The night grew late. The others went to their rooms. Sarai went, too, but not to sleep. Her day was just beginning.
Her rooms had been her mother’s, and were second in size and splendor only to Minya’s, which were a full palace in their own right, enclosed within the body of the citadel, and had been the domain of her father: Skathis, god of beasts and high lord of the Mesarthim, most monstrous of them all.
Sarai’s were at the extremity of the dexter arm—which was a way of saying right, as sinister was a way of saying left—down the long, curved corridor from the gallery. Her door didn’t close. Every door in the citadel—every thing in the citadel—was frozen as it had been at the moment of Skathis’s death. Doors that had been open remained resolutely open. Doors that had been closed were permanently impassable. Vast sectors of the citadel were, in fact, sealed off, their contents a mystery. When the five of them were younger, they had liked to imagine other children surviving in those closed-off wings, leading parallel lives, and they had played at imagining who they might be, and what gifts they had to make their cloistered existence bearable.
Great Ellen had told them of children she had known in her years in the nursery. A girl who could project illusions with her mind. A boy who could mimic others’ faces. Another whose tears could heal any hurt—a beautiful gift, but he was destined to spend his whole life crying.
Most enviable to them back then had been the girl who could bring things out of dreams. If she could dream it, she could carry it out with her. Toys and harps and kittens, cakes and crowns and butterflies. They’d loved imagining all the things they’d get if they had that gift: seed packets for Sparrow to grow a real garden, and books for Feral, who longed to learn more than what the ghosts could teach. For Sarai: a doll she coveted from down in Weep, that she’d seen hugged in a sleeping girl’s arms during one of her nocturnal visits. An army for Minya, who had always been grim. For Ruby, a whole jar of honey to eat without sharing.
“You should have that gift instead,” she had told Sarai. “It’s much nicer than yours.”
“Nice enough until you have a nightmare,” Sarai had replied, grudging.
“What if she dreamed a ravid,” said Minya, grinning, “and when she woke up it bit off her head?”
They understood now that if anyone had been locked away in other sectors of the citadel they would have died within days. The five of them were the only living beings here.
Sarai couldn’t close her door, but she drew the curtain she’d fixed to cover it. They were supposed to respect one another’s curtains, but it was an imperfect system, especially where Minya was concerned. An imperfect situation, Sarai recalled, but the fizz of laughter had gone flat.
An antechamber led into the bedroom. Unlike the austere walls of the corridor, this room mimicked the architecture of Weep, with columns supporting an ornamental entablature and soaring, fan-vaulted ceiling. Down in the city, the buildings were stone, intricately carved with scenes from the natural world and the mythic one. Among the loveliest was the Temple of Thakra, at which a dozen master sculptors had labored for forty years, two of them going blind in the process. The frieze alone boasted a thousand sparrows so lifelike that real birds had been known to while away their lives romancing them in vain. Here in these chambers were twice as many songbirds, mingling with seraphim and lilies, spectrals and vines, and though the work was likely accomplished in a mere hour or two, they were even more perfect than the ones on the temple. They were wrought in mesarthium, not stone, and had been neither carved nor cast. That wasn’t how mesarthium worked.
The curtained bed occupied a dais in the center of the chamber. Sarai didn’t sleep in it. It was too big—like a stage. There was another, more reasonable bed tucked in an alcove behind the dressing room. When she was younger, she’d supposed it had belonged to a maid, but at some point she came to understand that it had been for Isagol’s consorts, paramours, whatever you chose to call them. Sarai’s own father would have slept in this bed when Isagol didn’t want him in hers. Her father. When she’d realized that, it had felt like a violation of her own safe place, to imagine him here, taking solace in this little bit of privacy while he lay awake, plotting the slaughter of the gods.
It was Sarai’s bed now, but she wouldn’t need it yet for hours. She crossed to the terrace door, barefoot, and stepped out into the moonlight.
Sarai was seventeen years old, a goddess and a girl. Half her blood was human, but it counted for nothing. She was blue. She was godspawn. She was anathema. She was young. She was lovely. She was afraid. She had russet hair and a slender neck, and wore a robe that had belonged to the goddess of despair. It was too long, and trailed behind her, its hem worn to a sheen from dragging over the floor, back and forth, back and forth. Pacing this terrace, Sarai might have walked as far as the moon and back.
Except, of course, that if she could walk to the moon, she wouldn’t come back.
It was time. She closed her eyes. She closed them tight. Her gift was ugly. She never let anyone see her call it forth. She could teach Ari-Eil a thing or two yet about revulsion, she thought. She took a deep breath. She could feel it burgeoning within her, welling up like tears. She held it in a moment longer. There was always that impulse: to keep it inside, this part of herself. To hide it. But she didn’t have that luxury. She had work to do, so she opened her mouth.
And screamed.
It was clearly a scream—the rictus tension in her face, head thrust forward, throat stretched taut—but no sound came out. Sarai didn’t scream sound. She screamed something else. It issued forth: a soft, boiling darkness. It looked like a cloud.
It wasn’t a cloud.
Five seconds, ten. She screamed her silent scream. She screamed an exodus.
Streaming forth into the night, the darkness fractured into a hundred fluttering bits like windblown scraps of velvet. A hundred smithereens of darkness, they broke apart and re-formed and siphoned themselves into a little typhoon that swept down toward the rooftops of Weep, whirling and wheeling on soft twilight wings.
Sarai screamed moths. Moths and her own mind, pulled into a hundred pieces and flung out into the world.
17
THE MUSE OF NIGHTMARES