Muse of Nightmares (Strange the Dreamer #2_UK)

by Laini Taylor

  It was the last thing she wanted to tell him. He was here. She wanted nothing more than to tuck her face into his neck and breathe the sandalwood scent of him, but since when did she get what she wanted? There was too much at stake. She had to be brave.

  “Leave?” he repeated, looking lost and confused. “I’m not going anywhere without you.”

  “But I can’t leave. I’m bound to her, and it’s too great a risk for you to stay. You must see that. She won’t give up. She never does. I don’t think she can.”

  Lazlo swallowed hard. The thought of leaving choked him. “I belong here,” he said, feeling the truth of it all through him. With Sarai, whom he loved, and with others like himself, and with the metal, too. It had awakened a dimension of him that he had never known existed, a whole new sense, as real as sight or touch. It was part of him now. He was part of this. To leave would mean losing not only Sarai but a piece of himself as well.

  “If you stay,” said Sarai, “she’ll find a way to break you.”

  “I won’t break.”

  She wanted to believe him. She was weary of being brave. “Not even if she lets me evanesce,” she said. “Promise me you won’t bring her to Weep, no matter what.”

  “I promise,” Lazlo said, and underneath that promise he made another to himself: that he wouldn’t fail Sarai again. No matter what. And if the two vows were in conflict? He would find a way. He had to. “We’ll get through this,” he told her. “Together.”

  He reached for her, and she gave up all resistance.

  The others watched, transfixed, as she melted against him, sweetly heavy and his to hold. Their eyes closed, and they rested their foreheads together as they breathed soft words from each other’s lips. They didn’t kiss, yet the moment was as intimate as any kiss, and it was clear to the others by the sure draw of his arms, and the smooth glide of her into them, that they’d done this before. When, though? How could Sarai have kept such a secret? A lover, and never a word!

  “I’m sorry,” said Ruby, her voice bright and intrusive. “I feel I should know this already. But...who are you?”

  Sarai and Lazlo both turned. “Oh,” said Sarai, biting her lip. “Right. This is Lazlo. Lazlo, this is Ruby, Feral, Sparrow.” She gestured to them one by one. “Great Ellen, Less Ellen.”

  “I’m very pleased to meet you,” he said, earnest, fixing his dreamer’s gray eyes on each of them in turn. “I’ve heard so much about you all.”

  “Have you?” inquired Feral, skewing a look at Sarai. “Because we can’t say the same.”

  “We’ve never heard of you,” Ruby clarified tartly.

  Sarai felt a flush of guilt, but it didn’t last. With a lift of her chin, she said, “If you’d come to me yesterday when I was trapped in my room without food or water, I might have told you about him.”

  “Now, now,” said Great Ellen, coming between them. “It’s no time for sniping.” To Lazlo, she offered her hand, and he took it. “It’s my pleasure, young man,” she said. “Welcome. Or perhaps...” She cocked her head, considering him. “Welcome back?”

  Welcome back? They all stared at her, Lazlo most of all. “Do you know me?” he asked.

  “I might,” she answered. “Though if it is you, you’ve changed a bit since I saw you last. Babies all rather look the same.”

  “What do you mean, Ellen?” Sarai asked her. “Was Lazlo born here?”

  “I couldn’t say for certain.” She frowned, thinking back. “But there was a baby, a boy—” And they didn’t get to hear the rest, not then, because a scream split the air and they all flinched and looked up.

  It sounded like a woman’s voice, high and plaintive, but it was a bird. Well, it was no ordinary bird, but the great white eagle they called Wraith, for its phantom habit of vanishing in thin air. It wasn’t a ghost—they knew that because if it were, Minya would have power over it, and she didn’t. It had been around as long as they had, appearing now and then to draw its floating circles in the sky over the citadel, watching them from a distance. It had always been silent. But not now.

  It drew lower in its circling than ever before, so that they could make out its eyes for the first time, gleaming dark like gemstones. The dagger hook of its beak opened in another scream before it luffed its huge wings to land on a slender branch of one of the plum trees at the garden’s edge. The bough bobbed under its weight, a few plums detaching to fall to the city far below.

  It screamed again, neck stretched forward, eyes intent. They all stood transfixed.

  Lazlo’s heartbeats quickened. The moment he’d first glimpsed the bird, out the library window back in Zosma, he’d felt an affinity, a rush—like the turn of a page and a story beginning. It was at that moment, before he ever laid eyes on the Tizerkane or the Godslayer, that his tame patience with the gray of his life had smashed and spilled him tumbling toward his future. This future. It hadn’t begun in the courtyard, when the warriors had entered on spectralback and cast the whole library into uproar. It had begun when he glanced out the window and saw a huge white bird hovering on an updraft.

  But he’d had no context for the affinity then. He hadn’t known what he was. Now he did, and the sight of the bird up close stirred memories too deep to claim. He had only been a baby. How could he possibly remember...if indeed it had actually happened?

  If his suspicions were right, it was this bird that had carried him to Zosma.

  Why?

  Wraith lifted off the bough. One last scream, and it dove, disappearing from their sight, so that they all moved to the balustrade and peered over, to watch it veer and glide down in a widening spiral until it was naught but a scrap of white against the rooftops far below.

  “Well,” said Sarai. “That was new.”

  “What do you mean?” asked Lazlo.

  “It’s never done anything like that before. It’s never made a sound, or come so near us.”

  “Do you think it was trying to tell us something?” mused Sparrow.

  “Like what?” asked Ruby, who couldn’t begin to imagine.

  And Lazlo couldn’t, either, and yet that feeling, that affinity, made him certain there was something. Because if he was right, the bird had changed the whole course of his life. What was it? he wondered, and would have asked, but just then Feral pointed down, over the balustrade at the city below. “Look,” he said, and they forgot Wraith for the moment.

  Something was happening in Weep.

  Chapter 8

  Streets as Full as Veins

  The bird swooped low over the city.

  Its shadow flew with it in a perfect ballet, flickering over rooftops where, for the first time in fifteen years, the sun shone down. The golden domes blazed with morning light. The topography of the city had changed overnight. Where there had been four anchors— monumental blocks of mesarthium—now there were only three. Where the fourth had been was just a melted lump and a great, ragged sinkhole flanked by charred ruins.

  Melted anchor, folded wings, and a new blue god in the citadel over Weep. It meant something, and the bird grew restless. It had been waiting for so long. It let out a final wail and vanished, taking its shadow with it.

  The streets below were as full as veins, streams of people pulsing like blood, like spirit, through the city’s arteries and out. Weep was bleeding its citizens into the countryside. A hundred thousand souls, and all of them wanted out. They were bottlenecked in the narrow lanes, pressed together like tinned fish—if tinned fish could curse, and had elbows with which to prod one another. Their panic made a low thrum. They pushed handcarts piled with possessions, grandmothers perched on top like wizened queens. Chickens flapped in cages. Children rode their parents’ shoulders; babies were tied to backs, and dogs stuck close with their tails between their legs. As for the cats, they would stay put. Weep was theirs now. The citizens were fleeing the night’s disaster and revelation.

  Godspawn.

  The word was cursed and spat a hundred thousand times, and whispered and moaned
a hundred thousand more as the city’s heartbeats pumped its people out the eastern gate in a roiling, frightened flow.

  Mounted Tizerkane warriors rode among them, keeping the peace. An orderly evacuation would have been better, neighborhood by neighborhood, but the folk would have rioted sooner than stay at home awaiting their turn to leave. So the Tizerkane didn’t try to stop them, but only to prevent them from trampling one another in their haste. The warriors were well trained, and managed to conceal their own fear, when most just wanted to fall in line and flee with the rest.

  There were outsiders in the city, too—the faranji from the Godslayer’s delegation—and most of them sat in carriages, stuck in the slow throb of the exodus. They rapped on ceilings with fists and canes, trying to urge their drivers to move. But the drivers just shrugged, gestured to the density of bodies—and wagons and leashed pigs and at least one four-poster bed set on wheels and drawn by a great brute of a goat—and kept their pace, ever so slowly grinding toward the gate.

  Some parts of the city were quiet—notably the quarter of the melted anchor, where last night all hell had broken loose.

  The fires had died away. The dust clouds had settled on the rubble of the explosion, and a young man with golden hair stood at the rim of the sinkhole. He was the alchemist, Thyon Nero, and he could hear the river moving below, and remember the roar when it had nearly burst through. His eyes traced the sunstruck rivulets of blue metal that disappeared into the ground. Somehow, Strange had shored up the cracked bedrock.

  Thyon’s mind was undergoing a sensation of warp, as though it were shrinking and expanding, shrinking and expanding, trying to discover its new boundaries. Sometimes the limits of understanding shift too quickly to track, and it felt like being swept out to sea by a rogue wave and having to swim back, against riptides, finally staggering ashore to a landscape made unfamiliar by cataclysm. If the kingdom of knowledge was a city, then a swath of Thyon’s had been shaken to the ground, and he was standing knee-deep in rubble both in his thoughts and in reality.

  What had he witnessed last night?

  What was Strange?

  “Oh. You’re still here.”

  Thyon whipped around at the sound of the voice. He’d been absorbed in his thoughts and hadn’t heard anyone approach. His expression didn’t change at the sight of Calixte Dagaz—acrobat, climber, convicted jewel thief, possible assassin, and, like himself, esteemed member of the Godslayer’s delegation.

  “I thought you’d have fled with the others,” she said, her voice light with careless scorn.

  “Did you,” said Thyon, flat, as though making it a question would take too much effort. “Then you’re a poor judge of character.”

  Calixte was a slip of a young woman, narrow-hipped, flat-chested, and lithe. Her shorn hair, only now growing back from its prison shave, might have made her look like a boy, but it didn’t. Her face, if not pretty in the way Thyon had been trained to judge such matters, was undeniably feminine. Her lips were full, her eyes knife-shaped and thickly lashed, and there was a delicacy to her features that was at odds, Thyon thought, with the crude way she spoke, and the too-loud laugh she’d no doubt honed among circus folk, striving to be heard over the bellows and guffaws of sword swallowers and fire breathers. “I’m an excellent judge of character,” she said. “Which is why I made friends with Lazlo, and not you.”

  The barb struck but didn’t hurt. Thyon didn’t care what Calixte thought of him. “You say that as though I was an option.”

  He meant, of course, that he—son of a duke, godson to a queen, and the most celebrated alchemist of the age—was above befriending a circus waif sprung from prison out of pity, but she turned his words against him. “No. You don’t have friends. I noticed that straightaway. It would have been wasted effort. Still, I’ve been known to exert valiant efforts when someone’s worth it.”

  He gave her a wan smile. “If I’m not worth your efforts, why are you bothering me now?”

  It was a fair question. She skewed her mouth to one side. “Because I have no one else to bother?”

  “What about your girlfriend? Has she tired of you already?” Thyon might not have involved himself in the lives of the others—if that was what friendship was, being involved in the mess that was other people’s lives—but it hadn’t escaped his notice that Calixte had paired off with one of the warriors. The other delegates had gossiped about them like washerwomen, following them with hot eyes even as they called them unnatural and worse.

  No one from Weep, Thyon had noted, had seemed in any way troubled by the pairing.

  “It’s impossible to tire of me,” Calixte stated as simple fact. “Tzara’s busy.” She waved a hand toward the chaos to the south. The noise was only a low rumble here, in this abandoned quarter. “Preventing stampedes and such.” She spoke blithely, but worry lurked in the corners of her mouth and eyes—for Tzara, charged with keeping the peace; for Weep, whose worst fears stirred in the hated metal angel; and for Lazlo, who’d gone up there and hadn’t come back.

  “Why stay, if you have no one to play with?” Thyon asked, still matching his tone to her scorn. He was irritated. This banter was beneath him; she was beneath him. In truth, he’d had little experience consorting with common people. He was baffled by their casualness, and stymied by their disrespect. Back home, someone like Calixte wouldn’t dare address him, let alone insult him. “You could still catch the carriages. I’m sure Tod would be happy to make space for you.”

  Calixte mock-smiled her eyes to squints. She had not been well received by her fellow delegates, and her countryman Ebliz Tod was the worst of the lot. “Oh, he must be long gone by now,” she said. “He probably ran out of here first thing, using the heads of the populace as stepping-stones.”

  In spite of himself, Thyon smiled. He could just picture it.

  “I’m not going anywhere,” Calixte added with quiet intensity. She joined Thyon at the edge of the sinkhole and peered into it as intently as he had been. “I want to know what happened last night.”

  “Which part? Nearly being crushed to death, or the metal coming alive, or—”

  “Lazlo turned blue.”

  Thyon had been about to say that, though he would have called him Strange, not Lazlo. But the way Calixte said it—intense, confused, and fascinated—brushed away the veil of casual banter. There was nothing casual here.

  “That he did,” said Thyon.

  They’d both seen it happen. They’d watched him run to the sinking anchor and brace it with his bare hands, as though with the strength of his body he could keep it from capsizing. And, impossibly, he had—though not, they both gathered, with the strength of his body. It was some other strength they couldn’t begin to fathom. They fell into a momentary silence, their mutual disdain muted in the presence of this mystery.

  “How?” she wanted to know.

  There were worlds in that word. Thyon had no doubt that both metal and gods had come from some other world, but he was an alchemist, not a mystic, and he only knew one thing for certain. “It was the metal,” he told her. “It’s a reaction to touching the metal.”

  She squinted at him. “But I’ve touched it plenty, and I’m not blue.”

  “No. Me either. It’s just him. It’s something about him.”

  “But what does that mean? That he’s one of them? One of the gods who made that thing?”

  Strange, a god? Through all his musing, Thyon had not allowed those words to scrape against each other. “That’s absurd,” he said tightly.

  Calixte agreed, though for a different reason. Thyon objected to the notion that Lazlo could be divine, powerful. She objected on the grounds that the Mesarthim were evil. “No one’s less evil than Lazlo. And the girl, she didn’t look evil, either, poor thing.”

  The girl. Thyon was assailed anew by the brew of feelings that had churned in him at the sight of Lazlo Strange cradling a girl to his chest. He’d hardly known how to interpret the image. It was so unexpected as to be incom
prehensible. Strange with a girl. The details—that she was blue, that she was dead—had filtered in slowly, and he’d still been processing them after Strange carried her away. Into the air. On a statue brought to life. Indeed, he was still processing them now.

  Strange had known a girl—a goddess, no less—and she had died, and he was grieving.

  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.