Muse of Nightmares (Strange the Dreamer #2_UK)

by Laini Taylor

  Sarai heard his anguish. His voice was extraordinary. It was so rough, and suffused with emotion. It affected her like texture, like the sweet stroke of a callused palm, and she wanted to lean into it and let it stroke her forever. Instead, she forced out bitter words. The terror of her unraveling still pulsed in her, but she meant it absolutely when she said, “I would sooner evanesce than be the ruin of you and the death of Weep.”

  Ruin. Death. Those words were all wrong. Lazlo shook his head but he couldn’t shake them free. He had saved Weep. He could never harm it. But neither could he lose Sarai. Was that really the choice before him? “You can’t ask me not to save you.”

  Minya chose to speak up then. “Really, Sarai, what do you think?” Her tone suggested sympathy for Lazlo’s plight—as though it were Sarai putting him in this impossible position, and not herself. “That he could just let you fade away, and have that on his conscience?”

  “Don’t talk about his conscience,” cried Sarai, “when you would tear it in half without a second thought!”

  Minya shrugged. “Two halves still make a whole.”

  “No, they don’t,” Sarai said bitterly. “I should know.” Minya had made her what she was—the Muse of Nightmares—but years of immersion in human dreams had changed her. Hate used to be like armor, but she’d lost it, and without it, she’d found herself defenseless against the suffering of Weep. Her conscience had torn in half, and the rip was a wound. Two halves did not make a whole. They made two bloody, sundered halves: the part that was loyal to her godspawn family, and the part that understood the humans were victims, too.

  “Poor you,” said Minya. “Is it my fault you all have such frail consciences?”

  “It isn’t frail to choose peace over war.”

  “It’s frail to run away,” snarled Minya. “And I won’t!”

  “It’s not running away. It’s being free to leave—”

  “We’re not free!” barked Minya, cutting her off. “How can we be free if justice isn’t done?” Her rage kindled. It was always there, always smoldering, and it didn’t take much to set it ablaze. The thought of the murderers going unpunished, of the Godslayer walking untroubled in the sun-washed streets of Weep, it lit a hellfire in her hearts, and she couldn’t fathom—would never fathom—why it failed to light one in Sarai’s. What was missing in her that the Carnage meant nothing? She said, seething, “You’re right about one thing, though. Everything has changed. We don’t have to wait for them to come to us now.” With a calculating look at the winged beast, Rasalas, she said, “We can go down to the city anytime we like.”

  Down to the city.

  Minya, in Weep.

  Lazlo and Sarai were standing close together. His hand was warm on the small of her back, and she felt the jolt that went through him. It went through her, too, at the idea of Minya in Weep. She saw how it would be: a ragged little girl with beetle shell eyes, trailing an army of ghosts. She would set them on their own kith and kin, and every life they ended would be one more soldier for her army. Who could fight such a force? The Tizerkane were strong but few, and ghosts could not be hurt or killed.

  “No,” choked Sarai. “Lazlo won’t take you there.”

  “He will if he loves you.”

  The word, which had been so sweet on Sarai’s lips just moments ago, was obscene on Minya’s. “Won’t you,” the little girl said, turning her dark eyes on Lazlo.

  How could he answer? Either choice was unthinkable. When he shook his head, he didn’t mean it as a response. He was unmoored, spinning. He only shook his head to clear it, but Minya took it for an answer, and her eyes cut narrow.

  She didn’t know where this stranger had come from, or how he was godspawn like them, but she knew one thing for certain: She had won. He had Skathis’s gift and she’d beaten him anyway. Didn’t they understand that? She had them, and yet they stood there arguing as though this were a discussion.

  It was not a discussion.

  Whenever Minya won at quell—and Minya always won at quell—she upended the game board and sent the pieces flying, so the loser had to crawl around on hands and knees and gather them up. It was important that losers understood what they were; sometimes you had to drive the point home. How, though?

  Nothing easier. The stranger held Sarai as though she were his. She wasn’t his. He couldn’t hold her if Minya chose to take her.

  And Minya did.

  She snatched her away. Oh, she didn’t move a muscle. She simply compelled Sarai’s substance to obey. She could have made it seem as though Sarai were moving of her own accord, but where was the lesson in that? Instead, she seized her by her wrists, her hair, her being. And pulled.

  Chapter 4

  War with the Impossible

  Lazlo felt as though he were clinging to the edge of reason by his fingertips, and that the spinning world might at any moment shake him off and hurl him, as the blast had hurled him last night. That was surely part of it: He’d hit his head on the cobblestones. It throbbed. Dizziness came and went, and his ears still rang. They’d bled. The blood was dried on his neck, caked with the dust of the explosion, but that was the least of the blood on him. His arms and hands, his chest, they were dark with Sarai’s blood, and the reality of it—what was more real than blood?—stirred a war in him between grief and disbelief.

  How could he make sense of all that had happened? In the most beautiful dream of his life, he’d shared his hearts with Sarai, kissed her, flown with her, and tipped over the edge of innocence with her into something hot and sweet and perfect, only to have her ripped from him with sudden waking—

  —to find the alchemist Thyon Nero at his window, cold with accusations that had led Lazlo to the extraordinary discovery of who and what he was: no war orphan of Zosma, but the half-human son of a god, blessed with the power that had been Weep’s curse, just in time to save it.

  But not Sarai.

  He had saved everyone but her. He still couldn’t draw a full breath. He would be haunted forever by the sight of her body arched backward over the gate it had landed on, blood dripping from the ends of her long hair.

  But the chain of wonders and horrors hadn’t ended with her death. This was not the world as Lazlo had known it, outside his books of fairy tales. This was a place where moths were magic and gods were real, and angels had burned demons on a pyre the size of a moon. Here, death was not the end. Sarai’s soul was safe and bound—oh wonder—but a grubby little girl dangled her fate like a toy on a string, plunging them both back into horror.

  And now Minya snatched her away, and the bottom fell out of Lazlo’s despair, proving it an abyss, its depths unknown. He tried to hold her, but the tighter he gripped, the more she melted away. It was like trying to hold on to the reflection of the moon.

  There was a word from a myth: sathaz. It was the desire to possess that which can never be yours. It meant senseless, hopeless yearning, the way a gutter child might dream of being king, and it came from the tale of the man who loved the moon. Lazlo used to like that story, but now he hated it. It was about making peace with the impossible, and he couldn’t do that anymore. As Sarai melted right out of his arms, he knew: He could only make war with it.

  War with the impossible. War with the monstrous child before him. Nothing less than war.

  But .. . how could he fight her when she held Sarai’s soul?

  He clamped his jaws shut to keep unwise words from flying out of his mouth. Breath hissed out between his clenched teeth. His fists clenched, too, but there was too much fury for his body to contain, and Lazlo did not yet comprehend that he was no longer just a man. The boundaries of his self had changed. He was flesh and blood, and he was bone and spirit, and he was metal now, too.

  Rasalas roared. The creature that had been Skathis’s, and hideous, was Lazlo’s now, and majestic. Part spectral, part ravid, it was sleek and powerful, with vast mirror-metal antlers and such fine rendering that its mesarthium fur felt plush to the touch. Lazlo didn’t mean the b
east to roar, but it was an extension of him now, and when he clamped his own mouth shut, Rasalas’s came open instead. The sound ...When the creature had screamed down in the city, the sound had been pure anguish. This was rage, and the entire citadel vibrated with it.

  Minya felt it rattle through her and she didn’t even blink. She knew whose rage mattered here, and Lazlo knew it, too. “I don’t speak beast,” she said as the roar died away, “but I hope that wasn’t a no.” Her voice was calm now, even bored. “You remember the rule, I trust. There was only the one.”

  Do everything I say, or I’ll let her soul go.

  “I remember,” said Lazlo.

  Sarai was by Minya’s side now, rigid as a board. She was suspended in the air, like she was hanging from a hook. Horror and helplessness were plain in her eyes, and he was sure the moment had come—the impossible choice between the girl he loved and an entire city. A rushing filled his ears. He raised his hands, placating. “Don’t hurt her.”

  “Don’t make me hurt her,” Minya spat back.

  A sound came from behind Lazlo. It was part gasp, part sob, and, small though it was, it spidered a crack through the atmosphere of threat. Minya cast a glance to the other three godspawn. Ruby, Sparrow, and Feral were still reeling with shocks. The citadel’s lurch, Sarai’s fall, and this stranger carrying her back to them dead. It was shock upon shock, and now this.

  “What are you doing?” Sparrow asked, disbelieving. She stared at Minya with haunted eyes. “You can’t... use Sarai.”

  “Clearly I can,” replied Minya, and to prove it she made Sarai nod.

  It was grotesque, that jerk of a nod, all while Sarai’s eyes pleaded with them. It was the only weakness in Minya’s gift: She couldn’t keep her slaves’ horror from showing in their eyes. Or perhaps she simply preferred it this way.

  Another soft sob tore from Sparrow’s throat. “Stop it!” she cried. She came forward, wanting to go to Sarai and grab her away from Minya—not that she could—but she stopped short at the corpse, which lay in her way. She might have gone around it or stepped over it, but she came to a halt and stared. She’d only seen it from across the terrace, when Lazlo laid it down. Up close, the brutal reality robbed her of breath. Ruby and Feral came up beside her, and they stared down at it, too. A whimper escaped from Ruby.

  Sarai had been impaled. The wound was right in the center of her chest, an ugly ravaged hole. She had hung upside down, so the blood had run up her neck, into her hair, saturating it. At the temples and crown it was still cinnamon, but the long waves of it were wine-dark and clumped into a sticky mass.

  The three of them looked from Sarai to Sarai and back again— from the body to the ghost and the ghost to the body—trying to reconcile the two. The ghost wore the same pink slip as the body, though it was without blood, and there was no wound on her. Her eyes were open; the body’s were shut. Lazlo had kissed them closed when he laid it down, though it couldn’t be said that it looked peaceful. Neither did, the one lifeless and discarded, the other frozen in midair, a pawn in a treacherous game.

  “She’s dead, Minya,” Sparrow said, a tear tracing down each cheek. “Sarai died.”

  With a little chuff, Minya said, “I’m aware of that, thanks.”

  “Are you?” asked Feral. “I mean, because you called this a game.” His own voice sounded thin to him now in contrast to this stranger’s. Unconsciously, he deepened it, trying to match Lazlo’s masculine burr. “Look at her, Minya,” he said, gesturing to the body. “This isn’t a game. This is death.”

  Minya did look, but if Feral was hoping for a reaction, he was disappointed. “You think I don’t know what death is?” she asked, amusement quirking her lips.

  Oh, she knew. When she was six years old, everyone she knew was murdered in cold blood, except the four babies she saved just in time. Death had made her who she was: this unnatural child who never grew up, who never forgot, and would never forgive.

  “Minya,” said Ruby. “Let her go.”

  Lazlo couldn’t know how unusual it was that they were standing up to her. Only Sarai ever did that, and now, of course, she couldn’t, so they did what they knew she would do, and lent their voices for hers, which had been silenced. They spoke in little surges of gathered breath, their cheeks flushed violet. It was frightening, and also freeing, like pushing open a door that one has never dared try. Lazlo waited, grateful for their intervention, and prayed Minya would listen.

  “You want me to let her go?” she asked, a dangerous glint in her eyes.

  “No—” he said quickly, reading her intent, to release Sarai’s soul to evanescence. It was like a fairy tale, a wish unclearly phrased, turned against the wisher.

  “You know what I mean,” said Ruby, impatient. “We’re family. We don’t enslave each other.”

  “You don’t because you can’t,” retorted Minya.

  “I wouldn’t if I could,” said Ruby—rather unconvincingly, if truth be told.

  “We don’t use our magic on each other,” said Feral. “That’s your rule.”

  Minya had made them all promise when they were still little children. They’d put their hands to their hearts and sworn, and they had abided by it—the occasional rain cloud or burned bed notwithstanding.

  Minya regarded them, gathered now around the stranger. They seemed all arrayed against her. She gave her answer slowly, as though instructing idiots in the obvious. “If I didn’t use my magic on her, she would evanesce.”

  “So use it for her, not against her,” Sparrow implored. “You can hold her soul but leave her free will, the way you do with the Ellens.”

  The Ellens were the two ghost women who’d raised them, and there was a problem with Sparrow’s innocent statement. The women, they all now noted, weren’t currently exhibiting “free will.” If they had been, they would not have remained apart, huddled behind the metal barrier Lazlo had made when he fought off Minya’s assault. They would be right here with them, tangled up in their business, clucking and bossing as was their way.

  But they were not, and as this dawned on them, their shock pivoted in this new direction. “Minya,” said Feral, appalled. “Tell me you aren’t controlling the Ellens.”

  It was unthinkable. They weren’t like the other ghosts in Minya’s sad, dead army. They didn’t despise the godspawn. They loved them, and were loved, and had died trying to protect them from the God-slayer. Theirs were the first souls Minya had ever caught, on that dire day when she’d found herself alone with four babies to raise in a blood-spattered prison. She could never have managed without them, and it was as Sparrow said, or at least it always had been: She used her magic for them, not against them. Yes, she held their souls on strings, like she did with all the rest, but that was just so they wouldn’t evanesce. She left them their free will. Supposedly.

  Minya’s face tightened, a flash of guilt no sooner showing than it vanished. “I needed them. I was defending the citadel,” she said with a special glare for Lazlo. “After he trapped my army inside.”

  “Well, you’re not defending it now,” said Feral. “Let them be.”

  “Fine,” said Minya.

  The ghost women emerged from behind the barrier, freed. Great Ellen’s eyes were fierce. Sometimes, to get the children to tell her the truth, she turned her whole head into a hawk’s. They could never defy that piercing gaze. She didn’t transform now, but her gaze pierced nonetheless.

  “My darlings, my vipers,” she said, coming over. She seemed to glide, her feet not touching the floor. “Let’s have an end to this bickering, shall we?” To Minya, in a voice equal parts fondness and censure, she said, “I know you’re upset, but Sarai’s not the enemy.”

  “She betrayed us.”

  Great Ellen clucked her tongue. “She did no such thing. She didn’t do what you wanted her to. That isn’t betrayal, pet. It’s disagreement.”

  Less Ellen, who was younger and slighter than her broad, matronly cohort, added with some humor, “You never do what I wa
nt you to. Is it betrayal every time you hide from a bath?”

  “That’s different,” muttered Minya.

  To Lazlo, watching, with the awful sensation that his hearts were in a vise, the tone of the interaction was bizarre. It was so casual, so entirely not on par with Minya holding Sarai’s soul prisoner. They might have been scolding a child for hugging a kitten too tight.

  “We should all decide what to do,” said Feral in his newly deepened voice. “Together.”

  Sparrow added, with a note of pleading, “Minya, this is us.”

  Us, Minya heard. The word was tiny, and it was huge, and it was hers. Without her, there would be no “us,” just piles of bones in cradles. And yet they gathered around this man they had never seen before, and stared at her as though she were the stranger.

  No. They were staring as though she were the enemy. It was a look Minya knew very well. For fifteen years, every soul she’d captured had looked at her just like that. A frisson of... something . .. ran through her. It was as fierce as joy but it wasn’t joy. It shot through her veins like molten mesarthium and made her feel invincible.

  It was hate.

  It was reflex, like drawing your knife when your foe’s hand twitches. It pounded through her like blood, like spirit. Her hands tingled with it. The sun seemed to brighten, and everything became simple. This was what Minya knew: Have an enemy, be an enemy. Hate those who hate you. Hate them better. Hate them worse. Be the monster they fear the most. And whenever you can, and however you can, make them suffer.

  The feeling welled up in her so swiftly. If she’d had fangs they’d be beaded with venom and ready to bite.

  But .. .bite whom?

  Hate whom?

  These were her people. Everything she’d done for the past fifteen years had been for them. This is us, Sparrow had said. Us us us. But they were over there, looking at her like that, and she was no part of their us. She was outside it now, alone, apart. A sudden void opened up in her. Would they all betray her, as Sarai had, and...what would she do if they did?