I saw Azal one more time. I’d got no message from him, but a full week after the Rite it just made sense to look there. The sentinel spire hadn’t been manned since the ascension, so nothing stopped a casual view-seeker from climbing its two-hundred-and-fifty-three steps to the lookout. He seemed like just such a view-seeker when I got to the top; standing with arms behind his back in one of those eight frames of sky. Except for the fact that a gryphon sat by his leg, talons drawn close and wings folded. It had been harnessed with a leash, though it lay slack across the floor. I thought of Scrivens and missed him in a distant sort of way.

‘Good morning friend,’ Azal said before I thought I’d made a sound. The gryphon rolled its head back to look at me.

‘Hello,’ I said, looking away.

To the right, some way below, was the broader tower; stone eagles shouldering its parapet. One of those windows was open, making it almost possible to see into that cushioned domain. No more crazed screams from those windows. Just the warm breeze on the stone and the most general city sounds.

I walked up to the edge where the man, almost twice my height, stood very still. A world of gypsum, dust and sand was laid out there, the desert challenging us to believe any civilisation at all was out beyond our wall of sandstone. The yellow hues at the edges seemed to melt into a blue rim and, above that, there were no clouds. Just one last gleaming bronze dome between our heads and the heavens. I marvelled dumbly, ‘It’s nice up here.’

‘Never been?’

I shook my head.

‘Hm, one of the rare spots in the fortress one can still find a good firm breeze.’

I frowned, though hadn’t meant to. I felt, not dizzy, but strange. Too much air probably. And Azal’s zenith-blue gaze. He had lived here, I remembered, and now I wondered how many times he’d climbed up here a lifetime ago. My eyes dropped back to the little gryphon, which was distending its skinny neck to preen its chest. ‘So you still haven’t changed your mind?’

‘Oft I’ve tried, sir,’ he said, scratching his scalp, ‘but the effort never seems to a yield lasting improvement.’

‘I mean about the gryphon.’

‘Ah. No, the plan must go ahead, friend.’

I felt the face I made to that. ‘Can I ask one more time where you’re going to send it?’

He chuckled. ‘Only if you’d prefer on this occasion I point.’

‘South?’

‘South.’

I smiled defeat, mirroring him now as he knelt down to the gryphon. Probing his secrets was as good as trying to snatch perfume from the air.

The little harness wasn’t tight and came off easily enough; the creature cooperated through the process, simply watching the man’s long hands and croaking a few times.

‘However,’ said Azal, ‘since you’ve been kind enough to join me today, I can perhaps offer you some small piece of why.’

And just like that, as if by some trick of his sleeve, the Disc was there on his open palm. He held it between us. As a blue sheen grew on the mirror—just enough that I could look at it directly without going giddy at the skyline—I was aware of the gryphon’s head following slowly in its wake. But the man’s eyes were on me; in their intensity something of the snake-charmer’s art. They were, if it was even possible, the same blue.

Sapphire.

Deep down, I think, I’d known right from the start.

And then the gryphon was up between us, on back legs, wings flapping hard—they batted my face and pushed me over off my haunches.

This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

The beak snapped fast and I rolled up just in time to see the Disc disappear over the thorny grey tongue.

With two short, satisfied belches, the thing was gone down the feathered throat.

I gaped.

‘The gryphon ate it!’ I cried, as if I might in fact have been the only witness. ‘That was the Disc you came back for!’

The Blue Man took me by the arm and helped me back onto my feet, his gaze unbroken. Quite calm, he brushed a gryphon-feather off my swathes.

‘You have, I believe I’m correct, experienced for yourself the power contained by some things to carry one from where one is to where one must be.’

‘Yes,’ I said.

He raised a slender finger, as if admonishing. ‘That is neither fate, nor is it magic, nor indeed the will of gods. There is, truthfully speaking, nothing unnatural about it.’

‘Schyluscience?’ I said, still shocked by what had just happened. Nor did the gryphon seem to be about to bring it up again. ‘What is schyluscience?’

The man tested me with a tortuous pause before replying: ‘The countless forms of a manifest grace. A normal phenomenon, as a matter of fact.’ He winced. ‘Quickened a bit.’

I remembered the very first time: the borderlands, the Rath monster standing over me to kill me, then the wagons that I’d reached without knowing what came between. I remembered the Hub and how I’d crossed its breadth and depth inside a moment, reaching the valve I knew I needed. Shen Drumbar, where I’d been swept from the Caliph’s house under attack and planted far away from danger. The Spectres . . . I looked out towards the northern erg. Somewhere among those dunes, a crag of jet blazed white. I only wished I could remember the name the ghost had said that day.

‘But why me?’

That seemed to startle him.

‘Why not you?’ he said, making me remember something Mother Far had said. ‘Are you so small beside the turning of your world’s wheels and gears as to deserve exclusion from them all? Look behind where you now stand. You are twice, if not more, a refugee. Perhaps an orphan. You have tasted loss, yet have been anything but content to sit among its pieces. You are defender of a people. Trusted of the great. You have, with rather more mettle if you’ll permit me, exerted force upon the world and achieved things as might indeed be called . . . effective. That, friend, is not grace. That is you.’

Our eye-contact stretched like soft rubber, never tensing. It made me think of the Builders’ polymer far below; a thing I’d discovered for this city myself.

‘Do you mean—’

‘Ah-ah-ah, there you see, it’s not for me to give the answer to the question you would ask. Not least because you’d be cross if you didn’t like it.’

‘Yes, but you said—’

‘I say all kind of things.’ As the gryphon chirruped, the man seemed to float towards the window where he leaned out. As his white hair played he drew an enormous breath. ‘All I can provably assure you, Florian Flint of Antissa, is that while the future will never come, it will be gentler when it does to all who care to pay attention.’

It was such nonsense, all of it.

Beautiful nonsense, though.

Something pulled my gaze east; maybe I’d already seen it in the corner of my eye. Far out there, over the dustlands of the Lack, but getting bigger, a fat dark mass was in the sky. It took me a moment to recognise. ‘Is that . . . ?’

‘Mm! Rain-clouds.’

‘Ha.’

‘Come!’ My heart lurched when he rolled his sleeves back and stooped for the fledgling. Just as the Builders had promised, the Arbiter of Justice. I did my best to help him lift it while avoiding the rapid flapping. ‘Watch those claws.’

‘I’m watching them!’

Once the creature was in his arms, I stepped away, not even sure what to think anymore. With a firm hand he stroked its belly where fur and feathers seemed to meet, stepping closer to the open. From the next watch-window along I looked down on the gardens and rooftops. A long, long fall.

‘Wait, can it fly?’ I gasped and wondered why I hadn’t thought of it before.

The wings struck up another beating, as if eager to try. Through the bluster the Blue Man graced me with a glance of wild excitement. ‘On changing winds such as these?’ he shouted. ‘Who couldn’t!’

And in a swirl of sleeves and wings, he launched a gryphon.

----------------------------------------

END OF DEEP METTLE