What a treasure trove he and Calixte had uncovered. At least, the books looked like treasure. He had no way to judge their contents.
Alongside Ruza, he started lifting them out of the basket and stacking them in crates in the cart they’d backed up to the sinkhole. There was a donkey in harness, drowsily waiting to make the return journey to the Merchants’ Guildhall. For hours they’d been trudging back and forth, stacking the books in the halls, in the dining room, anywhere there was space, just to get them away from here, lest the sinkhole give way and spill what remained of the city’s lost knowledge into the roiling Uzumark. Thyon and Calixte had gone to Eril-Fane as soon as they realized what they’d discovered. They’d found him looking haggard and sorrowful, and their news had brought him a tired smile.
The Tizerkane had been involved in defensive preparations, but he had lent them Ruza and Tzara to aid in their salvage efforts. Thyon had hardly expected to work all night long, but no one had suggested stopping, so he couldn’t, either, without having to imagine the meaning of the words they’d call him under their breath. They’d eaten bread and cheese a while ago, and drunk gulps from a bottle of something potent that had burned the edges off his fatigue— and perhaps the surface layer off his throat as well, not that he was complaining.
Thyon had thought that, as a scholar, he should be down in the library, selecting which books to save, but it had been pointed out— correctly, if not politely—that he couldn’t read them, and was thus useless, except as a pair of arms to haul them.
Demoted to laborer. Imagine.
At least he could examine them as he unloaded them. Carefully he lifted out a tome. It was a marvel: soft white leather leafed liberally in gold. There was a moon etched on the spine. He couldn’t help himself. “What does this say?” he asked Ruza, holding it out for him to see.
The warrior took it. He was shorter than Thyon and more heavily made—thick-shouldered, with big, square hands that made the alchemist’s look fragile—like the porcelain hands in jewelers’ shops that were used for displaying rings. “This?” Ruza squinted, tracing the gold letters with a broad fingertip, and, Thyon noted, leaving a smudge. He gritted his teeth and refrained from snatching the volume back. “It says,” the warrior told him, “ ‘Greatest Mysteries of Alchemy Revealed.’ ”
Thyon’s hearts gave a lurch. “Really?” he asked. The alchemists of Weep had been paragons of the ancient world, and all their secrets were lost.
He could learn the language. He could read all these books. A great hunger and excitement filled him. He could stay here to study. He didn’t have to go home.
Zosma. The thought of his city, of his empty pink palace, even of his laboratory, they conjured no feeling of “home.” He didn’t miss any of it, and not any person, either. The realization made him feel adrift, like one of the ulola flowers borne on a gust of wind.
It also made him feel the smallest bit…free.
“Mm.” Ruza nodded. “But oh, what’s this? Down here it says—” And, pointing at the subtitle that Thyon could see was only three words long, purported to read out, “‘A practical handbook for making the rich richer and granting eternal life to greedy monarchs so that they can rule poorly forever’?” With confusion painted on his face, he looked up at Thyon, and asked, pretending to be an imbecile, “Is that what alchemy does?”
Thyon’s excitement curdled. He bent back to the basket to hide the flush that spread up his neck. He hated being mocked. It brought up his father’s voice, so elegant and vicious. “If you don’t know how to read,” he retorted stiffly, “just say so.”
“Funny,” said Ruza, unperturbed. “Seems like you’re the one who can’t read. Oh. Look.” He picked up another book. “This one’s called ‘Manners for Faranji: How Not to Act Like a Supercilious Gulik to Your Barbarian Hosts.’ Did they not have this one back in your library?”
Thyon didn’t know what gulik meant, and supposed it was better that way. As for supercilious, he had to revise his notion that Ruza’s Common Tongue was rudimentary. Perhaps his language lessons with Strange had gone both ways. Which meant, of course, that all his curt commands were every bit as rude as they sounded.
If Strange were here, he would have made some clever retort, and their eyes would have laughed as they strove to look serious. But Strange wasn’t here, and Ruza’s eyes weren’t laughing. Thyon took the book without comment and added it to the crate.
With every book he unloaded, he gazed at the cover and the inscrutable title, and felt locked out of it by his own ignorance. Nothing would have induced him to ask for Ruza’s help again, but one book was too extraordinary to simply stack into a crate. Lifting it out of the basket, he felt something like reverence. Its cover wasn’t leather or board but cloisonné—an intricate picture of inlaid enamel and what could only be lys and precious stones. By the way it had been worn smooth in places, he guessed that it was very old, and had been much handled in its time. As for the image depicted in a hundred vivid colors, it was a battle: a battle between giants and angels.
Seraphim, he thought. And ijji, the monstrous race they were supposed to have slain and piled in the pyre the size of a moon. He’d scoffed at the story when Strange told it, the night before they reached Weep. But there was no more scoffing after climbing the Cusp, which was, beyond doubt, the very pyre.
Opening the book, Thyon saw there were engravings inside, depicting more monsters and angels. It might all have spilled straight from Strange’s story.
“Are we taking a reading break?” asked Ruza. “Or should I say, a looking at the pictures break?”
Thyon closed the book and turned away.
“Don’t you want to know what it says?” asked Ruza.
“No,” said Thyon. He went to put the book with the rest, at the last moment sliding it instead into a gap between crates, so that he could find it later. He wasn’t done with it.
They got the cart loaded again, and Calixte and Tzara climbed back out of the pit. Calixte wasn’t bounding now, and even Tzara looked weary. Thyon felt hot and dirty. Too tired to think straight, he rolled his sleeves up to his elbows.
“What happened to you?” asked Calixte, staring at his forearms.
Hastily he rolled his sleeves back down. “Nothing.”
“That’s nothing?” she said, eyebrows raised. “It looks like you’ve been training ravid kittens how to hunt.”
But that was not what it looked like. The marks on Thyon’s arms were scars, too regular to make sense. They might have been measured with a ruler, they were so precise, each two inches long, and spaced a quarter inch apart. Several were fresh and raw, though not altogether new: Puckers of old scar tissue were split with red lines, as though new cuts had been made on the healed sites of older ones.
“Did you do that to yourself?” asked Ruza, confused.
“It’s an alchemical experiment,” Thyon lied, his voice tight. He thought of the secret only Lazlo Strange knew—how he drew his own spirit with a syringe, and used it to make azoth. And there were some bruises and little scabbed needle pricks from that, but these were something else. Not even Strange knew this secret. “You wouldn’t understand.”
“No, I know,” said Ruza, “because I’m just a stupid barbarian.”
“That’s not why. Only an alchemist could understand.” Also a lie. Thyon was certain that this wouldn’t make sense to anyone.
Ruza snorted. “But I am a stupid barbarian?”
“Did I say so?”
“You say it with your face.”
“That’s just his face,” said Calixte in a pretense of defending him. “He can’t help having indignant nostrils. Can you, Nero? You probably come from a long line of indignant nostrils. Aristocrats are issued them at birth, along with haughty eyes and judgmental cheeks.”
“Judgmental cheeks?” repeated Ruza. “Can cheeks be judgmental?”