Muse of Nightmares

by Laini Taylor

  It was like flying into a tornado. She’d used Kiska’s gift before, but not often enough to get used to it—the whirl of thoughts and feelings. Fear, anguish, confusion, uncertainty assailed her eightfold and she almost recoiled. She heard the same words that Kiska had heard, but she didn’t know what they meant. Words were meaningless, but there weren’t just words. She could see their memories, too, a messy, mad tumult of them, like reflections in boiling water. There was so much chaos, so many images, but the one she wanted—or rather, the one she didn’t want, the last thing she ever wanted—was there among them. She saw, and she could not unsee, and she could not undo.

  too late

  She saw the life leave Kora’s eyes.

  too late

  She felt the knife as though it entered her own heart.

  too late

  Nova saw her sister die in the killer’s own memory.

  forever and always too late

  She let go of Kiska’s power. Kiska felt its return like a punch, and staggered with the blowback of Nova’s feelings. She wasn’t ready, and the raw emotion was crushing.

  Nova was shaking all over. Her eyes had become pools of fire. The air was thickening around her with a cloud so dark it looked as though it had been pulled from a night sky with night still clinging to it. And as she shook, the room shook, too. The walkway heaved and juddered. Those on it had to grasp the rail.

  “You killed my sister!” Nova wailed. She wasn’t using Werran’s scream, but her own voice was nearly as wild.

  Eril-Fane heard and understood. He might almost have been waiting for this. That didn’t mean he wanted it. If he hadn’t always been sure, now he was: He wanted to live. That didn’t mean he believed he deserved to, but he wanted to, so very much. He even thought that he might be free, finally, of Isagol’s curse, because as he faced his reckoning, there was no more shadow to his love, no maggots feasting at its soft underside, but only love so pure it burned.

  Whatever happened to him, though, he would protect all the others as he had failed to before. Azareen, the children. He had another chance to do that, at least. “Get out of here, all of you,” he told them. “Go!”

  Little Sparrow was beside him. He gave her a nudge back up the walkway toward the door. She grabbed Ruby’s hand and tugged her along, both of them clinging to the railing as the walkway shuddered underfoot. Lazlo was still on his knees, Sarai crouched beside him. Eril-Fane took his daughter’s arm, pulled her upright, and urged her, “Go,” as he pulled Lazlo up, too. He was a commander. His voice brooked no dissent. Feral wrapped a protective arm around Suheyla and braced her between himself and the railing as they made their way back toward the door. Azareen did not leave Eril-Fane’s side.

  He said to the goddess, in her language—how he hated the feel of it in his mouth!—“They are innocent. Please. Let them go.”

  Azareen didn’t understand the language, but she understood his fixed footing well enough. He wasn’t retreating. Why wasn’t he retreating? “Come on.” She pulled at him but couldn’t budge him. His eyes were riveted on the goddess.

  Nova was beyond thinking. The whisper had become a roar. TOO LATE. TOO LATE. Grief, formless and rampant, was sucking at her and pounding at her till she could hardly feel her own edges. She was entangled in dark mist with her eyes on fire, spilling out wrath, pain, and power. And all of it, right or wrong, was directed at her sister’s killer.

  Azareen saw the burning gaze, and she felt her husband’s stillness. She looked back and forth between the two. Her eyes were open very wide, rings of white showing full around her irises, like someone who’s just bolted upright from a nightmare to find the nightmare real all around her. She’d known something was coming. Since she saw the bird’s shadow fall over Eril-Fane, she’d known and been powerless to stop it. Wasn’t there anything she might have done? Fought harder, raged harder, made him listen? She shook her head, still trying to deny it. She shook her head and shook it as though she couldn’t stop, would never stop defending him or defying fate or waiting for him to come back to her.

  Nova raised a hand. The energy of the mesarthium surrounded her. She conducted it like music. The wasp ships were on the wall. Their stingers were as long as spears and as sharp as needles. At the lightest touch of her mind, they disengaged and hung poised in the air.

  Eril-Fane and Azareen saw at the same moment. At least, they saw one of them. And as it shot like an arrow, Azareen raised her sword and stepped in front of her husband.

  A deep horror filled him. He roared, “Azareen, NO!”

  The stinger was a blur.

  Azareen’s hreshtek blurred to meet it.

  There was a sound, too small and sweet, almost like a bell’s chime, as she knocked the stinger away. It careened, spinning, off course, hit the wall, and fell to the floor.

  Eril-Fane’s roar of protest died. He said, with an edge of desperation, “Azareen, go with the others. Please.”

  She shook her head, grim, and adjusted her grip on her sword.

  He remembered the first time he’d handed her a hreshtek, in the training cave when they were just children. He remembered her look of wonder, and the first awkward clash of their blades, and he remembered the first desperate touch of their lips, and he remembered her screams in the sinister wing, and he remembered her hollow-eyed after it was all over and the gods were dead and she needed her husband but he couldn’t even hold her because his soul was filthy. But she had never forsaken him, and he knew she never would. She would share his fate, whatever it was.

  And she did. She shared it exactly.

  The second wasp was on the wall behind them. They never saw the stinger coming.

  If Azareen hadn’t stepped in front of him to deflect the first, she would still have been at his side, clear of the path of the second stinger when it hit between his shoulder blades and cut right between his hearts to burst out of his chest, slicing through his armor with an eruption of blood that painted her red in the instant before it cut through her, too—as though they were as insubstantial as Wraith, as ethereal as Sarai. But they were neither smoke nor phantom. They were flesh and blood and bronze, and the stinger ripped through them. It was moving with so much raw power it didn’t slow, but shot across the chamber to strike the far wall with a faint, bright tink! before rebounding to cartwheel backward in slow motion, spraying blood as it spun.

  The two warriors dropped their swords. The blades hit the walkway and clattered off to fall to the floor down below. Azareen was close to the edge, and the force of the blow drove her back, so she teetered at the edge and almost went over. But Eril-Fane caught her and reeled her to his chest, even as he lost the strength to stand and fell to his knees, taking her with him.

  Blood was flowing from the holes in their armor, pumping out in spurts and mingling between them, catching and pooling where they pressed together. Azareen thrust her hands against Eril-Fane’s chest to try to keep his blood inside him, as though she didn’t notice her own was escaping. But her hands were inexplicably weak, and she couldn’t even get to his wound to apply proper pressure. His armor was in the way. The hole in the bronze was so small. Metal jutted out, sharp, where it had been pierced. She sliced her palm on it. His blood pushed out through her fingers, slicking down her wrists, all the way down her arms. Her own blood was mostly hidden, sluicing down inside her armor, her back and belly slick with it. It was so hot and there was so much and it was emptying them like spigots. His eyes were vague and her vision was swimming but she saw him clearly when he fixed on her and rasped, “Azareen. I wish…”

  He pitched forward, as though he were falling asleep. She caught him, but couldn’t hold him upright. Her arms were numb, and he was so heavy. She collapsed to the side, and he slumped down over her. “What?” she asked, desperate, with her shallowing breath. “My love,” she pleaded as his eyes went dull. “What do you wish?”

  But the time for wishing had passed.

  Eril-Fane died first, Azareen just after.
/>   43

  VIOLENT RADIANCE

  Sarai saw it all. She’d reached the doorway and spun to look back, surprised to see her father and Azareen still at the end of the walkway. Had she thought they were following? She hadn’t thought at all. She’d just panicked and done as he’d ordered.

  Now she screamed. Lazlo couldn’t. His strangled throat could only croak. Suheyla couldn’t, either. She couldn’t even breathe. Feral was all that was keeping her upright. Ruby and Sparrow were sobbing. The unnatural quiet of the heart of the citadel echoed with gasps that were part scream, part sob.

  Nova heard none of it. Something had come undone in her mind. She had hung on so long by a single filament of purpose, and the moment she saw Kora’s death, it snapped. The whisper broke free. It filled her head, her body, her soul, like the black water of the sea under ice, many worlds from here. Everything was roaring. Everything was slow. Kora’s killer died. Nova felt her own blood pulsing in time to his arterial spurts, and even in the roaring slow motion of her shock, she thought he died far too quickly.

  What now? Was there an after? Would time keep traipsing forward, indifferent? Nova wasn’t ready for after. There was no “next,” not for her. She had failed. This was all there was, only this, forever.

  There was one last gift in her cohort that she hadn’t yet commandeered: Rook’s. She snatched it from him now and threw out her arms in a spell-casting motion.

  As Sarai started back up the walkway, a faint iridescence, all but invisible, appeared in the air like a bubble around her father and Azareen.

  “Sarai, no,” said Lazlo. He gripped her hand, wanting to stop her, but she turned to smoke and slipped out of his grasp. She couldn’t fathom what she had just witnessed. It couldn’t be real. She was still trapped in Minya’s dream. That had to be it.

  If it was a nightmare, she could change it. She could fix it. She reached them and came up against the faint, shimmering sphere that enclosed them. It looked fragile as a soap bubble, but when Sarai went to push through it, she found she couldn’t even get near it. A field of stillness seemed to surround it. There was no sensation of a physical barrier. She couldn’t feel anything. Simply, the air redirected her movement, her will, like a slow running dream, so that no matter how hard she tried, she just couldn’t get close to the two fallen Tizerkane. She cried out in frustration.

  Their blood was flowing. It oozed out from under their breastplates, spreading over the walkway and dripping off the sides. “Father,” said Sarai, for only the second time in her life. He was slumped over Azareen. Their eyes were open and unseeing and dead.

  A sob choked up Sarai’s throat. “No no no,” she said. She felt hands on her back. Lazlo had followed her. He came to her side, his arms wrapping around her. She clung to him. Together they stared at the bodies, and over them at the invader.

  At the murderer.

  Today Sarai had finally met her father. He had spoken the word daughter and filled an empty place inside her, and now it was empty again. He was dead at her feet. He was dead.

  …wasn’t he?

  Eril-Fane moved. Sarai was staring across his body at Nova when a movement caught her eye. She looked down and beheld the incredible sight of her father sitting up. He had slumped. Now he straightened. Sarai caught a glimpse of Azareen’s eyes that a moment before had been lifeless, and they were not lifeless, not anymore. They were haunted, bleary, fierce, imploring, and unmistakably alive. She sat up, too.

  There was a moment when it was possible to hope.

  Eril-Fane and Azareen were alive. It could not be denied. But some part of Sarai froze and waited, feeling nothing, holding off relief, because the dead don’t come back to life. Who knew that better than she? But more than that, it was the way the two were moving. It didn’t make sense. They had subsided to the floor. To pick themselves up, they ought to have had to push up with their arms. But they didn’t. They rose up like they were on strings, and… and their blood.

  The blood that had pooled around them and was running in rivulets off the walkway, it was flowing back up them, back into their armor.

  Their blood was pulsing back into their bodies.

  Sarai and Lazlo didn’t understand what they was seeing, not when it seemed as though Eril-Fane pushed Azareen backward to teeter at the edge of the walkway, or when she regained her balance, or when their swords, which they had dropped, flew back up from the floor far below to clatter against the walkway and then… jump back into their hands?

  From the corner of their eyes, they saw a bloody blue streak. It was the stinger, flying back at them. Sarai gasped when it reentered Azareen’s back and burst out through her chest before cutting again through Eril-Fane. His blood that had painted her… it peeled away from her and was sucked back inside him, and the stinger exited between his shoulder blades and shot backward, bloodless now, to the wasp whence it had first come.

  “…what?” breathed Sarai, speechless.

  Her father was only a few feet in front of her. She clearly saw that there was no hole now in his bronze backplate. It was unpierced, as though nothing had happened.

  “…how?” asked Lazlo.

  They understood that they were witnessing magic. The bubble, the field of energy. The invader possessed this gift, the extraordinary ability to turn back time. And she had used it to unkill her victims. They understood, but they didn’t trust it.

  And they were right not to.

  Time snapped back and it all played out again, precisely as it had before. The stinger, the blood, the dropped swords. Azareen teetered at the edge. Eril-Fane caught her and pulled her to him. He said, “Azareen. I wish…” They collapsed to their knees.

  “What? My love,” Azareen pleaded. “What do you wish?”

  He hadn’t answered before, and he didn’t now. Again, as before, they died.

  Then it all reversed and happened again.

  Eril-Fane died with his wish unspoken on his lips, its irony bitter on his tongue. I wish we could start all over again. That was what he’d wanted to say to his wife. He meant start a new life—together. Instead it was death they would share. Again.

  And again.

  And again.

  Nova couldn’t stop. There was nothing after this. So she just kept on killing him.

  Rook’s gift was to close off a loop in space and time—a small space, a short time—so that events trapped inside happened over and over until he opened it again. Or, until Nova did, as the case may be. With her hands, in that spell-casting gesture, she had sketched the bubble around her sister’s killer. Everything inside it was trapped in the loop. It stretched from the moment the stinger disengaged from the wasp to when it fell, bloody, to the floor of the chamber—around five seconds, all told. It was meant for him, but it caught Azareen, too, because she’d gotten in the way. And so over and over they played out their deaths, aware every second of what was happening, but powerless to break the cycle. Each time the stinger cut through them, the pain burned through them anew. And each time their vision dimmed and life ebbed, the other’s anguished face was the last thing they saw.

  The first time Rook ever used his gift, he’d been five years old, in the nursery. One of the toddlers had vomited right in Great Ellen’s lap. He’d thought it was funny, and wanted to see it again. When it happened again, he’d had no idea it was his doing. Then it happened again, and kept happening, all while Great Ellen grew red with rage, and the toddler’s eyes streamed frantic tears. It quickly stopped being funny.

  And then it really wasn’t funny, because Korako came and took Rook away.

  She’d brought him here, to this very room, as she brought Werran and Kiska after him, and hundreds before him, thousands. It was surreal for the three of them to be back in this hangar and see the wasp ships on the wall. They couldn’t see the cages within, but they would never forget them, or all that had come after. And they could never betray Nova, who had saved them.

  She looked so much like Korako that the first time they
saw her, they had thought she was her. But Korako had put them in cages. Nova had gotten them out. She’d killed the men who kept the keys, and anyone else who came looking for them, until finally they were left alone.

  “Where did they take you?” Sarai had asked. “Are all the others alive, too?”

  What was, to her, a mystery was Kiska, Rook, and Werran’s life. And yet even they couldn’t answer the second question. The others, all those taken before—were they alive? Maybe. Probably. Some of them, anyway.

  As to the first question, they were taken to the island in the wild red sea, and transferred from the cages in the wasp ships to larger cages there. When Rook was brought, he the first of the three, all the cages were empty, and he was all alone—except for the guards with their lightning prods, that is, which they employed liberally to discourage him from even thinking about using his gift. Those were the worst days of his life by far: five years old, alone in a cage in a row of empty cages. There were signs that other children had been kept there. He’d wondered at Topaz, taken before him, and Samoon and Willow before her, but he hadn’t understood until much later: There had been an auction just before he came.

  The others had already been sold.

  And there it was, the truth at the dark heart of it all. Two hundred years of tyranny, and it all came down to this: Skathis, so-called god of beasts, was breeding magical children to sell as slaves across dozens of worlds. In the wake of the empire’s collapse, wars had broken out all over as factions fought for dominance like pit dogs all turned loose at once. Who wouldn’t pay a king’s ransom for a girl who could stir up the sea just by looking, and drown the whole enemy navy in an hour? Who wouldn’t bid on a child who could pass through walls and murder foes in their sleep, or marshal scourges of insects, read minds, shake the earth, persuade, teleport, control wind?

  Skathis amassed a fortune, all while living as a god and siring bastards to sell as slaves to the highest bidder. Several times a year he held an auction. Buyers came from worlds away, paid princely sums, and took home children to fight their wars for them. Rook was the first of what would have been the new lot, to be sold at the next auction. Werran came soon after, then Kiska, then… no one. No more godspawn came after Kiska. Because the portal never opened again.