It took Sarai a moment to understand what she meant, because she thought of the blood spurting up from the wound in the bed, and of the phantom pressure of the knifepoint against her breast. But it was her monthly bleeding that Minya meant, and the suggestion only made her angrier. “No, Minya. Unlike you, the rest of us experience a normal range of emotion, including but not limited to distress when forced to endure the disgust of the dead.” And it wasn’t Ari-Eil’s face in her mind when she said it, but the old women all crowded round her, and she knew that at least part of her anger at Minya was left over from the dream and was irrational—because Minya hadn’t actually turned old women loose to wander the citadel and attempt to murder her. But part of being irrational is not caring that you’re being irrational, and right now she just didn’t.
“Is he bothering you so much?” Minya asked. “I can make him face the wall, if it helps.”
“It doesn’t help,” said Sarai. “Just let him go.”
The others were watching, breath all but held, eyes overlarge. Minya’s eyes were always large, and now they glittered. “Are you sure?” she asked, and it felt like a trap.
But what kind of trap could it possibly be? “Of course I’m sure,” said Sarai.
“All right,” said Minya in a lilting tone that signified it went against her better judgment. “But it is strange you don’t want to hear his news first.”
News?
Sarai tried to match Minya’s feigned calm. “What news?”
“First you don’t want to hear and now you do.” She rolled her eyes. “Really, Sarai. Make up your mind.”
“I never didn’t want to hear,” Sarai snapped. “You never said there was anything to hear.”
“Touchy,” said Minya. “Are you sure you aren’t bleeding?”
What would you know about that? Sarai wanted to demand. If you ever decide to grow up, then maybe we’ll talk about it. But she wasn’t nearly angry enough—or foolish enough—to speak the words grow up to Minya. She just gritted her teeth and waited.
Minya turned to Ari-Eil. “Come over here,” she said, and he did, though she still asserted only partial control, allowing him to fight against her at every step so that he came lurching and stumbling. It was grotesque to watch, which was, of course, the point. She brought him to the opposite end of the long table from where she sat. “Go on, then,” she said. “Tell them what you told me.”
“Tell them yourself,” he spat.
And it wasn’t him she was toying with now by dragging out the suspense of it, but the rest of them. Minya paused to study the quell board, taking her time to move one of her game pieces, and Sarai could tell from Feral’s expression that it was a devastating move. Minya collected her captured piece with a look of smug satisfaction. A scream was building in Sarai’s mind, and, with it, an awful presentiment that the pall of doom of the past day had been leading to this moment.
What news?
“It’s lucky for us you happened to die,” Minya said, redirecting herself at the ghost. “Else we might have been taken entirely by surprise.”
“It doesn’t matter whether you’re surprised,” snarled the dead man. “He killed you once, he’ll do it again.”
A jolt went through Sarai. Sparrow gasped. Feral sat bolt upright. “Minya,” he said. “What is he talking about?”
“Tell them,” commanded Minya. Her voice was still bright, but not like a bell now. Like a knife. She rose to her feet, which were bare and dirty, and stepped from her chair onto the table. She prowled the length of it, until she was standing right in front of him. They were nearly eye-to-eye: he, an imposing grown man; she, a slight and messy child. No more suspense, and no more delusion of freedom. Her will clamped onto him and his words reeled out as though she’d reached down his throat and ripped them from him.
“The Godslayer is coming!” he cried out, gasping. That much Minya made him tell, but the rest he spoke freely. Savagely. “And he’s going to tear your world apart.”
Minya looked over her shoulder. Sarai saw Skathis in her eyes, as though the god of beasts were somehow alive in his small daughter. It was a chilling look: cold and accusing, full of blame and triumph. “Well, Sarai?” she asked. “What do you have to say about that? Your papa’s come back home.”
21
THE PROBLEM IN WEEP
“What is that?” Lazlo asked. He felt himself perfectly poised at the midpoint between wonder and dread, and didn’t know which to feel. Dread, it had to be, because he’d glimpsed dread on Eril-Fane’s face, but how could he not feel wonder at such a sight?
“That,” said Eril-Fane, “is the citadel of the Mesarthim.”
“Mesarthim?” said Lazlo, at the same moment that Thyon Nero asked, “Citadel?” Their voices clashed, and their glances, too.
“Citadel, palace, prison,” said Eril-Fane. His voice was rough, and dropped almost to nothing on the last word.
“That’s a building?” Ebliz Tod demanded, brash and incredulous. His Cloudspire, it would seem, was not the tallest structure in the world.
The height of the thing was but one element of its magnificence, and not even the foremost. It was tall, certainly. Even at a distance of miles, it was clearly massive, but how to properly gauge its height, in light of the fact that… it didn’t stand upon the ground?
The thing was floating. It was fixed in space, absolutely motionless, high above the city with no possible means of suspension—unless, indeed, there were some scaffolding in the heavens. It was composed of dazzling blue metal with an almost mirror shine to it, as smooth as water, and nowhere rectilinear or planar, but all flowing contours, as supple as skin. It didn’t look like a thing built or sculpted, but rather poured of molten metal. Lazlo could scarcely decide what was more extraordinary: that it was floating, or that it took the form of an immense being, because here was where his wild and improbable theory came wildly and improbably true. In a manner of speaking.
The entire impossible structure took the form of a seraph. It was a statue too huge to be conceived: upright, straight, feet toward the city, head in the sky, arms outheld in a pose of supplication. Its wings were spread wide. Its wings. The great metal span of them. They were fanned out to such a tremendous breadth that they made a canopy over the city, blocking out the sunlight. Moonlight, starlight, all natural light.
This wasn’t what Lazlo had meant by his theory, even in jest, but he was hard-pressed now to say which was wilder or more improbable: the return of mythic beings from beyond the sky, or a thousand-foot-high metal statue of one, hovering in the air. The imagination, he thought, no matter how vivid, was still tethered in some measure to the known, and this was beyond anything he could have imagined. If the Godslayer had told them in advance, it would have sounded absurd even to him.
The delegates found their voices and poured forth a deluge of questions.
“How is it floating?”
“What is that metal?”
“Who made it?”
“How did it get there?”
Lazlo asked, “Who are the Mesarthim?” and that was the first question Eril-Fane answered. Sort of.
“The question is: Who were the Mesarthim. They’re dead now.” Lazlo thought he saw a trace of grief in the Godslayer’s eyes, and he couldn’t make sense of it. The Mesarthim could only be the “gods” whose deaths had earned him his name. But if he had killed them, why should he grieve? “And that,” he added, nodding to it, “is dead, too.”