Some parts of the city were quiet—notably the quarter of the melted anchor, where last night all hell had broken loose.
The fires had died away. The dust clouds had settled on the rubble of the explosion, and a young man with golden hair stood at the rim of the sinkhole. He was the alchemist, Thyon Nero, and he could hear the river moving below, and remember the roar when it had nearly burst through. His eyes traced the sunstruck rivulets of blue metal that disappeared into the ground. Somehow, Strange had shored up the cracked bedrock.
Thyon’s mind was undergoing a sensation of warp, as though it were shrinking and expanding, shrinking and expanding, trying to discover its new boundaries. Sometimes the limits of understanding shift too quickly to track, and it felt like being swept out to sea by a rogue wave and having to swim back, against riptides, finally staggering ashore to a landscape made unfamiliar by cataclysm. If the kingdom of knowledge was a city, then a swath of Thyon’s had been shaken to the ground, and he was standing knee-deep in rubble both in his thoughts and in reality.
What had he witnessed last night?
What was Strange?
“Oh. You’re still here.”
Thyon whipped around at the sound of the voice. He’d been absorbed in his thoughts and hadn’t heard anyone approach. His expression didn’t change at the sight of Calixte Dagaz—acrobat, climber, convicted jewel thief, possible assassin, and, like himself, esteemed member of the Godslayer’s delegation.
“I thought you’d have fled with the others,” she said, her voice light with careless scorn.
“Did you,” said Thyon, flat, as though making it a question would take too much effort. “Then you’re a poor judge of character.”
Calixte was a slip of a young woman, narrow-hipped, flat-chested, and lithe. Her shorn hair, only now growing back from its prison shave, might have made her look like a boy, but it didn’t. Her face, if not pretty in the way Thyon had been trained to judge such matters, was undeniably feminine. Her lips were full, her eyes knife-shaped and thickly lashed, and there was a delicacy to her features that was at odds, Thyon thought, with the crude way she spoke, and the too-loud laugh she’d no doubt honed among circus folk, striving to be heard over the bellows and guffaws of sword swallowers and fire breathers. “I’m an excellent judge of character,” she said. “Which is why I made friends with Lazlo, and not you.”
The barb struck but didn’t hurt. Thyon didn’t care what Calixte thought of him. “You say that as though I was an option.”
He meant, of course, that he—son of a duke, godson to a queen, and the most celebrated alchemist of the age—was above befriending a circus waif sprung from prison out of pity, but she turned his words against him. “No. You don’t have friends. I noticed that straightaway. It would have been wasted effort. Still, I’ve been known to exert valiant efforts when someone’s worth it.”
He gave her a wan smile. “If I’m not worth your efforts, why are you bothering me now?”
It was a fair question. She skewed her mouth to one side. “Because I have no one else to bother?”
“What about your girlfriend? Has she tired of you already?” Thyon might not have involved himself in the lives of the others—if that was what friendship was, being involved in the mess that was other people’s lives—but it hadn’t escaped his notice that Calixte had paired off with one of the warriors. The other delegates had gossiped about them like washerwomen, following them with hot eyes even as they called them unnatural and worse.
No one from Weep, Thyon had noted, had seemed in any way troubled by the pairing.
“It’s impossible to tire of me,” Calixte stated as simple fact. “Tzara’s busy.” She waved a hand toward the chaos to the south. The noise was only a low rumble here, in this abandoned quarter. “Preventing stampedes and such.” She spoke blithely, but worry lurked in the corners of her mouth and eyes—for Tzara, charged with keeping the peace; for Weep, whose worst fears stirred in the hated metal angel; and for Lazlo, who’d gone up there and hadn’t come back.
“Why stay, if you have no one to play with?” Thyon asked, still matching his tone to her scorn. He was irritated. This banter was beneath him; she was beneath him. In truth, he’d had little experience consorting with common people. He was baffled by their casualness, and stymied by their disrespect. Back home, someone like Calixte wouldn’t dare address him, let alone insult him. “You could still catch the carriages. I’m sure Tod would be happy to make space for you.”
Calixte mock-smiled her eyes to squints. She had not been well received by her fellow delegates, and her countryman Ebliz Tod was the worst of the lot. “Oh, he must be long gone by now,” she said. “He probably ran out of here first thing, using the heads of the populace as stepping-stones.”
In spite of himself, Thyon smiled. He could just picture it.
“I’m not going anywhere,” Calixte added with quiet intensity. She joined Thyon at the edge of the sinkhole and peered into it as intently as he had been. “I want to know what happened last night.”
“Which part? Nearly being crushed to death, or the metal coming alive, or—”
“Lazlo turned blue.”
Thyon had been about to say that, though he would have called him Strange, not Lazlo. But the way Calixte said it—intense, confused, and fascinated—brushed away the veil of casual banter. There was nothing casual here.
“That he did,” said Thyon.
They’d both seen it happen. They’d watched him run to the sinking anchor and brace it with his bare hands, as though with the strength of his body he could keep it from capsizing. And, impossibly, he had—though not, they both gathered, with the strength of his body. It was some other strength they couldn’t begin to fathom. They fell into a momentary silence, their mutual disdain muted in the presence of this mystery.
“How?” she wanted to know.
There were worlds in that word. Thyon had no doubt that both metal and gods had come from some other world, but he was an alchemist, not a mystic, and he only knew one thing for certain. “It was the metal,” he told her. “It’s a reaction to touching the metal.”
She squinted at him. “But I’ve touched it plenty, and I’m not blue.”
“No. Me either. It’s just him. It’s something about him.”
“But what does that mean? That he’s one of them? One of the gods who made that thing?”
Strange, a god? Through all his musing, Thyon had not allowed those words to scrape against each other. “That’s absurd,” he said tightly.
Calixte agreed, though for a different reason. Thyon objected to the notion that Lazlo could be divine, powerful. She objected on the grounds that the Mesarthim were evil. “No one’s less evil than Lazlo. And the girl, she didn’t look evil, either, poor thing.”
The girl. Thyon was assailed anew by the brew of feelings that had churned in him at the sight of Lazlo Strange cradling a girl to his chest. He’d hardly known how to interpret the image. It was so unexpected as to be incomprehensible. Strange with a girl. The details—that she was blue, that she was dead—had filtered in slowly, and he’d still been processing them after Strange carried her away. Into the air. On a statue brought to life. Indeed, he was still processing them now.
Strange had known a girl—a goddess, no less—and she had died, and he was grieving.
Thyon Nero was late awakening to the understanding that other people are living lives, too. He knew it, of course, intellectually, but it had never much impressed him. They had always been minor players in a drama about him, their stories mere subplots woven around his own, and it floored him to experience a sudden shift—as though a script had been shuffled and he’d been handed the wrong pages. He was the minor player now, standing in the settled dust, while Strange flew metal beasts and held dead goddesses in his arms.