Lazlo turned back to the goddess. “My mentor,” he explained. “He has bad manners but good hearts.”
“I wouldn’t know about either,” said Sarai, who had found no fault with the old man’s manners, and had to remind herself, in any case, that he had been just another figment of the dreamer’s mind. “You’ve got it wrong, boy,” the librarian had said. “Look at her.” Did that mean that on some level Lazlo saw through her disguise, and didn’t believe she was Isagol? She was pleased by this idea, and chided herself for caring. She turned back to the shelves, ran her finger along a row of spines. “All these books,” she said. “They’re about magic?” She was wondering if he were some sort of expert. If that was why the Godslayer had brought him along.
“They’re myths and folktales mostly,” said Lazlo. “Anything dismissed by scholars as too fun to be important. They put it down here and forget it. Superstitions, songs, spells. Seraphim, omens, demons, fairies.” He pointed to one bookcase. “Those are all about Weep.”
“Weep is too fun to be important?” she asked. “I rather think its citizens might disagree with you.”
“It’s not my assessment, believe me. If I were a scholar, I could have made a case for it, but you see, I’m not important, either.”
“No? And why is that?”
Lazlo looked down at his feet, reluctant to explain his own insignificance. “I’m a foundling,” he said, looking up again. “I have no family, and no name.”
“But you told me your name.”
“All right. I have a name that tells the world I have no name. It’s like a sign around my neck that reads ‘No one.’ ”
“Is it so important, a name?” Sarai asked.
“I think the citizens of Weep would say it is.”
Sarai had no answer for that.
“They’ll never get it back, will they?” Lazlo asked. “The city’s true name? Do you remember it?”
Sarai did not. She doubted she had ever known it. “When Letha took a memory,” she said, “she didn’t keep it in a drawer like a confiscated toy. She ate it and it was gone forever. That was her gift. Eradication.”
“And your gift?” Lazlo asked.
Sarai froze. The thought of explaining her gift to him brought an immediate flush of shame. Moths swarm out of my mouth, she imagined herself saying. So that I can maraud through human minds, like I’m doing right now in yours. But of course, he wasn’t asking about her gift. For a moment she’d forgotten who she was—or wasn’t. She wasn’t Sarai here, but this absurd tame phantasm of her mother.
“Well, she was no moon goddess,” she said. “That’s all nonsense.”
“She?” asked Lazlo, confused.
“I,” said Sarai, though it stuck in her throat. It struck her with a pang of deep resentment, that this extraordinary, inexplicable thing should happen: A human could see her—and he was talking to her without hate, with something more like fascination and even wonder—and she had to hide behind this pretense. If she were Isagol, she would show him her gift. Like a malefic kitten with a ball of string, she would tangle his emotions until he lost all distinction between love and hate, joy and sorrow. Sarai didn’t want to play that part, not ever. She turned the questions back on him.
“Why don’t you have a family?” she asked.
“There was a war. I was a baby. I ended up on a cartload of orphans. That’s all I know.”
“So you could be anyone,” she said. “A prince, even.”
“In a tale, maybe.” He smiled. “I don’t believe there were any princes unaccounted for. But what about you? Do gods have families?”
Sarai thought first of Ruby and Sparrow, Feral and Minya, Great and Less Ellen, and the others: her family, if not by blood. Then she thought of her father, and hardened her hearts. But the dreamer was doing it again, turning the questions around on her. “We’re made by mist,” she said. “Remember? Every fifty years.”
“The mahalath. Of course. So you were one who took the risk.”
“Would you?” she asked. “If the mist were coming, would you stay and be transformed, not knowing what the result might be?”
“I would,” he said at once.
“That was fast. You would abandon your true nature with so little consideration?”
He laughed at that. “You have no idea how much consideration I’ve given it. I lived seven years inside these books. My body may have been going about its duties in the library, but my mind was here. Do you know what they called me? Strange the dreamer. I was barely aware of my surroundings half the time.” He was amazed at himself, going on like this, and to the goddess of despair, no less. But her eyes were bright with curiosity—a mirror of his own curiosity about her, and he felt entirely at ease. Certainly despair was the last thing he thought of when he looked at her. “I walked around wondering what kind of wings I would buy if the wingsmiths came to town, and if I’d prefer to ride dragons or hunt them, and whether I’d stay when the mist came, and more than anything else by far, how in the world I was going to get to the Unseen City.”
Sarai cocked her head. “The Unseen City?”
“Weep,” he said. “I always hated the name, so I made up my own.”
Sarai had been smiling in spite of herself, and wanting to ask which book the wingsmiths were in, and whether the dragons were vicious or not, but at this reminder of Weep, her smile slowly melted back to melancholy, and that wasn’t all that melted away. To her regret, the library did, too, and they were in Weep once more. But this time it wasn’t his Weep, but hers, and it might have been closer to the true city than his version, but it wasn’t accurate, either. It was still beautiful, certainly, but there was a forbidding quality to it, too. All the doors and windows were closed—and the sills, it went without saying, were empty of cake—and it was desolate with dead gardens and the telltale hunched hurry of a populace that feared the sky.
There were so many things she wanted to ask Lazlo, who had been called “dreamer” even before she dubbed him that. Why can you see me? What would you do if you knew I was real? What wings would you choose if the wingsmiths came to town? Can we go back to the library, please, and stay awhile? But she couldn’t say any of that. “Why are you here?” she asked.
He was taken aback by the sudden turn in mood. “It’s been my dream since I was a child.”
“But why did the Godslayer bring you? What is your part in this? The others are scientists, builders. What does the Godslayer need with a librarian?”
“Oh,” said Lazlo. “No. I’m not really one of them. Part of the delegation, I mean. I had to beg for a place in the party. I’m his secretary.”
“You’re Eril-Fane’s secretary.”
“Yes.”
“Then you must know his plans.” Sarai’s pulse quickened. Another of her moths was fluttering in sight of the pavilion where the silk sleighs rested. “When will he come to the citadel?” she blurted out.
It was the wrong question. She knew it as soon as she said it. Maybe it was the directness, or the sense of urgency, or maybe it was the slip of using come instead of go, but something shifted in his look, as though he were seeing her with new eyes.
And he was. Dreams have their rhythms, their deeps and shallows, and he was caroming upward into a state of heightened lucidity. The left-behind logic of the real world came slanting down like shafts of sun through the surface of the sea, and he began to grasp that none of this was real. Of course he hadn’t actually ridden Lixxa through the Pavilion of Thought. It was all fugitive, evanescent: a dream.
Except for her.