“… And of course Berkan Hood said he didn’t approve of talk about leaving, because, after all, we are at war. Have you seen the lord constable lately, Matty? He has been at it less than a year—how long was Brone the constable, a dozen years?—but he already looks like a man who can hear the Black Hound at night, quite pale and drawn and years older…”
“I’m sorry, Puzzle, but I truly need to read this.” Tinwright had been staring for some time and had not recognized a single word, although it was in reasonably modern Hierosoline. “You should get to sleep now, and we’ll catch up in the morning.”
“Oh! Oh, of... of course.” Puzzle gave him a look like a child slapped for some other child’s misdeed. “I’ll just keep silent. While you’re working.”
“It’s just that Lord Tolly will have my head if I don’t…”
“Of course.” Puzzle waved his gnarled fingers. “It’s of no account. I’ll just sleep.” But when he lay back, he was rigid as a plank.
Tinwright sighed. He knew when he had been defeated—his mother had been the supreme mistress of disappointment used as a weapon. “Oh, very well,” he said. “I’ll go find a butt-end of something to drink in the kitchen, and we’ll catch up.”
The old jester clapped his hands and bounced back upright, as pleased as if he’d found the Orphan’s coin and sweetmeats in his shoe.
Hours later, when Puzzle had at last fallen asleep and was happily, drunkenly snoring, Tinwright picked up The Agony of Truth Forsworn and began to look through it again. It was hard going—a series of cranky disquisitions on the great errors of history, as far as he could tell, many of which surrounded events of which he had never heard, like the apparently controversial Third Hierarchical Conclave. It was only as his cursory exploration reached the last part of the book that he discovered something which caught his attention, a heretical sect called the Hypnologues who had maintained that the gods did not merely communicate with mortal oracles during sleep, but were asleep themselves. This sect had been persecuted by the Trigonate Church all through the eighth and ninth centuries, and all but wiped out before the arrival of the year 1000, although some related groups had appeared during the madness of the Great Death when many folk in Eion lost faith in the Trigonate Church and other authorities completely.
But what was interesting was that Rhantys, writing in the early 1200s, seemed in no hurry to join in the condemnation of the Hypnologues. He even quoted from many of the Oniri and from passages in the Book of the Trigon itself in a way that suggested the heretics might be correct—that the gods might truly be asleep and taking a less active role in the lives of men than had been true in the days when the texts of the Book of the Trigon were first being assembled.
Some of this, Tinwright thought, sounded more than a bit like what Tolly said all the time. More importantly, it sounded like what the terrifying autarch had said as well. If two powerful men from different ends of the world both believed in sleeping gods who longed to wake and escape back into the world, maybe there was indeed something to it.
Then his flagging, weary attention was caught again, and this time what he read made his skin itch and his hackles rise.
“The Hypnologues had at the center of their beliefs a tenet that was stranger still—that the center of the religious world lay not in the southern lands or Great Hierosol itself, or even in Tessis, the more recent capital of the Trigonate faith, but rather in the northern territories sometimes called Anglin’s Land or the March Kingdoms, and specifically in the keep of Southmarch, the royal seat of those kingdoms. Their faith maintained that the entrances to the domains of the sleeping gods were to be found there, and that, in fact, the very struggle which had led to the gods’ insensibility took place there, back in the depths of time.
“Trigonarch Gerasimos, a man who had seen the Korykidons burned alive for pretending to have found the Orphan’s birthplace and making it a shrine, was not one to take a challenge to the church lightly, and he anathematized the Hypnologues in his Proclamation of 714 T.E. This did not end the heresy, of course—it would last until the plague era and beyond—but it marked the end of any public speculation about whether the gods were truly watching over mankind…”
So it wasn’t just Hendon Tolly and the autarch, Tinwright thought, it was an entire movement that the church had tried to destroy. And they didn’t just claim the gods were sleeping, but also that this very city—Southmarch, of all places!—had been the site of the kingdom of Heaven. Or something like that.
But how could something so mad be true, even if Hendon Tolly and some maniacal southern king agreed?
Then again, why had the Qar attacked Southmarch even before the autarch did? Why was everybody so determined to lay hold of this minor northern kingdom when all of Eion was in play? Clearly, whether he actually meant to help Hendon Tolly or not, there was much more that Matt Tinwright needed to learn.
He fell asleep that night with a hundred strange new ideas spinning in his head, and dreamed of himself tiptoeing through forests of twisted trees in near darkness, with giant slumbering shapes looming up on all sides and no one awake but himself in all the world.
16. A Cage for a King
“With the hidden aid of Erivor they came to shore at last beside a village called Tessideme at the snowy northern end of great Strivothos…”
“You cannot do it, Princess Briony.” Eneas could not stop pacing. Perhaps it was easier than looking at her. “I cannot let you throw your life away on such madness—it would be a crime against your people. I am sorry, but I must forbid you to go in search of King Olin.”
“And I am sorry too,” she told him, “but it’s you who don’t understand, Highness. You cannot forbid me. I am going to do it. I have not spoken to my father in a year. I will risk anything to see him.”
“No!” He turned to her, distraught. “I will not let you!”
“And how will you stop me, my dear friend?” She fought to keep her voice low and calm—she did not want him to think it was some womanly frailty on her part. “Will you imprison me? Will you force your men to listen to me screaming night and day that you have betrayed me?”
“What?” Eneas looked her up and down in something very close to astonishment. “You would not do such a thing.” He did not sound entirely certain.
“Oh, I most certainly would. I know it is dangerous, but I must go to him.”
The prince threw himself down on a stool opposite her. He looked so miserable that it was all she could do not to take his hand. Eneas was a good man, a very good man, but, like most men, he believed he was responsible for the well-being of every woman who drew breath in his vicinity. “You truly mean it, don’t you, Princess? You truly mean to do this.”
“I do.”
He sucked air through his teeth and sat thinking, toying with his ring. Helkis, his captain, stood near the wall of the tent trying to keep all expression from his unshaven face. “You say I must either imprison you or simply let you go,” Eneas said at last. “But there is another possibility.”
“Oh?” She tried to sound calm but she hadn’t foreseen any third way.
“I can help you not to get caught. I will send some of my best warriors with you…”