by Laini Taylor
And up from the sinkhole, on the pulley line they’d rigged from the doorway, another basket loaded with books rose slowly into sight.
“Why are books so heavy?” groaned Ruza as it reached the top, and they swung it onto solid ground.
Thyon’s mind produced explanations that had to do with the density of paper, but he offered up only a grunt. He had a new appreciation himself for the weight of books. He was accustomed to a small army of librarians carting them around for him. Truth be told, he was accustomed to servants doing everything for him. In his neck, a nerve pinched. He rolled his head from side to side, grimaced, and bent to examine the contents of the basket.
What a treasure trove he and Calixte had uncovered. At least, the books looked like treasure. He had no way to judge their contents.
Alongside Ruza, he started lifting them out of the basket and stacking them in crates in the cart they’d backed up to the sinkhole. There was a donkey in harness, drowsily waiting to make the return journey to the Merchants’ Guildhall. For hours they’d been trudging back and forth, stacking the books in the halls, in the dining room, anywhere there was space, just to get them away from here, lest the sinkhole give way and spill what remained of the city’s lost knowledge into the roiling Uzumark. Thyon and Calixte had gone to Eril-Fane as soon as they realized what they’d discovered. They’d found him looking haggard and sorrowful, and their news had brought him a tired smile.
The Tizerkane had been involved in defensive preparations, but he had lent them Ruza and Tzara to aid in their salvage efforts. Thyon had hardly expected to work all night long, but no one had suggested stopping, so he couldn’t, either, without having to imagine the meaning of the words they’d call him under their breath. They’d eaten bread and cheese a while ago, and drunk gulps from a bottle of something potent that had burned the edges off his fatigue—and perhaps the surface layer off his throat as well, not that he was complaining.
Thyon had thought that, as a scholar, he should be down in the library, selecting which books to save, but it had been pointed out—correctly, if not politely—that he couldn’t read them, and was thus useless, except as a pair of arms to haul them.
Demoted to laborer. Imagine.
At least he could examine them as he unloaded them. Carefully he lifted out a tome. It was a marvel: soft white leather leafed liberally in gold. There was a moon etched on the spine. He couldn’t help himself. “What does this say?” he asked Ruza, holding it out for him to see.
The warrior took it. He was shorter than Thyon and more heavily made—thick-shouldered, with big, square hands that made the alchemist’s look fragile—like the porcelain hands in jewelers’ shops that were used for displaying rings. “This?” Ruza squinted, tracing the gold letters with a broad fingertip, and, Thyon noted, leaving a smudge. He gritted his teeth and refrained from snatching the volume back. “It says,” the warrior told him, “‘Greatest Mysteries of Alchemy Revealed.’”
Thyon’s hearts gave a lurch. “Really?” he asked. The alchemists of Weep had been paragons of the ancient world, and all their secrets were lost.
He could learn the language. He could read all these books. A great hunger and excitement filled him. He could stay here to study. He didn’t have to go home.
Zosma. The thought of his city, of his empty pink palace, even of his laboratory, they conjured no feeling of “home.” He didn’t miss any of it, and not any person, either. The realization made him feel adrift, like one of the ulola flowers borne on a gust of wind.
It also made him feel the smallest bit… free.
“Mm.” Ruza nodded. “But oh, what’s this? Down here it says—” And, pointing at the subtitle that Thyon could see was only three words long, purported to read out, “‘A practical handbook for making the rich richer and granting eternal life to greedy monarchs so that they can rule poorly forever’?” With confusion painted on his face, he looked up at Thyon, and asked, pretending to be an imbecile, “Is that what alchemy does?”
Thyon’s excitement curdled. He bent back to the basket to hide the flush that spread up his neck. He hated being mocked. It brought up his father’s voice, so elegant and vicious. “If you don’t know how to read,” he retorted stiffly, “just say so.”
“Funny,” said Ruza, unperturbed. “Seems like you’re the one who can’t read. Oh. Look.” He picked up another book. “This one’s called ‘Manners for Faranji: How Not to Act Like a Supercilious Gulik to Your Barbarian Hosts.’ Did they not have this one back in your library?”
Thyon didn’t know what gulik meant, and supposed it was better that way. As for supercilious, he had to revise his notion that Ruza’s Common Tongue was rudimentary. Perhaps his language lessons with Strange had gone both ways. Which meant, of course, that all his curt commands were every bit as rude as they sounded.
If Strange were here, he would have made some clever retort, and their eyes would have laughed as they strove to look serious. But Strange wasn’t here, and Ruza’s eyes weren’t laughing. Thyon took the book without comment and added it to the crate.
With every book he unloaded, he gazed at the cover and the inscrutable title, and felt locked out of it by his own ignorance. Nothing would have induced him to ask for Ruza’s help again, but one book was too extraordinary to simply stack into a crate. Lifting it out of the basket, he felt something like reverence. Its cover wasn’t leather or board but cloisonné—an intricate picture of inlaid enamel and what could only be lys and precious stones. By the way it had been worn smooth in places, he guessed that it was very old, and had been much handled in its time. As for the image depicted in a hundred vivid colors, it was a battle: a battle between giants and angels.
Seraphim, he thought. And ijji, the monstrous race they were supposed to have slain and piled in the pyre the size of a moon. He’d scoffed at the story when Strange told it, the night before they reached Weep. But there was no more scoffing after climbing the Cusp, which was, beyond doubt, the very pyre.
Opening the book, Thyon saw there were engravings inside, depicting more monsters and angels. It might all have spilled straight from Strange’s story.
“Are we taking a reading break?” asked Ruza. “Or should I say, a looking at the pictures break?”
Thyon closed the book and turned away.
“Don’t you want to know what it says?” asked Ruza.
“No,” said Thyon. He went to put the book with the rest, at the last moment sliding it instead into a gap between crates, so that he could find it later. He wasn’t done with it.
They got the cart loaded again, and Calixte and Tzara climbed back out of the pit. Calixte wasn’t bounding now, and even Tzara looked weary. Thyon felt hot and dirty. Too tired to think straight, he rolled his sleeves up to his elbows.
“What happened to you?” asked Calixte, staring at his forearms.
Hastily he rolled his sleeves back down. “Nothing.”
“That’s nothing?” she said, eyebrows raised. “It looks like you’ve been training ravid kittens how to hunt.”
But that was not what it looked like. The marks on Thyon’s arms were scars, too regular to make sense. They might have been measured with a ruler, they were so precise, each two inches long, and spaced a quarter inch apart. Several were fresh and raw, though not altogether new: Puckers of old scar tissue were split with red lines, as though new cuts had been made on the healed sites of older ones.
“Did you do that to yourself?” asked Ruza, confused.
“It’s an alchemical experiment,” Thyon lied, his voice tight. He thought of the secret only Lazlo Strange knew—how he drew his own spirit with a syringe, and used it to make azoth. And there were some bruises and little scabbed needle pricks from that, but these were something else. Not even Strange knew this secret. “You wouldn’t understand.”
“No, I know,” said Ruza, “because I’m just a stupid barbarian.”
“That’s not why. Only an alchemist could understand.” Also a lie. Thyon was c
ertain that this wouldn’t make sense to anyone.
Ruza snorted. “But I am a stupid barbarian?”
“Did I say so?”
“You say it with your face.”
“That’s just his face,” said Calixte in a pretense of defending him. “He can’t help having indignant nostrils. Can you, Nero? You probably come from a long line of indignant nostrils. Aristocrats are issued them at birth, along with haughty eyes and judgmental cheeks.”
“Judgmental cheeks?” repeated Ruza. “Can cheeks be judgmental?”
“His manage.”
To Thyon’s surprise, Tzara took his side. “Leave him alone. He’s here, isn’t he? He could have fled like the others.” She gave Ruza a shove. “You’re just jealous he’s so much better-looking than you.”
“I am not,” the warrior protested. “And he is not. Look at him! He’s not even a real person.”
“What?” asked Thyon, honestly baffled. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
But Ruza didn’t answer him. He only gestured at him, telling the women, “He looks like somebody made him, and delivered him in a velvet-lined box. He probably plucks his eyebrows. I don’t know how you could possibly find that attractive.”
“Us?” asked Calixte, laughing. “He’s hardly my type.”
“Too pretty for me,” said Tzara, bracing herself for the exaggerated punch Calixte landed on her hip.
“Are you saying I’m not pretty?” she demanded with mock umbrage.
“Not that pretty, thank the gods. I’d be afraid to touch you.”
Thyon was speechless. He was well aware of his own perfection—and his eyebrows were natural, thank you very much—but had never heard it discussed so openly, or, of all things, as though it were a fault. A small tingling of relief mingled with his indignation, though, because they’d forgotten about the cuts on his arms.
“Exactly,” said Ruza. “He’s like a new linen napkin that you’re afraid to wipe your mouth on.”
The women both laughed at the absurdity of the comparison. Thyon’s brow crinkled. A napkin? “I’ll thank you to keep your mouth away from me,” he said, causing the women to laugh even harder.
“You don’t have to worry about that,” said Ruza, looking positively repelled.
But Tzara shut him down, saying with a sly edge, “I think you protest too much, my friend.”
Whatever she meant by it, Ruza’s cheeks flamed, and he looked anywhere but at Thyon. Busying himself with the donkey, he asked, sounding sour, “Are we going to deliver this load or not?” He climbed into the driver’s seat. “I don’t know about the rest of you, but I could use some sleep.”
Finally, thought Thyon, who wasn’t sure he could have managed another cartload without a break.
“Me too,” said Tzara. “But we’ll have to check in at the garrison.”
“Not me,” gloated Calixte. “I have no master. I sleep when I like. Wait—”
The cart had started to pull away. She darted forward and plucked something out. “A book didn’t make it in the crates. Oh, this one. It’s gorgeous.”
It was the one Thyon had set aside. He started to speak, but stopped. What could he say? Words came unbidden into his mind, and he wanted to scour them out.
I thought Strange would like to see it.
Since when did he care what Strange would like? That wasn’t why he’d set it aside.
“Is it about the seraphim?” Calixte wondered.
Tzara looked over her shoulder, and Thyon witnessed the instant her face changed, all her weariness vanishing. “Merciful seraphim,” she said in awe. “It’s the Thakranaxet.”
“What?” Ruza jumped down from the driver’s seat, and then the three of them were shoulder to shoulder, peering at the book with avid eyes. Thyon, opposite, felt a pinch of envy and, preposterously, loss, as though the book had been his discovery, and was being taken away from him.
As he had taken away Strange’s books back in Zosma? No. Of course that had been much worse. A pang of shame twisted his gut at the thought of those scruffy, handmade books, labors of love brimming with years of the librarian’s hard-earned knowledge. They were still back in his pink marble palace, stacked up where he’d left them. It occurred to him now that he might have brought them, and returned them to Strange on the journey. He did have one book that Strange would know. It was Miracles for Breakfast, the volume of tales Strange had brought to his door when they were sixteen. What would he think if he knew Thyon had read it so often he knew it practically by heart?
“What’s the Thakranaxet?” he asked, stumbling over the name.
“It’s the testament of Thakra,” Tzara said. “She was leader of the seraphim who came to Zeru.”
Even after what he’d seen, it still startled Thyon to hear the seraphim spoken of so matter-of-factly, as real historical beings. In Zosma, there was lore of the seraphim, but it was very old and had been churned under by the One God like weeds by a plow. No names survived there that Thyon had ever heard, and certainly no one knew it was fact.
“It’s our holy book,” Tzara said. “All copies were lost or destroyed when the Mesarthim came.”
They went on murmuring, turning pages, but Thyon looked up at the citadel. When the Mesarthim came, Tzara had said, and it struck him what an extraordinary coincidence it was that both seraphim and Mesarthim had come… here. Thousands of years apart, two different races of otherworldly beings, and both came right here, and not anywhere else in all the wide world of Zeru. It was too extraordinary to be a coincidence, really, especially considering that the Mesarthim citadel took the form of a seraph.
Thyon’s gaze glided over the contours of the great metal angel, and he wondered what it all meant. They were pieces of a story, Mesarthim and seraphim, but how did they fit together?
And what place did Lazlo Strange have in it?
“You know who’d love this book?” asked Calixte, flipping pages.
Thyon gritted his teeth, knowing exactly who and still telling himself that wasn’t why he’d put it aside. What did he care what the dreamer would love, or who got to give it to him?
Nothing at all. Not a bit. It was none of his concern.
The golden godson, all blisters and aches, trudged stiffly ahead of the donkey.
22
DO YOU WANT TO DIE, TOO?
Sarai opened her eyes in Minya’s dream, and realized she was holding her breath, braced for a clash that didn’t come. She exhaled slowly and looked around, taking stock of her surroundings.
She knew the citadel nursery, but she knew it bare. After what happened there, Minya had ordered everything burned. Nowadays, it was an austere place—a kind of awful memorial, with nothing left but the rows of mesarthium cribs and cots, all shining blue, abstracted by the absence of bedding and babies.
This was the same nursery, but it took a beat to realize it. Sarai was standing in it, and there was bedding and babies—and children and tidy piles of folded diapers, and white blankets worn soft with many washings, and nippled bottles all lined up on a shelf. The babies were in the cribs, lying down, limbs waving, or standing at the bars like tiny prisoners. Some bigger children were playing on woven mats laid out on the floor. They had a few toys: blocks, a doll. Not much. One girl walked up to a crib and lifted one of the babies out and held it on her hip like a little mother.
The girl was Minya. Though in size and shape she hadn’t changed, she was vastly different in presentation: She was clean, for one thing, and her hair was long, not chopped off with a knife. It was dark and shining and fell in waves down her back, and her little nursery smock was white, with nary a rip or stain. She was singing to the baby. It was her same icing-sugar voice, but it sounded different, fuller and more sincere.
It didn’t surprise Sarai to find herself here. The nursery was bound to loom large in the landscape of Minya’s mind. The calm of the scene did surprise her a little. She’d been braced for something ugly—a confrontation, blame. She had thought Minya might be
waiting for her at the border of the dream, the way Lazlo did, except unsmiling. But that was foolish. How could Minya know she would come? Sarai didn’t even know if Minya would be able to see her, and even if she could, she couldn’t expect her to be lucid and present in the way Lazlo was.
He was Strange the dreamer, after all. He wasn’t your ordinary dreamer, prey to all the vagaries of the unconscious. He moved through his mind with the assuredness of an explorer and the grace of a poet. Most dreams don’t make sense, and most dreamers aren’t even aware they’re dreaming. Was Minya?
Sarai stood where she was, waiting to see if the little girl would notice her. She didn’t, not yet. She was focused on the baby. She carried it to a table and laid it on a blanket. Sarai supposed she must be changing its diaper. She let her eyes wander, wondering if she might find herself here—her baby self. She should be easy to spot, the only one with Isagol’s red-brown hair.
As she looked around, she noticed an anomaly. Whenever she tried to look at the door—the only one that led out into the corridor—there was a sort of… disruption in her vision, as though her eyes were skipping over something. She found herself blinking, trying to focus, but it was as though an area of the dreamscape was blurred out, like breath-fogged glass. She several times thought she glimpsed figures—grown-up-size figures—out of the corner of her eye, but when she turned, there was no one there.
She wondered where the Ellens were. She couldn’t spot herself, either.
Minya walked back to the cribs, plucked out another baby, and settled it on her hip. She did the little bounce and sway that Sarai had seen humans do to calm their babies when they woke in the night. The baby regarded her placidly. The crib she’d taken the first one from was still empty, and Sarai glanced over at the table where Minya had been changing its diaper. It wasn’t there, either.
A little shiver of unease ran down her spine.