“What do you mean, it’s dead?” someone asked. “Was it alive? That… thing?”
“Not exactly,” said Eril-Fane. “But it moved as though it were. It breathed.” He wasn’t looking at anyone. He seemed very far away. He fell silent, facing the immensity of the strangeness before them, and then breathed out. “When the sun rose that day two hundred years ago, it was there. When the people came out of their houses and looked up and saw it, there were many who rejoiced. We have always worshipped the seraphim here. It might sound like a fairy tale to some of you, but our temples are timbered with the bones of demons, and it is no fairy tale to us.” He gestured toward the great metal angel. “Our holy book tells of a Second Coming. This isn’t what anyone thought it would look like, but many wanted to believe. Our priestesses have always taught that divinity, by virtue of its great power, must encompass both beauty and terror. And here were both.” He shook his head. “But in the end, the form of the citadel might only have been a twisted joke. Whatever they were, the Mesarthim weren’t seraphim.”
The whole party was silent. All the faranji looked as dazed as Lazlo felt. Some brows creased as rational minds grappled with this proof of the impossible—or at least the hitherto inconceivable. Others were smooth on faces gone slack with astonishment. The Tizerkane looked grim, and… this was odd, but Lazlo noticed, first seeing Azareen and the way she kept her eyes pinned on Eril-Fane, that none of them were looking at the citadel. Not Ruza or Tzara or anyone. It seemed to Lazlo they were looking anywhere but there, as though they couldn’t bear the sight of the thing.
“They didn’t have wings. They weren’t beings of fire. Like the seraphim, though, there were six of them, three male, three female. No army, no servants. They needed none,” said Eril-Fane. “They had magic.” He gave a bitter smile. “Magic isn’t a fairy tale, either, as we here have cause to know. I wanted you to see this before I tried to explain. I knew your minds would fight it. Even now, with the proof before you, I can see you’re struggling.”
“Where did they come from?” Calixte asked.
Eril-Fane just shook his head. “We don’t know.”
“But you say they were gods?” asked Mouzaive, the natural philosopher, who was hard-pressed to believe in the divine.
“What is a god?” was Eril-Fane’s reply. “I don’t know the answer to that, but I can tell you this: The Mesarthim were powerful, but they were nothing holy.”
He sank into silence, and they waited to see if he would break it. There were so many questions they wanted to ask, but even Drave, the explosionist, felt the pathos of the moment and held his tongue. When Eril-Fane did speak, though, it was only to say, “It’s getting late. You’ll want to reach the city.”
“We’re going there?” some among them demanded, fear thick in their voices. “Right underneath that thing?”
“It’s safe,” the Godslayer assured them. “I promise you. It’s just a shell now. It’s been empty for fifteen years.”
“Then what’s the problem?” Thyon Nero asked. “Why exactly have you brought us here?”
Lazlo was surprised he hadn’t figured it out. He gazed at the dazzling behemoth and the darkness beneath it. “The shadow of our dark time still haunts us.” Eril-Fane might have slain the gods and freed his people from thrall, but that thing remained, blocking out the sun, and lording their long torment over them. “To get rid of it,” he told the alchemist, as sure as he had ever been of anything. “And give the city back its sky.”
22
PATTERN OF LIGHT, SCRIBBLE OF DARKNESS
Lazlo looked up: at the shining citadel of alien blue metal floating in the sky.
Sarai looked down: at the gleam of the Cusp, beyond which the sun was soon to sink, and at the fine thread winding down the valley toward Weep. It was the trail. Squinting, she could just make out a progress of specks against the white.
Lazlo was one of the specks.
Around them both, voices jangled and jarred—speculation, debate, alarm—but they heard them only as noise. Both were absorbed in their own thoughts. Lazlo’s mind was afire with marvel, the lit match touching off fuse after fuse. Burning lines raced through his consciousness, connecting far-flung dots and filling in blanks, erasing question marks and adding a dozen more for every one erased. A dozen dozen. There could be no end to the questions, but the sketch outlines of answers were beginning to appear, and they were astonishing.
If his absorption were a pattern of light, though, Sarai’s was a scribble of darkness. For fifteen years, she and the others had survived in hiding, trapped in this citadel of murdered gods and scraping a meager existence from it. And maybe they had always known this day would come, but the only life—the only sanity—had been in believing it could be held at bay. Now those specks in the distance, almost too small to be seen, were coming inexorably toward them to attempt to dismantle their world, and what tatters remained of Sarai’s belief deserted her.
The Godslayer had returned to Weep.
She had always known who her father was. Long before she ever screamed moths and sent her senses down to the city, she knew about the man who had loved and killed her mother, and who would have killed her, too, if she had been in the nursery with the others. Images rose from her arsenal of horrors. His strong hand, drawing a knife across Isagol’s throat. Children and babies screaming, the bigger ones thrashing in the arms of their killers. Spuming arterial fountains, leaping sprays of red. “The throat’s better,” the old woman had said in Sarai’s nightmare. She reached up for her own throat and wrapped her hands around it as though she could protect it. Her pulse was frantic, her breathing ragged, and it seemed impossible that people could live at all with such flimsy stuff as skin keeping blood, breath, and spirit safe inside their bodies.
At the garden balustrade in the citadel of the Mesarthim, with ghosts peering over their shoulders, the godspawn watched their death ride down to Weep.
And in the sky overhead—empty, empty, empty and then not—a white bird appeared in the blue, like the tip of a knife stabbed through a veil, and wherever it had been, and however it had come, it was here now, and it was watching.
PART III
mahal (muh·HAHL) noun
A risk that will yield either tremendous reward or disastrous consequence.
Archaic; from the mahalath, a
transformative fog of myth that turns
one either into a god or a monster.
23
UNSEEN NO LONGER