Shadowheart

by Tad Williams

  Barrick felt strangely empty, like a pottery vessel cleansed by fire. All the things he had worried about for so long, loved so hopelessly, now seemed to have vanished; he could scarcely remember them.

  He nodded slowly. “I’ll fight with you, Saqri, yes. You’re all the family I have, now. And when the time comes, I’ll die with you, too, if the gods grant it.” He did his best to smile, but it had become an unfamiliar exercise. “After all, it will be a better ending than what I’ve always expected.”

  PART THREE

  THE OWL

  29

  A Little Man of Stone

  “After more than a year’s journey they reached the grim castle known as the Siege of Always-Winter, but Moros was too frightened to go farther and so he deserted the Orphan at the threshold.”

  —from “A Child’s Book of the Orphan, and His Life and Death and Reward in Heaven”

  THE FIRES BURNING in the mainland city and the Xixian ships still smoldering on the water made the night almost as bright as dawn. Some of the ships had burned to the waterline, unrecognizable hulks that still hissed steam and spat sparks into the dark sky.

  I never dreamed I would come back like this, Briony thought, watching the mainland recede as Ena plied the oars. All around her boats slid toward the castle like water beetles converging at one end of a pond. Eneas and his men had been loaded onto wherries in twos and threes, the horses onto barges, and now almost twenty score small Skimmer craft were making their way back across the bay to Southmarch.

  Neither Briony nor Ena were much interested in conversation; the short journey passed in silence until the first of the boats neared the ruins of the causeway, now nothing more than a short spit of land between the great outer gate and the edge of Midlan’s Mount. Briony let Ena help her out onto the slippery stones.

  “But where do we go?” Briony asked. The huge Basilisk Gate looked down on them like a frowning giant. She had never thought about how it felt to come to this place and see such a daunting thing—always before it had been one of the last signs that she was returning home. “How do we get inside?”

  “Not the way we Skimmers go, my lady,” said Ena, smiling. “That’s our secret, and in times like these it’ll remain our secret. But you have no need for secrets, Highness! You have come back to your own house!”

  “Not everyone here will be so glad to see me,” Briony said, but Ena was already pushing her boat back from the rocks and into safer waters.

  “Take care, Queen Briony! We will meet again!” the Skimmer girl called.

  She wanted to shout, “I’m only a princess,” but thought better of making so much noise. The other Skimmers swooped in to deliver their passengers to the causeway; then, when all Eneas’ troops were unloaded, they swung back into the open water. A song rose up among them, deep and barely audible above the crash of the ocean against the rocks. It was in no language Briony knew, and she only guessed it was a song because it had a sort of tune that went up and down like the waves themselves. Who were the Skimmers, really? That Saqri creature had said something about them being the kin of the Qar, but that seemed impossible. The water people were part of Southmarch and had been so for centuries, long before and long after the Qar had been driven into exile beyond the Shadowline.

  Eneas appeared out of the evening mist, so tall and stern that for a startled moment she thought he was her father. “Princess, are you well?”

  “I am, sir, thank you.” Dawn was still hours away; they had no light but the glare of ships burning on the bay and fires on the distant mainland. “This seems a rather uncomfortable spot to make our camp.” She gestured to the mighty walls jutting out above them, the gate itself as tall as a tall tree all carved in the stony coils of its namesake. “Do you have a plan to get us inside?”

  “Well, we are a little late to the inn, but perhaps we can wake the porter.” Eneas called to one of his men, and a moment later a trumpeter had taken out his horn. At a second word from the prince, he began to blow a brazen battle call. Startled, Briony could only put her hands over her ears and shrink away.

  Moments later a head appeared atop the gate, then three or four more, helmeted guards crouching so low they were scarcely more than bumps above the battlements like a baby’s teeth nudging through its gums.

  “Who goes there?” one of them called, so high above them atop the wall that the wind almost tore his words away. “One of the autarch’s men, hoping for a dram of water to put out your fires? We’ll send it down to you, but not in a way you’ll like!”

  “No Xixians, we!” cried Eneas. “We are allies! Let us in!”

  “Allies! Not likely!” the man shouted back. “Just blew in on the wind and landed in front of the Old Lizard, did you? Think we’ll let you in? Then you’re a madman, that’s what you are.”

  “A madman and a madwoman!” the prince shouted back. “Here is one who thinks himself the rightful heir of Syan, and another who believes herself mistress of this very castle!”

  “For the love of the gods!” Briony told him in a horrified whisper. “Eneas, are you mad? These are Tolly’s men!”

  “Perhaps,” he said cheerfully. “But perhaps not. Let us find out.”

  “What foolery are you at, man?” demanded the fellow on the wall. “Mistress? Your mistress is likely a slattern and you are certainly a drunk fool, fisherman. Get back in your boat and go away before we feather you and your lady properly!”

  One of the Syannese soldiers already had an arrow on his string and was preparing to dispatch the guard when Eneas held out his hand. “Leave him be,” he said quietly.

  “But, Highness . . . !” the soldier protested. “Did you hear . . . ?”

  “I heard.” Eneas raised his voice. “It is you who is feeling the breath of Old Knot on the back of his neck, fellow. I am Prince Eneas of Syan. Open the gate! We are allies of your true king!” He turned and said quietly to Briony, “That should start some interesting conversations!”

  More heads popped up along the top of the massive gate, and several men held up torches, peering down into the darkness below for a look at the visitors. Briony could only hold her breath and pray for Zoria’s continued protection. The gatehouse above it, and the monstrous towers on either side probably housed a pentecount of men or more. Eneas might have far more men than that, but they had no protection and nowhere to go if the archers began firing on them. The Skimmers were gone and there was no other way off the narrow piece of land in front of the gate.

  “That is the Syannese prince!” one man atop the gate shouted. “I’ve seen his banner! That’s him!”

  “Liar!” another screamed. “Or traitor!”

  “Open the gates!” someone called. “Let them in! They sank them Otarch ships!”

  “I’ll kill the first man who goes near that windlass . . . !” a man cried, and then many voices began shouting at once, and even the figures lined up atop the gate suddenly dissolved into chaos. To Briony’s horror, a figure came flying off the top of the gatehouse, ten times a man’s height in the air, and hit the ground in front of Eneas and his men with a horrible moist thump.

  Flames rippled across the top of the gate and in the narrow slits in the towers on either side as men with torches ran in and out. One of the Basilisk Gate’s huge bells began to ring out an alarm, then fell silent again almost immediately, as though the bell ringer had met a sudden, violent end. Torches began appearing along nearby sections of the wall as the struggle at the main gate caught the attention of the other guard posts.

  “Form up!” Eneas told his men. “Shields up—the arrows may begin flying any moment!”

  Briony was only too happy to lift her shield over her head, although it was not long before her arms were aching so badly she would almost have preferred being shot. A few arrows did come sailing down, but more or less randomly, and not from atop the gate itself, as though a few scared soldiers on the walls were merely firing out into the darkness.

  At last silence fell, then the grea
t gate creaked open; Eneas held his men back when they would have surged through. The portcullis shuddered and rose, and a handful of figures with torches stepped into the cobbled opening, a space wide enough for a dozen men to ride through.

  “Is it truly you, Prince Eneas?” one of the torchbearers asked, taking a limping step forward and holding up his torch, which rippled as the breeze from the bay whipped through the open gate.

  “It is. Do I know you?” Eneas strode forward. Briony hurried to stay with him—his confidence, at that moment, seemed better protection than any Syannese shield.

  “No, sire. You wouldn’t. But we true Southmarchers are happy to see you. Was it you burned the Xixy ships?”

  A crowd of guardsmen quickly surrounded Eneas and his men, but to Briony’s relief the mood was more festive than combative. Several dozen were climbing down from the nearest guardhouses to see what was happening, but most of the fighting was already over. At least a dozen men sat sullenly on the ground with their backs to the wall, being guarded by men with spears. Half a dozen more lay nearby and did not need to be watched, as their contorted limbs and the blood on their tabards made clear.

  The soldier who had spoken saw Eneas and his men looking at the dead. “They were Tolly’s men, those scum. One of them tried to ring the bells. The rest would have been off to warn the Protector and his bullyboys—they’ve all gone to ground in the royal residence. What is happening, Sire? Have you come to chase the damned Summerfielders out? May the gods bless you if you have, Highness.” He peered out past Eneas and the others, squinting as if he could make out what was happening on the far shore. “What about that autarch? What happened to his ships?”

  “These are long stories,” Eneas said. “And my men will need food and drink and a place to sleep.”

  “Of course, Prince Eneas ...” the leader began, but then Briony stepped out of the shadow of the wall and into the torchlight.

  “I will not enter my own home in secret,” she said. “You men have done more than open the gates for the Syannese—you’ve let the Eddons back in as well.” She pulled off her helmet and hoped they could still recognize her with her hair cut short.

  The men around her heard a woman’s voice and turned, staring. The leader, the man with the limp, lowered himself to one knee. “Praise the Three,” he said. “It’s King Olin’s daughter.”

  Murmuring, the other men, who had been gathering around her, began to get down on their knees.

  “Do not bow,” she said. “Look at me—please don’t bow! I don’t want to make my presence known yet. Not until we learn how things fare here and decide what to do next.” She would have preferred that they had remembered her name as well as her father’s, but the hope and even happiness on the faces of most of the men she could see was reward enough. “All of you who can hear me, come now. Let no one leave. Set some men to watch the gate again while you others follow Prince Eneas and me.”

  “The inner keep is Hendon Tolly’s armed camp, Highness,” one of the guards said. “You’re safe here in the outer keep, but most of Tolly’s supporters are with him in the residence. They have at least as many men as your Syannese, Princess, and they also hold many of our women and children.”

  “All the more reason that we should move slowly and not make a great parade,” Briony said. “Take us to a place where our soldiers can rest.”

  Several of the Southmarch guards let out a cheer, but the others silenced them. The limping man who had welcomed them looked up at Briony.

  “Is it truly you, Princess?” he asked.

  “It is. And my father is alive, too. The Eddons have not given up their throne—or their people.”

  “And will it all be well, then? Things will be well again?”

  She looked at him and suddenly the weight of who she was, and what she still had to do pressed against her like a great stone on her chest, so that for a moment she could not speak. “That is beyond my power to say,” she managed at last. “But I will do everything I can to make it so.”

  Something about seeing his sister still troubled Barrick, although he could not say exactly what that something was. It was not emotion—at least not the sort of confused, ill-defined feelings that had been so common in him before the gift of the Fireflower—but it made it hard to concentrate on what Saqri was saying about Lady Yasammez.

  “. . . So she will meet us in the Great Delve.”

  “But I don’t understand. Why didn’t Yasammez come up with us to fight the Xixians? She lives for war!”

  Saqri’s thoughts had something of both unhappiness and anger in them, but those she chose to express were straightforward. “I imagine she wished to see what I would do with the command and the Seal. Perhaps she had matters of her own to deal with as well.”

  “Like what?” A swirl of Fireflower memories tantalized him but he was learning how to do what Ynnir had taught him; to simply be and let them swim around him like fish.

  “Dissension among her close advisers, I suspect. You know about the disagreement between Yasammez and my husband. What you may not know, or may not have been able to sift from what the Fireflower has given you, is that the distinctions are not so simple as to be divided into two camps only.”

  “Tell me.” But what he said was closer to “Bring me to your thought.” He found that in his own head he was now using Qar ideas nearly as frequently as his native tongue.

  “From the first, great Yasammez warned that we should sweep the mortals from the land before it was too late. But her great age and long experience have changed her, and her hatred of your kind is no longer as deadly as it once was. However, there are still many others of our people, some of the wilder folk, Tricksters and Elementals, who would happily see your kind vanish from the earth forever. ...”

  “But then why did Yasammez send me to King Ynnir?” Barrick asked. “Does that mean she’s changed her mind about my people somehow? Or that she thought keeping me alive could . . . could help the Qar?”

  Saqri let him feel a blank, cloudy thought, another kind of shrug. “I do not know. I have tried to sense her mind on this but she keeps it hidden, even from me.” And now she let him feel a little of the pain that caused her. “So much has changed. Once Yasammez was more to me than my own mother ...”

  She did not finish the thought, and Barrick did not press for it. Too much hurt and confusion was there, things he could not understand, feelings so naked and private in a being of such immense composure that he did not want to go farther.

  “So we face our final hours, Barrick,” Saqri finished at last, “and all that was once certain has become uncertain. Except for defeat. That, as always, is the end of all our stories.”

  The dark lady met them in a place the Funderlings called the Old Baryte Span, her vanguard carrying torches that made the veins of quartz in the walls flash like lightning. Barrick could not help wondering if this great show of light was for him, since most of the Qar saw as well in dark passages as the little people who usually walked here.

  As Yasammez stepped down from the crude rock stairway onto the cavern floor, Saqri raised her hands in greeting. “We are together again.”

  “Yes. We are together again.” Yasammez turned her somber face toward Barrick. “You have had to fight against your own people now. Do you still wish to stand with us?”

  “My own people?” It took him a moment to understand she was talking about the Xixians, the autarch’s soldiers. “They are nothing to me—invaders. Intruders. If I could kill them all with one swing of my sword, I would.”

  Yasammez looked at him for a long moment, silent and calculating. “Time is short,” was all she said.

  The council was surprisingly brief. Barrick had grown used to the Qar taking days to decide or do anything, but it seemed the passing of the Seal of War to Saqri had brought a great change: Yasammez offered little in the way of advice and objected to almost nothing, letting Saqri make the decisions and give the orders.

  “We must try to beat th
e southerners to the Last Hour of the Ancestor in the uttermost deeps,” Saqri said when she had heard from all her lieutenants. “But they are too many for us to stop them by main strength. Even if Vansen and his drows are still alive and we could attack the southerners from both sides, the autarch has too many soldiers. Fighting is beside the point, anyway. Time is what is important now, and they are already deep below us, at the doorway to the depths.”

  Fireflower thoughts and memories swirled in Barrick’s head, but the silent presence that had been Ynnir led him to those that mattered, each as delicately precise as a note picked out on a lute. He began to understand. “But Crooked . . . is dead.” He shook a little at the storm that realization raised inside him—all the meanings, the memories, the ancient hopes and miseries. It was hard even to say it. The god whose blood ran in him and in Saqri was dead. The god who had fathered Yasammez, and whose own parentage had started the Godwar . . . Barrick ignored a cold wind of irritation from Yasammez and some of the others. “He pushed the old gods through and then sealed the way behind them. But the autarch wants to release them again!”

  Saqri nodded. “And like most mortals, he has no idea of how dire many of these . . . beings are, how long they have waited outside the walls of nightmare ...”

  “And how fiercely and greedily they are watching for their chance.” Yasammez stood, her black armor covering her like a shadow, so that for a moment it seemed her face rose in darkness like the moon. “Whatever sins mortal men have committed, I would not wish such horrors on the earth itself, which is blameless. It is time. We can wait no longer. What is your wish, granddaughter?”

  Saqri paused as if the Porcupine’s abruptness had caught her by surprise. “We need a better way.” She turned to the Ettins. “Singscrape, you and others have been working here while the rest of us fought the southerners. What have you found?”