Lazlo nodded. When he looked at Eril-Fane now, what did he see? A hero? A butcher? Did they cancel each other out, or would butcher always trump hero? Could they exist side by side, two such opposites, like the love and hate he’d borne for three long years?
“I had to,” said the Godslayer. “We couldn’t suffer them to live, not with magic that would set them above us, to conquer us all over again when they grew up. The risk was too great.” It all had the ring of something oft repeated, and his look appealed to Lazlo to understand. Lazlo didn’t. When Sarai told him what Eril-Fane had done, he’d believed the Godslayer must repent of it now. But here he was, defending the slaughter.
“They were innocent,” he said.
The Godslayer seemed to shrink in on himself. “I know. Do you think I wanted to do it? There was no other way. There was no place for them in this world.”
“And now?” Lazlo asked. He felt cold. This wasn’t the conversation he had expected to be having. They should have been figuring out a plan. Instead, his question was met with silence, the only possible interpretation of which was: There was still no place for them in this world. “She’s your daughter,” he said. “She’s not some monster. She’s afraid. She’s kind.”
Eril-Fane shrank further. The two women closed ranks around him. Azareen flashed Lazlo a warning look, and Suheyla reached for her son’s hand. “And what of our dead, trapped up there?” she asked. “Is that kind?”
“That isn’t her doing,” Lazlo said, not to dismiss the threat, but at least to exonerate Sarai. “It must be one of the others.”
Eril-Fane flinched. “Others?”
How deep and tangled the roots of hatred were, thought Lazlo, seeing how even now, with remorse and self-loathing like a fifteen years’ canker eating him from within, the Godslayer could hardly tell whether he wished the godspawn unslain or feared them so.
As for Lazlo, he was uneasy with the information. He felt sick in the pit of his stomach to fear that he couldn’t trust Eril-Fane. “There are other survivors,” was all he said.
Survivors. There was so much in that word: strength, resilience, luck, along with the shadow of whatever crime or cruelty had been survived. In this case, Eril-Fane was that crime, that cruelty. They had survived him, and the shadow fell very dark on him.
“Sarai saved us,” Lazlo said quietly. “Now we have to save her, and the others, too. You’re Eril-Fane. It’s up to you. The people will follow your lead.”
“It isn’t that simple, Lazlo,” said Suheyla. “There’s no way you could understand the hate. It’s like a disease.”
He was beginning to understand. How had Sarai put it? “The hate of the used and tormented, who are the children of the used and tormented, and whose own children will be used and tormented.”
“So what are you saying? What do you mean to do?” He braced himself, and asked, “Kill them?”
“No,” said Eril-Fane. “No.” It was an answer to the question, but it came out as though he were warding off a nightmare or a blow, as though even the idea was an assault, and he couldn’t bear it. He put his face in his hand, head bowed. Azareen sat apart, watching him, her eyes dark and liquid and so full of pain that she might have been made of it. Suheyla, eyes brimming with tears, laid her one good hand on her son’s shoulder.
“I’ll take the second silk sleigh,” he had said, lifting his head, and while the women’s eyes were wet, his were dry. “I’ll go up and meet with them.”
Azareen and Suheyla immediately objected. “And offer yourself as sacrifice?” demanded Azareen. “What would that accomplish?”
“It seems to me you barely escaped with your lives,” Suheyla pointed out more gently.
He looked to Lazlo, and there was a helplessness in him, as though he wanted Lazlo to tell him what to do. “I’ll talk to Sarai tonight,” he volunteered. “I’ll ask if she can persuade the others to call a truce.”
“How do you know she’ll come again?”
Lazlo blushed, and worried they could see it all written on his face. “She said she would,” he lied. They’d run out of time to make plans, but she didn’t need to say it. Night couldn’t come soon enough, and he was sure she felt the same. And next time he wouldn’t wait until the precise strike of dawn before drawing her close. He cleared his throat. “If she says it’s safe, we can go up tomorrow.”
“We?” said Eril-Fane. “No. Not you. I’ll risk no one but myself.”
Azareen looked sharply away at that, and in the bleakness of her eyes, Lazlo saw a shade of the anguish of loving someone who doesn’t love himself.
“Oh, I’m going with you,” Lazlo said, not with force but simple resolve. He was imagining disembarking from the sleigh onto the seraph’s palm, and Sarai standing before him, as real as his own flesh and blood. He had to be there. Whatever look these musings produced upon his face, Eril-Fane didn’t try to argue him out of it. As for Azareen, neither would she be left behind. But first, the five up in the citadel had to agree to it, and that couldn’t happen until tomorrow.
Meanwhile, there was today to deal with. Lazlo was to go to the Merchants’ Guildhall this morning and ask Soulzeren and Ozwin, privately, to conjure some likely excuse for delaying the launch of the second silk sleigh. Everyone would be expecting them to follow up yesterday’s failed ascension with a success, which of course they couldn’t do, at least not yet.
As for the secret, it would be kept from the citizens. Eril-Fane considered keeping it from the Tizerkane, too, for fear that it would cause them too much turmoil and prove too difficult to hide. But Azareen was staunch on their behalf, and argued that they needed to be ready for anything that happened. “They can bear it,” she said, adding softly, “They don’t need to know all of it yet.”
She meant Sarai, Lazlo understood, and whose child she was.
“There’s something I don’t understand,” he said as he prepared to take his leave. It seemed to him it was the mystery at the center of everything to do with the godspawn. “Sarai said there were thirty of them in the nursery that day.”