“Do you want to try?” asked Lazlo, hopeful, and trying to disguise it.
“There can’t be much time before sunrise.”
“Not much,” he agreed. “But a little.”
She had another thought. She was poking the idea for weaknesses, and so frightened of finding them. “What if it works, but my terrors come, too?”
Lazlo shrugged. “We’ll chase them away, or else turn them into fireflies and catch them in jars.” He wasn’t afraid. Well. He was only afraid it wouldn’t work. Anything else they could handle, together. “What do you say?”
For a moment Sarai didn’t trust her voice. As casual as they strove to seem, they both felt something momentous take shape between them, and—though she didn’t for a minute question his intentions—something intimate, too. To sleep inside his dream, when she wasn’t even certain she’d be aware it was a dream. Where she might not have control . . .
“If it does work,” she whispered, “but I’m powerless . . .”
She faltered, but he understood. “Do you trust me?” he asked.
It wasn’t even a question. She felt safer here than she ever had anywhere. And anyway, she asked herself, what real risk was there? It’s just a dream, she answered, though of course it was so much more.
She looked at Lazlo, bit her lip and let it go, and said, “All right.”
45
Strange Azoth
In the makeshift alchemical laboratory in the windowless attic of the crematorium, a small blue flame touched the curved glass base of a suspended flask. The liquid there heated and changed state, rising as vapor through the fractionating column to catch in the condenser and trickle in droplets into the collection flask.
The golden godson retrieved it and held it up to a glave to examine it.
Clear fluid. It might have been water to look at it, but it wasn’t. It was azoth, a substance even more precious than the gold it could yield, because, unlike gold, it had multiple, wondrous applications and but a single source in all the world: himself—at least as long as its key component remained secret.
A vial lay empty on the worktable. It was labeled spirit of librarian, and Thyon felt a twinge of . . . distaste? Here was vital essence of the no-name peasant foundling who had the unforgivable habit of helping him for no good reason, all while looking guileless, as though it were a normal thing to do.
Maybe it was distaste. Thyon pushed the empty vial aside to clear space for his next procedure. Or maybe it was discomfort. The whole world saw him the way he wanted to be seen: as an unassailable force, complete unto himself and in full command of the mysteries of the universe.
Except for Strange, that is, who knew what he really was. His jaw clenched. If only, he thought, Lazlo would have the courtesy to . . . cease to exist . . . then perhaps he could be grateful to him. But not while he was there, always there, a benign presence laughing with warriors or doing, gladly, whatever needed to be done. He’d even formed the habit of helping the caravan’s cook scrub the big soup pot out with sand. What was he trying to prove?
Thyon shook his head. He knew the answer, he just couldn’t understand it. Lazlo wasn’t trying to prove anything. Nothing was strategy with him. Nothing was deception. Strange was just Strange, and he’d offered up his spirit with no strings attached. Thyon was grateful, even if he was resentful in equal—or greater—measure. He had drawn too much of his own spirit, and that was a dangerous game. Lazlo’s jibe that it would make him ugly had not missed its mark, but that wasn’t his only concern. He had seen the spirit-dead. Most didn’t last long, either taking their own lives or wasting away from a lack of will even to eat. The will to live, it would seem, existed in this mysterious clear fluid that Strange had given of without a second thought.
And Thyon was much restored, thanks to the reprieve. He was taking another stab at alkahest, using the Strange azoth this time. Usually he felt a stir of eagerness at this part of a chemical procedure—a thrill to create something no one else could, and alter the very structure of nature. Alkahest was a universal solvent, true to its name, and had never failed him before. He’d tested it tirelessly back at the Chrysopoesium, and it had dissolved every substance he’d touched it to, even diamond.
But not mesarthium. The damnable metal frightened him in its unnaturalness, and he felt already the ignominy of defeat. But scientific method was Thyon’s religion, and it dictated the repeat of experiments—even of failures. So he cooked a new batch of chemicals, and took the alkahest over to the north anchor to test it again. It wasn’t in its final preparation, of course, or else it would eat through its container. He would make the final mixture at the last moment to activate it.
And then, when nothing happened—as nothing would—he would apply the neutralizing compound to deactivate it so it didn’t just drip down the impervious metal and eat its way into the ground.
He was going to take a nap after. That was what he was thinking about—beauty sleep, you Strange bastard—as he walked through the moonless city of Weep with a satchel of flasks slung over his shoulder. He was going to repeat his experiment and record its failure, and then he was going to bed.
There wasn’t even a moment, not even a second, in which Thyon Nero considered that the experiment might not fail.
46
Just a Dream
Sarai called the rest of her moths home early, leaving just the one on Lazlo’s brow. She hesitated only to recall the one watching over her father.
Watching him, she corrected herself. Not watching over him. That wasn’t what she was doing.
Here she’d finally found him, and she couldn’t even look into his mind.
It was a relief, she admitted to herself, finally giving up and drawing the moth off the wall and out the window, back up into the air. She was afraid to know what she would find in his dreams now that he knew she was alive. Could it be that after everything there was still some capacity for hope in her—that he might be glad she wasn’t dead?
She shook it off. Of course he wouldn’t be glad, but tonight she didn’t have to know it. She left him to his thoughts, whatever they might be.
The journey from rooftops to terrace was long for such small fluttering scraps as moths, and she had never been so impatient as in those minutes while they rose through the heights of the air. When they finally arrived and fluttered back through the terrace door, she saw the ghosts standing guard and remembered with a start that she was a prisoner. She’d all but forgotten, and didn’t dwell on it now. Most of her awareness was with Lazlo. She was still in his room with him when, up in her own, she parted her lips to receive her moths home.
She turned away from him in the dream, even though she knew he couldn’t see her real mouth, or the moths vanishing into it. Their wings brushed over her lips, soft as the ghost of a kiss, and all she could think was how the sight would disgust him.
Who would ever want to kiss a girl who eats moths?
I don’t “eat” them, she argued with herself.
Your lips still taste of salt and soot.