The Sleeping God

by Violette Malan

  She looked up to see One-eye still looking at her, the muscles in his face, still moving to focus two eyes, gave him a most peculiar squint. Here it comes, she thought.

  “Can you see the future, little wolf? Can you?”

  He was close enough to her. And she had an answer to give him. A true answer. “I can See your death,” she said finally, smiling her wolf’s smile. “But what does that prove?”

  He reached out his left hand and stroked her cheek with the back of his fingers. Dhulyn opened her mouth to scream as images blasted their way into her mind.

  SHE SEES AN OLD DOG, PUSHING WITH HIS NOSE AT HIS MASTER’S SLACK HAND. THE DOG IS WHINING. HIS MASTER, A BEAUTIFUL MAN WITH LARGE BLUE EYES IS SPRAWLED ACROSS THE TABLE, ONE ARM FLUNG STRAIGHT OUT, HIS CHEEK RESTING ON THE ARM. HIS BEAUTY IS MARRED BY DARK DISCOLORATIONS IN HIS FACE, POINTS OF RED IN THE WHITES OF HIS EYES. THOSE EYES ARE WIDE OPEN, STARING, THE PUPILS TINY POINTS OF BLACK. THERE’S FOAM DRYING ON HIS LIPS, AND A LINE OF BRIGHT YELLOW DROOL HANGS FROM THE EDGE OF HIS MOUTH AND TOUCHES THE TABLE. THE DOG WHINES AND PUSHES AT HIS HAND AGAIN.

  A PLATE OF KIDNEYS CONGEALING IN SAUCE SITS ON THE TABLE, JUST TO THE MAN’S RIGHT. THERE IS A FORK LYING WHERE IT FELL FROM THE MAN’S FINGERS, AND A PIECE OF BREAD BROKEN OFF FROM A SMALL LOAF HAS FALLEN TO THE

  FLOOR. AFTER NUDGING THE MAN’S HAND ONCE MORE, THE DOG EATS THE BREAD.

  THE DEAD MAN WEARS THE DARK RED SURCOTTE AND THE THIN GOLD CIRCLET AROUND HIS BROWS THAT MARKS HIM FOR THE TARKIN OF IMRION…

  SEVEN WOMEN WITH BLOOD-RED HAIR STAND IN A CIRCLE SINGING. DHULYN BELIEVES SHE WOULD RECOGNIZE THE TUNE, BUT SHE CANNOT HEAR ANY SOUND. THEY HOLD EACH OTHER’S HANDS AND DANCE, FIRST ONE WAY, THEN THE OTHER, CALLING OUT THE STEPS, ENDING WITH A CLAP AND STILLNESS ONCE AGAIN. THE TALLEST WOMAN LOOKS UP, RIGHT INTO DHULYN’S EYES, AND SAYS HER NAME…

  THE CARNELIAN THRONE. A ONE-EYED MAN SITS ON IT, HIS DARK RED SURCOAT OVER HIS TEAL-AND-BLACK CLOTHES. HE TURNS THE THIN GOLD CIRCLET AROUND IN HIS FINGERS, THEN REACHES UP TO TOUCH HIS EYE PATCH. BEHIND HIM STANDS A MUCH OLDER MAN IN RED WITH A DARK BROWN CLOAK, CASTING A GREEN SHADOW. THE MAN ON THE THRONE CASTS A GREEN SHADOW HIMSELF. HE LOOKS UP FROM THE CIRCLET IN HIS FINGERS AND LOOKS RIGHT AT HER, HIS EYE GLOWING A SOFT JADE GREEN. HIS EYES GLOWING GREEN. SHE TURNS TO RUN FROM THE ROOM, BUT THERE IS NO HERE, NO THERE TO RUN TO…

  A CLOUDMAN WITH A TATTOOED FACE LEANS AGAINST A STONE PARAPET AND LOOKS INTO THE SKY…

  SHE BEARS TWO SWORDS, THE LONGER IN HER RIGHT HAND. SHE PARRIES A BLOW WITH THE LEFT, CIRCLING AND PULLING HER OPPONENT’S SWORD FROM HIS GRASP AS SHE STEPS FORWARD, THRUSTING HER LONGER SWORD THROUGH HIS BODY WITH THE WEIGHT OF HER OWN BEHIND IT. THE GREEN FADES FROM HIS ONE EYE AS HE FALLS TO HIS KNEES.

  Nine

  MAR HAD LEARNED long ago that if you walked with a purpose, and nodded at the people you passed, everyone who saw you assumed you had business, and let you go without comment. She found that this was as true in Tenebro House as it had been in the streets of Navra. So far, none of the people in the passages, most wearing the livery of servants or guards, had done more than return her nods, and many not even that much. If anyone asked her, she planned to say she was looking for the Scholar to return his play, and she had it in her gown pocket for proof. But also in that pocket was a piece of drawing chalk she had pilfered from a box in Lan-eLan’s rooms after luncheon.

  Every now and then she would make sure no one was looking, and chalk a mark low on the wall, pattern marks like weavers used to record how a pattern had been woven. Meaningless to anyone else, they would tell Mar which passages led toward exits, and which deeper into the House.

  She didn’t have a plan, exactly, but Dhulyn Wolfshead had once said that you should always be sure of the way out.

  She had just backtracked out of a passage that led only to bedrooms and was trying another turning when she saw there was someone sitting in the seat fitted into the window embrasure halfway up the passage on the right. She fixed a modest smile on her lips and prepared to stride purposefully by when recognition made her slow her steps.

  “Gundaron,” she said, her heart beating faster. He was leaning forward, his elbows on his knees, staring at his clasped hands. He didn’t look up.

  “Scholar.” Mar raised a tentative hand to touch him on the shoulder. He shuddered and straightened, showing her a pale face with dark circles under the eyes.

  Gundaron blinked, for a moment not recognizing the silhouette, backlit by the branched candlesticks farther down the passage. Scholar, he thought, shaking his head and blinking again to clear the fog from his brain. This was Mar-eMar. He straightened. Had she asked him a question?

  Mar motioned with her hand and Gundaron shifted over. The window seat was more than wide enough for them to share.

  “I said, are you all right? You look very pale.”

  “I don’t know,” he glanced around. “I must have dozed off. I… I don’t remember.”

  “Did you hit your head? What’s the last thing you do remember?”

  “Pasillon.” The word popped out of his mouth before he could stop it. “Oh, Caids,” he said, as the scene in the Kir’s workroom came spilling into his mind. What was he doing sitting here? How did he get here? The light spun, and he clutched at the hand Mar had placed on his arm to steady himself.

  “Who is Pasillon?”

  Could he tell her? Certainly he had to give her some reason for the fear he saw mirrored in her face.

  “Not a who, a what. When I was a boy, in the Library at Valdomar, I used to sneak downstairs, late at night when I was supposed to be asleep, to read the books we weren’t old enough to read yet.” He swallowed, and a smile’s ghost rested a moment on his lips. “There was one in particular, the Book of Gabrian, that told of Pasillon.”

  Mar-eMar settled herself, half-turned toward him, her face steady and unsmiling.

  “It’s a plain,” he said. “Far to the west of here and south, in the country that’s now Lebmuin. The plain has another name now, but when it was Pasillon, there was a great battle there, between two city-states, Tragon and Conchabar. It was Tragon that won.”

  “I’ve never heard of them.”

  “Practically no one has, but that’s not why people remember Pasillon.” Gundaron twisted to face her. “There were Mercenary Brothers on both sides-”

  “Both sides?”

  “They’re like Scholars, the Brotherhood, free of all countries, citizens of the world. And during battle-” All at once Gundaron was back in his midnight Library, shivering in the cold. Mar took his hands in hers and began chafing them. “During battle they’ll kill each other, if they come upon other Mercenaries on the opposing side. They think it’s the best way to die, at the hands of one of their own.”

  Mar drew down her brows, nodding. “Yes, that’s what they would think.”

  Gundaron took a deep breath and released it slowly. He could feel sweat on his upper lip. He freed his hands from hers and rubbed them on the smooth cloth of his hose.

  “That day, the day of the battle at Pasillon, the lord of Tragon had been killed, or maybe it was his son-I only read Gabrian that one time, so I’m not sure. But, with this special grievance, the Tragoni fought harder and won.” Gundaron looked closely into Mar’s face, searching for the glimmer that showed she understood. “But their loss made it a sour victory. And the taste of it left them angry, so they chose to take no prisoners. The Tragoni killed the Conchabari as they fled, allowing no one to surrender.”

  “Oh, no.” Mar raised her shoulders and drew her sleeves down over her hands.

  “But the Brotherhood, the Mercenaries, they had no reason to flee. Their Common Rule says that those who fight on the losing side submit to the victors and are ransomed by their own Brothers. But not that day. Not at Pasillon. Blinded by victory, enraged by its cost, the Tragoni pursued their fleeing enemy and fell upon any who stood in their way. They did not see why a Mercenary badge should buy someone’s life.

  “They’d forgotten th
ey had Mercenaries on their own side. And those men and women were quick to come to the aid of their Brothers. And then the real battle of Pasillon began.” Gundaron leaned back against the cold stone embrasure, eyes closed, looking back at the boy he had been, reading an exciting and forbidden book by candlelight when he should have been in bed.

  “Exhausted, outnumbered,” he went on, “some injured, forty or fifty Mercenaries stood against more than five hundred. Gabrian describes how they stood back-to-back on a rise of ground and cut down wave after wave of enraged Tragoni until finally, long hours later, when the sun had set, three injured Brothers crept off in the darkness, leaving the rest to cover their escape. And finally, finally, the last Mercenary fell. The victors-the few Tragoni who were left, looked about them and shook their heads, thanking their gods that it was over.”

  Gundaron blinked, and focused on Mar once more. Her eyes were wide, whites showing all around, and the corners of her mouth were turned down.

  “Except it wasn’t over.” His voice dropped to a whisper. “The army of Tragon continued to die after that day. Not everyone, just the men who were there that day. Just the men who had killed Mercenaries. And the officers who did not stop them. And the lords who gave orders to the officers.

  “People spoke of bad luck and the Curse of Pasillon, and many went to Healers and Finders and Menders, even Jaldean shrines, since they were soldiers, to see if the Sleeping God would cleanse them. The Healers saw no illness, the Finders found no poisons, the Menders nothing broken, and the Sleeping God slept on. But many shrines housed Scholars, and the Scholars saw that this was the work of the Brotherhood.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Don’t you see? It was the Mercenaries, the Brothers who escaped. They carried the story back to their Houses, and their Schools, and the Brotherhood acted, to teach everyone in the world that mistreated and betrayed Mercenaries would be avenged.” He looked away. “Will be. Still will be.”

  “No, I understood that part. I don’t understand what made you think of all this now? Why you’re so frightened.”

  He looked at her, licked his dry lips. Realizing that he could not tell her. Could not tell her of the look on Dhulyn Wolfshead’s face and the word Pasillon on her lips-Gundaron pressed his clasped hands between his knees to steady them.

  “It was seeing the Mercenaries,” he said finally. “Not the tame ones who live here and guard the walls, but the strange ones, your Mercenaries. They made me think of it and I had a nightmare…”

  The girl pressed her lips together, frowning. “Something else has happened.”

  Gundaron looked down at his hands, suddenly clenched into fists without his even realizing it. What else happened? He’d been in the Kir’s workroom and Dhulyn Wolfshead had said “Pasillon,” and then… and then. Nothing.

  He looked at Mar-eMar. His hands were shaking.

  “Nothing,” he said. “There’s nothing there.” He pitched forward as the yawning blackness swallowed him again.

  Dal-eDal shook the box of vera tiles, listening with half an ear to the rattle, spilled them onto the tabletop, and began laying them out in the Tarkin’s Cross, one of the old patterns, the Seer’s patterns. As a child he’d wished for the Sight, sometimes even pretended he had it, and he’d brought his box of tiles with him when he was summoned to Tenebro House on the death of his parents. If he’d been the Seer he’d pretended to be, would he be sitting now in his own Household, he wondered, his mother and father still alive? His sisters nearby instead of married away, and himself at home instead of a Steward he knew only through the man’s reports. But perhaps then he’d have been summoned to Gotterang after all, like little Cousin Mar, who might yet find herself in one of Lok-iKol’s windowless rooms, on the receiving end of uncomfortable questions, with the chance of an unwanted introduction to a highly-placed Jaldean staring her in the face.

  While her cousin Dal-eDal sat in his room and played vera with himself.

  Dal didn’t even bother to sweep the tiles back into their box when a knock sounded at the door.

  “Come,” he said, looking up from the pattern on the table and smiling his inquiry at the man-at-arms who came in.

  “I don’t know how you knew it, my lord, but you’re right. The upper armory’s been unlocked and restocked, though nothing’s missing from the lower armory, and nothing’s been delivered from outside so far as I can find out.”

  Dal tapped the tabletop with the tile in his hand, keeping his face impassive. “And the other matter?”

  “I did as you told me, my lord, and asked in the kitchens. The Scholar and the Kir are using the big workroom, leastways food and drink have been taken there, and up to the small room in the north tower as well. But there’s something else, my lord. Lights and braziers have been taken down to the western subcellar, the wine rooms.”

  Dal lifted his eyebrows, but slowly, careful to keep his excitement off his face. Lights to the wine rooms were one thing, but lights and heat? He sat back in his chair. Wine rooms indeed. Cells didn’t stop being cells because you called them wine rooms. Light and heat down there, that meant new prisoners in the old cells. And new, unaccounted-for weapons in the armory? That gave him an idea of who the prisoners were.

  If he was right, if the Mercenaries were still in the House-what, if anything, was he going to do about it?

  He knew what his father would have done, if Lok-iKol had left Dal’s father alive to do anything. Mil-eMil would have gone straight to the nearest Mercenary House with his tale of kidnapping and forced imprisonment. And not because he wanted to remove an obstacle to his own ambition-he’d had none, though Lok-iKol had never believed it-but to protect the House. And maybe, said the voice of the little boy who still lived inside Dal, maybe just because it was the right thing to do.

  What would my father do? he thought. Something more than stand back collecting information, that was certain. And what had happened to make him think of his father just now?

  “Thank you, Juslyn, you’ve done well. Ask the Steward of Walls to be good enough to join me in the upper armory at his earliest convenience. I require his advice for a new sword.”

  “Very good, my lord. Thank you, my lord.” The man-at-arms bowed his way out of the room, his crooked teeth showing in his wide grin.

  Dal turned over the tile he’d set down and looked at it. The picture on its face was tiny, but unmistakable. A Mercenary of Swords. He sat up straight, concentrating on the tile. There had been something. Something that had made him think for a split second of his father. When he’d led the two Mercenaries through the halls to the trap point, something-a shiver of familiarity-about the man Lionsmane had triggered a thought, a memory. What had it been? He frowned, placed the Mercenary of Swords back into the olive-wood box and began sliding the others into his palm. No time to chase down stray thoughts now.

  He closed the lid of the olive-wood box with a snap.

  And if his one-eyed cousin was keeping four Mercenary Brothers in a cell and one in a nice room-when she wasn’t tied to a chair-what, precisely, could Dal do about it now?

  A brisk knock, and Lan-eLan entered with a click of high heels. She shut the door behind her, leaning against the knob.

  “Why knock if you don’t wait for me to say ‘enter’?” Dal said, good training bringing him to his feet. As usual, she ignored him. They’d long ago come to an understanding; a free exchange of information between them helped them both.

  “Mar-eMar was told she’d get her lands back.”

  Dal sat slowly, holding the edge of the table like an old man.

  Lan nodded, a stiff smile on her lips. “She wondered, as innocent as you please, should she ask about it now or wait. I told her she should wait, of course, or speak to you.”

  “Sound advice, in any case. Though she’d wait a long time. Do we even own the lands still?” Dal shook his head. It felt strange to know that once upon a time he’d been this naive himself. “Did she say what she’d done to expect thi
s gift?”

  “I gave her every chance to tell me,” Lan said, spreading her hands wide. “But the moment passed. She must have been asked for something…”

  Dal thought he knew what Mar-eMar had been asked for-and what she’d brought. But why?

  “I’ll find a chance to speak to her myself,” he said. “See what I can get from her.” Lan nodded and left as abruptly as she’d entered.

  What was so important about these Mercenaries? Dal pushed his chair back from the table, stood, and picked up his box of tiles. He’d asked the Steward of Walls to meet him, and he’d better go. He could give the good Walls a nudge in the right direction. With luck, this affair might become his chance to finally do what his father had asked of him. Avenge his death. Stay alive himself.

  Maybe the Mercenary Brothers would solve his problems for him.

  “You sent for me, my lord?” Karlyn-Tan waited in the doorway of the old armory, letting his eyes adjust to the light of the oil lamps within the room, so much darker than the sunlight streaming into the passageway from slits high in the stone walls.

  Dal-eDal looked up from the dagger he was examining. “We’re alone, Karlyn, or will be if you shut the door.”

  Karlyn took a step forward and let the oaken door, reinforced with strips of iron, swing shut behind him. Sturdy wooden shelves lined the walls, and low tables divided the floor space into long sections with clear pathways leading toward the far end of the room. A fine layer of dust covered innumerable pieces of weaponry laid out in orderly rows, everything from a gilded mace to a dagger small enough to fit in a glove. Many pieces were ceremonial, or so jeweled as to be almost useless.

  “What’s this Juslyn tells me about a new sword? Are you sure you don’t want one new-forged?”

  “I’m afraid I misled Juslyn slightly.” Dal was looking him directly in the face, but Karlyn thought there was something stiff and unnatural about the man’s smile. “It’s not so much a new sword I’m looking for, as a particular one. My father’s, to be precise. I seem to remember it was among the effects I brought from my Household.”