Muse of Nightmares (Strange the Dreamer #2_UK)

by Laini Taylor

  “I didn’t mean right now,” said Lazlo, laughing a little.

  “Why not?”

  “Ruby, really,” said Sarai. “Now’s hardly the time for raiding bakeries.”

  “It’s fine for you to say. You could turn that into cake if you wanted.” She indicated the phantom bread Sarai held in her hand.

  Sarai looked at it. “You make a good point,” she said, and transformed it. In an instant it was cake, and Ruby gasped at the sight. It was three layers tall, white as snow, with a froth of cream filling and the palest pink icing piped into flowers. Sparrow and Feral gasped, too. It seemed so real, as though they ought to be able to reach out and take it, but they knew better, and just stared—or, in Ruby’s case, glared. “I deserve cake,” she sniffed. “After what I just had to do.”

  “It’s true,” said Sarai. “You do.” Though she felt that the ravid’s share of pity was hers in this situation. “All things considered, I’d rather have real bread than imaginary cake.” She took a bite. They all watched hungrily, as though they could taste it by witnessing her expression.

  “How is it?” Sparrow asked, yearning in her voice.

  Sarai shrugged and vanished it, feeling a little wicked. “Nothing special, just sweet.” She looked to Lazlo with a secret smile. “Like eating cake in dreams.”

  He smiled back, and they all could see that there were memories shimmering between them. “What dreams?” asked Feral.

  “What cake?” demanded Ruby.

  But Sarai had no will for storytelling. She wished, rather, to spend whatever time she had left, if not living, then at least doing and being and feeling. Never before had time seemed so like currency, each moment a coin that could be well- or ill-spent, or even, if one wasn’t careful, wasted and lost. She looked to Minya’s chair at the head of the table. Even empty, it seemed to reign over them. Ominously, the quell board was there, all set up and ready for a game. I’m good at games, she heard in her mind. She wanted to dash the board to the floor.

  If only it could be that easy to put an end to all of Minya’s games.

  “You must be tired,” she said to Lazlo, rising from her chair. “I know I am.”

  “Tired?” asked Ruby. “Can ghosts sleep?”

  Feral shook his head at her, his expression sour. “How can you have lived your whole life with ghosts and never wondered that before?”

  “I’ve wondered. I’ve just never asked.”

  “Ghosts can do everything the living can do,” Sparrow told her, looking to the Ellens for confirmation. “As long as they believe it.”

  “And,” Sarai added, “as long as Minya lets us.”

  But she wasn’t thinking of sleep in any case. As she took Lazlo’s hand and led him from the gallery, sleep was the last thing on her mind.

  Chapter 11

  Cannibals and Virgins

  “We should come back with some rope,” said Thyon, eyeing the crumbling edges of the sinkhole.

  “While you do that,” said Calixte, “I’ll just go down and open the door.”

  “It isn’t—” Safe, he was going to say, but there wasn’t much point. Calixte had already jumped into the hole.

  Thyon let out a hard breath and watched her, seeming weightless as she passed between handholds or simply leapt, landing on narrow ledges with virtually no sound of impact. In a matter of seconds she was down in the pit, crossing it in little skips, like a child crossing a stream on stepping-stones. Except the stepping-stones were veins of mesarthium gleaming amid chunks of broken rock and shifting piles of earth, beneath which an underground river raged.

  Thyon held his breath, watching her, half expecting the ground to give way and suck her into the dark. But it didn’t, and then she was scaling the far side of the sinkhole, if possible even faster than she’d descended. She paused, only yards below the door, to look over her shoulder at him and call up, “Well?”

  Well indeed. What to do? Go for rope, knowing she’d open the door while he was gone and have the discovery to herself? Or follow her and take the risk of plunging into the Uzumark to be swept away flailing and drown in the dark?

  Neither choice appealed.

  “If you’re afraid,” called Calixte, “I can just tell you what I find!”

  Gritting his teeth, Thyon paced the edge, looking for a place to go over. Calixte had made it look easy. It wasn’t. Where she’d leapt, he skidded, kicking off a minor avalanche, only to slide into his own dirt plume and choke on the laden air. He reached out to catch himself on a protruding rock, but it came away in his hand and he pitched off balance, only saving himself from tumbling headlong into the pit by sprawling out like a starfish. Lying there hugging the dirt, his mouth full of grit, he seethed with resentment for the bounding girl who’d lured him into danger, as though his life were worth no more than hers, to be thrown away on senseless risk.

  “Get up,” she called. “I’ll wait for you. Go slow. We aren’t all so blessed to be descended from spiders.”

  Spiders?

  Thyon picked himself up—sort of. He kept on hugging the slope and made his way down like that, getting dirtier with every step. Crossing the pit, he found leaping unnecessary. He set his feet on a seam of mesarthium and followed it, windmilling his arms for balance. Calixte’s leaping had been showmanship, he concluded, or else the sheer joy of motion. Reaching the slope below her, he looked up and saw that she had, indeed, waited.

  She was pretending to have fallen asleep.

  Peeved, he picked up a pebble and threw it at her. He missed, but she heard it plink against the ledge of rock and cracked open an eye

  midsnore. “You’ll regret that, faranji,” she said with equanimity.

  “Faranji? You’re a faranji, too.”

  “Not like you.” She picked herself up from her pretend-slumber slump and dusted the dirt from her behind. “I mean, there are faranji, and there are faranji.” On the second faranji, she grimaced and raised her eyebrows, indicating a specially pernicious breed of outsider, in which category, clearly, she placed him. She helpfully pointed out a foothold to him while saying, “There’s the kind of guest who’s honored to be invited, and the kind who believes he’s bestowing honor by accepting.”

  He stepped on the foothold and reached for a rock she indicated next. “The kind who expresses interest in the culture and language,” she went on. “And the kind who disdains it as barbaric, and insists on an entire camel to carry foodstuffs from their own land, as though they might perish on native fare.”

  “That wasn’t me,” argued Thyon. It was Ebliz Tod who’d done that. So all right, he’d brought some rations, but they were in case of emergency, and hardly a whole camel’s worth. He’d had a lot of gear, transporting a working alchemical laboratory. Any extra camels were well justified. “And I’ve never called anything barbaric,” he said. That charge he could cleanly dispute.

  Calixte shrugged. “Thoughts count, too, Nero. If you think you’ve concealed yours, you’re mistaken.”

  His impulse was to angrily dismiss everything she’d said, but could he? The truth was, he had been sensible of bestowing upon Weep the honor of his presence, and why not? Any city in the world would be grateful to host him. As to their language, that brought up more complicated feelings. Back in Zosma, he’d learned enough from Strange’s books to make a fair greeting and impress Eril-Fane...that is, until Strange had gone and opened his mouth and outshone him. It only made sense. It was Strange’s life work. Of course he spoke better than Thyon could after such brief study. Had Thyon thought he wouldn’t speak up?

  He had thought that. He’d thought Strange would meekly subside while Thyon stole his work and his dream, and he’d been wrong.

  Instead, Strange left with the Godslayer and his warriors, and when Thyon next saw him, several months later, he’d practically become one of them, riding a spectral, wearing clothes like theirs, and speaking their language fluently. After that, Thyon had told himself it was beneath him. He wasn’t about to suffer in co
mparison to a foundling librarian. He was the golden godson. If they wanted to address him, they should do the work, not he. And so he hadn’t learned any more of their language than he could help.

  He found the next handhold himself and hoisted himself higher. “You’re the good kind of faranji, I suppose.”

  “Oh yes,” she said. “Very good. I even taste good, or so I’m told.”

  He was focused on not falling to his death, and so he missed the mischief in her voice. “Taste,” he scoffed. “I suppose they’re cannibals. Who’s calling them barbarians now?”

  Calixte laughed with delighted disbelief, and it was only then, too late, that Thyon took her meaning. Oh gods. Taste. He flung back his head to look up at her, nearly losing his balance in the process. She laughed harder at the shock on his face. “Cannibals!” she repeated. “That’s good. I’m going to start calling Tzara that. My sweet cannibal. Can I tell you a secret?” She whispered the rest, wide-eyed and zestful: “I’m a cannibal, too.”

  Thyon flushed with mortification. “I’ll thank you to keep your private matters to yourself.”

  “You’re blushing like a maiden,” said Calixte. “Honestly, you’re as innocent as Lazlo. Who’d have thought it?”

  “It’s not innocence, it’s propriety—”

  “If your next sentence starts with ‘a lady would never,’ you can choke on it, Nero. I’m no lady.”

  The wicked relish with which she disavowed the word robbed Thyon of any easy insult, so he put his energy into swinging himself up to the little lip of earth on which she stood. Now he was level with her and could hardly avoid her merry eyes, though he tried his best, and blushed anew.

  “Are you a maiden?” Calixte asked. “You can tell me.”

  A maiden? He kept right on climbing. Did she mean a virgin? Was she really asking him that? It defied belief. The doorway was nearly within reach now, and she was still busy mocking him.

  “It’s nothing to be ashamed of,” she told his back. “Plenty of fine gentlemen wait until marriage.”

  “And you’ve been acquainted with ‘plenty of fine gentlemen,’ have you?”

  “Well, no,” Calixte admitted. And then, as though a new thought had occurred to her, she asked with a note of piquant curiosity, “Have you?”

  Her innuendo struck him, and it stunned him. In Zosma, such a suggestion could only end in a duel. Thyon flashed hot and cold. He wore his dueling blade at his side as always, but one did not fight women. He had to struggle to remind himself it wasn’t an insult here, much less a matter of honor, especially considering the source. He shot her a warning look and kept climbing, reaching the door ahead of her.

  It was blocked by several large rocks. “We should have brought tools,” he said.

  “Tools,” scoffed Calixte. “Tools are for people with nothing better to do than think things through and make sensible plans.”

  Thyon raised his eyebrows. “And...what sort of people are we at the moment?”

  “The foolish sort who do things like this.” She folded herself up like a piece of paper and slipped into the narrow gap between one large rock and the slope. Thyon couldn’t understand how a body could do that. It hardly seemed decent to watch. Somehow her knees were behind her shoulders. Her back was flat to the slope, her feet to the rock, pushing. She bit her lip white with the strain, and the rock creaked, shifted, and plunged over the edge.

  Thyon shot out a hand to make sure she didn’t plunge with it.

  “Thank you, good sir,” she said, dropping quite an elegant curtsy on the narrow foothold they shared.

  He snatched back his hand and wiped it off on the side of his dirty trousers.

  The rest of the rocks were smaller, but still Thyon’s hands were bleeding by the time they’d cleared them away. The door they uncovered was stout, wooden, and, like everything else in Weep, carved. It depicted a single great tree, roots to branches, and each leaf was a lidded eye that seemed to watch them, lazy and judgmental.

  It would have been frustrating to find the door locked after all that, but the knob turned in Thyon’s hand, and between the two of them, they were able to grind it open on rusted hinges—

  —to reveal a corridor, its ceiling inlaid with glavestone that lit it up like morning. Dust hung in the air, and the smell was...well, it was stale, much staler than any air Thyon had breathed before, and in it were undertones of long-ago death, trapped bodies, old bones, but there was leather, too, and crumbling paper and dust. Thyon knew this smell. For all that he was a duke’s son, born in a castle, with a palace of his own gifted him by the queen, he was a scholar,

  too, and he lived this smell. It was unmistakable. Universal.

  It was books.

  He gave a laugh that spun the dust in front of his face and sent ripples through the heavy air. “It’s the library,” he said, and his very first thought was that Strange would give a limb to get to wander in this place. “It’s the ancient library of Weep.”

  Chapter 12

  Witchlight and Rue

  Sarai held her curtain for Lazlo, and drew it closed behind him. There were ghosts in the corridor, and more out on her terrace. She drew that curtain, too, then paused. She looked at the doorways, then at Lazlo, and, blushing, asked, “Can you close them?”

  Her voice was low, warm, and silken, and Lazlo blushed, too. This was real. It wasn’t a dream, some filament spun between them across space. It was him facing her, his real hand clasping her ghostflesh one. They wouldn’t be wrenched apart by sunrise, or the sad demise of a fragile moth, or an alchemist pelting stones. They were here, awake, together.

  They could be wrenched apart by Minya, though, at literally any moment, and their hearts felt ragged, frayed by desperation and the thoughtless drub of time.

  Lazlo shut the doors.

  If it had been a dream, the room could have melted away, transforming into some other scene, without metal walls and ghosts at the doors. Sarai would have loved to re-create last night’s dream and slip right back where she had been: to the bed with its feather down, and Lazlo’s weight on top of her, a revelation of sensation. His mouth would be on her shoulder, the strap of her slip eased aside.

  But to will it was one thing. To do it was another. Their dream-smith skills wouldn’t serve them now, and for the moment they only stood there, their gazes mingling witchlight and rue.

  Lazlo swallowed. “So this is your room,” he said, and tore his eyes from her to look around. He noticed at once its central feature: the huge bed, bigger than his whole room at the Great Library. It was raised on a dais and curtained like a stage, and his eyes grew wide at the sight of it.

  “My mother’s,” Sarai said quickly. “I don’t sleep there.”

  “No?”

  “No. I have a smaller bed back by the dressing room.”

  Talking about beds wasn’t helping. It made their desire too transparent. While Sarai might have silently led Lazlo there, now that it was spoken aloud, it seemed far too bold. They both grew bashful, as though all that had passed between them in dreams remained there, and these bodies with their awkward arms would have to learn it all over again.

  “It’s actually beautiful,” said Lazlo, still looking around the room. The ceiling was soaring and fan-vaulted, the walls much more ornate than anything he’d seen in the citadel so far. They reminded him of the carvings down in Weep, though these, of course, were wrought of mesarthium, not stone. “Skathis did all this?” he asked, reaching out to trace a songbird with his finger. It was one of hundreds, and stunning in its perfection, perching among vines and lilies equally lifelike, as though they were the real thing dipped in metal, gilded in molten mesarthium.

  Sarai nodded, reaching out to stroke the eye ridge of a life-size spectral in bas-relief. Its antlers projected from the wall; she had used them as a hook to hang her robe. “It makes him harder to imagine. Shouldn’t all his creations have been as hideous as Rasalas was?”

  Nothing in the room was hideous. It was a luxuri
ous temple wrought of water-smooth metal. Lazlo skimmed his fingertips over a sparrow and freed it. Buoying it on the same magnetic field as the citadel itself, he shook its little wings and gave it flight.

  From Sarai’s lips came a soft sound of wonder. Lazlo loved it, and wanted to hear it again, so he quickened more birds and they came and flew in a ring around her. Her laugh was music. She held out her free hand, the one not still clasped in his, and one of the birds alighted on her palm.

  “I wish I could make it sing for you,” said Lazlo, but that was beyond his power.

  A new bird appeared beside it, coalescing out of nowhere. For an instant it startled Lazlo, but then he realized Sarai had made it. Like herself, it was illusion, and flawless: a phantom sparrow, brown and faun, with a little black beak the size and shape of a rose thorn. It did sing. The notes were sweet as summer rain, and it was Lazlo’s turn for wonder. These two birds, side by side, represented their new selves, god and ghost, and their new abilities, too. Both had their limitations: Sarai’s sparrow could sing but not fly. Lazlo’s could fly but not sing.

  With a flick of her wrist, she sent them airborne. Hers vanished at once, unable to exist apart from the illusion of her self. Lazlo flew his, and the rest of the flock, to find new perches and fall still.

  “How does it work?” he asked her, intrigued. “This transformation business. Are there limits?”

  “Only of imagination, I think. Tell me.” She waved a hand over herself. “What should I change?”

  “Nothing.” He breathed a laugh. The idea was so absurd. “You’re perfect as you are.”

  Sarai blushed and looked down. They were drifting across the room, unconsciously—or maybe not—in the direction of the nook behind the dressing room, where Sarai’s little bed was tucked out of sight. “Oh, I don’t know,” she said. “What about wings? Or even just clothes that never belonged to the goddess of despair.”

  “I have to admit,” said Lazlo with a furtive glance down at her pink slip. “I’m rather fond of these clothes.”