Give Me Time

The knock came after lockdown.

Three short strikes. One pause. Two more.

Ashpenaz's pattern.

Danel was already at the door when it came. The others rose with him. Hanan looked as though the blood had left him hours ago and forgotten the way back. Mishael had gone frighteningly calm. Azaryah looked like a man preparing to attack the concept of inevitability with his bare hands.

Danel opened the door.

Ashpenaz stood in the corridor with two trusted guards behind him and urgency stripped down to function.

"Now," he said.

No further explanation.

Danel turned once toward the room.

Hanan took one step forward. "If he says no—"

"Then he says no," Danel said.

Azaryah caught his wrist hard enough to hurt and then let go just as quickly.

"Do not sound like you are leaving for grammar practice," he said.

Danel looked at him.

"I do not know how else to sound."

Azaryah's mouth worked once around words too blunt to help. He settled for a shove to the shoulder that was half violence, half blessing.

Then Danel was in the corridor and the door was closing behind him.

The walk to the throne room happened inside a silence too complete to be accidental.

The palace's usual noises had thinned away. Few servants. Fewer torches. Guards posted at every turn with faces gone blank from exposure to royal rage. Above them, in the higher corridors, Danel felt the remaining currents of the Hollow Path moving in defensive knots, no longer harvesting, only bracing.

Ashpenaz walked half a step ahead of him.

"When we enter," he said without looking back, "you will speak exactly once unless the king addresses you directly."

"Yes."

"You will not attempt cleverness."

"No."

"You will remember that every man in that room is already afraid and that fear in powerful rooms behaves like fire in enclosed spaces."

"Yes."

Ashpenaz glanced back once.

"If you survive this, I will find new ways to resent you."

"That seems fair."

One of the guards made a choking sound that might have been laughter in a less terminal corridor.

Then they reached the bronze-banded doors.

The chamber beyond was larger at night.

Not physically. In consequence.

Nebukhadran sat high beneath the carved lions of the dais, not robed for ceremony but for wakefulness—heavy dark cloth, gold at the wrist, no crown, which made him look more dangerous rather than less. Nathrek stood to the right of the throne with Bel-iddin and three other magicians behind him, all of them composed past credibility. On the left, administrators and military officers arranged themselves in the rigid geometry of men hoping structure might keep terror from becoming contagious.

The Class III pressure under the room hit Danel the moment he crossed the threshold.

It was not like the eastern alcove. Not like the harvest lines. This was older, broader, woven into the throne room so deeply it had learned stillness. Threshold sight did not show him its whole shape. It merely informed his bones that the dais stood above something which had been fed for generations.

He kept walking.

Ashpenaz bowed.

"My lord king," he said. "This is Danel of Judah, a trainee in the upper records program. He asks leave to speak."

Nebukhadran's eyes fixed on Danel.

They were the eyes of a man who had not slept and would now gladly turn wakefulness into slaughter if it restored the world to proportion.

"Another wise man?" the king said.

The title landed like accusation.

"A trainee only, my lord," Ashpenaz said.

"Then why is he here?"

Ashpenaz did not answer.

Danel bowed to the proper depth and heard his own pulse with unsettling clarity.

"My lord king," he said, "give me time, and I will tell the king the interpretation."

The room changed.

Not outwardly. Inwardly. Every man in it recalculated at once.

Nebukhadran leaned forward.

"The interpretation?"

Danel understood then that wording mattered beyond fear. He had used the old prophetic wording and yet the room still strained toward the omitted impossibility.

He corrected himself before caution could interfere.

"The dream and the interpretation, my lord."

Nathrek moved at that. Barely. Enough for Danel to see from the corner of his eye.

The king's gaze sharpened until it felt almost like the harvest pressure had when focused.

"You ask boldly for a boy whose category is already under sentence."

"Yes, my lord."

"And why should I grant you time when men older, richer, and more learned than you have already failed me?"

The truthful answer sat in Danel's throat, terrible and simple: because they were trying to steal what only God could reveal.

He said the survivable part.

"Because haste has not helped them," he said. "And because if the thing is to be known, it will not become less knowable by dawn."

The silence that followed stretched nearly to breaking.

Nebukhadran sat back.

Danel could feel every gaze in the room trying to decide whether he was brave, insane, or useful enough for those categories to stop mattering.

At last the king said, "Until dawn."

The room exhaled without permission.

"If by dawn you fail me," Nebukhadran continued, "you will die with the rest."

"Yes, my lord."

"Take him out."

Ashpenaz did not wait for repetition.

The corridor outside felt almost gentle after the throne room, which proved only that fear was relative.

Ashpenaz walked Danel back faster than protocol should have allowed.

"Until dawn," he said once they were past the first guard turn.

"I heard him."

"Good. I wanted to ensure the memory survived the hallway."

When they reached the shared room, Ashpenaz opened the door himself and did not step inside.

"No one leaves this room," he said to all four of them. "If anyone asks why, tell them the steward himself ordered it. If anyone higher asks why, tell them I have lost my mind."

Azaryah said, "Have you?"

"Increasingly."

Ashpenaz looked at Danel one last time.

"You have until dawn to justify my career."

Then he left.

The door shut.

Four boys. One lamp. A palace waiting to kill them by morning.

Danel looked at the others.

This time he did not hesitate.

He knelt.

"We ask for mercy from the God of heaven," he said.

The words struck the room like the first true thing it had been waiting for all day.

Hanan went down beside him instantly. Mishael a heartbeat later. Azaryah last, breathing hard, like a man lowering himself into water he knew might freeze him and entering anyway.

Outside, Babylon remained immense.

Inside, in one small room the empire considered expendable, four Judean exiles bent toward the floor and asked God for what kings, magicians, and all the machinery between them could not take.