To wake up holding hands.
Up in the citadel, Sarai’s throat constricted. Her hands clenched into fists. Such was not for the likes of her. “I kiss dozens of people every night,” she’d told Feral earlier that evening.
“That’s not kissing,” he’d said, and he was right. Kissing was not what Sarai did to humans in their sleep. In fact, everything up to this point was preamble—the flight from the citadel, the squeezing down chimneys and perching on brows. Sight and feel, smell, taste and touch, they were just the threshold of her gift. Here was the fullness of it:
When a moth made contact with a person, Sarai could step inside their dreams as easily as stepping through a door, and once she was there, she could do as she pleased.
Their minds lay open to her—or at least, the surfaces did, and whatever bubbled up from beneath to paint them in streams of imagery, sensation, and emotion, endlessly combining and recombining in the ceaseless effort at making sense, at making self. For what was a person but the sum of all the scraps of their memory and experience: a finite set of components with an infinite array of expressions. When a moth perched on a sleeper’s brow, Sarai was plunged into their dream. What the dreamer was experiencing, she experienced, and not as some hapless spectator. As soon as she entered—an invisible marauder, unseen and unfelt—the dream was hers to control. In the realm of the real, she might have been just a girl, in hiding and in peril, but in the unconscious mind she was all-powerful: sorceress and storyteller, puppeteer and dark enthraller.
Sarai was the Muse of Nightmares.
Minya had given her the name, and the purpose that went with it. Minya had made her what she was. “We need bad, Sarai,” the little girl had said. “For vengeance.” And Sarai had become the weapon Minya wanted her to be, and punished humans in the only way she could: through their dreams. Fear was her medium, and nightmares her art. Every night, for years, she had tormented the sleepers of Weep. “Did you make anyone cry?” Minya would ask her in the morning. “Did you make anyone scream?”
The answer was always yes.
For a long time, this new, exciting thing had been the focus of their lives. The other four would come to her room at dawn to crowd into her bed with her as soon as her moths returned, and she would tell them everything: what and whom she had seen, what the homes were like in the city, what the people were like. Minya just wanted to know about the nightmares, but the others were more interested in Weep itself. She would tell them about parents who came to comfort their children when nightmares woke them, and they would all go still and quiet, listening with a terrible intensity. There was always, among them, such a stew of envy and longing. They hated the humans, but they also wanted to be them. They wanted to punish them, and they wanted to be embraced by them. To be accepted, honored, loved, like someone’s child. And since they couldn’t have any of it, it all took the form of spite. Anyone who has ever been excluded can understand what they felt, and no one has ever been quite so excluded as they.
So they layered cynicism atop their longing, and it was something like laying laughter over the darkness—self-preservation of an uglier stripe. And thus did they harden themselves, by choosing to meet hate with hate.
Sarai settled a moth on Hayva, Ari-Eil’s sister, and on other sleepers in other houses. All across the city, she sank into the dreams of Weep. Most were mundane, the mind’s rote bookkeeping. Some dreams stood out. One man was dancing with his neighbor’s wife. An old woman was hunting a ravid with nothing but a demonglass knife. A pregnant woman imagined her baby born blue, and hoped it were the blue of death sooner than the blue of gods.
Hayva dreamed of her brother.
Two children played in a courtyard. It was a simple snippet of memory. There was a dead tree, and Ari-Eil was holding Hayva on his shoulders so she could hang paper flowers on its branches. Like most of the trees in Weep, it would never bloom again. They were playing that it was still alive.
Sarai stood by, invisible to them. Even if she’d wanted them to see her, they wouldn’t. This was the limit of her gift as she knew it from long experience. In the early days she’d tried everything to catch their attention. She’d hollered and hissed and they never heard her, pinched them and they never felt her. In the dreams of others, she was as a ghost, fated to never be seen.
She was used to it now. She watched the two children decorate the dead branches with paper flowers, and wondered if that was the most that Weep could ever hope for. A pretense of life.
Wasn’t that what she had, too?
What was she doing here, in this home, in this dream? If she were trying to earn Minya’s praise, she wouldn’t hold back, but would use Hayva’s tenderness and grief against her. Sarai had an arsenal of terrors. She was an arsenal of terrors. All these years she’d been collecting them, and where could she keep them but within herself? She felt them at the core of her, every image and scene of fright and foreboding, of shame, shock, and misery, of bloodshed and agony. It was why she dared no longer dream: because in her own sleep she was like any dreamer, at the mercy of her unconscious. When she fell asleep, she was no sorceress or dark enthraller, but just a sleeping girl with no control over the terrors within her.
When she was younger, she wouldn’t have hesitated to plague Hayva with dread visions of her dead brother. She might have had him die a hundred new ways, each more gruesome than the last. Or else she might have made the little boy in this sweet memory into a ravenous undead thing who would hurl his sister to the ground and sink his teeth into her scalp as she woke screaming.
Once upon a time, Sarai would have imagined Minya’s delight, and done her worst.
Not anymore.
Tonight, she imagined Hayva’s delight, and did her best. Channeling Sparrow, her sweet Orchid Witch, she willed the dead tree back to life and watched it set forth leaf and bud while the two memory-children danced around it, laughing. In the real room where the girl was slouched in a chair beside her dead brother’s body, her lips curved into a soft smile. The moth left her brow, and Sarai left the dream and flew back out into the night.
It’s funny, how you can go years seeing only what you choose to see, and picking your outrage like you pick out a slip, leaving all the others hanging on their slim mesarthium dowel. If outrage were a slip, then for years Sarai had worn only the one: the Carnage.
How well she knew it from dreams. Over and over she’d seen it play out in the minds of the men who’d done it—Eril-Fane’s most of all.
Knifeshine and spreading blood. The Ellens dead on the floor so the men who’d slain them had to step over their bodies. The terror and pleading of little girls and boys old enough to understand what was happening. The wail and lamb bleat of babies too small to know, but infected by the terror of the others. All those screams: subtracted one by one as though silence were the goal.
And the goal was achieved.
Nearly thirty voices were subtracted from the world that day, not even counting the six gods or the dozen humans who, like the Ellens, had gotten in the way. If it weren’t for Minya, then Sarai and Feral, Ruby and Sparrow would have been four more small bodies in the nursery that day. The humans had done that. They had slaughtered babies. It was no surprise that Sarai had become the Muse of Nightmares, a vengeful goddess to haunt their dreams.
But, as she had told Feral, she’d spent her vengeance years ago.
The wretched thing—and the thing she never dared talk about—was that in order to exploit the humans’ fears, she’d had to dwell in them. And you couldn’t do that for four thousand nights without coming to understand, in spite of yourself, that the humans were survivors, too. The gods had been monsters, and had deserved to die.
But their children didn’t. Not then, and not now.
The citadel was their prison, and it was their sanctuary, but for how much longer could it be either? No matter how well they obeyed The Rule, someday the humans would come. If the horror of Minya’s fresh-caught ghosts told them anything, it was that the people of Weep would do again what they had done before, and how could they hope to defend themselves?
Moths and clouds and flowers and fire and ghosts. They weren’t powerless, but Sarai had no delusions. They couldn’t survive a second Carnage. Their only hope was in not being found.
She paced on her terrace, back and forth beneath the moon, while down in the city her moths went from house to house like bees from flower to flower. Her consciousness was a subtle instrument. It could divide evenly among her hundred sentinels, or shift between them in any configuration, honing in where attention was required and receding where it wasn’t. Every moment her perception was shifting. She had to react on a wing’s edge, trust her instincts, carom through the city dipping in and out of minds, spin a hundred moths through their wild dance, twist dreams and sharpen them, harry gods and beasts down the paths of the unconscious. And always, always, whatever else she did, whatever fears she deployed, to each she attached a sneak postscript, like devastating news at the end of a letter. It was always the same. Every nightmare that shook every sleeper in Weep carried the same subliminal warning.
It was a nameless horror of the citadel and all it contained.
This was the work she set herself: to weave through all the dreams of Weep a dread so potent that none could bear to look at the citadel, much less go near it. So far it had been enough.
The night felt very long, but it ended as all nights do, and Sarai called her moths home. She stopped her pacing, and waited. They winged through the last gleams of starlight, re-forming into their siphon of whirling wings, and she opened her mouth and took them back in.
In the beginning, the return had been even worse than the exodus. That first time, she hadn’t managed it at all. She just couldn’t open her mouth to them, and had had to watch them turn to smoke when the sun rose.
She’d been mute all day, as though her voice had turned to smoke with them.
Come nightfall, though, she’d felt the burgeoning again, as the whole cycle began anew, and she’d learned that if she wished to be able to speak, she’d better open her mouth and let the moths back in.