The doors that led up or down, into the head or body of the citadel, were all closed, just as they had been when Skathis died. It wasn’t even possible to discern where they had been.
The sinister arm—as it was called—was passable, though they rarely went there. It held the nursery, and none of them could bear the sight of the empty cribs, even if the blood was long since washed away. There were a lot of small cell-like rooms beyond with nothing but beds in them. Sarai knew what those were. She’d seen them in dreams, but only the dreams of the girls who’d occupied them last—like Azareen—whose memories had outlived Letha. Sarai could think of no reason that Minya would take them there.
“Where are we going?” Feral asked.
Minya didn’t reply, but they had their answer in the next moment when she didn’t turn toward the sinister arm, but toward another place they never went—if for different reasons.
“The heart,” said Ruby.
“But . . .” said Sparrow, then cut herself off with a look of realization.
Sarai could guess both what she’d almost said and what had stopped her, because they had occurred to her at the same moment as Sparrow. But we can’t fit anymore. That was the thought. But Minya can. That was the realization. And Sarai knew then where Minya had been spending her time when the rest of them lost track of her. If they’d really wanted to know, they might have figured it out easily enough, but the truth was they’d just been glad she was elsewhere, so they’d never bothered to look for her.
They rounded a corner and came to the door.
It couldn’t properly be called a door anymore. It was less than a foot wide: a tall, straight gap in the metal where, near as they could guess, a door hadn’t quite finished closing when Skathis died. By its height, which was some twenty feet, it was clear that it had been no ordinary door, though there was no way to gauge what its width might have been when open.
Minya barely fit through it. She had to ease one shoulder in, then her face. It seemed for a moment that her ears would hang her up, but she pressed on and they were forced flat, and she had to work her head side to side to get it through, then exhale fully to narrow her chest enough for the rest of her body to pass. It was a near thing. Any bigger and she couldn’t have made it.
“Minya, you know we can’t get in,” Sparrow called after her as she disappeared into the corridor on the other side.
“Wait there,” she called back, and was gone.
They all looked at one another. “What could she want to show us here?” Sarai asked.
“Could she have found something in the heart?” Feral wondered.
“If there was anything to find we’d have found it years ago.”
Once, they’d all been small enough to get in. “How long has it been?” Feral asked, running his hand over the sleek edge of the opening.
“Longer for you than for us,” said Sparrow.
“That big head of yours,” added Ruby, giving him a little shove.
Feral had outgrown it first, then Sarai, and the girls a year or so later. Minya obviously never had. When they were all small, it had been their favorite place to play, partly because the narrow opening made it feel forbidden, and partly because it was so strange.
It was an enormous, echoing chamber, perfectly spherical, all smooth, curved metal, with a narrow walkway wrapping around its circumference. In diameter it was perhaps one hundred feet, and, suspended in its dead center was a smaller sphere of perhaps twenty feet diameter. That, too, was perfectly smooth, and, like the entirety of the citadel, it floated, held in place not by ropes or chains but some unfathomable force. The chamber occupied the place where hearts would go in a true body, so that was what they called it, but that was just their own term. They had no idea what its name or purpose had been. Even Great Ellen didn’t know. It was just a big metal ball floating in a bigger metal room.
Oh, and there were monsters perched on the walls. Two of them.
Sarai knew the beasts of the anchors, Rasalas and the others. She had seen them with her moths’ eyes, inert as they were now, but she had also seen them as they were before, through the dreams of the people of Weep. She had, in her arsenal, a seemingly infinite number of visions of Skathis mounted on Rasalas, carrying off young women and men no older than she was now. It had been her go-to terror, Weep’s worst collective memory, and she shuddered now to think how blithely she had inflicted it, not understanding, as a child, what it had meant. And the beasts of the anchors were big, make no mistake. But the monsters perched like statues on the walls of the citadel’s heart were bigger.
They were wasplike, thorax and abdomen joined in narrow waists, wings like blades, and stingers longer than a child’s arm. Sarai and the others had climbed on them when they were children, and “ridden” them and pretended they were real, but if, in the reign of the gods, they had been anything more than statues, Sarai had no visions to attest to it. These monsters, she was fairly sure, had never left the citadel. By their size, it was hard to imagine them even leaving this room.
“Here she comes,” said Ruby, who’d been peering through the opening at the dark corridor beyond. She stepped out of the way, but the figure that emerged was not Minya. It didn’t have to pause and carefully fit any flesh-on-skeleton mass through the gap, but flowed out with the ease of a ghost, which was what it was.
It was Ari-Eil. He glided past them without turning his head, and was followed immediately by another ghost. Sarai blinked. This one was familiar, but she couldn’t immediately place him, and then he was past and she had no time to search her memory because another was coming after him.
And another.
And another.
. . . So many?
Ghosts poured out of the citadel’s heart, one after the next, passing the four of them without acknowledgment to continue right on by, up the long doorless corridor that led toward the gallery and the garden terrace and their bedchambers. Sarai found herself flattened against the wall, trying to make sense of the flow of faces, and they were all familiar but not as familiar as they would be if she had seen them recently.
Which she had not.
She picked out a face, then another. They were men, women, and children, though most were old. Names began to come to her. Thann, priestess of Thakra. Mazli, dead in childbirth with twins who died, too. Guldan, the tattoo master. The old woman had been famous in the city for inking the most beautiful elilith. All the girls had wanted her to do theirs. Sarai couldn’t remember exactly when she had passed away, but it was certainly before her own first bleeding, because her reaction to discovering the old woman’s death had been so foolish. It had been disappointment—that Guldan wouldn’t be able to do her elilith, when her time came. As though such a thing could ever have come to pass. What had she been, twelve? Thirteen? Behind her closed eyelids, she had imagined the skin of her tummy brown instead of blue, decorated with the old woman’s exquisite flourishes. And oh, the hot flush of shame that chased that picture. To have forgotten, even for an instant, what she was.
As though a human would ever touch her for any reason other than to kill her.
At least four years had passed since then. Four years. So how could Guldan be here now? It was the same with the others. And there were so many of them. They all stared straight ahead, expressionless, but Sarai caught the desperate plea in more than a few eyes as they flowed past her. They moved with ghostly ease, but also with a severe, martial intent. They moved like soldiers.
Understanding came slowly and then all at once. Sarai’s hands flew to her mouth. Both hands, as though to hold in a wail. All this time. How was it possible? Tears sprang to her eyes. So many. So terribly many.