‘Of course you can. We’re in your head, aren’t we? You are dreaming and aware of it, yet you haven’t woken up. That suggests to me that you have enough mastery of your own dreamspace to manipulate it.’ He caught the look she was giving him and smirked. ‘Just try it. Imagine being back at the Winnowry. Pick a memory of it, and concentrate on it.’
Noon sat back on her haunches, considering. She had lots of memories of the Winnowry – ten years of nothing else, in fact – but they were all more or less the same. Damp walls, narrow windows, grey food. There was one occasion when she had seen it differently, of course. She held her hands up in front of her, remembering that they had bound her hands and then wrapped them in thick black cloth, and during the journey they had covered her head with a heavy hood. When they had removed it and pulled her down from the back of the bat she had been surprised to land on wet sand. Confused, terrified and wracked with guilt, she had had no real idea where she was, and when she had looked up –
The cave and the grotty marshland were gone, and instead they were standing together on a beach. A bleak and featureless coast stretched away to either side of them, and, looming ahead, was the Winnowry.
‘By the roots,’ murmured Tor. ‘The architect must have been having a really bad day.’
The black towers stretched towards an indifferent sky like broken knives. High above, tiny slivers of light burned from narrow windows, while just ahead a great iron door marked the entrance. On either side of it were a pair of torches, unlit now, above two pieces of bleached driftwood. Tomas’s inscrutable face had been carved into both with little love for the subject, it seemed to Noon; the staring face looked blind. She remembered being dragged towards that door, boots pushing up furrows of sand. She remembered how she had screamed.
‘I was eleven years old when they brought me here,’ she said. ‘They just snatched me up, bound me, and flew me to this miserable place. I wasn’t allowed to bring anything with me. Not that I had anything left to bring.’
Tor didn’t say anything, and she felt embarrassed that she had talked about it at all. She looked at him and noticed that his outfit had changed again – now he wore a dark maroon coat the same colour as his eyes, with a dove-grey silk shirt underneath. There was an elaborate earring hanging from his left ear, some confection of cloudy glass and spiralled silver.
‘Why do you keep changing your clothes?’
He smiled at her. ‘Why not? I wear them so well.’ He made a sweeping gesture as if presenting himself for inspection, and his earring spun, catching the muted light. Noon abruptly remembered that he barely had anything left that could be called an ear on that side of his face. She looked away.
‘I never wanted to see this place again.’
‘What’s it like inside?’
As easy as that, they were there, standing too close together in the cramped cell Noon had lived in for ten years. The cold iron grid of the floor was the same, the narrow bunk untouched. It was smaller and darker than she remembered, but then it was a place from a nightmare – perhaps her own emotions were distorting it. Tor walked up to the bars and looked out across the echoing chasm to the far side of the prison, where rows of identical cells waited. They were alone.
‘I’ve never seen it empty,’ she said. ‘It’s strange.’
‘What a desolate hole,’ remarked Tor. ‘At least my prison was beautiful, if sad. No one should be kept in a place like this.’
‘What do you mean, your prison?’ asked Noon. She joined him at the bars. ‘What did you get locked up for?’
‘Oh. Forget I said it, I was being poetic.’ Tor pushed the door and it swung open easily. Beyond Noon’s cell the Winnowry was drowned in shadows, a place made of darkness and sorrow. Seeing it without the living, breathing women who had populated it was deeply frightening, she realised. Looking at the darkness and feeling the emptiness of the space between them, she didn’t assume they had all escaped, like she had. She assumed they were all dead.
She turned to look back at her bunk, only to see the thin covers there boiling with movement.
‘No!’
Hundreds of shining black beetle-like creatures erupted from the bedding, streaming towards her on needle-sharp legs. From somewhere outside and above them came a shattering roar, and the Winnowry trembled around them. She looked at Tor, who was staring at the beetles in bemusement.
‘What is happening?’
‘It’s them! They’re back, we’ll all—’
There was another crash and Noon stumbled, trying to keep upright while the beetles surged around her feet. The Winnowry was now full of the sound of screaming women, and Noon knew that they were down in the shadows somewhere, crushing each other and suffocating in their panic to flee the building. The urge to summon the winnowfire was enormous, but if she did that, if she did that—
Tor was suddenly next to her, taking her hand firmly – she was surprised that it was warm, when everything else here was cold – and they were back on the beach.
‘Now, it really is quite rude of you to have a nightmare while I am accompanying you,’ said Tor, in an entirely normal tone. ‘It spoils the mood utterly.’
‘Shut up, you idiot. Look!’
Above the Winnowry the sky was crowded with Behemoths, corpse coloured and teeming with tiny vessels pushing their way through the ships’ shining skin. Things like giant spiders, their legs spread like grasping hands, were floating down towards them.
‘Get control of it,’ said Tor, sharply. ‘This is your head, remember?’
‘I can’t! This thing, it – it comes from outside of me.’ As soon as she said it, Noon knew it was true. ‘This isn’t my nightmare at all!’
The gates of the Winnowry were open, and thousands of the beetles were skittering towards them. In that way that only happens in dreams, she knew that there was someone behind them now, a figure with a low, feminine voice who would speak directly into her ear. She knew what it would say.
Tor spun round, looking towards the strip of iron-grey sea, and she knew that he had felt it too. ‘There’s no one there. No one there at all,’ he said, his voice low. ‘I’ve had enough of this.’
He took hold of her hand again, and this time Noon felt herself physically wrenched from the terrible scene around her. Caught between the feeling of falling down and being thrown up into the air, she stumbled to her knees, only to find herself on all fours on a thick, luxurious carpet.
‘This is about as far from that miserable place as I could get,’ said Tor in way of an explanation. ‘Welcome to the Eskt family suite.’
Noon stood up. They were in a room more opulent than any she’d ever seen; fancier than Vintage’s carriage on the winnowline, larger than any of the rooms she’d seen in Esiah Godwort’s rambling mansion. There were tall, lacquered screens everywhere, long, low seats spilling over with plush cushions, and elegant pieces of sculpture in each corner, stylised images of people with long faces. The walls were covered in patterned silk; blue herons against pale gold. She couldn’t take it all in. Tor had sat down on one of the low seats. He was breathing hard and looking at the floor.