They’d have to get supplies. She made a mental note. But mostly she was thinking about the dream. The carefully wrapped babies, Minya’s sweet voice—even if the song was sinister—and the way she’d held them on her hip like a little mother, while the Ellens were nowhere to be seen.
Well, no. That wasn’t right. The Ellens were dead on the floor.
The horror of it was still in Sarai’s throat. She already knew how they’d died, of course. Minya had told them lots of times how they’d tried to stop the Godslayer and been cut down at the threshold. She’d even seen them in Eril-Fane’s dreams. He’d stepped over their bodies, as she had had to climb. She shuddered at the memory of their inert flesh, slippery with fresh blood, and of Minya’s red hand, and how it had crushed hers.
Minya’s red, slippery hand.
Lazlo, watching Sarai, saw her brow twitch into a furrow. “What is it?” he asked.
“It doesn’t make sense.”
“What doesn’t?”
“The timing,” she said. She cradled her hand like a wounded bird.
The bones ached from Minya’s terrible grip, and she could still feel the slick slide of little fingers and blood.
Do you want to die, too?
Too. What did it mean, that Minya had said “too”? She must have meant the Ellens: Do you want to die like them?
But...it didn’t line up. The Godslayer hadn’t gotten there yet, or else how could they have escaped?
She explained it to Lazlo. “It’s the bodies I don’t understand. How could we have climbed over them? We had to have gotten out before the Ellens were killed. If we’d still been there when Eril-Fane came, we would have died with all the rest.”
“It doesn’t mean it really happened like that,” he said. “Dreams aren’t truth. Memory is malleable. She was only a little girl. It’s probably just all out of sequence.”
Sarai wanted to think that was what it was, but Minya’s question had brought her back to that room, in that moment: “Do you want to die, too?” She couldn’t remember anything else: just the terror and those words, like a splinter in her mind with a haze of pain around them. It had happened. She was sure.
Puzzle pieces were moving around. There were the dead nurses, their poor dear Ellens, and the question that had sounded like a threat. And there was the place in the nursery Sarai couldn’t see— the breath-fogged glass, the skip—as though the dream was keeping a secret, maybe even from the dreamer. And there was the matter of Minya’s red hand.
And. ..
It came to Sarai that she had never, in all the dreams of the Carnage, actually seen Eril-Fane kill the nurses. She had only seen him step over them. Her mind had filled in the rest, based on Minya’s tellings. But Minya couldn’t have seen it. She had to have been gone by then, shoving the four babies she’d managed to save through the crack into the heart of the citadel.
What had really happened that day? The puzzle pieces did present one possible answer, but it was incomprehensible.
“They loved us,” said Sarai, as though to ward off a terrible truth that was trying to make itself known. “We loved them.” But the words felt hollow somehow. The Ellens she loved were ghosts. She had no memory of them alive.
And now those ghosts, for reasons unclear, were blank as empty shells, standing in the kitchen doorway with nothing at all in their eyes.
Sarai knew she had to go back there, to the nursery in the dream. She had hoped to reach Minya, to talk to her, and...what? Change her mind? Talk her down? Fundamentally alter her psyche with a minimum of fuss? But the Minya she’d found was in no state for talk, and the dream had the force of a river in flood, and Sarai had not been prepared. Could she prepare? She had told Lazlo that she wanted to get Minya out of there—out of the nursery, out of that day—but was it possible?
Or would she find, no matter what she tried, that some people cannot be saved?
Chapter 24
Blue Stew
For the first time in his life, no one made Thyon Nero breakfast.
Well, technically yesterday had been the first time, but he hadn’t noticed, since he had been out in the chaos of the city along with everyone else. But this morning it was quiet, and he woke hungry. He’d slept in the Merchants’ Guildhall, in the opulent rooms provided for him, which he had been shunning in favor of a workshop above a defunct crematorium. He had wanted his privacy but now it was too private. He didn’t care for the idea of no one knowing where he was. What if he woke up in the morning to find that those few who remained in the city had gone, without even thinking to tell him?
So he had slept at the guildhall, where Calixte was, too, and where they had piled the books in the passages. The Tizerkane garrison was close by. He could see the watchtower out his window and know whether it was manned. And the kitchen, he thought, would most likely be stocked, even if there was no one in it to cook and wash up after.
He dressed, stiff and sore, all aching shoulders and raw hands, and wandered toward the dining room, assuming the kitchen was probably somewhere in its vicinity. It was. It was big and full of copper pots, and the pantry shelves were lined with bins labeled with words he couldn’t read in an alphabet he hadn’t learned. He lifted lids, sniffed things, and had, though he did not know it, an experience similar to the godspawn in the citadel, who had also been discovering that food requires esoteric knowledge. He did not equate it with alchemy, though, since alchemy was less mysterious to him than flour, leavening, and the like. The kitchen was obscure to him in the way that women were obscure, and that wasn’t because women worked in the kitchen. Those weren’t the women he meant. Those were servants, and as such, had hardly occupied his thoughts as people, let alone females. Kitchens and women were both subjects that simply did not intrigue him.
Oh, individual women could be interesting, though this was something of a new notion. Calixte and Tzara, he had to admit, were not boring, and neither was Soulzeren, the mechanist who’d built firearms for warlords in the Thanagost badlands. But they did things, like men. The women he knew in Zosma did not. They wouldn’t be permitted to even if they wished, he admitted to himself, though he’d hardly ever considered whether they might. Now that he had met Calixte, Tzara, and Soulzeren, not to mention the intimidating Azareen, he did begin to wonder if any of the hothouse flowers who were paraded before him in Zosma might be as bored with their lot as he was with them.
There was an expectation that he be enchanted with them for their form alone, and for the cultivated coquetry that was like a play they were acting in, all the time. Every civilized person knew the lines and gestures, and made a life out of parroting them about. Those who were counted charming and clever were the ones who were best at making them seem fresh as they patched evenings together out of the same dances and conversations that they’d done and had a thousand times before.
Thyon had played his part. He knew the lines and dances, but inside he had been screaming. He wondered if perhaps he wasn’t the only one. If, behind their lacquered faces, some of those Zosma girls might have felt stifled, too, and secretly longed to steal emeralds and build airships and fight gods in a shadowed city.
Well, when he went home, he would doubtless be made to marry one of them, and then, he supposed, he could ask her.
He let out a laugh. It dropped like a stone. He pushed away the thought that was more distant and more unimaginable than librarians turning out to be gods. Discovering where the fruit was stored, he piled some on a plate and kept scrounging. There had to be cheese. There was. He piled that on, too. Then—glory—he found slabs of bacon in a cold box, and stood there wondering if he could figure out how to fry some.
He answered himself as though affronted. “I am the greatest alchemist of the age. I distilled azoth. I can transmute lead into gold. I think I can light a stove.”
“What’s that, Nero?”
Calixte and Tzara had come in. He gave a start, and flushed, wondering if they’d heard him talking to himself like a fool starved for flattery. “Are you arguing with that bacon?” Calixte asked. “I hope you’re winning, because I’m starving.”
With a wicked grin, Tzara added, “Cannibalism doesn’t really fill you up, you see.”
. . .
Ruza ate in the garrison mess, and he was halfway through his bowl of thick kesh porridge before he realized what it was that was putting him off about it. Berries tinted the porridge blue, and brought to mind “blue stew.”
When had it been, the day before yesterday? It felt like a year ago at least. It was the last time he saw Lazlo before the explosion. They’d argued. He and some of the others—Shimzen, Tzara—had been joking about taking the explosionist up to the citadel to blow the godspawn into “blue stew.” It had seemed funny then. What exactly had he said? He struggled to remember. That the godspawn were monsters, more like threaves than people? That if Lazlo knew them he’d be happy to blow them up himself?
Ruza’s porridge churned in his stomach. He let his spoon drop into the dregs.
Lazlo was his friend. Lazlo was godspawn.
These two statements could not both be true, because one could not be friends with godspawn. Lazlo was godspawn. There was no denying it. Therefore, he was not Ruza’s friend.
It was supposed to be that simple, but Ruza was finding his mind unable to perform the simplification—as though there were two columns, a Lazlo in each, and he was tasked to erase one of them.
In his lessons—and as Ruza was only eighteen, these were not a distant memory—he had always pressed down too hard with his pencil, committing himself to his first guess, never learning to write lightly in case he was in error. Was it carelessness or confidence? Opinions differed, but did it matter? He could never fully erase his dark pencil lines, and he had never turned his back on a friend.
Hell. He finished his porridge. It was only porridge, and Ruza had yet to meet a philosophical dilemma that could spoil his appetite. He washed up his bowl and stacked it, then headed toward the stables for the donkey and cart. It was book-salvage duty again today with the ridiculous alchemist and his ridiculous face.