by Laini Taylor
After a few moments that rang with raised voices he couldn’t quite make out, the guardhouse door opened and Eril-Fane emerged, followed closely by Azareen. Both looked regal and weary, and, he thought, older than when he’d seen them last. Still, he had to remind himself, they weren’t so old. When Eril-Fane became the Godslayer, he had been but Lazlo’s age: twenty. Fifteen years had passed since then, putting him at thirty-five, and Azareen a little younger. They could still have a life ahead of them, after all this was over. Perhaps even a family.
Lazlo stood where he was and let them approach.
“Are you all right?” Eril-Fane asked.
The question caught him off guard. Of all the things he’d braced himself for, simple concern had not crossed his mind. “Actually, yes,” he said, though they were bound to think it strange until he had a chance to explain. After all, the last time they’d seen him, he’d been clutching Sarai’s corpse to his chest, and they had no way of knowing that she survived, in her way. “And you?”
Eril-Fane admitted, “I’ve been better. I hoped you’d come. Tell me now, Lazlo. Are we in danger?”
“No,” Lazlo answered, and was profoundly grateful that it was true. If it weren’t for Ruby and Sparrow drugging Minya, he would have landed here saddled with the decision of who to save and who to sacrifice.
From Azareen issued a sound of disbelief. “So everything’s just fine now? Is that what you’re telling us?”
He shook his head. “I’m telling you that you’re not in danger. That doesn’t mean everything’s fine.” He saw her wariness, and couldn’t blame her for it. As succinctly as he could, he apprised them of the situation:
That Sarai was dead, but not gone. That her soul was bound by an ageless little girl, the same one who held all the ghosts in thrall, and who had attacked their silk sleigh. That the girl alone of the godspawn possessed a will for vengeance, and that she was drugged now, unconscious, buying them time to come up with a plan.
“Kill her,” said Azareen. “There’s your plan.”
“Azareen,” Eril-Fane reproached.
“You know I’m right,” she said, then told Lazlo, “She wants revenge, and you want to protect us? Go back up there and kill her.”
“Azareen,” repeated Eril-Fane. “That cannot be the only answer.”
“Sometimes it is. As it was for Isagol, Skathis, and the rest. Sometimes killing is the only answer.”
Harsh as it was, Lazlo supposed it must be true, that some people were beyond all hope of redemption, and would only cause grief and suffering as long as they were allowed to live. “I hope this is not one of those times,” he said. Reasons ran rampant in his mind. She is a survivor. She is what you made her. She is my sister. But he only said, “She holds Sarai’s soul in the world. If she dies, Sarai will be lost.”
This quelled Azareen’s insistence. She clamped her mouth shut and remembered the way Eril-Fane had fallen to his knees and wept at the sight of his dead daughter. If it truly came down to a choice between godspawn and humans, well, then she would do what needed to be done. But she knew that if it came to that, it would spell an end to any hope, however remote, of her husband reclaiming his right to live and be happy.
“Her name is Minya,” Lazlo told them, hoping to make her real to them. “She was the oldest in the nursery when… Well. She saved four babies.” His eyes flickered to Eril-Fane. It all led back to the Carnage, and it felt like blame to say so. “She… she heard everything.”
“Don’t try to spare me,” said Eril-Fane, grim. “I know what I did. And now she wants revenge. Who can blame her?”
“I can.” said Azareen. “We’ve endured enough. Sacrificed enough!”
A new voice answered, “That’s seldom our decision to make.” It was Suheyla. When she’d witnessed Lazlo’s descent, she’d been headed for the garrison already, with a stack of her big discs of flatbread, wrapped in a cloth and still hot, balanced on her head. Now she regarded him from under her burden. This was her first sight of him blue, and it jarred her less than she’d feared it would, perhaps because she’d braced herself. Or maybe it was just that his face was still his face, his eyes still his eyes—guileless, earnest, and full of hope. “Look at you,” she said, lowering her bread to the ground. “Who’d have thought?” And she held out her hand to him.
He took it, and she laid her other—her tapered wrist where once a hand had been—atop it and gave a squeeze. It reminded him of the sacrifices the people of Weep had made, and also of their resilience. “I was as surprised as anyone,” he said. “I’m sorry to have left without saying good-bye.”
“Sometimes these things are beyond our control. Now, what’s this about my granddaughter’s soul?”
Granddaughter. There was claiming in that word, and Lazlo experienced a keen pang of hope on Sarai’s behalf. He knew what it would mean to her to be claimed as family. He answered Suheyla. He couldn’t see, as others could, the way he looked when he spoke of Sarai, or know the effect it had on them—as though the idea of her was translated through his love and wonder, and all their associations with “godspawn” were called into question.
“She’s been going into Minya’s dreams,” he said. “She thinks she’s trapped, somehow, by the past. We hope that she can help her to finally be free of… of what happened that day.”
It struck Azareen and Suheyla perhaps more even than the two men: that the little girl was a counterpoint to Eril-Fane, both of them trapped by the same horrific day, both of them saviors, and both broken. Azareen swallowed hard, and was prey to an echo of yesterday’s omen: the white bird and its shadow, and the sense that fate was hunting, and had already picked out its quarry.
No. It couldn’t have him.
“So take the citadel away,” she blurted, her voice thrumming at the border of passion and desperation. “If you can’t kill her, at least do that, and let us be free, too.”
A silence followed her words as the others took them in. Eril-Fane spoke first. “We need to bring our people home,” he told Lazlo, who saw shame in his face as though it pained him to ask them to leave, as indeed it did. But his first duty had to be to his people, and his city.
Lazlo nodded. This was, after all, why he’d come here: to help Weep solve this very problem, little suspecting, at the time, that he was the only one who could. With Minya unconscious, there was no real impediment. “That’s fair,” he said, and, at the prospect of pulling up anchor and moving the whole citadel, felt both apprehension and excitement. Move it where?
The answer that came to him was… anywhere.
Apprehension fell away. Lazlo let the realization fill him: that he was in possession of a magical metal palace he could shape with his mind—a magical flying metal palace he could shape with his mind—and for the first time in his life, he had a kind of family, and together they had… the world, the whole world, and time. That was crucial. They had time.
“I’ll ask the others,” he said.
“You’re the one who can move it,” Azareen insisted. “It’s your choice.”
Lazlo shook his head. “Just because the power is mine, it doesn’t follow that all the choices are.” But he saw that Azareen’s harshness was stemming not from hate of the godspawn, but worry. Her stern, lovely features were pinched with it, and her hands were clasping and unclasping, unable to be still. “But I think they’ll agree,” he told her. “Sarai already pleaded with Minya to consider it.”
There wasn’t much more to say. Lazlo would return to the citadel and talk to the others, then come back and relay their decision. He was concerned about the anchors, and whether there might be damage to surrounding structures when he lifted them up. At least the city was empty. There would be no risk of injuries, but Eril-Fane said he would send soldiers to make sure the areas were clear.
“We could use supplies for a journey,” Lazlo said. “There’s not much to eat up there.” He gestured to his clothes. “Or to wear.”
“We can do that,” said Eril
-Fane.
Azareen almost felt relief—to be so nearly free of the citadel and godspawn. At least, she sensed what it might feel like, but she wasn’t ready to trust it, not until the sky was clear, and maybe not even then. Did she remember how to feel relief? If anything, she was holding her breath, waiting for the words she already knew that Eril-Fane would speak.
“Do you think… Can I meet her?” he asked, hesitant. “Can I come up with you?”
Lazlo already knew how Sarai yearned for her father to want to know her, so he nodded, and didn’t try to speak for fear that emotion would overcome him.
“And I as well,” said Suheyla.
Azareen wanted to scream. Didn’t they feel it, Fate’s bowstring drawing taut? She tried to dissuade them. “Just let them leave,” she pleaded. “Don’t go back up there.”
But the Godslayer’s burden of guilt and shame would not permit him to evict the survivors of his own bloodbath as though they were a nuisance, without at least going himself to face them—face her, his daughter—and take responsibility, and give her a place to put all the blame she had to have been carrying all this time. He owed her that at least. He could stand there and accept the weight of her blame, and hope it left her lightened.
He passed temporary command to a captain named Brishan, and gave orders to his quartermaster to begin drawing up lists to provision the citadel.
The four of them could have fit astride Rasalas if it came to it, but such inelegance was unnecessary. The creature was the beast of the north anchor. There were three more anchors and a beast for each, and Lazlo reached out into the scheme of energies, feeling for them and waking them as he had awakened Rasalas. It was easier now. He didn’t even need to be near them, or see them. He had the feeling that his power was growing all the time. He reached and they responded, each quickening, and, like Rasalas, transforming at the touch of his mind into his creatures, so that what Skathis had made hideous became beautiful.
By the time they landed beside Rasalas, they were no longer the grotesques that had glowered over the city.
Thyon, coming out through the guardhouse with Ruza, Tzara, and Calixte, saw them, and thought they looked like they had flown straight out of the illustrations in Miracles for Breakfast, the fairy-tale book that, once upon a time, Strange had brought him in good faith, and he had kept, in bad. There was a winged horse, a dragon, and a gryphon, all exquisite.
A stir went through the Tizerkane, but their fear couldn’t properly kindle. These were not the beasts of their nightmares.
They mounted: Azareen astride the horse, and Suheyla behind her son on the gryphon, leaving the dragon riderless.
Inside of a second, Thyon’s mind flashed before him an alternate history of his own life, in which he thanked the boy who brought him a fairy-tale book at dawn, instead of scorning him and pushing him down stairs. And later, instead of threatening him and stealing his books, and trying to steal his dream, he might have introduced him to the Godslayer himself, and recommended him for the delegation. If he had done these things, all of which, he had no doubt, Strange would have done in his place, then might he be mounting that metal dragon now, and flying up to the citadel with them?
His brain presented this entire fantasy in roughly the time it took Strange to swing his leg across his creature’s back. As the party took flight, Thyon, earthbound, felt every choice he’d made, every action he’d taken, as a weight he carried with him. He wondered: Was it weight he could shed or throw off, or was it forever a part of him, as much as his bones and his hearts?
32
ALL THE JAGGED EDGES
Sarai knew her father well. Hundreds of times she’d perched moths on his brow, watched him sleep, and plagued him with nightmares. She’d traveled the pathways of his mind, and shuddered at the horrors there. She’d even seen him in the dreams of others—as a boy, a young husband, a hero. But she had never met him.
When she saw not one flying shape but four rising up from Weep, she knew who it must be, and backed away from the railing, a seethe of emotions filling her: fear, hope, shame, longing, each entangled in the roots of the others. She had hated him once. Minya had made sure of it. But the more time she spent spinning nightmares to torment him, the more she’d understood that the worst nightmare she could hope to conjure would pale beside the ones that already lived inside him. It wasn’t fear that ate him alive. Eril-Fane was brave; he could cope with fear. But guilt and shame were corrosive, and the great Godslayer was a husk.
Sarai had stopped hating him a long time ago, and ceased to plague him, too, though Minya had railed and ranted, called her a traitor and worse. But Sarai knew what she knew—what only she knew—and the greatest feat of strength she had ever witnessed was the one he performed every day: continuing to live for the sake of others, when it would be so much easier to stop.
Did she hope he would love her, be a father to her? No.
Yes.
But no. She knew what could only be known by sojourning in his mind: what Isagol had done to him—her mother, the beautiful, terrible goddess of despair. She had made him love her, and ruined love.
So Sarai smashed down the hopes that were trying to well up in her, even as she looked down at herself and transformed her slip into the respectable Weep costume that she’d worn in her dream. It would be enough if he managed to hide his abhorrence. That was what she told herself as he came.
Eril-Fane, on the gryphon with his mother riding behind him, was caught up in a memory of another ascent to the citadel. He hadn’t been astride a creature that time, but caught in the claws of one, plucked right off the street where he’d been walking with his bride. And though it was Skathis who’d taken him, all the horror of the memory was bound up in another. His horror belonged to her. The god of beasts had procured him as a plaything for his lover: Isagol, who was as queen to his fell king. How many years the pair had played their games, Eril-Fane had no way of knowing. Two hundred at least; that was how long they’d been here in this sky. Where before? They were immortal, were they not? They might have been ruining lives since time began, for all he knew.
How the citadel had loomed as they flew up toward it, so bright, so impossibly huge, and he had been… surprised. That was the overwhelming feeling, as Rasalas—the old, hideous version—dropped him into the garden like a piece of windfall fruit. It had all happened so fast. Eril-Fane had lived in fear of Azareen being taken, but he was the one on his knees in the garden of the gods.
And framed in an archway of the arcade was Isagol, waiting as though she had said to Skathis, Go and bring me back someone to play with.
Eril-Fane had seen her before, from a distance. He knew her red-brown hair and the band of black she painted across her eyes. He had witnessed the languid way she moved, as though she were bored and would always be bored, and despised the world because of it. His hatred of her was as old as himself, and as pure as his love for his wife. But as he knelt there, reeling with surprise, still not comprehending that his life as he knew it was over, he felt something else begin to stir in him.
It felt like… fascination.
That was how it began. Isagol sauntered toward him. Her hips moved in a way that was entirely unlike Azareen’s hips. The one, he found himself thinking, was like print: neat, economical, nothing to spare. The other was script: flowing and graceful, wasteful, hypnotic. One woman was a secret warrior, the other an evil goddess, and though Azareen wielded a hreshtek as though she’d been born to hold one, there was no doubt who was deadlier.
Isagol walked a circle around him, looking him over with interest. “Well done,” she said to Skathis.
“He’s in love,” the god of beasts told her. “I thought you’d like that.”
Her eyes brightened. “You’re too good to me.”
“I know.”
Skathis went inside, leaving them alone. Isagol was undefended. She came near enough to touch Eril-Fane and ran her fingers through his hair—softly at first—then she clasped it in a fist
and jerked his head up to make him look at her. And… Thakra help him… Eril-Fane gazed at her, when he could have picked her up and heaved her right over the balustrade.
He remembered wanting to, but wanting… other things, too, and feeling sick with it, poisoned, turned inside out, exposed, as though she were rooting out darkness in him: desire and disfaith he’d never imagined himself capable of.
Because he wasn’t. It wasn’t him. He didn’t want her. And yet, he did.
This is what he was to learn: It didn’t matter if the feelings were his, or if she put them in him. Either way, they were real, and they would rule over him for the next three years, and all the years that came after.
She made him want her, and she made him love her. But, though she easily could have, she never took away his natural feelings. Isagol liked her pets dangerous. She was hard to thrill, and it excited her to keep them at war with themselves, ever walking a knife-edge between adoration and animus. That first day, she didn’t prevent him from hurling her over the balustrade. She simply made him desire her more than he desired her death, so that later—after—he would lie tangled in the silken sheets of her enormous bed, and believe in his bones that he had chosen this, that he had chosen her—over Azareen and fidelity, over justice and all that was good—that he chose her every moment he didn’t throttle her in her sleep, or gut her with the carving knife while serving her at table. She was an executioner by increments, a master of subtlety and tempter of fate, ever seeing how close she could slice the difference between hate and love.
Until one day she miscalculated and lost the game and her life.
And Eril-Fane had “won,” but it was a bitter victory. She had infested him, and infected him, and what he’d done in the aftermath could never be shriven.
Now he returned to the citadel, to meet the ghost of the daughter he had failed to murder on the day he turned savior and butcher.