Muse of Nightmares (Strange the Dreamer #2_UK)

by Laini Taylor

  One gift never made it to the block. Smiths could be identified as babies. They had only to touch godsmetal and their little fingers would leave marks in its surface. These babies he slew.

  And so years passed, and Kora was given the task of testing the children and taking them to the wasp ship and locking them up in the little cages. And every time she did, she died a little more, and she might have chosen to die in body as well as spirit were it not for one thing. She dreamed that her sister was still looking for her. She had only to imagine Nova arriving too late, coming to save her only to find that she’d taken her own life, and she wouldn’t be able to do it. She stayed alive.

  And one day a baby boy in the nursery manifested smith ability. Kora snatched him. She stole him, and sent him, in her eagle’s grip, through pierced space to a place far away where Skathis wouldn’t find him.

  She hadn’t planned it. It was luck. But once she had the baby, it all began to take shape in her mind: her mutiny. The boy would grow up, not knowing what he was, and one day she would bring him back, and he would set her free. She daydreamed of murdering Skathis. If his hobby was breeding slave children, hers was dreaming up his death.

  She planned to wait until the baby grew into his power. Then she would bring him back—to fight the gods and kill them, and open the portal and fly her through it. She had it all planned out.

  But it wasn’t to be.

  Because Eril-Fane killed her with the rest of the gods, and the little boy was cast adrift without a single soul knowing what he was. And all that survived of Kora was a shred of her soul in the form of an eagle, which went on as it always had, circling, watching, and waiting for the day when it could finally escape, and go home— wherever that was now.

  Because home was and had always been Nova, and Kora died believing her sister would come.

  Chapter 48

  They Beheld Abominations

  The citadel of the Mesarthim had come alive in the sky. It had ripped its chest open and reached inside, grabbed a handful of people, then knelt—a giant, wings flaring, dwarfing the city—leaned down, and tossed them like litter.

  Lazlo was not among them.

  When the hand had thrust into the chamber, and the metal, flowing, had swept everyone into it, he had tried to follow. He’d seen Sarai and reached for her, but the metal hadn’t let him. Nova hadn’t let him. She still held his power, and she kept him here. He was sunk to his knees in the walkway, trapped. He struggled but couldn’t pull free. He could only watch as the hand drew away, taking everyone he cared about with it.

  “Sarai!” he screamed till his throat went raw.

  Now they were gone and he was still here. He watched in horror as Nova set about doing what he himself had planned to do, but with none of the care he would have taken. She pulled up the anchors one by one. The seraph maneuvered to set a foot on each in turn—east anchor, south, then west. Metal adhered to metal, and she ripped them up, heedless of the buildings around them, which swayed and toppled, sending up billows of dust as the citadel resorbed the mesarthium and grew larger.

  Nova turned last to the melted north anchor, and Lazlo tried to stop her.

  “Leave that one,” he pleaded. With his gift gone, he could no longer sense the metal holding the fractured bedrock together, but he remembered. He had done it, and he knew what would happen if she ripped it out. “The ground will collapse,” he said, looking in desperation to Kiska, Rook, and Werran, as though they might care, or intercede. “The river will flood. The city could fall. Please. Just leave it.”

  But Nova did not.

  Like a beautiful nightmare, the seraph crouched over Weep. It plunged its massive fingers into the sinkhole, gouging down into the rock to find and suck up every dram and rivulet of mesarthium. The ground began to tremble and crack. The sinkhole grew. Its sides collapsed. Huge chunks of stone calved away, and the foaming churn of the Uzumark broke free. Rows of buildings were sucked underground, including the ancient library so recently unearthed. The roar was distant. Plumes of spray and dust fountained up, filling the air with haze.

  From above, to Lazlo’s horrified eyes, it looked like a toy city falling to pieces. “No!” he choked as the devastation spread, block after block collapsing into ruin as the river chewed its way out of the ground like some hell-banished creature seeking the light.

  How far would the destruction reach? How much of the city would crumble? Was the amphitheater safe? Were Sarai and the others?

  Lazlo wasn’t to know. The citadel righted itself in the air and he could see only sky through the hole in its hull. Weep’s fate—and Sarai’s—was hidden from him. “Let me go!” he begged his captors. “Leave me here!”

  Nova didn’t even look at him. She didn’t look at anyone. Her eyes had gone out of focus. A veil of exhaustion had fallen over her. Ashen-faced and heavy-lidded, she undertook her grandest feat of piracy yet. Skathis’s ship was the largest concentration of godsmetal that there had ever been. It was the most powerful vessel in the Continuum. There wasn’t a force in any world that could touch it in battle. And now it was hers.

  With a deep breath, she began the task of moving it through the portal to the world on the other side.

  . . .

  The earth shook under Sarai. A dull roar sounded from all directions. What was happening? Was the city coming down? She couldn’t see over the walls of the amphitheater, but only up at the sky, where the seraph was moving like a creature of mercury, rippling in the sun.

  She saw its right hand attenuate, fingers stretching, thinning. It was a moment before she understood what it was doing. It was feeding itself through the gash in the sky. It was leaving the world. It was leaving them behind. It was going fast, pulsing like blood through a tube. In a matter of seconds it had vanished to the wrist, just like Lazlo’s when he thrust his hand through the warp. Sarai realized that her terrace, where she had paced every night, must now be above the ghastly red sea. Soon all the rest would follow, and Lazlo with it.

  Lazlo.

  She couldn’t catch her breath. It was all too much. Her father was dead. Azareen too. Her home was stolen, and Lazlo was taken. The rest of them had been jettisoned here. She could hardly process this basic fact: She was in Weep.

  A thought hit her like a sobering slap. Everything else went quiet, all other fears blurring to background. She was in Weep, yes. But more to the point, Minya was.

  Minya was in Weep.

  This was just what the little girl had wanted, what she’d threatened Sarai’s soul for, what they’d all tried so hard to prevent. Minya was in Weep with her army. Sarai turned slowly to face her. She had been on her hands and knees, her head hanging down. Not now. She’d gotten to her feet. Her stance was wide. Her hands were fists. She was still shaking, almost shuddering, her thin little chest heaving under her ragged shift. Her ghosts were fanning out to form a protective ring around the strewn godspawn and humans. They were just closing the circle when the Tizerkane warriors came pouring into the amphitheater and had them surrounded in seconds.

  There were scores of them. Their movements were fluid and seemed too quiet for such imposing figures as they. Their armor was bronze, their helms tusked. They carried swords and spears. The spectral-mounted towered over the rest, and the creatures’ branching antlers shone in the late-day sun.

  There were men and women, both young and not. Their faces were hard, their color high. They were hiding their terror as best they could, but Sarai knew their fear as well as her own. She had nurtured it with nightmares, never letting it fade. Their hate they didn’t even try to hide. It was etched into every line of their faces. They breathed through bared teeth. Their eyes were slits. The way they looked at the godspawn, it was brutally clear: It wasn’t young people they saw, survivors, half human, afraid. They beheld abominations.

  No. It was worse than that. They beheld abominations with blood on their hands.

  Sarai saw the scene as they would see it. Ghosts and godspawn would have been bad en
ough, even without the corpses. But there were Eril-Fane and Azareen, laid out so still, limbs askew, and Sparrow—sweet Sparrow who would never hurt anyone—was kneeling between them, ashen-pale, eyes closed, her arms red to her elbows as though she were wearing blood gloves.

  Gentle Sparrow looked like a ghoul who fed on the hearts of heroes.

  Shock ripped through the warriors. At a barked command, they raised their spears. A hundred arms cocked back as one. There was such power in the motion—the collective strength of a people who had borne so much and would risk no more, forgive nothing, and show no mercy. Their hate, already blazing, burned hotter.

  A movement from above drew Sarai’s eye upward to the tiered heights of the amphitheater. Archers had taken up positions, and were sighting down their arrows straight at them.

  Dread lanced through her. It looked as though Minya was getting her fight.

  But could anyone survive it?

  Chapter 49

  Good Little Girls Don’t Kill. They Die.

  Minya was reeling. She was not herself. To have felt that lightness— the weight of souls lifted—even for a minute, had stunned her. And the hate-fear-despair. She hadn’t known how pernicious it was until it ceased.

  For a moment she’d known lightness and silence, and then it all slammed back—the souls and their despair, crushing her once more, all the heavier now that she knew. She was staggering, aware for the first time of the toll she paid every second for her magic.

  It was so much. And there was more. There was just so much, all spinning and crashing around in her head:

  She was aching at the betrayal of waking up on the floor, discarded by her own people.

  She was aghast at the invasion, and gutted, gasping with disbelief, to find herself defeated, cast out, dispossessed.

  When Minya won at quell, she upended the game board and sent the pieces flying, so the loser had to crawl around on hands and knees to gather them up. Now, down on the ground for the first time in her life, her bare feet not on metal but stone—she felt keenly: She was the loser. Nova had upended the board, and she was one of the scattered pieces.

  But who would gather her up?

  She had a flash memory of Lazlo grabbing her and holding her against him to shield her from her own ghosts’ knives, and it joined the crashing, spinning whirl in her head. He’d saved her. He’d risked himself. He’d held her. No one had touched Minya on purpose for a long, long time, let alone held her, and even now, after the fact and in the midst of all this, the feeling of arms and strength and safety overwhelmed her.

  Of course, she told herself, he’d done it for Sarai’s sake, not hers. Who would ever save her for her own sake?

  And anyway, Lazlo wasn’t here now. It was up to her to save them. It always had been. But how? The air pulsed with tension. You could feel the drawn bowstrings, the flex of scarred knuckles, the warriors’ hissed breath, and their sharp desire to let go, to let fly.

  To kill.

  Minya felt it all. The humans’ hate spoke and hers answered.

  When a hundred sets of eyes pin you in place, and all of them see the same thing, how can you not be that thing? The Tizerkane looked at children and saw monsters, and Minya’s darkest self rose to the challenge. It was her oldest, truest reflex:

  Have an enemy, be an enemy.

  The Tizerkane captain barked out a command. “Lay down your weapons. Now!”

  The ghosts were gripping kitchen knives, cleavers. They were paltry weapons against spears, swords, and bows, but Minya knew her army’s strength, and it wasn’t in their steel. “Lay down yours!”

  she hollered back, and her high bell voice was absurd after the low, rough depths of his. “And I might let you live.”

  A rough murmur rumbled through the Tizerkane troops.

  “Minya,” Sarai said, frantic. “Don’t. Please.”

  Minya turned to her sharply. “Don’t what? Keep us alive? You want me to be a good little girl like you, Sarai? Let me tell you something. If I was a good little girl, we’d have died in the nursery with all the rest!”

  Sarai swallowed hard. Now that she’d been in Minya’s dreams, those words had a meaning they wouldn’t have before. She didn’t know if she was right about the Ellens, but if she was, it was true what Minya said. Good little girls don’t stab their nurses and drag toddlers over their corpses in order to save their lives. Good little girls don’t kill. They die.

  And Minya was not a good little girl.

  “I know what you did for us,” said Sarai. “And I’m grateful—”

  “Spare me your gratitude. This is all your fault!”

  “Now, pet,” said Great Ellen, coming between them. “You know that’s not fair. We’re caught up in something older than ourselves and bigger than our world. How could it be all Sarai’s fault?” “Because she chose them and left me on the floor,” said Minya, her anger only thinly covering her hurt. “And now look where we are.”

  Sarai did look, and she did wonder: Was it her fault? Maybe. But what happened now depended on Minya. “We’re stranded and we’re surrounded,” she said. “We can’t hide or retreat. Our only hope is to not fight. You must see that.”

  “Let me guess. You want to beg.”

  “Not beg, just talk.”

  “You think they’ll listen to us?” Minya scoffed.

  “I said, lay down your weapons!” the captain commanded, though he had to know that the ghosts themselves were the weapons, with or without their knives. One might excuse him, though, for not knowing how to demand the surrender of a magical child with an undead army. Eril-Fane had chosen wisely when he put Brishan in charge. Any other commander would already have attacked. Even he wouldn’t wait much longer. His voice grew harsh. “On the ground! I won’t tell you again.”

  And they came to it: fight or surrender. Minya felt herself torn at by two possible outcomes, as though she were lashed to creatures straining in opposite directions, but she couldn’t see what they were.

  Fight, and what then? Sarai was right: They were stranded. It wasn’t supposed to be like this. She had planned to sweep down on Rasalas, wreak her vengeance, and fly home to safety.

  But her vengeance was stolen—Eril-Fane was dead—and so was home and safety. Overhead, so high and hopelessly out of reach, the citadel was disappearing.

  The seraph was up to its shoulder now, one whole arm eaten away. That was what it looked like to her: as though the sky were eating the angel. Minya hadn’t seen what the others had—the portal, and the world beyond it, or Lazlo’s hand vanishing when he reached through the warp. She didn’t know what was happening. Confusion pounded in her temples. She couldn’t catch her breath. She felt light-headed, frail, as though her power, now that she understood its heft, had become too much for her to bear.

  A slither of fear writhed through her. It left a cold trail. Could she win this fight? She’d lost once today already. If she lost again, there would be no pieces to pick up off the floor. This would be the last game she ever played.

  Surrender, though? Put their fate in the hands of humans? Impossible. Minya had seen what humans did to godspawn. Surrender was simply not an option.

  Sarai saw all of this play over her face. “Minya,” she pleaded, her throat tight with mounting fear. “They’ll kill us.”

  A ripple went through the ring of ghosts. Sarai braced for the worst, and was stunned when they dropped their knives without fanfare. Steel clattered and skittered over cobbles. She was dumbfounded. For an instant she almost believed they were surrendering.

  Then their quicksilver substance transformed. Wings unfurled from their shoulders and flared open. They were wings of fire, each feather a flame. The ghosts took on the forms of seraphim, and out of magic and air, in their hands, spears appeared, and the same smile shaped all their lips. It was tight and grim. It was Minya’s smile echoed across all their faces.

  “They’ll kill us no matter what we do,” the little girl said. “And I’m going to take them with
us.”

  Chapter 50

  More to the Story

  Violence erupted in the amphitheater of Weep.

  The Tizerkane hurled their spears. Fire-winged ghosts surged up to block them.

  Any hope Sarai had of survival dissolved under the first clash of metal on metal. She looked up at the sky. The citadel was half gone. Her hearts cried out for Lazlo. She imagined she could hear his hearts crying out for her. It was all so unfair. They’d never had a chance—any of them. Their lives had come to them tangled in hate. They’d tried to untangle them and failed. And now?

  The ghosts deflected the hurled spears with their own, and none made it through to the godspawn. The Tizerkane roared and attacked with their swords, and, up above, the archers loosed arrows. Sarai heard the twang of bowstrings from all sides, and felt a whisper of air by her cheek. Arrows are swifter than spears, and much smaller. The ghosts couldn’t possibly block them all and the archers had the advantageous position. Sarai, gasping, looked around to see if anyone was hit. She saw Ruby and Feral looking wide-eyed and frantic, Suheyla between them, beginning to stir. Minya stood stock-still and furious, flanked by the Ellens. And Sparrow—

  The instant Sarai’s eyes lit on her, Sparrow jerked. She was on her knees between Eril-Fane and Azareen, and an arrow slammed into her back and threw her forward.

  “No!” screamed Sarai, and rushed toward her. Where was she hit? She couldn’t tell. Please. Not her hearts, not anything vital, she prayed as more arrows flew.

  Sparrow was slumped across Azareen. Sarai reached her as she struggled to push herself up. “Stay down!” she told her, trying to shield her with her self.