Strange the Dreamer: Chapters 32–39

She actually believed it was her moths, that she had to choke them down, cloying and clogging and alive.

In the pulse of her blood and spirit was a cadence of panic.

Sarai almost blanched at the vitriol there.

Feral and Ruby both ate with a gusto that spared no concern for the loveliness of the meat source, and if Minya had never been a big eater, it certainly had nothing to do with delicacy of feeling.

She wanted to leave them behind her in the gallery, but as she passed through the gauntlet of ghost soldiers that lined the corridor to her room, their lips parted and they murmured all together, “To save us all, to save us all,” and after that, the words they’d only spoken with their eyes: Help us.

But there were the butcher priests, too, performing divination of animal entrails, and the Doomsayers on their stilts, crying End Times from behind their skeleton masks.

Ruza assured him that it was the highest possible compliment to the chef, but the merriness in everyone’s eyes suggested a more...prurient meaning.

He bought four pair—a profligate quantity of socks—and not only were they not gray, no two pair were even the same color.

The mesarthium, he thought, must be reactive with skin the way some other metals were, such as copper.

“It’s a damned inconvenience,” the explosionist groused, though the inconvenience proved quite minimal, due to the fact that after overseeing the unloading of his supplies, he spent no further time there.

The plant was called ulola, and it was known for two things. One: Its nondescript shrubs were a favorite resting place for serpaise in the heat of the day, which accounted for its nickname, “snake-shade.” And two: Its flowers could fly.

As to the matter of when they would fly, the subject was broached on the fifth afternoon, at a meeting of city leaders that Lazlo attended with Eril-Fane.

“Nero, are you unwell?”
“I’m fine,” the golden godson deigned to say.

His skin was sallow.

Even the whites of his eyes were jaundiced.

He winced when Thyon jabbed in his needle, and winced again, because the alchemist missed the spirit vein and hit a blood vessel instead. Thyon wasn’t an especially skilled phlebotomist, but he didn’t apologize and Lazlo didn’t complain, and eventually there was a vial of clear fluid on the table, labeled, with a contemptuous flourish, SPIRIT OF LIBRARIAN.

What was it about the tattoos that so beguiled her? They were beautiful, but it wasn’t just that.

Or maybe it was the future the mark portended. Marriage, motherhood, family, continuity. Being a person. With a life.

Or...things she shouldn't dare to dream about. Like nightmares, dreams were insidious things, and didn’t like being locked away.

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.

The girls whom Skathis stole, their eliliths were pristine when he took them. Not so when he returned them.

They still whispered Minya’s words to her, but she had inured herself to them.

It might have her face, but it was a phantasm—just a scrap of memory dancing on a string—and everything it said and did came from the dreamer’s own mind.

She was crowned with braids and vines and what he first took for butterflies but quickly saw were orchids, with a single long white feather at a jaunty angle.

A sort of...sharpening of the lines of her, as though a diaphanous veil had been lifted. She felt more real than she had a moment ago.

She was too accustomed to dream logic to be surprised by any of the trappings, but not too jaded to find them beautiful.

However many dreams she had navigated, whatever chimerical fancies she had witnessed, she had never interacted.

He brought it down: a huge tome bound in pale-green velvet with a filigreed layer of silver scrollwork laid over it.

As to how she could be both dead and here, dream logic was untroubled by conundrums.

Lazlo enveloped him in a hug, which evidently constituted a surfeit of affection, because the old man pushed him off, incensed.

Lazlo enveloped him in a hug, which evidently constituted a surfeit of affection, because the old man pushed him off, incensed.

He knew the old man’s lecherous tendencies, and was anxious to see him on his way before he said or did something untoward.

“When Letha took a memory,” she said, “she didn’t keep it in a drawer like a confiscated toy. She ate it and it was gone forever. That was her gift. Eradication.”

Moths swarm out of my mouth, she imagined herself saying. So that I can maraud through human minds, like I’m doing right now in yours.

It wasn’t like soaring. There was nothing of the bird in this steady ascension.

Aside from the pontoons, which were sewn of specially treated red silk and contained ulola gas, there was another bladder, this one under the craft, filled with air by means of a foot-pedal bellows.

If Minya had gotten Skathis’s power, she wondered, would she be any different from him, or would she willingly subjugate a whole population, and justify it all within the rigid parameters of justice.

She gripped the sides of the doorway, but the mesarthium was smooth; there was no frame, nothing to give her purchase, and there were too many hands, grabbing at her arms and hair and shoulders. She had nothing to hold on to.

The force of the blow—immense for an old woman!—was too great. But the pole was padded with batting and canvas, and it stopped Azareen’s skull from being staved in.

The thought of the others, and all the questions they would ask, jolted Lazlo out of his survival euphoria and back into reality.