The Sleeping God

by Violette Malan

  “There.” The Finding part of us is strong and true now, Mended and Healthy.

  “The Green Shadow.”

  The youngest part is frightened; we all are, but together it is much easier to be brave.

  “What is it?”

  “It’s mad. Forced to ‘shape’ in our world, its wholeness makes it broken, and drives it insane.”

  “In its madness it will destroy, unmake, undo.”

  “To make a home for itself.”

  “How sad, how frightened it must be.”

  “We must destroy it, or let its madness destroy us. For the safety of all, and for mercy to it as well.”

  “Please, don’t let’s hurt it. Can’t it be Mended? Isn’t it a lost child, singing the same in-and-out song that we know? Couldn’t we Find its home?”

  “It’s too badly hurt, like a dragon, dying, but breathing poison as it dies.”

  “It’s like torn pieces of paper and parchments covered with writing, glued and sewn together by a child. Form without true content, spilling lies.”

  “It is a plague victim, innocent but spreading death as it walks.”

  “We need to see more clearly, focus more. The Shadow is all and none of these things. If we must destroy it, let us give it honor. It will fight us, in its madness and its fear. Let us be a warrior, and give it a clean death.”

  It is best to be the Wolfshead; skilled, deadly, and unstoppable. I alone of all of us have Seen this room before, and can feel at ease here.

  The man looks up from the table, shock showing in his face. “You can’t follow me here.”

  I approach him, looking at him with our head tilted to one side. “Who do you think you speak to?”

  “Dhulyn Wolfshead.”

  The man looks like Karlyn-Tan, but I shake that from our mind. Now he is Lok-iKol, his one eye blazing green, and that is easier. He looks down at his hands, face twisted in surprise.

  “How-who are you?”

  “You know who.” There is a sword in our hand and I cut, striking off the hand nearest us and a piece of jade-green stone falls to the floor. Its hand and arm remain still whole. I see the comprehension pass over his face like a cloud across the sun. He whirls and snatches the sword from the scabbard that hangs on the back of the chair. He strikes at me, but I jump back.

  I look around us. “This is the room where it all began. There’s the mirror.” I leap on the table and cut at him again, but this time the One-eye parries, and jumps back himself, forcing us to descend once more to the floor. I strike and whirl and strike again, moving our feet in the Shora, but he wards off our blows.

  “When I am whole-” his mouth twists as if the word itself was poison, “I can come back to this room. Behind that mirror, through that sky, is my home, the real world, not this place of shape and form.” His mouth forms those words, but the thought I can see in his mind is “horror” and “pain.”

  “I can end your pain.” A cut, a thrust, which the one-eyed man does not parry in time. Our sword penetrates his left side to the depth of three fingers. If this were a man, he would be bleeding too freely to continue fighting.

  Of course, if this were a man, my earlier cut would have removed his hand, and he would have bled to death already.

  “No, you can only break me into pieces. Me, that should never have had form to be made into parts. Do you think that ends the pain?”

  “What would end it?”

  “Open the door, send me home.”

  I smile and shake our head. “I would open the door, and others of your kind would come here.” But the youngest part of us, the part that is a little boy is crying, he, too, has lost his home. I shake our head again. Our homes are also lost, but I have found another. I have her Brotherhood. I have Parno Lionsmane. He is our home. The little one, he, too, will find a new home. But what about this one’s home, the little one asks us?

  The man changes again. Now he’s the Mage. The sword flicks out, much faster than the One-eye could use it, and I fall back, tasting a sharp flicker of fear in our throat.

  “Do you think I would wish this suffering on any other of my kind?” he says. He steps back, lowers his sword, and points to the book on the table.

  “I cannot read the book. That is too much form for me, too much shape. It is not just words, but thoughts, the form of form and shape of shape. If I could use the book, I would have gone from here before the madness came.”

  I keep our sword high, but think. It is true that I have Seen this man trying to open the gate, and failing. And that man wept, not from frustrated ambition, but from despair. I know, because I Saw truly, and I See truly now. I back around the table until I can glance down at the book. It is a language I have never seen before. I can’t read it. We can’t Find it.

  I look up at him. “Would you promise to stay here, in this room, to leave the world alone?”

  He shakes his head, rubs at his lips with trembling hand. “I must unmake it. It is madness. I must be sane again. I must.” He snatches up the sword again. He strikes, again, and again, and I fall back, suddenly feeling the young ones’ fear weighing down my limbs, the old one’s age in my laboring lungs.

  The edges of the room begin to waver, the walls to dissolve and I try, my breath short and my eyes watering, to Find my place again as the NOT approaches, closer…

  Focus. I need focus. The Hunting Cat Shora. Defense and offense. Stillness and movement. I grasp at the Shora and they all grasp with me, all breathe with me; our hearts beat as one. We breathe as one, and together I fall into the Hunting Cat Shora, sword up, left hand raised, feet sliding across the floor, keeping our weight balanced.

  I glide toward him like the cat the Shora is named for and he cuts at our head. I parry, he cuts again, thinking to blind us with his speed, but I move when he blinks, faster than he imagines possible, for I am the God Awake. I cut his arm, slash his ribs, and miss his neck by a hair-breadth. He touches our thigh, but I Heal.

  It is like a dance, and I hum a tune under my breath as I strike, and strike. I feel all our thoughts, all I feel, focus. The pain of loss. A home gone. The need to have that home restored, and the hateful and the horrible things that need drives us to do. Part of me weeps, and I know I must end this. I am the Sleeping God, but my bodies are human. I cannot dance this measure forever.

  But he is so lonely, and all he wants is his home. I stand back, our breath rough and uneven, the sound of weeping in our ears, the taste of tears on our lips.

  As if he hears my thoughts, and shares my feeling, the Green Shadow steps away.

  “Home,” he says. He is trembling, and I see ourselves shining in the light that comes from his eyes. He reverses his sword and plunges it into the floor.

  He falls to his knees and bows his head, covering his face with hands that shake. “Break me, Sleeping God,” he says. “Let one of us keep their home. Buy your world time. Let us start the long dance again. Until the one is Found who can send me home.”

  I take the Mage’s sword in our left hand, I step toward him, close enough to strike.

  “How many times have we danced these steps?” I ask him.

  He shakes his head.

  I have seen him in this room many times. He cannot read the book, and without it, he cannot cut the mirror, he cannot open the gate. But I also cannot read the book. Even I, the Sleeping God. Healer, Finder, Mender, Seer, held and focused by the Lens. Scholar, warrior, child, maid, crone. I have to strike, to break him once more into pieces, begin the dance of the Sleeping God again. Will another like us See this room? See the Mage reading his book? See his lips forming-

  I leap over the kneeling man at our feet and raise the Mage’s sword. Adelgarrembil, our lips say. Acucheeyarob. Fetentabil. Debereeyarob. Esfumarrenbil.

  I bring the sword down and cut the mirror, cut the night sky, and the gateway opens. The joy of the Shadow behind us cuts through us like a knife as it blows, flies, ROARS through us and into its own place.

  We teeter on the bri
nk of the gate. There is no room behind us, there never was, and there is nothing, no safeguard, no door to shut, that prevents us, our thoughts, our selves, from being sucked through into the formless NOT. Nothing, the real nothing, awaits us, our parts unmaking into the NOT.

  I drop no sword from no hand fall to no knees

  Until there is only one small piece of us left.

  A thin line of black traces through the blue and the green.

  Parno, I think, my soul.

  Suddenly I Find a sound, a chord of music, playing itself through our mind. Our feet move in the dance. We Mend the cut in the universes. We Heal the holes in our being. We turn to See, and clearly, brightly, with great focus, Dhulyn Wolfshead finds herself in her Partner’s arms.

  Twenty-eight

  PARNO SAT IN the chair by the edge of the bed on which Karlyn-Tan, gray-faced and drawn, lay propped up on feather pillows.

  “Sortera the Healer has finished her long journey,” Parno said. “She did not wake from the trance of the god.”

  “We were almost unmade,” Dhulyn added from where she leaned on the doorframe. “And she chose to use her strength to Heal us. So you must heal yourself, Karlyn, with rest and good food. We’ll wait for you to return to Gotterang with us.”

  “Don’t wait,” Karlyn said. “I’m not going back to Gotterang.”

  Dhulyn approached the bed, stopped with her hand on Parno’s shoulder. “Where, then?” she said.

  “I’m going to Tourin,” Karlyn said. “To Nerysa Warhammer. I’d like a House that won’t cast me out.”

  “You can’t do better,” Parno said.

  “If you live through it,” Dhulyn added.

  Two days later they were at the edge of the Vale of Trevel, on the unmarked path that led to the Gotterang Pass. Their packs were tied securely to their saddles, and their horses were restive, already looking forward to the road.

  “You’re sure you won’t come with us,” Parno was saying to Mar. “Dal would be glad of you, I think. He seems to set great store by his relatives.”

  “Maybe one day,” Mar said, looking over her shoulder at where Gun was looking down the trail. He must have felt her gaze; he turned and smiled at her, and her face lit up. “We’re going to Valdomar. Gun needs to write down all that’s happened, and while he does, I’d like to see if the Scholar’s life is for me.”

  “The Scholar is definitely for you, I would say.” Dhulyn stroked Mar’s hair away from her face, and suddenly found her arms full, as the girl hugged her.

  “There, little Dove, we’ll meet again, don’t fear it.”

  Mar stepped back, blinking. “We tried again last night,” she said. “Not because we don’t believe it, but…”

  “Just to be sure,” Dhulyn said, turning to check Bloodbone’s girth.

  “There no sign of it.” Gun drew nearer. “Nowhere in my mind’s Library. Even the wall of books is gone.”

  “Never thought I’d be happy to hear that books had disappeared.” She gave Gundaron a friendly shove and was surprised at the flush of pleasure that colored his face.

  “And with Mar’s help?”

  “No difference,” the girl said with a wistful look. “I don’t think I’m the Lens anymore.”

  “Broken?” Parno said.

  Mar shook her head. “Jerrick says not, he feels nothing broken about me. I don’t feel any different, just,” she shrugged, “lighter, maybe.”

  “The Lens has dissolved, perhaps, like the godhood we were; unnecessary now.” Dhulyn swung herself into the saddle. “The gods blow fair winds on you, and warm. Farewell, my Doves.”

  They had passed over the crest of the first hill, and looking back no longer showed them Gun and Mar standing side by side. Not, Parno thought, that Dhulyn had looked back.

  “The God’s gone, then?” he asked her.

  Dhulyn frowned, her blood-red brows drawn down in a vee over her narrowed eyes. “The Sleeping God is gone. Perhaps forever.” She looked up, her brow still clouded. “If its only purpose was to oppose the Green Shadow, then there is no further need of the Sleeping God.” She thought for a moment, until her face cleared. “We can’t know. As Mar said, Gun will write it all down, in case the God is ever needed again. Lenses will be tested for, like the other Marks-though, thank the Caids, I don’t have to create the test, for I’ve no notion what it might be.”

  “But for us, it’s over?”

  “I won’t forget. Shape and form has been at the root of this, and part of me will always remember what it was to be the form of the God.”

  “Oh, wonderful,” Parno threw up his hands. “My Partner is a god. I’ll never hear the end of this.”

  A half moon later they were in Gotterang. They found that Karlyn-Tan could have accompanied them after all, as Dorian the Black had docked his ship in Gotterang’s harbor, the better to oversee the rebuilding of Mercenary House.

  “The maps are safe, thanks to your warning,” he told them, once they had been found seats in a half-restored room and been served with mugs of hot ganje. “Though we’ve told the Tarkina that they were destroyed in the fire.”

  “Thus setting any fears of us to rest,” Parno said. “So we’ve only to present ourselves at the Carnelian Dome, collect our wages, with, it’s to be hoped, a nice bonus, and be on our way.”

  Dorian shook his head.

  “Bet-oTeb Tarkin, on the advice of her Guardian, Zelianora Tarkina, has sent you your wages here, and begs that you not present yourselves at the Dome. Though it’s been proclaimed that you found and killed the assassins of Tek-aKet Tarkin, awkward questions may yet be asked. Bet-oTeb Tarkin suggests that you may wish to find employment elsewhere until interest dies down. Zelianora Tarkina suggests her sister, the Queen of Berdana, may have work for you.”

  “Essentially, take your wages and leave the country-better yet, the continent?”

  “Essentially.” Dorian’s smile was very white in his dark face. “There’s a ship just now in the harbor, leaving tomorrow at dawn. The Horse’s Mane. A good omen if ever I heard one.”

  As they walked down the staircase to the sound of carpenters hammering, Parno looked around.

  “Well, at least we’ve been paid this time.”

  “Do you realize what our expenses have been? Replace at least one horse? Two thirds of our weapons gone and the expensive two thirds at that? A capital city is not the best place for good prices. And now we’re to buy passage on a ship at the height of the season?” Dhulyn stopped, her fingers tapping out a now familiar rhythm on the railing. “Did Dorian say the ship leaves at dawn?”

  “What of it?”

  She gestured at the carpentry work around them. “We can’t sleep here, so that means an inn, and where there’s an inn there’s a taproom…”

  “And where there’s a taproom there’s gamblers. Do you think they’ll let you use your own tiles?”

  Violette Malan

  Violette Malan lives in a nineteenth-century limestone farmhouse in southeastern Ontario with her husband. Born in Canada, Violette’s cultural background is half Spanish and half Polish, which makes it interesting at meal times. She has worked as a teacher of creative writing, English as a second language, Spanish, beginner’s French, and choreography for strippers. On occasion she’s been an administrative assistant and a carpenter’s helper. Her most unusual job was translating letters between lovers, one of whom spoke only English, the other only Spanish.

  Visit Violette’s website: www.violettemalan.com.

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