LATER, THE BIG MAN slept—peacefully for a dozen breaths. Then, under the moon, a drop, three drops, twenty drops broke on his face. Inside the nostrils loud air snagged. Lashes shook. His head rocked on stone. Dragging a heel back, he raised a hand, first to rub at his cheek, then to drop at his chest. ‘Get away! One-eyed beast! Get away, you little…’ His hand rose again—to beat at something. But the fingers caught in chain.
Curled with his back against the big man’s side, the little man—either because of the big one’s rocking or the neck chain’s rattle or the barkings out of sleep like shouts from a full-flooded cistern—rolled over and was on his knees.
Green eyes beat open.
The little man grabbed the great wrist, while heavy fingers, untangling from brass, caught the small shoulders.
‘Calm yourself, master!’ the little one whispered. ‘You are my breath, my light, my—’
‘I was dreaming, Noyeed—’
‘—my love, my lord, and my life!’
‘No, Noyeed! I was only dreaming—’
‘Of what, master? What dream?’
‘I was dreaming of…’
The little man’s skull blocked the moon, leaving only the lunar halo by which farmers predict rain in three days—though one out of five such predictions brings only overcast.
‘I was dreaming of you, Noyeed!’
‘Me, master?’
‘But I was where you are, now, leaning above me. And you—a much younger you, a boy, Noyeed, with your blind eye and your dirty hair—you lay on the ground where I am, like this, terrified. And, with the others, I…’
‘Master?’
‘Noyeed—’ Holding the man, no taller than a boy, up against the night, Gorgik’s arms relaxed; the small face fell—‘either you know something I can never understand and you will not tell me. Or I know something that, for all my struggles toward freedom, I’m still terrified to say.’
‘Master…’ Noyeed turned his forehead against Gorgik’s chest.
Gorgik’s fingers slid to the little man’s neck, touching iron. ‘Just a moment.’ He slipped his forefingers under the collar, centimeters too big for the one-eyed man against him. ‘You needn’t wear this any longer.’ He pulled open the hinge. ‘It’s time to give it back to me.’
Noyeed grappled the heavy wrists. ‘No!’ Through thin skin and thick, bone felt bone.
‘What is it?’ Gorgik moved his chin in Noyeed’s hair. It smelled of dogs and wet leaves.
‘Don’t take it from me!’
‘Why?’
‘You told me you or I must wear it…?’
‘Yes. Here, yes.’ The night was cool, dry. ‘But by day only I need to, as a sign of the oppression throughout Nevèrÿon—’
‘Don’t!’
Gorgik looked down, moving Noyeed to the side.
The single eye blinked.
A breeze crossed the moonlit roof, while a crisp leaf beat at the balustrade as if, after an immense delay, it would topple the stone onto someone below, who even now might be gazing up. ‘Don’t what?’
The little man thought: He looks at me as if he were hearing all the others who have begged him for his collar.
The big man thought: I could leap up, seize that leaf from the wind, and wrest it from its endless, minuscule damages.
Noyeed said: ‘Don’t encumber yourself with such ornaments, master.’ (The leaf turned, blew back, then up and over the wall.) ‘Let me wear your collar! Let me be your lieutenant and the bearer of your standard! And this…?’ Noyeed reached across Gorgik’s chest to rattle the chain on which hung a verdigrised astrolabe. ‘You go to meet with Lord Krodar tomorrow at the High Court. Why wear something like this?’ He reached down to touch the knife at Gorgik’s side. ‘Or this. Go naked, master. Your bare body will serve much better than armor or ornament to speak of who you are.’
‘Why do you say—?’
‘Look, master!’ The little man rolled to his belly. ‘Look!’
Turning to his side, Gorgik pushed up on an elbow.
Part of the crenellation near their heads had fallen. Between broken stones, by craning, they could see down into the yard. Near an outbuilding armed and unarmed figures stood at a small, flapping fire.
‘Here we are on the roof of your headquarters. There are your supporters. After today’s victory you are only a shadow away from being the most powerful man in all Nevèrÿon.’
‘No, Noyeed.’ Gorgik chuckled. ‘No. My power is nothing in Kolhari, in Nevèrÿon. It was a precarious victory, and I would be the most unfortunate of rebels if I let such delusion take hold.’
‘But you may become the most powerful man in Nevèrÿon. And if you would, to further your cause, someone—perhaps me—must think it possible. Go naked, master. Let your fearlessness be your protection. In the meantime, let me carry your—no, let me be your sign!’
‘Noyeed, I don’t understand.’
‘Look, master.’ The little man elbowed forward, staring through the break. ‘Just look!’ He pointed, not at the milling men and women below but at the horizon’s hills black under moon-dusted dark. ‘Already you can see fog gathering in the mountain peaks outside the city. By dawn it will roll down over all Kolhari, where it will lie till sunlight burns it off. Naked, you will ascend into that fog, meet it, become one with it. Abandon the signs by which men and women know you, and you will become invisible—or at least as insubstantial to them as that mist. Your power—now small, but growing—will, at whatever degree, be marked at no limit. Without clear site, it will seem everywhere at once. That’s what such invisibility can gain you. That’s what you can win if you shrug off all signs. You will be able to move into, out of, and through the cities of empire like fog, without hindrance, while I—’
‘What nonsense, Noyeed!’ Gorgik laughed. Has your harried childhood and hunted youth wounded you to where you can only babble—’
‘Not babble, master! Listen! Unencumbered, you can be as the all-pervasive fog. And if you need now or again to be at a specific place and time, use me! Wearing your collar as the mark of your anger and authority, I can stand on the city’s stones wherever you would place me, leaving you free for greater movement, while I serve you, visible to all, your incorporated will. Oh, among slaves the collar will make me invisible to their masters as it has already made you. Among nobles, it will make me at least as much a reminder of injustice as you were. And among the good men and women who do their daily work it will transform me into the oddity and outrage intruding on them the reality of evils they would rather forget. Though, master—’ and Noyeed laughed—‘with my missing eye and skulking ways have I ever been anything else? You wear the collar because you were once a slave. Well, so was I. You require the collar to motivate the engines of desire. Well, as you have seen, for me it’s much the same. We are much alike, master. Why not let me stand in your place? Why not move me as you would move a piece in the game of power and time, sending me here and there, your servant and marked spy? Let me be your manifestation in the granite streets of the cities, leaving you free for all unencumbered missions. I will be your mark. You will be my meaning. I will be your sign. You will be my signification. You will be the freer, relieved of the mark I carry, to move more fully, further, faster.’
‘Noyeed, I’m afraid to—because I know what I know, and you are in ignorance of it. Or because you know what you know—and I am the deceived.’
‘Oh, master, I will always be your finger and your foot, your belt and your blade, your word and your wisdom, made real in the open avenue and the closed courtyard. Only I beg you, let me do it wearing your sign—’
‘I say no, Noyeed! I say nonsense!’
‘As you have seen how I love your body, master, your hand, your mouth, your ear, your eye, your knee, your foot, what I speak is a bandit’s, a wanderer’s, a one-eyed murderer’s long-thought wisdom—’
‘You babble! And yet…as I visit the court tomorrow, perhaps there’s something in what you say about the way I should go. Perhaps for just a little I might…’
And still later, when the big man and the one-eyed man came from the dark mansion into the yard among the men and women at the fire, Noyeed still wore the collar, while Gorgik no longer wore either the chain with the astrolabe, nor any sword, nor clout, nor dagger—as if all had been discarded or given away during the descent through the empty building.