Shadowmarch s-1

by Tad Williams

  —from The Bonefall Oracles

  Chert had already sat down on the bench to rest his tired legs when he realized Opal had not followed him in, but was still standing in the doorway, peering out into Wedge Road. “What is it, my dear?”

  “Flint. He’s not with you?”

  He frowned. “Why -would he be with me? I left him home with you because he’s such a distraction where we’re working right now—won’t stay with me because he doesn’t like it there, but won’t stay where I tell him aboveground either…” He felt a clutch in his chest. “You mean he’s gone?”

  “I don’t know! Yes! He went with me to Lower Ore Street.Then, when I came back, he was playing beside the road, piling up stones and making those walls and tunnels and whatnot he likes so much—the dust that comes in on that boy!” Tears filled her eyes. “Oh, and I don’t know—I went out to call him in to eat, hours ago, and he was gone. I’ve been up and down the roads, down to the guildhall—I even went to the Salt Pool and asked little Boulder if he’d been there. Nobody’s seen him at all!”

  He got himself up despite his aching legs and hurried to put his arms around her. “There, my old darling, there. I’m sure he’s just up to some pranks—he is a boy, after all, and a very independent lad at that, the Earth Elders know. He’ll be back before our evening meal is over, you’ll see.”

  “Evening meal!” she almost shrieked. “You old fool, do you think I’ve had time to prepare an evening meal? I’ve been hurrying all around town the length of the afternoon with my heart aching, trying to find that boy. There is no evening meal!” Sobbing out loud now, she turned and stumbled back toward their bed and wrapped herself in a blanket so all that could be seen was a shuddering lump.

  Chert was troubled, too, but he couldn’t help feeling that Opal was getting a bit ahead of things. Flint would not be the first boy in Funderling Town—or the last—to wander off on some childish quest and lose track of time. It had only been a short while ago he had disappeared during the prince regent’s funeral. If he wasn’t back by bedtime, they could start fretting in earnest. In the meantime, though, Chert had put in a long day and his stomach felt shrunken and empty as a dried leather sack.

  He halfheartedly examined the larder. “Ah, look, we have greatroots in!” he said loud enough for Opal to hear. “A bit of cooking and those would go down a treat.” She didn’t answer. He picked through the other roots and various tubers. Some were looking a bit whiskery. “Perhaps I’ll just have a bit of bread and some cheese.”

  “There isn’t any bread.” The lump under the blanket shifted. It did not sound like a happy lump. “I was going to go back out and get the afternoon’s baking, but… but…”

  “Ah, yes, of course,” Chert said hurriedly. “Never fear. Still, it’s a shame about the greatroots. A bit of cooking…” “If you want them cooked, cook them yourself If you know how.”

  Chert was sadly chewing a piece of raw greatroot—he had not realized how much more bitter they tasted if they had not been boiled in beet sugar—and beginning to admit to himself that the boy was not coming back for his evening meal. Not that a raw root and a piece of hard cheese was particularly worth coming back for, but Chert couldn’t deny that the pang of disquiet was growing inside him; although his mug of ale had helped to wash down the fibrous root and remove a little of the worst of the throbbing of his legs and back, it had not gone very far toward soothing his mind. He had been out into Wedge Road several times. The dimmer stonehghts were lit for evening and the streets were nearly empty as families finished their suppers and prepared for the night. The children must all be in bed now. The other children.

  He decided to take a lamp and go out looking.

  Could the boy have gone into one of the unfinished tunnels, he wondered, been caught by a slide in one of the side corridors where the bracing was less than adequate? But what would he be doing in such a place? Chert let his mind run across other possibilities, some happier and others much more frightening. Could he have gone home with another child? Flint was so unworldly in some ways that Chert could easily imagine he would forget to send word of where he was, let alone ask permission, but he had never really made friends with any of the Funderling children, even those in nearby houses who were of his own age. Where else? Down in the excavations where Chert had been working, near the Eddon family tomb? Certainly there were treacherous spots there, but Flint had made it clear he hated the place, and in any case how could Chert have missed him?

  The Rooftoppers—the little people. Perhaps the boy had gone to see them and either stayed or not been able to get back before dark. Unbidden, a horrid vision came to him, of the boy fallen from a roof and lying helpless in some shadowy, unvisited courtyard. He put the greatroot down, sickened.

  But where else could he be?

  “Chert!” Opal shouted from the bedchamber. “Chert, come here!”

  He wished she did not sound frightened. Suddenly, he didn’t want to walk through the door and see what she had found. But he did.

  Opal had not found anything—in fact, rather the reverse. “It’s gone!” she said, pointing at the boy’s pallet, at the blanket and shirt lying across it in twisted coils like weary ghosts. “His bag. With that… that little mirror in it. It’s gone.” Opal turned to him, eyes big with fear. “He never puts it on anymore, never wears it—it’s always here! Why isn’t it here now?” Her face suddenly grew slack, as though she had aged five years in a matter of moments. “He’s gone away, hasn’t he? He’s gone away for good and so he took it with him.”

  Chert could think of nothing to say—or, in any case, nothing that would make either of them feel better.

  * * *

  “By the gods, Toby, are you falling asleep again? You’ve jogged the glass!” The young man stood up quickly, raising his hands in the air to show that he couldn’t possibly have done such a thing, his look ot wounded honor suggested that he was always awake and at his best in the midnight hours and that Chaven was being needlessly cruel to suggest otherwise. “But, Master Chaven.

  “Never mind I expect you to be a man of science and I suppose that is asking too much.” “But I want to be! I listen! I do everything you say?"

  The physician sighed. It was not really the lad’s fault. Chaven had put too much stock in the recommendation of his friend, Euan Dogsend, who was the most learned man in Blueshore but perhaps not its best judge of character. The young man worked hard for his age but he was distracted and touchy at the best of times, and worst of all, although he was by no means stupid, he seemed to have an unquestioning pattern of mind.

  It is like trying to make my dear mistress Kloe pursue friendship with the mice and rats.

  Still, the young man was standing right there with his face screwed up in a look of furious attention, so Chaven tried again. “See, the perspective glass must not move once we have found the spot we seek Leotrodos down in Perikal says that the new star is in Kossope Once we have set the eye of our glass on Kossope, we must tighten the housing so that it does not move—thus, we can make measurements, not just tonight, but other nights. And we most certainly must not lean on the perspective glass while we are making those measurements?"

  “But the sky is full of stars,” said Toby “Why is it so important to measure this one?”

  Chaven closed his eyes for a moment “Because Leotrodos says he has found a new star. A new star has not been seen in hundreds of years—perhaps even thousands, since the methods of the ancients are sometimes obscure and thus open to question More importantly, it raises many doubts about the shape of the heavens “ The boy’s puzzled look told him all he needed to know “Because if the heavens are fixed, as the astrologers of the Trigonate so loudly tell us, yet there is a new star in the sky, where did it come from ?"

  “But, Master, that doesn’t make sense,” Toby said, yawning but a little more awake now. “If the gods made all the spheres, couldn’t the gods just make a new star?"

  Chaven had to smile. “You are d
oing better. That is a proper question, but a more important question is, why haven’t they done it before now?”

  For a moment, just a moment, he saw something ignite in the young man’s eyes. Then caution or weariness or simply the habit of a lifetime dulled the expression again. “It seems like a lot of thinking about a star.”

  “Yes, it is. And one day that thinking may teach us exactly how the gods have made our world. And on that day, will we not be nearly gods ourselves?”

  Toby made the pass-evil. “What a thing to say! Sometimes you frighten me, Master Chaven.”

  He shook his head. “Just help me get the perspective glass fixed on Kos-sope again, then you can take yourself to bed.”

  It was just as well he was now alone, Chaven thought as he wrote down the last of the notations. Even Toby might have noticed the way his hands had begun shaking as the hour he was waiting for came nearer. It was powerfully strange, this feeling. He had always coveted knowledge, but this was more like a hunger, and it did not seem to be a healthful one. Each time he used the Great Mirror, he felt more reluctant to cover it up again. Was it simply lust for the wisdom that he gained or some glamour of the spirit which gave that wisdom to him? Or was it something else entirely? Whatever might have caused the craving, he could barely force himself to take the time to drape his long box full of rare and costly lenses with its heavy covering, and only the sharp chill of the night air persuaded him to add even more delay so that he could crank shut the door in the observatory roof, shutting out those intrusive, maddening stars.

  His need was especially sharp because it had been so long—days and days!—since the mirror had gifted him with anything but shadows and silence. How frustrating it had been all of tonight, trying to concentrate on Kossope when it was the three red stars called the Horns of Zmeos, also called the Old Serpent, that had his deepest attention: when they appeared behind the shoulder of Perin’s great planet, as they would do tonight, he could consult the mirror again.

  When the observatory room and the perspective glass were both secured, he went in search of Kloe. Tonight, if the gods smiled, her work and his offering would not lie ignored again.

  Chaven’s need had grown so strong that he didn’t notice how roughly he was handling Kloe until she gave him a swift but meaningful bite on the web of his thumb and forefinger as he put her out. He dropped her, cursing and sucking at the wound as she scampered away down the passage, but although his anger was swiftly replaced by shame for his carelessness toward his faithful mistress, even that shame was devoured by the need that was roaring up inside him.

  He sat before the mirror in a dark room that already seemed to be growing darker still, and began to sing. It was an old song in a language so dead that no one living could be certain they were pronouncing it correctly, but Chaven sang the words as his onetime master, Kaspar Dyelos, had taught them to him. Dyelos, sometimes called the Warlock of Krace, had never owned a Great Mirror, although he had possessed broken shards of more than one and had been able to do wonderful things with those shards. But mirror-lore as a discipline was as much about remembering and passing that memory along for the generations to come as it was about the practical manipulation of the cosmos—Chaven often wondered how many wonderful, astounding things had been lost in the plague years—and so Dyelos had taught all that he had learned to his apprentice, Chaven. Thus, on that day when Chaven had found this particular mirror, this astounding artifact, he had already known how to use it, even if he had not precisely understood every single step of the process.

  Now Chaven rubbed his head, troubled by an errant thought. His brow was starting to ache from staring into the mirror-shadows and wondering if something else was looking at the shadow-mouse that lay on the shadow-floor, and whether that something would finally come. Was he doomed to failure again tonight? He was distracted, that was the problem… but he could not help being puzzled by the fact that he suddenly couldn’t remember where he had acquired the mirror that was before him now, leaning against the wall of his secret storeroom. At least it seemed sudden, this emptiness in his memory. He could recall without trouble where and when he had obtained each of the other draped glasses on the shelves, and their particular provenances as well, but for some reason he could not just at this moment remember how he had obtained the jewel in his collection, this Great Mirror.

  The incongruity was beginning to feel like an itch that would not be scratched and it was growing worse. Even the powerful hunger he felt began to weaken a little as the puzzle took hold of him. Where did it come from, this powerful thing? I have had it… how long?

  Just then something flared in the center of the looking glass, a great out-wash of white light as though a hole had been torn through the night sky to release the radiance of the gods that lay behind everything. Chaven threw his hands up, dazzled; the light faded a little as the owl settled, folded its bright wings, and looked back at him with orange eyes, Kloe’s sacrificial mouse in its great talons.

  All his other thoughts flew away, then, as though the wings had enfolded him as well, or perhaps as though he had become the tiny thing clutched in that snowy claw, in the grip of a power so much greater than his own that it could seem a kind of honor to give up his life to it.

  He came up out of the long emptiness at last and into the greater light. Music beyond explaining—a kind of endless drone that was nevertheless full of complicated voices and melodies—still filled his ears but was beginning to grow less. His nostrils also seemed still to breathe that ineffable scent, as powerful and heady-sweet as attar of roses (although such roses never grew on bushes rooted in ordinary earth, in soil steeped in death and corruption), but it was no longer the only thing he could think about.

  It might have only been with him a moment, that deepest bliss, or he might have been basking in those sensations for centuries, when the voice-that-was-no-voice spoke to him at last, a single thought that might have been “I am here,” or simply, “I am.” Male, female, it was neither, it was both—the distinction was of no importance. He expressed his gratefulness that his offering had been received again, at last. What came back to him was a kind of knowing, the powerful calm of something that expected nothing less than to be adored and feared.

  But even in the midst of his joy at being allowed within the circle of this great light again, something tugged again at his thoughts, a small but troubling something, just as shadows in his room of mirrors sometimes seemed to take odd shapes at the corner of his eye but never at the center of his vision.

  Questions, he remembered, and for an instant he was almost himself. I have questions to ask. The Rooftoppers, he announced, those small, old ones who live in hiding. They speak of someone they call the Lord of the Peaks who comes to them and gives them wisdom. Is that you?

  What came back to him was something almost like amusement. There was also a sensation of dismissal, of negation. So they do not speak of you? he persisted. It is not you who visits them with dire warnings? The shining thing—it looked nothing like an owl now, and although at this moment its shape was perfectly plain to him, he knew he would not afterward be able to explain it in words, nor even quite remember it—took a long time to answer. He felt the absence in that silence almost as a death, so that when it did speak again, he was so grateful that he missed part of what it told him.

  Things had been awakened that would otherwise be sleeping, was all the sense that he could make of its wordless, fragmented thought. The shining thing told him that its works were subtle, and not meant for him to understand.

  He sensed he was being chided now, there was more than a hint of discord in the all-surrounding music. He was devastated and begged forgiveness, reminded the shining thing that he only wanted to serve it faithfully, but in the one piece of his secret self which remained to him, the small sour note had allowed him to think a little more clearly Was that truly his only wish—to serve this thing, this being, this force? When he had first touched it, or it had touched him, had they not
almost seemed to have been equals, exchanging information?

  But what did it want to learn from me? What could I possibly have given to this power? He couldn’t remember now, any more than he could remember how the mirror, the portal to this painful bliss, had first come into his hands.

  The radiant presence made it clear that it would forgive him for his unseemly questioning, but in return he must perform a task. It was an important task, it seemed to say, perhaps even a sacred one.

  For a moment, but only a moment, he hesitated. A little of himself still hung back, as though the mirror were a fine sieve and not all that had been Chaven could pass through it into this singing fire. That tiny remainder stood and watched, helpless as though in a nightmare, but it was not strong enough to change anything yet. What must I do? he asked.

  It told him, or rather it put the knowledge into him, and just as it had chided, now it praised, that kindness was like honey and silvery music and the endless, awesome light of the heavens.

  You are my good and faithful servant, it told him. And in the end, you will have your reward —the thing you truly seek.

  The white light began to fade, retreating like a wave that had crested and now ran backward down the sand to rejoin the sea Within moments he was alone in a deep, secret room lit only by the guttering flame of a black candle.

  * * *

  Pounding on the kitchen door brought Mistress Jennikin out in her nightdress and nightcap. She held the candle before her as though it were a magic talisman. Her gray hair, unbound for the night and thinning with age, hung in an untidy fringe over her shoulders.

  “It is only me. I am sorry to rouse you at such an hour, but my need is great.”

  “Doctor… ? What is wrong? Is someone ill?” Her eyes widened. “Oh, Zoria watch over us, there hasn’t been another murder… !”

  “No, no. Rest easy. I must go on a journey, that is all, and I must leave immediately—before dawn.” She held the candle a little closer to his face—scanning for signs of madness or fever, perhaps. “But Doctor, it’s…” “Yes, the middle of the night. To be more precise, it is two hours before dawn by my chain-clock. I know that as well as anyone and better than most. And I know at least as well as anyone else what I must do, don’t you think?” “Of course, sir! But what do you want… I mean…”