The Burning Page

‘I wish I could give you that promise, Winters,’ Vale said slowly. ‘But if I am to be functional, then I need to sleep. And if I am to sleep, then I must have morphine.’

‘Why can’t you sleep?’ Irene asked bluntly.

Vale was silent for a long moment. Finally he said, ‘I dream.’

The logical next question would have been: What do you dream about? Irene had never trained as a psychologist. Or a psychiatrist. She wasn’t actually sure what the difference was, or which sort had more letters after their name. The closest she’d come to it was on-the-job training in persuading people to talk to her. Usually to get them to tell her where books were. She wasn’t any sort of therapist. If Vale had been traumatized by his visit to that other dark Venice, like Kai with his understandable post-kidnapping PTSD, then where did she start?

Silence seemed to be the right course of action. Vale finally spoke again. ‘I dream of moving amid a world of masks, where we are all actors, Winters, and where we are all on the strings of greater puppeteers. I dream of a thousand, thousand worlds, all of them spinning at odds to each other, all of them gradually being lost to a random ocean of utter illogic and randomness, like flotsam in a whirlpool. I dream that nothing makes sense.’

‘Dreams can be chaotic—’ Irene started.

‘Of course they can,’ Vale said with exhausted patience. ‘But these are not just dreams where things from my daily life are jumbled together randomly. I dare say such dreams are common enough. These are dreams that exalt disorder and illogic, Winters. Nothing makes sense. The only thing that eases them is to throw myself into work, and even that is scarce – there are no problems large enough to challenge me, no mysteries complex enough to intrigue me.’ He was sitting upright now, grasping her wrist hard enough to hurt. ‘You must understand me, Winters. I cannot endure these dreams.’

Irene looked down at her wrist meaningfully. Vale followed her gaze and let go of her, carefully unfolding his fingers. ‘Forgive me,’ he said. ‘I should not have done that.’

‘I asked the question,’ Irene said. And the answer made far too much sense. They’d visited a high-chaos world. Vale had been warned not to go to that version of Venice – Lord Silver had been quite clear about risks, even if he hadn’t made it clear what those risks were. And now there was this threat – not to Vale’s body, which would have been comparatively minor, in Vale’s own estimation, but to his mind . . .

‘It hardly takes a great logician to connect this to recent events,’ Vale said, echoing her thoughts. ‘But I will be damned if I go to Lord Silver for help. If I can endure these dreams until the influence of that world weakens, then I can reduce the morphine afterwards.’

There were so many possible logical holes in that statement that Irene could have used it as a tea-strainer. But she could see from Vale’s face that he himself was aware of them, and it would have been no more than cruelty to have pointed them out, without something better to offer. Finally she said, ‘I could take you to the Library.’

Vale blinked. Just once. His eyelids flickered, but his gaze was set on her face. ‘You have never shown any interest in taking me there, in the past.’

‘You’ve always avoided actually suggesting it.’ Probably because you knew I’d say no. It’s not a tourist hangout.

‘Do you honestly think it will help?’ He left out the question What would your superiors say?, which was a relief, as Irene was trying not to think about that.

‘I don’t know,’ she admitted. ‘But we do know that Fae can’t enter the Library. If I escort you in there, it might purge your system – I take it we’re going with the explanation that you have been affected by over-exposure to high levels of chaos?’

Vale gave her one of his best neither you nor I are idiots, so do not descend to idiocy looks. ‘It would seem the most obvious explanation. Though when you were infected with chaos in the past, you weren’t even able to enter the Library, as I recall. Do you think I will be able to?’

Irene pursed her lips. ‘Well, if we try and find that you can’t, then at least we’ll be one step closer to identifying the problem.’

‘And locating a solution?’

‘Let’s take this one step at a time,’ she said firmly.

‘Could you use your Language to force this infestation out of me?’ Vale suggested. ‘You did it to yourself, as I recall, when you fell victim to chaos exposure.’

‘Um. There could be consequences.’ Irene could think of a number of undefined but vaguely unpleasant ways that such a thing could go wrong. It could be worse – both to soul and to body – than sweating morphine, and that was just the first thing she could imagine. Heaven only knew how many other ways something like that could go wrong. ‘The official line was that chaos infection would eventually be purged from our bodies naturally. And it’s known that as a world shifts from chaos to order or back again, so do the people of that world. So if we can keep you steady long enough for it to equalize to your natural balance . . .’ She was conscious that this wasn’t being very specific, or even remotely reassuring. It might not even be accurate. She certainly wouldn’t have wanted to hear it herself. ‘We can save it as a last resort,’ she said.

‘Tell me, Winters, do you think . . .’ Vale trailed off for a moment. ‘Do you think I am particularly vulnerable to this contagion?’