“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.”