Sarai saw their distress and mastered her own, pushing the dreamer from her mind—for now. He had seen her. What could it mean? The others were peppering her with questions—questions she couldn’t answer because her moths hadn’t yet come back to her. They were in the sky now, racing the rising sun. If they didn’t make it back in time, she would be voiceless until dark fell and a new hundred were born in her. She didn’t know why it worked that way, but it did. She clutched her throat so the others would understand, and she tried to wave them inside so they wouldn’t see what happened next. She hated for anyone to see her moths come or go.
But they only drew back, apprehension on their faces, and all she could do when the moths came frothing up over the edge of the terrace was turn away to hide her face as she opened her mouth wide to let them back in.
Ninety-nine.
In her shock, she’d severed the connection and left the moth on the dreamer’s brow. Her hearts gave a lurch. She reached out with her mind, fumbling for the cut tether, as though she might revive the moth and draw it back home, but it was lost to her. First she’d been seen by a human, and then she’d left a moth behind like a calling card. Was she coming undone?
How had he seen her?
She was pacing again, out of habit. The others came beside her, demanding to know what had happened. Minya still stood back, watching. Sarai reached the end of the palm, turned, and stopped. There were no railings on this terrace to prevent one from stepping off the edge. There was, instead, the subtle curve of the cupped hand—the metal flesh sloping gently upward to form a kind of great shallow bowl so that you couldn’t simply walk off the edge. Even at her most distracted, Sarai’s feet kept track of the slope, and knew to stay in the palm’s flat center.
Now the panic of the others brought her back to herself.
“Tell us, Sarai,” said Feral, holding his voice steady to show that he could take it. Ruby was on one side of him, Sparrow on the other. Sarai drank in the sight of their faces. She’d taken so little time over the past years simply to be with them. They lived by day and she by night, and they shared one meal in between. It was no way to live. But . . . it was living, and it was all they had.
In a fragile whisper, she said, “They have flying machines,” and watched, desolate, as the understanding changed their three faces, bullying out the last defiant shred of hope, leaving nothing but despair.
She felt like her mother’s daughter then.
Sparrow’s hands flew to her mouth. “So that’s it, then,” said Ruby. They didn’t even question it. Somehow, in the night, they’d passed through panic to defeat.
Not Minya. “Look at you all,” she said, scathing. “I swear, you look ready to fall to your knees and expose your throats to them.”
Sarai turned to her. Minya’s excitement had brightened. It appalled her. “How can you be happy about this?”
“It had to happen sooner or later,” was her answer. “Better to get it over with.”
“Over with? What, our lives?”
Minya scoffed. “Only if you’d sooner die than defend yourselves. I can’t stop you if you’re that set on dying, but it’s not what I’ll be doing.”
A silence gathered. It occurred to Sarai, and perhaps to the other three at the same time, that yesterday, when Minya had scorned their varying levels of uselessness in a fight, she had made no mention of what her own part might be. Now, in the face of their despair, she radiated eagerness. Zeal. It was so utterly wrong that Sarai couldn’t even take it in. “What’s wrong with you?” she demanded. “Why are you so pleased?”
“I thought you’d never ask,” Minya said, with a grin that showed all her little teeth. “Come with me. I want to show you something.”
The Godslayer’s family home was a modest example of the traditional Weep yeldez, or courtyard house. From the outside, it presented a stone facade carved in a pattern of lizards and pomegranates. The door was stout, and painted green; it gave access to a passage straight through to a courtyard. This was open, and was the home’s central and primary room, used for cooking, dining, gathering. Weep’s mild climate meant that most living happened out of doors. It also meant that, once upon a time, the sky had been their ceiling, and now the citadel was. Only the bedrooms, water closet, and winter parlor were fully enclosed. They surrounded the courtyard in a U and opened onto it through four green doors. The kitchen was recessed into a covered alcove, and a pergola around the dining area would once have been covered with climbing vines for shade. There would have been trees, and an herb garden. Those were gone now. A scrub of pallid shrubs survived, and there were some pots of delicate forest flowers that could grow without much sun, but they were no match for the lush picture in Lazlo’s mind.
When he stepped out of his room in the morning, he found Suheyla pulling a fish trap out of the well. This was less strange than it might seem, as it wasn’t really a well, but a shaft cut down to the river that flowed beneath the city.
The Uzumark wasn’t a single, massive subterranean channel, but an intricate network of waterways that carved their way through the valley bedrock. When the city was built, the brilliant early engineers had adapted these to a system of natural plumbing. Some streams were for freshwater, some for waste disposal. Others, larger, were glave-lit subterranean canals plied by long, narrow boats. From east to west, there was no faster way to traverse the long oval of the city than by underground boat. There was even rumor of a great buried lake, deeper than everything, in which a prehistoric svytagor was trapped by its immense size and lived like a goldfish in a bowl, feeding on eels that bred in the cool springwater. They called it the kalisma, which meant “eel god,” as it would, to the eels, certainly seem that way.
“Good morning,” said Lazlo, coming into the courtyard.
“Ah, you’re up,” returned Suheyla, merry. She opened the trap and the small fish flickered green and gold as she spilled them into a bucket. “Slept well, I hope?”
“Too well,” he said. “And too late. I hate to be a layabout. I’m sorry.”
“Nonsense. If ever there’s a time for sleeping in, I’d say it’s the morning after crossing the Elmuthaleth. And my son hasn’t turned up yet, so you haven’t missed anything.”
Lazlo caught sight of the breakfast that was set out on the low stone table. It was almost equal to the dinner spread from the night before, which made sense, since it was Suheyla’s first opportunity to feed Eril-Fane in over two years. “Can I help you?” he asked.
“Put the cover back on the well?”
He did as she asked, then followed her to the open fire, where he watched as she cleaned the fish with a few deft flicks of a knife, dunked them in oil, dredged them in spices, and laid them on the grill. He could hardly imagine her being more dexterous if she’d had two hands instead of just the one.
She saw him looking. More to the point, she saw him look away when caught looking. She held up the smooth, tapered stump of her wrist and said, “I don’t mind. Have an ogle.”
He blushed, abashed. “I’m sorry.”
“I’m going to impose a fine on apologies,” she said. “I didn’t like to mention it last night, but today is your new beginning. Ten silver every time you say you’re sorry.”
Lazlo laughed, and had to bite his tongue before apologizing for apologizing. “It was trained into me,” he said. “I’m helpless.”
“I accept the challenge of retraining you. Henceforth you are only allowed to apologize if you tread on someone’s foot while dancing.”
“Only then? I don’t even dance.”
“What? Well, we’ll work on that, too.”
She flipped the fish on the grill. The smoke was fragrant with spice.
“I’ve spent all my life in the company of old men,” Lazlo told her. “If you’re hoping to make me fit for society, you’ll have your hands full—”
The words were out before he could consider them. His face flamed, and it was only her holding up a warning finger that prevented him from apologizing. “Don’t say it,” she said. Her affect was stern but her eyes danced. “You mustn’t worry about offending me, young man. I’m quite impervious. As for this . . .” She held up her wrist. “I almost think they did me a favor. Ten seems an excessive number of fingers to keep track of. And so many nails to pare!”
Her grin infected Lazlo, and he grinned, too. “I never thought of that. You know, there’s a goddess with six arms in Maialen myth. Think of her.”