The Sleeping God

by Violette Malan

  The dark man was Tek-aKet. The golden man would fight to save the dark man. Interesting. He could not TOUCH the golden man from here. But he could TOUCH the dark one.

  “This way.”

  Mentally checking and approving the direction against the map she’d seen days before in Alkoryn’s workroom, Dhulyn ran down the corridor after Dal-eDal. This was the right direction for the throne room, even though they’d missed the formal public approaches that would have taken them directly there. She quickened her pace until she was just behind the Tenebro lord. If he was leading them into a trap, she was willing to let him spring it. As they came up on a second cross corridor, they slowed. This passage was not as wide as the one they were using, but its carpet was good wool, not the woven matting they were walking on. Here they might run into someone with authority.

  “Hold your sword down and just walk straight across at a normal speed,” Dhulyn told him. “From a distance we’ll pass for Dome Guards. It’s the stealth and the running that attracts attention.”

  They slowed to a walk, but just as they reached the other corridor, a slim, dark-haired young woman turned briskly into their passageway. She yelped, took a quick step back, turned, and ran off. Training made Dhulyn pull out a throwing dagger before she thought again, and resheathed it. Killing the girl would accomplish nothing.

  “So much for stealth,” Dal said. “Let’s hope she doesn’t bring the guards.”

  “You mean more guards?” Dhulyn said.

  They were no more than ten or twelve paces past the intersection when a small group of six guards burst into the passage behind them. They came, Dhulyn noticed, not from the arm of the corridor down which the dark-haired girl had fled, but from the opposite direction.

  “Sun and Moon take them,” Dhulyn cursed. They couldn’t hope to outrun soldiers on their own ground, and while six were not too many to deal with, it would cost them time they might not have.

  “Let me try something,” Dal said. He took a step toward the approaching Guards with his hands up, palms toward them.

  “We come to kill Lok-iKol,” he called out, “and restore Tek-aKet to the Carnelian Throne. We’d just as soon not kill you, so are you with us or against us?”

  Dhulyn grinned, seeing that the man in front, while unshaven, was otherwise tidy in the solid dark red uniform of the Tarkin’s Personal Guard, as were three others. The remaining two wore the multicolored sleeves of the Carnelian Guards. Dal-eDal had good eyesight.

  The lead guard rubbed his face with his free hand. “You’ve got Tek-aKet? He’s alive?”

  “He should be ahead of us,” Dhulyn said. “With my Partner.”

  “You swear it’s so?”

  “I’m Dhulyn Wolfshead the Scholar, I was Schooled by Dorian the Black. I fight with Parno Lionsmane the Chanter. I swear by my Partner, may we both die in battle.” Dhulyn touched her forehead with the back of the hand that held her sword.

  The man reversed his own weapon and held it out to Dhulyn, hilt first. “I’m Dernan. We’re with you. Lead on.”

  “You won’t mind keeping your weapon, and taking the point position? It’s not that I don’t trust you,” Dhulyn said, with a smile. “It’s that I trust no one.”

  With their reinforcements surrounded, they crossed three more corridors on the way to the throne room, but the only other people they saw were two young pages. Unlike the dark-haired young woman, these two boys did not run away, but stood looking at them as they approached. They clung to each other, though Dhulyn was sure they weren’t aware of it.

  “Telian-Han,” Dernan called out. “Go for Talya. Tell her to come help us kill the Tenebroso usurper.”

  Both boys broke into wide smiles and ran off down the corridor behind them.

  The waiting area outside the wide oak doors of the throne room was just as dusty and neglected as the corridors had been. But somehow it made Dhulyn’s skin tingle to see the tastefully organized chairs with their side tables carrying dead greenery and guttered candles.

  “Take care, my lords,” Dernan said, as Dhulyn, shoving her sense of unease to one side, ran across to the closed doors. “If you stay too long with the Tenebroso, or too near him, some illness takes you.”

  “I don’t want to stay long in One-eye’s company,” Dhulyn said. “I want to kill him.” She seized the gilded pommels in the center of the ornamental doors and threw them open.

  Even as the others spread out, Cullen behind her, Dal to her right, Karlyn-Tan to her left, Dhulyn assessed the room, mentally ticking off friend from foe, looking for the one she wanted most to see. She found Parno just as he shrugged a guard off his back and cut off another’s hand with a casual stroke of his sword before turning to engage two others. A guard she recognized as one from Mercenary House, who had been facing two opponents until one suddenly found herself hand-less, dispatched the man left to him with a broad cut to his head. Dhulyn was more than halfway across the room herself when she heard Parno cry out “Tek, no!” and increased her speed.

  Parno’s cry had a strange impact on the people in the room. Fighting all over the room faltered as several of the Carnelian Guards raised their weapons and stepped back from their opponents, looking around them as if unsure what to do. One even nudged a fellow guard who was still fighting out of the path of his adversary and called something Dhulyn couldn’t hear into the man’s ear.

  Dhulyn ran past them and skidded to a halt.

  Tek-aKet Tarkin and Lok-iKol Tenebroso were circling each other in front of the Carnelian Throne. Lok looked as though he had been wearing the same clothes for some days, and his hair hung stringy and unwashed. He still wore his eye patch, but a green glow shone from behind it, matching the color that shone from his good eye.

  Dhulyn caught Parno’s attention across the room and flashed him a grin as she circled around to the left, hefting her dagger. Now if only the Tarkin could maneuver the green-eyed dung eater around so that she could plant a blade in him. Her experienced eye was just telling her that Lok was holding his blade a shade too low, when Tek-aKet, remembering what they had taught him, swept the other man’s blade aside and planted his own squarely in the center of the taller man’s body.

  For a moment they stood there frozen, Lok’s arm falling limp by his side, his sword dropping to the floor with a clang of metal on stone, his green eye hooded. He coughed and a dribble of blood ran out of the corner of his mouth. Then Lok moved, reaching out for Tek-aKet, pushing himself up the blade until he clutched at Tek’s clothing, staring the Tarkin in the face as if he would say something important. Per-force, Tek let go of his sword, grabbing Lok’s wrists to prevent being pulled off his feet. Dhulyn saw the green die out of Lok’s eyes, saw the lips form the words, “Tek, Cousin” as Lok-iKol’s knees sagged, and he slid slowly to the floor, taking the blade with him, hands still clamped to Tek’s arm. Lok’s mouth still worked, but the lips formed no words. Dhulyn ran forward to catch the Tarkin’s arm before he joined his cousin on the floor.

  Tek-aKet screamed, yanked his arm loose and fell, cracking his head against the foot of the Carnelian Throne.

  He cried out, letting the new body scream for him. The light. The searing light. She Sees. She was not to touch him, with her all-seeing eye. He withdrew, diving deeper, until the darkness covered him.

  She Sees.

  “How can you be humming?”

  Dhulyn lifted her fingers from the charred window frame. “What?” “You’re humming that children’s tune, the one from the game you’re so interested in.”

  “It’s going through my head, I can’t get it out.”

  “Come, the floors are unsafe here. We must go.”

  Dhulyn followed Parno out of the charred ruin that had once been Alkoryn’s map room. It had taken them some time to get away from the rejoicing at the Carnelian Dome, but as soon as they could find enough horses, they’d gathered the Mercenaries who had come up through the tunnels and returned to Mercenary House through streets filling with people as news of
Tek-aKet’s restoration spread through Gotterang. They’d found the gates battered but still closed, no attackers outside, and nothing living inside.

  It didn’t need any great experience to see what had happened. Unable to breach the gate, the attackers had resorted to fire arrows and scaling ladders. From the body count, seventeen had made it inside the House. They’d been laid to one side in the courtyard, as far as possible from the four bodies of the Brothers who’d been found. Parno had found Thionan’s body where he expected, under the plum tree. Fanryn was lying over her, sword bloody.

  “Another one this way,” Tyler Nightsky stuck his head in the door.

  “We’ll help,” Parno said, turning away from the stairs and following his Brother to the rear of the House. He stopped Tyler with a hand on the arm. “Dhulyn,” he said, motioning her forward. “It’s Alkoryn.”

  From the look of the bodies, Alkoryn Pantherclaw had killed one man as he came through the second-story window, and had been backed into a corner by a second man in a Tenebro uniform. This second man was spitted on Alkoryn’s sword, the pool of tacky blood beneath him showing the wound to be immediately mortal.

  “Does he live?”

  Dhulyn pulled the Tenebro man’s body away and squatted next to Alkoryn. In death, his hand had fallen away from where the hilt of a dagger stuck out, just below where his navel would be, if she could see it. He’d held it in place, keeping the blood in, until he’d been able to dispatch his opponent.

  “In Battle or in Death,” Dhulyn saluted him, touching her fingertips to her forehead.

  “Zella.”

  Zelianora looked up from where she sat in the window seat of her bedroom, the shutters angled to throw the morning sunlight on the book in her hands, and keep it from the bed where Tek was resting. At the sound of her name, she put the book aside and stepped over to the bed.

  “How are you feeling?” she said, sitting down on the edge of the thick mattress, and drawing her hand down the side of Tek’s face, letting her fingertips linger on his warm skin. She had caused him to be shaved as he slept, and though he was thinner, and there were new lines on his face, he looked more like the man who had met with and disbelieved the Mercenary Dhulyn Wolfshead-was it only a half moon ago? It felt like three moons at least.

  Tek had been unconscious for almost a day after the fight to restore him to the throne, and of course there were now no Healers to be found in all of Gotterang. A surgeon had come from the Mercenary House, a “Knife” as they called him, but the Brother had found nothing physically wrong with Tek beyond the lump on his head.

  Zella took the hand that lay on the outside of the thick feather bedcover. “Here I thought that, once we were back in the Dome, all our troubles would be over. I would rather have you well, than all the thrones in the world.”

  Tek squeezed her hand and she thought she saw him smile.

  “It is only a headache, Zella,” he said. “The Mercenary Knife said, from the knock on my head. It will pass.”

  Zella nodded, smiling. “Dal-eDal is suggesting that you show yourself to your men, and to some of the other Houses, now that you are awake. They need to know that you are well, and Tarkin again.”

  “I’m so tired.” And indeed, his voice was lower than she had ever heard it, even the time that he’d had the coughing sickness and had lost his voice for three days. There had been no Healer then, either, now that she thought about it.

  “I thought perhaps a short audience,” she said now. “It would have to be in the throne room itself, I’m afraid, but we could get you seated before inviting your nobles in… And we could be careful of the light, so long as they could clearly see you.”

  “No Mercenaries,” he said. “Not Dal-eDal.”

  Zella licked her lips, hesitating. Dal had been a great help to her while Tek was unconscious, and she well understood that without the help of the Mercenaries, neither she nor Tek-nor their children-would be alive to have this discussion.

  He seemed to take in what she left unspoken.

  “It’s the appearance,” he said. “I-we. We mustn’t look as though we were relying on paid troops, no matter how respected the Brotherhood is. And even if Dal has not yet been confirmed as Tenebroso, his attendance might send the wrong message.”

  Zella nodded, relief making her smile come naturally. Tek was talking and thinking like his old self. “I see, that’s well thought out,” she said.

  “Get Gan to arrange it.”

  Zella felt her face go stiff. “Gan-eGan is dead, my heart. Don’t you remember?”

  The man’s mind told him how to speak to her, what to say. He wanted to send her away, but that would cause remark. Remark he could not afford now, not while this pain throbbed its way through the head, pulling at his attention. He had considered taking another shape, an uninjured one, but Tek-aKet was Tarkin, his was the most useful shape. No other so powerful, so safe. Once the pain was gone, once the body was well, then the Seer. Not now, not yet.

  Dhulyn sucked in her stomach as the point of Parno’s blade passed within a hair’s breadth of the skin on her belly.

  “Trying to tickle me?” she said, aiming a blow at his left shoulder which he parried, making her duck under a cut to her head.

  Parno grinned. “And why, exactly, shouldn’t I tickle you?”

  “Because you know what tickling leads to.” She saw her opening, slapped his sword aside with the palm of her hand against the flat of the blade, and stepped into him, taking his wrist in her left hand and throwing her sword arm around his neck. She kissed him, light touches on cheeks, chin, and lips, as he laughed. “And we have company.” She made to step back, but his arms had gone around her, so she turned in their circle and smiled her wolf’s smile at the two men approaching from under the arches of the arcade along the north side of the courtyard.

  Parno whistled softly next to her ear as he let his arms fall away, releasing her. She gave Dal-eDal and Karlyn-Tan a short nod before turning to the stone bench where they’d left their other weapons. She tossed Parno his shirt and slipped her vest on over her breastband.

  “I see we’re not the only ones left uninvited to Tek-aKet’s audience,” Parno said, as he wiped the sweat off his face and arms with his shirt.

  Dal-eDal shrugged, tilting his head to one side. “I could see how my presence might be awkward, but I was surprised when I heard that you were also excluded.”

  Parno grinned. “Politically, it’s an astute move. Now isn’t the time to remind the Houses that the Tarkinate was restored by a handful of Mercenary Brothers.”

  “You were always more politically aware than I,” Dal-eDal said, with a short bow. “And that is why I have come to you. I felt you should be told. The Tarkin has sent word that he will confirm me as Tenebroso four days from now.”

  “You don’t need my permission.”

  Dal shook his head, lips pressed tight. “Nor do I ask for it. But I find that I would like your… your approval.”

  “You have it.” Parno’s voice was low and cool.

  “The reason for your Casting Out has been removed, and I would like to offer you the shelter of the House once more. So that you are Tenebro again.”

  Dhulyn’s heart thundered in her ears as Parno remained silent a long moment. Would he give the same answer here, in front of others, that he had given her?

  “Don’t take offense at what I’m about to say, Dal,” Parno finally said. “But I want you to remember that I didn’t leave the House. Do you understand? It was taken from me. I was Cast out.” Karlyn-Tan’s head came up, and he looked sharply at Parno. “I have another House now, one that I can never lose. And I have a Partner. Not even death will release me from that bond.” He looked down at Dhulyn and touched her cheek with his fingertips. “In Battle,” he said.

  “And in Death,” she answered, forcing her voice through the barrier in her throat.

  “I understand.” Dal-eDal swallowed. “But I will consider you my cousin. A Tenebro.” He looked at Dhu
lyn. “Both of you. The task of being Tenebroso will be difficult enough without you.”

  “Want my advice?”

  “Always.”

  “Just ask yourself, what would Lok do? And do the opposite.”

  Dal-eDal joined the laugh, but Dhulyn thought his eyes were not smiling.

  Dhulyn was quiet as Parno followed her to the baths in the Tarkina’s wing. She had neither spoken nor answered any greeting since they’d left the courtyard. The corridor to the baths was deserted, and as she reached for the door latch, Parno put his hand on top of hers.

  “All’s well, my soul?” Was it possible that the woman was still worrying about Dal-eDal and the lure of House Tenebro? Would this uncertainty haunt her forever?

  His heart froze as she looked up the short distance between them, frowning, her blood-red brows drawn down in a sharp vee.

  “I don’t like Tek-aKet’s behavior,” she said. “I don’t like our being excluded.”

  Parno let out his breath slowly. After all this time, he still expected her to react like a civilized woman-as his mother or sisters might have done, wanting to talk it over, reassuring themselves again and again. Was he ever going to know her well enough to know what she was thinking? Did he want to?

  “Tek’s position is logical, politically speaking.”

  “There is no such thing as logic, politically speaking.”

  “Ah, so young to be so cynical.”

  She shook her head, lips pursed. “There’s something off. Something wrong.”

  Parno pushed the door open and let Dhulyn precede him into the baths before he answered. “Let me see if I understand. We’ve killed Lok-iKol, restored the rightful Tarkin to the Carnelian Throne, we’re valued guests of the Tarkinate…” He imitated Dhulyn, shaking his head, pursing his lips. “No, I can’t say that I see a problem.”