Fabled Weep, unseen no longer.
From the top of the Cusp, where the Godslayer’s delegation stood, a trail descended into the canyon of the River Uzumark, with the white of demonglass gradually giving way to the honey-colored stone of cliff faces and natural spires and arches, and to the green of forests so dense that their canopies looked, from above, like carpets of moss one might walk across. And the waterfalls might have been curtains of pale silk hung from the cliff tops, too numerous to count. With its waterfall curtains and carpets of forest, the canyon was like a long and beautiful room, and Weep a toy city—a gilded model—at its center. The shocking surreality of the citadel—the sheer size of the thing—played havoc with the mind’s sense of scale.
“Does Eril-Fane want me to climb that?” Calixte asked, staring up at the great seraph.
“What’s the matter? Couldn’t do it?” taunted Ebliz Tod.
“Have to reach it first,” she quipped. “I suppose that’s where you come in.” She waved her hand at him, queenly. “Be a dear and build me some stairs.”
Tod’s umbrage rendered him momentarily speechless, during which pause Soulzeren interjected, “Be faster to fly, anyway. We can have the silk sleighs ready in a few days.”
“That’s just getting to it, though,” her husband, Ozwin, pointed out. “That’ll be the easy part. Getting rid of it, now, there’s another matter.”
“What do you reckon?” Soulzeren mused. “Move it? Dismantle it?”
“Blow it up,” said Drave, which drew him flat looks from everyone.
“You do see that it’s directly above the city,” Lazlo pointed out.
“So they get out of the way.”
“I imagine they’re trying to avoid further destruction.”
“Then why invite me?” he asked, grinning.
“Why indeed?” Soulzeren murmured in an undertone.
Drave reached out to smack Thyon Nero on the shoulder. “Did you hear that?” he asked, as Thyon had failed to laugh. “Why invite me if you don’t want destruction, eh? Why bring ten camels’ worth of powder if you don’t want to blow that thing right back to the heavens?”
Thyon gave him a thin smile and half nod, though it was clear that his mind was elsewise occupied. No doubt he was processing the problem in his own way. He kept his own counsel, while the other delegates were vociferous. For months their intellects had been hamstrung by mystery. Now the sky presented the greatest scientific puzzle they had ever encountered, and they were all considering their place in it, and their chances of solving it.
Mouzaive was talking to Belabra about magnets, but Belabra wasn’t listening. He was muttering indecipherable calculations, while the Fellerings—the twin metallurgists—discussed the possible composition of the blue metal.
As for Lazlo, he was awed and humbled. He’d known from the first that he had no qualifications to recommend him for the Godslayer’s delegation, but it wasn’t until he beheld the problem that he realized that some part of him had still hoped he might be the one to solve it. Ridiculous. A storybook might have held the secret of azoth, and knowledge of stories might have earned him a place in the party, but he hardly thought that tales would give him an edge now.
Well, but he was here, and he would help in any way he could, even if it was only running errands for the delegates. What was it Master Hyrrokkin had said? “Some men are born for great things, and others to help great men do great things.” He’d also said there was no shame in it, and Lazlo agreed.
Still, was it too much to hope that the “man born for great things” should not turn out to be Thyon Nero? Anyone but him, thought Lazlo, laughing a little at his own pettiness.
The caravan descended the trail into the valley, and Lazlo looked about himself, amazed. He was really here, seeing it. A canyon of golden stone, swaths of unbroken forest, a great green river blurred by waterfall mist, flowing as far as the shadow of the citadel. There, just shy of the city, the Uzumark broadened into a delta and was sliced into ribbons by boulders and small islands before simply vanishing. Beyond the city it reappeared and continued its tumultuous journey eastward and away. The river, it seemed, flowed under the city.
From a distance, Weep was stunningly like Lazlo’s long-held picture of it—or at least, like his long-held picture as seen through a veil of shadow. There were the golden domes, though fewer than he’d pictured, and they didn’t gleam. The sunlight didn’t strike them. By the time the sun angled low enough to slant its rays under the citadel’s outspread wings, it had gone beyond the edge of the Cusp, and only traded one shadow for another.
But it was more than that. There was a forlorn look about it, a sense of lingering despair. There were the city’s defensive walls, built in a harmonious oval, but the harmony was broken. In four places, the wall was obliterated. Set down with geometric precision at the cardinal points were four monumental slabs of the same alien metal as the citadel. They were great tapered blocks, each as big in its own right as a castle, but they appeared entirely smooth, windowless and doorless. They looked, from above, like a set of great map weights holding down the city’s edges so it wouldn’t blow away.
It was difficult to make out from this distance, but there seemed to be something atop each one. A statue, perhaps.
“What are those great blocks?” he asked Ruza, pointing.
“Those are the anchors.”
“Anchors?” Lazlo squinted across the distance, gauging the blocks’ position relative to the great seraph overhead. It appeared to be centered in the air above them. “Do they act like anchors?” he asked. He thought of ships in harbor, in which case there would be anchor chain. Nothing visible connected the seraph to the blocks. “Are they keeping it from drifting away?”
Ruza’s smile was wry. “They never took the time to explain it to us, Strange. They set them down the day they came—never mind what was under them—and there they are still.” Ruza jerked his head at the procession behind them. “Think one of these geniuses will be able to move them?”
“Move the anchors? Do you think that’s how to move the citadel?”
Ruza shrugged. “Or what? Attach towlines to it and pull? All I know is it won’t be leaving the way it came. Not with Skathis dead.”
Skathis.
The name was like a serpent’s hiss. Lazlo took it in, and the realization dawned that Ruza was talking. Well, he was always talking. The fine point was: The secrecy that had bound them all until now was apparently broken. Lazlo could ask questions. He turned to his friend.
“Don’t look at me like that,” said Ruza.
“Like what?”
“Like I’m a beautiful book you’re about to open and plunder with your greedy mad eyes.”
Lazlo laughed. “Greedy mad eyes? Plunder? Are you afraid of me, Ruza?”