Ari-Eil realized, as he plucked Minya back onto the walkway, that he did not wish to cease to exist.
In the garden. On the terrace. Three girls with lips stained damson and flowers in their hair. Ruby, Sparrow, and Sarai went weightless, and there were no walls or ghosts to catch them.
Or, there were ghosts, but Minya’s binding was too strict to allow them the choice they might or might not have made: to catch godspawn girls and keep them from falling into the sky. Bahar would have helped, but couldn’t. She could only watch.
Hands clutched at metal, at plum boughs.
At air.
And one of the girls—graceful in all things, even in this—slipped right off the edge.
And fell.
It was a long way down to Weep. Only the first seconds were terrible.
Well. And the last.
64
What Version of the World
Lazlo saw. He was looking up, aghast, at the unimaginable sight of the citadel tilting off its axis, when, through the blowing smoke and grit he saw something plummet from it. A tiny far-off thing. A mote, a bird.
Sarai, he thought, and shunned the possibility. Everything was unreal, tinged with the impossible. Something had fallen, but it couldn’t be her, and the great seraph couldn’t be keeling over.
But it was. It seemed to lean as though to take a better look at the city below. The delegates had debated the anchors’ purpose, assuming they kept the citadel from drifting away. But now the truth was revealed. They held it up. Or they had. It tipped slowly, still buoyed on the magnetic field of the east, west, and south anchors, but it had lost its balance, like a table with one leg cut away. It could only tip so far before it would fall.
The citadel was going to fall on the city. The impact would be incredible. Nothing could survive it. Lazlo saw how it would be. Weep would be ended, along with everyone in it. He would be ended, and so would Sarai, and dreams, and hope.
And love.
This couldn’t be happening. It couldn’t end this way. He had never felt so powerless.
The catastrophe in the sky was distant, slow, even serene. But the one on the ground was not. The street was disintegrating. The sinking anchor sheared its way through layers of crust and sediment, and the spidering cracks met and joined and became pits, calving slabs of earth and stone into the darkness below, where the first froth of the Uzumark was breaking free of its tunnels. The roar, the thunder. It was all Lazlo could hear, all he could feel. It seemed to inhabit him. And through it all, he couldn’t take his eyes off the anchor.
Impulse had drawn him this far. Something stronger took over now. Instinct or mania, he didn’t know. He didn’t wonder. There was no space in his head for thinking. It was throbbing full of horror and roar, and there was only one thing that was louder—the need to reach the anchor.
The sheen of its blue surface pulled at him. Unthinking, he took a few steps forward. His hearts were in his throat. What had been a broad avenue was fast becoming a ragged sinkhole with black water boiling up to fill it. Ruza caught his arm. He was screaming. Lazlo couldn’t hear him over the din of destruction, but it was easy to read the words his mouth formed.
“Get back!” and “Do you want to die?”
Lazlo did not want to die. The desire to not die had never been so piercing. It was like hearing a song so beautiful that you understood not only the meaning of art, but life. It gutted him, and buoyed him, ripped out his hearts and gave them back bigger. He was desperate to not die, and even more than that, to live.
Everyone else was falling back, even Eril-Fane—as though “back” were safe. Nowhere was safe, not with the citadel poised to topple. Lazlo couldn’t just retreat and watch it happen. He had to do something. Everything in him screamed out for action, and instinct or mania were telling him what action:
Go to the anchor.
He pulled free of Ruza and turned to face it, but still he hesitated. “My boy,” he heard in his mind—old Master Hyrrokkin’s words, kindly meant. “How could you help?” And Master Ellemire’s, not kindly meant. “I hardly think he’s recruiting librarians, boy.” And always, there was Thyon Nero’s voice. “Enlighten me, Strange. In what version of the world could you possibly help?”
What version of the world?
The dream version, in which he could do anything, even fly. Even reshape mesarthium. Even hold Sarai in his arms.
He took a deep breath. He’d sooner die trying to hold the world on his shoulders than running away. Better, always, to run toward. And so he did. Everyone else followed sense and command, and made for whatever fleeting safety they could find before the final cataclysm came. But not Lazlo Strange.
He pretended it was a dream. It was easier that way. He lowered his head, and ran.
Over the suicide landscape of the collapsing street, around the turbulent froth of the escaping Uzumark, over churned-up paving stones and smoking ruins, to the sheen of the blue metal that seemed to call to him.
Eril-Fane saw him and bellowed, “Strange!” He looked from the anchor to the citadel, and his horror deepened, a new layer added to the grief of this doom: the daughter who had survived all these years, only to die now. He halted his retreat, and so did his warriors, to watch Lazlo run to the anchor. It was madness, of course, but there was beauty in it. They realized, all of them—in that moment if they hadn’t already—how fond of the young outsider they’d grown. And even if they knew death was coming for them, none of them wanted to see him die first. They watched him climb over shifting rubble, losing his footing and slipping, rising again to scrabble forward until he reached it: the wall of metal that had seemed insurmountable, shrinking now as the earth sucked it under.
Even though it was sinking, still he looked so small before it. It was absurd what he did next. He put up his hands and braced it, as though, with the strength of his body, he could hold it up.
There were carvings of gods in just this pose. In the Temple of Thakra, seraphim upheld the heavens. It might have been absurd to see Lazlo attempt it, but nobody laughed, and nobody looked away.
And so they saw, all together, what happened next. It had the feel of a shared hallucination. Only Thyon Nero understood what he was seeing. He arrived on the scene out of breath. He’d run from his laboratory with his shard of mesarthium clutched in his hand, desperate to find Strange and tell him . . . tell him what?
That there were fingerprints in the metal, and it might mean something?
Well, he didn’t need to tell him. Lazlo’s body knew what to do.
He gave himself over, as he had to the mahalath. Some deep place in his mind had taken control. His palms were pressed full against the mesarthium, and they throbbed with the rhythm of his heartbeats. The metal was cool under his hands, and . . .
. . . alive.
Even with all the tumult around him, the noise and quaking and the ground shifting under his feet, he sensed the change. It felt like a hum—that is, the way your lips feel when you hum, but all over. He was unusually aware of the surface of himself, of the lines of his body and the planes of his face, as though his skin were alive with some subtle vibrations. It was strongest where his hands met the metal. Whatever was awakening within him, it was waking in the metal, too. He felt as though he were absorbing it, or it was absorbing him. It was becoming him, and he it. It was a new sense, more than touch. He felt it most in his hands, but it was spreading: a pulse of blood and spirit and . . . power.