In the real city, Thyon Nero walked to the anchor, his satchel slung over his shoulder. Last night, he had made the same walk with the same satchel. He had been weary then, and thinking about napping. He ought to have been wearier now, but he was not.
His pulse was reedy. His spirit, depleted by his own depredations, pulsed too fast through his veins, twinning with a whirr and discordant jangle of . . . of disbelief crashing against evidence, producing a sensation of disfaith.
He had stumbled onto something that refused to be believed. His mind was at war with itself. Alchemy and magic. The mystical and the material. Demons and angels, gods and men. What was the world? What was the cosmos? Up in the black, were there roads through the stars, traveled by impossible beings? What had he entered into, by coming across the world?
He reached the anchor. There was the whole broad face of it, visible to any passerby—not that there were likely to be passersby at this late hour of night—and there was the alley with its mural depicting the wretched, bloody gods. The alley was where he’d been doing his testing, where no one would see him if they happened by. If he could have had a fragment of mesarthium to experiment on in his laboratory, he would have been spared these late-night outings, this risk of discovery. But no fragments existed, for the simplest of reasons: Mesarthium could not be cut. There were no scraps to be had. There was only this massive slab of it—and the other three identical ones at the southern, eastern, and western edges of the city.
He returned to his site in the alley, and shifted the debris he had leaned there to screen it from view. And there, at the base of the impregnable anchor, where smooth mesarthium met the stones it had crushed two hundred years ago underneath its awful weight, was the solution to Weep’s problem.
Thyon Nero had done it.
So why hadn’t he sent at once for Eril-Fane, and earned himself the envy of all the other delegates and the gratitude of Weep? Well, he had to confirm the results first. Rigor, always. It might have been a fluke.
It wasn’t. He knew that much. He didn’t understand it, and he didn’t believe it, but he knew.
“Stories will be told about me.” That was what he had said to Strange back in Zosma—his reason for coming on this journey. It wasn’t his main reason, but never mind. That had been escape—from the queen and his father and the Chrysopoesium and the stifling box that was his life. Whatever his reason, he was here now and a story was unfurling before him. A legend was taking shape.
He set down his satchel and opened it. More vials and flasks than last night, and a hand glave to see by. He had several tests to perform this time. The old alkahest and the new. The notes he took were habit and comfort, as though his tidy writing could transform mystery into sense.
There was a gaping rent in the metal. It was knee-high, a foot wide at the bottom, and deep enough to reach your arm into. It looked like an ax chop, except that the edges weren’t sharp, but smooth, as though they had been melted.
The new tests proved what Thyon already knew—not what he understood or believed, but what he knew, in the way that a man who falls on his face knows the ground.
Mesarthium was conquered.
There was a legend taking shape. But it wasn’t his.
He packed up his satchel and leaned the debris back up against the anchor, to screen the rent from sight. He stood at the mouth of the alley, all reedy pulse and ravaged spirit, wondering what it all meant. Weep gave no answer. The night was silent. He slowly walked away.
Across the street, Drave watched, and when the alchemist was gone, he disengaged from the shadows, crept to the mouth of the alley, and went in.
56
The Dreamsmiths
“No no no no no,” said Lazlo, bolting upright in his bed. The moth lay on his pillow like a scrap of sooty velvet. He prodded it with his finger and it didn’t move at all. It was dead. It was Sarai’s and he had killed it. The bizarre, tenuous nature of their connection struck him with new force—that a moth should be their only link. That they could be sharing such a moment and lose it in an instant because he rolled over on his pillow and crushed a moth. He cupped the poor thing on his palm, then set it gently on the night table. It would vanish at dawn, he knew, and be reborn at next nightfall. He’d killed nothing . . . besides his own ardor.
It was funny, really. Absurd. Infuriating. And funny.
He flopped back onto his pillows and looked up at the moths on his ceiling beam. They were stirring, and he knew that Sarai could see him through their eyes. With a mournful smile, we waved.
Up in her room, Sarai laughed, voicelessly. The look on his face was priceless, and his body was limp with helpless vexation. Go back to sleep, she willed him. Now.
He did. Well, it took ten hours—or perhaps ten minutes—and then Sarai was standing before him with her hands on her hips.
“Moth killer,” she admonished him.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I really loved that moth, too. That one was my favorite.”
“Better keep your voice down. This one will get its feelings hurt and fly away.”
“I mean this one’s my favorite,” he revised. “I promise not to smoosh it.”
“Be sure that you don’t.”
They were both smiling like fools. They were so full of happiness, and Dreamer’s Weep was colored by it. If only real Weep could be so easily set right. “It was probably for the best, though,” Lazlo ventured.
“Oh?”
“Mm. I wouldn’t have been able to stop kissing you otherwise. I’m sure I’d be kissing you still.”
“That would be terrible,” she said, and took a prowling step closer, reaching up to trace a line down the center of his chest.
“Wretched,” he agreed. She was lifting her face to his, ready to pick up where they’d left off, and he wanted to melt right back into her, breathe the nectar and rosemary of her, tease her neck with his teeth, and make her mouth curve into its feline curl.
It thrilled him that he could make her smile, but he had the gallant notion that he should make best efforts, now, to do so in other ways. “I have a surprise for you,” he said before she could kiss him and undermine his good intentions.
“A surprise?” she asked, skeptical. In Sarai’s experience, surprises were bad.
“You’ll like it. I promise.”
He took her hand and curled it through his arm, and they walked through the marketplace of Dreamer’s Weep, where mixed among the commonplace items were wonderful ones like witch’s honey, supposed to give you a fine singing voice. They sampled it, and it did, but only for a few seconds. And there were beetles that could chew gemstones better than any jeweler could cut them, and silence trumpets that, when blown, blasted a blanket of quiet loud enough to smother thunder. There were mirrors that reflected the viewer’s aura, and they came with little cards to tell what the colors meant. Sarai’s and Lazlo’s auras were a matching shade of fuchsia that fell smack between pink for “lust” and red for “love,” and when they read it, Lazlo blushed almost the same hue, whereas Sarai went more to violet.
They glimpsed the centaur and his lady; she held a parasol and he a string market bag, and they were just another couple out for a stroll, buying vegetables for their supper.
And they saw the moon’s reflection displayed in a pail of water—never mind that it was daytime—and it wasn’t for sale but “free” for whoever was able to catch it. There were sugared flowers and ijji bones, trinkets of gold and carvings of lys. There was even a sly old woman with a barrel full of threave eggs. “To bury in your enemy’s garden,” she told them with a cackle.