by Tad Williams
And so saying, Zosim put his thumb in the middle of the autarch’s breast to hold him, then tore off first one of his arms then the other, letting them fall to the ground. Then, as the autarch’s thin shrieks filled the cavern, and his blood spurted and streamed over Zosim’s hand, the god yanked off the Xixian’s long legs as well. The autarch’s mindless cries of agony rose until it seemed the very stars in the sky might be screaming in the invisible heights. The god lifted the autarch’s writhing, limbless torso and head to his mighty forehead and affixed it there, so that the bloody golden lump seemed almost grown into the f lesh . . . then it burst into flames. Sulepis still lived, burning but unconsumed, and screeching helplessly as he struggled against the god’s flesh that now held him fast. Ferras Vansen could only lie gasping in the muck, half-mad with all he had seen.
“NOW YOU WILL GO WHERE I GO, LITTLE KING, SEE WHAT I SEE . . . FOR A WHILE.” Zosim turned and stalked away across the island, each step making the ground shake as he headed toward the shore and waded into the Silver up to his marble thighs. With every step, the god seemed to glow brighter, hotter, and the flames that danced on his skin burned higher. By the time he had reached the far side of the Sea in the Depths, he blazed so brightly it was hard to see the form of the god within the fires.
Zosim reached up a massive hand and clutched at the cavern’s stone wall. The rock smoked and cracked and crumbled outward. He reached up and made another handhold higher up, then dug his foot into the wall. The god was no longer even remotely human, but only a titanic manlike shape of almost pure fire. From such a distance Vansen could see nothing of the autarch, but he thought he could still hear thin screams through the roaring of the flame.
“AND SO I RETURN!” the god proclaimed, then began to mount the sheer cliff of smoking, melting stone, climbing steadily toward the surface.
44
The Screaming Stars
“... And so Kernios summoned the Orphan’s shade, and said that if anyone in bleak Kerniou would weep for him, he could go . . . Zoria gave him hands of oak wood so he could play his flute.”
—from “A Child’s Book of the Orphan, and His Life and Death and Reward in Heaven”
SEE WHAT THEY HAVE DONE.
Barrick stirred, tried to open his eyes, but could not. The blackness simply was. I can’t see anything!
You must see with the eyes of the Fireflower. Ynnir’s voice. This is the last time I can speak to you, I fear—it is harder and harder . . .
Barrick began to move toward something—not light, but a lessening of the shadow, a shape that seemed to create itself by its resistance to the darkness. It stood calmly before him, waiting, its antlers a tangle that seemed to have no ending.
Am I dying now, too?
Not yet. The great stag lowered its head for a moment as if to crop at the grass. But no one—not even the gods, it seems—will outlast the Book. And this will be one of its strangest pages. . . . Suddenly, the beast lifted its head as though it heard something. Come. Follow me. See what they have done . . . !
The stag sprang away, and although Barrick could discern nothing of the ground on which it ran, it had the sound of a real place, of grass and leaves and twigs beneath the stag’s hooves. Barrick sprang after it.
What who have done? he called.
The short-lived ones. Your kind—tall and small. See? See how they have found a way through the darkness . . . !
The two of them raced now through a black emptiness shot by streams of fire. The bursts of flame shot out, one after another, great blossoms of burning force that rolled and gleamed, spreading out in spumes of hot wind, until the very earth trembled and began to come apart.
What is this, Lord?
The mortals have unleashed fire to battle a fire god, Ynnir said as they watched the conflagration grow and spread, watched the stone splinter and the earth collapse. Crooked’s Fire, it is called. Do you see? The strength of Fire is the strength of Time itself, that ravages all things, but here the ravages of fiery Time have been shrunk to a single point, a moment of destruction that we now see in all its magnificence. Behold! With nothing but powdered earth the mortals have made flame and broken the earth apart.
But why? Do they think to crush the Trickster and his flame?
Oh, no. They have a greater plan. They have called up the fire to crumble the earth, and when the earth crumbles—now, see!
And then, as the stones of Midlan’s Mount broke and fell, as burst after burst of fire collapsed first one wall of the Funderling Mysteries then the next, the sea at last broke in.
The Water Lord may sleep, but he is still mighty! cried Ynnir. What can destroy the fires of the Trickster god? The deep waters, manchild—the deep, cold waters of the great ocean . . . !
The great burning god had scarcely climbed up the stone chimney and out of Ferras Vansen’s sight when a roar like thunder rolled down out of the monstrous opening in the cavern’s ceiling. For an instant Vansen thought it was the god shouting his rage and triumph again, his voice made even greater by the echoes of the great vertical tunnel, but this time the very earth shook as well, the rounded stones of the island slipping and bouncing and tumbling all around him.
Vansen struggled onto his hands and knees and then raised himself painfully to his feet. Stones were tumbling from the cavern’s walls now, only pebbles at first, but chunks of rock as big as his head quickly followed, and then others larger still. A boulder the size of a goods wagon crashed down out of the heights into the Sea in the Depths and sent up a silver fountain as high as the castle outwall.
Somewhere, the gods must be laughing at us, Ferras Vansen thought. Zosim the Trickster will climb to the surface while we mortals who remain behind will be crushed by falling stones, helpless to escape.
The rumble grew louder. The ground shook harder. Vansen staggered as the island swayed beneath him like a rope bridge, but at last he reached Prince Barrick. He hoped the tremor would end soon, but instead the earth throbbed on and on—harder now if anything, as though he stood jouncing on the skin of a beaten drum. At the same time, the air around him was growing heavier and tighter, pressing on his eyes and making his ears ring.
“Highness! Barrick! I’m not . . . strong enough . . . to carry you . . . ! Wake up!”
Vansen dragged the prince a few steps toward the boat, but he could barely keep upright and his arms were numb. He felt Barrick stir a little beneath his hands.
“What . . . ?”
“It collapses around us, Highness—the entire cavern is falling down. Perhaps if we can reach one of the tunnels ...”
Barrick fought his way out of Vansen’s grip. “No!” He rolled over, then began to crawl across the stones, clumsy as a tortoise. “No, the . . . the boat. We must . . . get into the boat.”
“Highness, that is madness,” cried Vansen. “It will never protect us—some of the stones are big as houses . . . !”
“Vansen, I do not . . . command you as a prince, I . . . beg you as a friend. Get into the boat!”
Barrick clambered up over the bundled reeds and into the boat with what looked like the last of his strength, then lay stretched between King Olin and the black-haired girl, as pale and motionless as if his heart had stopped. Vansen crawled in beside him.
“No matter what happens, hold them,” Barrick said, his eyes closed and his face as pale as his dead brother’s had been on the night of his murder. “Hold my father tightly and do not let his body go. He deserves . . . to come home ...”
And then the first great gush of seawater plunged down out of the heights and into the Last Hour of the Ancestor. The gush became a flood, a single jade-green column, as if the entire Irisian Ocean had been poured on them from above out of some upturned bucket. As the wall of green rushed toward them, Vansen had a strange moment’s vision of a beautiful white youth trapped inside, burning and glowing like molten silver as he tumbled helplessly in the water’s grip. Vansen plunged one hand as deeply as he could into the reeds of the boat, th
en wrapped his other arm around the limp form of Barrick’s father, the king.
The speeding wave crashed over them and turned the world to silent jade. Bubbles floated before Ferras Vansen’s blinking eyes, shining like stars lost from the firmament. The reed boat squirted up to the surface and for a brief moment he could suck in air, but the craft was being tossed like a wood chip by the crashing water. Vansen could not lift his head to look—it was all he could do to hang on to both Olin and the boat, bellowing with pain as the force threatened to yank his arms out of their sockets. They crashed against stone and the little craft turned over, then the boat was tossed out of the rushing green, spun, lifted, and tossed again. Once more they careened against a wall. Vansen thought he heard Barrick shouting and spluttering. Again the green covered them and spun them like a leaf in a powerful eddy. Deep beneath them, something still burned and smoldered in the depths, but even the god’s flame was dying beneath the weight of so much water.
Up and out. Over, clinging without knowing which direction he was falling. Down again, then spat up and out once more. Water shook him like a dog shakes a rat. Vansen closed his eyes and hung on.
Briony was struggling to get back up when the first great shudder passed through the stone beneath her feet, knocking her to the ground again and almost rolling her over the edge and into the chasm. A roar as deep as some terrible beast of legend rose from the depths; even the Elementals slipped sideways in the air, surprised.
The roar from below had become a fierce and growing thunder. A howling gale burst up from the chasm deeps, and the rush of hot air threw Briony back from the edge and sent the Elementals flying like rags. The one with the glowing stone, the one named Shadow’s Cauldron, hovered out of Briony’s reach above the abyss, ready to throw down the Fever Egg and burst it on the stone to free the poisons inside.
“No!” shouted Briony as the sickly jewel rose higher and the ground shuddered beneath her hands and knees. “Don’t . . . !”
A shape flew forward and threw itself off the edge toward the Elemental. At the last moment before falling into empty darkness it caught the floating thing and held on, grappling with Shadow’s Cauldron’s black insubstantiality as though the Elemental were a huge bat. The attacker was Kayyin, and for a moment it seemed his weight might pull the creature down with him, but the ragged black thing was too strong—it lifted itself and the half-fairy until Kayyin’s legs dangled. Then, a moment later, another figure rushed past Briony—the girl Willow. She leaped after Kayyin, catching and clinging to his legs with a cry like a fearful child. She had surprised the Elemental. As Briony watched in horror, all three of them swayed for a moment and then tumbled away into the darkness, the Egg with them. The other two Elementals floated out over the abyss as if to see what had happened to their comrade, then abruptly vanished as if they had never appeared at all.
Breathless, horrified, Briony scrambled to the edge, staring down into the darkness, wondering if she would feel the poison when it came—would it be thick like smoke, like temple incense . . . ?
Something was climbing up the chasm from below, something big. The wind of its coming flattened her hair against her head, but Briony could see it only as a broad moving front pushing its way up through the darkness.
Water. The gigantic hole was filling with water, and it was rushing upward toward her. Kayyin and the girl and even the Fever Egg were gone beneath it, and in a few moments she and Chert would be swallowed up, too, left to drift in it until their bones settled to the bottom. Briony crawled back toward the place where the little man lay beside the wall, still fighting to get onto his feet. She sat down beside him and waited for the end, wanting to pray but not certain to whom she should address the prayer. After a few long moments the roaring began to quiet; the water still rose, but its speed seemed to have lessened. Briony clambered back to the edge and looked down, holding the torch out so she could watch the frothing shadow as it rose, as it swallowed level after level beneath her, until to her amazement it finally stopped rising only a few dozen yards below.
“Water,” she said, still trying to understand it.
Chert had crawled to her side. “Fracture and fissure,” he said. “We did it. Oh, my ancestors, we did it. ...”
“And that Fever Egg fell into the water and didn’t break,” she said slowly. “Even now it’s sinking to the bottom.”
“Are you certain?” Chert asked, peering down into the darkness as if it might be floating there. “How can you know?”
“Because if the shell had broken, I imagine we’d be dead by now.”
Chert was suddenly distracted. “Princess? Don’t you see them?”
“See what? See whom?”
“Down there.” But where he pointed, Briony could see nothing—it was too far and too dark. “None of them are moving,” he said, “but there are four of them lying in the bottom of the boat.”
“What do you mean?” She could not see in this dim light like a Funderling, and certainly could not see a boat, but as she stared, she saw a green gleam far down in the watery depths, growing as it rose toward the surface. For a moment, as if in a dream, she saw an impossible thing—a gigantic, glowing human shape struggling up through the fathoms of roiling water, thrashing toward the surface. Then it slowed to a drift. The light dimmed and nearly died, and the vast, manlike shape fell into dark, flickering pieces. A moment later the water was completely dark once more. It had been a dream, a vision, nothing more. Briony shook her head in confusion. “Do you still see the boat? Are there truly people in it?”
“Yes. Perhaps if I can get down to them with my rope, they can answer some of your questions. If they’re still alive, of course.”
“I think it unlikely.” Briony stared down at the boat she could not see. What had happened here? More importantly, what had happened far below? To her family? To the autarch? The unsettled water still roiled and made waves along the edge of the chasm. How could any of them have survived? “Merciful Zoria, does anyone but us still live?”
But Chert had already gone looking for a place to anchor his climbing-rope.
Chert seemed unusually grim as he came back up the treacherous slope after tying a rope to one of the survivors, and he would not answer Briony’s questions as they hauled up the first of the boat’s passengers, a slender young girl with the dark skin and dark eyes of a southerner, her body cold and motionless. By the time they had untied her, the first of the Syannese troops began to appear on the path. Eneas had sent them, they told Briony, and the prince himself was close behind. With their help, the second victim came up much more quickly, and even before he had been unharnessed, she realized she was looking at her father’s body.
As she lay weeping on Olin’s cold chest, the guards drew up the last two from the boat. Her brother Barrick was laid out beside her father, then as she stared down at his pale, still features in growing horror, the last of the survivors was brought up. He struggled out of his own harness and walked unsteadily toward her, then fell to his knees, swaying like a tree that had been cut mostly through.
“At your command, Princess, I bring your brother back to you. I believe . . . I believe he yet lives ...”
Then Ferras Vansen’s eyes turned up and he fell senseless before her.
PART FOUR
THE PINE TREE
45
Only in Dreams
“For three days and three nights Adis went up and down across Kerniou singing the story of his sad life, and at last the goddess Mesiya, wife of Kernios, let drop a tear of pity. Kernios was so angry that he banished her forever . . .”
—from “A Child’s Book of the Orphan, and His Life and Death and Reward in Heaven”
SHE WAS SO TIRED, so tired. All she wanted to do was sleep until the world was different—but that was very clearly not to be . . .
“And the Xixian enemy, Highness?”
Briony nodded. “The city is safe. Captain Vansen says they are scattered through the hills, Lord M’Ardall.”
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“But there are still many of them . . . thousands!”
She did her best to keep her voice measured. The young earl was one of the few who had resisted Hendon Tolly’s rule. She would need men like him. “They have shown no sign of wanting to continue their autarch’s lawless attack on Southmarch, and our soldiers are busy subduing the last of the traitor Tolly’s men inside the walls.” She did her best to smile. “I promise you, good M’Ardall, we are watching all our enemies. Let’s not borrow trouble until we have a better chance of paying it back.”
He bowed. “I hear your wisdom, Highness.”
The Throne hall was in ruins, so the seat of power was now a quartet of dining hall benches set in a tent in the middle of the residence’s front garden until the residence itself was sufficiently repaired. At the insistence of Prince Eneas of Syan, Briony alone had been given a chair, both to make sure she held pride of place in the makeshift throne room and to alleviate the misery of having to wear a dress and stays again. She hated it, but it was a sacrifice she would make to show her people that things had gone back to the way they were—even those things she had loathed.
If only my head didn’t feel like an anvil, she thought. If only their voices did not feel so much like hammers, beating on it . . .
As she looked at the faces around her, many of them as familiar as members of her own family, she could not help a moment’s pang at the strangeness of her situation: though a few still survived, not a single person around her now was an Eddon. Anissa had taken baby Alessandros and retreated to her old haunts in the damaged Tower of Spring. Her great-aunt Merolanna was in ill health and kept to her rooms. Briony’s father lay in state in the one remaining public hall of the residence, his bier surrounded by candles. Briony had wept over him many times. And her brother . . .
