“THERE IS A PRECEDENT for madness.”
The next morning, Tek-aKet Tarkin’s voice sounded even more gruff than usual, as if someone had been sanding his vocal cords with a metal rasp. Dhulyn frowned. Or as if someone else has been using them.
“Madness is not considered grounds for the Ballot. Tau-Nuat Tarkin was always restrained to prevent him from harming himself,” Gun said from where he stood, shifting from foot to foot, near the door of the Tarkin’s bedroom.
“True,” Tek-aKet said. “And he’s an ancestor of mine, as it happens, so neither Guard nor Houses will be too shocked if they see me chained to the throne.” He lifted his hands the scant inches allowed by the silk ropes to illustrate his point.
It may have been a trick of the light, but Dhulyn could have sworn there was a smile hovering on the man’s lips. When Gun had come out of his Finder’s trance, they had all rushed immediately to the Tarkina, and they had found her, with tears in her eyes, already in Tek-aKet’s room clutching his bound left hand in both of hers. Now, Zelianora still sat on the edge of the bed, across from where Dhulyn had dragged up the chair that had been standing closer to the window.
“Do you remember anything of the Shadow?” she asked.
Zelianora raised her face from where she’d laid it on Tek-aKet’s hand. “Give him a chance to rest-” Her words died away as Tek-aKet tried to raise his hand.
“We may not have time, Zella. If it should come back…”
The Tarkina swallowed, and nodded her understanding. She reached up and smoothed back a lock of hair that had fallen into his face.
“Your pardon, Dhulyn Wolfshead. Pray proceed.”
Dhulyn looked at where Parno leaned with his back against the door of the room. He raised his left eyebrow, and lifted both shoulders the merest fraction. She inclined her head to the same degree.
“Lord Tarkin?”
“The first I remember is the pain in my head. I’d banged it once as a child, falling from my pony, and I thought-” He cleared his throat, “I thought that somehow I was there again, or there still. Thank you.” He raised his head to sip at the water cup the Tarkina held to his mouth. “I realized after some time had passed that I did not actually feel the pain.” Tek-aKet frowned. “It was as if I stood to one side and watched it more than felt it.” He turned to his wife. “I’ve had the same feeling when I’ve been fevered.”
And there were drugs, too, Dhulyn thought, that gave you the same feeling of detachment.
“Suddenly I wasn’t off to one side, but inside. Inside, looking out through my own eyes as if they belonged to someone else. Pushed to the back like a passenger in a carriage.” The Tarkin swallowed, but he shook his head when Zelianora lifted the water cup. His voice dropped to a thread of sound. “More time passed, and-some of that time-I wasn’t inside. I was… nowhere.” He looked up. “It, the thing I was inside, is nowhere.”
“NOT” Dhulyn said.
“What do you mean?” Gun took a step into the room.
“When I knocked it out, before I knocked it out. I saw it changing the room, and the space around itself, making it nothing.” She looked over the boy’s shoulder to Parno.
“The damaged part of the floor, in your bedroom, Zelianora,” Parno said. “The end of the bench that looked melted.”
“Like the Dead Lands.” It was no question, but Dhulyn nodded to Gun just the same.
“It is not simple damage,” she said. “He makes a nothing. No.” She shook her head, the words not making sense even to her. “Not nothing, for that’s the opposite of something, and therefore a thing in itself. Unmaking it, as if it never was.”
“Yes,” the Tarkin said dreamily, his eyes unfocused. “It unmakes, it returns the world to the never was.”
“Lord Tarkin.” Dhulyn tapped Tek-aKet sharply on the side of the face. “Do not drift away from us.”
The Tarkin pressed his lips together and took a deep breath through his nose. “It’s so old,” he said. “It wants its home. It loathes the body, the… the shape, and would destroy it.”
“Your body?” It was true the man looked older and worn, as though he’d been faded through too many washings.
The Tarkin nodded, but slowly, face contorted with the effort of making himself understood. “Yes, but also… the body of the world.”
“And the Sleeping God?” Gun asked.
“It fears the Sleeping God. Hates and fears it. It was the Sleeping God who broke it. Into parts. It knew nothing of parts-do you know, I just realized that. That’s the reason it hates the world and everything in it.” Tek-aKet dropped his voice as if he were sharing a secret. “We’re all made up of parts. Shapes within shapes.”
Dhulyn looked at Parno, saw her own confusion mirrored in his face. Shape and edges. That’s how she’d Seen it when she was close to the Green Shadow. What Tek-aKet saw as parts. But if what made up the world was strange to the Shadow-how could that be? Unless the Shadow was not of this world.
Then she Saw it. The mirror window that was the night sky. The sword cut that opened the doorway in the stars. The entrance of the mist. The entrance of something not of this world.
A Sight from the past, not the future. She’d realized with her Vision of the Finder’s fire from Navra, and the circle of Espadryni women that the Sight was showing her the past as well as the future, but, fool that she was, she’d never thought to examine her other Visions. Parno’s voice brought her back to the present moment. She would have to consider what the Vision of the doorway could tell her later.
“Does it know how the Sleeping God is called?” Parno was asking.
“It’s ironic. It knows irony. Only the Marked can call the Sleeping God. But they’ve forgotten how. He’s the only one left who knows. The Shadow.”
“But he kills them anyway.”
“Surely.” The Tarkin nodded, his eyes still focused on his memory. “What if they remember?”
“Now we know,” Parno said from the doorway.
The Tarkin licked his lips. Dhulyn leaned forward again with her cup of water. “You frightened it, Dhulyn Wolfshead. It knows what I know. When it rode Lok-iKol, it only suspected, but it knew you were a Seer as soon as it entered m-” He clamped his mouth shut as if against a scream. Dhulyn knew he was drawing upon the rags of his strength to be able to speak to them at all, to tell them what he must. Worse than any rape, the Green Shadow had been inside him, inside his mind. He had watched it wear his body, use it. Such a thing could do more than make a man mad-it could drive him to his own destruction.
“Enough, Lord Tarkin,” she said. “Now you must rest.”
“No.” It was a command, no matter how faint the voice. “It had to wait to destroy you,” Tek-aKet said finally, spittle forming at the corners of his mouth. “It had to wait until the effects of the blow to my head had worn off, and the body-my body, was strong again.”
“Lucky it hadn’t finished, then,” she said.
“You were too fast for it. Then, when the Scholar found me, its attention was turned away; it had gone to look through someone else’s eyes for a while.”
They all look at each other. “Beslyn-Tor?”
Tek-aKet lifted his right hand as far as the silk bindings would let him and waved it from side to side. “Not then. It was-oh the blessed Caids, it was Far-eFar. Who else?” His hand clutched and Dhulyn grasped it, wincing at the sudden strength of his grip. “Hid-oHid the Steward of Keys and Korvolyn the guard. It can look through their eyes, and,” his eyes locked on hers, “it can visit them.”
“Parno!”
But her Partner was already on his way out the door.
“Wolfshead, he must rest now. He must.” Zelianora rose to her feet, ready to argue, but Dhulyn also stood. They had heard the meat of it. If the Tarkin regained his strength, there might be more he could tell them, but if they taxed the man too much now-She forced her lips to smile in what she hoped was reassurance. He looked as though he’d been ill of a wasting sickness for months. As she began to release his hand, however, it tightened once more on hers.
“Dhulyn Wolfshead,” Tek-aKet said, his voice suddenly strong. “Promise me. If the Shadow returns, kill me. I lived too long in the never was. I can’t go back. If it returns, kill me.”
Dhulyn knew the right words to reassure him and opened her mouth to say them. Things were never so dark as you thought. He was not alone in the world. He could come back from anything but death. But she remembered her own sight of the NOT and the platitudes died unspoken.
“I am Dhulyn Wolfshead, called the Scholar. If the Green Shadow possesses you again, I will kill you.”
“Gun’s Found it once, why not have him Find it again?” Mar shook her head as Parno offered her a piece of roasted pheasant.
“What if all we’d manage was to chase it into someone else? Even if I find it again…” Gun looked at the food on his plate as if he couldn’t imagine how it had arrived there. “We need to know how to destroy it.” He picked up his knife and fork, but did nothing more.
“We need to awaken the Sleeping God,” Dhulyn said. Once Parno had returned from securing the men-all men, she noticed, and wondered if it was significant-and setting Brothers to watch them, they’d brought the youngsters once more to their own rooms.
“We don’t know how,” Parno said.
“What do we know?” Dhulyn said. “Gundaron, an exercise for your scholarship, summarize what we know about the Green Shadow.”
“We know it does not have innate shape or substance, and that it views these things as foreign and hateful. Therefore, it must originate in a world other than our own.” Gundaron tilted his head to one side, as if examining his own thought, before nodding in satisfaction. He sat up straighter and began cutting his food.
Mar began to protest, but subsided when Dhulyn held up her hand. No time now to describe the links in the chain of theory.
“We know it destroys the Marked to prevent them-to prevent us,” Gun amended with a nod at Dhulyn, “from calling the Sleeping God. Even though we don’t remember how,” he added, his voice turning thoughtful. “We know it wants the Mesticha Stone, though again, we don’t know why.”
“I have a theory,” Dhulyn said, “but finish your list.”
The corners of Gundaron’s mouth turned down. “I think I am finished.”
“We’d have done better to list the things we don’t know,” Parno said, throwing his own knife down in disgust.
“We may not have that much time,” Dhulyn said. She looked over her companions. “I’ve not spent much of my life in Imrion,” she said. “What does the Mesticha Stone look like?”
“Well,” Mar said when it appeared no one else would speak. “Like all the Jaldean relics, it’s believed to be a part of the Sleeping God.”
“Like the bracelet with green stones that was in the Tarkin’s treasure room?” Dhulyn picked a wing from the platter and tore it in two.
“It’s green, all the relics are,” Gundaron said. “But the Mesticha Stone is shaped like a hand carved from green stone. There’s a treatise-the original’s here in the Gotterang Library-that says there was a statue of the Sleeping God that shattered when the God last awoke, or because the God awoke, something like that. That’s what these relics really are, just bits of the statue.”
Dhulyn tossed down a bone. “Bits of a green statue that this Shadow absorbs into itself,” she said. “Beslyn-Tor said when he collected five relics of the God together for the first time, the God appeared and spoke to him.”
“Except he was mistaken,” Parno said. “It wasn’t the Sleeping God at all, it was this Green Shadow. And it made him keep on collecting the relics.” Parno thought, his head to one side. “Pieces of itself, do you think?”
“But if it has no form,” Mar said, “how can there be pieces of it?”
“Pieces of its first shape,” Dhulyn said, remembering the Green Shadow’s words to her. “Nothing exists in this world without form, so it must have taken a shape-been forced into a shape when it entered our world.”
“And the Sleeping God broke it,” Gundaron said. “ ‘And the awakened God, eyes shut still in sleep, sword aloft, turned his head, listened for the Intruder, and when he heard the cries of the fearful creature, struck again and again, turning the Intruder into dust, breaking it, bone and spirit.”’ Gun opened his eyes. “The original’s in verse,” he said, “but that’s the sense of it.”
“How can you be so sure?” Mar looked from one to the other.
“Because I’ve Seen it.”
At the fall of silence, Dhulyn looked up from lifting the bones from her fish to see three identical faces frozen in shock. “There’s a Vision I keep having,” she began, and told them what she’d Seen, the Mage with his book and sword, the mirror that was a window that was a door, the entrance of the green mist. The possessed Mage, green-eyed, unable to open the doorway again.
Parno froze in the act of refilling his wine cup. “It has to be. There are too many details that fit for it to be anything else.”
“But how?” Mar said. “I thought Seers saw only the future.”
“It’s the common assumption,” Gundaron said, eyes narrowed in thought. “But when I was researching the origins of the Espadryni,” he faltered, licking his lips. “In the city state of Shpadrajh, they answered any question that was put to them, and one old scrap of parchment was a partial list of the questions that had been asked in one year. Many seemed to make no sense, as they obviously concerned events which had already occurred. It was long thought to be a mistranslation, or at the least a misinterpretation, but if it’s not… the Sight isn’t limited in the way everyone assumes.”
Parno gave a low whistle. “Tek-aKet said the thing understood irony. Now we see why. It began its present existence in irony. It killed the only person who knew how to send it back.”
“Wolfshead.” Gun laid his fork down gently. “If you’ve Seen the Green Shadow coming into the world, you’ve Seen a time before the Sleeping God destroyed it.”
“I suppose I have. Blood! The Mage could be one of the Caids.”
“That means you could See how the Sleeping God is called.”
“I can’t make a Vision come when I want it to, and even if we could afford to wait until my woman’s time when the Sight is stronger, I can’t See what I want to See.”
“You must try, my heart. You had clear Visions when we were in Tenebro House, and that was not your woman’s time.”
“Fresnoyn.” Dhulyn and Gundaron spoke at once.
“I’d much rather have walked,” Gun said, squirming to find a more comfortable seat on the saddle.
“I thought you were in a hurry. Stop wiggling, you’re only annoying the horse.”
Dhulyn Wolfshead sounded as though she might be smiling, but she’d only turned her head enough for him to see the very corner of her mouth. Gun pressed his knees tightly against the saddle and tried to sit up straight as she’d instructed him. It had been years since he’d sat on a horse, and even though it was said that you never forgot how to ride, there seemed to be something lacking in his own recall. Had the beasts always been this far from the ground?
His teeth closed sharply on the inside of his cheek as his horse stopped short. Gingerly, the taste of blood on his tongue, he edged his horse next to Dhulyn’s.
“I thought we were in a hurry,” he said. He craned his neck to see what had stopped her, but all he could see was a group of children playing Blind Man. Three stood to one side, waiting their turn to play; four were chanting as they danced around the child in the center, blindfolded with what looked like a strip torn from the bottom of his shirt. Someone’ll be in trouble when he gets home tonight, Gun thought.
“Blind Man, Blind Man,
Which one will you choose?
Over and through, in and out he goes;
The green tile or the blue, no one really knows
Are you a glad one or are you a sad one?
Are you a good one or are you a bad one?”
“Three days ago they were afraid to come out to play,” Dhulyn Wolfshead said, her eyes fixed on the children and their game.
“They wouldn’t be out now, if they knew what we know,” Gun said.
The Mercenary smiled her wolf’s grin. “We do know,” she said, “and yet here we are.” She clucked to her horse and Gun was jolted upright as his own beast followed.
“If this is a game,” Gun said to her back. “I don’t want to play anymore.”
One of the Tenebro guards must have recognized them as they rode along the street, for the gate of Tenebro House was rolling back as they approached, and a familiar figure appeared in the opening. Except for the change in his clothing and the different braiding of his hair, he looked exactly as he had the first time Dhulyn had seen him.
“Look to the Scholar,” she said to him as he came to help her down from Bloodbone. “He’s the one’s not ridden much.”
But another guard was stepping up to help Gundaron, and Karlyn-Tan stayed where he was, smiling up at her. “We thought it would be Parno Lionsmane with you,” he said. “Is your errand to the Tenebroso?”
“Is there a Tenebroso?”
“The lord Dal-eDal was called to the Tarkin’s bedside this morning, and confirmed before witnesses as Dal-eLad Tenebroso.”
“And do you address me as his Walls?”
Karlyn-Tan smiled again and shrugged, shaking his head in answer. “But I must do something while I’m here, eating his bread.”
“Since you ask as a friend, Karlyn, we come on the Tarkin’s orders, to fetch certain needed supplies that the Scholar knows to be in his former rooms. Whose leave do we ask, if not yours?”
“As you come in the Tarkin’s name, I’d say you ask leave of no one.”
Dhulyn swung her leg over Bloodbone’s head and slid off the mare’s back, landing on her feet face-to-face with the former Steward of Walls. He made no step back, just put his hand out for the bridle. “Perhaps, then, the Scholar can find his own way to his old rooms,” she said.
“Undoubtedly he can, but Dal-eLad Tenebroso’s been told of your approach, and has asked that you speak with him when your errand is done.”
Dhulyn looked Karlyn up and down, the beginnings of her wolf’s smile on her lips. “It seems to me I’ve come into this House once before, Karlyn. I’m in no hurry to do so again.”
“Ah, but this time you may keep your weapons,” the former Walls said, his own grin wide and open. “The new Tenebroso says that all Mercenary Brothers are to be regarded as members of his House. Your Partner and yourself above all others.”
Dhulyn absently stroked Bloodbone’s neck. “Does he now? That’s kind of him.” She supposed it was, really, but somehow she couldn’t find herself grateful.
“So you may go about your business, Scholar. The Wolfshead will be in the small salon when you are ready.”
When Gundaron looked at her, Dhulyn nodded. “Go ahead, Scholar, I’ve no need to see that room again.”
Karlyn waited until Gundaron had run up the left-hand staircase before leading Dhulyn away to the right.
“You won’t be familiar with the small salon,” he said, holding open a heavy wood door with a small iron grille at eye height for her. “Dal is converting it to his study, and restoring the old Tenebroso’s sitting room to its public function.”
“I’m surprised to see you still here, if you don’t intend to become Walls again,” Dhulyn said.
He let her pass through the door, then paused a moment holding it open. Dhulyn stopped and looked back at him. He faced her, but his crystal-blue eyes were focused inward.
“It’s not my plan to stay here,” he said, finally lifting his eyes to her. “But it’s as good a place to live as any until this crisis ends, or until I know where I wish to be.”
“You are not too old to make a Mercenary Brother, if you lived through the Schooling,” she said.
His smile, for all that it creased his eyes, made him look younger. “I’ve lived through several things already.”
Gundaron’s room wasn’t exactly as he’d left it. It was clear that someone had searched it, but it had been someone who had left the room almost as neat as they’d found it. The books and scrolls had clearly been taken from the shelf and then stuffed back in place without regard for either order or bent corners; the bed had been stripped of linens, but the linens themselves had been taken away and the bed restored-almost-to its place against the wall.
He wasn’t surprised to find the same partially restored order in his clothespress, though he was surprised that his spare tunics were still there. What wasn’t there, however, was the box of drugs that should have been on the top shelf.
Gun chewed on his bottom lip. He’d taken the drugs to the workroom when he’d given them to Dhulyn Wolfshead. He’d brought them back here-hadn’t he? He touched the spot on the shelves where the pearwood box should be. Well, if he had brought it back, whoever had searched the room had taken it away again.
That did leave him one other place to look.
He was actually out the door and into the hallway before he remembered there was something else he’d come here to get.
Karlyn tapped on the right-hand leaf of a set of plain double doors and opened it without waiting. The room within was neither as crowded and carpeted as the old woman’s room, nor as cold and heavy-furnitured as Lok-iKol’s. The floors were plain golden wood, clean and polished. The furniture, while sturdy, was limited to a few chairs of a light-colored wood, backs, seats, and arms covered with tooled leather, with a few bright-patterned cushions scattered about. The walls held simple ink drawings, there were flowers in low vases, and dried fruit in shallow ceramic bowls. As they entered, the new House, Dal-eLad Tenebroso, was studying the top of a low, round table that sat between two of the leather-covered armchairs. Before he got to his feet, he shifted something on the table with his fingertips with a movement that was very familiar to Dhulyn. She waited until he raised his head and smiled before advancing into the room herself. When she got close enough, she was not surprised to see that the tabletop was covered with what looked to be a very old set of vera tiles. Most were turned facedown, as if a game were about to begin.
“Do you play the tiles, Tenebroso?”
“Please, call me Dal. We are related, in an odd way, though it seems we’re not to acknowledge it. And no, I get no pleasure from gambling. I don’t even play the Solitary hands, really. It’s the patterns that interest me most. I lay the tiles out in the old patterns as a way to help me relax.”
“The old patterns?”
“The Seer’s Patterns, my nurse used to call them. It’s why I wanted to see you, as it happens.” He gestured for her to sit in the chair opposite him before resuming his own seat.
Dal laid the tips of his fingers lightly on the backs of the tiles nearest him. “My mother brought this set into our Household. I don’t know how far back it goes in her family, but it was said the set was made in the time of the Caids.”
Dhulyn shrugged, her eyes on the tiles. “It’s certainly possible. If parchments and even some paper can last so long, why not tiles? Do you know what they’re made of?”
“Some kind of bone or stone, judging by how they change temperature.” He picked up a piece and handed it to her.
Dhulyn lifted the tile to her mouth and touched it with the tip of her tongue, tested it with her teeth. “Stone, I would say. I do use the tiles for gambling, as it happens, but I doubt you’ve asked for me in order to teach you how.”
Dal laughed softly. “Quite right. Turn over the tile you’ve got in your hand.”
Suddenly-
A HEAVY WEIGHT OF TIME; GENERATIONS; HOUSES RISE AND FALL. A MOUNTAIN PUSHES UP OUT OF THE SEA. AN ISLAND. SHE TOOK A SHARP BREATH…
“Wolfshead, I said, ‘are you all right?’ ”
“Yes, thank you.” Eyebrows raised, Dhulyn turned the tile over. Rather than being marked with one of the cups, coins, swords, or spears that she was familiar with, this tile had a circle with a dot in the middle. She looked back at Dal-eLad.
He was nodding. “There are tiles in this set not seen in the sets used for gambling. That’s one of them. There are four tiles with that dot and circle. And three other sets of four.” He began turning over the tiles in front of him. “A simple straight line, running lengthwise down the center. A rectangle, just smaller than the tile itself, and a triangle, centered along the length of the tile, like a spearhead.”
Dhulyn set down the tile she held next to its brothers. “A line, a circle, a rectangle, a triangle. Four in each pattern. Sixteen extra tiles?”
Dal shook his head. “Seventeen. This one is unique.” He picked up a tile that lay to his left, and showed, if possible, more wear than the others. When he turned it over, Dhulyn could see, faint but clear, a design of three concentric circles.
“Could the other three have been lost?”
Dal shook his head. “My nurse said no, the set had always been like this.”
“But surely, if the set is so very old…” Dhulyn let her objection die away as Dal went on shaking his head.
“No other tile is missing, you can tell by the wear and the patterns that they are all original. What odds would you give me that three tiles only, and those particular three would be the only ones lost since the time of the Caids? No. This tile is unique.”
“So.” Dhulyn leaned back in her chair, tapping her lips with her linked fingers. “Seventeen extra tiles we don’t use in the modern sets of vera tiles. And these patterns, what are they?”
“As I said, my nurse called them the Seer’s Patterns. My sisters and I-”
Dhulyn looked up from her study of the tiles. Dal sat with his elbow on the table, chin in his hand, lips pressed tightly together. His sisters are gone, she thought, and it still hurts him.
“My sisters and I,” Dal began again, his voice lower and carefully under control, “would pretend to be Seers, telling each other’s fortunes.” He cleared his throat and began turning all the tiles faceup. “You know that some of the tiles have names, other than their places in the suits?”
“The Tarkina of Swords is called the Black Maid, the nine of cups is called Wealth, that kind of thing?”
Dal nodded. “Exactly.” He held one tile in his hand, leaving the others as they lay. “My nurse said that once upon a time all the tiles had names, and meanings as well. That you would choose the tile that stood for you, and from it your fortune could be told.”
Dhulyn leaned forward, placing her elbows on the table.
“Show me.”
“This is my tile,” he said, showing her the Mercenary of Coins. “A young man or woman, golden-haired, brown-eyed. This tile would be placed in the center of a table such as this one. I would ask my question, and this tile,” he held up the singleton, “with its concentric circles, would be placed atop my own.” He set the unique tile on top of the Mercenary of Coins. “The circled dot above, the triangle below, the rectangle to the right, the line to the left, forming a small cross. We would toss the rest of the tiles, and, drawing one at a time, place one face up above the circled dot, one below the triangle, one to the right of the rectangle, and one to the left of the line, extending the arms of the cross.” Pretending to draw tiles from the box, Dal placed them as he indicated. “Lastly, we would choose four more, one at a time, and place them in a vertical here, to the left of the tiles we’ve already set up. This is the simplest of the Seer’s Patterns.”
“The simplest?” Dhulyn drew down her brows in a frown, shaking her head. “And what does it tell you?”
Dal spread his hands, palms raised. “That I can’t say. No one in my family ever had the Sight, to my knowledge. But I thought that you…”
Dhulyn let her lower lip slip from between her teeth. “I’ve seen these markings before,” she said. She tapped one of the rectangle tiles with her fingernail. “Around the base of Mar’s bowl. They’re-” the blood rushed to her ears. “They’re Marks.” She looked up, smiling, but Dal was frowning his incomprehension. “Marks,” she said again. “This one’s a Seer,” she tapped the circled dot. “It looks like an eye. This one’s a Finder, Gundaron says Finding is like following a straight line.”
Now Dal was nodding. “So one of these is a Healer-”
“Probably the square.”
“And the other’s a Mender.”
“But this one,” Dhulyn tapped the unique tile with its concentric circles. “I’ve no idea what this one might be. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
“Because it’s a Lens,” Gun said from the doorway. Dal jumped in his seat, but Dhulyn didn’t even look around. “The missing Mark.”
“What do you mean, my Scholar?”
Gundaron held up the scroll in his hand. “It’s in the Commentaries, the part I couldn’t remember, Holderon writes about an ancient text of the Caids, one that existed in his day but doesn’t any longer, though some of the stories it was said to contain have come down to us in the forms of folk songs and plays. Anyway, in the part that I’m referring to, Holderon appears to be answering the argument of another Scholar, and it’s Holderon’s position that the other Scholar is mistaken, that the Missing Mark, the so-called Lens, doesn’t exist.”
“A fifth Mark? What was his logic?”
“That while everyone knew of the other Marks, no one had ever encountered a Lens.”
“Perhaps it wasn’t a person,” Dal said. “Perhaps it was an artifact?”
An artifact, Dhulyn thought. A round artifact. One, perhaps, that had somewhere along the line been disguised as something more ordinary, and therefore not nearly as old. Something round could easily be disguised as… Dhulyn’s blood began to pound in her ears. As a bowl, for example.
Dal and Gundaron had gone on talking, and after a moment Dhulyn realized they were suggesting that she try Seeing, using the tiles.
“I’m afraid there is no fresnoyn,” Gundaron was saying. “I’ve tried Finding, but I get nothing.”
“Possibly Lok-iKol used it,” Dhulyn said, shelving her thoughts about the bowl. It would wait until they were back in the Dome. “Let me see what the tiles can do. Which shall I use?”
“I should think you’d be the Mercenary of Swords,” Dal said. “You’re not old enough to use the Tarkina’s tile.”
“I use my own tile?”
“A Sight that involved you might prove to be most useful,” Dal suggested.
Dhulyn nodded and took the tile he handed her, setting it down in the center of the table as Dal had shown her. How do I call the Sleeping God? she asked herself. As she placed the tiles she thought of as the other Marks, Dal swept the rest off the table, and shook them in their box. As they were placed, Dhulyn tried not to guide her thoughts, but to let them float freely, making whatever associations they might form by themselves. Her Visions usually came to her in her sleep; those very few she’d had in her waking state had always fallen upon her like a blow. Unlike Gundaron, she had never used her Mark deliberately, never sought after a Vision. Perhaps she would See one, though, if their methods were not too broken. And providing the Visions were not so thoroughly linked to her woman’s time that this effort was wasted. That tile was the Tarkin of Swords, clearly a man and he was holding a type of sword very much like one she owns, though she doesn’t use it much as it’s…
NOT THE SWORD OF A HORSEMAN. SHE CAN SEE NOW THAT THE MERCENARY’S CLOTHES ARE BRIGHTLY COLORED, AND FIT HIM CLOSELY EXCEPT FOR THE SLEEVES WHICH FALL FROM HIS SHOULDERS LIKE INVERTED LILIES.
HE TURNS AWAY FROM THE STRANGELY TIDY WORKTABLE AND TOWARD A CIRCULAR MIRROR, AS TALL AS HE IS HIMSELF. THE MIRROR DOESN’T REFLECT THE ROOM, HOWEVER, BUT SHOWS A NIGHT SKY FULL OF STARS. HIS LIPS MOVE AND SHE SEES HIM NOW FROM THAT SIDE, AS IF SHE WERE STANDING IN FRONT OF THE MIRROR AND HIS LIPS FORM WHAT DHULYN KNOWS ARE THE WORDS FROM THE BOOK. ADELGARREMBIL HE SAYS, AND THEN ACUCHEEYAROB. A FOREIGN TONGUE?
“Wolfshead. Wolfshead wake up.”
Dhulyn snatched the hand from her shoulder and only just stopped from breaking the wrist when she realized the person shaking her was Mar-eMar. Dhulyn’s heart grew cold. The little Dove was out of breath and as pale as lilies. Behind her, in the doorway of Dal-eLad’s salon, was the Mercenary Brother Oswin Battlehammer.
“Dhulyn, hurry. Tek-aKet’s sitting on the Carnelian Throne and he’s-” she shot a glance over her shoulder at the Brother in the doorway. “He’s raving.”
“Where’s Parno?” Dhulyn was already into the hallway and heading to the courtyard where Bloodbone waited.
“At the doors to the throne room letting no one in, but you must…”
Mar fell behind, but Dhulyn went on running. She knew perfectly well what the girl had been about to say. “You must hurry.” Of course she must. Wait too long, and Parno would go in without her.