Setting aside, for a moment, the question of how he had known a goddess, there was the more pertinent issue of: “Evil or not, how was she up there? Eril-Fane told us the citadel was empty.”
The Godslayer had assured the delegation that the gods were dead, the citadel empty, and they weren’t in any danger.
Calixte pursed her lips and looked up at the great hovering thing. “Apparently he was wrong.”
…
Eril-Fane and Azareen were positioned halfway between the amphitheater and the eastern gate, where a bottleneck of merging streets made a nasty tangle. They were mounted on their spectrals, side by side on a small bridge that arced over the city’s main thoroughfare. Below them, their people passed in graceless turmoil, too many at once, frustration and dread turning them volatile. Their presence, they hoped, would calm the boil to a simmer.
The newly revealed sun glared down on them. It felt like being watched.
“Why is it still here?” Azareen asked, flinging a hand upward, to where the citadel still hovered. “He said he could move it, so why hasn’t he? Why isn’t it gone, and the godspawn with it?”
“I don’t know,” said Eril-Fane. “Perhaps it isn’t so easily done. He may have to learn how to master it.” There was also the matter of grieving, he thought but didn’t say.
“He mastered it quickly enough last night. You saw the wings. Rasalas. If he can do that, he can move the citadel. Unless he has other plans.”
“What other plans?”
“We need to be ready, in case of attack.”
“Lazlo won’t attack,” said Eril-Fane, uneasy. “As for the others, if they could, why didn’t they before?”
“You can’t just assume we’re safe.”
“I assume nothing. We’ll make ready as best we can, though I don’t know how we could ever be ready for that.” To fight an army of their own dearly departed? It was the stuff of nightmares.
“And there could be more out there besides,” said Azareen, gesturing to the Cusp and beyond. They knew now that there were godspawn in the citadel, but Lazlo’s transformation bespoke a new and unsettling possibility: that there were more out in the world, too, living in far-off countries, their flesh un-blue, their heritage a secret, perhaps even to them.
“There could be,” Eril-Fane agreed.
“They can pass as human,” said Azareen. “They can hide in plain sight, like he did.”
“He wasn’t hiding,” Eril-Fane replied. “He said he didn’t know.”
“And you believe him?”
He hesitated, then nodded. In the young faranji, Eril-Fane’s starved and stunted paternal feelings had found a place to fix. He was more than fond of the young man. He felt protective of him, and in spite of everything, he couldn’t help trusting him.
“You think it’s a coincidence that he studied Weep?” asked Azareen. “That he learned our language, our legends?” Now that she knew what he was, Lazlo’s fascination took on a sinister character.
“Not a coincidence, no,” said Eril-Fane. “I think there was something that called to him, something he didn’t understand.”
“How did he end up there, though, all the way in Zosma? Is he… one of ours?”
Eril-Fane turned to look at her—his wife, who’d been gotten with godspawn like so many other daughters of Weep. When she said “ours,” she was asking if some woman of the city had given birth to Lazlo up in the sterile room in the citadel the gods had used for that purpose.
“Let’s hope,” said Eril-Fane. “Because if not, then there could be more Mesarthim out there, maybe another citadel floating over another city, somewhere on Zeru.” It was a big world, much of it unmapped. In what distant places might bad gods reign? But Eril-Fane had a sense that Lazlo was tied to Weep, that all of it hinged on this city, this citadel, these gods and godspawn.
For fifteen years, the people of Weep had lived with the certainty that the monsters were dead, and Eril-Fane had lived with the burden of it: his the hands that had slain them, gods and their children alike—and his child, too, or so he’d believed. He had committed a crime as heinous as the gods’ own, and though he’d never tried to forgive himself, he had lived with it by telling himself there had been no choice, that it had been necessary to ensure that Weep would never again be forced to its knees, or its belly, or its back.
Now he was tracing the implications of this new discovery—that the metal activated Mesarthim power—and even that small, sickly faith was eroding. What if it hadn’t been necessary to kill them? “When they’re away from the metal,” he ventured, reluctant to speak his suspicion aloud, “does their power just…wear off?”
Azareen tried to read his face, as she’d been trying to do all these years. He had been the plaything of the goddess of despair. Isagol had mangled his emotions, poisoned his faculties for love and trust until they were so tangled with hate and shame that he hardly knew one from the other. She understood his meaning, though, and felt a stab of the remorse she knew he was inflicting on himself. That was Azareen’s burden: to feel all the pain of Eril-Fane’s torment, and be unable to help him. “Even if it does,” she said warily, “you couldn’t have known.”
“I should have waited. Babes in cradles, what was the rush? They couldn’t hurt us. I should have tried to understand.”
“Someone else would have done it if you hadn’t,” she said, “and it would have been worse.”
Eril-Fane knew it was true, but it hardly helped to hear that the rest of his people would have been more barbaric than he had been. “They were babies. I could have protected them instead of—”
“You protected us,” said Azareen fiercely.
“I didn’t, though.” His voice had dropped low. The look he gave her was one she knew well—it was helplessness, guilt. He was remembering her cries in the citadel, and her belly swelled with a baby that wasn’t his, that wasn’t human. “I didn’t protect you.”
“And I didn’t protect you,” she said. “No one protected anyone. How could we? They were gods! And yet you freed us. All of us, my love. The whole city.” She pointed to a little girl in the flow of people beneath them. She was riding on her father’s shoulders, red-cheeked and wide-eyed, her hair sticking out in black sprouts of pigtails. “Because of you, that child will never be a slave. Her family will never answer Skathis’s knock and see her borne away on Rasalas.”
She could have gone on reassuring him that he was a hero, but she knew he didn’t want it. It had never helped, and he probably didn’t even hear it. He was still looking at the little girl in the crowd, but there was a haunted vagueness to his gaze, and Azareen knew he was seeing someone else—his own daughter, whose broken blue body Lazlo had lifted off an iron gate in the earliest hours of dawn.
Eril-Fane had fallen to his knees at the sight of her, and he’d done something that Azareen hadn’t seen him do since Isagol had her way with him, body and mind. He’d wept. She was still trying to decide if it was a good thing or bad. For years he couldn’t cry, and now he could. Did that mean the broken pathways of his emotions were healing?
Just in time to mourn the death of his daughter.
It was Azareen’s turn to do something she hadn’t done in years. She reached for her husband’s hand, slipping her fingers into his, feeling his calluses, his scars, the warmth of him, the realness. They’d had only five days and nights as husband and wife, nearly two decades ago now, but she remembered the feel of these hands— these—on her body, learning everything about her, or at least as much as a young husband could learn in five days and nights. After the liberation, he wouldn’t touch her or let her touch him. Now Azareen’s hearts seemed to pause in their rhythm, waiting to see what he would do.
For a moment, he only fell still. She watched him look down at their hands—at hers inside his much bigger one, both of them scarred and callused, a far cry from the young hands that had known each other so well. She saw him swallow, and close his eyes, and then gently, gently fold his fingers over hers.
And when her hearts resumed beating, she imagined she could feel a spill of light into the veins that carried her spirit.