Neither was Sarai, but she thought if they could act normal, they might feel normal. A little bit, anyway. Though it was hard to feel normal with a ghost glaring at you from the head of the table. “Minya…” she said. It pained her to be gracious, but she forced herself. “Would you please send Ari-Eil away so that we can eat in peace?” She didn’t ask her to release him. She understood that Minya meant to keep him around, if only to torment Sarai.
“Certainly I will, since you ask so nicely,” said Minya, matching her gracious tone with just an edge of mockery. She gave no visible signal, but in the dining room, the ghost unfroze and pivoted toward the interior door. Minya was done toying with him, apparently, because he didn’t shuffle his steps or fight against her now, but virtually glided from their sight.
“Thank you,” said Sarai, and they went inside.
Dinner was not kimril soup, though Sarai doubted Ruby would have voiced any objection to it tonight. She was uncharacteristically silent, and Sarai could imagine the tenor of her thoughts. Her own were grim enough, and she wasn’t faced with the notion of burning people alive. What Feral said was true. They could never win a battle. Once they were discovered, there simply was no scenario in which life went on.
She didn’t linger in the gallery after dinner, but asked Ruby to heat a bath for her.
Their suites all had bathrooms with deep mesarthium pools in them, but water no longer came from the pipes, so they used a copper tub in the rain room instead. The “rain room” was the chamber off the kitchens they’d designated for Feral’s cloud summoning. They’d fitted it with barrels, and a channel in the floor caught runoff and funneled it out to the gardens. Kem, the ghost footman, said it had been the butchering room before, and the channel was for blood and the big hooks on the ceiling were for hanging meat. No trace of blood remained, though, just as none remained in the nursery or the corridors. One of Minya’s first commands to the ghosts in the aftermath of the Carnage had been to clean up all the blood.
Sarai scooped water into the tub with a bucket, and Ruby put her hands on the side and ignited them. Just her hands, like she was holding fireballs. The copper conducted the heat beautifully, and soon the water was steaming and Ruby left. Sarai submerged herself and soaked, and washed her hair with the soap Great Ellen made them from the herbs in the garden, and all the while she had the peculiar sense that she was preparing herself—as though her body would be going out from the citadel and not merely her senses. She was even nervous, as if she were about to meet new people. Meet them, ha. She was about to spy on new people and violate their minds. What did it matter if her hair was clean? They wouldn’t see her, or have any awareness of her presence. They never did. In Weep it was she who was the ghost, and an unbound one, invisible, incorporeal, insubstantial as a murmur.
Back in her dressing room, she put on a slip. Staring at herself in the mirror, she found that she’d lost the ability to see herself through her own eyes. She saw only what humans would see. Not a girl or a woman or someone in between. They wouldn’t see her loneliness or fear or courage, let alone her humanity. They would see only obscenity. Calamity.
Godspawn.
Something took hold of her. A surge of defiance. Her eyes swept the dressing room. Past the slips to the terrible gowns, the headdresses and fans and pots of her mother’s face paint and all the macabre accoutrements of the goddess of despair. And when she emerged, Less Ellen, who had brought her tea, did a double take and nearly dropped her tray. “Oh, Sarai, you gave me a fright.”
“It’s just me,” said Sarai, though she didn’t feel quite herself. She’d never desired to be anything like her mother before, but tonight she craved a little goddess ferocity, so she’d painted Isagol’s black band across her eyes from temple to temple and mussed her cinnamon-red hair as wild as she could make it.
She turned to the terrace—which was the outstretched right hand of the huge metal seraph—and went out to meet the night and the newcomers.
25
THE NIGHT AND THE NEWCOMERS
Sarai screamed her moths at Weep, and down and down they whirled. On a normal night they would split up and divide the city a hundred ways between them, but not tonight. She needed all her focus on the newcomers. Tonight, the citizens of Weep would not weep because of her.
The ghost Ari-Eil had told them—or been compelled by Minya to tell them—that the faranji were to be housed at the Merchants’ Guildhall, where a wing had been outfitted as a hostelry just for them. Sarai had never gone there before. It wasn’t a residence, so she’d never looked there for sleepers, and it took her a few minutes to locate the right wing. The place was palatial, with a large central structure topped with a golden dome, and walls of the native honey stone. All was carved in the traditional style. Weep wasn’t a city that feared ornamentation. Centuries of carvers had embellished every stone surface with patterns and creatures and seraphim.
Graceful open pavilions were connected by covered walkways to outbuildings capped in smaller domes. There were fountains, and once upon a time there had been gardens full of fruit and flowers, but those had all withered in the accursed shade.
The whole city had been a garden once. Not anymore. Orchid Witch, Sarai thought in passing, could do a sight of good down here.
If not for the fact that she would be murdered on sight.
The moths tested the terrace doors first, but found most of them closed, and far too well made for any cracks that might admit them, so they flew down the chimneys instead. Inside, the rooms were sumptuous, as befitted the first foreign delegation ever welcomed beyond the Cusp. For centuries, the city had been famed the world over for its craftsmanship, and these chambers might have served as a showplace: the finest of carpets laid over floors of mosaic gold and lys, with embroidered bedcovers, frescoed walls, carved ceiling timbers, and marvelous objects on shelves and walls, every one a masterpiece.