He smiled coldly. “Not to retain the glory, Nomi. We need to keep this secret because of what just might be up there on the Divide. There must be very good reasons why no one has ever seen anything like this before.”

“One beat you're a skeptic, the next you're protecting Noreela from a Sleeping God!”

“Just being cautious.” He shook his head, sighing.

Nomi did not care. There were always dangers—her last trip to Ventgoria had proved that, though that was something she would always keep to herself.

“So we keep it a secret,” she said. “You for your reasons, me for mine.”

He closed his eyes and nodded.

“So dawn, the day after tomorrow.”

“That's fine. I have a few things to put in order,” Ramus said.

I have little, Nomi thought, but Ramus already knew that. She'd told him about Timal's leaving, and there had been no one since. Sometimes Ramus seemed most at ease when she was not involved. He was like a brother watching over his little sister, believing that no one was good enough for her.

“I need to see Beko and agree to his fee, but that's all,” she said. “I just wish you were more excited!”

“I can't change what I am,” Ramus said.

Nomi went then, giving him a tight smile before leaving his rooms. Out in the street she leaned against the wall and watched a few people passing by, trying to confine her mind to their narrow concerns. She could not. Her ideas had been expanded, her horizons stretched. And the farther she walked from Ramus's home, the lighter her step became.

Chapter 3

Chapter 3

THE DREAM HAD assailed Ramus as he dozed off after Nomi left his rooms: a Sleeping God rising from the ground, fearful, dreadful and unknowable. But the Sleeping God risen was a trifle compared to the sense that he was someone else.

What do we have if not our own identity? Nomi had her home up in the hills, her ornaments and objects of worth brought back from voyages or purchased with her Ventgorian wine profits, but most of all she still had herself. Even she—shallow, perhaps, but still intelligent and broad-minded—would surely agree with that?

He groaned, holding his head as though to squeeze out the pain. The attacks were becoming worse, and more frequent. He should see the healer before he went, though the healer had already told him that there was little she could do for a disease of the mind.

Such a thing eats at itself, she had said. And while I've never seen one like this before, I can see the swellings behind your eyes. There's a mass, and if it follows patterns I've seen before, it will get larger, the symptoms will worsen, then you will die.

The healer's words echoed back at him, as they often did when he was alone and suffering another strange dream.