Shadowmarch

by Tad Williams

  “Don’t . . . ! Don’t talk. I want . . .” He sucked in another rough breath. “He opened the door. Father opened the door. He . . . he didn’t recognize me. I don’t think he did, anyway. His eyes . . . ! Briony, his eyes were wild, wild like an animal’s eyes! And his shirt was off and he had scratches on his belly—bleeding. He was bleeding. He took one look at me and then grabbed me, pulled me into the library. He was talking nonsense—I couldn’t understand a word—and he was pulling at me, growling at me. Like an animal! I thought he was going to kill me. I still think it.”

  “Merciful Zoria!” She didn’t know what to believe. The world was upside down. She felt like she had been thrown from Snow’s saddle and all the air had been knocked out of her chest. “Are you . . . could you have dreamed it . . . ?”

  His face was twisted with pain and rage. “Dreamed it? That was the night my arm was crippled. Do you think I dreamed that?”

  “What do you mean? Oh, by all the gods, that was when it happened?”

  “I broke away from him. He chased me. I was trying to get to the door but I kept tripping over books, knocking over piles of them. He had every book in the library on the floor, stacked up like towers, with candlesticks on top of each one. I must have knocked over half a dozen trying to get away—I still don’t know why that wretched tower didn’t burn down that night. I wish it had. I wish it had!” He was breathing hard now, like someone near the end of a race. “I got to the door at last. He kept chasing me, growling and cursing and talking nonsense. He grabbed me at the top of the stairs and tried to pull me back to the library again. I . . . I bit him on the hand and he let go. I fell down the stairs.

  “When I woke up, it was the next day and Chaven was setting the bones of my arm—or trying to. I could barely think from the pain, and from the way my skull had been rattled when I fell. Chaven said that Father had found me at the foot of the steps in the Tower of Summer, which was probably true, that he had carried me to Chaven himself, crying over my injuries, begging him to heal me. That was probably true, too. But Chaven says that Father brought me to him at dawn, which means that I had been left lying there the rest of the night. The story told was that I had come looking for him and had fallen down the stairs in the dark.”

  Briony could barely think. Like Barrick on that night, she was in a waking nightmare. “But . . . Father? Why would he do such a thing to you? Had he . . . was he drunk?” It was hard to imagine her abstemious father drinking himself into that kind of roaring, black mood, but nothing else made sense.

  Barrick was still shaking, but only a little now. He tried to slide out of her arms, but she held on. “No, Briony. He was not drunk. You haven’t heard the rest, although I’m sure you won’t want to believe me.”

  She didn’t want to hear any more, but she was afraid to let Barrick go, afraid that if she did he would somehow fly away like that half-tamed pigeonhawk she had lost when its creance snapped and it had gone spiral-mg out from her, never to return. She tightened her grip so that for a moment they were almost wrestling, rucking the covers around Barrick’s legs until he gave up trying to escape her. “I have always had nightmares,” he said at last, quietly. “Dreamed that there were men watching me, men made of smoke and blood, following me all through the castle, waiting to catch me alone so they could steal me away, or somehow make me one of them. At least, I always believed they were dreams. Now, I’m not so certain. But after that night, I began to have one that’s worse than the others. Always him—his face, but it isn’t his face. It’s a stranger’s face. When he came after me, he looked . . . like a beast.”

  “Oh, my poor Barrick . . .”

  “You may want to be more careful with your sympathies.” His voice was partially muffled by the cushion. He seemed to have grown smaller in her arms, curled into himself. “You remember I was in bed for weeks. Kendrick came to bring me things, you came and played with me every day, or tried to . . .”

  “You were so quiet and pale. It frightened me.”

  “It frightened me, too. And Father came, but he never stayed more than a few moments. Do you know, I might even have believed it had all been a nightmare—that I really had just been sleepwalking and then fell down the steps—except for the way he could not be around me without fidgeting and avoiding my eyes. Then, one day, when I was finally up and limping around the household instead of confined to that cursed bed, he called me into his chambers. ‘You remember, don’t you?’ was the first thing he said. I nodded. I was almost as frightened then as the night it happened. I thought I was the one who had done something terribly wrong, although I wasn’t sure what it was. I half thought he might try to murder me again or have me thrown in the stronghold to rot in a cell. Instead he burst into tears—I swear it’s true. He wrapped his arms around me and pulled me to him and kissed my head, all the time crying so hard that he got my hair wet. He was hurting my arm badly, which was tied up in a sling. Once I stopped being frightened, I hated him. If I could have killed him at that moment, I would have.”

  “Barrick!”

  “You wanted the truth, Briony. This is what it looks like.” He finally wriggled himself free of her. “He told me that he had done a terrible thing and begged my forgiveness. I took him to mean that chasing me so that I fell down the stairs and shattered my arm, crippling myself so that I could never play or ride or draw a bow like the other boys was the terrible thing, but as he clutched me and talked I began to understand that the terrible thing he had done was to sire me in the first place.”

  “What?”

  “Be quiet and listen!” he said fiercely. “It is a madness that Father has. It came on him when he was a young man—first as terrible dreams, later as a restless, monstrously angry spirit that, on the nights when it takes him, grows so strong it cannot be resisted. He has it and one of his uncles had it. It is a family curse. He told me that it had grown so strong in him that although months might go by and it remained absent, on the nights he felt it coming back he could only lock himself away to rage by himself. That was how I had found him.”

  “A family curse . . . ?”

  He showed her a bitter smile. “Fear not. You don’t have it and neither did Kendrick.You are the lucky ones—the yellow-haired ones. Father told me that he had studied the Eddon family histories, and that he had never found any trace of the curse in any of the fair-haired children. Only the gods know why. You are the golden ones, in more ways than one.”

  “But you have . . .” She suddenly understood. Again, it was like being struck a hard blow. “Oh, Barrick, you are afraid you might have this, too?”

  “Might have it? No, Sister, I already do. The dreams started even earlier for me than they did for Father.”

  “You had a fever . . . !”

  “Long before the fever.” He let out a shaky breath. “Although, since then, they have been worse. I wake up in the night cold with sweat, thinking only of killing, of blood. And since the fevers, I . . . I see things, too. Waking, sleeping, it almost makes no difference. I am watched. The house is full of shadows.”

  She was stunned, helpless. She had never felt so distant from him, and for Briony that was a shocking, raw feeling, as though a part of her own body had been torn away. “I hardly know what to say—this is all so strange! But . . . but even if Father has some . . . madness, he still has managed to be a good man, a loving father. Perhaps you are worrying too . . .”

  Again he interrupted her. “A loving father who threw me down the stairs. A loving father who told me he should never have sired me.” His face was stony. “You have not been listening very carefully. It started early in me. My madness won’t be mild, like Father’s—a few days a year when he must shut himself away from the rest of mankind. That is what he meant in the letter, do you see now? That he has not suffered badly from the madness since he has been captive. It is nothing to do with making jokes, he was talking to me about something ugly we both share—our tainted blood. But his will seem mild next to mine. Mine will grow and
grow until you have no choice but to lock me away in a cage like a beast—or to kill me.”

  “Barrick!”

  “Go away, Briony.” He was weeping again, but without much movement this time and with his eyes half shut: the tears came out of some deep, hard place, like water through a cracked stone. “You know what you came to learn. I don’t want to talk anymore.”

  “But I . . . I want to help you.”

  “Then leave me alone.”

  *

  The mists had grown so thick that they all had to travel like blind pilgrims, each one clinging to the one before him and being clung to in turn. Only the girl Willow who led them was not hung between two fellows front and back. She walked more slowly now in the smothering whiteness, but still with purpose, always forward.

  Dab Dawley had hold of Vansen’s cloak. Sound was confused in the mist and it was sometimes hard to hear even words spoken in a loud voice by a man a few yards away, butVansen thought the young guardsman might be whimpering.

  They had slept two times and walked for most of the waking hours between those sleeps, yet still had found no end to the terrible forest. Ferras Vansen did not have the sense they were walking in circles in the aimless way he and Collum Dyer did before, but he was still disheartened that two days’ march had not taken them back to the fields of men.

  I could be that even if we’re not going in circles, we’ve turned the wrong direction. Perhaps I’ve trusted in the girl too much. The moon, after an initial appearance when they were setting out, had been as scarce as the sun. But perhaps we are going in the right direction, only the Shadowline has continued to spread. It was a hard, chill thought. Perhaps all the lands everywhere are now truly under shadow.

  “Are you sure you know where home is?” he whispered to the girl when they were all standing together on a shelf of rock above what sounded like either a quiet stream just beneath them or a very noisy one far below. Whatever the distance stretching beneath them, they were taking no chances; they leaned back against the cliff face side by side as they rested.

  She smiled at him. Her thin, dirty face was weary, but some of the early expression of almost religious ecstasy had worn away, along with some of the fear and confusion.”! will find it. They have just dragged it far away.”

  “Dragged what?”

  Willow shook her head. “Trust in the gods. They see through all the darkness.They see your good works.”

  And my bad ones, Vansen couldn’t help thinking. The two days or however long it had been, struggling step by slow step through the murk, had left him much time to brood on his failures of command. Now that the worst shock of losing most of his company had worn down to a persistent, painful ache, he felt almost as wretched about losing the merchant’s nephew, Raemon Beck. He couldn’t help seeing Beck’s miserable face in his mind’s eye Hie poor fellow was certain something like this would happen— that we would drag him back into shadow, that he would meet his doom here. And it seems he was right. But perhaps Raemon Beck and the other guardsmen were alive, merely lost as he and Dyer had been lost. Perhaps he might even discover them before leaving the shadowlands. It was something to cling to, a hope to make the bleak hours a little less haunting.

  “What’s that?” Dawley said in a sharp whisper, yanking Vansen’s thoughts back to the damp, mist-shrouded hillside where the company was resting.

  “I heard nothing. What was it?”

  “A tapping sound—there it is again! It sounds like . . . like claws clicking on stone.”

  A thought that would make no one any happier, Vansen knew. He himself could not hear it, but Dawley had by far the sharpest ears of any of them. “Let’s move on, then,” Vansen said, doing his best to keep his voice calm. “Willow? We need you to lead us again, girl.”

  “Lead us where, I’m asking?” said Southstead. “Right into the nest of some great cave bear or something like.”

  “None of that,” Dyer told him sharply. They had found something a little like military discipline again, but it was fragile.

  They moved carefully along the narrow trail. Vansen held onto the girl’s tattered shift only lightly, wanting to be able to move his arms quickly if he stumbled and lost his balance. The unknown distance to the side of them began to feel even more frightening as they hurried along. In his imagination, Vansen could almost feel the invisible bottom of the ravine grow deeper, dropping away from them like water running out of a leaky bucket.

  “There’s something there!” shouted Balk, the last in line; his voice seemed to come to them down a long tunnel. “Up there! Behind us!”

  Vansen tightened his grip on the girl’s smock and turned to look back. For a moment he could see it coming along the top of the cliff face behind them, a grotesque, drawn-out shape like a scarecrow going on four legs, but more tattered and less comprehensible, then it reared up to an unbelievable height, stiltlike legs pawing, before the mist folded around it again.

  Terror set his heart rattling in his chest. “Perin save us! Faster, girl!”

  She did her best, but the trail was narrow and untrustworthy. The men behind him were cursing and even sobbing. Gravel slid from beneath Vansen’s feet.

  Now he could hear the thing just above them, clicking and scratching like the armored claws of a crab dragging across the wet rock between tide-pools. The mists had grown thicker. He could barely see the girl moving before him as she climbed a short rise, even though he was still clinging to her hem. A shower of stones fell between them and he looked up to see a dark and indistinct shape loom out of the curtaining fogs only half a dozen yards above. If that was the thing’s head, it was misshapen as the stump of a twisted tree. For a moment he could hear it breathe, a deep, scratchy wheeze, as a scrabbling leg probed down the rock face. Vansen let go of Willow’s garment so he could draw his sword, but the ragged limb stopped short. The thing was still too far above them. It drew back into the mists.

  “Go—quick as you can to open ground!” he told the girl, then turned to shout back to the others. “Let go and draw your swords, but don’t get separated! Dawley, do you have arrows still?” He heard the young guardsman grunt something he could not quite make out. “Try to get a shot if you can see it well enough.”

  Vansen scrambled up the path behind the girl, doing his best to lean in toward the hillface despite every screaming sense telling him to lean back, away from the reaching arms of the thing that stalked just up the slope. Behind him the men had become a disorganized rout, but he did not know what else to do; to make them try to continue walking while holding onto each other and their weapons would be to invite disaster. They needed to find their way to some open space where Dawley’s bow and their swords might save them.

  He staggered and put his foot down on loose soil, then windmilled his arms to keep from tipping out into the misty invisibility behind him. As he regained his footing, another scrabbling noise came from behind him, then a strange wooden creaking and a sudden screech from one of the men—a sound of such naked animal terror that he could not even tell who was making it. He turned, blade held high, to see the huge thing had lunged downward out of the fogs like a spider gliding down a web.The men around it were screaming and hacking away. In the instant it was among them, it still had no semblance or shape of anything he could understand—spindly arms long as tree branches, hanging rags of skin or fur almost like singed parchment. It was a madness, an obscenity. For an instant only he saw in the chaos what seemed to be a sagging hole of a mouth and a single empty black eye, then the huge thing went scuttling backward up the cliff face with a kicking, shrieking bundle clutched in its folding limbs. Beside him, Dawley cursed and wept as he loosed a single arrow at the shape, then it disappeared into the mists again. It had taken Collum Dyer.

  They staggered now in silence, Vansen choked with despair. The thing had caught what it wanted and they did not see it again, but it was as though it had reached down and plucked their hearts away with their comrade. Vansen had known Collum Dyer since he fir
st came to Southmarch. He found his thoughts turning helplessly again and again to that moment, to Dyer’s screams. Once he had to stop and be sick, but there was little in his stomach to vomit out.

  When they finally reached the edge of the cliff path they stopped, gasping for breath as though they had been running at uttermost speed, although they had spent most of the hour since the attack barely at walking pace. Mickael Southstead and Balk were gray with fear; they knelt on the ground, praying, although to what gods Vansen couldn’t guess. The girl Willow was clearly frightened, too, but sat on a stone as patiently as a child being punished.

  Young Dawley stood with his bow still in his hand and his last arrow on the string, tears in his eyes.

  “What was it?” he asked his captain at last.

  Ferras Vansen could only shake his head. “Did you hit it?"

  It took Dawley a moment to reply, as though he had to wait for Vansen’s voice to blow down a long canyon. “Hit it?”

  “You shot at it. I want to know what happened, in case it comes back. Did you hit it?”

  “I wasn’t trying to hit it, Captain.” Dawley wiped at his face with the back of his hand. “I was . . . was trying to kill Collum . before it took him away. But I couldn’t see if . . . if I . . .”