Lazlo agreed, thoughtful. “Though some have more control over the where than others.”
He didn’t mean the ghosts now. He cocked his head a little and looked intently at Sarai. She felt his question forming. She didn’t know what words he would use, but the gist of it boiled down to why. Why are you up there? Why are you trapped? Why is this your life? Why everything about you? And she wanted to tell him, but she felt her own return question burgeoning within her. It felt a little like the burgeoning of moths at darkfall, but it was something much more dangerous than moths. It was hope. It was: Can you help me? Can you save me? Can you save us?
When she’d gone down to Weep to “meet” the Godslayer’s guests, she’d had no scope to imagine him. A . . . friend? An ally? A dreamer in whose mind the best version of the world grew like seed stock. If only it could be transplanted into reality, she thought, but it couldn’t. It couldn’t. Who knew better how poisonous the soil was in Weep than she who had been poisoning it for ten long years?
So instead she cut off his almost-question and asked, “Speaking of where, what is this place?”
Lazlo didn’t press her. He had patience for mysteries. All these years, though, the mysteries of Weep had never had the urgency of this one. This was life or death. It had almost been his death. But he had to earn her trust. He didn’t know how to do that, and so once again sought refuge in stories. “Ah, well. I’m glad you asked. This is a village called Zeltzin. Or at least this is how I imagine a village called Zeltzin might look. It’s an ordinary place. Pretty, if unexceptional. But it does have one distinction.”
His eyes sparkled. Sarai found herself curious. She looked around her, wondering what that distinction might be.
Earlier, while he was trying to fall asleep, Lazlo’s first thought was to make an elegant sort of parlor to receive her in if she came. It seemed the proper way to go about things, if a bit dull. For some reason, then, Calixte’s voice had come into his head. “Beautiful and full of monsters,” she’d said. “All the best stories are.” And she was right. “Any guesses?” he asked Sarai.
She shook her head. Her eyes had a bit of a sparkle, too.
“Well, I might as well tell you,” said Lazlo, enjoying himself. “There’s a mineshaft over there that’s an entrance to the underworld.”
“The underworld?” Sarai repeated, craning her neck in the direction he pointed.
“Yes. But that’s not the distinction.”
She narrowed her eyes. “Then what is?”
“I could also tell you that the children here are born with teeth and gnaw on bird bones in their cradles.”
She winced. “That’s horrible.”
“But that’s not the distinction, either.”
“Won’t you tell me?” she asked, growing impatient.
Lazlo shook his head. He was smiling. This was fun. “It’s quiet, don’t you think?” he asked, faintly teasing. “I wonder where everyone’s gone.”
It was quiet. The insects had ceased their whirring. There was only the sound of the river now. Behind the village, sweet meadows climbed toward a ridge of hills that looked, from a distance, to be covered in dark fur. Hills that seemed, Sarai thought, to be holding their breath. She sensed it, a preternatural stillness, and held hers, too. And then . . . the hills exhaled, and so did she.
“Ohhh,” she breathed. “Is it—?”
“The mahalath,” said Lazlo.
The fifty-year mist that made gods or monsters. It was coming. It was fog—tongues of white vapor extruding between the knuckles of the fur-dark hills—but it moved like a living thing, with a curious, hunting intelligence. At once light and dense, there was something lithe about it, almost serpentine. Unlike fog, it didn’t merely drift and settle, tumbling downward, heavier than the air. Here and there, tendrils of its curling white churn seemed to rise up and peer about before collapsing again into the tidal flow like whitecaps sucked back into the surf. It was pouring downward—pouring itself downward—in a glorious, relentless glissade over the meadow slopes on a straight path for the village.
“Did you ever play make-believe?” Lazlo asked Sarai.
She gave a laugh. “Not like this.” She was frightened and exhilarated.
“Shall we flee?” he asked. “Or stay and take our chances?”
The tea table had vanished, and the chairs and dishes, too. Without noticing the transition, the pair of them were standing, knee-deep in the river, watching the mahalath swallow the farthest houses of the village. Sarai had to remind herself that none of it was real. It was a game within a dream. But what were the rules? “Will it change us?” she asked. “Or do we change ourselves?”
“I don’t know,” said Lazlo, to whom this was also new. “I think we could choose what we want to become, or we could choose to let the dream choose, if that makes sense.”
It did. They could exert control, or relinquish it to their own unconscious minds. Either way, it wasn’t a mist remaking them, but themselves. God or monster, monster or god. Sarai had an ugly thought. “What if you’re already a monster?” she asked in a whisper.
Lazlo looked over at her, and the witchlight in his eyes said that she was nothing of the sort. “Anything can happen,” he said. “That’s the whole point.”
The mist poured forth. It swallowed the drifting swans one by one. “Stay or go?” Lazlo asked.
Sarai faced the mahalath. She let it come. And as its first tendrils wrapped around her like arms, she reached for Lazlo’s hand, and held it tight.
43
A Singularly Unhorrible Demon
Inside a mist, inside a dream, a young man and woman were remade. But first they were unmade, their edges fading like the evanescent white bird, Wraith, as it phased through the skin of the sky. All sense of physical reality slipped away—except for one. Their hands, joined together, remained as real as bone and sinew. There was no world anymore, no riverbank or water, nothing beneath their feet—and anyway, no feet. There was only that one point of contact, and even as they let go of themselves, Lazlo and Sarai held on to each other.
And when the mist passed on its way, and the remade swans lorded their magnificence over the humble green river, they turned to each other, fingers interlaced, and looked, and looked, and looked.
Eyes wide and shining, eyes unchanged. His were still gray, hers were still blue. And her lashes were still honey red, and his as glossy black as the pelts of rivercats. His hair was still dark, and hers was still cinnamon, and his nose was the victim of velvet-bound fairy tales, and her mouth was damson-lush.
They were both in every way unchanged, save one.
Sarai’s skin was brown, and Lazlo’s was blue.
They looked, and looked, and looked at each other, and they looked at their joined hands, the brown-and-blue pattern of their fingers reversed, and they looked at the surface of the water, which hadn’t been a mirror before but was now because they willed it so. And they gazed at themselves in it, side by side and hand in hand, and they beheld neither gods nor monsters. They were so nearly unchanged, and yet that one thing—the color of their skin—would, in the real world, change everything.
Sarai looked at the rich earthen color of her arms, and she knew, though it was hidden, that she bore an elilith on her belly like a human girl. She wondered what the pattern was, and wished that she could take a peek. The other hand, the one joined with Lazlo’s, she gently withdrew. There seemed no further pretext for holding it, though it had been rather nice while it lasted.
She looked at him. Blue. “Did you choose this?” she asked.
Lazlo shook his head. “I left it to the mahalath,” he said.