Shadowheart (38 page)

 

Tinwright stayed with Brone for what must have been at least another hour and was likely more. Brone kept asking him questions, which sometimes made him change what he had said before, which Brone would then cross out from the parchment with a great many sulfurous curses before laboriously writing down the new version.

When the questioning was over, Lord Brone told Tinwright some ways he could get a letter to him in sudden need. Then, to make the topsy-turvy evening complete, he offered Tinwright a handclasp of farewell. “You’ve done well,” the large man said. “This is much and much to think about. Try to stay alive. It would mean a loss of useful information if Tolly put a knife in your throat.”

This last was much more like the Brone he knew, and in a way it made everything that had come before seem even more impressive. The man hadn’t gone mad: Tinwright must have actually pleased him.

After leaving Brone, he had an overwhelming urge to go and see Elan, but if Hendon knew about his sister’s house as he had claimed, then the worst thing Tinwright could do would be to draw further attention by actually going there. Since for once he wasn’t hungry, he decided to take advantage of this unusual feeling of well being and have a start at the work he was supposed to be doing.

Okros’ rooms were also in the residence, only a few corridors away from the old royal chambers that Hendon Tolly had commandeered for his own. The sour-faced guard waiting in front of Okros’ doorway wore the key on a chain around his neck, but when he saw the message bearing Hendon Tolly’s seal, he sprang to attention. After unlocking the door, he clearly intended to follow Matt Tinwright inside, but the poet told him, “I need to be on my own here.
‘It is not enough to see with the eyes of my body,’
” he added, quoting from the Kracian bard Tyron.
“ ‘I must see with my soul as well, or I am no better than blind.’ ”

The guard gave him a look that suggested speaking Kracian poetry was a suspicious thing to do even at the best of times, but reluctantly agreed to remain outside.

Tolly had told him that Dioketian Okros’ rooms had been left more or less as they had been when he died. If so, Tinwright decided, the physician must have been something less than tidy. The place was in chaos, books and papers piled on every surface, as well as what looked like entire baskets of documents dumped out and scattered across the floor. Tinwright suspected however that some of the havoc had been caused since the scholar’s death and that more than a few people had likely rummaged through this chamber in search of any secrets or wealth Okros might have harbored, perhaps even the guard standing outside this moment. Tinwright knew that Hendon Tolly had taken many of the physician’s books and artifacts himself on the night Okros died; he would not be able to examine those without Tolly watching over him. This was his one chance to see if Okros had left anything else.

What remained seemed to be divided between the most ordinary and the most esoteric sorts of texts, mostly to do with history and the divinatory arts. The only thing that caught his attention was a volume entitled
The Agony of Truth Forsworn
, which he had never seen nor heard of, but whose author, Rhantys of Kalebria, he seemed to remember having once heard something strange about. Tinwright pulled it from the shelf and then began to look in less obvious places, testing the dead scholar’s furniture for secret drawers, even examining the backs of all the cabinets for hidden compartments, but with no luck. While Tinwright was pushing the last of them back against the wall, he did notice something quite extraordinary. On the corner of the top of the cabinet, on a surface otherwise covered in a thick fall of dust, were several strange marks which looked almost exactly like the prints of tiny human feet.

It had to be some trick of the eye, he decided—probably they were only the marks of someone’s fingers who had, like Tinwright, been moving the cabinet. Still, it was impossible to look at the half dozen small marks, obscured though they were by subsequent larger and less specific marks, and not imagine a human the size of a clothes peg leaving them behind in the dust like tracks in the snow.

To his great irritation, Tinwright then had to spend long moments quibbling with the guard as to whether he was permitted to remove something from the room, but he relied on his temporary power as Lord Protector Hendon Tolly’s envoy and the guard, grumbling, finally gave up.

While he had this unwonted freedom, Matt Tinwright had no desire at all to go anywhere near Hendon Tolly himself, so instead he made his way back across the residence and out to the servants’ dormitory near the kitchens where he and Puzzle had for so long shared sleeping quarters.

The jester was half asleep on the cot, a little the worse for drink, but began to move over to make room for Tinwright.

“No, I’ll sit up,” he told the old man. “I have reading to do.”

“I haven’t seen you lately,” Puzzle said. “I worried about you.”

“I’ve been waiting on the lord protector.”

Puzzle sat up now, his eyes wide. “Truly? What good luck!”

Tinwright rolled his eyes, but it was foolish to expect the old man to understand the truth. “I suppose. I do not mean to disturb you, though. I just needed a place to read in quiet.”

The jester would not take the hint. “Did you know that Lady M’Ardall asked me to come to their house in Helmingsea and entertain her friends and family? As soon as the siege has ended, they will take me in their coach and all!”

“That’s wonderful.” Tinwright opened Rhantys’ book, trying to ignore the jester, who had apparently decided against sleeping and had begun to rattle off all the interesting things that had happened to him of late—interesting to Puzzle, in any case.

“. . . 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.

 

 

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.

—from “A Child’s Book of the Orphan, and His Life and Death and Reward in Heaven”

 

 

 

“Y
OU 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.”