The Tarkina hesitated, lips parted, before turning to glance at Mar. As she turned back, she faltered, as if her knees were failing her. Parno stepped forward and took the Tarkina’s arm to steady her and led her to a chair, but let it go immediately as Zella gasped in pain. Dhulyn sprang up with a snort of disgust and pulled back the woman’s sleeve, to reveal bruises darkening on her forearm.
“Zelianora,” Dhulyn said, her voice sharp enough to shock the Tarkina to attention. “The Tarkin did this.”
“No! Yes, but hear me out.” The Tarkina waved Dhulyn away with impatient hands. “This is not important.”
“We are listening, Zelianora Tarkina,” Parno said.
“I don’t know that I can make you understand.” She raised her hands to her head as if she would cover her ears. “He is terrified. I have never seen anyone so afraid.” She looked directly at Dhulyn. “And yet…”
Dhulyn took Zelianora’s hands and led her to a seat. “And yet?”
“He is himself in a way he has not been these past few days. Since the blow to his head, he’s been like a man suffering from an illness. Now it is as though a fever has broken and-he is himself again. He is Tek. Do you understand?”
“Before this,” Dhulyn said, indicating the bruised arm. “Did he stare into your eyes? Touch you in any way that made you feel dizzy? Ill? Are there gaps in your memories?”
“No, indeed,” Zelianora said. “Nothing like that. Since his illness Tek… he has not touched me,” she said, as if realizing it for the first time. “But he’s been ill, I thought nothing of it.”
“If I might interrupt,” Parno’s voice was vibrant with urgency. “I rejoice that Zelianora Tarkina is well, but she tells us that the Tarkin is more like himself than he’s seemed in days. In the light of what we were discussing, perhaps we should go and see for ourselves.”
“Don’t let him touch you,” Parno said, as he helped Dhulyn lift her sword belts over her head.
“If you’d rather do it yourself…” Dhulyn pulled her multicolored vest back into place. She needed no help to remove harness or weapons-she could have done it by herself, in the dark, and one-handed-but Parno had needed the reassurance that helping her disarm, that touching her, would bring. And he’s not the only one.
“We’ve been through that,” he reminded her. “Do you want me to say it again?”
Dhulyn smiled, patting him on the shoulder. Once they had explained their fears to a white-faced but resolute Tarkina, Parno had made everyone see that they had to send someone in to speak to Tek-aKet. And once they’d persuaded Zelianora Tarkina that it should not be her, he’d insisted that Dhulyn was the only logical choice. “There’s no one faster,” he’d said. Out loud, too, where everyone could hear it, even if he didn’t want to repeat it now for her ears only. “If it becomes necessary to disable the Tarkin without permanent harm,” he’d said. “Dhulyn is the only one who can do it.”
Dhulyn handed Parno the long dagger from her left boot. She still had her holdouts hidden, but there were no more weapons that someone else could reach easily. They both knew that this was precaution only. So far as they knew, Tek-aKet Tarkin-if this was Tek-aKet Tarkin-had no reason to harm her. But they both knew of many people killed by those with no known reason to harm them.
Parno, her dagger still in his left hand, brushed something off her shoulder with his right. “Do you know what you’re going to do?”
“Come out alive, and in my right mind,” she said, giving him the smile she saved only for him. The smile that had no wolf in it.
He laughed without making a sound and stepped back from her.
“In Battle,” he said, touching his fingers to his lips.
“Or in Death.”
Dhulyn slid through the barely opened door and waited, listening, while Parno pulled it shut and latched it behind her. She could see at once that things were not as Zelianora Tarkina had left them. Dhulyn had expected the room to be dark, the windows shuttered. The Tarkina had left her husband tucked up in the bed, shivering and semiconscious. This man was standing at the window, shades thrown open to the early evening.
“You sent for me, Lord Tarkin?”
“I sent for you.” The tone was ambiguous enough that Dhulyn could not be sure whether it was question or statement. The man turned to face her.
She took a step toward him, and then another. With the light behind him, his face was shadowed and she couldn’t be sure… She took another step. And stopped, repressing a shiver as the hair on her arms and the back of her neck stood up. There was no doubt. The man’s eyes were green. Whatever Zelianora thought she had seen, it was gone.
“What is it, then?” she asked.
“You take a very informal tone with your Tarkin.”
“But you’re not the Tarkin, are you? Mine or anyone else’s.” she said, strolling casually closer, fingers reaching automatically to tap the place on her hip where her sword hilt should rest. Could she keep him from hearing the noises in the anteroom?
“What am I, then?”
Dhulyn frowned. She would almost swear the question was asked in earnest. “You best know that yourself.” She moved still farther into the room, beginning to circle around to the right, keeping his attention on her, and away from the door.
“Will you tell me something? I am curious.” He turned to follow her, stepping away from the window and into the room.
“You are capable of curiosity, then?”
“I am capable of worlds.”
Dhulyn wanted to snort in disbelief, but found she couldn’t. “Ask.”
“How was it known, so quickly, that Tek-aKet was not here? With the others, with Beslyn-Tor, with Lok-iKol, no one knew.”
A sensible question. How did you catch me? A very sensible question. Would the Green Shadow understand the answer?
“They had no one close enough,” she told him. “No one who knew them well enough to see a change.”
“No one who could see me?”
“No one who could see you,” she agreed. It didn’t know about Dal, then, or Gun; nor was she about to tell him. She stepped around a long padded bench, still moving toward him. They were only a few spans apart, almost close enough, and she was eyeing the precise spot on his neck where her blow should land.
“What do you want?” she asked. Keep him talking, keep his attention from what she planned.
“Nothing.”
“Your actions say otherwise. Have we no common ground? Can we not negotiate?”
The thing that possessed Tek-aKet closed its eyes. “Common ground.” Its voice, Tek’s and yet not Tek’s, trembled with some unnameable emotion. “Too much shape.” The eyes opened, bright as gemstones. “All things here have shape. Everything. Shapes. Edges. Start, stop. Here, even I have shape. Even I. Can you send me back, Seer? Can you or any of your kind do more than force me to a different shape? You ask me what I want. Give me nothing.” The right hand rose up and, fingers curled, tapped it on the chest. “Make this nothing. I want NOTHING.”
She blinked, and shifted her gaze. The far end of the bench, the end closest to the Shadow… shimmered like the air above a fire. It was not there, then it was. She blinked again and shook her head. A fog grew out of nowhere and swallowed the bench, and the Tarkina’s room, and the world, leaving a curious emptiness. A NOT.
Dhulyn stopped walking. A corridor formed around her and dissolved as she stepped forward onto a beach… the Tarkina’s bedroom again with the Green Shadow who inhabited the Tarkin looking at her… the hold of a ship… a window, a mirror-no, a window, the night sky cut and a green fog spilling down. The corridor again with the fog, a cloud like hot dust eating the air, consuming all that lay before it, making NOT.
Advancing toward her.
This was death coming. Now. Death was now. No battlefield. No sword in her hand. No hot rush of blood, heart pounding in her ears. A slow dissolve, the world like crystals of ice slowly melting and becoming not water, but nothing, nothing at all.