Muse of Nightmares

by Laini Taylor

  Thyon Nero was late awakening to the understanding that other people are living lives, too. He knew it, of course, intellectually, but it had never much impressed him. They had always been minor players in a drama about him, their stories mere subplots woven around his own, and it floored him to experience a sudden shift—as though a script had been shuffled and he’d been handed the wrong pages. He was the minor player now, standing in the settled dust, while Strange flew metal beasts and held dead goddesses in his arms.

  Setting aside, for a moment, the question of how he had known a goddess, there was the more pertinent issue of: “Evil or not, how was she up there? Eril-Fane told us the citadel was empty.”

  The Godslayer had assured the delegation that the gods were dead, the citadel empty, and they weren’t in any danger.

  Calixte pursed her lips and looked up at the great hovering thing. “Apparently he was wrong.”

  Eril-Fane and Azareen were positioned halfway between the amphitheater and the eastern gate, where a bottleneck of merging streets made a nasty tangle. They were mounted on their spectrals, side by side on a small bridge that arced over the city’s main thoroughfare. Below them, their people passed in graceless turmoil, too many at once, frustration and dread turning them volatile. Their presence, they hoped, would calm the boil to a simmer.

  The newly revealed sun glared down on them. It felt like being watched.

  “Why is it still here?” Azareen asked, flinging a hand upward, to where the citadel still hovered. “He said he could move it, so why hasn’t he? Why isn’t it gone, and the godspawn with it?”

  “I don’t know,” said Eril-Fane. “Perhaps it isn’t so easily done. He may have to learn how to master it.” There was also the matter of grieving, he thought but didn’t say.

  “He mastered it quickly enough last night. You saw the wings. Rasalas. If he can do that, he can move the citadel. Unless he has other plans.”

  “What other plans?”

  “We need to be ready, in case of attack.”

  “Lazlo won’t attack,” said Eril-Fane, uneasy. “As for the others, if they could, why didn’t they before?”

  “You can’t just assume we’re safe.”

  “I assume nothing. We’ll make ready as best we can, though I don’t know how we could ever be ready for that.” To fight an army of their own dearly departed? It was the stuff of nightmares.

  “And there could be more out there besides,” said Azareen, gesturing to the Cusp and beyond. They knew now that there were godspawn in the citadel, but Lazlo’s transformation bespoke a new and unsettling possibility: that there were more out in the world, too, living in far-off countries, their flesh un-blue, their heritage a secret, perhaps even to them.

  “There could be,” Eril-Fane agreed.

  “They can pass as human,” said Azareen. “They can hide in plain sight, like he did.”

  “He wasn’t hiding,” Eril-Fane replied. “He said he didn’t know.”

  “And you believe him?”

  He hesitated, then nodded. In the young faranji, Eril-Fane’s starved and stunted paternal feelings had found a place to fix. He was more than fond of the young man. He felt protective of him, and in spite of everything, he couldn’t help trusting him.

  “You think it’s a coincidence that he studied Weep?” asked Azareen. “That he learned our language, our legends?” Now that she knew what he was, Lazlo’s fascination took on a sinister character.

  “Not a coincidence, no,” said Eril-Fane. “I think there was something that called to him, something he didn’t understand.”

  “How did he end up there, though, all the way in Zosma? Is he… one of ours?”

  Eril-Fane turned to look at her—his wife, who’d been gotten with godspawn like so many other daughters of Weep. When she said “ours,” she was asking if some woman of the city had given birth to Lazlo up in the sterile room in the citadel the gods had used for that purpose.

  “Let’s hope,” said Eril-Fane. “Because if not, then there could be more Mesarthim out there, maybe another citadel floating over another city, somewhere on Zeru.” It was a big world, much of it unmapped. In what distant places might bad gods reign? But Eril-Fane had a sense that Lazlo was tied to Weep, that all of it hinged on this city, this citadel, these gods and godspawn.

  For fifteen years, the people of Weep had lived with the certainty that the monsters were dead, and Eril-Fane had lived with the burden of it: his the hands that had slain them, gods and their children alike—and his child, too, or so he’d believed. He had committed a crime as heinous as the gods’ own, and though he’d never tried to forgive himself, he had lived with it by telling himself there had been no choice, that it had been necessary to ensure that Weep would never again be forced to its knees, or its belly, or its back.

  Now he was tracing the implications of this new discovery—that the metal activated Mesarthim power—and even that small, sickly faith was eroding. What if it hadn’t been necessary to kill them? “When they’re away from the metal,” he ventured, reluctant to speak his suspicion aloud, “does their power just… wear off?”

  Azareen tried to read his face, as she’d been trying to do all these years. He had been the plaything of the goddess of despair. Isagol had mangled his emotions, poisoned his faculties for love and trust until they were so tangled with hate and shame that he hardly knew one from the other. She understood his meaning, though, and felt a stab of the remorse she knew he was inflicting on himself. That was Azareen’s burden: to feel all the pain of Eril-Fane’s torment, and be unable to help him. “Even if it does,” she said warily, “you couldn’t have known.”

  “I should have waited. Babes in cradles, what was the rush? They couldn’t hurt us. I should have tried to understand.”

  “Someone else would have done it if you hadn’t,” she said, “and it would have been worse.”

  Eril-Fane knew it was true, but it hardly helped to hear that the rest of his people would have been more barbaric than he had been. “They were babies. I could have protected them instead of—”

  “You protected us,” said Azareen fiercely.

  “I didn’t, though.” His voice had dropped low. The look he gave her was one she knew well—it was helplessness, guilt. He was remembering her cries in the citadel, and her belly swelled with a baby that wasn’t his, that wasn’t human. “I didn’t protect you.”

  “And I didn’t protect you,” she said. “No one protected anyone. How could we? They were gods! And yet you freed us. All of us, my love. The whole city.” She pointed to a little girl in the flow of people beneath them. She was riding on her father’s shoulders, red-cheeked and wide-eyed, her hair sticking out in black sprouts of pigtails. “Because of you, that child will never be a slave. Her family will never answer Skathis’s knock and see her borne away on Rasalas.”

  She could have gone on reassuring him that he was a hero, but she knew he didn’t want it. It had never helped, and he probably didn’t even hear it. He was still looking at the little girl in the crowd, but there was a haunted vagueness to his gaze, and Azareen knew he was seeing someone else—his own daughter, whose broken blue body Lazlo had lifted off an iron gate in the earliest hours of dawn.

  Eril-Fane had fallen to his knees at the sight of her, and he’d done something that Azareen hadn’t seen him do since Isagol had her way with him, body and mind. He’d wept. She was still trying to decide if it was a good thing or bad. For years he couldn’t cry, and now he could. Did that mean the broken pathways of his emotions were healing?

  Just in time to mourn the death of his daughter.

  It was Azareen’s turn to do something she hadn’t done in years. She reached for her husband’s hand, slipping her fingers into his, feeling his calluses, his scars, the warmth of him, the realness. They’d had only five days and nights as husband and wife, nearly two decades ago now, but she remembered the feel of these hands—these—on her body, learning everything about her, or at least as much as a
young husband could learn in five days and nights. After the liberation, he wouldn’t touch her or let her touch him. Now Azareen’s hearts seemed to pause in their rhythm, waiting to see what he would do.

  For a moment, he only fell still. She watched him look down at their hands—at hers inside his much bigger one, both of them scarred and callused, a far cry from the young hands that had known each other so well. She saw him swallow, and close his eyes, and then gently, gently fold his fingers over hers.

  And when her hearts resumed beating, she imagined she could feel a spill of light into the veins that carried her spirit.

  The Godslayer’s mother, Suheyla, stood in her garden courtyard and lifted her face to feel the sun. She closed her eyes when she did it, though, so she wouldn’t have to see the citadel.

  She couldn’t believe the sweet young man who’d been living in her home was up there right now, that he was one of them. She hadn’t witnessed the transformation. She’d missed everything—an old woman can’t go running through the streets!—so it had the feel of a tall tale to her. She just couldn’t picture Lazlo blue. What did it mean? What would happen now? She couldn’t feel the shape of it, but it was clear that everything would change. It was hard to think of tomorrow, though, when grief spat like grease in the pit of her belly.

  Yesterday she’d discovered she had a grandchild, living—a grandchild who was half monster, yes, but the blood of her blood nonetheless. She hadn’t sorted out how to feel about it until the girl was dead. Now she knew: She wanted her. And it was too late.

  She busied herself with her usual routine, like any other day, as though the streets weren’t choked with people flooding out of the city like fleas deserting a corpse.

  Weep wasn’t a corpse, and Suheyla wasn’t a flea. All her old fears persisted, but she just couldn’t add Lazlo to them, blue skin or not. Of all the possibilities laid out like a feast of uncertainty and doom, there was simply no scenario in which Lazlo Strange hurt Weep, or anybody in it.

  She surveyed her sad garden, so long starved of sun. She might make something of it now, she thought. Oh, she’d need to go out into the countryside for cuttings, and that wasn’t happening today. But she could make it ready. She could do that.

  Suheyla rolled up her sleeves, and got to work.

  “What’s that?” Calixte asked.

  Thyon turned to her, expecting her to be looking up at the citadel, but she wasn’t. She was pointing down into the sinkhole.

  “What?” he asked, squinting where she pointed.

  The sinking of the anchor had sheared right through the crust of earth beneath the city, exposing layers of stone and sediment, like an excavation. The Godslayer had told them that the gods had set the anchors down with precision, crushing the buildings beneath them, “which happened to include,” as he had said, “the university and library, the Tizerkane garrison, and the royal palace.”

  Which had this been? It was impossible to tell from the layers of rubble ground down by the anchor’s weight. But what Calixte was pointing at was beneath those layers, where, if you looked, you could make out the remnants of foundations, and the suggestion of deeper subterranean levels. Was it possible they hadn’t all caved in? “There,” she said. “You can just see the corner of it. It looks like…”

  Thyon saw. He finished her sentence with her. In unison, they said, “A door.”

  9

  A DEAD GOD’S CLOSET

  They didn’t simply burn the body and have done with it. “You need to honor this good vessel,” Great Ellen told Sarai, “the same as you would with a loved one you’d lost.”

  It would be a strange sort of funeral, with Sarai’s own ghost attending, but it had been a strange sort of life, so why should death be any different? Great Ellen took charge, as was her way. She sent Less Ellen to the kitchens for water, soap, a soft cloth. “Scissors, too,” she called after her before turning to Ruby and Sparrow. “You two, fetch a clean slip from Sarai’s dressing room.”

  “What color would you like, Sarai?” asked Sparrow, and the question, so seemingly ordinary, was surreal, because the slip wasn’t for her, but her body.

  It was only a week since Sarai had chided Ruby for burning up her own slip after Feral drenched her with a rain shower. “We won’t live long enough to run out of dresses,” Ruby had said then, and her nonchalance had shocked Sarai. But now that prophecy was fulfilled, for her at least, and it struck her that she was through with her dressing room and all her dead mother’s things. Or she would be, after this. One last time her body needed to be dressed.

  “White,” she said. She would be burned in white.

  The girls went off to fetch the slip and Great Ellen turned to the boys. “Feral,” she said, “won’t you please show our guest where he can get himself cleaned up?”

  Lazlo objected. He wanted to stay with Sarai, but was made to understand in no uncertain terms that it wouldn’t be decent, not while they washed the body, on top of which he was filthy himself. So he acquiesced, parting from Sarai with difficulty, and followed Feral inside.

  It was his first sight of the citadel’s interior, and the first thing he noticed was the living wall of orchids that Sparrow had grown to soften the effect of so much metal. It couldn’t be disguised, though. Everything was metal here—walls, floors, ceilings, fixtures, furniture. So much metal, all mesarthium, and all of it seemed to be holding its breath, waiting for him to awaken it. He didn’t know what to do with the feeling. It was overwhelming. It felt like claiming—the metal claiming him, or he it? Of course this whole vast otherworldly citadel didn’t belong to him, but… he couldn’t shake the feeling that it was somehow his, eager to yield itself up to him.

  Ghosts stood at attention against the wall: some old men, a girl. They were stiff, facing forward, and didn’t—couldn’t—turn their heads to watch the young men walk in. Their eyes rolled to the side, though, showing too much white. The sight was disturbing. Lazlo saw Feral glance at them and look quickly away.

  “This is the gallery,” said Feral, leading Lazlo through the big room with its long mesarthium table. “Kitchen’s through here. We bathe in the rain room.” He stopped in the doorway and looked Lazlo up and down. “I don’t suppose you have a change of clothes.”

  Lazlo held his arms out to his sides to show that, of course, he carried nothing.

  It wasn’t the first time. When Lazlo Strange changed his life, he went with only the clothes on his back. This was the third time—or, he supposed, the fourth, if you counted his journey as a baby, though he couldn’t take credit for that one. The next had been at thirteen, when he stowed away at the Great Library, and then again when he rode out through the gates with Eril-Fane. Lazlo’s chances came without warning, and when they did, he didn’t dither, and he didn’t stop to pack.

  “We’ll find you something,” said Feral, who was torn between wariness and awe of him.

  He led Lazlo deeper into the citadel, giving him a rudimentary tour. “That way to the sinister arm,” he said, pointing left. Lazlo knew that sinister meant “left” in the language of heraldry, but something in Feral’s tone made him think the word applied in more ways than that, even before he added gruffly, “We don’t go there.”

  He led the way to the dexter arm instead. It was a long corridor, sleek and tubelike. It curved to the right; Lazlo couldn’t see to the end. He realized that he was inside the seraph’s right arm.

  They passed a door with a curtain strung across it. A pair of ghosts stood guard outside it. “Minya’s chambers,” said Feral. “They were Skathis’s, so they’re the biggest.”

  Along the corridor were several more doors. Feral named them all as they went by. “Sparrow’s room. It was Korako’s before. Ruby’s was Letha’s. Here’s mine. It was Vanth’s. My father.” He said the word without feeling. At each door there were guards, and he continued to look past them. “And here’s Ikirok’s. No one uses it, so I guess it’s yours.”

  His? Lazlo hadn’t thought as far
as having a room here, of living here. His mind flashed to Sarai. He wanted to be where she was. As though Feral read the thought, he pointed ahead. “Sarai’s is next. The last one.” There was a kind of furtive curiosity in the younger man’s manner. He clearly wanted to ask a question, and finally he came out with it. “How do you know her?” he blurted. “How does she know you? When… how could you have possibly met?”

  “In dreams,” Lazlo told him. “I didn’t know she was real until the silk sleigh, when she saved us.”

  “That was you.” Feral hadn’t realized. He hadn’t gotten a good look that day, and of course, Lazlo had still been human. Shame flashed through him. Sarai had tried to persuade him to summon clouds so that the craft couldn’t reach the citadel, but he’d been too afraid to defy Minya. If it had been left up to him, Lazlo would be dead.

  And if Lazlo was dead, he realized with a queasy lurch in his gut, they’d all have died last night. He swallowed down the sickening feeling. “But I didn’t think people could see her,” he said.

  It was true. Normally, when Sarai entered a dream, she was an invisible presence there. For years she’d felt like a phantom. And then Lazlo. His first sight of her was emblazoned on his memory: a beautiful blue girl with wild red-brown hair and a slash of black paint from temple to temple, her blue eyes vivid as she stared at him with unmasked intrigue.

  “I can see her,” he said. See her, touch her, hold her. Last night: the feel of her beneath him, her body full against him. She’d clasped his head with both hands, twining her fingers through his hair as he kissed a path down her throat. How real it had been—as real as anything that ever happened when he was awake.

  “I wonder why,” said Feral. “Maybe it’s because you’re not human.”

  “Can you see her?” Lazlo asked.

  Feral shrugged. “Don’t know. She’s never come into my dreams. Any of ours. Minya forbade it.”