POV: painter
Summary
Painter continues his night perimeter walk along the western edge of Kilahito while the narrator considers the nature of nightmares in general — the way they shift and reshape themselves whenever the dreamer tries to fix them in mind — and observes that on Painter's world the worst of them tend to crawl out of the head and into the world for real. The shroud churns just past his hand, an ink-like void without reflection. Trains run on hion lines to small towns like the one his family still lives in, but standing here, looking out at it, it is hard not to feel cut off from everything else.
He walks past the outer perimeter and the row of windowless buildings that back onto the shroud. The locals here paint capstone paintings on those blank walls during slow patrols — black on whitewash, each a personal statement. He passes Akane's painting, a sweeping flower, and his own two buildings on: a wall he has just whitewashed again over a failed star piece he started months ago and abandoned. The star painting was inspired by the news of the planned voyage to it: scientists in Kilahito mean to lay a pair of hion lines across the dark to the star itself, which telescopes have recently shown to be a planet rather than a point of light, and best guesses suggest is inhabited.
Past the painting he picks out the signs of a nightmare — the shroud surface rippled like wet paint just touched, a smear of black wisps still steaming off a corner stone, evidence that something has crept out and made for the interior. He draws his long brush from his shoulder bag — a tool roughly the length of a sword — and follows the trail inward. A footprint on stone, vapours rising. A clawed handprint on a wall, with too-long fingers. The nightmare is evolving, picking up on human thoughts and beginning to take a vague upright shape; usually they leave nothing behind, so the prints are unusually generous.
He finds it in a narrow alley by a bare wall: a creature seven feet tall, two long arms with too many joints planted against the stone, head pushed through into the room beyond. It has no face, only a dripping darker spot on the front of its head. The narrator explains the rules. Nightmares feed on raw thoughts and emotions; the first lesson of training is to think calm thoughts and starve them of attention. They grow more substantial with each excursion out of the shroud — roughly a dozen trips before they become genuinely dangerous, with each excursion requiring a return to the shroud to renew. This one is fresh, probably only its first or second trip; it likely cannot hurt him. Probably. That doublethink is the central trick of being a painter: essential to the city, but disposable, because nightmares can almost always be caught early.
Painter kneels, places a three-foot canvas on the ground, and opens his black ink — painters never use colour, the better to mimic the look of a nightmare. He chooses, as he always chooses these days, to paint bamboo: a stalk and joints he can throw down in a single practiced flourish. He has stopped trying to match the nightmare's actual shape, which is supposed to give the technique more power; bamboo works, and works fast, and that is what matters to him now. As he begins to paint, the deliberate thought pulls the nightmare's attention. It withdraws its head from the wall, turns toward him, and starts forward on its hands — but its arms have already begun to round and knot themselves into segments.
He paints leaves with quick flips of the brush, then a pot at the base. The nightmare shrinks, leaves of black sprout from its limbs, and by the time it reaches him it is bamboo in fact as well as in shape — even rattling gently in the air. He lifts the brush, leaves a clean black bamboo on the canvas, and the trapped creature — unable to flow back to the shroud in this new form — sighs and evaporates. He packs the canvas back into his bag, alongside three unused ones, and resumes his beat.