Nothing. Reluctantly, Tor sat up fully and knelt next to her. It was possible she was having a fit of some sort, he supposed, although she’d never mentioned suffering from such. Tor sighed and placed the palm of his hand against Ainsel’s forehead. It was damp with a cold sweat – not, he thought, the result of their earlier exertions.
‘It’s been years,’ he muttered. ‘I’m not sure I even remember how.’
Even so, Tor closed his eyes and took a series of slow breaths. When Hestillion dream-walked, she described it as like being in a great shadowy realm, with distant lights all around. The dreaming minds were the lights, and you just had to find the right one. When the light shone on you too, she used to say, that was when you slipped into their dream. Tor pursed his lips and concentrated. It came back to him more easily than expected. In the darkness around him he could sense men and women sleeping – to him they felt like knots of warmth in a cold night – their minds either lost to the blankness of pure sleep, or caught in the intricate whirl of dream-sleep. There was a man somewhere on the floor below whose sleep carried the thick, pungent aroma of a day of drinking heavily, while a woman somewhere to the right of Ainsel’s small room was lost in a dream that was repeating, over and over. If he wanted to, Tor could press closer to those minds, push through the soft barrier and step within, but he did not have time for sight-seeing.
Here was Ainsel’s dreaming mind, the warmest of the lights surrounding him. Tor paused. What he was doing was, at best, impolite; at worst, a breach of trust. He knew from his own experience, and Hest’s, that people generally did not want anyone poking around inside their sleeping heads without permission. Dreams were irrational, after all, and could suggest things about the dreamer that could shame them, no matter how untrue they were. More to the point, humans simply were not used to the art of dream-walking; in Ebora it might be a mildly diverting recreation with your closest friends, but to humans it was unfathomable.
Beneath him, Ainsel cried out, and Tor could feel the waves of fear emanating from her like a fever.
‘Oh, damn it all. I will go quietly, at least.’
Gently, Tor reached for Ainsel’s dreaming mind. He felt that odd mixture of light and warmth that was actually neither, and pushed through the faintly resisting barrier. For a few more seconds he was aware of himself kneeling on the bed, the breeze from the window chilling his uncovered skin, and then he was somewhere else. He opened his dreaming eyes.
He was standing on a beach. It was night-time, and somewhere off to his left there was the booming roar and hiss of the sea caressing the shoreline. Just ahead of him was a large camp fire, and a group of men and women sat around it in a circle. They were laughing and talking, and bottles and plates of meat were being passed around. Ainsel was there – she was difficult to miss, being nearly a head taller than everyone else at the fire. The flickering light danced off her blond hair, and she was smiling and nodding to a woman who was sitting next to her. She had auburn hair tied into many braids, and an eyepatch over one eye. Tor reminded himself that time was strange in a dreaming mind; dreams did not need to follow a linear pattern; they could skip back and forth over themselves. It was likely that Ainsel had already experienced this part of the dream, and he was still catching up. Tor frowned. Hestillion had always been so much better at this than him.
‘To Lucky Ainsel!’ A man at the fire raised his bottle, and those next to him clinked their cups to his. ‘Without her we’d all be at the bottom of the fucking sea.’
There was a ragged but enthusiastic cheer. Tor moved closer to the fire, taking care to stay out of the circle of its light.
‘You should listen to me more often,’ Ainsel was saying, grinning round at them all. ‘Perhaps I should be your leader – we’d all be richer!’
There was another, slightly rowdier burst of laughter, and the auburn-haired woman next to Ainsel punched her on the arm, none too lightly.
‘Less of your cheek, Lucky Ainsel, or I’ll have you keel-hauled next time we take to the sea.’
Tor realised he had heard about this. When Ainsel had been working for the Broken Cage, a group of mercenaries operating out of Reidn, she had had a bad feeling about the ship they had been due to board for passage to Mushenska. Despite being ridiculed up and down by the rest of the crew, she had told Jessica Stormbones, their leader, about her misgivings – ‘Don’t get on that ship,’ she’d told them. ‘I get a cold feeling just looking at it.’ As it happened, a bigger and better job had come up in the city state itself and so they had let the ship sail without them. A week later, news came back that it had been caught in a terrible storm in the midst of the Mariano Strait; all hands lost. After that, the Broken Cage mercenaries had taken to calling her Lucky Ainsel. So this was a good memory. What was it about this dream that had caused such a reaction in Ainsel?
‘I’ll be your lucky mascot, then,’ Ainsel was saying now, grinning still. ‘And I think the best way to keep that luck going would be to keep me in beer from now on. A small price to pay for your sorry lives.’
A solidly built man with a neat ginger beard laughed, slapping Ainsel on her meaty arm, and then his mouth seemed to droop open, as though his face were made of wet dough instead of skin and bone. He poked at his lower mouth in confusion, and his fingers sank into the doughy flesh. He tried to speak and, instead of words, a flurry of small black beetle-like creatures spewed from his mouth, running down his hairy chest. Next to him, Ainsel half scrambled away, an expression of dismay on her face.
Ah, thought Tor. Here it is.
‘What’s wrong with Bill?’
‘There’s nothing wrong with him,’ said Jessica Stormbones. She looked at Ainsel and lifted her eyepatch to reveal a gaping hole. A handful of scuttling beetle creatures escaped it to run across her face. ‘Just relax, Lucky Ainsel, and it’ll be over soon.’
There was a hissing noise from all around, and Tor looked down to see a tide of thousands of the black-beetle creatures covering the sand. They ran over his boots, and he grimaced with displeasure. Ahead of him, Ainsel was on her feet, brushing away the beetle creatures from her shirt, her face pale.
Tor leaned down and, concentrating on the reality of the dream, concentrating on him being a part of it, picked up one of the creatures and held it up to the poor light. Its back flexed and twisted under his fingers, needle-like legs waved in the air.
‘I think I know what this is. What an odd thing for you to dream about, Ainsel.’