They looked without respect or regard upon their leader’s eldest son and dragged him between them through this strange realm of broken lights and broken shadows. Sunan knew without doubt that he had left his own world far behind, though how he could know this he wasn’t certain. But he felt the imp in his mind screeching and ramming against the edges of his consciousness, desperate to be free, to escape. Its fear infected Sunan’s heart, and he found he was whispering prayers and pleading with his captors to let him go. They only tightened their grips and walked faster.
Chanting filled his ears. Along with the sound came a sudden clearing of vision. Sunan, his head dangling loosely from his neck, stared down at the dry wasteland spreading beneath his feet. It was not the dry of sun-baked, nor even the dry of death. For death to take place there must first be life, and there had never been life here. Nothing had ever grown from this soil, and nothing ever would. Sunan, however, was momentarily glad to see something he could stand on, something besides the swirling insanity through which he had just passed. He raised his head.
In the near distance an edifice of stone marked the only change in the endless horizon. From this edifice came the sound of chanting, and it seemed as though the chanting itself may be the very stones of its foundation.
“What is that place?” he gasped.
He did not expect an answer, so he was surprised when one of his father’s men—Kosul, he thought—answered in low voice, “Ay-Ibunda. The Hidden Temple.”
No more was said, but it was enough. Sunan knew he did not want to go anywhere near those dark gates opening before them. He pulled against the Chhayan men’s hold, but they expected his resistance and their grips were firm. “Let me go! Let me go, please!” Sunan cried.
It was a dishonor to his father’s name that he should whimper so. The Tiger men sneered and dragged him beneath the eyes of the stone dragon on one side of the gate.
Yet it wasn’t the stone dragon that made Sunan’s heart quail inside him. For opposite the dragon was a formless stone, rough, uncut, and unlovely. Somehow Sunan felt that something inside it looked out at him. And whatever it was, it was more dreadful even than the dragon.
The imp in his mind shrieked and seemed to bury itself ever deeper within his brain. He hoped it would be quiet now. He had enough to deal with without its chitterings.
Then Sunan was through the gate, passing on into a courtyard where dust and mist swirled together as one entity. The chanting was louder now, and he could just discern the shadowy forms of men clad like priests bowed down together, their voices a constant, droning drum: some high, some low, but indistinguishable. And they created and supported Ay-Ibunda with their voices, with their dreams. Sunan wondered if perhaps this was all a dream. If perhaps he walked outside his body in the realm of the unconscious.
Then he heard a voice crying out to him. A voice too well known, too well loved to be a dream.
“My son! My son!”
He knew then that, whatever the world around him might be, he was real, he was solid. He felt his heart beating at a furious rate in his throat, and he turned to that voice.
“Mother!”
They dragged her down the steps of the central temple building. They dragged her, two great warriors hauling her by ropes binding her arms, her hands, her neck. And yet they looked warily at her, careful not to drop their guard. His brave mother. His fierce mother. They knew she would tear their eyes out if they did not protect themselves.
But her gaze was only for Sunan standing in the center of the courtyard. She lunged against the ropes, which cut deep into her skin. “My son, what have they done to you?” she cried. Her beauty had long since vanished in hatred, but the ferocious love in her eyes when she gazed upon Sunan lent her a strange and fearsome dignity.
Chakra and Kosul dropped their hold on him, and Sunan fell to his knees. But he was on his feet again in an instant. His hands, one still clenched tight, reached out to his mother. He crossed the space between them, took her into his arms, and drew her close. “I’m here, I’m here,” he said as though it were she who needed protecting, who needed comfort. She held him tight, pressing her head to his heart, and he felt his beating pulse calm, felt his breath come more gently from his lungs. They were together. After eight long, long years they were together. United, they would face the Tiger Clan even as they once had. Even here in this nightmare.
Juong-Khla approached. Sunan, gazing over the top of his mother’s head, saw this man who was his father appear in the doorway of the temple and move slowly down the steps. He wore his warrior’s gear: the great pronged helmet, the fur-lined armor, the boots of cured buffalo hide studded with wolves’ teeth. He greeted his son in the same voice with which he would have greeted his enemy. “Well, Sunan. We meet again.”
Sunan felt the jolt of loathing pass through his mother’s body at the sound of her husband’s voice. She pulled out of his arms and turned to Juong-Khla, placing herself like a shield between the Tiger Chief and her son.
Juong-Khla uttered a short, mirthless laugh. “Wildcat, stand away from your cub. I will not kill him.”
“You forget, Honored Husband,” she said through bile in her throat. “You forget, I wrote down with ink and brush your vow to take my son’s life if ever the two of you met again. You forget, but I do not. And you will have to kill me first.”
He blinked slowly. “I vowed to take his life in exchange for Jovann’s. But Jovann is not dead.”
“What?” The word burst from Sunan’s mouth before he could stop it. And his heart leapt with a hope he had long since thought perished. “Jovann is alive?”
“If he is not, it is not your doing,” said the Tiger Chief. “I saw him with my own eyes not many months gone.”
“Where? Where is he?”
“Far beyond your reach, son of my stolen wife. And indeed it should not have surprised me to see him. I should have known from the beginning that you would never have the courage to follow through with your blood-thirst.” Juong-Khla proceeded down the stairs and stood now opposite his son with his wife between them. He folded his arms over his chest. Sunan was equal to his father in height, but nowhere near his match in breadth. The differences between them were always so much starker when they stood face-to-face. No man of the Khla clan could help but see.
None of them would have accepted Sunan as their chieftain’s heir.
“Now,” said Juong-Khla, “the time is short, and I am in no mood to argue or to barter. I need you to tell me where the Dream Walker is.”
Sunan said nothing, in part because he did not know the answer to his father’s question; in part because he did not want to reveal his ignorance right away. In spite of his fear, his natural Pen-Chan cunning—a very different sort of cunning than that of a beast of prey but no less deadly in its own way—reared up in his spirit, cold and intellectual. Across his memory flashed one of the hundreds of proverbs he had memorized over the years of his study: “A secret kept is a power retained.” Even the secret of his own ignorance. So he said nothing.
“I know,” said the Tiger Chief, “that you are under the thumb of those twice-blighted Crouching Shadows. I know that you are under oath to serve them. I also know how they have hemmed and harried my people for centuries, trying to prevent that which I will accomplish. And so I proclaim you Traitor, and thus named you deserve to die by my hand.”
“No,” said his wife. “He will not die.”
Juong-Khla snarled down at Sunan’s mother and, with a single swipe of his arm, threw her to one side. She shrieked like the wildcat he’d called her and would have thrown herself at him had not his warriors stepped in and restrained her by her bindings. Juong-Khla addressed himself once more to his son.
“Tell me where the Dream Walker is, and I will even now spare your life.”
Still Sunan said nothing.
“I know he has come to this city,” Juong-Khla persisted, beginning to circle his son, watching his face from every angle as he moved, searching
for some small crack in his mask. “I know this for truth. The raven brought the message far, and it was as truthful a message as such a creature can speak. They were not its own words, in any case, but Tenuk’s. And Tenuk, old fool though he is, would not have lied to us. Tenuk has been loyal to our order all his life. He has suffered for the sake of our mission, lived and breathed among our enemies. He wore their trappings, spoke their lies, but in his breast there ever beat a true Chhayan heart. He would not deceive me. He sent the Dream Walker to the dungeons beneath the Crown of the Moon. But when we went to fetch him, he was not to be found.”
Juong-Khla leaned in, placing his lips so near his son’s ear that Sunan’s skin burned with the heat of his father’s breath. “Where is he, son of my stolen wife? Where is my prize?”
“I—” Sunan steadied his voice and spoke with great care. “I do not know of what you speak.”
The Tiger Chief’s voice became a low hiss. “Liar.”
He whipped out a cruel dagger made of bone and sharpened to a razor’s edge. It was carved with deep, swirling grooves into which decades’ worth of blood had settled, staining it an ugly brown. It had belonged to chieftains of the Tiger Clan for generations past. Juong-Khla gripped it hard and strode to Sunan’s mother, whom he caught by the back of the head, yanking back her chin. He placed the blade along her throat, and his face radiated the urge of slaughter.
“Tell me where the Dream Walker is.”
His mother’s eyes rolled with fury, seeking to burn her husband with their intensity. But she could neither see him nor struggle, so tightly restrained as she was. She growled like an animal, daring him to do his worst.
Sunan watched, and his heart sank. Then suddenly he felt a deadly calm pass over his soul. A calm of inevitable loss. He could not fight what was about to take place. He could not resist it. He could only, as the Pen-Chan philosophers said, face his doom with the courage of equanimity. Thus he might do honor to his mother’s forefathers even as he discredited all the Chhayans of his lineage.
He felt the pulse of the chanters all around him, and their voices spoke of darkness and certain death. In their steady rhythm he found a foothold and braced himself against what would follow. When he answered his father, his voice was steady if not peaceful. “I cannot tell you what you want, for I do not know the answer to your question.”
Juong-Khla bared his teeth. In the next moment he would have dealt the death-stroke. But before his hand could move, a new voice spoke from the depths of the temple.
“Wait.”
Everyone—Juong-Khla, his wife, Sunan, and the warriors standing in the mist—everyone save the phantom chanters turned to the temple door and the figure that appeared at the top of the stairs. And Sunan beheld a face and form unlike anything he had ever before seen.
He was like a man but also unlike in the most grotesque extreme. Seven feet tall, taller even, shrouded in a darkness falling from his shoulders in what may have been a cloak or may simply have been a long, thick shadow. His face was bone-white, the skin stretched too thin across his skull, which was black beneath.
But his eyes were worst of all. For these burned with raging furnaces much greater than the mere size of them would suggest. As though they burned in a realm completely other than this, and there they consumed the entirety of their world. When he opened his mouth to speak, more fire, red with wrath, gleamed in the back of his throat.
Sunan knew in a glance who this was, and he whispered the name he had seen written down but once, in his mother’s coded hand: “The Greater Dark.”
Moving with a grace incongruous to his size, the Dragon descended the steps, and his cloak flowed softly behind him. As he drew nearer, the heat of his form struck Sunan until sweat beaded his forehead. Inside, however, he felt deathly cold.
The imp in his brain began to scream.
Though no one could have heard that scream, the Dragon turned sharply to Sunan, his flaming eyes narrowed. “What have you got inside you?” he asked. “A spy? A spirit?”
He put out a hand with long slender fingers which looked like bones tipped with great claws. His speed was so great that Sunan had not time even to flinch before those claws rammed into his eye and back into his conscious mind. They closed on the wriggling imp and dragged it out, leaving Sunan gasping in agony and falling to his knees.
The Dragon inspected the imp, holding it up to his face. It writhed and shrieked in the highest, most piercing voice imaginable.
“Imps,” said the Dragon. “Disgusting.” With that, he rubbed his fingers and thumb together in a quick, dismissive motion. With a last thin wail the imp disintegrated in a puff of smoke. Sunan did not doubt that it was dead.
He remained kneeling where he had fallen, one hand pressed to his temple, the other, still closed in a fist, jammed into his eye. Although the Dragon’s claws had not touched him in any physical sense, his body reacted as though they had, and his eye throbbed painfully in its socket. Even so, he felt a strange relief to have the imp gone from his head, a relief that far outweighed any pity he might have felt for the creature.
As though some formality were now out of the way, the Dragon turned something that might almost be called a smile down upon Sunan. It was not a smile because his mouth, though shaped like a man’s, was full of black teeth, every one resembling a snake’s fangs. They were too large for his mouth. Indeed, they should never have been able to fit in a jaw that size, as though this towering form were actually two forms, the one only just containing the other, which ever sought to burst forth from its constraints.
“Now,” said the Dragon through his cage-like smile, “tell me, what do you have in your hand?”
Blinking hard, Sunan gazed up into that terrible face. “Nothing,” he said, and did not realize for a moment that he lied. The realization came over him as soon as the word was out, however, and he closed his fist still tighter so that his knuckles stood out white.
“Something, I think,” said the Dragon. He bent, his narrow frame folding up on itself as he crouched before Sunan. Even when he crouched his head was higher than Sunan’s, and Sunan had to crane his neck to meet that burning gaze. “Something quite wonderful, in fact, or why would you hide it so?”
“We haven’t time for this,” snarled the voice of Juong-Khla. He dropped his hold upon his wife and strode over to stand behind Sunan, his knife raised threateningly. “We haven’t time, do you hear? Our hour is fast approaching.”
“Our hour?” said the Dragon, glancing up disdainfully from beneath his lashless lids. “Oh yes. I’d almost forgotten. We have a bargain, don’t we?”
“You may have forgotten, but I have not,” said the Tiger Chief. “And we have done everything you asked. We possess the secret of Long Fire.”
“You don’t possess the Dream Walker.”
Juong-Khla tapped Sunan’s cheek with the flat of his blade. “This one knows where he is. I would bet my right eye on it.”
“Would you? How lovely,” said the Dragon. Then he addressed himself to Sunan once more, and the heat of a thousand suns burned in his words when he spoke. “Tell me, boy, what do you have in your hand?”
“I—I don’t know anything about any Dream Walker,” Sunan managed. He tried to sit back on his heels, to hide his fist in the folds of his robe. “You’re asking the wrong man. I’ve not seen—”
The Dragon sighed like a snake’s hiss. Then he reached out and took hold of Sunan by the wrist. His touch was like hot brands, and Sunan screamed and struggled. But the Dragon paid no heed to this, merely turning his fist around and prying his fingers open with one long claw.
And there, revealed in the darkness of that nightmare so that it must gleam more brilliantly than ever, lay the blossom from Hulan’s garden.
Juong-Khla gasped at the sight of it. The men of the Tiger Clan forgot their trembling fear of the Dragon and drew closer, eager to see, eager to know. Even Sunan’s mother rose up from where she lay, pulling against the ropes and craning her neck to be
tter see that which her son held. They drank in the lights, the luminous beauty, the colors so rich and vivid as only a blossom of this kind could boast. For a moment the darkness of the Hidden Temple fell away. For a moment some of them even believed they heard snatches of a great, a powerful, a dreadful Song.
But the Dragon merely snorted. “I thought as much,” he said. “Though how you came to possess such a prize is more than I can guess. But I know what this is, and I know from whence it came. Do you?”
Sunan bowed his head, trying to avoid that burning gaze but seeing it in his head even when he closed his eyes. “It is . . . it is a gift of the heart.”
The Dragon threw back his head and barked a laugh that shot a spurt of flame up from his throat. “Who told you that? It may be true, but no heart was given to you along with this gift, so I can only assume you gave yours in exchange. More the fool are you! Though it is a worthy prize, and I do not fully blame you. I can see from your eyes that you have never set foot in the Gardens of Hymlumé, the Lady Moon. Hulan, as you call her. So it must have been a Dream Walker, a powerful Dream Walker, who retrieved this lovely . . . and who gave it to you, I would venture to guess.”
Sunan thought suddenly of the depths he had glimpsed in the beautiful woman’s eyes. Even there in a leper’s hut, her eyes had held the glory of the Dara themselves.
He began to tremble.
The Dragon smiled a slow, predatory grin. “So I am right,” he said. “And what’s more, I now know a secret.” He looked up at Juong-Khla, his appalling face full of repugnance. “You mortal fool,” he said. “Did you never consider that the Dream Walker might be a woman?”
“A woman?” Juong-Khla shook his head. “Magnificent Dark, how can it—?”
But the Dragon wasn’t listening. He put out both his hands and placed them in the air just above Sunan’s shoulders. He did not touch him, but Sunan felt the heat of those hands much too close, much too painful. He struggled desperately to keep from wincing, to keep from moaning in his terror. To maintain the mask of restraint and poise proper for a Pen-Chan scholar.