57
The Secret Language
Lazlo shot upright, blinking. The moth spooked from his brow and all the others from the wall, to flutter up to the ceiling and beat around the beams. But he wasn’t thinking about the moths. He wasn’t thinking. The dream had pulled him down so deep that he was underneath thought, submerged in a place of pure feeling—and what feeling. Every feeling, and with the sense that they’d been stripped down to their essence, revealed for the first time in all their unspeakable beauty, their unbearable fragility. There was no part of him that knew he was dreaming—or, more to the point, that he was suddenly not dreaming.
He only knew that he was holding Sarai, the flesh of her shoulder hot and smooth against his mouth, and then he wasn’t.
Twice before, the dream had broken and stolen her away, but those other times he’d understood what was happening. Not now. Now he experienced it as though Sarai herself—flesh and breath and hearts and hope—melted to nothing in his arms. He tried to hold on to her, but it was like trying to hold on to smoke or shadow, or—like Sathaz from the folktale—the reflection of the moon. Lazlo felt all of Sathaz’s helplessness. Even as he sat up in his bed in this room where Sarai had never been, the air seemed to cling to the curves of her, warm with traces of her scent and heat—but empty, forsaken. Devoid.
Those other times he’d felt frustration. This was loss, and it tore something open inside him. “No,” he gasped, surfacing fast to be spilled back into reality like someone beached by the crash of a wave. The dream receded and left him there, in his bed, alone—stranded in the merciless intransigence of reality, and it was as bleak a truth to his soul as the nothingness of the Elmuthaleth.
He exhaled with a shudder, his arms giving up on the sweet, lost phantom of Sarai. Even her fragrance was gone. He was awake, and he was alone. Well. He was awake.
He heard a sound—a faint, incredulous chuff—and spun toward it. The shutters were open and the window ought to have been a square of dim cut from the dark, plain and empty against the night. Instead, a silhouette was blocked in it: a head and shoulders, glossed pale gold.
“Now that,” drawled Thyon Nero, “looked like a really good dream.”
Lazlo stared. Thyon Nero was standing at his window. He had been watching Lazlo sleep, watching him dream. Watching him dream that dream.
Outrage coursed through him, and it was disproportionate to the moment—as though Thyon had been peering not just into the room but into the dream itself, witness to those perfect moments with Sarai.
“Sorry to interrupt, whatever it was,” Thyon continued. “Though really you should thank me.” He tossed a spare pebble over his shoulder to skitter across the paving stones. “There are moths everywhere.” They were all still there, settling on the ceiling beams. “There was even one on your face.”
And Lazlo realized that the golden godson hadn’t just spied on him. He had actually awakened him. It wasn’t sunrise or a crushed moth that had broken this dream, but Thyon Nero pitching pebbles. Lazlo’s outrage transformed in an instant to rage—simpler, hotter—and he shot out of bed as fast as he had shot out of sleep.
“What are you doing here?” he growled, looming in the space of the open window so that Thyon, surprised, stumbled back. He regarded Lazlo with narrow-eyed wariness. He’d never seen him angry before, let alone wrathful, and it made him seem bigger somehow, an altogether different and more dangerous species of Strange than the one he had known all these years.
Which shouldn’t surprise him, considering why he’d come.
“That’s a good question,” he said, and turned it back on Lazlo. “What am I doing here, Strange? Are you going to enlighten me?” His voice was hollow, and so were his eyes, his sunken cheeks. He was gaunt with spirit loss, his color sickly. He looked even worse than he had the day before.
As for Lazlo, he was surprised at his own rage, which even now was ebbing away. It wasn’t an emotion he had much experience with—it didn’t fit him—and he knew it wasn’t really Thyon who had provoked it, but his own powerlessness to save Sarai. For an instant, just an instant, he had felt the searing anguish of losing her—but it wasn’t real. She wasn’t lost. Her moths were still here, up on the ceiling beams, and the night wasn’t over. As soon as he fell back to sleep she’d return to him.
Of course, he had to get rid of the alchemist first. “Enlighten you?” he asked, confused. “What are you talking about, Nero?”
Thyon shook his head, scornful. “You’ve always been good at that,” he said. “That hapless look. Those innocent eyes.” He spoke bitterly. “Yesterday, you almost had me convinced that you helped me because I needed it.” This he said as though it were the most absurd of propositions. “As though any man ever walked up to another and offered the spirit from his veins. But I couldn’t imagine what motive you could have, so I almost believed it.”
Lazlo squinted at him. “You should believe it. What other motive could there be?”
“That’s what I want to know. You pulled me into this years ago, all the way back at the Chrysopoesium. Why, Strange? What’s your game?” He looked wild as well as ill, a sheen of sweat on his brow. “Who are you really?”
The question took Lazlo aback. Thyon had known him since he was thirteen years old. He knew who he was, insofar as it was knowable. He was a Strange, with all that that implied. “What’s this about, Nero?”
“Don’t even think about playing me for a fool, Strange—”
Lazlo lost patience and cut him off, repeating, in a louder voice, “What’s this about, Nero?”
The two young men stood on opposite sides of the open window, facing each other across the sill much as they had once faced each other across the Enquiries desk, except that now Lazlo was uncowed. Sarai watched them through her sentinels. She had awakened when Lazlo did, then collapsed back on her pillows, squeezing her eyes tight shut to block out the sight of the mesarthium walls and ceiling that hemmed her in. Hadn’t she said she didn’t want to come back here yet? She could have cried in her frustration. Her blood and spirit were coursing fast and her shoulder was hot as though from Lazlo’s real breath. The pink silk strap had even slipped down, just like in the dream. She traced it with her fingers, eyes closed, recalling the feeling of Lazlo’s lips and hands, the exquisite paths of sensation that came alive wherever he touched her. What did the faranji mean, coming here in the middle of the night?
The two spoke in their own language, as meaningless to her as drums or birdsong. She didn’t know what they were saying, but she saw the wariness in their posture, the mistrust in their eyes, and it set her on edge. Lazlo pushed his hair back impatiently with one hand. A beat passed in silence. Then the other man reached into his pocket. The movement was quicksilver-sudden. Sarai glimpsed a glint of metal.
Lazlo saw it, too. A knife. Flashing toward him.
He jerked back. The bed was right behind him. He bumped against it and ended up sitting. In his mind’s eye, Ruza shook his head, despairing of ever making a warrior of him.
Thyon gave him a scathing look. “I’m not going to kill you, Strange,” he said, and Lazlo saw that it was not a knife that lay across his open palm, but a long sliver of metal.
His heartbeats stuttered. Not just metal. Mesarthium.
Understanding flooded him and he surged back to his feet. For the moment, he forgot all his anger and Thyon’s cryptic insinuations and was simply overcome by the significance of the achievement. “You did it,” he said, breaking into a smile. “The alkahest worked. Nero, you did it!”
Thyon’s scathing look was wiped away, replaced with uncertainty. He’d convinced himself this was part of some ploy, some trickery or treachery with Strange at its center, but suddenly he wasn’t sure. In Lazlo’s reaction was pure wonder, and even he could see it wasn’t feigned. He shook his head, not in denial, but more like he was shaking something off. It was the same feeling of disfaith he’d experienced at the anchor—of disbelief crashing against evidence. Lazlo wasn’t hiding anything. Whatever the meaning of this enigma, it was a mystery to him as well.
“May I?” Lazlo asked, not waiting for an answer. The metal seemed to call out to him. He took it from Thyon’s hand and weighed it on his own. The ripple of glavelight on its satin-blue sheen was mesmerizing, its surface cool against his dream-fevered skin. “Have you told Eril-Fane?” he asked, and when Thyon didn’t answer, he pulled his gaze up from the metal. The scorn and suspicion were gone from the alchemist’s face, leaving him blank. Lazlo didn’t know exactly what this breakthrough would mean for Weep’s problem, which was far more complicated than Thyon knew, but there was no doubt that it was a major accomplishment. “Why aren’t you gloating, Nero?” he asked. There was no grudge in his voice when he said, “It’s a good episode for your legend, to be sure.”
“Shut up, Strange,” said Thyon, though there was less rancor in the words than in all the ones that came before them. “Listen to me. It’s important.” His jaw clenched and unclenched. His gaze was sharp as claws. “Our world has a remarkable cohesion—a set of elements that make up everything in it. Everything in it. Leaf and beetle, tongue and teeth, iron and water, honey and gold. Azoth is . . .” He groped for a way to explain. “It’s the secret language they all understand. Do you see? It’s the skeleton key that unlocks every door.” He paused to let this sink in.
“And you’re unlocking the doors,” said Lazlo, trying to guess where he was going with this.
“Yes, I am. Not all of them, not yet. It’s the work of a lifetime—the Great Work. My great work, Strange. I’m not some gold maker to spend my days filling a queen’s coin purse. I am unlocking the mysteries of the world, one by one, and I haven’t come across a lock yet, so to speak, that my key will not fit. The world is my house. I am its master. Azoth is my key.”
He paused again, with significance, and Lazlo, seeking to fill the silence, ventured a wary, “You’re welcome?”
But whatever Thyon’s point was, it was apparently not gratitude for the part Lazlo had played in giving him his “key.” Aside from a narrowing of his eyes, he continued as though he hadn’t heard. “Mesarthium, now”—he paused before laying down his next words with great weight—“is not of this world.”
He said it as though it were a great revelation, but Lazlo just raised his eyebrows. He knew that much already. Well, he might not know it the way that Thyon knew it, through experiments and empirical evidence. Still, he’d been sure of it since he first set eyes on the citadel. “Nero,” he said, “I should have thought that was obvious.”
“And that being the case, it should be no surprise that it does not understand the secret language. The skeleton key does not fit.” In a voice that brooked no doubt, he said, “Azoth of this world does not affect mesarthium.”
Lazlo’s brow furrowed. “But it did,” he said, holding up the shard of metal.
“Not quite.” Thyon looked at him very hard. “Azoth distilled from my spirit had no effect on it at all. So I ask you again, Lazlo Strange . . . who are you?”