Chapter 8: The Sleep

"Tell me," she said.

Casimir leaned back in his chair, the candlelight catching the planes of his face, and he began to speak in that careful, old-fashioned English of his.

"Sleep was not peaceful," he said. "Contrary to what one might imagine, closure consciousness does not resemble peaceful sleep. It is more like a state of suspension. I was aware, in a way that exists very deep below waking awareness, of time passing. I could feel the seasons changing, hear the distant sounds of Prague evolving around my sealed chamber. I dreamed, though not in the linear way humans dream. The dreams were fragmented, architectural, structured like memories being reorganized and recatalogued repeatedly into different configurations."

He paused, looking up at the portrait through the open doorway.

"The first few years were the worst. I was aware enough to regret the decision, to want to wake and reverse what I had done. But I had sealed myself well. The words I used, the knowledge I invoked, all of it was specifically designed to prevent exactly that sort of disruption. So I sank deeper. The dreams became more abstract. I was aware for a time, I think, of the wars that came. The sounds of the city being punished. The particular quality of fear that comes when one is sealed beneath stone while suffering happens above." He was very quiet for a moment. "And then I stopped being aware of much at all. There was simply the slow dissolution of time, the calendar pages turning in accelerated speed, centuries becoming moments."

"But you woke," Nora said. "You were aware again."

"In the last years," Casimir said, "as if something in me knew that the time was approaching when I would be willing to emerge. I began to become conscious again. Very slowly. And I waited, in that deep awareness, for whatever would wake me to arrive. I did not expect it to be you, specifically. But I recognize, now that I am awake, that I was waiting for someone precisely like you. An archivist. Someone who reads the world the way I do, in terms of preservation and organization and the mathematics of meaning." He looked at her directly. "Your blood confirmed what my dreaming mind somehow already knew."

Nora didn't know what to do with this information. She didn't know how to file it into her careful architecture of understanding. So she did what she always did: she took it as fact, whatever its strangeness, and accepted it as part of the larger structure of the world as it actually was rather than as she had believed it to be.

"What were you like?" she asked. "Before the sleep. What made you choose to become something you didn't recognize?"

Casimir was quiet for a long time. The candles burned. The library surrounded them in its careful preservation.

"I was becoming power," he said finally. "Not through evil or through malice, but through simple accumulation. Every century, I understood more. Every century, I could do more. And there is a point at which power becomes indistinguishable from control, and a person either surrenders to that transformation or interrupts it. I chose to interrupt. I chose to sleep rather than become the thing I was beginning to be." He tilted his head slightly. "I suspect you understand that choice. The archive. The cataloguing. The constant ordering of things. It is a way of maintaining control against the chaos of simply existing in the world."

"Yes," Nora said softly. "I think I do."

"Then we are not so different as might be assumed," Casimir said. "Both of us preserving things. Both of us arranging the world into configurations that feel manageable. Both of us afraid of what we might become if we stopped."

Nora wanted to argue that they were very different indeed. She wanted to point out that she was human and he was something else entirely, that her fear operated on an entirely different scale, that the comparison was impossible.

But as she sat in that sealed library, surrounded by centuries of accumulated knowledge, with the memory of his blood at his mouth and the fading punctures in her wrist, she found that she couldn't quite convince herself.

Some fears, perhaps, transcended species.

The summons came three days after the feeding, written on paper that looked like it predated the United States, delivered by a woman who materialized in the palace's entrance hall and then dematerialized once Casimir had read the message. Nora watched the whole thing happen with the equanimity of someone whose understanding of physics had been substantially revised.

"The court requires my presence," Casimir said, reading the message with an expression of distaste. "An informational briefing regarding the recent disturbances in the city. Political necessity. They need to see that I have emerged from sleep, that my power is restored, that I represent no threat to their carefully negotiated balances."

"Do you represent a threat?" Nora asked.

"I represent the possibility of complication," Casimir said. "Which is, to those who prefer clarity, much the same thing."

That evening, Nora found clothes laid out in the guest room where she'd been sleeping: a dress from the eighteenth century, meticulously preserved, deep green velvet with silver embroidery at the cuffs and neckline. It fit perfectly. This fact disturbed her less than she might have expected, though she filed it as further evidence that Casimir's relationship with time was not the same as hers.

"Did you..." she asked as they descended the palace stairs, "plan for this? Was there a wardrobe assembled specifically for my eventual arrival?"

"No," Casimir said. He was dressed in clothes equally old, equally preserved, dark velvet and silver buckles that caught the candlelight. "But I have had several centuries to acquire a variety of sizes and styles. Preparation is simply another form of ordering the world. I suspect you understand this very well."

The court was not located beneath Prague, as Nora had vaguely imagined, but rather in the cellars of several connected buildings in the Old Town Square. Casimir led her through narrow passages that shifted between ancient stone and medieval architecture, through chambers that had hosted people and events for centuries, until they arrived at a grand door guarded by two creatures that looked almost human if one didn't examine them too carefully.

They recognized Casimir and stood aside without question.

The chamber beyond was cavernous, lit by what appeared to be hundreds of candles arranged in precise configurations. Faces turned as they entered, and Nora became acutely aware of the weight of attention. Creatures of various ages and configurations, all of them radiating power in the way that predators radiated warning, all of them assessing her with the particular intensity of those who could smell biology and blood and emotion with clarity that far exceeded human capacity.

She could feel them reading her. She could feel the moment that several of them recognized what her blood meant, that she was archivist bloodline, that she was rare. She could feel them testing her, probing at her mind looking for compulsion hooks that would not be there.

And she could feel them reading what else was present: her attraction to Casimir, palpable as a scent, written in the elevation of her heart rate and the careful control with which she maintained her breathing.

Casimir, by contrast, was ice.