Sarai shuddered. She felt so helpless. The day was bright, and it went on and on. Her craving for lull was powerful, but there was no more gray waiting for her now, no matter how much lull she drank. She was so tired she felt . . . threadbare, like the soles of old slippers, but she didn’t dare close her eyes. Her terror of what awaited her just over the threshold of consciousness was more powerful still. She wasn’t well. Ghosts without, horrors within, and nowhere to turn. Her shining blue walls hemmed her in. She wept, waiting for nightfall, and finally it came. Never before had her silent scream been such a release. She screamed everything, and felt as though her very being broke apart in the soft scatter of wings.
Translated into moths, Sarai surged out the windows and siphoned herself away. The sky was huge and there was freedom in it. The stars called to her like signal beacons burning on a vast black sea as she flung herself a hundredfold into the dizzy air. Escape, escape. She flew away from nightmares and privation and the turned backs of her kindred. She flew away from the dead-end corridor where her life had trapped and taunted her. She flew away from herself. A wild desire gripped her to fly as far as she could from Weep—a hundred moths, a hundred directions—to fly and fly till sunrise came and turned her to smoke and all her misery, too.
“Kill yourself, girl,” the old woman had said. “Have mercy on us all.”
Mercy.
Mercy.
Would it be mercy, to put an end to herself? Sarai knew those vicious words had come not from old ghost women but her own innermost self, guilt-poisoned from four thousands nights of dark dreams. She also knew that in all of the city and in the monstrous metal angel that had stolen the sky, she was the only one who knew the suffering of humans and godspawn both, and it came to her that her mercy was singular and precious. Today it had forestalled carnage, at least for a time. The future was blind, but she couldn’t feel, truly, that it would be better without her in it. She gathered herself from her wild scatter. She gave up the sky with its signal-fire stars, and flew instead down to Weep to find out what her mercy had set in motion.
41
Witchlight
The goddess was real, and she was alive.
Lazlo had dreamed her before he knew the Mesarthim were blue, and that had seemed uncanny enough. How much more now that he’d seen her alive, her lovely face an exact match to the one in his dreams. It was no coincidence.
It could only be magic.
When wagons arrived to retrieve the downed silk sleigh and its passengers, the four of them stuck to a simple story of mechanical failure, which was questioned by no one. They downplayed the event to such a degree that the day carried on as usual, though Lazlo felt as though he’d left “usual” behind forever. He processed everything as well as could be expected—considering that “everything” entailed near death at the hands of savage ghosts—and he found within himself, rising through all the consternation and fright, a strange bubble of gladness. The girl from his dreams wasn’t a figment, and she wasn’t the goddess of despair, and she wasn’t dead. All day long he kept tipping back his head to look up at the citadel with new eyes, knowing she was inside it. How was it possible?
How was any of it possible? Who was she, and how had she come into his dreams? He was fretful as he laid himself down to sleep that night, hoping that she would return. Unlike the previous night, when he’d sprawled facedown on the bed, shirtless and unself-conscious, without even tying the drawstring of his breeches, tonight he was prey to a peculiar formality. He put on a shirt, tied his drawstring, tied back his hair. He even glanced at himself in the mirror—and felt foolish to be concerned for his appearance, as though she would somehow see him. He had no idea how it worked, this magic. She was up there and he was down here, but he couldn’t shake the feeling that he was expecting a visitor—which would have been a new experience for him in any setting, but was particularly, uh, provocative in this one. To be lying in bed, waiting for a goddess to pay him a call . . .
He blushed. Of course it wasn’t like that. He stared at the ceiling, a tension in his limbs, and felt as though he were acting the part of a sleeper in a play. It wouldn’t do. He had to actually fall asleep in order to dream, and it wasn’t coming easily, with his mind racing from the mania of the day. There was a kind of euphoria, he had discovered, in nearly dying and then not. Add to that his anxiousness as to whether she would come. He was all nerves and fascination and bashfulness and a deep, stirring hope.
He remembered, marveling, how he had taken her hand last night and held it in his own, sensing the realness of it, and of her, and the connection that had blazed between them when he had. In reality he would never have dared to do such a bold thing. But he couldn’t quite convince himself that it wasn’t reality, in its way. It hadn’t occurred in the physical realm, that much was true. His hand had not touched her hand. But . . . his mind had touched her mind, and that seemed to him a deeper reality and even greater intimacy. She had gasped when he touched her, and her eyes had flown wide. It had been real to her, too, he thought. Her lashes, he recalled, were golden red, her eyes pellucid blue. And he remembered how she had looked at him as though transfixed, the first time, nights ago, and again last night. No one had ever looked at him like that before. It made him want to check the mirror again to see what she had seen—if perhaps his face had improved without his knowing it—and the impulse was so vain and unlike him that he flung an arm over his eyes and laughed at himself.
His laughter subsided. He remembered, too, the welling blood and her warning—“Everyone will die”—and the furious way she had grappled in the doorway of the citadel, fighting to warn him yet again.
He would be dead if it weren’t for her.
“Go!” she had screamed as hands caught at her, reeling her back inside. How fierce and desperate she had looked. Was she all right? Had she been hurt? In what conditions did she exist? What was her life? There was so much he wanted to know. Everything. He wanted to know everything, and he wanted to help. Back in Zosma, when Eril-Fane had stood before the scholars and spoken with shadowed countenance of Weep’s “problem,” Lazlo had been overcome by this same deep desire: to help, as though someone like him had any chance of solving a problem like this.
It struck him as he lay here with his arm slung across his eyes, that the girl was tied up in Weep’s problem in ways he could not yet understand. One thing was clear to him, though. She wasn’t safe, and she wasn’t free, and Weep’s problem had just grown much more complicated.
Whom had she defied with that scream, he wondered, and what price might she have paid for it? Worrying about her redoubled his anxiety and pushed sleep even further away, so that he feared it would never come. He was anxious that he might miss her visit, as though his dreams were a door she might even now be knocking on, and finding no one at home. Wait, he thought. Please wait for me. And finally he calmed himself with what he thought of, self-mockingly, as “housekeeping concerns.” He’d never had a guest before, and he didn’t know how to go about it. How to receive her if she came, and where. If there were etiquette guidelines for hosting goddesses in one’s dreams, he had never found that book at the Great Library.
It wasn’t simply a question of parlors and tea trays—though there was that, too. If she were coming in reality he would be limited by reality. But dreams were a different matter. He was Strange the dreamer. This was his realm, and there were no limits here.