by Tad Williams
“Don’t shoot,” he said One of the soldiers raised his bow and aimed. “Don’t!” At Vansen’s shout, even though it had been looking straight at them, the stag for the first time seemed to understand its peril It turned and with two long leaps vanished into the cover of the trees.
“I could have had him,” snarled the bowman, the old campaigner Southstead whose grumbling ways had been the reason Vansen brought him instead of leaving him home to gossip and spread dissatisfaction among the rest of the guardsmen.
“We do not know what is natural here and what is not.” Ferras was careful to keep anger out of his voice. “You saw the flowers. You have seen the empty houses. We have enough to eat in our packs and saddlebags to keep us alive. Kill nothing that does not threaten you—do you all hear me?”
“What,” demanded Southstead, “do you think it might be another girl, magicked into a deer?” He turned to the other guards with a loud, angry laugh. “He’s already got one—that’s just greedy, that is.”
Vansen realized that the man was frightened by this journey through lands grown strange. As are we all, he told himself, but that makes such talk all the more dangerous. “If you think you know better than me how to lead this company, Mickael Southstead, then say so to me, not to them.”
Southstead’s smile faltered. He licked his lips. “I meant only a jest, sir.” “Well, then Let us leave it at that and make camp. Jests will be more welcome over a fire.”
When the flames were rising and the girl Willow was warming her hands, Collum Dyer made his way to Vansen s side. “You’ll have to keep an eye on our Micka, Captain,” he said quietly. “Too many years of too much wine has curdled his heart and brains, but I had not thought him so far gone as to mock his captain. He never would have dared it in Murray’s day.”
“He’ll still do well enough if there’s something to do.” Vansen frowned. “Raemon Beck, come here.”
The young merchant, who had spent most of the journey like a man caught in a nightmare from which he couldn’t awaken, slowly made his way toward Vansen and Dyer.
“Are you an honorable man, Beck?”
He looked at Ferras Vansen in surprise. “Why, yes, I am.” “Yes, Captain,” grunted Dyer.
Vansen raised his hand it didn’t matter. “Good. Then I want you to be the girl’s companion. She will ride with you. Trying to get sense from her is like sifting a thousandweight of chaff for every grain of wheat, anyway, and you may recognize better than I can if she says something useful.”
“Me?”
“Because you are the only one here who has been through something like what I believe she has seen and heard and felt.” Ferras looked over to where the men were gathering more deadfall for the fire. “Also, to be frank, it is better if the men are angry with you than angry with me.”
Beck did not look too pleased at this, but Collum Dyer was standing right beside him, cleaning his dirty fingernails with a very long dagger, so he only scowled and said, “But I am a married man!”
“Then treat her as you would want your wife treated if she were found wandering ill and confused beside the road. And if she says anything that you think might be useful, anything at all, tell me at once.”
“Useful how?"
Vansen sighed. “In keeping us alive, for one thing.”
He and Dyer watched as a chastened Beck walked back to the fire and sat himself down beside the near-child Willow. “Do you think we’re in such danger, Captain?” asked Dyer.
“Truly.”
“Because of a few flowers and a daft girl?”
“Perhaps not. But I’d rather come home with everyone safe and be laughed at for being too cautious—wouldn’t you?"
The night passed without incident, and by midmorning the road had led them so deep into the trees that they could no longer see the dreary hills or the looming Shadowline. At first that seemed a blessing, but as the day wore on and the sun, glimpsed only for brief moments through chinks in the canopy, passed the peak of the sky and began to slide into the west, Vansen found himself wondering whether they would have to spend the night surrounded by forest, which was not a comfortable thought. As they took their midday meal of roadbread and cheese, he called Raemon Beck to his side again.
“There is nothing to tell,” Beck said sullenly. “I have never heard so much prattling about pigs and goats in my entire life. If we were to come upon her father’s farm now, I think I might put a torch to it myself.”
“That is not what I wished to ask you. These woods—when you were riding through them, how long did it take you? On the way out toward Settland, I mean.” He tried a kind smile. “I doubt you were paying much notice to such things on your ride back.”
Beck’s look was almost amused, but it didn’t hide his misery. “We went through no forest like this on the way out.” “What do you mean? You traveled on the Settland Road, did you not?”
The merchant’s nephew looked pale, weary. “Don’t you understand, Captain? Everything has changed. Everything. I remember scarcely half these places from my journey.”
“What nonsense is that? It was only a week or two ago. You must have passed through this wood. A road is not a river—it doesn’t flood its banks and find a new channel.”
Beck only shrugged. “Then I must have forgotten this wood, Captain Vansen.”
The afternoon wore on. The cleared space where the road passed through the trees was quiet and gloomy, but there were signs of life—a few deer, squirrels, a pair of silvery foxes that passed through a clearing beside them like midday moonlight before vanishing into a thicket, and a raven that for a while seemed to keep pace with them, fluttering from branch to branch, cocking its head to examine them with bright yellow eyes. Then, one of the men on foot who could no longer stand the raven’s persistence and silence chased it away with a stone Vansen did not have the heart to scold him.
At last, as the sharp shadows of leaves and branches on the road began to blur into a more general murkiness, he decided that they could not go on any longer in the hope of outlasting the forest. It would be dark within an hour. He bade the company stop and set camp at the edge of the trees, beside the road.
He was kneeling in front of the first gathering of kindling, trying to strike a light from his recalcitrant flint, when one of the youngest guardsmen came racing toward them along the edge of the forest.
“Captain! Captain!” he shouted. “There is someone on the road ahead.” Vansen stood. “Armed? Could you tell? How many?”
The young soldier shook his head, wide-eyed. “Just one—an old man, I think. And he was walking away from us. I saw him! He had a staff and wore a cloak with the hood up.”
Vansen was struck by the young man’s almost feverish excitement. “A local woodsman, no doubt.” “He… he seemed strange to me.”
Ferras Vansen looked around. Work setting up camp had stopped and all were now watching him. He could feel their curiosity and discomfort. “Well, then, we’ll have a look.You come with me. Dyer? You, too. Perhaps we can all shelter somewhere a bit more comfortable tonight, if this old fellow lives nearby.”
The pair climbed onto their horses and followed the young guard along the road, past the point where it turned and took them out of sight of the camp. There was indeed a small, dark figure hurrying along ahead of them. Although the shape was bent,Vansen thought that if he was an old man, he must be a very spry old man.
They left the young foot soldier and spurred ahead, thinking to catch up to the cloaked shape in a matter of moments, but it was growing dark quickly and somehow even though the road curved again only a little, they could not find him.
“He’s heard us coming and stepped into the trees,” said Collum Dyer.
They rode a little farther, until they could see a clear stretch of road before them. Even in the poor light it was quite clear no one was hurrying ahead of them. They turned and made their way back, riding slowly, peering into the thicket on either side of the road to see if their quarry w
as hiding there.
“A trick,” Dyer said. “Do you think he was an enemy? A spy?”
“Perhaps, but…” Vansen suddenly pulled up in the middle of the road. His horse was restive, pawing at the ground impatiently. A little evening mist had begun to rise from the ground. “We’ve come back two bends of the road,” he said. “Collum, where is the camp?”
Dyer looked startled, then scowled. “You’ll frighten us both, Captain. A little farther ahead—we’ve just mistaken how far in this failing light.”
Vansen allowed himself to be led, but after they had been riding for a while longer, Dyer suddenly reined up and began to call.
“Hallooo! Hallooo! Where are you all? It’s Dyer—halloooo!” No one answered.
“But we are still on the same road!” Collum Dyer said in panic and fury. “It’s not even full dark!” Ferras Vansen found he was trembling a little, although the evening was not particularly cold. Mist twined lazily between the trees. He made the sign of the Trigon and realized he had been silently murmuring prayers to the gods for some time. “No,” he said slowly, “but somewhere, somehow, without even knowing it… we have crossed the Shadowline.”
19. The God-King
DEEP HOLE:
The sound of a distant horn
The salt smell of a weeping child
The air is hard to breathe
—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 Pan-hyssir, 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 aeon 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 he 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 u
p 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 proceedings, 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.
