Muse of Nightmares (Strange the Dreamer #2_UK)

by Laini Taylor

  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?

  Chapter 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.

  Chapter 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 dozen 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.

  On Azareen’s sixte
enth birthday, there was a dance in the Fishermen’s Pavilion. It wasn’t for her birthday; that was chance. She didn’t tell Eril-Fane, but he knew and brought a present—a bracelet he’d made himself, of hammered steel with a demonglass sunburst. When he clasped it for her, his fingers lingered on her wrist, and when they danced, his big, sure hands trembled on her waist.

  And when the dance was broken up by Skathis arriving on Rasalas to carry off a girl called Mazal, they stood frozen, powerless and furious, and wept.

  That night he walked her home by a towpath underground, and they spoke with the fervor of untested warriors of overthrowing the gods. He went down on his knees before her, and, trembling, kissed her hands. She touched his face with unreality and ease: She’d dreamed of this so much that nothing was more natural, but there were details she hadn’t known to imagine: how rough his jaw, how hot his brow, how soft—how soft—his lips. She brushed her fingers over them, dazed, half dreaming, dizzy. Time skipped, and then it wasn’t her fingers but her lips on his lips, all the better to feel their softness, because her fingers were callused but her lips felt everything, and he was everything she wanted to feel.

  Something in them was awakened that night. To see a girl borne off by Skathis when they had just been dancing, and to know, even if they could not bear to think of it, what she must be enduring...It was a harsh awakening, and they drowned it with each other, with their lips and hands and hunger. Mazal was hardly older than Azareen. Few girls in the city escaped the gods’ attentions. Almost all were destined to take that ride up to the citadel and spend a year they would not remember. It was only a matter of time, they knew, and so time took on new meaning.

  Azareen scarcely remembered the days that had followed, but the nights. ..oh, the nights. In the river cavern, they sparred with new wildness, so that the others training around them would find themselves stopping to watch. It was a deadly, passionate dance, and they were perfectly matched, her speed a counterpoint to his strength. No one else in the city could have bested them. After sparring, he would walk her home, only they wouldn’t get there till close to sunup. They knew all the shadowed places where they could be alone, to kiss and touch and press and breathe and drown and live and burn.