“Who would ever want to kiss a girl who eats moths?” Ruby had once asked her in a spirit of commiseration. And Sarai had thought then—as she did now—that kissing wasn’t a problem likely to arise for her. But she didn’t eat the moths, in any case. There was nothing to choke down, no creatures to swallow. Just the feather-soft brush of wings against her lips as they melted back into her, leaving an aftertaste of salt and soot. Salt from tears, soot from chimneys, and Sarai was whole again. Whole and weary.
She’d hardly stepped back inside when Less Ellen entered, carrying her morning tray. This held her lull in a small crystal vial, with a dish of plums to cut the bitterness. “Good morning, lovely,” said the ghost.
“Good morning, sweet,” replied Sarai. And she reached for her lull, and downed her gray oblivion.
18
The Fused Bones of Slaughtered Demons
For all his fanciful storytelling and talk of open minds, what had Lazlo really expected to find as the caravan approached the Cusp? A fissured cliff face of weather-riven marble? Rock that looked enough like bones to spawn a myth, with a boulder here and there in the rough shape of a skull?
That was not what he found.
“They’re really bones,” he said to Eril-Fane, and tried to read confirmation in the hero’s expression, but Eril-Fane only gave a ghost of a smile and maintained the silence that he’d carried with him all day.
“They’re really bones,” Lazlo said again, faintly, to himself. That, over there. That wasn’t a boulder that looked like a skull. It was a skull, and there were hundreds of them. No, there had to be thousands in all this vast white mass, of which hundreds were visible just from the track. Teeth in the jaws, sharp as any hreshtek, and, in the great eye sockets, just as he had said: carrion bird nests. They were strange and shaggy affairs, woven out of stolen things—dropped ribbons and hanks of hair, fringe torn off shawls and even shed feathers. The birds themselves swooped and cried, weaving in and out of immense, curved ridges that could only be spines, segmented and spurred, and, unmistakably: giant hands, giant feet. Tapering carpals as long as a man’s arm. Knucklebones like fists. They were melted, they were fused. The skulls were warped, like candles left too near the fire, so that none held the same shape. But they held shape enough. These had been living creatures once.
Though not generally given to gloating, he would have liked to see the other faranji’s faces just now, Thyon’s in particular. But the golden godson was stuck on a camel, farther back in the caravan, and Lazlo had to be content with echoing exclamations from Calixte, who was given to gloating.
“Hey, Tod, am I really seeing this?” he heard her call. “Or am I lost in my vast credulity?” And, a moment later: “What are you doing here, Tod? Don’t you know it’s rude to wander about in someone else’s credulity?” And then: “Is this fact or reason I’m encountering? Wait, no, it’s more demon bones.”
He suspected she wouldn’t soon tire of the joke.
“You’re surprised,” Eril-Fane remarked to Lazlo. “The way you talked last night, I thought you knew.”
“Knew? No, I thought . . . I don’t know what I thought. I thought that even if it were true, it wouldn’t be so obviously true.”
It was strikingly obvious, and somehow too big to fit into his mind—like trying to cram the actual Cusp into his own small skull. It wasn’t every day you got proof of myth, but if this wasn’t proof, he didn’t know what was. “The seraphim?” he asked Eril-Fane. “Were they real, too?”
“Is there proof, do you mean?” Eril-Fane asked. “Nothing like this. But then, they didn’t die here, so they couldn’t have left bones. The Thakranaxet has always been proof enough for us.”
The Thakranaxet was the epic of the seraphim. Lazlo had found a few passages over the years, though the poem in its entirety had never found its way to Zosma. Hearing the reverence of Eril-Fane’s tone, he understood that it was a holy text. “You worship them.”
“We do.”
“I hope I didn’t offend you with my theory.”
“Not at all,” said Eril-Fane. “I enjoyed it.”
They continued riding. Dazzled, Lazlo took in the extraordinary formations around him. “That one was a juvenile,” he said, pointing to a skull smaller than the rest. “That’s a baby demon skull. And this is a mountain of melted demon bones. And I’m riding over it on a spectral.” He stroked Lixxa’s long white ears and she whickered, and he murmured sweet things to her before continuing. “I am riding over the funeral pyre of the ijji with the Godslayer. Whose secretary I am.”
Eril-Fane’s ghost of a smile became somewhat less ghostly. “Are you narrating?” he asked, amused.
“I should be,” Lazlo said, and began to, in a dramatic voice. “The Cusp, which had looked low on the horizon, was formidable at close range, and it took the caravan several hours to climb the switchback track to Fort Misrach. It was the only way through. It was also the place where, for centuries, faranji had been drawn and quartered and fed to the sirrahs. Lazlo Strange looked to the sky”—here, Lazlo paused to look to the sky—“where the foul birds circled, screeching and crying and all but tying dinner napkins around their foul, sloped throats. And he wondered, with a frisson of concern: Was it possible he’d been brought so far just to serve as food for the carrion-eaters?”
Eril-Fane laughed, and Lazlo counted it a small victory. A kind of grimness had been growing on the Godslayer the nearer they drew to their destination. Lazlo couldn’t understand it. Shouldn’t he be eager to get home?
“A frisson of concern?” repeated Eril-Fane, cocking an eyebrow.
Lazlo gestured to the birds. “They are ominously glad to see us.”
“I suppose I might as well tell you. Due to a shortfall in faranji adventurers, the sirrahs were becoming malnourished. It was deemed necessary to lure some travelers here to make up the lack. After all, the birds must eat.”
“Damn. If only you’d told me sooner, I’d have put it in Calixte’s book. Then I could have used the prize money to bribe the executioners.”
“Too late now,” said Eril-Fane with regret. “We’re here.”
And here, indeed, they were. The fortress gates loomed before them. Helmed Tizerkane drew them open, welcoming their leader and comrades home with solemn gladness. Lazlo they regarded with curiosity, and the rest of the strangers as well, once their camels had been brought through the gates into the central plaza of the fortress. It was sliced right into the rock—or rather, into the melted, heat-rendered bones—which rose in high walls on either side, keeping the sky at a distance. Barracks and stables lined the walls, and there were troughs and a fountain—the first unrationed water they had seen for two months. Dead ahead at some twenty meters was another gate. The way through, Lazlo thought, and he almost couldn’t process it.
“The moment you see the city,” Eril-Fane had said, “you will understand what this is about.”
What could it be, that would be clear at a glance?
He dismounted and led Lixxa to a trough, then turned to the fountain and scooped water over his head with both hands. The feel of it, cold and sharp, soaking to his scalp and rushing down his neck, was unimaginably good. The next scoop was for drinking, and the next, and the next. After that: scrubbing his face, digging his fingertips into the itchy growth of unaccustomed beard. Now that they were nearly arrived, he allowed himself a brief daydream of comfort. Not luxury, which was beyond his ken, but simple comfort: a wash, a shave, a meal, a bed. He would buy some clothes with his wages as soon as he had the chance. He’d never done that before and didn’t know the first thing about it, but supposed he’d figure it out. What did one wear, when one might wear anything?
Nothing gray, he thought, and remembered the sense of finality he’d felt throwing away his librarian’s robes after joining Eril-Fane—and the regret, too. He had loved the library, and had felt, as a boy, as though it had a kind of sentience, and perhaps loved him back. But even if it was just walls and a roof with papers inside, it had bewitched him, and drawn him in, and given him everything he needed to become himself.
Would he ever see it again, or old Master Hyrrokkin? Though it had been only half a year, the Great Library had become memory, as though his mind had sorted his seven years there and archived them into a more distant past. Whatever happened here, Lazlo knew that that part of his life was over. He had crossed continents and drunk starlight from rivers without names. There was no going back from that.
“Strange!” cried Calixte, springing toward him in her dancing way. Her eyes were alight as she grabbed his shoulders with both hands and shook him. “Bones, Strange! Isn’t it ghoulish?” Her tone made clear that she meant good-ghoulish, if there were such a thing. Lazlo didn’t think there was. However you looked at it—whatever the ijji had been, and whatever had killed them, angels or not—this mound of bones was an epic mass grave. But there would be time for pondering the implications later. For now, he allowed himself wonder.
Calixte thrust a cupped hand at him. “Here. I knew you’d be too virtuous to do it yourself.” Curious, he put out his hand, and she dropped a sharp, curved fragment of glittering white glass onto it. “It’s a Cusp cuspid,” she said, beaming.
An ijji tooth. “You broke this off?” he marveled. She’d have had to dismount, perhaps even climb.
“Well, no one said not to deface the mountain.”
Lazlo shook his head, smiling, and thought how, if he hadn’t heard the rumor in Syriza, if he hadn’t mentioned it to Eril-Fane, Calixte might still be in jail, if she was even still alive. “Thank you,” he said, closing his hand around the tooth.
It was the first gift he had ever been given.
There was a small meal waiting for them—simple fare but exquisite for being fresh. Soft, salty bread and white cheese, slices of spiced meat, and quarters of some big, globed fruit that tasted of sugared rain. No one spoke, and there were, for the moment, no divisions among them—rich or poor, outsider or native, scholar or secretary. Never mind that Thyon Nero had grown up on delicacies and Lazlo Strange on crusts, neither had ever enjoyed a meal more.