by Tad Williams
“Highness, Princess Briony, lovely and serene and wise, it is a pleasure beyond words to see you. And look, you are robed for battle, as is fitting for a warrior queen.” He leaned in close for a conspiratorial whisper. “I have heard that our land is threatened, glorious princess—that the army is being mustered. Would that I were one who could meetly raise a sword as your champion, but my own war must be fought with stirring songs and odes, inducers of brave deeds which I will construct for the good of crown and country!”
He was not at all bad to look at—he was in fact quite handsome, which was likely one of the reasons Barrick disliked him—but she was far too impatient for even this harmless nonsense today. “Do you want to go with the army so you can write poems about the battlefield, Master Tinwright? You have my permission. Now, if you will excuse me . . .”
He seemed to be swallowing something the size of a shuttlecock. “Go with . . . ?”
“The army, yes. You may. Now if that was all . . .”
“But I . . .” He seemed dazed, as though the possibility that he might be directed to join the army of Southmarch had never occurred to him. In truth, Briony was mostly being spiteful—she did not actually wish to saddle any commander with both her brother and this idiot poetaster. “But I did not come to ask .” Tinwright swallowed again. It was not getting easier for him. “In truth I came to you, Highness, because Gil wishes an audience with you.”
“Gil?”
“The potboy, Mistress. Surely you have not forgotten already, since it was his errand that first brought me to your attention.”
She remembered now, the thin man with the strange, calmly mad eyes. “The one who has dreams—he wishes to speak to me?”
Tinwright nodded eagerly. “Yes, Highness. I was visiting him in the stronghold—the poor man scarcely sees anyone, he is almost a prisoner— and he asked me specially to speak to you. He says that he has something important to tell you of what he called ‘the upcoming struggle.’ ” For a moment Tinwright’s forehead wrinkled. “I was surprised to hear him use such a term, to be honest, Mistresss, since he is not at all educated.”
Briony shook her head as if to clear it, a bit overwhelmed by the poet’s swift and highly inflected speech. He was a popinjay in more than just his cheapstreet finery. “Gil the potboy wants to talk to me about the upcoming struggle? He must have heard about it from the guards in the stronghold.” The stronghold held another prisoner, she could not help remembering. A moment of dislocation washed over her, something approaching real panic. Shaso dan-Heza was the one who should be commanding both this war party and the defense of the castle that might come later. Had someone anticipated just that? Had he been made to look guilty of Kendrick’s murder for just that reason?
“Yes, Highness,” Tinwright confirmed. “Doubtless that was where he heard of it. In any case, that is the message I was asked to give you. Now, about this riding off with the soldiers . . .”
“I already gave you my permission,” she said, then turned and headed off at a fast walk toward Sister Utta’s room. Behind her she could hear her guards snarling as they struggled to push past Matty Tinwright, who seemed to be following her.
“But, Highness . . .!”
She turned. “The potboy—he gave you a gold dolphin to write that letter, did he not?”
“Y-yes . . .”
“So where did a potboy get a thick, shiny gold piece?” She saw that Tinwright obviously had no answer to that and turned away again.
“I don’t know. But, Highness, about what you said . . . the army . . . !”
Her mind was too full. She scarcely even heard him.
*
“We do not often go deeper than the temple,” Chert explained to his small passenger as they made their way down the twisting slope known as the Cascade Stair. The curve of the wide spiral, at its uppermost reaches wider in circumference than Funderling Town itself, was beginning to tighten, and the air was noticeably warmer. A seam of white quartz in the limestone directly above them seemed to undulate back and forth above their heads like a snake as Chert descended. They had left the last of the Funderling wall lamps behind, Chert was glad he had brought coral from the Salt Pool. “I think the acolytes come down this way to make offerings, especially on festival days, and of course all of us come here for the ceremonies when we reach manhood or womanhood.” Even with all his worries he couldn’t help wondering how many young ones the acolytes would take down into the depths this year. Chert would know them all, of course—Funderling Town was a small, clannish community and there were never more than a couple of dozen who had reached the proper age on the night the Mysteries were formally celebrated. As he walked, he told Beetledown some memories from his own initiation into adulthood, so many years ago now—the giddiness brought on by fasting, the strange shadows and voices, and most frightening and exhilarating of all, that brief glimpse of the Shining Man that the young Chert had not been entirely certain was real. In fact, much of the experience now seemed like a dream.
“Shining Man?” asked Beetledown.
Chert shook his head. “Forget I said it. The others will already think it bad enough I bring you to these sacred places.”
As they stepped down from the Cascade Stair and into a natural cavern full of tall, hourglass-shaped columns, Chert walked forward until they stood in front of the one unnatural thing in the chamber. It was a wall even larger than the Silk Door, with five big arched doorways in it, each one a black hole into which the coral-light could not reach.
“Five?” said Beetledown. “Have thy people naught better to do than dig tunnels side by side?"
Chert was still keeping his voice low, although the unlit lamps in these chambers suggested that if the acolytes had been down today they had already left. “That is more to do with the weight of stone and less to do with the number of tunnels. If you cut one tunnel it makes an arch in the fabric of the living stone above it—I cannot think of the words to explain it, since we use an old Funderling word, dh’yok, to describe such a thing.That one arch will be a small one, and eventually the stone above it will crush the tunnel closed again.”
“Wind from the Peak!” swore Beetledown, scrambling in from the point of Chert’s shoulder to the presumably greater protection next to the Funderling’s head, making Chert’s neck itch and tickle in the process. “The stone crushes un?"
“Even that doesn’t happen right away, never fear. But when you make several tunnels beside each other, the dh’yok, the . . . arch in the stone is much bigger and stronger, and even when the weight of the stone above starts to collapse it at last, it takes the outer tunnels first, giving us plenty of warning to shore up the inside tunnels and eventually to stop using them altogether.”
“You mean, someday mountain will just crush all down? All thy building? All thy digging?” He sounded almost more outraged on the Funderlings’ behalf than fearful of the danger.
Chert laughed a soft laugh. “Someday. But that’s a long time—that’s stone time, as we call it. Unless the gods take it into their minds to send an earthshaking—a far stronger one than we’ve ever had before—even these outside tunnels will still be standing when the grandchildren of the men and women joining the Guilds today are brought down to see . . . brought down for their coming-of-age.”
His explanation didn’t seem to mollify Beetledown all that much, although the little man was reassured when Chert chose the middle tunnel, presumably the safest, to continue their journey, and Chert didn’t share the less inspiring truth with him—that nobody ever used any of the other tunnels anyway, since they existed purely to support the passage through which he and the Rooftopper were descending to the next level.
“But why build tunnels here at all?” Beetledown asked suddenly, perhaps to break the silence in the close-quartered passage, whose abstract carvings seemed just as weirdly unsettling to Chert now as they had on that long-ago night of his initiation, and which must seem even more so to a stranger like the tiny man.”All el
se down here in deeps be touched by no hand.”
Again he was struck by the sharpness of the little man’s wits and his keen eye for details in an unfamiliar place. “A good question, that.” But Chert was beginning to feel the power of the place, the importance and the strangeness of it, and did not feel much like talking. His people didn’t enter the Mysteries lightly, and even though he would walk into the smoking heart of J’ezh’kral Pit itself to find the boy and save his Opal from feeling so miserable, he could not be happy about his responsibility for this comparative parade of outsiders, first Flint and now Beetledown, both of whom were in the ceremonied depths because of Chert Blue Quartz and no other.
“I don’t want to tell the whole story now. Perhaps it will be enough to say that our ancestors came to realize that there was another set of caverns they could not reach, and that they cut these tunnels to reach down from the caverns we knew—those in which we have been traveling until now— into these deeper and more unfamiliar spaces.”
It was not enough, of course—it barely explained anything, let alone the profound revelations at the heart of the Mysteries, but there was only so much that could be put into words. Or that should even be put into words at all.
*
The idea of needing to talk to the potboy had upset her, but not because of the potboy himself. Even if the fellow was some kind of dream-scryer, even if he could do to her what he did to Barrick, calling up and naming the things that haunted her sleep, what Briony feared was no secret from anyone who had any wits at all. She feared that she would lose her brother and father, what remained of her family. She feared that she would fail Southmarch and the March Kingdoms, that in this time of growing danger, with Olin imprisoned and her brother strange and often ill, she would be the last of the Eddons to wield power.
No. I will not let that happen, she swore to herself as she strode along the Lesser Hall toward the residence. I will be ruthless if it is needed. I will bum down all the forests that lie beyond the Shadowline, throw every Tolly into chains. And if Shaso truly is a murderer, I will drag him to the headsman’s block myself to save our kingdom.
This was what had upset her, of course, the thought of her father’s trusted adviser still locked up in the stronghold during such times. If she went to see the potboy Gil in his makeshift accommodations there, could she avoid speaking to Shaso? She didn’t even want to see him: she was not certain of his guilt and never had been, despite all the signs, but much of the autumn had passed with no change in the circumstances and she and Barrick couldn’t avoid passing judgment on him forever. If he had murdered the reigning prince, he must himself be put to death. Still, Briony knew she didn’t really understand what had happened that fatal night, and the idea of executing one of her father’s closest advisers—a man who also, for all his sour temper and rigidity had been almost another parent to her— was very disturbing. No, it was terrifying.
Her guards had caught up to her again as she reached the high-walled Rose Garden, where the Lesser Hall became a covered walkway that ran the garden’s length. It was sometimes called the Traitor’s Garden, because an angry noble had lain in wait there to murder one of Briony’s royal ancestors, Kellick the Second. The assassin had failed and his head had wound up on the Basilisk Gate, the tattered remains of his quartered body shared out over the entrances of the cardinal towers. Something of this legend had stuck to the garden, and it was not her favorite place, even in spring. Now the roses were long gone, their thorny branches so thick on the walls that it looked as though they were holding up the ancient bricks rather than the other way around.
Caught up in her thoughts, Briony barely noticed her guards until one of them sneezed and mumbled a quiet prayer. She suddenly thought, What am I doing? Why should I go down to the stronghold? I am the queen, almost— the princess regent. I will have the potboy brought to one of the council chambers and speak to him there. There is no need for me to go down there at all. The relief that washed over her brought a little shame with it; this would be another day she did not need to think too much about Shaso dan-Heza. . . .
She was startled by a pressure on either side as the two guards suddenly stepped in close to her like a pair of dogs heading a straying sheep. She was about to snap at them—Briony Eddon would not be anyone’s lamb—when she saw a man and a woman rise from a bench in the late-autumn sun and walk toward her. It took her a moment to recognize the first of the pair before they joined her in the shade of the walkway: she had not seen Hendon Tolly for almost a year.
“Your Highness,” he said, sketching a not very convincing bow. The youngest Tolly brother was still thin as a racing dog, all length and tendon. His dark hair had been cut high above his ears in the current Syan-nese style and he even wore a little tuft of beard on his chin, with his short gown in golden satin and his parti-colored hose and velvet trim he looked every inch a prince of one of the more fashion-conscious southern courts. Briony thought it was strange that he could look both so much like his brother Gailon in the face and so little like him in all else— dark for fair, slim for well-muscled, foppish for stolid, as though this were Gailon himself dressed up for some outrageous, impossible Midsummer Festival mummery.
“Ah, I see by your attire we have caught you at a bad time, Princess Briony,” Hendon said with an edge of superiority in his voice that was meant to make her bristle, and did. “You have apparently been engaged in something . . . strenuous.”
She barely resisted the temptation to look down at what she had worn to practice at the armory. For the first time in longer than she could remember she wished she were dressed properly, in the full panoply of her position.
“Oh, but there are no bad times for relatives,” was what she said, as sweetly as she could, “and family is, of course permitted a certain informality of both dress and speech. But even among family, one can go too far.” She smiled, with teeth showing. “You will, of course, forgive me for meeting you while dressed this way, dear cousin.”
“Oh, Highness, the fault is all ours. My sister-in-law was so anxious to meet you that I took a chance we might find you out and about This is Elan M’Cory, the sister of my brother Caradon’s wife.”
The girl made an elaborate courtesy. “Your Highness.”
“We were introduced at your sisters wedding, I think.” Briony was furious that she should be forced to stand here in her sweaty clothes, but Hendon Tolly was playing a deliberate game and she would not let him see her irritation. She concentrated instead on the young woman, who was roughly her own age and pretty in a translucent, long-boned way. Unlike her brother-in-law, Elan kept her eyes cast down and offered little in the way of reply to Briony’s equally perfunctory questions.
“I really must go,” Briony announced at last. “There is much to do. Lord Tolly, you and I must speak on important matters. Will this evening suit you? And of course you will join us for supper, I hope. We missed your company last night.”
“Tired from the journey,” he said. “And with worry for my missing brother, of course. Doubtless, fears for Duke Gailon have made things difficult for you, too, Highness.”
“It seems there is a conspiracy to make things difficult for me, Lord Tolly, and your brother’s sudden absence is certainly one of them. You might also have heard that my brother Kendrick died.”
He raised an eyebrow at this broad stroke. “But of course, Highness, of course! I was devastated when I heard the news, but I was traveling in northern Syan at the time, and since Gailon was actually here to represent the family at the funeral.
“Yes, certainly.” She suddenly wondered what had really brought Hendon here now, of all times. The two-or-three-day ride from Summerfield Court seemed a bit of a long distance to come simply to cause trouble. Briony couldn’t forget Brone s spy and his warnings that the Autarch had been in touch with theTollys, although she couldn’t quite make sense of it. She did not put treachery beyond them, but it seemed a large step—and a large risk—for a family that was already livin
g a fat and comfortable life. Still, as her father had always said, the prospect of a throne could make people do some very strange things indeed. “Now, as I said, I have much to do I suspect that you will be busy as well. For one thing, you will want to send a message home to your family as soon as you have heard my news.”
He was clearly caught by surprise “News? Have you heard something of Gailon?"
“I fear not. But I have news, nonetheless.”
“You have the advantage of me, Highness What is afoot? Will you make me wait until tonight to find out?"
“I’m surprised you haven’t heard already. We are at war.”
For a moment Hendon Tolly actually blanched—seeing that was worth the humiliation of standing for a quarter of an hour in sweaty clothes. “We . . . We . . .”
