The shaking became gentler. Ethrian shifted his attention to the body lying between the beast's paws.
It had grown. It was about to become that of a man. A man who would be tall and powerful and dark, like his mother's brothers. The sleeper's face resembled that of his uncle Valther, the one who had married the Shinsaner sorceress. Ethrian and his mother had been living with Valther when Lord Chin's agents had spirited them away.
He considered the woman trying to waken him. She had substance now. She appeared to be in her late teens, and of promising beauty.
Only in her eyes was the past of her, the time-depth of her, obvious. Her eyes were older and deader than the desert.
Ethrian permitted himself to be wakened.
"Deliverer! You have to free us, or we're doomed."
What had they contrived now? "Show it to me."
The woman tried to drag him past the pond.
"I gave you power. Reach back. Show me from the beginning."
She made excuses. That would require intercession by the Great One. He was preoccupied.
"Unpreoccupy him. Tell him to make time." How can I have aged in dreams? he wondered.
He had, by drawing on those minds he was not entirely aware of having tapped. He was not the boy who had swum the strait and walked the beaches of Nawami. He was no longer the youth who had flown to witness his father's passing. He had become someone else. Someone more sure of himself and more determined to remain his own creature. He had developed an arrogant face. He now had eyes like a snake.
"Please!"
"Show me. From the beginning."
A savage bellow raged across his mind as the stone beast responded. It flung images at him like a barrage of angry spears.
They were coming. Shinsan was in the desert. The stone beast was animating a handful of its soldiers in waiting. They were out there now, overwhelming Shinsan's reconnaissance parties.
Ethrian saw it through, to the moment, and wondered if anything could stop the Dread Empire. What drove it so? Did it feel compelled to conquer even lifeless lands?
He yielded no more power. The beast was trying to panic him.
Its soldiers obliterated a half dozen patrols. The explorers stopped coming.
"Deliver us!" the woman begged, her soft eyes filled with water. "They'll come again, and they'll destroy us."
"They might. That's their nature. Who is master here?"
"The Great One."
"Then you get no help from me. I won't bend the knee to him." Ethrian turned away, stripped himself, waded into the cool of the pool. Fish brushed his legs. Waterfowl chivied their young into the reeds. Sahmanan pursued him along the pond's edge, begging from beyond the vegetation.
"You've made a work of art of this," he told her. "Why not confine yourself to this? The patrols are gone."
Would they give up? Of course not. Shinsan did not accept defeat. Her soldiers would try an alternate approach. It would have more weight behind it.
What would they do if they caught him?
A slow smile crossed his lips. Shinsan might provide the leverage needed to best the stone beast. He would play the wronged prisoner welcoming liberation. Why should they know whom he was... ? If he did not free it, the Tervola would dispatch this trifling godlet before noticing an ordinary boy.
He was living on borrowed time anyway. He could lay his bet with little to lose. The beast would accept his demands or perish.
Perhaps it discerned the trend of his thoughts. It growled. It threatened him. It pleaded. He ignored it, except to say, "When you're ready to pledge yourself my slave."
Hellish laughter rolled across the desert. It was the great jest of the godling's lifetime.
Question, Ethrian said to himself. How do you force a god to keep his word after you strongarm him into giving it?
He climbed out of the pool and returned to his resting place. The desert air dried him quickly. "Sahmanan, come here. Sit. Tell me about yourself."
She started talking, and casting frightened glances upward.
"No. Tell me about the child. About the little girl who grew up to become a priestess. About her mother and father and sisters and brothers. Tell me what games she liked, and what songs her friends sang when they played."
Black, brooding disapproval drifted down from above. The beast knew what seeds he was planting.
"Tell me your story. I'll tell you mine."
"Why?"
"Because we were all children before we became whatever we became. In the child is the understanding."
"Where did you get that idea?"
"From an enemy. Lord Chin, of the Tervola. A man with a black heart, but brilliant even so. One of my grandfather's master teachers."
"Your grandfather?"
"Varthlokkur. They called him the Empire Destroyer. The most terrible wizard ever to tread this earth."
"I don't know the name." She seemed taken aback.
"He's one of the great old wickednesses of the world. You could've seen him if you'd waited a second longer out west. He showed up just after you charged into the wall." Ethrian laughed a soft, wicked little laugh. "He might have seen you. I'm sure he saw me."
Her eyes widened. She glanced up, momentarily worried.
The stone beast ignored her. It was too busy with its patrols.
Ethrian toyed with Sahmanan for weeks, prospecting for a vein of humanity. It was there. He knew it with a certainty that was absolute. It compelled her to "waste" her strength on her restoration hobby.
He had few successes. That vein lay deep, like a diamond seam. Layers lay over its top. The meek, innocent ingenue with empty eyes. The creature older than the stone beast itself, that had built itself a heart of steel. The priestess...
Ethrian resumed a normal cycle of sleeps and waking, doing his sleeping during the fury of the day.
He wakened one afternoon, suddenly. Instinct made him leap into the air. Terror wriggled down into the core of him. The stone beast had flung out a tremendous bolt of power. The surge left a bleak, hungry vacuum behind. He shuffled this way, then that, moving aimlessly while trying to assemble his wits.
"They came back!" Sahmanan wailed. "They're going to destroy us!"
He felt the stone beast's fear. It had fought, and had lost, and in its despair had flung everything in one great black hammer stroke. If that blow failed, doom was upon Nawami.
Ethrian raced around the beast's paw. He clambered up its back. Sahmanan followed. At the base of the thing's neck, she gasped, "Get down! He failed!"
Ethrian flung himself against weathered stone. Something tortured the air. He heard the crackle of bacon frying magnified ten thousand times. A titan's drumstick hammered out one mighty beat. Ethrian turned his head warily. He saw an iridescent dust tower hundreds of yards high, settling back to earth. A thousand diabolic faces leered out, laughed, faded as an unseasonal breeze dispersed the dust.
The stone beast whined. Sahmanan begged. Ethrian ignored them. He scrambled to the peak of the monster's head, sat cross-legged, faced west. He let his being slip its moorings and drift toward the grey mountains.
He halted when he spied something atop a long, dusty dune, facing the stone beast. Another joined it, then another. Their shapes seemed to waver.
Ethrian drifted closer. It wasn't just the heat making their edges raggedy. Their cloaks of office rippled in the breeze. There were six of them now. No: seven. The one in the middle was shorter and wider. They wore grotesque masks. Their jeweled eyepieces glistened in the desert sun.
Tervola, he thought. They've stopped playing. They've come to see for themselves.
Soldiers of the Dread Empire joined their captains. A dozen. A score. A hundred. They stared at the stone beast.
The short one spoke. He made a slight gesture, then descended the back of the dune. One Tervola and a handful of men started forward. The others settled down as if for a long wait.