The window was open. There was no obstacle to entering, but she hesitated and perched the moths on the window ledge to peer inside. There wasn’t much to the narrow room: a clothes cupboard, some shelves, and a bed of tidy, tightly packed feather mattresses covered with hand-embroidered quilts. There was just enough light through the window to give depth to the darkness, so she saw, in shades of black, the contour of a form. A shoulder, tapering downward. He was sleeping on his side, his back to the window.
Up in her own body, Sarai’s hearts stammered. She was nervous, flustered even, as though it were some sort of reunion. A one-sided reunion, anyway. It had been two years since he went away, and it had been such a relief when he did—to be free of Minya’s constant harassment. Every day—every day—the little girl had demanded to know what he’d dreamed about, and what Sarai had unleashed on her father. Whatever the answer, she was never content. She had wanted Sarai to visit on him such a cataclysm of nightmares as would shatter his mind and leave him spinning through darkness forever. She had wanted Sarai to drive him mad.
The Godslayer had always been a threat to them—the greatest threat. He was Weep’s beating heart, the liberator of his people, and their greatest hero. No one was more beloved, or possessed of more authority, and so no one was more dangerous. After the uprising and the liberation, the humans had been kept very busy. They’d had two centuries of tyranny to overcome, after all. They’d had to create a government from nothing, along with laws and a system of justice. They’d had to restore defenses, civil life, industry, and at least the hope of trade. An army, temples, guilds, schools—they’d had to rebuild it all. It had been the work of years, and through it all, the citadel had loomed over their heads, out of their reach. The people of Weep had had no choice but to work at what they could change and tolerate what they could not—which meant never feeling the sun on their faces, or teaching the constellations to their children, or picking fruit from their own garden trees. There had been talk of moving the city out from under the shadow, starting anew someplace else. A site had even been chosen downriver, but there was far too deep a history here to simply give up. This land had been won for them by angels. Shadowed or not, it was sacred.
They had lacked the resources, then, to take on the citadel, but they were never going to tolerate it forever. Eventually, their resolve was going to focus upward. The Godslayer would not give up.
“If you’re not the end of him,” Minya would say, “he’ll be the end of us.”
And Sarai had been Minya’s willing weapon. With the Carnage red and bloody in her hearts, she had tried her best and done her worst. So many nights, she’d covered Eril-Fane in moths and unleashed every terror in her arsenal. Waves of horrors, ranks of monsters. His whole body would go rigid as a board. She’d heard teeth cracking with the clench of his jaw. Never had eyes been squeezed so tightly shut. It had seemed as though they must rupture. But she couldn’t break him; she couldn’t even make him cry. Eril-Fane had his own arsenal of horrors; he hardly needed hers. Fear was the least of it. Sarai hadn’t understood before that fear could be the lesser torment. It was shame that tore him apart. It was despair. There was no darkness she could send him to rival what he’d endured already. He had lived three years with Isagol the Terrible. He had survived too much to be driven mad by dreams.
It was strange. Every night Sarai split her mind a hundred ways, her moths carrying pieces of her consciousness through the city, and when they came back to her, she was whole again. It was easy. But something began to happen, the more she tormented her father—a different kind of division within her, and one not so easily reconciled at night’s end.
To Minya, there would only ever be the Carnage. But, in fact, there was so much more. There was before. Stolen girls, lost years, broken people. And always, there were the savage, merciless gods.
Isagol, reaching into your soul and playing your emotions like a harp.
Letha, dredging your mind, taking out memories and swallowing them whole.
Skathis at the door, come for your daughter.
Skathis at the door, bringing her back home.
The function of hate, as Sarai saw it, was to stamp out compassion—to close a door in one’s own self and forget it was ever there. If you had hate, then you could see suffering—and cause it—and feel nothing except perhaps a sordid vindication.
But at some point . . . here in this room, Sarai thought . . . she had lost that capacity. Hate had failed her, and it was like losing a shield in battle. Once it was gone, all the suffering had risen up to overwhelm her. It was too much.
It was then that her nightmares turned against her, and she started needing lull.
With a deep breath, Sarai disengaged a moth from the ledge and spurred it forward, a single smithereen of darkness dispatched into the dim. In that one sentinel she focused her attention, and so she was as good as there, hovering just inches above the Godslayer’s shoulder.
Except . . .
She could hardly have said which sense first vibrated with a small shock of difference, but she understood at once: This was not the Godslayer.
The bulk didn’t match. Nor did the scent of him. Whoever this was, he was slighter than Eril-Fane, and sank less deeply into the down. As she adjusted to the scant ambient light, she was able to make out dark hair spilled across the pillow, but little more than that.
Who was this, asleep in the Godslayer’s bed? Where was Eril-Fane? Curiosity overtook her, and she did something she would never have considered in ordinary times. That is to say: in times of less certain doom.
There was a glave on the bedside table, with a black knit cover drawn down over it. Sarai directed a score of moths to it to grasp the weave with their tiny feet and shift it back just enough to uncover a slice of light. If anyone were ever to witness the moths behaving in such a coordinated way, they would have to grow suspicious that these were no natural creatures. But such a fear seemed quaint to Sarai now, compared to her other concerns. With that small task accomplished, she studied the face that was illuminated by the sliver of glave.
She beheld a young man with a crooked nose. His brows were black and heavy, his eyes deep-set. His cheeks were high and flat, and cut to his jaw with the abruptness of an ax chop. No finesse, no elegance. And the nose. It had clearly met with violence, and lent an aspect of violence to the whole. His hair was thick and dark, and where it gleamed in the glavelight the glints were warm reds, not cool blues. He was shirtless, and though mostly covered by the quilt, the arm that rested over it was corded with lean muscle. He was clean, and must just have shaved for the first time in weeks, as his jaw and chin were paler than the rest of his face and all but smooth—in that way that a man’s face is never truly smooth, even right after an encounter with a perfectly sharpened razor. This Sarai knew from years of perching on sleeping faces, and not from Feral who, though he had begun to shave, could go days between with no one the wiser. Not this man. He wasn’t, like Feral, almost all the way over the line into adulthood, but all the way over it: a man in no uncertain terms.
He wasn’t handsome. He was certainly no museum piece. There was something of the brute about him with that broken nose, but Sarai found herself lingering longer in the appraisal of him than she had over any of the others, save the golden one. Because they were both young men, and she wasn’t so immaculate as to be free of the longings that Ruby expressed so openly, nor so detached that the physical presence of young men had no effect on her. She just kept it to herself, as she kept so many things to herself.
Looking at his lashes resting closed, she wondered what color his eyes were, and experienced a pang of alienation, that it should be her lot to see and never be seen, to pass in secret through the minds of others and leave no trace of herself but fear.
She took quick stock of the sky. Better hurry. She wouldn’t have time to glean much of an impression from this one, but even a hint of who he was might prove useful. A stranger in Eril-Fane’s house. What did it mean?
She drifted a moth onto his brow.
And promptly fell into another world.
27
Another World