Shadowheart

by Tad Williams

  Ferras Vansen, who had fallen into seemingly endless darkness, undergoes a strange, dreamlike journey through the land of the dead at the side of his deceased father. He escapes at last only to find himself no longer behind the Shadowline, but in Funderling Town underneath Southmarch Castle. CHAVEN the physician, who is hiding from Hendon Tolly, is also with the Funderlings now.

  Far to the south, in Hierosol, Qinnitan is captured by Daikonas Vo, who takes her to the Autarch Sulepis, but the Autarch has already left Hierosol on a ship bound for the obscure northern kingdom of Southmarch. Vo commandeers another ship and sets out after his cruel master.

  The Autarch is not alone on his flagship. Besides his faithful minister PINIMMON VASH, he also has a prisoner—the northern king, OLIN EDDON. And Olin’s ultimate fate, Sulepis informs him, will be to die so that the Autarch can gain the power of the sleeping gods.

  Synopsis of Shadowrise

  The twins, BARRICK EDDON and his sister BRIONY, are both far away from their embattled family home, Southmarch Castle. The usurper HENDON TOLLY still holds Southmarch, which has been besieged for weeks by the Qar, also called the fairies or the Twilight folk. The brunt of the attack has fallen on the Funderlings who live beneath the castle in a near-endless warren of tunnels that stretch deep, deep down into the ground, down to the sacred places the Funderlings call “the Mysteries.”

  Princess Briony is far to the south, a guest of sorts at the court of KING ENANDER of Syan. (She has given up her disguise as a traveling player after they were all arrested by the Syannese king’s guards.) She makes some friends in the court but only one useful ally, the king’s son, PRINCE ENEAS, who seems to think very highly of Briony indeed. She is all the more grateful for his support when she survives a poisoning attempt that kills one of her maids.

  Her brother Barrick is traveling through the twilit fairy lands with an ill-mannered raven named SKURN, on a mission he does not entirely understand. Barrick knows only that before his death the Qar warrior GYIR made him swear he would deliver a magical mirror to the royal court of the fairies—the timeless halls of Qul-na-Qar. But between him and the legendary fairy city lie countless murderous miles of shadowlands, full of miniature dangers like the Tine Fay and stranger creatures like the faceless, murderous Silkins.

  To Skurn’s disgust, Barrick chooses to take refuge from the Silkins on a place called Cursed Hill, and at the top he encounters a trio of strange, apparently ancient creatures who call themselves SLEEPERS. They are renegade members of the Dreamless tribe of Qar, and they declare they know Barrick and want to help him reach Qul-na-Qar, but that he is both too weak and too far from Qul-na-Qar to succeed in reaching it. They perform a magic ceremony that makes him feel stronger and healthier and restores his crippled arm to full health, and then tell him that he must find the mystical gateway to Qul-na-Qar in the city of Sleep, home of the Qar’s enemies (and former relations) the Dreamless.

  It is not only the Qar who have designs on Southmarch. The AUTARCH, the god-king of the southern land of Xis, is bringing many men and ships to conquer the castle, along with Southmarch’s true ruler, the children’s father, KING OLIN, who is his prisoner. The autarch is not at all reticent about what he plans to do, and even seems to enjoy talking about it: he plans to sacrifice Olin and use his blood (which derives in part from the Qar royal family, and thus from a god) as a magical tool to open a portal to the land where the gods lie trapped in sleep, banished there by the very god who is ancestor to both Olin’s family and the Qar—KUPILAS, also known as CROOKED. But it is not dying Kupilas who interests the autarch, but some other, more sinister god whose power the autarch means to steal and take for himself in a ritual on Midsummer’s Day, which is only a matter of days away.

  Olin is not the only prisoner who interests the autarch. A young woman who escaped from him earlier, QINNITAN, has been recaptured by the autarch’s hand-picked hunter, the mercenary DAIKONAS VO. Vo barely misses the autarch’s ship, which has just left for Southmarch in the north, but he commandeers another Xixian vessel and pursues them, looking to give the autarch his prisoner and receive his reward. After several attempts, Qinnitan finally manages to escape from Vo in the wild coastal lands east of Southmarch, but Vo, who is growing increasingly mad, continues to pursue her.

  FERRAS VANSEN, the captain of the Southmarch royal guard, has led the Funderlings in a long and brave resistance against the Qar, but now he learns that the autarch is on his way. Vansen sets off for the Qar camp, determined to make common cause with the fairies or to die trying. Meanwhile, the enigmatic boy FLINT, adopted by the Funderlings CHERT and OPAL, continues to take a mysterious role in events, but sometimes seems as confused by his own actions as everyone else is.

  In Syan, Briony is betrayed and falsely accused of trying to undermine King Enander’s rule. She escapes with the help of her actor friends. Prince Eneas, the king’s heir who wants to aid her, catches up to her and declares he will help her reach her home, and even assist her to retake her throne if he can. With such an ally (and his troops) Briony can finally begin to think about heading home to her family’s stolen kingdom.

  Meanwhile her twin Barrick has finally made his way to the city of Sleep, and after defeating some particularly dreadful guardians he is able to use the magical gateway there to go directly to Qul-na-Qar, although his companions Skurn and the merchant RAEMON BECK enter the gateway with him but do not arrive in Qul-na-Qar. The ancient home of the Qar is all but abandoned (since most are besieging Southmarch with their fierce leader, LADY YASAMMEZ) but the blind king YNNIR and sleeping queen SAQRI and a few servants remain. Ynnir uses the mirror Barrick has brought so far, but its power is not enough to wake the queen.

  The autarch and his prisoner King Olin land in Southmarch. Olin’s home looks deserted: the Qar seem to have given up their siege and left, which means the autarch’s huge army will quickly overcome the castle’s meager defenses and then the autarch will open the doorway to the place where the angry, dispossessed gods are waiting for their revenge.

  In Qul-na-Qar, King Ynnir tells the mortal prince Barrick that the only way Queen Saqri can be woken is if Ynnir gives her the last of his strength. But he cannot do this without finding a caretaker for the FIREFLOWER within him, the wisdom of all the kings of the Qar. (Saqri contains the female version, the wisdom of the fairy queens.) No human has ever taken the Fireflower, but Barrick, like his father, has the blood of the god Kupilas (or Crooked, as the Qar name him) in his veins. Barrick agrees.

  He is almost destroyed by the power of the Fireflower, but Saqri revives even as Ynnir dies. Barrick is left alone in the house of his enemies with a head full of incomprehensible Qar memories.

  Prelude

  He was named after the tualum, small antelope that ran in the dry desert hills. As a girl, his mother had often watched the herd come down to the river to drink, so lean, so bright of eye, so brave; when she first saw her son, she saw all those things in him. “Tulim,” she gasped. “Call him Tulim.” It was duly noted down as he was taken away from her and given to a royal wet nurse.

  The first things the boy remembered were the sunset-colored hangings of the Seclusion where he lived among the women for the earliest years of his life, where kind, sweet-smelling nurses held him, sang to him, and rubbed his tiny brown limbs with expensive unguents. The child’s only moments of sadness came when he was placed back in his cot and another of the monarch’s youngest children was lifted out to be cosseted and caressed in turn. The unfairness of it, that the attention which should have been for him alone was also given to others, burned inside little Tulim like the flame of the lamp he stared at each night before he fell asleep—a flame that he watched so carefully he could sometimes see it in his mind’s eye at midday, so bright that it pushed everything real into shadow.

  When he was scarcely three years old, as a sort of experiment, Tulim drowned one of the other young princes in the bath they shared. He waited until the nurses were turned away to comfort another child who
had been splashed and was crying, then he reached for his brother Kirgaz’s head, shoved it under the blossom-strewn water, and held it down. The three or four other children in the bath were so busy splashing and playing that they didn’t notice.

  It was strange to feel his brother’s desperate struggles and to know that only inches away ordinary things went on without him. People made so much of life, Tulim realized, but he could take it away whenever he chose. He saw the lamp’s flame again in his mind’s eye, but this time it was as though he himself had become the fire, burning so brightly that the rest of creation fell into darkness. It was ecstasy.

  By the time the nurses turned around, Kirgaz was floating lazily, his hair swirling on the surface like seaweed, pale flower petals tangled in it. They screamed and dragged him out, but it was too late to save him. Many princes lived in the Orchard Palace—the autarch had many wives and was a prolific father—so the loss of one was no great tragedy, but both nurses were, of course, immediately executed. Tulim was sad about that. One of them had been in the habit of smuggling him a honey-milk sweet out of the Seclusion’s kitchen each night. Now he would have to go to bed without it.

  Tulim soon grew too old to live in the Seclusion, so he was moved to the Cedar Court, the part of the mighty, sprawling Orchard Palace where the young sons of nobles were raised until manhood in fortunate proximity to the royal sons of Tulim’s father, the glorious god-king Parnad. There for the first time Tulim lived with true men—only the Favored were allowed in the Seclusion—and learned manly things, how to hunt and fight and sing a war-song. With his long-legged good looks and his sharp wits, he also for the first time came to the attention of the men of the Orchard Palace, including, most surprisingly, his own father.

  Most of Parnad’s sons hoped to remain unnoticed by their father. True, one of them would one day become his heir, but the autarch was a vigorous, powerful man in his fifties so that day was far away, and Xixian heirs had a way of suffering accidents. Parnad himself had found a few of his sons too popular with the soldiers or the common people. One such young man had been the sole casualty of a battle with pirates in the western islands. Another had died, purple and choking, after apparently being bitten by a snake in the Yenidos Mountains in midwinter—a most unusual season for snakebites. Thus, none of the other princes felt too jealous when their father noticed Tulim and began to speak to him occasionally.

  “Who was your mother?” Parnad asked him the first time. The autarch was a big man, tall but also broad as an old crocodile. It was strange for Tulim to think that this heavyset man with his thick beard was the source of his own slender limbs. “Ah, yes, I remember her. Like a cat, she was. You have her eyes.”

  Tulim wasn’t sure whether this way of talking meant his mother was no longer alive, but he did not want to ask, which might seem sentimental and womanish. If he had inherited her eyes, though, she must have been exceptional indeed, for that was the thing that people noticed first about Tulim, the strange, golden eyes like holes filled with molten metal. It was one of the reasons he had long known he was not like any of the others—that same bright, all-devouring flame did not burn within his brothers or the other children as it did in him.

  He and his father the autarch had other conversations, although Tulim never said much, and after a while Tulim was taken from the sleeping room he shared with several of the other young princes and given his own room where the autarch could visit him at whatever time of the day or night he thought best without disturbing Tulim’s brothers. Parnad also began to perform various odd cruelties and unwholesome practices on him, all the while explaining to him about the terrifying responsibility of being the Bishakh—the chief of the falcon line that had come out of the desert to trample down the thrones of the world’s cities.

  “The gods hold us dear,” Parnad would explain as he held Tulim’s mouth closed, silencing his cries of pain. “It is given by them that the falcon soars higher than any other—that he can look down on all creation. The very sun itself is only the great falcon’s eye.”

  Tulim could not always make sense of what his father said, but as a whole the lessons, coupled with the pain and other strange feelings, made it clear that the way of the flame and the way of the falcon were more or less the same: Everything belongs to the man who can reach and grasp without fear. That man the gods love.

  Still, although the visits went on for years, Prince Tulim made a vow the first night that he would kill his father one day. It was not so much the pain that had to be revenged as the helplessness—the flame should never be smothered by the shadow of another, not even the autarch himself.

  As he approached the age at which boyhood would be set aside and manhood put on like a new garment, Tulim began to spend time with another grown man, this one much more deferential toward his feelings. It was the man he called Uncle Gorhan, one of the autarch’s older half brothers. Gorhan had been sired by Parnad’s father on a woman of extremely common blood, and so was no threat to take the throne. He had used this sullied nobility to his advantage, becoming one of the autarch’s most trusted councillors, a man of storied wisdom and ingenuity. His attraction to Tulim was both less physical and less metaphysical than that of the boy’s father: he saw in the youth a mind like his own, one that could, with proper training, roam not just beyond the walls of the Orchard Palace or the boundaries of Xis but through all the endless corridors of the gods’ creation. Gorhan it was who taught Tulim to read properly. Not simply to recognize characters printed on vellum or reed paper and glean their sense—all princes learned that—but to read as a way of harnessing new wisdom to one’s own like draft oxen, or adding new ideas to one’s own like soldiers, so that the reader’s power grew ever greater.

  Gorhan introduced Tulim to the works of famous tacticians like Kersus and Hereddin, and historians like the great Pirilab. Tulim learned that the thoughts of men could be saved in books for a thousand years—that the great and learned men of other ages could speak as if to his own ear. Even more important, he learned that the gods and their closest followers could also speak across the great abyss of time and the greater abyss that gaped between earth and Heaven, sharing the secrets of creation itself. In the words of the warrior-poet Hereddin, which Gorhan quoted to him, “He who reaches only for a throne will never grasp the stars.” Tulim understood that and felt that his uncle also must have a wisdom beyond other men, a wisdom only a little less than the gods: Gorhan had clearly sensed that Tulim was like no other, that he was greater even than the blood of his father that rushed through his veins. Gorhan understood that Tulim was a child, not of a man, but of Heaven itself.

  Over the years, as Tulim grew older and his boyish limbs gained the supple sinews of young manhood, his father the autarch lost interest in him, which only confirmed him in his hatred. The autarch had only wished to use him, and not even for that which made him unique, but for those qualities he shared with any other handsome boy. If Tulim could have killed Parnad, he would have, but the autarch was not only constantly attended by his fierce Leopard guards but was himself a man of astounding strength and practiced, unflagging attention, even while engaged in activities which would leave a lesser man distracted or drowsy. In any case, generations of Xixian Autarchs had been protected by the existence of the scotarchs, the special, temporary heirs who were not of the autarch’s direct line, men who would take the throne in the event of any autarch’s suspicious death and mete out justice before handing the throne over to the true heir—providing that heir had not been the former autarch’s murderer. It was a strange old custom; one with many twists and turns, but it had kept centuries of autarchs safer from intrigue than almost any other nation’s monarchs.

  So Tulim could do nothing except wait, and study, and plan . . . and dream.

  At last came the day when the rectangular gongs in the Sycamore Tower and the Temple of Nushash sounded the royal death-knell. Parnad, only a little more than three-score years old, had died in the Seclusion, in the bed of one of h
is wives. Although there was no sign of foul play his scotarch promptly had the wife and her maids tortured to make sure they had no guilty knowledge, then executed them, which served as a reminder to other palace dwellers of how unsafe it was to be involved, even innocently, in the death of an autarch. The period of mourning began, after which Dordom, the oldest son, already a general in the army and a warrior of renowned skill and cruelty, would ascend to the throne.

  But Dordom died choking the night of Parnad’s death and it was whispered throughout the Orchard Palace that he had been poisoned. That began to seem even more likely when three more of Parnad’s brothers (and a few of their friends, servants, and mistresses who happened to share the wrong plate or goblet) also died from some strange poison that could not be tasted or smelled, did not act at once, but then ate the victim away from inside like spirit of vitriol.

  One by one the other heirs fell, poisoned like Dordom, stabbed in their sleep by servants thought incorruptible, or strangled by assassins while in the throes of love, with guards waiting outside who, apparently, heard nothing. Several of Parnad’s less ambitious sons and daughters, seeing which way the winds of change were blowing, took their families and left Xis altogether to avoid their own deaths (which, nevertheless, eventually found them.) Others fell into the spirit of the game and for a year ancient Xis was like a single huge shanat board, with every move by a surviving member of the royal family considered and countered. Tulim, who was twenty-third in the line of succession, was not even considered as a possible culprit in the early deaths—many people believed that Parnad’s death had set off a long-prepared, murderous rivalry between many of the aspirants to the throne. In fact, during the Scotarch’s Year (as it was afterward called) most inhabitants of Xis, and certainly the wisest minds in the Orchard Palace, believed that the struggle for supremacy was between Dordom’s younger brothers, the princes Ultin and Mehnad, who survived as other heirs fell or fled until only they, Tulim, and a demi-handful of others remained alive in Xis.