Who knew?
He had not elected to eat in the bath, however—or even to linger beyond the not inconsiderable time it took to get clean—being far too eager to continue talking with Suheyla. She had, on the walk from the guildhall, joined his admittedly short list of favorite people, along with Eril-Fane, Calixte, Ruza, and old Master Hyrrokkin. When he saw the quantity of food she’d laid out for him, though, his ingrained abnegation rose to the surface. There were small roast birds and pastries glistening with honey, cubes of meat in fragrant sauce, and curled crustaceans impaled on sticks. There was a salad of grains and another of greens, and a platter of fruit and a half-dozen small bowls of pastes and another half-dozen of salts, and the bread was a disc too big for the table, hanging instead from a hook that existed for this purpose, so that you might just reach up and tear some off. And there were sweets and peppers and tea and wine and . . . and it was all too much for him.
“I’m so sorry to put you to such trouble,” he’d said, earning himself a sharp look.
“Guests aren’t trouble,” Suheyla had replied. “They’re a blessing. Having no one to cook for, now, that’s a sadness. But a young man gaunt from the Elmuthaleth and in need of fattening? That’s a pleasure.”
And what could he do but say thank you and eat his fill?
Oh glory, he’d never had a better meal. And he’d never felt so full, or lingered at a table so long, or talked so much or been so comfortable with someone he’d only just met. And so his introduction to the world of homes and mothers was powerfully good, and though he had felt, on his first walk through the city of his dreams, that he would never be tired again, he was in fact very, very tired, which Suheyla couldn’t help but notice. “Come along,” she said. “I’ve kept you up too late.”
Earlier, he had left his travel bag near the door. “Let me,” he said as she bent to pick it up.
“Nonsense,” she replied, and in a flash of a glimpse he perceived that she had no right hand, only a smooth, tapering wrist, though it didn’t hinder her in the slightest as she hooked the strap of his bag with it and slung it over her shoulder. He wondered that he hadn’t noticed it earlier.
She showed him to one of the green painted doors that opened off the courtyard. “This was my son’s room,” she said, gesturing for him to enter.
“Oh. But won’t he be wanting it?”
“I don’t think so,” she said with a tinge of sadness in her voice. “Tell me, how does he sleep . . . out there?” She made a vague gesture to the west, indicating, Lazlo supposed, the whole rest of the world.
“I don’t know,” he answered, surprised. “Well enough.” How inadequate an offering to a worried mother. Well enough. And how would Lazlo know? It had never crossed his mind that Eril-Fane might have vulnerabilities. He realized that all this time he’d been looking to the Godslayer as a hero, not a man, but that heroes, whatever else they are, are also men—and women—and prey to human troubles just like anybody else.
“That’s good,” said Suheyla. “Perhaps it’s gotten better, with his being away from here.”
“It?” asked Lazlo, remembering the way Eril-Fane had averted his eyes and said he didn’t sleep well in Weep.
“Oh, nightmares.” Suheyla waved away the subject and laid her hand to Lazlo’s cheek. “It’s very good to have you here, young man. Do sleep well.”
Moths effused from the chimneys of the Merchants’ Guildhall.
It was the hour before dawn. Some in the city were waking. The bakers were already at work, and carts rolled quietly toward the market square, bringing their daily burdens of produce from the valley farms. Sarai hadn’t meant to stay so long in the outsiders’ dreams, but she’d found in them such an alien world, so full of visions she had no context for, that she had barely felt time passing.
The ocean: a vastness unspeakable. Leviathans as big as palaces, harnessed to pontoons to keep them from submerging to their freedom. Glave mines like buried sunlight. Towers like tusks. Men with leashed wolves patrolling dazzling blue fields. Such images spoke of a world beyond her ken, and, scattered throughout them—strange among strange and as difficult to separate from the wild vagaries of dreams as snowflakes from a basket of lace—were the answers she had been seeking.
Who were these strangers and what nature of threat did they pose?
As to the first, they were men and women driven by ideas and powered by intelligence and rare skills. Some had families, some did not. Some were kind, some were not. She couldn’t possibly know them in one night of trespass. She’d formed impressions; that was all. But as to the second question . . .
Sarai was reeling with visions of explosions and contraptions and impossibly tall towers—and girls climbing impossibly tall towers—and magnets and saws and bridges and flasks of miraculous chemicals and . . . and . . . and flying machines.
“It’s not as though they can fly,” Feral had said, but it would seem that he was wrong. When Sarai first glimpsed the craft in the dreams of the older of the two faranji women, she had dismissed it as fantasy. Dreams are full of flying. It hadn’t worried her. But when she saw the same craft in the husband’s mind, she had to take notice. The thing was sleek and simple in design and far too specific to occur by coincidence in two people’s dreams, no matter that they lay side by side, touching. Dreams didn’t transfer from one sleeper to another. And there was something else that made Sarai believe. She lived in the sky. She knew the world from above in a way that humans didn’t, and most dreams of flying just didn’t get it right—the reflection of the setting sun on the tops of clouds, the tidal ebb and flow of winds, the look of the world from on high. But this couple with their rough hands, they knew what it was like. No question about it: They’d been there.
So how long before their flying machines were in the air, delivering invaders to the garden terrace and to the flat of the seraph’s palm, right where Sarai now stood?
“Tomorrow we’ll know if we need to have this conversation or not,” she had told the others last evening, when Minya was rattling them all with her talk of fighting. Well, they would have to have it, and quickly, little good it would do. Sarai felt sick.
Up in the citadel, she turned in her relentless pacing. Her eyes were open, her surroundings a blur. No one was nearby, but she knew the others must be waiting. If they’d slept at all they’d have risen early to meet her as soon as her moths returned, and hear what she had to tell. Were they just on the other side of her curtain, even now? She hoped they would stay there until she was ready for them.
She considered calling her moths back. Already the eastern horizon was paling and they would fall dead at the first appearance of the sun. But there was something she still had to do. She’d been putting it off all night.
She had to pay a call on the Godslayer.
26
Broken People
Sarai had come many times to this window. More than to any other in Weep. It was her father’s window, and rarely had she let a night pass without a visit to him.
A visit to torment him—and herself, too, as she tried to imagine being the sort of child that a father could love instead of kill.