by Tad Williams
Tinwright shook his head. She was older than his mother, but he was tired of being alone with his own thoughts. “No, stay, please. Are you a priestess?”
“A Zorian sister,” she said.
“So.” He nodded. “No shortage of things for you to do these days, I’m sure.”
“There is never a shortage of things to do, now or any other time.” But she smiled as she said it. Tinwright liked the woman, liked her grave, somber features. “At the moment, though, I want to do nothing except feel some wind on my face.”
Tinwright took this as a request for silence, so he turned away again to contemplate the restless ocean. People said that the sea had now flooded all the depths underneath Funderling Town; ever since he had heard that Tinwright half expected the castle to float away at any moment, like a boat lifted off the beach by a rising tide.
“Tell me,” he said after a while. “How does it feel to know that the gods are not with us?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“You must have heard what happened here. Even in your temple or shrine you must have been told something of what happened.”
The woman smiled again. “Oh, I know a bit about it, yes.”
“Then tell me how you can still call yourself a Zorian sister when we are told the gods are asleep—that they have been sleeping for thousands of years. That Zoria herself was killed by her husband back in the beginning of Time. That all the things the priests have told us about Heaven have been lies.” He could not choke off his own bitterness now. “Nobody watches over us. Nobody waits for us when we die. Nobody cares what we do in this world, for good or ill.”
She looked at him carefully, then took a step closer and stood behind him, so that they both looked out over the moving water, which glinted like silver in the afternoon glare. “And how is that different?” she asked after a while.
“What do you mean?”
“How is that different from what we have always had, always known? The gods come to us only in dreams. We must make our own choices every day of our own short lives. Whether they will reward those choices or even notice them, we do not know. I see nothing changed.”
“But it is changed! It was all a lie. We saw what the priests showed us, believed what they told us, but the gods they described to us were only puppets playing out a story. Now we don’t even have the puppets. We don’t have anything.”
“We have the same troubles we always had, young man,” she said sharply. “We have the same needs as always. I see you are injured.” She pointed to the bump of the poultice under his shirt. “But there are many who are more sorely wounded. They need help here on earth, whatever the gods may do. Even if our faith was never anything but a shadow play, we can still learn from it. And it could be that even the gods themselves were only puppets—that there is a larger cause behind it all, for you and for me and for every person here.” She shook her head. “Listen to me go on. Some comfort, eh? I fear I am out of practice.” She patted his arm. “Take care, young man. Despair is the only true enemy. Make yourself useful. Nurse someone who has greater need than you. Feed someone who is hungry. Make something that will help another.”
After the woman had left, Tinwright found himself still thinking about what she had said.
“Where are Crowel and his renegades now?” Briony asked Lord Helkis, who had been alerted to her coming and had met her at the front gate of Funderling Town.
“All but run to ground, Princess. They have been pushed back to the quarry on the edge of the town, I’m told. It will be over soon.” Helkis seemed to have decided that since it was now all but certain she would marry his prince, he had better start treating her with respect. Briony wasn’t at all sure about his reasoning, but it made for a nice change. “Crowel does not know these tunnels but that man Vansen seems to, and Vansen also has the help of the Kallikans, of course.”
“Vansen makes himself very busy,” she said. So busy that she had not seen him since his recovery. Between the guard captain and her brother, she was beginning to feel quite thoroughly avoided. Does Vansen hate me? she wondered. Fear me? Or do both he and Barrick simply not care, as my brother did his best to make clear the last time?
The Funderlings who had returned to the heart of their city came out to watch Briony as she passed down Gem Street, some of them cheering but the rest watching with fascination and worry on their faces. Apparently the Funderlings were not all happy with her, either.
“I feel the need to talk to Chert Blue Quartz,” she said to Lord Helkis. “Will you ask the Funderlings to send him to me?”
“As you wish, Highness.” He dispatched a runner to the guildhall at the far end of the long, winding street, where reconstruction had already begun on the damage caused in the last few days of fighting before Crowel’s retreat. “No man would ignore your summons, Princess, I promise you.”
Except the ones I truly want to see, she thought.
Aesi’uah came out to meet her in front of the chamber, and though the woman’s face was as calm as always, Briony could not help feeling that the eremite was anxious about something. “He is waiting for you, Princess Briony.” Aesi’uah gestured with her long hands toward the archway and the flickering lights beyond, then stepped discreetly to one side.
“He is my brother,” Briony said when Helkis and his guards would have accompanied her. “Whatever else has happened, I feel certain he is no danger to me.”
Lord Helkis did not look pleased to have to stand so near to Aesi’uah, but he was not going to move any farther away, either; Briony left them to sort it out.
Her brother stood looking down at a table made from two stones set one on top of the other where he had spread many slates and rolls of parchment. Barrick had taken off his armor, and wore only a loose-fitting white shirt with breeches of the same color. His feet were bare, and for a moment she had the illusion that the past year had not happened, that she had left her bedchamber and found him up before her, standing in his nightshirt waiting for her to rise as he had when they were children. Then he looked up, and the strange coldness in his face proved that such an innocent, mostly happy past was truly gone forever. “Briony,” he said calmly. “You wish to talk with me, I hear.”
It was hard to make herself speak. She wanted to rush to him, to throw her arms around him, even to hit him—anything to drive that look from his face. Instead, all she managed was a nod. “Yes, I thought that would be a good idea . . . since you would not come to me.”
“My apologies,” he said in the way he might have said it to a stranger after treading on her foot, “but it is not so easy. My people . . . well, they hate yours. That makes it difficult. They are still fearful, and many of them do not trust me completely.”
“Your people? Are you talking about elves and goblins?” Briony realized her voice had risen almost to a shout, but she could not help herself. “You are calling these your people now, but you will not come to see your own sister? You will not come to see your father’s body before he is buried?”
He turned his back on her as if to resume studying his papers and slates. “Of course you cannot understand.”
Could this tall, flame-haired stranger really be Barrick? Or had the Qar somehow set a changeling in his place? Was such a thing even possible, or was it just another old wives’ tale? These days legends and fairy stories seemed to be the only things that were unquestionably true. “Do you think things have not changed for me, Barrick? Our father is dead. I have walked all the way to Tessis and back as a traveling player. People have tried to poison me and shoot me with arrows. I met a demigoddess . . . !”
“I knew a demigoddess, too,” he said. “But she was not the type who made friends with our kind.”
“With our kind. Listen to yourself! A moment ago, the fairies were your people, now you speak as though you remember your true blood! You’ll have to make up your mind, Barrick Eddon.”
“You do not understand. The Fireflower ...”
“Oh!” She tu
rned and walked away, fighting back her anger. “Yes, things have happened to you. To me as well. Zoria’s mercy, Barrick, I killed Hendon Tolly with my own hands! If you have been burned by Heaven’s fire like the Orphan—well, then, so have I! We are both changed! But you haven’t changed all that much—your suffering still must be unequaled by any other’s . . . !”
He turned, his face tight with rage. “Don’t talk to me about suffering, Briony! You will marry that prince—I have seen him moon over you like a calf following its mother. You will be the queen of Syan and the world will bow to you. What do I have? Do you even care?”
“Barrick, that is foolishness ...”
“Do you know what is ahead for the Qar . . . and for me? Saqri, the queen of the People, is dying. She sacrificed herself so that Zosim could be defeated—dozens of arrows and rifle balls pierced her. Only her will and her love for her people keep her alive. When she is gone, half of what has kept the Qar race alive will be gone, too. Think of that, sister—when you are planning your marriage, I will be burying my queen and my beloved . . . !”
“Your beloved . . . ?” Briony could only stand and gape as if struck. “Who are you talking about—not that Saqri?”
“You don’t understand anything,” he said bitterly. “Come. Come and I will show you.” He beckoned Briony to follow, then led her to a side chamber where a pair of female creatures in garb like Aesi’uah’s, but whose angular shapes were less human, knelt in silence beside a makeshift bed of straw. On it, scarcely visible in the dim light of a few candles, lay a small, slender girl who could not be even as old as she and Barrick were.
“This isn’t Saqri,” she said. “This is the girl that was in the boat with you.”
He stood over the head of the bed, looking down. “Saqri is in the center of the camp, surrounded by her people. This . . . this is the only person who truly cared whether I lived or died during this entire terrible nightmare. Her name is Qinnitan. For a year she was in my dreams and in my thoughts. She was my companion, my friend, my ...” He stopped and shook himself angrily. “Now she is dying . . . and we never even spoke face-to-face. Never touched ...” He turned abruptly and walked out.
Briony stood for a moment, gazing down at the motionless girl. If she lived, it was impossible to tell. She showed no movement of breath, no sign of the animation that plays over a sleeper’s face even in quiet slumber.
Who are you? Briony wondered. And what were you to my brother, really? Would you have loved him? Would you have cared for him?
“How long will she live?” she asked the two Qar women, but although they both looked up at her words, neither answered.
“I’m sorry, Barrick,” she said when she had found him again. “I didn’t know. But that is all the more reason ...”
“Cease, Briony, I beg you.” He moved away when she would have touched his arm. “You will say it is all the more reason to cleave to the family I have, but you do not understand. I am no longer one of you.”
“What? An Eddon . . . ?”
He laughed harshly. “Oh, I am an Eddon all right. Everywhere I go others suffer in my stead. You must know that by now. How many of the men who came with you died so that you could regain Father’s throne? How many others because the Tollys wanted it in the first place? And how many of the Qar have died because our ancestor stole Sanasu from her own family?”
A memory struck her, from the last time she had talked to their father. “There is something you must know ...”
But Barrick did not seem to hear her. “In fact, now that I think on it, the number of current victims doesn’t matter, because eventually the Qar will all have died because of what our family did to them. So if I can repay even a little of the debt that the Eddons owe to Saqri and Ynnir and even Yasammez, then that is what I must do.”
The memory was washed away by anger. “You speak of Yasammez that way? The bitch that murdered so many of our people?”
He waved his hand. “Go away, Briony—you cannot understand. We have no more to say to each other. Soon enough the Qar will be gone from here and I will go with them. You can rebuild your houses in peace—we are too few to trouble mankind again.”
“When I saw you, I wondered at how much you had changed, Barrick,” she told him. “But now I see that in the most important ways you are no different. It’s still your own sorrows you care about and no one else’s, and you still turn away from love and kindness as though it were an attack.”
Her brother’s pale face showed nothing—he seemed as unmoved as the sea itself. Briony turned and walked out of the cavern.
46
The Guttering Candle
“ . . . He told Zoria that if she could lead him out of Kerniou, the Orphan could return to the world and the sun, but if she faltered or failed, he would have to remain among the dead forever.”
—from “A Child’s Book of the Orphan, and His Life and Death and Reward in Heaven”
HE COULD FEEL HER TRYING not to be amused, although he did not know why. The exact nature of what Saqri found funny often eluded him. Your sister has departed. Did it not go well?
You know it didn’t. You know it as well as I do, I’m sure.
I was not with you. I felt you, but at a distance. Still, the emotions were very great!
Even as she teased him with that strange indulgence she had begun to show toward him since she had been struck down, he could feel her fighting against her own growing weakness. Unlike Saqri, he was only just learning how to politely not notice things. Don’t mock, he told her. I am in pain.
Of course you are. But it is unnecessary. The People have ended. Never was it promised that we would all meet our ends in the same instant, but I doubt not this will be our last generation, at least for those of the long-lived. A few of us shall straggle on for years, but the Defeat has finally come. Your people do not carry quite the same burden as we do, so you likely do not understand that knowing the end has arrived is almost a relief to us. I am sorry I will not be here to see the last, bright flowering that will come of it—I am certain the art and music will be glorious and frightening in a thousand subtle ways!
But if there is no longer a People, Barrick Eddon, there is no need for you to sacrifice yourself. The Fireflower of all our mothers will be gone soon. Then someday soon, even if your time is elongated by what has happened to you, it will happen to you, too, dear manchild—the last Fireflower will flicker and die. Without the Fireflower’s light, the Deep Library will become a stagnant pond. And without the memory of who we are, we will dwindle and die like any mute creatures. The song will go on without our voices. . . .
It was as if the closer she moved toward death, the older she became. She seemed nearly as ancient as Yasammez now. Perhaps it’s the nearness of eternity and whatever it brings, he thought, but did not share it with her.
When you have finished your moment with the mortal girl, she told him, come to me. I would like to see you with my eyes.
He stood over Qinnitan for a long while, trying not to think. Before he left he lowered himself to his knees and took her hand, but it was so limp and cold, he could not bear to hold it. He kissed it and laid it back on her breast.
Saqri was on a bed that Barrick had asked be made, although if the queen of the fairies had been given her way, she would have been laid on the naked rocks and covered only with her cloak. If we are given the choice of how to die, she had said, we of the old ways, then we prefer the elements just as they are. It is good to learn to deal with the chill of night, because as it comes, death also blows its cold breath upon us. We learn to move less and think more.
But you aren’t being given any choice, Barrick had told her, and so the Daughter of the First Flower was kept comfortable and warm because she was too weak to have it be otherwise. I will not let you die here in this place, Barrick had sworn to her. I will return you to the People’s House.
Foolish boy. Like Yasammez, I will die when the Book says I must die.
Liar. You are a
live now when anyone else would have long since crossed the river. It is the strength of your will that gives us this time and you know it.
You saw your sister, she said. She burns more brightly than I had guessed. She would have made a good mate for you.
Barrick could only stare at her. That is disgusting.
Not among our kind—not in our ruling family. I loved Ynnir before I hated him, and hated him before I loved him. I knew him each moment of my life. That is how entwined we were. But your ways are not ours, I realize.
Don’t say such things. Besides, she and I are no longer close. I’ve changed too much.
Have you?
You know I have!
She smiled at him. It was such a small wrinkle of her lips that someone watching less carefully might have missed it. “All can be foretold,” as the Oracles say. In truth, I think you should stay with your people . . . I am sorry, Barrick Eddon—with your other people.
Never! I can never live among them again. I am nothing like that anymore.
She went on as though he had not responded. I meant no insult. You have earned your blood with us as well, there is no doubt. Even the smallest and most distant of the People’s clans will know about you.
Barrick didn’t care about such things—what did any kind of fame matter when the rest of his life would be little better than a long funeral procession as the Qar and their knowledge slowly died away? And at last he would die, too, either alone among a people that his family had helped destroy or as an alien in the land of his birth. Either way he would be a stranger to those around him.
Be of good cheer, Saqri told him. Life is short at best. Even the long span of Yasammez was a mere flicker beside the stars, and the stars too will go dark some day.
There was nothing to be said to such a blindingly joyful sentiment. Barrick nodded and turned away.
