Strange the Dreamer: Chapters 40–51

She flew away from nightmares and privation and the turned backs of her kindred. She flew away from the dead-end corridor where her life had trapped and taunted her.

She also knew that in all of the city and in the monstrous metal angel that had stolen the sky, she was the only one who knew the suffering of humans and godspawn both, and it came to her that her mercy was singular and precious. Today it had forestalled carnage, at least for a time.

He processed everything as well as could be expected—considering that “everything” entailed near death at the hands of savage ghosts—and he found within himself, rising through all the consternation and fright, a strange bubble of gladness.

Her lashes, he recalled, were golden red, her eyes pellucid blue.

Did they not understand how, in the strange chemistry of human emotion, his suffering and hers, mingled together, could...countervail each other?

It choked him like weeds and rot and colonies of vermin, clogging and staining him, stagnant and fetid, so that nothing so noble as love, or—gods above—forgiveness, could ever claim space in him.

Sarai had a new, disconcerting awareness of herself, as though she’d never realized how many moving parts she had, all to be coordinated with some semblance of grace.

Had she ever set foot on the world? With this in mind, the sight of her bare blue toes curling into the river mud struck him with a deep poignancy.

He wouldn’t, in the world, ever look at a young woman with such directness and intensity, but it was somehow all right here, as though they had met with the tacit intent to know each other.

“I suppose everyone has to be somewhere,” Sarai said evasively.

She didn’t know what words he would use, but the gist of it boiled down to why.

Hills that seemed, Sarai thought, to be holding their breath. She sensed it, a preternatural stillness, and held hers, too.

Here was her humanity externalized, and all her longing—for freedom, from disgust, from the confines of her metal cage.

“Well, you’re a singularly unhorrible demon, if I may say so.”

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.

But far more intense was the utter, ineffable tenderness he felt, and the solemnity.

She had inherited a story that was strewn with corpses and clotted with enmity, and was only trying to stay alive in it.

Even in that confined space, it was pacing—like a menagerie ravid, she thought—with just a whisper of her awareness left behind to guide it.

It was no living thing, but moved as though it were, as sinuous as a ravid, and shining like poured mercury.

The youth are the spoils of war. Chattel, labor. No one is safe. Tyrants have always taken who they wanted, and tyrants always will.

It was new to both of them—this nearness that mingles breath and warmth—and they shared the sensation that they were absorbing each other, melting together in an exquisite crucible.

He searched her eyes for acquiescence and found it. Freely she gave it. It was like a thread of light passing from one to the other, and it was more than acquiescence.

It was complicity, and desire.

She wasn’t one to give credence to hell, and was braced for the truth.

“That isn’t her doing,” Lazlo said, not to dismiss the threat, but at least to exonerate Sarai. “It must be one of the others.”

Eril-Fane considered keeping it from the Tizerkane, too, for fear that it would cause them too much turmoil and prove too difficult to hide. But Azareen was staunch on their behalf, and argued that they needed to be ready for anything that happened.

“The ones who weren’t babies anymore? If the Mesarthim were doing this all along...” This? He shuddered at his own craven circumlocution, using so meaningless a word to obscure so hideous a truth.

“The ones who weren’t babies anymore? If the Mesarthim were doing this all along...” This? He shuddered at his own craven circumlocution, using so meaningless a word to obscure so hideous a truth. Breeding. That was what they’d been doing.

He had always eschewed the mystical side of alchemy and focused on pure science.

Waking from her first kiss, still flush with the magic of the extraordinary night, Sarai had been buoyant, and alive with new hope.

Even the interminable days of the Elmuthaleth crossing had passed more quickly than this one.

“How am I supposed to win the reward if I’m not allowed to do anything?” he demanded of Lazlo that afternoon, waylaying him outside the Tizerkane guard station where he’d stopped to talk with Ruza and Tzara and some of the other warriors.

“Doesn’t involve destruction? That’s like me asking you not to be a mealy-mouthed poltroon.”
Lazlo’s eyebrows shot up. “Poltroon?”
“Look it up,” snapped Drave.

Their blasé demeanor was certainly a cover for their deep disquiet, but that didn’t mean they weren’t absolutely in earnest.

Tzara shook her head, and Lazlo thought she was going to chide the men for their callousness, but she said, “Where’s the fun in that? You wouldn’t even get to watch them die.”