Time slowed. He watched Thyon’s knuckles whiten, saw the span of visible steel lengthen as the sword was drawn up and out of its sheath. It had a curve to it, like a rib. It had a mirror brightness in the glavelight, and caught gold in it, and gray. Lazlo’s eyes locked with Thyon’s. He saw calculation there, as Thyon weighed the trouble of killing him with the risk of letting him live.
And he knew how that calculus would come out. With him alive, there would always be someone who knew the secret, while killing him would be no trouble at all. Thyon might leave his engraved ancestral sword skewered through Lazlo’s corpse, and it would be returned to him cleaned. The whole thing would simply be tidied away. Someone like Nero might do as he liked to someone like Lazlo.
But . . . he didn’t.
He sheathed the blade. “You will never speak of it,” he said. “You will never write of it. No one will ever know. Do you understand me?”
“Yes,” said Lazlo, hoarse.
“Swear to it,” Thyon ordered, but then he cast his eyes over the books on the floor and abruptly changed his mind. “On second thought, don’t swear.” His lips curved in a subtle jeer. “Promise me three times.”
Lazlo was startled. A triple promise? It was a child’s vow from fairy tales, where breaking it was a curse, and it was more powerful to Lazlo than any vow on god or monarch would have been. “I promise,” he said, shaking with the chill of his own near death. “I promise,” he said again, and his face was hot and burning. “I promise.”
The words, repeated, had the rhythm of an incantation, and they were the last that passed between the two young men for more than four years. Until the day the golden godson came in person to the Enquiries desk to requisition Lazlo’s books.
The Complete Works of Lazlo Strange.
Gripping the request form, Lazlo’s hands shook. The books were his, and they were all that was his. He’d made them, and he loved them in the way one loves things that come of one’s own hands, but even that wasn’t the extent of it. They weren’t just a collection of notes. They were where he kept his impossible dream—every discovery he’d made about the Unseen City, every piece he’d puzzled into place. And it wasn’t for the simple accumulation of knowledge, but with the goal of one day . . . circumventing impossibility. Of somehow going there, where no outsider had ever been. Of crossing the desert, seeing those glittering domes with his own eyes, and finding out, at last, what happened to the Unseen City.
His books were a seven-year-long record of his hopes. Even touching them gave him courage. And now they were to fall into Thyon Nero’s hands?
“What in the world,” Master Hyrrokkin had asked, “could Thyon Nero want with your books?”
“I don’t know,” said Lazlo, at a loss. “Nothing. Only to take them away from me.”
The old man clucked his tongue. “Surely such pettiness is beneath him.”
“You think so? Well, then perhaps he intends to read them cover to cover.”
Lazlo’s tone was flat, and Master Hyrrokkin took his point. That scenario was indeed the more ridiculous. “But why?” Hyrrokkin persisted. “Why should he want to take them away from you?”
And Lazlo couldn’t tell him that. What he himself was wondering was: Why now, four years later? He had done nothing to break his promise, or to draw Nero’s ire in any way. “Because he can?” he asked, bleak.
He fought the requisition. Of course he did. He went straight to the master of archives to plead his case. The books were his own, he said, and not property of the library. It had always been made clear that the expertise of librarians was unworthy of the term scholarship. As such, how could they now be claimed? It was contradictory and unjust.
“Unjust? You ought to be proud, young man,” Villiers, the master, told him. “Thyon Nero has taken an interest in your work. It’s a great day for you.”
A great day indeed. For seven years, Lazlo had been “Strange the dreamer,” and his books had been “scribblings” and “foolishness.” Now, just like that, they were his “work,” validated and stolen in one fell swoop.
“Please,” he begged, urgent and hushed. “Please don’t give him my books.”
And . . . they didn’t.
They made him do it.
“You’re disgracing yourself,” Villiers snapped. “And I won’t have you disgrace the library, too. He’s the golden godson, not some thief in the stacks. He’ll return them when he’s done with them. Now be off with you.”
And so he had no choice. He loaded them into a crate and onto a handcart and trundled them out of the library, through the front gates, and down the long road that spiraled around Zosimos Ridge. He paused and looked out. The Eder sparkled in the sun, the rich brown of a pretty girl’s eyes. The New Palace arched across it, as fantastical as a painted backdrop in a fairy play. Birds wheeled over the fishing docks, and a long golden pennant flew from the cupola of Nero’s pale-pink palace. Lazlo made his slow way there. Rang the bell with deep reluctance. Remembered ringing another bell four years earlier, with Miracles for Breakfast clutched in his hands. He’d never seen it again. Would these books be any different?
A butler answered. He bid Lazlo leave the crate, but Lazlo refused. “I must see Lord Nero,” he said, and when Thyon at last presented himself, Lazlo asked him simply, “Why?”
“Why?” The alchemist was in his shirtsleeves, without his scarlet cravat. His blade was in its place, though, and his hand rested casually on its hilt. “I’ve always wanted to ask you that, you know.”
“Me?”
“Yes. Why, Strange? Why did you give it to me?” It? The secret, and all that followed. “When you might have kept it, and been someone yourself.”
The truth was—and nothing would have persuaded Nero to believe it—that it had never occurred to Lazlo to seek his own advantage. In the tombwalk that day, it had been very clear to him: Here was a story of greedy queens and wicked fathers and war on the horizon, and . . . it wasn’t his story. It was Thyon’s. To take it for himself . . . it would have been stealing. It was as simple as that. “I am someone,” he said. He gestured to the crate. “That’s who I am.” And then, with quiet intensity, “Don’t take them. Please.”
There was a moment, very brief, when the guarded dispassion fell away from Thyon’s face, and Lazlo saw something human in him. Regretful, even. Then it was gone. “Remember your promise,” he warned, and shut the door in Lazlo’s face.
Lazlo returned to his room late that evening, having lingered at dinner to avoid it. Reaching his door, he took his glave down off its hook, hesitated, then hung it back up. With a deep breath, he entered. He hoped that darkness might soften the loss, but there was just enough moonlight to bathe his window ledge in a soft glow. Its emptiness was stark. The room felt hollow and dead, like a body with its hearts cut out. Breathing wasn’t easy. He dropped onto the edge of his bed. “They’re only books,” he told himself. Just paper and ink.
Paper, ink, and years.
Paper, ink, years, and his dream.
He shook his head. His dream was in his mind and in his soul. Thyon might steal his books, but he couldn’t steal that.
That was what he told himself that first long night bereft of his books, and he had trouble falling asleep for wondering where they were and what Nero had done to them. He might have burned them, or put them into a moldering cellar. He might even now be pulling them apart page by page, folding them into birds, and launching them off his high widow’s walk, one by one.
When he finally did sleep, Lazlo dreamed his books were buried beneath the earth, and that the blades of grass that grew up from them whispered “Weep, Weep” when the winds blew, and all who heard it felt tears prick their eyes.
Never once did he consider that Thyon might be reading them. That, in a room as opulent as Lazlo’s was plain, with his feet up on a tufted stool and a glave on either side, he was reading long into the night while servants brought him tea, and supper, and tea again. Lazlo certainly never imagined him taking notes, with a swan quill and octopus ink from an inkwell of inlaid lys that had actually come from Weep some five hundred years ago. His handsome face was devoid of mockery or malice, and was instead intent, alive, and fascinated.