“Oh, nothing,” said Feral. “Ruby tried to drown me in saliva, that’s all. Come to think of it, has anyone seen Kem lately? He’s not dead in a puddle of drool somewhere, is he?”

“Well, he’s definitely dead,” remarked Sarai. “I couldn’t say about the drool.”

“He’s probably hiding,” said Sparrow. “Or maybe pleading with Minya to release him from his torment.”

Ruby was unfazed. “Say what you like. He loved it. I bet he’s writing a poem about it.”

Sarai let out a muffled snort at the idea of Kem writing a poem. Great Ellen sighed. “Those lips will lead you into trouble, my pretty flame.”

“I hope so.”

“Where is Minya, anyway?” asked Great Ellen, regarding the girl’s empty chair.

“I thought she might be with you,” said Sarai.

Great Ellen shook her head. “I haven’t seen her all day.”

“I checked her rooms,” said Ruby. “She wasn’t there, either.”

They all looked at one another. It wasn’t as though one could go missing in the citadel—not unless you took a leap off the terrace, anyway, which Sarai thought Minya the least likely of the five of them to do. “Where could she be?” mused Sparrow.

“I haven’t seen much of her lately,” said Feral. “I wonder where she’s been spending her time.”

“Are you missing me?” asked a voice from behind them. It was a child’s voice, bell-bright and as sweet as icing sugar.

Sarai turned, and there was Minya in the doorway. A six-year-old child to all appearances, she was grubby and round-faced and stick-limbed. Her eyes were big and glossy as only a child’s or spectral’s can be, minus the innocence of either.

“Where have you been?” Great Ellen asked her.

“Just making friends,” said the little girl. “Am I late for dinner? What is it? Not soup again.”

“That’s what I said,” chimed Ruby.

Minya came forward, and it became clear what she meant by “making friends.”

She was leading a ghost behind her like a pet. He was newly dead, his face blank with shock, and Sarai felt a tightness in her throat. Not another one.

He moved in Minya’s wake, stiffly, as though fighting a compulsion. He might strain all he liked. He was hers now, and no amount of struggle would restore his free will. This was Minya’s gift. She fished spirits from the air and bound them to her service. Thus was the citadel staffed with the dead: a dozen servants to see to the needs of five children who were no longer children.

She didn’t have a moniker, the way Feral was Cloud Thief and Ruby was Bonfire and Sparrow was Orchid Witch. Sarai had a name, too, but Minya was just Minya, or “mistress” to the ghosts she bound in iron gossamers of will.

It was an extraordinary power. After death, souls were invisible, incorporeal, and ephemeral, lasting a few days at the most between death and evanescence, during which time they could only cling to their bodies or drift helplessly upward toward their final unmaking—unless, that is, Minya caught and kept them. They were made solid by her binding—substance and matter, if not flesh and blood. They had hands to work with, mouths to kiss with. They could speak, dance, love, hate, cook, teach, tickle, and even rock babies to sleep at night, but only if Minya let them. They were hers to control.

This one was a man. He still wore the semblance of his worldly body. Sarai knew him. Of course she did. She knew the people of Weep better than anyone, including their leaders, including their priestesses. They were her dark work. They were her nights. Sooner or later they would all die and find themselves at Minya’s mercy, but while they lived, it was Sarai’s mercy that mattered.

“Tell us your name,” Minya commanded the ghost.

He gritted his teeth, choking to keep his name to himself. He held out for four or five seconds and looked exhausted but determined. He didn’t understand that Minya was toying with him. She was leaving him just enough will to believe he stood a chance against her. It was cruel. Like opening a birdcage to let the bird fly out, whilst all the while it’s tethered by the leg, and freedom is only an illusion. Minya marshaled a dozen ghosts at all times, even in her sleep. Her power over them was entire. If she wanted him to say his name, he would say his name. If she wanted him to sing it, he would sing it. Just now, it amused her to let him believe he could resist her.

Sarai said nothing. She couldn’t help him. She shouldn’t want to. He would kill her if he could, and the others, too. If he were alive, he would rip them apart with his bare hands.

And she couldn’t really blame him for it.

Finally, Minya tore his name from his lips. “Ari-Eil!” he gasped.

“You’re young,” said Ruby, who was fixed on him with uncommon interest. “How did you die? Did someone kill you?” she asked, in much the same tone as if she were inquiring after his health.

He stared at them in raw horror, his eyes skipping from Ruby to Feral to Sparrow to Sarai, trying to process the sight of their blue flesh.

Blue. As blue as tyranny and thrall and monsters in the streets. His eyes caught on Sarai for a long tremulous moment and she knew what he was seeing: Isagol the Terrible, resurrected from the dead. But Sarai’s face was too young, and must seem naked without the black band painted across her eyes. She wasn’t Isagol. She saw it dawn on him: what she was, if not who. What they all were.

“Godspawn,” he whispered, and Sarai felt his revulsion as powerfully as though it, too, were given substance by Minya’s binding. The air felt slippery with it. Rank. He shook his head and squeezed his eyes shut, as though he could deny their existence. It served as an affirmation, if nothing else. Every new ghost who recoiled from them in shock proved that they had not yet broken The Rule.

The Rule, the one and only. Self-imposed, it contained, in its simplicity, countless forbiddens. If they lived a thousand years, they’d still be discovering new things they mustn’t do.

No evidence of life.

That was it: the four-word mantra that governed their existence. They must betray no evidence of life. At all costs, the citadel must appear abandoned. They must remain hidden, and give the humans no hint that they were here, or that, unthinkably, five abominations had survived the Carnage and eked out an existence here for fifteen years.

In this ghost’s reaction, they saw that all was well. They were still a secret: the fruits of slaughter, slipped through bloody fingers. “You’re dead,” he said, almost pleading for it to be true. “We killed you.”

“About that . . .” said Ruby.

Minya gave the ghost’s invisible leash a tug that felled him to his knees. “We’re not dead,” she said. “But you are.”

He must have known already, but the plain words were a sucker punch. He looked around, taking it all in: this place that he only knew from his worst nightmares. “Is this hell?” he asked, hoarse.

Ruby laughed. “I wish,” she said. “Welcome to purgatory. Care for some soup?”

14

Beautiful and Full of Monsters

Lazlo clutched his spear and moved slowly over the desert sand, Ruza on his left, Tzara on his right. The two Tizerkane held spears as well, and though Ruza had been teaching him to throw, Lazlo still felt like an impostor. “I won’t be any help if it comes to it,” he’d said before they set out on their hunt.

The creature they sought was something out of stories. He’d never imagined they were real, much less that he would ever track one.

“Don’t underestimate yourself, faranji,” Ruza had replied, his voice full of assurance. “I can always push you into its mouth and run. So you see, you’ll have saved my life, and I’ll never forget it.”

“Nice,” Lazlo had said. “That’s exactly the sort of heroism that inspired me to play Tizerkane as a little boy.”

“It won’t come to anything,” Tzara had cut in, giving Ruza a shove. “We’re just going to poke it. You can’t appreciate a threave until you’ve seen one. That’s all.”

Just poke it. Poke a monster. And then?

“Behold the horror,” Eril-Fane had said, approving the excursion. The caravan had adjusted its course to give the thing a wide berth, but Ruza had been keen for Lazlo to see the Elmuthaleth’s ugliest species. Threaves were ambush predators. They burrowed under the sand and lay in wait, for years even, for prey to happen along, and they were only a threat if you had the poor fortune of walking over one. But thanks to the caravan’s threave hawks, they knew exactly where the thing was.

Low in the sky, one of the birds flew circles to mark the place where the threave lay buried. The caravans had always employed falconers with special birds that could scent the stench of the creatures and avoid them—and occasionally to hunt them, as they were doing now, though with no intent to kill. They were only twenty yards from it, and the back of Lazlo’s neck prickled. He’d never stalked anything before.

“It knows we’re coming,” Ruza said. “It can feel the vibrations of our footsteps. It must be getting excited. Its mouth will be filling with digestive juices, all bubbly and hot. It would be like falling into a bath if it ate you. A really awful bath.” He was the youngest of the Tizerkane, only eighteen, and had been the first to make Lazlo welcome. Not that any of them had made him unwelcome. It was just that Ruza had an eager nature—eager to tease, more than anything else—and had taken it upon himself to teach Lazlo basic skills, such as riding, spear-throwing, cursing. He was a good language teacher all around, mainly because he talked so much, but he was unreliable—as Lazlo had discovered early on when he’d asked Azareen, Eril-Fane’s second-in-command, what turned out to mean not “Can I help you with that?” but “Would you like to sniff my armpits?”

She had declined.

That was early on. His Unseen had improved enough now to know when Ruza was trying to trick him.