Shadowheart

by Tad Williams

“You promise this?” Briony said, looking not at Vash now but at Prusus. “If we let you and your men take ship—and you Xixians will pay for those ships and pay for everything that goes upon them—then you promise you will withdraw your armies from the rest of Eion?”

  Prusus’ head wagged several times before he could get out the words. They were hard to understand, but not impossible.

  “Yiy ... I ... do. I ... puh ... rah ... misss.”

  “You and Minister Vash may return to your camp in the hills. My counselors, Prince Eneas, and I must talk together.”

  “I am disposed to trust them, not because I believe everything they say—Vash, it is clear to me, is a man who has long acquaintance with the manipulation of truth—but because I see no choice.” In the privacy of the tent she had taken off her headpiece. A sheen of sweat flecked her brow. Vansen realized he was staring.

  “I do not like it, Briony,” said Prince Eneas. “Don’t do it. I think it is a mistake.”

  She gave him enough of a nettled look to make Ferras Vansen happier than he had been in hours. “I’m grateful for your advice, Eneas, but please remember, this is Southmarch soil, and although I will never be able to repay all you have done for me and my people, I am still the mistress here, even if I have not yet been crowned.”

  She truly has changed, Vansen realized. Most of the petty angers have gone. What remains is just and necessary . . . even queenly.

  Briony frowned. “In any case, what can we do? Imprison them all? Execute them . . . ?”

  As she spoke a guard came in, clearly in haste. He bent and whispered his message to Vansen, who immediately stepped forward.

  “Princess,” he said, “my men say that a boat is coming, not from the Southmarch mainland but across the bay from Oscastle ...”

  “Surely that is not so unusual, Captain Vansen? Or is it a warship?”

  “No, but ...” He did not know what to say. “Perhaps you should come and see.”

  It took only a short time to throw back the curtains again and open the pavilion to the blue sky and the green bay all around. The Marrinswalk ship was impossible to mistake, a single-masted cog of the type usually meant for fast travel and vital news, but what caught Vansen’s attention were the three flags she flew. One was the owl of the Marrinswalk’s ducal family, but she also showed the black and silver of the Eddons and another pennant with a strange sigil that Vansen did not recognize.

  “By the gods,” said Steffens Nynor, his wispy hair a little disarranged with drink and the heat of the day, “they’re flying the battle standard of the Southmarch master of arms. But we have no master of arms. Not since ...”

  “Do not say it,” Briony told him. “Do not tempt the gods to cruelty or tricks.”

  The ship anchored a short distance out in the bay and a boat rowed across to the causeway and tied up on the opposite side from the Xixian falcon boat, which was just raising anchor. As if in studied imitation of the southern delegation, this boat too disgorged a man in dark traveling clothes and a broad hat; the man at the front of the landing boat was even darker of skin than Pinimmon Vash.

  “Oh, merciful Zoria, is that truly Dawet?” Briony said. She stood up and waved her hand. “Master Dan-Faar, is it you?”

  The newcomer waved from the end of the causeway, but Vansen thought it a subdued gesture. The dark man climbed out as the boat was still being tied and walked up the road toward the pavilion.

  Briony clapped her hands. “I am so pleased you have come to us!” she called. “I feared something had happened to you—that you would never see the happy result of all our labors together in Syan.”

  The man Vansen had last seen as the envoy of Ludis Drakava mounted the wooden steps to the pavilion. He bowed and kissed Briony’s hand. “I rejoice to see you back on your throne again, Princess.” He turned and made a bow to the prince as well. “Your Royal Highness.”

  Eneas and Ferras Vansen looked at each other, unhappy with the arrival of this handsome newcomer and with Briony’s obvious affection for him.

  “But why did you come in such a manner, Master Dan-Faar, flying the flag of the master of arms?” Briony asked him. “Do you seek to fill the position?” She laughed, but suddenly looked unsure. “And why are you dressed so, all in black? Has something happened?

  Dawet was still on his knees, as if he were too weary to rise. He took a square of parchment from his cloak and offered it to her. “Here, Princess. This is for you.”

  Watching the way Briony flinched at the letter, Vansen wanted to leap forward and snatch it from her hand, but he knew he could not. She took it and broke the seal, then spread it on her lap. For a moment she read it in silence, then held it out to Dan-Faar, blinking away tears. “I cannot . . . I ...” She shook her head. “Please read it to me.”

  “To Princess Briony from her friend and servant, Idite ela-dan-Mozan, greetings.

  On the night of the fire, we were able to bring the great man Shaso dan-Heza out of the flames of my husband’s house, may the Great Mother guide and protect them both on their journeys. Shaso had taken great injury fighting with the men who set the fire, giving the women, children, and others a chance to escape the destruction, but he lived long enough to ask after your safety. When we told him you could not be found but had not been captured, he seemed satisfied, and died without saying more. Shaso was a man of great honor and wisdom. Tuan and Southmarch are both sadder places for his loss. ...”

  Dawet lowered the letter and turned to Briony. “I have returned a great man to Southmarch, my lady, so my ship bears his insignia. I am dressed in mourning because I bring back only his ashes.” He lowered his head. “Princess, I come to confirm what was heretofore only a sad belief. Shaso dan-Heza is dead.”

  “Are you certain we are allowed to be here?” Opal asked again. Even the stolid presence of Brother Antimony did not seem to reassure her. The Tower of Summer, at the very heart of the castle, was not the kind of place where most Funderlings would ever feel comfortable, even though their ancestors had helped build it.

  “The Big Folk owe a debt to the Rooftoppers now,” said Brother Antimony. “I do not think they would grudge their use of an abandoned tower.”

  “Be grateful,” Chert told his wife as they trooped up past another closed room. “When I wanted to visit them, I had to climb onto the roof.”

  “You? At your age? What were you thinking?”

  “Fracture and fissure, woman, I’m not that old.”

  But he knew she didn’t really mean it—like him, she was struggling to make sense of a world that had gone completely downside-up. Funderling Town remained a madhouse, with some neighborhoods still sealed off by the Guild and patrolled by the Big Folk’s royal guards until the last of Durstin Crowel’s men were rounded up. Almost every home had at least one survivor of the war, many of them wounded, not to mention all the surviving monks who had lost not just the Mysteries themselves but their temple home as well—and that, of course, had been mostly Chert’s doing. And even though many of Funderling Town’s citizens regarded flooding the depths as a heroic, brilliant act that might well have saved all their lives, Chert and Antimony and the engineers that had accomplished it were now despised by the most traditional and conservative of their kind, including the Metamorphic Brothers, many of whom had made it clear that Chert Blue Quartz would never be forgiven for what he (as they saw it) had taken from them.

  “Here,” he said as they reached the final landing. He pushed open the door. “The top floor.”

  Opal went through first. “Oh,” she said in a faint voice. “Oh, look how many . . . !”

  We’ll be attending quite a few more of these, Chert thought. A vast assembly of such unhappy gatherings, funerals and memorials for fallen friends, awaited them in the days ahead. But in truth, he decided, what they watched now was more than a bit like a Funderling memorial ceremony, but one seen from the very back row of the guildhall: the tiny figures came out and performed their parts, but he and Opal could scarcel
y hear them and had to guess at what was being said and done. There was no coffin, of course, and no image of Beetledown the Bowman that he could see either, but the Rooftoppers’ tiny voices were convincingly somber and the attitude of the mourners indisputably sad. Chert’s friend had been well-loved by his people, that was clear, and understanding this reminded him that he would never see Beetledown’s tiny, friendly face again. It was strange, because he had never known whether the little scout was married or had children, so he could scarcely claim to have been close to him, but they had been through adventures together nobody else could even imagine, let alone claim to have shared.

  Chert found himself suddenly dabbing at his eyes with his sleeve, trying to hide what he was doing from Antimony and Opal. Because of this, he did not see the queen of the Rooftoppers’ first steps out into the center of the empty fireplace, but he heard the tiny shell trumpets that announced her and hastily finished wiping away his tears.

  She stood, smaller than a child’s doll, in a beautiful dress of stiff, shiny fabric studded with beads so small Chert could scarcely even make them out. Beside him, Opal took a deep breath.

  “My,” his wife whispered, “isn’t she so pretty!”

  “That’s the queen,” he whispered back.

  “Don’t you think I could tell, you old fool?”

  “Her most Insidious and Unalloyed Majesty, Upsteeplebat the Queen!” announced a crier the size of a darning needle, then blew on his fluted shell trumpet again.

  “Upsteeplebat?” Opal murmured. “What kind of name is that?”

  “Hush.”

  The queen looked up into the heights of the room—or so it must have seemed to her—where the faces of her giant guests loomed like three moons hanging in the sky. She nodded in a way that suggested that she was glad to see them, but she directed her words to the crowd of mourners.

  “I do not come here to lament over the death of Beetledown the Bowman, chief of my Gutter-Scouts,” she began in a surprisingly loud, high voice, “because we know that he is with the Hand of the Sky in the heights above the heights, and in that attic of delight there is no sadness, no pain.

  “But I do stand before you to say that we will miss him, because our love for him was fierce—as was his love for his race and his nation, from the tip of the Iron Needle to the depths of the terrifying earth, from the Great Wainscoting to the fields of the South Roofs where our sky-steeds graze. Beetledown gave the greatest gift he had so that these things could survive, and so you and I could see our people prosper in a world that so often taxes us with hardship, but which is nevertheless the only world we the living have. ...”

  “She speaks wondrous well,” whispered Antimony.

  “She is their queen,” said Chert. “She is altogether admirable.”

  Opal gave him a look that he could feel without seeing. “Admirable, is she?”

  “She is their queen and a goodly one, that is all I am saying!”

  “Bad enough you are a troublesome old dog who likes to roam,” she said with quiet intensity, “but when you cast your eye on a woman no bigger than a baby’s rattle . . . !”

  “Oh, stop.” He was mortified, and fearful that their voices might carry farther than they guessed among such small, sharp-eared creatures. “That is nonsense, woman, and you know it.”

  Opal sniffed, but fell silent again.

  “ . . . And without a moment’s hesitation, after all that he had already given to his people and his queen, he said he would do it.” Upsteeplebat was still extolling Beetledown’s virtues. “Let those who are children this day look to his example—no finer one could have been set for you.”

  The thought of children made Chert’s heart grow even heavier. Opal was not really angry with him, he knew, nor did she believe for a moment he felt anything for the tiny queen of the Rooftoppers. She was angry at him for letting Flint go, and angry at herself more than at him. This day’s ceremony was no doubt reminding her of the day the boy had disappeared, that he had last been seen helping Beetledown escape a deadly attack to reach Antimony with the Astion, and that shortly after that sighting everything beneath that place, including the spot where Flint had been, had vanished in a remorseless crush of water. Corpses were still drifting up to the surface of the Salt Pool from its new tributaries below, bodies of Funderlings and Xixians and Qar alike. Chert knew Opal was terrified that Flint’s fate had been the same as theirs, that their house would be one of those to receive a visit from a gang of men carrying a dripping body on a covered bier.

  He lost track then of exactly what the queen of the Rooftoppers was saying, his thoughts spinning in unhappy circles until the ceremony was over.

  The tiny man with the trumpet stood at Chert’s feet, shouting at the top of his lungs. “Her Majesty wishes to speak to you, Chert of Blue Quartz.”

  Antimony patted him on the back. “You go. I will wait for you on the stairs. I am too fretful I will step on someone here.”

  “Don’t take long with your flirtations, old man,” his wife told him. “We have a great deal to see to at home.”

  “What are you talking about?” said Chert. “You must meet the queen, Opal. It is an honor. How many queens have you met?”

  “Really? But I’m not dressed for it ...”

  “Gods of raw earth, woman, you spent the entire morning making certain you had on the right garb. Come along. Beetledown was my friend—and he helped rescue Flint, too.”

  His wife’s face suddenly betrayed such deep unhappiness that he wished he hadn’t said anything, but it was too late to take it back. He took her arm and led her forward, walking with small, sliding steps to give their hosts ample time to get out of his way.

  Queen Upsteeplebat had been lifted up onto her saddled dove and waited for them with the serenity of a small but artful carving. When Chert and Opal had shuffled close enough, they carefully lowered themselves to their knees so they could see her better.

  “You are very kind to come, Chert of Blue Quartz,” the queen said. “And this must be your wife, the Lady Opal.” She nodded. “We have heard so much good of you from Flint and Chert, Mistress. I thank you also for coming. Beetledown the Bowman meant much to us.” She shook her head. “We will never forget him, nor will we ever be able to replace him.”

  To Chert’s surprise and pleasure, Opal was clearly charmed by the miniature queen. “You are too kind, Your Majesty. I liked Beetledown so much, too. A lovely lit . . . a lovely man. So many have been lost in the war—what terrible times!”

  As he listened to his wife and the queen, Chert’s attention was caught by Antimony, who was standing in the doorway of the Rooftoppers’ sanctuary trying to catch his eye, beckoning. Chert carefully made his way back across the floor.

  “You had better come.” Antimony’s face betrayed nothing.

  “What is it?”

  “Bring your wife, too, Master Chert.”

  He went back and made apologies to the Rooftoppers’ monarch, who did not seem either insulted or unduly surprised, and led Opal out.

  “What is this about?” his wife demanded. “You wanted me to meet her, then as soon as we’re talking friendly-like, you yank me off as though I were a ...” She stopped in the doorway, looking past Antimony at something Chert could not yet see. “Oh,” she said. “Oh!” And then she was hurrying across the landing. “Praise the Elders!” she shouted. “Oh, come see!”

  It was the boy, of course—Chert had known that by the sound of his wife’s voice. As Opal squeezed him and rubbed tears all over his shoulder and neck—he had grown even taller in the past days, it seemed—Flint gave Chert a look that seemed to mix amusement and bafflement.

  “But Mama Opal, I’m well,” he said as she wept and touched his face. “I said I would see you again. Didn’t they tell you?”

  She laughed through her tears. “Hark to the boy. As if I shouldn’t worry when he’s vanished and half the world’s tumbled down—and him right at the center of it all!”

  Chert
joined the embrace, if a little awkwardly. The boy was almost a head taller than he was now but still looked as though he might have seen nine summers at most. “Still, you shouldn’t have made your mother worry so, lad. We didn’t know where you were ...”

  “Come home,” Opal said. “Come home and I will make your favorite—muldywarp stew. Oh, Chert, let’s take him home.”

  Chert could not help noticing that Brother Antimony looked uncomfortable, even troubled. As the boy tried to get down the stairs under Opal’s continued assault, hugging him and trying to hold his hands and several times almost toppling them both off the steep steps, Chert slowed until he was walking beside Antimony.

  “Why the worried face?” he asked the monk as lightly as he could.

  “Oh, it is nothing,” Antimony said. “It only troubled me that bad luck should have forced me to leave Beetledown behind just so I could carry Nickel to safety—that . . . that ...” He looked around as though Brother Nickel’s supporters might even be there, in the upper floors of the Tower of Summer. “That miserly, self-important creature. What a waste to lose little Beetledown instead of him!”

  “The Elders’ plans are not always written clear,” Chert said.

  “But then I was thinking about how Flint knew just where to be—just where to be! Of all the tunnels of the Mysteries, he knew just where Beetledown would be coming and where the owl would catch him ...” Antimony shook his head. “And I was thinking of that, and how he disappeared, and wondering how a mere boy could know such things . . . and then there he was! Standing directly in front of me on the stairs as if I had . . . as if I had conjured him up.”

  Chert felt a bit of a chill, too—not the first that his adopted son’s actions had given him. “We have all had to get used to that. The boy . . . the boy is not like others.”

  Antimony’s laugh was almost angry. “You are a wise man, Chert Blue Quartz, but that is far from the cleverest thing you’ve ever said. The boy is not like any other!”