Strange the Dreamer: Chapters 23–31

With its waterfall curtains and carpets of forest, the canyon was like a long and beautiful room, and Weep a toy city—a gilded model—at its center.

Tod’s umbrage rendered him momentarily speechless, during which pause Soulzeren interjected, “Be faster to fly, anyway. We can have the silk sleighs ready in a few days.”

A canyon of golden stone, swaths of unbroken forest, a great green river blurred by waterfall mist, flowing as far as the shadow of the citadel.

He exchanged a chastened glance with Ruza as Azareen passed them on the trail and took the lead.

Better that no one should see him like this. If the Godslayer couldn’t keep his countenance, how could anyone else?

Somehow, he would find the courage to finish what he had started fifteen years ago, and free his people from this last vestige of their long torment.

“I told you we'd die before we ran out of dresses,” said Ruby, and all of her saucy bravado was gone. She might have been blithe about dying when it was abstraction, but she wasn’t now.

They didn’t swing open and shut. They didn’t latch or lock. They weren’t objects at all, but only apertures in the smooth mesarthium. The open ones were apertures, anyway.

It was beyond his control, and though this was due to the natural parameters of his gift and no personal failing, it didn't spare him Minya’s judgment.

Ruby paled to a bloodless cerulean.

They wouldn’t see her loneliness or fear or courage, let alone her humanity. They would see only obscenity. Calamity.

Her eyes swept the dressing room. Past the slips to the terrible gowns, the headdresses and fans and pots of her mother’s face paint and all the macabre accoutrements of the goddess of despair.

Her eyes swept the dressing room. Past the slips to the terrible gowns, the headdresses and fans and pots of her mother’s face paint and all the macabre accoutrements of the goddess of despair.

She reminded herself that she wasn’t here to be enraptured by this stranger’s beauty, but to discover who he was, and what nature of threat he posed, and the same with the rest whose humbler looks presented less distraction.

Still, feeling deeply that his filth was an unforgivable imposition, he’d chosen to bathe first, and thus had he discovered, at the age of twenty, the incomparable pleasure of submergence in hot water.

When he saw the quantity of food she’d laid out for him, though, his ingrained abnegation rose to the surface.

Such images spoke of a world beyond her ken, and, scattered throughout them—strange among strange and as difficult to separate from the wild vagaries of dreams as snowflakes from a basket of lace—were the answers she had been seeking.

If you had hate, then you could see suffering—and cause it—and feel nothing except perhaps a sordid vindication.

Rose and russet, scarlet and sienna. Old men blew colored smoke through long painted flutes, etching the air with soundless music. Saffron and vermilion, amaranth and coral.

The air was redolent with their honey perfume and with another scent, one that transported Sarai back to childhood.

The timbre of his voice sent a thrill through Sarai. It was deep, low, and raw—a voice like woodsmoke, serrated blades, and boots breaking through snow.

Down in Weep, Lazlo woke with a start and sat up in bed just in time to witness ninety-nine smithereens of darkness spook from his window ledge and burst into the air, where, with one frantic eddy, they were sucked up and out of sight.

The kitchen was recessed into a covered alcove, and a pergola around the dining area would once have been covered with climbing vines for shade.

Others, larger, were glave-lit subterranean canals plied by long, narrow boats.

He did as she asked, then followed her to the open fire, where he watched as she cleaned the fish with a few deft flicks of a knife, dunked them in oil, dredged them in spices, and laid them on the grill.

“You mustn’t worry about offending me, young man. I’m quite impervious...”

In this litany, it was somehow very clear that these jobs, they were the exceptions, and that “service” had mostly been of another kind.

For years, unbeknownst to the rest of them, Minya had been catching ghosts and...keeping them.

Minya was going to force a decade’s worth of the city’s dead to fight and kill their own kith and kin.

Her eyes darkened as though her pupils had engulfed her irises, and Sarai felt it coming, the response that brooked no comeback: Tell that to the other babies.

And once upon a time, survival had seemed like an end unto itself. But now...it began to feel like an expedient with no object. Survive for what?

Lazlo watched the delegates’ reactions, and he could understand their incredulity, certainly, but there was a rather large inducement here to believe the unbelievable.

Thyon, for his part, volunteered nothing, and there was more arrogance in his silence than in the Fellerings’ bluster.

All were dead or dying—skewered or laid open or sundered.

Terrors stirred within her, and she imagined she could hear a din of helpless screaming in the heads of all the ghosts.

They were both of them daughters of Ikirok, god of revelry, who had also served as executioner in his spare time.

She had tried to be gentle, but Minya had suffered no such compunction.

She knew now what the nature of her own begetting must have been, and even though the knowing was a blurry, shadowed thing, she felt the horror of it like the weight of an uninvited body and it made her gorge rise.

“Respect the curtain,” he intoned, and looked back down at his book.

“It’s possible I was wrong,” she said, with an air of great magnanimity. “I’ve decided to give you another chance.”