Ruthless V5Ch34-The Mind Is Its Own Place...

I hope that gives him some peace, James thought once Moishe had left.

The Fisher King had meant everything he said to the Assassin, but if someone had killed James’s sister, even a sincere apology wouldn’t have saved them from his wrath. Sure, Moishe’s sister had been in a specific situation that made it genuinely the best possible choice to kill her—James still believed that—but it would be normal for that to be hard for someone to accept.

He waited patiently as Moishe went to bring back his friend for James to bless, and as he waited, James felt something else stirring in the room with him. Hester was moving.

“Hello there,” James said quietly. “How are you feeling? Partially recovered from your egg laying?”

“I am ready for service, sir,” Hester replied. James could practically hear a salute in the tone of her voice, but he noticed that she had not actually answered either of his questions. Not really.

She’s in rough shape, then.

James took in the quality of the light in the room. It was already the middle of the day, he estimated.

“Tonight, then,” he said. “Tonight, we’ll go out together and infiltrate the dreams of our enemies.”

Part of his motivation was genuine necessity. Infiltrating the dreams of the Panther Army would give him obvious advantages in preparing to fight them. But there was also a part of James that just wanted to share something with the spider who had been a part of so much of his journey since Orientation—and who might not have much more journey left herself.

“Excellent!” Hester exclaimed.

James was quietly pleased that she seemed to be so excited.

He spent the next few hours on mundane tasks. He blessed Wolfgang once Moishe brought him in, he ate dinner with Mina, and he told the kids a bedtime story before they went to sleep.

It was only when the sun was down and the rest of his household was settling in to rest that James whispered to the spider again.

“Hester, are you there?”

Her tiny figure was little more than a black speck on the gray wall, all color and shading leached from the room’s surfaces by the encroaching darkness. James could not fully turn his head to look in her direction, or his superhuman senses would have made it clearer that he was looking at Hester rather than a previously unnoticed stain on the stone.

But he knew the speck was her when she began rapidly clambering toward him as she replied.

“Looking forward to it,” she said quietly.

Mina was getting ready for bed as well, putting on a pair of pajamas she had purchased from Carol’s inventory. James had already told her what they were going to be doing while she slept, and his Queen had just asked them to keep the noise down.

“Good luck,” Mina said, looking back and forth between Hester and James and smiling sleepily. “Don’t do anything to bring any dream demons here, all right?”

“No, ma’am,” Hester replied in a voice so earnest that James thought she might have missed the joke.

“I won’t do anything you wouldn’t do,” James replied with light sarcasm.

“I didn’t say that, skapi,” Mina said. “Go wild. Make mistakes. Get messy!”

James just grinned.

Today on “The Magic School Bus,” we’re going to invade the world of dreams!

Hester skittered along the wall until she came to the space just above James’s head. Then she jumped down and landed on his neck, and James felt a number of legs much greater than the eight he knew Hester had running along his neck.

“My children,” Hester said in a semi-apologetic tone as James twitched with the sudden sensation. “They have been living on my body, and I thought now would be a good moment to give them an introduction to you. Your body, in particular, since that is where they are meant to live most of the time. I should have asked first, I realize… Do you mind?”

What, mind an itch that I can’t scratch all over my neck? No, of course not…

“It’s fine,” James said, his eyelid spasming slightly with the uncomfortable itchy sensation.

Then Full Body Control kicked in, and he was able to still those pesky nerve endings that were telling him he was experiencing something bothersome.

James activated Dreamwalk immediately, jerking himself and Hester into Dreamspace. The strange, supple texture of the surroundings and lack of solid surfaces surrounding them would have told him instantly, if he didn’t already know, that he wasn’t just lying in bed anymore. Their spirits were somewhere else.

“Whoa,” she said. “That was sudden.”

“Oh, I should’ve given you a warning,” James replied.

“I guess it’s not as if I’m going to get nauseous,” Hester said.

“Glad to hear it. This space is going to become very familiar to you over the next couple of weeks, at least, so I hope it starts to feel like home. Whenever I jump into Dreamspace, it does kind of feel like that. Just going someplace comfortable. Although tonight, we’re visiting the dreams of our enemies.”

“Right…”

The spider moved toward James, limbs seemingly swimming in the almost liquid texture of the space around them. She slipped two legs around the place where, on his normal body, his bicep would be. Then James took off.

He had a single thread connecting him to the destination they wanted to visit. He had felt the connection that the Panther Scout had with the Panther Queen. It was similar to the tie that bound James to each of those he had blessed, and the material was powerful—perhaps close to unbreakable.

In Dreamspace, James felt the other pole of that connection: the Panther Queen.

Now he knew that such a bond was not necessarily severed even by death.

He tugged at that feeling, and it pulled him rapidly through Dreamspace, passing quickly out of his own territory and through others’ territories, zipping across the landscape in search of the one who sought to challenge him.

He passed through the vast stretches of emptiness that existed where forces had clashed and left none triumphant. And he left untouched the large populations of slumbering creatures that were not his enemies.

Finally, though, James and Hester drew near a place where James felt the pull of the bond that the Panther Scout had enjoyed with the Panther Queen begin to weaken—because there was slack. They were very close.

In the near distance, he felt them.

Thousands of dreamers, each deeply involved in their inner worlds. Resting. Recuperating. Probably preparing for another day of conquest and violent plunder.

Their spirits were visible and countable to James, like campfires across a flat, desolate landscape.

“Is this… the place?” Hester asked.

She sounded hesitant, and James guessed he knew why. The sheer number of the enemy posed a rather intimidating challenge. Both in the number of opponents that they might have to deal with and in the fact that it would be harder to find their main target.

“Don’t worry,” James said. “I know how to find her.”

Even if the connection had gone a bit slack, he still remembered what the Panther Queen’s personality and presence had felt like—what kind of a person she was.

As they drew nearer, James reached out with his power and began to skim the dreams. He felt them in their thousands, briefly touched their hearts and souls with Dreamwalk.

Scraps of memory played themselves out before his eyes—a battle here, a fireside chat there, the occasional memory of life before the System, when these Pantherfolk had just been wild animals. But James did not stay with any of them. He might do so later, but right now, he was there on a mission.

He kept going until he was in the center of the vast collective of Pantherfolk minds. He had even been able to perceive that there were some individuals awake nearby, though the number of Pantherfolk on what he imagined was guard duty was a tiny fraction of the whole—perhaps one percent.

James felt it more strongly when he got closer to her: the distinctive mental signature of the Panther Queen.

It’s somewhere in this cluster, he thought silently.

There were a half dozen dreaming minds clumped in a group—not that they were all experiencing the same dream or something, just that they seemed to all be sleeping close together. This was not particularly strange for the Panther Army as he had observed it thus far. The big cats appeared to be fond of sleeping close to each other in little groups, perhaps for warmth.

James guessed that the Panther Queen would be in the middle of this cluster—for reasons of sheer, simple status. She was the sun around which everyone and everything else orbited, after all.

Under that assumption, he first reached for the centermost of the dreamers.

His ethereal hand brushed against the contours of what he imagined might be the Queen’s sleeping mind—and he felt a sudden, forceful pushback. His astral form recoiled for a moment. Then James smiled.

“We found our girl,” he whispered, as if the very sound waves might disturb the Panther Queen’s slumber.

“Nicely done, boss,” Hester said approvingly. “What next?”

“Now we muscle our way in,” James said. “We’re not going in to break things. Just trying to gather information for right now.”

“Is breaking things inside someone something we can actually do with this power?” Hester asked.

“I believe anything is possible with sufficient effort and skill,” James replied. “I have never broken a mind in dreams, but that’s only because that situation has not come up. I also doubt that the Panther Queen is weak enough mentally for me to do that to her without some sort of defense rescuing her. If she wakes up from this and realizes that it was an attack from us, it could accelerate the timing of her attack on the Kingdom. In fact, I would expect it to do so. If someone invaded my dreams—well, you already know how I handled someone invading the Fisher Kingdom’s sleeping minds. You can’t tolerate that stuff.”

“I see,” Hester said, clearly not quite seeing.

“The mind has to be a fortress,” James added. “It is its own place. It can make a heaven of hell or a hell of heaven. If someone else starts to influence your mind, everything in your life can be compromised. At least, that’s my theory of how I could really abuse this gift if I wanted to.”

Hester said nothing to that. James just felt the spider looking at him rather intensely. He knew Hester wanted to ask further questions. Perhaps she even wanted to probe into whether James felt his mind had been influenced by the Wraith James had fought with in dreams weeks earlier.

But James had no interest in answering those questions. Not even to himself. Not right now.

“Keep a tight hold on me,” he said. “We’re going in. The Panther Queen can’t stop it. We can use as much force as we need to. But I’ll try finesse first and see how far that gets us.”

Hester latched onto him harder as he spoke.

Then James’s spiritual matter began to shift and change with his Will. He reshaped and transformed into a new form—a form that would be more familiar to the Panther Queen than to James himself, but one that he remembered well enough to mimic it, especially in the context of dreams.

James had become the Panther Scout.

“Should I transform myself too?” Hester asked.

He nodded. “Only a little bit. Just to become more inconspicuous, so she doesn’t notice you’re with me. If we get in, even if I have to occupy her by pretending to be the Panther Scout and talking to her, at least you should be able to sneak around inside the dream and gather information, assuming you make yourself difficult to detect.”

“Right.” There was just the slightest hint of reluctance in her voice, but she complied.

James knew what it was. In the world of dreams, the spider could be as big as she wanted for the only time in her life. Even if it was a little silly, it was understandable if she wanted to take advantage of that and just not be small for a while.

But the mission came first.

The spider’s body shrank down as James thought about her, until she was even smaller than her usual shape. Just a little spec of exoskeleton on the Panther Scout’s fur. Easy to miss.

Once Hester had reduced her size to that tiny shape, James reached out and began pushing again. This time, however, rather than just shoving himself against the barrier of the Panther Queen’s mind, James tried to think himself into the Panther Scout’s headspace.

I am a loyal servant of the Panther Queen, he told himself. Here to report back on what I have seen in the Fisher Kingdom. Here with a warning. Here to do my best to protect my Ruler from making a deadly mistake…

As James repeated similar thoughts to himself in a silent mantra, he felt the bubble that protected the Panther Queen’s mind slowly begin to give way—as if he had now sufficiently disguised himself as something that her mental immune system should not attack.

A moment later, the Fisher King and his companion were inside the Panther Queen’s mind. He cast his gaze around, taking in the scenery.

Interesting.

A creek flowed in front of them. The current was steady and slow. A gentle hum, the sound of motion, arose from the water.

Beside the bank, a female Pantherfolk sat with crossed legs and her back turned to James and Hester.

That’s her, James thought. Despite how peaceful the surroundings are, that’s definitely her.

“Welcome,” said the Panther Queen, not rising or turning from her seated position.