Strange the Dreamer: Chapters 52–67

The little girl ghost, Bahar, dripping with river water and dolor, told her solemnly, “Sarai can’t play right now,” which sent a chill up her spine.

“Have you no shame? Lying there all silky and wanton, having good dreams while our lives fall apart?”

Whatever accounted for the unnatural stasis that had kept her a child for fifteen years, it was beyond the reach of reason or persuasion.

Her voice was timorous. “Does...does she hate us very much?”

He wanted to tell her that Sarai understood, but that absolution could come only from Sarai.

Sometime early in the kiss—if one could, with generosity, call it a kiss—a convenient tree grew up from a crack in the cobbles, tall and smooth and canted at just the right angle for leaning when the dizziness became too much.

There was, even in their delectation of necks, an innocence born of perfect inexperience combined with...politeness.

Their hands were hot, but they were hot in safe places, and their bodies were close but chaste.

It was just that it was all so new and so sublime.

His spirit, depleted by his own depredations, pulsed too fast through his veins, twinning with a whirr and discordant jangle of...of disbelief crashing against evidence, producing a sensation of disfaith.

And there, at the base of the impregnable anchor, where smooth mesarthium met the stones it had crushed two hundred years ago underneath its awful weight, was the solution to Weep’s problem.

“Moth killer,” she admonished him.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I really loved that moth, too. That one was my favorite.”

Sarai was bemused. “I see.”
“You probably don’t,” said Lazlo, grinning.
“Not in the slightest,” Sarai agreed.

There were butterfly wings, to go with the proboscis. One pair was sunset orange, swallow-tailed, and scalloped in black.

“Come down over here,” he said. “Onto the anchor.”
“Not the anchor,” she demurred.

They fell into the stars in a rush of air and ether.

Lazlo had given her the moon on her wrist, the stars that bedecked it, the sun in its jar on the shelf with the fireflies.

He traced the line of her neck, dizzy with this new topography.

The dream receded and left him there, in his bed, alone—stranded in the merciless intransigence of reality, and it was as bleak a truth to his soul as the nothingness of the Elmuthaleth.

For the moment, he forgot all his anger and Thyon’s cryptic insinuations and was simply overcome by the significance of the achievement.

She experienced an utterly irrational flare of pique toward Feral.

A haze of dust and smoke hung over everything, lit lurid by the fire blazing at the blast sight.

It didn’t look like a bonfire from down here, but a conflagration.

For an instant, he captured the memory—white wings against stars—just a glimpse, accompanied by a sensation of weightlessness that was the antithesis of what he was feeling now, sprawled out on the street, staring up at the citadel.

A ringing supplanted the silence in his head.

How deep it went no one knew, but now, all unseen, the intricate subterranean strata were collapsing.

They watched him climb over shifting rubble, losing his footing and slipping, rising again to scrabble forward until he reached it: the wall of metal that had seemed insurmountable, shrinking now as the earth sucked it under.

He was suffused with well-being. This was who he was.

If there was some providence or cosmic will, some scheme of energies or even some god or angel answering his prayers tonight, then they had to grant this part, too.

Her skin was blue and her slip was...it was pink, and her hair, spilling loose, was the orange-red of copper and persimmons, cinnamon and wildflower honey.

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.

Their faces were stricken, ashen, and so were their hearts. Their grief was inarticulate, still entangled in their shock.

Only Minya didn’t dither with disbelief.

And before she knew who and before she knew how, Minya grasped the full ramifications of Lazlo’s existence, and understood that this changed everything.

He watched Minya’s face, alert to any change in her expression, but there was none. Her little grubby visage was mask-still until the moment her eyes sprang open.