With these last words, he tossed the imp toward the window. He saw it whirl about in the air like the tiniest puff of candle smoke. Then it whipped away and vanished from his sight, carrying his message with it.
Tu Domchu closed his eyes and offered a prayer to Hulan. “Guide it safely, Lady Moon,” he whispered, “or we are all doomed.”
The imp flew out through the window and whipped its way up into the darkness of the night. It chittered to itself as it went, but if any mortal ear had heard it, the sound would have seemed like nothing more than cricket’s chirp. It caught a wind current and rose up and up, whirling wildly high above Daramuti and the mountains.
A dark form rose from below. The imp saw it coming and screeched, darting to one side only just in time to avoid the snapping beak of a large creature that may have been a raven. Black wings pounded the night, and for an instant the imp prepared for pursuit. But the raven seemed to have no further interest; it flew on and vanished.
Vanished out of this world.
Overseer Rangsun of the Suthinnakor Center of Learning enjoyed a private set of apartments in the upper floors of the Center, with a high balcony granting him a view over the city rooftops out to the western farmlands beyond. And some days, when the weather was quite clear, he could even see the faint, distant haze of the Khir Mountains, which marked the boundary between Nua-Pratut and the great empire of Noorhitam.
At night, however, not even the moon could illuminate his vision so far.
That night, as was his custom, Overseer Rangsun could be found out upon his balcony. As so often happened at moonrise, he felt disturbed in his spirit and could not sleep. He knelt in an attitude of worship that would have surprised many of the students within the Center of Learning, who thought of the overseer as a man of science only and never would have believed that he was also a man of deep, driving, religious devotion.
The moon shone down upon him, her light gentle, full of restful promises. But Overseer Rangsun could not rest. So he prayed instead, to Hulan, to her children. His prayers were not so much supplications as they were promises of his own. Promises of protection.
“I will not let the Greater Dark approach your gate, Mother of Light,” he said, his hands folded in prayer. “I, your servant, have vowed as much upon your own pure glory. I will see you and your children safe.”
No matter how much blood he must shed to do so.
A whirring in the air caught his attention, and he raised his prayerful face to the night. He glimpsed the flitting shadow, like a tiny bat on wings, and recognized it at once. He closed one eye and opened wide the other.
With a quick dart, the imp vanished within Overseer Rangsun’s pupil.
Long ago, the Crouching Shadows had set clever traps for creatures of worlds beyond. When they finally succeeded in catching one, they found it stranger by far than anything they had ever imagined, a being which, with very little effort, could be split in two, and both halves would survive. But, thus sundered, each half would do everything in its power to be whole again.
So they served well for carrying messages. Overseer Rangsun kept any number of imps in his eyes at a time, and those men under his command, whom he sent to work for him across the nations, possessed the other halves. If a message must be sent, it could be done in no more than a candle’s flickering. For the imps would travel the whole world wide in mere moments, always returning to their missing half.
Overseer Rangsun blinked, for the pain of the imp’s return was great, like a knife stabbing into his brain. But his body did not move, for he was master of himself even in agony. And the agony did pass. Then he closed his eyes, bowed his head, and concentrated his mind upon the new imp. He recognized it at once as belonging to Tu Domchu—faithful servant, gone into the field in the guise of an elderly slave six years ago. Tu Domchu, whose one goal in life was to discover the identity of the rumored Dream Walker who, so the priests of the Crown of the Moon said, would one day walk all the way to Hulan’s Gate.
And when he discovered the Dream Walker, he would put an end to him. Thus Hulan would be protected, even as she had been protected by the Crouching Shadows for generations of mortal men.
Overseer Rangsun sat quite still, waiting for the vision from Tu Domchu to present itself in his mind. He did not have long to wait.
“A woman!”
He gasped, and both eyes flew open. He stared out into the night, across the rooftops of Suthinnakor, on to the horizon beyond which loomed the mountains. Then he cursed and got to his feet.
“A woman! Why did we not guess?”
But who would ever have believed that a woman could perform so great a feat which generations of men could not? He cursed again and stormed into his chambers. Snatching up brush and paper, he wrote out a note in his elegant hand, each figure perfectly formed despite his haste. He rolled it up and sealed it in melted gold-flecked wax, marking it with his signet ring. Then he turned to the darkest corner of his room and spoke to the shadows.
“Take this.”
As though materializing from nothing, a figure in a rigid wooden mask stepped forward, hand extended, and accepted the message.
“Hurry!” said Overseer Rangsun.
The Mask bowed. Then it vanished as if by magic, although the only magic at work here was that of stealth and silence.
Overseer Rangsun stood a while in the center of his rooms, his face half-lit by a single candle. Suddenly, his face sagged, and he passed a hand across his forehead.
“If he cannot kill her,” he whispered, “all is lost. All is lost . . .”
The world was as still and quiet as ever when Sunan woke in his uncle’s empty house. He could hear the sounds on the streets far away beyond the walls, but those were sounds that did nothing more than contribute to the quiet around him.
He lay with his eyes closed, allowing wakefulness to return slowly to his body. How much he hated to face one more day of imprisonment! For, indeed, he was no better than a prisoner here.
At last, however, he opened his eyes. He must rise, he must eat, and he must wait. Someday, surely, the imprisonment must end. Someday, surely, the Crouching Shadows would demand fulfillment of the oath he had sworn.
He sat up, pushing back his blanket. One hand rested on his pillow, and he was surprised to feel something there. He looked.
A message in parchment, sealed in gold-pigment wax. He knew at once from whom it had come, and his eyes moved to every corner of the room, seeking some sign of the Mask. But the room was empty.
Trembling with something akin to fear but more closely akin to relief, he broke the seal and read the scroll. It consisted of one line:
Go to Lunthea Maly.
The Anuk Anwar, favored Son of the Sun, the Imperial Glory, Emperor of mighty Noorhitam, heir of conquerors, blessed by Hulan’s grace, woke with a start and stared up at the intricately painted tiles on his ceiling.
Then he swore: “Anwar’s elbow!”
His voice emerged in little more than a whisper, for his heart raced too hard and his breath came in too short of gasps to allow for speech. So he stared at the painted tiles depicting at intervals Anwar and Hulan’s various faces and the faces of their children: Maly, the star for which the city of Lunthea Maly took its name; the twin lights of Zampei and Zampey; Chendu, the star of wisdom; and, of course, Chiev, the North Star. He stared at them, but it was not their painted faces and forms, worked into elaborate medallions, that he saw before his eye.
He saw instead his dream.
With a sudden surge he sat upright, roaring as he did so, “Bintun! Bintun!”
The door to the small adjoining apartment opened, and the emperor’s favorite long-suffering personal slave and bodyguard stuck his face into the room, his eyes bleary with want of sleep. “Yes, Imperial Glory, Son of Anwar?” he asked, in the same tone with which a mother might speak to a child screaming in the night.
The Imperial Glory of Noorhitam snatched up one of the many pillows tossed about his enormous boat
of a bed and threw it with all the force he could muster at Bintun’s head. “Bring me the Besur!” he cried. “Bring me the Besur and any priests you can find!”
“Hulan is at the full tonight, Imperial Glory,” Bintun reminded his emperor, his voice a smooth cadence of tolerant calm. “The Besur and his priests will all be at prayer, performing the rites of—”
“I don’t care!” said the emperor. His eyes were wide and full of fury, and his hand grappled for another pillow to throw. He selected one and hurled it across the room, where it struck the wall by Bintun’s face without provoking his servant to so much as blink, which infuriated the Imperial Glory all the more. “I don’t care if you fetch them naked from the ceremonial baths! Bring them to me! Now!”
It was an hour later before the Besur could make his entrance. Although the Crown of the Moon stood adjacent to the emperor’s palace, temple and palace were both so enormous that it took several couriers running at full tilt a good ten minutes to travel from one to the other. Then, when the Besur—who had been interrupted in the middle of a loud and involved prayer to Hulan, which was difficult enough to remember without slaves plucking at his sleeves—had received the message, rolled his eyes heavenward, and cursed, “Anwar’s elbow!” in unconscious echo of his emperor, he was obliged himself to run in order to change into the required robes a high priest always wore when entering the presence of Anwar’s favored son. Since the Besur spent most of his time in prayer—and ate and drank a great many ceremonial cakes and sacred brews—any amount of physical exertion left him sweating and puffing.
Therefore, shrugged into robes of gold and a headdress mimicking that which artists and poets said adorned the head of Chendu, the star of wisdom, he was obliged to stand some moments outside his emperor’s private chambers, gasping to regain his breath while slaves wiped sweat from his brow. Ten other priests of various orders clustered behind him, none of them eager for another audience with the Anuk of Noorhitam.
They knew exactly what this midnight meeting was about.
At length, his dignity somewhat recovered, the Besur motioned to Bintun, who slid back the door and announced the Besur in a voice much too loud for the time of night.
The emperor, still in his bed and clothed in his nightgown (which, the Besur noted with some envy, was of finer work and intricacy than his own ceremonial garment), looked smaller than usual without his crown. He was not a big man to begin with; indeed, he was rather scrawny of limb and proportion, scarcely taller than a woman. But the old crown of his forefathers, fashioned in glorious imitation of Anwar’s own, always lent him a magnificence that would bring the princes of other nations to their knees before him. Without it, he looked like an overgrown child. But he was still the emperor.
“What in Hulan’s name took you so long?” the Anuk demanded before the Besur had even finished reciting the required greeting.
“I came as soon as I could,” the Besur growled, then added “Imperial Glory” and bowed, just to be safe.
“Don’t try to placate me!” yelled the emperor and, since he boasted a wealth of pillows, took up his third one of the night and threw it, with remarkable aim, at the Besur’s headdress. It knocked the headdress askew, and the Besur dared not adjust it, because that would be an overt mark of disrespect to his emperor. So he left it be and wondered how long until it fell off altogether and landed with a ringing thud on the floor.
“How may I serve you, Imperial Glory?” the Besur said, even though he already knew, or at least strongly suspected, the answer. This was not the first time he had been summoned to the emperor’s chambers in the middle of the night. Indeed, it was the fifth time in the last two weeks.
The emperor sank back upon his pillows, and his face was very pale against the rich red silks. “I saw it again,” he said.
“The dream, favored Son of Anwar?”
“Yes. I need you to find out what it means. And this time I need you to succeed. I can’t bear it any longer.”
The Besur bowed again to give himself time to think, and felt his headdress teeter dangerously. “Will the Imperial Glory kindly describe what you saw in your sleeping mind?”
“Why? I’ve told you already. Four times.”
“Perhaps in a fifth telling you will be able to communicate something more, something to enable me to shed the light you so desire,” said the Besur. He didn’t believe it himself, and he could feel the unease in the ten priests gathered and bowing behind him. But he simply did not know what else to do.
The Anuk of Noorhitam sucked in his lips, chewing on them and causing his face to look rather frog-like. Then he closed his eyes as though better to see the images which had crossed his unconscious mind.
“I saw the Lady Moon,” he said. “She screamed. And she bled from a thousand wounds. Her blood stained the whole of the sky. And I saw men with their arms full of fire, and they hurled that fire at the walls of Manusbau. My loyal servants, defending the walls, crumbled to dust in their flames.”
He opened his eyes, and though his face was that of a middle-aged man, his eyes were very young. Perhaps it was the fear that made them young. The Besur shuddered under his gaze.
“Tell me what it means, priest,” said the emperor. “Tell me why my rest is again disturbed by this vision.”
The Besur tried to swallow, but his mouth and throat were too dry. He said, “I do not know the meaning, Imperial Glory.”
This time the hurled pillow knocked his headdress clean off his head, and it rolled with great clattering across the floor. “Dream-walk, then!” roared the emperor. “Do what you are supposed to do and enter the Dream! Find out what it means or so help me . . .”
The subsequent threats were empty, the Besur knew. If the emperor dared do any of the horrible things he shouted with curses at his high priest, his warlords would rise up in protest. Not even the favored son of Anwar had absolute power. But while the threats were harmless, the rage was real, and the high priest dared not ignore the rage of the Anuk.
He bowed. His head felt cold without its headdress. “I will try,” he said.
At the emperor’s command, slaves scurried from the room and returned momentarily with braziers and harimau spice. The bare-headed Besur and his ten companions ordered how the braziers should be arranged, then lit the coals and sprinkled liberal handfuls of harimau. Soon the room was filled with its odor, which tingled on the senses. The emperor sneezed. Three slaves fell over themselves to give him handkerchiefs.
The Besur stood in the center of the circle of braziers, and the ten priests took their places around him. They stretched out their hands to each other, their fingertips just touching. And they began the chant.
It was an old chant, designed to bring the mind into clear, concentrated focus. To step from one world into another was a feat an ordinary man could never accomplish and even an extraordinary man could not succeed on his own. Indeed, as the Besur closed his eyes and composed his mind into a deep, meditative state, he felt the strength of his brothers around him and knew he could never do what he attempted now without their support.
He breathed deep of the harimau. In actual fact, any spice would do, so long as it was strong enough to absorb the senses, blocking out other smells and fixing the mind upon a single path. But harimau was the strongest spice, too hot even to be used for culinary purposes. Those who ground it from harimau peppers wore stout leather gloves to keep from burning their skin. When tossed over coals, it stung in the nostrils and made the eyes water.
It cleared out everything save the chant.
Wise men speculated that the gateway into the Dream was different for each man. The Besur did not know if this were true or not. But for him, it looked like the door to his mother’s summer home, which he had visited each year as a boy. A red door painted with peonies. Every spring, slaves were obliged to repaint the door, for the winter weather wore away the color and brilliance. The boy who was once the Besur’s true self had always loved those frilly peonies on their crimson
setting, and associated them with all the joys of summer and freedom.
He saw those peonies in his mind now, appearing in the darkling haze of the priest’s chants and the spice. The door seemed as his boyhood eyes had seen it, much larger than it probably was in reality. He approached without fear, slid it open, and stepped through into the Dream.
All around him was mist. All around him was blindness. He breathed harimau, leaned into the support of the chant, and moved forward. But still, only mist. Only blindness.
He must try to find the emperor’s dream. Theoretically it was possible. The scrolls of bygone Dream Walkers indicated that many of them had succeeded in discovering dreams and interpretations while moving through the Realm of Dreams. But the Besur had never managed anything like it, not in all his years of loyal service within the Crown of the Moon.
He moved through the mist, searching. Sometimes he thought he glimpsed solid ground beneath his feet, but even that vision did not last long. He hadn’t the strength of the great Dream Walkers.
He hadn’t the strength of Lady Hariawan.
The chanting of his brethren supported him, lending strength to his spirit as he moved in this strange plain of existence. He knew the chant as well as he knew all the prayers of the temple, could recite it to himself backwards in his sleep.
“From this world to the other, let me walk
From the Near, from the Far, into the Between
From tedium to elucidation, let me walk
From mortal bounds into Eternity.”
He knew the chant and all its hundred variations. So when a new line of sound—deeper, darker, and far, far stronger—touched upon his soul, he turned to it with great surprise.
He had never heard anything like it before in the Dream. It sounded as though it sprang from the voices of men. But this was no chant he knew, and it was not spoken in a language he understood. It could not be voiced by any priest of his order.