She needn’t have spoken aloud. It wasn’t her words the ghosts were obeying. Her will smothered theirs. She moved them like game pieces. But it was good to speak and be obeyed. It flitted through her mind how simple it would be if everyone were dead and hers to command.
From the gallery it was only a few turns and a short passage to reach the door she sought. It wasn’t properly a door, not anymore, having frozen in the act of closing at the moment of Skathis’s death. It was tall—twice the height of a man—and though it must have been wide once, it was now a mere gap. She could only just squeeze through. She had to work her head from side to side. It would be easier, she thought, without ears. Everything would be. Then she wouldn’t have to hear the breathless, righteous weakness of the others, their begging talk of mercy, their dissent.
Once her head was in, she wedged a shoulder into the gap. The rest should have slipped right through, but her chest was too puffed up with furious breathing. She had to forcibly exhale and thrust herself in. It hurt—especially where Rasalas’s hoof had pinned her—but it was nothing under the steady seethe of her rage.
Inside, there was an antechamber, and then the walls opened up into the space that had become her sanctuary: the heart of the citadel, they had dubbed it as children.
No sooner did she enter than she let loose the scream she had been holding inside. It ripped up from the core of her, scouring her throat and filling her head with a battering gyre of sound. It felt like screaming an apocalypse, but the sound that left her lips fell flat and small in the big, strange room, no match at all to what she heard inside her head. The heart of the citadel ate sound, and when Minya screamed in here, it seemed to eat her rage, too, though she could never scream long enough to pour all of it out. Her voice would die before she ran out of rage. She could scream a hole in her throat and come unraveled, fall to pieces like moth-chewed silk, and still, from the leftover shreds of her, the little pile of tatters, would pour forth this unending scream.
Finally, coughing, she cut it off. Her throat felt like meat. Her apocalypse still boiled inside her, but it always did. It always did.
She sank down onto the narrow walkway that ran the circumference of the room. It was a mystifying space: spherical, like the inside of a ball, but vast—some hundred feet in diameter—and all smooth mesarthium. A walkway threaded all the way around it, fifty feet of empty air above, and fifty feet below. Or not quite empty. Dead center, floating on air like the citadel itself, was a smaller sphere, smooth and fixed in space, some twenty feet wide and tall.
And then there were the wasps: two of them, huge and terrible and beautiful, sculpted of mesarthium and perched on the curvature of the walls.
All below was just a great bowl of air. Minya was unaccustomed to its emptiness. All these years she’d kept her army here, building it up soul by soul. Now they were out standing guard along the passages, in the garden, and in the open palms of the great seraph’s hands, from where they could spot any hint of threat that might rise up from Weep.
Only one ghost was with her now: Ari-Eil, who was the newest, save Sarai. He was the Godslayer’s young cousin, very recently dead. She’d been keeping him by her as a bodyguard. She met his eyes. They were as hard as ever. How he hated her. All the ghosts did, but his hate was freshest, and it made a good whetstone upon which to sharpen her own. She had only to look at him and it sang bright in her, a defensive reaction to the human gaze. Hate those who hate you.
It was easy. Natural. What was unnatural was not hating them.
“What?” she snapped at him, fancying she saw a glimmer of satisfaction in his eyes. “They didn’t beat me, if that’s what you’re thinking.” Her voice was scream ravaged. “I let them have a break. To burn the body.”
She allowed him his voice, so that he could insult her and she could punish him, but he only said flatly, “You are benevolence itself.”
Her face twitched, and she spun him around to face the door. She didn’t want him watching her. “Don’t think your city is safe,” she whispered, and though she gave him the freedom to answer her, he declined to make use of it.
She sat, letting her feet down to dangle over the edge of the walkway. She was trembling. Minutes passed thickly, and she quieted into stillness, finally, and then into something else.
Minya went blank.
The others didn’t realize: Minya rarely slept. She could, and did when it was essential, when she began to feel like a ghost herself. But sleep was a deeper submergence than she was comfortable with. She couldn’t control her ghosts from that state, but only set commands they’d obey until she changed them. There was this other state, though: a kind of shallowing of her consciousness, like a river that, pouring out of a slot canyon, widens and grows slow. She could rest here, drifting, without ever having to surrender to the deeper pull of darkness.
Minya had never heard of leviathans. Lazlo could have told her how in the west, where the sea was the color of a newborn baby’s eyes, people captured sea monsters when they were still young, and lashed them to great pontoons to prevent them from submerging to freedom. They would serve their whole lives as ships, some for hundreds of years, never able to dive and disappear into the deep. Her mind was like that. She kept it like that: captive at the surface, only very rarely sinking into the wild and unknowable deep.
She preferred these shallows, where she could react, keep control of all her tethers. Her eyes were open, vacant. She seemed an empty shell—except, that is, that she was rocking. It was ever so slight, her thin, hunched shoulders jerking back and forth. Her lips were moving, shaping the same words over and over in silence, as she lived the same memories she always did, and the same screams echoed forever.
Always and forever: the children. Each face was seared into her mind, two versions of them, side by side: alive and terrified next to dead and glassy-eyed, because she had failed to save them.
They were all I could carry.
Those were the words her lips formed, over and over as she rocked back and forth. A mere four she had saved, out of thirty: Sarai and Feral, Ruby and Sparrow. She hadn’t chosen, just grabbed who was nearest. She’d meant to go back for the others.
But then the screaming had begun.
Her hands in her lap made loose fists, and her fingers moved constantly, smearing imagined slickness over her palms. She was remembering the sweat, and trying to hold on to Sarai’s and Feral’s wriggling hands. Ruby and Sparrow had been infants; she’d held them in one arm. Sarai and Feral had been toddlers. Them, she’d dragged. They hadn’t wanted to come with her. She’d had to squeeze to keep hold of their little fingers. She’d hurt them and they’d cried. “Come on,” she’d hissed, tugging at them. “Do you want to die, too? Do you?”
The Ellens’ bodies had lain in their way. They’d been too small to step over them, and had to crawl, tangling in the nurses’ bloody aprons, stumbling right through their ghosts. They couldn’t see the ghosts, of course. Only Minya could, and she didn’t want to look.
The others didn’t remember. They’d been too small. The whole slick, screaming day was lost to them, and they were lucky for it. Minya could never lose it. Other thoughts might pass in front of it, obscuring it for a time, but always they cleared or moved on, and there it was, as vivid as the day it happened.
In the fifteen years since the Carnage, Minya hadn’t seen another corpse. Now, in the nursery of her memory, between the Ellens’ bodies, she saw Sarai’s there, too. It was pink and blue and broken, cinnamon and red, and when she went to step over it, its eyes flew
open. “Monster,” it hissed. The word echoed.
“Monster,” said Great Ellen’s corpse.
“Monster,” agreed Less Ellen’s.
And the babies’ screams morphed into words, and every one cried “Monster.”
Chapter 7
Wraith
Out in the garden, Lazlo repaired the wall he’d poured down on Minya’s ghosts. The weapons that were trapped in it fell free, and the mesarthium flowed upward, returning to the smooth wall of the seraph’s chest, re-forming its elegant clavicles, the column of its throat.
It took but a moment. He turned back to Sarai. He marveled, to see her in the sun—her hair, spice hues in rich ripples on blue shoulders, her face, full and soft-cheeked, soft-lipped and generous, tapering like a heart to her little pointed chin. Her brow was creased with worry, her eyes heavy with reluctant resolve. “You have to go,” she said, bleak.
He thought he must have misheard. “What?”
“You must see, Lazlo. You have to leave so she can’t use you.”
It was the last thing she wanted to tell him. He was here. She wanted nothing more than to tuck her face into his neck and breathe the sandalwood scent of him, but since when did she get what she wanted? There was too much at stake. She had to be brave.
“Leave?” he repeated, looking lost and confused. “I’m not going anywhere without you.”
“But I can’t leave. I’m bound to her, and it’s too great a risk for you to stay. You must see that. She won’t give up. She never does. I don’t think she can.”
Lazlo swallowed hard. The thought of leaving choked him. “I belong here,” he said, feeling the truth of it all through him. With Sarai, whom he loved, and with others like himself, and with the metal, too. It had awakened a dimension of him that he had never known existed, a whole new sense, as real as sight or touch. It was part of him now. He was part of this. To leave would mean losing not only Sarai but a piece of himself as well.
“If you stay,” said Sarai, “she’ll find a way to break you.”
“I won’t break.”
She wanted to believe him. She was weary of being brave. “Not even if she lets me evanesce,” she said. “Promise me you won’t bring her to Weep, no matter what.”
“I promise,” Lazlo said, and underneath that promise he made another to himself: that he wouldn’t fail Sarai again. No matter what. And if the two vows were in conflict? He would find a way. He had to. “We’ll get through this,” he told her. “Together.”