They came to look and see what manner of world it was, and they found rich soil and sweet seas and plants that dreamed they were birds and drifted up to the clouds on leaves like wings. They also found the ijji, a huge and hideous race that kept humans as slaves, pets, or food, depending on the version of the tale. The seraphim took pity on the humans, and for them they slew the ijji, every one, and they piled the dead at the edge of the great dust sea and burned them on a pyre the size of a moon.
And that, the story went, is how man claimed ascendency over the world that was Zeru, while the demons were stricken from it by the angels. Once upon a long-lost time, people had believed it, and had believed, too, that the seraphim would return one day and sit in judgment over them. There had been temples and priestesses and fire rites and sacrifice, but that was a long time ago. No one believed in the old myths anymore.
“Get out your pencil,” Lazlo told Calixte, emerging from his tent. He had taken the time, first, to groom his spectral, Lixxa, and then himself. His last sand bath. He wouldn’t miss it. “Are you ready for this? It’s going to be good. Extremely improbable.”
“Let’s have it, then.”
“All right.” He cleared his throat. Calixte waggled her pencil, impatient. “The problem,” he said, as though it were perfectly reasonable, “is that the seraphim have returned.”
She looked delighted. She bent her head and started scribbling.
From the direction of the faranji, Lazlo heard a laugh. “Seraphim,” someone scoffed. “Absurd.”
He ignored them. “Of course you know the seraphim,” he told Calixte. “They came down from the skies, but do you know where they came to? They came here.” He gestured around him. “The great dust sea, it’s called in the tales. What else but the Elmuthaleth? And the funeral pyre the size of a moon?” He pointed to the single feature in the great flat land.
“The Cusp?” Calixte asked.
“Look at it. It’s not crystal, it’s not marble, and it’s definitely not ice.”
The sun had melted to a stripe of copper and the sky was deepening blue. The Cusp looked more otherworldly even than by daylight, aglow as though lit from within. “Then what is it?” Calixte asked.
“The fused bones of slaughtered demons,” said Lazlo, just as Brother Cyrus had once told him. “Thousands of them. The holy fire burned away their flesh, and whatever their bones were made of, it melted into glass. You can still see their skulls, all full of teeth, and make out their curved spines and long skeletal feet. Carrion birds nest in their great eye sockets. Nothing can survive there but eaters of the dead.”
Calixte had stopped writing. Her eyes were wide. “Really?” she asked, breathless.
Lazlo broke into a smile. Extremely improbably, he was about to remind her, but someone else answered first.
“Of course not really,” said the voice, with a drawl of exaggerated patience. It was Ebliz Tod, the builder. He had not appreciated sharing the Godslayer’s invitation with the girl who’d “scuttled up the Cloudspire like a bug,” and had been heard to voice such complaints as, “it demeans those of us of true accomplishment to count a thief in our number.” Now he said to her, with utmost condescension, “Dear girl, your credulity is as vast as this desert. One might get lost in it and never again encounter fact or reason.”
A couple of the others laughed with him, marveling that anyone could believe such nonsense. Thyon Nero was leaning back against the windbreak, gilded by both sunset and firelight. “Strange believes it, too,” he told Drave, the explosionist, who sat by his side, faring poorly by proximity. The golden godson managed to look dashing even in the midst of a desert crossing. The sun had treated his skin to a happy golden hue, and bleached the tips of his hair to a pale gleam. The lean travel rations had only accentuated the exquisite modeling of his features, and his short beard—kept trimmed, unlike everyone else’s—lent him maturity and consequence without sacrificing any of his youthful splendor.
Drave, by contrast, was wiry and weather-beaten beyond his years, which were somewhere near thirty. Hailing from Maialen, where sun was scant, he was very fair, and had suffered in the Elmuthaleth more than anyone, burning and peeling, burning and peeling, his face a patchwork of pink and red with brownish curls of dead skin sloughing away.
The two made an unlikely pair: the alchemist and the explosionist. They had fallen into step back in Alkonost, and taken to riding and eating meals together. In anyone else, it would have looked like friendship, but Lazlo couldn’t see it as anything so benign. Thyon Nero hadn’t had “friends” in Zosma so much as admirers, and Drave seemed willing to fill that role, even fetching him his breakfast, and shaking the sand out of his boots for him, and all without the reward of gratitude. Lazlo wondered if his own long ago “thank you” was the only one Nero had ever spoken. He didn’t pity Drave, though. It was clear to him that the explosionist wasn’t after friendship, but the secret of gold.
Good luck with that, he thought, wry.
“He believes in everything, even ghosts,” Thyon added, drawing a willing snigger from Drave before turning his eyes on Lazlo. “Don’t you, Strange?”
It reminded Lazlo of that awful day at the Enquiries desk when he’d requisitioned Lazlo’s books: the sudden cut of his eyes singling Lazlo out. The barbed question, intended to discomfit. And he felt a shade of his old fear, too. This whole journey, Nero had hardly spoken to him except to make little sharp jibes, but Lazlo felt the burn of his gaze sometimes, and wondered if the alchemist still counted him a cost—the only person alive who knew his secret.
As to Thyon’s question, his reply was noncommittal. “I admit, I prefer an open mind to a closed one,” he said.
“You call it an open mind to believe men flew down from the skies on fiery wings?”
“And women,” said Lazlo. “It’s a woeful species that’s all male.”
“More like a nonexistent species,” remarked Calixte. “Men lacking both wombs and good sense.”
A disturbing thought occurred to Lazlo. He turned to Ruza, shifting into Unseen to ask him, “Are there male and female threaves? Dear god, tell me those things don’t mate.”
“Baby threaves must come from somewhere,” said Ruza.
“But how would they even find each other?” Lazlo wondered. “Let alone . . . ?” He let the rest pass unsaid.
“I don’t know, but I bet when they do, they make the most of it.” The young warrior waggled his eyebrows.
Lazlo grimaced. Ruza shrugged. “What? For all we know, threave love stories are the most beautiful of all time—”
Calixte snorted. She, too, had troubled herself to learn the language, with Tzara her principle teacher, as Ruza was Lazlo’s. The two women were sitting together now, and Calixte whispered something to Tzara that made the warrior bite her lip and flush.
“Pardon me,” cut in Thyon, with the pinched look of someone who believes he’s being mocked. And since he hadn’t bothered to learn Unseen, he could almost be forgiven for thinking so. He restated his question. “You believe men and women flew down from the skies on fiery wings?”
Lazlo had never said he believed in the seraphim. Even in his books he’d made no such claim. He had nothing like proof, or even faith. It simply interested him—greatly—how all the cultures of Zeru were underpinned by the same story. At the very least, it spoke to the migration patterns of ancient people. At the very most, it spoke to a good deal more. But all that was neither here nor there. He wasn’t trying to win the theory purse, after all. He was only satisfying Calixte. “I see no harm in entertaining all ideas,” he said. “For example, could you have arrived at azoth if you’d arbitrarily closed your mind to certain chemical compounds?”
Thyon’s jaw clenched. When he spoke again a tightness had replaced the mockery in his tone. “Alchemy is a science. There is no comparison.”