Shadowrise s-3

by Tad Williams

  "Hurts…!" Beck moaned. "Cold…!"

  "Don't fall!" Barrick was fighting to keep his balance; if he went into the water he knew he would not come out again, that the mist-faces would bleed his strength away.

  That's it-they are bleeding us empty, like leeches…

  The cold patches on his skin were spreading. His clothing did not seem to protect him from the heat-eaters at all, as if fever chills crawled through him-but these were on the outside, working their way in…

  Warmer on the inside, he thought blearily. We're all warmer on the inside. They want warmth…

  The idea was a mad one, but he knew he had only moments to do something. He lifted his left hand and slashed at it with Qu'arus' short sword. He barely felt the blade cut, as though he had plunged the arm in snow first, but blood welled in the crease of his palm and began to drip down his wrist. Barrick stretched out his arm, struggling to stay upright, and let the blood drizzle into the water.

  Immediately the mists began to swirl faster, circling around the place where his blood was spreading pinkly through the water. The fog above the pool thickened, then it too began to turn a subtle rosy shade, like low clouds refracting the coming dawn.

  "Move!" Barrick cried, but his voice was so weak he found it hard to believe that Beck could even hear him. He let more blood drip, then took a staggering step to the next flat stone. The mists swirled for a moment around the blood before moving toward him again. Barrick shook out more blood, but already the flow from his palm was beginning to slow. He cut himself in a different spot and let it drip into the water. Even the mist clinging to Raemon Beck's legs seemed to grow thinner as some of it wafted to the spot where Barrick's blood stained the water. Beck's first step was like a man waist-deep in mud, but the second came a little easier; after a few moments they were both lurching forward across the stepping stones toward the safety of the courtyard's far end.

  By the time they collapsed into the archway, wheezing and shivering, Barrick had cut his arm in three more places. His entire arm and hand below his elbow were streaked and smeared with red, the few patches of clean skin as startling as eyes in a dark forest.

  When Beck had caught his breath he tore off the ends of his tattered sleeves and began to wrap them around Barrick's wounds. The bandages he made were not the cleanest, but they stanched the blood well enough.

  Barrick peered unhappily across the next courtyard. This one seemed even more innocuous than the others, a featureless stone close with steps at the far end leading up to what looked like a simple, closed door-but he knew better. "What's waiting for us this time, do you think," he asked sourly, "-a nest of adders?"

  "You will defeat it, Highness, whatever it is." Something in Raemon Beck's tone made Barrick turn to look at him. Was that admiration he was seeing? Someone admiring the infamous cripple, Barrick Eddon? Or had the day's terrors simply injured the man's mind?

  "I don't want to defeat it." Barrick could see Skurn circling high above their heads, far away from bewitched grasses and blood-drinking mists. One of them had some sense, anyway. "I want someone to come with a battering ram and knock it all down. I'm weary of all this."

  Raemon Beck shook his head. "We must go forward. More skrikers will come to avenge their sisters and we will not surprise them the same way again."

  "Sisters?" It made him feel ill. "They truly are women?"

  "Not human women," Beck said grimly. "She-demons, maybe."

  "Forward, then, as you say." Barrick knew there was a certain inevitability to what was happening: of course he couldn't go backward, anymore than he could go backward through life to repair the mistakes already made. He got to his feet, groaning. The numbness of the biting mist had worn off and he ached all over. What would the people of Southmarch think of their wretch of a prince if they saw him now?

  Here I stand, he told himself, the Prince of Nothing. No subjects, no soldiers, no family, no friends.

  Skurn dropped from the sky and fluttered down onto the paving stones on the far side of the archway. As the raven strutted back and forth only a few paces away, Barrick half expected something to reach up from between the stones and throttle the black bird, but either the lurking danger did not care about ravens or it was something more subtle.

  "Happy now?" Skurn demanded. "Can't help wondering, us."

  "Shut your snailhole, bird. I had to come to this wretched city. Now I have to do this as well. Nobody forced you to come along."

  "Oh, aye, cast us out, 'course. All us did was warn you. Fair payment."

  "Look, instead of scolding me like an old woman, tell me if you've seen anything. What's beyond this next courtyard?"

  The raven eyed him. "Naught."

  "Truly? Then what's on the other side of that door?"

  Skurn squinted across the courtyard toward the ancient wooden portal, which was unmarked except for a corroded metal boss in the middle-a handle, perhaps.

  "On other side? There be no other side."

  "What are you talking about?" It was all Barrick could do to keep his temper. "Once we cross that courtyard and open that door, there has to be something on the other side-a building? Another courtyard? What?"

  "Naught-us told you!" The raven fluffed his feathers in irritation. "Not even door. On far side be the outside of yon big wall. Then trees and whatnot. Same as the front, like. Nothing else."

  Repeated questioning finally established that what sounded like a misunderstanding was in fact the truth: according to Skurn, who had flown over the site several times, nothing stood on the other side of that final wall with the door in it, and on the outside there was no sign that the door even existed. It was all some elaborate trick. Barrick slumped down in the archway, defeated, but Raemon Beck tugged at his arm.

  "Come, Highness. Do not despair. We are nearly at the end." The man's patchwork clothing was now almost as badly torn and dirtied as Barrick's own clothes, which he had been wearing for months. Barrick suddenly wondered what he must look like to someone else-what he must smell like.

  Prince of Nothing, he thought again, and began to laugh. It took him so hard that for long moments he could do nothing but sit, bent double, wheezing.

  "Highness, are you hurt?" Beck tugged again. "Are you ill?"

  Barrick shook his head. "Help me up," he said at last, still struggling to catch his breath. He didn't even know why he was laughing. "You're right. We're nearly at the end." It was just that he had a different idea of what the end meant than Beck did.

  Once on his feet Barrick did not pause-what use in waiting any longer?-but walked out of the arch and began to make his way across the cracked and crumbling stone flags of the empty courtyard. He did his best to hold his head up and walk forward bravely, although he knew that at any moment something would reach up from below or drop on them from the sky. But to Barrick's weary astonishment, no reaching hands clutched at him, no menaces leaped out of the shadows. He and Beck marched slowly but steadily across the stone courtyard until they stood on the steps looking up at the great gray door and its crude metal handle.

  Skurn dropped onto Barrick's shoulder, clutching nervously with his claws so that Barrick squirmed in discomfort. He reached out toward the door, expecting that any moment something would happen to stop him-a noise, a sudden movement, an agonizing pain-but nothing like that occurred. His fingers closed on the rough, corroded metal of the handle, but when he pulled the door did not budge or even quiver. It might as well have been part of the wall.

  Barrick wrapped both hands around the handle and pulled harder, ignoring the pain from his bandaged palm, but the door seemed as immovable as a mountain. He put his foot against the topmost step and leaned back, using his legs as well as his arms, but he might as well have been trying to heave the entire green earth onto his shoulders. Raemon Beck then put his arms around Barrick's waist and added his own weight and strength, but it still made no difference.

  "Didst think on pushing yon great door, 'stead of just pulling?" offered Skurn.
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  Barrick stared at him balefully, then stepped onto the threshold and shoved as hard as he could. The door did not budge. "Happy now?" he asked the bird, then turned his back to the door and slid down until he was sitting on the threshold looking back across the gloomy, twilit courtyard, here in this place where no darklights burned.

  "Pushed hard, did you?" Skurn asked.

  Barrick scowled at him. "Try it yourself if you don't think so."

  Skurn made a throaty sound of disgust. "Got no hands, does us?"

  The raven's words poked at his memory. No hands. Barrick let his head fall back against the door-it felt as solid as the side of a granite cliff-and closed his eyes, but the thought remained elusive. He was so tired that the world seemed to tilt and pitch around him and he opened his eyes. Surely he had never been so tired in his life…

  "Hands," he said abruptly. "It was something about hands."

  "What?" Raemon Beck looked toward him, but the merchant's gaze was dull and hopeless. Barrick felt sure he was seeing an army of skrikers making their way across the courtyard of grass, then the courtyard of water…

  "Listen," Barrick said. "The Sleepers told me something about this place-Crooked's Hall, if this is truly it. They said no mortal hand could open the door."

  Beck barely seemed to have heard him. "We have to do something, my lord. More Lonely Ones will be coming soon!"

  Barrick laughed, harshly, bleakly. What use was the knowledge even if it was correct? They were all mortal here, even Skurn. If it had been "no man's hand," perhaps the raven could have tugged the door open with his beak. Barrick snorted at the thought. Perhaps they should ask the skrikers to help them…

  "Wait. No mortal hand, they said." He reached into his shirt and took out Gyir's mirror, then slipped its cord from around his neck. For a moment, feeling the mirror's substantial weight in his hand he had the strange sensation that it was a living thing he held, but he had no time for such thoughts-the idea that had just come to him was little to do with the mirror, but everything to do with the slender piece of anchor cord on which it hung.

  Raemon Beck looked up from his exhausted slouch at the base of the steps. "What is that…?"

  "Don't say anything." Barrick leaned closer and threw the cord over the door handle, grabbing it with his hands on either side of the pouch that held the mirror. Then he pulled. Nothing happened.

  Skurn flapped up into the air, circling once near Barrick's head.

  "Them gray things. I see more by the river, coming this way," the bird announced. "Fast, like…!"

  Barrick's fingers began to tingle. A moment later, a flicker of light ran the length of the string, so faint that only the dark shadows in the doorway made it visible. Without thinking he twisted his hands, one over the other, and pulled. The door swung outward with a deep rumble and an almost inaudible screech, as if the hinges were breaking free from centuries of rust. Barrick had to step back as the heavy door slowly swung past him, and Raemon Beck half-tumbled down the steps to the courtyard stones to avoid it. Skurn flapped his wings, hovering before the opening, but then suddenly spun in the air and vanished into the blackness beyond the door-frame as abruptly as if a great wind had caught him and swept him in.

  "Hoy, bird!" Barrick flung out his hand toward the emptiness inside the door, but pulled back before his fingers passed into it. It was more than shadow, it was nothingness itself, like the black gulf that had taken Captain Vansen…

  He felt a wind blowing past him, pulling at his hair, his clothes… Raemon Beck only had time to tell him, "My lord, I'm afraid…!" then everything seemed to tilt up on edge and they both fell out of the world. Barrick couldn't scream, couldn't weep, couldn't think, could do nothing but tumble through the blackness, the cold nothing-at-all that already seemed to go on forever…

  There was only void, without sound or light, without direction, even without meaning. Time itself had deserted this emptiness, if it had ever trespassed here at all. He waited a thousand, thousand years to breathe, and then a thousand more for his heart to beat. He was alive, but he was not living. He was nowhere, forever.

  An age passed. He had forgotten everything. His name had gone long ago-his memories, too-and any purpose had vanished long before that. He floated in the between like a dead leaf in a river, without volition or concern and with no motion but what was given to him. The void itself might have rushed and surged like a cataract for all he knew, but because he was in it and of it, he felt nothing. He was a grain of sand on a deserted beach. He was a cold dead star in the farthest corner of the sky. He could barely even think anymore. He was… he was…

  Barrick? Barrick, where are you?

  The sounds fell upon his thoughts, stunning in their complexity. They were meaningless to him, of course-clumps of noise stopping and starting, artifacts of intent that could mean nothing to a leaf, a pebble, a cold spark whose light had guttered out. But still, the feeling of it tugged at him, quickened him. What did it mean?

  Barrick, where have you gone? Why won't you speak to me? Why have you left me alone?

  He thought of something then, or felt it, a mote of brilliance dancing before his eyes, a bit of light… a smear of fire. The brightness finally gave the void shape and as it did it gave him direction as well, up and down, backward, forward… The light emanated from a small, slender figure with dark eyes and darker hair-hair almost as black as the void itself but for one gleaming streak, the fiery smear that had caught his attention through the endless nullity. It was a girl.

  Barrick? I need you. Where have you gone?

  And then it began to come back to him, but in confused pieces, so that for a moment the black-haired girl seemed to be his sister, or maybe his betrothed. Qinnitan? He tried to call to her with all his strength. Qinnitan!

  I am so lonely, she cried. Why won't you come to me anymore? Why have you deserted me?

  I'm here! But although it seemed he was almost beside her, he could not make her hear him. I'm here! Qinnitan! She might as well have been on the far side of a thick, distorting window. They were alone in the void together, but they could not touch, could not speak…

  Why? she cried. Why have you forsaken me…?

  Praise the ancestors. Another voice, another thought, suddenly intruded into the emptiness. I have searched and searched. I thought you lost in the Great Between…

  Qinnitan clearly did not sense this presence any more than she heard or saw Barrick. Her voice was growing fainter. Oh, Barrick, why…?

  Come, the new voice said-a male voice. He had heard it before. I will help you, child, but you must cross the gap yourself. It is late now-you must go directly through a dark time… Then he could see it, a huge, pale shape on four legs, its head a complication of slender boughs like a young tree.

  No, he realized, they were antlers: what stood before him in the endless dark, burning icily bright as a distant star, so that he could barely see Qinnitan beyond it, was a great white stag.

  Follow me, it said. The very words seemed to glow with a pale lavender light of their own. Follow-or have you already fallen in love with nothingness? Something seemed to seize him then, a flash of white that lifted him loose from the void and pulled him away from the dark-haired girl.

  No! He fought but could not overcome it. Qinnitan, no, I'm here! I'm here!

  But she still could not hear him, and he could not fight this new force. A moment later she was slipping away, retreating into greater inclarity as though she sank beneath the surface of a muddy pond; the last he saw of her was a flicker of fire in the great black. Barrick felt as though his heart had been ripped from his breast and he was leaving it behind in the void.

  Now he began to spin through alternations of heat and cold and flashes of light that pained and sickened him but did not entirely disperse the darkness. He was falling, he was flying, he was… he could not tell. The flashes of light came faster, the pulses of heat more frequently. Soon came sound as well-brief wordless hisses, groans, and then roars, as if
the world of life and movement were crashing in on him like ocean waves and then receding just as swiftly.

  I want to go back…! But whoever had pulled him away from the dark-haired girl was no longer speaking to him, or at least Barrick could no longer hear his voice.

  Qinnitan, I'm so sorry…

  And then light and sound suddenly broke in like a river overflowing its banks, a flood of sensation that hammered at his thoughts until he could not think, only absorb. Madness surrounded him.

  Faces big as mountains-faces that were mountains, vomiting out rockfalls-and faces like swollen thunderheads spitting lightning. Men that were storms and women that were fiery columns. Shadows riding horses that trampled tall trees beneath their hooves. The land itself riven and turned over, gouged into fresh valleys and mountains, the sky blazing with white light or popping and crackling as it filled with falling stars. Barrick could only cringe and whimper as it all thrust in upon him.

  It was a war between gods, a war of giants and monsters, the maddest, strangest war that had ever been. The warriors became animals, became spinning winds or sheets of flame as they struggled with each other before the walls of a bizarre city, a rumpled hedgehog-hide of high, spiky crystalline towers that seemed to both loom and tremble, as though the sky itself pressed down on them. One moment the city seemed taller than any mountain, the next it was dwarfed by those who fought there, by both besiegers and besieged.

  A battle was raging. Birds arrowed down from the sky in thousands, attacking a woman who seemed to be made of water, but who grew until she was a fountain higher than the black towers themselves. Bursts of blinding light revealed whole armies of skeletal soldiers that became invisible again when the light died. Stones swirled like windblown leaves, a snake made of bundled lightning squeezed the top from a mountain and set it tumbling down to shatter one of the castle walls. The hole was quickly patched by a swarm of insects all made from metal, huffing steam at every crack and joint.