Night Watch

They stopped sleeping all at once.

Not completely. That would have broken them within three days and probably amused the empire in the process. But after the threads and the wrong air and Azaryah waking with Jerusalem still on his face, none of them trusted night to remain a private country.

So they made shifts.

It was Mishael who suggested it, which surprised no one.

"If the taking happens in sleep," he said, sitting cross-legged on his pallet with a wax tablet on one knee, "then we need witnesses who are not asleep."

"That assumes wakefulness changes anything," Hanan said.

"No," Mishael replied. "It assumes ignorance changes nothing."

Azaryah grunted. For him this was agreement.

Danel took first watch.

The room settled around him one breath at a time. Hanan was asleep fastest, which seemed unfair given how anxiously he had spoken about losing the window. Mishael slept quietly even when anxious, as if his mind refused to waste motion. Azaryah fell into unconsciousness the way men in battle sometimes fell after bleeding out—suddenly, with all resistance ending at once.

Danel remained upright against the wall with the lamp turned low and the System half-called at the edge of sight like a tool he disliked touching too often.

At first nothing happened.

Then the palace entered its second life.

It began with pressure moving through the corridor beyond the door. Not footsteps exactly. The shape of intention. Veiled Sight opened halfway on its own, no longer needing the same degree of coaxing. Through the crack beneath the door Danel saw a red-black shimmer slide past like light reflected from dark water.

He stood without waking the others and moved silently to the door.

The corridor outside was dim, lit only by night lamps set at long intervals in wall niches. Two figures moved through it with deliberate patience. Bel-iddin was one of them. The other was a junior from Nathrek's office Danel had seen only in passing. Between them they carried a bronze basin no larger than a wash bowl, engraved with lines that hurt to look at directly once threshold sight touched them.

Above sleeping rooms along the hall, the air opened.

Not fully. Not like the breach behind the eastern idol. These were thinner tears, functional rather than anchored, made to permit passage rather than residence. From within them the red-black threads descended, joined the sleepers beyond each door, and rose again into the basin in slow, trembling filaments.

Danel did not move.

He watched Bel-iddin pause outside one room, tilt his head as if listening, then make a note on a wax strip tied to the basin's handle. The junior adjusted the angle of the bowl. The threads thickened. Somewhere inside that room, someone whimpered and turned over.

Dreams, Danel thought.

Or fear. Or both.

Bel-iddin moved on.

When he reached the Judean room, he stopped.

Danel went perfectly still.

Nothing descended from their ceiling. No thread reached toward the basin. The air above the door remained ordinary, or as ordinary as anything in Babylon remained now that Danel knew how many falsities it housed.

Bel-iddin stood there for three full breaths.

Then he looked very slightly toward the door, not enough to claim knowledge if challenged, and said to the junior, "Not tonight."

The two men continued down the corridor.

Danel waited until the pressure of them had faded before he let himself breathe.

Not tonight.

Because they were awake? Because of chance? Because of something the prayer-less vigilance itself had altered?

He did not know. The absence mattered anyway.

When he woke Hanan for second watch, he told him what he had seen in the fewest words possible.

Hanan's face changed while he listened.

"A bowl," he said.

"Yes."

"You are sure."

"Yes."

Hanan looked toward the ceiling as if it had become unclean.

"Then what happens if we all fall asleep?"

"What has been happening," Danel said.

Hanan rubbed both hands hard over his face.

"You say that like information is comfort."

"It isn't."

"Good. I would have hated to disappoint you by failing to feel any."

Danel almost apologized and then decided against it. Hanan would have despised that.

He lay down instead and tried to sleep.

The problem with witness, he discovered, was that it altered the imagination permanently. Every settling noise in the corridor became a return. Every dream at the edge of sleep became suspect. He did not fully rest. He drifted in and out of lightless fragments until Hanan's hand on his shoulder woke him before dawn.

"They came back," Hanan whispered.

Danel sat up at once.

"And?"

Hanan shook his head. "I could not see what you saw. Only where the air bent. But they stopped here again."

He hesitated.

"Bel-iddin touched the door."

The room was still dark. The others slept. That made the sentence worse.

"Why?" Danel asked.

"I do not know."

The System opened without being summoned, smaller than usual and stripped down to a single line.

System Note: Witness is not yet authority.

Danel read it and hated how accurate it was.

They could see enough to know what Babylon was doing and not enough to stop it.

That, he thought as first light bled slowly into the room, was a particularly imperial kind of torment.