The Commission

The Dream-Wright called herself Maret, which was probably not her name. She worked from a room above a laundry in the Tannery Quarter, accessed through a door that was not visible until you had already decided to find it. Her Aethersprite Lantern was unlicensed, and she knew the penalties, and she had decided some years ago that the penalties were the cost of operating honestly.

Licensed dream-work was propaganda at best. Comfort at worst. The Guild's approved catalogue ran to forty-seven narrative categories, all of them ending in resolution. Maret had worked under Guild licence for three years before she understood what the approved endings were actually doing, and after that she could not unknow it, and after that the door appeared.

Most of her clients wanted simple things. The recurring dream made bearable. The dead mother visited once more under better circumstances. The fear of water approached at a careful distance. She was good at these and she charged fairly and she did not ask what had made the fear or where the dead mother had gone, because that was not what they were paying for.

The commission arrived on a Tuesday in the form of a letter written in a hand that was too regular to be entirely human and sealed with wax that left no impression. The client wished to commission a specific dream. He named the content precisely. He named the duration. He named the subject of the dream, who was not himself.

He named a price that was large enough to mean something.

Maret read the letter twice and then set it on the table and went to the window and watched the laundry women below for a while, which was something she did when she needed to think about something without appearing to think about it.

The dream he wanted was not in the Guild's catalogue. It was not prohibited, exactly — or rather, it was prohibited only in the way that many things in the Tannery Quarter were prohibited, which was to say that the prohibition existed and was enforced selectively and the selectivity followed a logic that had nothing to do with harm. The dream itself was not harmful. She had built similar architectures before, for clients whose needs ran in the same direction. The particular feeling the client wanted the subject to experience was available. She had the components.

The difficulty was the subject.

She did not know the subject personally. She had seen her once at a distance, crossing the market square with the efficient stride of someone who does not expect to be waited for. The subject was not the kind of person who would visit a room above a laundry in the Tannery Quarter. The subject was not the kind of person who needed to.

Maret wrote back asking a single question. The reply came the next morning: the subject would not know. The subject would believe she had dreamed it herself.

She sat with this for three days.

On the third day she wrote to decline the commission, and found when she came to write the reason that she could not make it fit the space available for reasons. The dream itself was not cruel. The feeling the client wanted the subject to experience was not, in isolation, a bad feeling to experience. People paid to experience it voluntarily. If the subject had known, she might have agreed. She might even have been grateful.

The word might was doing a great deal of work in that sentence.

She sealed the refusal and sent it.

Three weeks later she heard, through the network of information that moves through the Tannery Quarter like water through old pipes, that a Guild-licensed Dream-Wright in the Westgate Salon had accepted a commission meeting a similar description. She heard this and returned to her window and watched the laundry women for a long time.

She did not know whether the Guild-Wright had asked the same question she had asked. She did not know whether the client had told the Guild-Wright what he had told her. She did not know what the subject had dreamed, or whether she had noticed anything different about the quality of the morning after, or whether she had attributed the dream to herself in the way that people attribute dreams they did not choose to the part of themselves they know least.

The unlicensed door was still there when she looked for it.

She was not sure what that meant about her, and she was not sure whether she wanted to know.

The Guild of Onierurgists and the Dream-Houses of the Tannery Quarter feature in The Aetheric Intelligencer. The Dreamer is one of the Minor Arcana of the deck.