Thoom.
Sarai froze. It didn’t seem possible for her eyes to widen any further, but they did, and in that brief moment of silence when the footsteps ceased—that terrible pause that every household in Weep had dreaded for two hundred years—Sarai’s panic overpowered Lazlo’s reason, so that they were both in it, living it, when the shutters, without warning, were ripped from their hinges in a havoc of splintering wood and shattered glass. And there, just outside, was the creature whose footsteps shook the bones of Weep. It was no living thing, but moved as though it were, as sinuous as a ravid, and shining like poured mercury. It was all mesarthium, smooth bunched muscle shaped for crouching and leaping. The flanks of a great cat, the neck and heavy hump of a bull, wings as sharp and vicious as the wings of the great seraph, though on a smaller scale. And a head… a head that was made for nightmares.
Its head was carrion.
It was metal, of course, but like the relief on the walls of Sarai’s rooms—the songbirds and lilies so real they mocked the master carvers of Weep—it was utterly true to life. Or rather, true to death. It was a dead thing, a rotten thing, a skull with the flesh peeling off, revealing teeth to the roots in a grimace of fangs, and in the great black eye sockets were no eyes but only a terrible, all-seeing light. It had horns thick as arms, tapering to wicked points, and it pawed at the ground and tossed its head, a roar rumbling up its metal throat.
It was Rasalas, the beast of the north anchor, and it wasn’t the true monster. The true monster was astride it:
Skathis, god of beasts, master of metal, thief of sons and daughters, tormentor of Weep.
Lazlo had only the crudely drawn mural to go on, but he beheld now the god who had stolen so much—not just sons and daughters, though that was the dark heart of it. Skathis had stolen the sky from the city, and the city from the world. What tremendous, insidious power that took, and here was the god himself.
One might expect a presence to rival the Godslayer’s—a dark counterpart to his light, as two quell kings faced off across a game board.
But no. He was nothing next to the Godslayer. Here was no dark majesty, no fell magnificence. He was of ordinary stature and his face was just a face. He was no demon-god from myth. But for his color—that extraordinary blue—there was nothing extraordinary about him besides the cruelty in his face. He was neither handsome nor ugly, distinguished only by the malice that burned in his gray eyes, and that serpent smile of cunning and venom.
But he rode upon Rasalas, and that more than made up for any shortfall of godly grandeur, the beast an extension of his own psyche, every prowling, pawing step and toss of the head his own. Each growl that echoed up that metal throat was his as surely as if issued from his own flesh throat. His hair was of sullen brown, and he wore on it a crown of mesarthium shaped as a wreath of serpents swallowing each other by the tails. They moved about his brow in sinuous waves of devouring, round and round, relentless. He was clothed in a coat of velvet and diamond dust with long, fluttering tails in the shape of knife blades, and his boots were white spectral leather buckled with lys.
It was an accursed thing to flay a spectral and wear its skin. Those boots might almost have been of human leather, so deeply wrong were they.
But none of the terrible details could account for the purity of dread that surged through the room—through the dream, though both Lazlo and Sarai had lost their grip on that fact, and were prey to the torrents of the unconscious. That pure dread, as Lazlo had witnessed again and again since arriving in Weep, was a collective horror that had been building for two full centuries. How many young men and women had been taken up in all that time, and returned with no memories after this moment—this moment at their door or window when the leering god came calling. Lazlo thought of Suheyla and Azareen and Eril-Fane, and so many others, taken just like this, no matter what their families did to keep them safe.
Again the question beat at his mind. Why? All the stolen girls and boys, their memories taken and much more than that.
The nursery, the babies. Why?
On the one hand it was obvious, and certainly nothing new. If there has ever been a conqueror who did not exact this most devastating tithe from his subjects, he is unknown to history. The youth are the spoils of war. Chattel, labor. No one is safe. Tyrants have always taken who they wanted, and tyrants always will. The king of Syriza had a harem even now.
But this stood apart. There was something systematic in the taking, something shrouded. That was what nudged at Lazlo’s mind—but briefly, only to be churned under by the overwhelming dread. Just a few minutes earlier he had thought, nonchalant, that he could catch Sarai’s terrors like fireflies in a jar. Now the enormity of them reached out to catch him.
“Strange the dreamer,” said Skathis, extending one imperious hand. “Come with me.”
“No!” cried Sarai. She grabbed at Lazlo’s arm and clutched it to herself.
Skathis grinned. “Come now. You know there is no safety and no salvation. There is only surrender.”
Only surrender. Only surrender.
What flooded Sarai was the emotion of everyone ever left behind, every family member or fiancé, childhood sweetheart or best friend who could do nothing but surrender as their loved one was taken up. Rasalas reared up on its hind legs, its huge, clawed paws coming down hard on the window ledge, crumbling it away. Sarai and Lazlo stumbled backward. They clung together. “You can’t have him!” choked Sarai.
“Don’t worry, child,” said Skathis, fixing her with his cold eyes. “I’m taking him for you.”
She shook her head, hard, at the idea that this thing should be done in her name—as Isagol had taken Eril-Fane for her own, so would Skathis take Lazlo for her. But then… that very idea—the paradox of it, of Skathis taking Lazlo from her to bring him to her—split Sarai back into two people, the one in the citadel and the one in this room, and uncovered the border between dream and reality that had become lost in the fear. This was just a dream, and as long as she knew that, she wouldn’t be powerless in it.
All the fear washed away like dust in a rainstorm. You are the Muse of Nightmares, Sarai told herself. You are their mistress, not their thrall.
And she threw up one hand, not forming in her mind a precise attack, but—as with the mahalath—letting some deeper voice within herself decide.