He let his perception flow outward. The energies felt like ornate musical staves, weaving in and out of each other, dense with information and commands. There was a whole language at work, but it was nothing that could ever be explained or taught. Lazlo knew what it was like to learn languages. It was work. This wasn’t. It simply gave itself to his mind, making sense to him in a wordless way that could only be described as magic.
Feral was right, he found. The doors could be keyed to fingerprints, so they would open only at the touch of those authorized to enter.
He keyed Feral’s door to him, and there was a fraught moment of silence where they might have gone on to the next door, but neither Ruby nor Feral moved. Finally Ruby cleared her throat, and Feral asked Lazlo sheepishly, “Can you make it so she can open it, too?”
He did. And he keyed Ruby’s door to the pair of them as well, and had a premonition that he would many times be asked to change them back and then back again.
Sparrow’s door was keyed to her alone, but she didn’t close it. She was used to her curtain, she said, and asked, “What about the other doors? Not the open ones to be closed, but the closed ones to open?”
It was an excellent question. Because mesarthium doors didn’t shut so much as melt closed and become wall, it wasn’t apparent where they even were, much less what lay behind them. What was the citadel hiding? A thrill went through all of them. Those of them who’d grown up here had spent hours of their childhood imagining the rest of the citadel, tormenting themselves with the notion that wonderful things were just out of their reach: libraries and racing tracks and menageries; bigger, better kitchens stocked with all sorts of delights; playrooms filled with whole other sets of trapped godspawn leading parallel lives. Basically, anything they wished they had, they would imagine existing on the other side of a wall. It had been maddening, and an integral part of their mental landscapes, these places that were closed to them, and yet, for all that they were unreachable, never so unreachable as the city. They couldn’t very well dream of Weep, where they would be killed on sight. It had given their minds a place to go, even though they could not.
And now the prospect of finding out what was there raised the hairs on their arms. As for Lazlo, it was all new but no less thrilling. With his hand to the wall, he sent out his will, bidding hidden doors to open.
“There,” he said as a seam appeared on an expanse of wall just up the passage. They rushed to it, breath held as it split, became a door, and revealed—
“Linens,” said Ruby, disappointed. It was only a closet.
“Oh good,” said Feral, helping himself to a set of silk sheets to replace his, which had been burned. “What?” he asked, flat, turning around to find them watching him with amusement. “You try sleeping on scratchy sheets.”
Lazlo smiled and shook his head. He’d hardly known any sheets but scratchy ones. For all that this was a prison, it was a luxurious one.
“Let’s look for some real treasure,” said Ruby. She was on her toes, springing up the corridor. “There must be pantries in the kitchen. There might be sugar!”
They followed her, and found that she was right: a pantry door had opened on a wall beside the bank of stoves. Ruby led and the others followed, but they thumped into one another when she halted on the threshold. “What is it?” asked Sparrow. “Why did you—? Oh.” Peering around her, she saw why Ruby had stopped, and so did Lazlo and Feral, who could see over the girls’ heads.
There were skeletons in the pantry—some cooks or scullery maids who’d been trapped when Skathis died.
“Poor souls,” said Sparrow.
“They better not have eaten all the sugar,” said Ruby, and plunged on in to see what she could find.
“Savage,” said Feral, and followed her.
Sparrow hesitated, and followed, too, though not to scavenge for sugar. She found a large empty basket and began to gather up the bones and stack them neatly inside.
Lazlo helped her, shuddering at the skeletons’ fate. “I wonder how long they lasted.”
“Too long, I imagine. Trapped in a storeroom.” Sparrow shook her head. “It must have felt like luck at first, until no one came to free them.”
Lazlo knew what she meant. Trapped anywhere else, they’d have died within days. But here they’d had enough raw goods to keep themselves alive far past hope of rescue. It must have been a torment. He wondered how many others had been trapped when the doors stopped working. It made him worry. “Maybe I shouldn’t have reactivated the doors,” he said. “If something were to happen to me...” He gave Sparrow a comical squint. “Is that why you left yours open?”
She set a skull in the basket and let out a laugh. “Nothing so gloomy. I’m just used to it open. Though now that you mention it, maybe I’ll leave it.” She returned his squint and added a grimace. It was all jest, but then her gaze fixed on his swollen lip. Something seemed to occur to her, but she dismissed it and went back to the bones, only to look up a second later, pensive. “That must hurt,” she said.
Lazlo, brushing the dust of the dead off his hands, said, “I can’t complain.”
“Well, you could. It’s to your credit that you don’t. Believe me, I know complainers.” At that moment, as if on cue, a moan of wild lament reached them from deeper in the storeroom. It was Ruby, who had apparently found the sugar barrel empty. “Case in point,” said Sparrow. “Could I try something?”
She indicated his lip. Lazlo gave an uncertain shrug. She told him to close his eyes. He did, and he felt a light touch on his mouth. He was aware of the small throb in the wound, like a miniature heartbeat, and then a tingling. And then he was aware only of noise as Ruby emerged, literally incandescent with disappointment, the ends of her hair flickering flame as she cursed the skeletons as greedy.
“Ruby.” Feral tried reasoning with her. “They literally died of starvation.”
Sparrow had drawn her hand away from Lazlo’s cut, and the touch was forgotten in the ensuing argument. Lazlo, thinking perhaps it was best to explore the doorways one by one, reached back out with his mind to countermand his previous action.
Throughout the citadel, many doors had opened. Mostly they led down, into the torso. In Minya’s domain, off the atrium with its dome upheld by angel wings, a staircase was exposed, spiraling gracefully up through the column of the seraph’s neck into its head, with whatever secrets might lie therein.
And in the heart of the citadel, on the strange metal orb that floated dead center in the big, empty chamber, a seam appeared there, too. It ran vertically from zenith to nadir. Smoothly, soundlessly, the orb split and opened, and inside it there was...
. .. nothing.
The floating orb, twenty feet in diameter, was hollow, and it was empty. But...there was something wrong with the emptiness, though no one was there to notice. A nearly imperceptible warp wavered in its center. There was nothing there, but the nothing moved, like a pennant rippling in a breeze.
Throughout the citadel, the open doors reversed and began to melt back shut, all closing up again with no one to witness them. Except—
In the heart of the citadel, a cry poured itself into the quiet. The chamber had its way of eating sound, and what would, elsewhere, have been a banshee shriek, fell muffled, like a woman’s far-off wail. It was Wraith, the white bird, materialized out of nowhere. It dove toward the floating orb just as it was closing and slipped between the metal edges to hit the nothing head on, and...disappear.
Wraith was an unnatural thing, and much given to vanishing. But this was different. The bird didn’t fade or melt into the air. It hit the ripple of warp and the air parted around it, gaping open like a slash in fabric. There was a glimpse of sky, and...it was not Weep’s sky.
And then the edges of the air fell back into place. The orb closed. All was quiet.
The bird was gone.
Chapter 30
Like Eating Cake in Dreams
The sun set. A bland dinner was prepared and eaten. Sarai saw to Minya, fed her and cleaned her, left Feral watching over her, and went to her room.
Lazlo had gone ahead, and her steps up the long dexter corridor were much quicker and lighter than they usually were. In fact, her feet barely touched the floor. All these years, after sundown, when the others went to bed, she had gone back to her room—not to sleep, but to send out her moths and visit nightmares on the people of Weep. And though she’d passed through hundreds of minds every night, she’d always felt so alone. Not now.
At the door, she paused. Her insides fluttered, from knowing Lazlo was here and the whole night was ahead of them.
This morning, with the pink of sunrise slanting through the window, she’d vanished her clothes and lain down on the bed, and Lazlo had lain down with her. They’d slept, skin to skin, and met in a dream, and there, too, they’d lain skin to skin.
Being a ghost had a lot in common with being in a dream. Neither were “real,” in the strict sense of the word. Dreams drew on memory, experience. As Sarai had discovered with Lazlo, from their efforts at conjuring cake, you couldn’t taste what you didn’t already know.
It was the same with her ghostflesh. Sarai knew that all sensation now was her mind’s best guess based on what she’d experienced before, and she’d experienced almost nothing. Lazlo had never touched her real skin, except to carry her dead body, and she’d only kissed him in dreams. So when his lips brushed her nipple, or his fingertips traced round her navel, she could only imagine the feeling. It felt real. It felt wonderful, but she couldn’t help thinking it was like eating cake in dreams, which is to say: a pale phantom of the true and exquisite vastness of pleasure that is the privilege of the living.
Not that she’d appreciated that privilege while she was alive. She’d never had the chance, and now she never would. It was a sad thought, but there was a saving grace: In dreams, sensation could be shared, just like emotions and the flavor of cake. As long as it was known to one dreamer, it could be imparted to the other through the medium of the dream, so that when Sarai brushed her lips over Lazlo’s nipple, or traced her fingertips round his navel, she could feel what he was feeling, and share in the exquisite vastness by proxy.