Together they rounded the corner to see what the explosion had wrought.

62

A Calm Apocalypse

Heavy gray smoke churned skyward. There was an acrid stink of saltpeter, and the air was dense and grainy. The ruins around the anchor’s east flank were no more. There was a wasteland of fiery debris now. The scene was apocalyptic, but . . . it was a calm apocalypse. No one was running or screaming. No one lived here, and that was a mercy. There was no one to evacuate, no one and nothing to save.

In the midst of it all, the anchor loomed indomitable. For all the savage power of the blast, it was unscathed. Lazlo could make out Rasalas on high, hazy in the scrim of dust-diffused firelight. The beast seemed so untouchable up there, as though it would always and forever lord its death leer over the city.

“Are you all right?” Ruza demanded, and Lazlo started to nod before he realized he’d heard him. The words had an underwater warble and there was still a tinny ringing in his ears, but he could hear. “I’m fine,” he said, too on edge to be relieved. The panic was leaving him, though, and the disorientation, too. He saw Eril-Fane giving orders. A fire wagon rolled up. Already the flames were dying down as the ancient timbers were consumed. Everything was under control. It seemed no one had even been hurt—except for Drave, and no one would mourn for him.

“It could have been so much worse,” he said, with a sense of narrow escape.

And then, as if in answer, the earth gave a deep, splintering crack and threw him to his knees.

Drave had wedged his charge into the breach Thyon’s alkahest had made in the anchor. He’d treated it like stone, because stone was what he knew: mountainsides, mines. The anchor was like a small mountain to him, and he’d thought to blow a hole in it and expose its inner workings—to do quickly what Nero was doing slowly, and so win the credit for it.

But mesarthium was not stone, and the anchor not a mountain. It had remained impervious, and so the bulk of the charge, meeting perfect resistance from above, had had nowhere to blow but . . . down.

A new sound cut through the ringing in Lazlo’s ears—or was it a feeling? A rumbling, a roar, he could hear it with his bones.

“Earthquake!” he hollered.

The ground beneath their feet might have been the city’s floor, but it was also a roof, the roof of something vast and deep: an unmapped world of shimmering tunnels where the Uzumark flowed dark and mythic monsters swam in sealed caverns. How deep it went no one knew, but now, all unseen, the intricate subterranean strata were collapsing. The bedrock had fractured under the power of the blast, and could no longer support the anchor’s weight. Fault lines were spidering out from it like cracks in plaster. Huge cracks in plaster.

Lazlo could barely keep his feet. He’d never been in an earthquake before. It was like standing on the skin of a drum whilst some great hands beat it without rhythm. Each concussion threw him, staggering, and he watched in sick astonishment as the cracks grew to gaping rifts wide enough to swallow a man. Lapis paving stones buckled. The ones at the edges toppled inward and vanished, and the rifts became chasms.

“Strange!” Ruza hollered, dragging him back. Lazlo let himself be dragged, but he didn’t look away.

It struck him like a hammer blow what must happen next. His astonishment turned to horror. He watched the anchor. He saw it shudder. He heard the cataclysmic rending of stone and metal as the ground gave way. The great monolith tilted and began to sink, grinding down through ancient layers of rock, ripping through them as though they were paper. The sound was soul-splitting, and this apocalypse was calm no longer.

The anchor capsized like a ship.

And overhead, with a sickening lurch, the citadel of the Mesarthim came loose from the sky.

63

Weightless

Feral was asleep in Ruby’s bed.

Ruby and Sparrow were leaning over the garden balustrade, watching the fire in the city below.

Minya was in the heart of the citadel, her feet dangling over the edge of the walkway.

Sarai was kneeling on her terrace, peering over the edge.

In all their lives, the citadel had never so much as swayed in the wind. And now, without warning, it pitched. The horizon swung out of true, like a picture going crooked on a wall. Their stomachs lurched. The floor fell away. They lost purchase. It was like floating. For one or two very long seconds they hung there, suspended in the air.

Then gravity seized them. It flung them.

Feral woke as he was thrown out of bed. His first thought was of Ruby—first, disoriented, to wonder if she’d shoved him; second, as he tumbled . . . downhill? . . . if she was all right. He hit the wall, smacking his head, and scrambled to stand. “Ruby!” he called. No answer. He was alone in her room, and her room was—

—sideways?

Minya was thrown off the walkway but caught the edge with her fingers and hung there, dangling in the huge sphere of a room, some fifty feet up from the bottom. Ari-Eil stood nearby, as unaffected by the tilt as he was by gravity or the need to breathe. His actions weren’t his own, but his thoughts were, and as he moved to grab Minya by the wrists, he was surprised to find himself conflicted.

He hated her, and wished her dead. The conflict was not to do with her—except insofar as it was she who kept him from dissolving into nothing. If she died, he would cease to exist.

Ari-Eil realized, as he plucked Minya back onto the walkway, that he did not wish to cease to exist.

In the garden. On the terrace. Three girls with lips stained damson and flowers in their hair. Ruby, Sparrow, and Sarai went weightless, and there were no walls or ghosts to catch them.

Or, there were ghosts, but Minya’s binding was too strict to allow them the choice they might or might not have made: to catch godspawn girls and keep them from falling into the sky. Bahar would have helped, but couldn’t. She could only watch.

Hands clutched at metal, at plum boughs.

At air.

And one of the girls—graceful in all things, even in this—slipped right off the edge.

And fell.

It was a long way down to Weep. Only the first seconds were terrible.

Well. And the last.

64

What Version of the World

Lazlo saw. He was looking up, aghast, at the unimaginable sight of the citadel tilting off its axis, when, through the blowing smoke and grit he saw something plummet from it. A tiny far-off thing. A mote, a bird.

Sarai, he thought, and shunned the possibility. Everything was unreal, tinged with the impossible. Something had fallen, but it couldn’t be her, and the great seraph couldn’t be keeling over.

But it was. It seemed to lean as though to take a better look at the city below. The delegates had debated the anchors’ purpose, assuming they kept the citadel from drifting away. But now the truth was revealed. They held it up. Or they had. It tipped slowly, still buoyed on the magnetic field of the east, west, and south anchors, but it had lost its balance, like a table with one leg cut away. It could only tip so far before it would fall.

The citadel was going to fall on the city. The impact would be incredible. Nothing could survive it. Lazlo saw how it would be. Weep would be ended, along with everyone in it. He would be ended, and so would Sarai, and dreams, and hope.

And love.

This couldn’t be happening. It couldn’t end this way. He had never felt so powerless.

The catastrophe in the sky was distant, slow, even serene. But the one on the ground was not. The street was disintegrating. The sinking anchor sheared its way through layers of crust and sediment, and the spidering cracks met and joined and became pits, calving slabs of earth and stone into the darkness below, where the first froth of the Uzumark was breaking free of its tunnels. The roar, the thunder. It was all Lazlo could hear, all he could feel. It seemed to inhabit him. And through it all, he couldn’t take his eyes off the anchor.

Impulse had drawn him this far. Something stronger took over now. Instinct or mania, he didn’t know. He didn’t wonder. There was no space in his head for thinking. It was throbbing full of horror and roar, and there was only one thing that was louder—the need to reach the anchor.

The sheen of its blue surface pulled at him. Unthinking, he took a few steps forward. His hearts were in his throat. What had been a broad avenue was fast becoming a ragged sinkhole with black water boiling up to fill it. Ruza caught his arm. He was screaming. Lazlo couldn’t hear him over the din of destruction, but it was easy to read the words his mouth formed.

“Get back!” and “Do you want to die?”

Lazlo did not want to die. The desire to not die had never been so piercing. It was like hearing a song so beautiful that you understood not only the meaning of art, but life. It gutted him, and buoyed him, ripped out his hearts and gave them back bigger. He was desperate to not die, and even more than that, to live.

Everyone else was falling back, even Eril-Fane—as though “back” were safe. Nowhere was safe, not with the citadel poised to topple. Lazlo couldn’t just retreat and watch it happen. He had to do something. Everything in him screamed out for action, and instinct or mania were telling him what action:

Go to the anchor.

He pulled free of Ruza and turned to face it, but still he hesitated. “My boy,” he heard in his mind—old Master Hyrrokkin’s words, kindly meant. “How could you help?” And Master Ellemire’s, not kindly meant. “I hardly think he’s recruiting librarians, boy.” And always, there was Thyon Nero’s voice. “Enlighten me, Strange. In what version of the world could you possibly help?”

What version of the world?

The dream version, in which he could do anything, even fly. Even reshape mesarthium. Even hold Sarai in his arms.

He took a deep breath. He’d sooner die trying to hold the world on his shoulders than running away. Better, always, to run toward. And so he did. Everyone else followed sense and command, and made for whatever fleeting safety they could find before the final cataclysm came. But not Lazlo Strange.

He pretended it was a dream. It was easier that way. He lowered his head, and ran.

Over the suicide landscape of the collapsing street, around the turbulent froth of the escaping Uzumark, over churned-up paving stones and smoking ruins, to the sheen of the blue metal that seemed to call to him.