Muse of Nightmares (Strange the Dreamer #2_UK)

by Laini Taylor

Her gift had come. It took the form of an awareness of something passing within reach. She didn’t know what, but by the third or fourth time she felt it, she knew she could grab it, keep it. She just knew, but she didn’t do it. She ignored it as best she could. To be seen with a faraway, puzzled expression was as sure a sign of gift manifestation as doing actual magic. The goddess’s spies would go and tell—Minya’s been seen thinking! Then Korako would come with her low voice and light touch, and it wouldn’t matter that she wasn’t cruel. You might even imagine she was sorry, but that didn’t matter, either. It wouldn’t stop her from taking you.

  Kiska had been gone for three weeks. They couldn’t play the dizzy game now. None of the others were strong enough to hold the other side of the hammock. Korako’s spies were watchful. Minya felt their eyes on her all the time. She would be next. She was overdue. When she felt the awareness, she pushed it down deep inside herself.

  “You’ll outgrow your cot before long,” Great Ellen observed that morning. Minya woke to find the nurse had been watching her sleep. That wasn’t good. Sometimes godspawn on the cusp of their gift slipped up in their sleep and gave themselves away.

  It was true, what Great Ellen said. Minya’s toes were starting to hang out over the end of her little metal bed. “I’ll curl up,” she said. “I don’t need to sleep all stretched out.”

  “This isn’t your home,” said the nurse.

  Less Ellen chimed in. “Don’t think you can trick us. We’ve seen it all.”

  Minya took the words as a challenge. She was good at games. She would trick them. She would not give in to her gift, no matter what it was.

  But she did, and only hours later. She still won the game, though, because the Ellens were dead, and when Minya learned what it was she could do, it was them she learned it on.

  It all started with strange noises in the corridor: shouts and running feet. And then a man appeared in the doorway, out of breath, with a knife in his hand. He was small and trim, with a pointed beard. He was human, brown-skinned like the Ellens. He skidded to a stop in front of the door, his face all lit up with triumph.

  “They’re dead!” he shouted, glorying. “All dead, every one. The monsters are slain and we are free!”

  Monsters? Minya wondered with a jolt of fear. What monsters?

  The Ellens peppered him with questions, and when Minya grasped what monsters were dead, she was not in the least bit sad. Dread, after all, was a pale-haired goddess, and she didn’t have to fear her anymore. When the Ellens whooped for joy and shouted, “Thakra be praised! We’re free!” she actually thought, for a sweet, thrilling moment, that she might be free with them, and all the rest of the godspawn, too.

  The shouting alarmed the babies. Some began to cry. And the Ellens turned and looked at them, and Minya knew then that whatever cause for joy they had, it spelled nothing good for her and hers.

  “There’s still the little monsters to deal with,” Great Ellen said to the man.

  And the three of them surveyed the rows of cribs and cots with such revulsion.

  “I’ll bring Eril-Fane,” said the man with the pointed beard. “I reckon he deserves to do the honors.”

  The honors.

  “Don’t take too long,” Less Ellen told him. She wore an eye patch. The eye she’d had there had been lazy. Isagol hadn’t cared for it, and so had plucked it out with her fingers. “I can’t stand to stay here for one more minute.”

  “Here,” said the man, handing over the knife. “Take this in case you need it.”

  He looked right at Minya when he said it, and then he was gone and the Ellens were giddy, laughing and saying, “We’re getting out of here, at last.”

  A little boy named Evran, four years old, went up to them, infected by their laughter, and asked, bright and eager, “Where are we going?”

  The laughter evaporated. “We’re going home,” Great Ellen said, and Minya understood that she and the other children were going nowhere.

  Ever.

  The man who had killed the gods was coming to kill them, too.

  She grabbed up Evran and darted for the door. It wasn’t a plan. It was panic. Less Ellen grabbed her by the wrist and yanked her right off her feet. Minya kicked out at her, and let go of Evran. Less Ellen dropped the knife. Minya got to it first. The little boy scrambled back to hide behind a cot.

  All the rest was a blur.

  The knife lay on the ground. The red was spreading—a glistening pool on the shining blue floor. The Ellens were lying still, their eyes open and staring, and...and they were standing there, too, right beside their own bodies. Their ghosts were staring at Minya, aghast. She was the only one who could see them, and she didn’t want to look. None of it felt real—not the bodies, the ghosts, the spreading pool of red or the slickness on her hands. Her fingers moved, smearing it over her palms. And it wasn’t sweat. It had never been sweat. It was red, red and wet, and when she grabbed Sarai and Feral, she got it on them, too. They were stricken, too shocked to cry, emitting hiccuping gasps as though they’d forgotten how to breathe. Their little hands kept slipping out of her grip. They were pulling away. They didn’t want to go with her.

  Because of what they had seen her do.

  Do you want to die, too? Do you?

  They probably thought she was going to kill them next. She dragged them over their slain nurses and out into the corridor. She didn’t know her way around the citadel; she had hardly ever been out of the nursery. It was luck that brought her to the almost-shut door, too narrow for adults to squeeze through. If she’d gone any other way, they would have been caught and killed. She pushed the little ones through the narrow opening and went back for more.

  But she was too late. The Godslayer was already there. All she could do was listen, frozen in place, as the screams were cut off one by one.

  Chapter 53

  A Creature Riddled with Empty Spaces

  “Minya, it’s all right. Minya!” Sarai crouched at her side. She saw the sheer, naked panic in the little girl’s eyes.

  “They were all I could carry,” Minya told her, shaking.

  “I know. You did so well. It’s over now,” Sarai told her. “I promise. It’s all over.”

  But Minya saw the Ellens’ ghosts and recoiled. She couldn’t unsee their leering faces, and she couldn’t unknow the truth. She’d killed them once, and she’d kept them. She’d needed them. She could never have cared for four babies on her own!

  The rest had been unconscious. It was the first time she ever used her gift. She didn’t even know what it was, and she did it in a haze of trauma. She was six years old and everyone was dead. She took hold of the nurses’ souls and made them into what she needed them to be: someone to love and look after them all—like mothers, as best she could imagine, never having been privileged to know one. And her mind had smeared a blur around it, and the Ellens’ tethers had grown into her, concrescent with her own soul, like the rhizomes of Sparrow’s orchids all tangling together.

  She couldn’t just release them. She had to uproot them.

  And she did.

  She ripped them out of her, and for a brief moment, before the tide of unmaking took hold of them, the Ellens were themselves again. For fifteen years they’d been shoved down deep into the recesses of their own souls while a stronger will guided them, became them. They’d been there, underneath, all along, trapped, and now they surfaced.

  Sarai saw them become the women from the dream, eyes like eel flesh, puckered mouths, and menace. Just for an instant, just enough to know. Then the air took them up and pulled them apart, and the Ellens were no more.

  . . .

  When Minya let go of her army, a tremendous weight lifted. That was not what happened when she let go of the Ellens.

  She hadn’t known she was crushed until she wasn’t, and she didn’t know she was fragmented until she became whole. Fifteen years ago, she’d desperately needed someone to care for four babies, and she’d created those someones. She’d been t
hem, and the whole time, she’d hidden it from herself, because... she’d needed someone, too.

  And so the parts of her that nurtured and sang and loved went out of her to animate them, and she was what was left: fear and rage and vengeance.

  When the Ellens evanesced, her fragments came back to her. It wasn’t weight, exactly. It was more like...fullness. She had been a creature riddled with empty spaces, a ventriloquist, a puppet master, a little girl in pieces.

  Now she was just a person.

  . . .

  Eril-Fane beckoned the medics to approach. They did, wide eyes darting from one godspawn to the next, giving Minya a wide berth, and hesitating in front of Sparrow. Ruby held her sister in her arms and glared at the warriors. Feral planted himself beside her and helped her glare. It was a detente. Suheyla went over to mediate.

  Eril-Fane told them, “You are all under my protection. I swear it.”

  Minya looked to Sarai. The Godslayer was the last person in the world whose vow she could believe. But Sarai nodded. “You’re safe,” she said. “You’ll all be safe now.”

  And Minya heard what was hiding in her words. You, not we, because of course Sarai was not safe. By releasing her army, Minya might have slowed her fading, but she couldn’t stop it. Just by holding Sarai, she was using her gift. She would use it up, and Sarai would evanesce. The question was: How long did she have?

  Minya looked at her hands, and it was even worse than she’d feared. The gray was already shading into the warmer, richer realm of brown. Her breath left her in a rush. She looked up and met Sarai’s eyes, and saw fierce, sad courage in them.

  “What can we do?” Minya asked her.

  Sarai shook her head. She was fighting back tears. She, too, saw the brown creeping into Minya’s color, but there was a far worse tell that was hers alone. She could already feel the cold of the unmaking seeping through the ether to claim her. It wouldn’t be long now. “Listen to me, Minya. Whatever you do, promise me you’ll find Lazlo. You have to save him from her.”

  Minya’s eyes and nostrils flared. Anger chased away all her meek, unwelcome fear, and she relished it. Standing up as tall as she could, which wasn’t very, she said, with all her old ungraciousness, “Save him yourself.” And then she turned on her heel, stalked up to Eril-Fane, whom all her life she’d dreamed of killing, and spoke to him. Her teeth were gritted the whole time, but nevertheless, she spoke. She said, “I seem to recall you have some flying machines around here.”

  Chapter 54

  Merry Hell Indeed

  Lazlo had stopped struggling. His long hair hung in his face. His legs were bruised and aching from trying to pull them free of the metal, but he’d finally given up. How much time had passed? An hour? He didn’t know. Was it more than the length of time it had taken Minya to fade before? If it wasn’t, it was close. Sarai might already be gone.

  A void opened up inside him.

  All last night, in the glade he had made for her, in the sunken bed he’d crafted for the goddess of dreams, they had lapped in and out of sleep like waves gliding over soft white sand. And in both states—awake, asleep—they were together. “I want to try something,” Sarai had said, bashful, her teeth teasing her luscious lower lip. Her mist dress had been evaporating off her like dawn fog wicked away by the sun.

  “So do I,” he’d replied, his voice seeming to surface from somewhere deep inside him.

  “You tell me yours,” she’d coaxed, half sultry, half silly, “and I’ll tell you mine.”

  “You first,” he’d said, and she’d told him her idea: that since she, being. .. differently alive—as they had taken to calling her ghost state (“dead” not feeling even remotely accurate)—couldn’t experience new sensation, he would share his. That is to say: While they were awake, it was his responsibility to discover pleasure for them both, and then, while they were asleep, to impart it to her through the generous medium of dreams.

  “That sounds like a lot of work,” he’d said, acting weary, and she’d batted at him, and he’d caught her hand, and captured her waist in the crook of his arm, and fallen sideways, carrying her with him onto the bed sunk down between hummocks of mesarthium moss and leaning trees with leaves shaped like stars.

  It turned out that her idea extravagantly encompassed his own, and quite a few other things, too.

  They hadn’t made love. They’d come to it in the course of things, more than once, both awake and in dreams, and each time they’d paused and held this tremendous thing between them—this certainty, this promise. That was what it had felt like: something that was theirs to come to in sweet time. And maybe waiting had been a way of laying claim to the future, and all the nights and mornings yet to come.

  Now it felt as though they’d challenged fate to a duel and lost. There would be no more nights and no more mornings, not for Sarai, or with her. All the fight went out of Lazlo, and all the joy and wonder and witchlight. He slumped and lay back on the walkway where he was still trapped by his own magic that had been stolen and turned against him.

  The metal beneath him was sticky with the blood of Eril-Fane and Azareen, and this grief burned cold in his gut beside the other.

  He thought back to the day the Tizerkane came to the Great Library of Zosma. Eril-Fane had stood before the scholars in the Royal Theater and told them that his people had passed through a long, dark time and come out of it alive and strong. But now he was dead, and Azareen, too. Weep’s long, dark time had tracked them down.

  Or Nova had, anyway.

  She had remained, all this while, in her vague state, exhausted but intent on transferring the citadel out of Zeru. There had been a bizarre, protracted moment when the chamber had to warp out of shape to pass through the portal. The sphere had folded in on itself and narrowed to a tube before slowly reclaiming its shape on the other side. That was the only way Lazlo knew they were through to the other world.

  Wraith circled, relentless, never far from Nova. Kiska, Rook, and Werran waited at the threshold, keeping a wary eye on their leader, and a conflicted one on Lazlo.

  Kiska came over, hesitant, a while after he’d given up pleading and struggling. She wanted to ask him...many things. She couldn’t get Minya’s face out of her mind—the version from years ago, as she’d looked defying Korako, and the version from this day, when she’d looked just the same defying Nova. Exactly, impossibly the same. But Lazlo’s eyes looked like burned-out holes, and all she could bring herself to ask him was: “...are you all right?”

  He stared at her, unable to process the question. All right? Was he.. . all right? Dead-eyed, and recalling that she was a telepath, he gestured to his head and said, “Why don’t you come in and see.”

  Kiska declined the invitation.

  . . .

  “What in merry hell is going on out there?” asked Calixte. She might have meant it rhetorically, not expecting Thyon to know, but his mind was working on the puzzle and would not let go until he had an answer. Sky portals, melting armies, gray children, plenty of blood. Merry hell indeed.

  The two of them were crouching in the first tier of the amphitheater. Arrows had, until a moment ago, been whizzing over their heads. They had witnessed everything, and understood... not everything.

  When it had all started to go mad—the citadel coming alive— Thyon had considered, with admirable calm, that he might die. The whole city could topple. It had felt likely for a few minutes there. Or else the citadel might outright step on him. An image had popped into his mind of an elaborately carved headstone engraved with the words stepped on by an angel in the prime of his life. A hysterical laugh had escaped from his throat, drawing a glare from Calixte, who couldn’t imagine what was funny.

  He hadn’t tried to explain.

  Back in Zosma, months ago, he’d boasted to Strange, “Stories will be told about me.” It gave him chills of shame to remember his pompous airs, and he couldn’t help thinking that being stepped on by an angel made a fitting ending to that story. But he was gl
ad he wasn’t dead.

  And he was glad that Ruza and Tzara weren’t, either, and no one else, that he could see—if you didn’t count all those apparitions who had melted into the air. What had they been? Illusions? If so, how had their weapons rung out like that, clashing against the Tizerkane spears?

  The sound alone had left him trembling, even up here. Ruza and Tzara had been in the thick of it, fighting that mystifying army, and Thyon had flinched with every blow that shuddered through his friend.

  Friends, plural, he corrected himself. He hadn’t just watched Ruza, of course. As he bargained under his breath with imaginary deities, he’d made an excellent offer for Tzara’s safety, too. He wondered if he would have to pay up, now that the fighting was over and his friends were alive. Or maybe the debt would fall to Calixte. She had threatened rather than bargained, much louder than he, and with far more profanity.

  “Isn’t that Lazlo’s girl?” she asked now. Since the mystical army had mystically vanished, they had a clear view of what and who the citadel had dropped here—and what and who had been the target of all the spears and arrows. It was rather egregious overkill, if you asked Thyon.

  He saw:

  —Eril-Fane and Azareen, both looking weak in blood-smeared armor

  —Eril-Fane’s mother

  —A thin little creature of a girl who wasn’t blue but gray

  —Two young women and a young man, of whom two were blue, and one apparently human, with an arrow sticking out of her shoulder

  —Strange’s girl, maybe. Thyon hadn’t gotten a good look at her the other day, but she’d had this same whip of red-brown hair.

  “I thought she was dead,” he said.

  “Maybe she is,” said Calixte. “This is Weep. You can’t expect things to make sense here.”

  Thyon didn’t agree. “I expect they make perfect sense,” he said. “Just under a different set of rules.” It was a matter of learning the rules, like learning a new language. He felt doubly in the dark then, locked out of both rules and language, as a heated discussion broke out below, the little gray girl’s high voice vying with Eril-Fane’s deep one.