(Shadowmarch #1) Shadowmarch

by Tad Williams

  One of the riders slowly turned toward the trees where the two Funderlings lay hidden, a glint of eyes in the depths of the shadowed hood the only indication it was not empty. For a long moment the rider only stared, or perhaps listened, and although Chert’s every fiber told him to leap to his feet and run, he lay as still as he could, clutching Opal so tightly that he could feel her silently struggling to break his painful grip.

  At last the hooded figure turned away. One of its fellows lifted something from the back of its saddle and dropped it to the ground. The riders lingered for a moment longer, staring across the valley at the distant towers of Southmarch Castle. Then, without a sound, they wheeled and rode their ghostwhite horses back into the ragged wall of mist.

  Chert still waited a dozen frightened heartbeats before he let go of his wife.

  “You’ve crushed my innards, you old fool,” she moaned, climbing up onto hands and knees. “Who was it? I couldn’t see.”

  “I . . . I don’t know.” It had happened so quickly that it almost seemed a dream. He got up, feeling the ache of their clumsy, panicked flight begin to throb in all his joints. “They just rode out, then turned around and rode back . . .” He stopped, staring at the dark bundle the riders had dropped. It was moving.

  “Chert, where are you going?”

  He didn’t intend to touch it, of course—no Funderling was such a fool, to snatch up something that even those beyond the Shadowline did not want. As he moved closer, he could not help noticing that the large sack was making small, frightened noises.

  “There’s something in it,” he called to Opal.

  “There’s something in lots of things,” she said, coming grimly after him. “But not much between your ears. Leave it alone and come away, you. No good can come of it.”

  “It’s . . . it’s alive.” A thought had come into his head. It was a goblin, or some other magical creature banished from the lands beyond. Goblins were wish-granters, that was what the old tales said. And if he freed it, would it not give those wishes to him? A new shawl . . . ? Opal could have a queen’s closet full of clothes if she wished. Or the goblin might lead him to a vein of firegold and the masters of the Funderling guilds would soon be coming to Chert’s house with caps in hands, begging his assistance. Even his own so-proud brother . . .

  The sack thrashed and tipped over. Something inside it snarled.

  Of course, he thought, there could be a reason they took it across the Shadowline and tossed it away like bones on a midden. It could be something extremely unpleasant.

  An even stranger sound came from the sack.

  “Oh, Chert.” His wife’s voice was now quite different. “There’s a child in there! Listen—it’s crying!”

  He still did not move. Everyone knew there were sprites and bogles even on this side of the Shadowline that could mimic the voices of loved ones in order to lure travelers off the path to certain doom. Why expect better of something that actually came from inside the twilight country?

  “Aren’t you going to do anything?”

  “Do what? Any kind of demon could be in there, woman.”

  “That’s no demon, that’s a child—and if you’re too frightened to let it out, Chert of the Blue Quartz, I will.”

  He knew that tone all too well. He muttered a prayer to the gods of deep places, then advanced on the sack as though it were a coiled viper, stepping carefully so that in its thrashing it would not roll against him and, perhaps, bite. The sack was held shut with a knot of some gray rope. He touched it carefully and found the cord slippery as polished soapstone.

  “Hurry up, old man!”

  He glared at her, then began cautiously to unpick the knot, wishing he had brought something with him sharper than his old knife, dulled by digging out stones. Despite the cool, foggy air, sweat had beaded on his forehead by the time he was able to tease the knot apart. The sack had lain still and silent for some time. He wondered, half hoping it was so, whether the thing inside might have suffocated.

  “What’s in there?” his wife called, but before he had time to explain that he hadn’t even opened the cursed thing, something shot out of the heavy sack like a stone from the mouth of a culverin and knocked him onto his back.

  Chert tried to shout, but the thing had his neck gripped in clammy hands and was trying to bite his chest through his thick jerkin. He was so busy fighting for his life that he couldn’t even make out the shape of his attacker until a third body entered the fray and dragged the clutching, strangling monstrosity off him and they all tumbled into a pile.

  “Are you . . . hurt . . . ?” Opal gasped.

  “Where is that thing?” Chert rolled over into a sitting position. The sack’s contents were crouching a short distance away, staring at him with squinting blue eyes. It was a slender-limbed boy, a child of perhaps five or six years, sweaty and disheveled, with deathly pale skin and hair that was almost white, as though he had been inside the sack for years.

  Opal sat up. “A child! I told you.” She looked at the boy for a moment. “One of the big folk, poor thing.”

  “Poor thing, indeed!” Chert gently touched the scraped places on his neck and cheeks. “The little beast tried to murder me.”

  “Oh, be still. You startled him, that’s all.” She held out her hand toward the boy. “Come here—I won’t hurt you. What’s your name, child?” When the boy did not reply, she fumbled in the wide pockets of her dress and withdrew a heel of brown bread. “Are you hungry?”

  From the fierce glint in his eye, the boy was clearly very interested, but he still did not move toward her. Opal leaned forward and set the bread on the grass. He looked at it and her, then snatched the bread up, sniffed it, and crammed it into his mouth, scarcely bothering to chew before swallowing. Finished, the boy looked at Opal with fierce expectancy. She laughed in a worried way and felt in her pocket until she located a few pieces of dried fruit, which she also set on the grass. They disappeared even faster than the bread.

  “What’s your name?” she asked the boy. “Where are you from?”

  Searching his teeth with his tongue for any fragments of food that might have escaped him, he only looked at her.

  “Dumb, it seems,” said Chert. “Or at least he doesn’t speak our . . .”

  “Where is this?” the boy asked.

  “Where . . . what do you mean?” said Chert, startled.

  “Where is this . . . ?” The boy swept his arm in a circle, taking in the trees, the grassy hillside, the fogbound forest. “This . . . place. Where are we?” He sounded older than his age somehow, but younger, too, as though speaking were a new thing to him.

  “We are on the edge of Southmarch—called Shadowmarch by some, because of this Shadowline.” Chert gestured toward the misty boundary, then swung himself around to point in the opposite direction. “The castle is over there.”

  “Shadow . . . line?” The boy squinted. “Castle?”

  “He needs more food.” Opal’s words had the sound of an inarguable decision rendered. “And sleep. You can see he’s nearly falling over.”

  “Which means what?” But Chert already saw the shape of it and did not like it much at all.

  “Which means we take him home, of course.” Opal stood, brushing the loose grass from her dress. “We feed him.”

  “But . . . but he must belong to someone! To one of the big-folk families!”

  “And they tied him in a sack and left him here?” Opal laughed scornfully. “Then they are likely not pining for his return.”

  “But he came . . . he came from . . .” Chert looked at the boy, who was sucking his fingers and examining the landscape. He lowered his voice. “He came from the other side.”

  “He’s here now,” Opal said. “Look at him. Do you really think he’s some unnatural thing? He’s a little boy who wandered into the twilight and was tossed out again. Surely we, of all people, should know better than to believe everything that has to do with the Shadowline is wicked. Does this mean you plan t
o throw back the gems you’ve found here, too? No, he probably comes from some other place along the boundary—somewhere leagues and leagues away! Should we leave him here to starve?” She patted her thigh, then beckoned. “Come along with us, child. We’ll take you home and feed you properly.”

  Before Chert could make further objection Opal set off, stumping back along the hillside toward the distant castle, the hem of her old dress trailing in the wet grass. The boy paused only to glance at Chert—a look the little man first thought was threatening, then decided might be as much fear as bravado—before following after her.

  “No good will come of it,” Chert said, but quietly, already resigned through long experiece to whatever complex doom the gods had planned for him. In any case, better some angry gods than an angry Opal. He didn’t have to share a small house with the gods, who had their own vast and hidden places. He sighed and fell into step behind his wife and the boy.

  The wyvern had been brought to bay in another copse of trees, a dense circle of rowans carpeted with bracken. Even through the milling ring of hounds, wild with excitement but still cautious enough to keep their distance, perhaps put off by the unusual smell or strange slithering movements of their quarry, Briony could see the length of the thing as it moved restlessly from one side of the copse to the other, its bright scales glimmering in the shadows like a brushfire.

  “Cowardly beasts, dogs,” said Barrick. “They are fifty to one but still hold back.”

  “They are not cowards!” Briony resisted the urge to push him off his horse. He was looking even more drawn and pale, and had tucked his left arm inside his cloak as though to protect it from chill, though the afternoon air was still sun-warmed. “The scent is strange to them!”

  Barrick frowned. “There are too many things coming across the Shadowline these days. Just back in the spring there were those birds with the iron beaks that killed a shepherd at Landsend. And the dead giant in Daler’s Troth . . .”

  The thing in the copse reared up, hissing loudly. The hounds started away, whining and yipping, and several of the beaters shouted in terror and scuttled back from the ring of trees. Briony could still see only a little of the beast as it slipped in and out through the gray rowan trunks and the tangled undergrowth. It seemed to have a head narrow as a sea horse’s, and as it hissed again she glimpsed a mouth full of spiny teeth.

  It almost seems frightened, she thought, but that did not make sense. It was a monster, an unnatural thing: there could be nothing in its dark mind but malevolence.

  “Enough!” cried Kendrick, who was holding his frightened horse steady near the edge of the copse. “Bring me my spear!”

  His squire ran to him, face wan with dread, looking determinedly at anything except the hissing shape only a few paces away. The young man, one of Tyne Aldritch’s sons, was in such terrified haste to hand over the spear and escape that he almost let the long, gold-chased shaft with its crosshaft and its heavy iron head fall to the ground as the prince reached for it. Kendrick caught it, then kicked out at the retreating youth in irritation.

  Others of the hunting party were calling for spears as well. With the kill so close, the two dozen immaculately coiffed and dressed noblewomen who had accompanied the hunt, most riding decorously on sidesaddles, a few even carried in litters—their awkward progress had slowed everyone else quite a bit, to Briony’s disgust—took the opportunity to withdraw to a nearby hillock where they could watch the end from a safe distance. Briony saw that Rose and Moina, her two principal ladies-in-waiting, had spread a blanket for her between them on the hillside and were looking at her expectantly. Rose Trelling was one of Lord Constable Brone’s nieces, Moina Hartsbrook the daughter of a Helmingsea nobleman. Both were good-hearted girls, which made them Briony’s favorites out of what she thought of as a mediocre stable of court women, but she sometimes found them just as silly and hidebound as their older relatives, scandalized by the slightest variation from formal etiquette or tradition. Old Puzzle the jester was sitting with them, restringing his lute, biding his time until he could see what food the ladies might have in their hamper.

  The idea of withdrawing to the safety of the hill and watching the rest of the hunt while her ladies-in-waiting gossiped about people’s jewelry and clothes was too painful. Briony scowled and waved at one of the beaters as he staggered past with several of the heavy spears in his arms. “Give me one of those.”

  “What are you doing?” Barrick himself could not easily handle the long spears with only one arm, and had not bothered to call for one. “You can’t go near that creature. Kendrick won’t let you.”

  “Kendrick has quite enough to think about. Oh, gods curse it.” She scowled. Gailon of Summerfield had seen and was spurring toward them.

  “My lady! Princess!” He leaned out as if to take the spear from her, and only realized at the last moment that he would be overstepping. “You will hurt yourself.”

  She managed to control her voice, but barely. “I do know which end points outward, Duke Gailon.”

  “But this is not fitting for a lady . . . and especially with such a fearsome beast . . . !”

  “Then you must make sure and kill it first,” she said, a bit more gently but no more sweetly. “Because if it reaches me, it will get no farther.”

  Barrick groaned, then called the bearer back and took a spear for himself, clutching it awkwardly under one arm while still holding the reins.

  “And what are you doing?” she demanded.

  “If you’re going to be a fool, strawhead, someone has to protect you.”

  Gailon Tolly looked at them both, then shook his head and rode off toward Kendrick and the hounds.

  “I don’t think he’s very happy with us,” Briony said cheerfully. From somewhere back along the hillside she heard the master of arms shout her name, then her brother’s. “And Shaso won’t be either. Let’s go.”

  They spurred forward. The dogs, surrounded now by a ring of men with spears, were beginning to find their courage again. Several of the lymers darted into the copse to snap at the swift-moving, reddish shape. Briony saw the long neck move, quick as a whipcrack, and one of the dogs yelped in terror as it was caught in the long jaws.

  “Oh, hurry!” she said, miserable but also strangely excited. Again she could feel the presence of invisible things swirling like winter clouds. She said a prayer to Zoria.

  The dogs began to swarm into the copse in numbers, a flood of low shapes swirling in the dappled light beneath the trees, barking in frightened excitement. There were more squeals of pain, but then a strange, creaking bellow from the wyvern as one of the dogs got its teeth into a sensitive spot. The barking suddenly rose fiercely in pitch as the beast fought its way through the pack, trying to escape the confinement of the trees. It crushed at least one of the hounds under its clawed feet and gutted several others, shaking one victim so hard that blood flew everywhere like red rain. Then it burst out of the leaves and moving shadows into the clear afternoon sunlight, and for the first time Briony could see it whole.

  It was mostly serpentine body, a great tube of muscle covered with glimmering red and gold and brown scales, with a single pair of sturdy legs a third of the way down its length. A sort of ruff of bone and skin had flared out behind the narrow head, stretching even wider now as the thing rose up on those legs, head swaying higher than a man’s as it struck toward Kendrick and the two other nobles closest to it. It had come on them too quickly for the men to dismount and use their long boar spears properly. Kendrick waited until the strike had missed, then dug at the creature’s face with his spear. The wyvern hissed and sideslipped the blow, but as it did so one of the other men—Briony thought it might be Tyne, the hunting-mad Earl of Blueshore—drove his spearhead into the thing’s ribs just behind its shoulders. The wyvern contorted its neck to snap at the shaft. Kendrick seized the opportunity to drive his own spear into the creature’s throat, then spurred his horse forward so that he could use its force to pin the wyvern against
the ground. The spear slid in through a sluice of red-black blood until the crosshaft that was meant to keep a boar from forcing its way up the shaft stopped it. Kendrick’s horse reared in alarm at the thing’s agonized, furious hiss, but the prince stood in his stirrups and leaned his weight on the spear, determined to keep the thing staked to the earth.

  The dogs swarmed forward again; the other members of the hunt began to close in too, all anxious to be in at the kill. But the wyvern was not beaten.

  In a sudden, explosive movement the thing coiled itself around the spear, stretching its neck a surprising distance to bite at Kendrick’s gloved hand. The prince’s horse reared again and he almost lost his grip on the spear entirely. The monster’s tail lashed out and wrapped around the horse’s legs. The black gelding nickered in terror. For a brief moment they were all tangled together like some fantastical scene from one of the ancient tapestries in the castle’s throne room, everything so strange that Briony could not quite believe it was truly happening. Then the wyvern tightened itself around the legs of Kendrick’s horse, crushing bones in a drumroll of frighteningly loud cracks, and the prince and his mount collapsed downward into a maul of red-gold coils.

  As Barrick and Briony stared in horror from twenty paces away, Summerfield and Blueshore both began to jab wildly at the agitated monster and its prey. Other nobles hurried forward, shouting in fear for the prince regent’s life. The crush of eager dogs, the writhing loops of the injured wyvern’s long body, and the thrashing of the mortally injured horse made it impossible to see what was happening on the ground. Briony was light-headed and sick.

  Then something came up suddenly out of the long grass, speeding toward her like the figurehead of a Vuttish longboat cutting the water—the wyvern, making a desperate lunge at escape, still dragging Kendrick’s spear in its neck. It darted first to one side, then to the other, hemmed in by terrified horses and jabbing spears, then plunged through an opening in the ring of hunters, straight at Briony and Barrick.