Chapter 30
There is a state of sleep that is deeper than simple slumber, more than any nightly doze.
I have had these rests occasionally in my service: a deep, febrile dreaming, when you are granted more than mere satiation of the flesh, but something bordering on transformative.
If there is a state of reverie that the moth is granted as it lies within the cocoon awaiting its birth, that is the sleep I speak of now, and that is the rest I was given that night.
I exulted in it. What a wonderful thing it was to slumber here, with him beside me, little more than a twitching tangle of hot limbs, and the occasional buffet of humid breath.
I slept.
Then the veil of darkness drew back, and I was standing in my chambers.
—
I blinked. I looked around. Though I could not explain it, it appeared to be so: I was standing in my undergarments, in my chambers in the Green Drover, gazing at the blank wall. Moonlight filtered through my window shutters, the fernpaper sheets of my bed slightly mussed behind me. I was alone.
And yet someone was singing in the streets below my window. It was a beautiful, soft song, in a language that I did not know—if it was any language at all, for its beauty seemed beyond words.
“Hum,” I said to myself.
I attempted to review my memories and found I had none.
I had no idea how I had gotten here. I recalled the steam baths, and Tauri.
The way he had stood to meet me, eyes locked on mine, waiting for the signal to proceed, which I had greedily given.
But we had not returned to my chambers, but his, at the Orbiis office.
So. How had I gotten here?
I looked around, befuddled. Now that I thought of it, I could not hear anything else in the tavern, or indeed in the streets beyond: no clatter of carters, no whoop or clap from the drovers, no thud of footsteps as the other guests moved about me in their own chambers.
There was just the song, its high, pure tone rising up and drifting through my window.
I attempted to move to the window, to peer down at this strange singer and behold them.
But, to my bafflement, my legs would not move.
I could not even lift my bare feet from the floor.
I tried to move again and again, to recruit and activate the muscles in my legs, to force myself to shift.
Yet it remained beyond me: it was like I was paralyzed from the waist down, even though I was standing.
Then the room began to change. It began to feel insubstantial, and flimsy. A hazy projection of a room, like light cast through the colored glass of a lantern.
Then my eyes trembled, and I felt another strange sensation—though this one was terribly familiar to me.
My memories awoke, quivering, and whispered in my mind: This isn’t right, is it, Din?
I cringed, for their murmur was terribly loud in this silent world. Again, I gazed about, staring at the shafts of moonlight twinkling just beside me, and listening to that twirling, high song warbling in the darkness.
“Ahh. No…” I said. “It isn’t. How did I get here?”
The walls flickered, darkened, returned, as if this chamber did not like me speaking aloud. The song stuttered as well, like the singer had to pause for breath.
My memories spoke again, their words trickling down to me as if dribbling through some tiny canal behind my eyes: Are you sure you’re anywhere at all? Or is this a dream—but a very specific dream?
I blinked in the darkness. Then, like he was right behind me, I heard the voice of Castus Armenta: …it sounded like song…Someone singing. Outside our chamber, in the street or the courtyard…But it was the most beautiful sound, Iudex…
Then my memories shifted again, like a chick turning over in the egg of my skull, and I heard Tauri’s voice: the cats begin re-creating their conditioned behaviors while they sleep. Nocturnal disruptions, they called it in early tests…
“I cannot move,” I said aloud, “because…I have been conditioned not to move.”
Light began pouring through my window shutters—this time not moonlight, but daylight, bright and brittle.
The song grew fainter.
“But that would mean,” I said slowly, “that I am infected. And conditioned. That the fungus is awake within me.”
The corners of my chamber filled with shadow, until there was only the blazing window, and all else was a trembling darkness.
The voice of my memories spoke again: Yes.
My skin crawled. For now the voice of my memories sounded very close, and very, very familiar to me.
I looked to the side, and there in the swirling shadows I saw someone sitting on my bed. A shifting image of a person—yet as I looked at them, my nostrils suddenly swam with an achingly familiar aroma.
Clothes. Old clothes and gowns and dresses, stored in an old closet, where all was close and dark, and all was safe.
I awoke.
—
I stood there, gasping in the dark: not the surreal stasis of my own chamber, so silent and cast in twinkling moonlight, but rather in Tauri’s chambers in the Orbiis office. I heard drovers singing in the streets beyond, and a night breeze nibbling at the fretvine walls.
I staggered about. Tauri lay in a gleaming pile on the bed, his face concealed in his hair. With a snort, he awoke.
“Mm?” he murmured. “Din? What is it?”
I swallowed, my heart beating madly in my chest. “Testing paper,” I whispered.
“What?”
“Testing paper. Get me testing paper. Now, please.”
He scrambled out of bed and dashed to where his coat lay on the floor. He fished out the wheel of green paper, saying hoarsely, “Did…did you dream, Din? Is that it?”
I motioned impatiently for the paper. He tore off a piece and handed it to me. I hurriedly popped its end within my mouth, then withdrew it.
Bright orange.
I gazed at it, then up at Tauri.
“Oh, hell,” he said.