:For now, we trust him,:
Mags said.
:We can always change our minds later. I don’t fancy killing anyone in cold blood, not even if he deserves it. And how the hell do I know if he deserves it?:
:And there are three of us,:
Dallen reminded him.
:You are the one in the most physical danger from him. You have to sleep some time. Maybe—probably—he can get into our cavern, but one of us will stay awake at all times, and he’ll never do it without us noticing.:
Mags felt a chill of alarm. If all the tunnels were connected—and they
must
be, since the others had had that same feeling of being watched—he could get to Amily!
:If he comes near us, he’s dead,:
Dallen said flatly.
:I promise you. And I think he’s smart enough to have figured that out. What’s more, if Jermayan and I keep a close watch on him, I am near certain we can stop him before he can get to you. There’s always a chance he has a second of those talismans hidden somewhere, but if he vanishes from our minds, we’ll alert you.:
Mags took a deep, steadying breath.
:All right then,:
he said again.
:We trust him. For now.:
• • •
“Cousin,” came a distant, echoing call, sounding as if it originated from a place very deep under the hill. “I come.” Mags wondered how far away Bey was—and how he managed to navigate in pitch-black tunnels seemingly without fear. Had he done all his exploring with one of their lamps while they had been gone? He must have; surely he hadn’t brought any such thing with him. Mags wished now that they had been more systematic about marking off what supplies they had used. They were probably missing quite a bit—bedding, lanterns, rope, food . . .
On the one hand, it was terribly clever of Bey to have figured out they were not going to keep strict track of their supplies. On the other hand, if they had kept strict track of their supplies and found things missing they would have
known,
from the beginning, that there was someone in the caverns besides them.
We prolly would have thought it was a hermit or a bandit or something, but we would have been looking for him.
Would they have found Bey, though? Mags thought not. Bey was just too good at hiding his presence. And they were nowhere near as adept at finding someone who had that talisman and was determined they not find him.
Shoot, all he needed to do was to move to the other side of the valley until we stopped looking.
Bey must have worked his way across Valdemar in the same way, stealing what he needed as he followed Mags. When had he first begun? Right after Mags crossed the Karsite border, he said, and Mags had no reason to doubt him. He’d said he was on a “wild year;” if he had already been in Valdemar for a time before he picked up Mags, he’d have had plenty of time to study Heralds and the culture of Valdemar.
If you were going to be a successful assassin, you had to learn how to assimilate quickly so you could fit in seamlessly. And Bey was the best of the best. He probably couldn’t pass as a Valdemaran, but he surely knew enough not to stand out, and there were plenty of foreigners in Valdemar.
I’d give a lot to know exactly what he knows.
Mags had not been idle in the time that Bey had gone. He’d taken the talismans—both of them—and locked them in the pot box, then piled all of the rest of the firewood on top of the box. He’d folded one of the blankets into a pad and positioned it out of arm’s reach of his bed. He had every knife that he had brought over to this cave with him, out and ready to throw or stab with. He had the lantern positioned so that it would glare into Bey’s eyes but gave him a perfect and unimpeded view of Bey.
When Bey appeared in the doorway, he seemed delighted at these preparations. “Very well done, my cousin!” he said with high approval, and sat down on the folded blanket. “Ah, that is much more comfortable, and my thanks for the courtesy. I trust you have done your practice at this distance?”
“Seriously? You ask that? You’d be annoyed with me if I hadn’t,” Mags retorted.
“So I would. I expect much of you, cousin. Even as I expect much of myself. Well, have you fully absorbed the tale of the Sleepgivers?” Bey asked, tilting his head slightly, and wearing an inquisitive expression.
“I didn’t think about much else,” Mags admitted.
“And did you find a flaw in it?” Bey smiled. It was a curiously disarming smile. Charming. But charm could be as powerful a weapon as anything with a point or an edge.
“We couldn’t, and we tried.” Right this minute, Mags realized that there was one thing that he did
not
know. And it was important. He didn’t know anything at all about Bey’s motives.
“Just what do you expect to get from me anyway?” he asked, leveling a very hard look at this purported cousin. “You say you’ve studied Heralds, so you’ve got to know there isn’t a chance I’d do anything to hurt my friends, my King, or my Kingdom.”
Bey shrugged a little and said slowly. “You, my cousin. What I want, is you. Not for the reason that Kan-li did, because he was ordered to bring you. And not for the reason you think. It would be easier, much easier, to return the House to the old ways with two of us. In no small part because for at least a time, no one but the Shadao would be aware there were two of us. Nor would anyone be aware that you had that great and powerful Blessing. It would appear that the gods had bestowed the Blessing on
me
—and also, on me, the ability to be in two places at once. Such a thing would make me feared, which I may need to be before I am obeyed. And that is but one reason why I wish to have you at my side.”
Mags shook his head. “You are not going to get me,” he said flatly. “You can call me kin and talk about blood calling to blood all you like, but I’m Valdemaran, and I’m a Herald, and that’s that.”
Again Bey shrugged. Mags’ words did not seem to disturb him in the least. “That remains to be seen. And if I do not persuade you, I still will have knowledge. Knowledge is power. You know this. If I can bring back the old ways, perhaps one day your King will wish to be rid of those demon-summoners. The Sleepgivers could be of service there. This is a rich land, and you could pay well . . .” He smiled again. “But I have not yet given up on having you.”
:He’s very certain he can persuade you,:
Dallen said, pretty much cementing what Mags already thought. Bey was a very stubborn person—and also very certain of his own powers of persuasion.
:He don’t know how stubborn
I
am.:
After all, Mags had managed to ride out that session of drugs, which by all rights and expectations should have turned him into—well, someone else. He didn’t think that mere words were likely to change him. “All right,” he said aloud. “So what’s next?”
“Now I tell you the tale of the four twins and the two cousins, and I think that might persuade you, Blessed One,” Bey replied with a slight smile, and closed his eyes serenely and waited for Dallen to enter his thoughts.
Mags waited for Dallen to begin.
This time the images were clearer. Four portraits, done in a severe and stylistic manner. Two young men, one in gray, one in brown. Two young women, one in red, one in blue. All four of the young people were dark-haired, dark-eyed, and lean, just as he was. It was hard to say if there was any more resemblance to him, since all four faces were much alike. Mags got the feeling that “portraits” in this culture were less personal and more ideal images.
:His parents and yours,:
Dallen said.
:The one in gray was supposed to marry the one in red, but the one in brown had Mind-magic, Mindspeech, and Empathy, and the girl in red did, too. That’s what he means by Blessed, because it’s almost unheard of for men to have Gifts, and when they do, it’s considered to be a miracle of the gods. Well, the first thing that happened was that the two with Mind-magic fell in love.:
There were some more stylized images, as if all of this had come from an illustrated story.
:It did,:
Dallen confirmed.
:It’s something like the stuff in the Archives, only they make an art form out of historical records. He’s studied this manuscript many times. I think he was a little obsessed with the cousin he’d never met.:
Dallen’s images became clearer, revealing that this was, in fact, an illuminated manuscript, or the memory of one. And there were a lot of illuminations. The boy and girl meeting on a bridge in what was clearly a cavern, sitting on a bench under a rocky overhang, walking together on a cliff overlooking the desert.
This was kind of curious. If this was the story of a pair of runaways, why was it so lovingly detailed?
:Because the Shadao never gave up on the idea of bringing them back, I think. And the next Shadao—Bey’s father—was the same. I get the feeling this was supposed to be something like a child’s storybook, with the moral at the end being “and one day you must bring the missing ones home.”:
Well, that made a kind of odd sense. So instead of erasing the runaways from history, as plenty of other rulers would have, the Shadao turned finding them into a quest.
Given that the insane Sleepbringer—and the half-insane one—and Ice and Stone—and Levor and Kan-li had all been very much aware of this obsession, Bey wasn’t the only one who’d grown up with the story and the quest as a part of his training.
:The parents were still determined that the betrothed pairs wed. But at the wedding, all four conspired against that, and since all four were wedded at the same ceremony, and all four wore the same costumes, they switched partners and no one knew until the ceremony was over.:
An image of the young man and young woman standing defiantly against the railing of other, older people. For all that the little painting was stylized, it demonstrated rather graphically that the elders were not at all pleased that their careful plans had been upset.
:Your parents were the Gifted ones, of course. And you can imagine how someone with Empathy and Mindspeech both felt about—the family business.:
Mags could, indeed. It had been torture to kill someone who was trying to kill
him,
and that was only with Mindspeech. With Empathy, he could not begin to imagine how hard it would be.
:Impossible, really. So after about a year of marriage, and after everyone had more or less settled down and accepted the
fait accompli,
the two decided to run away, and their siblings decided to help them.:
Dallen paused, and Mags waited patiently, figuring that Dallen was interpreting something he had found in Bey’s memory.
:Ah, now I have their names. Meric-an and Li-Inaken. You were named for your father, as the first in the line. This is something Bey’s father told him, not in the storybook. This all came to a head when they knew they were going to have a child. They had heard of a place where the talismans and the Power of the Shadao could not follow. They told their siblings that was where they were going to go, because Meric could no longer bear the pain of killing others. It seems every time he did his duty, he got sicker, and his brother was afraid that he would either die of it or slay himself.:
Mags snorted. How could his grandfather
ever
have expected otherwise? Knowing his father was Gifted and still expecting him to be an assassin was worse than ridiculous, it was insanity. What they
should
have done was to—make him a scholar or something. Although, you never knew, for all Mags knew, the mere proximity to all those other cold-blooded killers might have been eating away at his soul, too.
: They were heading for Valdemar, obviously.:
Dallen pointed out.
:He must have been talking to anyone he could, searching every record he could find, to locate a place where his father wouldn’t be able to touch him—or you. You saw for yourself what happened to the Sleepgivers that tried using their powers in our borders. Madness. The talismans turning on them.:
That certainly made Valdemar a logical place to flee to. Mags even had to wonder if they hadn’t just been so desperate that they ran on a mere rumor. “There’s a place in the north where it’s said magic doesn’t work. We’ll be safe forever there!” He could see two lovestruck people striking out in that way. After all, that was what made romantic tragedy.
:And it was quite a feat of legerdemain, because the pair that was staying undertook to impersonate the pair that was fleeing. Your parents stole a talisman for Meric and took both girls’ jewelry—quite a lot of it—and fled. Bey’s parents managed, by moving around the palace and changing clothing a lot, to hide the fact that they were gone for three days, giving them a good head start.:
Now Mags understood some of the things he’d seen when drugged. The young couple on the run, the birth of the baby—which was him.
:I’m not sure how you managed to see those things, Mags. I’m not sure if they’re real, or someone’s—Levor or Kan-li’s—ideas of what happened. I’d be more inclined to think the latter.:
That wouldn’t have been in that storybook, of course, nor the cruder versions which the young second-rank Sleepgivers would have seen. No one would have known what had happened to the pair. But Dallen thought that Levor and Kan-li had good enough imaginations to patch something into their own memories, since they knew about Mags.
Mags agreed. There had been a sort of vague blurriness about those sequences that made them stand out from some of the others. And since his own Mind-magic had been coming back at the time he took the drugs, he could easily have picked that up from the two Sleepgivers.
:And there the tale ends. Bey’s parents would have been in a lot more trouble if the Shadao hadn’t been trying to find his fleeing son. And when it was obvious that your parents had escaped successfully, the Shadao was too overcome with grief at losing his eldest to punish them. And
then,
right when the grief faded and the anger began, Bey’s mother was pregnant, thus giving the Shadao the heir he desperately desired.:
Dallen sighed.
:I will say this, Bey’s father has a fine sense of the melodramatic. According to Bey’s recollection, he made quite a production out of his attempt at placating his father. He went to the Shadao and offered to kill himself in reparation. He got as far as slicing a wrist when the old man forgave him. He became such a model Sleepgiver that the old man completely relented and bequeathed the title of Shadao on him at his own death.: