(Shadowmarch #1) Shadowmarch

by Tad Williams

“Have the potboy brought to me,” she told one of the guards. “I will see him in the Erivor Chapel.”

  “Just him, Highness?”

  She thought of the potboy’s erstwhile companion, the poet Tinwright. The last thing she wanted just now was to have to endure his boobish flattery. “Bring him and nobody else.”

  She almost forgot the potboy again, but after she left the lord constable, the smell of incense wafting out of the shrine to Erilo in Farmers’ Hall reminded her and she made her way to the chapel.

  The strange man named Gil seemed to be waiting extremely patiently, his long, sleepwalker’s face almost empty of expression, but the guards around him looked a little itchy, and Briony realized with some dismay that she’d kept them all waiting for a good piece of the day.

  Well, I am the princess regent, am I not?

  Yes, she reminded herself, but this was also a castle readying for siege. Perhaps there were other things these men should have been doing. Still, it nettled her a bit.

  “Your fellows look tired,” she said to the sergeant. “Did you have a hard time getting him here?”

  “Not him, Highness. We had a hard time keeping the girl from coming along.”

  “Girl?” Briony was completely confused. “What girl?”

  “The one Captain Vansen brought back, Highness. What’s her name—Willow? The girl from the dales.”

  “But why should she want to come along?”

  The sergeant shrugged, then realized it was not what one did in front of princesses. He lowered his head. “I don’t know, Highness, but the men in the stronghold say she is there every day, watching this one like a cat beside a mousehole, sitting with him when she can. They don’t say nothing, either of them, but she watches him and he doesn’t watch her.” He colored a little. “That’s what I’m told, Ma’am.”

  Briony narrowed her eyes, turned to the apparently fascinating potboy. “Did you hear that? Is it true about the girl?”

  His cool, clear eyes were almost as empty as the stare of a fish. “There are people,” he said slowly. “I seldom look. I am listening.”

  “To what?”

  “Voices.” He smiled, but there was something wrong with it, as though he had never completely learned the trick. “They try to speak to you, some of them. They bid me to tell you about your brother—the one who has the dreams.”

  “What voices?” It was hard not to be angry with someone who looked at you as though you were a chair or a stone. “And what do they tell you about Prince Barrick—your liege lord?”

  “I am not certain. The voices speak in my head, in sleep and sometimes even when I am awake.” The blank eyes closed, opened, slow as the flutter of a dead leaf. “And they say he is not to leave the castle—he is not to go into the west.”

  “He’s not . . . ? But he already has left! Why . . . ?” She was about to rage over being told this only now, but she knew it was her own fault. The flash of anger turned into something quite different, something icy in her chest. “Why shouldn’t he go?”

  Gil slowly shook his head. She suddenly realized that she knew nothing about him at all—that Brone had told her only that he worked in a low inn near Skimmer’s Lagoon. “If he goes into the west,” the potboy said, “he must beware of the porcupine’s eye.”

  “What does that mean?” The sense of having made a terrible mistake was on her, but what was she to do about it? Even if she believed it utterly, was she to send a fast messenger just to pass Barrick this . . . this prophecy? He had already been infuriated once by the man’s soothsaying. No, she decided, she would put it in a letter to go with the first regular courier. She would phrase it as though to amuse him—perhaps it would stick in his head, and if there turned out to be any truth to it, that would help him. She offered a prayer to the gods that her foolishness and laxity would not have some terrible cost.

  “What does it mean?” The potboy shook his head. “I do not know—the voices do not tell me, they only speak so that I can hear them, like people on the other side of a wall.” He took a maddeningly long breath. “It is happening more often now, because the world is changing.”

  “Changing?”

  “Oh, yes. Because the gods are awakening again.” He said it very simply, as if it were a truth available to all. “Right under our feet.”

  31

  A Night Visitor

  A STORY:

  The tale is being told

  In the corridors, in the courtyards

  It is only the sighing of a dove’s wings

  —from The Bonefall Oracles

  THE DAY’S PRAYERS AND RITUALS had been particularly grueling. Qinnitan found herself ill now almost every time Panhyssir gave her one of the potions, but also sometimes full of a useless, undirected vigor, and that was the case now, hours after she had heard the song of midnight prayers. She couldn’t sleep and wasn’t sure she wanted to, but neither did she want to lie in bed and listen to her own breathing.

  That morning, when she had drunk the priest’s elixir, she could almost feel it scouring away her insides, as though she were being cleaned like a gourd filled with pebbles and boiling water. The weird sense of being untethered also seemed to last longer each time, as though she were becoming a guest in her own body, and not a particularly welcome one either. Worst of all, and something she could not bear thinking about too much, was that when she drank the Sun’s Blood and dropped into that momentary but still terrifying darkness, that living death, she felt like a cricket stuck flexing on a fishhook, as though she were living bait dangled above ultimate depths while something huge moved beneath her, sniffing, deciding . . .

  And what could that something be, a thing with thoughts as slow and shuddering as the movements of the earth itself ? Could there even be such a thing, or was the elixir disordering her mind? Just a few months back one of the young queens had lost her wits and had not been able to stop laughing and weeping. The girl had claimed that the Favored spied on her even in her dreams. She had torn her clothes and walked up and down the passageways singing children’s songs until at last she disappeared from the Seclusion altogether.

  What do these people want from me? Qinnitan wondered hopelessly. Do they truly wish to drive me mad? Or are they simply murdering me slowly, for some strange reasons of their own?

  She was becoming obsessed with the idea of being poisoned, and not just because of the high priest’s foul elixir. Each time someone handed her a cup, any time she accepted food that was not spooned out of a communal pot, she felt as though she was about to step off a cliff. It was not merely the open and obvious malice of Paramount Wife Arimone—many of the other women had begun to look at her strangely, too, regarding her sessions with Panhyssir and the other priests of Nushash as a sign of some kind of unwarranted favor, as though that daily misery was some prize Qinnitan had secured for herself! Even Luian, who had been her staunchest ally, had grown a little distant from her. Their conversations had become awkward, like two women meeting in a marketplace who both knew that one had slandered the other recently. It was Jeddin and his ridiculous, unreasonable passion for her—it stood between them now like a closed door.

  So now Qinnitan lay sleepless in her narrow bed in the deep watches of the night, thoughts scurrying like busy ants, the occasional snoring of her maids outside her door poking at her like a cruel child every time it seemed she might be drifting toward slumber. The days in the Hive seemed impossibly far away. Everything that was happy and simple seemed beyond reach. And because she lay wakeful, thinking such feverish, miserable thoughts, Qinnitan heard the quiet noise of someone moving at the far side of her chamber as plainly as if they spoke to her, and knew that she was not alone.

  Her heart lurched, sped. She slowly sat up, squinting into the near-darkness beside the door. All she could see by the glow of the shuttered lamp was a shape, but it was a shape that had not been there when she had crawled into her bed.

  Tanyssa. The First Wife has sent her for me. She could see the Favored gard
ener’s square face in her mind’s eye, the eyes empty but for the guarded sullenness of a whipped dog. Even if I scream, she’ll kill me before help can come. And if the gardener was on Arimone’s business, Qinnitan knew she might scream herself hoarse without bringing any help at all.

  She slid out of the bed and onto the floor as quietly as she could, letting out a small whimper like a disturbed sleeper in the hope of covering the sound of her own movements and perhaps even making the assassin stop moving for fear of waking her up. Desperate, her heart still hammering painfully fast, she struggled to think of what she might use for a weapon. The scissors that the slaves used to cut and shape her hair! But they were at the bottom of the basket under her bedside table, inside the ivory sewing kit—she could never get them out in time.

  As her hand passed over the small table, she touched something cold and hard and her fingers closed on it. It was a dressing pin Luian had given her, a handspan long and ornamented with a gold-and-enamel nightingale. She curled the nightingale into her fist, raised the pin like a dagger. Tanyssa would not murder her without bleeding for it, Qinnitan decided. Her mouth was dry, her throat as tight as if the strangling cord were already twisting tight.

  The shape by the doorway began to move again, slowly, silently, feeling its way with outstretched hands. With much of the dim light behind it now, it seemed scarcely even human, too thin of limb to be Tanyssa, let alone any of the other stranglers Arimone or the autarch might send. For a moment Qinnitan’s already racing heart threatened to stop entirely. Was it a ghost? A shadow-demon from out of Argal’s night kingdom?

  The thing was almost upon her. She saw a shadowed face loom up and her superstitious terror turned her arm to stone when she should have struck with the pin, should have buried it in the dark spots of the intruder’s eyes; instead she felt the thing bump against her and recoil. The feeling of cool, human flesh was so startling that the sinews of her arm finally caught life and she slashed at it. Her attacker fell back with a strange, breathy whimper but no words, no shout of pain or surprise, and Qinnitan’s heart stuttered again with superstitious fear.

  “Leave me alone!” she cried, but it came out a choked murmur. The thing scrambled away from her, still making the strange, animal noise, and cowered on the floor. Qinnitan leaped past it and ran toward the door, ready to scream for the huge Favored guards waiting only a few dozen paces away from the sleeping chambers, but then she stopped in the doorway. The thing was weeping, she realized, a bizarre, rasping sound.

  She reached up and burned her fingers pulling the lamp from behind its slotted screen, but when she had the handle and lifted it up, flooding the room with yellow light, she saw that the fearsome thing crouched on her floor was only a small, dark-haired boy.

  “Queen of the Hive!” Caution and fear still kept her oath of surprise quiet. She moved closer. The boy looked up at her with wide, frightened eyes. A long scratch down his chest dripped blood, showing where she had caught him with her nightingale pin. “Who are you?” she whispered.

  The child stared at her, tears in his eyes and on his cheeks. He opened his mouth but what came out was only a low grunt. She flinched and he threw his arm in front of his face to protect himself.

  One of the Silent Favored! He was a mute slave taken in one of the wars of Xis, an infant at his capture, perhaps. The autarchs of the Orchard Palace and their highest servants had always liked to surround themselves with such boys, who could neither spill secrets nor cry out, no matter what kind of cruelties were visited on them. “You poor thing,” Qinnitan said, half to herself—it did not immediately occur to her that one who could not speak might yet be able to hear and understand. She put out a cautious hand and he shrank away again. “I won’t hurt you,” she said, hoping that at least the tone of her voice would convince him. She was talking too loud, she realized—she might wake up her maids, and although moments earlier she would have welcomed it, suddenly she did not want anyone intruding. When she spoke again, only the wounded child could hear her. “Let me help you. I am sorry. Do you understand? I thought you were . . . You frightened me.”

  The boy whimpered again but let her examine his wound. It was long but shallow. Still, blood was already soaking the waist of his white linen breeches. She hunted for a moment until she found one of the clean cloths waiting for her next moonblood and pressed it against the cut, then found an old scarf and tied it around his waist to hold the bandage in place.

  “It is not a bad wound,” she whispered. “Can you understand me?”

  He touched the cloth gingerly. He still looked as though he might bolt at any moment, but at last he nodded his head.

  “Good. I am sorry I hurt you. What are you doing here?”

  Even in the lamplight she could see his face pale so quickly that she feared she had given him a mortal wound after all. She tried to restrain him, but he clambered grunting to his feet and reached into the blood-soaked waistband of his breeches, making soft hooting noises like a dove. He pulled out a bag that had been tucked away there between his body and the clothing. It was red with the blood of his body and wet, and for a moment she was reluctant to take it, but his expression was so anguished she realized that he was afraid something within had been ruined. She took it from him and saw that the drawstring was sealed with silver thread and wax. She held the lamp close, but did not immediately recognize the seal printed on it. Qinnitan took a breath, suddenly reluctant again, but the boy made a little whimpering sound like a dog waiting to be let out of doors and so she broke the wax away from the string and shook out into her hand a curl of parchment and a gold ring.

  The signature at the bottom of the parchment said “Jeddin.” She cursed again, but silently this time.

  “I have it,” she said. “It is safe—the blood has not soaked through. Was it the captain who sent this? The Leopard captain?”

  The boy shook his head, puzzled. Qinnitan was puzzled, too, then she had another thought. “Luian? Favored Luian? Did she send this?”

  Now he smiled, although it was a pained and sickly one, and nodded his head.

  “Very well. You have done what was asked. Now you must go out again, as silently as you came, so as not to wake the ones sleeping outside. I truly am sorry. Have someone dress that wound properly. Tell them . . . tell them you fell on a stone in the garden.”

  The boy looked doubtful, but he rose and patted his bandage to make sure it was still in place. He bowed to her, and the courtly display was so strange in the middle of the night, with the lamplight and the smears of blood on the floor, that she almost laughed with shock to see it. A moment later he slipped out through the curtains and was gone.

  Qinnitan waited, listening to the silence, then bent to the task of cleaning the blood from the floor, blotting it up with another of her own rags. The thought of reading what Jeddin had to say filled her with a sour dismay. Was it some foolish love poem that had almost cost a child his life? Or was it something newer and more dangerous, him ordering her to meet him somewhere, with the same sort of threats he had used to cow Luian into cooperation?

  Finished, with the room exactly as it had been before the midnight visitor’s arrival, she set the lamp on her bedside table and sat cross-legged on the bed, leaning close so she could read.

  Beloved,

  it began. She stared at Jeddin’s precise and surprisingly delicate script. At least he’s left my name off it, she thought, but a moment later the power of that single word reached out and struck her as powerfully as a blow. How had things come to this? It was like something out of an old story, that this powerful man should risk both their lives to prove his love, and that another even more powerful man—the mightiest on earth—should have already claimed her as his own.

  Me! Me, Qinnitan. It was impossible to compass.

  I was a fool to take the risk of meeting you. You were right to tell me so. There is talk. One of my enemies suspects. It must be Vash the chief minister but he can prove nothing.

  Dread seized
her, so powerful it almost stopped her breath. She did not want to read any more. But she did.

  However the day may come when he can act against me despite the favor the autarch all praise to His name has shown me. No it is because of the favor that the Golden One has shown me. He hates me. Vash I mean. As do others here.

  I must prepare for a day when things might change. I have my own followers loyal to me but my own safety would mean nothing to me without you. If such a day should come I will send a messenger to you who will speak the sacred name Habbili. And just as the son of the great god went down from the mountains and his enemies and onto the boat that brought him wounded to Xis so we will sail to freedom. In the harbor in a slip near to the Habbili temple there is a small fast ship named Morning Star of Kirous. I did not name it after you my beautiful star I have had it since I was first lifted to my place over the autarch’s Leopards but when I learned that some in the Seclusion called you by that name it only proved to me that the fates have meant this for us from the first. When you go there show the captain this ring. He will know it and show you all courtesy and when I join you you will see how sweetly that morning star sails.

  I hope it will not come to this beloved. I may yet defeat Pinimmon Vash and my other enemies and perhaps find some way that our love can grow under the Golden One’s sunshine. But as the saying goes there is no rest in a viper’s den—not even for vipers.

  He had signed his name with a flourish.

  Fool, she thought. Oh, Jeddin, you fool! Had the boy woken up the guards or even her servants, had this fallen into anyone’s hand, she and Jeddin and probably Luian would all be kneeling before the executioner this very moment. The captain of the Leopards was infected with a particularly dangerous sort of madness, Qinnitan thought, one in which he could praise the autarch even as he schemed to rob the ruler of the earth of his chosen bride.