The Cartographer of Forgotten Dreams

13 min read · Dark fantasy romance · Free, complete, 18+

Hesper Lusk charged double for nightmares and triple for Nightlords, and until the night one climbed the forty stairs to her workshop she had never had to say the second price out loud.

He spared her the trouble. He set a purse on her drawing table, beside the half-inked map of a fishwife’s drowning dream, and said, “Triple. I asked in the street what you charge my kind. They told me, and then they put their shutters up.”

The sun had not risen over Noctis Aeterna in seven hundred years, and the Tallow Quarter, where the lamps were cheapest and the smoke hung lowest, was the darkest corner of a dark city. Hesper had lived all her thirty-one years in it. She had seen the sun only in other people’s sleep: a harbour at dawn, a yellow field, a lit kitchen. Borrowed light. It never warmed her.

He lowered his hood. A scar ran from his left temple to the hinge of his jaw, pale as a snail’s track, and he stood like someone used to rooms going quiet when he came into them. Hers did. Even the lamp seemed to burn smaller.

“I have the same dream every night,” he said. “A city burning. A woman calling my name. A blue door I never reach. I want it mapped as far as the door.” He looked at the edge of the table, where her teacher had cut the first rule of the trade into the wood with a penknife: Leave the last line. “And then I want the map finished.”

Every walker knew why the rule was there. A dream map stayed a picture only while it stayed incomplete. Draw the last line and it became a door, and a door, once opened, took someone through. The one it took did not wake.

“Then you know what a finished map does,” she said.

“I know.”

“It takes someone.”

“I know that too.”

“I’ll map you to the door,” Hesper said. “I don’t draw doors. Which one are you?”

“Cassiel.”

She knew the name. Every child in the Quarter knew it, because every house in the Quarter paid the Spire one dream at each dark of the moon, and you woke from tithe-night with a clean hole in you where the night should have been. Seven Nightlords fed on those holes. Cassiel was the first of them: the one who had climbed the Spire on the last morning and spoken the bargain aloud.

“You put the sun out,” she said.

“I did.”

He did not add a but. She waited for one, and it did not come, and that was what made her pick up her pen. That, and the purse. And one more thing she did not say: walkers had only been born since the dark. The sunless nights made sleep deep enough to walk in. Everything she was, his bargain had made.

“In here,” she said, “I say when we stop.”

“Agreed.”

He lay on the narrow cot she kept for clients, his boots still on, and she sat beside him with two fingers on each of his temples. His skin was cool. She went down into his sleep the way she always went: slowly, like a lamp lowered into a well.

She came out into noon.

Not a dream’s noon. She had stood in a hundred of those, flat and yellow as painted card. This one had heat in it. It lay across the back of her neck like a hand. White stone streets ran down to a river, and the market stalls were heaped with fruit she had no names for, and window boxes spilled flowers that had needed the sun and had not grown anywhere since. Hesper stood in the middle of the street with her mouth open and her eyes running.

“This is what it was,” Cassiel said beside her. He looked younger here, and unscarred. “Watch.”

A bell rang somewhere above the city. The light did not set. It went out, the way a lamp goes out when someone pinches the wick, and in the dark the people of the white city began to light everything they had: torches, cartwheels, furniture, their own roofs. By the time she found Cassiel’s hand the whole street was burning.

She mapped it over seven nights. By day she inked what she had walked: the river of fire that had once been the market, the bridge that fell on the third night, the alley where the heat was worst. Somewhere beyond the flames a woman called his name, over and over, and every night they got a few streets closer to the blue door.

Under an arch on the third night, waiting for a wall to finish falling, she asked him why.

“To end the river wars,” he said. “Dreams are easier to rule than armies.”

“That’s what the Spire says. I didn’t ask the Spire.”

He did not answer while a whole wall came down across the street. The arch dripped burning pitch beside them.

“I was a minor lord with a good house,” he said. “I wanted to be one of seven. My wife laughed at me for it. She told me not to go up that morning, and I went. From the top of the Spire you can see the whole city. I watched my street catch. The rite had another hour to run, and if I left it, the bargain failed.”

“And you stayed.”

“I stayed.” He looked at her. “I chose the dark over them. Is that what you wanted?”

“It’s what was true,” Hesper said. “Now it’s on the map.”

She drew his street that day with a steadier hand than she expected, and she did not soften one line of it.

On the fifth night the fire opened on a garden it had not reached: a square of grass, a fountain still running, a pear tree with its fruit unburnt. They sat on the fountain’s rim. Every night, when the heat came close, he had reached for her hand, and every night she had let him. Tonight he did not let go when the heat went away.

“Why me?” she said. “There are walkers in the upper city who charge twice what I do.”

“You charge triple and you still said no.” He turned her hand over and looked at the ink ground into the side of her finger. “I would like to kiss you. You said in here you are the one who says when we stop.”

“Feelings run hot in a dream. Everybody knows that. It may only be the dream.”

“Then wake me and ask me again. I’ll give you the same answer.”

She did not say stop. She kissed him on the rim of a fountain in the middle of a Nightlord’s worst memory, and when their mouths met every flame in the city stopped where it was, mid-leap, like a drawing of fire. In that stillness she heard the woman’s voice clearly for once. It was not calling his name. It was singing. An old song, the kind that is sung over a cradle, with a line at the end that went down instead of up.

She woke him early. He opened his eyes on her cot, in her lamplight, with the fishwife’s map pinned above his head, and she asked him again.

He gave her the same answer, and this time she was awake to hear it. She kissed him in the plain dark of the Tallow Quarter, with his hand spread at the small of her back and her knee on the edge of the cot, slowly, until the lamp guttered and neither of them got up to trim it.

He left before the morning bell. On her drawing table, under the purse, he had left a folded paper sealed with his mark. For Hesper Lusk. On the seventh night.

She broke the seal at once, because she had never in her life waited for a seventh night to open anything.

It was a deed. His house on Spire Hill, its books, its silver, an account at the Lamplighters’ Bank. All of it hers, on the day that Cassiel, first of the seven, did not wake.

She read it twice. Then she sat with it in her lap until the Quarter’s lamps were lit for evening, and when his step sounded on the stairs she was waiting at the top of them with the paper in her hand.

“You came here to be let out,” she said.

He stopped three stairs below her. He did not pretend.

“Yes.”

“You were going to walk through that door to them and leave me to wake up holding a dead man’s head.”

“When I first climbed your stairs, yes. It is the only door I have wanted to go through in seven hundred years.”

“And now?”

“Now I want to stay.” He said it to the stair rod, not to her. “And I do not know how to stay with what I did. I have tried. Going through seemed cleaner.”

“Cleaner.” Hesper held the deed out over the stairwell, and let it go, and watched it fall forty stairs into the dark. “The Quarter pays your tithe every month and stays. My mother paid it until she died and stayed. You don’t get to leave because staying is hard.”

“Then don’t finish it.”

“The dream won’t stop if I don’t. You’ll have it tonight and every night after.” She came down two stairs, until her face was level with his. “I’ll finish it. But I draw the door, so I choose which way it opens. And you’ll hold my hand the whole time.”

“And if I let go?”

“Then I’ll know what you chose.”

He took her hand there on the stairs, before they had even gone inside, and held it as if she were the last fixed point on a coast he did not know.

On the seventh night the door stood at the centre of the fire, untouched: a plain wooden door painted blue, in a frame that led nowhere. Hesper knew it now. She had drawn the street it belonged to. It was his own front door.

She took the map out of her coat, where she had carried it down with her the way walkers carried anything: by holding it in mind as they went. In a dream her pen worked like any other pen, and the map was nearly whole: seven nights of streets, the fallen bridge, the garden, his street drawn without mercy. One line was missing, the line of the threshold. She drew it.

The door swung inward on its own.

Noon came through it, and this time she understood what it was. It was no memory. It was hot enough to sting her face and bright enough to make her eyes water, and nothing in a dream had ever done either. It was the sun. Or a seventh of it, the last morning’s share that Cassiel had carried into his sleep when he climbed down from the Spire. The Nightlords had not destroyed the sun. They had divided it and kept it, and that was why their dreams were the deepest in the city, and why anyone in the Tallow Quarter was ever born able to walk in them.

Beyond the threshold was a garden at noon. A pear tree. A woman with dark hair sat under it with a small girl on her knee, and she was singing the cradle song with the line at the end that went down.

Cassiel’s hand tightened on Hesper’s until the bones ground.

“Odile,” he said. “Bryony.” She knew, without being told, that he had not let himself say them since the morning he went up the hill. Hesper heard what it cost him to say them, and did not look away from his face while he did.

The woman looked up. She saw him. She did not stop singing, and she did not beckon. Her eyes went past him to the burning street at his back, and rested there, and came back to him. Then she bent her head over the child again.

“She isn’t asking you in,” Hesper said.

“No.” His voice broke on it. “She never was.”

“If you walk in there, you take the sun with you again. For good this time.”

“I know.”

“There’s another way it opens.” She turned the map in her hands, so that the compass rose pointed back the way they had come. “A door swings both ways. If I open it outward, the noon goes out into the waking city. It comes out where we are lying. Here, in the Quarter. But it takes what’s inside with it.”

He did not need her to name it. The garden. The pear tree. The last place where the two of them still sat in the light. And his share of the dark, which was all that had kept him alive for seven hundred years.

“And you?” he said. “What does it take from you?”

She had worked it out on the stairs the night before, with the deed falling away into the dark. “When there’s daylight in the Quarter, I won’t be able to walk. Not into anyone’s sleep. Not ever.” Her maps, her trade, the only bright places she had ever stood in. “I’m choosing it anyway. I want to know if you are.”

He looked at the garden for a long time. The woman sang the song to its last line, the one that went down, and stopped.

“I’m sorry,” Cassiel said across the threshold. “I should have come home.”

He did not let go of Hesper’s hand. She turned the map.

The door swung outward. Noon poured past them like a tide coming in over flat sand, and the garden folded into it, the pear tree and the woman and the child, and the burning city went white from end to end.

She woke on the floor beside the cot with her cheek on the boards and a stripe of gold across her eyes.

Light. Coming through the gaps in her shutters in long hot bars, with dust turning slowly inside them. Down in the street someone was shouting, and then a great many people were, and a dog barked, and none of it sounded afraid. She crawled to the window and pushed the shutters open, and the sun stood over the Tallow Quarter, low and enormous, a seventh of a sky. Beyond the Quarter’s last roofs the rest of Noctis Aeterna lay as dark as it had always been.

She turned round to tell him, and stopped.

Her walls were going blank. Every map she owned was dream-ink, and dream-ink did not hold in daylight. As she watched, the fishwife’s drowning coastline faded to a water stain. The yellow field went the colour of weak tea. Twelve years of other people’s nights left the paper one by one, and the last to go was his burning street, until the sheets on her walls were only sheets.

She put her fingers to her own temple and reached for the old door into sleep. There was nothing there. Skin, and her own pulse under it.

Cassiel sat up on the cot. The scar was the same. The hair at his temple had gone grey overnight, a streak of it, and when he held his hand out into the bar of sun he looked at it as if he expected it to burn.

“It doesn’t hurt,” he said.

“It’s only a morning.”

“The other six will know by noon. They’ll send for me.”

“Then they can climb forty stairs.” She sat down on the floor of the light with her back against the cot, and after a moment his hand came down onto her shoulder and stayed there. “You’ll answer for it in front of them, and I’ll stand at the back and watch you do it.”

“And after that?”

“After that you’ll get old, the same as the rest of us. I’m told it’s slow.”

She found a clean sheet and a bottle of ordinary ink, the kind that would still be there tomorrow. She drew the street below her window as it was this morning: shadows falling the wrong way, faces turned up, a man on the cot behind her with grey at his temple. She drew until the light moved off the table.

Then she put the pen down, closed the shutters halfway, and drew him down onto the narrow cot in the striped sun, and for once in that room nobody slept.

The map stayed on the table all day with its last line undrawn. Nothing could come through it now. They simply were not finished.