I know a lot of stories.
Had he really just said that? Thyon Nero laughed. Eril-Fane didn’t. He exchanged a look with his second-in-command, the tall, straight woman by his side. Lazlo couldn’t read it. He saw that she was beautiful, in a very different way than the women of Zosma were beautiful. She was unpainted and unsmiling. There were lines around her eyes from laughter, and around her mouth from grief. She didn’t speak, but something passed between the two. These seconds were the longest of Lazlo’s life, and the heaviest with fate. If they left him behind, would he even last the day? What would Nero do to him, and when?
Then Eril-Fane cleared his throat. “It’s been a very long time since we heard new stories,” he said. “And I could indeed use a secretary. Gather your things. You’ll come with us now.”
Lazlo’s throat trapped his breath. His knees felt turned to water. What had been holding him up all this time? Whatever it was, it let go, and it was all he could do not to stumble. Everyone was watching. Everyone was listening. The shocked hush was threaded with murmurs.
“I have nothing to gather,” he breathed. It was true, but even if he’d had a palace full of possessions, he couldn’t have gone to fetch them now, for fear of returning to find the Tizerkane gone, and his chance, and his dream—and his life—with them.
“Well then, up with you,” said Eril-Fane, and a spectral was led forward.
A spectral. For him. “This is Lixxa,” said the warrior, putting the reins into Lazlo’s hand as though he might know what to do with them. He’d never even ridden a horse, let alone a creature like this. He stood there looking at the reins, and the stirrup, and the faces of the Tizerkane regarding him with curiosity. He was used to hiding behind books or in the shadows. It was midsummer, midmorning, in the full light of day. There were no books to hide behind, and no shadows—only Lazlo Strange in his worn gray robes, with his nose that had been broken by fairy tales, looking like the hero of no story ever told.
Or. No story yet told.
He mounted. He was clumsy, and he wasn’t dressed for riding, but he got a leg across, and that seemed to be the main thing. His robes hiked up to his knees. His legs were pale, and his soft-soled slippers were worn nearly through. Lixxa knew her business, and followed when the others filed out through the gate. All eyes were on Lazlo, and all were wide—except for Thyon’s, which were narrow with fury. “You can keep the books,” Lazlo told him, and left him standing there. He took one last look at the gathered crowd—scarlet robes and the occasional gray—and spotted Master Hyrrokkin, looking stunned and proud. Lazlo nodded to the old man—the only person besides Thyon who knew what this meant to him, and the only person in the world who might be happy for him—and he nearly wept.
I’m going to Weep, he thought, and could have laughed at the pun, but he kept his composure, and when the Tizerkane warriors rode out of the Great Library and out of Zosma, Strange the dreamer went with them.
11
TWELFTHMOON
That was Sixthmoon, summer in the north.
It was Twelfthmoon now, and winter in Zosma, the Eder frozen over, and young men perchance composing poems to girls they’d met ice-skating.
Lazlo Strange was not among them. He was riding a spectral at the head of a long, undulating line of camels. Behind them lay all the emptiness of the known world: flat sky above, flat earth below, and between the two nothing at all for hundreds of miles save the name Elmuthaleth for parched lips to curse.
The months of travel had altered him. His library pallor had burned and then browned. His muscles had hardened, his hands grown callused. He felt himself toughened, like meat hung to cure, and though he hadn’t seen his reflection for weeks, he had no doubt that Master Hyrrokkin would be satisfied.
“A man should have squint lines from looking at the horizon,” the old librarian had said, “not just from reading in dim light.”
Well, here was the horizon Lazlo had dreamed of since he was five years old. Ahead, at last, lay the desert’s hard and final edge: the Cusp. Jagged and glittering, it was a long, low-slung formation of blinding white rock, and a perfect natural battlement for that which lay beyond: Not yet visible and never before seen by faranji eyes, lay the city that had lost its name, and, within it, whatever problem the Godslayer sought help to solve.
It was the first week of Twelfthmoon, on the far side of the Elmuthaleth, and Strange the dreamer—library stowaway and scholar of fairy tales—had never been thirstier, or more full of wonder.
PART II
thakrar (THAH·krahr) noun
The precise point on the spectrum of awe at which wonder turns to dread, or dread to wonder.
Archaic; from the ecstatic priestesses of
Thakra, worshippers of the seraphim,
whose ritual dance expressed the dualism
of beauty and terror.
12
KISSING GHOSTS
“You can kiss a ghost.”
“I suppose you’d know.”
“I do know. It’s just like kissing a person.”
“Now, that’s something you wouldn’t know.”
Sarai lingered in the half-light of the gallery, listening to the rhythms of Sparrow and Ruby arguing. It never grew very heated between them, but neither did it ever quite abate. She knew that as soon as she stepped out into the garden they would draw her into it, and she wasn’t awake enough for that. It was late afternoon; she’d only just risen, and it took her some time to shake off the effects of lull, the draught she drank to help her sleep.
Well, she didn’t need help sleeping. Her nights were long and filled with dark work; she was exhausted by dawn, and drifted off as soon as she let her eyes shut. But she didn’t let them shut until she’d had her lull, because lull kept her from dreaming.
Sarai didn’t dream. She didn’t dare.
“I’ve kissed people,” said Ruby. “I’ve kissed you.”
“Pecks on the cheek don’t count,” replied Sparrow.
Sarai could see the pair of them, shimmering in the late-day sun. Sparrow had just turned sixteen, and Ruby would in a few more months. Like Sarai, they wore silk slips that would have been considered undergarments if there were anyone around to see them. Anyone alive, that is. They were picking plums, their two sets of bare arms reaching in among the whiplike boughs, their two dark heads turned away from her, one tidy, the other wild as wind. The wild one was Ruby. She refused to wear her hair in braids and then acted as though she were dying when they tried to brush out the tangles.