The Sleeping God

by Violette Malan

  The Tarkina lifted her hand, as if to put her fingertips on her husband’s shoulder. There was no other movement in the room.

  Finally, the Tarkin leaned back in his chair, rested his chin in his right hand. The red stone in his seal ring caught the light, twinkling.

  “The newly risen House and a Jaldean priest?”

  “Yes, Lord Tarkin.”

  The Tarkin looked at his aide. “Have your people heard anything of this?”

  Gan-eGan shook his head. “No, my lord, and I do not see how this could be so. The Jaldeans have made no changes in their usual demands.”

  Out of the corner of her eye, Dhulyn saw Parno rub his upper lip with his left index finger. She, too, imagined she knew what the “usual demands” were. Judging from what they’d heard preached on the street, the Jaldeans wanted arrests and detainments, not just green headdresses, curfews and pressure to come to their shrines voluntarily.

  Alkoryn cleared his throat. “Nor would there be, if they had something like this in view. You are too moderate for them, Lord Tarkin…”

  “It may be, as some suggest, that I would prefer the Jaldeans had never found their new teachings,” the Tarkin said. “But they are here, many listen and believe, and that is a reality of my reign. I am sorry for the Marked. I have instructed my soldiers, and the guards along my borders not to hinder or stop them if they wish to go, though the Jaldeans would prefer I did otherwise. I am not myself a New Believer, but I will have order, and until I find some other way, the Marked are the price I must pay.”

  “It is as I have said,” the aide said. “The Jaldeans have no need to support the claims of another for the Throne.”

  “Perhaps the need is Lok-iKol’s,” Dhulyn said.

  “You should be more careful, Mercenary. This is a High Noble House you speak of.”

  Dhulyn smiled her wolf’s smile, and Gan-eGan edged farther away from her. The Tarkin looked quickly aside, lifting his hand to rub at his upper lip. I could like him, were he not so wrong, Dhulyn thought, stifling a genuine smile of her own.

  “May I ask, Dhulyn Wolfshead, how it is you came to overhear this conversation?” the Tarkin said.

  Dhulyn swallowed. This was the tricky part.

  “They thought I was unconscious, and so spoke freely before me.” The Tarkin sat up straight. “They thought you were unconscious? How?” He transferred his look to Alkoryn. “Drunk?”

  “Drugged, my lord.”

  The aide sniffed. “Is that not much the same thing?”

  “Drugged by them.”

  “To what possible purpose?”

  The Tarkin was content, Dhulyn saw, to let his weasel of an aide pursue his questions for him. She drew in air through her nose.

  “I did not catch your name, sir,” Parno cut in. Dhulyn ground her teeth but stayed silent. This was Parno’s world, as she herself had said. She’d do best to let him handle it.

  “I am Gan-eGan,” the aide said through stiff lips. “I am the head of the Tarkin’s private council.”

  “I am surprised, Gan-eGan, to find you so hostile to persons who have come here with a warning.”

  “The Brotherhood’s neutrality is well known, so you may therefore understand my caution when one of you, claiming to have been drugged, comes with an accusation against a High Noble House,” Gan-eGan said.

  It was all Dhulyn could do not to throw her hands in the air. This would get them nowhere. “My partner and I delivered a cousin of theirs whom we’d guarded from Navra, and when the job was done, we were set upon and held. We don’t know why-perhaps you could ask the Tenebros? They gave me fresnoyn, and while they were waiting to question me-again, I don’t know why-I overheard the conversation I’ve described. The interrogation was interrupted, and we escaped before it could be continued. We thought about remaining in captivity and asking a few questions of our own, but rational thought prevailed.”

  “Do not take offense.” The Tarkin’s eyes danced in an otherwise straight face. “The Carnelian Throne is not an easy seat. Even the accusations of friends must be examined, when they come without proof. Is there proof you can offer me?”

  Dhulyn closed her eyes and gritted her teeth. “I thought it was a mistake to come here,” she muttered. “Believe us, don’t believe us-it’s all the same to me.”

  It was as if Dhulyn had thrown a cat into a dovecote. The weasel of an aide yammering his indignation, Alkoryn’s rough whisper failing to catch the Tarkin’s ear, and Parno also trying to be heard. Dhulyn ground her teeth together. This would all be for nothing if she could not get them to believe her. She caught Parno’s eye and raised her eyebrows. He grimaced and shrugged, leaving it up to her. She looked from Alkoryn to the Tarkin and back. She was here. Her decision, she realized, had already been made.

  She grasped Gan-eGan by the shoulders and moved him to one side as though he had been a child, stepping into the space he had occupied, stepping to within striking distance of the now silent Tarkin. If details were what they wanted…

  “They will poison you in a dish of kidneys.”

  Every tongue stilled. Every eye in the room turned to her, and the Tarkin’s were not the only ones which had narrowed. Dhulyn took a deep breath, now she was for it. At least the weaselly clerk had stopped his yammering.

  “You’ll be in a little room, much smaller than this one, in an old part of the palace where the walls are very thick. There’s a tall, thin window with an archer’s grille, and a shutter on the inner wall, with glass panes in it.” The Tarkin’s chair was elevated enough that Dhulyn looked straight into Tek-aKet’s blue eyes. “The lower left-hand pane has some words scratched on the glass; I don’t know what they say, it’s a language I don’t know. I could write it for you, though. There’s a worktable, with an armchair on each side of it, both cushioned. A fireplace on the side of the room farthest from the window, with a small fire laid but not yet burning. A dark patterned carpet on the floor, old with worn spots, but you can still see the outline of snakes. A cloth covering the table with weights sewn into the corners-”

  “Enough,” the Tarkin said, his voice harsh and abrupt. “I know the room.”

  “Well, they’ll bring you a dish of kidneys there, Lord, and you’ll die from it.”

  “How can you know-”

  “She’s Marked.” Only the Tarkina would interrupt the Tarkin, and she’d been silent so long they had all forgotten her. She sounded as though she smiled with delight under her veil, and her voice had the liquid lilt of her northern homeland. “She’s a Seer.”

  “That’s why you include the Jaldean priest in your accusation.” Gan-eGan stabbed the air with his beringed index finger. “Now your motives come clear. The Marked have ample reason to wish the Jaldeans accused of the assassination of the Tarkin.” The man’s eyes narrowed with calculation as he turned to the Tarkina, “My lady, this is not proof.”

  “You could always let the Tarkin be poisoned, then you’d know for sure.” Parno said in his most reasonable tone.

  “I Saw what happens to the Tarkin, and I Saw Lok-iKol on the Carnelian Throne,” Dhulyn continued, leaning forward against the grip Parno had on her arm. “I don’t need the Sight to know what will happen to you. It’s all the same to you who sits on the Carnelian Throne, providing you keep your office-” She poked the aide’s shoulder with her index finger.

  GAN-EGAN STANDS IN THE COUNCIL CHAMBER AND TALKS TO A TALL MAN IN A DARK RED GUARD’S UNIFORM. HE IS CALM AND SMILES A SMALL, VEE-SHAPED SMILE; HIS EYES ARE A WARM JADE GREEN. ANOTHER GAN-EGAN, TRANSPARENT LIKE THE IMAGE OF THE SCHOLAR SHE HAS SEEN BEFORE, STANDS BEHIND HIM,

  WEEPING, AND WRINGING HIS HANDS. WHEN HE IS FINALLY ALONE, IN HIS OWN ROOM, AND HIS EYES ARE GRAY ONCE MORE, HE FITS A ROPE AROUND HIS NECK AND STEPS ON TO A CHAIR.

  Dhulyn sucked in air and clung to Parno’s arm. The green again. The green fog. In the priest’s eyes, in the one-eyed Lok-iKol, and now in this old man. What was it, and how did it move? And why did it seek out the Marked? She sw
allowed. Gan-eGan’s eyes were gray now. If she saved the Tarkin, would she save this counselor as well?

  “You will feel differently, sir,” she told him. “You will. If this man falls-” she jerked her head toward the Tarkin, “so will you.”

  Dhulyn stepped back into Parno’s circling arm and hung her head, swallowing. They were fools, all of them. Listen to them now, Alkoryn’s urgent whisper going unheard, drowned out by the clerk bleating his outrage. Only Parno’s murmur in her ear made any sense. She wished she hadn’t come.

  The doors to the anteroom opened, and the slim, golden-haired young woman who’d been their escort through the winding corridors of the Carnelian Dome came in with a unit of six guards in the Dome colors at her back.

  “My lord Tarkin,” she said, “a report has come from House Tenebro. It seems the old House did not Fall of age and infirmity as was thought at first. There is now evidence that the Fallen House was poisoned, and two members of the House have run away, suggesting their guilt.”

  “I grieve to hear it, Amandar,” the Tarkin said. “But why must I hear it now?”

  “One of the runaways is a distant cousin, Mar-eMar, recently come to the House, and brought by these Mercenary Brothers.”

  “Who else ran from the House?” Parno said.

  The young woman shot a quick glance at Parno out of the corner of her eye before focusing again on the Tarkin.

  “The Scholar Gundaron of Valdomar,” she said when the Tarkin had nodded his permission for her to answer.

  Dhulyn looked at Parno and raised her eyebrows.

  “And do we know where these people are now?” the Tarkin asked.

  “They were followed almost to the doors of Mercenary House, and then lost, my lord.”

  “Alkoryn Pantherclaw,” the Tarkin said. “You will understand that I must detain your Brothers-” He raised his hand to halt Alkoryn’s whispered protests. “This is the Fall of a High Noble House, and not any House, mind, but one closely related to my own… and it places into a different light the tale that these Brothers have brought you. Some will say,” here he looked aside at Gan-eGan, “that they wished to make the first move in a game of accusations-but enough! Questions must be asked, and these Brothers will remain here, well-treated, until the answers are found. You, I hold blameless; you may go. But see that you send the Tenebro cousin and the Scholar Gundaron to me, should you have occasion to find them.”

  “My lord, we are neutrals, we cannot merely-”

  “You may go.” The Tarkin stood and looked to his wife, who shook her head and remained standing beside the chair. He nodded to Alkoryn, and left the room by the double doors to the right of his chair, accompanied by Gan-eGan. Once her husband had cleared the door, the Tarkina turned back to the young woman and the guards.

  “Amandar, you will give me a moment with these Brothers. You guards may wait outside. Alkoryn Pantherclaw, I know you have matters to attend to at your own House.”

  “I do, my lady, but I expect to return for my Brothers.” He turned to them and touched his forehead.

  Dhulyn caught herself before the smile reached the surface of her lips. It was not the Tarkina, but she and Parno who were being reminded. Dhulyn remembered Alkoryn’s workroom, and the charts and floor plans that lined his shelves, and thought she knew how Alkoryn intended to return for them.

  “Dhulyn, Parno,” Alkoryn touched his forehead with his fingertips. “In Battle.”

  “Or in Death,” they replied in unison, saluting him in return.

  The young woman, Amandar, hesitated but finally made a short bow and gestured the guards out of the room. The Tarkina waited until they were alone before sitting down in the Tarkin’s chair and throwing off her veil with a sigh. The face revealed was striking, her olive skin darker than the norm for Imrion, and her profile too pronounced, too hawklike, for conventional beauty. But her eyes, the darkest Dhulyn had ever seen, were large and lustrous, her lips full, warm and ready to smile.

  Dhulyn pressed her own lips together. She’d wondered what the presence of the Tarkina might mean; perhaps she was about to find out.

  “Do you know when this will come to pass?”

  For a moment, Dhulyn wasn’t sure what the woman was asking about. Then she remembered it was the Tarkina who had guessed she was Marked.

  “You believe me,” she said.

  The dark woman in the Carnelian chair nodded slowly, the jewels in her hair twinkling in the light of the oil lamps. “Most people think there are no Seers left in the world, but I know differently. There was one, an old man from the far west, at my grandfather’s court when my father was a child. Long before my time, truly, but unlike Gan-eGan, I do not need to experience something personally to know that it exists.”

  “And you do not mistrust the Wolfshead’s words, simply because she is Marked?” Parno said, his head tilted to one side as he considered the woman in the chair.

  “No,” the Tarkina said, leaning back in such a way that it was obvious she’d often sat in her husband’s chair. “By what I was taught, the New Believers are heretics, and in Berdana the Queen, my sister, provides asylum to the Marked, and refuses the demands they are starting to make. Here in Imrion they are my husband’s subjects, and therefore safe from my bad opinion.”

  “You’re not afraid of what you don’t understand?”

  The dark woman shrugged. “I don’t understand higher mathematics, but I am not afraid of the Tarkin’s accountants nor yet his astronomers. And I’m not afraid of the Marked, that’s certain. Whether I understand it…” She shrugged again. “When we were young, my sister and I, in our father’s palace in Berdana we had many companions from among the children of the noble classes, and my favorite, the one who I think would have loved me even if I were not the daughter of the King, she was Marked. Not a Seer, no, but a Finder. Because of my love for my friend, our tutors told us stories of the Marked, and made their histories part of our studies.”

  The Tarkina brought her gaze back from the shadows of her childhood to focus once more on Dhulyn. “If I can persuade my husband, will you help him? And if I cannot, can I hire you myself, to act as eyes and ears about the Dome?”

  “Lady, I believe we are being detained under suspicion of abetting in the Fall of a House.”

  “Yes, that is a small problem.”

  “I’m glad you think so.”

  “You misunderstand me. I’m not concerned with the Fall of Tenebro House. I’m concerned with the Tarkin-personally,” she said, giving Dhulyn a direct look from her raven-dark eyes, “not just for the sake of my position, and the position of my children. I believe it would be a tragedy for Imrion to loose Tek-aKet as their Tarkin, but it would be more than a tragedy for me to lose my husband. At the moment, Tek and the moderates among the Houses who support him are keeping the Jaldeans in check in this country. If the New Belief wins here, there will be war. War here will mean war for Berdana; my sister cannot remain neutral.”

  The Tarkina leaned forward and rested her chin on her right fist. “Gan-eGan is a fine man, whatever you might think, but he lacks imagination. Unlike him, I believe the Jaldeans will not stop their persecutions with the Marked, and if the Carnelian Throne will not give them what they want, I believe they will take the Throne. For Imrion, which is now my home, for Berdana my homeland, for my sister as well as my husband and children, I would push the Jaldeans back into their temples, and out of the council halls. For the sake of my old friend, I would have the Marked free again. Will you help me?”

  Dhulyn glanced at Parno and found him looking at her, the same thought, she knew, in both their minds. This is what they had talked about, back in the Mercenary House, when she hadn’t been sure about warning the Tarkin. The Tarkina saw the same things in the Jaldeans that they had seen themselves. The balance would be upset, no matter what the Tarkin thought, and she and Parno needed to know on which side of the scales they were weighed.

  “If we are free and alive,” Dhulyn told the dark woman i
n the Tarkin’s chair, “we will help you.”

  The woman they brought him had a strong golden fire, small but perfect. He shuddered, knowing that he was broken and in pieces, who should never have had form to begin with. The shape of Beslyn-Tor was whole, and wearing it was less exhausting than trying to form and hold a shape of his own; it was easy to gather his powers-to gather himself-and push into her eyes, probing into the flame, smelling it, tasting it, feeling its strengths. Holding it in his hands.

  A Mender.

  In an instant he was in the mirror room, standing over the Mender woman holding her head between his hands; holding it high and tight so that her neck stretched uncomfortably and her eyes flared with alarm. This is where it had begun. Where he’d been Seen and Found and Healed and Mended. No matter that he had not been lost, and was neither sick nor broken.

  “Do you know this room? Have you seen me before?” She had a different form, but that did not mean this was not the Mender who had first given him shape. Even now, even after all this eternal passage of time in this world of forms and solids, he did not understand all that it was possible for shape to do. “Are you the one? Can you open the door?”

  Her eyes flicked from side to side, seeing the great round mirror that held the doorway, the worktable with its scrolls and books. The sword.

  “No, my lord. No.” She would have shaken her head, if he had not been holding it so tightly.

  At once they were in the priest’s room in the Jaldean Shrine in Gotterang, he still holding her head between his hands. He reached into her with his own essence, sought out and found once more the golden flame. It burned hot and chaotic, almost shapeless. But he knew what true shapelessness was, and this was a mockery. He touched the golden flame and released it, dissolved its form. Made it NOT.

  The woman fainted. When they took her away, her face was empty and she cried.