37
A Perfectly Delightful Shade of Blue
Lazlo blinked. One moment Isagol had black paint streaked across her eyes and the next she didn’t. One moment her hair was draped around her like a shawl and the next it was gleaming down her back like molten bronze. She was crowned with braids and vines and what he first took for butterflies but quickly saw were orchids, with a single long white feather at a jaunty angle. Instead of the slip, she was wearing a robe of cherry silk embroidered with blossoms of white and saffron.
There was a new fragrance, too, rosemary and nectar, and there were other differences, subtler: a slight shift in her shade of blue, an adjustment to the tilt of her eyes. A sort of . . . sharpening of the lines of her, as though a diaphanous veil had been lifted. She felt more real than she had a moment ago.
Also, she was no longer smiling.
“Who are you?” she asked, and her voice had changed. It was richer, more complex—a chord as opposed to a note. It was darker, too, and with it, the whimsy of the moment ebbed away. There were no more moons on her wrist—and none visible in the sky, either. The world seemed to dim, and Lazlo, looking up, perceived the moonlight now only as a nimbus around the citadel’s edges.
“Lazlo Strange,” he replied, growing serious. “At your service.”
“Lazlo Strange,” she repeated, and the syllables were exotic on her tongue. Her gaze was piercing, unblinking. Her eyes were a paler blue than her skin, and it seemed to him that she was trying to fathom him. “But who are you?”
It was the smallest and biggest of questions, and Lazlo didn’t know what to say. At the most fundamental level, he didn’t know who he was. He was a Strange, with all that that entailed—though the significance of his name would be meaningless to her, and anyway, he didn’t think she was inquiring into his pedigree. So then, who was he?
At that moment, as she had changed, so did their surroundings. Gone was the moon shop, and all of Weep with it. Gone the citadel and its shadow. Lazlo and the goddess, still astride their creatures, were transported right to the center of the Pavilion of Thought. Forty feet high, the shelves of books. The spines in their jewel tones, the glimmer of leaf. Librarians on ladders like specters in gray, and scholars in scarlet hunched at their tables. It was all as Lazlo had seen it that day seven years ago when the good fortune of bad fish had brought him to a new life.
And so it would seem that this was his answer, or at least his first answer. His outermost layer of self, even after six months away. “I’m a librarian,” he said. “Or I was, until recently. At the Great Library of Zosma.”
Sarai looked around, taking it all in, and momentarily forgot her hard line of questioning. What would Feral do in such a place? “So many books,” she said, awed. “I never knew there were this many books in all the world.”
Her awe endeared her to Lazlo. She might be Isagol the Terrible, but one can’t be irredeemable who shows reverence for books. “That’s how I felt, the first time I saw it.”
“What’s in them all?” she asked.
“In this room, they’re all philosophy.”
“This room?” She turned to him. “There are more?”
He smiled broadly. “So many more.”
“All full of books?”
He nodded, proud, as though he’d made them all himself. “Would you like to see my favorites?”
“All right,” she said.
Lazlo urged Lixxa forward, and the goddess kept pace with him on her gryphon. Side by side, as majestic as a pair of statues but far more fantastical, they rode right through the Pavilion of Thought. The gryphon’s wings brushed the shoulders of scholars. Lixxa’s antlers nearly toppled a ladder. And Lazlo might have been an accomplished dreamer—in several senses of the word—but right now he was like anyone else. He wasn’t conscious that this was a dream. He was simply in it. The logic that belonged to the real world had remained behind, like luggage on a dock. This world had a logic all its own, and it was fluid, generous, and deep. The secret stairs to his dusty sublevel were too narrow to accommodate great beasts like these, but they slipped down them easily. And he’d long since cleaned off the books with infinite love and care, but the dust was just as he had found it that very first day: a soft blanket of years, keeping all the best secrets.
“No one but me has read any of these in at least a lifetime,” he told her.
She took down a book and blew off the dust. It flurried around her like snowflakes as she flipped pages, but the words were in some strange alphabet and she couldn’t read them. “What’s in this one?” she asked Lazlo, passing it to him.
“This is one of my favorites,” he said. “It’s the epic of the mahalath, a magic fog that comes every fifty years and blankets a village for three days and three nights. Every living thing in it is transformed, for either better or worse. The people know when it’s coming, and most flee and wait for it to pass. But there are always a few who stay and take the risk.”
“And what happens to them?”
“Some turn into monsters,” he said. “And some to gods.”
“So that’s where gods come from,” she said, wry.
“You would know better than me, my lady.”
Not really, Sarai thought, because she had no more idea where the Mesarthim had come from than the humans did. She, of course, was conscious that this was a dream. She was too accustomed to dream logic to be surprised by any of the trappings, but not too jaded to find them beautiful. After the initial flurry, snow continued to fall in the alcove. It shone on the floor like spilled sugar, and when she slid from her gryphon’s back, it was cold under her bare feet. The thing that did surprise her, that she couldn’t get her mind around, even now, was that she was having a conversation with a stranger. However many dreams she had navigated, whatever chimerical fancies she had witnessed, she had never interacted. But here she was, talking—chatting, even. Almost like a real person.
“What about this one?” she asked, picking up another book.
He took it and read the spine. “Folktales from Vaire. That’s the small kingdom just south of Zosma.” He leafed pages and smiled. “You’ll like this one. It’s about a young man who falls in love with the moon. He tries to steal it. Perhaps he’s your culprit.”
“And does he succeed?”
“No,” said Lazlo. “He has to make peace with the impossible.”
Sarai wrinkled her nose. “You mean he has to give up.”
“Well, it is the moon.” In the story, the young man, Sathaz, was so enchanted by the moon’s reflection in the still, deep pool near his forest home that he would gaze at it, entranced, but whenever he reached for it, it broke into a thousand pieces and left him drenched, with empty arms. “But then,” Lazlo added, “if someone managed to steal it from you—” He looked to her bare wrist where no moon charms now hung.
“Maybe it was him,” she said, “and the story got it wrong.”
“Maybe,” allowed Lazlo. “And Sathaz and the moon are living happily together in a cave somewhere.”
“And they’ve had thousands of children together, and that’s where glaves come from. The union of man and moon.” Sarai heard herself, and wondered what was wrong with her. Just moments ago she’d been annoyed at the moon nonsense that was coming out of her phantasm’s mouth, and now she was doing it. It was Lazlo, she thought. It was his mind. The rules were different here. The truth was different. It was . . . nicer.
He was grinning broadly, and the sight set off a fluttering in Sarai’s belly. “What about that one?” she asked, turning quickly away to point at a big book on a higher shelf.
“Oh hello,” he said, reaching for it. He brought it down: a huge tome bound in pale-green velvet with a filigreed layer of silver scrollwork laid over it. “This,” he said, passing it to her, “is the villain that broke my nose.”
When he released it into her hands, its weight almost made her drop it in the snow. “This?” she asked.
“My first day as apprentice,” he said, rueful. “There was blood everywhere. I won’t disgust you by pointing out the stain on the spine.”
“A book of fairy tales broke your nose,” she said, helpless not to smile at how wrong her first impression had been. “I supposed you were in a fight.”
“More of an ambush, actually,” he said. “I was on tiptoe, trying to get it.” He touched his nose. “But it got me.”
“You’re lucky it didn’t take your head off,” said Sarai, hefting it back to him.
“Very lucky. I got enough grief for a broken nose. I’d never have heard the end of a lost head.”
A small laugh escaped Sarai. “I don’t think you hear very much, if you lose your head.”
Solemnly, he said, “I hope never to know.”
Sarai studied his face, much as she had done the first time she saw him. In addition to thinking him some sort of brute, she had also thought him not handsome. Looking now, though, she thought that handsome was beside the point. He was striking, like the profile of a conqueror on a bronze coin. And that was better.
Lazlo, feeling her scrutiny, blushed. His assumption as to her opinion of his looks was far less favorable than her actual thoughts on the subject. His opinion of her looks was simple. She was purely lovely. She had full cheeks and a sharp little chin and her mouth was damson-lush, lower lip like ripe fruit with a crease in the middle, and soft as apricot down. The corners of her smile, turned up in delight, were as neat as the tips of a crescent moon, and her brows were bright against the blue of her skin, as cinnamon as her hair. He kept forgetting that she was dead and then remembering, and he was sorrier about it every time he did. As to how she could be both dead and here, dream logic was untroubled by conundrums.
“Dear god in heaven, Strange,” came a voice then, and Lazlo looked up to see old Master Hyrrokkin approaching, pushing a library trolley. “I’ve been looking all over for you.”
It was so good to see him. Lazlo enveloped him in a hug, which evidently constituted a surfeit of affection, because the old man pushed him off, incensed. “What’s gotten into you?” he demanded, straightening out his robes. “I suppose in Weep they just go around mauling one another like bear wrestlers.”
“Exactly like bear wrestlers,” said Lazlo. “Without the bears. Or the wrestling.”
But Master Hyrrokkin had caught sight of Lazlo’s companion. His eyes widened. “Now, who’s this?” he inquired, his voice rising an octave or so.
Lazlo made an introduction. “Master Hyrrokkin, this is Isagol. Isagol, Master Hyrrokkin.”
In a stage whisper, the old man asked, “Whyever is she blue?”
“She’s the goddess of despair,” Lazlo answered, as though that explained everything.
“No, she isn’t,” said Master Hyrrokkin at once. “You’ve got it wrong, boy. Look at her.”
Lazlo did look at her, but more to offer an apologetic shrug than to consider Master Hyrrokkin’s assertion. He knew who she was. He’d seen the painting, and Eril-Fane had confirmed it.
Of course, she looked less like her now, without the black paint across her eyes.
“Did you do as I suggested, then?” asked Master Hyrrokkin. “Did you give her flowers?”
Lazlo remembered his advice. “Pick flowers and find a girl to give them to.” He remembered the rest of his advice, too. “Kind eyes and wide hips.” He flushed at the memory. This girl was very slender, and Lazlo hardly expected the goddess of despair to have kind eyes. She did, though, he realized. “Flowers, no,” he said, awkward, wanting to head off any further exploration of the topic. He knew the old man’s lecherous tendencies, and was anxious to see him on his way before he said or did something untoward. “It’s not like that—”
But Isagol surprised him by holding up her wrist, upon which the bracelet had reappeared. “He did give me the moon, though,” she said. There weren’t multiple charms on it now, but just one: a white-gold crescent, pallid and radiant, looking just as though it had been plucked down from the sky.
“Nicely done, boy,” said Master Hyrrokkin, approving. Again, the stage whisper: “She could do with more cushioning, but I daresay she’s soft enough in the right places. You don’t want to be jabbed with bones when you—”
“Please, Master Hyrrokkin,” Lazlo said, hastily cutting him off. His face flamed.
The librarian chuckled. “What’s the point of being old if you can’t mortify the young? Well, I’ll leave you two in peace. Good day, young lady. It was a real pleasure.” He kissed her hand, then turned aside, nudging Lazlo with his elbow and loud-whispering, “What a perfectly delightful shade of blue,” as he took his leave.
Lazlo turned back to the goddess. “My mentor,” he explained. “He has bad manners but good hearts.”
“I wouldn’t know about either,” said Sarai, who had found no fault with the old man’s manners, and had to remind herself, in any case, that he had been just another figment of the dreamer’s mind. “You’ve got it wrong, boy,” the librarian had said. “Look at her.” Did that mean that on some level Lazlo saw through her disguise, and didn’t believe she was Isagol? She was pleased by this idea, and chided herself for caring. She turned back to the shelves, ran her finger along a row of spines. “All these books,” she said. “They’re about magic?” She was wondering if he were some sort of expert. If that was why the Godslayer had brought him along.
“They’re myths and folktales mostly,” said Lazlo. “Anything dismissed by scholars as too fun to be important. They put it down here and forget it. Superstitions, songs, spells. Seraphim, omens, demons, fairies.” He pointed to one bookcase. “Those are all about Weep.”
“Weep is too fun to be important?” she asked. “I rather think its citizens might disagree with you.”
“It’s not my assessment, believe me. If I were a scholar, I could have made a case for it, but you see, I’m not important, either.”
“No? And why is that?”
Lazlo looked down at his feet, reluctant to explain his own insignificance. “I’m a foundling,” he said, looking up again. “I have no family, and no name.”
“But you told me your name.”
“All right. I have a name that tells the world I have no name. It’s like a sign around my neck that reads ‘No one.’ ”
“Is it so important, a name?” Sarai asked.
“I think the citizens of Weep would say it is.”
Sarai had no answer for that.
“They’ll never get it back, will they?” Lazlo asked. “The city’s true name? Do you remember it?”
Sarai did not. She doubted she had ever known it. “When Letha took a memory,” she said, “she didn’t keep it in a drawer like a confiscated toy. She ate it and it was gone forever. That was her gift. Eradication.”
“And your gift?” Lazlo asked.
Sarai froze. The thought of explaining her gift to him brought an immediate flush of shame. Moths swarm out of my mouth, she imagined herself saying. So that I can maraud through human minds, like I’m doing right now in yours. But of course, he wasn’t asking about her gift. For a moment she’d forgotten who she was—or wasn’t. She wasn’t Sarai here, but this absurd tame phantasm of her mother.
“Well, she was no moon goddess,” she said. “That’s all nonsense.”
“She?” asked Lazlo, confused.
“I,” said Sarai, though it stuck in her throat. It struck her with a pang of deep resentment, that this extraordinary, inexplicable thing should happen: A human could see her—and he was talking to her without hate, with something more like fascination and even wonder—and she had to hide behind this pretense. If she were Isagol, she would show him her gift. Like a malefic kitten with a ball of string, she would tangle his emotions until he lost all distinction between love and hate, joy and sorrow. Sarai didn’t want to play that part, not ever. She turned the questions back on him.
“Why don’t you have a family?” she asked.
“There was a war. I was a baby. I ended up on a cartload of orphans. That’s all I know.”
“So you could be anyone,” she said. “A prince, even.”
“In a tale, maybe.” He smiled. “I don’t believe there were any princes unaccounted for. But what about you? Do gods have families?”
Sarai thought first of Ruby and Sparrow, Feral and Minya, Great and Less Ellen, and the others: her family, if not by blood. Then she thought of her father, and hardened her hearts. But the dreamer was doing it again, turning the questions around on her. “We’re made by mist,” she said. “Remember? Every fifty years.”
“The mahalath. Of course. So you were one who took the risk.”
“Would you?” she asked. “If the mist were coming, would you stay and be transformed, not knowing what the result might be?”
“I would,” he said at once.
“That was fast. You would abandon your true nature with so little consideration?”
He laughed at that. “You have no idea how much consideration I’ve given it. I lived seven years inside these books. My body may have been going about its duties in the library, but my mind was here. Do you know what they called me? Strange the dreamer. I was barely aware of my surroundings half the time.” He was amazed at himself, going on like this, and to the goddess of despair, no less. But her eyes were bright with curiosity—a mirror of his own curiosity about her, and he felt entirely at ease. Certainly despair was the last thing he thought of when he looked at her. “I walked around wondering what kind of wings I would buy if the wingsmiths came to town, and if I’d prefer to ride dragons or hunt them, and whether I’d stay when the mist came, and more than anything else by far, how in the world I was going to get to the Unseen City.”
Sarai cocked her head. “The Unseen City?”
“Weep,” he said. “I always hated the name, so I made up my own.”
Sarai had been smiling in spite of herself, and wanting to ask which book the wingsmiths were in, and whether the dragons were vicious or not, but at this reminder of Weep, her smile slowly melted back to melancholy, and that wasn’t all that melted away. To her regret, the library did, too, and they were in Weep once more. But this time it wasn’t his Weep, but hers, and it might have been closer to the true city than his version, but it wasn’t accurate, either. It was still beautiful, certainly, but there was a forbidding quality to it, too. All the doors and windows were closed—and the sills, it went without saying, were empty of cake—and it was desolate with dead gardens and the telltale hunched hurry of a populace that feared the sky.
There were so many things she wanted to ask Lazlo, who had been called “dreamer” even before she dubbed him that. Why can you see me? What would you do if you knew I was real? What wings would you choose if the wingsmiths came to town? Can we go back to the library, please, and stay awhile? But she couldn’t say any of that. “Why are you here?” she asked.
He was taken aback by the sudden turn in mood. “It’s been my dream since I was a child.”
“But why did the Godslayer bring you? What is your part in this? The others are scientists, builders. What does the Godslayer need with a librarian?”
“Oh,” said Lazlo. “No. I’m not really one of them. Part of the delegation, I mean. I had to beg for a place in the party. I’m his secretary.”
“You’re Eril-Fane’s secretary.”
“Yes.”
“Then you must know his plans.” Sarai’s pulse quickened. Another of her moths was fluttering in sight of the pavilion where the silk sleighs rested. “When will he come to the citadel?” she blurted out.
It was the wrong question. She knew it as soon as she said it. Maybe it was the directness, or the sense of urgency, or maybe it was the slip of using come instead of go, but something shifted in his look, as though he were seeing her with new eyes.
And he was. Dreams have their rhythms, their deeps and shallows, and he was caroming upward into a state of heightened lucidity. The left-behind logic of the real world came slanting down like shafts of sun through the surface of the sea, and he began to grasp that none of this was real. Of course he hadn’t actually ridden Lixxa through the Pavilion of Thought. It was all fugitive, evanescent: a dream.
Except for her.
She was neither fugitive nor evanescent. Her presence had a weight, depth, and clarity that nothing else did—not even Lixxa, and there were few things Lazlo knew better these days than the physical reality of Lixxa. After six months of all-day riding, she felt almost like an extension of himself. But the spectral seemed suddenly insubstantial, and no sooner did this thought occur than she melted away. The gryphon, too. There was only himself and the goddess with her piercing gaze and nectar scent and . . . gravity.
Not gravity in the sense of solemnity—though that, too—but gravity in the sense of a pull. He felt as though she were the center of this small, surreal galaxy—indeed, that it was she who was dreaming him, and not the other way around.
He didn’t know what made him do it. It was so unlike him. He reached for her hand and caught it—lightly—and held it. It was small, smooth, and very real.
Up in the citadel, Sarai gasped. She felt the warmth of his skin on hers. A blaze of connection—or collision, as though they had long been wandering in the same labyrinth and had finally rounded the corner that would bring them face-to-face. It was a feeling of being lost and alone and then suddenly neither. Sarai knew she ought to pull her hand free, but she didn’t. “You have to tell me,” she said. She could feel the dream shallowing, like a sleek ship beaching on a shoal. Soon he would wake. “The flying machines. When will they launch?”
Lazlo knew it was a dream, and he knew it wasn’t a dream, and the two knowings chased circles in his mind, dizzying him. “What?” he asked. Her hand felt like a heartbeat wrapped within his own.
“The flying machines,” she repeated. “When?”
“Tomorrow,” he answered, hardly thinking.
The word, like a scythe, cut the strings that were holding her upright. Lazlo thought that his hand around hers was all that was keeping her standing. “What is it?” he asked. “Are you all right?”
She pulled away, grabbed back her hand. “Listen to me,” she said, and her face grew severe. The black band returned like a slash, and her eyes blazed all the brighter for the contrast. “They must not come,” she said, in a voice as unyielding as mesarthium. The vines and orchids disappeared from her hair, and then there was blood running out of it, streaming rivulets down her brow to collect in her eye sockets and fill them up until they were nothing but glassy red pools, and still the blood flowed, down over her lips and into her mouth, smearing as she spoke. “Do you understand?” she demanded. “If they do, everyone will die.”