Sarai saw his hand tremble. She watched him trace the slim pink strap hanging limp from her dead shoulder, and remembered the feel of his hand there, easing the same strap aside, the heat of his mouth on her skin and the exquisite paths of sensation, in every way as though it had really happened—as though their bodies had come together, and not just their minds. The cruelty of it was a knife to her soul. Lazlo had never touched her, and now he was, and she couldn’t feel a thing.
He eased the strap back into place. Tears streaked down his cheeks. The gate was tall. Sarai’s dead face, upside down, was higher than his upturned one. He gathered her hair to him as though it were something worth holding. Blood wicked into his shirt and smeared over his neck and jaw. He cupped the back of her neck. How gently he held the dead thing that had been her. Sarai reached down to touch his face, but her hands passed right through him.
The first time she ever went into his dream, she had stood right in front of him, secure in her invisibility, and wistful, wishing this strange dreamer might fix his sweet gray eyes on her.
And then he had. Only him. He had seen her, and his seeing had given her being, as though the witchlight of his wonder were the magic that made her real. She had lived more in the past nights than in all the dreams that came before, much less her real days and nights, and all because he saw her.
But not anymore. There was no more witchlight and no more wonder—only despair worthy of Isagol at her worst. “Lazlo!” she cried. At least, she shaped the name, but she had no breath or tongue or teeth to give it sound. She had nothing. The mahalath had come and remade them both. He was a god, and she was a ghost. A page had turned. A new story was beginning. You had only to look at Lazlo to know it would be brilliant.
And Sarai could not be in it.
Lazlo didn’t feel the page turn. He felt the book slam shut. He felt it fall, like the one long ago that had shattered his nose, only this one shattered his life.
He climbed the stone base of the gate and reached up for Sarai’s body. He placed one hand under the small of her back. The other still cradled her neck. As carefully as he could, he lifted her. Strangled sobs broke from him as he disengaged her slender frame from the finial that pinned it in place. When she came free, he stepped back down, folding her to his chest, at once gutted and filled with unspeakable tenderness. Here at last were her real arms, and they would never hold him. Her real lips, and they would never kiss him. He curled over her as though he could protect her, but it was far too late for that.
How could it be that in his triumph he had saved everyone but her?
In the furnace of his grief, rage kindled. When he turned around, holding the body of the girl he loved—so light, so brutally unalive—the blanket of shock that had muted the screaming was thrown off, and the sound came roaring at him, as deafening as any explosion, louder than the rending of the earth. He wanted to roar back. Those who hadn’t fled were pressing close. There was menace in their hate and fear, and when Lazlo saw it, the feeling inside him was like the blast of fire rising up a dragon’s throat. If he screamed, it would burn the city black. That was how it felt. That was the fury that was in him.
“You do understand, don’t you,” Sarai had said, “that they would kill me on sight?”
He understood now. He knew they hadn’t killed her, and he knew they would have, given the chance. And he knew that Weep, the city of his dreams, which he had just saved from devastation, was open to him no longer. He might have filled the place at the center of himself with the answer to who he was, but he had lost so much more. Weep and Sarai. The chance of home and the chance of love. Gone.
He didn’t scream. Rasalas did. Lazlo wasn’t even touching him. He didn’t need to now; nearness was enough. Like a living thing, the beast of the anchor spun on the closing crowd, and the sound that rippled up and blasted from its metal throat wasn’t fury but anguish.
The sound of it crashed against the screaming and overwhelmed it. It was like color drowning color. The hate was black and the fear was red, and the anguish, it was blue. Not the blue of cornflowers or dragonfly wings or skies, and not of tyranny, either, or murder waiting to happen. It was the color of bruised flesh and storm-dark seas, the bleak and hopeless blue of a dead girl’s eyes. 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.
The Godslayer and Azareen reached Windfall just as Rasalas screamed. They pushed through the crowd. The sound of pain carved them open even before they saw . . .
They saw Lazlo and what he held in his arms—the slender, slack limbs, the wicking flowers of blood, the cinnamon spill of hair, and the truth that it betrayed. Eril-Fane staggered. His gasp was the rupture of the small, brave hope growing inside his shame, and when Lazlo mounted Rasalas with Sarai clutched to his chest, he dropped to his knees like a warrior felled in battle.
Rasalas took flight. Its wingbeats stirred a storm of grit, and the crowd had to close its eyes. In the darkness behind their shut lids they all saw the same thing: no color at all, only loss like a hole torn in the world.
Azareen knelt behind her husband. Trembling, she wrapped her arms around his shoulders. She curved herself against his back, laid her face to the side of his neck, and wept the tears that he could not. Eril-Fane shuddered as her tears seared his skin, and something inside him gave way. He pulled her arms tight against his chest and crushed his face into her hands. And then, and there, for everything lost and everything stolen, both from him and by him in all these long years, the Godslayer started to sob.
Sarai saw everything, and could do nothing. When Lazlo lifted her body down, she couldn’t even follow. Some final invisible mooring line snapped, and she was cast adrift. At once, there was a sensation of . . . unraveling. She felt herself beginning to come apart. Here was her evanescence, and it was like dying all over again. She remembered the dream of the mahalath, when the mist unmade her and all sense of physical being vanished, but for one thing, one solid thing: Lazlo’s hand gripping hers.
Not now. He took her body and left her soul. She cried out after him, but her screams were silent even to herself, and with a flash of metal and a swirl of smoke, he was gone.
Sarai was alone in her final fading, her soul diffusing in the brimstone air.
Like a cloud of breath in an orchard when there’s nothing left to say.
67
Peace with the Impossible
The city saw the new god rise into the sky, and the citadel watched him come.
The smooth gleam of Rasalas poured itself upward, wingbeat by wingbeat, out of the smoke that still churned, restless, around the rooftops of Weep. The moon was finally setting; soon the sun would rise.
Ruby, Sparrow, and Feral were at the garden’s edge. Their faces were stricken, ashen, and so were their hearts. Their grief was inarticulate, still entangled in their shock. They were just beginning to grasp the task that lay ahead: the task of believing that it had really happened, that the citadel had really tilted.
And Sarai had really fallen.
Only Sparrow had seen her, and only out of the corner of her eye. “Like a falling star,” she had said, choking on sobs, when she and Ruby had finally unclenched their hands from the balustrade and the plum boughs that had saved them from sharing her fate. Ruby had shaken her head, denying it, rejecting it, and she was shaking it still, slowly and mechanically, as though she couldn’t stop. Feral held her against him. Their rasping, sob-raw breathing had settled into rhythm. He was watching Sarai’s terrace, and he kept expecting her to emerge. He kept willing her to. His plea of “Come on, come on,” was an unspoken chant, timed to the shaking of Ruby’s head. But deep down he knew that if there were any chance that she was there—that Sarai was still here—he would be marching down the corridor to prove it with his own eyes.
But he wasn’t. He couldn’t. Because his gut already knew what his head refused to accept, and he didn’t want it proven.
Only Minya didn’t dither with disbelief. Nor did she appear to be afflicted by grief, or any other feeling. She stood back by the arcade, just a few steps into the garden, her small body framed in an open archway. There was no expression on her face beyond a kind of remote . . . alertness.
As though she was listening for something.
Whatever it was, it wasn’t wingbeats. Those, when they came, drubbing at the air and peppered by the amazed cries of the others, brought her blinking out of her transfixion, and when she saw what revealed itself, rising up in the air in front of the garden, her shock was like a blow.
For a moment, every ghost in the citadel felt their tethers fall slack. Immediately the feeling passed. Minya’s will was reasserted, the tethers once more drawn taut, but they all felt, to a one, a gasp of freedom too fleeing to exploit. What torment—like a cage door no sooner swinging open than it slammed shut again. It had never happened before. The Ellens could attest that in fifteen years, Minya’s will had never faltered, not even in her sleep.
Such was her astonishment at the sight of man and creature surging over the heads of Ruby, Feral, and Sparrow to land, amid gusting wingbeats, in the patch of anadne blossoms in the center of the garden. White flowers whirled like snow and her draggled hair streamed back from her face as she squinted against the draft.
Mesarthim. Mesarthium. Man and beast, strangers both, blue and blue. 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.
What she felt, first and foremost, faced with the solution to her problem and Weep’s, wasn’t relief, but—slow and steady and devastating, like a leak that would steal all the air from her world—the certain loss of control.
She held herself as still as a queen on a quell board, her eyes cut as narrow as the heat pits on a viper, and watched them come.
Lazlo dismounted. He’d seen the others first—their three stricken faces at the garden railing—and he was highly aware of the ghosts, but it was Minya he scanned for and fixed on, and her to whom he went with Sarai clasped to his chest.