“I can read,” said Feral, defensive. Great Ellen had taught them all. Since there was no paper in the citadel, she’d used a tray of crushed herbs and a stick, so that without even realizing it, they all associated reading with the scent of mint and thyme. “I just can’t read that.”
Lazlo’s interest was piqued. Feral fetched the book in question: the only one they had. It was like no book Lazlo had seen. It wasn’t paper and board, but all mesarthium, cover and pages. Feral opened it and turned its thin metal sheets. The alphabet was angular and somehow menacing. It made Lazlo imagine that the corresponding language must be harsh to hear. “May I?” he asked before reaching out to touch it.
It hummed against his fingers, seeming to whisper to his skin, just like the anchors, the citadel, and Rasalas. It had its own scheme of energies, small but dense, and he knew at first touch that there was more to it than met the eye. With a brush of his fingers, he awakened the page, and the markings engraved on it changed.
“What did you do?” Feral demanded, reaching protectively for the book.
Lazlo let it go, but tried to explain. “There’s more here than you can see. Look.” He reached back out and, with a fingertip, woke the page again, the runelike engravings melting away and giving rise to all new ones. “Every sheet remembers volumes of information.”
“What kind of information?”
But Lazlo couldn’t say. He had, on his own, decoded the language of Weep, but it had taken him years, and he’d had trade manifests to use to build a key. The thought of translating the gods’ language was daunting. When he drew his fingers away again, the page fell still on a diagram.
“What’s that?” asked Sarai, bending her head toward it.
The sheet was divided into narrow vertical columns, each one labeled in the inscrutable writing. “It looks like a row of books on a shelf,” said Lazlo, because the runes ran sideways, like titles printed on spines.
“They look more like plates on the drying rack to me,” said Sarai, because, unlike the spines of books, each one tapered, disclike, to a point at the top and bottom.
On a hunch, Lazlo touched the page and set it scrolling, the metal coming to life, the marks rolling over its surface in waves. They all watched, transfixed. Whatever the vertical shapes represented, they went on and on. There were dozens of them, each one labeled in the angular letters of the Mesarthim.
More mystified by it than ever, Feral explained that the book had been found here, in Skathis’s chambers. “I’ve always thought there must be answers in it. Where the Mesarthim came from, and why.”
“And what they did with the others,” Sparrow added softly.
Whatever mystery the diagram represented, it faded away at the mention of this one:
In the citadel, they’d lived their whole lives with the question of the others—not the two dozen godspawn slain in the Carnage, but the ones who’d vanished before. Thousands of them, there had to have been, over two centuries of Mesarthim rule.
“The other children,” said Lazlo, looking around at their solemn faces.
“You know about them?” asked Feral.
He did. He thought of Suheyla, and all the other women who’d birthed babies in the citadel and had their memories eaten by Letha before they were returned home. Over the past days, as Weep had revealed its dark history to him, this question had emerged: Why had the gods bred themselves on humans? Bred themselves on. His jaw clenched and he banished the pallid term, even from his mind. Why had the gods raped humans and forced them to bear—or father— their “godspawn”? Lazlo was certain that the rapes themselves weren’t the point but the means—that the children were the point. It was too systematic to be otherwise. There was even a nursery.
So the question was: Why? And: What did they do with them? What did they do with all those children? “You’ve no idea what it was all about?” he asked.
“We only know that they were taken away as soon as their gifts manifested,” explained Sarai. “Korako took them. The goddess of secrets.”
“Korako,” Lazlo repeated. “But you don’t know where she took them?”
They shook their heads.
“Could you be one of them?” asked Sparrow, fixing on Lazlo.
“I think Great Ellen thinks you are,” said Sarai, remembering. But they couldn’t ask the nurse now which baby boy she’d meant.
Lazlo told them about his fragile wisp of memory: wings against the sky, and the feeling of weightlessness. “The white bird,” he said. “I think she took me to Zosma.”
“Wraith?” said Sarai, surprised. “Why?”
Why had the great white eagle carried him away from here and abandoned him in war-torn Zosma, if indeed she had? He had no idea. “Could she have taken all of them? All of us? Could that be the answer somehow? Did Wraith carry all the babies out into the world?”
“They weren’t babies, though,” said Sarai. “Most gifts manifest at four or five, if not later, and that’s when they were taken.”
That made a difference. Could Wraith have carried children that age? Even if she could, children would remember it, surely, in a way babies wouldn’t. And if it were true, and the world was full of men and women who’d been born in a floating metal angel and carried from it by a huge white eagle that could vanish in thin air… wouldn’t there be stories?
“I don’t know.” Lazlo sighed, rubbing his face. He was feeling his fatigue. They all were. “What is she?” he asked. “The bird. Do you know? Did she belong to the gods? Was she some kind of pet, or messenger?”
“She?” repeated Feral. They had never thought to assign the bird a gender. “You keeping calling Wraith she.”
“Eril-Fane did,” Lazlo told them. “As though he knew her.”
“Maybe he knows something we don’t,” said Ruby.
“I’m sure he knows a lot that we don’t,” said Feral.
Sarai agreed. “He lived here for three years. He learned enough about the gods to kill them. He must have found out their weaknesses, and who knows what else.”
“We could talk to him,” Lazlo ventured.
Talk to her father? Meet her father? A thrill of anxious excitement raced through Sarai, but the anxiety quickly swallowed the excitement so that what was left simply felt like fear. Would he even want to meet her? Unconsciously, she glanced at Minya. The two were so tangled in her mind, all blood and vengeance and strife.
But what she saw on the bed pushed all thought of Eril-Fane from her mind. She gasped and pointed, and the others spun to look, stricken, sure to find Minya awake behind them and smiling her malevolent smile. But she wasn’t awake, or smiling.
She was simply gray.
…
“Is she dying?” cried Ruby. “Have I killed her?” Because Minya looked like she was dying, and what else could it be but the potion? She was
the color of ashes, of stone, and only Lazlo knew what it meant. He didn’t hesitate, but scooped her into his arms and laid her right down on the floor.
“What are you doing?” Feral demanded.
“It’s okay,” Lazlo said. “She’ll be all right. Look.” He took her little hands in his, one at a time, and opened her curled fingers to press her palms to the floor. He held them like that, palms flat against the metal. Her legs were touching it, too, and it wasn’t long before it was obvious: Her blue was coming back.
Sarai took a deep breath. Minya’s death also meant her own, and she’d braced for it for a terrible second. Minya had looked so ill, but she was fine now, bluer every second, and still sleeping peacefully. “What happened?” she asked Lazlo.
“She wasn’t touching mesarthium,” he said. He shook his head. “Stupid. I should have thought of it. But it happened fast.” He marveled. “I’d never have thought it would be that fast.”
“What?” demanded Ruby. “That what would be that fast?”
“Her fading,” he said, looking at his own hands. They were fully blue now, of course, but he remembered how, down in the city when he’d still been human, his hands had turned gray when he touched mesarthium. It had taken days for the tinge to wear off, but Minya hadn’t been lying here for much more than an hour. “It was a lot slower for me.”