Excerpt: The Undertow

A couple of knocks sounded out on my office's open door, falling brief and heavy. For some reason or another, it didn’t startle me, and I noticed how distant and level my pulse felt as I turned around.

Aster looked incredibly tired. He nodded to me; I nodded back.

"You have a surprise appointment," he said. "Some Masi kid’s getting recurring themed nightmares. Might be worth investigating. I’d put this on one of the Avra on fourth—" (the fourth floor was where the five dream specialists were grouped) "—but, well." He sighed. "We’re keeping Theo and Cera under protection at the moment."

Comprehension failed me just then. "What about the others?"

Aster shook his head. "I don’t think anyone is too eager to replace them anymore. The appointment’s in five minutes, Imre. You up to it?"

An extra layer of haze settled over my mind. I couldn't remember what the other three dream specialists' names had been, and I felt a little guilty for that. "I’m, er... I have some training." Not as much as the specialists on the fourth floor, but it would have to do. "Yes, sir."

"Okay. Come upstairs if it gets too hairy." And with that, he was gone.

The fact that this kid with the appointment was Masi was not altogether astonishing. The agricultural class, those who paid close attention to the land and to animals for a living, were often more well-acquainted with omens in general than most other echelons, simply because they cared more. As they sat just two ranks below we Avra, with the scholars in between, they often felt that they were in a good position to pass on up what they had observed, too.

The Masi had their cranks, just as any echelon did: sometimes younger farmers who didn’t really know what they were observing but thought they did, or older ones who were convinced they had been deemed worthy by the land to be privy to its secrets and ended making a lot of stuff up. Obviously some of them just wanted attention, but I never had gotten around to figuring out whether or not most of them were actually aware of their falsehoods. At least such reports didn’t endanger the Avra’s intake system all that much. The vast majority of them were laughably easy to pick out, and only annoying to have to deal with.

Many of we Avra had fond memories of one Masi or other, though, who had made some sort of enormously important observation and forwarded it on to us posthaste. It had been a Masi who had seen the portent that prepared us for a fire two years ago that might have consumed half of the Citadel if it had been a total surprise. It had been a Masi four years before that who had reported an omen that allowed us to stock up for the severely dry season that followed. There were many more records of useful reports from them over the course of history.

I spent the remaining time that I had to myself by cleaning up my desk a little more and nudging the room’s spare chair into position, rotating it sideways to the desk so that my visitor wouldn’t have to shove it around too much just in order to sit down. I hoped that whoever this person was, they weren’t going to be one of those self-delusional ones. That would be the last thing any of us needed right now.

Though on second thought, no (real) news might be good news.

I had just finished the process of worrying a blank scrap of paper loose from the bottom of a small stack of notes when he stepped into the doorway. Keeping one’s eyes closed never served any Avra very well—we were encouraged to pick up on traits, to attempt to glean information about what sort of person might be standing before us, as this could potentially influence the report they were giving. And as most appointments were made on only the severest of reports, attempting to understand the person came about to be of rather much importance.

He was probably somewhere around seventeen years of age, I guessed, and maybe of average height. His black hair was tied off into a short ponytail, though not all of it was long enough to be held back, and there was a bit of a patchy beard on his chin, likely one of those defiant youthful declarations of maturity. If I had only observed his face, I might have imagined him to be a bit coldly aggressive. Or maybe that was just the sharpness of his features and the ice-blue of his catlike eyes talking. As he walked in, though, I was a little surprised to note how much restraint seemed to be in the way he moved. Maybe he was one of those sorts who were hypersensitive to what was going on around them, and more conscious of themselves than they really needed to be. He did take his seat with an air of undeniable certainty, though. A little automatic weariness fell into place over me and I hoped this one wasn’t going to be a handful.

"You’re the one who’s been receiving nightmares?" I asked. It didn’t hurt to be sure.

"Yes’m." He sounded subdued. I couldn’t help but feel a little sorry for him at that.

"All right. Before we start—I’m Avra Imre." I offered him my hand. "I’m afraid I haven’t got your name." Aster must have forgotten to tell it to me, which was a distressingly unusual kind of slip from him. I hoped he had given himself enough time somewhere along the line to begin to recover from all that he had seen.

My appointment reached over the desk to shake my hand and looked back at me, his expression unreadable. "Masi Artaxas."

What kind of mother would name her son Artaxas? The poor guy. The way he said it, though, was enough to make it clear to me that it was going to be all or nothing. This was not somebody who wanted a nickname. "Okay, Artaxas. Don’t worry about maintaining formalities while you’re here. I’ve got to apologise for how disorganised everything is at the moment, maybe you noticed. The Reticulum’s been dealing with, uh—"

"Death." He didn’t sound completely certain about it, and stared at me, maybe to try and ascertain by my reaction whether it was the truth. "That’s what it means, doesn’t it?"

All of a sudden, I had what I considered to be a pretty good guess as to what he had been having nightmares about, and I shut my eyes for a moment. "Can you please tell me about the subject of your dreams?"

"Big black birds."

What a surprise.

"I dreamt they take people apart," he added, glancing down to the surface of the desk. "Everyone I know, and then all the Masi, and that is followed by everyone in the Citadel. They leave the Dulat alone while they go underground, and they rip apart the world for the very last thing, and that’s how they have the Dulat die."

That... was quite specific. "Do you usually dream with this kind of clarity of sequence? Where it isn’t all muddled together?"

Artaxas sat in silence, long enough to make me wonder whether he had actually understood the question; but after a minute he sighed. "I can’t always be sure whether I’m dreaming or awake while it happens. It was kind of scary, this one."

"Sounds like it," I murmured, letting my hand work away with my pen at jotting down shorthand. "How often does it recur, and when was the first time it came to you?"

He hesitated again.

"Don’t worry, you won’t get in trouble if it’s been ongoing for a while," I added. "The important thing is that we’re talking about it now."

"I guess so. All right, I’ve had it for three years."

I almost dropped my pen. Usually when people came in tardy to report a nightmare, they only delayed by ten or twelve months at most.

"It usually comes around once a month," Artaxas said. "But over the past week it’s happened every night. I suppose it’s connected with whatever’s going on around here, isn’t it?"

"That’s what most of us suppose. And by now I think we have pretty good reason."

"Is it just, you know…" He gestured loosely, as if he was beckoning his words to come forth out of hiding. "Metaphorical? Just represents something?"

"That’s almost always the case. This time, though… well, we have seen an actual bird of that kind. It’s called a raven." I set down my pen for the moment. "It might have been directly responsible for some of the things that have been happening, but judging from what I’ve seen, I don’t think the general public has been in very much danger. It hasn’t fallen upon anyone indiscriminately."

Artaxas clasped his hands. I kept expecting him to look so painfully out of place here, like most people of other echelons did, but in a way he fit in with the rich surroundings better than many of the Avra themselves. "I should likely keep all this to myself for now, shouldn’t I."

"Have you told anyone outside this Reticulum about the dream?"

He shook his head. "I didn’t want to make anyone worry."

That was always a fine motivation. Unfortunately it often produced unintended results. I nodded anyway. "Many people are already becoming aware of this raven. I just suggest that you take care, but don’t feel any need to drive yourself to paranoia. All right?"

"Yes." He paused, perhaps to collect his thoughts again. "What about the rest of it?"

"The world coming apart and that?"

"It was just as vivid. There was nothing at all left by the end of it."

"Well… it’s unlikely that a bird would be able to rend the ground itself, I think. That’s much more likely a metaphor." I tapped the end of my pen on the desk a couple of times. "I’ll go over this information with a few other Avra to make sure we cover all the possibilities, and once that’s finished, we’ll have something to work from. Thanks to you, it won’t take us by surprise when it happens."

Artaxas seemed to be in no way reassured. "But is there any way at all to prepare for something like that?"

The question was as unavoidable as it was unanswerable. It held a near-total dominion over my mind while I wrapped the appointment up in the way all Avra were expected to. By this I ensured that Artaxas had no further questions; that he was indeed feeling all right, and better now that he had done something about these recurring nightmares; and that, yes, he would like to keep an open invitation to return should he feel the need to report anything at a later point in time.

The system was maintaining its essential purpose, and the relief that I found in this was the greatest that I had experienced since I had first become aware of the murders of my colleagues by that big black bird itself. It was what allowed me to bid a warm farewell to Artaxas—perhaps he wasn’t much used to these, as he gave me a brief but inquisitive look before disappearing out the door—and it was also what allowed me to hold myself together for a few seconds longer than was my record over the past few days when I saw the raven in flight outside, passing so close to my window that the tips of its flight feathers might have nearly brushed the pane.

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