Muse of Nightmares (Strange the Dreamer #2_UK)

by Laini Taylor

  It was a little like being on tea break from the end of the world. What was Minya doing? How much longer did they have?

  They spoke in hushed voices so the ghosts couldn’t hear them. “I would never have thought so before,” said Sparrow. “But now I’m not so sure.”

  “Something’s gone wrong with her.” Ruby was bleak. “She wasn’t always this bad. Was she?”

  Sparrow shook her head. She sat back on her heels. Her fingers were dark with soil, her hair neatly braided. She was sixteen, and Ruby would be soon. They were half sisters by Ikirok, god of revelry. Their temperaments were so different: Ruby was bold and easily bored. She no sooner thought a thing than said it, or wanted a thing than she tried to get it. Sparrow was quieter. She watched and wished and kept her hopes to herself, but, however sweet her nature, she was not soft. Just the other day, she’d shocked Sarai and Ruby by suggesting that Ruby could give Minya “a nice warm hug”—by which she’d meant that she could burn her alive.

  She hadn’t wanted it, of course, but she’d seen the darkness in Minya and worried what it would come to. And now here they were, on the brink of war. “I wonder,” she said, “if it’s the ghosts that have made her so dark. We thought it was bad for us, when she’d catch a soul now and then—the ones we knew about—and we’d feel obscene because of how they looked at us. You can’t help but see yourself through their eyes.”

  “I can,” Ruby claimed. “I know I’m beautiful.”

  But Sparrow knew this was only bravado and that Ruby hated it, too. She even tried to win the ghosts over sometimes, to show them they weren’t like their parents, not that it did any good. “And all that time, we had no idea how many ghosts—hundreds of them, with all their hate, and Minya’s been steeping in it.”

  “It’s her own fault. What was she thinking?”

  “She was thinking about keeping us safe,” said Sparrow. That much was obvious. “Keeping us alive.”

  Ruby huffed a half laugh. “It sounds like you’re on her side.”

  “Don’t be simple,” said Sparrow. It was so easy to call sides, and so unhelpful. “We’re all on the same side. Even her. You can be on the same side and have different ideas.”

  “So what do we do?” asked Ruby.

  What could they do? At a loss, Sparrow shook her head. She sank her fingers back into the soil and felt the soft throb of life it conducted through the branching roots it embraced. This was the bed of flowers where they’d cremated Sarai. Ruby’s pyre had burned hot and fast. It had eaten only the body and the orchids they’d adorned it with. The living bower upon which it had lain was astonishingly unscorched. It was only crushed down a little in the shape of a body, and Sparrow had been coaxing the stalks upright, wanting to erase the image of what they’d done here.

  She fingered a flower. It was little and white—insubstantial, yet it pulsed with life. It struck her as such a mysterious force that flowed in one direction only, and, once gone, could never return. She plucked the flower. The force did not immediately snuff out. It waned. The bloom took a few seconds to die.

  She was thinking of life and death, but another thought tiptoed between them. It was guileful and sly. It waited to be noticed. Sparrow noticed, and dropped the flower. She looked up at Ruby. An idea lit her eyes. A question creased her brow. She asked it.

  Ruby stared. And then she smiled.

  And then she answered.

  . . .

  Feral slouched through the sinister arm, dragging two mattresses behind him. He’d fetched them from the rooms they never liked to go in—the little rooms that were like cells with nothing in them but beds. The mattresses were just pallets, really, not at all like the thick, comfortable bedding in the chambers of the gods. That was why he’d taken two, but they would still be a poor substitute.

  He thought Ruby should have them, and he should have hers. She’d burned his, after all. At the time he hadn’t minded. He’d thought...Well, he was a fool. He’d thought he’d just sleep in her room from now on, as though there was something between them.

  It wasn’t stupid to have thought it. What they’d been doing together wasn’t nothing. It might have begun that way, but...he liked it. A lot. And, much to his surprise, he liked her. Even if she was utterly unreasonable. To get mad that he’d never spied on her naked!

  All right, he might once or twice have passed by the rain room when one or another of the girls was bathing, but he’d never peeped through the curtain.

  Unless there was a gap in it already, and even then he hadn’t slowed down too much, or gotten more than a glimpse.

  Anyway, he hadn’t gone out of his way, and that was what upset her.

  What did she want, anyway?

  Not me, he answered himself glumly. “We’re not children anymore and we have lips,” she’d said when she came to his room to seduce him. “Isn’t that reason enough?” It wasn’t him she cared for. He just happened to have lips, not to mention the significant anatomical feature that set him apart in this small tribe of girls. She’d been using him, and he’d been fine with it, but now he wasn’t, and not only because he had to scrounge up new bedding.

  He came to the end of the passage, where the seraph’s left arm joined its shoulder and a broad hall abutted the gallery that ran the length of the chest. Halfway across he had to stumble to a stop, because a steady stream of ghosts was passing by. They were coming from the opposite direction. He never liked to look at them straight on—he disliked seeing the hate in their eyes, and the misery that was there, too—but he still could pick out this one from that one, and he recognized the guards from the dexter arm. They were all marching into the gallery.

  He got a bad feeling, and then Minya appeared, and his feeling got worse. “What’s going on?” he asked her.

  “Come see,” she replied in her icing-sugar voice. “I promise it won’t be boring.”

  . . .

  Out in the garden, Ruby and Sparrow saw the ghosts and shared a stark look. They had the same bad feeling as Feral, and went warily to the arches.

  Feral abandoned his mattresses and followed the procession of ghosts.

  Minya paced to the table and climbed into her chair. She arranged herself, crossing her ankles, and took some care with the folds of her torn and grubby shift. What a sight she was: an urchin with the bearing of a queen.

  No, not a queen. A goddess. The wrathful kind.

  She lined up her troops in formation. There were too many of them to fit in the room, so she overlapped them. It fought the eye to look at them: seeming solid but for the way they disappeared into one another like partially shuffled cards. Last, she parted them down the center and made an aisle from the door straight to her, so that when Sarai and Lazlo came round the corner, that’s what they saw: Minya sitting in state at the end of a gauntlet of slave souls.

  “There you are,” she said. “Are you ready?”

  They just looked at her, bleak, and knew that no words existed that could shift her from her course.

  She cocked her head when they failed to answer. “Wraith got your tongues?” she asked. She wrinkled her nose at Lazlo. “Or maybe Sarai got yours.”

  He was a sight, his lip swollen, blood dried down to his chin. The others’ eyes widened. “That little maniac,” uttered Ruby.

  Lazlo answered calmly, “My tongue is intact. I should thank you. I suppose it could have been worse.”

  “That’s a good rule to live by. It can always be worse. But cheer up. If you’re good and do what I tell you”—she spoke in singsong, dangling her words like a bribe—“I’ll let you two alone later, to do as you like behind your closed door.”

  If they were “good”? Let them alone...? As though they would return from slaughter eager for pleasure? Sarai felt ill. Did Minya really understand so little? Had her hate devoured everything else? She let out a hard breath. “That’s your bargain? Help you kill, and you’ll let us kiss?”

  “Oh no,” said Minya. “That’s just me being nice. There is
no bargain, silly. Have I not made that quite clear?”

  But of course she had. Do everything I say, or I’ll let her soul go. It wasn’t a bargain, but a threat.

  “Come here,” she said. “Why are you lurking in the doorway?” She stood up on her chair and stepped onto the table to stroll its length, hands clasped behind her back, her gaze never leaving them.

  Sarai and Lazlo advanced between the phalanxes of ghosts. Ruby and Sparrow came through the arches, and Feral from the door, and all three went to stand with them, so that Minya again felt splintered from the “us” that was rightly hers. Here they were, at last, on the verge of avenging the deaths of their kindred. They should have been lining up behind her, taking up knives of their own accord. Instead they stood there like that: pallid and weak, soft, pitiful things incapable of avenging anyone. She wanted to slap them awake.

  No more preamble. No more waiting. She fixed on Lazlo and said, “It’s time. You know what’s at stake.” Her gaze shifted to Sarai and back. “No need to yammer on.”

  And so they came to the moment, like a dark hole between them, from which there was no escape. A jolt of horror shot through Lazlo. “Wait.” He was shaking. His blood and spirit were racing, and his thoughts went around in a loop, like the white bird circling, only faster. In tales, when heroes battled monsters, they always won by slaying, but that wasn’t an option for him. He couldn’t kill anyone, and even if he could—if he were that kind of hero—it wouldn’t help. If he slew this monster, he’d lose Sarai, too. Killing could not solve this problem. “Can’t we talk—”

  “No.” The word punched through the air like a fist. “Take. Me. To Weep. Right. NOW!” Minya finished on a roar, her face going red.

  Sarai clenched Lazlo’s hand. She could feel him trembling, and squeezed, wanting to give him strength, and take it, too. In that moment, she didn’t know what scared her more: that he would keep his promise or break it. Oh gods. She didn’t have it in her to hope for her own evanescence.

  Nobody noticed when Sparrow nudged Ruby, and shot a sharp glance toward the door. Or when Ruby, with a half step, then a full step, then a duck, slipped between the ranks of ghosts and sidled out of the room.

  Lazlo just stood there, reeling, flooded with the bitter choice between Sarai and Weep. But...he had already made it, when she had made him promise. No matter what. Helplessness vied with rebellion. His two vows clashed like swords. He was supposed to save her anyway.

  How could he save her anyway?

  “I can’t,” he choked out.

  A wild disbelief flared in the little girl. Her eyes flashed back and forth between Lazlo and Sarai. How was it possible they still dared to defy her? She had thought it a certainty that they wouldn’t put at risk all that tenderness and aching. What mad notion of honor was this?

  Pieces on a game board, she told herself, grim, and it wasn’t she who spoke next, but Sarai.

  “Lazlo,” she whispered, soft, at his side. “I’ve changed my mind. Don’t let me go.”

  He turned to her sharply, expecting her eyes, like all the other ghosts’ eyes, to give lie to her words. But they didn’t. They weren’t wide, showing whites, and rolling with helplessness. They were soft and hesitant, ashamed and sweet and full of fear, as though it pained her to be weak and plead for her own soul. “Sarai?” he queried, uncertain.

  “No!” she screamed, but only in her head, where it was so loud to her own senses that it seemed impossible he couldn’t hear it. Those weren’t her words. That wasn’t her plea. But her face—her eyes— betrayed none of the panic they sparked in her. Ghosts’ eyes always told the truth, didn’t they? That was what they’d always believed, that Minya’s power had that limit, at least, but Sarai could tell by the intensity with which Lazlo was searching hers, and by his confusion, that they didn’t. “I’m afraid,” she whispered, and clutched his hand tighter, and none of it was her. “It’s so cold out there, Lazlo. I’m so afraid.”

  He warred with himself right before her. She saw every nuance cross his face. He was caught between what he knew to be true and the flawless, insidious lie Minya was putting on like a show. “Just do what she wants,” Sarai pleaded. “For me.”

  And he knew. And he felt sick. No matter what, Sarai had said. He remembered how brave she’d been, and he turned to Minya, shaking. “Stop it,” he said, his bloody, swollen lip curling with fury. “She would never ask that.” He knew it was true. Sarai would never choose her uncertain ghost future over untold human lives.

  A cry of anguish escaped from Sarai. Her pleading became more insistent—and all the more unconvincing for it, as though it was only to torment him now that he hadn’t taken the bait. “Don’t you love me?” she asked. “Won’t you save me?”

  The words tore through her and she despised them, because a part of her wanted to say them, to beg and be saved, no matter what the cost. She was held in the world by such a fine thread. The void hovered—the ether, the tide of unmaking—and she was terrified.

  Her words sank claws into Lazlo’s hearts, whether they came from Sarai or not. Tears burst from his eyes, thick and full, plashing drops onto his cheekbones, his lashes dark and clumped. The midday light glazed his eyes and they shone like rising suns. He took a step toward Minya, searching her face for some hint of kinship or humanity.

  But he found none.

  “So that’s it?” Minya asked him, both astonished and disgusted. “You would destroy her to save them?” She had the uneasy sensation of losing her grip, of rope reeling out of her hands. It wasn’t supposed to go like this. They were supposed to do as she said.

  Lazlo shook his head. It was all so wrong. “No,” he said. “I would destroy no one.”

  Minya’s teeth were gritted. Her eyes were slits. “That isn’t one of your choices. It’s simple: Choose Sarai and the killers die. Choose the killers and lose Sarai.”

  In her childish voice, it sounded like a nursery song, and Lazlo knew that, whatever happened and however long he lived, he would never be able to cleanse it from his mind. It was maddening, this black and white choice: One must die for the other to live. But... how could it not seem so to her? Whoever Minya might have been without the Carnage, Lazlo would never know. She’d been forged that day when the Godslayer slew babies so humans could live. He’d killed them against a future threat, because of what they were. It was he who’d set the rules of the game that Minya was still playing. Was it fair to change them now that she finally had the advantage?

  Bleakly he glimpsed the world as she must see it, made simple by righteousness and fury. Could he ask her to be better than those whose hate had forged her? He knew what she would say to that, but still he had to try. “It can all end right here. You just have to let it. We’re not murderers.” He held Sarai and spoke to Minya. “And neither are you.”

  The words were out, and he thought he saw her flinch as though they struck her. She seemed to shrink and then catch herself and thrust back her shoulders, her expression turning even darker. “Don’t presume to know what I am. Let’s be perfectly clear. Are you refusing me? I won’t ask you again.”

  “I .. .I.. .”

  But he couldn’t say it. Promise or not, Lazlo could not speak the words that would seal Sarai’s fate. He turned to her. Her eyes were so wide, blue like skies, her honey-red lashes beaded with tears. She was innocent, and Minya was right: There were those in Weep, Eril-Fane included, who were guilty. Why should Sarai pay for their lives with her soul?

  She whispered, “I love you,” and he was lost. No one had ever said those words to him, not once in all his life. He wasn’t even conscious of summoning Rasalas, but then the creature was beside him, come in from the garden, its huge metal wings at the ready. Minya mounted from the tabletop, triumphant, and sat astride her father’s beast, ready to fly down to Weep.

  Many a choice is made in this way: by pretending it makes itself.

  And many a fate is decided by those who cannot decide.

  She’ll find a way
to break you, Sarai had warned Lazlo. Now she saw that Minya had, and so many feelings tore through her: despair, relief, self-loathing. Still possessed by Minya’s will, she could do nothing, say nothing, but the worst part of all was that something insidious within her relished her own helplessness, because it freed her from having to fight.

  The last thing she wanted to do was fight for her own oblivion.

  She tried to tell herself it would be all right. The city had emptied. The citizens were safe, and the Tizerkane could take care of themselves.

  But these were all lies, and they festered inside her: her hearts, her whole self felt corrupt, like a plum gone soft with rot. It would ruin Lazlo to do this. It would break Weep, and ruin him, and she would wish for oblivion then, which Minya would not grant. Sarai would still be her puppet, with bloody teeth and ineluctable strings, after everything else was gone.

  Lazlo said, “I love you, too,” and it was so wrong that he should say it now, with Minya’s will crammed in Sarai’s soul, and murder to be done. He bent down and softly brushed the unbitten side of his mouth over hers, and rested his face, cheek to cheek, against hers. His jaw was rough, his skin too warm. He shuddered lightly against her. Sarai breathed his sandalwood smell, and remembered her first discovery of him, through her moths in the Godslayer’s house. She’d thought him a brute at first glance. The idea amazed her now. There had been so many moments of wonder, but her mind leapt somewhere quite different: to the last minutes of her own life. It was just before the blast ripped the city—deep night and silent, all the streets empty. Lazlo had been walking through Weep. Sarai had been with him by way of a moth perched on his wrist, and she’d had no inkling of all that was about to occur.

  It was a funny thing to think of. At first, she didn’t know why she had. But then...she thought maybe she did, and a strange kind of shiver ran through her.

  She had never been able to enter the minds of those who were awake. As a girl, testing her powers, she had tried and learned: The conscious mind was closed to her. And so it had been that night as well. Her moth had ridden on Lazlo’s wrist as he paced through the silent city, and she’d been shut out of his mind, with no idea what he was thinking.