Night Harvest

The nightmare started with Azaryah.

He was not a man who thrashed in sleep. He slept the way he did most things: hard, direct, and without ornament. So when Danel woke to the sound of strangled breath and saw Azaryah twisted halfway off his pallet with one fist clenched so hard the forearm trembled, he was on his feet before he understood why.

"Azaryah."

No response.

The room was dark except for moonlight through the slit window and the faint blue persistence of Danel's own half-opened System at the edge of vision. Hanan was sitting up too. Mishael woke in silence, already alert.

Azaryah made a sound through his teeth and then went still all at once, as if some pressure had released.

His breathing remained shallow.

"Wake him," Hanan said.

Danel stepped closer, reached down, and caught Azaryah by the shoulder.

The moment he touched him, Veiled Sight opened.

Not fully. Enough.

The room changed.

It did not become another room. It became this room with one more layer of truth left visible than before. Over each sleeping body ran a thread so fine it should not have been perceptible, rising from forehead or chest or open mouth in faint lines of dark red light that trembled upward toward the ceiling and then bent, impossibly, toward the upper palace.

Danel jerked his hand back.

The threads remained.

"Do you see that?" he whispered.

Hanan was already standing. He turned slowly, eyes wide on something that was not quite what Danel saw and yet clearly not nothing.

"I see..." He stopped. "I see where the air is wrong."

That was enough.

Mishael said, "See what?"

Danel looked at him, then at Azaryah, then back at the threads.

"Something is being taken," he said.

Mishael was on his feet now too, but blind to the thing itself. He read Danel's face and believed the sentence anyway.

Azaryah woke with a gasp.

All the threads vanished at once.

He sat up hard, eyes wild for a moment before the room found him again.

"I was back there," he said.

No one asked where. Jerusalem meant back there to all of them without needing names attached.

Azaryah rubbed one hand over his mouth and then looked at the others as if embarrassed by the evidence of being penetrable.

"It did not feel like a dream," he said.

"No," Danel said.

"What did you see?"

It took Danel too long to answer.

"A mechanism," he said at last.

That was the best word available.

They did not go back to sleep.

Instead they sat in the dark and listened to the palace breathe. Other boys in the main dormitory muttered, whimpered, turned over, subsided. Once, from somewhere farther down the hall, came the distinct sound of a man waking in panic and choking it back quickly enough not to earn punishment.

Hanan kept looking at the ceiling.

"I could not see the threads," he said.

"You are still Dormant," Danel said.

"Threshold," Hanan corrected. "At least, I was earlier."

"No," Danel said. "Mine is Threshold. Yours is Dormant."

Hanan let out a thin breath. "That is increasingly irritating."

Mishael said, "Could the palace be inducing dreams for information?"

Danel turned to him.

"Why that first?"

"Because Nathrek's office asked you about sleep before anything else. Because Bel-iddin's questions were diagnostic rather than theological. Because empires extract from whatever is most difficult to guard. Dreams qualify."

Azaryah looked disgusted. "You say that like it is a tax policy."

"Most evil improves when given administration," Mishael said.

No one had an answer to that.

At some point after midnight Danel stood and crossed to the window slit. The city beyond was dark except for temple lamps and the scattered movement of patrol torches. But in threshold sight another geography overlaid the visible one. He could not see all of it at once. Only hints. Places where the air above certain districts bruised darker than night. Places where pressure gathered.

One line in particular drew his attention: a slow red-black current rising from the sleeping quarters below and bending toward the upper northern wing where the magicians kept their chambers.

Night harvest.

He did not yet know the name. He knew the practice.

When at last the window opened, it did so without the full panel of his status. Only a single line, suspended in the dark like a judgment too concise to argue with.

System Note: What is taken in sleep is still taken.

Danel read it three times.

Then he turned back toward the room, toward Hanan rigid on his pallet, toward Mishael already building a structure of inference out of too little data, toward Azaryah staring at the wall as if he might punch Jerusalem back out of it.

Babylon did not merely train the conquered.

It harvested them.

The thought remained with him until dawn.