“Thank you, daughter,” said Stone of the Unwilling. “Have you heard what you wished to hear, Lady Yasammez?”
“She may go.”
A moment later, Shadow’s Cauldron and the Egg were no longer in the cavern. It was the eremite Aesi’uah who broke the silence. “Has it really come to this, Mistress? To such despair? Not only to take our own lives, and thousands upon thousands of mortal lives as well, but even the lives of beast and herb, then to make this place a wasteland of death for years to come?”
“Small enough price for them to pay for their treachery, certainly!” said one of the Changing tribe. “We are owed this vengeance, Dreamless! As Shadow’s Cauldron said, it is a shame we cannot kill more.”
Yasammez silenced him with a harsh gesture. “We do nothing simply for vengeance, much as it might be deserved. But know that I will do whatever I must to make certain that the gods and their gateway do not fall under the control of any mortal.”
“Are you not putting your own wisdom above that of the god himself?” Aesi’uah protested. “Why should Crooked himself not decide what is right to do?”
“Because the god is dying,” Yasammez said coldly. She did not like being questioned by her own eremite, however long and honorably the half-Dreamless had served her. “He is scarcely still there—certainly his thoughts have been strange for some time. It could be he is trapped in nightmare and will no longer even be able to understand us. No, we must not rely on even the god… on my father… to make our decisions. The People must choose their own way forward.”
“But ...” Aesi’uah was searching for words, her own thoughts clearly complicated. “But I fear for them, my lady.”
“For whom?”
“Our allies, the mortals—the sunlanders. I find it harder to hate them now. They are… different than I expected.”
“Think you so?” asked Yasammez with no small amount of scorn. “They are exactly as I expected. Exactly.”
The boat with Hendon Tolly, Matt Tinwright, and two of the lord protector’s guards landed at M’Helan’s Rock first. While Hendon Tolly and Tinwright climbed carefully up the ancient dock stairs, the boat with the other four guards tied up and began to unload. Tinwright paused on the steps to look out across the rocky island and the lights of the castle just across the water, overwhelmed with fear and wonder.
It was plain to see why Tolly had chosen the spot: it was accessible from the mainland but far enough from both the shore and the castle that even in daylight an observer would have had trouble seeing who landed there. And the rock itself was so craggy and studded with caves and inlets that Tinwright thought three or four different ships might land on the island and never see each other.
The lodge at the top of the hill smelled musty when they opened the great doors, and little surprise: Hendon Tolly said no one had used it since he had taken power. Tolly complained about the lack of amenities and having to wait in the cold and damp while one of his guards lit a fire in the great room—even now, in late spring, the island was a windy, wet place. All the guards were well armed, some carrying swords and spears, others with loaded crossbows.
“He will be here soon.” Tolly settled into a high-backed chair. “Oh, yes—he will have been watching us land, to make certain we brought only six guards and no more, as we agreed.”
Something made a skittering noise in the ceiling and Tinwright looked up.
“Rats,” said Hendon Tolly. “The place has been empty so long that it must be full of them. Do you fear rats, poet?”
“Fear them?” He didn’t like them much, but he also wasn’t certain what Tolly wanted him to say. “Not too much ...”
“They are the cleverest of cattle, as the country folk say.” Hendon Tolly grinned. “I knew a man once, a keeper in our hunting lodge in the Summerfield hills, who raised one almost like his own child. It would sit upon his shoulder, and when he commanded it to, it would sing.”
“Sing?” The noise of someone shouting down on the dock wafted through the unshuttered windows.
“Well, as much as a rat can,” Tolly conceded. “It would squeak along when he sang. And it could fetch him his purse if he dropped it, or find coins in the straw under a table. Then somebody tired of the trick and stepped on the creature.” He tilted his head. “Ah, do you hear? He is coming.” The lord protector stood, which was a surprise in itself, but as Tinwright watched him shifting from foot to foot, he realized something even stranger: Hendon Tolly was worried, perhaps even frightened.
One of the Summerfield guards opened the door and let in two dark, hard-faced men carrying long, ornamented rifles and wearing helmets in the shape of some grinning, spotted cat, a lion or a pard. After a moment’s wary inspection of the room, they stepped to either side of the door and stood at rigid attention. Before Tinwright had time to do more than gawk at these newcomers with their hard, brown faces, a third figure followed them through, a portly, older man with a long and carefully tended beard and an air of almost ludicrous gravity.
This must be the Xixian envoy… Tinwright thought.
“Out of the way, priest,” said another voice. The heavyset man scuttled to the side so that a new figure could duck underneath the lintel and enter the hall.
He was very tall, that was the first thing Matt Tinwright saw—more than a head taller than Hendon Tolly, taller also than the bearded man or any of the guards, who were not small men. The newcomer was dressed strangely, in a long white linen robe and a hat unlike anything Tinwright had ever seen, a tall cylinder encrusted with gems and wound with gold wire, which with his height made the newcomer literally tower above everybody in the room. Only as he stared up at this apparition did Matt Tinwright finally understand it was not just an odd and expensive hat the tall man wore: it was a crown. The autarch himself had come.
In that precise, terrified second of recognition the two Xixian guards crashed their rifle butts on the ground so hard that Matt Tinwright jumped and Tolly’s guards grabbed at their own weapons.
“The Golden One, Master of the Great Tent and the Falcon Throne,” one of the Xixian guards announced in a loud voice, “Lord of All Places and Happenings, a thousand, thousand praises to His name—bow before the glory of Sulepis Bishakh am-Xis III, monarch of all Xand and Elect of Nushash!”
Once their master had been announced, the leopard-clad guards ushered him to one of the room’s two principal chairs. Hendon Tolly took the opposing seat, his face a careful mask. The autarch gestured for his fat, bearded priest to stand behind him. Tolly did not stoop to introducing Matt Tinwright which did not bother the poet at alclass="underline" even a momentary glance from the autarch’s odd, golden eyes was enough to make him want to start explaining things, or apologizing, or even throwing himself on his belly and begging not to be killed. Yes, he was a coward—Tinwright was the first to admit it—but what compelled him now was something more primitive, more basic. The master of the southern continent seemed to the poet a completely different kind of creature, a predator to Matt Tinwright’s hapless prey, and if flight was impossible, the only defense against that kind of murderous threat was to remain unimportant.
At first the autarch and the lord protector exchanged only small talk. The autarch spoke their tongue well, and it was clear this was not the first time he and Tolly had communicated. What was going on? How could the master of Southmarch sit down for a friendly conversation with the Monster of Xis?