“That wasn’t me,” argued Thyon. It was Ebliz Tod who’d done that. So all right, he’d brought some rations, but they were in case of emergency, and hardly a whole camel’s worth. He’d had a lot of gear, transporting a working alchemical laboratory. Any extra camels were well justified. “And I’ve never called anything barbaric,” he said. That charge he could cleanly dispute.
Calixte shrugged. “Thoughts count, too, Nero. If you think you’ve concealed yours, you’re mistaken.”
His impulse was to angrily dismiss everything she’d said, but could he? The truth was, he had been sensible of bestowing upon Weep the honor of his presence, and why not? Any city in the world would be grateful to host him. As to their language, that brought up more complicated feelings. Back in Zosma, he’d learned enough from Strange’s books to make a fair greeting and impress Eril-Fane...that is, until Strange had gone and opened his mouth and outshone him. It only made sense. It was Strange’s life work. Of course he spoke better than Thyon could after such brief study. Had Thyon thought he wouldn’t speak up?
He had thought that. He’d thought Strange would meekly subside while Thyon stole his work and his dream, and he’d been wrong.
Instead, Strange left with the Godslayer and his warriors, and when Thyon next saw him, several months later, he’d practically become one of them, riding a spectral, wearing clothes like theirs, and speaking their language fluently. After that, Thyon had told himself it was beneath him. He wasn’t about to suffer in comparison to a foundling librarian. He was the golden godson. If they wanted to address him, they should do the work, not he. And so he hadn’t learned any more of their language than he could help.
He found the next handhold himself and hoisted himself higher. “You’re the good kind of faranji, I suppose.”
“Oh yes,” she said. “Very good. I even taste good, or so I’m told.”
He was focused on not falling to his death, and so he missed the mischief in her voice. “Taste,” he scoffed. “I suppose they’re cannibals. Who’s calling them barbarians now?”
Calixte laughed with delighted disbelief, and it was only then, too late, that Thyon took her meaning. Oh gods. Taste. He flung back his head to look up at her, nearly losing his balance in the process. She laughed harder at the shock on his face. “Cannibals!” she repeated. “That’s good. I’m going to start calling Tzara that. My sweet cannibal. Can I tell you a secret?” She whispered the rest, wide-eyed and zestful: “I’m a cannibal, too.”
Thyon flushed with mortification. “I’ll thank you to keep your private matters to yourself.”
“You’re blushing like a maiden,” said Calixte. “Honestly, you’re as innocent as Lazlo. Who’d have thought it?”
“It’s not innocence, it’s propriety—”
“If your next sentence starts with ‘a lady would never,’ you can choke on it, Nero. I’m no lady.”
The wicked relish with which she disavowed the word robbed Thyon of any easy insult, so he put his energy into swinging himself up to the little lip of earth on which she stood. Now he was level with her and could hardly avoid her merry eyes, though he tried his best, and blushed anew.
“Are you a maiden?” Calixte asked. “You can tell me.”
A maiden? He kept right on climbing. Did she mean a virgin? Was she really asking him that? It defied belief. The doorway was nearly within reach now, and she was still busy mocking him.
“It’s nothing to be ashamed of,” she told his back. “Plenty of fine gentlemen wait until marriage.”
“And you’ve been acquainted with ‘plenty of fine gentlemen,’ have you?”
“Well, no,” Calixte admitted. And then, as though a new thought had occurred to her, she asked with a note of piquant curiosity, “Have you?”
Her innuendo struck him, and it stunned him. In Zosma, such a suggestion could only end in a duel. Thyon flashed hot and cold. He wore his dueling blade at his side as always, but one did not fight women. He had to struggle to remind himself it wasn’t an insult here, much less a matter of honor, especially considering the source. He shot her a warning look and kept climbing, reaching the door ahead of her.
It was blocked by several large rocks. “We should have brought tools,” he said.
“Tools,” scoffed Calixte. “Tools are for people with nothing better to do than think things through and make sensible plans.”
Thyon raised his eyebrows. “And...what sort of people are we at the moment?”
“The foolish sort who do things like this.” She folded herself up like a piece of paper and slipped into the narrow gap between one large rock and the slope. Thyon couldn’t understand how a body could do that. It hardly seemed decent to watch. Somehow her knees were behind her shoulders. Her back was flat to the slope, her feet to the rock, pushing. She bit her lip white with the strain, and the rock creaked, shifted, and plunged over the edge.
Thyon shot out a hand to make sure she didn’t plunge with it.
“Thank you, good sir,” she said, dropping quite an elegant curtsy on the narrow foothold they shared.
He snatched back his hand and wiped it off on the side of his dirty trousers.
The rest of the rocks were smaller, but still Thyon’s hands were bleeding by the time they’d cleared them away. The door they uncovered was stout, wooden, and, like everything else in Weep, carved. It depicted a single great tree, roots to branches, and each leaf was a lidded eye that seemed to watch them, lazy and judgmental.
It would have been frustrating to find the door locked after all that, but the knob turned in Thyon’s hand, and between the two of them, they were able to grind it open on rusted hinges—
—to reveal a corridor, its ceiling inlaid with glavestone that lit it up like morning. Dust hung in the air, and the smell was...well, it was stale, much staler than any air Thyon had breathed before, and in it were undertones of long-ago death, trapped bodies, old bones, but there was leather, too, and crumbling paper and dust. Thyon knew this smell. For all that he was a duke’s son, born in a castle, with a palace of his own gifted him by the queen, he was a scholar,
too, and he lived this smell. It was unmistakable. Universal.
It was books.
He gave a laugh that spun the dust in front of his face and sent ripples through the heavy air. “It’s the library,” he said, and his very first thought was that Strange would give a limb to get to wander in this place. “It’s the ancient library of Weep.”
Chapter 12
Witchlight and Rue
Sarai held her curtain for Lazlo, and drew it closed behind him. There were ghosts in the corridor, and more out on her terrace. She drew that curtain, too, then paused. She looked at the doorways, then at Lazlo, and, blushing, asked, “Can you close them?”
Her voice was low, warm, and silken, and Lazlo blushed, too. This was real. It wasn’t a dream, some filament spun between them across space. It was him facing her, his real hand clasping her ghostflesh one. They wouldn’t be wrenched apart by sunrise, or the sad demise of a fragile moth, or an alchemist pelting stones. They were here, awake, together.
They could be wrenched apart by Minya, though, at literally any moment, and their hearts felt ragged, frayed by desperation and the thoughtless drub of time.
Lazlo shut the doors.
If it had been a dream, the room could have melted away, transforming into some other scene, without metal walls and ghosts at the doors. Sarai would have loved to re-create last night’s dream and slip right back where she had been: to the bed with its feather down, and Lazlo’s weight on top of her, a revelation of sensation. His mouth would be on her shoulder, the strap of her slip eased aside.
But to will it was one thing. To do it was another. Their dream-smith skills wouldn’t serve them now, and for the moment they only stood there, their gazes mingling witchlight and rue.
Lazlo swallowed. “So this is your room,” he said, and tore his eyes from her to look around. He noticed at once its central feature: the huge bed, bigger than his whole room at the Great Library. It was raised on a dais and curtained like a stage, and his eyes grew wide at the sight of it.
“My mother’s,” Sarai said quickly. “I don’t sleep there.”
“No?”
“No. I have a smaller bed back by the dressing room.”
Talking about beds wasn’t helping. It made their desire too transparent. While Sarai might have silently led Lazlo there, now that it was spoken aloud, it seemed far too bold. They both grew bashful, as though all that had passed between them in dreams remained there, and these bodies with their awkward arms would have to learn it all over again.
“It’s actually beautiful,” said Lazlo, still looking around the room. The ceiling was soaring and fan-vaulted, the walls much more ornate than anything he’d seen in the citadel so far. They reminded him of the carvings down in Weep, though these, of course, were wrought of mesarthium, not stone. “Skathis did all this?” he asked, reaching out to trace a songbird with his finger. It was one of hundreds, and stunning in its perfection, perching among vines and lilies equally lifelike, as though they were the real thing dipped in metal, gilded in molten mesarthium.
Sarai nodded, reaching out to stroke the eye ridge of a life-size spectral in bas-relief. Its antlers projected from the wall; she had used them as a hook to hang her robe. “It makes him harder to imagine. Shouldn’t all his creations have been as hideous as Rasalas was?”
Nothing in the room was hideous. It was a luxurious temple wrought of water-smooth metal. Lazlo skimmed his fingertips over a sparrow and freed it. Buoying it on the same magnetic field as the citadel itself, he shook its little wings and gave it flight.
From Sarai’s lips came a soft sound of wonder. Lazlo loved it, and wanted to hear it again, so he quickened more birds and they came and flew in a ring around her. Her laugh was music. She held out her free hand, the one not still clasped in his, and one of the birds alighted on her palm.