He walks faster, following the red-marked books as they lead him across a wider lane with a metal cart in it. The cart holds books with green marks on their spines and Gun averts his eyes as he crosses the aisle into the next wall of shelves. There’s a man at a desk farther down, his elbows on the tabletop, his head down between his hands. Just a shadowy figure at first, but he comes clearer as Gun advances. Gun knows the man won’t look up, that he’s afraid to. Gun puts his hand on the man’s shoulder, wondering whether he knows the book the man’s reading. He can see the writing, but it’s a language he doesn’t know.
“My lord Tarkin,” are the words that come out of his mouth. “Tek-aKet. You must come with me.”
Twenty-four
“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.