Dreaming Death Read online

  All the sensitives knew him. Or of him, to be more precise.

  Her position, serving at the entry to the palace grounds, meant that she was a sensitive. The treaty required that all sentries controlling access to the Royal House would be. That afforded the Lucas Family multiple opportunities to gauge the intentions of visitors. That was what the Six Families had offered the Anvarrid to retain their place in the country following the invasion. They provided protection for the Anvarrid. In return, the Six Families kept their buried fortresses.

  The sentry took one last look at Mikael, stepped down, and shut the coach door. The driver started the horses moving, heading around the palace grounds to the back courtyard entrance. As they moved on, Mikael raised the blind slightly to prepare his eyes for the sunlight outside. It might be cool this morning after the rain, but the sky was clear and the sun bright.

  “I’m sure Father will want to talk to you,” Kai said after a moment. His father, Dahar, ran the Daujom, the office out of which they both worked.

  Mikael dismissed the accusing tone he heard in Kai’s voice. “I’ll clean up first and then go to the office.”

  “Good.” Kai turned his head to gaze pensively at the closed shade on his side of the coach, fist held to his mouth. Evidently that conversation was over.

  Mikael rubbed his temples, wishing the headache away. He didn’t know what had been bothering Kai of late. He suspected it was some difficulty between father and son, because Kai had recently been making every excuse possible to get out of the office of the Daujom and away from his father. It would be more irritating, Mikael supposed, if Kai actually shirked his duties, but he did get his work done, often staying in the office long after his father had left for the day. Thus far, Mikael hadn’t complained.

  As soon as the coach stopped, Elisabet slipped out and waited for Kai. After he stepped down, Mikael climbed out, hitting the buff-colored flagstones with a semblance of normalcy. His breath steamed out in the chilly air. He could put on his overcoat but didn’t want to transfer blood to it, so he just drew in a breath through his nose and did his best to ignore the cold.

  The palace rose above them, an ornate creation unsuitable for the climate in which it existed. It harkened back to the palaces the Anvarrid had built in their homeland, a much warmer place from which the Cince had driven them. The pale granite of the palace walls rose in four stories that wrapped about the wide courtyard. Large onion domes capped each corner of the rooftops, and smaller ones sat atop the sentry turrets. Stone railings ran along the flat portions of the rooftops, and there sentries stood on duty, the black of their uniforms stark against the white walls and blue sky. As the palace stood at the highest point in the city, exposed to the cold wind, most of those sentries wore their hoods up at the moment, hiding their faces.

  Not that Mikael could tell them apart at a distance. All sentries, male and female, wore identical uniforms. They wore their hair in the same style, braided away from their faces and falling to the middle of their backs. The uniformity was a tactic meant to intimidate, one all of the Six Families employed. But the Lucas Family thrived on conformation and perfection and carried the practice to greater heights than the other Families, perhaps because they guarded the king rather than the master of a province.

  Mikael sighed. How many of those sentries did I wake last night?

  He stilled his mind, not wanting to agitate the sensitives any further. He cast a glance up at the windows of One Above—the first floor of the palace—and spotted Dahar holding back the heavy black draperies, watching them. Mikael nodded once toward the window. Dahar returned the gesture and disappeared as the drapes fell back in place. He would make his apologies to Dahar later, after he went to his quarters and bathed.

  Kai and Elisabet had already disappeared under the white stone of the arcade, so Mikael followed. Inside the palace there was only a single pair of sentries at the doors to contend with—a man and a woman, both years older than him. He wished good thoughts at them, hoping not to annoy them further this morning. Neither looked directly at him.

  The back entry hall of the palace wasn’t its most impressive hall—more of an intersection point for the wide stone stairwells coming from the upper floors—but light from a series of stained-glass windows spangled the white marble floor in a rainbow of colors. Like the Larossans, the Anvarrid favored colors, but darker and richer ones, so the walls were hung with tapestries of battle scenes wrought in jewel tones and highlighted with gold threads. The runners in the halls were thick wool and silk, muffling Mikael’s footsteps, and had been created especially for this palace in muted shades of beige and brown so as not to distract from the brilliant tapestries. Delicately crafted iron lanterns hung from chains in the arched stone hallways. They were rarely lit now since gas had been piped in to light the palace, but were retained because of their beauty. In the summer, the outer doors and windows of the palace could be thrown open to allow wind to sweep along the hallways, but in the winter, the abundance of glass made these halls icy.

  The opulence of the palace provided a stark contrast to the utter simplicity of the Lucas fortress located far below these halls. There the Lucas Family lived in a domain without sunlight, with endless gray walls and floors, with minimal decoration and painted floorcloths rather than fine carpets. It was a different world down below. And centuries underground had turned the Six Families paler than any of the peoples who surrounded them now. When the Anvarrid conquered Larossa, they had given the Six Families the nickname termites.

  Truthfully, Mikael would rather live below instead of in this sparkling palace. Unfortunately, the Lucas elders found his dreams worrisome, and thus he lived up here, on Two Above, the wing of the palace that housed members of the Daujom. Kai and Elisabet had already gone up the stairwell to the left, probably to retrieve Elisabet’s rifle from the armory, so Mikael made his way up behind them.

  Once he reached his quarters, Mikael fished out his key. It was, thankfully, still in his jacket pocket. The room wasn’t large, but it gave him privacy he wouldn’t have had in the fortress below.

  As a child in Lee Province, he’d regularly moved between his grandfather’s wing in the Vandriyen Palace and the Lee fortress beneath it, his mother’s world. With most yeargroups housing between twenty and thirty members, the children’s barracks there were crowded, always full of noise and activity. By comparison, the palace seemed stifled and formal, quiet and dull. He missed the bustle of being in a yeargroup, but he would never have been able to hide the truth of his dreams from them for long.

  After dumping his overcoat on the end of his bed, Mikael went to the window and drew back the heavy draperies to let in some light. From the chest at the end of his bed, he grabbed one of the old stained towels he kept for just this purpose and set it next to the basin on his table. He stripped off his jacket first, folding it so the laundry wouldn’t notice the blood across the front panels. His shirt was blotched with drying blood, though, undoubtedly ruined. Mikael pulled it off over his head and rolled it up. He’d send that down to the quartermasters later to be cut up for scrap. Using the icy water left in the basin, he took the towel and gingerly patted his chest clear of blood.

  After one of his dreams, he would often wake with injuries that mimicked the victim’s. Most of the time they were restricted to bruises, but his false injuries sometimes bled through the skin, as if he were sweating blood. It happened only when a dream was particularly frightening or urgent, or when he felt a closer tie to the victim. Last night’s dream had been one of those.

  When he looked directly downward, he could see a wide band of bruising across the lower part of his rib cage, also oozing blood in a few places. The skin had broken in several spots when Kai hit him in the chest with his boots. But when it came to the injuries running across his collarbones, he couldn’t see what lay beneath his chin.

  He grabbed his shaving mirror with one hand and held it at arm�
�s length, trying to understand what he saw. Left in a string of reddish purple bruises was lettering, running from the end of one collarbone to the other. Someone had carved a message into the victim’s flesh, a message now reflected on Mikael’s skin. But the markings were already fading. It had been too many hours since his dream.

  Left alone, he would have slept on until the false injuries healed completely. He’d slept more than a full day after one of his dreams before, so there was value to Kai waking him and dragging him back to the palace, even if Kai didn’t know that. This way Mikael got to see the injuries before they faded away.

  He turned his head and angled the mirror to peer at the spot on his neck where it felt like he’d been jabbed by a knife. The tiny wound there was still tender to the touch. That transferred injury hadn’t bled, which made him suspect the victim’s injury might have come from some manner of poison. That might explain the alternating numbness and tingling of his limbs too, and the tightness in his lungs that made him feel fifty instead of twenty-three. A dart? Perhaps an injection?

  He’d known it was murder before, without any doubt, given the ritualistic cuts made across his chest. But if there was poison involved, that indicated careful planning. A memory surfaced, no more than a flash, of someone watching as the victim died.

  He went to his writing desk and pulled out his journal and ink, angled the mirror this way and that, and tried to record what was left of the unknown word across his chest.

  The letters looked foreign—Pedraisi. Having grown up in one of the provinces that bordered the country of Pedrossa, he was familiar with the appearance of their alphabet, even if he didn’t read the language. He could speak a few words of it, but that was all. Many Larossans had blood ties back to Pedrossa, though, since both their peoples had come here centuries ago from the same part of the world. There were people in this city who could read and write that language, but also those who traded across the border or had old family ties. The city had its share of Pedraisi immigrants as well, blending in among the Larossans.

  Mikael blew on the ink to dry it and then angled the mirror to look at the word again. What does it mean?

  It had to be blood magic, sacrifice to a foreign god, asking for . . . something. Although blood magic was illegal in Larossa, it was still practiced. Some Larossans secretly begged favors of the old gods, even while being faithful to their true god. Most of the time it was harmless. A prick of a finger to cause a man to fall in love, or cutting the thumb to dab blood on a pennant meant to bring success in business. Or luck in cards, tiles, or any of a hundred other endeavors. There were a multitude of tiny ways that blood magic still appeared in day-to-day life among the Larossans, only most saw no harm in those small actions, no disloyalty to their true god.

  Ending someone’s life in this way, however, clearly crossed the line. Murder, even in the name of religion, was as unacceptable to the Pedraisi government as it was to the Larossan one.

  Mikael couldn’t begin to guess what those letters were meant to convey. He hoped that in time his memory would supply more, enough details to make sense of the fragments of the dream he could recall.

  He always did his best to keep an open mind when he considered his dreamed murders. Sometimes something that seemed clear turned out to be completely wrong. Even so, if he could figure out what that word was, that might tell him who’d killed whom, and why.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  “So Shironne says we’re looking for a man’s body,” Cerradine summed up Messine’s words. “Near the river.” They walked along the hallway toward his office in the army’s Administration Building, his heels loud on the hard marble floors.

  All of the buildings in this area of Noikinos were comparatively new, as the entire Seychas District—including Army Square—had been built where an old slum had been razed before Cerradine was born. As befitted the rising importance of the Larossan army at the time, the buildings surrounding Army Square were fine, with marble-floored hallways and wood paneling on the walls. Paintings of past generals gathered dust in niches along the walls, some festooned with aged pennants, their tips stained with those generals’ blood.

  “In a field,” Messine said. “She didn’t know what sort of crop, but she thought it had already been harvested.” Still wearing the livery he wore in his false position at the Anjir household, the young lieutenant shook his head.

  Although the young man had been working at the Anjir household for months now, it always surprised Cerradine to see him dressed as a servant, in that simple brown tunic and black trousers. He was accustomed to seeing his personnel—Cerradine’s children, as the general often called them, only halfway in jest—in the blue and brown uniform of the army. Messine had volunteered to take the post, though, and had been diligent in watching over Shironne.

  The young man followed Cerradine into his office at the end of the hall, a brown box of a room with wood paneling, a wood desk, and wooden chairs. The only brightness came from a framed map of the country hanging on one of the walls. Messine waited patiently as Cerradine puffed out his cheeks, contemplating Shironne’s information again. It wasn’t much to go on.

  The Laksitya River curved along the city’s edge for miles, and for miles in either direction from that, much of the land was cultivated. He wasn’t a farmer, but he couldn’t imagine any crops would still be in the fields, not with winter coming on. The hints of the body’s location they had were nearly useless. And the death might not concern the army anyway. The location she’d described, however vaguely, suggested that when the body was found, the investigation would fall under the jurisdiction of the local police.

  That had been a thorn in his side for years now. The army served the Anvarrid government of the country, not the local municipal government, a wholly Larossan body that controlled the day-to-day functions of the city. The local police, however, were notoriously corrupt, a condition on which the current police commissioner and the city’s council turned a blind eye. Anyone who wanted a crime hidden, even a murder that smacked of blood magic, as Shironne’s description hinted, need only pay off the correct officials to have a case disappear. As head of the army’s intelligence and investigations office, Cerradine had made a point of wresting every case away from the local police that he could.

  Cerradine turned back to young Messine. “Would you go down to the morgue and bring Kassannan back? And tell Aldassa to come talk to me.”

  “Yes, sir,” Messine said sharply, and ducked out of the office.

  Cerradine sat in one of the chairs in front of the desk and stretched out his long legs. He didn’t want to waste his resources chasing a crime they couldn’t even prove had happened. The office’s personnel were already stretched thin. A number of them were currently off investigating the disappearance of one of their compatriots near the Pedraisi border, in Andersen Province.

  Even so, while people were murdered in this city every day, only a select few deaths played out in Mikael Lee’s dreams. There had to be some significance to that fact; there always was. And Shironne Anjir was always dragged into them.

  Over the last four years, Shironne had regularly picked up on Mikael’s dreams, even though he shouldn’t have bothered anyone at that distance. Shironne was a profound sensitive, though, possibly the strongest of her generation. Beyond the normal ability to sense others’ emotions, she could read information by touch, a very rare power. So while a medical examiner could tell him information about a man’s death, Shironne could touch the dead man’s mind. She could even pick out thoughts or memories, so long as the man in question hadn’t been dead too long.

  The true question, though, wasn’t why Shironne was intercepting Mikael’s dreams. It was why she’d become a touch-sensitive at all.

  Most people looked at Shironne and saw an average Larossan girl. She was small and brown, like most Larossans. She dressed as a Larossan and lived in a Larossan household, but Cerradine knew Madam
Anjir’s secret. Shironne’s mother was the child of an affair between a wealthy Larossan businessman’s wife and the previous king, Khorasion of the House of Valaren. Madam Anjir was thus half-Anvarrid and a member of the Royal House, even if she chose not to acknowledge that fact. And she was a sensitive, but not a particularly strong one. Shironne’s youngest sister, Melanna, also showed signs of developing into a sensitive, although she was nothing special in that way either.

  So why Shironne? Why had she suddenly developed a power so crippling that she’d come close to starvation because she couldn’t tolerate the impurities in food on her tongue? She’d been unable to don clothing at first, and even now kept her garments to a handful of well-worn items to which she’d become accustomed. Over the four years since her powers had first emerged, she’d learned to compensate for them. She’d slowly become accustomed to touching things again, although, when possible, she preferred to have the minimal barrier that wearing gloves provided. She was, as far as Cerradine knew, the only touch-sensitive alive . . . or at least the only one who had survived to adulthood.

  That the Royal House had any sensitives in it at all was a result of centuries of intermarriage between the Anvarrid and the Six Families. That was how Shironne had inherited the few drops of Lucas blood that ran in her veins. But none of the Lucas children had her profound powers. And although many shared the emotions in Mikael’s dreams—fear, helplessness, and anger—Shironne came out of those dreams with details. Details that Mikael himself often didn’t recall.

  Deborah, the Lucas Family’s Head Infirmarian and his own foster sister, claimed that Mikael’s dreams were a gift that ran in his father’s bloodline, the House of Vandriyen. The Lucas Family had extensive records of the talents of different Anvarrid Houses, and over the last few years, Deborah had become an expert on those as she hunted for a way to tame Mikael’s dreams . . . and to figure out the puzzle that Shironne Anjir presented.