27
Another World
Every mind is its own world. Most occupy a vast middle ground of ordinary, while others are more distinct: pleasant, even beautiful, or sometimes slippery and unaccountably wrong-feeling. Sarai couldn’t even remember what her own had been like, back before she had made of it the zoo of terrors it was now—her own mind a place she was afraid to be caught out in after dark, so to speak, and had to shelter herself from by means of a drink that dulled her with its seeping gray nothing. The Godslayer’s dreams were a realm of horrors, too, uniquely his own, while Suheyla’s were as soft as a shawl that wraps a child against the cold. Sarai had trespassed in thousands of minds—tens of thousands—and she had sifted her invisible fingers through dreams beyond counting.
But she had never known anything like this.
She blinked and looked around.
Here was a street paved in lapis lazuli, the carved facades of buildings rising up on either side. And there were domes of gold, and the luster of the Cusp in the distance. All night long Sarai had sojourned in dreamscapes wholly alien to her. This wasn’t, and yet was. She spun slowly, taking in the curious twinning of familiarity and the strange that was stranger in its way than the wholly alien had been. Clearly this was Weep, but it was not the Weep she knew. The lapis was bluer, the gold brighter, the carvings unfamiliar. The domes—of which there were hundreds instead of merely dozens—weren’t quite the right shape. Nor were they of smooth gold leaf as in reality, but were patterned instead in fish-scale tiles of darker gold and brighter, so the sun didn’t merely glint on them. It played. It danced.
The sun.
The sun on Weep.
There was no citadel, and no anchors. No mesarthium anywhere, and not a trace of lingering gloom or hint of bitterness. She was experiencing a version of Weep that existed only in this dreamer’s mind. She couldn’t know that it was born of tales told years ago by a monk slipping into senility, or that it had been fed ever since by every source Lazlo could get his hands on. That he knew everything that it was possible for an outsider to know about Weep, and this was the vision he’d built out of pieces. Sarai had entered into an idea of the city, and it was the most wonderful thing that she had ever seen. It danced over her senses the way the dream sun danced over the domes. Every color was deeper, richer than the real, and there were so many of them. If the weaver of the world itself had kept the snipped ends of every thread she’d ever used, her basket might look something like this. There were awnings over market stalls, and rows of spice shaped into cones. Rose and russet, scarlet and sienna. Old men blew colored smoke through long painted flutes, etching the air with soundless music. Saffron and vermilion, amaranth and coral. From each dome rose a needlelike spire, all of them snapping with swallowtail flags and interconnected by ribbons across which children ran laughing, clad in cloaks of colored feathers. Mulberry and citrine, celadon and chocolate. Their shadows kept pace with them down below in a way that could never happen in the true Weep, enshrouded as it was in one great shadow. The imaginary citizenry wore garments of simple loveliness, the women’s hair long and trailing behind them, or else held aloft by attendant songbirds that were their own sparks of color. Dandelion and chestnut, tangerine and goldenrod.
Over the walls, vines grew, as they must have done in bygone days, before the shade. Fruits burgeoned, fat and glistening. Sunset and thistle, verdigris and violet. The air was redolent with their honey perfume and with another scent, one that transported Sarai back to childhood.
When she was small, before the pantries of the citadel kitchens were emptied of irreplaceable provisions like sugar and white flour, Great Ellen used to make them a birthday cake each year: one to share, to stretch the sugar and white flour across as many years as possible. Sarai had been eight for the last one. The five of them had savored it, made a game of eating it with excruciating slowness, knowing it was the last cake they would ever taste.
And here in this strange and lovely Weep were cakes set out on window ledges, their icing glittering with crystal sugar and flower petals, and passersby stopped to help themselves to a slice of this one or that one, and folks inside handed cups out through the windows, so that they might have something to wash it down with.
Sarai drank it all in in a daze. This was the second time tonight she had been surprised by the stark dissonance between a face and a mind. The first had been the golden faranji. However fine his face, not so his dreams. They were as cramped and airless as coffins. He could barely breathe or move in them, and neither could she. And now this.
That this rugged countenance with its air of violence should give her entrance into such a realm of wonder.
She saw spectrals parading unattended, side by side like couples out for a stroll, and other such creatures as she recognized and didn’t. A ravid, its arm-long fangs festooned in beads and tassels, rose up on its hind legs to lick a cake with its long, rasping tongue. She saw a genteel centaur bearing a princess sidesaddle, and such was the atmosphere of magic that they weren’t out of place here. He turned his head and the pair shared a lingering kiss that brought warmth to Sarai’s cheeks. And there were small men with the feet of chickens, walking backward so their tracks would point the wrong way, and tiny old ladies racing about on saddled cats, and goat-horned boys ringing bells, and the flit and flutter of gossamer wings, and more and lovelier things everywhere she looked. She had been inside the dream for less than a minute—two mere spans of the great seraph’s hand, paced forth and back—when she realized that she had a smile on her face.
A smile.
Smiles were rare enough, given the nature of her work, but on such a night as this, with such discoveries, it was unthinkable. She pushed it flat with her hand, ashamed, and paced on. So this faranji was good at dreams? So what. None of this was useful to her. Who was this dreamer? What was he doing here? Hardening herself to wonder, she looked around again and saw, up ahead, the figure of a man with long dark hair.
It was him.
This was normal. People manifest in their own dreams more often than they don’t. He was walking away from her, and she willed herself nearer—no sooner wishing it than she was right behind him. This dream might be special, but it was still a dream and, as such, hers to control. She could, if she wished, vanquish all this color. She might turn it all to blood, smash the domes, send the feather-cloaked children tumbling to their deaths. She might drive that tame ravid with its tassels and beads to maul the lovely women with their long black hair. She could turn all this into nightmare. Such was her gift. Her vile, vile gift.
She did none of that. It wasn’t why she’d come, for one thing, but even if it was, it was unthinkable that she should mangle this dream. It wasn’t just the colors and the fairy-tale creatures, the magic. It wasn’t even the cakes. There was such a feeling here of . . . of sweetness, and safety, and Sarai wished . . .
She wished it were real, and she could live in it. If ravids could walk here side by side with men and women and even share their cakes, then maybe godspawn could, too.
Real. Foolish, foolish thought. This was a stranger’s mind. Real was the other four waiting for her in an agony of wondering. Real was the truth she had to tell them, and real was the dawn glow creeping up the horizon. It was time to go. Sarai gathered up her moths. Those perched on the knitted glave cover released it and it eased back down, swallowing the slice of light and returning the dreamer to darkness. They fluttered to the window and waited there, but the one on his brow remained. Sarai was poised, ready to withdraw it, but she hesitated. She was so many places at once. She was on the flat of the seraph’s palm, barefoot, and she was hovering in the window of the Godslayer’s bedroom, and she was perched, light as a petal, on the dreamer’s brow.
And she was inside his dream, standing right behind him. She had an unaccountable urge to see his face, here in this place of his creation, with his eyes open.
He reached out to pluck a fruit from one of the vines.
Sarai’s hand twitched at her side, wanting one, too. Wanting five, one for each of them. She thought of the godspawn girl who could bring things out of dreams, and wished she could return with her arms full of fruit. A cake balanced on her head. And riding the tame ravid that now had icing on its whiskers. As though, with gifts and whimsy, she might soften the blow of her news.
Some children were climbing a trellis, and they paused to toss some more fruit down to the dreamer. He caught the yellow orbs and called back, “Thank you.”
The timbre of his voice sent a thrill through Sarai. It was deep, low, and raw—a voice like woodsmoke, serrated blades, and boots breaking through snow. But for all its roughness, there was the most endearing hint of shyness in it, too. “I believed it when I was a little boy,” he told an old man standing nearby. “About the fruit free for the taking. But later I thought it had to be a fantasy dreamed up for hungry children.”
Belatedly, it struck Sarai that he was speaking the language of Weep. All night long, in all those other strangers’ dreams, she’d heard scarcely a word she could understand, but this one was speaking it without even an accent. She drifted to one side, coming around finally to get a look at him.
She went right up close, studying him—in profile—in the same shameless way that one might study a statue—or, indeed, in which a ghost might study the living. Earlier in the night, she had done the same with the golden faranji, standing right beside him while he did furious work in a laboratory of spurting flames and shattered glass. Everything had been jagged there, hot and full of peril, and it didn’t matter how beautiful he was. She’d been eager to get away.
There was no peril here, or desire for escape. On the contrary, she was drawn in closer. A decade of invisibility had done away with any hesitancy she might once have felt about such flagrant staring. She saw that his eyes were gray, and that his smile wore the same hint of shyness as his voice. And yes, there was the broken line of his nose. And yes, the cut of his cheeks to his jaw was harsh. But, to her surprise, his face, awake and animate, conveyed none of the brutality that had been her first impression. On the contrary.
It was as sweet as the air in his dream.
He turned his head her way, and Sarai was so accustomed to her own acute nonbeing that it didn’t even startle her. She only took it as an opportunity to see him better. She had seen so many closed eyes, and eyelids trembling with dreams, and lashes fluttering on cheeks, that she was transfixed by his open ones. They were so near. She could see, in this indulgence of sunlight, the patterns of his irises. They weren’t solid gray, but filaments of a hundred different grays and blues and pearls, and they looked like reflections of light wavering on water, with the softest sunburst of amber haloing his pupils.
And . . . every bit as avidly as she was looking at him, he was looking at . . . No, not at her. He could only be looking through her. He had an air of one bewitched. There was a light in his eyes of absolute wonder. Witchlight, she thought, and she suffered a deep pang of envy for whoever or whatever it was behind her that enthralled him so completely. For just a moment, she let herself pretend that it was her.
That he was looking at her in that rapt way.
It was only pretend. An instant of self-indulgence—like a phantom that interposes itself between lovers to feel what it is to be alive. All of this happened in a flutter of seconds, three at the very most. She stood quiet inside the remarkable dream and pretended the dreamer was captivated by her. She tracked the movement of his pupils. They seemed to trace the lines of her face and the band of black she’d painted across it. They dropped, only to rise again at once from the sight of her slip-clad form and her immodest blue skin. He blushed, and sometime in those three seconds it had ceased being pretend. Sarai blushed, too. She fell back a step and the dreamer’s eyes followed her.
His eyes followed her.
There was no one behind her. There was no one else at all. The whole dream shrank to a sphere around the pair of them, and there could be no question that the witchlight was for her, or that it was her he meant when he whispered, with vivid and tender enthrallment, “Who are you?”
Reality came slamming down. She was seen. She was seen. Up in the citadel Sarai jerked back. She snapped the tether of consciousness and cut the moth loose, losing the dream in an instant. All the focus she’d poured into the single sentinel was shunted back into her physical body, and she stumbled and fell, gasping, to her knees.
It was impossible. In dreams, she was a phantom. He couldn’t have seen her.
Yet there was no question in her mind that he had.
Down in Weep, Lazlo woke with a start and sat up in bed just in time to witness ninety-nine smithereens of darkness spook from his window ledge and burst into the air, where, with one frantic eddy, they were sucked up and out of sight.
He blinked. All was quiet and still. Dark, too. He might have doubted that he’d seen anything at all if, at that moment, the one-hundredth moth hadn’t tumbled off his brow to fall dead into his lap. Gently he scooped it into his palm. It was a delicate thing, its wings furred in plush the color of twilight.
Half tangled in the remnants of his dream, Lazlo was still seeing the wide blue eyes of the beautiful blue girl, and he was frustrated to have wakened and lost her so abruptly. If he could get back to the dream, he wondered, might he find her again? He laid the dead moth on the bedside table and fell back to sleep.
And he did find the dream, but not the girl. She was gone. In those next moments the sun rose. It seeped a pallid light into the citadel’s gloom and turned the moth to smoke on the table.
When Lazlo woke again, a couple of hours later, he’d forgotten them both.