you out of here,’ Doran said. ‘Come along.’

The building was emptying. There were ambulances in the plaza. People were being seen to, bandaged, offered blankets and sweet tea.

Doran took a blanket and draped it around Rose. He got the attention of a captain of the police and called him over. ‘I’m rich in witnesses,’ the captain said, ‘but of course they all want to go home. I have my men taking names and addresses.’

‘Good,’ said Doran. ‘Were there any serious injuries? Or arrests?’

‘There were people who couldn’t be calmed down. We took some into custody. Others were taken in ambulances to Pike Street Hospital. I imagine the Regulatory Body will want to interview witnesses?’

‘Yes.’

‘The dreamhunters have gone to the city barracks. They’ll be safe there. I have to say, Secretary Doran, some of what I’m hearing sounds like plain nonsense. Half these people were running around while still asleep, I think.’

A dishevelled youth, blanket floating behind him like batwings, barged past the police captain shouting, ‘Rose!

Rose!’

‘Sandy!’ Rose said.

The police captain seized the youth by the collar of his pyjamas.

‘Where’s Laura?’ the young man asked. His eyes stayed on Rose’s face while his fingers grappled with the policeman’s hand, slipping, for they were covered in bleeding bite marks.

Doran spotted the copper tags that swung flashing through the gap in the front of the young man’s pyjama jacket. He said to the police captain, ‘This is another dreamhunter. You should make sure you catch any who were here. It’s almost certain that the nightmare has printed itself on them. They’ll be reproducing it in a diminished form for the next few nights.’

The young man looked at Cas Doran then, his eyes wide. He moaned.

‘Sandy, your uncle is with my mother at the police barracks,’ Rose said.

Cas Doran thought: ‘This is George Mason’s nephew, asking after Laura Hame, desperate with worry.’

‘Where is she?’ Sandy Mason said again.

Rose’s eyes flicked sideways – met Doran’s gaze – then returned to Sandy’s face. ‘She ran off. She was scared. I had bare feet, there was glass on the stairs.’

Rose was explaining how she and her cousin had become separated.

Cas Doran knew – because it had been described to him – that the nightmare he had just experienced was Tziga Hame’s Buried Alive, a dream Hame had caught for the first time the previous spring and had performed in prisons in a couple of week-long stints in spring and early summer. Hame had had Buried Alive the night he jumped from a pier while walking under escort between the Regulatory Body’s special train and Westport’s Pier Prison. Hame’s family seemed to accept the fiction that he had disappeared while attempting a solo crossing of the Place.

The story – the cover-up – wasn’t Doran’s idea. He knew nothing about it until it was done: a sloppy deception, a forged signature in the Intentions Book at the ranger station in Doorhandle. Hame’s sister-in-law Grace Tiebold had organised a search party and had taken it In looking for a body.

There was no body. No body mummifying in the Place, nor, in fact, where it should be, in a pauper’s grave belonging to Magdalene Charity Hospital in Westport. But Hame’s family seemed prepared to accept his passing without a body to bury. They were even planning a memorial service.

Cas Doran knew all this, and he also knew that Tziga Hame’s sister, Marta, opposed the planned service. Marta Hame was a very religious woman and – Doran figured – the only reason she could have for not wanting the proper ceremony was if she thought her brother was, in fact, still alive.

Cas Doran looked back at the Opera, its walls blackened by heaving, magnified shadows. He looked at all the tattered fingers and clawed faces and thought: ‘Hame is alive.’ Hame’s nightmare had not been felt in the world since he disappeared. And yet tonight, when the Opera’s patrons were expecting a seasonal performance of Homecoming, here it was, bursting out of an unknown grave – Hame’s grave – like a blood-soaked revenant. Doran set his hands on Sandy Mason’s bullish neck and held him hard.

‘Who was Laura Hame with?’ he demanded. Sandy looked baffled. ‘She was with Miss Tiebold. That’s why I’m asking Miss Tiebold where she is.’

‘Laura was in bed with me,’ Rose said.

Cas Doran studied Rose’s face and saw that she was much more composed than she had been only moments before.

‘We didn’t sleep. We were talking. When the screaming started Laura got scared and bolted down the stairs to the dreamer’s door,’ Rose said, looking from Doran to Sandy.

Sandy was stricken. He writhed out of Doran’s grip. ‘We have to find her!’

‘Oh – yes,’ said Rose. She laid a hand on Cas Doran’s arm. ‘Secretary Doran, could you please have someone take me home? Laura will have run there.’

‘No. I won’t feel clear in my conscience unless I take you home with me, Rose. Mamie’s mother wouldn’t forgive me for failing to do so. I’ll send some people around to your house to find your cousin. I’m sure you’re right and she’s there.’ Doran regarded Sandy. ‘As for you, Mr Mason – the police and Body officials are gathering exposed dreamhunters so they can be quarantined. It’s a matter of public safety. I’m sure you understand. And you will need some easing through it.’ Doran patted Sandy Mason’s shoulder. ‘We’ll let you know how your friend is as soon as we locate her.’

Sandy slumped, but nodded.

Doran signalled to a bowler-hatted Regulatory Body official. The man came to him.

‘I have a dreamhunter here,’ Doran said, one hand resting on Sandy in a proprietary way, ‘and Maze Plasir’s apprentice is standing over there with my son. Also, Miss Tiebold tells me that her cousin – the dreamhunter Laura Hame – will have run home.’

‘She didn’t sleep,’ Rose said again. ‘We were talking.’

Then her eyelids fluttered as if she were about faint and she began to laugh, semi-hysterical again.

The official took hold of Sandy and escorted him away.

‘Your cousin’s beau?’ Doran asked.

Rose stopped laughing and said, ‘I’m sure I wouldn’t know,’ every inch a Founderston Girls’ Academy senior asserting her sense of what was proper. And Cas Doran realised with a small shock that he knew very well what her life was like. Rose Tiebold had the kind of agile spirit to be found in those who straddled very different worlds. She attended a fashionable school, had all the manners of a nice young lady – in other words, she prickled with barbed boundaries – but she was also from a dreamhunting family, and party to the daily phantasmagoria of life with dreamhunters, to their frequent exhaustion and feverish wildness.

These dreamhunters – they were his. His responsibility, his study, his stock-in-trade. But Cas Doran was not a dreamhunter, nor was anyone in his family. He lived a regular domestic life in a household run by a refined woman – herself a graduate of the Girls’ Academy. And that is how Cas Doran knew what Rose Tiebold’s life was like: how contradictory it must be. Because, even given the differences in their age and occupation, this girl was in some ways like him.

Rose was squinting against the headlamps of his car, which his chauffeur had driven slowly and expertly through the thronging people. The chauffeur put his hand on the top of the windscreen, stood up and called to Doran.

‘Sir!’

‘Good work!’ Doran called back. He took Rose’s arm. ‘Come,’ he said, tenderly. ‘There’s no need for you to try to think it all through now. I’m sure we’ll find your cousin and she’ll be all right. Your mother will be perfectly safe at the police barracks, and cared for – I’ll see to that myself. We’ll send for your father – wherever he is. You must be worn out. If, as you say, you didn’t sleep, it is safe for you to sleep now.’

Rose went with Secretary Doran. He spoke soothingly, said that everything would be all right. He handed her into the car. Its interior smelled pleasantly of new leather. Rose realised that there had been some terrible smells, as well as terrible sights, in the plaza. The car began to move again, easing its way through the thronging people. There were seething shadows in the plaza, interrupting the lights from streets and houses.

Rose stared at Doran’s profile. In the light ghosting over his face Doran looked grim and intent, like someone making ready for a fight. Then he turned and smiled at her.

Rose knew she’d do everything she could to keep people from guessing that it was her cousin’s nightmare. Before too long she’d speak to Laura, then she would know why her cousin had done it. There would be a reason, some kind of sense. Rose suspected it was something to do with the letter Laura had torn up, a last letter from her missing father.

The letter had, for some reason unfathomable at the time, been partly buried in a large amount of sand in Laura’s bedroom at Summerfort. Laura had been Into the Place illicitly, looking for clues as to why her father had disappeared. She was back in Summerfort when Rose and Rose’s father, Chorley, found her. Laura had kept them out of her bedroom, then, when she had finally opened the door, they’d found her standing up to her ankles in a pile of sand. The envelope that held the letter was sticking out of it.

Sand!

That very night – St Lazarus’s Eve – when the howls of terror had wound down, Rose had seen her cousin emerge from the Hame suite, and stand for a moment unwinding bandages from her hands. Laura had looked up at Rose, then seemed to dismiss her. She began to call. What Laura shouted sounded like nonsense, but it was a name. At her call a monster had come running. A great statue in the shape of a man – beautifully muscled, nobly serene. A man apparently made of sand. The monster had swept Laura up in his arms and run to the stairs down to the dreamer’s door. Rose had tried to break away from her mother to follow them. But Rose’s mother had kept a firm hold on her.

Then Rose, straining after Laura, had seen something. She saw the name Laura had called was scored in the sand on the back of the monster’s neck. Four letters: N O W N.

Rose was trembling. Secretary Doran touched her arm and said, ‘How are you, Rose?’ Then, ‘We’ll be home shortly.’

There was no one in the world Rose was closer to than Laura, but Rose had known nothing of any of this – the nightmare, or the monster. She felt herself shrinking. She didn’t know anything. All her schoolmates thought she was a bit of a hero, but she wasn’t. She was baffled, and in the dark.