by Laini Taylor
“They better not have eaten all the sugar,” said Ruby, and plunged on in to see what she could find.
“Savage,” said Feral, and followed her.
Sparrow hesitated, and followed, too, though not to scavenge for sugar. She found a large empty basket and began to gather up the bones and stack them neatly inside.
Lazlo helped her, shuddering at the skeletons’ fate. “I wonder how long they lasted.”
“Too long, I imagine. Trapped in a storeroom.” Sparrow shook her head. “It must have felt like luck at first, until no one came to free them.”
Lazlo knew what she meant. Trapped anywhere else, they’d have died within days. But here they’d had enough raw goods to keep themselves alive far past hope of rescue. It must have been a torment. He wondered how many others had been trapped when the doors stopped working. It made him worry. “Maybe I shouldn’t have reactivated the doors,” he said. “If something were to happen to me...” He gave Sparrow a comical squint. “Is that why you left yours open?”
She set a skull in the basket and let out a laugh. “Nothing so gloomy. I’m just used to it open. Though now that you mention it, maybe I’ll leave it.” She returned his squint and added a grimace. It was all jest, but then her gaze fixed on his swollen lip. Something seemed to occur to her, but she dismissed it and went back to the bones, only to look up a second later, pensive. “That must hurt,” she said.
Lazlo, brushing the dust of the dead off his hands, said, “I can’t complain.”
“Well, you could. It’s to your credit that you don’t. Believe me, I know complainers.” At that moment, as if on cue, a moan of wild lament reached them from deeper in the storeroom. It was Ruby, who had apparently found the sugar barrel empty. “Case in point,” said Sparrow. “Could I try something?”
She indicated his lip. Lazlo gave an uncertain shrug. She told him to close his eyes. He did, and he felt a light touch on his mouth. He was aware of the small throb in the wound, like a miniature heartbeat, and then a tingling. And then he was aware only of noise as Ruby emerged, literally incandescent with disappointment, the ends of her hair flickering flame as she cursed the skeletons as greedy.
“Ruby.” Feral tried reasoning with her. “They literally died of starvation.”
Sparrow had drawn her hand away from Lazlo’s cut, and the touch was forgotten in the ensuing argument. Lazlo, thinking perhaps it was best to explore the doorways one by one, reached back out with his mind to countermand his previous action.
Throughout the citadel, many doors had opened. Mostly they led down, into the torso. In Minya’s domain, off the atrium with its dome upheld by angel wings, a staircase was exposed, spiraling gracefully up through the column of the seraph’s neck into its head, with whatever secrets might lie therein.
And in the heart of the citadel, on the strange metal orb that floated dead center in the big, empty chamber, a seam appeared there, too. It ran vertically from zenith to nadir. Smoothly, soundlessly, the orb split and opened, and inside it there was...
. .. nothing.
The floating orb, twenty feet in diameter, was hollow, and it was empty. But...there was something wrong with the emptiness, though no one was there to notice. A nearly imperceptible warp wavered in its center. There was nothing there, but the nothing moved, like a pennant rippling in a breeze.
Throughout the citadel, the open doors reversed and began to melt back shut, all closing up again with no one to witness them. Except—
In the heart of the citadel, a cry poured itself into the quiet. The chamber had its way of eating sound, and what would, elsewhere, have been a banshee shriek, fell muffled, like a woman’s far-off wail. It was Wraith, the white bird, materialized out of nowhere. It dove toward the floating orb just as it was closing and slipped between the metal edges to hit the nothing head on, and...disappear.
Wraith was an unnatural thing, and much given to vanishing. But this was different. The bird didn’t fade or melt into the air. It hit the ripple of warp and the air parted around it, gaping open like a slash in fabric. There was a glimpse of sky, and...it was not Weep’s sky.
And then the edges of the air fell back into place. The orb closed. All was quiet.
The bird was gone.
Chapter 30
Like Eating Cake in Dreams
The sun set. A bland dinner was prepared and eaten. Sarai saw to Minya, fed her and cleaned her, left Feral watching over her, and went to her room.
Lazlo had gone ahead, and her steps up the long dexter corridor were much quicker and lighter than they usually were. In fact, her feet barely touched the floor. All these years, after sundown, when the others went to bed, she had gone back to her room—not to sleep, but to send out her moths and visit nightmares on the people of Weep. And though she’d passed through hundreds of minds every night, she’d always felt so alone. Not now.
At the door, she paused. Her insides fluttered, from knowing Lazlo was here and the whole night was ahead of them.
This morning, with the pink of sunrise slanting through the window, she’d vanished her clothes and lain down on the bed, and Lazlo had lain down with her. They’d slept, skin to skin, and met in a dream, and there, too, they’d lain skin to skin.
Being a ghost had a lot in common with being in a dream. Neither were “real,” in the strict sense of the word. Dreams drew on memory, experience. As Sarai had discovered with Lazlo, from their efforts at conjuring cake, you couldn’t taste what you didn’t already know.
It was the same with her ghostflesh. Sarai knew that all sensation now was her mind’s best guess based on what she’d experienced before, and she’d experienced almost nothing. Lazlo had never touched her real skin, except to carry her dead body, and she’d only kissed him in dreams. So when his lips brushed her nipple, or his fingertips traced round her navel, she could only imagine the feeling. It felt real. It felt wonderful, but she couldn’t help thinking it was like eating cake in dreams, which is to say: a pale phantom of the true and exquisite vastness of pleasure that is the privilege of the living.
Not that she’d appreciated that privilege while she was alive. She’d never had the chance, and now she never would. It was a sad thought, but there was a saving grace: In dreams, sensation could be shared, just like emotions and the flavor of cake. As long as it was known to one dreamer, it could be imparted to the other through the medium of the dream, so that when Sarai brushed her lips over Lazlo’s nipple, or traced her fingertips round his navel, she could feel what he was feeling, and share in the exquisite vastness by proxy.
That was what she was thinking, flushed, warm, and eager, when she stepped into her room...to find it transformed.
She halted in the doorway and stared around in astonishment. It had always been beautiful, but it had been just a room, and tainted by the fact that Skathis had made it for Isagol—one monster’s gift to another.
Whatever it had been, it was no longer “just a room.” It was a fairyland. It was a forest glade. It was alive.
There were trees, tall and slender, vine-draped and swaying. You couldn’t see the walls beyond them. A row of stepping-stones led between them and out of sight. Bewitched, Sarai stepped over the threshold. Just as she placed her foot on the first stone, a mesarthium snake glided over her toes. With a little gasp, she watched it vanish, sinuous, into the undergrowth. The details! Its little forked tongue. Tangles of ivy cascaded through ferns, and mushrooms no bigger than the end of her thumb grew on the mossy bark of the trees. She spotted a fox, a beetle. Both had wings, and darted out of sight.
It was, all of it, blue metal. But it was night, and everything looks blue at night. Sarai let her mind relax into the fantasy of it, and followed the stepping-stone path. It was like a fairy tale, and she might have been the maiden about to meet some mystical creature—a wish-granting crone or an enormous wise cat—and have her whole life transformed.
She came to a clearing, and it was not a crone or cat she met but Lazlo, leaning against a tr
ee, trying to look casual with a rather large iguana perched on his shoulder. “Oh, good evening,” he said. “Are you lost, miss? Can I help you?”
Sarai bit her lip to repress a smile, and tried to look demure. “I think I am lost,” she said, playing along. She looked around. It was so changed. The ceiling was high, no longer fan-vaulted but drooping with a lacework of leaves and blooms. Moths browsed among drooping bellflowers, and fireflies flitted by, their bellies lit by chips of glavestone. “Can you tell me...I believe there was a bed somewhere around here?”
“A bed, you say?” Lazlo struck a pondering pose. “Can you describe it?”
“Well, yes. It was big and horrible.”
“I know just the one.” He wrinkled his excellent crooked nose. “It belonged to the witch.”
“Yes, exactly.”
“It’s gone.” Confidingly, he said, “There’s a new one, though, made especially for the goddess of dreams.”
The goddess of dreams. The words filtered sweetly into Sarai’s mind, and she imagined a girl with cinnamon hair facing another in the mirror, the one the muse of nightmares, the other the goddess of dreams. Which was real, and which was reflection? “Indeed,” she said. “And do you expect her to pass this way?”
“I hope so.” Lazlo took his first step toward her. The iguana’s tail curled over his shoulder. “I made that path just to lure her here.”
“Do you mean to tell me, good sir, that you’re lurking in the woods in hopes of taking a goddess to bed?”
“I admit I am. I hope she doesn’t mind.”
“I promise you she doesn’t.”
The goddess of dreams, she thought, if there were such a person, would wear gossamer and moonlight. No sooner did she think it than she was it. Her skin let off a subtle glow. Her dress floated like evaporating mist, and a corona of stars and fireflies perched on her red-brown hair. “Show me this bed,” she said, her voice low and liquid, and Lazlo took her by the hand and led her through the trees.
The iguana was not invited.
Chapter 31
A Man Who Loves You Enough to Come Back to You Even When You’re a Biting Ghost
The next morning it was decided that Lazlo would go down to the city to talk to Eril-Fane.
He mounted Rasalas in the garden, and couldn’t help but remember the day at the library when he’d mounted a spectral and ridden out with the Tizerkane. It had been his first time riding anything, and he hadn’t been dressed for it, or in any way prepared. His robes had hiked up to show threadbare slippers and bare, pale calves, and he’d known he looked preposterous. Well, today he was barefoot and wearing a dead god’s underthings, but he didn’t feel preposterous now. It was impossible to feel foolish when the goddess of dreams looks at you with witchlight in her eyes.
“Come back to me,” Sarai told him, anxious. He had assured her he would be safe, and was able to keep himself so if need be, but she couldn’t help worrying. “Promise me.”
“I promise. Do you think anything could keep me away?” A glint came into Lazlo’s eye. “Who would not not kiss me if I didn’t have you?”
Sarai recalled her important job of protecting his lip from kissing. Well, she’d failed spectacularly at that last night. In fact, in the low light and the wonder of it all, she’d forgotten all about it, and there’d been no wincing or taste of blood to remind her. “I don’t care to speculate,” she said, and eyed the lip in question, which was looking much better. The swelling was all but gone, and what had been a livid gash was just a small scab now. It had healed fast, she thought.
“You don’t have to speculate,” Lazlo said. “I only want you. Even if you are a biting ghost.”
Sarai wrinkled her nose at him. “I’ll bite you right now,” she threatened.
He leaned down and let her. Her teeth were light on his lip, and so was the tip of her tongue. “You call that a bite?” he murmured against her mouth.
“It’s a bite that dreams of being a kiss,” she murmured back.
“Let’s teach it later.”
Sarai felt warm all over, and amazed by this new life that was theirs, and all the nights ahead to share in their enchanted glade. “I like that idea,” she said, and Lazlo straightened up. Sarai stroked the side of Rasalas’s neck as though it were a living thing, and then Lazlo was away, and she went to the balustrade and watched him fly, thinking how, of all the things she’d conjured in years of yearning for a different life, it had never occurred to her to wish for a man who’d love her enough to come back to her even when she was a biting ghost.
. . .
Over at the sinkhole, Thyon spotted the shape in the sky and paused in his hauling to point up and say, “Look.”
The pace of the donkey cart would not do, so they ran, all of them—Ruza, Tzara, Calixte, himself—through the deserted streets toward the city center, watching as creature and rider disappeared behind the roofline. Thyon ran because the others did, but he felt like an impostor. They had reason to run: Calixte out of eagerness to see her friend, and Ruza and Tzara either for that reason or else to do their part in defending the city against him. Thyon honestly didn’t know which, and he didn’t think they did, either. In any case, when they reached the garrison, they all went straight through the gate without turning to look back, and Thyon slowed, and came to a stop outside. He wasn’t Tizerkane. He couldn’t go in there. Calixte wasn’t, either, but she was different. She was liked.
The things she’d said before flashed through his mind as he stood alone outside the gate. It all boiled down to what kind of outsider one strove to be, and he felt it keenly: He was the wrong kind.
He would go around the garrison wall. It only took up a couple of city blocks. He didn’t know where Strange had landed, but if he walked the perimeter, he supposed he’d find out. And if he’d landed inside, well, it wasn’t as though Thyon had anything to say to him. Why had he even come? He might have stayed behind, climbed down into the sinkhole, and gone into the library on his own.
To walk stupidly amongst ancient texts that he could not decipher.
“Nero!” A shout.
Thyon turned. It was Ruza, his head poking out through the gates. “What are you doing?” he called, annoyed. “Come on.” As though it were a given that he should follow.
Thyon ran his fingers over the bandages on his palms, swallowed past the unaccountable lump in his throat, and did just that.
. . .
When he’d flown up from the city, Lazlo had been holding Sarai’s body, too distressed to appreciate that he was flying, and too grief-stricken for fear. Not to mention that flying up is an altogether different proposition than flying down. Going over the balustrade felt like plunging off a cliff, and there was a heart-stopping moment when he feared it was a mistake, and Rasalas would drop like a stone. But he didn’t. He soared. They soared, riding the magnetic fields like a raptor on an updraft.
They spiraled downward, descending toward the Tizerkane garrison in the center of the city. The last time Lazlo had been there, Ruza and Tzara and some of the others had joked about blowing the godspawn into “blue stew.” Their hate, as Suheyla had tried to warn him, was like a disease. Would they hate him now, too?
Flying lower, he spotted figures on the ground: running flat out, as though to man posts. He heard shouts. His wariness increased and he proceeded slowly, holding his breath as he came level with the watchtowers. Silhouettes moved within them. He couldn’t make out faces. He luffed Rasalas’s wings, feeling the weight of eyes as they settled onto the street—softly, with none of the jarring or cracking of paving stones that had been Skathis’s way. He dismounted and walked slowly forward, thinking that he would pose less of a threat away from the creature. Then he waited.
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, t
hey 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.”