(Shadowmarch #1) Shadowmarch

by Tad Williams

  “Which of us?” asked Barrick a little nastily. “You can’t have two heads.”

  “Either of you,” said Brone, surprised for a moment, as though he had not thought of this particular conundrum. “Both of you. But you must see what we do, that justice is done.”

  “What are you talking about?” demanded Briony. The man Vansen, the captain of the guards, was standing behind the lord constable. He had bloody scratches on his face, and for a moment she felt a twinge of shame, thinking of how she had attacked him. But he is the one who is alive, and my brother is murdered, she thought, and the feeling evaporated. He did not meet her eye, which made it easier to ignore him.

  “I am talking about the knife that made the wounds on your brother and his guards, Princess.” Brone turned at a clattering noise. A troop of guards entered the corridor and stopped at the end, waiting. “Tell them about it, Captain Vansen.”

  The man still could not look her in the face. “It was curved,” he said quietly. “The physician Chaven saw that when he looked at . . . at the wounds. A curved dagger.”

  Brone waited for him to say more, then grunted with impatience and turned to the twins. “A Tuani dagger, Highnesses.”

  It took a moment for Briony to make out what he was saying, then the mocking, handsome face of the envoy came rushing into her mind. “That man Dawat . . . !” She would see him skinned. Burned alive.

  “No,” said Brone. “He did not leave his chambers all night. Nor did any of his entourage. We had guards watching them.”

  “Then . . . then what?” said Briony, but a moment later she began to understand.

  “Shaso?” Barrick’s voice was strange, tight, full of both fear and a kind of weird exhilaration. “Are you saying that Shaso killed our brother?”

  “We do not know for certain,” the lord constable said. “We must go and confront him. But he is a promoted peer of Southmarch, an honored friend of your father’s. We need you two to be there.”

  As Brone led them down the hall toward the armory, the troop of guards fell in behind them, faces hard, eyes shadowed beneath their helmets. The hierarch and Merolanna did not accompany them, heading for the family chapel to pray instead.

  What is going on? Briony wondered. Has everything in the world turned upside down at once? Shaso? It could not be true—someone must have stolen the old man’s dagger. In fact, why must it have even been Shaso’s dagger? She found it hard to disbelieve Chaven, but surely there were other explanations—there must be dozens of Tuani weapons available in the waterside markets. But when she whispered this to Barrick, he only shook his head. As if he had cried out all his brotherly feeling with his tears, he barely looked at her.

  Merciful Zoria, will he turn into another Kendrick now? Will he send me to Ludis because it’s best for the whole kingdom? Her skin was needled by a sudden chill.

  Three guards waited in the armory outside the door of Shaso’s chamber. “He has not left,” said one of them, looking at empty air as he talked, clearly confused as to whether to speak directly to the lord constable or his captain, Vansen. “But we have heard strange noises. And the door is bolted.”

  “Break it down,” said Brone, then turned to the twins. “Stand back, if you please, Highnesses.”

  A half dozen kicks from booted feet and the bolt splintered away from the inside. The door swung in. The guards stepped through with halberds extended, then quickly stepped back again. A dark shape appeared in the opening like a monstrous spirit summoned from the netherworld.

  “Kill me then,” it growled, but the voice was strangely liquid. For a moment Briony thought that Shaso had indeed been invested by some kind of demon, one which had not learned to use its usurped body properly, for the master of arms was swaying in the doorway, unable to stand upright. “I suppose I am . . . a traitor. So kill me. If you can.”

  “He’s drunk,” Barrick said slowly, as though this was the biggest surprise the night had produced.

  “Take him,” Avin Brone called. “But ’ware—he is dangerous.”

  Briony could not make herself believe it. “Don’t hurt him! Alive! He must be taken alive!”

  The guards moved forward, jabbing with the pike ends of their halberds, forcing the dark-skinned man out of the doorway and back into his chamber. Briony could see that the room was in disarray behind him, the bedclothes torn to pieces and scattered across the floor, the shrine in the corner knocked to flinders. He is mad, then, or sick. “Don’t hurt him!” she shouted again.

  “Will you condemn some of these guardsmen to death?” Avin Brone growled. “That old man is still one of the fiercest fighters alive!”

  Briony shook her head. She could only watch with Barrick as the guards tried to subdue Shaso. Barrick was right, the man was reeling, clearly drunk or damaged in some way, but even without a weapon he was a formidable quarry.

  Shaso did not remain weaponless for long. He snatched a halberd away from one of the guards and stunned the man with the butt, then crashed it against the helm of another who tried to take advantage of the opening. Already two of the guards were down. The room was too small for proper pike work. Shaso put his back against the far wall and stood there, chest heaving. Blood was smeared all over his arms and some on his face as well—old blood, dried until it was scarcely visible against his skin.

  “Captain,” Brone said, “bring me archers.”

  “No!” Briony tried to rush forward, but the lord constable seized her arm and held her despite all her struggles.

  “Forgive me, my lady,” he said through clenched teeth. “But I will not lose another Eddon tonight.”

  Suddenly someone else slipped past him—Barrick. Even as Avin Brone cursed, Briony’s brother stopped just inside the doorway.

  “Shaso!” he shouted. “Put that down!”

  The old man lifted his head and shook it. “Is that you, boy?”

  “What have you done?” The prince’s voice trembled. “Gods curse you, what have you done?”

  Shaso tipped his head quizzically for a moment, then smiled a bitter, horrible smile. “What I had to—what was right. Will you kill me for it? For the honor of the family? Now there is irony for you.”

  “Give yourself up,” Barrick said.

  “Let the guards take me, if they can.” Even slurred with drink, his laugh was dreadful. “I do not care much if I live or not.”

  For a moment no one spoke. Briony was numb with despair. The dark wings of her ominous mood had not been black at all, it seemed, but blood-red; now they had spread over the whole of the house of Eddon.

  “You owe your life to our father.” Barrick’s voice was tight with misery or fear or something else that Briony could not recognize. “You speak of honor—will you give away even that last vestige of it? Kill some of these innocent men instead of surrendering?”

  Shaso goggled at him. For a moment he lost his balance where he leaned on the wall, but then the halberd came up again quickly. “You would do that to me, boy? Remind me of that?”

  “I would. Father saved your life. You swore that you would obey him and all his heirs. We are his heirs. Put up your weapon and do the honorable thing, if you have not become a stranger to honor altogether. Be a man.”

  The master of arms looked at him, then at Briony. He barked a laugh that ended in a ragged tatter of breath. “You are crueler than your father ever was—than your brother, even.” He threw the halberd clattering to the floor. A moment later he swayed again and this time crumpled and fell. The guards rushed forward and swarmed on him until it was clear he was not feigning, that he had fallen senseless from drink or exhaustion or something else.

  The guards heaved him up from the floor, one on each leg and arm. It was not easy—Shaso was a large man. “To the stronghold with him,” Brone commanded them. “Chain him well. When he wakes we will question him closely, but I cannot doubt we have found our murderer.”

  As he was carried past Briony, Shaso’s eyes flicked open. He saw her and tried to say
something but could only groan, then his eyes slid shut again. His breath smelled of drink.

  “It can’t be,” she said. “I don’t believe it.”

  Ferras Vansen, the captain of the guard, had found something on the floor beside Shaso’s spare bed. He picked it up with a polishing cloth and brought it to the twins and the lord constable, bearing it gingerly, like a servant carrying a royal crown.

  It was a curved Tuani dagger nearly as as long as a man’s forearm—a dagger that all of them had seen before, scab-barded on Shaso’s belt. The hilt was wrapped in figured leather. The sharp blade, always kept glitteringly polished, was smeared up and down with blood.

  9

  A Gleam of Pale Wings

  MOUNTAIN SPIRIT���S BELT:

  He is cloaked in mistletoe and the musk of bees

  Lightning makes the trees grow

  And makes the earth cry out

  —from The Bonefall Oracles

  “TOBY!” THE PHYSICIANbellowed as he staggered through the door. He did not know whether to weep or scream or beat his head against the wall—he had been restraining his feelings too long. “Curse you, where are you hiding?”

  The other two servants, his old manservant and his house-keeper (who had just barely managed to beat Chaven home, hurrying back from a gathering of worried citizens in the torchlit square between the West Green and the Raven’s Gate), scuttled away down the corridors of Observatory House, grateful that their master’s unhappiness had settled on someone other than themselves.

  The young man appeared, wiping his hands on his smock. “Yes, Master?”

  Chaven made a face at the black smears on Toby’s clothing, but was surprised to find the young fellow at his tasks so early in the morning; it was usually hard to get him to work even when the sun was high in the sky. “Bring me something to drink. Wine—that Torvian muck is already open on my bedside table. By the gods, the world is falling apart.”

  The young man hesitated. Chaven could see fear behind the usual sullenness. “Is . . . will there . . . will there be war?”

  Chaven shook his head. “War? What do you mean?”

  “Mistress Jennikin and Harry, they say the older prince is dead, sir. Murdered. My da’ told me once that when Olin’s brother died there was almost a war.”

  The physician fought down the urge to berate this poor blunt tool. Everyone in the castle was terrified—he himself had not felt so desperate in all the years since fleeing Ulos. Why should the boy feel any differently? “Yes, Toby, the older prince is dead. But when Olin’s brother Lorick died, the country was rich and unthreatened, and it was worth the time of any number of ambitious nobles to try to put themselves or some useful puppet on the Southmarch throne instead of a child heir. Now I suppose it will be young Barrick earns the regency, and no one will want the blame for what is about to happen here, so they will gratefully let him have the honor of keeping his father’s chair warm.”

  “So there won’t be a war?” Toby ignored Chaven’s bleak sarcasm as though it were a foreign language. He could not meet his master’s eye directly, and had his head down like a stubborn goat that would not be forced through a gate. “You are telling the truth, Master? You are certain?”

  “I’m certain of nothing,” Chaven said. “Nothing. Now go fetch me the wine and perhaps a bit of cheese and bread and dried fish, too, then let me think.”

  He let the hanging fall back across the window. It was still dark outside, although he could smell dawn on the breeze, which should have been reassuring but was not. The wine had done nothing to relieve the pressure in his skull, the fear that he was watching the first moments of a collapse that might soon begin to spread so quickly there would be no stopping it. He had been in the middle of such a frenzy before, although not in Southmarch: he never wanted to experience it again. And of all the people who had been in the castle tonight dealing with the horror of the prince regent’s death, Chaven alone knew of the movement of the Shadowline.

  He had questions he wanted to ask before he slept—needed to ask. Unusual questions.

  The idea had been preying on him since the first dreadful moment looking down on Kendrick’s murdered body and had kept tugging at him since, far more powerful than the urge for wine he had just satisfied. He had tried to fight it down because there was more than a little shame in his hunger and he had promised himself not to indulge again so soon, but he reassured himself that it was clearly an exceptional night, a night for suspending his own rules. And (he also told himself ) the things he might learn could save his life, perhaps even save the kingdom.

  “Kloe?” he called quietly. He snapped his fingers and looked around. “Where are you, my mistress?”

  She did not appear immediately, upset perhaps that after a rude and hurried excursion from their shared bed earlier he had been back in his house for an hour, but this was the first time he seemed to have thought of her.

  “Kloe, I apologize. I have been discourteous.”

  Mollified, she appeared from behind a curtain and stretched. She was spotted like a pard, but all in shadow-tones of black and gray, with only a little white around her eyes. Chaven could not have said exactly why he found her beautiful but he did. He snapped his fingers again and she came to him, exactly slow enough to demonstrate whose need was greater. But when he scratched under her chin she forgot herself enough to purr.

  “Come,” he said, and gave the cat the last bit of dried fish before lifting her. “We have work to do.”

  It was a room that no living person in Southmarch Castle except Chaven had ever seen, a small dark compartment deep beneath the observatory, with a door that opened off the corridor where he had let in the Funderling Chert and his strange ward. On one wall a row of shelves began near the flagstone floor and stretched to the low ceiling, and every shelf contained a row of objects covered with dark cloths. With the door safely closed and bolted behind him, Chaven put down his candleholder and picked up a covered object too large to rest beside the others, which had been leaning propped against the wall. Kloe, after a brief sniff around the room, leaped up onto one of the upper shelves and curled into a ball, her eyes bright and watchful.

  He took off the velvet cover very carefully, then unfolded the wooden wings so that the mirror could stand by itself. It was one of his largest: with the base on the floor, the top reached almost to the physician’s waist.

  Chaven lowered himself into a sitting position on the flags in front of the mirror and for a long time said nothing, staring deep into the glass. The candlelight made strange angles of things and cast long, swaying shadows: if something had actually been moving in the mirror’s depths, it would have taken an observer a little while to be sure.

  Chaven remained silent for a long, long time. At last, without turning from the glass, he said, “Kloe? Come here, now, Mistress. Come.”

  The cat stretched, then jumped down from the shelf and stepped delicately across the floor toward him. When she stopped, he reached out and tapped on the mirror.

  “Do you see that? Look there, Kloe! A mouse!”

  She brought her blunt gray-and-black face close to the glass, staring. Her ears twitched. Indeed, there was something moving in the dark corner of the room, but only in the room as it was reflected. Kloe hunched lower, tail kinking and unkinking as she watched the scurrying shadow in the depths of the mirror. Chaven stared at it, too, fixedly, as though he dared not close his eyes or even breathe. Oddly, the mirror seemed not to reflect either the cat or physician, but only the empty room behind them.

  Without warning, Kloe lunged forward. For a moment it actually seemed that her paw passed through the reflecting surface, but she hissed in frustration as though she had struck only cold glass. Chaven abruptly picked her up, stroked her, and then unbolted the door and put her outside in the corridor.

  “Wait for me.”

  Balked, but by what it was hard to say, Kloe let out a warble of irritation.

  “You would not be happy in here,” he
told the cat as he closed the door. “And you would never have tasted that mouse anyway, I fear.”

  Now he sat before the mirror again. The candle was apparently burning low because the room swiftly grew darker. All that showed in the mirror were the reflected walls, except that the mirror-chamber contained a tiny bundle of darkness lying on the mirror-floor near the front of the glass.

  Chaven sang a little in a very old language, was quiet for some time, then sang a little more. He sat and stared at the small dark shape. He waited.

  When it came, it was like a sudden flame, an explosion of pale light. Despite his strong, schooled nerves, Chaven let out a quiet grunt of surprise. Feathers rippled and gleamed in the depths of the mirror as it clutched the dead mouse with a taloned foot, then bent to take the offering in its sharp beak. For a moment the tail hung like a thread, then the shadow-mouse was swallowed down and a huge white owl stared out of the glass with eyes like molten copper.

  “I don’t understand,” said the boy Flint, scowling. “I like the tunnels. Why do we have to walk up here?”

  Chert looked back to make sure the Funderling work crew were in an orderly line behind him. Dawn was just beginning to lighten the sky and turn the shadows silvery: if they had been big folk and unused to darkness, they would have been carrying torches. Chert’s guilds-men were straggling a little, a few whispering avidly among themselves, but that was within the bounds of suitable respect. He turned back to the boy. “Because when we go to work in the keep, we always come in at the gate. Remember, there are no tunnels that lead into the inner keep from below.” He gave the boy a significant look, praying silently to the Earth Elders that the child would not start prattling about the underground doorway into Chaven’s observatory within the hearing of the other Funderlings.

  Flint shook his head. “We could have gone a lot of the way underground. I like the tunnels!”