43
A Singularly Unhorrible Demon
Inside a mist, inside a dream, a young man and woman were remade. But first they were unmade, their edges fading like the evanescent white bird, Wraith, as it phased through the skin of the sky. All sense of physical reality slipped away—except for one. Their hands, joined together, remained as real as bone and sinew. There was no world anymore, no riverbank or water, nothing beneath their feet—and anyway, no feet. There was only that one point of contact, and even as they let go of themselves, Lazlo and Sarai held on to each other.
And when the mist passed on its way, and the remade swans lorded their magnificence over the humble green river, they turned to each other, fingers interlaced, and looked, and looked, and looked.
Eyes wide and shining, eyes unchanged. His were still gray, hers were still blue. And her lashes were still honey red, and his as glossy black as the pelts of rivercats. His hair was still dark, and hers was still cinnamon, and his nose was the victim of velvet-bound fairy tales, and her mouth was damson-lush.
They were both in every way unchanged, save one.
Sarai’s skin was brown, and Lazlo’s was blue.
They looked, and looked, and looked at each other, and they looked at their joined hands, the brown-and-blue pattern of their fingers reversed, and they looked at the surface of the water, which hadn’t been a mirror before but was now because they willed it so. And they gazed at themselves in it, side by side and hand in hand, and they beheld neither gods nor monsters. They were so nearly unchanged, and yet that one thing—the color of their skin—would, in the real world, change everything.
Sarai looked at the rich earthen color of her arms, and she knew, though it was hidden, that she bore an elilith on her belly like a human girl. She wondered what the pattern was, and wished that she could take a peek. The other hand, the one joined with Lazlo’s, she gently withdrew. There seemed no further pretext for holding it, though it had been rather nice while it lasted.
She looked at him. Blue. “Did you choose this?” she asked.
Lazlo shook his head. “I left it to the mahalath,” he said.
“And it did this.” She wondered why. Her own change was easier to understand. Here was her humanity externalized, and all her longing—for freedom, from disgust, from the confines of her metal cage. But why should he come to this? Maybe, she thought, it wasn’t longing but fear, and this was his idea of a monster. “Well, I wonder what gift it has given you,” she said.
“Gift? You mean magic? Do you think I have one?”
“All godspawn have gifts.”
“Godspawn?”
“That’s what they call us.”
Us. Another collective pronoun. It glimmered between them, briefly, but Lazlo didn’t call attention this time. “Spawn, though,” he said, grimacing. “It doesn’t suit. That’s the offspring of fish or demons.”
“The intent, I believe, is the latter.”
“Well, you’re a singularly unhorrible demon, if I may say so.”
“Thank you,” Sarai said with play sincerity, laying a modest hand across her breast. “That’s the nicest thing anyone has ever said to me.”
“Well, I have at least a hundred nicer things to say and am only prevented by embarrassment.”
His mention of embarrassment magically conjured embarrassment. In her reflection, Sarai saw the way her brown cheeks went crimson instead of lavender, while Lazlo beheld the reverse in his own. “So, gifts,” he said, recovering, though Sarai wouldn’t have minded dwelling for a moment on his hundred nicer things. “And yours is . . . going into dreams?”
She nodded. She saw no need to explain the mechanics of it. Ruby’s long-ago commiseration flashed through her mind. “Who would ever want to kiss a girl who eats moths?” The thought of kissing stirred a fluttering in her belly that was something like it might feel if her moths really did live inside of her. Wings, delicate and tickling.
“So how do I know what it is, this gift?” Lazlo asked. “How does one find out?”
“It’s always different,” she told him. “Sometimes it’s spontaneous and obvious, and other times it has to be teased out. When the Mesarthim were alive, it was Korako, the goddess of secrets, who did the teasing out. Or so I’m told. I must have known her, but I can’t remember.”
The question “Told by whom?” was so palpable between them that, though Lazlo didn’t ask it—except, perhaps, with his eyebrows—Sarai nevertheless answered. “By the ghosts,” she said. Which happened, in this case, to be the truth.
“Korako,” said Lazlo. He thought back on the mural, but he’d been so fixed on Isagol that the other goddesses were a blur. Suheyla had mentioned Letha, but not the other one. “I haven’t heard anything about her.”
“No. You wouldn’t. She was the goddess of secrets, and her best-kept secret was herself. No one ever knew what her gift even was.”
“Another mystery,” said Lazlo, and they talked of gods and gifts, walking by the river. Sarai kicked at the surface and watched the flying droplets shiver ephemeral rainbows. They pointed to the swans, which had been identical before but now were strange—one fanged and made of agates and moss, another seeming dipped in gold. One had even become a svytagor. It submerged and vanished beneath the opaque green water. Sarai told Lazlo some of the better gifts she knew from Great Ellen, and slipped in among them a girl who could make things grow and a boy who could bring rain. His own gift, if the mahalath had given him one, remained a mystery.
“But what about you?” he asked her, pausing to pluck a flower that he had just willed to grow. It was an exotic bloom he’d seen in a shop window, and he would have been abashed to know it was called a passion flower. He offered it to Sarai. “If you were human, you would have to give up your gift, wouldn’t you?”
He couldn’t know the curse that her gift was, or what the use of it had done to her and to Weep. “I suppose so,” she said, sniffing the flower, which smelled of rain.
“But then you couldn’t be here with me.”
It was true. If she were human, Sarai couldn’t be in Lazlo’s dream with him. But . . . she could be in his room with him. A heat flared through her, and it wasn’t shame or even embarrassment. It was a kind of longing, but not hearts’ longing. It was skin’s longing. To be touched. It was limbs’ longing. To entwine. It was centered in her belly where her new elilith was, and she brushed her fingers over it again and shivered. Up in the citadel, pacing, her true body shivered in kind. “It’s a sacrifice I would be willing to make,” she said.
Lazlo couldn’t fathom it, that a goddess would be willing to give up her magic. It wasn’t just the magic, either. He thought she would be beautiful in any color, but found he missed the true exquisite hue of her. “You wouldn’t really want to change, though, would you?” he persisted. “If this were real, and you had the choice?”
Wouldn’t she? Why else had her unconscious—her inner mahalath—chosen this transformation? “If it meant having a life? Yes, I would.”
He was puzzled. “But you’re alive already.” He felt a sudden stab of fear. “You are, aren’t you? You’re not a ghost like the ones—”
“I’m not a ghost,” said Sarai, to his great relief. “But I am godspawn, and you must see that there’s a difference between being alive and having a life.”
Lazlo did see that. At least, he thought he saw. He thought that what she meant was in some way comparable to being a foundling at Zemonan Abbey: alive, but not living a life. And because he had found his way from one to the other and had even seen his dream come true, he felt a certain qualification on the subject. But he was missing a crucial piece of the puzzle. A crucial, bloody piece of the puzzle. Reasonably, and warmly, he sympathized. “It can’t be much of a life trapped up there. But now that we know about you, we can get you out.”
“Get me out? What, down to Weep?” There was a twist of incredulous amusement in Sarai’s voice, and while she spoke, she reverted to her true color, her skin flushing back to blue. So much for human, she thought. The hard truth would brook no make-believe. As though her reversion had triggered an end to the fantasy, Lazlo reverted, too, and was himself again. Sarai was almost sorry. When he had looked like that, she could almost have believed a connection between them. Had she really wondered, wistfully, a short time earlier, if this dreamer could help her? Could save her? He had no clue. “You do understand, don’t you,” she said with undue harshness, “that they would kill me on sight.”
“Who would?”
“Anyone would.”
“No.” He shook his head, unwilling to believe it. “They’re good people. It will be a surprise, yes, but they couldn’t hate you just because of what your parents were.”
Sarai stopped walking. “You think good people can’t hate?” she asked. “You think good people don’t kill?” Her breathing hitched, and she realized she’d crushed Lazlo’s flower in her hand. She dropped the petals into the water. “Good people do all the things bad people do, Lazlo. It’s just that when they do them, they call it justice.” She paused. Her voice grew heavy. “When they slaughter thirty babies in their cradles, they call it necessary.”
Lazlo stared at her. He shook his head in disbelief.
“That shock you saw on Eril-Fane’s face?” she went on. “It wasn’t because he didn’t know he had a child.” She took a breath. “It was because he thought he killed me fifteen years ago.” Her voice broke at the end. She swallowed hard. She felt, suddenly, as though her entire head were filled with tears and if she didn’t shed some of them it would explode. “When he killed all the godspawn, Lazlo,” she added, and wept.
Not in the dream, not where Lazlo could see, but up in her room, hidden away. Tears sheeted down her cheeks the way the monsoon rains sheeted down the smooth contours of the citadel in summer, flooding in through all the open doors, a rolling deluge of rain across the slick floors and nothing to do but wait for it to stop.
Eril-Fane had known that one of the babies in the nursery was his, but he didn’t know which one. He had seen Isagol’s belly swell with his child, of course, but after she was delivered of it, she had never mentioned it again. He’d asked. She’d shrugged. She’d done her duty; it was the nursery’s problem now. She hadn’t even known if it was a boy or a girl; it was nothing to her. And when he had walked, drenched in godsblood, into the nursery and looked about him at the squalling blue infants and toddlers, he had feared that he would see, and know: There. That one is mine.
If he had seen Sarai, cinnamon-haired like her mother, he would have known her in an instant, but he hadn’t, because she wasn’t there. But he hadn’t known that; for all he knew her hair was dark like his own, like all the rest of the babies. They made a blur of blue and blood and screams.
All innocent. All anathema.
All dead.
Lazlo’s eyes were dry but wide and unblinking. Babies. His mind rejected it, even as, under the surface, puzzle pieces were snapping together. All the dread, and the shame he’d seen in Eril-Fane. Everything about the meeting with the Zeyyadin, and . . . and the way Maldagha had laid her hands on her stomach. Suheyla, too. It was a maternal gesture. How stupid he’d been not to see it, but then how could he, when he’d spent his life among old men? All the things that hadn’t quite made sense now shifted just enough, and it was like tilting the angle of the sun so that instead of glancing off a window-pane and blinding you, it passed through it to illuminate all that was within.
He knew Sarai was telling the truth.
A great man, and also a good one. Is that what he had thought? But the man who had slain gods had also slain their babies, and Lazlo understood now what it was he’d feared to find in the citadel. “Some of us know better than others the . . . state . . . it was left in,” he had said. Not the skeletons of gods, but infants. Lazlo hunched over, feeling ill. He pressed a palm hard to his forehead. The village and the monster swans vanished. The river was no more. It all blinked out, and Lazlo and Sarai found themselves in his little room—the Godslayer’s little room. Lazlo’s sleeping body wasn’t stretched out on the bed. This was one more dream setting. In reality he was sleeping in the room, and in the dream he was standing in it. In reality a moth perched on his brow. In the dream the Muse of Nightmares stood beside him.
The Muse of Nightmares, Sarai thought. As much as ever. She had, after all, brought nightmare to this dreamer to whom she had come seeking refuge. In his sleep, he murmured, “No.” His eyes and fists were squeezed tight shut. His breathing was quick, and so was his pulse. All the hallmarks of nightmare. How well Sarai knew them. All she’d done was tell the truth. She hadn’t even shown it to him. Knifeshine and spreading blood, and all the small blue bodies. Nothing would induce her to drag that festering memory into this beautiful mind. “I’m sorry,” she said.
Up in the citadel, she sobbed. She could never be free of the fester. Her own mind would always be an open grave.
“Why are you sorry?” Lazlo asked her. There was sweetness in his voice, but the brightness had left it. It had gone dull somehow, like an old coin. “You’re the last person who should be sorry. He’s supposed to be a hero,” he said. “He let me believe it. But what kind of hero could do . . . that?”
In Windfall, the “hero” in question was lying stretched out on the floor. He was as still as a sleeper but his eyes were open in the dark, and Sarai thought again how he was as much a ruin as he was a man. He was, she thought, like a cursed temple, still beautiful to look at—the shell of something sacred—but benighted within, and none but ghosts could ever cross the threshold.
“What kind of hero?” Lazlo had asked. What kind, indeed. Sarai had never let herself rise to his defense. It was unthinkable, as though the bodies themselves were a barrier between her and forgiveness. Nevertheless, and not quite knowing what she was going to say, she told Lazlo, speaking softly, “For three years, Isagol . . . made him love her. That is . . . she didn’t inspire love. She didn’t strive to be worthy of it. She just reached into his mind . . . or his hearts or his soul . . . and played the note that would make him love her against everything that was in him. She was a very dark thing.” She shuddered to think how she herself had come from the body of this very dark thing. “She didn’t take away his conflicting emotions, although she could have. She didn’t make him not hate her. She left his hate there, right beside the love. She thought it was funny. And it wasn’t . . . it wasn’t dislike beside lust, or some trivial pale versions of hate and love. You see, it was hate.” She put everything she knew of hate into her voice—and not her own hate, but Eril-Fane’s and the rest of the victims of the Mesarthim. “It was the hate of the used and tormented, who are the children of the used and tormented, and whose own children will be used and tormented. And it was love,” she went on, and she put that into her voice, too, as well as she was able. Love that sets forth the soul like springtime and ripens it like summer. Love as rarely exists in reality, as if a master alchemist has taken it and distilled out all the impurities, every petty disenchantment, every unworthy thought, into a perfect elixir, sweet and deep and all-consuming. “He loved her so much,” she whispered. “It was all a lie. It was a violation. But it didn’t matter, did it, because when Isagol made you feel something, it became real. He hated her. And he loved her. And he killed her.”
She sank onto the edge of Lazlo’s bed and let her gaze roam over the familiar walls. Memories can be trapped in a room, and this one still held all the years that she’d come in this window full of righteous malice. Lazlo sank down beside her. “Hate won,” she said. “Isagol left it there for her amusement, and for three years he fought a war within himself. The only way he could win was for his hate to surpass that vile, false, perfect love. And it did.” Her jaw clenched. She darted a glance at Lazlo. This story wasn’t hers to tell, but she thought he needed to know. “After Skathis brought Azareen up to the citadel.”
Lazlo knew a little of the story already. “They got her later,” Suheyla had said. Sarai knew all of it. She alone knew of the tarnished silver band that Azareen put on her finger every night and took off first thing every morning. Theirs wasn’t the only love story ended by the gods, but it was the only one that ended the gods.
Eril-Fane had been gone for more than two years by the time Skathis took Azareen, and she might have been the first girl in Weep who was glad to mount the monster Rasalas and fly up to her own enslavement. She would know, at least, if her husband was still alive.
He was. And Azareen had learned how you can be glad and devastated at the same time. She heard his laugh before she saw his face—Eril-Fane’s laugh, in that place, as alive as she had ever heard it—and she broke away from her guard to run toward it, skidding around a corner of the sleek metal corridor to the sight of him gazing at Isagol the Terrible with love.
She knew it for what it was. He had looked at her like that, too. It wasn’t feigned but true, and so after more than two years of wondering what had become of him, Azareen found out. In addition to the misery of serving the gods’ “purpose,” it was her fate to watch her husband love the goddess of despair.
And Eril-Fane, it was his fate to see his bride led down the sinister corridor—door after door of little rooms with nothing in them but beds—and finally, Isagol’s calculus failed. Love was no match for what burned in Eril-Fane when he heard Azareen’s first screams.
“Hate was his triumph,” Sarai told Lazlo. “It was who he became to save his wife, and all his people. So much blood on his hands, so much hate in his hearts. The gods had created their own undoing.” She sat there for a moment, mute, and felt an emptiness within her where for years her own sustaining hate had been. There was only a terrible sadness now. “And after they were slain and all their slaves were freed,” she said heavily, “there was still the nursery, and a future full of terrible, unguessable magic.”
The tears that had, until now, flowed only down Sarai’s real cheeks, slipped down her dream ones, too. Lazlo reached for her hands and held them in both of his own.
“It’s a violence that can never be forgiven,” she said, her voice husky with emotion. “Some things are too terrible to forgive. But I think . . . I think I can understand what they felt that day, and what they faced. What were they to do with children who would grow into a new generation of tormentors?”
Lazlo reeled with the horror of it all, and with the incredible feeling that after all his own youth had been merciful. “But . . . if they’d been embraced instead, and raised with love,” he said, “they wouldn’t have become tormentors.”
It sounded so simple, so clean. But what had the humans known of Mesarthim power besides how it could be used to punish and oppress, terrify and control? How could they even have imagined a Sparrow or a Feral when all they knew was the likes of Skathis and Isagol? Could one reach back in time and expect them to be as merciful as it was possible to be fifteen years later with a mind and body unviolated by gods?
Sarai’s own empathy made her queasy. She’d said she could never forgive, but it would seem she already had, and she flushed with confused dismay. It was one thing not to hate, and another to forgive. She told Lazlo, “I feel a little like him sometimes, the love and hate side by side. It’s not easy having a paradox at the core of one’s own being.”
“What do you mean? What paradox? Being human and godsp—” Lazlo couldn’t bring himself to call her spawn, even if she called herself that. “Human and Mesarthim?”
“There’s that, too, but no. I mean the curse of knowledge. It was easy when we were the only victims.” We. She’d been looking down at their hands, still joined, hers curled inside his, but she glanced up now and didn’t retreat from the pronoun. “There are five of us,” she admitted. “And for the others there is only one truth: the Carnage.
“But because of my gift—or curse—I’ve learned what it’s been like for the humans, before and since. I know the insides of their minds, why they did it, and how it changed them. And so when I see a memory of those babies being . . .” Her words choked off in a sob. “And I know that was my fate, too, I feel the same simple rage I always have, but now there’s . . . there’s outrage, too, on behalf of those young men and women who were plucked from their homes to serve the gods’ purpose, and desolation for what it did to them, and guilt . . . for what I’ve done to them.”
She wept, and Lazlo drew her into an embrace as though it were the most natural thing in the world that he should draw a mournful goddess against his shoulder, enfold her in his arms, breathe the scent of the flowers in her hair, and even lightly stroke her temple with the edge of his thumb. And though there was a layer of his mind that knew this was a dream, it was momentarily shuffled under by other, more compelling layers, and he experienced the moment as though it were absolutely real. All the emotion, all the sensation. The texture of her skin, the scent of her hair, the heat of her breath through his linen shirt, and even the moisture of tears seeping through it. But far more intense was the utter, ineffable tenderness he felt, and the solemnity. As though he had been entrusted with something infinitely precious. As though he had taken an oath, and his very life stood surety to it. He would recognize this later as the moment his center of gravity shifted: from being one of one—a pillar alone, apart—to being half of something that would fall if either side were cut away.
Three fears had gnawed at Lazlo, back in his old life. The first: that he would never see proof of magic. The second: that he would never find out what had happened in Weep. Those fears were gone; proof and answers were unfolding minute by minute. And the third? That he would always be alone?
He didn’t grasp it yet—at least not consciously—but he no longer was, and he had a whole new set of fears to discover: the ones that come with cherishing someone you’re very likely to lose.
“Sarai.” Sarai. Her name was calligraphy and honey. “What do you mean?” he asked her gently. “What is it you’ve done to them?”
And Sarai, remaining just as she was—tucked into his shoulder, her forehead resting against his jaw—told him. She told him what she was and what she did and even . . . though her voice went thin as paper . . . how she did it, moths and all. And when she was finished telling and was tense in the circle of his arms, she waited to see what he would say. Unlike him, she couldn’t forget that this was a dream. She was outside it and inside it at once. And though she didn’t dare look at him while she told him her truth, her moth watched his sleeping face for any flicker of expression that might betray disgust.
There were none.
Lazlo wasn’t thinking about the moths—though he did recollect, now, the one that had fallen dead from his brow on his first morning waking up in Weep. What really seized him was the implication of nightmares. It explained so much. It had seemed to him as though fear were a living thing here, because it was. Sarai kept it alive. She tended it like a fire and made sure it never went out.
If there were such a goddess in a book of olden tales, she would be the villain, tormenting the innocent from her high castle. The people of Weep were innocent—most of them—and she did torment them, but . . . what choice did she have? She had inherited a story that was strewn with corpses and clotted with enmity, and was only trying to stay alive in it. Lazlo felt many things for her in that moment, feeling her tension as he held her, and none of them were disgust.
He was under her spell and on her side. When it came to Sarai, even nightmares seemed like magic. “The Muse of Nightmares,” he said. “It sounds like a poem.”
A poem? Sarai detected nothing mocking in his voice, but she had to see his face to confirm it, which meant sitting up and breaking the embrace. Regretfully, she did. She saw no mockery, but only . . . witchlight, still witchlight, and she wanted to live in it forever.
She asked in a hesitant whisper, “Do you still think I’m a . . . a singularly unhorrible demon?”
“No,” he said, smiling. “I think you’re a fairy tale. I think you’re magical, and brave, and exquisite. And . . .” His voice grew bashful. Only in a dream could he be so bold and speak such words. “I hope you’ll let me be in your story.”