by Tad Williams
Still, he couldn’t help wishing the gods would do something about the war that had brought so many frightened souls into the castle that Tin-wright now found himself sharing his bed in shifts again, just as in his days at the Quiller’s Mint. For a moment he felt a twinge of real fear.
It could not be that the gods have some plan to trick me, could it? That they have brought me to this high estate only to let me die at the hands of warlocks and fames . . . ? He shook his head. The gloomy day had put foul thoughts in his mind. Briony Eddon herself elevated me, defends me. She recognizes my art and has brought me under her mantle. And everyone knows this castle will never be taken by siege—the ocean will defend it just as the princess regent protects me.
Dark thoughts banished,Tinwright took a long swallow of the wine and then passed the heavy jug to Puzzle, who had to hold it with both hands, trembling with the effort as he lifted it to his lips. The thin jester swayed a little, like a sapling.
“It’s a good thing you’re holding that,” Tinwnght told him. “The wind is growing fierce.”
“Good, that.” The old man wiped his lips. “Wine, I mean. Warms a man up. Now, sir, I did not call you up here merely to admire the view, although it is very fine. I need your help.”
Tinwright raised an eyebrow. “My help?”
“You are a poet, sir, are you not? Winter’s Eve is almost upon us. There will be a feast, of course. I must entertain the princess regent and the others. The good old duchess will be there.” He smiled for a moment, lost in some memory. “She likes my jests. And the other great and good—all will be gathered together. I must have something special for them.”
Tinwright was watching the bay again. A small boat had capsized; a family was in the choppy water. It all seemed very distant, but still Tinwright was glad to see that a number of other boats, mostly Skimmer crafts, were moving toward the place. A Skimmer man, one long arm still holding the tiller of his tiny sailboat, reached out and pulled what looked like a small child out of the gray-green water. “Sorry,” Tinwright said. “I don’t understand.”
“A song, man, a song!”The intensity in the jester’s voice was such that Matty Tinwright turned away from the rescue. Puzzle’s lined face seemed lit from within, full of glee. “You must write something clever!”
How much wine has the old fellow drunk? “You want me to write a song for you?”
Puzzle shook his head. “I will write the tune. I was much known for it in my younger days. For my voice, too.” His face sagged. “Never grow old. Do you hear me? Never grow old.”
In truth, Tinwright could not quite imagine such a thing, although he knew it lay in the distance somewhere, just as he had been told there was another continent far to the south, a place he had never seen and thought of not at all except to borrow the occasional metaphor set there—”dusky and sweet as a Xandian grape”—that he had heard used by other poets. Old age was like that to him as well. “What kind of song do you wish to sing?”
“Nothing to make people laugh.These are not the times for levity.” The old man nodded, as if being unfunny was for him a careful decision instead of the helpless tragedy of his life’s work. “Something heroic and light-hearted. Some tale of Silas or one of the other Lander’s Hall knights might do. Perhaps. The Ever-Wounded Maid—that takes place at a Winter’s Eve feast, after all.”
Tinwright considered it. There was no obvious value in the favor: Puzzle, despite his reminiscences, was no closer to the heart of power in Southmarch these days than Tinwright himself. Then again, what if the king did return? Odder things had happened.
Also—and it took Tinwright a moment to understand this, so unusual was the impulse—he liked the old man and would enjoy doing him a favor. After all, the gods knew that Puzzle had not been blessed with the natural gifts of art, as Matt Tinwright had in his own calling.
“Very well,” he said. “But you have not given me much time.”
Puzzle beamed. “You are a stout fellow, Tinwright. Truly, you are a friend. It need not be overlong—the attention of the court tends to wander by the time the meal is over and they have been well into the wine. Ah, thank you. This calls for another drink.” He heaved up the jug for a healthy swallow, then passed it to Tinwright, who almost dropped it, his attention again on the water.
“The Skimmers have saved that family,” he noted. “May the gods bite other gods, look at them! Half-naked in this cold? I will never understand Skimmers. They must have blubberous hide like a seal.”
“It is cold,”said Puzzle. “We should go down.” He squinted into the distance. “Look, you cannot even see Landsend for the fog. And it has come down out of the hills, too, and all across the downs. It will cover the city soon.” He wrapped his thin arms around himself. “Shadow-weather, we used to call it.” He turned suddenly to Tinwnght. “You do not think it has anything to do with the Twilight People, do you?"
Tinwright looked at the thick mists crawling down from the tops of the nearby hills, combs of white that mirrored the wind-slapped waves of the bay. “This is a spit of land between the bay and the ocean. There are always fogs here.”
“Perhaps.” Puzzle nodded. “Yes, of course, you are right. We older folk, when the cold gets into our bones, it makes us think of.” He wiped his eyes the wind had made them water. “Let us go down. There will be a fire in the kitchen and we can finish the jug and talk about my Winter’s Eve song.”
*
“Who is your master?" Chert asked.
The girl Willow suddenly looked shy, the first thing she had done that seemed in keeping with her age and appearance. “I do not know his name . . . but I know his voice.”
He shook his head. “Look, child, I don’t know you or what brings you here. It could be that at some other time I would go with you, if only to find out what sort of strangeness this is, but I have just returned from a journey beneath the earth that would make the Lord of that would make Kernios himself fall down and nap for a week. Our boy is in the other room, sick, perhaps dying. My wife has been terrified for us both. I cannot go with you to see your master, especially when you cannot even name him.”
For a long moment she faced him, narrow face solemn, as though the words he had spoken had not yet reached her ears. Her heavy-lidded eyes fell shut. When she opened them, she said, “Do you have the mirror?"
“The what?”
“The mirror. My master says that if you cannot come yourself, you must send the mirror with me.” She reached out her hand, guileless and direct as a girl half her age demanding a sweet. Even in his startlement, Chert couldn’t help wondering about her. She was tall even for one of the big folk, and pretty enough, but even though she was washed and her frock was clean, if plain, there was something offhand and bedraggled about her, as though she had dressed herself in the dark.
“Your master wants the mirror?" Without thought Chert put his hand into the pocket of his tattered, sweat-stained shirt, closed it on the smooth, cool thing. Too late he realized he had given away that he had it, but the girl was not even looking at him. She stood, palm still extended, staring into the middle distance as though looking right through the wall of the house.
“He says that each moment that goes by brings Old Night closer,” she said.
Chert was startled to hear Chaven’s words, Chaven’s terrible warning, coming from the mouth of this moonstruck child. He groaned.
“I must tell my wife,” he said at last.
Few folk were still on the streets of Funderling Town now that the lamps had been lowered for evening, but those who were out watched Chert with surprise. Most had already heard about the bizarre little parade that had signaled his return from the depths, but even that could not have prepared them for this sight Chert Blue Quartz, only just finished one set of-wild adventures, glumly following one of the big folk back out of town as though walking to his own execution. And in truth, his thoughts were nearly that heavy.
Opal didn’t even shout, he thought as he followed the g
irl toward the town gates. I could have borne it if she had shouted at me, called me names. I can scarcely believe I am going out again myself. But to see her turn her back on me, with nothing more than, “You do what you must.” Is it the child? Has she found something she cares for more than me?
Or perhaps she’s just like you, old fool, a part of him suggested. Perhaps with the boy so still and deathly she’s got enough under her pick that she doesn’t have time for something she doesn’t understand. Not that you understand it either.
Music drifted out of the guildhall as he passed, the voices of men and boys lifted in song. The men’s choir was practicing for year’s end, the timeless songs of their people shared between them like a meal. Schist the chorister would be pacing back and forth, listening, frowning, absently wagging one hand to show the rhythm. For the singers all was ordinary tonight, even the threat of war and tales of Cherts weird adventures largely a diversion. The Funderlings outlasted wars, or at least they always had builders, diggers, miners, they were too valuable to kill and too hard to eatth in their serpentine retreats even if someone wished to kill them We stone folk stay close to the ground, his father used to say. The view ts not so proud, but we’re harder to knock down.
Would they outlast Old Night, too, if it came?
Why has my life been broken into pieces? Chert wondered. Why have I been singled out?
To his growing amazement, the girl led him into the very heart of the castle. A crush of people surrounded the Raven’s Gate, guards arguing with a variety of petitioners, but one of them recognized her and let her through, although he cast a mistrustful eye over Chert before allowing the Funderling to follow her into the inner keep. Willow did not speak to anyone, but led him through open spaces, gardens, and covered walkways until even his fine sense of direction was confused. The sun had set and the air was bitingly cold Chert was glad that he had brought his warm coat, although it had been hard to believe he would need it when he left, so much was he still remembering the heat of the depths. It made him a little sad that Opal had not reminded him to take it as she usually did, but he told himself that even his all-seeing, all-knowing wife couldn’t remember everything, especially in the midst of such a strange day.
As he finally pulled on the coat, Willow led him through a gate and into an arbored garden lit by a few torches in stands Chert did not know what garden it was, and he certainly didn’t recognize the man waiting on a low bench. He had half-suspected he would find Chaven on the other side of this mysterious summons and it was hard to fight a feeling of disappointment bordering on real fear to discover this stranger instead.
The man turned his face toward them as they approached, his eyes seemed as disturbingly incurious as the girl’s. He was almost Chaven’s opposite, younger than the physician and much thinner, with hair close-cropped in an awkward way that looked as if he had done it himself with a knife, and without looking.
Perhaps that’s why he needs the mirror, Chert thought, but he was not amusing anyone today, least of all himself. “You sent for me,” he said aloud, as firmly as he could manage. “As though you were my master and not just the girl’s. But you are not, so tell me your business.”
“Did you bring the mirror?” The man’s voice was slow and quiet.
“You will answer my questions first. Who are you and what do you want?”
“Who am I?” The stranger said it slowly, as though it were an unexpected question. “Here, in this place, I am called Gil. I think I have another name . . . but I cannot remember it.”
Chert felt a quiver of panic move down his backbone. The man had the detachment of the mad, as calm as Chert’s old grandfather had been in his last years, sitting beside the fire in his house like a lizard in the sun, barely moving at all from unseen dawn to day’s end.
“I don’t know what that nonsense means, but I know you have called me out of my home at a time when my family has great need of me. I will ask you again—what do you want?”
“To prevent the destruction of two races. To put off the finality of the Great Defeat a little longer, even if it cannot forever be averted.” The one named Gil nodded slowly, as if he only now understood his own words. For the first time, he smiled—a thin, ghostly thing. “Is that not enough?”
“I have no idea what you mean, what these things are you speak about.” Chert wanted badly to turn around and walk, even run, until stone was above him once more. Clouds hung overhead, night clouds so thick that he couldn’t see the moon or stars, but it was still nothing like being in his own place, among his own people and his own homely things.
“Neither do I,” said Gil. “But I am given to understand a little, and that little is this—you must give me the mirror. Then your work is done.”
Chert almost clutched at the mirror again, even though neither the strange man nor the girl looked like much of a threat to take it away from him. Still, they were twice his height . . . Just let them try, he thought Just let them try to get the thing my son almost died for . And then he realized for the first time what he had been thinking in a wordless way for some time; the mirror was the answer. The mirror was what had taken Flint down into the depths of the Mysteries, and what had almost killed him. “No, I will not give you the mirror—if I even had such a thing.”
“You have it,” Gil said mildly. “I can feel it. And it is not yours to keep.”
“It is my son’s!”
Gil shook his head. “I think not, although that is somewhat dark to me. But it doesn’t matter. You have it now. If you give it to me, you may go home and never think of it again.”
“I will not give it to you.”
“Then you must come with me,” the strange man said. “The hour is almost upon us. The mirror must be carried to her. It will not prevent Old Night and the destruction of all, but it may gain a little time.”
“What does this mean? What are you talking about? Carried to her? Who in the name of the Earth Elders is ‘her’?”
“She is called Yasammez,” the stranger told him. “She is one of the oldest. She is death, and she has been loosed on your kind at last.”
*
The afternoon sun was beginning to settle behind the hills. From where they sat on a rocky hilltop prominence, looking southeast toward the castle, although it was still too far away to see, the grass was a damp, rich green and the sky was marbled with sunlight and cloud. In all ways it would have seemed a crisp, cool day at the turning of winter had it not been for the clot of fog rolling across the land below them, obscuring all but the highest slopes of the downs as it reached toward Southmarch.
“It must be them,” said Tyne Aldritch, and spat. “You said that it came down from the Shadowline,Vansen, a fog like that. You said they traveled under it like a cloak.”
The captain of the guard stirred. His face was pinched, worried. “That is what the merchant’s nephew told us, the one whose caravan was attacked. When my men and I stumbled across the boundary, there was no fog. But, yes, I think it’s likely our enemies are in that murk.”
Barrick was finding it hard to do anything at this moment except stay upright in his saddle They had driven the army far and fast already today, and even though he was mounted, he was astonishingly weary and his bad arm ached as though someone had pushed a dagger between the bones of his wrist Not for the first time today he wished he had kept his mouth closed and stayed at home.
But if we don’t stop them, it will only be a different sort of death for those who remained behind in Southmarch. All during the day today the memory of the pale faces of the shadow-things, the dead but still terrifying eyes, had troubled him. He had not eaten. He could not imagine putting anything in his stomach except water.
“Are our scouts fast enough to beat them to the city?” asked Lord Fiddicks. “If we can get Brone’s garrison out, we can catch them as between hammer and anvil.”
“Our scouts might, but I think we should not trust to them alone,” said Earl Tyne. “Ah, but we have pigeons, don�
��t we? We will send messages that way. A bird will go faster than any man, especially if that man is riding a tired horse.”
Ferras Vansen cleared his throat. Oddly, he looked at Barrick for permission to speak. Despite his weariness and misery, Barrick was amused that the world of title and privilege should still exist after the morning’s debacle, but he nodded.
“It is just . . .” Vansen began. “My lords, it seems to me that we cannot wait.”
