Shadowmarch s-1

by Tad Williams

  “I asked if you are mad, Captain Vansen. Are your wits damaged? It seems a simple enough question.” “No, Princess. No, Highness, I do not think so.”

  “Then unless you are a liar or a traitor—fear not, I won’t ask you to deny those possibilities as well, we don’t have the time—what you have seen is real. Our danger is real. So let us talk about why your arrogant wish to be important enough to be punished will not be satisfied.”

  “My lady… ?”

  “Silence. I didn’t ask you a question. Captain Vansen, from what you’ve told me, it seems that not everyone is the same when it comes to this fairy-magic. You said that some of the men were bewildered, even bewitched, and that others were not. You were one of those who were not. True?”

  “Or at least very little, Highness, as far as I could tell.” He was looking at her with something like surprised respect. She liked the respect. She did not like the surprise.

  “Then I would be a fool to throw a soldier who seemed armored against such charms and snares into chains at a time when we may need that talent far more than strong arms or even stout hearts… would I not?”

  “I… I take your point, Highness.”

  “Here is another question. Did you see any reason, any differences in those affected, that might explain why some of you were overwhelmed by the Shadowline magic and some were not?”

  “No, Highness. One of my most trusted and sensible men, Collum Dyer, was swept away into a dream very quickly, but a man who is for all purposes his opposite was not touched and, in fact, made it home with me.”

  “So we have no way to know who has the weakness until it is revealed.” She frowned, biting her lip. Vansen watched her, clearly masking deeper feelings, but this time more effectively. She wondered briefly what he was hiding from her. Irritation? Fear? “Despite what you think of him, this fellow you mentioned who was not overcome by the fairy-magic must be given a role in preparing to fight this strange enemy. He and all the others who were not poisoned by this strange dreaming. He and your other survivors must all be made captains.”

  “Mickael Southstead a captain?" Vansen was chagrined.

  “Unless he is the lowest, vilest criminal ever born, his clear head will be worth more to us than if Anglin the Great himself were to come back from the heavens to lead us, then fall into a bewildered nightmare. As we have agreed,Vansen, I am no fool, and I don’t think you are one either. Can you not see this?"

  He bowed his head again briefly. “I can, Highness. You are right.”

  “Very kind of you to say so, Captain. We do not know where we will be fighting. It could be we will meet them in the hills of Daler’s Troth in an attempt to keep them away from the cities. It could just as easily happen that we cannot stop them until they reach the walls of Southmarch itself You are the only ones who have seen the enemy and returned to tell of it. You must help us prepare for them in any way you can imagine. I am not happy about it, Vansen, but I need you just as much as I need Brone and Nynor and Tyne Aldritch. The matter of my brother’s murder and your failure is not closed, but until better times I will push it from my mind, and so will you. It could be that if you serve me well if you serve Southmarch well then what is in the ledger of that night can be scraped away, or at least inked over.”

  “I will do all that you ask, Highness.” This new expression was hard to unriddle, both elevated and miserable, so that for a moment he appeared to have stepped down from a different fresco altogether.

  You are a strange man, Ferras Vansen, she thought. Maybe I was wrong to think you are the sort that has no secrets. “Go, then. Gather those who came back with you. See that they are fed and rested, but in no circumstance let them leave. I will speak to them myself tomorrow morning.”

  “Yes, Highness.” He rose, but hesitated. “Princess Briony… ?” “Speak.”

  “There is a young woman, too—I believe I told you.”

  A cold irritation crept over her. “What about her? We cannot let her go either, even if she is mad and suffering. I regret it. Make her comfortable.” She narrowed her eyes. “Do you have some feelings for her?”

  “No!” He flushed: she was certain she had touched a nerve.That made her grow even more chill, although she did not know why. “No, Highness. Responsibility, perhaps—she is like a child and she trusts me. But although she seemed just as lost in the Shadowline dream as Dyer and the others, she also found a way out again for us. She seems to be in some middle ground between the two…”

  “We have no time or patience to try to make sense out of some unfortunate young woman. If the magic took her and confused her, she is no use to us. Make her comfortable. Bring me the others tomorrow at ten of the clock.”

  Vansen bowed and went out, looking not exactly like one reprieved, but perhaps like one who had found out the gallows makers were all ill with a bad fever.

  She sat for a long time after he was gone, her thoughts an unsettled swirl. She had only an hour or so before she had to meet with the nobles and make a plan of war. She would have liked to go to Utta—she missed the Zorian sister’s wisdom and calm—but she knew there was a more important visit she had to make. Whatever complicated feelings she might have and whatever terrors might be punishing him, she did not wish to go to this evening’s council without her twin.

  * * *

  The Scourge of the Shivering Plain stood on a hillside at the edge of the line of trees, looking down on the valley and the town that bestrode the river at its bottom. The sun had vanished behind the top of the hills and lamps were already being lit all along the dark valley, even though evening was still an hour away.

  Yasammez turned and reached out with her thoughts, feeling back toward the Shadowline. The mantle of shadow, the web of careful, ancient enchantments that had trailed behind her for days like a cape of mists, the vast, mortal-bewildering essence of the Qar heartland that had hidden and protected her marching army, had now stretched to its limits and was beginning to thin. She knew that it would reach no farther into these fields, that where she went from now on she must do beneath the bright sun or the unclouded stars. That was why she waited for night.

  The Seal of War glowed on her chest like a coal. Its weight was both comforting and terrifying. For year upon long year she had waited for this hour to come. Whatever befell would have much to do with her decisions in the days ahead, and she would have had it no other way. Still, many would die, and many of them would be her own kind. Like almost all warriors, no matter how fierce, it was not easy for her to see her own killed, whatever the need.

  She turned and walked back up the hillside. Although her armor was covered in long spines and the trees grew close together here, she made no sound.

  In the woods along the hilltop her army had gathered. With the mantle’s weakening their bright eyes glittered in the gathering dark like a sky full of stars as they watched her pass. No fires had been lit. Later, when she had a better idea of what she faced, had learned something of the mettle of her sunlander enemies, Lady Porcupine might find it useful to let them see her army’s fires burning on the hills and plains, let them count the blazes -with chilling blood—but not tonight. Tonight the People would come down on their foes like lightning from a cloudless sky.

  Her tent was a thing woven of silence and thickened shadow. Several of her captains awaited her inside its surprisingly large expanse, seated around the dim amethyst glow of her empty helmet in a circle like the Whispering Mothers who nursed the Great Egg.

  Yasammez wished she could send them all away—there was always that still moment before the noise and the blood and she preferred to spend it by herself—but first there were things she had to do and even a few hated formalities she must observe.

  Mormng-in-Eye of the Changing People was waiting, her naked chest heaving. She had just run a long way. “What do you bring me?” Yasammez asked her.

  “They are no more than they seem, or else they have grown a thousand times more skilled in trickery than they once were
. A small garrison lives inside the town gates. There are other small forces of armed folk in the larger houses, and an armory that suggests they can muster more when need be.”

  “But the armory is full?”

  Morning-in-Eye nodded her sleek head. “Pikes and helmets, bows, arrows —none have been given out. They do not suspect.”

  Yasammez showed nothing, but she was pleased. An easy victory would bring its own problems, but it was more important that her army’s first blooding not be too perilous. Even with all those she had mustered, the People were still vastly outnumbered by the mortals who now filled the lands that once had belonged to her folk. She relied on surprise and terror to increase the size of her host tenfold.

  “Hammerfoot of Firstdeep?”

  “Yes, Lady.”

  “It is long since we have come against mortal men or their works. When the village is afire, take some of your women and men and pull down the walls. See to the way of their building. It is only a town, but perhaps we will see something of what we must defeat when we come against the Old Place.”

  “Yes, Lady.”

  She turned to Gyir, the most trusted of her captains, and for a moment their thoughts commingled. Compared to her or even many of the others present he was merely a stripling, but his ferocity and cunning were second only to hers. She tasted his cold resolve and was pleased, then spoke so that the others might hear. “When we are putting the town to fire and the people to slaughter, it is my wish that a large number be allowed to escape, or at least to believe that they are escaping.” She paused for a moment, considered unflinchingly the horror that would come. “Let them be mostly females and their young.”

  Stone of the Unwilling stirred, flickered. “But why, Lady? Why show them mercy? They never showed us any —when they found my people’s hive in the last great battles they burned it and clubbed our children to death as they came out, screaming and weeping.”

  “It is not mercy. You should know that I of all the People have no such failing when it comes to the sunlanders. I wish the news of what happened here to spread —it will fill their land with terror. And the females and young we allow to escape will not take up arms as their males might, but in the cities we besiege they will need to be fed and watered, taking resources from those who do stand against us.” She slipped Whitefire from its sheath and laid it beside her helmet. There was no fire in her pavilion of shadow; the sword’s lunar glow gave all the light. “We have not spilled the blood of mortals since we retreated behind the Shadowline. Now that is ended. Let the Book of Regret remember this hour even beyond the world’s end. “ She raised her hand. “Sing with me, for the sake of all the People. We must now praise the blind king and the sleeping queen and swear our fealty to the Pact of the Glass—yes, we will all swear to it together, think what we might—then we will take flame and fear to our enemies.”

  Part Three

  FIRE

  … And Perin went among them and heard their cries, and when they told him, not knowing who he was, of the terrible beast that beset them, he smiled and patted his great hammer and instructed them not to be afraid…

  —from A Compendium of Tilings That are Known, The Book of the Trigon

  27. Candlerstown

  THE TALE OF YEARS:

  Each page turned is a page of fire

  The tortoise licks his burned feet

  And stares into darkness

  —from The Bonefall Oracles

  He knew he had to pay attention. Barrick knew that what was happening was terribly important, if hard to believe. He also knew that his sister was expecting him to shoulder some of the burden. He just didn’t know whether he could do it or not.

  It was the dreams, his harrowing dreams, wearing him away just as the powerful ocean waves broke down the causeway between Southmarch’s castle and town, so that men had to labor constantly to build it back up again. Sometimes he found it difficult to remember what it felt like simply to be Barrick. There were nights when he woke scratching like a beast at the inside of his chamber door, locked each night by his servants to prevent him from walking in his sleep. Other midnights he came gasping up from nightmares, half certain that he had changed into something else entirely, and could only sit in the dark feeling at first his hands and arms and then, reluctantly, his face, terrified that he might find some dreadful transfiguration had taken place to match those dreams of violence. In many of the dreams he was surrounded by faceless shapes that wanted to imprison him, perhaps even kill him, unless he destroyed them first. Always he woke sweating, breathless with fear that he was becoming some brute beast like a shape-changer out of some old nurse’s tale, and worst of all, that this time the dream creature whose neck had just snapped in his hands would turn out to be a real person he had attacked—someone he knew, perhaps even someone he loved.

  In fact, there seemed little separation now between the madness of nightmare and what had been the sanctuary of wakefulness In the dim hours of the previous night he had awakened with a voice in his ear, someone speaking as though they sat right next to him, although the room was silent but for the breath of his slumbering page.

  “We do not need the mantle any longer,” it had said—a woman’s voice, commanding, cold. It had not been like something heard in a dream, but had seemed to resound inside the very bones of his skull. He had whimpered at the sound, the nearness of it. “We will sweep down on them like fire. They will fear us in light as well as darkness.”

  Prince Barrick?" said a gruff voice.

  Someone was trying to get his attention—a real voice, not a midnight dream. He shook his head, trying to make sense.

  “Prince Barrick, we know it is an effort for you to be here and we are all grateful for that. Shall I have someone bring you wine?” It was Avin Brone speaking, clumsily trying to let him know he was not paying attention.

  “Are you ill again?” Briony asked quietly.

  “I am well enough. It is the fever, still I do not sleep well.” He took a breath to clear his head, struggling to remember what the others had been saying. He wanted to show that he was worthy to sit beside his sister. “But why should these fairy-beasts come here and attack us? Why now?"

  “We do not know anything for certain, Highness.” That was the quiet one, Vansen, the guard captain. Barrick wasn’t certain what he thought about the man. Briony’s anger with him had been reasonable—letting a reigning prince be killed in his own bedroom was obviously a dereliction of duty, and under old King Ustin the captain’s head would probably have been on a spike above the Basilisk Gate weeks ago—so he was not quite certain why she now seemed to be treating the young soldier like an important adviser. He dimly remembered Briony saying something about it as they made their way to this council, but his head had been pounding from the effort of getting up and getting dressed. “All I can say is that the creature we caught said something about someone leading an army, coming to burn our houses,” Vansen went on. “Strangely, it was a she the goblin said was going to do it. ‘She brings white fire,’ that’s what it told us. ‘Burn all your houses to black stones.’ But perhaps the monster did not speak our tongue well enough Barrick felt a chill trace down his back Vansen’s words were much like his dream, the cold, female voice out of the empty night. He almost said something, but the stony, doubting faces all around made him hold his tongue. The prince is imagining things, they would whisper to each other. His wits are going. He should never have confessed his secrets to Briony. Thank the gods he had not given up all caution and had kept the strangest of them to himself.

  “Is there some reason this enemy couldn’t be a woman?” Briony demanded. Barrick could not help noticing changes in his sister: it was as though she had grown bigger, harder, while he grew smaller and more helpless daily. “Didn’t Anglin’s granddaughter Lily lead her people against the Gray Companies? If the Twilight People are somehow led by a woman, does that mean we have no need to be wary of them?”

  “No, Highness, of course not.” Vans
en flushed easily. Barrick wondered if the man was trying to hide a great anger.

  “But the princess raises an important question,” said old Steffans Nynor with surprising matter-of-factness. The castellan seemed to have put aside his fluttery servility in this time of need. Eyes of Heaven, Barrick thought, have I been asleep for a hundred years ? Is everyone turning into something else? For a moment the walls of the chapel seemed to drop away and he was turning, falling. He recovered himself by biting his tongue; as the pain jumped into the back of his mouth he heard Nynor say, “… after all. Perhaps they merely wish to test their strength—a raid or two, then back across the Shadowline.”

  “Wishful thinking,” declared Tyne of Blueshore. “Unless Vansen is utterly mistaken, that is no raiding party They are bringing a large army, the kind that will stay in the field until it has accomplished its task.”

  “But why me?” said Earl Rorick. “First they steal my bride and her splendid dowry, now they will attack my lands. I have done nothing to offend these creatures!”

  “Opportunity, my lord—that seems most likely,” said Vansen. He looked at Rorick with such a calm, measured gaze that Barrick could almost see him weighing the man and finding him to be a short measure. But Vansen is a dalesman, isn’t he? So Rorick is his lord. The idea that a liege lord would not receive the unquestioning respect of all his liegemen was a slightly new one to Barrick, who had spent his childhood so taken with his own cynicism that it had not occurred to him others might also find the ancient order of things to be less than perfect.

  “Opportunity?” asked Briony.

  “When I was in… when I was behind the Shadowline, Highness,” the captain said, “it was like falling into a fast river, even though I was less troubled than many of my men. But time and even… even the substance of things seemed different from place to place there, in the way… in the way that someone swept down a river might for a moment be pulled down and then be lifted to the surface again, or be caught for a moment in an eddy, then pushed helplessly into the rocks.”