Thyon didn’t know what gulik meant, and supposed it was better that way. As for supercilious, he had to revise his notion that Ruza’s Common Tongue was rudimentary. Perhaps his language lessons with Strange had gone both ways. Which meant, of course, that all his curt commands were every bit as rude as they sounded.
If Strange were here, he would have made some clever retort, and their eyes would have laughed as they strove to look serious. But Strange wasn’t here, and Ruza’s eyes weren’t laughing. Thyon took the book without comment and added it to the crate.
With every book he unloaded, he gazed at the cover and the inscrutable title, and felt locked out of it by his own ignorance. Nothing would have induced him to ask for Ruza’s help again, but one book was too extraordinary to simply stack into a crate. Lifting it out of the basket, he felt something like reverence. Its cover wasn’t leather or board but cloisonné—an intricate picture of inlaid enamel and what could only be lys and precious stones. By the way it had been worn smooth in places, he guessed that it was very old, and had been much handled in its time. As for the image depicted in a hundred vivid colors, it was a battle: a battle between giants and angels.
Seraphim, he thought. And ijji, the monstrous race they were supposed to have slain and piled in the pyre the size of a moon. He’d scoffed at the story when Strange told it, the night before they reached Weep. But there was no more scoffing after climbing the Cusp, which was, beyond doubt, the very pyre.
Opening the book, Thyon saw there were engravings inside, depicting more monsters and angels. It might all have spilled straight from Strange’s story.
“Are we taking a reading break?” asked Ruza. “Or should I say, a looking at the pictures break?”
Thyon closed the book and turned away.
“Don’t you want to know what it says?” asked Ruza.
“No,” said Thyon. He went to put the book with the rest, at the last moment sliding it instead into a gap between crates, so that he could find it later. He wasn’t done with it.
They got the cart loaded again, and Calixte and Tzara climbed back out of the pit. Calixte wasn’t bounding now, and even Tzara looked weary. Thyon felt hot and dirty. Too tired to think straight, he rolled his sleeves up to his elbows.
“What happened to you?” asked Calixte, staring at his forearms.
Hastily he rolled his sleeves back down. “Nothing.”
“That’s nothing?” she said, eyebrows raised. “It looks like you’ve been training ravid kittens how to hunt.”
But that was not what it looked like. The marks on Thyon’s arms were scars, too regular to make sense. They might have been measured with a ruler, they were so precise, each two inches long, and spaced a quarter inch apart. Several were fresh and raw, though not altogether new: Puckers of old scar tissue were split with red lines, as though new cuts had been made on the healed sites of older ones.
“Did you do that to yourself?” asked Ruza, confused.
“It’s an alchemical experiment,” Thyon lied, his voice tight. He thought of the secret only Lazlo Strange knew—how he drew his own spirit with a syringe, and used it to make azoth. And there were some bruises and little scabbed needle pricks from that, but these were something else. Not even Strange knew this secret. “You wouldn’t understand.”
“No, I know,” said Ruza, “because I’m just a stupid barbarian.”
“That’s not why. Only an alchemist could understand.” Also a lie. Thyon was certain that this wouldn’t make sense to anyone.
Ruza snorted. “But I am a stupid barbarian?”
“Did I say so?”
“You say it with your face.”
“That’s just his face,” said Calixte in a pretense of defending him. “He can’t help having indignant nostrils. Can you, Nero? You probably come from a long line of indignant nostrils. Aristocrats are issued them at birth, along with haughty eyes and judgmental cheeks.”
“Judgmental cheeks?” repeated Ruza. “Can cheeks be judgmental?”
“His manage.”
To Thyon’s surprise, Tzara took his side. “Leave him alone. He’s here, isn’t he? He could have fled like the others.” She gave Ruza a shove. “You’re just jealous he’s so much better-looking than you.”
“I am not,” the warrior protested. “And he is not. Look at him! He’s not even a real person.”
“What?” asked Thyon, honestly baffled. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
But Ruza didn’t answer him. He only gestured at him, telling the women, “He looks like somebody made him, and delivered him in a velvet-lined box. He probably plucks his eyebrows. I don’t know how you could possibly find that attractive.”
“Us?” asked Calixte, laughing. “He’s hardly my type.”
“Too pretty for me,” said Tzara, bracing herself for the exaggerated punch Calixte landed on her hip.
“Are you saying I’m not pretty?” she demanded with mock umbrage.
“Not that pretty, thank the gods. I’d be afraid to touch you.”
Thyon was speechless. He was well aware of his own perfection— and his eyebrows were natural, thank you very much—but had never heard it discussed so openly, or, of all things, as though it were a fault. A small tingling of relief mingled with his indignation, though, because they’d forgotten about the cuts on his arms.
“Exactly,” said Ruza. “He’s like a new linen napkin that you’re afraid to wipe your mouth on.”
The women both laughed at the absurdity of the comparison. Thyon’s brow crinkled. A napkin? “I’ll thank you to keep your mouth away from me,” he said, causing the women to laugh even harder.
“You don’t have to worry about that,” said Ruza, looking positively repelled.
But Tzara shut him down, saying with a sly edge, “I think you protest too much, my friend.”
Whatever she meant by it, Ruza’s cheeks flamed, and he looked anywhere but at Thyon. Busying himself with the donkey, he asked, sounding sour, “Are we going to deliver this load or not?” He climbed into the driver’s seat. “I don’t know about the rest of you, but I could use some sleep.”
Finally, thought Thyon, who wasn’t sure he could have managed another cartload without a break.
“Me too,” said Tzara. “But we’ll have to check in at the garrison.”
“Not me,” gloated Calixte. “I have no master. I sleep when I like. Wait—”
The cart had started to pull away. She darted forward and plucked something out. “A book didn’t make it in the crates. Oh, this one. It’s gorgeous.”
It was the one Thyon had set aside. He started to speak, but stopped. What could he say? Words came unbidden into his mind, and he wanted to scour them out.
I thought Strange would like to see it.
Since when did he care what Strange would like? That wasn’t why he’d set it aside.
“Is it about the seraphim?” Calixte wondered.
Tzara looked over her shoulder, and Thyon witnessed the instant her face changed, all her weariness vanishing. “Merciful seraphim,” she said in awe. “It’s the Thakranaxet.”
“What?” Ruza jumped down from the driver’s seat, and then the three of them were shoulder to shoulder, peering at the book with avid eyes. Thyon, opposite, felt a pinch of envy and, preposterously, loss, as though the book had been his discovery, and was being taken away from him.
As he had taken away Strange’s books back in Zosma? No. Of course that had been much worse. A pang of shame twisted his gut at the thought of those scruffy, handmade books, labors of love brimming with years of the librarian’s hard-earned knowledge. They were still back in his pink marble palace, stacked up where he’d left them. It occurred to him now that he might have brought them, and returned them to Strange on the journey. He did have one book that Strange would know. It was Miracles for Breakfast, the volume of tales Strange had brought to his door when they were sixteen. What would he think if he knew Thyon had read it so often he knew it practically by heart?
“What’s the Thakranaxet?” he asked, stumbling over the name.
“It’s the testament of Thakra,” Tzara said. “She was leader of the seraphim who came to Zeru.”
Even after what he’d seen, it still startled Thyon to hear the seraphim spoken of so matter-of-factly, as real historical beings. In Zosma, there was lore of the seraphim, but it was very old and had been churned under by the One God like weeds by a plow. No names survived there that Thyon had ever heard, and certainly no one knew it was fact.
“It’s our holy book,” Tzara said. “All copies were lost or destroyed when the Mesarthim came.”
They went on murmuring, turning pages, but Thyon looked up at the citadel. When the Mesarthim came, Tzara had said, and it struck him what an extraordinary coincidence it was that both seraphim and Mesarthim had come... here. Thousands of years apart, two different races of otherworldly beings, and both came right here, and not anywhere else in all the wide world of Zeru. It was too extraordinary to be a coincidence, really, especially considering that the Mesarthim citadel took the form of a seraph.
Thyon’s gaze glided over the contours of the great metal angel, and he wondered what it all meant. They were pieces of a story, Mesarthim and seraphim, but how did they fit together?
And what place did Lazlo Strange have in it?
“You know who’d love this book?” asked Calixte, flipping pages.
Thyon gritted his teeth, knowing exactly who and still telling himself that wasn’t why he’d put it aside. What did he care what the dreamer would love, or who got to give it to him?
Nothing at all. Not a bit. It was none of his concern.
The golden godson, all blisters and aches, trudged stiffly ahead of the donkey.
Chapter 22
Do You Want to Die, Too?