This evening, after I have placed down my shuttle, taken my supper and returned to my chamber, sleep is deceptively easy to come. It puts me behind a door in a place that is the web-maze, and yet is not: the walls are gauze and yarn, but the door is a robust wooden door. It is ajar, and behind it opens a deep and dense darkness. On the other side there is a rustling sound, like someone breathing. I turn around. The web walls close to form a dead end before me. As I approach them I think I hear words swishing, and behind the walls I sense many solitudes interlaced with one another. But I know it is a dream, and my dream is mine to command. I will my body to be lighter than air. Wind blows through the crack in the door and over my skin, picks me up from the maze with lithe fingers and floats me towards the skies. The starry night sky pulls me up until I am wind and light, rips apart to reveal a universe where nothing withholds me.
Then I am back in my bed, the mattress hard under my back, breath struggling in my throat. My body is tired, as if I have spent all my strength on hard work. The walls of my cell are close.
I am not certain what has woken me.
There is no light yet around the edges of the curtains. The glow-glass draws a faint blue ring around itself. The house is frozen around the mutest heart of the night. If there are weavers walking and guarding the corridors, they are far away from my cell.
I realize I have forgotten my night-watch.
The glow-glass almost shatters to the floor when I reach out to shake it brighter. I catch it just before it slides over the edge of the table. I throw my blanket aside and pull a cloak from the foot of the bed to cover my nightgown. The sand sits still in the hourglass next to the door. I forgot to turn it before I went to bed. I push my feet into leather-soled shoes.
The door closes behind me more loudly than I intend.
Half-running, I pass a long row of quiet cell doors. When I turn the corner at the end of the corridor, I hear the sound.
It is a hardly discernible rift in the wall of silence, thinner than a line drawn with a needlepoint. A narrow moan is rising and falling along the ceiling vaults, in the chambers of stone that throw it back from their walls. I recognize it. My steps turn faster.
Past the washrooms I reach the first dormitory doorway. The sound fades. I peek in. All is quiet. A drowsy third-year weaver lifts her head and lets it fall back on the pillow. I do not see anything unusual in the next dormitory, either. But when I close the door, the sound begins again. This time I know where it is coming from.
In the first-year apprentices’ dormitory everyone is awake by now. A flood of whispers and half-spoken words washes over me. At the far end of the room, where the youngest apprentices sleep, a group of girls is gathered around a bed, but not too close. Their ring leaves an empty space full of fear around the source of the sound, and they are all fiddling coral amulets between their fingers. A faint, anxious moan carries from the bed, circling the room like a starved ghost seeking a way out.
I hope to be wrong. I walk across the dormitory towards the bed.
When I see the girl from whose mouth the moan is rising, I know there is nothing I can do for her.
She is lying on her back, her body completely still and her lips slightly parted. I remember her name: Mirea. She cannot be older than ten. Her breathing is strained, as if her throat is trying to close around it. But it is her eyes that really give her away. They are open, black holes. Her pupils have widened like dark water, washed away all colour, and there is nothing between their edges and the frightened whites. Because frightened she is, her whole face brimming with terror as she stares into the space above her that seems empty to everyone else. Yet I know what she sees. And I know the strange song of her low, bare moan: the kind people always sing when a night-maere is riding them. The sound marks the sleeper as soon as someone else hears it.
I seize my own coral amulet and speak her name softly.
‘Mirea.’
A violent shudder runs through her, and then she grasps my arm. The grip is tight enough to bruise.
‘Help me,’ she says.
‘Everything’s fine, Mirea,’ I tell her, although it is not.
‘There was a shadow,’ she says. ‘It tried to strangle me.’
Her first time, then. She does not know yet what happened. Does not know how to keep the secret. Not that it would help now. The others stare at us. I see some girls whisper to each other. There is no easy way to do this.
‘Have you heard of night-maere possession?’ I ask.
Alarm stains Mirea’s face. Of course she has. Everyone on the island has.
‘It wasn’t like that,’ she says, but without certainty.
‘I’m so sorry, Mirea,’ I say. The rims of her eyes are turning red and her cheeks quiver once, twice. ‘Everyone saw you. Your eyes were night-maere black. You carry the dream-plague.’
‘My mother says night-maeres are invisible,’ Mirea tries. Her voice cracks and fails. ‘It was here. Someone else must have seen it.’ A single tear rolls down her face.
The girls around us shift uncomfortably. Someone sniggers. Anger burns in my throat like white-hot glass.
‘Only those who carry a night-maere can see them.’ Weaver’s tall figure has appeared in the doorway. Her words cross the room before she does.
I look at Mirea, who has begun to shake with sobs.
‘I don’t want to sleep in the same room with a Dreamer.’ It is a blonde girl. Her face is smooth as polished white stone, and equally hard.
Weaver looks at her with an expression that betrays the slightest crack of impatience, and behind it, something buried far deeper. For a moment I think her words are going to be something else entirely, but then she just says, ‘We will want to avoid contamination, of course.’ She pulls a small notebook from her pocket, tears out a page and draws three symbols on it. ‘Eliana, go and send this message immediately.’ She hands the piece of paper to me.
Mirea is still crying. Her nose is dripping large, wet drops to the sheets, and the softness of her child-face is distorted with fear. The coral amulet hangs around her neck purposeless, incapable of keeping the night-maere away, a piece of dead seafloor. I see the blonde girl look at her in disgust. I nod and turn slowly to go. I have to stop myself from giving Mirea’s hand a quick, encouraging squeeze. It would be a lie. She has nothing to feel encouraged about.
The door to Weaver’s study opens without a sound. It is never locked. The glow-glasses shine faintly. Through the window in the corner I can see the ever-burning fires of the Tower at a distance, like sharp eyes blinking in the face of darkness.
I missed my night-watch.
Perhaps there is nothing I could have done for Mirea. But if I had been walking the corridors and listening to the sounds of night-rest in the rooms, I might have heard her before anyone else. Quietly, without anyone knowing, I could have woken her up, and she could have hidden her illness – if not forever, at least until the next time. She might have lived through the dormitory years and even through sharing a cell without another visit from a night-maere, and no one would ever have known.
The watergraph stands tall and robust in the corner. The glass tank embedded in its stone body reflects my face dark and distorted when I step close. I select the lever that bears the emblem of the House of the Tainted. The metal creaks. The message-pipe leading there opens. In the faint light I can just barely see the index and the scale plate with its engraved symbols inside the tank. I