Dreams of Gods & Monsters

—Will you do it, my lady, or shall I?

Carnassial’s voice came into her head with the intimacy of a whisper. He was several paces behind her—glamoured, as she was—but his mind brushed hers like the stir of breath against her ear. Tickle and heat and even a trace of his scent. It was deeply real.

And deeply presumptuous.

She delivered her response and felt him flinch away.

—What do you think?she returned. Those were her only words, but there was more to her reply.

Telesthesia was an art form more akin to dreaming than speaking. The sender entwined sensory threads, with or without words, to form a message that keyed to the receiver’s mind at every level: sound and image, taste, touch, smell, and memory. Even—if they were very good at it—emotion. A sending from a master telesthete was an experience fuller than reality: a waking dream delivered on a thought. Scarab was not a master telesthete by any stretch, but she could twine several threads into her sending, and she did now. The flexion of cat’s claws and the sting of nettles—Eidolon had taught her that one—declared to Carnassial: Back off.

Did he think that because she had made him the gift of her body for her first dream season, he could touch her mind uninvited?

Men.

A single dream season was a single dream season. If she chose him again next year, that might begin to mean something, but she didn’t suppose she would. Not because he hadn’t pleased her, but simply this: How could she know his worth if she had no one to compare him to?

—Forgive me, my queen.

From a respectable remove came this sending, more like an approximation of his physical distance, and it was stripped of scent and stir, as was right. She could feel a wisp of penitence, though, and that was a fine flourish. Carnassial wasn’t a master telesthete, either—it would be a long time before either of them could hope to achieve mastery; they were both very young—but he had the makings of one. Not for nothing had Scarab chosen him for her honor guard—and not for his lutenist fingers, either, that had learned to play her with such ardor in the spring, or for his deep bell laughter, or for his hunger that understood her own and spoke to it, not unlike a sending, at every level.

He was a fine magus, as were the rest of her guard, but none of them—none of them—pulsed raw power like the seraph before her now. Her eyes swept down his bare back, and she felt the tug of surprise. It was a warrior’s back, muscled and scarred, and a pair of swords hung crossed in their harness from a jut of stone to his right. He was a soldier. She had gleaned this much in Astrae, where the folk spoke of him with acid fear, but she hadn’t fully believed it until now. It didn’t fit. Magi didn’t use steel; they didn’t need it. When a magus killed, no blood flowed. When she killed him, as she had come here to do, he would simply… stop living.

Life is only a thread tethering soul to body, and once you know how to find it, it is as easily plucked as a flower.

So do it, she told herself, and she reached for his thread, conscious of Carnassial behind her, waiting. “Will you do it or shall I?” he had asked her, and it galled. He doubted that she could, because she never had. In training, she had touched life threads and let them sing between her fingers—the fingers of her anima, that is, her incorporeal self. It was the equivalent of laying a blade to an opponent’s throat in sparring. I win, you die, better luck next time.But she had never severed one, and doing so would be the difference between laying a blade to an opponent’s throat and laying his throat open.

It was a very great difference.

But she could do it. To prove herself to Carnassial, she had an inspiration to perform ez vash, the clean slash of execution. An instant and it would be done. She wouldn’t feel the stranger’s thread or pause to read anything of it, but only scythe it with her anima, and he would be dead without her ever having seen his face or touched his life.

She thought of the yorayathen, and a feeling of reckless might flowed through her.

It was only a legend. Probably. In the First Age of her people, which had been far, far longer than this the Second Age and had been ended with such brutality, Stelians had been very different than they were now. Surrounded by powerful enemies, they had lived ever at war, and so a great deal of their magic had been concentrated on the war arts. Tales were told of the mystical yoraya, a harp strung with the life threads of slain foes. It was a weapon of the animaand had no substance in the material world; it could not be found like a relic or passed on as an inheritance. A magus made his own, and it died with him. It was said to be a reservoir of deepest power, but darkest, too, achievable only by killing on a staggering scale, and the playing of it was as likely to drive its maker mad as it was to strengthen him.

When she was a little girl, Scarab used to scandalize her nursemaids by plotting her own yoraya. “You will be my first string,” she had once said, wickedly, to an ayawho had dared to bathe her against her will.

The same words came into her head now. You will be my first string, she thought to the scarred and muscled back of the unknown magus before her. She reached out with her animato perform the execution, and a horror washed through her, because she had meant it, just for a moment.

“Take care what desires you mold your life and reign to, princess,” the ayahad said to her beside the bath that day. “Even if the yorayawere real, only someone with many enemies could ever hope to achieve it, and that isn’t what we are anymore. We have more important work to do than fight.”

Work, yes. The work that was the shape of their lives—and the thief of it. “Not that anyone thanks us,” Scarab had replied. She had been a small child then, and more intrigued by stories of warfare than the Stelians’ solemn duty.

“Because no one knows. We don’t do it for thanks, or for the rest of Eretz, though they benefit as well. We do it for our own survival, and because no one else can.”

She may have stuck her tongue out at her ayathat day, but as she grew up, she had taken the words to heart. She had even, recently, declined a tempting invitation of enemyhood from the fool emperor Joram. She might have had a harp string of him, but instead she had only sent a basket of fruit, and now he was dead anyway—at this magus’s hand, if the stories were true—and… it was as it should be.

She didn’t want enemies. She didn’t want a yoraya, or war. At least, so Scarab tried to convince herself, though in truth—and in secret—there was a voice within her that called out for those things.

It filled her with dread, but it thrilled her, too, and her dark excitement was the most dreadful thing of all.

Scarab did not perform ez vash. Realizing she was trying to prove herself to Carnassial, she rebelled against the idea—it was hewho must prove himself to her—and besides, she wished to see this magus’s face and touch his life, to know who he was before she killed him. It was no small thing to draw down sirithar. It was no goodthing, but it was without doubt a greatthing, and she would know how he had done it when all knowledge of magic in the so-called Empire of Seraphim was lost.

So instead of slashing the thread of his life, Scarab reached for it with her anima, and touched it.

And gasped.

It was a very small gasp, but it was enough to make him turn.

—Scarab.Carnassial’s sending was sheathed in urgency. Do it.

But she didn’t, because now she knew. She had touched his life and knew what he was before she even saw his face, and then she did see his face and so did Carnassial, and though he did not gasp, Scarab felt the ripples of his shock as they merged with her own.