The Sleeping God

by Violette Malan

  Karlyn shrugged. “Wolfshead, that is the tale told in the House. But I have seen your swords and weapons hanging in the north tower armory.”

  She raised her eyebrows a fraction and inclined her head once.

  “I must ask something of you.”

  Her lips twisted to one side. “You and everyone else in the blooded House.”

  “Will you tell me what the Kir wants of you?”

  The stony immobility of her face gave him his answer. Did not know, or would not say.

  “Can you tell me at least whether it brings danger to the House-other than the danger you represent yourself?”

  This time Dhulyn Wolfshead drew down her blood-red brows and pursed her lips. “That would be hard to say. He takes a great risk, I would judge, but whether it endangers the House…” Her frown deepened. “When you invade another’s territory, do you endanger your own?”

  Lok was planning an assault on another House? Karlyn found himself nodding. Yes, that would fit. Perhaps even explain the Jaldean.

  “I will free you, Dhulyn Wolfshead. And in return, may I ask you to spare my guards? They are innocent in this.”

  Dhulyn sat up straight, hands on her knees. She had rarely seen a man look as troubled as the Steward of Walls looked at that moment. The little muscles around his eyes and mouth were sharp with tension. As if he’d spent much time in thought before coming to her. But his request was sincere. That, Dhulyn was sure of. She had been right to approve of him when they had met at the gate. That he did not ask for himself, only for his men, showed his heart moved him in the right way. Dhulyn found she was glad of this. And that gladness surprised her, a little.

  “Why should I do this thing, Steward of Walls?”

  “I will set you free with my own hand, and give my word that my guards know nothing of your captivity,” he said.

  “Someone must know.”

  This closed his eyes, as a look of pain shot across his face. “None of my people, Wolfshead. I cannot speak for the Kir’s personal guard.”

  “You have named the Kir,” she said, leaning forward.

  “My oaths are not to the Kir,” he replied. “But to House Tenebro. That House is more than the Kir or even the Tenebroso herself. Like me, my people do not belong to the Kir, but to House Tenebro. They are innocent in this,” he repeated.

  Again, he did not ask for himself. “Blade oath, Steward of Walls?”

  “Blade oath, Dhulyn Wolfshead.”

  A long moment passed. “I believe you,” she said finally. He bowed to her, but made no move to leave.

  “I will leave the door open,” he said. “May I ask you to wait until the middle of the third watch?”

  “What of this?” Dhulyn Wolfshead uncrossed her legs; as she lowered her bare feet to the floor, a heavy chain rang against the metal of the bed frame. Karlyn felt his stomach clench. He did not have the keys to that manacle.

  “A hacksaw-” he began, already turning to the door.

  “Wait.” He turned back. “You are an honorable man, and I will take your word in this as in the other. Go, lock the door behind you lest another come. Best you be able to say you do know not how I escaped.”

  Karlyn-Tan gave the Mercenary a deep bow, and turned to the door. “One thing is certain,” Parno said. They had waited until the middle of the second watch to make their attempt on the door. He gritted his teeth and coaxed the bent-and-folded wire he had inserted into the lock a little to the right. Stupid lock was blooded stiff. And using his left hand was not making a hard job easier. Trial had shown, however, that left-handed or no, he was still better at lockpicking than the other three. He closed his eyes the better to feel the mechanism. “What I’d like to know,” he said through his teeth, “is how much the little Dove knew when we were looking after her on the road and making sure she wasn’t eaten by Cloud People.”

  “Your coming was not just coincidence, you think?” Thionan said.

  “Perhaps,” Parno jerked his head and young Hernyn eased in beside him. “Hold this just where I have it, my Brother.” Parno waited until the young man had slipped his hand into position and grasped the wire before moving his own hand away. The cracked bone made his right arm throb. “But it’s certain they were ready for us. Perhaps the little Dove’s an innocent bystander. And the letter we never saw a love note. It’s just that I’d like to know before I cut her throat.” Parno thought of Mar white-faced and vomiting after Dhulyn had cut young Clarys’ throat. It had taken days for that big-eyed look of apprehension to fade from the girl’s face. She had looked at Dhulyn the way one looks when one realizes that the house dog one cuddled in the evening was really trained to kill strangers who came uninvited. Had that pallor and those sidelong glances been no more than a performance? Or was it just that the girl had found it was one thing to act as lure, and another to travel with killers?

  “The Lady Mar-eMar’s really a member of the House,” Fanryn said. She crouched on the floor near Parno, her back braced against the wall. “That much you may believe. They’ve been sending for cousins and second cousins and even more distant relatives since last planting season. Some stay, some go forth again.” She handed Parno the wire she’d finished bending for him. She’d been the one who’d helped him off with his boots. The pattern of beading around the boot tops still looked intact, but some of the beads were gone, worked into the dirt floor, and the wires which had held them on were picking the lock of the cell door.

  A dull click, and the Brothers smiled at one another in satisfaction. Parno and Hernyn eased the door open a fingerwidth, and they all fell silent, listening. They quieted their breathing, waited with trained patience for one thousand heartbeats, before Parno slowly twisted the picks out of the lock. “There we are, my lords and ladies,” Parno looked around at the three faces grinning back at him. “Off you go, Hernyn, and mind you don’t get caught. In Battle, my Brother.”

  “Or in Death.” Hernyn gave Parno a grin of his own and snaked himself out of the door on his belly. Parno relocked the door. Always easier to relock than to unlock. A twist to the old proverb Dhulyn was always quoting, “easier in than out.” Too bad she hadn’t remembered it before they’d come into this place.

  “He’ll be all right.” Parno hoped his words did not sound like a question. It was not something he could have said while the youngster was still in the room. Fanryn, Hernyn, and Thionan had matched fingers for the job and the boy had won.

  “Oh, blood, yes,” Thionan snickered. “He’s new in the Brotherhood, but that makes him old for outsiders. You or I might see him, Parno; Fanryn here knows his smell and could track him by that alone. But none of these people will see him.” She tossed her head at the corridor on the other side of the door. “We used to go roaming at night-blood, during the day sometimes, and none of us were ever seen.”

  Parno nodded. He would rather have gone himself, of course, but there was no way to convince the others in view of his injury. No way to explain the map in his head, if it came to that. And these three had more than maps in their heads. In their time in the House, they had been over the whole edifice several times, they’d told him. And it was from Brothers like these, Parno knew, that the maps he and Dhulyn were shown had come. They knew where every member of the household slept, and with whom, and what many of them looked like in their sleep. They knew where the chamber pots were kept and how often they were emptied; where the Tenebroso kept her jeweled gloves, and what kind of sweetmeats the tame Scholar kept under his bed.

  Most important, they knew of the places that a prisoner like Dhulyn Wolfshead-someone who had to be kept secret from the rest of the household-might be hidden. According to Thionan, there were three small rooms that, going by their placement within the maze of Tenebro House, were without windows and had only one door. Thionan knew of at least one other visitor who had been kept in the room she considered most likely.

  “Look there first,” she’d said to Hernyn. “You know the place I mean. Around to the left and do
wn the short flight of stairs beyond the Kir’s suite. Across from the hallway that goes nowhere.”

  “That’s not the place to start,” Fanryn had said, shaking her head. “You want to check that chamber next to the Kir’s suite first, the one he and the Scholar use for a workroom.” When the other three waited for her to go on she shrugged. “That’s where they question people. He should make sure she’s not there before looking for her cell.”

  Hernyn had looked at Parno and waited for the older man’s nod. No one thought it odd that the man who knew the least about the House should be the one to decide. Even if he had not been Senior, Parno was Dhulyn’s Partner, the only one who could speak for her.

  Parno sat propped on one of the cots while Thionan quickly put together what spare clothing and blankets they had between them to look like Hernyn was asleep on the other cot. They’d need all their luck and the bad lighting to fool anyone for long, Parno thought.

  “How’s this look?” Thionan flopped herself on the cot along with the make-believe Brother and drew a length of twisted tunic around her own waist. Parno squinted, then began to laugh. By the Caids it did look like Thionan was sharing the cot with someone else. She rolled back up to a seated position and bowed her acknowledgment of Parno’s tribute.

  “What shall we do to pass the time?” Parno said. “I’m no Scholar, but I know a good many tales, or I can sing.”

  “A song by all means,” Fanryn said, leaning back and shutting her eyes with a smile.

  Dhulyn stood ignoring the passage of precious minutes, waiting with a cat’s patience for the sound of footsteps in the hall to move away. When she’d heard them approaching, she’d ducked into the nearest open door and found herself unmistakably in the anteroom of the Tenebroso’s chambers. Two sleeping women, wearing the silken sleeping shifts and loose hairnets of senior lady pages, with heavier but no less finely woven robes across the foot of each bed, explained the absence of any other guards. Handmaidens or dressers would be sleeping elsewhere-these women would be nurses and companions, as well as bodyguards. Though the one to the left was too rolled up in her bedding to come to anyone’s quick assistance, Dhulyn thought, her lip curling slightly.

  Still, here in the heart of the House, surrounded by her people, the Tenebroso was evidently thought sufficiently well-guarded. And so she would have been, from any intruder other than a Mercenary Brother.

  Not that Dhulyn wished to intrude upon her. She stood not quite in front of the closed door, the well-oiled hinges at her back. She tried not to think about time passing slowly and inexorably by. She tried only to listen to the breathing of the two women with her in the softly lit room, until she was sure they breathed at the same moment, as people who sleep together over long periods of time often do. If she needed to-and then the footsteps of the guards outside stopped in front of the door at her back.

  Like a cat, Dhulyn walked quickly, softly across the room’s thick carpets to the interior door, keeping her footsteps timed to the breathing she felt more than heard, and slipped behind the heavy quilted curtain that marked the archway into the main bedchamber. She moved immediately to the right of the doorway and slowed her breathing, hoping her heart would follow suit and stop its hammering.

  The Tenebroso’s room was so large that the small oil lamps placed one to each side of the doorway did very little more than create deeper shadows. It had been a long time, evidently, since anyone other than Kor-iRok and her women had needed to navigate this room in the dark. Dhulyn heard sounds and murmuring voices from the anteroom and froze. After an eternity her heart resumed beating. Would they come into the Tenebroso’s room, or would they take it for granted that no one had been able to pass the lady pages?

  More importantly, was this a routine check, or were the guards looking for her? Had someone found her cell empty?

  Like her sitting room twenty paces farther down the hall, Kor-iRok’s bedroom was crowded with furniture. Little tables, stools, cabinets as tall as Dhulyn herself, some with open shelves and some with closed doors. Dhulyn edged over farther and squatted, adding herself to the shadow of a round table with thick carved legs. From here, she had a clear view of the large bed at the far end of the room. A small bedside table held a bowl of fruit and a light horn cup with a hinged silver lid to keep insects out of the drink. The Tenebroso Kor-iRok did not stir. The woman was warmly dressed and covered. At her age she would feel the cold more than would her ladies asleep in the outer room. Without cosmetics to give it color, the skin of her face was papery and pale. On a stand near the bed rested the elaborate golden-haired wig the old woman had been wearing when Dhulyn had first seen her, a gold, Dhulyn realized with a jolt, the exact shade of Parno’s hair.

  More light entered the room as the curtain was noiselessly pushed aside. The rings must have been bound with cord to prevent them rattling against the curtain rod. Wish I’d known that before, Dhulyn thought. One of the lady pages from the anteroom took a step into the bedroom.

  “What is it, Jhes-iJhes?” came a whisper from the bed. Only years of discipline, and her teeth in her lower lip, prevented Dhulyn from making any sound.

  “One of the guards in the west wing thought he saw something, my House,” the woman said.

  Not me, then, Dhulyn thought.

  “Well, there is nothing in here,” the papery whisper sounded once more from the bed. “Pray shut the door until the alert is over.”

  “Yes, my House, sleep well.” The woman stepped out of the room, drawing the curtain closed as she went. Dhulyn heard the “snick” of the latch as the door she hadn’t noticed in the anteroom was closed. She squeezed her eyes shut. This was all going to take much longer than she’d thought. She’d hoped to find Parno and go tonight, not take the chance of another day in One-eye’s interrogation room.

  “Come sit by me, Mercenary,” came the whisper again. “They will take a few minutes to sleep again, and you will be more comfortable here.”

  Dhulyn squeezed her eyes shut. Why didn’t her Sight ever show her something like this? Suppressing a sigh, she straightened out of the shadow of the round table.

  “When did you know?” she asked, as she sat down on the edge of the bed.

  “When you moved the curtain,” the old woman said. “The air changed.”

  Dhulyn eyed the distance to the door, and turned to watch the old woman’s thin chest rise and fall. If she took a breath deep enough to call out, Dhulyn could stop her before any sound got farther than the edge of the bed. Though it was bad luck to kill someone so old.

  “I did not want to be Tenebroso, you know,” Kor-iRok said as though she was continuing a conversation. “But my brother died, and then my sister. I had a daughter who died also, an elder daughter. Two months before her presentation day, dead of a fever. Young. I believed it to be natural; eventually, I learned differently. Now my time comes, though I am the only one who knows it.” She looked directly at Dhulyn, the force of her stare belying her words. “You may help me. Your coming is most advantageous. I fear I have less time than I had hoped.”

  Dhulyn pressed her lips together. There was no doubt, not even any real sense of request in the Tenebroso’s voice. She was used to being obeyed, and she expected to be obeyed now. What help would the old woman need? And what would she do if Dhulyn did not provide it?

  “I do not see how I may be of aid,” she said. “We do not kill people in their beds.”

  “The only killing needed here will be done by me.” The old woman indicated the bedside table with a glance from her still bright amber eyes. Following that glance Dhulyn saw what she’d missed before in all the shadows of the place, a glass vial no longer than her smallest finger, and stopped with a waxed plug. Dhulyn pursed her lips in a soundless whistle.

  “Grandmother,” Dhulyn said, finding herself instinctively reverting to the courtesy of her Clan. “I do not understand.”

  “I will ask three-no-four things of you. First, unstopper the vial and hand it to me.” She waited. “I am
ready my child,” the papery voice whispered when Dhulyn hesitated. “More than ready.”

  Dhulyn looked at the vial, at the old woman, saw the determination and certainty in the Tenebroso’s face. She picked up the vial. She wondered what kind of poison the old woman had decided on. She ran her thumbnail around the edge of wax and worked out the cork before placing it into the Tenebroso’s waiting hand. The old woman smiled, and tipped the contents of the little glass tube into her mouth. A small grimace of distaste, as when one takes a mouthful of sour wine, and then she held out the vial once more.

  “I wish you to take this with you when you go.” The Tenebroso suddenly gasped and shut her eyes tight before blinking them open again. “I will not give him the satisfaction… I would not have him think I have killed myself because of him.”

  No need for Dhulyn to ask who the man in question might be.

  “That is only two things, Grandmother.”

  “I would have you listen to my curse,” the old woman said. “Another’s ears will give it weight and power. And I wish it to fall upon him as heavily as might be.”

  “You would curse your own Kir?” Towns folk. Who could understand them?

  The old woman’s eyes must have been very accustomed to the darkness in her room for her to catch Dhulyn shaking her head.

  “It is not what you think, Mercenary. I would curse him for killing my daughter, all those years ago. For killing his sister.”

  “But your House…” She’d condemn her House to the chaos and turmoil that would follow the cursing of its Kir? Not that Dhulyn would stand in the old woman’s way. As far as she was concerned, a curse was just what the One-eye needed.

  “The House will continue. I was afraid,” the old woman said in the voice of one confiding in a friend. “I thought I might have waited too long. Dal is not what I had hoped. He watches, but he does not lead. He hates Lok, but he cannot make up his mind to kill him.”