The theatre ticket lay on Grey's desk all morning.
The old inspector regarded it like an artillery shell that had failed to explode.
"The Bureau laboratory has reported," he said at last. "The paper is thirty years old. The gilding was done by a thirty-year-old process. The typeface—Archives found a comparison sample on an old tax bill—belonged to a Kandelburg printer that existed thirty years ago. Everything about this ticket is thirty years old except the ink. The ink was laid down last night."
"And the Sundial Theatre?" Sharlo asked.
"It existed." Grey drew out a pitifully thin file. "A back street in the bell-tower district, Sundial Lane. Thirty years ago, a small private theatre stood there. Two hundred seats. It specialized in new work by local playwrights. The Golden Iris presented famous performers and classics; the Sundial presented unknown writers and new scripts. Tickets cost one copper tinder, and the audience was made up of poor students and junior clerks. One winter night thirty years ago, a fire burned the entire theatre flat. The file states: no casualties; cause, unattended stove. A cloth warehouse was built on the site the next year and remains there today."
"No casualties?" Viola singled out the words. "A theatre fire in the middle of the night, and not one death?"
"That is what the file says." Grey turned the sheet around and pushed it toward them. "Read it."
NO CASUALTIES stood plainly on the page. But beneath it lay a blank area three lines deep. It was not unused space. The paper bore grooves left by a moving nib, curling in rows, as if someone had indeed written three lines there.
Only the ink was gone. It had not faded. It had not been scraped away. Wherever the paper had once drunk ink was perfectly clean, as though the ink had risen to its feet and walked away.
"Technical tried seven developing methods," Grey said. "Nothing rises from the impressions. I have called for this file three times: once ten years ago and twice yesterday. Ten years ago, I would swear on the bell those three lines were present. I even remember reading them. I cannot remember what they said."
The meeting room fell quiet. A familiar cold crept upward from Sharlo's tailbone. He remembered the cut-out pages in the Evening Bell Gazette's basement. But scissors had done that.
A person had done it. This was different. Here, the words themselves had vanished.
"There is worse." Grey lowered his voice. "Last night I went through my old colleagues from thirty years ago and telephoned two who are still alive. The constabulary responded to the theatre fire; both retired constables remember it. I asked who owned the theatre. One said a cloth dyer, but he couldn't recall the surname. The other thought it might have been a firm run by brothers. Then I asked about the resident playwright."
The old inspector stopped.
"Both men fell silent on the telephone. Then both said exactly the same thing: 'Playwright? Did the Sundial Theatre have a playwright?'"
Grey looked from one of them to the other. "A theatre dedicated to new local work. Two hundred seats. One copper tinder a ticket. Forty new plays a year. If it had no playwright, who wrote them?"
* * *
That afternoon, Sharlo and Viola went to Sundial Lane.
The cloth warehouse was high and cold, the air between its racks smelling of dye and old fabric. Its manager, an obliging middle-aged man, heard that the authorities were investigating thirty-year-old history and eagerly led them through every part of the premises. The floors had been relaid; the beams and columns were new. Not one nail of the theatre remained.
"There is one old thing, now you mention it." The manager scratched his head. "When the workmen cleared the ruins, they dug it out of the ash. Couldn't smash it, seemed a waste to throw it away, so it has stayed beside the well platform in the back yard as a prop."
Beside the well lay a stone slab half a man's height. It had been whitewashed twice, its corners worn round, several deep grooves cut by thirty years of well rope. Sharlo crouched and wiped away the loose dust with his sleeve. Carving showed through the wash: the broken face of a sundial, with nearly half its ring of hour marks still intact.
At the centre, the gnomon had broken away, leaving a rusted socket. A ring of small, badly worn letters circled it. He traced them one by one:
TIME WILL NOT ABIDE. LET THE DREAM OF THE STAGE BEAR WITNESS.
"The theatre's signboard," the manager offered. "Old folk said it was set over the main doors. Sundial Theatre, you see. That was the conceit."
Viola spoke suddenly. "You heard it from old folk. Which old person?"
The manager opened his mouth to answer, but the answer lodged on his tongue. An expression Sharlo knew too well came over his face: the look of a man reaching into a pocket and finding it empty.
"... That's odd," the manager murmured. "I remember someone telling me. Made it vivid as life—even said whether it rained the day the sign went up. But who told me? My father? No. The manager before me? No..."
He scratched his head, and panic rose as he searched. "Sir, isn't that uncanny? I can't even remember whether the speaker was a man or a woman."
Sharlo and Viola exchanged a look.
Another one. Dig three feet beneath the name "Sundial Theatre," and every thread ended the same way. The object remained.
The traces remained. Only the person was gone. It was like a figure cut from a painting: every colour around the shape remembered its outline, but the outline itself contained nothing.
In the carriage home, Viola suddenly said, "I want to see your notebook."
Sharlo handed it over. She opened it to the pages recording the previous night's performance at the ferry landing, read line by line, and touched one entry.
"Here. You wrote, 'Ticket issued by the Sundial Theatre.'" She looked up.
"The ink is intact. Every word you wrote last night remains."
"What does that tell us?"
"In this case, the words disappear from every paper on which 'that person' was written. The archive loses them. Memory loses them. Even the identity of 'the one who told me' disappears."
Viola closed the notebook and returned it with the care she would give evidence. "Only your book remembered. Sharlo, what is present on your paper that is absent from everyone else's?"
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Sharlo held the black notebook without speaking for a long time.
He remembered the warning in his uncle's letter: They can see anything written down.
Perhaps the reverse was also true. Perhaps there was a kind of writing They could not see. Words written by a man without a script belonged to no script, and even the plot called "disappearance" could not be assigned to them.
"Raven," he said slowly, "I have a feeling that by the end of this case, the only record left will be this notebook. So from tonight on, tell me every word of every performance you see. I will write down every word."
He paused, then finished the thought:
"We may be this person's last audience in the world. An audience owes the play its remembrance."
That night's performance opened below Viola's apartment.
No ferry landing, no random street corner. At two in the morning, when fog filled the back lane of the bell-tower district where she lived, more than twenty neighbours in their nightclothes—a baker, a clockmaker's apprentice, the landlady with curling papers throughout her hair—quietly took their places in the open space beneath her window.
Viola stood at the second-floor window. Sharlo sat at the table behind her, his fountain pen full of ink.
"It has begun," she said. "Still Dreamless Street. Act Two."
Her account flowed more easily than it had at the ferry. The second act told the apothecary's history. When he was young, the old man too had possessed dreams.
One by one, he told them to patients in place of a fee. When not one dream remained, he grew old and opened the apothecary that accepted dreams. "There is a line," Viola whispered.
"'A dream diminishes each time it is told. But if none are told, none survive.'"
Sharlo's pen raced. He recorded every word of her account, the neighbours' positions, and something in Viola's voice she did not notice herself: whenever she recounted the apothecary's monologue, her pace unconsciously slowed, as though she could not bear to reach its end.
"Raven," he asked while writing, "objective report: is the play good?"
The figure at the window was silent for several seconds.
"Yes." She said it like a confession. "I have read thirty-seven kinds of prohibited literature seized by the Bureau. I have trained against enchantment. I know that 'good' is itself a warning sign. But it is good. Sharlo, I have not dreamed in six years. This play is the closest I have come to a dream in all that time."
The performance ended as quietly as the one at the ferry. The neighbours went home, the fog withdrew, and the ground lay clean—except for the wall.
At some unknown moment, words had appeared on the brick opposite Viola's apartment. They were written in chalk in a graceful old-fashioned hand, like the heading of an antique poster:
DREAMLESS STREET · ACT THREE CONTINUES TOMORROW NIGHT
PERFORMANCE: ADDED FOR YOU
P.S. SHOULD THE LADY WISH TO SPEAK UPON THE STAGE, THE BACKSTAGE DOOR STANDS ALWAYS OPEN
The chalk glimmered white in the dawn. Sharlo copied it word for word into his notebook. When he finished, he stared at BACKSTAGE DOOR for a long time.
"It is inviting you into the play," he said. "Out of the audience and onto the stage. Raven, you cannot watch again tomorrow night."
"No." Viola answered without a fraction of hesitation. "I will watch tomorrow."
"Raven—"
"Two reasons." She turned. The morning light edged the bruised shadows beneath her eyes. "First, regulations. I am the only means of observation in this case. If I stop for one night, the case is blind for one night. Second—"
She paused. Clearly she had considered how to phrase the second reason, and in the end abandoned the attempt.
"Second, it bears me no malice. Sharlo, I have done this work for six years. I have been targeted eleven times. I could recognize malice with my eyes closed. This play has none for me. What it has is..."
Her fingers tapped lightly on the sill while she searched. "An orphanage child clinging to the railings and watching the one passerby willing to stop. It is that. It does not want to consume me. No one has watched it in thirty years."
"Thirty years without an audience does not mean it will bear to let you go after it pulls you inside." Sharlo closed the notebook. "An orphan clinging to a passerby's leg can make her fall, Raven. And this orphan can make the whole city play supernumeraries and erase ink from the archives."
"That is why you are here," Viola said evenly. "You pull me up if I fall. You devised the division of labour yourself."
Sharlo opened his mouth and found no answer. She had learned too quickly how to stop his mouth with his own words.
* * *
At the case meeting on the third morning, pressure came from another direction.
"A formal communication from the Church of the Daystar." Grey tossed a document embossed with a golden solar wheel onto the table. "Four pages. Translated into ordinary speech, three sentences. First: the Church is aware of the city's 'collective nocturnal somnambulism.' Second: it classifies the phenomenon as 'an evil spirit beguiling repose,' a matter of faith, and demands jurisdiction. Third"—the old inspector tapped the final paragraph—"if the Vesper Bureau has not resolved the case within seven days, the Order of the Sacred Flame will begin a 'Night-Cleansing Patrol and Prayer' on the eighth."
"What is a Night-Cleansing Patrol and Prayer?" Sharlo asked.
"Armed patrols. Any 'anomaly' encountered is purified on sight." Viola's voice went cold.
"It was last carried out thirty-nine years ago, during the 'languor sickness' in the textile district. The file records seventeen subjects purified. Later investigation established that fourteen were ordinary sleepwalkers."
"What does purified mean?"
No one answered. The silence of the veteran Duskwardens around the table was answer enough.
Sharlo's knuckles tightened. He remembered the neighbours in nightclothes in the fog: the baker, the clockmaker's apprentice, the landlady in curling papers, the child with the pillow. He remembered their peaceful, deeply sleeping faces as they returned home from the play. Beginning on the eighth night, if they took their positions in the fog again, they would be met not by the morning bell but by gold patterns on a blade.
"Seven days." Grey looked around the room. "The Church has not given us a deadline. It has given us the edge of a knife. Before it falls, we must make this play lower its own curtain. Find the author. Find what he wants. Negotiate or lay the dead to rest, but in seven days the night fog must be clean."
After the meeting, Sharlo caught Grey in the corridor. "Chief, why is the Church in such a hurry? Its response wasn't this fast during the languor sickness thirty-nine years ago or the cold sickness twenty years ago. The sleepwalking neighbours have suffered no harm. They are sleeping better. What frightens the Church?"
Grey stopped and studied him for some time.
"You have put the question against the bone." The old inspector lowered his voice. "I am wondering too. The communication uses a peculiar phrase: 'an evil spirit beguiling repose.' Repose. Not beguiling minds, not blaspheming gods. Beguiling repose."
He paused. "As though sleep itself were their property, and anyone who touched it were stealing their custom."
Sharlo did not yet know of the three hundred thousand lamps beneath the Dawn Tower. But the remark entered his notebook like a cold needle, pinning itself to the same page as the oath's third line and his uncle's words, No one remembers dreams.
* * *
Third night, Act Three. Fourth night, Act Four.
Dreamless Street continued one act at a time. The venue settled beneath Viola's window. Each night brought new players, and each night their performances improved.
Dozens of pages filled Sharlo's black notebook: plot, dialogue, sets, and the chalk notice updated daily on the wall. The full play clearly ran to seven acts, an old-fashioned tragedy shaped like a lament—
The same dramatic form as The Scarlet Queen Returns.
On the fifth night, two things happened.
First, an elderly clerk whom Grey had assigned to organize fair copies of Sharlo's notes suddenly slapped his thigh and remembered something. Thirty years ago, when he was a poor student, he had attended the Sundial Theatre. He remembered neither title nor author, but he remembered one sentence passed from mouth to mouth when the crowd filed out: "After this script, that one will go to the capital."
A playwright whom the whole city expected to make a name in the capital. Then fire, erasure, name and person cut out of the world.
The second thing happened near the end of the performance.
Act Five showed a funeral on the snowbound street. The heroine who traded dreams for medicine had died. Everyone in the street came to pay respects, each placing in the coffin one thing they had once dreamed.
Midway through her account, Viola's voice went hoarse. She stopped for a full ten seconds.
"Raven?"
"The final player to come forward." Her voice was soft and steady—frighteningly steady. "A girl of about twelve, wearing a nightdress with one sleeve scorched. What she puts in the coffin is a thimble."
Sharlo's pen stopped on the paper.
He had read one line about the tragedy in Viola's family in the Bureau file: Rope-Makers' Lane fire. Four dead, including one woman, formerly employed as a seamstress.
The old soldier at the bridge had taken out his dead wife's thimble—no, that belonged to someone else on the Night of Settled Accounts. This was her mother. A seamstress.
A thimble. A scorched sleeve.
"At that point in the play, the girl turns," Viola said, one word at a time. "She curtsies toward my window. Then the chalk writing on the wall changes."
Sharlo rushed to the window. The old notice on the opposite brick wall had been erased. A new line still shimmered with chalk dust:
TOMORROW NIGHT · ACT SIX · ROPE-MAKERS' LANE
FOR OUR SOLE LADY IN THE AUDIENCE, A FAREWELL SHE NEVER HAD THE CHANCE TO SEE