The Prince of Shadow (63 page)

“He comes to me in my dreams. Master Markko. He tells me I'm dying, and I believe him. Then I wake up, and he's gone, and I'm still here.” Still alive. But the dreams sometimes felt more real than the waking world.

“And you want to know—?”

“Is it real? Or am I going mad?”

“Ah.”

Llesho waited for Master Den to go on, fretfully at first, but as the silence stretched between them, he found that his fears, all his conscious thought, for that matter, drifted away. He heard the merry chime of water dashing on stone, and saw the bright flick of the light bouncing off the droplets in myriad rainbows. He felt the sun on his back, and the breeze on his face, and the rough split logs of the bench under his backside. The sun moved, and he turned his head to feel its heat on his closed eyes, on his smile. Without realizing it was happening, the moment stole through him, sunlight filling all the chinks and crannies of his fractured existence. He was aware only of a profound peace settling in his heart and his gut, pinning him to his bench in a perfect eternity of now.

“As long as you hold the world in your heart, he can't touch you.” Master Den gave a little shrug. “But if you ever tire of the world, have something else to grab onto.”

His mind went to Carina, the healer with hair the color of the Golden River Dragon, and eyes like Mara's, who aspired to be the eighth mortal god. But he knew instinctively that wasn't what his teacher meant. He already had a purpose to hold him: to free his country and open the gates of heaven. Now he needed a dream more powerful than the ones Master Markko sent to trouble his sleep. His questions, about the brothers still lost to him that he had pledged his quest to free and the necklace of the Great Goddess that the mortal goddess SeinMa had charged him to find, would keep for another day. This lesson, to store up the sights and sounds and smell and touch of peace against the struggle to come, he finally understood.

They sat in comfortable silence together until the sun had reached the zenith, and then Master Den swept up the petition Llesho had placed on his altar.

“You are wanted at the palace.” He flipped Llesho's silver coin in the air, and when it had landed in the palm of his hand, he tucked it into his own purse with a wink and a lopsided grin. He was, after all, a trickster god. “It's time to go.”

 

 

The round, full light of Great Moon Lun hung low in the sky—Lun chasing her smaller brothers Han and Chen, already touching the zenith. Habiba moved about his workshop with precise, studied motions. The magician once had told him that Lun was no moon at all but a dying sun smoldering in the dark, and somehow Llesho knew that he was waiting for Lun's faint light to shine more fully through the window that overlooked the workbench.

He took a shallow bowl of polished silver from a shelf and carefully wiped it clean with a soft cloth. From an earthen pitcher he poured pure, cold water, filling the bowl to the brim.

“What's that for?”

The magician bent over so that his nose almost touched the water in the bowl but gave no answer.

“Habiba?”

Llesho wondered briefly how he'd come to be here, and why Habiba didn't seem to hear him or even notice his presence, but the youth couldn't seem to muster much worry about it. He stretched on tiptoe to peer over the magician's shoulder. As Great Moon Lun rose, its glow filled the sky in the silver bowl with pearly light. It overpowered the lesser shine of little Han Moon, which floated like a black pearl in the reflection. The pattern from the silver bowl drifted on the waster, so that the pearl of Han seemed to hang suspended from a silver chain.

“Ah! But where are you?” Habiba asked the image in the water. The magician was looking for the String of Midnights, the pearls of the Great Goddess lost in the attack on the gates of heaven. Llesho had three of them; it seemed that Habiba had found another.

As if some spell had taken control of his body, Llesho's hand reached out for the dark moon-pearl floating in the bowl. Part of him expected to close his fingers around the pearl while another part braced for a cold wet hand.

Instead, he fell headfirst through the water, which parted like a mist around him.

“Help!”

“Grab hold!” a voice answered.

Llesho reached out and grabbed onto the wide silver chain he was passing as he fell. The chain pulled him up short and he swung for a moment over an abyss before he managed to wrap his legs around the broad flat links and pull himself up on them.

“Who's there?” he asked. It wasn't Habiba's voice, or Kaydu's. He might have expected ChiChu to show up at a moment like this, but it wasn't the voice of the trickster god either.

“It's me.” The moon swimming in Habiba's silver bowl began to jump like a fish on a hook, nearly dislodging Llesho from his perch. He peered more closely: the moon was no pearl at all, but almost man-like. Round in the body and naked, his skin was black as pitch and gleamed like the pearls Llesho carried in the velvet pouch at his breast. The pearl-man sprouted tiny arms and legs that he flailed in his effort to escape the chain that ran through a hook set in his back. The creature snuffled through a round, upturned nose that was pink around its flaring nostrils. His mouth, lined with pearly white teeth, shouted, “Get me down from here!” in a voice far too large for its pearly head.

“Stop that!” Llesho shouted as the chain that held them both swayed dangerously. “How can I get you down anyway? I'm stuck here myself, and about to fall if you don't stop rocking the chain.”

“I beg your pardon,” the creature apologized politely. “I let my anxiety overcome my good sense.”

“Pardon given,” Llesho returned with equal grace and added, when curiosity would allow silence no longer, “What magical creature are you? And,” he thought to ask, “why are you hanging around like this, naked like a pearl from the goddess' jewel chest?”

The creature sniffed indignantly. “My name is Pig. I'm a Jinn in the service of the Great Goddess, chief gardener in her heavenly orchards.” The pearl-man, who called himself a Jinn, stopped struggling and allowed his body to swing slowly on its chain. The whole situation should have disturbed him more, Llesho thought in passing. But the Jinn was waiting patiently to tell his tale, so he tucked his left foot into the open loop of one of the links and grabbed hold of another with his right hand. Securely anchored against a fall, he settled in to listen.

“Ever since the demon invader laid siege to the gates of heaven, I have searched for a way to escape and seek help for my lady, the Great Goddess. Finally I devised a plan; I would make myself small as a pearl from her lost necklace and slip through the cracks, so to speak. I thought to fall to earth far from the gates where our enemies lie in wait, and then I hoped to raise an army and march to the rescue.”

“Doesn't seem to have worked out that way.” Llesho felt it needed to be said.

The Jinn puffed out his cheeks and gave Llesho a sour glare. “I didn't need you to tell me that. Now, if you will just release the pin in my back, I can go about my business. Heaven can't wait forever, you know. There's planting to be done.”

“You should have thought of that before you turned yourself into a pearl. What if you're lying to me?” The question added an unwelcome note of reality to the situation. Jinn were a notoriously untrustworthy caste, which even Pig had to recognize.

“You can make me promise to give you wishes,” Pig suggested with a trustworthy smile. “You can use your wishes to make me tell the truth.” His efforts to look dependable were thwarted by the way he swayed hypnotically, like a pendulum, which made Llesho very dizzy.

Pig's present state suggested that ideas were not, perhaps, his strongest game. This one seemed fairly simple, though. Foolproof even.

“I'll do it.” Llesho stretched over the abyss to grasp the pin in the Jinn's back, but Pig wriggled out of reach.

“I have to promise first.”

“You just did.”

“No, I said I
would
promise. You haven't asked me to do it yet.”

Llesho was growing more annoyed with the strange pearly creature by the minute. When he stopped to consider this strange situation, none of it made sense, least of all his own patience in dealing with the captive Jinn. He was in it now, however, and could see no way out except through to the end.

“Promise me three wishes,” he insisted, and started pulling himself closer on the chain even before the words “I promise” left Pig's mouth.

Suddenly, a hand big enough to hold Llesho and the Jinn together in its palm swept him off the silver chain and held him up to the face he most dreaded in the world. “Welcome home, Llesho.”

“Master Markko!” he shouted. . . .