“You’re awake now?” he asked, still trying to grasp how it worked. “Up in the citadel, I mean.”
She nodded. Her body was in her alcove. Even in that confined space, it was pacing—like a menagerie ravid, she thought—with just a whisper of her awareness left behind to guide it. She felt a stab of sympathy for it, abandoned not only by her kin, but by herself, left empty and alone while she was here, weeping her tears onto a stranger’s chest.
No, not a stranger. The only one who saw her.
“So, when I wake up,” he went on, “and the city wakes up, you’ll just be going to sleep?”
Sarai experienced a thrum of fear at the thought of falling asleep. “That’s the usual practice,” she said. “But ‘usual’ is dead and gone.” She took a deep breath and let it out. She told him about lull, and how it didn’t work anymore, and how, as soon as her consciousness relaxed, it was as though the doors of all her captive terrors’ cages slid wide open.
And, while most people might have a few terrors rattling their cages, she had… all of them.
“I did it to myself,” she said. “I was so young when I began, and no one ever told me to consider the consequences. Of course, it seems so obvious now.”
“But you can’t just banish them?” he asked her. “Or transform them?”
She shook her head. “In other people’s dreams I have control, but when I’m asleep,” she said, “I’m powerless, just like any other dreamer.” She regarded him evenly. “Except you. You’re like no other dreamer.”
“Sarai,” said Lazlo. He saw how she sagged against the window frame, and put out his arm to support her. “How long has it been since you’ve slept?”
She hardly knew. “Four days? I’m not sure.” At his look of alarm, she forced a smile. “I sleep a little,” she said, “in between nightmares.”
“But that’s mad. You know you can actually die of sleep deprivation.”
Her answering laugh was grim. “I didn’t know that, no. You don’t happen to know how long it takes, do you? So I can plan my day?” She meant it as a joke, but there was an edge of desperation to the question.
“No,” said Lazlo, feeling spectacularly helpless. What an impossible situation. She was up there alone, he was down here alone, and yet somehow they were together. She was inside his dream, sharing it with him. If he had her gift, he wondered, could he go into her dreams and help her to endure them? What would that mean? What terrors did she face? Fighting off ravids, witnessing the Carnage again and again? Whatever it was, the notion of her facing them alone gutted him.
A thought came to him. It seemed to land as lightly as a moth. “Sarai,” he asked, speculative. “What would happen if you were to fall asleep right now?”
Her eyes widened a little. “What, you mean here?” She glanced toward the bed.
“No,” he said quickly, his face going hot. In his head it was clear: He wanted to give her a haven from her nightmares—to be a haven from them. “I mean, if you keep the moth where it is, on me, but fall asleep up there, could you… do you think that maybe you could stay here? With me?”
When Sarai was silent, he was afraid the suggestion went too far. Was he not, in a way, inviting her to… spend the night with him? “I only mean,” he rushed to explain, “if you’re afraid of your own dreams, you’re welcome here in mine.”
A light frisson of shivers went down Sarai’s arms. She wasn’t silent because she was offended or dismayed. Quite the opposite. She was overwhelmed. She was welcome. She was wanted. Lazlo didn’t know about the nights she’d trespassed without his invitation, tucking a little piece of her mind into a corner of his, so that the wonder and delight of it could help her to endure… everything else. She needed rest, badly, and though she joked with him about dying of sleep deprivation, she was, in fact, afraid.
The idea that she could stay here, be safe here—with him… it was like a window swinging open, light and air rushing in. But fear, too. Fear of hope, because the instant she understood what he was proposing, Sarai wanted so badly for it to work, and when did she ever get what she wanted? “I’ve never tried it before,” she said, striving to keep her voice neutral. She was afraid of betraying her longing, in case it all should come to nothing. “Falling asleep might sever the tether,” she said, “and cut the moth loose.”
“Do you want to try?” asked Lazlo, hopeful, and trying to disguise it.
“There can’t be much time before sunrise.”
“Not much,” he agreed. “But a little.”
She had another thought. She was poking the idea for weaknesses, and so frightened of finding them. “What if it works, but my terrors come, too?”
Lazlo shrugged. “We’ll chase them away, or else turn them into fireflies and catch them in jars.” He wasn’t afraid. Well. He was only afraid it wouldn’t work. Anything else they could handle, together. “What do you say?”
For a moment Sarai didn’t trust her voice. As casual as they strove to seem, they both felt something momentous take shape between them, and—though she didn’t for a minute question his intentions—something intimate, too. To sleep inside his dream, when she wasn’t even certain she’d be aware it was a dream. Where she might not have control…
“If it does work,” she whispered, “but I’m powerless…”
She faltered, but he understood. “Do you trust me?” he asked.
It wasn’t even a question. She felt safer here than she ever had anywhere. And anyway, she asked herself, what real risk was there? It’s just a dream, she answered, though of course it was so much more.
She looked at Lazlo, bit her lip and let it go, and said, “All right.”
45
STRANGE AZOTH
In the makeshift alchemical laboratory in the windowless attic of the crematorium, a small blue flame touched the curved glass base of a suspended flask. The liquid there heated and changed state, rising as vapor through the fractionating column to catch in the condenser and trickle in droplets into the collection flask.
The golden godson retrieved it and held it up to a glave to examine it.
Clear fluid. It might have been water to look at it, but it wasn’t. It was azoth, a substance even more precious than the gold it could yield, because, unlike gold, it had multiple, wondrous applications and but a single source in all the world: himself—at least as long as its key component remained secret.
A vial lay empty on the worktable. It was labeled SPIRIT OF LIBRARIAN, and Thyon felt a twinge of… distaste? Here was vital essence of the no-name peasant foundling who had the unforgivable habit of helping him for no good reason, all while looking guileless, as though it were a normal thing to do.