His gift. He laughed out loud. Some of the Tizerkane flinched at the sound.
“Don’t you see what this means?” he asked. His voice was rich and full of wonder, and all of them knew it so well. It was their storyteller’s voice, both rough and pure, their friend’s voice that repeated every fool phrase they threw at him in their language lessons. They knew him, blue or not. He wanted to push past this ugliness of age-old hates and soul-warping fears and start a new era. For the first time, it truly seemed possible. “I can move the citadel,” he said. He could free the city from its shadow now, and Sarai from her prison. What couldn’t he do in this version of the world in which he was hero and monster in one? He laughed again. “Don’t you see?” he demanded, losing patience with their suspicion and scrutiny and the unacceptable absence of celebration. “The problem,” he said, “is solved.”
No cheers broke out. He didn’t expect any, but they might at least have looked glad not to be dead. Instead they were just overwhelmed, glancing at Eril-Fane to see what he would do.
He came forward, his steps heavy. He might have been called the Godslayer for good reason, but Lazlo didn’t fear him. He looked him right in the eyes and saw a man who was great and good and human, who had done extraordinary things and terrible things and been broken and reassembled as a shell, only then to do the bravest thing of all: He had kept on living, though there are easier paths to take.
Eril-Fane stared back at Lazlo, coming to terms with the new complexion of his familiar face. Time passed in heartbeats, and at last he held out his great hand. “You have saved our city and all our lives, Lazlo Strange. We are greatly in your debt.”
Lazlo took his hand. “There is no debt,” he said. “It’s all I wanted—”
But he broke off, because it was then, in the silence after the earth settled and the crackle of the fire died down, that the screams reached them, and, a moment later, carried by a terror-stricken rider, the news.
A girl had fallen from the sky. She was blue.
And she was dead.
Sound and air were stolen, and joy and thought and purpose. Lazlo’s wonder became its own dark inverse: not even despair, but nothingness. For despair there would have to be acceptance, and that was impossible. There was only nothing, so much nothing that he couldn’t breathe.
“Where?” he choked out.
Windfall. Windfall, where ripe plums rain down from the gods’ trees and there is always the sweet smell of rot.
The plummet, he recalled, sick with sudden memory. Had he seen her fall? No. No. He’d told himself then it couldn’t be her, and he had to believe it now. He would know if Sarai had . . .
He couldn’t even form the word in his mind. He would feel her fear—the way he had just before the blast, when that urgency of feeling had hit him, along with Drave’s sulfur stink, like a premonition. That could only have come from her, by way of her moth.
Her moth.
Something pierced the nothingness, and the something was dread. Where were Sarai’s moths? Why weren’t they here? They had been, when he lay on the ground, unconscious. “You have to wake up now, my love.”
My love.
My love.
And they’d been with him when he staggered down the street toward the fire. When had they gone? And where?
And why?
He asked the question, but slammed the door on any answers. A girl was dead, and the girl was blue, but it couldn’t be Sarai. There were four girls in the citadel, after all. It felt filthy to hope it was one of the others, but he hoped it nonetheless. He was near enough to the melted remains of the anchor to reach back and touch it, and he did, instantly drawing on its power. And Rasalas—Rasalas remade—lifted its great horned head.
It was like a creature awakening from sleep, and when it moved—sinuous, liquid—and shook open its massive wings, a bone-deep terror stirred in all the warriors. They drew their swords, though their swords were useless, and when Rasalas leapt down from its perch, they scattered, all but Eril-Fane, who was stricken by a terror closer to Lazlo’s own. A girl, fallen. A girl, dead. He was shaking his head. His hands balled into fists. Lazlo didn’t see him. He didn’t see anyone but Sarai, bright in his mind, laughing, beautiful, and alive—as though picturing her that way proved that she was.
With a leap, he mounted Rasalas. His will flowed into the metal. Muscles bunched. The creature leapt, and they were airborne. Lazlo was flying, but there was no joy in it, only the detached recognition that this was the version of the world he had wished for just moments ago. It was staggering. He could reshape mesarthium and he could fly. That much had come to pass, but there was a piece missing, the most important piece: to hold Sarai in his arms. It was a part of the wish, and the rest had come true, so it had to, too. A stubborn, desperate voice inside of Lazlo bargained with whatever might be listening. If there was some providence or cosmic will, some scheme of energies or even some god or angel answering his prayers tonight, then they had to grant this part, too.
And . . . it could be argued that they did.
Rasalas descended on Windfall. It was a quiet neighborhood usually, but not now. Now it was chaos: wild-eyed citizens caught in a nightmare carnival in which there was but one attraction. All was hysteria. The horror of the averted cataclysm had all poured into it, mixing with old hate and helplessness, and as the beast descended from the sky, the fervor rose to a new pitch.
Lazlo was barely aware of it. At the center of it all, in a pocket of stillness within the roiling nest of screams, was the girl. She was arched over a garden gate, head tilted back, arms loose around her face. She was graceful. Vivid. Her skin was blue and her slip was . . . it was pink, and her hair, spilling loose, was the orange-red of copper and persimmons, cinnamon and wildflower honey.
And blood.
Lazlo did hold Sarai in his arms that night, and she was real and flesh, blood and spirit, but not laughter. Not breath. Those had left her body forever.
The Muse of Nightmares was dead.
c66
God and Ghost
Of course it was a dream. All of it, another nightmare. The citadel’s sickening lurch, the helpless silk-on-mesarthium glide down the seraph’s slick palm, flailing wildly for something to hold on to and finding nothing, and then . . . falling. Sarai had dreamed of falling before. She had dreamed of dying any number of ways since her lull stopped working. Of course . . . those other times, she’d always awakened at the moment of death. The knife in the heart, the fangs in her throat, the instant of impact, and she’d bolt upright in her bed, gasping. But here she was: not awake, not asleep.
Not alive.
Disbelief came first, then surprise. In a dream, there were a hundred thousand ways that it might go, and many of them were beautiful. Fox wings, a flying carpet, falling forever into the stars.
In reality, though, there was only the one way, and it wasn’t beautiful at all. It was sudden. Almost too sudden to hurt.
Almost.
White-hot, like tearing in half, and then nothing.
Surrounded by ghosts as she had always been, Sarai had wondered what it was like at the last, and how much power a soul had, to leave the body or stay. She had imagined, as others had before her and would after, that it was somehow a matter of will. If you just clung tightly enough and refused to let go, you might . . . well, you might get to live.
She wanted so badly to live.