“You needn’t,” Eril-Fane replied. He was currying his spectral, Syrangelis. “We have enough water for tomorrow.”
The nets were designed to leach condensation out of the cool night air, and were an important supplementary source of water in the Elmuthaleth. It was the last night of their crossing, though, and the water in the skins would last until they reached their destination. Lazlo shrugged. “There’s nothing like freshly harvested fog,” he said, and went off to do it anyway. The water in the skins was two months stale, and besides, he’d gotten used to the labor—which involved an ironwood mallet and pounding stakes deep into the sand. It loosened him up after a long day in the saddle, and though he would have been embarrassed to admit it, he liked the change it had made to his body. When he stripped off his white chaulnot to bathe—what passed for “bathing” in the desert, that is, scrubbing his skin with a mixture of sand and pulverized negau root—there was a hardness and sculpt that hadn’t been there before.
Even his hands hardly seemed his own these days. Before, he’d had a single callus from holding his pen. Now his palms were tough all over and the backs of his hands were as brown as his face. His gray eyes seemed shades lighter by contrast to his darkened skin, and the months of traveling into the sun hadn’t only earned him squint lines. They had reshaped his eyes, cutting them narrower against the light, and altered the line of his brow, drawing it forward and knitting it between his black eyebrows in a single furrow. Those small changes wrought an undue transformation, replacing his dreamy vagueness with a hunting intensity.
Such was the power of a half year of horizons.
Lazlo had reason to know that he bore little resemblance now to the junior librarian who’d ridden out of Zosma six months ago with the Tizerkane. In fact, when the delegates had all assembled in Alkonost to cross the desert together, Thyon Nero had failed to recognize him.
It had been four months by then since they had seen each other last, and, to Lazlo’s surprise, the golden godson had several times passed him right by in the caravansary before registering, with a visible start, who he was.
With his long dark hair and hooded white chaulnot, riding a spectral with panache and speaking Unseen as though his smoky voice were made for it, Lazlo could almost pass for one of the Tizerkane. It was hard to believe he was the same hapless dreamer who used to walk into walls while reading.
Horizons instead of books. Riding instead of reading. It was a different life out here, but make no mistake: Lazlo was every bit the dreamer he had always been, if not more. He might have left his books behind, but he carried all his stories with him, out of the glave-lit nooks of the library and into landscapes far more fit for them.
Like this one.
He straightened the fog net and peered over it at the Cusp. He’d thought at first that it was a mirage. In the midst of the Elmuthaleth, sky had met ground in an unbroken circle, flat and featureless, as far as the eye could see. To travel across it, day after day, for weeks, to make and break camp each dusk and dawn with a sameness that merged the days to a blur, it defied the mind to believe that it could end. When the first shimmer had appeared in the distance, he’d thought it must be an illusion, like the lakes they sometimes saw that vanished as they drew near, but this hadn’t vanished. Over the past several days it had grown from a pale streak on the horizon to… well, to the Cusp, whatever the Cusp was.
It formed the eastern edge of the Elmuthaleth, and the other faranji were content to call it a mountain range, but it didn’t look like a mountain range. It lacked peaks. The entire formation—a kind of immense mound—was white, from the dun desert floor to the blue of the sky. It looked like milky crystal, or perhaps ice.
Or… it looked like what the myths said it was.
“Almost there. Hard to believe.”
It was Calixte’s voice. She was one of the other faranji. Coming up beside Lazlo to share the view, she pushed back the hood of her chaulnot to reveal her fine, small head. It had been naked as an egg the first time Lazlo saw her—forcibly shaved, as his own had once been, and just as crudely—but her hair was growing in now. It was a soft brown fluff like fledgling plumage. Her bruises were long gone, but she still had scars where her manacles had rubbed her wrists and ankles raw.
Calixte was not only the first girl Lazlo counted as a friend, but also the first criminal.
“By this time tomorrow…” he said. He didn’t need to finish the thought. The anticipation was palpable. By this time tomorrow they would be there. They would climb the single track that led through Fort Misrach to the top of the Cusp, and they would get their first sight of that which lay beyond it.
Weep.
“Last chance for a theory,” said Calixte. Her ragged notebook was in her hands. She held it up and flapped it like a butterfly.
“You don’t give up, do you?”
“It’s been said. Look, there’s one page left.” She showed him. “I saved it for you.”
“You shouldn’t have.”
“Yes, I should. Don’t think I’m letting you reach the Cusp without giving me at least one.”
One theory.
When the delegates had met up in Alkonost, they had assumed they would be enlightened as to the reason for their journey. The nature of Weep’s “problem,” as it were. They’d earned that much, surely, by coming so far. And when Eril-Fane rose to his feet at the head of the table at their first shared meal, they’d waited with hushed expectancy for the information that was their due. The next morning they would set foot to the great and terrible Elmuthaleth. It was only fair that they should know why—and preferably while they could still turn back if they chose.
“In your time among us,” Eril-Fane had told them then, “you will be called upon to believe things you would not at this moment find it possible to believe. You are rational men and women who believe what you can see and prove. Nothing would be gained by telling you now. On the contrary. You will find that the relentless nothingness of the Elmuthaleth has a way of amplifying the workings of your mind. I would sooner it amplify your curiosity than your skepticism.”