There was a moment, very brief, when the guarded dispassion fell away from Thyon’s face, and Lazlo saw something human in him. Regretful, even. Then it was gone. “Remember your promise,” he warned, and shut the door in Lazlo’s face.
Lazlo returned to his room late that evening, having lingered at dinner to avoid it. Reaching his door, he took his glave down off its hook, hesitated, then hung it back up. With a deep breath, he entered. He hoped that darkness might soften the loss, but there was just enough moonlight to bathe his window ledge in a soft glow. Its emptiness was stark. The room felt hollow and dead, like a body with its hearts cut out. Breathing wasn’t easy. He dropped onto the edge of his bed. “They’re only books,” he told himself. Just paper and ink.
Paper, ink, and years.
Paper, ink, years, and his dream.
He shook his head. His dream was in his mind and in his soul. Thyon might steal his books, but he couldn’t steal that.
That was what he told himself that first long night bereft of his books, and he had trouble falling asleep for wondering where they were and what Nero had done to them. He might have burned them, or put them into a moldering cellar. He might even now be pulling them apart page by page, folding them into birds, and launching them off his high widow’s walk, one by one.
When he finally did sleep, Lazlo dreamed his books were buried beneath the earth, and that the blades of grass that grew up from them whispered “Weep, Weep” when the winds blew, and all who heard it felt tears prick their eyes.
Never once did he consider that Thyon might be reading them. That, in a room as opulent as Lazlo’s was plain, with his feet up on a tufted stool and a glave on either side, he was reading long into the night while servants brought him tea, and supper, and tea again. Lazlo certainly never imagined him taking notes, with a swan quill and octopus ink from an inkwell of inlaid lys that had actually come from Weep some five hundred years ago. His handsome face was devoid of mockery or malice, and was instead intent, alive, and fascinated.
Which was so much worse.
Because if Lazlo thought a dream could not be stolen, he underestimated Thyon Nero.
7
Impossible Dream
Without his books, Lazlo felt as though a vital link to his dream had been cut. The Unseen City had never seemed more distant, or more out of reach. It was as though a fog had lifted, forcing him to confront an uncomfortable truth.
His books were not his dream. Moreover, he had tucked his dream into their pages like a bookmark and been content to leave it there for too long. The fact was: Nothing he might ever do or read or find inside the Great Library of Zosma was going to bring him one step closer to Weep. Only a journey would do that.
Easier said than done, of course. It was so very far. He might conceivably find a way of reaching Alkonost, the crossroads of the continent and western outpost of the Elmuthaleth. He had no qualifications to recommend him, but there was at least a chance he could hire onto a merchant convoy and work his way there. After that, though, he would be on his own. No guide would take faranji across the desert. They wouldn’t even sell them camels so that they might make the attempt on their own—which would be suicide in any case.
And even supposing he somehow managed to cross the desert, there would still be the Cusp to confront: the mountain of white glass said in legend to be the funeral pyre of demons. There was only one way over it, and that was through the gates of Fort Misrach, where faranji were executed as spies.
If the city was dead, then he might get through to explore its ruins. The thought was unutterably sad. He didn’t want to find ruins, but a city full of life and color, like the one from the stories. But if the city was alive, then he could expect to be drawn and quartered and fed in pieces to the carrion birds.
It wasn’t hard to see why he’d tucked his dream into his books for safekeeping. But now it was all he had left, and he had to take a good, hard look at it. It wasn’t encouraging. Whatever way he turned it, all he saw was: impossible. If the dream chose the dreamer, then his had chosen poorly. It needed someone far more daring than he. It needed the thunder and the avalanche, the war cry and the whirlwind. It needed fire.
It was a low point, the weeks after Thyon Nero took away his books. The days dragged. The walls closed in. He dreamed of deserts and great empty cities and imagined he could feel the minutes and hours of his life running through him, as though he were nothing but an hourglass of flesh and bone. He found himself staring out windows, wistful, yearning for that distant, unattainable horizon.
Which is how he happened to see the bird.
He was up one of the ladders in the Pavilion of Thought, pulling books for an impatient philosopher who paced below. “I haven’t got all day,” the man called up.
I have, thought Lazlo, pushing off to send his ladder rolling along its tracks. He was at the top tier of the very tall shelves, along the northern wall beyond which the shark-fin ridge fell away in a sheer cliff all the way to the city. There were narrow windows slotted between each section of bookcase, and he caught glimpses of the summer sky as he rolled past them. Bookcase, window, bookcase, window. And there it was: a bird, hovering on an updraft, as birds liked to do on this side of the ridge, hanging in place like tethered kites. But he’d never seen a bird like this one. He halted the ladder to watch it, and something went very still at the core of him. It was pure white, a hook-beaked raptor, and it was immense, larger even than the hunting eagles he’d seen with the nomads who passed through the marketplace. Its wings were like the sails of a small ship, each feather as broad as a cutlass. But it wasn’t just its color or size that struck him. There was something about it. Some trick of the light? Its edges . . . they weren’t defined, but seemed to melt against the blue of the sky like sugar dissolving into tea.
Like a ghost diffusing through the veil of the world.
“What are you doing up there?” called the philosopher. Lazlo ignored him. He leaned forward to peer through the glare on the glass. The bird pirouetted on one vast wing and tipped into a slow, graceful spiral. He watched it plummet and soar out to cast its shadow over the roadway below, and over the roof of a carriage.
The royal carriage. Lazlo’s forehead clashed against the window in his surprise. There was a procession coming up the long, winding road: not just the carriage but files of mounted soldiers both ahead and behind, the sun glittering on their armor. He squinted. One troop of soldiers didn’t look like the others, but they were too distant for a clear view. Their armor didn’t glitter. Their mounts moved with a strange gait. The road curved around to the ridge’s south face, and soon the whole procession had passed out of view. The huge white eagle glided after them and then . . .
Perhaps Lazlo looked away. Perhaps he blinked. He didn’t think so, but just like that the bird wasn’t there anymore. It was and then it wasn’t, and even if he had blinked, it couldn’t have left his sight so quickly. There was no cover nearby, nothing to hide it. The drumbeat of Lazlo’s blood and spirit surged. The bird had vanished.
“You there!” The philosopher was getting angry.
Lazlo looked down at him. “Is the queen meant to visit today?” he called.
“What? No.”
“Because the royal carriage is coming.”
The scholars sitting nearest heard and looked up. Word spread in murmurs. Royal visits were rare, and generally announced well in advance. Soon the scholars were standing up from their tables and leaving their materials behind to go outside and gather in the entrance court. Lazlo descended the ladder and walked out with them, not even hearing the call of his name from the librarian behind the Enquiries desk. “Strange, where are you going? Strange.”
The bird had vanished. It was magic. Lazlo knew it, as he’d known before. Whatever had happened to the city’s true name, magic was responsible. Lazlo had never doubted it, but he’d feared that he’d never see further proof of it. He had a trio of fears that sat in his gut like swallowed teeth, and when he was too quiet with his own thoughts, they’d grind together to gnaw at him from within. This was the first: that he would never see further proof of magic.
The second: that he would never find out what had happened in Weep.
The third: that he would always be as alone as he was now.
All his life, time had been passing in the only way he knew time to pass: unrushed and unrushable, as sands running through an hourglass grain by grain. And if the hourglass had been real, then in the bottom and neck—the past and the present—the sands of Lazlo’s life would be as gray as his robes, as gray as his eyes, but the top—the future—would hold a brilliant storm of color: azure and cinnamon, blinding white and yellow gold and the shell pink of svytagor blood. So he hoped, so he dreamed: that, in the course of time, grain by grain, the gray would give way to the dream and the sands of his life would run bright.
Now the bird. The presence of magic. And something beyond the reach of understanding. An affinity, a resonance. It felt like . . . it felt like the turn of a page, and a story just beginning. There was the faintest glimmer of familiarity in it, as though he knew the story, but had forgotten it. And at that moment, for no reason he could put into words, the hourglass shattered. No more, the cool gray sift of days, the diligent waiting for the future to trickle forth. Lazlo’s dream was spilled out into the air, the color and storm of it no longer a future to be reached, but a cyclone here and now. He didn’t know what, but as surely as one feels the sting of shards when an hourglass tips off a shelf and smashes, he knew that something was happening.
Right now.
8
Tizerkane
Soldiers and carriage clattered through the gates. The royal entourage was always a gorgeous spectacle, but that wasn’t what stopped Lazlo’s feet as abruptly as though his soul had flown on ahead of his body and left it stranded. It hadn’t, surely, though maybe it leaned forward, like a craned neck. A craned soul.
Such absolute, unjaded wonder he had never experienced in his life.
Warriors. That was the only word for the men who rode behind the queen. They were not of Zosma. Even at war, soldiers of the crown hardly merited that term, which belonged to ancient battles and bloodcurdling cries. It belonged to men like this, in tusked helms and bronze chest plates, with axes strapped across their backs. They towered. Their mounts were unnaturally tall. Their mounts were unnatural. They weren’t horses. They were creatures never seen before, lithe and grand and complicated. Their long necks folded back like egrets’; their legs were sleek and many-jointed, their faces deerlike, with great dark eyes and ears like sheaves of snowy feathers. And then there were their antlers: huge and branching, with a sheen like the play of prisms of warm gold. Lys.