Nightmare by Steven Harper Page A

Holographic models of spaceships floated just below the ceiling. Outside, the sun was setting, and purple shadows gathered among the talltree branches. The office was a bit stuffy—Melthine preferred to keep the windows shut. Ara occupied a deep armchair, and an empty glass sat on a table at her elbow. Her hands had finally stopped shaking. Inspector Tan sat rigid in another chair while her partner Linus Gray leaned against one wall. He was a tall, spare man, with ash-blond hair that was receding from a high forehead. Around his neck he wore a medallion of worked silver instead of plain gold, a symbol of his position as Inspector with the Guardians of Irfan. Tan, presumably, wore hers underneath her shirt.
      "This opens up a great many questions," Melthine said at last. "We need to discuss them."
      "You and Mother Ara are both experts in Dream theory," Gray said. "Whatever information you can give us will help."
      "The number twelve is significant," Tan said, voice raspy again. "Obviously."
      "You think Iris was his twelfth victim?" Ara asked.
      Tan shrugged. "Could be. Or he might write the number twelve on all his victims. No way to know yet. If we assume —" her emphasis on that word made it clear what she thought of the idea "—that the number twelve means he’s killed eleven other people, and if we assume he killed the other two finger victims, that would mean there are nine other corpses we don’t know about yet. I’ve already checked the databases. In the entire recorded history we have of Bellerophon, there isn’t a single incident in which a murder victim turned up with someone else’s finger sewn on."
      She sat back in her chair, as if exhausted by the long speech.
      "Which means the killer came to us from another planet," Melthine said.
      "No," Tan groused. "It only means we’ve made a lot of assumptions. He might be a native and he hid the other bodies. Or he dropped them off a balcony, fed the dinosaurs. But it looks like we need to operate on the theory that the same person killed all three women and that he’s going to do it again."
      "I’m not Silent," Gray said, "and I’m nowhere near an expert in Dream theory, but doesn’t a Silent’s landscape disappear when they leave the Dream or if they die while in it? Temm—and her forest—should have disappeared the moment she died. Why did her Dream body hang around after this hat guy killed her?"
    Ara picked up the glass. She could still smell the scotch. "I imagine it did vanish. But he recreated her body and her turf long enough to ...do what he did. That scares the hell out of me."
      "Why?" Gray said intently.
      "Because he did it without a noticeable break in the scenery. There should have been a flicker or something between the time Iris’s Dream ended and he took it over. There wasn’t. That means he’s highly skilled in the Dream, in addition to being frighteningly powerful."
      "Powerful because he could kill her, you mean?" Gray said. "There’ve been other Dream murders over the centuries, and in all cases the killer had to be more powerful than the victim."
      "It’s more than just the amount of power." Ara set the glass back down and turned her gaze to the darkening window. "First, he was able to wrench control of her own turf away from her and change it. That means his mind was stronger than Iris’s. Second, he was able to disrupt her concentration enough that she couldn’t leave the Dream to escape. That isn’t easy to do because every Silent knows that the Dream is just that—a dream. You can wake up whenever you want. He scared Iris so much that she forgot this fact. Third, he was powerful enough to convince Iris’s mind that she was being torn limb from limb. The human survival instinct is very strong, Inspector. It takes a lot of power to convince someone that they’re dead. This guy is both potent and skilled, and the idea that I myself might run across him in the Dream makes me shake."