Shadowrise s-3

by Tad Williams

  "Why did you do that, boy?" he demanded. "The brothers said to stay out of there-what were you doing? And what happened in Chaven's room?"

  Flint shook his head sleepily. "I don't know." He walked on in silence for several paces, then suddenly said, "Sometimes… sometimes I think I know things. Sometimes I do know things-important things! And then… and then I don't." To Chert's astonishment, the boy abruptly burst into tears, something Chert had never, ever seen him do. "I just don't know, Father! I don't understand!"

  Chert wrapped his arms around Flint, hugging this strange creature, this alien child, feeling the boy shake with helpless sorrow. There was nothing else he could do.

  He had just got Flint settled in bed when someone rapped at the door. Wearily, Chert got up and opened it to reveal Chaven, wide-eyed in the dark hallway.

  "Did you find the boy?" he asked.

  "Yes. He is well. He went to the library. I have just put him to bed." He stepped back, beckoned the physician to enter. "Come in and I'll see if I can find us some mossbrew. Do you remember what happened?"

  "I cannot," said Chaven. "In truth, I came to bring you a message. Ferras Vansen has sent to say that they have learned how to speak with the Funderling they captured."

  Chert lifted an eyebrow. "I am a Funderling. That murderous creature is a drow."

  Chaven waved his hand. "Of course, of course. Your pardon. In any case, will you come? Captain Vansen asked for you."

  He shook his head. "No. I must stay with my boy. Too many things have called me away from him. Besides, there is nothing I can do there to help Vansen. If he truly needs me I will come to him tomorrow." He smiled sourly. "Unless the Qar murder us all before then, of course."

  The physician didn't know quite how to take this. "Of course."

  When Chaven had left Chert went to look in on the boy. Flint's face was slack in sleep, mouth open, his tousled hair lighter even than citron quartz. What did all that mean? Chert wondered. He knows, but he doesn't know?

  As always, Chert could only wonder at the strange thing he and Opal had brought into their lives, this changeling boy… this walking mystery.

  Utta pulled at the older woman's arm, trying to hold her back, but her efforts had little effect. Together they slid and slipped in the mud of the main street. Kayyin made a languid move to help them, but they regained their balance.

  "I will not be stopped, Sister." Merolanna was breathing hard from the exertion and the cold. Before the Bridge of Thorns had begun to grow the days had actually turned warm, but since the beginning of the monstrous project the entirety of the coastline around Southmarch had been shrouded in chill wet mist, as if summer had entirely passed them by and they had tumbled straight into Dekamene or even later.

  "Kayyin, help me," Utta begged. "The dark lady will kill her."

  "Perhaps," the Qar said. "But, see-we are all still alive. My mother seems to have lost a bit of her bloodlust in these sad, late days."

  "Are you mad, Halfling?" Merolanna said. "Lost her bloodlust! She is killing our people this moment! I can hear the screams!"

  Kayyin shrugged. "I did not say she had become a different person entirely."

  Merolanna strode on, determined, smacking away Utta's hand when the Zorian sister tried to slow her. "No! She will hear me. I will not be stopped!"

  "If Snout and his fellow guards had not been called to the siege," Kayyin said cheerfully, "you would not have gotten out the front door."

  Merolanna only showed her teeth in an expression that on someone other than a respectable dowager might have been called a snarl.

  The collection of docks and harbor buildings facing the castle's drowned causeway had become a scene of nightmarish chaos. Creatures of dozens of different shapes and sizes hurried back and forth through the fog as the vast, creaking, treelike branches of the Bridge of Thorns loomed over all like the deformed bones of a collapsing temple. Merolanna, mud now spattered halfway up her skirt, did not flinch from even the most grotesque creatures that appeared out of the murk, but stamped along like a determined soldier, headed for the black and gold tent standing by itself at the center of things.

  She is brave, Utta thought, I cannot take that away from her. But the one she seeks is not some ordinary mortal to be cowed by an irate old woman. If what Kayyin said was true, the dark lady herself is older than we can imagine-the child of a god. And sweet Zoria knows that she is angry and vengeful beyond our understanding as well.

  If it had not been for the strangeness of the last year, the mad things she herself had seen, Utta would have dismissed the Qar's talk of gods and Fireflowers and immortal siblings as nonsense… but no other answers fit what she had seen and what was all around her this moment! For Utta Fornsdodir, who thought of herself as an educated woman, one who despite her calling could glean the difference between the important truths in the old stories and the superstition and silliness of some of the tales themselves, it had been a shocking and even disheartening time.

  Yasammez stood before her tent like a statue of Nightmare, all in spiked black armor, an ivory-white sword hanging naked and unsheathed at her belt. She was watching something Utta could not see in the clouded heights of the thorns and did not turn even when Duchess Merolanna stumbled to a halt in front of her and slowly, painfully, lowered herself to her knees. A thin shrieking that might have been the wind wafted over the silent tableau, but Utta knew it was not the wind. Inside the walls of Southmarch castle, the fairies were killing men, women, and children.

  "I cannot take this cruelty any longer!" Merolanna's voice, so firm only moments ago, now had a hitch that was more than fear, Utta sensed: something about dark Yasammez was enough to make the words stumble in anyone's throat. "Why are you murdering my people? What have they done to you? Two hundred years since the last war with your kind-we had all but forgotten you even existed!"

  The face of Yasammez turned slowly toward her-an emotionless mask, pale and weirdly beautiful despite the inhuman angles of its bones. "Two hundred years? " the fairy-woman said in her harshly musical voice. "Mere moments. When you have seen the centuries flutter past as I have, then you may talk of time as if it meant something. Your people have doomed mine and now I am returning the favor. You may watch the ending or you may hide yourself away, but do not waste my time."

  "Kill me, then," said Merolanna. The hitch in her throat was gone.

  "No, Duchess!" Utta cried, but her legs suddenly felt wobbly as spring rushes and she could not move closer.

  "Quiet, Sister Utta." The duchess turned back to the angular shadow that was Yasammez. "I cannot simply watch my people die-my nieces and nephews and friends-but I cannot hide from it, either. If you understand suffering as you say you do, end mine." She bowed her head. "Take my life, you cold thing. Torture does not befit a great lady."

  Yasammez looked at Merolanna and something like a cold smile played across her face. For a long moment they stood like characters in a play, by appearance a terrifying conqueror and a helpless victim or an executioner and condemned prisoner-but it was nothing quite so simple, Utta realized.

  "You should not speak to me of suffering," Yasammez said at last. Her voice was still rough and strange, but lower, softer. "Never. Were I to bring your loved ones here one by one and execute them in front of you, still you should not speak that word to me."

  "I don't know what…" Merolanna began.

  "Silence." The word hissed like a red-hot blade thrust into cold water. "Do you know what you and your wretched kind have done to my people? Hunted us, murdered us, poisoned us like vermin. Those who survived driven into exile in the cold lands to the north, forced to draw the mantle of twilight over themselves like a child hiding beneath a blanket. Yes, you even stole the sun from us! But, cruelest jest of all, you pushed our race to the brink of destruction and then also snatched away our last chance at survival." The pale face tilted forward, black eyes slitted. "Torture? If I could, I would torture every one of you soft mortal slugs, then burn the fat from
your bodies while you screamed. Mounds of your charred bones would be your only monument."

  The dark woman's hatred was like an icy blast of wind down a mountainside. Utta could not help herself-she let out a little noise of terror.

  Yasammez turned on her as if she had noticed her for the first time. "You. You call yourself a servant of Zoria. What beside sentimental nonsense do you know of the white dove-of the true Dawnflower? What do you know of the way her father and his clan tormented her, killed her beloved, then handed her over to one of the victorious brothers as if the goddess of the first light was nothing but a spoil of war? What do you know of the way they tortured her son Crooked, the one you mayflies call Kupilas, until he was willing to give up his own life to rid the world of them? For thousands of years he has suffered to keep the world safe, agonies you and even I cannot imagine. Then think of this-you call him a god… but I call him Father." Her face, the mask of rage, suddenly went as slack as the features of a corpse. "And now he is dying. My father is dying, my family is dying, my entire race is dying-and you talk to me of suffering."

  Utta's legs buckled at last and she sank down into the mud beside Merolanna. In the moment's hush she could again hear the cries of Yasammez' victims across the bay, a chorus of terror that sounded like nothing so much as the screeching of distant seabirds.

  The dark lady turned her back on them. "Kayyin, take these things away from me, these… insects. I have a war to fight. Tell them the story of how their kind stole the Fireflower and murdered my family. After that, if they still want to die, I will be happy to accommodate them."

  28

  The Lonely Ones

  "In the tome known as Ximander's Book it is written that one family of the Elementals did join forces with the Qar long ago, and that they are called the Emerald Fire. According to Ximander they are a sort of royal guard to the king and queen of the fairies, like the Leopards of the Xixian Autarch."

  -from "A Treatise on the Fairy Peoples of Eion and Xand"

  "The repose… skrikers?I don't understand."Barrick took up the heavy oars again and began to row. The weird murk of the darklights lined the river like an arbor of old trees, dense along the bank and stretching high on either side until it finally began to thin far above their heads. "It makes no sense," he growled at Raemon Beck, struggling to keep his voice to a whisper. "Why would the Dreamless shut themselves away for hours each day when they do not sleep? And if everyone's inside, why would they have these skriker things guarding the streets? From what?"

  Beck had dried his eyes, but he looked as if he might burst into tears again any moment; the man's weak, puffy face made Barrick angry. "The Dreamless are fairies," Beck said quietly, "and except for my master they aren't kind ones. They trust no one-not even their own kind. As for the Repose, it is their law to lock themselves in, and that is what the skrikers see to. My master Qu'arus used to tell me that his people had to shut themselves away because too much wakefulness made their hearts and their thoughts sick. Before the Law of Repose many of them grew so damaged and secretive that they slaughtered their own families or their neighbors. There still are places where you can see the black ruins of estates that burned to the ground centuries ago with the family and all their servants inside, turned into funeral pyres by those who had grown tired of living…"

  Barrick felt a disturbing moment of kinship with the Dreamless. How often had he dreamed of his own home in flames? How often had he wished for some disaster to end his pain, little caring who else might be harmed?

  He rowed as quietly as he could, but the city was still as a tomb; every splash seemed certain to draw attention. The small waterway they were on came to an end, leaving them no choice but to move into a larger branch of one of the main canals. Three or four other boats were visible on the water, albeit distantly, but Barrick pulled hard on the oars and they managed to slip quickly across the wide waterway and then back onto one of the smaller side streams.

  It was tiring to go so fast, though: the boat was twice as big as the sort of two-man skiffs used in Southmarch. Barrick found himself thinking of the headless blemmy that had done the work before-he wished they could have brought one of the horrible things, just to spare himself this backbreaking labor.

  Barrick soon discovered that if he kept the skiff away from the darklights along the edge of the canals he could actually see fairly well, but the effect was still disturbing: out in the middle of the larger waterways was something like the shadowland twilight he had grown used to, but the banks seemed swaddled in inky black smoke. To see anything of what they were passing he had to move in close, until they were within the penumbra of the darklights and his eyes became accustomed to the deep shadow. But he had no idea whether they could be seen in turn or who might be looking at them.

  "We need a place to hide," he told Beck. "Some place no one will find us while we decide what to do next."

  "There is no such place," Beck said bleakly. "Not here. Not in Sleep."

  Barrick scowled. "And you do not know where Crooked's Hall is, either. You are as useless as a boar's teats…"

  At that moment something dropped on them out of the blackness, as though the darklights themselves had spat out part of their essence. Raemon Beck threw himself down, pressing his face against the deck, but Barrick recognized the clot of shadow and its method of entrance.

  "I didn't expect to see you again, bird," he said.

  "Us didn't expect to see you, neither… not alive, like." The bird bent to groom its chest feathers. "So, how went your guesting with those kindly blue-eyed folk?"

  Barrick almost laughed. "As you can see, we've decided to move on. The problem is, Beck here doesn't know where Crooked's Hall might be. We need somewhere to go where we can be safe from the Night Men. And the others… what did you call them, Beck? Skrikers? "

  "Quiet!" The patchwork man looked around in anxious terror. "Do not name them here where the banks are close by! You'll summon them."

  Skurn, who had been standing on one leg at the bow of the boat while he picked something out of his toes, shook himself and fluttered a little closer to Barrick. "P'raps us could fly up and try to see somewhat for you," he said offhandedly. "P'raps."

  Barrick couldn't help noticing the overture of comradeship. "Yes, that would be good, Skurn. Thank you." He looked at the pitchy clouds of blacklight along the banks. "Find a place where the darkness is not so thick-an island, perhaps. Unused. Maybe wild."

  The black bird flapped upward in a spiral and then leveled out, flying toward the nearest bank.

  "My stomach is empty," Barrick said as he watched the raven disappear. "If we take a fish from this water will it poison us?"

  Beck shook his head. "I don't think so. But there is already food in the boat. I doubt anyone touched it after we brought my master home. With so many lost on our hunting trip and my master wounded we did not eat it all-a good deal of dried meat and road bread should be left." He crawled forward and found a large waterproof sack folded underneath the foremost bench. "Yes, see!"

  The food had a strange, musty taste, but Barrick was far too tired and hungy to mind. They shared a handful of dried meat and two pieces of bread as hard as boot-leather that reminded Barrick of the brown maslin loaves back home.

  "And you are truly Prince Barrick!" Raemon Beck had recovered his spirits a bit. "I cannot believe I should see you again, my lord-and here of all places!"

  "If you say so. I do not remember our first meeting." In truth, Barrick didn't much want to remember. It was nothing to do with the man in the ragged clothes. He had felt such relief at being separated from all that he had left behind-his past, his heritage, his pain-and he was in no hurry to bring any of it back.

  Beck haltingly told him of how his caravan had been attacked by the Qar, he the lone survivor, and how after telling his story he had been summoned to a royal council and then had been sent back again to the same place along the Settland Road. The tale took a long while-Beck's memory had been addled by so much t
ime behind the Shadowline, a stay even longer than Barrick's-and every name he recovered was a victory for him but gave Barrick only pain.

  "And then your sister told the captain… what was his name? The tall one?"

  "Vansen," said Barrick flatly. The guardsman had fallen into blackness defending Barrick's life after Barrick himself had cursed him many times. Was there to be no end to this parade of wretched, useless memories?

  "Yes, your sister told him to take me back to where the caravan was attacked. But we never reached it-or I never did. I woke up in the night surrounded by mist. I was lost. I called and called but no one found me. Or at least none of the ones that I traveled with found me…" Raemon Beck broke off, shuddering, and would say no more about what had happened to him between that time and the time he was taken in by Qu'arus of Sleep. "He treated me well, did Master. Fed me. Didn't beat me unless I deserved it. And now he's dead…" Beck's shoulders trembled. "But I do not think your sister, bless her-forgive me, Lord, I should say Princess Briony… I do not think she meant me any harm. She was angry, but I don't think she was angry at me…"

  "Enough, man. Leave it." Barrick had heard as much as he could bear.

  Beck lapsed into silence. Barrick sat hunched in the robe that had cushioned Qu'arus on his dying journey and took up the oars again, rowing just enough to keep them in the middle of the quiet, backwater stream while they waited for the raven's return. The canal was narrow and the houses rose up on either side, scarcely distinguishable from the rough stony cliffs out of which they had been carved, only recognizable as dwellings by the occasional tiny window and the huge, gatelike doors in the walls above the waterline.