The Sleeping God

by Violette Malan

  The boy licked his lips again, looked at the door, looked at Dhulyn’s face. There was an armless chair next to the table. As if against his will, he sat down.

  The One-eye picked up the funnel and edged around her chair. Dhulyn heard a sharp metallic click, and felt a pressure on the strap around her forehead, increasing as her head was pulled back and down until her throat was exposed, her mouth sagging open, and she could see behind her to where he stood at the mechanism, part crank, part ratchet, to which the strap around her head was attached.

  “I advise you to relax,” the silken voice said. “I am going to use this tube to deliver some liquid into your stomach. If you struggle, I may miss and get your lungs instead. I advise you to be still.”

  Briefly, Dhulyn considered struggling anyway, but with her head in this position, she couldn’t even keep her teeth clenched tight. It wouldn’t be poison-there were faster and easier ways to kill her, if that’s all they wanted. While she still lived, she could get out of this- or Parno could get her out. She closed her eyes, made all her muscles relax, and tried to concentrate on what she’d told Mar about the sword swallower.

  Parno always woke up instantly alert. Which was a very lucky thing for the hazel-eyed woman inspecting the binding on his right arm. The heel of Parno’s left hand stopped just inches away from the bridge of her nose. The hazel-eyed woman, her hands still on Parno’s arm, never moved.

  “My Brother, I greet you,” she said formally. “I am Fanryn Bloodhand. Called the Knife. Schooled by Bettrian Skyborn, the Seeker. I have fought with my Brothers in the north, at Khudren and at Rendia. I fight with my Brother, Thionan Hawkmoon. The smaller arm bone is cracked, my Brother. Careful how you move it.”

  “I am Parno Lionsmane,” Parno said. His voice came out in a stiff croak and he cleared his throat. “Called Chanter. Schooled by Nerysa of Tourin, the Warhammer. I have fought with my Brother Dhulyn Wolfshead at Arcosa and Bhexyllia. Is she with us?” He knew she couldn’t be. If she were in this cell, Dhulyn would be in his line of sight. But he had to ask.

  “I’m afraid not, Brother,” Fanryn said. “With us is my Partner, Thionan Hawkmoon. Also Hernyn Greystone. But the one called Dhulyn the Scholar was not brought here.”

  Parno nodded. “We’ll take it that she lives, then.” Mercenary lore always said one Partner would know if the other died, but Parno wasn’t sure he believed it. “How long?” he asked.

  “A day and most of the second,” Fanryn said. “I thought you might wake up when I first bound your arm, but I had no such luck.”

  Parno began the slow process of sitting up. Bruises and abused muscles had stiffened as he slept. When she saw that he was determined, Fanryn slipped an arm behind him and helped him settle his aching arm in a sling she had ready, evidently torn from her own tunic. He looked around him. Fanryn sat back on her heels, her Partner Thionan hovering over her shoulder. At a guess they were close to his own age. Both women were tall, though not so tall as Dhulyn, both with the catlike grace that comes of good training and better muscles. They might have been sisters, except for their coloring. Fanryn was as golden blond as Parno himself, while Thionan had green eyes and hair close to black. Even so, Parno had known of parents who had produced such disparate offspring.

  The third Brother, Hernyn Greystone, was by far the youngest. A lanky boy with mousy brown hair, and a black eye that discolored most of the left side of his face. There was another pallet against the far wall of their prison, but the young Brother sat on the floor with his back to the wall, his arms wrapped around his knees.

  The room itself was cool, the walls dry, made of large blocks of undressed stone. What debris there was was surprisingly clean, scraps of straw and chips of wood, as from packing cases roughly opened. Whatever this room had been originally-and the heavy door with the small barred opening suggested a cell-its most recent use appeared to have been as a storage room.

  “Well, I’ve been in worse places,” Parno said, grateful for the steadying arm of Fanryn the Knife.

  “All this is due to me.” Young Hernyn Greystone lifted his head off his knees.Thionan Hawkmoon shut her eyes and made an impatient sound with her tongue.

  “You are here through my fault, my Brother,” the young man continued in the slightly righteous tone of someone determined to speak the truth, come what may. “You and the Wolfshead. They asked if I knew of a Brother, a tall woman with blood-colored hair. I knew of her, schooled by Dorian of the River as I was myself. So I gave them her name.”

  Parno winced as he leaned forward. “Who are ‘they’? Who asked you these things?”

  “Some of the guards here,” Hernyn said. “I thought them just curious. I meant no harm.”

  Thionan made her impatient sound again. “There is always harm in flapping the tongue. I’m surprised you didn’t learn that with Dorian.” Her voice was unexpectedly deep and rough.

  “Have done, Thio,” Fanryn said. Parno could tell they had tossed this bone back and forth many times already. “Anyone could go to our House and get the same answer. What harm could there be in repeating common knowledge?”

  “I should have thought the answer self-evident.” Thionan spread her hands out to take in the walls around them. She shook her head and stalked all of three strides across their cell to seat herself on the other cot.

  “Wait, wait,” Parno said. He tried to pat the air in front of him in a “calm down” motion, hissed in his breath, and bit down on a grunt. Hernyn buried his face again. Thionan stood up once more but was waved off by her Partner.

  “Sit still, my Brother,” Fanryn said. “I’ll have to bind that more tightly. Ask all the questions you wish, but for the Caids’ sake, sit still.” Fanryn folded Parno’s arm delicately across his stomach and began to tie it in place with strips of the same heavy cloth she’d used as the sling. The immobility of his arm made him more uncomfortable than the pain, but he did not protest. Mercenaries made the best surgeons, for obvious reasons, and he was not fool enough to argue.

  “Perhaps you might start at the beginning,” he said. “I know, more or less, how I got here, if not why. What are your stories?”

  “Simple enough,” Thionan said. “Straightforward guard detail. The Tenebros lost a few guards on caravan last fall. I think the Cloud People, wasn’t it?” She waited for her Partner’s nod before continuing. “Anyway, it’s hard to get good men in the city. If you’re in the country now, that’s different. You just promote some of your yeoman’s children, your farm boys who don’t care too much for farming, and there’s your new recruit. But here in the city-well, there aren’t so many extra pairs of hands here. The children of House servants rarely make good guards, even if they’re willing, and as for hiring outsiders-the questions come up, don’t they? ‘Why did you leave your last place of employment?’ People looking for a change aren’t the kind you want guarding your walls. And it’s too blooded dangerous to take some one else’s castoffs.”

  “So they hire Mercenaries,” Parno said. There was nothing new for him in what Thionan was saying. Let her talk, he told himself. Let’s get comfortable with one another. He knew from the battles they’d fought in that he was the Senior Brother present-though that would change when they found Dhulyn-let Thionan give him her report. They would all feel better for a little ordinary discipline.

  “So they hire Mercenaries,” Thionan agreed. “Specifically myself, my Partner and, not many moons ago, our Brother Hernyn here.”

  “When did they ask about Dhulyn Wolfshead?”

  Fanryn tied off the last strip of cloth and eased Parno back against the cold stone wall.

  “They never asked me,” Thionan said.

  “Or me,” Fanryn echoed. “Though, I daresay, we might either of us have answered. In our Brotherhood, your names are well known.”

  “Aye, you’re probably right,” Thionan conceded with a shrug. “After all,” she added with a neutral look at Hernyn, “what harm?”

  Hernyn shrugged and bit his lip. Pa
rno sighed. They didn’t have time for the boy’s self-pity.

  “Come on, man,” Parno said. “We’re all of us alive and, if we keep our heads, alive’s how we’ll stay. So snap out it, you sniveling brat!” Parno’s sudden roar popped the boy’s head up so fast he cracked it against the wall behind him. “We’re a council of war here. Stop wringing your hands and come be of some use.”

  The boy looked at the faces looking at him. Thionan patted the cot beside her. Slowly, with a shy bewilderment, Hernyn rose to his feet and sat down with his Brothers. He gave a sharp nod and squared his shoulders.

  “We were on watch one night,” he began. “Myself and two others of the guard.”

  “Which ones?” Fanryn asked.

  “The tall dark one with the broken nose, Rofrin, and Neslyn the Fair. Anyway, they were asking about how we live, the Brotherhood. Whether we marry and have children. Neslyn had just spoken for the son of the Steward of Keys, so there was much talk of such things. Everyone thought it would make a fine match-”

  “When was this?” Parno said. Best to keep the boy to the point.

  “Just over a moon ago,” Fanryn said.

  “So they were asking about Mercenary customs,” the boy continued. “And I tried to explain about Partners.” Here he looked at the two women. “How it really isn’t a marriage, the way outsiders think, but that it’s a kind of… of…”

  “Never mind, Hernyn,” Fanryn said, smiling. “We all know what it is.” Small wonder outsiders had difficulty understanding Partnering, her glance at Parno and Thionan seemed to say, if even Brothers got tongue-tied and embarrassed trying to explain it.

  “And so they asked about famous Brothers, and did I know any and I told them who I’d been Schooled by, Dorian of the River, the Black Traveler, because everyone’s heard of him. And I told them about some of the Brothers Dorian’s Schooled, Samlind the Nightbird and Pakina Swifthorse, that I thought they might’ve heard of. And they asked me if I knew a Mercenary they had heard about, and Rofrin described Dhulyn Wolfshead.”

  “They didn’t know her name?”

  “No, but they described her pretty well, even the scar on her lip. But it was the coloring and the build that they knew best. Tall as a man, they said, very lean, fair skin, gray eyes, blood-colored hair. Good with horses, used maybe a sword, maybe an ax. And I knew her, how could I not, with both of us Schooled in the same place, by the same hand? I told them her name.” Parno could hear in Hernyn’s voice how flattered the boy had been by their interest, how proud to know someone, even in so indirect a way, who was known to them. Borrowing a little glory from his better-known Brothers.

  “So they were looking for her, for Dhulyn Wolfshead? Her, particularly?” Thionan asked, breaking the silence before it could grow awkward.

  Parno shook his head slowly. “Barring the scar, they might have been looking for anyone like her, anyone of her Clan-though from what she tells me, the Espadryn are no more. Just our bad luck that she was the one they found.”

  “But what is it they want her for?” Fanryn asked.

  Parno looked his Brothers in the face. “I do not know,” he said, lying with the strictest truth.

  Thionan slapped her knee and stood up. “I’ve gone and forgotten,” she said. “Here, we’ve saved some stew for you, against the time you woke up.” She reached under the cot and pulled out a flat clay bowl, with another bowl turned over on top of it. “Hernyn ate a portion first to be sure it wasn’t drugged.”

  “Optimistic of you,” Parno said, his stomach rumbling.

  Good stew it was, too. Plenty of meat, if rather over seasoned for his taste. He’d paid for and eaten much worse any number of times.

  “If this is the kind of food they give prisoners,” he said aloud, “this must be a very prosperous House.”

  “Long as we don’t take it as a sign they mean to let us live,” growled Thionan. Hernyn curled back into the corner of the cot.

  “Relax,” Fanryn said when she noticed him. “It’s not what they’ve got planned will decide our fates, but what we let happen.” She turned back to Parno. “What will Dhulyn Wolfshead do, my Brother? It’s my guess they’ve kept her alone-otherwise why not keep us all together-and if I’m right, she’ll have no one to share the food.”

  “She won’t eat,” he said.

  “But she’ll have to drink,” Fanryn pointed out. “She can go a long time without food, most of us can. But she’ll die quickly without water.”

  “So they’ll drug the water,” Parno said.

  “And then?”

  Parno shook his head slowly, mouth twisted to one side. “That depends.” He wished he felt more confident about what he was going to say. His Schooling had not included any drug Shora. “Dhulyn knows the Shora for the fressian drugs,” he said. Both the older Brothers looked up at this. Most Brothers chose not to learn those particular Shora. As well as being one more way to die in Schooling, it diminished any future enjoyment a person might obtain from drugs. “And the iocain, too; plus one other, I think,” Parno told them. “If they give her one of the drugs using those bases, Dhulyn will manage.”

  “But how can they do this?” Hernyn burst out. “With Pasillon…” His voice trailed off under the steady looks of his Brothers.

  “Pasillon was long ago,” Parno said. “There are no longer thousands of Brothers who would come to avenge us.”

  “A better question is why do this,” Fanryn said.

  Parno nodded, more in response to the tone than the words.

  He’d have liked an answer to that same question, himself, if only to be sure that it wasn’t the thing he feared. But what else could it be? Since it wasn’t him isolated, it had to be Dhulyn they were after. He didn’t see how Lok-iKol could have found out, but he could easily see why such a man, a man with political ambition, would want a Seer, if he knew where to put his hands on one.

  What else would be worth so much trouble and risk?

  “Have you been out of the cell yet?” he asked, more in an attempt to change the path of his own thoughts than because it would be useful to know. When his companions did not answer right away, but exchanged looks out of the corners of their eyes, he feared he did not have to look far for more to worry him.

  “Well…” Fanryn scratched her elbow. “We were taken unprepared.”

  “Unprepared? How did that happen?” Parno kept his voice carefully neutral, though from the silence of the other three, he hadn’t quite managed to keep the censure from his tone.

  Fanryn shrugged. “Have you never taken service in a House, Parno? Things can look a bit different, you know.”

  “Different, indeed,” Parno agreed, “if it means you can end up in a cell without the means of freeing yourselves.” He shook his head. No point in being delicate about their feelings. If it came to that, he’d been caught himself. For years, he’d chafed under what he’d always thought to be Dhulyn’s unnecessarily strict discipline. After all, he’d been Schooled the same way she had; all Mercenaries were. The three Schools might have different philosophies, as befitted their Schoolers-the nomadic Dorian the Black, the mountain-bred Nerysa Warhammer, Bettrian Skyborn of the western plains-but the Shora were the same, as was the Common Rule. If this kind of slackness actually did exist-and three Brothers in a cell without lockpicks seemed to say it did-maybe Dhulyn Wolfshead was less fanatical than he’d thought.

  “Hold, Brother,” Thionan said, her hands raised, palms out. “We know. ‘A lazy Mercenary is a dead Mercenary.’ Believe me, we know. That’s not a lesson any of us will have to learn again. But telling us what we should have done doesn’t get us out of this cell right now.”

  Parno nodded. The woman was quite right. Recriminations didn’t solve problems. “How did you get taken, if you don’t mind the question?” They all three exchanged another look. “It might be useful for me to know,” he added.

  “They put something in our food,” Hernyn said, glancing at the stew bowl Parno had scraped clean. “It was j
ust after you and Dhulyn Wolfshead came in with the young woman, that same day. Wasn’t it?” He turned to the two women.

  “It was,” Thionan said. “A day, no, two days ago now. It was at the midday meal. They managed it the only way they could have, they put the stuff in the common dish. For the Caids’ sake, Parno.” Something of what he felt must have appeared on his face. “We’ve been here fourteen moons. We work for these people. We thought we’d be safe enough if we ate from the same dish as all the rest.”

  “They must have knocked out seven other people just to get us,” Fanryn pointed out.

  “And to confuse things,” Parno spoke his thought aloud. “No one could tell where you had gone or why.”

  “True,” said Thionan. “But according to the keeper who was talking to us before he was told to hold his tongue, one of the people at table with us didn’t get up. I don’t know what they used on us-Fan says something called cyantrine-but apparently they risked poisoning their own people, just to make sure they had us.”

  “What else could they do?” Parno said. “You would have known we never came out.” All four Brothers looked at each other. The word Pasillon went unspoken, unneeded.

  “You’ll get us out, though. Right, Parno?” Hernyn asked. Parno saw the boy had color in his face and had lost his hangdog expression. Though there was still something doglike and devoted in his eyes. At least he seemed to have taken Parno’s advice to heart, and was putting his indiscretions behind him.

  “Don’t see why not,” Parno said. “But let’s not rush ourselves. Getting out of the cell is one thing-out of the House another. I can’t leave without my Partner, so my first concern is to find her. Are we agreed?”

  Fanryn nodded. “You’re Senior, Parno, so even if we didn’t agree-”

  “Which we do-” Thionan cut in.

  “Wonderful,” Parno smiled back. “Help me get my boots off.”

  Eight