(Shadowmarch #1) Shadowmarch

by Tad Williams

  In Our Present Day Containing the opinions of Finn Teodoros, Himself, and no Responsibility to the late Master Clemon of Anverrin

  In this Year of the Trigon 1316, three hundred years after Coldgray Moor and two centuries since the loss of the northern marchlands and the establishment of the Shadowline, the north has changed little. The shadow-boundary has remained constant, and effectively marks the outer edge of the known world—even ships that wander off course in northern waters seldom return.

  Syan has almost entirely lost its hold over its former empire, and is now merely the strongest of several large kingdoms in the heartland of Eion, but there are other threats. The might of the Autarch, the god-king of Xis on the southern continent, is growing. For the first time in almost a thousand years, Xandians are exerting power across the northern continent. Many of the countries on the southernmost coast of Eion have already begun to pay the Autarch tribute, or are ruled by his puppets.

  The House of Eddon in all its honor still rules in Southmarch, and our March Kingdom is the only true power in the north—Brenland and Settland, as is commonly known, are small, rustic, inward-looking nations—but the March King’s descendants and their loyal servants have begun to wonder how much farther the Autarch’s arm might reach into Eion and what woe that might mean for us, as witness the unfortunate events that have befallen our beloved monarch, King Olin. We can only pray that he will be brought back safe to us.

  This is my history, prepared at your request, my lord. I hope it pleases you.

  (signed,) Finn Teodoros Scholar and Loyal Subject of His Majesty, Olin Eddon

  Prelude

  COME AWAY, dreamer, come away. Soon you will witness things that only sleepers and sorcerers can see. Climb onto the wind and let it bear you—yes, it is a swift and frightening steed, but there are leagues and leagues to journey and the night is short.

  Flying higher than the birds, you pass swiftly over the dry lands of the southern continent of Xand, above the Autarch’s startlingly huge temple-palace stretching mile upon mile along the stone canals of his great city of Xis. You do not pause—it is not mortal kings you spy upon today, not even the most powerful of them all. Instead you fly across the ocean to the northern continent of Eion, over timeless Hierosol, once the center of the world but now the plaything of bandits and warlords, but you do not linger here either. You hurry on, winging over principalities that already owe their fealty to the Autarch’s conquering legions and others who as yet do not, but soon will.

  Beyond the cloud-scraping mountains that fence the southern part of Eion from the rest, across the trackless forests north of the mountains, you reach the green country of the Free Kingdoms and stoop low over field and fell, speeding across the thriving heartlands of powerful Syan (which was once more powerful still), over broad farmlands and well-traveled roads, past ancient family seats of crumbling stone, and on to the marches that border the gray country beyond the Shadowline, the northernmost lands in which humans still live.

  On the very doorstep of those lost and inhuman northern lands, in the country of Southmarch, a tall old castle stands gazing out over a wide bay, a fortress isolated and protected by water, dignified and secretive as a queen who has outlived her royal husband. She is crowned with magnificent towers, and the patchwork roofs of the lower buildings are her skirt. A slender causeway that joins the castle to the mainland stretches out like a bridal train spreading out to make the rest of her city, which lies in the folds of the hills and along the mainland edge of the bay. This ancient stronghold is a place of mortal men now, but it has an air of something else, of something that has come to know these mortals and even deigns to shelter them, but does not entirely love them. Still, there is more than a little beauty in this stark place that many call Shadowmarch, in its proud, wind-tattered flags and its streets splashed by downstabbing sunlight. But although this hilly fortress is the last bright and welcoming thing you will see before entering the land of silence and fog, and although what you are shortly to experience will have dire consequence here, your journey will not stop at Southmarch—not yet. Today you are called elsewhere.

  You seek this castle’s mirror-twin, far in the haunted north, the great fortress of the immortal Qar.

  And now, as suddenly as stepping across a threshold, you cross into their twilight lands. Although the afternoon sun still illumines Southmarch Castle, only a short ride back across the Shadowline, all that dwells on this side of that invisible wall is in perpetual quiet evening. The meadows are deep and dark, the grass shiny with dew. Couched on the wind, you observe that the roads below you gleam pale as eel’s flesh and seem to form subtle patterns, as though some god had written a secret journal upon the face of the misty earth. You fly on over high, storm-haloed mountains and across forests vast as nations. Bright eyes gleam from the dark places beneath the trees, and voices whisper in the empty dells.

  And now at last you see your destination, standing high and pure and proud beside a wild, dark, inland sea. If there was something otherworldly about Southmarch Castle, there is very little that is worldly at all about this other: a million, million stones in a thousand shades of darkness have been piled high, onyx on jasper, obsidian on slate, and although there is a fine symmetry to these towers, it is a type of symmetry that would make ordinary mortals sick at the stomach.

  You descend now, dismounting from the wind at last so that you may hurry through the mazy and often narrow halls, but keep to the widest and most brightly lit passages: it is not good to wander carelessly in Qul-na-Qar, this eldest of buildings (whose stones some say were quarried so many eons ago that the oceans of the young earth were still warm) and in any case, you have little time to spare.

  The shadow-dwelling Qar have a saying which signifies, in rough translation: “Even the Book of Regret starts with a single word.” It means that even the most important matters have a unique and simple beginning, although sometimes it cannot be described until long afterward—a first stroke, a seed, a nearly silent intake of breath before a song is sung. That is why you are hurrying now: the sequence of events that in days ahead will shake not just Southmarch but the entire world to its roots is commencing here and now, and you shall be witness.

  In the deeps of Qul-na-Qar there is a hall. In truth there are many halls in Qul-na-Qar, as many as there are twigs on an ancient, leafless tree—even on an entire bone-dead orchard of such trees—but even those who have only seen Qul-na-Qar during the unsettled sleep of a bad night would know what hall this is. It is your destination. Come along. The time is growing short.

  The great hall is an hour’s walk from end to end, or at least it appears that way. It is lit by many torches, as well as by other less familiar lights that shimmer like fireflies beneath dark rafters carved in the likeness of holly bough and blackthorn branch. Mirrors line both long walls, each oval powdered so thick with dust that it seems odd the sparkling lights and the torches can be seen even in dull reflection, odder still that other, darker shapes can also be glimpsed moving in the murky glass. Those shapes are present even when the hall is empty.

  The hall is not empty now, but full of figures both beautiful and terrible. Were you to speed back across the Shadowline in this very instant to one of the great markets of the southern harbor kingdoms, and there saw humanity in all its shapes and sizes and colors drawn together from all over the wide world, still you would marvel at their sameness after having seen the Qar, the Twilight People, gathered here in their high, dark hall. Some are as stunningly fair as young gods, tall and shapely as the most graceful kings and queens of men. Some are small as mice. Others are figures from mortal nightmares, claw-fingered, serpent-eyed, covered with feathers or scales or oily fur. They fill the hall from one end to the other, ranked according to intricate primordial hierarchies, a thousand different forms sharing only a keen dislike of humankind and, for this moment, a vast silence.

  At the head of the long, mirror-hung room two figures sit on tall stone chairs. Both have the semb
lance of humanity, but with an unearthly twist that means not even a drunken blind man could actually mistake them for mortals. Both are still, but one is so motionless that it is hard to believe she is not a statue carved from pale marble, as stony as the chair on which she sits. Her eyes are open, but they are empty as the painted eyes of a doll, as though her spirit has flown far from her seemingly youthful, white-robed figure and cannot find its way back. Her hands lie in her lap like dead birds. She has not moved in years. Only the tiniest stirring, her breast rising and falling at achingly separated intervals beneath her robe, tells that she breathes.

  The one who sits beside her is taller by two hands’ breadth than most mortals, and that is the most human thing about him. His pale face, which was once startlingly fair, has aged over the centuries into something hard and sharp as the peak of a windswept crag. He has about him still a kind of terrible beauty, as dangerously beguiling as the grandeur of a storm rushing across the sea. His eyes, you feel sure would be clear and deep as night sky, would seem infinitely, coldly wise, but they are hidden behind a rag knotted at the back of his head, most of it hidden in his long moonsilver hair.

  He is Ynnir the Blind King, and the blindness is not all his own. Few mortal eyes have seen him, and no living mortal man or woman has gazed on him outside of dreams.

  The lord of the Twilight People raises his hand. The hall was already silent, but now the stillness becomes something deeper. Ynnir whispers, but every thing in that room hears him.

  “Bring the child.”

  Four hooded, manlike shapes carry a litter out of the shadows behind the twin thrones and place it at the king’s feet. On it lies curled what seems to be a mortal manchild, his fine, straw-colored hair pressed into damp ringlets around his sleeping face. The king leans over, for all the world as though he is looking at the child despite his blindness, memorizing his features. He reaches into his own gray garments, sumptuous once, but now weirdly threadbare and almost as dusty as the hall’s mirrors, and lifts out a small bag on a length of black cord, the sort of simple object in which a mortal might carry a charm or healing simple. Ynnir’s long fingers carefully lower the cord over the boy’s head, then tuck the bag under the coarse shirt and against the child’s narrow chest. The king is singing all the while, his voice a drowsy murmur. Only the last words are loud enough to hear.

  “. . . By star and stone, the act is done,

  Not stone nor star the act shall mar.”

  Ynnir pauses for a long moment before he speaks again, with a hesitation that might almost be mortal, but when he speaks, his words are clear and sure. “Take him.” The four figures raise the litter. “Let no one see you in the sunlight lands. Ride swiftly, there and back.”

  The hooded leader bows his head once, then they are gone with their sleeping burden. The king turns for a moment toward the pale woman beside him, almost as if he expected her to break her long silence, but she does not move and she most certainly does not speak. He turns to the rest of those watching, to the avid eyes and the thousand restless shapes—and to you, too, dreamer. Nothing that Fate has already woven is invisible to Ynnir.

  “It begins,” he says. Now the stillness of the hall is broken. A rising murmur fills the mirrored room, a wash of voices that grows until it echoes in the dark, thorn-carved rafters. As the din of singing and shouting spills out through the endless halls of Qul-na-Qar, it is hard to say whether the terrible noise is a chant of triumph or mourning.

  The blind king nods slowly. “Now, at last, it begins.”

  Remember this, dreamer, when you see what is to follow. As the blind king said, this is a beginning. What he did not say, but which is nonetheless true, is that what begins here is the ending of the world.

  PART ONE

  BLOOD

  “As the woodsman who sets snares cannot always know what he may catch,” the great god Kernios said to the wise man, “so, too, the scholar may find that his questions have brought him unforeseen and dangerous answers.”

  —from A Compendium of Things That Are Known,

  The Book of the Trigon

  1

  A Wyvern Hunt

  THE NARROWING WAY:

  Under stone there is earth

  Under earth there are stars; under stars, shadow

  Under shadow are all the things that are known

  —from The Bonefall Oracles,

  out of the Qar’s Book of Regret

  THE BELLING OF THE HOUNDS was already growing faint in the hollows behind them when he finally pulled up. His horse was restive, anxious to return to the hunt, but Barrick Eddon yanked hard on the reins to keep the mare dancing in place. His always-pale face seemed almost translucent with weariness, his eyes fever-bright. “Go on,” he told his sister. “You can still catch them.”

  Briony shook her head. “I’m not leaving you by yourself. Rest if you need to, then we’ll go on together.”

  He scowled as only a boy of fifteen years can scowl, the expression of a scholar among idiots, a noble among mud-footed peasants. “I don’t need to rest, strawhead. I just don’t want the bother.”

  “You are a dreadful liar,” she told her brother gently. Twins, they were bound to each other in ways as close as lovers’ ways.

  “And no one can kill a dragon with a spear, anyway. How did the men at the Shadowline outpost let it past?”

  “Perhaps it crossed over at night and they didn’t see it. It isn’t a dragon, anyway, it’s a wyvern—much smaller. Shaso says you can kill one with just a good clop on the head.”

  “What do either you or Shaso know about wyverns?” Barrick demanded. “They don’t come trotting across the hills every day. They’re not bloody cows.”

  Briony thought it a bad sign that he was rubbing his crippled arm without even trying to hide it from her. He looked more bloodless than usual, blue under the eyes, his flesh so thin he sometimes looked almost hollow. She feared he had been walking in his sleep again and the thought made her shudder. She had lived in Southmarch Castle all her life, but still did not like passing through any of its mazy, echoing halls after dark.

  She forced a smile. “No they’re not cows, silly, but the master of the hunt asked Chaven before we set out, remember? And Shaso says we had one in Grandfather Ustin’s day—it killed three sheep at a steading in Landsend.”

  “Three whole sheep! Heavens, what a monster!”

  The crying of the hounds rose in pitch, and now both horses began to take fretful little steps. Someone winded a horn, the moan almost smothered by the intervening trees.

  “They’ve seen something.” She felt a sudden pang. “Oh, mercy of Zoria! What if that thing hurts the dogs?”

  Barrick shook his head in disgust, then brushed a damp curl of dark red hair out of his eyes. “The dogs?”

  But Briony was truly frightened for them—she had raised two of the hounds, Rack and Dado, from puppy-hood, and in some ways they were more real to this king’s daughter than most people. “Oh, come, Barrick, please! I’ll ride slowly, but I won’t leave you here.”

  His mocking smile vanished. “Even with only one hand on the reins, I can outride you any hour.”

  “Then do it!” she laughed, spurring down the slope. She was doing her best to poke him out of his fury, but she knew that cold blank mask too well: only time and perhaps the excitement of the chase would breathe life back into it.

  Briony looked back up the hillside and was relieved to see that Barrick was following, a thin shadow atop the gray horse, dressed as though he were in mourning. But her twin dressed that way every day.

  Oh, please, Barrick, sweet angry Barrick, don’t fall in love with Death. Her own extravagant thought surprised her—poetical sentiment usually made Briony Eddon feel like she had an itch she couldn’t scratch—and as she turned back in distraction she nearly ran down a small figure scrambling out of her way through the long grass. Her heart thumping in her breast, she brought Snow to a halt and jumped down, certain she had almost killed some crofter�
��s child.

  “Are you hurt?”

  It was a very small man with graying hair who stood up from the yellowing grass, his head no higher than the belly-strap of her saddle—a Funderling of middle age, with short but well-muscled legs and arms. He doffed his shapeless felt hat and made a little bow. “Quite well, my lady. Kind of you to ask.”

  “I didn’t see you . . .”

  “Not many do, Mistress.” He smiled. “And I should also . . .”

  Barrick rattled past with hardly a look at his sister or her almost-victim. Despite his best efforts he was favoring the arm and his seat was dangerously bad. Briony scrambled back onto Snow, making a muddle of her riding skirt.

  “Forgive me,” she said to the little man, then bent low over Snow’s neck and spurred after her brother.

  The Funderling helped his wife to her feet. “I was going to introduce you to the princess.”

  “Don’t be daft.” She brushed burrs out of her thick skirt. “We’re just lucky that horse of hers didn’t crush us into pudding.”

  “Still, it might be your only chance to meet one of the royal family.” He shook his head in mock-sadness. “Our last opportunity to better ourselves, Opal.”

  She squinted, refusing to smile. “Better for us would mean enough coppers to buy new boots for you, Chert, and a nice winter shawl for me. Then we could go to meetings without looking like beggars’ children.”

  “It’s been a long time since we’ve looked like children of any sort, my old darling.” He plucked another burr out of her gray-streaked hair.