“First of all: Who would want to punch me? Second of all: ecstatic dazzlement. Nicely put.”
“First of all: Thank you. Second of all: Thyon Nero would love to punch you.”
“Oh, him,” said Lazlo. It might have been meant as a joke, but the golden godson’s animosity was palpable. The others felt it, even if they had no clue as to what was behind it. “I think he’s the only one, though.”
Calixte sighed. “So naïve, Strange. If they didn’t before, they all want to punch you over the theory purse. Drave especially. You should hear him rant. He put way too much into it, the fool. I think he thought it was a lottery, and if he made more guesses he’d be likelier to win. Whereas you make one—a ridiculous one—and win. I’m amazed he hasn’t punched you already.”
“Thakra save me from the theory purse,” said Lazlo, blithely invoking the local deity, Thakra. She had been commander of the six seraphim, according to legend—and holy book—and her temple stood just across a broad boulevard from the guildhall.
“Save you from five hundred silver?” queried Calixte. “I think I could help you out there.”
“Thanks, I think I’ll manage,” said Lazlo, who in truth had no idea where to begin with so much money. “More like save me from bitter explosionists and grudging alchemists.”
“I will. Don’t worry. It’s my fault, and I take full responsibility for you.”
Lazlo laughed. Calixte was as slim as a hreshtek, but far less dangerous-looking than one. Still, he didn’t mistake her for harmless, whereas he knew he was, Ruza’s spear-throwing lessons notwithstanding. “Thank you. If I’m attacked, I’ll scream hysterically and you can come save me.”
“I’ll send Tzara,” said Calixte. “She’s magnificent when she fights.” She added, with a secret smile, “Though she’s even more magnificent doing other things.”
Calixte had not been wrong in calling Lazlo naïve, but even as remote as such things as lovers were to him, he understood the smile, and the warm tone of her voice. Heat rose to his cheeks—much to her delight. “Strange, you’re blushing.”
“Of course I am,” he admitted. “I’m a perfect innocent. I’d blush at the sight of a woman’s collarbones.”
As he said that, an almost-memory tickled his mind. A woman’s collarbones, and the wonderful space between them. But where would he have seen . . . ? And then Calixte yanked her blouse askew to reveal hers—her collarbones, that is—and he laughed and lost the memory.
“Nice job denuding your face, by the way,” she said, waggling her fingers under her chin to indicate his shave. “I’d forgotten what it looked like under there.”
He grimaced. “Oh. Well, I’m sorry to have to remind you, but it itched.”
“What are you talking about, sorry? You have an excellent face,” she said, examining him. “It isn’t pretty, but there are other ways for a face to be excellent.”
He touched the sharp angle of his nose. “I do have a face,” was about as far as he was willing to go.
“Lazlo,” called Eril-Fane from across the room. “Gather everyone, will you?”
Lazlo nodded and rose. “Consider yourself gathered,” he informed Calixte, before going in search of the rest of the team.
“Scream if you need saving,” she called after him.
“Always.”
The time had come to discuss Weep’s “problem” in earnest. Lazlo knew some of it already from Ruza and Suheyla, but the others were hearing it for the first time.
“Our hope in bringing you here,” Eril-Fane said, addressing them in a beautiful salon of the guildhall, “is that you will find a way to free us of the thing in our sky.” He looked from one face to the next, and Lazlo was reminded of that day in the theater back at the Great Library, when the Godslayer’s gaze had fallen on him, and his dream had taken on this new clarity: not merely to see the Unseen City, but to help.
“Once, we were a city of learning,” said Eril-Fane. “Our ancestors would never have had to seek outsiders for help.” He said this with a tinge of shame. “But that’s in the past. The Mesarthim, they were . . . remarkable. God or other, they might have nurtured our awe into reverence and won themselves true worship. But nurture was not their way. They didn’t come to offer themselves as a choice, or to win our hearts. They came to rule, totally and brutally, and the first thing they did was break us.
“Before they even showed themselves, they released the anchors. You’ll have seen them. They didn’t drop them. The impact would have knocked down every structure in the city and collapsed the underground waterways, damming the Uzumark that flows under our feet, and flooding the whole valley. They wanted to rule us, not destroy us, and to enslave us, not massacre us, so they set the anchors down deliberately, and crushed only what was beneath them, which happened to include the university and library, the Tizerkane garrison, and the royal palace.”
Eril-Fane had mentioned the library before. Lazlo wondered about it, and what precious texts had been lost in it. Might there even have been histories from the time of the ijji and the seraphim?
“It was all terribly tidy. Army, wisdom-keepers, and royal family, obliterated in minutes. Any who escaped were found in the days after. The Mesarthim, they knew all. No secret could be kept from them. And that was all there was to it. They didn’t need soldiers, when they had their magic to . . .” He paused, his jaw clenching. “To control us. And so our learning was lost, along with our leadership, and so much else. A chain of knowledge handed down over centuries, and a library to shame even your great Zosma.” Here he smiled faintly at Lazlo. “Gone in a moment. Ended. In the years that followed, pursuit of knowledge was punished. All science and inquiry were dead. Which brings us to you,” he told the delegates. “I hope I’ve chosen well.”
Now, finally, their varied areas of expertise made sense. Mouzaive, the natural philosopher: for the mystery of the citadel’s suspension. How was it floating? Soulzeren and Ozwin for reaching it in their silk sleighs. The engineers for designing any structures that might be needed. Belabra for calculations. The Fellering twins and Thyon for the metal itself.
Mesarthium. Eril-Fane explained its properties to them—its imperviousness to everything, all heat, all tools. Everything, that is, except for Skathis, who had manipulated it with his mind.
“Skathis controlled mesarthium,” he told them, “and so he controlled . . . everything.”
Magical metal telepathically smithed by a god and impervious to all else. Lazlo watched the delegates’ reactions, and he could understand their incredulity, certainly, but there was a rather large inducement here to believe the unbelievable. He’d have thought that knee-jerk skepticism would have been knuckled under by the sight of the enormous floating seraph in the sky.
“It can certainly be cut,” asserted one of the Fellerings. “With the right instruments and know-how.”
“Or melted, with sufficient heat,” added the other, with a confidence that shaded into arrogance. “The temperatures that we can reach with our furnaces will easily double what your blacksmiths can achieve.”
Thyon, for his part, volunteered nothing, and there was more arrogance in his silence than in the Fellerings’ bluster. His invitation to the delegation was clearer now, too. Azoth wasn’t only a medium for making gold, after all. It also yielded alkahest, the universal solvent—an agent that could eat through any substance in the world: glass, stone, metal, even diamond. Would mesarthium yield to it as well?
If so, then he might well be Weep’s second liberator. What a fine accolade for his legend, Lazlo thought with a twinge of bitterness: Thyon Nero, deliverer from shadow.
“Why don’t we go over,” suggested Eril-Fane, faced with the incredulity of his guests. “I’ll introduce you to mesarthium. It’s as good a starting point as any.”
The north anchor was closest, near enough to walk—and the trip took them across the strip of light called the Avenue, though it wasn’t an avenue. It was the one place where sunlight fell on the city, down through the gap where the seraph’s wings came together in front and didn’t quite meet.
It was broad as a boulevard, and it almost seemed, crossing it, as though one went from dusk to day and back again in a matter of paces. It ran half the length of the city and had become its most coveted real estate, never mind that much of it fell in humbler neighborhoods. There was light, and that was everything. In this single sun-drunk stripe, Weep was as lush as Lazlo had always imagined it to be, and the rest of the city looked more dead for the contrast.
The wings hadn’t always been outspread as they were now, Eril-Fane told Lazlo. “It was Skathis’s dying act—to steal the sky, as though he hadn’t stolen enough already.” He looked up at the citadel, but not for long.
And it wasn’t only the sky that had been stolen that day, Lazlo learned, finding out, finally, the answer to the question that had haunted him since he was a little boy.
What power can annihilate a name?
“It was Letha,” Eril-Fane told him. Lazlo knew the name already: goddess of oblivion, mistress of forgetting. “She ate it,” Eril-Fane said. “Swallowed it as she died, and it died with her.”
“Couldn’t you rename it?” Lazlo asked him.
“You think we haven’t tried? The curse is more powerful than that. Every name we give it suffers the same fate as the first. Only Weep remains.”
Stolen name, stolen sky. Stolen children, stolen years. What had the Mesarthim been, Lazlo thought, but thieves on an epic scale.
The anchor dominated the landscape, a great mass hulking behind the silhouettes of the overlapping domes. It made everything else seem small, like a half-scale play village built for children. And up on top was one of the statues Lazlo couldn’t clearly make out, besides the fact of it being bestial—horned and winged. He saw Eril-Fane look at it, too, and shudder again and skew his gaze away.