The Sleeping Life

Chapter One

Even ignoring his nightmare predicament, Fallon DeVries would be glad to get back to the Arkathan and away from the ritual of saying goodnight to an idealised statue of his mother and sister. Every evening, as his father pressed lips to a marble forehead, Fallon’s heart crawled into his stomach and writhed.

"You’re looking well today, my dears," Vannan DeVries said. He reached down to pat the head of the smaller of the two figures, then glanced expectantly at Fallon.

"Goodnight Mother," Fallon said, obediently. "'Night Auri."

"You must be sure to visit on rest day, Fallon," his father said. "The house will be quiet with only we three."

"You’re forgetting Mrs Pardons."

"Indeed. Though I regret to say this evening’s offering will not easily slip my mind." Fallon’s father tugged at his short, brown-blond beard. "Perhaps she would do better with an assistant. We burden our old helpmate too much."

"It’s just because I’ve been home." The words had come too fast, too strong, and Fallon bit his lip, then forced a lighter tone. "I’ve eaten out the pantry. Besides, Mrs Pardons would be hurt if she thought we were angling to replace her."

"Oh, she could not think that." Distressed, Fallon’s father held a hand out toward the smiling, seated figure of his wife. "My dear, I had best go speak to her. Goodnight, lad."

Fallon let himself relax, knowing that Mrs Pardons would take in stride sudden reassurances that she was too valued a friend to be replaced, and nip in the bud any further ideas of new staff. Her cooking wasn’t likely to improve, but if Fallon’s plan succeeded she would be able to go back to providing meals delivered by her granddaughter. Father would never know.

"But he’s getting worse," Fallon said—to himself, not the statue.

The two figures smiled on: his stone mother relaxed in a stone chair, head turned attentively toward the library door, while stone Aurienne leaned against her knees, lips curved enigmatically. Even Auri admitted that the marble version of herself was a good deal prettier than it should be—and laughed at the thought of herself ever sitting devotedly at their mother’s feet—but still this remembrance of the dead was a triumph of their father’s skill. Mother had always had that complacent expression, that expectation of an audience. And Auri looked properly herself: restless and eager all at once.

Fallon went and ate jam tarts. They sat uneasily on the burnt grease Mrs Pardons had produced that evening, but were necessary energy. While his stomach settled he did the household accounts, refusing to let himself factor in any hope that his father would begin to work again, and make their financial situation less precarious. Then he prepared his room, setting a glow above a new book in the page-turner Sigillic, and weighting the corners of the latest collection of newssheets before settling with his head under a pillow to escape the light and dream his sister.

Though she neither ate nor drank, Auri had aged during the three years of the Dream, and now appeared fourteen to his sixteen. Even so, she was already inches taller, since Fallon took after their mother’s blond delicacy, while his twin had their father’s lanky frame. She read through the newssheets before crossing to the bed to take Fallon’s hand and draw him fully into the dream state that was now the whole of her existence.

"Can you think of anything to hobble Uncle?" Auri asked. "You’ll never get anywhere with Rennyn Claire if he keeps up this campaign against her husband."

"He was here today." Because he didn’t want to notice how frayed Auri was looking, Fallon glanced down at himself, shifting uneasily in the bed. "Banging on at Father about the need to counter the Kellian threat. Perhaps, if the first approach doesn’t work, I can offer Lady Rennyn inside information."

"Was Father very upset?" Auri asked, her voice sharpening as she crossed to the door. "Why can’t Uncle leave him be?"

Fallon followed his sister through the cold soapiness of the wooden door. "If anything, Uncle’s visits do Father good," he said, rubbing his goose-nabbed upper arms. "He gets annoyed and that makes him less vague and more in tune with the real world. But he—he is talking to them more."

Without replying, Auri stepped through the door of their father’s room, and again Fallon trailed her through slippery chill, finding her standing by their father, who was sitting up before his fire leafing through one of their mother’s books of verses.

"It might be too much for him," she said, stroking the oblivious man’s shoulder. "If you manage to get me back, he might be even more convinced Mama’s still alive. Or—"

She stopped, and moved to warm her hands over the fire, growing visibly more solid. Warmth was important to Auri, and while Fallon had learned to make sure there were always heatstones nearby, she preferred fires. Fallon didn’t go too close—fires in the Dream always made him feel floaty and less real.

"Father won’t blame you. You did something stupid, but Mother’s the one who made your disappearance all about her. She spent more time picking out becoming mourning clothes than crying. And wandering weeping in the rain was a scene right out of the last novel she’d read."

"She still wouldn’t have fallen ill if not for me," Auri said, bluntly. "And Father wouldn’t have—wouldn’t be this way if she were still alive. Me coming back isn’t going to make him better, is it?"

"It’s not like Father’s the only reason to fix this," Fallon said, moving away from the fire. He knew Auri’s mood was due to tomorrow’s return to the Arkathan, where Fallon would have to share a room with five others, and could not set the page-turning Sigillic without prompting questions impossible to answer. She’d been desperately bored during Fallon’s first term: unable to travel far from Fallon’s side, and finding little entertainment in a dormitory of sleeping students—beyond the things people did in their beds when they thought everyone asleep, which was hardly what Fallon wanted her watching.

"At least there’ll be plenty of food," Auri said, her thoughts obviously following—nearly—similar lines. "You look liable to snap in half. We’d do better to see if we can get any use out of Lady Rennyn before risking more experiments."

"This will be the last we can do for an age," Fallon pointed out. "And you promised not to wriggle out. Don’t be weak."

He pushed out through the door, knowing any suggestion of cowardice would bring her to the point. But, while Auri followed into the corridor, she passed him and stopped, blocking the way.

"I’m not the problem," Auri said. "You are. You kept putting this off until you were sure you had the right Sigillic, and now you’re all thin and worn looking. Do you want Father to carve a third family member?"

Fallon flinched, but would only concede a partial point. "I know I’m run down. But this is just a divination. And you know we can’t pin our hopes to one solution. No matter how clever and powerful a mage Lady Rennyn might be, if she isn’t told the problem she won’t be looking for a solution. It’s not as if I can explain anything."

"Bah. If she’s truly as good as the Elder Mages were, then she should know all at first glance, have an answer after a second. And why you’d argue against this I don’t know—admit it, there’s nothing you’d love more than to be the student of someone like that and burble on all day about the structure and nature of magic."

"I’m not arguing. But even without Uncle the chances of me convincing Lady Rennyn she wants another student are slim at best. We need to—"

"We need the best. And to have a better strategy than I’ll show her how much I love magic. Be clever about this, instead of falling into your usual trick of getting caught up in whatever you’re thinking and letting your mouth run on by itself. How I ever thought you’d keep a secret—"

"Well I have," Fallon pointed out.

"Exactly! Well, with the help of a little choking, but you obviously can think without your tongue slipping the leash sometimes."

"Nothing other than discussing you has me blue-faced and fainting," Fallon said. "And you’re one to talk about minding your words given it was your note that caused the problem. Keep this a secret or I’ll kill you indeed."

"It was just a note. I still can’t see how I went wrong. I had the Sigillic perfect, and it all was going as described and—Fel, I wish Lady Rennyn would come back to the city!" Auri whirled and dashed back through Fallon’s door.

Thinking too deeply about the miscasting always unsettled her, and Fallon knew better than to try to talk his sister into joining him. Rubbing his arms in hopes of warming them, he made himself turn the opposite way. The door of Auri’s room was different to all others: was like treacle or spider web, clinging and catching. All of the walls were like that too, but the floor was the worst, and Fallon still couldn’t bear to think about the time he’d tried to go down through it and almost been trapped.

In the waking world the room felt heavy and cold. The door stuck in a warped frame, the beams of the ceiling bowed, the walls leaned. The floorboards spiralled to a point in the very centre of the room. On the night Auri had complained of a headache and refused to go to the theatre, they’d returned to find every piece of her bedroom furniture clumped in the centre of the room, bent and distorted into a single mass. But no blood, no body.

Hand investigators concluded that she’d been trying to summon a mage’s focus—six years before legally permitted—and paid for her over-eagerness with her life. The note Fallon had found in his room had confirmed that, though he couldn’t show his parents or the investigators, since the slip of paper had crumpled into nothing as he read it, and when he’d tried to talk about it hands seemed to close about his throat.

Standing in the centre of the warped and nearly empty room, Fallon wrestled with that memory, with the suffocating weight of Auri’s half-life. It was unsustainable. Wherever it was she was trapped, she drew on his strength to come into the Dream. If she did nothing but read the books he set out, he did not feel the impact too greatly, though there had not been a morning since Auri’s death that he had not woken feeling tired. But it was Auri’s boredom that was liable to kill them both.

The very first night of the Dream, she had found that the world was not entirely soap bubble permeable. If she tried hard enough, she could touch, move, even cast if a Sigillic had been set written and waiting for her. But the energy this cost Fallon was ruinous, not only forcing him to sleep more and more, but bringing him to the very verge of over-commitment, the most common cause of any caster’s death. If a mage commenced a casting that they did not have the strength to sustain, something had to fail: either the casting, or the mage’s heart.

They had found a balance. The page-turner, a Sigillic Fallon would activate before he slept, would allow Auri to read without touching. He would set out newssheets, leave notes. On nights he was better rested, she would draw him into the Dream, and they would talk. But most of Auri’s existence was cold silence while the world slept, and Fallon desperately needed to understand what had gone wrong with her casting so he could fetch her back to the physical world. Focus-summoning required a trip to the dangerous shadow world of the Eferum, but Fallon was certain she was no longer there. Instead, she seemed to have found some place between the two worlds, less dangerous, but also less tangible.

Since it was essential for him to excel as a mage to figure out this puzzle, he attended the Arkathan, the most prestigious of the schools, but the cost took up most of their Mother’s annuity, leaving too little for household expenses. Fallon had hit on the idea of becoming a private student even before Rennyn Claire had surfaced that summer and shown Tyrland the kind of casting that hadn’t been seen since the Elder Mages had walked—and nearly destroyed—the world. But how was he to win her interest when he couldn’t explain how important it was? He loved magic, but he had hardly set the Arkathan ablaze with his brilliance.

"Get to know her other students." Auri, tense but resolute, stood at his elbow. She crossed to examine the Sigillic he had chalked earlier that day, adding: "Not her brother, but those other two: that villager and the Kellian girl. Work out why she decided to teach them, and maybe you can catch her notice the same way. Or get them to recommend you."

Moving carefully, so she didn’t push through it, Auri settled into one of the few pieces of furniture that had not been distorted beyond recognition: a heavy and ornate chair that had been left with a permanent forward bow, embracing its occupant.

"I’ll think about it," Fallon said, though he suspected those reasons would involve being a Kellian or having his home destroyed, neither of which were practical options. "I’m trying this divination because I think the floor in here might be distorting the ones I’ve used before. This should just make any magical emanations visible."

"Did you try it waking?" Auri asked, propping her chin on her hand.

"Yes. Just the usual miscast. The distortion in the physical world is fading a little, I think, but it still makes it too difficult for me to cast there."

Fallon frowned at the sigils he’d chalked down the length of one curving board. Why was it worse in the physical world than Auri’s Dream? And where was the Dream, if it was neither the physical world, nor the Eferum, the dimension that was the source of all magic? There were so many experiments he could try, and it was maddening to never have the energy to attempt them, or the freedom to discuss them with someone more interested in theory than his sister. She’d always found the why of magic boring, and had been so naturally talented that she felt she could skip plodding lesson plans and all the theory that went with the practice. If Auri had cared about theory they wouldn’t be in this situation in the first place.

"I swear, if you meet Lady Rennyn and spend an hour standing there thinking about what you might say to her instead of just going ahead and doing, I will—"

"Haunt me?" Fallon swallowed a giggle he knew would sound wrong. It wasn’t funny, not at all, and if he was half the mage he wanted to be he’d be neither slow nor rash, but simply sure. The kind of mage Lady Rennyn was said to be.

Sigillic casting was easy—so long as it was written correctly, was a true and tested formulation, all that was necessary was to feed power and let it work. He’d researched a divination that seemed perfect for his purposes: simple, and robust, showing only lingering traces of worked Efera. Fallon could cast it in his sleep—and almost stopped feeding power, thinking about how true that was. But neither distraction nor the strange environment prevented the Sigillic from obediently completing.

Pastel blue shading. It made the cold worse somehow, but it had done exactly what Fallon had wanted, and he let his breath out, pleased. That the entire room still carried the imprint of Auri’s miscasting was obvious to anyone who entered it, but what Fallon had wanted was the impression of the sigils she had used, the Sigillic form that had dictated the magical result. Sigils written with ink or chalk were usually consumed during a casting, but a strong Sigillic could at times leave a physical or Efera imprint, and Fallon’s divination was one used by the Hand to uncover the terms of Sigillics which had burned away or been erased.

"I didn’t write them like that," Auri said, staring down at the circle of glowing, snowflake shapes.

Fallon, spirits sinking, didn’t doubt it. Just like the floorboards they were written upon, the sigils had been twisted into spirals by the miscasting. The light would have made them hard enough to read: the distortion made it near-impossible.

"If I could trace them out, I suppose," he said, trying to puzzle out the nearest sigil. Three spokes, so it would be an action…

"Don’t be stupid." Auri, avoiding the Sigillic, crossed to tug on his arm. "You can’t maintain a casting like this nearly—" She broke off, and went back to her chair, kneeling down to peer underneath it.

"What?"

"Come see."

Her cheek was shining blue, reflecting a strong light source beneath the chair. Fallon hurried to poke his nose around the other side of the chair’s leg, and found that the light was coming from the base of the chair, from a sphere embedded into the wood.

"I did it after all," Auri said, reaching out to stroke the curve before Fallon could object. "It’s warm."

"I don’t think that’s a focus," Fallon said. "It looks dark, not clear."

"What else could it be? I read that Lady Rennyn’s focus is black. Maybe I accidentally summoned the way she did." She smiled, and poked the sphere again. "It feels good."

Resting back on his heels, Fallon murmured the cut-off for the detect Sigillic. "I guess this is progress. I’ll dig it out in the morning."

"And then go find out what you can about Lady Rennyn’s students."

"That too, for all the good it’ll do me. None of them are in the city."

"They’ll have to come back for her annunciation as Duchess. You can do it, Fallon."

He’d have to. Without being able to read the structure of Auri’s Sigillic, he had little chance of understanding just what had gone wrong. And even if he stumbled upon a solution, his ability to cast was greatly limited by the strain Auri constantly placed on him. Nor would it be sufficient to somehow enlist the help of his teachers, or the Hand mages, or even the Grand Magister. He needed an expert in the Eferum, and there was only one mage considered so brilliant, so revolutionary, so sheerly powerful, that she would have any hope of saving a girl trapped in a dream he couldn’t admit to.

If Auri was ever to find her way back to this world, they needed Rennyn Claire.