“Witless—” Thwop. “Imbecilic—” Thwop. “Lackadaisical—” Thwop. “Pathetic.”
It went on, merciless, and Lazlo flinched with every thwop, his anger smothered by a great confusion. Once he had time to think, it would flare up again, hotter than before. But in the face of such a sight, his overwhelming feeling was shock. He himself was no stranger to punishment. He still had faint scars crisscrossing his legs from all his lashings. He’d sometimes been locked in the crypt overnight with only the skulls of dead monks for company, and he couldn’t even count the number of times he’d been called stupid or worthless or worse. But that was him. He belonged to no one and had nothing. He had never imagined that Thyon Nero could be subject to such treatment, and such words. He had stumbled upon a private scene that belied everything he thought he knew about the golden godson and his charmed life, and it broke something in him to see the other boy brought low.
They weren’t friends. That would have been impossible. Nero was an aristocrat, and Lazlo so very much wasn’t. But Lazlo had many times fulfilled Thyon’s research requests, and once, in the early days, when he’d discovered a rare metallurgical treatise he thought might be of interest, Nero had even said, “Thank you.”
It might sound like nothing—or worse, it might appall that he only said it once in all those years. But Lazlo knew that boys like him were trained to speak only in commands, and when Thyon had looked up from the treatise and spoken those simple words, with gravity and sincerity—“Thank you”—he had glowed with pride.
Now his Stop! sat burning on his tongue; he wanted to shout it, but didn’t. He stood rooted, pressed against the cool side of the mossy mausoleum, afraid even to move. The riding crop fell still. Thyon cradled his head in his arms, face hidden. He made no more sound, but Lazlo could see his shoulders shaking.
“Get up,” snarled the duke.
Thyon straightened, and Lazlo saw him clearly. His face was slack and red, and his golden hair stuck to his brow in tear-damp strands. He looked a good deal younger than sixteen.
“Do you know what she spent on your laboratory?” demanded the duke. “Glassblowers all the way from Amaya. A furnace built from your own plans. A smokestack that’s the highest point in the entire city. And what have you to show for it all? Notes? Measurements?”
“Alchemy is notes and measurements,” protested Thyon. His voice was thick with tears, but not yet stripped of defiance. “You have to know the properties of metals before you can hope to alter them.”
The duke shook his head with utter contempt. “Master Luzinay was right. You do have the soul of a blacksmith. Alchemy is gold, do you understand me? Gold is your life now. Unless you fail to produce it, in which case you’ll be lucky to have a life. Do you understand me?”
Thyon drew back, stunned by the threat. “Father, please. It’s only been a year—”
“Only a year?” The duke’s laugh was a dead thing. “Do you know what can happen in a year? Houses fall. Kingdoms fall. While you sit in your laboratory learning the properties of metal?”
This gave Thyon pause, and Lazlo, too. Kingdoms fall? “But… you can’t expect me to do in a year what no one has ever done before.”
“No one had ever transmuted metal, either, and you did it at fifteen.”
“Only to bismuth,” the boy said bitterly.
“I am well aware of the inadequacy of your achievement,” spat the duke. “All I’ve heard from you since you started university is how much smarter you are than everyone else. So be smarter, damn you. I told her you could do it. I assured her.”
“I’m trying, Father.”
“Try harder!” This, the duke bellowed. His eyes were very wide, the whites showing in a full ring around his irises. There was desperation in him, and Lazlo, in the shadows, was chilled by it. When the queen had named the Chrysopoesium, he had thought it a fine name for an alchemical laboratory. He’d taken it in the spirit of hope: that the greatest ambition of the art might one day be realized there. But it seemed there was no “one day” about it. She wanted gold and she wanted it now.
Thyon swallowed hard and stared at his father. A wave of fear seemed to roil between them. Slowly, and all but whispering, the boy asked, “What if it can’t be done?”
Lazlo expected the duke to lash out again, but he only gritted his teeth. “Let me put it to you plainly. The treasury is empty. The soldiers cannot be paid. They are deserting, and our enemies have noticed. If this goes on, they will invade. Do you begin to see?”
There was more. Disastrous intrigues and debts called in, but what it added up to was very simple: Make gold, or Zosma will fall.
Lazlo watched Thyon go pale as the whole weight of the kingdom settled on him, and he felt it as though it were on his own shoulders.
And it was.
Not because it was put there by a cruel father and a greedy queen, but because he took it. Right there in the tombwalk, as though it were a real, physical burden, he put himself beneath it to help Thyon bear the weight—even if Thyon didn’t know it.
Why did he? He might have turned aside and gone about his evening and his life, giddy with relief that such burdens weren’t his to bear. Most would have. Moreover, most would have hastened hence to whisper of it and spread the rumor before night finished falling. But Lazlo wasn’t most people. He stood in the shadows, furious with thought. He was thinking of war, and the people the last one stole from him before he could know them, and all the children the next one would orphan, and all the names that would die like songs.
Through it all, he was highly sensible of his own uselessness. How could he help the golden godson? He wasn’t an alchemist, or a hero. He was a librarian, and a dreamer. He was a reader, and the unsung expert on a long-lost city no one cared a thing about. What could he possibly…?
It came to him.
He wasn’t an alchemist. He was an expert on a long-lost city no one cared a thing about. And it happened that that city, according to its legends, had been practicing alchemy back when Zosma was still a barbarian-plagued wilderness. In fact, the archetypal images of the art and its practitioners came from the old stories brought across the Elmuthaleth: tales of powerful men and women who had tapped the secrets of nature and the cosmos.
Lazlo thought about it. He thought about it as Thyon and the duke left the tombwalk in tense silence, and as he returned his armload of manuscripts to the library, and he kept thinking about it as the library closed for the night and he missed dinner to return to his room and his books.