Thyon did not say thank you. He did say, releasing Lazlo’s arm to him, “You might try washing your hands occasionally, Strange.”
Lazlo only smiled, as the condescension marked a return to familiar territory. He glanced at the hand in question. It did look dirty. He’d trailed it over the anchor on his way here, he remembered. “That’s the mesarthium,” he said, and asked, curious, “Have you noticed its being reactive to skin?”
“Hardly. It’s not reactive to anything.”
“Well, have you noticed skin being reactive to it?” Lazlo persisted, rolling his sleeve back down.
Thyon only held up his own palms. They were clean, and that was all his answer. Lazlo shrugged and put on his coat. Thyon’s response didn’t bode well, in its broader context—about mesarthium not being reactive with anything. In the doorway, Lazlo paused. “Eril-Fane will want to know. Is there any reason to be hopeful? Does the alkahest affect mesarthium at all?”
He didn’t think the alchemist would answer. His hand was on the door, ready to shove it shut. But he paused for half a second, as though Lazlo had earned this single, grudging syllable, and said, grimly, “No.”
35
Blurred Ink
Sarai felt . . . thinned out. To be so tired was like evaporating. Water to vapor. Flesh to ghost. Bit by bit, from the surface inward, you feel yourself begin to disappear, or at least to be translated into another state—from a tangible one, blood and spirit, to a kind of lost and drifting mist.
How many days had passed in this way, living from nightmare to nightmare? It felt like dozens, but was probably only five or six.
This is my life now, she thought, looking at her reflection in the polished mesarthium of the dressing room. She touched the skin around her eyes with her fingertips. It was almost damson, like the plums on the trees, and her eyes looked too big—as though, like Less Ellen, she had reimagined them so.
If I were a ghost, she wondered, regarding herself like a stranger, what would I change about myself? The answer was too obvious to admit, and too pathetic. She traced a line around her navel where her elilith would be if she were a human girl. What was it about the tattoos that so beguiled her? They were beautiful, but it wasn’t just that. Maybe it was the ritual: the circle of women coming together to celebrate being alive—and being a woman, which is a magic all its own. Or maybe it was the future the mark portended. Marriage, motherhood, family, continuity.
Being a person. With a life. And every expectation of a future. All things Sarai didn’t dare to dream about.
Or . . . things she shouldn’t dare to dream about. Like nightmares, dreams were insidious things, and didn’t like being locked away.
If she did have an elilith, she wouldn’t want a serpent swallowing its tail like Tzara and many of the younger women had who’d come of age after the liberation. She already felt like she had creatures inside her—moths and snakes and terrors—and wouldn’t want them on her, too. Azareen, fierce and stoic as she was, had one of the prettiest tattoos Sarai had seen—done by Guldan, of course, who was now a conscript in Minya’s wretched army. It was a delicate pattern of apple blossoms, which were a symbol of fertility.
Sarai knew that Azareen hated the sight of it, and everything it mocked.
The thing about eliliths. They were inked on girls’ bellies, which tended to be flat or only gently curved. And when in the course of time their promise of fertility was fulfilled, their bellies swelled, and their tattoos with them. They never really looked the same after. You could see the blurring of the fine ink lines where skin had stretched and then shrunk back again.
The girls whom Skathis stole, their eliliths were pristine when he took them. Not so when he returned them. But since Letha ate their memories, that was all they knew of their time in the citadel—the vague blur of the ink on their bellies, and all that it implied.
Except, that is, for the girls who were in the citadel on the day that Eril-Fane slew the gods. They’d had it worst. They’d had to come down like that, their bellies still full with godspawn and their minds with memories.
Azareen had been one of them. And though she had once been a bride—and before that a girl squeezing the hands of a circle of women while blossoms were etched round her navel in ink—the only time her belly ever swelled was with godseed, and she remembered every second of it, from the rapes that began it to the searing pains that ended it.
She’d never looked at the baby. She’d squeezed her eyes shut until they took it away. She’d heard its fragile cries, though, and heard them still.
Sarai could hear them, too. She was awake, but the terrors were clinging. She shook her head as though she could shake them away.
The things that had been done. By the gods, by the humans. Nothing could shake them away.
She picked out a clean slip. Pale green, not that she noticed. She just reached out blindly and pulled one down. She put it on, and her robe over it, belted tight, and considered her face in the mirror: her huge haunted eyes and the tale they told of nightmares and sleepless days. One look at her and Minya would smile. “Sleep well?” she’d ask. She always did now, and Sarai always answered, “Like a baby,” and pretended everything was fine.
There was no pretending away the bruises under her eyes. Briefly, she considered blacking them with her mother’s paint, but the effort seemed too great, and would fool no one.
She stepped out of the dressing room. Eyes fixed forward, she passed the ghosts standing guard. They still whispered Minya’s words to her, but she had inured herself to them. Even to Bahar, nine years old and soaked to the skin, who followed her down the hall, whispering “Save us,” and left wet footprints that weren’t really there.
All right, so she could never be inured to Bahar.
“Sleep well?” Minya asked her as soon as she walked into the gallery.
Sarai gave her a wan smile. “Why wouldn’t I?” she asked for a change.
“Oh, I don’t know, Sarai. Stubbornness?”
Sarai understood her perfectly—that she had only to ask for her lull to be restored to her and Minya would see it done.
Just as soon as Sarai did her bidding.
They hadn’t openly acknowledged the situation—that Minya was sabotaging Sarai’s lull—but it was in every look they shared.
A few minutes of disgust to save us all.
If Sarai killed Eril-Fane, Minya would let her sleep again. Well? Would her father lose a blink of sleep to save her?
It didn’t matter what he would or wouldn’t do. Sarai wasn’t going to kill anyone. She was stubborn, very, and she wasn’t about to surrender her decency or mercy for a sound day’s sleep. She wouldn’t beg Minya for lull. Whatever happened, she would never again serve Minya’s twisted will.
Also, she still couldn’t find him. So there was that.
Not that Minya believed her, but it was true, and she did look. She knew he was back in Weep, partly because Azareen would never have come back without him, and partly because he flickered through the dreams of all the others like a shimmering thread connecting them. But wherever he was sleeping, wherever he stayed at night, she never could find him.
Sarai laughed. “Me, stubborn,” she said, raising her eyebrows. “Have you met yourself?”
Minya made no denial. “I suppose the question is: Who’s more stubborn?”
It sounded like a challenge. “I guess we’ll find out,” Sarai replied.
Dinner was served and the others came in—Sparrow and Ruby from the garden; Feral, yawning, from the direction of his room. “Napping?” Sarai asked him. Everything had fallen to pieces lately. He used to at least attempt to oversee the girls during the day, and make sure they didn’t fall into chaos or break The Rule. Not that anything really mattered anymore.
He only shrugged. “Anything interesting?” he asked her.
He meant news from the night before. This was their routine now. It reminded her of their younger days, when she still told them all about her visits to the city and they all wanted to know different things: Sparrow, the glimpses of normal life; Ruby, the naughty bits; Minya, the screaming. Feral hadn’t really had a focus then, but he did now. He wanted to know everything about the faranji and their workshops—the diagrams on their drafting tables, the chemicals in their flasks, the dreams in their heads. Sarai told him what she could, and they tried to interpret the level of threat they posed. He claimed that his interest was defensive, but she saw a hunger in his eyes—for the books and papers she described, the instruments and bubbling beakers, the walls covered in a scrawl of numbers and symbols she couldn’t begin to make sense of.
It was his sweetshop window, the life he was missing, and she did her best to make it vivid for him. She could give him that at least. This evening, though, she bore bleak tidings.
“The flying machines,” she said. She’d been keeping an eye on them in a pavilion of the guildhall as they took shape in stages, day by day, until finally becoming the crafts she had seen in the faranji couple’s dreams. All her dread had at last caught up to her. “They seem to be ready.”
This drew a sharp intake of breath from Ruby and Sparrow. “When will they fly?” Minya asked coolly.
“I don’t know. Soon.”
“Well, I hope it’s soon. I’m getting bored. What’s the use of having an army if you don’t get to use it?”
Sarai didn’t rise to her bait. She’d been thinking of what she was going to say, and how she was going to say it. “It needn’t come to that,” she said, and turned to Feral. “The woman, she worries about the weather. I’ve seen it in her dreams. Wind is a problem. She won’t fly into clouds. I think the crafts must not be terribly stable.” She tried to sound calm, rational—not defensive or combative. She was simply making a reasonable suggestion to avoid bloodshed. “If you summon a storm, we can keep them from even getting close.”
Feral took this in, glancing with just his eyes toward Minya, who had her elbows on the table, chin in one hand, the other picking her kimril biscuit to bits. “Oh, Sarai,” she said. “What an idea.”