“That’s better,” sighed Sarai. Up in the citadel, her tears dried on her cheeks. The clench of her fists and stomach relaxed.
“Much better,” Lazlo agreed. “Do you think we just did that?”
“I’m certain of it.”
“Well done, us,” he said, then added, with exaggerated nonchalance, “I wonder what would happen if we kept kissing.”
In a similar display of feigned indifference, Sarai shrugged and said, “Well, I guess we could find out.”
They knew they had to talk about the day, and the future, and all the hate and despair and helplessness, but . . . not just yet. That place in their minds that had worked their mahalath transformations was coloring Dreamer’s Weep with their snatched and grabbed happiness. Everything else could wait. “Lazlo,” Sarai whispered, and she asked him a question to which he already knew the answer. “Do you still want me in your mind?”
“Sarai,” he replied. “I want you . . .” His arms were already around her. He drew her even closer. “In my mind.”
“Good.” She bit her lip, and the sight of her fine white teeth bearing down on that decadent, delicate lip planted at least an unconscious thought in his mind regarding the potential of teeth in kissing. “I’m going to go to sleep,” she told him. “I’m already lying in my bed.” She didn’t mean to sound seductive, but in her sudden shyness, her voice sank to a whisper, and Lazlo heard it like a purr.
He swallowed hard. “Do you need to lie down here?” In the dream, he meant, because she had last time.
“I don’t think so. Now that we know it works, I think it’ll be easy.” She touched the tip of her nose to the tip of his. Shaped by fairy tales, she thought, which made it better than every straight nose in the world. “But there is one thing you can do for me.”
“What is it?” asked Lazlo. “Anything.”
“You can kiss me some more,” she said.
And he did.
Up in the citadel, Sarai’s body fell asleep, and as soon as it did, she stopped being the girl lying on the bed, and she stopped being the moth perched on Lazlo’s brow, and became only—and gloriously—the girl in his arms.
Kissing, it turned out, was one of those things that only got better the more of it one did, and became more . . . interesting . . . as one gained confidence. Oh, the ways that lips could know each other, and tongues, how they could tease and tingle. Tongues, how they could lick.
Some things, thought Sarai, were too lovely to devour, while others were too lovely not to.
And together they learned that kissing wasn’t just for mouths. That was a revelation. Well, one mouth was needed, of course. But that mouth might decide to take a small sojourn down to the soft place under the jaw, or the tender, exquisite spot just below the ear. Or the earlobe. Who knew? Or the neck. The entire neck! And here was a cunning quirk of physiology. Sarai found that she could kiss Lazlo’s neck while he kissed hers. Wasn’t that lucky? And it was immensely rewarding to feel his tremors when her lips found a place that felt particularly good. Almost as rewarding as when his found such a place on her. And if not his lips, oh.
His teeth.
Even up in the citadel, the teeth caused her to shiver.
“I never knew about necks,” Sarai whispered between fast, hot kisses.
“Neither did I,” said Lazlo, breathless.
“Or ears.”
“I know. Who could have guessed about ears?”
They were still, all this while, in the marketplace of Dreamer’s Weep. Sometime early in the kiss—if one could, with generosity, call it a kiss—a convenient tree grew up from a crack in the cobbles, tall and smooth and canted at just the right angle for leaning when the dizziness became too much. This was never going any farther than leaning. There was, even in their delectation of necks, an innocence born of perfect inexperience combined with . . . politeness. Their hands were hot, but they were hot in safe places, and their bodies were close but chaste.
Well.
What does the body know of chastity? Only what the mind insists upon, and if Lazlo’s and Sarai’s minds insisted, it was not because their bodies failed to present a compelling argument. It was just that it was all so new and so sublime. It might take weeks, after all, just to master necks. Sarai’s fingertips did, at some point in the heedless flow of dream time, find themselves slipping under the hem of Lazlo’s shirt to play ever so lightly over the bare skin of his waist. She felt him shiver and she sensed—and he did, too—how very much remained to be discovered. She tickled him on purpose and the kiss became a laugh. He tickled back, his hands emboldened, and their laughter filled the air.
They were lost inside the dream, no awareness of the real—of rooms or beds or moths or brows. And so it was that in the giddy, sultry world of their embrace, the real Lazlo—fast asleep in the city of Weep—turned over on his pillow, crushed the moth, and broke the dream.
55
Disfaith
In the real city, Thyon Nero walked to the anchor, his satchel slung over his shoulder. Last night, he had made the same walk with the same satchel. He had been weary then, and thinking about napping. He ought to have been wearier now, but he was not.
His pulse was reedy. His spirit, depleted by his own depredations, pulsed too fast through his veins, twinning with a whirr and discordant jangle of . . . of disbelief crashing against evidence, producing a sensation of disfaith.
He had stumbled onto something that refused to be believed. His mind was at war with itself. Alchemy and magic. The mystical and the material. Demons and angels, gods and men. What was the world? What was the cosmos? Up in the black, were there roads through the stars, traveled by impossible beings? What had he entered into, by coming across the world?
He reached the anchor. There was the whole broad face of it, visible to any passerby—not that there were likely to be passersby at this late hour of night—and there was the alley with its mural depicting the wretched, bloody gods. The alley was where he’d been doing his testing, where no one would see him if they happened by. If he could have had a fragment of mesarthium to experiment on in his laboratory, he would have been spared these late-night outings, this risk of discovery. But no fragments existed, for the simplest of reasons: Mesarthium could not be cut. There were no scraps to be had. There was only this massive slab of it—and the other three identical ones at the southern, eastern, and western edges of the city.
He returned to his site in the alley, and shifted the debris he had leaned there to screen it from view. And there, at the base of the impregnable anchor, where smooth mesarthium met the stones it had crushed two hundred years ago underneath its awful weight, was the solution to Weep’s problem.
Thyon Nero had done it.
So why hadn’t he sent at once for Eril-Fane, and earned himself the envy of all the other delegates and the gratitude of Weep? Well, he had to confirm the results first. Rigor, always. It might have been a fluke.
It wasn’t. He knew that much. He didn’t understand it, and he didn’t believe it, but he knew.
“Stories will be told about me.” That was what he had said to Strange back in Zosma—his reason for coming on this journey. It wasn’t his main reason, but never mind. That had been escape—from the queen and his father and the Chrysopoesium and the stifling box that was his life. Whatever his reason, he was here now and a story was unfurling before him. A legend was taking shape.
He set down his satchel and opened it. More vials and flasks than last night, and a hand glave to see by. He had several tests to perform this time. The old alkahest and the new. The notes he took were habit and comfort, as though his tidy writing could transform mystery into sense.
There was a gaping rent in the metal. It was knee-high, a foot wide at the bottom, and deep enough to reach your arm into. It looked like an ax chop, except that the edges weren’t sharp, but smooth, as though they had been melted.
The new tests proved what Thyon already knew—not what he understood or believed, but what he knew, in the way that a man who falls on his face knows the ground.
Mesarthium was conquered.
There was a legend taking shape. But it wasn’t his.
He packed up his satchel and leaned the debris back up against the anchor, to screen the rent from sight. He stood at the mouth of the alley, all reedy pulse and ravaged spirit, wondering what it all meant. Weep gave no answer. The night was silent. He slowly walked away.
Across the street, Drave watched, and when the alchemist was gone, he disengaged from the shadows, crept to the mouth of the alley, and went in.
56
The Dreamsmiths
“No no no no no,” said Lazlo, bolting upright in his bed. The moth lay on his pillow like a scrap of sooty velvet. He prodded it with his finger and it didn’t move at all. It was dead. It was Sarai’s and he had killed it. The bizarre, tenuous nature of their connection struck him with new force—that a moth should be their only link. That they could be sharing such a moment and lose it in an instant because he rolled over on his pillow and crushed a moth. He cupped the poor thing on his palm, then set it gently on the night table. It would vanish at dawn, he knew, and be reborn at next nightfall. He’d killed nothing . . . besides his own ardor.
It was funny, really. Absurd. Infuriating. And funny.
He flopped back onto his pillows and looked up at the moths on his ceiling beam. They were stirring, and he knew that Sarai could see him through their eyes. With a mournful smile, we waved.
Up in her room, Sarai laughed, voicelessly. The look on his face was priceless, and his body was limp with helpless vexation. Go back to sleep, she willed him. Now.
He did. Well, it took ten hours—or perhaps ten minutes—and then Sarai was standing before him with her hands on her hips.
“Moth killer,” she admonished him.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I really loved that moth, too. That one was my favorite.”
“Better keep your voice down. This one will get its feelings hurt and fly away.”