23
Unseen No Longer
Fabled Weep, unseen no longer.
From the top of the Cusp, where the Godslayer’s delegation stood, a trail descended into the canyon of the River Uzumark, with the white of demonglass gradually giving way to the honey-colored stone of cliff faces and natural spires and arches, and to the green of forests so dense that their canopies looked, from above, like carpets of moss one might walk across. And the waterfalls might have been curtains of pale silk hung from the cliff tops, too numerous to count. With its waterfall curtains and carpets of forest, the canyon was like a long and beautiful room, and Weep a toy city—a gilded model—at its center. The shocking surreality of the citadel—the sheer size of the thing—played havoc with the mind’s sense of scale.
“Does Eril-Fane want me to climb that?” Calixte asked, staring up at the great seraph.
“What’s the matter? Couldn’t do it?” taunted Ebliz Tod.
“Have to reach it first,” she quipped. “I suppose that’s where you come in.” She waved her hand at him, queenly. “Be a dear and build me some stairs.”
Tod’s umbrage rendered him momentarily speechless, during which pause Soulzeren interjected, “Be faster to fly, anyway. We can have the silk sleighs ready in a few days.”
“That’s just getting to it, though,” her husband, Ozwin, pointed out. “That’ll be the easy part. Getting rid of it, now, there’s another matter.”
“What do you reckon?” Soulzeren mused. “Move it? Dismantle it?”
“Blow it up,” said Drave, which drew him flat looks from everyone.
“You do see that it’s directly above the city,” Lazlo pointed out.
“So they get out of the way.”
“I imagine they’re trying to avoid further destruction.”
“Then why invite me?” he asked, grinning.
“Why indeed?” Soulzeren murmured in an undertone.
Drave reached out to smack Thyon Nero on the shoulder. “Did you hear that?” he asked, as Thyon had failed to laugh. “Why invite me if you don’t want destruction, eh? Why bring ten camels’ worth of powder if you don’t want to blow that thing right back to the heavens?”
Thyon gave him a thin smile and half nod, though it was clear that his mind was elsewise occupied. No doubt he was processing the problem in his own way. He kept his own counsel, while the other delegates were vociferous. For months their intellects had been hamstrung by mystery. Now the sky presented the greatest scientific puzzle they had ever encountered, and they were all considering their place in it, and their chances of solving it.
Mouzaive was talking to Belabra about magnets, but Belabra wasn’t listening. He was muttering indecipherable calculations, while the Fellerings—the twin metallurgists—discussed the possible composition of the blue metal.
As for Lazlo, he was awed and humbled. He’d known from the first that he had no qualifications to recommend him for the Godslayer’s delegation, but it wasn’t until he beheld the problem that he realized that some part of him had still hoped he might be the one to solve it. Ridiculous. A storybook might have held the secret of azoth, and knowledge of stories might have earned him a place in the party, but he hardly thought that tales would give him an edge now.
Well, but he was here, and he would help in any way he could, even if it was only running errands for the delegates. What was it Master Hyrrokkin had said? “Some men are born for great things, and others to help great men do great things.” He’d also said there was no shame in it, and Lazlo agreed.
Still, was it too much to hope that the “man born for great things” should not turn out to be Thyon Nero? Anyone but him, thought Lazlo, laughing a little at his own pettiness.
The caravan descended the trail into the valley, and Lazlo looked about himself, amazed. He was really here, seeing it. A canyon of golden stone, swaths of unbroken forest, a great green river blurred by waterfall mist, flowing as far as the shadow of the citadel. There, just shy of the city, the Uzumark broadened into a delta and was sliced into ribbons by boulders and small islands before simply vanishing. Beyond the city it reappeared and continued its tumultuous journey eastward and away. The river, it seemed, flowed under the city.
From a distance, Weep was stunningly like Lazlo’s long-held picture of it—or at least, like his long-held picture as seen through a veil of shadow. There were the golden domes, though fewer than he’d pictured, and they didn’t gleam. The sunlight didn’t strike them. By the time the sun angled low enough to slant its rays under the citadel’s outspread wings, it had gone beyond the edge of the Cusp, and only traded one shadow for another.
But it was more than that. There was a forlorn look about it, a sense of lingering despair. There were the city’s defensive walls, built in a harmonious oval, but the harmony was broken. In four places, the wall was obliterated. Set down with geometric precision at the cardinal points were four monumental slabs of the same alien metal as the citadel. They were great tapered blocks, each as big in its own right as a castle, but they appeared entirely smooth, windowless and doorless. They looked, from above, like a set of great map weights holding down the city’s edges so it wouldn’t blow away.
It was difficult to make out from this distance, but there seemed to be something atop each one. A statue, perhaps.
“What are those great blocks?” he asked Ruza, pointing.
“Those are the anchors.”
“Anchors?” Lazlo squinted across the distance, gauging the blocks’ position relative to the great seraph overhead. It appeared to be centered in the air above them. “Do they act like anchors?” he asked. He thought of ships in harbor, in which case there would be anchor chain. Nothing visible connected the seraph to the blocks. “Are they keeping it from drifting away?”
Ruza’s smile was wry. “They never took the time to explain it to us, Strange. They set them down the day they came—never mind what was under them—and there they are still.” Ruza jerked his head at the procession behind them. “Think one of these geniuses will be able to move them?”
“Move the anchors? Do you think that’s how to move the citadel?”
Ruza shrugged. “Or what? Attach towlines to it and pull? All I know is it won’t be leaving the way it came. Not with Skathis dead.”
Skathis.
The name was like a serpent’s hiss. Lazlo took it in, and the realization dawned that Ruza was talking. Well, he was always talking. The fine point was: The secrecy that had bound them all until now was apparently broken. Lazlo could ask questions. He turned to his friend.
“Don’t look at me like that,” said Ruza.
“Like what?”
“Like I’m a beautiful book you’re about to open and plunder with your greedy mad eyes.”
Lazlo laughed. “Greedy mad eyes? Plunder? Are you afraid of me, Ruza?”
Ruza looked suddenly steely. “Do you know, Strange, that to ask a Tizerkane if he fears you is to challenge him to single combat?”
“Well then,” said Lazlo, who knew better than to believe anything Ruza said. “I’m glad I only said it to you and not one of the fearsome warriors like Azareen or Tzara.”
“Unkind,” said Ruza, wounded. His face crumpled. He pretended to weep. “I am fearsome,” he insisted. “I am.”
“There, there,” Lazlo consoled. “You’re a very fierce warrior. Don’t cry. You’re terrifying.”
“Really?” asked Ruza in a pitiful little hopeful voice. “You’re not just saying that?”
“You two idiots,” said Azareen, and Lazlo felt a curious twinge of pride, to be called an idiot by her, with what might have been the tiniest edge of fondness. He exchanged a chastened glance with Ruza as Azareen passed them on the trail and took the lead.
A short time ago, Lazlo had seen her arguing with Eril-Fane, and had heard just enough to understand that she’d wanted to stay with him at Fort Misrach. “Why must you face everything alone?” she had demanded before turning away and leaving him there. And when Lazlo last looked back to wave, the caravan starting down the trail and the Godslayer staying behind, he had seemed not only diminished, but haunted.
If it was safe in the city, as he promised, then why did he look like that, and why did he not come with them?
What happened here? Lazlo wondered. He didn’t ask any more questions. In silence, they rode the rest of the way down to Weep.
Eril-Fane stood on the ridge and watched the caravan make its way to the city. It took them an hour to reach it, weaving in and out of view among stands of trees, and by the time they left the forest for good, they were too distant for him to make out who was who. He could tell spectral from camel, and that was all. It was getting dark, which didn’t help.
Azareen would be leading. She would be straight-backed, face forward, and no one behind her would suspect the look on her face. The loneliness. The raw, bewildered mourning.
He did that to her. Over and over.
If she would only give up on him, he could stop destroying her. He could never be what she hoped for—what he had once been. Before he was a hero. Before he was even a man.
Before he was the lover of the goddess of despair.
Eril-Fane shuddered. Even after all these years, the thought of Isagol the Terrible stirred such a storm in him—of rancor and longing, desire and disgust, violence and even affection—all of it seething and bleeding and writhing, like a pit of rats eating one another alive. That was what his feelings were now, what Isagol had made of them. Nothing good or pure could survive in him. All was corruption and gore, suffocating in his self-loathing. How weak he was, how pitiful. He might have killed the goddess in the end, but he wasn’t free of her, and he never would be.
If only Azareen would let him go. Every day that she waited for him to become who he had been, he bore the burden of her loneliness in addition to his own.
His mother’s, too. At least he could send her Lazlo to take care of, and that would help. But he couldn’t very well send someone home with Azareen to take his place as . . . as her husband.
Only she could make that choice, and she wouldn’t.
Eril-Fane had told Lazlo he didn’t sleep well in Weep. Well, that rather downplayed the matter. It turned his blood cold to even think of closing his eyes in the city. Even from up here, where distance made a toy of it—a pretty glimmer of far-off glaves and old gold—he felt its atmosphere like tentacles waiting to drag him back in, and he couldn’t stop shaking. Better that no one should see him like this. If the Godslayer couldn’t keep his countenance, how could anyone else?
Feeling like the world’s greatest coward, he turned away from his city, and his guests, and his wife, whom he could not love because he could not love, and he rode the short track back to Fort Misrach.
Tomorrow, he told himself. Tomorrow he would face Weep, and his duty, and the nightmares that stalked him. Somehow, he would find the courage to finish what he had started fifteen years ago, and free his people from this last vestige of their long torment.
Even if he could never free himself.