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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.
And yet when her time came, there was no clinging, and no choice. Here was what she hadn’t counted on: There was her body to hold on to, but nothing to hold on with. She slipped out of herself with the sensation of being shed—like a bird’s molted feather, or a plum dropped from a tree.
The shock of it. She had no weight, no substance. She was in the air, and the dreamlike unreality of floating warred with the gruesome truth beneath her. Her body. She . . . it . . . had landed on a gate, and was curved over it backward, hair streaming long, ginger blossoms raining down from it like little flames. The column of her throat was smooth cerulean, her eyes glassy and staring. Her pink slip looked lewd to her here, hiked up her bare thighs—all the more so when a crowd began to gather.
And scream.
An iron finial had pierced through her breastbone, right in the center of her chest. Sarai focused on that small point of red-slick iron and . . . hovered there, over the husk of her body, while the men, women, and children of Weep pointed and clutched their throats and choked out their raw and reeling screams. Such vicious noise, such contorted faces, they were barely human in their horror. She wanted to scream back at them, but they wouldn’t hear her. They couldn’t see her, not her—a trembling ghost perched on the chest of her own fresh corpse. All they saw was calamity, obscenity. Godspawn.
Her moths found her, those that remained. She’d always thought they would die when she did, but some vestige of life was in them yet—the last tatters of her own, till sunrise could turn them to smoke. Frantic, they fluttered at her dead face and plucked wildly at her bloody hair—as though they could lift her up and carry her back home.
They could not. A dirty wind purled them away and there was only the screaming, the hateful twisted faces, and . . . the truth.
It was all real.
Sarai was dead. And though she had gone beyond breathing, the realization choked her, like when she woke from a nightmare and couldn’t get air. The sight of her poor body . . . like this, exposed to them. She wanted to gather herself into her own arms. And her body . . . it was only the beginning of loss. Her soul would go, too. The world would resorb it. Energy was never lost, but she would be lost, and her memories with her, and all her longing, and all her love. Her love.
Lazlo.
Everything came rushing back. The blast, and what came after. Dying had distracted her. With a gasp she looked up, braced for the sight of the citadel plunging from the sky. Instead she saw . . . the sky—moonlight shafting through smoke, and even the glimmer of stars. She blinked. The citadel wasn’t falling. The seraph’s wings were folded.
Truth skittered away again. What was real?
The frenzy around her, already unbearable, grew wilder. She wouldn’t have believed the screams could get any louder, but they did, and when she saw why, her hearts—or the memory of them—gave a lurch of savage hope.
Rasalas was in the sky, and Lazlo was astride him. Oh glory, the sight! The creature was remade, and . . . Lazlo was, too. He was Lazlo of the mahalath, as blue as skies and opals, and he took Sarai’s breath away. His long dark hair streamed in the gusts of wingbeats as Rasalas came down to land, and Sarai was overcome with the wild joy of reprieve. If Rasalas was flying, if Lazlo was blue, then it was, after all, just a dream.
Oh gods.
Lazlo slid from Rasalas’s back and stood before her, and if her despair was grim before that surge of joy, how wretched it was after. Her hope could not survive the grief she saw in him. He swayed on his feet. He couldn’t get his breath. His beautiful dreamer’s eyes were like burnt-out holes, and the worst thing was: He wasn’t looking at her. He was staring at the body arched over the gate, dripping blood from the ends of its cinnamon hair, and that was what he reached for. Not her, but it.
Sarai saw his hand tremble. She watched him trace the slim pink strap hanging limp from her dead shoulder, and remembered the feel of his hand there, easing the same strap aside, the heat of his mouth on her skin and the exquisite paths of sensation, in every way as though it had really happened—as though their bodies had come together, and not just their minds. The cruelty of it was a knife to her soul. Lazlo had never touched her, and now he was, and she couldn’t feel a thing.
He eased the strap back into place. Tears streaked down his cheeks. The gate was tall. Sarai’s dead face, upside down, was higher than his upturned one. He gathered her hair to him as though it were something worth holding. Blood wicked into his shirt and smeared over his neck and jaw. He cupped the back of her neck. How gently he held the dead thing that had been her. Sarai reached down to touch his face, but her hands passed right through him.
The first time she ever went into his dream, she had stood right in front of him, secure in her invisibility, and wistful, wishing this strange dreamer might fix his sweet gray eyes on her.
And then he had. Only him. He had seen her, and his seeing had given her being, as though the witchlight of his wonder were the magic that made her real. She had lived more in the past nights than in all the dreams that came before, much less her real days and nights, and all because he saw her.
But not anymore. There was no more witchlight and no more wonder—only despair worthy of Isagol at her worst. “Lazlo!” she cried. At least, she shaped the name, but she had no breath or tongue or teeth to give it sound. She had nothing. The mahalath had come and remade them both. He was a god, and she was a ghost. A page had turned. A new story was beginning. You had only to look at Lazlo to know it would be brilliant.
And Sarai could not be in it.
Lazlo didn’t feel the page turn. He felt the book slam shut. He felt it fall, like the one long ago that had shattered his nose, only this one shattered his life.
He climbed the stone base of the gate and reached up for Sarai’s body. He placed one hand under the small of her back. The other still cradled her neck. As carefully as he could, he lifted her. Strangled sobs broke from him as he disengaged her slender frame from the finial that pinned it in place. When she came free, he stepped back down, folding her to his chest, at once gutted and filled with unspeakable tenderness. Here at last were her real arms, and they would never hold him. Her real lips, and they would never kiss him. He curled over her as though he could protect her, but it was far too late for that.
How could it be that in his triumph he had saved everyone but her?
In the furnace of his grief, rage kindled. When he turned around, holding the body of the girl he loved—so light, so brutally unalive—the blanket of shock that had muted the screaming was thrown off, and the sound came roaring at him, as deafening as any explosion, louder than the rending of the earth. He wanted to roar back. Those who hadn’t fled were pressing close. There was menace in their hate and fear, and when Lazlo saw it, the feeling inside him was like the blast of fire rising up a dragon’s throat. If he screamed, it would burn the city black. That was how it felt. That was the fury that was in him.
“You do understand, don’t you,” Sarai had said, “that they would kill me on sight?”
He understood now. He knew they hadn’t killed her, and he knew they would have, given the chance. And he knew that Weep, the city of his dreams, which he had just saved from devastation, was open to him no longer. He might have filled the place at the center of himself with the answer to who he was, but he had lost so much more. Weep and Sarai. The chance of home and the chance of love. Gone.
He didn’t scream. Rasalas did. Lazlo wasn’t even touching him. He didn’t need to now; nearness was enough. Like a living thing, the beast of the anchor spun on the closing crowd, and the sound that rippled up and blasted from its metal throat wasn’t fury but anguish.
The sound of it crashed against the screaming and overwhelmed it. It was like color drowning color. The hate was black and the fear was red, and the anguish, it was blue. Not the blue of cornflowers or dragonfly wings or skies, and not of tyranny, either, or murder waiting to happen. It was the color of bruised flesh and storm-dark seas, the bleak and hopeless blue of a dead girl’s eyes. It was suffering, and at the bottom of everything, like dregs in a cup, there was no deeper truth in the soul of Weep than that.
The Godslayer and Azareen reached Windfall just as Rasalas screamed. They pushed through the crowd. The sound of pain carved them open even before they saw . . .
They saw Lazlo and what he held in his arms—the slender, slack limbs, the wicking flowers of blood, the cinnamon spill of hair, and the truth that it betrayed. Eril-Fane staggered. His gasp was the rupture of the small, brave hope growing inside his shame, and when Lazlo mounted Rasalas with Sarai clutched to his chest, he dropped to his knees like a warrior felled in battle.
Rasalas took flight. Its wingbeats stirred a storm of grit, and the crowd had to close its eyes. In the darkness behind their shut lids they all saw the same thing: no color at all, only loss like a hole torn in the world.
Azareen knelt behind her husband. Trembling, she wrapped her arms around his shoulders. She curved herself against his back, laid her face to the side of his neck, and wept the tears that he could not. Eril-Fane shuddered as her tears seared his skin, and something inside him gave way. He pulled her arms tight against his chest and crushed his face into her hands. And then, and there, for everything lost and everything stolen, both from him and by him in all these long years, the Godslayer started to sob.
Sarai saw everything, and could do nothing. When Lazlo lifted her body down, she couldn’t even follow. Some final invisible mooring line snapped, and she was cast adrift. At once, there was a sensation of . . . unraveling. She felt herself beginning to come apart. Here was her evanescence, and it was like dying all over again. She remembered the dream of the mahalath, when the mist unmade her and all sense of physical being vanished, but for one thing, one solid thing: Lazlo’s hand gripping hers.
Not now. He took her body and left her soul. She cried out after him, but her screams were silent even to herself, and with a flash of metal and a swirl of smoke, he was gone.
Sarai was alone in her final fading, her soul diffusing in the brimstone air.
Like a cloud of breath in an orchard when there’s nothing left to say.