Muse of Nightmares

by Laini Taylor

  “It doesn’t make sense.”

  “What doesn’t?”

  “The timing,” she said. She cradled her hand like a wounded bird. The bones ached from Minya’s terrible grip, and she could still feel the slick slide of little fingers and blood.

  Do you want to die, too?

  Too. What did it mean, that Minya had said “too”? She must have meant the Ellens: Do you want to die like them?

  But… it didn’t line up. The Godslayer hadn’t gotten there yet, or else how could they have escaped?

  She explained it to Lazlo. “It’s the bodies I don’t understand. How could we have climbed over them? We had to have gotten out before the Ellens were killed. If we’d still been there when Eril-Fane came, we would have died with all the rest.”

  “It doesn’t mean it really happened like that,” he said. “Dreams aren’t truth. Memory is malleable. She was only a little girl. It’s probably just all out of sequence.”

  Sarai wanted to think that was what it was, but Minya’s question had brought her back to that room, in that moment: “Do you want to die, too?” She couldn’t remember anything else: just the terror and those words, like a splinter in her mind with a haze of pain around them. It had happened. She was sure.

  Puzzle pieces were moving around. There were the dead nurses, their poor dear Ellens, and the question that had sounded like a threat. And there was the place in the nursery Sarai couldn’t see—the breath-fogged glass, the skip—as though the dream was keeping a secret, maybe even from the dreamer. And there was the matter of Minya’s red hand.

  And…

  It came to Sarai that she had never, in all the dreams of the Carnage, actually seen Eril-Fane kill the nurses. She had only seen him step over them. Her mind had filled in the rest, based on Minya’s tellings. But Minya couldn’t have seen it. She had to have been gone by then, shoving the four babies she’d managed to save through the crack into the heart of the citadel.

  What had really happened that day? The puzzle pieces did present one possible answer, but it was incomprehensible.

  “They loved us,” said Sarai, as though to ward off a terrible truth that was trying to make itself known. “We loved them.” But the words felt hollow somehow. The Ellens she loved were ghosts. She had no memory of them alive.

  And now those ghosts, for reasons unclear, were blank as empty shells, standing in the kitchen doorway with nothing at all in their eyes.

  Sarai knew she had to go back there, to the nursery in the dream. She had hoped to reach Minya, to talk to her, and… what? Change her mind? Talk her down? Fundamentally alter her psyche with a minimum of fuss? But the Minya she’d found was in no state for talk, and the dream had the force of a river in flood, and Sarai had not been prepared. Could she prepare? She had told Lazlo that she wanted to get Minya out of there—out of the nursery, out of that day—but was it possible?

  Or would she find, no matter what she tried, that some people cannot be saved?

  24

  BLUE STEW

  For the first time in his life, no one made Thyon Nero breakfast.

  Well, technically yesterday had been the first time, but he hadn’t noticed, since he had been out in the chaos of the city along with everyone else. But this morning it was quiet, and he woke hungry. He’d slept in the Merchants’ Guildhall, in the opulent rooms provided for him, which he had been shunning in favor of a workshop above a defunct crematorium. He had wanted his privacy but now it was too private. He didn’t care for the idea of no one knowing where he was. What if he woke up in the morning to find that those few who remained in the city had gone, without even thinking to tell him?

  So he had slept at the guildhall, where Calixte was, too, and where they had piled the books in the passages. The Tizerkane garrison was close by. He could see the watchtower out his window and know whether it was manned. And the kitchen, he thought, would most likely be stocked, even if there was no one in it to cook and wash up after.

  He dressed, stiff and sore, all aching shoulders and raw hands, and wandered toward the dining room, assuming the kitchen was probably somewhere in its vicinity. It was. It was big and full of copper pots, and the pantry shelves were lined with bins labeled with words he couldn’t read in an alphabet he hadn’t learned. He lifted lids, sniffed things, and had, though he did not know it, an experience similar to the godspawn in the citadel, who had also been discovering that food requires esoteric knowledge. He did not equate it with alchemy, though, since alchemy was less mysterious to him than flour, leavening, and the like. The kitchen was obscure to him in the way that women were obscure, and that wasn’t because women worked in the kitchen. Those weren’t the women he meant. Those were servants, and as such, had hardly occupied his thoughts as people, let alone females. Kitchens and women were both subjects that simply did not intrigue him.

  Oh, individual women could be interesting, though this was something of a new notion. Calixte and Tzara, he had to admit, were not boring, and neither was Soulzeren, the mechanist who’d built firearms for warlords in the Thanagost badlands. But they did things, like men. The women he knew in Zosma did not. They wouldn’t be permitted to even if they wished, he admitted to himself, though he’d hardly ever considered whether they might. Now that he had met Calixte, Tzara, and Soulzeren, not to mention the intimidating Azareen, he did begin to wonder if any of the hothouse flowers who were paraded before him in Zosma might be as bored with their lot as he was with them.

  There was an expectation that he be enchanted with them for their form alone, and for the cultivated coquetry that was like a play they were acting in, all the time. Every civilized person knew the lines and gestures, and made a life out of parroting them about. Those who were counted charming and clever were the ones who were best at making them seem fresh as they patched evenings together out of the same dances and conversations that they’d done and had a thousand times before.

  Thyon had played his part. He knew the lines and dances, but inside he had been screaming. He wondered if perhaps he wasn’t the only one. If, behind their lacquered faces, some of those Zosma girls might have felt stifled, too, and secretly longed to steal emeralds and build airships and fight gods in a shadowed city.

  Well, when he went home, he would doubtless be made to marry one of them, and then, he supposed, he could ask her.

  He let out a laugh. It dropped like a stone. He pushed away the thought that was more distant and more unimaginable than librarians turning out to be gods. Discovering where the fruit was stored, he piled some on a plate and kept scrounging. There had to be cheese. There was. He piled that on, too. Then—glory—he found slabs of bacon in a cold box, and stood there wondering if he could figure out how to fry some.

  He answered himself as though affronted. “I am the greatest alchemist of the age. I distilled azoth. I can transmute lead into gold. I think I can light a stove.”

  “What’s that, Nero?”

  Calixte and Tzara had come in. He gave a start, and flushed, wondering if they’d heard him talking to himself like a fool starved for flattery. “Are you arguing with that bacon?” Calixte asked. “I hope you’re winning, because I’m starving.”

  With a wicked grin, Tzara added, “Cannibalism doesn’t really fill you up, you see.”

  Ruza ate in the garrison mess, and he was halfway through his bowl of thick kesh porridge before he realized what it was that was putting him off about it. Berries tinted the porridge blue, and brought to mind “blue stew.”

  When had it been, the day before yesterday? It felt like a year ago at least. It was the last time he saw Lazlo before the explosion. They’d argued. He and some of the others—Shimzen, Tzara—had been joking about taking the explosionist up to the citadel to blow the godspawn into “blue stew.” It had seemed funny then. What exactly had he said? He struggled to remember. That the godspawn were monsters, more like threaves than people? That if Lazlo knew them he’d be happy to blow them up himself?

  Ruza’s porridge
churned in his stomach. He let his spoon drop into the dregs.

  Lazlo was his friend. Lazlo was godspawn.

  These two statements could not both be true, because one could not be friends with godspawn. Lazlo was godspawn. There was no denying it. Therefore, he was not Ruza’s friend.

  It was supposed to be that simple, but Ruza was finding his mind unable to perform the simplification—as though there were two columns, a Lazlo in each, and he was tasked to erase one of them.

  In his lessons—and as Ruza was only eighteen, these were not a distant memory—he had always pressed down too hard with his pencil, committing himself to his first guess, never learning to write lightly in case he was in error. Was it carelessness or confidence? Opinions differed, but did it matter? He could never fully erase his dark pencil lines, and he had never turned his back on a friend.

  Hell. He finished his porridge. It was only porridge, and Ruza had yet to meet a philosophical dilemma that could spoil his appetite. He washed up his bowl and stacked it, then headed toward the stables for the donkey and cart. It was book-salvage duty again today with the ridiculous alchemist and his ridiculous face.

  Ruza ducked into the barracks for a quick glance in his shaving mirror, though he couldn’t—or wouldn’t—have said why. He knew what he looked like. Was he hoping to discover an improvement? The mirror was small, the light dim, and the four square inches of face looked as they had last time he’d checked. He tossed the mirror onto his bunk—apparently with excessive force, because it skidded into the wall and cracked. Perfect.

  He did one more thing before heading on to the stable. He hit up the first aid box for a packet of bandages. He hadn’t known a grown man could have hands soft enough to blister and rip after a few hours hauling rope. The alchemist hadn’t complained, though, and he hadn’t quit. That was something, anyway. No reason he should keep getting blood all over the rope.

  Both Eril-Fane and Azareen had remained at the garrison overnight. They would hardly go home at a time like this, with the soldiers all on edge, waiting for something to happen. So far, nothing had. The citadel hadn’t moved, or made any further transformation. They could only guess at what was going on up there.

  Azareen slept for a time before dawn, and went to the Temple of Thakra at first light to make hasty ablutions. Returning, she sought out Eril-Fane. He wasn’t in the mess or barracks, the practice yard or the command center. She asked the watch captain, and when she heard where he was, her already ramrod soldier’s spine stiffened. She didn’t say a word, but turned on her boot heel and went straight there, the walk giving her anger and hurt time to fuse into something cold.

  “Eril-Fane,” she said, coming into the pavilion.

  He was in one of the silk sleighs. He appeared to be studying its workings, and looked up when she spoke. “Azareen,” he returned in a far too measured voice. He had been expecting, and dreading, her arrival. Well, perhaps dread was too strong a word, but he knew full well what she would have to say about this idea.

  “Going somewhere?” she asked, icy.

  “Of course not. Do you think I wouldn’t tell you?”

  “But you’re considering it.”

  “I’m considering all options.”

  “Well, you can eliminate this one. The advantage is all theirs. We could carry, what, four fighters in that thing, to attack a force of gods and ghosts on their own terrain?”

  “I don’t want to attack them, Azareen. I want to talk to them.”

  “You think they’ll talk to you?”

  She instantly regretted her tone, which conjured the specter of the man who had entered a nursery with a knife. She might as well have called him a murderer and been done with it. “I’m sorry,” she said, closing her eyes. “I didn’t mean—”

  “Please don’t ever apologize to me,” he said in barely more than a whisper. Eril-Fane lived under such a burden of guilt that apologies overwhelmed him with shame. The guilt for what he’d done in the citadel was a constant acid burn in his gut. The guilt for what he could not do was different, more stab than burn. Every time he looked at Azareen, he had to face the knowledge that his inability to… get over… what had been done to him—and what he had done—had robbed her of the life she deserved. To hear the word sorry from her lips… it made him want to die. Everyone else had managed to pick up the tatters and mend them into wearable lives. Why couldn’t he?

  Of course, no one else had been the special project of the goddess of despair, but he granted himself no leniency on that account, or any other.

  “I was just looking it over,” he told her, climbing out of the craft. “I don’t think I could fly it anyway. But if we don’t hear something today, from Lazlo, or.” He ended the sentence, having no way to finish it. Or who? His daughter? She was dead. Some other child who’d survived his massacre? The acid roiled within him. “We’ll have to consider calling on Soulzeren and asking for her help. We can’t go on without contact. The not knowing will eat us alive.” He sighed and rubbed his jaw. “We have to resolve this, Azareen. How long can they stay at Enet-Sarra?”

  That was the place downriver where their people had gone when they fled the city. For years, there’d been talk of building a new city there, and starting again, free of the seraph’s shadow. But you couldn’t just move thousands of people overnight to set up camps in fields, with no services, no sanitation. There would be sickness, unrest. They had to get their people home. They had to make it safe for them.

  “Shall I send for her?” asked Azareen, not contrite, but subdued. “Soulzeren.”

  “Yes. Please. If she’ll come.” He thought she would. Soulzeren was not the type to shrink from being useful in a time of need. “I’m going to the temple. Do you want to come?”

  “I’ve already been,” she told him.

  “I’ll see you later, then.” He gave her a tired smile, and turned to walk away, and she wondered, as she watched his back—so broad, so impossibly strong—if he would ever turn back to her, truly turn back to her, and walk toward her again.

  25

  ISAGOL’S BROKEN TOY

  Azareen fell in love with Eril-Fane when she was thirteen years old.

  Her elilith ceremony had been the week before; her tattoos—a circle of apple blossoms—were still tender when the artist, Guldan, came to see how they were healing. It was the first time she was alone with the old woman. During the ceremony, all the women of her family had been gathered around them; now it was just the two of them, and Guldan unsettled her with her piercing appraisal, seeming to examine more than her tattoos.

  “Let me see your hands,” she said, and Azareen held them out, unsure. She wasn’t proud of her hands, rough as they were from her work mending nets, and scarred here and there from the slip of a knife. But Guldan ran her fingers over them and nodded with quiet approval. “You’re a strong girl,” she said. “Are you also a brave one?”

  The question sent a chill down Azareen’s spine. There were secrets in it; she could feel them. She said she hoped she was, and the old woman gave her the instructions that would change her life.

  Azareen didn’t tell her parents; the fewer people who knew, the better. Two nights later, she slipped alone to a quiet channel of the underground Uzumark, spoke a password to a silent boatman, and was ferried to a cavern she had never known existed. It was hidden in the maze of waterways beneath the city, where the roar of rapids disguised the sound of what went on there. Azareen, hearts pounding with foreboding and the thrill of secrecy, came round a corner and beheld a sight she had never witnessed in her life: swordplay.

  Weapons were forbidden in the city. But here was the hidden training ground of the Tizerkane, legendary warriors who had been eradicated by the Mesarthim—or almost eradicated. That night, Azareen learned that their arts had been kept alive and passed down through the generations. They weren’t an army, but they were keepers: of skills and history, and of hope, that the city could one day be freed.

  Azareen beheld some d
ozen men and women sparring. She would learn, in time, that there were more, though she wasn’t to know who they were. They were careful never to gather all together. If any were caught, there would always be some left alive to recruit and begin again. It was glorious, what she saw by glavelight: a dance of grace and power, swords flashing—the traditional Tizerkane hreshteks—their clash muted by the river’s roar. She had never known to want this. She’d had no idea it existed. But from the moment she first beheld the gleam and spin of blades, she knew she was meant for this.

  She stood watching, mesmerized and a little shy, until someone spotted her and came over. He was the only other youth, a year older than her but already as powerful as a man. He was a blacksmith’s apprentice, and though he wasn’t from her district, Azareen had seen him in the marketplace. You couldn’t help but see him, if he was anywhere nearby. It wasn’t only that he was handsome. That seemed almost incidental. There was a warmth and energy about him, as though he were twice as alive as the next person, a fire burning in him and furnace doors thrown open so you could feel the flames. He radiated an extraordinary vitality. He held his eyes wide and saw everything, really saw, and seemed to love it, all of it, life and the world. Even though it was grim, it was precious, too, and fascinating, and when he looked at you… at least, when he looked at Azareen that night and after, she felt precious and fascinating, too, and more alive than she had been before.

  His name was Eril-Fane, and Guldan had chosen her to be his training partner. Azareen would often wonder what the old woman had seen in her to offer her this chance. It made her want to be worthy—of the sacred legacy of the Tizerkane, of being alive, and of him, whom she loved from the moment he grinned at her, handed her a sword, and said, blushing, “I hoped it would be you.”

  After that, her days were a fog, and real life was lived at night in a secret cavern with a sword in her hand, blade-dancing with a boy who burned with beautiful fire. A year passed, then two, then three, and he was no longer a boy. His face broadened; his body, too. His blacksmith’s arms grew massive. And always his eyes were open wide, and he loved the world and was fearless, but he blushed when he saw her, and smiled like a boy who would never grow up completely.