Strange the Dreamer: Prologue–Chapter 11

The moths were no bigger than the startled mouths of children, and even dozens together could only pluck at the strands of her darkening hair until their wings sagged, sodden with her blood.

The blue girl’s ghost gathered itself and perched, bereft, upon the spearpoint-tip of the projecting finial, just an inch above her own still chest.

And across the city, atop a monolithic wedge of seamless, mirror-smooth metal, a statue stirred, as though awakened by the tumult, and slowly lifted its great horned head.

Archaic; from Shres, the bastard god of fortune, who was believed to punish supplicants for inadequate offerings by granting their hearts’ desire to another.

They arrived like shipments of lambs, to hear the monks tell it, and with no more knowledge of their provenance than lambs, either.

He learned to coax Brother Cyrus into that place of reverie, and he collected the stories like treasure.

The streets of the city, Brother Cyrus said, were tiled with lapis lazuli and kept scrupulously clean so as not to soil the long, long hair the ladies wore loose and trailing behind them like bolts of blackest silk.

He roared the city’s name. Like thunder, like an avalanche, like the war cry of the seraphim who had come on wings of fire and cleansed the world of demons.

The glaves themselves were perfect polished spheres, hanging by the hundreds and emitting a purer white light than he’d ever seen from the rough, ruddy stones that lit the abbey.

He might have grown feral: the wild boy of the Great Library, versed in three dead languages and all the tales ever written in them, but ragged as a beggar in the alleys of the Grin.

The old librarian expressed this wish more often than was seemly, undaunted that the answer was always no.

“Do you want to end your days a half-blind troglodyte hobbling through the bowels of the library?” the old man demanded.

They were old cargo manifests, which sounded marginally more thrilling, from a time when the palace had been the royal residence and goods had come from every corner of the world.

Girls are not a hibernal phenomenon. Go now. Pick some flowers and find one to give them to.

Between the abbey and the library, he had hardly known a female person, much less a young female person, and even if he’d had the faintest idea what to say to one, he didn’t imagine that many would welcome the overtures of a penniless junior librarian with a crooked nose and the ignominious name of Strange.

Between the abbey and the library, he had hardly known a female person, much less a young female person, and even if he’d had the faintest idea what to say to one, he didn’t imagine that many would welcome the overtures of a penniless junior librarian with a crooked nose and the ignominious name of Strange.

“Don’t be impertinent."

“Don’t be imperious.”

“Fine, fine. Enjoy your receipts. I’m not giving up on you, though. What’s the point of being old if you can’t beleaguer the young with your vast stores of wisdom?”

As always, anything touching on the mysteries had a quickening effect on him, like a drumbeat pulling at his pulse—at both his pulses, blood and spirit, the rhythms of his two hearts interwoven like the syncopation of two hands beating at different drums.

He disdained full regalia, except on ceremonial occasions, and dressed instead in impeccable coats and breeches, with tall black riding boots and a dueling blade at his side.

He was no ordinary scholar, this man, but the apotheosis of scholars: the most famous personage in Zosma, save the queen and the hierarch, and the most popular, bar none.

Heads lifted at the jarring of the doors, but unlike the irritation mirrored on all faces when Master Hyrrokkin had laughed, this time they registered surprise before shifting into adulation or envy. Master Hyrrokkin’s reaction was pure adulation.

“That’s good of you, Hyrrokkin,” said this paragon, who had the face of a god, in addition to the mind of one.

They were the same height, but Nero stood as though posing for a sculptor, while Lazlo’s shoulders were curved in a posture of wariness.

“Do you need me to write out the address?” Nero asked. His affability was all sham.

“Is there a problem?” asked Nero, his pleasant tone belied by the sharpness of his eyes.

Names have power, and he was, from infancy, associated with gold. It was fitting, then, that when he entered the university, he made his place in the college of alchemy.

Thyon, thirteen years old and sharp as the point of a viper’s fang, had looked around him at the cryptic rituals and philosophies and seen it all as obfuscation cooked up to excuse that failure.

He refused to swear on it, and flat refused to study the esoteric texts, which he called “the consolation of would-be wizards cursed to live in a world without magic.”

And at fifteen, to the deep dismay of the “would-be wizards,” he performed the first transmutation in western history—not gold, alas, but lead into bismuth—and did so, as he said, without recourse to “spirits or spells.”

Lazlo stood in the crowd that day, awed by the spectacle and by the brilliant golden boy who had always seemed to him like a character from a story—a young hero blessed by fortune, rising to take his place in the world. That was what everyone saw—like an audience at the theater, blithely unaware that backstage the actors were playing out a darker drama.

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.”

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.”

Wan shafts of dawn light diffused through stained glass, throwing color onto shelves of gleaming glass and copper.

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.

They weren't just a collection of notes. They were where he kept his impossible dream—every discovery he'd made about the Unseen City, every piece he'd puzzled into place. And it wasn't for the simple accumulation of knowledge, but with the goal of one day...circumventing impossibility.

But if the city was alive, then he could expect to be drawn and quartered and fed in pieces to the carrion birds.

And there it was: a bird, hovering on an updraft, as birds liked to do on this side of the ridge, hanging in place like tethered kites.

Now the bird. The presence of magic. And something beyond the reach of understanding. An affinity, a resonance.

“Then what do you call it?” inquired the queen, querulous.

Everything about him was smooth—his pressed clothes and perfect shave, his cavalier voice and blithe expression.

Lazlo’s grasp of the spoken language was tenuous, but he managed to answer, in uncertain grammar, “I want to come with you. Please, let me be of service.”

How could he convey the hours—hundreds of hours—spent bent over ledgers, his eyes swimming in the dim light of a dull glave while his mind traced the arabesques and coils of an alphabet that looked like music sounded?

He was riding a spectral at the head of a long, undulating line of camels.