The scratching of a persistent broom reverberated through the thorn cathedral. Kendra turned hesitant circles, trying to see from where it was coming. The noise seemed to track her movements, so that it was always behind her. She tested her ability to shape dream events, hoping to make her enemy appear immediately, and in a spot of her choosing.

It didn't work. Evidently her knack for lucid dreaming afforded her no control over the movements of rival dream lords. This made sense but did little to slow her racing heartbeat. Amid the insistent, rhythmic scraping of her enemy's distant broom, Kendra thought she could detect a low, crackling chuckle.

"Enough with the dramatic entrance," she shouted. "Come out and face me."

Remaining on guard against the coming attack, she scanned the rows of briar scaffolds above her head, searching for Emily. There were hundreds of victims now, moaning and slowly convulsing, pierced by the cathedral's jagged thorns.

The sweeping intensified. A pile of ash, gathered into a mound by an unseen broom, grew on the hard earthen floor of the cathedral. It formed itself into a ball, then a column. It sprouted arms, legs, and a top-hatted head. As the form coalesced, the ashes lightened, until they took on bleached-out, glowing whiteness.

Kendra's mouth went dry.

The ashes completed their transformation, becoming the Sweeper, the eerie reverse-chimneysweep figure she'd seen the last time she was here. Then, it had clung to the shadows, directing an elephant demon in its battle against Tomas.

The Sweeper's eyes darkly glittered. "You've come uninvited."

"I'm here for my sister."

The Sweeper materialized the ivory sword cane he used as his dreamblade. Still sheathed, he tossed it, in a gesture of casual mockery, from hand to hand. "Ah yes, Emily. She's proven more useful than originally anticipated. Her media talents have been an unexpected asset, dayside. It will be a shame to say goodbye to her."

"You're prepared to free her?"

He removed his white top hat, whacking it to loose a shower of dark ash. As the cinders hit his topcoat, they either turned white or crawled like ants to the dark handprint over his heart. "Arrangements must be made, naturally. You're a lawyer; you know there's always a deal to be struck."

"What kind of deal?"

The Sweeper edged closer. "Another dream lord, with a narrower vision -- like Virgil, let's say -- would expect your complete, undying, and specific service. I, in contrast, would never expect you to agree to such constraining terms."

"Hate to correct you, but Virgil wants me dead." Kendra stiffened and raised her axe.

The Sweeper turned, moving a few steps away from her. "Mr. Lucier has greatly disappointed me. I don't wish your demise, Kendra. Nor do I seek your submission. I merely wish to determine your initial direction, then allow you to find your destiny from there."

"Care to break that down into specifics?"

"I will select a crew of allies to serve you."

"Creatures for me to spawn?"

He ventured a tight, almost prim nod. "It's a pity that you turned down the dreamblade we offered you. It would be so much more effective than that redcap's cast-off. Ridiculous!"

Kendra decided to try something. She visualized a couch, like her grandma's old chesterfield, which she'd dreamt of earlier at Chang Ho's Furniture Barn. The couch would reappear right behind her, she decided. She sat down without looking, praying it would be there to catch her. If it wasn't, her attempt at one-upmanship would veer sharply into humiliation.

She sat. The couch was there. To her pleasure, a frisson of suppressed rage flitted across the Sweeper's skeletal visage.

She smugly patted her couch cushions. "The zungar said if I'd taken that briar blade, I'd be beholden to you. Corrupted by fear and madness."

The Sweeper materialized an imitation Frank Lloyd Wright chair, its lines straight and nobly boxy, but made of gold instead of the standard wood. He placed himself regally on the lip of its seat, his legs intertwined at a severe, storklike angle. "Zungar? I wouldn't put too much stock in their foolish theories. Did they share their absurd claim that they're the dream-products of an alien dimension?"

"Move to strike as nonresponsive," said Kendra.

"I would quibble with the zungar and say I prefer fear to madness. But one takes one's allies where one can find them, no?"

"Okay, that's a little less evasive."

The Sweeper clucked impatiently. "Yes, yes. When we had an inkling that you, an Ur-dreamer, were about to achieve full lucidity, I arranged all of this. Better to have you on our side than futilely working to retard humanity's coming transformation."

"And what transformation is that?"

His smiling teeth blinded her. "We don't have all night. You can see it all around you. On the news. In the worry lines on your mother's face. The world is a pupae, about to shuck off its old perceptions and make itself anew. You want the power to shape those changes? Then let us be allies."

"And how many allies sign on with you, after you kidnap and torture their relatives?"

"You'd be surprised."

Kendra stood. "Well, I'm not going to be one of them."

The Sweeper remained seated. "You have so little faith in yourself."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"If I were an attorney as clever as yourself, I'd agree, take my sister home, and then find ways to subvert the arrangement. How unfortunate for poor suffering Emily, that you care more about your sense of rectitude than for her life." A thickening cloud of mist rolled up behind him.

Kendra vanished her couch. "So I guess this is where we fight."

The Sweeper probed at his bleached-out gums with an ivory toothpick. "If you insist," he sighed. "But first let us set the stakes."

The mists parted, revealing Virgil, his Provider armor melted and broken. A steel collar, clamped tight around his neck, held him chained to the cathedral floor.

The Sweeper saw her flinch. "We may disagree on many issues, but surely we concur on this. Mr. Lucier's attempt to kill you in the waking world was completely out of bounds. So here are the terms. If you win, you may kill him, for betraying both you and Emily. For placing you both in mortal danger. If I win, I get a piece of your soul. Not the entire thing, mind you. Only a fragment. As large as this, say." He held out his hand, as if gripping an invisible piece of coal.

Virgil whimpered. The raised, weeping welts of a recent beating marred his face.

Kendra shook her head. "How about if I win, I get Emily back?"

He rose, his golden chair turning to ashes beneath him. "You're that sure of yourself, are you? I thought I'd be sporting about it, and give you the option to come back at me later, should you lose. Which you will. If you fight me now and fail, you'll be subject to the default loss conditions of a dream lord battle. That is, you'll be banished from this place, as you are from the Valor Hills, because you lost to Virgil there. Then you'll never be able to get anywhere near Emily's dream form again. Better to play for lesser stakes, this first time out. Don't you think?"

Kendra put on her poker face, as if the Sweeper was a prosecutor blindsiding her with a suspiciously attractive plea offer. Losing even a small piece of your soul in the dreamscape had to be bad, but in what way? As hard as she'd worked to discover the rules of the dreamscape, her grasp on the basics still had holes in it the size of the Holland Tunnel.

It didn't matter. She had nothing to negotiate with, except for herself. "Okay," she heard herself saying, "let's do it."

He swished his narrow blade from its ebony sheath. Ashes formed on its tip, dropping down to the floor, where they transformed into a pair of green-skinned, desiccated specters. She'd seen one of these before at Skull Hill; it had scared her awake. They came toward her, floating on the plumes of fog that comprised their lower bodies. She cut open the air with her blade, releasing a club-toting zungar alien.

"So what is it you want, Sweeper? You get a thrill from corrupting people, is that all it is?"

The long-haired spirits shoved the aliens back with rippling waves of eldritch force.

"All men crave power," he replied, more ash jumping from the tip of his blade. "What greater power, than to imprint yourself forever on another's soul?"

From the ash pile rose a blank-faced, tuxedoed man. Green and silver tentacles hung from a gaping wound in his back. His glassy expression reminded Kendra of the bus driver she'd seen a few nights back, hauling his cargo of terrified souls. Maybe those poor dreamers were here all around her, pierced by briar branches.

Meanwhile, Kendra had been spawning additional creatures of her own: a pair of doctor apes, and her old, homicidal friend, Liam the Bloodthirsty Redcap.

From the Sweeper's rapidly growing ash pile crawled a harem girl, not unlike Sibel, but with translucent hair to match her tentacles. Alongside her slithered one of those horrible soul grub creatures, with the faces of its trapped victims screaming beneath the surface of its purulent skin.

The Sweeper's creatures launched themselves at Kendra's. The harem girl spread her tentacles, sending tremors of fear through her opponents. The specters pushed the lab-coated chimps into the soul grub, who devoured them. The alien swung fruitlessly at the tuxedoed figure, only to be seized by its extra appendages.

Kendra didn't care what the odds were. Her lack of experience didn't matter. Fear was an irrelevancy. She had to win, and so she would. From the torn air leapt a pair of the burly, tattooed men she'd seen on duty at the Heart Render parliament. The marks on their taut, muscled flesh and hairless heads faintly glowed as they dashed into the melee. They seized the soul grub, tearing it in two. Barely pausing to wipe the foamy slime out of their eyes, they jumped onto the harem girl, pulling at her tentacles.

The Sweeper made an elephant demon. Kendra spawned an armored alien bodyguard, then another, to take it on. Manipulating her blade, she guided the aliens into flanking position. They parried its twin scimitars with their shields, then smashed at its wobbling belly with their bludgeoning-axes.

She was trying to spawn a new creature, a copy of poor dead Tomas, when she realized it was over already. The Sweeper lay on the ground, overwhelmed. His dream beings were gone. Hers hovered uncertainly, waiting for instructions.

The bleached-out chimney sweep held out a wavering hand of surrender. His tall hat lay crumpled on the dirty floor. By leaning on the Provider's prostrate form, he worked his way up to a standing position.

"You aren't really . . ." Virgil pleaded.

The Sweeper patted his bruised, balding head. "You were the stakes, my friend. Despite your recent insubordination, I'll be sorry to lose you, overall."

Kendra strode over to him, axe upheld. "You aren't the prize I wanted to fight for, but this is gonna feel good, nonetheless."

"Don't!" he cried. "Wait!"

"Say goodbye, Virgil. You won't be seeing this place again."

His blocky polymer-clad hands clamped around her legs. "No, you don't get it. I won't just be banished. This is for my life. He beat me, with my life as the stakes, then held the coup de grace. If anyone kills me here, now, I'll die in my sleep. Please don't!"

"Ridiculous lies," the Sweeper said.

Kendra tested the axe against Virgil's neck. After all he'd done, it sure would be fun to dream of his head spinning off his shoulders.

She stopped. She hadn't won; the Sweeper had thrown the fight. He wanted her to murder Virgil. Maybe she could really kill him in the real world, maybe not.

But if she thought there was even a chance it would, and she went ahead and swung that axe anyway . . .

She'd be throwing away a little piece of her soul.

The terms of the game were rigged. Whatever the outcome, the Sweeper would win.

"Next time," she said, leaving the cathedral, "we go at it for real. For Emily's freedom."

She flew off, searching for a quiet place to think. As she drifted through a sky of floating, painted fence rails, the dreamworld wavered.

Continued in Chapter Nineteen: Contamination