Bad Dreams & Broken Hearts 03: “They don't cut off your head and fill your mouth with garlic anymore.”

Jake had a two year old National Motors Cataphract with all the trimmings, electric windows, polished cherry-wood dashboard with enough brass dials for a submersible, built-in tape deck, acres of kid-glove-soft rich brown leather. I also happened to know that it had a sixteen piston high torque motor under the hood, but Jake drove like he was transporting roc's eggs.

“What do you hope to find at the studio?” he asked softly as he pulled into traffic.

“I don't know,” I shot back “What am I going to find?”

“There's nothing conclusive,” he raised his voice a little. “I mean it. If she was engaged in any serious workings it wasn't at her studio.” A pause. “Nor in her rooming house—not that she spends much time there. I checked.”

“And you two pay her bills,” I mused.

“Not all of them,” he retorted sharply. Then he saw what I was driving at. “Yeah, if she's selling bloodmilk or maidensbreath, I don't know what she's doing with the money.”

“That picture took some talent,” I considered. “If she did it she's a magus—registered or unregistered—or she's not human.”

“How likely is that?” Jake asked.

“That's she's not human?” I shook my head. “I have no idea. Seriously. I was stashed here to keep me away from the notice of the family. There's no reason why one of the other lords couldn't have done the same thing, but if they did they'd keep quiet, just like my father has. It's possible even that she's oneiroi and doesn't know it.”

That earned me a sidelong glance. “You think so?”

“No, not really,” I admitted. “I mean, it's possible, but... Look, most of the children of Nightmare don't look human. Not entirely. There just happens to be another one like me, and Marji just happens to get involved with her? That's just too much coincidence. My bet is that she's a minor talent working off the books.”

That didn't sit well with Jake. “I'd hate to think she was messed up in that,” he said. “We have licenses for a reason. Trying to harness external energies without the proper training, without the proper equipment—”

“Without being a treaty signatory,” I put in.

“Yeah,” Jake gave me a sideways glance. “The Mayor's accords with Nightmare only protect authorized practitioners.” His tone implied that he was surprised I knew that.

“Which is why there is so much money in it,” I continued. “It's damned dangerous.”

“Karin was no gangster,” Jake said with finality. “I would have seen the signs. Marji would have seen the signs. She was in love, but she wasn't stupid.”

“I'm not saying that Karin was a gangster,” I held up my hand for peace. “Just a... hobbyist. Someone with a little talent. Maybe she was playing with it, and it got away from her.”

“Unlicensed magic is a serious crime,” Jake said. “It's a risk to public health.”

I sighed. “And it happens way more than the cops want to admit. We both know that. Someone's selling tigerberry or worse at half of the clubs I play at.”

He was silent for a moment. Then, “Uh. You're not...?”

“Me?” I laughed at the idea. “I haven't got the talent to charm an apple out of a tree. Just a resident alien.”

“You know a lot about it, though,” he said. “More than the average citizen.”

I shrugged. “I'm not the average citizen.” Then, before he could think too much about it I added, “My father made sure I knew all about binding and summoning and compulsion. That's survival knowledge for my kind.”

“I guess it would be,” Jake agreed softly. Then he changed the subject. “So you'll take a look around Karin's studio?”

“Sure,” I said. We had to be halfway there by now.

“And then?” he prompted.

I looked out the window at the street going by. A Summer night in the Midworld. Pretty girls in short-shorts and high heels navigating shakily over gratings in the sidewalks emitting wisps of smoke from the underground trains. Splashes of neon from signs announcing bars, dance clubs, late night eateries. Shop windows, still brilliantly illuminated after the clerks had locked up and gone home, full of shiny new automatic washing machines and console stereo receivers.

This was my home. My father had placed me with a human couple. Their baby had died, and he erased the memory from their minds and left me in their crib. My human parents were wealthy, and I had gone to private schools, lived a life of relative luxury.

That was during the day. At night I walked in my father's kingdom, but I had never really felt at home there.

I looked back at Jake, who was still expecting an answer.

“I'll talk to my father,” I assured him.

“Thank you,” he said.

“I may not be able to do anything,” I amplified.

He nodded. He looked disappointed. You don't know what you're asking, I thought. All my life I'd managed to avoid being drawn into the politics of the lords and their courtiers, to stay free of the web of favors and obligations. Nothing in Nightmare came without a price, and information could be the most precious commodity of all.

Jake drove on in silence.

We had been on the Standing Stones Expressway and he took an exit called “Local Streets”. I didn't know Pickmantown, except by reputation. The streets we navigated were dark, the occasional streetlights the old coal gas instead of the modern electrics that the more affluent neighborhoods used. The pedestrians here were sparser and had a rough look, young toughs and hard-bitten molls, I thought.

Jake took us through a maze of alleys before pulling up in front of a windowless brick warehouse.

“This is it,” he said.

I took a careful look around before I got out of the car. The dimness of the streetlights wasn't a problem for my eyes. A human might have thought it looked mysterious and romantic, but I could see how filthy it was, and the nearby buildings all had a blind, forbidding look, the windows shuttered or in some cases bricked in. It looked like a good place to score some tigerberry and then get knifed.

“Are you leaving your car here?” I asked. There were only a handful of other vehicles parked on the street, and about half of them looked as if they had been abandoned there, probably after the natives had eaten the owners.

“It'll be fine,” Jake assured me. “This area is not as bad as it looks.”

That wasn't reassuring. It could be really dreadful and still not be as bad as it looked. The papers liked to call Pickmantown “colorful” and “historic”. In recent years it had become popular with the City's artistic elite, for some bizarre reason, but it still looked to me like a place where lost tourists met untimely ends.

I did notice that Jake carefully made sure that his car doors were all locked before he headed towards the warehouse. I followed him, still looking around. “Isn't this where all those ghoul attacks happened?” I asked.

He shot me an exasperated glance and pulled a big ring of keys out of his pocket. “The papers blew that all out of proportion,” he said, sorting through the keys.

I was watching the street. Someone a couple of blocks away was weaving down the sidewalk. He might have been drunk. Or a ghoul. Or a drunk ghoul. Whatever he was it seemed likely that we would be safely inside the building long before he manage to get this far. “But there were ghoul attacks?” I prompted.

Jake got the door unlocked and pushed it open. “A couple. One woman was injured—slightly. There wasn't any risk of transmission.”

I followed him inside and pushed the door shut, made sure it latched. “But they won't know that until she dies,” I objected.

“Oh, come on, Sam,” Jake said. He led the way to a wide marble staircase that was separated from the lobby by a brass gate. “There's a blood test for that now. And in most cases it responds to treatment. They don't cut off your head and fill your mouth with garlic anymore. And in any event, she wasn't bitten. It jumped on her car and she ran into a telegraph pole trying to shake it off.”

He unlocked the brass gate and slid it back. We started up the staircase and I waited while he slid it shut and re-locked it.

“What floor?” I asked.

“Third,” he said.

And elevators wouldn't be “colorful” and “historic” enough for a place like this. I suppose I should have been grateful there were bulbs in the overhead fixtures rather than torches. There were more brass gates at the floors. Jake unlocked the one for the third floor are carefully locked it behind him. For a neighborhood that wasn't as bad as it looked the folks who lived here were sure security conscious. It took two more keys to open the door of Karin's loft.

The loft was a big open space. One wall was all windows and in a corner a couple of watered silk screens had been used to cordon off what looked like a makeshift bedroom. The rest of the space was covered with drawings. There were dozens of them, maybe hundreds. All sizes, from tiny scraps that looked like they were torn from envelopes to sheet as big as blueprints. The walls were papered with them. There was a big drafting table and a desk, both buried in drawings. Whatever else Karin was, she was prolific.

I walked over to wall, and I found myself looking at a drawing on the Colossus of Ferose, the citadel of Xor. A man shaped steel structure, dozens of stories high, arms outstretched. I had see it from afar, but Karin's sketch was made from within its shadow, close enough that she was looking almost straight up at the balcony of its mouth.

Beside it was a sketch of what I took for the Slough of Despond in Ventose, a place I had heard of, but never seen. A trio of chigoes who resembled wasps with human faces poled a raft that was laden with barrels.

Then someone was moving from behind the screens. I spun around, my heart hammering in my chest. Jake hurried to the corner, not quite running, to enfold her in his arms. Marji. She clung to him like a vine on a tree and he held her, murmuring softly to her.

I turned back to the wall of drawings. That was the Empty City, Death's dominion at the far border of Messidor. I didn't recognize the exact location, but the architecture was unmistakable. Karin had even managed to capture the strange shadows cast by the crimson sunless sky, although the drawing was black and white.

There were other places I didn't recognize at all.

“Sam..?” Marji's voice was soft. I turned. Her hair, always beautiful, lush and red, was a mad tangle around her head. Her face looked like she'd had been crying. She was dressed in a long robe of clinging silk in midnight blue.

“Hi, Marji,” I said, “It's been a while.”

“Yeah,” she breathed, her voice breaking. “I missed you.”

“I missed you, too, kid.” I told her softly, and suddenly she was in my arms. Her body melted against mine and I was acutely aware that she was naked under the robe. She smelled of liquor, too, something sweet.

I held her and she sniffled into my shoulder. I patted her hair. “It's okay,” I told her. “Hush, now, it's going to be okay.”

“Jake told you?” Marji asked softly against my neck. “He told you about Karin?”

“If I can help get her back, I will.” As I said it, I realized that I meant it. I didn't know this Karin, but I knew Jake and Marji, and if they needed my help, I would give it.

She took a deep breath and pulled back from a little. She looked up at me, and I smiled down at her.

“You're a good man,” she said, very seriously, and kissed me suddenly on the lips. Just a little peck, but full of the warmth and promise I remembered so well.

I glanced over at Jake. He was standing some ways off, his back carefully toward us, studying the pictures on the walls. Marji followed the direction of my eyes. There was tenderness in her eyes, and love.

I got my mind back on business. “These are all Karin's sketches?”

Marji nodded. “She's so talented.”

“Not to mention well traveled,” I pointed. “There. That's got to be the City of Brass.”

Jake walked over to frown at the sketch. Dozens of towers joined by narrow bridges, the whole complex structure seeming to glow.

“Yeah,” Jake said. “Those are the Pillars of Dawn, seen from the Stranger's Gate.”

“And that...” I pointed again. The drawing showed a vast frozen lake with giant misshapen figures partially buried in the ice, strange twisted limbs protruding above the surface. “I have no idea where that could be. It's nowhere I've ever heard of. Someplace in Bascose, maybe?”

Marji had come up behind us. “Karin always said she dreamed the places she drew. They're real, aren't they?”

I nodded. “Yeah. I think we can assume that her drawings are from astral projection.”

“That's why they call the outer worlds Nightmare, isn't it?” Marji asked, “Because we can reach it in dreams.”

“Some people can,” I clarified.

She looked to Jake for confirmation. “That's how magic got started, right? People figured out that the places they dreamed about are real places, just out of phase with our reality?”

Jake frowned. “Well,” he said slowly, “it was a little more complicated that that. But, yes, human minds can perceive non-linear space during d-state sleep. Usually we don't remember it clearly on awaking, just general impressions. It takes a fair amount of training to make sense of an alien space-time.”

“Karin just remembers what she sees, then,” Marji said. “She's an artist, she remembers everything.”

I shook my head. “I think it's more than just that.”

Marji looked stubborn.

I gestured around the room. “You can't get this level of detail from a dream state. Believe me. I've been to these places, and these look like photographs. Whoever drew these pictures visited Nightmare in a waking trance state.” Or in person, I added to myself. “And that means a magus.”

“Karin is not a witch,” Marji said coldly.

I held up my hands. “I'm not saying she is. Ability does not prove criminal action. Maybe she trained and went into art instead. Maybe she used to be a practitioner under another name. We don't know. But we know that she has the talent—serious, trained talent. And I'm betting that whatever happened to her happened because of that talent.”

“Marji,” Jake said gently, “we have to face facts. You know that I love Karin just as much as you do. I will do whatever it takes to get her out of the trouble she's in. If she needs an advocate, we'll get her the best money can buy. But first we have to find her.”

Marji nodded. “Okay,” she said to Jake, then turned to me.

“Will you go look for her? On the other side?” Marji was looking at me with eyes shining with hope.

I nodded and took a deep breath. “I'll see what I can do,” I said. It sounded weak even as I said it. I wanted to help her, and to help this Karin whom I had never met. But that didn't mean that I would be able to. I had a sinking feeling that I would end up disappointing Marji, and Jake—the two humans that I had been closest to, after my adopted parents. I had to try, though.

“Okay,” I said, looking around the studio, “the first question is how she got there. Physically. If that picture is accurate and she really is in Blindworm Forest, how did it happen?”

Jake frowned. “I was really hoping that you'd be able to answer that.”

“Me?” I shook my head. “I can see over there, and talk to the Sleepless Ones, but as far as transporting a body across worlds—you know more than I do.”

He nodded slowly. “Well, what I know is that you can't do it with pens and papers. I don't see any resonator here, or a containment matrix, or any optical synchronizors... nothing.”

“They did it from the other side,” Marji said.

Jake nodded slowly. “Yes. Something from Nightmare came and got her.”