Not anymore.
Tonight, she imagined Hayva’s delight, and did her best. Channeling Sparrow, her sweet Orchid Witch, she willed the dead tree back to life and watched it set forth leaf and bud while the two memory-children danced around it, laughing. In the real room where the girl was slouched in a chair beside her dead brother’s body, her lips curved into a soft smile. The moth left her brow, and Sarai left the dream and flew back out into the night.
It’s funny, how you can go years seeing only what you choose to see, and picking your outrage like you pick out a slip, leaving all the others hanging on their slim mesarthium dowel. If outrage were a slip, then for years Sarai had worn only the one: the Carnage.
How well she knew it from dreams. Over and over she’d seen it play out in the minds of the men who’d done it—Eril-Fane’s most of all.
Knifeshine and spreading blood. The Ellens dead on the floor so the men who’d slain them had to step over their bodies. The terror and pleading of little girls and boys old enough to understand what was happening. The wail and lamb bleat of babies too small to know, but infected by the terror of the others. All those screams: subtracted one by one as though silence were the goal.
And the goal was achieved.
Nearly thirty voices were subtracted from the world that day, not even counting the six gods or the dozen humans who, like the Ellens, had gotten in the way. If it weren’t for Minya, then Sarai and Feral, Ruby and Sparrow would have been four more small bodies in the nursery that day. The humans had done that. They had slaughtered babies. It was no surprise that Sarai had become the Muse of Nightmares, a vengeful goddess to haunt their dreams.
But, as she had told Feral, she’d spent her vengeance years ago.
The wretched thing—and the thing she never dared talk about—was that in order to exploit the humans’ fears, she’d had to dwell in them. And you couldn’t do that for four thousand nights without coming to understand, in spite of yourself, that the humans were survivors, too. The gods had been monsters, and had deserved to die.
But their children didn’t. Not then, and not now.
The citadel was their prison, and it was their sanctuary, but for how much longer could it be either? No matter how well they obeyed The Rule, someday the humans would come. If the horror of Minya’s fresh-caught ghosts told them anything, it was that the people of Weep would do again what they had done before, and how could they hope to defend themselves?
Moths and clouds and flowers and fire and ghosts. They weren’t powerless, but Sarai had no delusions. They couldn’t survive a second Carnage. Their only hope was in not being found.
She paced on her terrace, back and forth beneath the moon, while down in the city her moths went from house to house like bees from flower to flower. Her consciousness was a subtle instrument. It could divide evenly among her hundred sentinels, or shift between them in any configuration, honing in where attention was required and receding where it wasn’t. Every moment her perception was shifting. She had to react on a wing’s edge, trust her instincts, carom through the city dipping in and out of minds, spin a hundred moths through their wild dance, twist dreams and sharpen them, harry gods and beasts down the paths of the unconscious. And always, always, whatever else she did, whatever fears she deployed, to each she attached a sneak postscript, like devastating news at the end of a letter. It was always the same. Every nightmare that shook every sleeper in Weep carried the same subliminal warning.
It was a nameless horror of the citadel and all it contained.
This was the work she set herself: to weave through all the dreams of Weep a dread so potent that none could bear to look at the citadel, much less go near it. So far it had been enough.
The night felt very long, but it ended as all nights do, and Sarai called her moths home. She stopped her pacing, and waited. They winged through the last gleams of starlight, re-forming into their siphon of whirling wings, and she opened her mouth and took them back in.
In the beginning, the return had been even worse than the exodus. That first time, she hadn’t managed it at all. She just couldn’t open her mouth to them, and had had to watch them turn to smoke when the sun rose.
She’d been mute all day, as though her voice had turned to smoke with them.
Come nightfall, though, she’d felt the burgeoning again, as the whole cycle began anew, and she’d learned that if she wished to be able to speak, she’d better open her mouth and let the moths back in.
“Who would ever want to kiss a girl who eats moths?” Ruby had once asked her in a spirit of commiseration. And Sarai had thought then—as she did now—that kissing wasn’t a problem likely to arise for her. But she didn’t eat the moths, in any case. There was nothing to choke down, no creatures to swallow. Just the feather-soft brush of wings against her lips as they melted back into her, leaving an aftertaste of salt and soot. Salt from tears, soot from chimneys, and Sarai was whole again. Whole and weary.
She’d hardly stepped back inside when Less Ellen entered, carrying her morning tray. This held her lull in a small crystal vial, with a dish of plums to cut the bitterness. “Good morning, lovely,” said the ghost.
“Good morning, sweet,” replied Sarai. And she reached for her lull, and downed her gray oblivion.
18
The Fused Bones of Slaughtered Demons For all his fanciful storytelling and talk of open minds, what had Lazlo really expected to find as the caravan approached the Cusp? A fissured cliff face of weather-riven marble? Rock that looked enough like bones to spawn a myth, with a boulder here and there in the rough shape of a skull?
That was not what he found.
“They’re really bones,” he said to Eril-Fane, and tried to read confirmation in the hero’s expression, but Eril-Fane only gave a ghost of a smile and maintained the silence that he’d carried with him all day.
“They’re really bones,” Lazlo said again, faintly, to himself. That, over there. That wasn’t a boulder that looked like a skull. It was a skull, and there were hundreds of them. No, there had to be thousands in all this vast white mass, of which hundreds were visible just from the track. Teeth in the jaws, sharp as any hreshtek, and, in the great eye sockets, just as he had said: carrion bird nests. They were strange and shaggy affairs, woven out of stolen things—dropped ribbons and hanks of hair, fringe torn off shawls and even shed feathers. The birds themselves swooped and cried, weaving in and out of immense, curved ridges that could only be spines, segmented and spurred, and, unmistakably: giant hands, giant feet. Tapering carpals as long as a man’s arm. Knucklebones like fists. They were melted, they were fused. The skulls were warped, like candles left too near the fire, so that none held the same shape. But they held shape enough. These had been living creatures once.
Though not generally given to gloating, he would have liked to see the other faranji’s faces just now, Thyon’s in particular. But the golden godson was stuck on a camel, farther back in the caravan, and Lazlo had to be content with echoing exclamations from Calixte, who was given to gloating.
“Hey, Tod, am I really seeing this?” he heard her call. “Or am I lost in my vast credulity?” And, a moment later: “What are you doing here, Tod? Don’t you know it’s rude to wander about in someone else’s credulity?” And then: “Is this fact or reason I’m encountering? Wait, no, it’s more demon bones.”
He suspected she wouldn’t soon tire of the joke.
“You’re surprised,” Eril-Fane remarked to Lazlo. “The way you talked last night, I thought you knew.”