Two Windows

Hanan's window was still there in the morning.

That mattered more than Danel had expected.

He had half-feared the thing would vanish with daylight and leave them both wondering whether exhaustion had finally found a more sophisticated way to mock them. Instead Hanan woke before the others, sat up hard on his pallet, and said, to no one visible, "You again."

Danel was awake at once.

The room remained dim and cold and ordinary. Mishael and Azaryah still slept. The lamp had burned down to a dull clot of ash at the bottom of its bowl. But Hanan's face held that same arrested concentration Danel remembered from his own first morning: fear, wonder, irritation, the urge to deny and the inability to do so all arriving together.

"Can you read it?" Danel asked.

Hanan did not look away from the air in front of him.

"Yes."

"Out loud?"

Hanan swallowed.

COVENANT STATUS

Bearer: Hanan of Judah
Rank: E - Awakening
Sealed Bonds: 1
Active Bond: Stayed in the Test
Veiled Sight: Dormant
Authority: None

System Note: He stayed.

When he finished, the room felt smaller.

"Mine is uglier than yours," Hanan said.

Danel almost smiled. "You cannot see mine."

"I can tell."

The smile did not fully arrive. Too much sat beneath it.

Hanan rubbed both hands over his face and then finally looked at Danel.

"Why is yours stronger?"

"I don't know."

"That is not an answer."

"It is the only true one I have."

Hanan held his gaze for a moment longer, then nodded once. He believed Danel. That helped and did not help at all.

"Do we tell them?" Hanan asked quietly, glancing toward the other pallets.

Danel looked at Mishael and Azaryah asleep in the half-light.

"Not yet," he said.

Hanan's mouth tightened, but he did not argue.

That worried Danel more than argument would have.

Keeping a secret from Mishael lasted until midday.

Not because Danel or Hanan confessed. Because Mishael observed.

They were in the training hall waiting for Melzar to begin a recitation drill when Hanan's focus snagged for half a second on something at the edge of ordinary sight. The pause was small. Danel saw it because he knew what it meant. Mishael saw it because Mishael saw everything that repeated.

After the drill, he cornered them in a side corridor between two shelves of spare tablets.

"Something has changed," he said.

Danel said nothing.

Mishael's eyes moved from him to Hanan and back again. "Do not insult me by pretending otherwise."

Hanan exhaled. "He said not yet."

"That is not a sentence for me," Mishael said.

"No," Danel said. "It isn't."

Mishael waited.

Danel could not tell him the whole truth here. The corridor was too open, the walls too well built for listening. But neither could he give him nothing. Not after the ten days. Not after all four of them had held the same line.

"There is more happening in this palace than the palace admits," Danel said carefully. "Some of it is beginning to become visible to us in uneven ways. That is all I can say in a corridor."

Mishael considered that for one long breath.

"That is a terrible answer," he said.

"I know."

"Is it at least a truthful one?"

"Yes."

Mishael nodded once. "Then I will wait until tonight."

He walked away.

Hanan watched him go and said, "That could have gone worse."

"It will," Danel said.

He went to the eastern alcove alone.

Not out of courage. Out of the particular stupidity curiosity becomes when mixed with partial revelation.

The training hall was empty during the late afternoon break except for one scribe at the far western table sorting damaged wax boards. The idols along the wall kept their patient, conquered silence. Dust hung in the high air where light from the clerestory windows struck it.

Danel crossed the floor slowly.

With each step the pressure at the alcove increased. By the time he stood before the basalt idol, his skin had gone cold despite the heat. Up close the carving was worse than it had looked from a distance. The hands were not merely numerous; they overlapped in anatomically impossible ways. The mouth was slightly open. Not enough for a scream. Enough for invitation.

He fixed his attention and let Veiled Sight open as far as it would.

The world jerked.

Stone remained stone. But behind the stone the air split along the line he had glimpsed before, a dark vertical seam no wider than a finger and deeper than the room had any right to permit. Red-black light moved within it in pulses too slow to be flame and too deliberate to be weather. Something on the other side leaned once, testing.

Danel took an involuntary step back.

The seam widened by the width of a nail.

Pain detonated behind his eyes.

He dropped to one knee with one hand against the floor to keep himself upright. The room blurred. The idol resumed its harmless shape too quickly, as if the world had snapped a cover back over it.

The window opened through the headache.

COVENANT STATUS

Bearer: Danel of Judah
Rank: E - Awakening (strengthened)
Sealed Bonds: 2
Active Bond: Faithfulness Without Audience (sustained obedience, 10 days)
Veiled Sight: Threshold
Authority: None

System Note: Sight exceeds rank. Capacity will follow obedience.

He shut his eyes until the letters stopped burning themselves into the dark.

"Careful."

The voice came from his left.

Danel looked up too fast and regretted it immediately.

The thin-faced junior magician who had accompanied Nathrek during the inspection stood at the edge of the alcove with his hands folded into his sleeves. He was younger than Nathrek by decades and somehow more immediately unsettling for that reason. Nathrek felt like weather. This man felt like a tool used often enough to become dangerous in its own right.

"The hall plays tricks on boys who have not yet learned where not to look," he said.

Danel pushed himself carefully to standing.

"I stumbled."

"Of course you did."

The junior magician's eyes drifted once to the idol and then back to Danel's face, not missing much.

"You are Danel of Judah," he said. "Melzar speaks highly of your mind. Ashpenaz speaks carefully of your conduct. The Chief Magician's office will want a more formal sense of your placement."

Danel kept his breathing even.

"Placement?"

"An interview," the man said. "Tomorrow. Second bell after the midday meal."

"With whom?"

The junior magician's expression altered by less than a smile.

"With me," he said. "Bel-iddin, third lector to the Chief Magician."

Then he inclined his head just enough to make the gesture impossible to classify as courtesy or warning and walked away.

Danel remained in front of the alcove until the headache eased enough for movement.

The wrong part of the empire had reached out a hand.