Chapter 32 - Trouble Sleeping

A week of sleeping away the sun, and awakening to the crimson of dusk. Of watching the sun burn down into the sea on patrol, and re-learning the constellations on clear nights. Of the way even the air smelled and felt different against his face . . . had Cadryn fully convinced that the night was its own world, independent of the reality of Day. No wonder they were all strange on the night shift, but being strange was only the beginning of it. After the Starless Night, something worse wore on his mind.

Encara Tos was a traitor, or at the least she had betrayed the Keepers with her actions, by refusing to leave the library and help Mareth and him during the attack. What else was she capable of? At the least, she had proven herself a coward then, and he had discovered in the intervening time since: she was a snoop too.

“How many times must I apologize, young Cadryn,” she was saying, not for the first time that evening.

“It doesn’t matter how many times you say it, Encara, if your heart is in the wrong place,” he replied, and set off on the next leg of their patrol atop the wall of the citadel. Above them, the sound of the hanging gardens was a sea onto itself. For a moment he hoped to the Darkest Thought that one of the rotting carts in the Wreckage Spire might break free and land on the woman.

“Your words wound me,” Encara said from several steps behind.

Pausing in place, Cadryn looked back at her, he did not like her being behind him, but she insisted on taking her sweet time with their patrol route. The moon was at half, and the verdant light through the canopy above silhouetted the woman as she sauntered along. She looked like the specter of a drowned noblewoman below the waves of the sea: a great furred coat, hair a radiant curl of green, and her eyes two glowing emeralds cloaked within sharp features. He half expected her to smile with needle-like teeth. She did smile, but it was deceptively human, beautiful if it were on another face.

Cadryn turned back to the length of parapet ahead of them and started walking, “You could have simply told me what the stones in our sleeping alcoves do, you didn’t have to make me see . . . that.” For a minute only the wind answered, then the peace was broken.

“Maybe I wanted you to see it,” she called out, “to know that I am not as unfeeling as you might take me to be.”

He stopped walking again, inhaled, let it out slowly. That evening, upon awaking Cadryn found something strange: the stones of the alcove, the eleven he had seen before, were glowing, well some of them were at least. Pulling on his pants and getting up, only Encara was still in her alcove. She slept in the most opulently furnished of them, on the second floor off by herself. He called up to her asking about it and she bade him come to her, naturally. He did so, and instead of explaining the nature of the stones, she had just casually taken his finger, and placed it against one glowing on the ceiling of her chamber.

***

He was heaving against an empty stomach in the next moment, the memory, or dream, fading rapidly from his mind.

Back in the present, the wind slipped down his tunic and Cadryn shuddered.

“You had no right to show me that, I . . .” but he did not have the words. The stones, they stored dreams, or memories, if you dreamt of the past. If you touched someone else’s stone, you too would experience the dream as flash of revelation, like the moment of waking after a dream of your own only it stayed, vivid and real, in the mind.

“You asked why I would not aid you that night, why, I would refuse to leave the library despite my oaths . . . I dream of that night, often. You’re welcome to touch any of my stored dreams, I assure you most will be from that night.”

“I would rather be punched in the face,” Cadryn replied evenly, and shaking off the memory, looked out over the approach to the tollhouse. They were on the southern side, and the great rive-cut canyon that passed beside the Neeft on its way to the sea was a dark slash on the landscape, the silvery line of the bridge the only passage in sight. They had seen a caravan traveling across it a half-bell ago, but not seen them for the forest after. Presently the sound of a drayman yelling, and a whip crack, split the air.

“Ooh, guests,” Encara said, bobbing her head. “We should pop by in case there’s trouble.”

To his ears, it sounded like Encara hoped for trouble, she probably did.