“Don’t you dare pity me, you nothing,” Thyon snarled with such venom in his voice that Lazlo flinched back as if stung.
What followed was a terrible, sickening blur of spite and outrage. A red and twisted face. Bared teeth and clenched fists and glass shattering. It all got twisted up in nightmares in the days that followed, and embellished by Lazlo’s horror and regret. He stumbled out the door, and maybe a hand gave him a shove, and maybe it didn’t. Maybe he just tripped and sprawled down the short flight of steps, biting into his tongue so his mouth filled with blood. And he was swallowing blood, trying to look normal as he made his way, limping, back to the main palace.
He’d reached the steps before he realized he’d left the book behind. No more miracles for breakfast. No breakfast at all, not today with his bitten tongue swelling in his mouth. And he hadn’t eaten dinner the night before, or slept, but he was so far from hungry or tired, and he had some time to collect himself before his shift began, so he did. He bathed his face in cool water, and winced and rinsed his mouth out, spitting red into the basin. His tongue was grisly, the throb and sting seeming to fill his head. He didn’t speak a word all day and no one even noticed. He feared Thyon would have him fired, and he was braced for it, but it didn’t happen. Nothing happened. No one found out what he’d done that morning. No one missed the book, either, except for him, and he missed it very much.
Three weeks later, he heard the news. The queen was coming to the Great Library. It was the first time she’d visited since the dedication of the Chrysopoesium, which, it would appear, had been a wise investment.
Thyon Nero had made gold.
6
Paper, Ink, and Years
Coincidence?
For hundreds of years, alchemists had been trying to distill azoth. Three weeks after Lazlo’s visit to the Chrysopoesium, Thyon Nero did it. Lazlo had his suspicions, but they were only suspicions—until, that is, he opened the door to his room and found Thyon in it.
Lazlo’s pulse stammered. His books were spilled onto the floor, their pages creased beneath them like the broken wings of birds. Thyon held one in his hands. It was Lazlo’s finest, its binding nearly worthy of the Pavilion of Thought. He’d even illuminated the spine with flakes of leftover gold leaf it took him three years to save. The Unseen City, it read, in the calligraphy he’d learned at the abbey.
It hit the floor with a slap, and Lazlo felt it in his hearts. He wanted to stoop and pick it up, but he just stood there on his own threshold and stared at the intruder, so composed, so elegant, and as out of place in the dingy little room as a sunbeam in a cellar.
“Does anyone know that you came to the Chrysopoesium?” Thyon asked.
Slowly, Lazlo shook his head.
“And the book. Does anybody else know about it?”
And there it was. There was no coincidence. Lazlo had been right. Spirit was the key to azoth. It was almost funny—not just that the truth had been found in a fairy tale, but that the great secret ingredient should prove so common a thing as a bodily fluid. Every alchemist who had ever lived and died in search of it had had the answer all the time, running through his very veins.
If the truth were to be known, anyone with a pot and a fire would try to make gold, drawing spirit from their veins, or stealing it from others. It wouldn’t be so precious then, and nor would the golden godson be so special. With that, he understood what was at stake. Thyon meant to keep the secret of azoth at all costs.
And Lazlo was a cost.
He considered lying, but could think of no lie that might protect him. Hesitant, he shook his head again, and he thought he had never been so aware of anything as he was aware of Thyon’s hand on the hilt of his sword.
Time slowed. He watched Thyon’s knuckles whiten, saw the span of visible steel lengthen as the sword was drawn up and out of its sheath. It had a curve to it, like a rib. It had a mirror brightness in the glavelight, and caught gold in it, and gray. Lazlo’s eyes locked with Thyon’s. He saw calculation there, as Thyon weighed the trouble of killing him with the risk of letting him live.
And he knew how that calculus would come out. With him alive, there would always be someone who knew the secret, while killing him would be no trouble at all. Thyon might leave his engraved ancestral sword skewered through Lazlo’s corpse, and it would be returned to him cleaned. The whole thing would simply be tidied away. Someone like Nero might do as he liked to someone like Lazlo.
But . . . he didn’t.
He sheathed the blade. “You will never speak of it,” he said. “You will never write of it. No one will ever know. Do you understand me?”
“Yes,” said Lazlo, hoarse.
“Swear to it,” Thyon ordered, but then he cast his eyes over the books on the floor and abruptly changed his mind. “On second thought, don’t swear.” His lips curved in a subtle jeer. “Promise me three times.”
Lazlo was startled. A triple promise? It was a child’s vow from fairy tales, where breaking it was a curse, and it was more powerful to Lazlo than any vow on god or monarch would have been. “I promise,” he said, shaking with the chill of his own near death. “I promise,” he said again, and his face was hot and burning. “I promise.”
The words, repeated, had the rhythm of an incantation, and they were the last that passed between the two young men for more than four years. Until the day the golden godson came in person to the Enquiries desk to requisition Lazlo’s books.
The Complete Works of Lazlo Strange.
Gripping the request form, Lazlo’s hands shook. The books were his, and they were all that was his. He’d made them, and he loved them in the way one loves things that come of one’s own hands, but even that wasn’t the extent of it. They weren’t just a collection of notes. They were where he kept his impossible dream—every discovery he’d made about the Unseen City, every piece he’d puzzled into place. And it wasn’t for the simple accumulation of knowledge, but with the goal of one day . . . circumventing impossibility. Of somehow going there, where no outsider had ever been. Of crossing the desert, seeing those glittering domes with his own eyes, and finding out, at last, what happened to the Unseen City.
His books were a seven-year-long record of his hopes. Even touching them gave him courage. And now they were to fall into Thyon Nero’s hands?
“What in the world,” Master Hyrrokkin had asked, “could Thyon Nero want with your books?”
“I don’t know,” said Lazlo, at a loss. “Nothing. Only to take them away from me.”
The old man clucked his tongue. “Surely such pettiness is beneath him.”
“You think so? Well, then perhaps he intends to read them cover to cover.”
Lazlo’s tone was flat, and Master Hyrrokkin took his point. That scenario was indeed the more ridiculous. “But why?” Hyrrokkin persisted. “Why should he want to take them away from you?”
And Lazlo couldn’t tell him that. What he himself was wondering was: Why now, four years later? He had done nothing to break his promise, or to draw Nero’s ire in any way. “Because he can?” he asked, bleak.
He fought the requisition. Of course he did. He went straight to the master of archives to plead his case. The books were his own, he said, and not property of the library. It had always been made clear that the expertise of librarians was unworthy of the term scholarship. As such, how could they now be claimed? It was contradictory and unjust.
“Unjust? You ought to be proud, young man,” Villiers, the master, told him. “Thyon Nero has taken an interest in your work. It’s a great day for you.”
A great day indeed. For seven years, Lazlo had been “Strange the dreamer,” and his books had been “scribblings” and “foolishness.” Now, just like that, they were his “work,” validated and stolen in one fell swoop.
“Please,” he begged, urgent and hushed. “Please don’t give him my books.”
And . . . they didn’t.
They made him do it.
“You’re disgracing yourself,” Villiers snapped. “And I won’t have you disgrace the library, too. He’s the golden godson, not some thief in the stacks. He’ll return them when he’s done with them. Now be off with you.”
And so he had no choice. He loaded them into a crate and onto a handcart and trundled them out of the library, through the front gates, and down the long road that spiraled around Zosimos Ridge. He paused and looked out. The Eder sparkled in the sun, the rich brown of a pretty girl’s eyes. The New Palace arched across it, as fantastical as a painted backdrop in a fairy play. Birds wheeled over the fishing docks, and a long golden pennant flew from the cupola of Nero’s pale-pink palace. Lazlo made his slow way there. Rang the bell with deep reluctance. Remembered ringing another bell four years earlier, with Miracles for Breakfast clutched in his hands. He’d never seen it again. Would these books be any different?
A butler answered. He bid Lazlo leave the crate, but Lazlo refused. “I must see Lord Nero,” he said, and when Thyon at last presented himself, Lazlo asked him simply, “Why?”
“Why?” The alchemist was in his shirtsleeves, without his scarlet cravat. His blade was in its place, though, and his hand rested casually on its hilt. “I’ve always wanted to ask you that, you know.”
“Me?”
“Yes. Why, Strange? Why did you give it to me?” It? The secret, and all that followed. “When you might have kept it, and been someone yourself.”
The truth was—and nothing would have persuaded Nero to believe it—that it had never occurred to Lazlo to seek his own advantage. In the tombwalk that day, it had been very clear to him: Here was a story of greedy queens and wicked fathers and war on the horizon, and . . . it wasn’t his story. It was Thyon’s. To take it for himself . . . it would have been stealing. It was as simple as that. “I am someone,” he said. He gestured to the crate. “That’s who I am.” And then, with quiet intensity, “Don’t take them. Please.”