Muse of Nightmares (Strange the Dreamer #2_UK)

by Laini Taylor

  “Kora?” Nova asked, her voice quavering but bright with an eagerness that was childlike in its pure, naked vulnerability.

  Sarai’s own rage died like a smothered fire. Her remorse was instantaneous. This woman might be her enemy, and she might even now be tormenting people Sarai loved, but this was a cruelty she wouldn’t wish on anyone—to be taunted with phantoms of the beloved dead, and given hope where there was none. She hadn’t meant it. She wanted to take it back.

  Nova reached out with trembling hands and laid her palms to Sarai’s face—Sarai’s face that was shaped into her dead sister’s face. Her touch was unspeakably tender, and her smile unbearably sweet. She practically glowed with relief—as though she’d thought her reason for living lost, and been granted a last-second reprieve.

  Sarai drew back and returned at once to her own form. “I’m sorry,” she said quickly. “I’m not...”

  Her words trailed away.

  Again, Nova was transfigured, but not by hope this time. Sarai felt as though she were seeing into a bottomless well of anguish. She had the feeling of falling headlong into it, and she hardly knew if it was Nova’s anguish or her own. For that instant, at least, they seemed one and the same, as though all anguish exists in the same deep well, no matter what loss or misfortune leads us to it. We might be at odds, hate each other, and desire each other’s destruction, but in our despair, we are lost in the same darkness, breathing the same air as we choke on our grief.

  If the anguish had been black before the false hope, what Nova felt after was indescribable. With a wail she flew at Sarai and wrapped her hands around her neck. Sarai became mist. Nova couldn’t grab her. She couldn’t strangle or strike her. She didn’t know what Sarai was, but she was beyond trying to figure it out. All she wanted in that moment was to hurt her, and there was more than one way to do that.

  Her mind lashed out like a whip and seized Kiska’s power. Telepathy was a gift of great subtlety. It could infiltrate minds and sift memories, hear thoughts, feel emotions, plant ideas. Nova had no use for subtlety now. She turned it around and used it to pour all her pain into Sarai.

  From the very first, back on Rieva, Nova’s power had been like a lighthouse lens, amplifying the intensity of whatever gift she wielded. It had only grown since then. Now it was more like her name: nova, a star that steals energy from nearby stars and explodes into violent radiance.

  Her pain exploded at Sarai. Like a blast, it blew her backward, out through the door to hit the wall of the passage and slide down to the floor.

  Sarai had died and cremated her own body. She had known crippling nightmares and the misery of a people oppressed by bad gods. But she had never felt despair like this before. She felt flayed open, skinned and hacked apart and left for the flies and carrion birds, like the husks of dead creatures on a desolate beach at the bottom of a faraway world.

  She buckled under its weight. A voice inside her told her to fight, but it was so faint, and she felt so heavy—so alone—and she knew she was lost. They all were. Her own feelings—any hope and courage that were in her—were washed away by the torrent of despair. Nothing and no one could save them now.

  “What have you done?”

  The voice barely registered. It was outside the misery. It couldn’t possibly matter. Nothing mattered anymore.

  “WHAT. HAVE. YOU. DONE?”

  The voice was icing sugar and iron. Sarai blinked, shock searing a path through the haze of despair. She managed to turn her head. And there stood Minya with her army behind her.

  Chapter 44

  A Pirate’s Smile

  Ghosts flooded into the heart of the citadel.

  Nova and her cohort didn’t know what they were. They were floating. They cascaded off the edge of the walkway, a rippling river of men and women buoyed on the air without boots like their own to countervail gravity. Most were old, their hair white, gray, or sparse, faces lined. But there were younger men and women, too, and even some children among them. They weren’t wearing anything resembling armor, but they were formed up in ranks and moving with precision. They wielded knives and meat mallets. Some hefted big iron hooks. Others carried nothing, but had claws and fangs, and there seemed no end to their numbers. In they flowed, dauntless, expressionless. Inexplicable.

  They were human. Their skin was brown, not blue. So what magic was making them float? There was no time to wonder. They attacked.

  Nova met them with her stolen powers. Fireballs bloomed in her fists. She hurled them. They hit the leading edge of the oncoming assault and exploded in bursts of white flame. The soldiers—if that’s what they were—ought to have been engulfed in fire, but they weren’t. Sparks rained down, harmless. The flames died away, and the soldiers came on, unfazed.

  Rook, Werran, and Kiska held their lightning prods before them, and they drew their short swords from their scabbards, but they had little faith in their weapons. These foes were not natural. Could they even be hurt?

  Nova unleashed godsmetal next. She peeled strips from the curve of the walls, shaped them into scythe blades, and sent them spinning so fast they blurred. The soldiers ought to have been maimed, dozens at a swipe, but they didn’t even bleed. Their flesh re-formed with every strike and they just kept on coming. They engaged.

  There was a ringing of metal on metal as Rook and Werran parried the first blows.

  Nova let go of Kiska’s telepathy, and the torrent of despair dissipated. Sarai rose shakily to her feet in the passage. Ghosts were still pouring past her. Minya was standing stock-still. Her face was terrible, both bleak with hurt and dark with disgust. Her eyes were slits, her nostrils flared. She was flushed violet and breathing fast. Her little body was shaking with rage.

  Sarai had never been so glad to see her. “We’re under attack,” she told her in a rush. “The orb. It’s a doorway. They were waiting.”

  “You drugged me,” seethed Minya through gritted teeth while her ghosts clashed in the air with an enemy she had not yet laid eyes on.

  She had woken up alone on the floor, with a bad taste in her mouth and a worse one in her mind. In that first moment, she’d thought—what else would she think?—that the Godslayer must have attacked and won. Her mind had screamed and all she could think was that she’d failed again to protect her people—that she’d gotten the fight she wanted, and, unthinkably, lost, and lost them.

  That had been a very bad moment. The next was...complicated, because she saw the green glass bottle, and the truth struck her backhanded. Her people were alive, and had betrayed her. It stole her breath. They’d drugged her and left her defenseless. They’d taken the Godslayer’s side, and left her on the floor like dropped laundry. She’d picked up the bottle and hurled it at the wall, where it smashed into a million pieces. Then she’d turned on her heel and marched out of the bedroom, down her stairs, and out into the passage.

  Her army was just as she’d left it, formed up in ranks in the gallery. The Ellens rushed to meet her and tried to placate her. “Now, let’s not assume the worst, my love,” Great Ellen had said in a warning tone. “They may have had their reasons.”

  “Where are they?” demanded Minya, ready to spit on their reasons.

  But the Ellens didn’t know where they were. They, too, were just waking up, and were as confused as she was. “Something’s not right,” said Less Ellen.

  As soon as she’d voiced it, Minya knew it was true. The whole citadel was thrumming with a dark, unwelcome energy. “There’s somebody here,” she said.

  She was furious at her family for what they’d done to her. But they were hers, and this was her home, and gods help anyone who interfered with either.

  Now Sarai, stricken, said, “I’m sorry.”

  “Shut up,” Minya spat. “I’ll deal with you later.”

  And she followed her ghosts into battle.

  Ruby, Sparrow, Feral, and Suheyla were still in the entrance to the chamber. Eril-Fane had wanted them to flee, but they’d been too stunned by his and Azareen
’s dying—and dying and dying and dying—and stood rooted by their horror. When Minya stalked past them, they were overwhelmed by relief at the sight of her.

  Who’d ever have thought they’d be so glad to see Minya?

  Lazlo stood halfway up the walkway. When Sarai had been hurled back, he’d spun to follow, but halted as the army came flooding in. He flashed hot and cold at the sight of them bearing down, remembering the last time, in the silk sleigh, when he had barely escaped with his life. They weren’t coming for him this time, though. They parted around him and overwhelmed the invaders.

  In the heart of the citadel, the battle raged. Nova held five gifts in her keeping: Lazlo’s, Ruby’s, Feral’s, and Sarai’s—though she still didn’t know what Sarai’s was—and Rook’s. She lashed out with godsmetal, disarming soldiers only to see them turn monstrous and attack with their teeth instead. Rook, Werran, and Kiska were fighting with their lightning prods and short swords, but their thrusts went right through these foes, and fear was showing on their faces. Kiska was bleeding from a wound to her arm. Werran grappled with a little girl who’d gotten through his guard when he was too appalled to strike her. This was Bahar, nine years old, who’d drowned in the Uzumark and was always sopping wet. Rook saw her bite Werran, her teeth clamping down on his wrist, and he tried to drag her off, but she melted under his hands, somehow keeping her teeth in Werran’s flesh. She ground down, savage. Werran gave a cry and Bahar wrested away his prod with unchildlike strength and turned it on Rook, sending a jolt of lightning through him that blacked his vision to null and sent him flying back into the open orb, his eyes rolling back in his head.

  He didn’t get up.

  Nova knew fear such as she hadn’t felt in many years. They were so outnumbered, and this enemy made no sense. They weren’t flesh, or even magic. They swarmed at her with their blank faces and preternatural strength, and she deflected them with godsmetal, throwing up shields to protect herself and her cohort. She was on the defensive, losing ground. How could they be stopped? Werran’s war cry, she thought, but she was stretched too thin, holding five gifts already, to seize it and use it on her own.

  “Werran!” she barked. “Now!”

  He dragged in breath, ready to comply.

  But the breath rushed back out in a hard exhale. Werran didn’t scream. He stared. Because the ranks of attackers had melted apart to reveal a figure in the doorway. She was neither floating nor wielding a weapon. She stood with her arms at her sides, head lowered, peering at them from the tops of her eyes with exquisite, unblinking animus. She was a child. She was so small, her wrists as thin as gnawed bird bones. Her hair was short and choppy, her garment in tatters, hanging loose off one shoulder to show a clavicle as frail as the shaft of a feather. Everything about the sight of her was improbable: her size, her stillness, her black-eyed wrath. But none of that was what stopped Werran’s breath. He faltered because he knew her. So did Kiska. Rook, unconscious, would have known her, too. She was not forgettable, not even a little, and she had not changed in fifteen years.

  “. . . Minya?” asked Kiska, her voice breaking.

  Minya’s brows knit together, then fell smooth as her face blanked with shocked recognition. Her ghosts paused, all as one, including Sarai. Lazlo had just reached her. He saw her expression freeze.

  Nova saw, too. All the soldiers stopped moving at precisely the same moment, and, in a flash, she understood. Just like that, the army’s orchestrated movements made sense. This enemy she couldn’t hurt, these smoke soldiers she couldn’t stop, they belonged to this fierce little creature. They were doing her bidding. This was her magic.

  And suddenly, this unstoppable foe wasn’t unstoppable anymore. With a pirate’s smile of vicious delight, Nova reached out and stole Minya’s gift.

  Chapter 45

  If Stabbing Were a Dance

  There was no way Nova could have known.

  Nothing could have prepared her. She was a pirate, her gift rarer than rare, her magnitude off the charts. She’d ripped power from elementals, shape-shifters, war witches. She’d fought duels and battles and never been bested. But seizing this gift, she found out at once, was like taking hold of a mountain, and with a sharp little tug, pulling it down on her own head.

  It was impossible, the weight of it. A wave of blackness rolled across her vision, threatening to churn her under. She fought it with every fiber of her being, knowing that if she lost consciousness now, she would never regain it.

  With an effort of will that burst stars across her vision, she fought her way free of the dark. Staggering, she stared at the little girl in the doorway and couldn’t fathom how she could hold such power. It was so much heavier than any gift she’d ever taken. She could feel it burning through her as though she were a candlewick. How was it possible for such a tiny thing to bear such magic and not be consumed?

  . . .

  If Nova was stunned by the weight of Minya’s power, Minya was stunned by its loss.

  She had gathered her souls one by one over years. The weight had built up gradually, and she’d built up a tolerance with it. She didn’t know what she carried until it lifted. She didn’t know that she was crushed until she wasn’t. She couldn’t remember what it had been like before, when she was just a girl, and not an anchor for ghosts. She wasn’t like the others, using her magic only as needed—to light a fire, catch a cloud, send out moths, or grow the garden. She was using it all the time. If she let up, her ghosts would evanesce. There was no drawer she could put them in to give herself a rest, no hook she could tie their tethers to, to keep them in the world. It was just her, and the fist she imagined in her mind, with all those fine gossamers clutched in it.

  Even in her rare snatched moments of sleep, she held on to them. She’d grown up under the burden of them—or rather, she’d not grown up. Minya used up every ounce of her energy in this colossal, incessant expenditure of power. She spent too much. She spent everything, and had nothing left over to grow on.

  She was a candlewick, and her power was a fire burning her up every moment. But she was a candlewick that, by sheer cussedness, refused to be consumed.

  Nova felt as though a mountain fell on her. Minya felt the same weight lift. The strain evaporated. As lungs fill with air, her body filled with life. She was as light as a dust mote, as buoyant as a butterfly. And it wasn’t just the weight of the souls, but the incessant drag of their hate-fear-despair. All that clamor and misery cut off, and the quiet of its absence was as soft as velvet, and as deep and rich as the night sky.

  She felt reborn. For a brief, amazed moment, she felt something like peace.

  Then the panic set in. She was powerless. Her army was her might. Without it she was naught but bird bones and rage.

  Minya and Nova faced each other across the heart of the citadel—the one stripped of magic, the other overwhelmed. The ghosts, for the moment, were still, as Nova grappled to bear up under the threatening tide of darkness. She had no choice but to let go of the other gifts she was holding, though she knew that once she did they would be turned against her. She released Rook’s first, but not until after she severed the time loop and set Eril-Fane and Azareen free.

  She didn’t have to. She could have left it to keep on going and going, and would have, but she saw that Rook was regaining consciousness, and she knew that if she didn’t break the loop, he would.

  The thing about Rook’s time loops: They didn’t have to be opened in the same place as they’d been closed. That was the true beauty of his magic. It was for more than repeating an event over and over, or glutting a grieving goddess on vengeance. It was for reaching back in the flow of time—ten seconds at the most, but ten seconds could be everything—and saying: No. I don’t want that to happen. And fixing it so it didn’t.

  Nova had made the loop after the stinger sliced through the two bodies. But she could, if she chose, break it open before. Rook would,

  if it were up to him.

  Eril-Fane and Azareen could have l
ived.

  But Nova had no mercy. Even under the crushing avalanche of Minya’s magic, she held out for a second, then another, until the stinger cut its path, and blood painted its pattern, and the damage was done. Only then did she slash the loop so the bubble vanished and the capsule of trapped time spilled back into the flow, Eril-Fane’s and Azareen’s lives spilling with it.

  As soon as it was done, she let Rook’s gift go, and felt a scintilla of relief.

  The others all saw what happened. No matter how terrible the loop, as long as the warriors kept coming back to life, there had been some hope, and now it was lost. This time when they slumped over, it was final. They didn’t rise. Their blood flowed only outward, and there was just so much of it. Suheyla let out a cry and sagged against Feral, weeping. Lazlo stood with Sarai, who was frozen along with the rest of the ghosts. It was Sparrow who pelted down the walkway, heedless of danger, to try to press on the wounds as the warriors bled out.

  Nova let go of Ruby’s and Feral’s gifts next, and they felt their return like missing pieces slammed back in place, and immediately called on them. Ruby kindled fireballs, and Feral clawed a thunderhead out of a far-off sky. Sarai’s gift returned, too, but it was useless as a weapon, even if she hadn’t been frozen with all the ghosts.

  Nova struggled to wield Minya’s power. It was so big it was like trying to ride a wild creature that wanted to swallow her whole. She knew she couldn’t keep it, or it would annihilate her. And she couldn’t let it go, or the little girl would. The solution was simple. She’d done it countless times before, starting back at the beginning, with Zyak and Shergesh.

  She managed to turn some of the ghosts toward Minya. She made them raise up their knives.

  Minya’s eyes grew wide, and in a startled split second she got an inkling of the powerlessness she had inflicted on others. If stabbing were a dance, it would look like this: a score of blades flashing in flawless unison. They had her surrounded. She stood there, stunned, as they arced toward her.