“I’ve wondered. I’ve just never asked.”
“Ghosts can do everything the living can do,” Sparrow told her, looking to the Ellens for confirmation. “As long as they believe it.”
“And,” Sarai added, “as long as Minya lets us.”
But she wasn’t thinking of sleep in any case. As she took Lazlo’s hand and led him from the gallery, sleep was the last thing on her mind.
Chapter 11
Cannibals and Virgins
“We should come back with some rope,” said Thyon, eyeing the crumbling edges of the sinkhole.
“While you do that,” said Calixte, “I’ll just go down and open the door.”
“It isn’t—” Safe, he was going to say, but there wasn’t much point. Calixte had already jumped into the hole.
Thyon let out a hard breath and watched her, seeming weightless as she passed between handholds or simply leapt, landing on narrow ledges with virtually no sound of impact. In a matter of seconds she was down in the pit, crossing it in little skips, like a child crossing a stream on stepping-stones. Except the stepping-stones were veins of mesarthium gleaming amid chunks of broken rock and shifting piles of earth, beneath which an underground river raged.
Thyon held his breath, watching her, half expecting the ground to give way and suck her into the dark. But it didn’t, and then she was scaling the far side of the sinkhole, if possible even faster than she’d descended. She paused, only yards below the door, to look over her shoulder at him and call up, “Well?”
Well indeed. What to do? Go for rope, knowing she’d open the door while he was gone and have the discovery to herself? Or follow her and take the risk of plunging into the Uzumark to be swept away flailing and drown in the dark?
Neither choice appealed.
“If you’re afraid,” called Calixte, “I can just tell you what I find!”
Gritting his teeth, Thyon paced the edge, looking for a place to go over. Calixte had made it look easy. It wasn’t. Where she’d leapt, he skidded, kicking off a minor avalanche, only to slide into his own dirt plume and choke on the laden air. He reached out to catch himself on a protruding rock, but it came away in his hand and he pitched off balance, only saving himself from tumbling headlong into the pit by sprawling out like a starfish. Lying there hugging the dirt, his mouth full of grit, he seethed with resentment for the bounding girl who’d lured him into danger, as though his life were worth no more than hers, to be thrown away on senseless risk.
“Get up,” she called. “I’ll wait for you. Go slow. We aren’t all so blessed to be descended from spiders.”
Spiders?
Thyon picked himself up—sort of. He kept on hugging the slope and made his way down like that, getting dirtier with every step. Crossing the pit, he found leaping unnecessary. He set his feet on a seam of mesarthium and followed it, windmilling his arms for balance. Calixte’s leaping had been showmanship, he concluded, or else the sheer joy of motion. Reaching the slope below her, he looked up and saw that she had, indeed, waited.
She was pretending to have fallen asleep.
Peeved, he picked up a pebble and threw it at her. He missed, but she heard it plink against the ledge of rock and cracked open an eye
midsnore. “You’ll regret that, faranji,” she said with equanimity.
“Faranji? You’re a faranji, too.”
“Not like you.” She picked herself up from her pretend-slumber slump and dusted the dirt from her behind. “I mean, there are faranji, and there are faranji.” On the second faranji, she grimaced and raised her eyebrows, indicating a specially pernicious breed of outsider, in which category, clearly, she placed him. She helpfully pointed out a foothold to him while saying, “There’s the kind of guest who’s honored to be invited, and the kind who believes he’s bestowing honor by accepting.”
He stepped on the foothold and reached for a rock she indicated next. “The kind who expresses interest in the culture and language,” she went on. “And the kind who disdains it as barbaric, and insists on an entire camel to carry foodstuffs from their own land, as though they might perish on native fare.”
“That wasn’t me,” argued Thyon. It was Ebliz Tod who’d done that. So all right, he’d brought some rations, but they were in case of emergency, and hardly a whole camel’s worth. He’d had a lot of gear, transporting a working alchemical laboratory. Any extra camels were well justified. “And I’ve never called anything barbaric,” he said. That charge he could cleanly dispute.
Calixte shrugged. “Thoughts count, too, Nero. If you think you’ve concealed yours, you’re mistaken.”
His impulse was to angrily dismiss everything she’d said, but could he? The truth was, he had been sensible of bestowing upon Weep the honor of his presence, and why not? Any city in the world would be grateful to host him. As to their language, that brought up more complicated feelings. Back in Zosma, he’d learned enough from Strange’s books to make a fair greeting and impress Eril-Fane…that is, until Strange had gone and opened his mouth and outshone him. It only made sense. It was Strange’s life work. Of course he spoke better than Thyon could after such brief study. Had Thyon thought he wouldn’t speak up?
He had thought that. He’d thought Strange would meekly subside while Thyon stole his work and his dream, and he’d been wrong.
Instead, Strange left with the Godslayer and his warriors, and when Thyon next saw him, several months later, he’d practically become one of them, riding a spectral, wearing clothes like theirs, and speaking their language fluently. After that, Thyon had told himself it was beneath him. He wasn’t about to suffer in comparison to a foundling librarian. He was the golden godson. If they wanted to address him, they should do the work, not he. And so he hadn’t learned any more of their language than he could help.
He found the next handhold himself and hoisted himself higher. “You’re the good kind of faranji, I suppose.”
“Oh yes,” she said. “Very good. I even taste good, or so I’m told.”
He was focused on not falling to his death, and so he missed the mischief in her voice. “Taste,” he scoffed. “I suppose they’re cannibals. Who’s calling them barbarians now?”
Calixte laughed with delighted disbelief, and it was only then, too late, that Thyon took her meaning. Oh gods. Taste. He flung back his head to look up at her, nearly losing his balance in the process. She laughed harder at the shock on his face. “Cannibals!” she repeated. “That’s good. I’m going to start calling Tzara that. My sweet cannibal. Can I tell you a secret?” She whispered the rest, wide-eyed and zestful: “I’m a cannibal, too.”
Thyon flushed with mortification. “I’ll thank you to keep your private matters to yourself.”
“You’re blushing like a maiden,” said Calixte. “Honestly, you’re as innocent as Lazlo. Who’d have thought it?”
“It’s not innocence, it’s propriety—”
“If your next sentence starts with ‘a lady would never,’ you can choke on it, Nero. I’m no lady.”
The wicked relish with which she disavowed the word robbed Thyon of any easy insult, so he put his energy into swinging himself up to the little lip of earth on which she stood. Now he was level with her and could hardly avoid her merry eyes, though he tried his best, and blushed anew.
“Are you a maiden?” Calixte asked. “You can tell me.”
A maiden? He kept right on climbing. Did she mean a virgin? Was she really asking him that? It defied belief. The doorway was nearly within reach now, and she was still busy mocking him.
“It’s nothing to be ashamed of,” she told his back. “Plenty of fine gentlemen wait until marriage.”
“And you’ve been acquainted with ‘plenty of fine gentlemen,’ have you?”