Dreamshade

  “Quiet, please, my friends,” she said, so sweetly that the context made it menacing. “The child here is tired, and needs not your clamour. Let us leave in peace.”

  “Will he come back?” said the plumed yet crestfallen figure as they passed him.

  “He will,” she said.

  And that was enough for all, it seemed; the boy and the lady descended the stairs without incident, and any atulphi they met on the way enthused only to the point of smiles, muted handclaps, or hushed congratulations. Once they had reached the ground floor, Lilac - with the boy still in tow - made a quick dash down a small side-corridor to eventually arrive, after a turn or two, at a room which she had to access with a key. “Maintenance area,” she said, after locking the door behind her. It was a gloomy place, not much bigger than the inside of an average shed, and strewn with tools and buckets; what meagre light existed came not from a window, but a greasy lamp set into a wall. “We’ll have to wait here for a while,” she explained, perching herself on an upturned bucket. “Those we crossed on the stairs will already be telling their friends outside that we’ve left, and they’ll be on the lookout. Give it a breath or two, and things will have died down enough for us to make our getaway.”

  Benjamin found a bucket of his own to sit on, and plonked himself down next to Lilac. He felt shaky, and slightly sick in his stomach. “Are we allowed in here?” he asked, unsure as to whether his nervousness was down to tiredness, the exhilaration of fame, or just everything.

  Lilac held up her keys and jangled them. “Condition of contract,” she said. “We take care of the place as we see fit.”

  “Won’t anyone else come in?”

  “Nope,” sniffed Lilac. “Because no-one sees fit to take care of this place anyway.”

  It was just the thing to bring a smile the boy. “Fair enough,” he said, without raising a single thought as to why the owners of a block of flats should employ a communal bike-keeper, but not a maintenance man. An ordinary child might well have wondered; Benjamin Crosskeys did not.

  ***

  While they waited, Lilac and Benjamin chatted, and it wasn’t long before the subject turned to the events on the rooftop. The lady was eager to hear what her charge could recount of it, though there wasn’t much that he could remember. “I do know that there was a time when it was like seeing a pattern with bits missing,” he said, relating to the actual act of the transformation. “And when I thought about all the ways I could finish it, I got some new idea of what I could make.”

  “So you saw all the potentials?” asked Lilac, in a tone which suggested that she had previously thought the idea improbable.

  “Most of them,” said Benjamin, who then went on to summarise some of the possibilities that had occurred to him while communing with the silf: the fine thread, for example, and the drink that prevented its drinker from becoming lost.

  Lilac slapped her hands together with glee. “And yet you chose the catshadow - the very thing that would show up our self-proclaimed great and good as the suspicious, grovelling curbitlanks they really are. It was a masterstroke. Leaguers and Aptists, together in the dirt and scrabbling like fenrikay for the only thing that could unite them: a lie-detector.” Lilac laughed. “Boy, you have glamoured the iris of many atulphi now, I can tell you.”

  Benjamin smiled, but could not join in with the mirth wholeheartedly; he suddenly found himself thinking of the Aptists’ spokesman, and the peculiar - no, downright disturbing - method of his departure.

  “You okay?” ventured Lilac.

  “Oh yeah,” said Benjamin. “It’s just -” he paused “- who was that guy with the strings in his head? You know, the one who was talking for those Aptists.”

  Lilac shrugged. “Just the front man. I don’t know his name.”

  “Did you see -” he paused again, ascertaining the right words to use “- did you see what happened to him at the end?”

  “No. What?”

  “They - well, one of the ones behind him - they sort of folded him up and put him in that bag.”

  “Oh - that.” Lilac made to laugh, but stopped when she saw the look on Benjamin’s face. “What about it?”

  “It’s a bit creepy, isn’t it?”

  “When it comes to the Congregation of the Apt, everything’s creepy.”

  “He laughed though. When they were putting him in the bag. I saw it.”

  “Good for him.”

  “It’s just too weird. It was like he had nothing inside him but air.”

  “Your point being?”

  “I dunno. It’s just kind of - it’s hard to forget, that’s all.”

  Lilac waited a second before responding, pursing her lips in the way that people do when they need to quickly mull something over. “Let me ask you something,” she said. “Has it put you off having to deal with anyone even remotely like the Congregation of the Apt? Be honest now.”

  “Well, yeah. It has.”

  “Excellent,” came the chirpy - and unexpected - response. “Just the answer I was looking for.”

  “Why?”

  Lilac leaned forward, placed her hands on Benjamin’s shoulders, and looked gravely into his eyes. “Because, ” she said, lowering her face a little, “they are a load of rubbish.”

  The words were so out of kilter with her expression that Benjamin could not respond with anything but laughter. “What the hell does that mean?” he asked, amid a stifle. “That’s the funniest thing I’ve heard all day!”

  Lilac leaned back. “The funniest?” she said, placing a hand upon her chest in mock affrontedness. “Well, I am insulted. All that work I put into my laboured wordplay, and you think it’s funny because I think that you shouldn’t waste your time thinking about the Aptists because I think they are not very good.”

  Benjamin shrugged, and let his laughter subside. “It’s still funny though. It’s like something my mum would say.”

  Lilac made to reply, then hesitated. “Is that so,” she eventually said, as if a little taken aback by the idea that Benjamin might have a mother.

  “Yeah.”

  The lady nodded, but remained quiet.

  “What is it?”

  “Listen,” she said. “Do you hear?”

  “Hear what?”

  She turned towards a corner of the room, where Benjamin spied a door amongst the shadows and the clutter. “The people outside. They’re gone, I think. Most of them anyway.” Then she looked back at Benjamin - and though she was smiling, there was something in her eyes that suggested she was not. “It’s time for us to go,” she said.

  ***

  Owing to the boy’s new-found popularity, they took a circuitous route back towards the pier. As such, Benjamin was not really able to establish his bearings until they came upon a road that he could recollect as being one which they had taken when leaving the Macallory Lane Market. From then onwards, the journey advanced along a familiar path, and in no time at all they were venturing into Macallory Lane itself, whose market, much to Benjamin’s surprise, was still running, despite the darkening hour.

  “Won’t somebody see us here?” he asked, as Lilac guided him through the bustling crowd.

  “Possibly,” she replied. “But it would only be a glimmer, I expect. The lantern-light isn’t as strong as the day, and it leaves us merely as faces within the many. We’ll be fine.”

  And the lady was right; they bypassed the milling assortment of atulphi without incident, and attracted not even the slightest amount of attention. It was hard work, however, and it seemed to Benjamin that the market was even busier now than it had been in the morning. In fact, it seemed as if the whole of Niamago was busier now than it was before; by the time they had reached the promenade, it was clear to the boy that the noise and bustle of this most remarkable city was not about to be diminished by the onset of night.

  “Is there a concert on?” he asked, listening to the distant cheer of what must have been a vast audience, and the echo of drumbeats. He saw the beam of a
searchlight glide across the sky, striated by the shadows of flying atulphi, and thought, perhaps, that he had imagined it.

  “There’s lot of concerts going on,” said Lilac. “Niamago is only just becoming alive.”

  “What is it - a festival, or something?”

  “No. It’s like this always.”

  “Don't you ever sleep?” he asked, more in the spirit of jest than genuine enquiry.

  “No,” said Lilac. “We don’t.”

  Benjamin looked thoughtfully at her, and she looked thoughtfully back. “Never?” he asked.

  “Never,” she said.

  He wasn’t sure if never having to sleep was a good thing or a bad thing. It had its bonuses, true, but there was much to be said for just closing your eyes and letting the world drift by. But he didn’t pursue the matter. The curtness of Lilac’s responses had told him pretty much what he needed to know anyway: that humans sleep and atulphi do not, and that is all there is to it.

  Ahead, the pier was already in sight, grand with lights both of its own and those provided by the firefly contraptions that were either alighting upon it or ascending away. Inevitably, his gaze was drawn to the shore from which it projected, and then to the milky sea, where atulphi splashed and cheered amid colours glossed by the gleam of the setting sun.

  “They were there this morning,” said Benjamin, recalling the time when he had first set eyes on the beach. “There seems to be more now.”

  “Lots of people like to swim in the night,” said Lilac. “It’s chillier, but the atmosphere is fantastic. The striats - the colours - become so much richer.”

  “Have you swum in there?”

  “Many, many times.”

  They walked on for a while, taking care not to bump into any of the seats and tables left out by the warmly lit cafes that lined the promenade.

  “There’s a tradition associated with swimming in the Amar Imaga,” said Lilac, after some reflection. “A belief.”

  “What is it?”

  “That in immersing ourselves in that sea, we bring dreams to the people of your world.”

  Benjamin did not reply immediately, as it felt as if the lady was about to say more. When it was evident that she was not, he asked her if it was true.

  “I like to think so,” she said. “It seems right. It seems like it should happen that way.”

  Benjamin considered what she had said, and found himself in agreement. Yes, it did seem right; it had symmetry to it, a kind of poetry. The atulphi brought dreams to people, and the people, in turn, returned those dreams as the silfs from which the atulphi had raised a civilisation. It reminded him of what he knew of nature, about the circularity of things - like the clouds that rose from the oceans and brought snow to the mountain tops, from which came the rivers that fed back to the oceans - and he could only conclude that if it wasn’t true, then it certainly deserved to be.

  “It’s amazing,” he said, as if thinking out loud. “All of it.”

  “I know,” said Lilac.

  “I mean everything - not just this place.”

  “Oh?”

  “The way it all connects. My world and yours. It fits. And it explains...so much.”

  Lilac nodded. “But here’s a poser for you,” she said. “You say ‘my world and yours’ - but which one do you really think is yours?”

  Benjamin smiled, knowing that the question was a trick. “Both of them,” he said. “Because they’re just two halves of the same thing, aren’t they. Like two rooms in the same house.”

  “Or two houses in the same street, perhaps.”

  “Or two streets in the same town,” said Benjamin, his smile widening.

  Lilac ruffled the boy’s hair. “So I can hope, then, that you won’t feel so far from us when you’re gone?”

  “I reckon so,” said Benjamin.

  “Good,” said Lilac, as together they made their way along the promenade, towards a pier, glittering in the dusk, that the boy now saw not as a stepping stone between worlds, but as the first true step of a voyage home.

  19

  There was an unwelcome surprise awaiting them when they reached the pier and found the cage: most of Lilac’s birds were absent, their tethers either snapped or cut. “Now who could have done this?” she said, in what was almost a dismayed whisper. She reached out to one of the two remaining birds - both of which were roosting quietly atop the roof - and spoke softly to it in dinnywhit speak. When the bird hopped on to her hand, she brought it to her chest and gently stroked its head. “He seems fine,” she said, giving the creature a little kiss on the beak. “As does Rubidee there; whoever did this had no intention of harming my darlings, I’m happy to say.”

  “Was it Wolfgang?” asked Benjamin.

  Lilac stared silently at the cage for a moment. “No,” she said. “It’s not like him.”

  Benjamin looked around, to see if any of the nearby atulphi had anything on their faces that might suggest guilt or complicity. Not that he knew what a guilty or complicit face looked like, but he was prepared to put in the effort for Lilac’s sake. It was the first time he’d seen her genuinely upset, and he didn’t like it. “Anyone see what happened here?” he called, when his search proved fruitless. “Come on,” he yelled. “Someone must have seen something!”

  A few atulphi shook their heads. Some just stared. The rest gave him a glance, and those that didn’t become entranced by his eyes simply went back to their business. “T’was like that when I got ‘ere,” said one spindly specimen, a few yards away. “All them threads, ‘anging dangly-wangly; I did spec ‘pon it, yeah. Can’t help ya, though. Gone crummin, y’see.” Another atulphi spoke up, and though he talked in an even obscurer dialect, Benjamin got the gist of it. As with the first, he had seen nothing, done nothing, and it was like that when he got here anyway.

  Lilac put a reassuring hand on the boy’s shoulder. “Don’t worry,” she said. “It’s not the first time they’ve gone. They’ll be back. It just means I’ll have to wait for them, that’s all.”

  “But didn’t anyone see anything?” said the boy.

  “If they did, my friends would have told me,” she said, following it with a call of “isn’t that right, dear hearts?”

  Most of the atulphi within earshot murmured their agreement. “So there you go,” Lilac continued, again speaking to Benjamin. “We all look out for each other here. Whatever happened must have happened a while ago, of that we can be sure.”

  “What will you do now?”

  The lady gave a tremulous sigh. “I don’t know. It could be a long time before my darlings return. I might have to go out and call for them.”

  “I could wait. I could help.”

  “No,” said Lilac, managing, at last, to raise something of a smile. “If you’re not due for the alignments -” she nodded towards the horizon “- then you’ll have to wait for tomorrow. Which will not do.”

  Benjamin gave no response. Part of him wanted to go home and part of him wanted to stay and help; but he couldn’t go home unless he helped Lilac find her birds, in which case he had little option but to stay in Niamago until tomorrow. Would it be so bad, he thought, to make mum wait a day longer? Yes, it would - but what choice did he have?

  “No need to fret,” said Lilac, setting her bird free to flit back to its perch atop the cage. “Like I said: we all look out for each other here. I’m sure we’ll find someone to take you home.”

  “Like who?”

  Lilac considered for a second. “Strifer Dyne,” she said. “I thought I glimpsed him earlier. He won’t mind a little excursion into my territory. But there’s just one thing...”

  “What?”

  “Remember his surname: it’s dee-why-en-ee, not dee-eye-en-ee. He doesn’t like it when people pronounce it with an ‘i’. Okay?”

  ***

  Like Lilac, Strifer Dyne was a silf-hunting atulphi who kept his transport berthed on the pier. He was a young-looking yet striking figure, with spiky hair so blonde it appeared
almost white, and bare arms covered with tattoos that seemed to shift restlessly under his skin. He was clad in a sort of sleeveless, tie-dyed set of overalls, and slung over his left shoulder was what Benjamin could only describe as a Victorian electric guitar, in that its body was brassy, heavily riveted, and furnished with a diagonally-inclined array of funnels at the rear. In hearing him greet and then confer with Lilac, the boy placed his accent as being American; and his transport - which he occasionally glanced at while talking, as if assessing its capability in taking on an extra passenger - was, quite plainly, just about the coolest piece of hardware Benjamin had yet seen in Niamago.

  Put simply, Strifer Dyne’s vehicle was a flying saucer. A small flying saucer admittedly: it was about five metres in diameter, and far too thin to contain even one human-sized occupant, but it was still very cool, in any case. The main body was dark and smooth and seamless, and it thrummed in the way that the engine of a really good sports car might thrum: quietly, yet with a deep, reverberating power that told you it had nothing to prove. The upper part of the device, Benjamin saw, was flattened slightly, and surmounted with a circular railing, which was itself interrupted only by a gap, which he guessed was for access, and some kind of control console directly opposite. Underneath, where the bulge of the disc was fatter, the smoothness was unbroken, leaving the mechanism that allowed it to hover there, at the lip of the walkway, a mystery - though not such a mystery that it didn’t prevent the boy from wondering if he might be able to build something like this for himself. Okay, I’d need some time, and a lot of silfs, he thought, suddenly flushed with excitement. But I could do it. I could build a flying saucer. Just like this. I could build anything, in fact...

  A wave of elation flooded him, so fierce it felt almost like panic, as he began to imagine all the possibilities - all the potentials - that were open to him as a dreamshader: he thought of building a robot, huge and seraphic in shape - like a mecha from a Japanese cartoon - which he could pilot from within; he imagined building a fleet of robots, an army, which he, and he alone, could command. And then he remembered how tired he had felt after transforming one mere silf into a handful of stones, and decided that it would probably be better if he stuck to smaller things. Strangely enough, he felt relieved at this, but couldn’t say why. Maybe it was not so much the ecstasy of being a dreamshader which had caught him, but the ecstasy of power - and that, he knew, was something entirely different.