“If I could answer that,” said Eril-Fane, with the slightest of smiles, “I would have done it myself and avoided a long journey. Our guests possess the brightest practical minds in half a world—”
“But what is practicality against the magic of gods?” the old man interrupted.
“It is the best hope we have,” said Eril-Fane. “It won’t be the work of moments, as it was for Skathis, but what else can we do? We might be looking at years of effort. It may be that the best we can hope for is a tower to reach it and to carve it away piece by piece until it’s gone. Our grandchildren’s grandchildren may well be carting shavings of mesarthium out of the city as the monstrosity shrinks slowly to nothing. But even so, even if that’s the only way and we in this room don’t live to see it, there will come a day when the last piece is gone and the sky is free.”
They were powerful words, though spoken softly, and they seemed to lift the hopes of the others. Tentatively, Maldagha said, “Carve it away, you say. Can they cut it? Have they?”
“Not yet,” Eril-Fane admitted. In fact, the Fellerings’ confidence had proven misplaced. Like everyone else, they had failed even to make a scratch. Their arrogance was gone now, replaced with disgruntled determination. “But they’ve only just begun, and we’ve an alchemist, too. The most accomplished in the world.”
As for said alchemist, if he was having any luck with his alkahest, he was keeping it as much a secret as his key ingredient. His doors in the crematorium attic were locked, and he only opened them to receive meals. He’d even had a cot moved in so he could sleep on-site—which did not, however, mean that he never emerged. Tzara had been on watch, and had seen him in the dead of night, walking in the direction of the north anchor.
To experiment on mesarthium in secret, Lazlo supposed. When Tzara mentioned it to him this morning, he had gone himself to examine the surface, looking for any hint that Thyon had been successful. It was a big surface. It was possible he’d missed something, but he didn’t really think so. The whole expanse had been as smooth and unnaturally perfect as the first time he saw it.
There was not, in fact, any encouraging news to report to the Zeyyadin, not yet. The meeting had another purpose.
“Tomorrow,” Eril-Fane told them, and his voice seemed to weigh down the air, “we launch one of the silk sleighs.”
The effect of his words was immediate and… absolutely counterintuitive. In any city in the world, airships—real, functional airships—would be met with wonderment. This ought to have been thrilling news. But the men and women in the room went pale. Five faces in a row uniformly drained of color and went blank with a kind of stunned dread. The old man began to shake his head. Maldagha pressed her lips together to still their sudden trembling, and, in a gesture that pained Lazlo to interpret, laid a hand to her belly. Suheyla had made a similar movement, and he thought he knew what it meant. They all struggled to maintain composure, but their faces betrayed them. Lazlo hadn’t seen anyone look this stricken since the boys at the abbey were dragged to the crypt for punishment.
He had never seen adults look like this.
“It will only be a test flight,” Eril-Fane went on. “We need to establish a reliable means of coming and going between the city and the citadel. And…” He hesitated. Swallowed. Looked at no one when he said, “I need to see it.”
“You?” demanded one of the men. “Are you going up there?”
It seemed an odd question. It had never occurred to Lazlo that he might not.
Solemnly, Eril-Fane regarded the man. “I was hoping you would come, too, Shajan. You who were there at the end.” The end. The day the gods were slain? Lazlo’s mind flashed to the mural in the alley, and the hero depicted in it, six-armed and triumphant. “It has stood dead all these years, and some of us know better than others the… state… it was left in.”
No one met anyone’s eyes then. It was very odd. It put Lazlo in mind of the way they avoided looking at the citadel itself. It occurred to him that the bodies of the gods might still be up there, left where they’d died, but he didn’t see why that should cause such a trembling and shrinking.
“I couldn’t,” gasped Shajan, staring at his own shaking hands. “You can’t expect it. You see how I am now.”
It struck Lazlo as out of all proportion. A grown man reduced to trembling at the thought of entering an empty building—even that empty building—because there might be skeletons there? And the disproportion only grew.
“We could still move,” Maldagha blurted, looking as harrowed as Shajan. “You needn’t go back up there. We needn’t do any of this.” There was a note of desperation in her voice. “We can rebuild the city at Enet-Sarra, as we’ve discussed. The surveys have all been done. We need only to begin.”
Eril-Fane shook his head. “If we did,” he said, “it would mean that they had won, even in death. They haven’t. This is our city, that our foremothers and forefathers built on land consecrated by Thakra. We won’t forsake it. That is our sky, and we will have it back.” They were such words as might have been roared before battle. A little boy playing Tizerkane in an orchard would have loved the feel of them rolling off his tongue. But Eril-Fane didn’t roar them. His voice sounded faraway, like the last echo before silence redescends.
“What was that?” Lazlo asked him after they left.
“That was fear,” Eril-Fane said simply.
“But… fear of what?” Lazlo couldn’t comprehend it. “The citadel’s empty. What can there be to harm them?”
Eril-Fane let out a slow breath. “Were you afraid of the dark as a child?”
A chill snaked up Lazlo’s spine. He thought again of the crypt at the abbey, and the nights locked in with dead monks. “Yes,” he said simply.
“Even when you knew, rationally, that there was nothing in it that could harm you.”
“Yes.”
“Well. We are all children in the dark, here in Weep.”
34
SPIRIT OF LIBRARIAN
Another day over, another day of work and wonder, and Lazlo was returning to Suheyla’s for the night. As he crossed the Avenue, that solitary stripe of sunlight, he saw the errand boy from the guildhall coming toward him with a tray. It held empty dishes, and he realized the boy must be coming back from the crematorium, which lay just ahead. He’d have brought Thyon’s dinner, and traded it for his empty lunch tray. Lazlo greeted him, and wondered in passing how Thyon was getting on. He hadn’t seen him in the couple of days since he’d hidden himself away, and hadn’t had an update to give Eril-Fane when asked. With just a moment’s hesitation, he changed his course and made for the crematorium. Passing the anchor on the way, he skimmed his hand over its whole length, and tried to imagine it rippling and morphing as it apparently had for the dark god Skathis.