Page 120 of The Unweaver

Her heart seized. Now Cora held their spirits—their fates—in her hands. Weary and on the verge of succumbing to the Sleepwalker’s Draught, she closed her eyes. “We have a deal,” she whispered. “Teddy. Save... Teddy.”

The girl gave an enigmatic smile. Pulling a blade from the pocket of her sailor dress, she knelt beside Cora and sliced her palm deep. “You will join us, and I will release Teddy’s spirit.”

Cora repeated the words in a feeble voice. Palms clasped wound to wound, magic crackled between them, sealing their Binding Agreement.

“It is done. Puppets, unchain her. Kill the Realmwalker.”

“No!”

“He was not part of our deal. He has outlasted us all no longer. I shall cheat death in his stead.” Her head swiveled to her puppets. “Drain him.”

The sleepwalkers surrounded Bane’s prone form and yanked his head back, blade poised to slit his throat. Instinct kicked in over alarm. Channeling her remaining magic, Cora reached for the threads of Mother’s life. Freshly severed and easily rewoven. Mother’s spirit had not yet passed into the Death Realm. Her corpse reanimated greedily.

She pulled Mother by the strings of her death to sit up. Her sunken torso oozed organs. Spires of bone poked through the torn canvas of flabby flesh. Head twisted at a grotesque angle and gore-caked hair curtaining her slack features, the corpse smiled a little smile.

The Oneiromancer was frozen in disbelief as the mangled corpse rose in her chainmail shroud and staggered to her feet.Mother didn’t make it far before the sleepwalkers descended on her. She tackled a puppet, snapping its neck with beringed hands. The puppet fell, limp.

Cora drank deep of death’s awful energy, dissipating some of the thick fog in her mind. She reanimated the killed puppet with the slightest stitch of reweaving and launched it forward, its head lolling on exposed tendons. The Oneiromancer cried out, tugging her living puppets to defend her. Corpses and sleepwalkers fought in a tangle of limbs and chorus of smacking blows, death and dream feeding empowering their unconscious violence.

Cora tapped into her diminishing energy and rotted through the ballroom floor. Then they were sinking, her and Bane and the chains binding them. Corpses crashed to the ground with her broken concentration and drained magic. Mother’s glazed eyes stared unseeing as Cora fell through the decayed wood into darkness.

A scream tore out of her throat and a flash of metal caught her eye. The girl was also falling into the sinkhole, Koschei’s Egg and the Oracle Ruby along with her. In a suspended moment, the Egg slipped from her fingers and Bane’s heart plummeted.

The moment after Cora lost consciousness, a heartbeat before they hit the floor below, the world was plunged into a nightmare.

Chapter 33. A Living, Breathing Nightmare

Cora slipped through a gossamer veil into a boundless sea of stars. Disembodied, she floated through velvet waves of twinkling midnight. Stars seemed to glitter far overhead and deep below. Colors were blurred and sounds muffled as if she were underwater, but she felt no wetness. Figures, dark and distant, drifted among the stars. She thought she heard them call her name.

Thoughts filtered through her mind like mist, vague and formless. Was she in a dream within dreams? Or a nightmare she couldn’t wake from? Understanding was slow to surface. This wasn’t the Dream Realm where sleeping minds wandered, but a fusion of dreams with the corporeal. A living, breathing nightmare she couldn’t escape.

“Cora,” came a faraway voice, deep and lyrical. A shadow separated from the darkness. Malachy floated near. His eyes glinted in the starlight, one sky blue, one demon black. “The bullet— I can’t traverse us away. We’re asleep and trapped in a Dreamverse, a pocket between the Dream and Living Realms. The only way to escape is to wake up. Can you—”

A falling star streaked overhead. No, not a star, but a metallic sphere. Koschei’s Egg fell and dropped onto a cloud of velvety night, unbroken. A figure with mirror-bright eyes emerged from the inky ocean sparkling with celestial dust, holding Koschei’s Egg close to their chest.

The figure was like a Rorschach test of dreams projected onto the blank silhouette of a woman. She patterned herself in warped configurations of constantly shifting dreams and nightmares.

At first, Cora saw a tree struck by lightning, then the vision scrambled back into the blank woman-shaped canvas, then into a mouth full of rotting teeth. Before her mind could process, the vision morphed into a heartless corpse.

Cora had seen this nightmare before, reflected in the towering mirror of a dream when the creature had reached through the glass to caress her face with a long claw. The woman’s jaw unhinged. Her mouth gaped into a fang-lined blackhole from which the keening of a thousand shrill cries emerged. Cora tried to cover her ears, but her limbs were too heavy, the starry sea too thick.

Malachy’s horrified gaze fixed on the reconfiguring woman. “Ikelas. But… I saw you die.”

Ikelas smiled, her vicious mouth impossibly wide. The stars reflected blindingly bright in her mirror eyes. “But you did not see me reborn,” she said in a voice like liquid darkness.

“How?”

“I spirited myself away in dreams, boy. For decades after you left me to die in Russia, I have insinuated myself into dreamers. Feeding my puppets the threads of my spirit until they are more me than them. But each transfer weakens my magic, and my puppets are drained so quickly. I must wear younger flesh vessels to prolong their usefulness. Such is the high cost of theProfane Arts.” She caressed Koschei’s Egg. “A cost you have avoided too long, Realmwalker.”

“A body-snatching dream demon.” Mouth in a grim line, Malachy watched her fondle the vessel enclosing his heart. “I liked you better dead.”

A thousand discordant laughs blasted out of her maw. “Still as arrogant as you were as Master Ghose’s apprentice—or should I say servant? —when Tsar Nicholas raged across Crimea, ripe with the suggestions I seeped into his dreams. I long for that time. I long for that power. Soon, I shall have it again.”

Ikelas sucked in a gale of wind. The starry sea rippled, ferrying the pool of dreamers into a vortex around her. More dreamers fell through the veil and floated past in slumberous waves. The Dreamverse was expanding, and with it her power as she feasted off their dreams.

“You will fail, Ikelas.” Malachy fought against the vortex’s current. “As you have before, given your experiment’s death toll. How many Profane curses, how many spirit vessels did you try? How many more sleepwalking guinea pigs do you need to kill before you realize? It won’t work. Not even with Koschei’s Egg.”

“Ah, but it will, Realmwalker. As you know, the body must be alive when the spirit is transferred into the vessel. If not, both body and spirit will die. Keeping the blood flowing is insufficient. The spirit is partially transferred, the rest damned to Purgatory. But stopping time, as you did those many stolen years ago,willwork. Your Chronomancer Moriarty did not oblige my request when we held him below those docks. Fortunately, we have a more agreeable Chronomancer.”

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