(Shadowmarch #1) Shadowmarch

by Tad Williams

  —from The Bonefall Oracles

  AS USUAL, THE HIGH PRIEST did not enter the dark room until Qinnitan had already been led through an exhausting series of prayers and the steaming golden cup had been set before her. High Priest Panhyssir was another Favored, and was at least as large and imposing as Luian, but seemed to have studied the ways of real men as carefully as Luian had studied those of natural women. He also seemed to have kept his stones until after he had reached manhood—his beard was wispy but long, and he had a surprisingly deep voice, which he used to great effect.

  “Has she completed the day’s obeisances?” he demanded. When the acolyte nodded, the high priest crossed his arms on his chest. “Good. And the mirror-prayers—has she said them all?”

  Qinnitan swallowed her irritation. She didn’t like being talked about as if she were only a child who couldn’t understand, and considering that the hours-long prayer rituals in this small, mirror-lined chamber in the temple never changed, and that she had never been allowed to skip even one of the dozens of intricate chants (those many-named invocations of the different characters of Nushash spoken into the largest of the sacred mirrors, praising the god in his incarnations as the Red Horse, the Glowing Orb of Dawn, the Slayer of Night’s Demons, the Golden River, the Protector of Sleep, the Juggler of the Stars, and all the others) Qinnitan thought it was a bit much for the priest to act as if during his absence she might have been doing something else instead.

  “Yes, Great One, O treasured of Nushash.” The subordinate priest, also one of the Favored, had the voice and smooth skin of a young boy, although he was clearly full grown. He was vain, too: he liked to observe himself in the sacred mirrors when he didn’t think Qinnitan was looking. “She is prepared.”

  Qinnitan accepted the cup—a splendid thing of gems and hammered gold in the shape of the winged bull that drew Nushash’s great wagon across the sky, worth more than the entire neighborhood in which she had grown up—and did her best to look solemn and grateful. High Priest Panhyssir, after all, was one of the most powerful men in the world and probably held her life in his hands. Still, she could not help wrinkling up her face a little as she took the first swallow.

  It was lucky that the young priest always said his invocation so loudly—it made it easier for her to drink slowly, and not to worry about the noises she made as she forced the dreadful stuff down. The elixir, the Sun’s Blood as they called it, did taste a little bit like actual blood, salty and with a smoky hint of musk, which was one of the reasons Qinnitan had to force herself not to gag on it. There were other flavors as well, none of them particularly nice, and although it wasn’t spicy, it made her entire mouth tingle as though she had eaten too many of the little yellow Marash peppers.

  “Now close your eyes, child,” Panhyssir told her in his deep, important voice as she finished draining the cup. “Let the god find you and touch you. It is a great, great honor.”

  The honor came more quickly than usual, and it was no mere brush this time, no dreamy caress as in past days, but more like being grabbed and shaken by something huge. It started as a feeling of heat at the back of her stomach and then spread swiftly up and down her spine, both directions at the same moment like a crackle of fire through dry grass, flaring at last behind her eyes and between her legs so that she would have fallen off the chair if the younger priest had not grabbed her. She felt his hands as though they were far, far away, as though they touched a statue of her rather than the real Qinnitan. The rush of noise and darkness into her head was so powerful that for long moments she was certain she would die, that her skull would burst like a pine knot in a cook fire.

  “Help me!” she screamed—or tried to, but the words only existed in her own thoughts. What came out of her mouth instead were animal grunts.

  “Lay her down,” Panhyssir commanded. His voice seemed to come from another room. “It has well and truly taken her this time.”

  “Is there anything . . . ?” Qinnitan could not see the young priest—she was in a night-dark fog—but he sounded frightened. “Will she . . . ?”

  “She is feeling the touch of the god. She is being prepared. Lay her back on the cushions so she does not harm herself. The great god is speaking to her . . .”

  But he’s not, Qinnitan thought as Panhyssir’s voice grew fainter and fainter, leaving her alone at last in blackness. No one’s speaking to me. I’m all alone. I’m all alone!

  It grew thick around her, then—although she didn’t know, couldn’t even guess, what “it” was. She was having enough difficulty just holding what she was and who she was in her heart: the darkness threatened to suck it all away, all of what made her Qinnitan, just as winter nights of her childhood had yanked the warmth from her face when she ran outside in a sweat after jumping and playing with her cousins.

  Now the darkness began to change. She still could not see anything, but the emptiness around her began to harden like crystal, and every new thought that passed through her mind seemed to make it ring, a deep, slow tolling like a monstrous bell of ice. She was heavy, heavier and older than any mere living thing. Qinnitan could understand what it was to be a stone, to lie in the earth without moving, measuring out thoughts as deliberate as mountains rising, how it felt to live not just flitting moments but millennia, each dream an eon long.

  And then she could feel something outside herself, but close—frighteningly close, as though she were a fly walking all unknowing on the belly of a sleeping man.

  Sleeping? Perhaps not. For now she could sense the true size of the thoughts that surrounded and penetrated her, thoughts that she had for a moment imagined were her own, although she realized now that she could no more make sense of these vast ideas than she could speak the language of an earth tremor’s rumble.

  Nushash? Could it be the great god himself?

  Qinnitan did not want to be locked in this diamond-hard, resonant darkness anymore. The horrid shudder of the god’s slow pondering was too much for her frail thoughts, so far from her and so, so much greater than she or any mere man or woman could ever be, big as a mountain—no, big as Xand itself, bigger, something that could lie across the whole night sky and fill it like a grave.

  And then whatever it was finally noticed her.

  Qinnitan came up thrashing, her heart battering at her ribs as though trying to leap from her breast. As she woke to the burning brightness of the lanterns in the small temple room, she was weeping so hard she thought her bones would break, with a taste in the back of her mouth like corpse flesh. The younger Favored priest held her head as she vomited.

  At last, an hour later, when the female servants had cleaned up after her and bathed her and robed her, she was taken back to Panhyssir. The paramount priest held her face in his hard hand and stared into her eyes, not in sympathy, but like a jewel merchant evaluating facets.

  “Good,” he said. “The Golden One will be pleased. You are progressing well.”

  She tried to speak but couldn’t, as weary and sore as if she had been beaten.

  “Autarch Sulepis has called for you, girl. Tonight you will be prepared. Tomorrow you will be taken to him.”

  With that he left her.

  The preparations were so exhausting and kept her up so late that even as she was being hustled down the hallways of the Orchard Palace to her morning meeting with the autarch, and having got out of bed only an hour before, Qinnitan was stumbling with fatigue. She was also still suffering the effects of the potion the high priest had given her the previous day, feeling it much more strongly than she ever had before. Even in these shadowed halls the light seemed too painfully bright, the echoes too persistent—it made her want to run back to bed and pull something over her face.

  At the golden doors of the autarch’s reclining chamber, she and her small retinue had to step back and wait as the great litter she had seen once before was maneuvered somewhat awkwardly out into the passage. The crippled Scotarch Prusas pulled a curtain aside with his cramped fingers to watch the p
roceedings; then he caught sight of Qinnitan and his head twisted toward her, mouth hanging open as though in shock, although she thought that was more the slackness of his jaw than any real surprise at seeing a minor bride-to-be waiting for an audience with the autarch. He looked her up and down, his head trembling on his thin neck, and if the look he gave her was not contempt or even hatred, she was certain it was something close, a chilly examination made more disturbing still by his twitches and little gasps of breath.

  Why would the most powerful man in the world pick such a frail, mad creature as this for his scotarch? Qinnitan could not even guess. The scotarchy was an old tradition of the Falcon Throne, meant to make sure an heir was always in place until an autarch’s own son was old enough to take power; it was designed to forestall crippling warfare that had often broken out between factions when the autarch died without an heir ready. The strongest and oldest part of the ritualistic tradition, however, was that if the scotarch died it meant that the autarch had lost favor with heaven and thus he had to give up his throne as well. This had been meant to stave off treachery from sons and relatives not likely to be named as heir, and because of this ancient Xixian constraint on even their god-kings, scotarchs were chosen not so much for their actual worthiness to rule but for health and likely endurance, prized like racehorses for brightness of eye and strength of heart. Until a few generations back, they had always been chosen during ceremonial games in which all contestants but the winner might die. This had been deemed fitting, since the path to the Falcon Throne for aspiring autarchs also tended to work the same way, except that the deaths were not generally so public.

  As Qinnitan watched the trembling figure of Prusas withdraw into the cushioned depths of his litter with a stammering cry that his bearers should hurry on, she could only wonder how anyone, especially someone like Sulepis with no suitable male heirs even born, let alone ready to rule, could have chosen such a pathetic creature as Prusas for his scotarch, a cripple who looked to be tottering on the lip of the grave. (Qinnitan was not alone, of course: nobody in the Seclusion seemed to know the answer to that question, although it was much guessed-at throughout the entire Orchard Palace. Some brave ones whispered that it proved that Autarch Sulepis was either the maddest of his unstable family or, putting a more pleasant face on it, touched by the gods.)

  The tall doors had barely swung shut behind the scotarch’s litter before they swung open again for Qinnitan and her pair of attendant maids and complementary pair of Favored guards.

  The Reclining Chamber with its slender purple-and-gold columns was only slightly smaller than the great throne room, although there were many fewer people in it, only a dozen soldiers mostly ranged at the back of the dais and another two dozen servants and priests. In any other circumstances it would have felt strange to be the object of so many male stares after so long in the Seclusion, but even with Jeddin one of those watching her, the Leopard captain’s eyes rapt but his thoughts hidden as though behind a curtain, Qinnitan’s gaze was drawn to the man on the white stone bench as though by a lodestone. It was not just the autarch’s obvious power that seized her attention, the way the others in the room stayed as close to him as they could while still obviously fearing him, like freezing peasants around a huge bonfire, or even the fierce madness of his eyes, pitiless as a hunting bird’s, whose force she could feel even from a dozen paces away. This time, there was another reason for her fascination: except for the golden circlet in his hair and the golden stalls on his fingertips, the autarch was completely naked.

  Qinnitan realized that her cheeks were growing hot, as though the god-king really did burn with some kind of flame. She didn’t quite know where to look. Nakedness itself did not bother her, even that of a grown man—she had often seen her father and brothers bathe themselves, and the people of Great Xis did not wear much even when they were walking in the crowded, sun-blasted streets—and the autarch’s golden-brown limbs although long and thin were by no means ugly. Still, there was a disturbing heedlessness to Sulepis that made his unclothed form seem somehow more like that of an animal that did not know it was naked than a man who knew and reveled in it. There was a shiny film of sweat on all his skin. His member lay against his thighs, limp and long as the snout of some blind thing.

  “Ah,” the autarch said in a bored tone that didn’t match the expression in his eyes, “here she is, the young bride-to-be. Am I not right, Panhyssir? Is this not her?”

  “You are right, as always, Golden One.” The priest stepped out from behind the slaves with the fans and waited behind the couch.

  “And her name was . . . was . . .”

  “Qinnitan, Golden One—daughter of Cheshret of the Third Temple.”

  “Such an unusual name you have, child.” The autarch lifted his hand, crooked a long, shining finger at her. “Come closer.”

  Never in her life had she wanted more fervently to turn and run away as fast as she could, a beast-panic that struck her as shockingly as if a jar of cold water had been dashed against her skin. For a moment she could feel again the endless depths that had suddenly opened before her after drinking the Sun’s Blood elixir: it seemed that if she did not do something, she would fall into blackness and never stop falling. Qinnitan stood, desperate to escape although she couldn’t quite say why, but in any case unable to do so and fighting for breath.

  “Step forward!” Panhyssir said harshly. “The Golden One has spoken to you, girl.”

  His eyes held hers now and she found herself taking one small step forward, then another. The gold-tipped finger curled and she moved still closer, until she stood beside the couch with the god-king’s long face only a handsbreadth or two below her own. She had never seen such eyes, she knew now; she could not imagine such bright, mad depths attached to anything that walked on two legs. Beneath the attar of roses and other perfumes lurked something base and disturbing, a salty tang like blood or even hot metal—the autarch’s breath.

  “Her parentage shows, I think.” The mightiest man on earth reached up his hand to touch her. She flinched, then held steady as his fingertip in its little basket of warm gold mesh drew a line down her cheek that in her imagination rasped her skin and left behind a bloody path. She closed her eyes, feeling as though at any moment some terrible joke would be revealed and someone would step forward, throw her down, and hack off her head. It almost seemed it might come as a relief.

  “Open your eyes, girl. Am I so frightening? The Seclusion is full of women who have felt my touch with joy, and many others still praying I will come to them soon.”

  She looked at him. It was very difficult. There seemed nothing else in the great room—no columns, no guards, nothing but herself and those eyes the color of old linen.

  “Do not fear,” he said quietly. “Rather, rejoice. You will be the mother of my immortality, little bride-to-be. An honor like no other.”

  She could not speak, could not even nod until she swallowed down the lump in her throat.

  “Good. Do what the old priest bids you and you will have a wedding night that lifts you in glory above all others.” He let his hand slide from her face to her breast and she felt her nipples harden as if with fever-chill beneath the thin robe. “Remember, all this belongs to your god.” His hand slipped down over her belly, the finger-stalls hard and cruel as a vulture’s talons as he carelessly cupped her groin. She could not suppress a little grunt of shock. “Prepare and rejoice.”

  He let her go and turned away, lifted his hand. A cup-bearer sprang forward to give him something to drink.

  The autarch was clearly finished with her. Panhyssir clapped and the guards led her toward the door. Qinnitan was trembling so badly as she left the Reclining Chamber that she almost fell and had to be steadied. Beneath her robe she thought she could still feel every instant of his touch, as though his fingers had left a burning stain.

  20

  Lost in the Moon’s Land

  MIDDLE OF THE FOREST:

  Name the guardian trees—


  White Heart, Stone Arm, Hidden Eye, Seed of Stars

  Now bow and they bow also, laughing

  —from The Bonefall Oracles

  BARRICK WAS FURIOUS, to be summoned across the huge residence to Avin Brone’s chamber in the middle of the night as though he were a mere courtier. He growled at the small boy who opened the lord constable’s door when the child did not get out of the way fast enough, but he was disturbed as well by the urgent words of Brone’s messenger.

  “The lord constable begs you to come to his rooms, Highness,” the page had told him. “He respectfully asks that you come quickly.”

  Barrick’s sleep had been plagued again, as so often, by evil dreams; as the door opened a sickly fearful part of him wondered if the big man planned some treachery. Barrick almost flinched when the lord constable came across the small sitting room toward him, dressed in a monstrous nightgown, his buckled shoes pulled directly onto his bare feet. When Brone did nothing more suspicious than to bow slightly and hold the door open, another fear occurred to Barrick.

  “Where is my sister? Is she well?”

  “To the best of my knowledge. I imagine she will arrive any moment.” Brone gestured to a chair, one of two placed side by side. “Please, Highness, sit down. I will explain all.” His beard, uncombed and unribboned, strayed all over his face and chest like a wild shrub: apparently whatever had caused this unlikely summons had come after the Lord of Landsend was in bed.

  When Barrick had seated himself, Brone lowered his own large frame onto a stool, leaving the other chair empty. “I have sent the boy for some wine. Forgive the meagerness of my hospitality.”

  Barrick shrugged. “I will take some mulled.”

  “Good choice. There is an ugly chill in the corridors.”

  “There certainly is,” Briony announced from the doorway. “I’m sure you have good reason for getting me out of my warm bed, Lord Brone.”