“They took children?”

“One’s child is always one’s child, of course, but technically—or, physically, at least—he waited until they were . . . of age.”

Of age.

Those words. Lazlo swallowed a rising sensation of nausea. Those words were like . . . they were like seeing a bloody knife. You didn’t need to have witnessed the stabbing to understand what it meant.

“I worried for Azareen more than for Eril-Fane. For her, it was only a matter of time. They knew it, of course. That’s why they married so young. She . . . she said she wanted to be his before she was theirs. And she was. For five days. But it wasn’t her they took. It was him. Well. They got her later.”

This was . . . it was unspeakable, all of it. Azareen. Eril-Fane. The routine nature of atrocity. But . . . “They’re married?” was what Lazlo asked.

“Oh.” Suheyla looked rueful. “You didn’t know. Well, no secret’s safe with me, is it?”

“But why should it be a secret?”

“It’s not that it’s a secret,” she said carefully. “It’s more that it’s . . . not a marriage anymore. Not after . . .” She tipped her head up toward the citadel without looking at it.

Lazlo didn’t ask any more questions. Everything he’d wondered about Eril-Fane and Azareen had taken on a much darker cast than he could ever have imagined, and so had the mysteries of Weep.

“We were taken up to ‘serve,’ ” Suheyla went on, her pronoun shift reminding him that she had herself been one of these taken girls. “That’s what Skathis called it. He would come to the door, or the window.” Her hand trembled, and she clasped it tight over her stump. “They hadn’t brought any servants with them, so there was that. Serving at table, or in the kitchens. And there were chambermaids, gardeners, laundresses.”

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

“Of course, we didn’t know any of this until later. When they brought us back—and they didn’t always, but usually, and usually within a year—we wouldn’t remember a thing. Gone for a year, a year gone from us.” She dropped her stump, and her hand fluttered briefly to her belly. “It was as though no time had passed. Letha would eat our memories, you see.” She looked up at Lazlo then. “She was the goddess of oblivion.”

It made sense now—horrible sense—why Suheyla didn’t know what had become of her own hand.

“And . . . Eril-Fane?” he asked, steeling himself.

Suheyla looked back down at the teapot she was filling with steaming water from the kettle. “Oblivion was a mercy, it turns out. He remembers everything. Because he slew them, and there was no one left to take his memories away.”

Lazlo understood what she was telling him, what she was saying without saying it, but it didn’t seem possible. Not Eril-Fane, who was power incarnate. He was a liberator, not a slave.

“Three years,” said Suheyla. “That’s how long she had him. Isagol. Goddess of despair.” Her eyes lost focus. She seemed to slip into some great hollow place within her, and her voice sank to a whisper. “But then, if they’d never taken him, we would all of us still be slaves.”

For that brief moment, Lazlo felt a tremor of the quaking grief within her: that she had not been able to keep her child safe. That was a simple and profound grief, but under it was a deeper, stranger one: that in some way she had to be glad of it, because if she had kept him safe, he couldn’t have saved his people. It mixed up gladness, grief, and guilt into an intolerable brew.

“I’m so sorry,” said Lazlo, from the depths of both his hearts.

Suheyla snapped out of whatever faraway, hollow place she was lost in. Her eyes sharpened back to smiling squints. “Ha,” she said. “Ten silver please.” And she held out her palm until he put the coin in it.

29

The Other Babies

Minya led Sarai and the others back inside, through Sarai’s chambers, and back up the corridor. All of their rooms were on the dexter side of the citadel. Sarai’s suite was at the extremity of the seraph’s right arm, and the others’ were along that same passage, except for Minya’s. What had been Skathis’s palace occupied the entire right shoulder. They passed it, and the entrance to the gallery, too, and Sarai and Feral exchanged a glance.

The doors that led up or down, into the head or body of the citadel, were all closed, just as they had been when Skathis died. It wasn’t even possible to discern where they had been.

The sinister arm—as it was called—was passable, though they rarely went there. It held the nursery, and none of them could bear the sight of the empty cribs, even if the blood was long since washed away. There were a lot of small cell-like rooms beyond with nothing but beds in them. Sarai knew what those were. She’d seen them in dreams, but only the dreams of the girls who’d occupied them last—like Azareen—whose memories had outlived Letha. Sarai could think of no reason that Minya would take them there.

“Where are we going?” Feral asked.

Minya didn’t reply, but they had their answer in the next moment when she didn’t turn toward the sinister arm, but toward another place they never went—if for different reasons.

“The heart,” said Ruby.

“But . . .” said Sparrow, then cut herself off with a look of realization.

Sarai could guess both what she’d almost said and what had stopped her, because they had occurred to her at the same moment as Sparrow. But we can’t fit anymore. That was the thought. But Minya can. That was the realization. And Sarai knew then where Minya had been spending her time when the rest of them lost track of her. If they’d really wanted to know, they might have figured it out easily enough, but the truth was they’d just been glad she was elsewhere, so they’d never bothered to look for her.

They rounded a corner and came to the door.

It couldn’t properly be called a door anymore. It was less than a foot wide: a tall, straight gap in the metal where, near as they could guess, a door hadn’t quite finished closing when Skathis died. By its height, which was some twenty feet, it was clear that it had been no ordinary door, though there was no way to gauge what its width might have been when open.

Minya barely fit through it. She had to ease one shoulder in, then her face. It seemed for a moment that her ears would hang her up, but she pressed on and they were forced flat, and she had to work her head side to side to get it through, then exhale fully to narrow her chest enough for the rest of her body to pass. It was a near thing. Any bigger and she couldn’t have made it.

“Minya, you know we can’t get in,” Sparrow called after her as she disappeared into the corridor on the other side.

“Wait there,” she called back, and was gone.

They all looked at one another. “What could she want to show us here?” Sarai asked.

“Could she have found something in the heart?” Feral wondered.

“If there was anything to find we’d have found it years ago.”

Once, they’d all been small enough to get in. “How long has it been?” Feral asked, running his hand over the sleek edge of the opening.

“Longer for you than for us,” said Sparrow.

“That big head of yours,” added Ruby, giving him a little shove.

Feral had outgrown it first, then Sarai, and the girls a year or so later. Minya obviously never had. When they were all small, it had been their favorite place to play, partly because the narrow opening made it feel forbidden, and partly because it was so strange.

It was an enormous, echoing chamber, perfectly spherical, all smooth, curved metal, with a narrow walkway wrapping around its circumference. In diameter it was perhaps one hundred feet, and, suspended in its dead center was a smaller sphere of perhaps twenty feet diameter. That, too, was perfectly smooth, and, like the entirety of the citadel, it floated, held in place not by ropes or chains but some unfathomable force. The chamber occupied the place where hearts would go in a true body, so that was what they called it, but that was just their own term. They had no idea what its name or purpose had been. Even Great Ellen didn’t know. It was just a big metal ball floating in a bigger metal room.

Oh, and there were monsters perched on the walls. Two of them.

Sarai knew the beasts of the anchors, Rasalas and the others. She had seen them with her moths’ eyes, inert as they were now, but she had also seen them as they were before, through the dreams of the people of Weep. She had, in her arsenal, a seemingly infinite number of visions of Skathis mounted on Rasalas, carrying off young women and men no older than she was now. It had been her go-to terror, Weep’s worst collective memory, and she shuddered now to think how blithely she had inflicted it, not understanding, as a child, what it had meant. And the beasts of the anchors were big, make no mistake. But the monsters perched like statues on the walls of the citadel’s heart were bigger.

They were wasplike, thorax and abdomen joined in narrow waists, wings like blades, and stingers longer than a child’s arm. Sarai and the others had climbed on them when they were children, and “ridden” them and pretended they were real, but if, in the reign of the gods, they had been anything more than statues, Sarai had no visions to attest to it. These monsters, she was fairly sure, had never left the citadel. By their size, it was hard to imagine them even leaving this room.

“Here she comes,” said Ruby, who’d been peering through the opening at the dark corridor beyond. She stepped out of the way, but the figure that emerged was not Minya. It didn’t have to pause and carefully fit any flesh-on-skeleton mass through the gap, but flowed out with the ease of a ghost, which was what it was.

It was Ari-Eil. He glided past them without turning his head, and was followed immediately by another ghost. Sarai blinked. This one was familiar, but she couldn’t immediately place him, and then he was past and she had no time to search her memory because another was coming after him.