And with what important matters did Thyon Nero occupy his mind?
With no less than the animating principle of the universe: “azoth,” the secret essence alchemists had sought for centuries. He had distilled it at the age of sixteen, enabling him to work miracles, among them the highest aspiration of the ancient art: the transmutation of lead into gold.
“That’s good of you, Hyrrokkin,” said this paragon, who had the face of a god, in addition to the mind of one. “But I thought I’d better come myself”—he held up a rolled request form—“so that there could be no question whether this was a mistake.”
“A mistake? There was no need, my lord,” Master Hyrrokkin assured him. “There could be no quibbling with a request of yours, no matter who delivered it. We’re here to serve, not to question.”
“I’m glad to hear that,” said Nero, with the smile that had been known to render parlors full of ladies mute and dazed. And then he looked at Lazlo.
It was so unexpected, it was like sudden immersion in ice water. Lazlo hadn’t moved since the doors burst open. This was what he did when Thyon Nero was near: He seized up and felt as invisible as the alchemist pretended he was. He was accustomed to cutting silence, and a cool gaze that slid past him as though he didn’t exist, so the look came as a shock, and his words, when he spoke, an even greater one. “And you, Strange? Are you here to serve, or to question?” He was cordial, but his blue eyes held a brightness that filled Lazlo with dread.
“To serve, my lord,” he answered, his voice as brittle as the papers in his hands.
“Good.” Nero held his gaze, and Lazlo had to battle the urge to look away. They stared at each other, the alchemist and the librarian. They held a secret between them, and it burned like alchemical fire. Even old Master Hyrrokkin felt it, and glanced uneasily between the two young men. Nero looked like a prince from some saga told by firelight, all luster and gleam. Lazlo’s skin hadn’t been gray since he was a baby, but his librarian’s robes were, and his eyes, too, as though that color were his fate. He was quiet, and had a shadow’s talent for passing unremarked, while Thyon drew all eyes like a flare. Everything about him was as crisp and elegant as freshly pressed silk. He was shaved by a manservant with a blade sharpened daily, and his tailor’s bill could have fed a village.
By contrast, Lazlo was all rough edges: burlap to Nero’s silk. His robe had not been new even when it came to him a year ago. Its hem was frayed from dragging up and down the rough stone steps of the stacks, and it was large, so the shape of him was quite lost within it. They were the same height, but Nero stood as though posing for a sculptor, while Lazlo’s shoulders were curved in a posture of wariness. What did Nero want?
Nero turned back to the old man. He held his head high, as though conscious of the perfection of his jawline, and when speaking to someone shorter than himself, lowered only his eyes, not his head. He handed over the request form.
Master Hyrrokkin unrolled the paper, adjusted his spectacles, and read it. And . . . readjusted his spectacles, and read it again. He looked up at Nero. And then he looked at Lazlo, and Lazlo knew. He knew what the request was for. A numbness spread through him. He felt as though his blood and spirit had both ceased to circulate, and the breath in his lungs, too.
“Have them delivered to my palace,” Nero said.
Master Hyrrokkin opened his mouth, confounded, but no sound came out. He glanced at Lazlo again, and the glavelight shone on his spectacles so that Lazlo couldn’t see his eyes.
“Do you need me to write out the address?” Nero asked. His affability was all sham. Everyone knew the riverfront palace of pale-pink marble gifted him by the queen, and he knew they knew. The address was hardly the issue.
“My lord, of course not,” said Master Hyrrokkin. “It’s just, ah . . .”
“Is there a problem?” asked Nero, his pleasant tone belied by the sharpness of his eyes.
Yes, Lazlo thought. Yes, there is a problem, but Master Hyrrokkin quailed under the look. “No, my lord. I’m sure . . . I’m sure it’s an honor,” and the words were a knife in Lazlo’s back.
“Excellent,” said Nero. “That’s that, then. I’ll expect delivery this evening.” And he left as he had come, boot heels ringing on the marble floor and all eyes following.
Lazlo turned to Master Hyrrokkin. His hearts hadn’t stopped beating after all. They were fast and irregular, like a pair of trapped moths. “Tell me it isn’t,” he said.
Still confounded, the old librarian just held out the request form. Lazlo took it. He read it. His hands shook. It was what he thought:
In Nero’s bold, sweeping script was written: The Complete Works of Lazlo Strange.
Master Hyrrokkin asked, in utter mystification, “What in the world could Thyon Nero want with your books?”
4
The Bastard God of Fortune
The alchemist and the librarian, they couldn’t have been more different—as though Shres, the bastard god of fortune, had stood them side by side and divided his basket of gifts between them: every gift to Thyon Nero, one by one, until the very last, which he dropped in the dirt at Lazlo’s feet.
“Make what you can of that,” he might have said, if there were such a god, and he was feeling spiteful.
To Thyon Nero: birth, wealth, privilege, looks, charm, brilliance.
And to Lazlo Strange, to pick up and dust off, the one thing left over: honor.
It might have been better for him if Nero got that one, too.
Like Lazlo, Thyon Nero was born during the war, but war, like fortune, doesn’t touch all folk with the same hand. He grew up in his father’s castle, far from the sight and smell of suffering, much less the experience of it. On the same day that a gray and nameless infant was plunked on a cart bound for Zemonan Abbey, a golden one was christened Thyon—after the warrior-saint who drove the barbarians out of Zosma—in a lavish ceremony attended by half the court. He was a clever, beautiful child, and though his elder brother would inherit the title and lands, he claimed all else—love, attention, laughter, praise—and he claimed it loudly. If Lazlo was a silent baby, harshly raised by resentful monks, Thyon was a small, charming tyrant who demanded everything and was given even more.
Lazlo slept in a barracks of boys, went to bed hungry, and woke up cold.
Thyon’s boyhood bed was shaped like a war brig, complete with real sails and riggings, and even miniature cannons, so heavy it took the strength of two maids to rock him to sleep. His hair was of such an astonishing color—as the sun in frescoes, where you might stare at it without burning out your eyes—that it was allowed to grow long, though this was not the fashion for boys. It was only cut on his ninth birthday, to be woven into an elaborate neckpiece for his godmother, the queen. She wore it, and—to the dismay of goldsmiths—spawned a fashion for human-hair jewelry, though none of the imitations could compare with the original in brilliance.
Thyon’s nickname, “the golden godson,” was with him from his christening, and perhaps it ordained his path. Names have power, and he was, from infancy, associated with gold. It was fitting, then, that when he entered the university, he made his place in the college of alchemy.
What was alchemy? It was metallurgy wrapped in mysticism. The pursuit of the spiritual by way of the material. The great and noble effort to master the elements in order to achieve purity, perfection, and divinity.
Oh, and gold.
Let’s not forget gold. Kings wanted it. Alchemists promised it—had been promising it for centuries, and if they achieved purity and perfection in anything, it was the purity and perfection of their failure to produce it.
Thyon, thirteen years old and sharp as the point of a viper’s fang, had looked around him at the cryptic rituals and philosophies and seen it all as obfuscation cooked up to excuse that failure. Look how complicated this is, alchemists said, even as they made it so. Everything was outlandish. Initiates were required to swear an oath upon an emerald said to have been pried from the brow of a fallen angel, and when presented with this artifact, Thyon laughed. He refused to swear on it, and flat refused to study the esoteric texts, which he called “the consolation of would-be wizards cursed to live in a world without magic.”
“You, young man, have the soul of a blacksmith,” the master of alchemy told him in a cold rage.
“Better than the soul of a charlatan,” Thyon shot back. “I would sooner swear an oath on an anvil and do honest work than dupe the world with make-believe.”
And so it was that the golden godson swore his oath on a blacksmith’s anvil instead of the angel’s emerald. Anyone else would have been expelled, but he had the queen’s favor, and so the old guard had no choice but to stand aside and let him do his own work in his own way. He cared only for the material side of things: the nature of elements, the essence and mutability of matter. He was ambitious, meticulous, and intuitive. Fire, water, and air yielded up secrets to him. Minerals revealed their hidden properties. And at fifteen, to the deep dismay of the “would-be wizards,” he performed the first transmutation in western history—not gold, alas, but lead into bismuth—and did so, as he said, without recourse to “spirits or spells.” It was a triumph, for which he was rewarded by his godmother with a laboratory of his own. It took over the grand old church at the Great Library, and no expense was spared. The queen dubbed it “the Chrysopoesium”—from chrysopoeia, the transmutation of base metal into gold—and she wore her necklace of his hair when she came to present it to him. They walked arm in arm in matching gold: his on his head, hers on her neck, and soldiers marched behind them, clad in gold surcoats commissioned for the occasion.
Lazlo stood in the crowd that day, awed by the spectacle and by the brilliant golden boy who had always seemed to him like a character from a story—a young hero blessed by fortune, rising to take his place in the world. That was what everyone saw—like an audience at the theater, blithely unaware that backstage the actors were playing out a darker drama.