Glaves were quarried stones, naturally and perpetually luminous, and they emitted no heat, only radiance, the color and strength of which varied as greatly as the quality of gemstones. This one was poor: an irregular hunk of reddish rock emitting a muddy glow. Small as the room was, it left the corners in shadow. There was a narrow bed on one side and a desk and stool on the other. Two wall pegs held every item of clothing Lazlo owned, and there was no shelf but the window ledge. His books were lined up there. He hung up the glave and started pulling them off and flicking through them. Soon he was sitting on the floor, leaning against the wall, marking pages and jotting down notes. Footsteps passed in the corridor as the other librarians turned in for the night, but Lazlo had no awareness of them, or of the descending silence, or the rise and fall of the moon. Sometime in the night he left his room and made his way down to the dusty sublevel that hadn’t been dusty for years.
It was his sanctuary—a realm of stories, not just from the Unseen City, but the world. Weep might have been his dream, but he loved all stories, and knew every single one that resided here, even if he’d had to translate them from a dozen languages with the help of dictionaries and grammars. Here, captured between covers, was the history of the human imagination, and nothing had ever been more beautiful, or fearsome, or bizarre. Here were spells and curses and myths and legends, and Strange the dreamer had for so long fed his mind on them that if one could wander into it, they would discover a fantasia. He didn’t think like other people. He didn’t dismiss magic out of hand, and he didn’t believe that fairy tales were just for children. He knew magic was real, because he’d felt it when the name of the Unseen City was stolen from his mind. And as for fairy tales, he understood that they were reflections of the people who had spun them, and were flecked with little truths—intrusions of reality into fantasy, like . . . toast crumbs on a wizard’s beard.
He hoped this might be one such crumb.
At the heart of alchemy was the belief in azoth, the secret essence inherent in all matter. Alchemists believed that if they could distill it, it would enable them to master the underlying structures of the physical world. To transmute lead into gold, derive a universal solvent, and even an elixir of immortality.
It had long been accepted that this would be accomplished by means of some elaborate process involving the elemental trinity: salt, mercury, and sulfur. An absurd number of books and treatises had been written on the subject, considering the utter absence of empirical evidence. They were full of diagrams of dragons swallowing suns and men suckling at the breasts of goddesses, and Lazlo thought them as wild as any fairy tales, although they were shelved more respectably, in the alchemy room of the library, which, tellingly, had once been the palace treasury.
Meanwhile, banished belowstairs where no alchemist would ever look for it, in a book of tales from the Unseen City whimsically titled Miracles for Breakfast, there was mention of another theory: that the alchemist was himself the secret ingredient—that only the conjunction of human soul with elemental soul could give birth to azoth.
And there it was, a crumb on a wizard’s beard.
Perhaps.
5
Miracles for Breakfast
He ought to have waited, at least for a few days. Really, he ought never to have gone at all. He understood that later. Lazlo understood a lot of things later.
Too late.
The sun was rising by the time he emerged from the stacks clutching the book, and he might have been tired from staying up all night, but energy thrummed through him. Excitement. Nerves. He felt as though he were part of something, and forgot that only he knew it. He didn’t return to his room, but made his way out of the main palace and across the grounds to the old church that was now the Chrysopoesium.
All the city was spread out below. A radiance lit the Eder where it met the horizon. As the sun climbed, its gleam raced upriver like a lit fuse, seeming to carry daylight with it. The cathedral bells rang out, and all the other church bells followed—light and sweet, like children answering a parent’s call.
Lazlo thought Thyon might not have slept, either, not with the terrible burden laid on him. He approached the doors. They were huge, cast-bronze church doors, and weren’t exactly built for knocking. He knocked anyway, but he could hardly hear the rap of his own knuckles. He might have given up then, retreated, and given himself time to think better of what he was about to do. If the initial thrill of discovery had been allowed to wear off, surely he would have seen his folly, even na?ve as he was. But, instead, he checked around the side of the church, found a door with a bell, and rang it.
And so things fell out as they did.
Thyon answered the door. He looked blank. Lifeless. “Well?” he asked.
“I’m sorry to disturb you,” Lazlo said, or something to that effect. This part was a blur to him after. His pulse was pounding in his ears. It wasn’t like him to put himself forward. If his upbringing at the abbey had specialized in anything, it was instilling a profound sense of unworthiness. But he was riding the momentum of his outrage on Thyon’s behalf, and the flush of solidarity from one beaten boy for another, and above all, the thrill of discovery. Maybe he blurted “I found something for you,” and held up the book.
Whatever his words, Thyon stood back so that he might enter. The space was high and hushed, like any church, but the air stank of sulfur, like a pit of hell. Wan shafts of dawn light diffused through stained glass, throwing color onto shelves of gleaming glass and copper. The nave was occupied by a long worktable cluttered with equipment. The whole of the apse had been taken over by a monumental furnace, and a brick chimney cut right up through the center of the frescoed dome, obliterating the heads of angels.
“Well, what is it?” Thyon asked. He was moving stiffly, and Lazlo didn’t doubt that his back was covered with welts and bruises. “I suppose you’ve found me another treatise,” he said. “They’re all worthless, you know.”
“It’s not exactly a treatise.” Lazlo set the book down on the pocked surface of the worktable, noticing only now the engraving on the cover. It showed a spoon brimming with stars and mythical beasts. Miracles for Breakfast. It looked like a children’s book, and he had his first pang of misgiving. He hurried to open it, to hide the cover and title. “It is to do with gold, though,” he said, and launched into an explanation. To his dismay, it sounded as out of place in this somber laboratory as the book looked out of place, and he found himself rushing to keep ahead of his growing mortification, which only made it sound wilder and more foolish the faster he went.
“You know the lost city of Weep,” he said. He made himself use the impostor name and immediately tasted tears. “And its alchemists who were said to have made gold in ancient times.”
“Legends,” said Thyon, dismissive.
“Maybe,” said Lazlo. “But isn’t it possible the stories are true? That they made gold?”
He registered the look of incredulity on Thyon’s face, but misinterpreted it. Thinking it was his premise that the alchemist found unbelievable, he hurried along.
“Look here,” he said, and pointed to the passage in the book, about the alchemist himself being the secret ingredient of azoth. “It says the conjunction of human soul and elemental soul, which sounds, I don’t know, unhelpful, because how do you join your soul with metal? But I think it’s a mistranslation. I’ve come across it before. In Unseen . . . I mean, in the language of Weep, the word for ‘soul’ and ‘spirit’ is the same. It’s amarin for both. So I think this is a mistake.” He tapped his finger on the word soul and paused. Here it was, his big idea. “I think it means that the key to azoth is spirit. Spirit of the body.” He held out his wrists, pale side up, exposing the traceries of veins so that Thyon would be sure to take his meaning. And, with that, he found he’d run out of words. A conclusion was needed, something to shine a light on his idea and make it gleam, but he had none, so it just hung there in the air, sounding, frankly, ridiculous.