—The Fellerings: metallurgists; twin brothers.
—Fortune Kether: an artist—renowned publicly for his frescoes and privately for the catapults and siege engines he designed for skirmishing kings.
—Drave: just Drave, a so-called explosionist, whose job was setting blast charges in mines, and whose credits included blowing the sides off of mountains.
—Soulzeren and Ozwin Eoh, a married couple: she a mechanist, he a farmer-botanist, who together had invented a craft they called a silk sleigh. A craft that could fly.
These were the Godslayer’s delegates. Being told nothing more of the problem in Weep than that it was “the shadow of a dark time,” the only real clue they had to go on in their theorizing was… themselves. The answer, they reasoned, must be found in some configuration of their areas of expertise. Working backward, what sort of problem might such skills solve?
As Calixte had bemoaned, most of the theories were martial ones, involving conquest, weapons, and defense. Lazlo could see why—siege engines, explosives, and metal did suggest such a direction—but he didn’t think it would be anything like that. Eril-Fane had said the problem posed no danger to them, and he could ill imagine that the Tizerkane general would leave his city for so long if it were under threat. But something, he had said, still haunted them. He had used that word. Haunt. Lazlo alone had considered that he might mean it literally. Suppose there were ghosts. Godslayer. The ghosts of dead gods? He wouldn’t be putting that into Calixte’s book. For one thing, these were hardly the people you would summon to address such a dilemma, and, for another, how they would laugh at him if he did.
Was that why he hadn’t given a theory, because he was afraid of being laughed at? No. He thought it was because he wanted Calixte to be right: for the truth to be stranger than anything they could imagine. He didn’t want to guess the answer, not even for five hundred silver. He wanted to climb to the top of the Cusp tomorrow and open his eyes and see.
“The moment you see the city,” Eril-Fane had promised them, “you will understand what this is about.”
The moment you see the city.
The moment.
Whatever the problem was, it would be clear at a glance. That was another piece of the puzzle, but Lazlo didn’t want to ponder it. “I don’t want to guess,” he told Calixte. “I want to be surprised.”
“So be surprised!” she said, exasperated. “You don’t have to guess right, you only have to guess interesting.”
They were back in camp now. The low-slung woolen tents had gone up, and the Tizerkane had penned the spectrals in a larger pavilion of the same boiled wool. The camels, with their shaggy coats, passed their nights under the cold of the stars. The drovers had unloaded them, stacking their bales into a windbreak, though thus far the evening was still. The plume of smoke from the fire rose straight up, like the charmed ropes in the marketplace in Alkonost that had hung suspended in thin air whilst small boys clambered up and down them.
The faranji were still waiting for their dinner. There were carrion birds in the sky, circling and cawing ugly cries that Lazlo imagined translated as Die so we can eat you.
Eril-Fane released a message falcon and it rose through the ranks of them, screaming a raptor’s warning before striking out for the Cusp. Lazlo watched it go, and this, more than anything, drove home to him the nearness of their destination.
The unbelievable imminence of his impossible dream.
“All right,” he told Calixte. “You win.”
She put back her head and ululated, and everyone in camp turned to look.
“Hush, banshee,” he said, laughing. “I’ll give you one theory, as wild and improbable as I can make it.”
“And beautiful and full of monsters,” she reminded him.
“And beautiful and full of monsters,” he agreed, and he knew then what he would tell her.
It was the oldest story in the world.
15
THE OLDEST STORY IN THE WORLD
The seraphim were the world’s earliest myth. Lazlo had read every book of lore in the Great Library, and every scroll, and every song and saga that had made its way from voice to voice over centuries of oral tradition to finally be captured on paper, and this was the oldest. It went back several millennia—perhaps as many as seven—and was found in nearly every culture—including the Unseen City, where the beings had been worshipped. They might be called enkyel or anjelin or angels, s’rith or serifain or seraphim, but the core story remained constant, and it was this:
They were beings of surpassing beauty with wings of smokeless fire—six of them, three male, three female—and long, long ago, before time had a name, they came down from the skies.
They came to look and see what manner of world it was, and they found rich soil and sweet seas and plants that dreamed they were birds and drifted up to the clouds on leaves like wings. They also found the ijji, a huge and hideous race that kept humans as slaves, pets, or food, depending on the version of the tale. The seraphim took pity on the humans, and for them they slew the ijji, every one, and they piled the dead at the edge of the great dust sea and burned them on a pyre the size of a moon.
And that, the story went, is how man claimed ascendency over the world that was Zeru, while the demons were stricken from it by the angels. Once upon a long-lost time, people had believed it, and had believed, too, that the seraphim would return one day and sit in judgment over them. There had been temples and priestesses and fire rites and sacrifice, but that was a long time ago. No one believed in the old myths anymore.
“Get out your pencil,” Lazlo told Calixte, emerging from his tent. He had taken the time, first, to groom his spectral, Lixxa, and then himself. His last sand bath. He wouldn’t miss it. “Are you ready for this? It’s going to be good. Extremely improbable.”
“Let’s have it, then.”
“All right.” He cleared his throat. Calixte waggled her pencil, impatient. “The problem,” he said, as though it were perfectly reasonable, “is that the seraphim have returned.”
She looked delighted. She bent her head and started scribbling.
From the direction of the faranji, Lazlo heard a laugh. “Seraphim,” someone scoffed. “Absurd.”
He ignored them. “Of course you know the seraphim,” he told Calixte. “They came down from the skies, but do you know where they came to? They came here.” He gestured around him. “The great dust sea, it’s called in the tales. What else but the Elmuthaleth? And the funeral pyre the size of a moon?” He pointed to the single feature in the great flat land.
“The Cusp?” Calixte asked.
“Look at it. It’s not crystal, it’s not marble, and it’s definitely not ice.”