Like this one.
He straightened the fog net and peered over it at the Cusp. He’d thought at first that it was a mirage. In the midst of the Elmuthaleth, sky had met ground in an unbroken circle, flat and featureless, as far as the eye could see. To travel across it, day after day, for weeks, to make and break camp each dusk and dawn with a sameness that merged the days to a blur, it defied the mind to believe that it could end. When the first shimmer had appeared in the distance, he’d thought it must be an illusion, like the lakes they sometimes saw that vanished as they drew near, but this hadn’t vanished. Over the past several days it had grown from a pale streak on the horizon to . . . well, to the Cusp, whatever the Cusp was.
It formed the eastern edge of the Elmuthaleth, and the other faranji were content to call it a mountain range, but it didn’t look like a mountain range. It lacked peaks. The entire formation—a kind of immense mound—was white, from the dun desert floor to the blue of the sky. It looked like milky crystal, or perhaps ice.
Or . . . it looked like what the myths said it was.
“Almost there. Hard to believe.”
It was Calixte’s voice. She was one of the other faranji. Coming up beside Lazlo to share the view, she pushed back the hood of her chaulnot to reveal her fine, small head. It had been naked as an egg the first time Lazlo saw her—forcibly shaved, as his own had once been, and just as crudely—but her hair was growing in now. It was a soft brown fluff like fledgling plumage. Her bruises were long gone, but she still had scars where her manacles had rubbed her wrists and ankles raw.
Calixte was not only the first girl Lazlo counted as a friend, but also the first criminal.
“By this time tomorrow . . .” he said. He didn’t need to finish the thought. The anticipation was palpable. By this time tomorrow they would be there. They would climb the single track that led through Fort Misrach to the top of the Cusp, and they would get their first sight of that which lay beyond it.
Weep.
“Last chance for a theory,” said Calixte. Her ragged notebook was in her hands. She held it up and flapped it like a butterfly.
“You don’t give up, do you?”
“It’s been said. Look, there’s one page left.” She showed him. “I saved it for you.”
“You shouldn’t have.”
“Yes, I should. Don’t think I’m letting you reach the Cusp without giving me at least one.”
One theory.
When the delegates had met up in Alkonost, they had assumed they would be enlightened as to the reason for their journey. The nature of Weep’s “problem,” as it were. They’d earned that much, surely, by coming so far. And when Eril-Fane rose to his feet at the head of the table at their first shared meal, they’d waited with hushed expectancy for the information that was their due. The next morning they would set foot to the great and terrible Elmuthaleth. It was only fair that they should know why—and preferably while they could still turn back if they chose.
“In your time among us,” Eril-Fane had told them then, “you will be called upon to believe things you would not at this moment find it possible to believe. You are rational men and women who believe what you can see and prove. Nothing would be gained by telling you now. On the contrary. You will find that the relentless nothingness of the Elmuthaleth has a way of amplifying the workings of your mind. I would sooner it amplify your curiosity than your skepticism.”
In other words: It’s a surprise.
And so they’d gone on in mystery, but not without resentment and a vast deal of speculation. The crossing had been hard: bleak and monotonous, physically and mentally grueling. The theory purse had been Calixte’s idea, and a good one. Lazlo had seen how it gave the others a spark of life, to play a game of sorts, to have something to win. It didn’t hurt that they liked to hear themselves talk, and it gave them opportunity. It was simple: You made a guess as to what the problem was, and Calixte wrote it down in her book. You could make as many guesses as you wanted, but each one cost ten silver, paid into the purse, which was a shabby affair of old green brocade held closed with a gaudy brooch. Calixte said it had been her grandmother’s, but then she also said she came from a family of assassins—or else a family of acrobats, depending on her mood—so it was hard to know what to believe.
Once they reached Weep and all was revealed, whoever had made the closest guess would win the purse—which was up to some five hundred silver now, and bursting at its frayed green seams.
Lazlo had not entered a theory into the book. “There couldn’t possibly be an idea left unclaimed,” he said.
“Well, there’s not a boring one left unclaimed, that’s for certain. If I hear one more manly variation on the conquest theory I might kill myself. But you can do better. I know you can. You’re a storyteller. Dream up something wild and improbable,” she pleaded. “Something beautiful and full of monsters.”
“Beautiful and full of monsters?”
“All the best stories are.”
Lazlo didn’t disagree with that. He made a final adjustment to the net, and turned back toward camp. “It isn’t a story contest, though.”
Calixte fell into step beside him. “But it is. It’s a true-story contest, and I think the truth must be stranger than that lot is fit to dream up.” She flicked her notebook dismissively toward the center of camp, where the rest of the faranji were gathered waiting for their dinner to be cooked for them. They’d early established themselves in the role of guests—most of them, anyway—and were content to stand idle while the caravan drovers and the Tizerkane—and Lazlo—saw to all the work. They had already covered their lightweight chaulnots with their heavy woolen ones against the coming evening chill—proof that not one joule of energy had been converted to heat by means of respectable labor. With their hoods up and their purposeless milling, Lazlo thought they looked like a pack of ghosts on coffee break.
“Maybe not,” he allowed.
“So it’s all up to you,” said Calixte. “You can’t help but come up with a strange idea. Any idea you have is a Strange idea. Get it?”
Lazlo laughed in spite of himself. Usually, plays on his name were much less good-humored. “I’m not a member of the delegation,” he reminded her. What was he? Storyteller and secretary and doer of odd jobs, neither Tizerkane nor delegate, just someone along for the dream.
“But you are a faranji,” she countered. And this was true, though he didn’t fit with the rest of them. He’d ridden into their cities mounted on a spectral, after all, and most of them assumed he was from Weep—at least, until Thyon Nero disabused them of that notion.
“He’s just an orphan peasant from Zosma, you know,” he’d said, lest they be tempted to feel anything like respect for him.
“Even if I won,” Lazlo said to Calixte, “the others would just say I already had the answer from Eril-Fane.”
“I don’t care what they’d say,” Calixte replied. “It’s my game. I decide the winner, and I believe you.”
And Lazlo was surprised by the strength of his gratitude—to be believed, even by a tomb raider from a family of assassins. Or perhaps especially by a tomb raider from a family of assassins. (Or acrobats, depending on her mood.)
Calixte, like he, didn’t fit with the rest. But she, unlike he, was a member of the delegation. The most puzzling member, perhaps, and the least anticipated. She was even a surprise to Eril-Fane, who’d gone to Syriza seeking a builder, not an acrobat.