Muse of Nightmares (Strange the Dreamer #2_UK)

by Laini Taylor

  “It was,” said Ruby. “And to whoever might have called me an idiot for tasting it, I am accepting apologies. Not granting pardons, mind you. Just accepting apologies.” She didn’t look at Feral, so she didn’t see his scowl, but she imagined it, and, in fact, the one in her mind perfectly matched the one on his face.

  “Tasting what?” asked Lazlo. “What bottle?”

  Ruby held up a finger at him. “Hold that thought, please,” she said, adding in a stage whisper, “I’m waiting for an apology.”

  “Fine,” drawled Feral. “I take back what I said when we were children. You weren’t an idiot for tasting Letha’s potion. You were a lucky idiot.”

  Ruby’s eyes flashed to him. “You’d know all about being a lucky idiot. But you’ve run out of luck. Now you’re just an idiot.”

  And so Sarai inferred that whatever had begun between Feral and Ruby had ended. She didn’t know if she should be sorry about it; it seemed rather a terrible idea, the two of them paired up. She told Lazlo, “Ruby’s room used to be Letha’s, and there was a green glass bottle she’d kept on her bed table. When we were little, Ruby tasted it. She thought it might be sweet, but it wasn’t.”

  “I only touched my tongue to the rim of the bottle, like this,” said Ruby, demonstrating.

  “And she passed out for two days,” added Sparrow.

  “And woke up feeling perfectly fine,” concluded Ruby. “Having understood, even as a child”—and this next bit was directed at Feral—“that Letha would hardly have kept poison on her bed table.”

  “She could have,” argued Feral. “For all you knew, she murdered her lovers when she was through with them.”

  “What a fine idea.”

  “Stop it, you two,” Sarai said mildly. The point was: The green glass bottle had held a sleeping draught. Looking at Minya laid out there, so vulnerable, she realized something. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen her asleep.”

  Nor had the others. They had assumed she must sleep, but none of them could recall ever seeing her do it.

  It was then that Sarai noted a peculiar absence from the discussion and craned her head to look for the Ellens. They ought to have been right here, tongues clucking with praises and scolds, but...they were still in the kitchen doorway, and they weren’t moving.

  They weren’t moving at all.

  Sarai said, “Ellens?” and the others turned to look. For the moment, they forgot Minya and went over to the nurses. “Ellen?” coaxed Sarai, reaching for Great Ellen’s shoulder. There was no response, and...it wasn’t just that she was frozen. Great Ellen was blank. Less Ellen was, too. There was no expression at all on their faces, and worse: no awareness in their eyes. Sarai waved her hand in front of them. Nothing. She made a quick glance round at the rest of the ghosts, and they all looked as they always did: Their bodies were rigid, but their eyes were free and they watched everything, fully conscious inside their puppet forms. But not the Ellens.

  It didn’t make any sense.

  The nearest they could figure—this was Feral’s theory; he was always good for a theory, if not for a decision—was that when Minya fell asleep, her ghosts went on in whatever state she’d left them, until such a time as they received new orders. If they were frozen, they remained so. On guard duty, the same, though that they could not prove, since all the ghosts had been gathered here in anticipation of invading Weep. As for Sarai, she’d just been given back her free will, so she retained it.

  So why hadn’t the Ellens?

  “Maybe Minya froze them,” said Sparrow, “to stop them from interfering with her?”

  But Ruby had talked to them just the moment before, when she pushed back through the doorway with her tea tray. “They were normal,” she said. “They were crying.” Indeed, tear streaks were visible on their cheeks. “Great Ellen caught my elbow,” she said. “She made the cups slosh. I hissed at her to let go.” She frowned. “I wasn’t very pleasant.”

  And even if Minya had frozen them, as they all knew she had earlier in the garden, that couldn’t explain this vacant state. It was as though the two ghost women were... empty.

  Unsettled though they were, they had to leave them like that and turn their attention back to Minya and the very large question of what to do about her. “We can’t keep her drugged forever,” said Feral.

  “Well, we could,” Ruby argued, looking around at them. “I mean, it kind of solves all our problems. Sarai’s free, no one’s making us kill anyone, and it’s not like we’re hurting her. She’s just asleep. Sarai can give her nice dreams now and then, and we can do what we like from now on.”

  “It’s hardly a permanent solution,” said Sparrow.

  “Maybe not forever,” said Ruby, “but I’m in no hurry for her to wake up.”

  None of them were, but it was still unsettling to think of keeping her drugged. And she wasn’t the only one affected.

  “What about them?” Lazlo asked, meaning the slave ghosts packed into the gallery.

  Ruby grimaced as she considered them. “We could move them, I guess.” Her eyes lit up. “You can make mesarthium servants to do it, so we don’t even have to touch them.”

  He regarded her, quizzical. “I meant...” he began, at a loss, and looked to Sarai for help.

  “He meant,” she said with a note of censure, “that they’ll be slaves, and stay trapped, as long as Minya’s unconscious.”

  “At least no one’s making them kill their own families,” said Ruby. “They’re fine.”

  Feral exhaled and said to Lazlo, “You can’t expect her to have normal feelings. It’s just how she is.”

  A look suspiciously like hurt—a normal feeling if ever there was one—flashed across Ruby’s face. Sparrow spoke up before she could. “Or,” she told Feral wearily, “you’re just spectacularly bad at noticing feelings.” She knew as much from her own experience, when she’d fancied herself in love with him. Before he or anyone else could answer, she moved back to the topic at hand. “We can’t keep these ghosts prisoner forever. For now, we have to, while we think what to do. But we won’t move them.” She spoke with quiet authority. “It wouldn’t do to shuffle them out of sight just so their suffering doesn’t trouble us. We can’t forget about them. They’re people.”

  Sarai said, “She’s right. I could never keep all these souls enslaved just for my own freedom.”

  “Their freedom isn’t in your hands,” said Lazlo, wanting to alleviate the burden of her guilt. “It’s in Minya’s, and you know if she were to wake, the last thing she would do is set them free.”

  “I know,” Sarai said, feeling helpless. “There’s got to be something we haven’t thought of. A way of reaching her.”

  Her current profound relief notwithstanding, and no matter what her feelings for Minya in the worst or best of times, Sarai couldn’t bear the thought of keeping her asleep forever like some cursed girl in a fairy tale. But what was the alternative? The helplessness was consuming. Every attempt she’d made to reason with her, or to appeal to her, had failed. If there was some way to reach Minya, she had no idea what it was.

  But .. .

  A small cluster of words circled back to her from the flow of conversation. They were Ruby’s, and had been spoken carelessly: Sarai can give her nice dreams now and then.

  Sarai didn’t give nice dreams. She was the Muse of Nightmares. Minya had made her so. From the moment her gift awakened—the moment Minya had made her stop stifling it—the little girl had taken charge, and determined how she used it and who she became. Minya had created her, and...the Carnage had created Minya.

  Who might they have been, both of them, if they’d grown up in other times? In what service might Minya have used her gift, and in what manner Sarai? The one controlled souls, the other dreams. What power, between the two of them.

  Sarai had wished, that morning, for her mother’s gift, that she might unwork Minya’s hate. Well, she couldn’t. Her gift was dreams. Not specifically nightmares—that was Minya’s doing. Sa
rai’s gift was dreams. How might she use it, if she were making herself from scratch?

  If, indeed, she even still had it, now that she was dead.

  She took a steadying breath and looked from Lazlo to Sparrow to Feral to Ruby before turning to Minya. Her little face was relaxed in sleep, eyelashes dusky on her cheeks.

  What was going on in her mind? What did Minya dream of? Sarai didn’t know. She’d never looked. Minya had forbidden it when they were still little children. All of a sudden it was very clear: She had to find out. She had to go in, and talk to her there. If she could, if she still had her gift.

  She said to the others, “Let’s move her to her bed and make her comfortable.” She took a deep breath. “At nightfall, if my moths come, I’m going into her dreams.”

  Chapter 18

  Gray

  Nightfall was still some hours away, and those hours had to be spent. Having determined a course of action, Sarai was antsy and uncertain, a pendulum swinging between fear and dread: the one, that her gift wouldn’t manifest, the other that it would. What was she more afraid of? Violating Minya’s innermost sanctuary, or being unable to, and having to dredge up yet another wild hope?

  They settled Minya in her bed. Any of them might have carried her—she weighed nothing at all—but Lazlo was the one to pick her up, and the whole time he held her, he kept thinking with amazement, This is my sister.

  Her rooms, which had been Skathis’s, weren’t like the other chambers. All those consisted of a bedroom, bath, dressing room, and sitting room. But here was a proper palace, occupying the whole of the seraph’s right shoulder. There was a fountain—dry now—with mesarthium lily pads you could cross like stepping-stones. A sunken seating area was filled with velvet cushions, and great columns in the form of seraphim stood in a circle, their raised wings supporting a high, elegant dome. A sweeping staircase led to a mezzanine. From there, a long hall, lined on one side by filigree windows like enormous panels of metal lace, led to a grand bedroom, with, at its center, a bed that made even Isagol’s seem modest. Lazlo laid Minya down on it. She looked, in its waves of blue silk, like a matchstick bobbing in an ocean.

  “We should keep watch,” said Sparrow, “in case she stirs.”

  They all agreed. Sparrow took the first watch, and pulled up a chair by the bedside, with the green glass bottle close at hand in case she needed to dispense a drop between Minya’s lips.

  “Is she saying something?” asked Ruby, bending close.

  They all looked. Indeed, her lips seemed to be moving, though she made no sound. And if there were words in the movements, they couldn’t make them out. It gave them a chill, though, to wonder what conversation she might be having in her dreams.

  They were hungry. None of them had partaken with particular relish of the morning loaf. So they went to the kitchen, having to squeeze, unnerved, between the blank, frozen Ellens, and there they began to discover the extent of their helplessness.

  The loaf was but a crust, and they didn’t know how to make another. Bread might as well have been alchemy, for all that they knew what to do. There were always plums and kimril, though, so they boiled some tubers and mashed them, and stirred in plum jam for flavor, and then they carried the whole pot to Minya’s room with an extra spoon for Sparrow. They ate it feeling a little proud of themselves, and idiotic for feeling proud, all reaching out with their spoons, jousting in the bowl like children. The clink of metal mingled with laughs and huffs of mock outrage as someone stole a bite or parried a thrust, or even despooned an opponent.

  And in the course of things, in the kitchen and then by Minya’s bedside, they grew comfortable with the stranger who, impossibly, was kin. They wanted to know how Sarai had met him, and what sort of dreams she’d given him. “I didn’t,” she confessed, her cheeks warming. “I liked them just how they were. I snuck into them like a stowaway.”

  She described “Dreamer’s Weep”—the city as Lazlo imagined it: the children in their feather cloaks, the grannies riding saddled cats, the wingsmiths in the marketplace, even the centaur and his lady, all of whom she liked to think of as real people living out their days. By the end of it—and she didn’t tell everything, not by a long shot—they all wanted it to be real, so they could go there, too, and live there, and say good morning to all those folk and creatures.

  And they wanted to know about Lazlo, of course. They peppered him with questions, and he did his best to describe what his life had been like before Eril-Fane rode into it.

  “Are you telling me it was your job to read books?” Feral asked with as much or more yearning than Ruby had earlier shown for cake.

  “Not to read them, unfortunately,” answered Lazlo. “That was for the scholars. I read in my spare moments, and by staying up too late.”

  All of which sounded like paradise to Feral. “How many books are there?” he asked hungrily.

  “Too many to count. Thousands on every subject. History, astronomy, alchemy—”

  “Thousands of books on every subject?” repeated Feral, looking dazed and skeptical.

  “Poor Feral can’t picture it,” Sarai said gently. “He’s only ever seen one book, and he can’t read it.”

  “I can read,” said Feral, defensive. Great Ellen had taught them all. Since there was no paper in the citadel, she’d used a tray of crushed herbs and a stick, so that without even realizing it, they all associated reading with the scent of mint and thyme. “I just can’t read that.”

  Lazlo’s interest was piqued. Feral fetched the book in question: the only one they had. It was like no book Lazlo had seen. It wasn’t paper and board, but all mesarthium, cover and pages. Feral opened it and turned its thin metal sheets. The alphabet was angular and somehow menacing. It made Lazlo imagine that the corresponding language must be harsh to hear. “May I?” he asked before reaching out to touch it.

  It hummed against his fingers, seeming to whisper to his skin, just like the anchors, the citadel, and Rasalas. It had its own scheme of energies, small but dense, and he knew at first touch that there was more to it than met the eye. With a brush of his fingers, he awakened the page, and the markings engraved on it changed.

  “What did you do?” Feral demanded, reaching protectively for the book.

  Lazlo let it go, but tried to explain. “There’s more here than you can see. Look.” He reached back out and, with a fingertip, woke the page again, the runelike engravings melting away and giving rise to all new ones. “Every sheet remembers volumes of information.”

  “What kind of information?”

  But Lazlo couldn’t say. He had, on his own, decoded the language of Weep, but it had taken him years, and he’d had trade manifests to use to build a key. The thought of translating the gods’ language was daunting. When he drew his fingers away again, the page fell still on a diagram.

  “What’s that?” asked Sarai, bending her head toward it.

  The sheet was divided into narrow vertical columns, each one labeled in the inscrutable writing. “It looks like a row of books on a shelf,” said Lazlo, because the runes ran sideways, like titles printed on spines.

  “They look more like plates on the drying rack to me,” said Sarai, because, unlike the spines of books, each one tapered, disclike, to a point at the top and bottom.

  On a hunch, Lazlo touched the page and set it scrolling, the metal coming to life, the marks rolling over its surface in waves. They all watched, transfixed. Whatever the vertical shapes represented, they went on and on. There were dozens of them, each one labeled in the angular letters of the Mesarthim.

  More mystified by it than ever, Feral explained that the book had been found here, in Skathis’s chambers. “I’ve always thought there must be answers in it. Where the Mesarthim came from, and why.”

  “And what they did with the others,” Sparrow added softly.

  Whatever mystery the diagram represented, it faded away at the mention of this one:

  In the citadel, they’d lived their whole lives with
the question of the others—not the two dozen godspawn slain in the Carnage, but the ones who’d vanished before. Thousands of them, there had to have been, over two centuries of Mesarthim rule.

  “The other children,” said Lazlo, looking around at their solemn faces.

  “You know about them?” asked Feral.

  He did. He thought of Suheyla, and all the other women who’d birthed babies in the citadel and had their memories eaten by Letha before they were returned home. Over the past days, as Weep had revealed its dark history to him, this question had emerged: Why had the gods bred themselves on humans? Bred themselves on. His jaw clenched and he banished the pallid term, even from his mind. Why had the gods raped humans and forced them to bear—or father— their “godspawn”? Lazlo was certain that the rapes themselves weren’t the point but the means—that the children were the point. It was too systematic to be otherwise. There was even a nursery.

  So the question was: Why? And: What did they do with them? What did they do with all those children? “You’ve no idea what it was all about?” he asked.

  “We only know that they were taken away as soon as their gifts manifested,” explained Sarai. “Korako took them. The goddess of secrets.”

  “Korako,” Lazlo repeated. “But you don’t know where she took them?”

  They shook their heads.

  “Could you be one of them?” asked Sparrow, fixing on Lazlo.

  “I think Great Ellen thinks you are,” said Sarai, remembering. But they couldn’t ask the nurse now which baby boy she’d meant.

  Lazlo told them about his fragile wisp of memory: wings against the sky, and the feeling of weightlessness. “The white bird,” he said. “I think she took me to Zosma.”

  “Wraith?” said Sarai, surprised. “Why?”

  Why had the great white eagle carried him away from here and abandoned him in war-torn Zosma, if indeed she had? He had no idea. “Could she have taken all of them? All of us? Could that be the answer somehow? Did Wraith carry all the babies out into the world?”