“Knew? No, I thought . . . I don’t know what I thought. I thought that even if it were true, it wouldn’t be so obviously true.”
It was strikingly obvious, and somehow too big to fit into his mind—like trying to cram the actual Cusp into his own small skull. It wasn’t every day you got proof of myth, but if this wasn’t proof, he didn’t know what was. “The seraphim?” he asked Eril-Fane. “Were they real, too?”
“Is there proof, do you mean?” Eril-Fane asked. “Nothing like this. But then, they didn’t die here, so they couldn’t have left bones. The Thakranaxet has always been proof enough for us.”
The Thakranaxet was the epic of the seraphim. Lazlo had found a few passages over the years, though the poem in its entirety had never found its way to Zosma. Hearing the reverence of Eril-Fane’s tone, he understood that it was a holy text. “You worship them.”
“We do.”
“I hope I didn’t offend you with my theory.”
“Not at all,” said Eril-Fane. “I enjoyed it.”
They continued riding. Dazzled, Lazlo took in the extraordinary formations around him. “That one was a juvenile,” he said, pointing to a skull smaller than the rest. “That’s a baby demon skull. And this is a mountain of melted demon bones. And I’m riding over it on a spectral.” He stroked Lixxa’s long white ears and she whickered, and he murmured sweet things to her before continuing. “I am riding over the funeral pyre of the ijji with the Godslayer. Whose secretary I am.”
Eril-Fane’s ghost of a smile became somewhat less ghostly. “Are you narrating?” he asked, amused.
“I should be,” Lazlo said, and began to, in a dramatic voice. “The Cusp, which had looked low on the horizon, was formidable at close range, and it took the caravan several hours to climb the switchback track to Fort Misrach. It was the only way through. It was also the place where, for centuries, faranji had been drawn and quartered and fed to the sirrahs. Lazlo Strange looked to the sky”—here, Lazlo paused to look to the sky—“where the foul birds circled, screeching and crying and all but tying dinner napkins around their foul, sloped throats. And he wondered, with a frisson of concern: Was it possible he’d been brought so far just to serve as food for the carrion-eaters?”
Eril-Fane laughed, and Lazlo counted it a small victory. A kind of grimness had been growing on the Godslayer the nearer they drew to their destination. Lazlo couldn’t understand it. Shouldn’t he be eager to get home?
“A frisson of concern?” repeated Eril-Fane, cocking an eyebrow.
Lazlo gestured to the birds. “They are ominously glad to see us.”
“I suppose I might as well tell you. Due to a shortfall in faranji adventurers, the sirrahs were becoming malnourished. It was deemed necessary to lure some travelers here to make up the lack. After all, the birds must eat.”
“Damn. If only you’d told me sooner, I’d have put it in Calixte’s book. Then I could have used the prize money to bribe the executioners.”
“Too late now,” said Eril-Fane with regret. “We’re here.”
And here, indeed, they were. The fortress gates loomed before them. Helmed Tizerkane drew them open, welcoming their leader and comrades home with solemn gladness. Lazlo they regarded with curiosity, and the rest of the strangers as well, once their camels had been brought through the gates into the central plaza of the fortress. It was sliced right into the rock—or rather, into the melted, heat-rendered bones—which rose in high walls on either side, keeping the sky at a distance. Barracks and stables lined the walls, and there were troughs and a fountain—the first unrationed water they had seen for two months. Dead ahead at some twenty meters was another gate. The way through, Lazlo thought, and he almost couldn’t process it.
“The moment you see the city,” Eril-Fane had said, “you will understand what this is about.”
What could it be, that would be clear at a glance?
He dismounted and led Lixxa to a trough, then turned to the fountain and scooped water over his head with both hands. The feel of it, cold and sharp, soaking to his scalp and rushing down his neck, was unimaginably good. The next scoop was for drinking, and the next, and the next. After that: scrubbing his face, digging his fingertips into the itchy growth of unaccustomed beard. Now that they were nearly arrived, he allowed himself a brief daydream of comfort. Not luxury, which was beyond his ken, but simple comfort: a wash, a shave, a meal, a bed. He would buy some clothes with his wages as soon as he had the chance. He’d never done that before and didn’t know the first thing about it, but supposed he’d figure it out. What did one wear, when one might wear anything?
Nothing gray, he thought, and remembered the sense of finality he’d felt throwing away his librarian’s robes after joining Eril-Fane—and the regret, too. He had loved the library, and had felt, as a boy, as though it had a kind of sentience, and perhaps loved him back. But even if it was just walls and a roof with papers inside, it had bewitched him, and drawn him in, and given him everything he needed to become himself.
Would he ever see it again, or old Master Hyrrokkin? Though it had been only half a year, the Great Library had become memory, as though his mind had sorted his seven years there and archived them into a more distant past. Whatever happened here, Lazlo knew that that part of his life was over. He had crossed continents and drunk starlight from rivers without names. There was no going back from that.
“Strange!” cried Calixte, springing toward him in her dancing way. Her eyes were alight as she grabbed his shoulders with both hands and shook him. “Bones, Strange! Isn’t it ghoulish?” Her tone made clear that she meant good-ghoulish, if there were such a thing. Lazlo didn’t think there was. However you looked at it—whatever the ijji had been, and whatever had killed them, angels or not—this mound of bones was an epic mass grave. But there would be time for pondering the implications later. For now, he allowed himself wonder.
Calixte thrust a cupped hand at him. “Here. I knew you’d be too virtuous to do it yourself.” Curious, he put out his hand, and she dropped a sharp, curved fragment of glittering white glass onto it. “It’s a Cusp cuspid,” she said, beaming.
An ijji tooth. “You broke this off?” he marveled. She’d have had to dismount, perhaps even climb.
“Well, no one said not to deface the mountain.”
Lazlo shook his head, smiling, and thought how, if he hadn’t heard the rumor in Syriza, if he hadn’t mentioned it to Eril-Fane, Calixte might still be in jail, if she was even still alive. “Thank you,” he said, closing his hand around the tooth.
It was the first gift he had ever been given.
There was a small meal waiting for them—simple fare but exquisite for being fresh. Soft, salty bread and white cheese, slices of spiced meat, and quarters of some big, globed fruit that tasted of sugared rain. No one spoke, and there were, for the moment, no divisions among them—rich or poor, outsider or native, scholar or secretary. Never mind that Thyon Nero had grown up on delicacies and Lazlo Strange on crusts, neither had ever enjoyed a meal more.
“Hey, Tod,” said Calixte, around a mouthful of bread. “Are we still in my credulity? Because if we are, you owe me for this meal.”
Okay, maybe some divisions persisted.
The sirrahs continued to circle, squalling their ravenous chorus, and their ranks were disrupted once more, as they had been yesterday, by the passage of a message falcon. Half their size, it dove through the scribble of their ragged, stinking wings, driving them back with its piercing cry. Eril-Fane held up his arm, and the bird spiraled an elegant descent, luffed into the wind, and landed.
The Godslayer retrieved the message and read it, and when he looked up from the page, he sought out Lazlo, first with his eyes, then with his feet.
“News?” asked Lazlo as he approached.
“What, this?” He held up the message. “More like orders.”
“Orders?” From whom? A commander? A governor? “I thought you gave the orders.”