Shadowmarch

by Tad Williams

  “We have another letter?” As always, it filled him with both happiness and fear. What will I be like when he returns? A chill passed through him. And what if he doesn’t return? What then? All alone . .

  “No, not another letter—the last one.”

  It took him a moment to understand. “You mean the one that came with that envoy from Hierosol, the Tuani fellow. Your . . . friend.”

  She didn’t rise to the unpleasant tone. “Yes, that letter. Where is it?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Where is it, Barrick? I haven’t read it—have you? I didn’t think so. Nor has Brone, or Nynor, or anyone else as far as I’ve heard. The only person who actually saw it was Kendrick. And now it’s gone.”

  “It must be among some of the other things he had in his chamber. Or in his secretary, that one with the Envor carvings on it. Or Nynor has it in with the accounts and doesn’t know it.” His mood darkened. “That, or someone is lying to us.”

  “It’s not among Kendrick’s things. I’ve been looking. There are a lot of other matters we’ve got to deal with that are waiting there, but no letter from Father.”

  “But what else could have happened to it?”

  Briony shook her head fiercely; for a moment he saw the warrior queen she could someday be and was sad to think he might not be around to see it; love, pride, and anger mixed in him, swirled like the clouds blowing in overhead. “Stolen—by his murderer, perhaps,” she said. “Maybe there was something written there that someone didn’t want us to see. In fact, I’m certain of it.”

  Barrick felt a wave of dread. Suddenly the darkening courtyard seemed an exposed place, a dangerous place, and he knew why lizards were so quick to slither back into the cracks at any sound—but he realized an instant later that his father’s secret, his own secret, would not be the kind of thing that King Olin would commit to a letter, even a letter to his eldest son. Still,just the brief thought had been terribly disturbing.

  “So what do we do?” he asked. The day had gone sour. “We find that letter. We must.”

  *

  She came to him in the middle of the night, climbed under the heavy cloak and pressed herself against him. For a moment he took it as part of his dream and pulled her close, calling her by a name he knew he should not utter even half-asleep, but then he felt her trembling and smelled the smoke and damp in her clothes and he was awake.

  “What are you doing?” Vansen tried to sit up, but she clung. “Girl, what do you think you’re doing?”

  She pushed her head against his chest. “Cold,” she moaned. “Hold me.”

  The fire was nothing but embers now. A few of the horses moved restlessly on their tethers, but none of the other men were stirring. The girl slid her hard, thin little body against him, desperate for comfort, and for a moment his loneliness and fear made the temptation great. But Vansen remembered the frightened-child look, the terror that he had seen peering out of her eyes like a wounded animal driven into a thicket. He pulled free and sat up, then wrapped the cloak around her and tugged her close, using the heavy wool to help pinion her arms. After all, he could only take so much of her blind, needy rubbing before his resolve would crumble like walls made of sand. “You are safe,” he told her. “Don’t fear You are safe. We are soldiers of the king.”

  “Father?” Her voice was hoarse and confused.

  “I am not your father. My name is Ferras Vansen. We found you wandering in the forest—do you remember?”

  There were tears on her cheeks; he could feel them as she rubbed her face against his neck. “Where is he? Where is my father? And where is Collum?”

  For a moment he thought she was talking about Collum Dyer, but it was a common enough name in the March Kingdoms—he supposed it might be a brother or sweetheart. “I don’t know. What is your name? Do you remember how you came to be walking in the forest?”

  “Quiet! They will hear you. At night, when the moon is high, you can only whisper.”

  “Who? Who will hear me?”

  “Willow, the sheep are gone. That’s what he said. I ran out and the moonlight was so bright, so bright! Like eyes.”

  “Willow? Is that your name?"

  She burrowed in against his chest, struggling beneath the confining cloak to get as close to him as possible Her neediness was so startling and pitiable that his few lingering thoughts of lovemaking drained away. She was like a puppy or kitten standing beside its dead mother, nosing at a body gone cold.

  What happened to her father, then? And this Collum? “How did you come to be in the forest, Willow? That is your name, isn’t it? How did you come to be in the forest?”

  Her blind groping slowed, but more from the exhaustion of fighting against the folds of the heavy cloak, he thought, than from diminishing fear. “But I didn’t,” she said slowly, and lifted her face In the moonlight the darks of her eyes seemed shrunken, mere pinpoints with white all around. “Don’t you know? The forest came to me. It . . . swallowed me.”

  FerrasVansen had seen such a look before and it stabbed at him like a knife. The old madman back in the village where he had grown up so long ago had worn a stare like that—the old man who had crossed the Shadowline and returned.

  But we are still miles and miles from where the caravan was taken, he realized. The nodding black flowers, the deserted village. By the gods, it is spreading fast.

  18

  One Guest Less

  RABBITS MASK:

  Day is over, shadows in the nest

  Where have the children gone?

  All are running, scattering

  —from The Bonefall Oracles

  The mad muddle of life, Chert thought, was enough to make a person want to lie down on the ground, close his eyes, and become a blindworm Surely blindworms didn’t have to put up with nonsense like this?

  “Mica? Fissure and fracture, have you nothing better to do with your time and mine than argue?”

  Hornblende’s nephew looked around for his brother. Both of them could be difficult by themselves, but they were much less willing to put up a fight when they were on their own. “It’s not right, Chert, putting tunnels here. It’s too deep, too close to the Mysteries. If it collapses through to the next level, they’ll be right on top of where they shouldn’t be!”

  “It is not your place to decide. The king’s people want this tunnel system made bigger and that’s what we’re going to do. Cinnabar and the other chiefs of the Guild have approved the plans.”

  Mica scowled. “They haven’t been here. Most of them haven’t worked raw stone in years, and it’s been even longer since any of them have been here.” He brightened as his brother approached. “Tell him.”

  “Tell me what?” Chert took a deep breath. It had been a strange last few days since the bizarre miniature pageant on the castle roof; his head was so full of confusing thoughts and questions he could scarcely keep his mind on his work. That was the problem, of course—Hornblende’s nephews and the rest of the men needed his full supervision. Funderlings always had a difficult time working so close to the royal family’s residence and graves—superstition and resentment were never far away—but this growing proximity to the Funderlings’ own sacred places was even more of a problem. He couldn’t afford to be attending to his work with only half his usual attention.

  “That we want to go before the Guild Council,” said Mica’s brother Talc. He was the older and more levelheaded of the two. “We want to be heard.”

  “Heard, that’s what you young people always want—to be heard! And what is it you want to be heard about? That you’re feeling mistreated. That you have to work too hard. That what you’re given to do isn’t fair or kind or . . . or something.” Chert took another long breath. “Do you think your uncle or I ever got to ask so many questions? We took the work we were given to do and were grateful for it.” Because his own apprenticeship had been in the last days of the Gray Companies, Chert remembered but did not say—because the big folk were frightene
d in those years and there had not been much work even for skilled Funderling craftsmen. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, had left their ancestral home under Southmarch in search of labor and had never returned, settling in spots all over the middle and south of Eion where the big folk had previously had to do their own stonework. But during Chert’s own lifetime things had changed: even small cities now built great temples and underground baths, not to mention countless funeral vaults for rich merchants and clerics, and most of the Southmarch Funderlings found themselves in demand right here at home in the March Kingdoms.

  Talc shook his head. He was stubborn, but he was also smart—the worst kind of shirker, Chert thought. Or was he a shirker at all? Chert suddenly felt empty and tired, like a rock face with the seam of valuable stone chiseled out of it. Maybe they feel some of the same things I do. What did the tiny queen say? “Because we of the high places are frightened, and not just for ourselves. “ I am frightened myself, but it is because of things I have seen, felt . . .

  He did his best to clear his head of all the jibber-jabber. “Very well. I shall ask the Guild to grant you a hearing, if you will get on and finish this day’s work. There is shoring and bracing to do in the new tunnels, if you are not too frightened to work alongside your fellows there.”

  Hornblende’s nephews were still grumbling as they walked away, but there was a jauntiness to their step that suggested they secretly felt they had won a victory. It made Chert feel tired all over again.

  Thank the Old Ones that Chaven has come back. I will go see him when the men stop to eat Tins time, though, I will go in by the front door.

  As he made his way through the twisting byways of the inner keep, ignoring the people who felt that it was acceptable to stare at a Funderling simply because he was a Funderling, Chert was grateful that the boy Flint was spending the day with Opal at the market. She had accepted Chert’s astonishing report of meeting the Rooftoppers with a complacency that was almost more dumbfounding than the Rooftoppers themselves.

  “Of course there are more things under the stones and stars than we will ever know,” she had told her husband. “The boy is a burning spark—you can just see it! He’ll do wonderful things in this world. And I always believed there truly were Rooftoppers, anyway.”

  He wondered now if it had been some kind of intentional ignorance His wife was a clever woman—surely she couldn’t think this was the ordinary way of life Was she afraid of what these many new things portended— Flint himself, the Shadowline, this news of fabled creatures hiding in the roofs who talked of coming disaster—and so she covered it all in a blanket of the familiar’

  Chert realized he had shared very little of his own fear with Opal. A part of him wanted to continue that way, protecting her, which felt like his rightful duty. Another part realized that such a duty could become very lonely.

  It was not the young man Toby who opened the door at the Observatory House but the physician’s old, long-whiskered manservant, Harry. He seemed flustered, even nervous, and for a moment Chert feared that Harry’s master might be ill.

  “I’ll tell him you’re here,” the old man said, leaving Chert to wait in the front hall. A shrine to Zona with lit candles was set there, which struck Chert as odd—surely if the court physician were going to have a shrine to the gods of the big people, shouldn’t it be a Tngonate altar? Or perhaps to Kupilas, the god of healing? Then again, he had never been able to make much sense out of the big folk and their baskets full of gods.

  Harry came back, his expression still unsettled, and beckoned Chert down the corridor toward the chambers in which Chaven conducted his experiments. Perhaps that explained the manservant’s behavior; his master was doing something that he thought was dangerous.

  To his surprise, Chert found when he stepped into the dark room with its long, high table piled with books and unfamiliar equipment—measuring devices, lenses, things for grinding and mixing substances, bottles and jars, and candles on seemingly every one of the very few empty surfaces—that Chaven was not alone.

  I have seen this young fellow before . . . he thought for a puzzled moment.

  The red-haired youth looked up as the door closed behind Chert. “It’s a Funderling!”

  Chaven turned, and smiled at Chert. “You say that as though it were a surprise, Highness. Yet I imagine you have noticed that everyone in this room is aware that my friend Chert is a Funderling.”

  The boy frowned. He was dressed from head to foot in black—shoes, hose, doublet, even his soft hat. Chert knew who he was now, and tried to keep the astonishment off his face as the boy complained, “You are mocking me, Chaven.”

  “A little, Highness.” He turned to Chert. “This is one of our regents, Prince Barrick. Prince Barrick, this is my friend Chert of the Blue Quartz family, a very good man. He has recently done your family the helpful deed in a sad time of hurrying the construction of your brother’s tomb.”

  Barrick flinched a little, but to his credit, smiled at the new arrival. “That was kindly done.”

  Chert did not quite know what to do. He made a bow as best he could. “It was the least we could offer, Highness. Your brother was well-loved among my people.” Most of my people, he amended silently Well, a decent proportion.

  “And what brings you to see me today, good Chert?” asked Chaven. He seemed in an expansive mood—strangely so for someone who had been out viewing the sick and the dying.

  How can I talk about the things I have seen in front of the prince regent? Chert wondered. He could not help contemplating the urge to hide anything unusual from those with more power. There was also an opposing impulse that was nearly as strong, the desire to pass any strange situation on to someone else. I am more the type who wishes to know what I am doing first, Chert decided. And certainly I am not going to blurt out this mishmash of fears and suspicions and old-tales-come-to-life in front of one of the royal family.

  “I wished only to hear of your journeying,” he said out loud, then reallzed he did not want to wait days more before sharing his concerns with the physician. “And perhaps talk a little more of that matter we discussed last time . . .”

  Prince Barrick rose from the stool on which he had been perched off-balance and almost tipping over, Chert realized, like any ordinary young man. “I will not keep you, then,” he told the physician. The prince spoke lightly, but Chert thought he heard disappointment and something else in the boy’s words—anger? Worry? “But I would speak to you again. Tomorrow, perhaps?”

  “Of course, Highness, I am at your service always. In the meantime, perhaps a glass of fortified wine before bed would help a bit. And please remember what I said. Things always look different when night is on the world. Let me escort you to the door.”

  Barrick rolled his eyes. “My guards are in the kitchen bothering your housekeeper and her daughter. Since Kendrick was killed, I cannot go anywhere without bumping elbows with men in armor. It was all I could do to convince them I did not want them in the room with me here.” He waved his good hand. “I will find my own way out. Perhaps I can sneak past the kitchen and have an hour to myself before they know I’m gone.”

  “Don’t do that, Highness!” Chaven’s voice was hearty, even cheerful, but there was an edge to it. “People are frightened. If you disappear, even for a short time, some of those guardsmen will suffer.”

  Barrick scowled, then laughed a little. “I suppose you’re right. I’ll go and give them some warning before I run for it.” He nodded in a distracted way toward Chert as he left.

  “The Rooftoppers, eh?” Chaven took off the spectacles perched on his nose and wiped them on the cuff of his robe—a robe surprisingly stained considering he had worn it while receiving royalty—then put them back on and gave Chert a shrewd look. “It is very unusual news, this, but I confess that there are many you could tell it to who would be more surprised than me.”

  “You already knew?”

  “No—or at least I have never seen them, let alone met their que
en in such an unusual audience. But I have encountered . . . signs over the years that suggested to me that the Rooftoppers might be more than fable.”

  “But what does it mean? All this talk of shadows and the coming storm? Is it because the Shadowline is moving? There is talk back home in Quarry Square that something came across the Shadowline in the hills to the west and took an entire caravan.”

  “For once, the talk is right,” said Chaven, and quickly told his guest the merchant Raemon Beck’s story. “Even now the prince and princess have sent a company of soldiers to the place it happened.”

  Chert shook his head. “I cannot believe it—I am more than ever certain that the old tales are coming to hfe. It is a curse to live in such times.”