15
The Oldest Story in the World
The seraphim were the world’s earliest myth. Lazlo had read every book of lore in the Great Library, and every scroll, and every song and saga that had made its way from voice to voice over centuries of oral tradition to finally be captured on paper, and this was the oldest. It went back several millennia—perhaps as many as seven—and was found in nearly every culture—including the Unseen City, where the beings had been worshipped. They might be called enkyel or anjelin or angels, s’rith or serifain or seraphim, but the core story remained constant, and it was this:
They were beings of surpassing beauty with wings of smokeless fire—six of them, three male, three female—and long, long ago, before time had a name, they came down from the skies.
They came to look and see what manner of world it was, and they found rich soil and sweet seas and plants that dreamed they were birds and drifted up to the clouds on leaves like wings. They also found the ijji, a huge and hideous race that kept humans as slaves, pets, or food, depending on the version of the tale. The seraphim took pity on the humans, and for them they slew the ijji, every one, and they piled the dead at the edge of the great dust sea and burned them on a pyre the size of a moon.
And that, the story went, is how man claimed ascendency over the world that was Zeru, while the demons were stricken from it by the angels. Once upon a long-lost time, people had believed it, and had believed, too, that the seraphim would return one day and sit in judgment over them. There had been temples and priestesses and fire rites and sacrifice, but that was a long time ago. No one believed in the old myths anymore.
“Get out your pencil,” Lazlo told Calixte, emerging from his tent. He had taken the time, first, to groom his spectral, Lixxa, and then himself. His last sand bath. He wouldn’t miss it. “Are you ready for this? It’s going to be good. Extremely improbable.”
“Let’s have it, then.”
“All right.” He cleared his throat. Calixte waggled her pencil, impatient. “The problem,” he said, as though it were perfectly reasonable, “is that the seraphim have returned.”
She looked delighted. She bent her head and started scribbling.
From the direction of the faranji, Lazlo heard a laugh. “Seraphim,” someone scoffed. “Absurd.”
He ignored them. “Of course you know the seraphim,” he told Calixte. “They came down from the skies, but do you know where they came to? They came here.” He gestured around him. “The great dust sea, it’s called in the tales. What else but the Elmuthaleth? And the funeral pyre the size of a moon?” He pointed to the single feature in the great flat land.
“The Cusp?” Calixte asked.
“Look at it. It’s not crystal, it’s not marble, and it’s definitely not ice.”
The sun had melted to a stripe of copper and the sky was deepening blue. The Cusp looked more otherworldly even than by daylight, aglow as though lit from within. “Then what is it?” Calixte asked.
“The fused bones of slaughtered demons,” said Lazlo, just as Brother Cyrus had once told him. “Thousands of them. The holy fire burned away their flesh, and whatever their bones were made of, it melted into glass. You can still see their skulls, all full of teeth, and make out their curved spines and long skeletal feet. Carrion birds nest in their great eye sockets. Nothing can survive there but eaters of the dead.”
Calixte had stopped writing. Her eyes were wide. “Really?” she asked, breathless.
Lazlo broke into a smile. Extremely improbably, he was about to remind her, but someone else answered first.
“Of course not really,” said the voice, with a drawl of exaggerated patience. It was Ebliz Tod, the builder. He had not appreciated sharing the Godslayer’s invitation with the girl who’d “scuttled up the Cloudspire like a bug,” and had been heard to voice such complaints as, “it demeans those of us of true accomplishment to count a thief in our number.” Now he said to her, with utmost condescension, “Dear girl, your credulity is as vast as this desert. One might get lost in it and never again encounter fact or reason.”
A couple of the others laughed with him, marveling that anyone could believe such nonsense. Thyon Nero was leaning back against the windbreak, gilded by both sunset and firelight. “Strange believes it, too,” he told Drave, the explosionist, who sat by his side, faring poorly by proximity. The golden godson managed to look dashing even in the midst of a desert crossing. The sun had treated his skin to a happy golden hue, and bleached the tips of his hair to a pale gleam. The lean travel rations had only accentuated the exquisite modeling of his features, and his short beard—kept trimmed, unlike everyone else’s—lent him maturity and consequence without sacrificing any of his youthful splendor.
Drave, by contrast, was wiry and weather-beaten beyond his years, which were somewhere near thirty. Hailing from Maialen, where sun was scant, he was very fair, and had suffered in the Elmuthaleth more than anyone, burning and peeling, burning and peeling, his face a patchwork of pink and red with brownish curls of dead skin sloughing away.
The two made an unlikely pair: the alchemist and the explosionist. They had fallen into step back in Alkonost, and taken to riding and eating meals together. In anyone else, it would have looked like friendship, but Lazlo couldn’t see it as anything so benign. Thyon Nero hadn’t had “friends” in Zosma so much as admirers, and Drave seemed willing to fill that role, even fetching him his breakfast, and shaking the sand out of his boots for him, and all without the reward of gratitude. Lazlo wondered if his own long ago “thank you” was the only one Nero had ever spoken. He didn’t pity Drave, though. It was clear to him that the explosionist wasn’t after friendship, but the secret of gold.
Good luck with that, he thought, wry.
“He believes in everything, even ghosts,” Thyon added, drawing a willing snigger from Drave before turning his eyes on Lazlo. “Don’t you, Strange?”
It reminded Lazlo of that awful day at the Enquiries desk when he’d requisitioned Lazlo’s books: the sudden cut of his eyes singling Lazlo out. The barbed question, intended to discomfit. And he felt a shade of his old fear, too. This whole journey, Nero had hardly spoken to him except to make little sharp jibes, but Lazlo felt the burn of his gaze sometimes, and wondered if the alchemist still counted him a cost—the only person alive who knew his secret.
As to Thyon’s question, his reply was noncommittal. “I admit, I prefer an open mind to a closed one,” he said.
“You call it an open mind to believe men flew down from the skies on fiery wings?”
“And women,” said Lazlo. “It’s a woeful species that’s all male.”
“More like a nonexistent species,” remarked Calixte. “Men lacking both wombs and good sense.”
A disturbing thought occurred to Lazlo. He turned to Ruza, shifting into Unseen to ask him, “Are there male and female threaves? Dear god, tell me those things don’t mate.”
“Baby threaves must come from somewhere,” said Ruza.
“But how would they even find each other?” Lazlo wondered. “Let alone . . . ?” He let the rest pass unsaid.
“I don’t know, but I bet when they do, they make the most of it.” The young warrior waggled his eyebrows.
Lazlo grimaced. Ruza shrugged. “What? For all we know, threave love stories are the most beautiful of all time—”
Calixte snorted. She, too, had troubled herself to learn the language, with Tzara her principle teacher, as Ruza was Lazlo’s. The two women were sitting together now, and Calixte whispered something to Tzara that made the warrior bite her lip and flush.
“Pardon me,” cut in Thyon, with the pinched look of someone who believes he’s being mocked. And since he hadn’t bothered to learn Unseen, he could almost be forgiven for thinking so. He restated his question. “You believe men and women flew down from the skies on fiery wings?”
Lazlo had never said he believed in the seraphim. Even in his books he’d made no such claim. He had nothing like proof, or even faith. It simply interested him—greatly—how all the cultures of Zeru were underpinned by the same story. At the very least, it spoke to the migration patterns of ancient people. At the very most, it spoke to a good deal more. But all that was neither here nor there. He wasn’t trying to win the theory purse, after all. He was only satisfying Calixte. “I see no harm in entertaining all ideas,” he said. “For example, could you have arrived at azoth if you’d arbitrarily closed your mind to certain chemical compounds?”
Thyon’s jaw clenched. When he spoke again a tightness had replaced the mockery in his tone. “Alchemy is a science. There is no comparison.”
“Well, I’m no alchemist,” Lazlo said, affable. “You know me, Strange the dreamer, head in the clouds.” He paused and added with a grin, “Miracles for breakfast.”
Thyon’s face went stony at the mention of the book. Was Lazlo threatening him? Absolutely not. He would never break his triple promise, and he heard his own taunts with a sense of unreality. He wasn’t a junior librarian at the golden godson’s mercy anymore, and whatever awe he had felt for him was gone. Still, it was stupid to goad him. He turned back to Calixte. “Now, where was I?”
She referred to her notebook. “The fused bones of slaughtered demons,” she supplied.
“Right. So it was here the seraphim came down—or more like there, in the city.” He gestured toward the Cusp and beyond. “And there they slew the unwholesome ijji, leaving the young and attractive race of man and woman free of foes, and went away again. Millennia passed. Humans thrived. And then one day, as prophesied . . . the seraphim returned.”
He waited for Calixte’s pencil to catch up. “Okay,” she said. “You’ve got the monsters part, and I suppose I’ll grant you beauty. For your lovely face, if not for the seraphim,” she added in a tease. Lazlo didn’t even blush. If Calixte did find his face lovely—which he found distinctly implausible, considering its centerpiece—there was nothing like attraction or desire behind it. No, he had seen the way she looked at Tzara, and the way Tzara looked at her, and that made for a fairly thorough education on the subject of desire. “But what,” Calixte asked him, “is the problem?”
“I’m getting to it,” said Lazlo, though in truth he hadn’t quite figured out that part of his wild and improbable theory. He looked around. He saw that it wasn’t only the faranji paying attention, but the Unseen as well: the Tizerkane, the camel drovers, and old Oyonnax, the shaman. They couldn’t understand Common Tongue, but his voice naturally caught their ear. They were accustomed to listening to him tell stories, though that usually happened after dinner, when the sky was dark and he could only see their faces by the flickering light of the fire. He did a quick translation for their benefit. Eril-Fane was listening with wry amusement, and Azareen, too, who was perhaps more to him than his second-in-command, though Lazlo couldn’t work out the nature of their relationship. The closeness between them was palpable but also somehow . . . painful. They didn’t share a tent, as several pairs of warriors did, and though they showed no physical affection, it was clear to anyone with eyes that Azareen loved Eril-Fane. Eril-Fane’s feelings were harder to interpret. For all his warmth, there was something guarded about him.
The two shared a history, but what kind?
In any case, this wasn’t Lazlo’s current puzzle. The problem, he thought, casting about. Seraphim and ijji.
He caught sight of Mouzaive, the natural philosopher, standing over the cook, Madja, with his plate in his hand and a sour look on his face, and that was where his spark of inspiration came from.
“The Second Coming of the seraphim. It may have begun with awe and reverence, but what do you suppose?” he said, first in Common Tongue and then in Unseen. “It turns out they make terrible guests. Extremely impressed with themselves. Never lift a finger. Expect to be waited on hand and foot. They won’t even put up their own tents, if you can credit it, or help with the camels. They just . . . lurk about, waiting to be fed.”
Calixte wrote, biting her lip to keep from laughing. Some of the Tizerkane did laugh, as did Soulzeren and Ozwin, the married couple with the flying machines. They could laugh because the criticism wasn’t aimed at them. Accustomed to farming the Thanagost badlands, they weren’t the sort to sit idle, but helped out however they could. The same could not be said of the others, who were stiff with affront. “Is he suggesting we ought to perform labor?” asked Belabra, the mathematician, to a stir of astonished murmurs.
“In short,” Lazlo concluded, “the purpose of this delegation is to persuade the seraphim to be on their way. Politely, of course. Failing that: forcible eviction.” He gestured to the delegates. “Explosions and catapults and so forth.”
Soulzeren started clapping, so he bowed. He caught sight of Eril-Fane again, and saw that his wry amusement had sharpened to a kind of keen appraisal. Azareen was giving him the same frank look, which Lazlo met with an apologetic shrug. It was a ridiculous notion, as well as petty and impolitic, but he hadn’t been able to resist.
Calixte filled the last page of the book, and he dug out his ten silver, which was more money than he’d ever held before receiving his first wage from Eril-Fane. “Farewell, good coin,” he bid it, surrendering it, “for I shall never see thee more.”
“Don’t be glum, Strange. You might win,” said Calixte without conviction. She examined the coin and declared that it had “a damned triumphant look about it,” before shoving it into the overstuffed purse. The seams strained. It appeared as though one more coin might split it wide open. The last page in the book, the last space in the purse, and the theory game was ended.
They had only now to wait until tomorrow and see who won.
The temperature plummeted as the desert fell dark. Lazlo layered his woolen chaulnot over the linen one and put up his hood. The campfire burned against the deep blue night, and the travelers all gathered in its glow. Dinner was served, and Eril-Fane opened a bottle of spirits he’d saved for this night. Their last night of thirst and bland journey food and aching buttocks and saddle chafe and dry bathing and grit in every crease of cloth and flesh. The last night of lying on hard ground, and falling asleep to the murmured incantations of the shaman stirring his powders into the fire.
The last night of wondering.
Lazlo looked to the Cusp, subtle in the starlight. The mysteries of Weep had been music to his blood for as long as he could remember. This time tomorrow, they would be mysteries no longer.
The end of wondering, he thought, but not of wonder. That was just beginning. He was certain of it.