“So I decided the toe-stubbing dream was my own. Seswatha never stubbed his toe, I told myself. I stubbed my dream toe while dreaming that I was Seswatha. After all, it was my toe that ached all morning! It never happened, I told myself. Not really …

“And of course the next night it was back to the Dreams as I knew them. Back to the blood and the fire and the horror. A year passed, maybe more, before I dreamed another banality: Seswatha scolding a student on a veranda overlooking the Library of Sauglish. I dismissed this one the same as the first.

“Then two months after that, I dreamed yet another trivial thing: Seswatha huddled in a scriptorium, reading a scroll by the light of coals …”

He trailed, though whether to let the significance settle in or to savour the memory, he did not know. Sometimes words interrupted themselves. He pinched the hem of his cloak, rolled the rough-sewn seam between thumb and forefinger.

Mimara ran the blade of her hand across the bowl’s interior curve to scoop out the last of her gruel—like any slave or caste-menial. It was strange, Achamian noted, the way she alternately remembered and forgot her jnanic manners. “What was the scroll?” she asked, swallowing.

“A lost work,” he replied, absent with memories. He blinked. “Gotagga’s Parapolis … The title means nothing to you, I know, but for a scholar it’s nothing short of … well, a miracle. The Parapolis is a lost work, famous, the first great treatise on politics, referenced by almost all the writers of Far Antiquity. It was one of the greater treasures lost in the First Apocalypse and I dreamed of reading it, as Seswatha, sitting in the cellars of the Library …”

Mimara paused for one last pass of her tongue along the bowl’s rim. “And you don’t think you invented this?”

Irritation marbled his laugh. “I suppose my tongue is sharp enough to count me clever, but I’m no Gotagga, I assure you. No. No. There was no question. I awoke in a mad haste, searching for quill, hide, and horn so I could scratch down as much as I could remember …”

Her meal forgotten, Mimara watched him with same shrewd canniness that had so honed her mother’s beauty. “So the dreams were real …”

He nodded, squinting at the memory of the miracle that had been that morning. What a wondrous, breathless scramble! It was as though the answer was already there, wholly formed, as clear as the steam rolling off his morning tea: He had started dreaming outside the narrow circle of his former Mandate brothers. He had begun dreaming Seswatha’s mundane life.

“And no one,” she asked, “no Mandate Schoolman, has ever dreamed these things before?”

“Bits maybe, fragments, but nothing like this.”