At that moment, as she had changed, so did their surroundings. Gone was the moon shop, and all of Weep with it. Gone the citadel and its shadow. Lazlo and the goddess, still astride their creatures, were transported right to the center of the Pavilion of Thought. Forty feet high, the shelves of books. The spines in their jewel tones, the glimmer of leaf. Librarians on ladders like specters in gray, and scholars in scarlet hunched at their tables. It was all as Lazlo had seen it that day seven years ago when the good fortune of bad fish had brought him to a new life.
And so it would seem that this was his answer, or at least his first answer. His outermost layer of self, even after six months away. “I’m a librarian,” he said. “Or I was, until recently. At the Great Library of Zosma.”
Sarai looked around, taking it all in, and momentarily forgot her hard line of questioning. What would Feral do in such a place? “So many books,” she said, awed. “I never knew there were this many books in all the world.”
Her awe endeared her to Lazlo. She might be Isagol the Terrible, but one can’t be irredeemable who shows reverence for books. “That’s how I felt, the first time I saw it.”
“What’s in them all?” she asked.
“In this room, they’re all philosophy.”
“This room?” She turned to him. “There are more?”
He smiled broadly. “So many more.”
“All full of books?”
He nodded, proud, as though he’d made them all himself. “Would you like to see my favorites?”
“All right,” she said.
Lazlo urged Lixxa forward, and the goddess kept pace with him on her gryphon. Side by side, as majestic as a pair of statues but far more fantastical, they rode right through the Pavilion of Thought. The gryphon’s wings brushed the shoulders of scholars. Lixxa’s antlers nearly toppled a ladder. And Lazlo might have been an accomplished dreamer—in several senses of the word—but right now he was like anyone else. He wasn’t conscious that this was a dream. He was simply in it. The logic that belonged to the real world had remained behind, like luggage on a dock. This world had a logic all its own, and it was fluid, generous, and deep. The secret stairs to his dusty sublevel were too narrow to accommodate great beasts like these, but they slipped down them easily. And he’d long since cleaned off the books with infinite love and care, but the dust was just as he had found it that very first day: a soft blanket of years, keeping all the best secrets.
“No one but me has read any of these in at least a lifetime,” he told her.
She took down a book and blew off the dust. It flurried around her like snowflakes as she flipped pages, but the words were in some strange alphabet and she couldn’t read them. “What’s in this one?” she asked Lazlo, passing it to him.
“This is one of my favorites,” he said. “It’s the epic of the mahalath, a magic fog that comes every fifty years and blankets a village for three days and three nights. Every living thing in it is transformed, for either better or worse. The people know when it’s coming, and most flee and wait for it to pass. But there are always a few who stay and take the risk.”
“And what happens to them?”
“Some turn into monsters,” he said. “And some to gods.”
“So that’s where gods come from,” she said, wry.
“You would know better than me, my lady.”
Not really, Sarai thought, because she had no more idea where the Mesarthim had come from than the humans did. She, of course, was conscious that this was a dream. She was too accustomed to dream logic to be surprised by any of the trappings, but not too jaded to find them beautiful. After the initial flurry, snow continued to fall in the alcove. It shone on the floor like spilled sugar, and when she slid from her gryphon’s back, it was cold under her bare feet. The thing that did surprise her, that she couldn’t get her mind around, even now, was that she was having a conversation with a stranger. However many dreams she had navigated, whatever chimerical fancies she had witnessed, she had never interacted. But here she was, talking—chatting, even. Almost like a real person.
“What about this one?” she asked, picking up another book.
He took it and read the spine. “Folktales from Vaire. That’s the small kingdom just south of Zosma.” He leafed pages and smiled. “You’ll like this one. It’s about a young man who falls in love with the moon. He tries to steal it. Perhaps he’s your culprit.”
“And does he succeed?”
“No,” said Lazlo. “He has to make peace with the impossible.”
Sarai wrinkled her nose. “You mean he has to give up.”
“Well, it is the moon.” In the story, the young man, Sathaz, was so enchanted by the moon’s reflection in the still, deep pool near his forest home that he would gaze at it, entranced, but whenever he reached for it, it broke into a thousand pieces and left him drenched, with empty arms. “But then,” Lazlo added, “if someone managed to steal it from you—” He looked to her bare wrist where no moon charms now hung.
“Maybe it was him,” she said, “and the story got it wrong.”
“Maybe,” allowed Lazlo. “And Sathaz and the moon are living happily together in a cave somewhere.”
“And they’ve had thousands of children together, and that’s where glaves come from. The union of man and moon.” Sarai heard herself, and wondered what was wrong with her. Just moments ago she’d been annoyed at the moon nonsense that was coming out of her phantasm’s mouth, and now she was doing it. It was Lazlo, she thought. It was his mind. The rules were different here. The truth was different. It was… nicer.
He was grinning broadly, and the sight set off a fluttering in Sarai’s belly. “What about that one?” she asked, turning quickly away to point at a big book on a higher shelf.
“Oh hello,” he said, reaching for it. He brought it down: a huge tome bound in pale-green velvet with a filigreed layer of silver scrollwork laid over it. “This,” he said, passing it to her, “is the villain that broke my nose.”
When he released it into her hands, its weight almost made her drop it in the snow. “This?” she asked.
“My first day as apprentice,” he said, rueful. “There was blood everywhere. I won’t disgust you by pointing out the stain on the spine.”
“A book of fairy tales broke your nose,” she said, helpless not to smile at how wrong her first impression had been. “I supposed you were in a fight.”
“More of an ambush, actually,” he said. “I was on tiptoe, trying to get it.” He touched his nose. “But it got me.”
“You’re lucky it didn’t take your head off,” said Sarai, hefting it back to him.
“Very lucky. I got enough grief for a broken nose. I’d never have heard the end of a lost head.”
A small laugh escaped Sarai. “I don’t think you hear very much, if you lose your head.”
Solemnly, he said, “I hope never to know.”