Muse of Nightmares (Strange the Dreamer #2_UK) Page 4

  “We don’t have to decide the whole course of our lives right this moment,” said Great Ellen. She fixed her gaze on Minya. Her eyes weren’t hawk-like now, but soft and velvety brown and filled with devoted compassion.

  Inside Minya, something was coiled, growing tighter and tighter the more the others faced her down. Telling her what to do could only back her into a corner, where she would, like a trapped thing, fight to the bitter end. From the start, Lazlo had raised her hackles by coming out of nowhere like an impossible vision—a Mesarthim, astride Rasalas!—and ordering her to catch Sarai’s soul. As though she wouldn’t have on her own! The gall of him. It burned like acid. He’d even pinned her to the ground, Rasalas’s hoof hard on her chest. It ached, and she was sure a bruise was forming, but it was nothing next to her resentment. By compelling her by force to do what she’d been doing already, it was as though he’d won something, and she’d lost.

  What if he’d asked instead? Please, won’t you catch Sarai’s soul? Or, better yet, trusted that she just would. Oh, it wouldn’t have been all how-do-you-do and sitting down to tea, but would Sarai be frozen in the air right now? Perhaps not.

  And though Lazlo couldn’t be expected to know her, the others certainly should. But of them all, only Great Ellen understood what to do. “One thing at a time and first things first,” she said. “Why don’t you tell us, pet. What’s first?”

  Instead of ordering, the nurse asked. She deferred to her, and let her choose, and the coiled thing in Minya relaxed just a little. It was fear, of course, though Minya did not know it. She believed it was rage, only and always rage, but that was the costume it wore, because fear was weakness, and she had vowed to never again be weak.

  She might have replied that first they would kill Eril-Fane. It was what they expected. She could see it in their wariness. But she saw something else in them, too: a budding defiance. They had tested their voices against her, and they still had the taste in their mouths. It would be stupid to push them right now, and Minya was not stupid. In life, as in quell, direct attacks meet with the greatest resistance. It’s better to be oblique, lull them into lowering their defenses. So she took a step back and, with effort, grew calm.

  “First,” she said, “we should see to Sarai.”

  And with that, she let her go—her substance, not her soul. No tricks. She’d made her point.

  Released from her grip, Sarai fell back to the ground. It was abrupt, and she collapsed to her knees. All those long moments she’d been held rigid, paralyzed, she’d been fighting it, probing for weakness. But there was no weakness. Minya’s hold on her had been absolute, and now that she was freed, she began to shake uncontrollably.

  Lazlo rushed forward to hold her, murmuring in his gravelly voice. “You’re all right now,” he said. “I have you. We’ll save you, Sarai. We’ll find a way. We’ll save you.”

  She didn’t answer. She rested against him, depleted, and all she could think was: How?

  The others—except Minya—all clustered around, stroking her arms, her hair, asking if she was all right, and casting shy looks at Lazlo, who was, after all, the first living stranger to ever stand in their midst.

  It was Sparrow, face clouded, who turned to Minya and asked, uncertain, “What did you mean by ‘see to her’?”

  “Oh,” said Minya, screwing up her face as though the subject were regrettable. “As you were so kind to point out to me before, Sarai’s dead.” She fluttered her fingers toward the body. “We can’t just leave that lying there, can we? We’re going to have to burn it.”

  Chapter 5

  The Sting and the Ache

  Burn it.

  It shouldn’t have come as a shock, but it did. The soil in the garden was too shallow for burial, and of course Minya was right: You couldn’t just leave a body lying around. But they were none of them ready to face what must be done. It was all too raw, the body too real and too... Sarai.

  “No,” said Lazlo, stricken pale. He still couldn’t reconcile the two of her. “We...we have her body and we have her soul. Can’t we just...put them back together?”

  Minya raised her eyebrows. “Put them back together?” she parroted, her tone mocking. “What, like pouring an egg back into its shell?”

  Great Ellen placed a quelling hand on her shoulder and told Lazlo, with utmost gentleness, “It doesn’t work like that, I’m afraid.”

  Sarai knew her body was beyond repair. Her hearts had been pierced, her spine shattered, but still she wished for this same miracle. “Weren’t there godspawn who could heal?” she asked, thinking of all the other magical children born in the citadel and vanished from it over the years.

  “Indeed there were,” said the nurse. “But they’d do us no good. Death can’t be healed.”

  “One who could bring back the dead, then,” she persisted. “Weren’t there any?”

  “If there were, they’re no help to us now, bless them wherever they may be. There’s no saving your body, love. I’m sorry for it, but Minya’s right.”

  “But to burn it,” said Ruby in soft panic, for it was she who would have to light the fire. “It’s so...permanent.”

  “Death is permanent,” said Less Ellen, “while flesh very much is not.” She was less a force of nature than Great Ellen, but she was a steady presence with her calming hands and sweet voice. When they were small she had sung them lullabies from Weep. Now she said, “It’s best done soon. Nothing to be gained by waiting.”

  The Ellens should know. They had tended their own murdered bodies once upon a time, and burned them in a pyre along with all the gods and babies who’d died that same dark day.

  Sparrow knelt beside the corpse. The movement was sudden, as though her knees gave out. A compulsion forced her to put her hands on the body. Her gift was what it was. She made things grow. She was Orchid Witch, not a healer, but she could sense the pulse of life in plants even at its faintest, and had coaxed forth blooms from withered stalks that to anyone else would seem dead. If there was life yet in Sarai, she thought she would at least know. Hesitating, she reached out, her hands trembling as they came to rest on the bloodied blue skin. She closed her eyes and listened, or did something like listen. It was no ordinary sense, and was akin to the way Minya felt for the passage of spirits in the air.

  But Minya had sensed the flutter of Sarai’s spirit and hooked it. Sparrow felt only a terrible echoing nothing.

  She drew back her hands. They were shaking. She had never touched a dead body, and hoped she never would again. It was so inert, so... vacant. She wept for all that it would never do or feel, her tears following the dried salt paths left by many others since last night.

  Watching her, the rest of them understood that this was final. Lazlo felt a sting behind his eyes and an ache in his hearts, and so did Sarai, even though she understood that her eyes, her hearts, weren’t real, and so neither were the sting and the ache.

  Ruby sobbed, turning to Feral to crush her face to his chest. He spread one big hand over the back of her head, his fingers disappearing in her wild dark hair, and bent over her to hide his face while his shoulders shook in silence.

  The Ellens wept, too. Only Minya’s eyes were dry.

  Lazlo alone caught the moment that she glanced down at the body in the flowers and looked, for an instant, like an actual child. Her eyes weren’t beetle shells then, and they weren’t ablaze with triumph. They were...lost, as though she hardly knew what she was seeing. And then she felt him watching and it was over. Her gaze slashed to meet his and there was nothing in it but challenge.

  “Clean this up,” she told them, with a wave of her hand dismissing the corpse as naught but a mess in need of tidying. “Say good-bye. Do what you need to do. We’ll discuss Weep once you’ve finished.” She turned away. It was clear she intended to stalk off without another word, but was thwarted by the arcade, which Lazlo had earlier closed to trap her army. “You,” she commanded without looking back. “Open the doors.”

  Lazlo did.
As he had melted them closed, so did he melt them back open. It was the first time he’d done it in a state of calm, all else having happened in a blur of desperation, and he marveled at the ease of it. The mesarthium responded to his merest urging, and a small thrill ran through him.

  I have power, he thought, amazed.

  When the archways had been restored, he saw the ghost army waiting within, and worried that Minya would renew her attack, but she didn’t. She just walked away.

  He had, in his hearts, declared war on the dark child, but Lazlo was no warrior, and his hearts had no talent for hate. As he watched her go, so small and all alone, a moment of clarity shattered him. She might be savage, beyond redemption, broken beyond repair. But if they wanted to save Sarai and Weep...they had to save her first.

  Chapter 6

  Every One Cried “Monster”

  Minya pushed through the clot of her ghosts. She could have moved them aside to clear a path for herself, but it suited her just now to shove. “Back to your posts,” she commanded, harsh, and they immediately moved off to take up their prior positions throughout the citadel.

  She needn’t have spoken aloud. It wasn’t her words the ghosts were obeying. Her will smothered theirs. She moved them like game pieces. But it was good to speak and be obeyed. It flitted through her mind how simple it would be if everyone were dead and hers to command.

  From the gallery it was only a few turns and a short passage to reach the door she sought. It wasn’t properly a door, not anymore, having frozen in the act of closing at the moment of Skathis’s death. It was tall—twice the height of a man—and though it must have been wide once, it was now a mere gap. She could only just squeeze through. She had to work her head from side to side. It would be easier, she thought, without ears. Everything would be. Then she wouldn’t have to hear the breathless, righteous weakness of the others, their begging talk of mercy, their dissent.

  Once her head was in, she wedged a shoulder into the gap. The rest should have slipped right through, but her chest was too puffed up with furious breathing. She had to forcibly exhale and thrust herself in. It hurt—especially where Rasalas’s hoof had pinned her—but it was nothing under the steady seethe of her rage.

  Inside, there was an antechamber, and then the walls opened up into the space that had become her sanctuary: the heart of the citadel, they had dubbed it as children.

  No sooner did she enter than she let loose the scream she had been holding inside. It ripped up from the core of her, scouring her throat and filling her head with a battering gyre of sound. It felt like screaming an apocalypse, but the sound that left her lips fell flat and small in the big, strange room, no match at all to what she heard inside her head. The heart of the citadel ate sound, and when Minya screamed in here, it seemed to eat her rage, too, though she could never scream long enough to pour all of it out. Her voice would die before she ran out of rage. She could scream a hole in her throat and come unraveled, fall to pieces like moth-chewed silk, and still, from the leftover shreds of her, the little pile of tatters, would pour forth this unending scream.

  Finally, coughing, she cut it off. Her throat felt like meat. Her apocalypse still boiled inside her, but it always did. It always did.

  She sank down onto the narrow walkway that ran the circumference of the room. It was a mystifying space: spherical, like the inside of a ball, but vast—some hundred feet in diameter—and all smooth mesarthium. A walkway threaded all the way around it, fifty feet of empty air above, and fifty feet below. Or not quite empty. Dead center, floating on air like the citadel itself, was a smaller sphere, smooth and fixed in space, some twenty feet wide and tall.

  And then there were the wasps: two of them, huge and terrible and beautiful, sculpted of mesarthium and perched on the curvature of the walls.

  All below was just a great bowl of air. Minya was unaccustomed to its emptiness. All these years she’d kept her army here, building it up soul by soul. Now they were out standing guard along the passages, in the garden, and in the open palms of the great seraph’s hands, from where they could spot any hint of threat that might rise up from Weep.

  Only one ghost was with her now: Ari-Eil, who was the newest, save Sarai. He was the Godslayer’s young cousin, very recently dead. She’d been keeping him by her as a bodyguard. She met his eyes. They were as hard as ever. How he hated her. All the ghosts did, but his hate was freshest, and it made a good whetstone upon which to sharpen her own. She had only to look at him and it sang bright in her, a defensive reaction to the human gaze. Hate those who hate you.

  It was easy. Natural. What was unnatural was not hating them.

  “What?” she snapped at him, fancying she saw a glimmer of satisfaction in his eyes. “They didn’t beat me, if that’s what you’re thinking.” Her voice was scream ravaged. “I let them have a break. To burn the body.”

  She allowed him his voice, so that he could insult her and she could punish him, but he only said flatly, “You are benevolence itself.”

  Her face twitched, and she spun him around to face the door. She didn’t want him watching her. “Don’t think your city is safe,” she whispered, and though she gave him the freedom to answer her, he declined to make use of it.

  She sat, letting her feet down to dangle over the edge of the walkway. She was trembling. Minutes passed thickly, and she quieted into stillness, finally, and then into something else.

  Minya went blank.

  The others didn’t realize: Minya rarely slept. She could, and did when it was essential, when she began to feel like a ghost herself. But sleep was a deeper submergence than she was comfortable with. She couldn’t control her ghosts from that state, but only set commands they’d obey until she changed them. There was this other state, though: a kind of shallowing of her consciousness, like a river that, pouring out of a slot canyon, widens and grows slow. She could rest here, drifting, without ever having to surrender to the deeper pull of darkness.

  Minya had never heard of leviathans. Lazlo could have told her how in the west, where the sea was the color of a newborn baby’s eyes, people captured sea monsters when they were still young, and lashed them to great pontoons to prevent them from submerging to freedom. They would serve their whole lives as ships, some for hundreds of years, never able to dive and disappear into the deep. Her mind was like that. She kept it like that: captive at the surface, only very rarely sinking into the wild and unknowable deep.

  She preferred these shallows, where she could react, keep control of all her tethers. Her eyes were open, vacant. She seemed an empty shell—except, that is, that she was rocking. It was ever so slight, her thin, hunched shoulders jerking back and forth. Her lips were moving, shaping the same words over and over in silence, as she lived the same memories she always did, and the same screams echoed forever.

  Always and forever: the children. Each face was seared into her mind, two versions of them, side by side: alive and terrified next to dead and glassy-eyed, because she had failed to save them.

  They were all I could carry.

  Those were the words her lips formed, over and over as she rocked back and forth. A mere four she had saved, out of thirty: Sarai and Feral, Ruby and Sparrow. She hadn’t chosen, just grabbed who was nearest. She’d meant to go back for the others.

  But then the screaming had begun.

  Her hands in her lap made loose fists, and her fingers moved constantly, smearing imagined slickness over her palms. She was remembering the sweat, and trying to hold on to Sarai’s and Feral’s wriggling hands. Ruby and Sparrow had been infants; she’d held them in one arm. Sarai and Feral had been toddlers. Them, she’d dragged. They hadn’t wanted to come with her. She’d had to squeeze to keep hold of their little fingers. She’d hurt them and they’d cried. “Come on,” she’d hissed, tugging at them. “Do you want to die, too? Do you?”

  The Ellens’ bodies had lain in their way. They’d been too small to step over them, and had to crawl, tangling in the nurses’ bloody aprons,
stumbling right through their ghosts. They couldn’t see the ghosts, of course. Only Minya could, and she didn’t want to look.

  The others didn’t remember. They’d been too small. The whole slick, screaming day was lost to them, and they were lucky for it. Minya could never lose it. Other thoughts might pass in front of it, obscuring it for a time, but always they cleared or moved on, and there it was, as vivid as the day it happened.

  In the fifteen years since the Carnage, Minya hadn’t seen another corpse. Now, in the nursery of her memory, between the Ellens’ bodies, she saw Sarai’s there, too. It was pink and blue and broken, cinnamon and red, and when she went to step over it, its eyes flew

  open. “Monster,” it hissed. The word echoed.

  “Monster,” said Great Ellen’s corpse.

  “Monster,” agreed Less Ellen’s.

  And the babies’ screams morphed into words, and every one cried “Monster.”

  Chapter 7

  Wraith

  Out in the garden, Lazlo repaired the wall he’d poured down on Minya’s ghosts. The weapons that were trapped in it fell free, and the mesarthium flowed upward, returning to the smooth wall of the seraph’s chest, re-forming its elegant clavicles, the column of its throat.

  It took but a moment. He turned back to Sarai. He marveled, to see her in the sun—her hair, spice hues in rich ripples on blue shoulders, her face, full and soft-cheeked, soft-lipped and generous, tapering like a heart to her little pointed chin. Her brow was creased with worry, her eyes heavy with reluctant resolve. “You have to go,” she said, bleak.

  He thought he must have misheard. “What?”

  “You must see, Lazlo. You have to leave so she can’t use you.”