Strange the Dreamer: Chapters 12–22

It was late afternoon; she’d only just risen, and it took her some time to shake off the effects of lull, the draught she drank to help her sleep.

It was a long, vaulted arcade that overlooked the garden from the dexter arm of the citadel, and was where dinner would soon be laid out for the five of them.

He’d been a footman before the Carnage, and still wore the livery he’d died in, which to Sarai’s mind suggested a distinct lack of imagination.

Ruby appeared in an arch of the arcade, looking like one more orchid in the forest, her slim form a stem upholding a bloom of riotous hair.

Her eyes were the last reservoir of flame, burning as red as her name so that she looked, for a second, like a temple icon to an evil goddess, and then she was just herself again—herself and only herself, nary a shred or ashen tatter remaining of her dress.

There were dozens of gowns, all of them too grand to wear, and too terrible. Satins and foils and stiff brocades, encrusted with jewels and trimmed in furs with the heads still on, glassy eyes, bared fangs and all.

There was a bodice of pure molded gold, made to look like a beetle’s carapace, and a fan collar fashioned from the spines of poisonous fish, with tiny teeth sewn in patterns like seed pearls.

The garden was a broad terrace that stretched the breadth of the citadel, abutting the high, indomitable body of the structure on one side, and falling away to a sheer drop on the other, edged only by a hip-high balustrade.

“Don’t you wish you had someone to sneak off and do things with?”
Sparrow flushed at this, a roseate warmth creeping into the blue of her cheeks and giving them a violet cast.

“You’ve debauched me enough for one day.”
Ruby rolled her eyes. “Please. That’s an experiment I won’t be repeating. You’re a terrible kisser.”

She didn’t have a moniker, the way Feral was Cloud Thief and Ruby was Bonfire and Sparrow was Orchid Witch.

Sarai had a name, too, but Minya was just Minya, or “mistress” to the ghosts she bound in iron gossamers of will.

After death, souls were invisible, incorporeal, and ephemeral, lasting a few days at the most between death and evanescence, during which time they could only cling to their bodies or drift helplessly upward toward their final unmaking—unless, that is, Minya caught and kept them.

After death, souls were invisible, incorporeal, and ephemeral, lasting a few days at the most between death and evanescence, during which time they could only cling to their bodies or drift helplessly upward toward their final unmaking—unless, that is, Minya caught and kept them.

He still wore the semblance of his worldly body.

He stared at them in raw horror, his eyes skipping from Ruby to Feral to Sparrow to Sarai, trying to process the sight of their blue flesh.
Blue. As blue as tyranny and thrall and monsters in the streets.

The entire formation—a kind of immense mound—was white, from the dun desert floor to the blue of the sky.

He’d ridden into their cities mounted on a spectral, after all, and most of them assumed he was from Weep—at least, until Thyon Nero disabused them of that notion.

She put back her head and ululated, and everyone in camp turned to look.

The barbed question, intended to discomfit.

It was a ridiculous notion, as well as petty and impolitic, but he hadn’t been able to resist.

Sparrow and Ruby threw snowballs at each other, their laughter a bit too sharp, their aim a bit too true, and Minya slipped away somewhere, promising to release the ghost, Ari-Eil, to his natural evanescence.

Minya’s animus burned brighter than Ruby’s fire, and for good reason: She was the only one of them who actually remembered the Carnage.

When she was younger, she’d supposed it had belonged to a maid, but at some point she came to understand that it had been for Isagol’s consorts, paramours, whatever you chose to call them.

Half her blood was human, but it counted for nothing. She was blue. She was godspawn. She was anathema.

She could feel it burgeoning within her, welling up like tears. She held it in a moment longer.

It was clearly a scream—the rictus tension in her face, head thrust forward, throat stretched taut—but no sound came out.

Snowdrifts and lightning strikes, or bedclothes burned away, leaving nothing but an angry, naked baby steaming in a mesarthium bassinet.

The sky took them. They rose up and returned to it, and were subsumed by it.

“Who would ever want to kiss a girl who eats moths?” Ruby had once asked her in a spirit of commiseration.

And he wondered, with a frisson of concern: Was it possible he’d been brought so far just to serve as food for the carrion-eaters?

Now that they were nearly arrived, he allowed himself a brief daydream of comfort. Not luxury, which was beyond his ken, but simple comfort: a wash, a shave, a meal, a bed.

The Elmuthaleth had been high desert plateau, flat and sere.

Sarai uncovered her eyes and found Great Ellen restored to human form, the excoriating hawk gaze replaced by a piercing but compassionate human one.

“Minya,” she said, remonstrating. “You promised you’d let him go.”

Minya was many things—perverse, capricious, and obstinate among them.

She was like a wild creature, by turns furtive and barging, ever unwashed, and with the staring lack of empathy that belongs to murderers and small children.

After the dream she’d had, the last thing she needed was another baleful ghost glaring at her.

A scream was building in Sarai’s mind, and, with it, an awful presentiment that the pall of doom of the past day had been leading to this moment.

Now those specks in the distance, almost too small to be seen, were coming inexorably toward them to attempt to dismantle their world, and what tatters remained of Sarai’s belief deserted her.