by Tad Williams
“Just don’t leave me here,” Beetledown begged him, and Chert suddenly recognized that the undertone he had been hearing in the Rooftopper’s voice was pure fear. For the first time he considered what it must feel like for his minuscule companion to come so far beneath the ground, away from the open roofs and sky. “Not even Beetledown the brave bowman can live long by himself in such a place,” the tiny man said,”—not with the air so tight and close and even un’s breathing’s so unnatural loud.”
“I won’t leave you here.”
They crossed down through the Festival Halls and toward the cavern called the Curtainfall, which was a side doorway to the great honeycomb of caves known as the Temple. But when first seen, it didn’t look like the doorway to anything at one end of the small cave a broad sheet of water drizzled from a lip of jutting rock, down into a pool. The waterfall shimmered blackly in the weak light of the cavern’s single bracketed torch although, as Chert moved closer to the curtain of water, he could also see the pale reflection of his coral lamp move like a firefly across its surface.
“Who comes down here so far to light torches?” Beetledown asked, distractedly sniffing.
“You’ll see.” Chert stepped out into the pool on a bridge of submerged stones near the edge of the cataract and headed straight for the falling water.
“Tha’ll drown us!” Beetledown chirped in alarm.
“Don’t fear There is space between the water and the stone—and look!” There was more than space between water and wall—there was a hole in the great slab of stone, a hole that from most angles was hidden behind the waterfall Chert stepped through, taking more care than he normally would to avoid the edge of the waterfall so that Beetledown would not accidentally be washed off his shoulder. On the far side of the water they entered a single chamber the size of an entire Funderling Town neighborhood, whose walls were lined with bracketed torches and whose high ceiling was covered with the same kind of strange carvings that filled the Garden of Earth Shapes. At the far side of this massive chamber stood the pillared front of the Temple of the Metamorphic Elders, cut directly into the living rock.
“By the Peak!” the little man said in wonder. “Un goes on and on’. Have tha Funderling folk truly dug all the way down in the dark earth and out through the bottom’!”
“Not quite,” Chert told him, looking at the intricately worked stone facade—only the unevenness of some of the shapes showed that it had been natural cavern once. “But we have found many of the deep places of the earth that water dug, then carved them even more to make them our own.”
Beetledown made a face, sniffed. “But for the first time I do not scent the boy strongly. Un’s track runs weaker here, behind the water-wall.”
Chert sighed. “I will ask the temple brothers, anyway,” he said. “But I’m afraid you’ll have to wait here.” “Art coming back for me?”
“I won’t go out of your sight. Just sit here on this stone.” He placed Beetledown atop a relatively flat bit of carved wall, high off the cavern floor. He was glad he didn’t have to go far: he felt a responsibility for the little man he had not expected. He remembered the tiny fellow’s worry about cats and the joke he had made about it and was again struck by shame. It’s true there aren’t too many cats down here, he thought, but I don’t think I remembered to tell him that many here keep snakes against rats and voles and other vermin. I doubt Beetledown likes snakes any better than cats.
He hurried across the wide floor of the temple chamber. It was here that the people of Funderling Town made pilgrimage, gathering on the nights when the Mysteries themselves were celebrated and for other important holiday observances. Chert was relieved to see a dark-robed acolyte standing just inside the doorway of the temple proper, so that he didn’t have to break his word to stay within Beetledown’s sight. “Your pardon, Brother.”
The acolyte came out into the full glow of the torches. The Metamorphic Brothers did not use stonelights, considering them to be dangerously modern, even though the glowing lamps had been used in the streets of Funderling Town for at least two centuries. “What do you seek, Child of the Elders?” he asked. He was dressed in the temple’s costume of archaic, loose-fitting clothes and was younger than Chert would have expected. He looked like he might be from one of the Bismuth families.
“I am Chert Blue Quartz. My foster son is lost.” He took a breath. Here was where the trouble might really begin. “He is one of the big folk. Has he come past here?”
The acolyte raised an eyebrow but only shook his head. “Do not go away just yet, though. One of the brothers came back from the market and said he saw a Gha’jaz child.” Chert was not surprised to hear the man use the old Funderling word—he had spoken the Common Tongue of big folk and Funderlings awkwardly, as though he didn’t use it very often. The Temple had always disliked change. “I will bring him out.”
Chert waited impatiently. When the other acolyte at last emerged, he confirmed that he had seen a boy much like Flint hours earlier, fair-haired and small but clearly not a Funderling, in one of the outer Festival Halls, but heading away from the Temple rather than toward it. Just as Chert was absorbing the implications, he heard a clamor from behind him. Three more acolytes, apparently returning from some errand, had stopped and clustered around the bit of wall where he’d left Beetledown.
“Nickel!” one of them shouted to the first acolyte. “Look, it is a real, living Gha’sun’nk!” Chert cursed under his breath.
Several more of the Metamorphic Brothers spilled out of the temple, some bare-chested and sweaty as though they had just come from forges, kilns, or ovens, within moments a dozen or so had surrounded the Roof-topper. They seemed even more curious than he would have expected. Chert waded through them and lifted the little man up onto his shoulder; Beetledown was looking a bit panicky.
“Is he really Gha’sun’nk?” asked an acolyte, again using the old Funderling name for the Rooftoppers—the little, little people.
“Yes. He is helping me hunt for my foster son.”
As the other acolytes whispered to each other, Nickel approached, a strange gleam in his eyes. “Ah! This is a terrible day,” he said and laid both fists on his chest in a gesture of surrender to the Earth Elders.
“What do you mean?” Chert asked, startled.
“We had hoped that Grandfather Sulphur’s dreams spoke of a time still to come,” said the acolyte. “He is the oldest among us, our master, and the Elders speak to him. Lately he has dreamed that the hour is coming when Old Night will reach out and claim all the di-G’zeh-nah’nk,” —he used an old word that meant something like “left-behinds”—”and that our days of freedom are over.”
The acolytes began to argue among themselves. Chert had left Beetledown on the wall simply to avoid having to explain him and acknowledge the breach of tradition, but the Metamorphic Brothers’ unhappy confusion was real and honest.
“Will they kill me?” Beetledown fluted in his ear.
“No, no. They’re just upset because the times are strange—like your queen and her Lord of the High Place or whatever it was, the one that she said warned you that some kind of storm was coming.”
“The Lord of the Peak,” said Beetledown. “And he is real. The storm is real, too, mark tha—’twill blow the very tiles of our roofs out into darkness.”
Chert did not reply, but stood suddenly rigid in the midst of the tumult like a traveler lost without light on one of the wild roads on the outskirts of Funderling Town. He had just realized where Flint must be going, and it was a fearful thought indeed.
* * *
The snores of Finneth’s husband seem loud as the roar of his forge fires.
The clanging all day, she thought, then lying sleepless in the dark with him snorting like a bull all night. The gods gwe us what they think fit, but what have I done that this is my lot? Not that she had only complaints. Her man, called Onsin Oak-arms, was not the worst husband a woman could have. He worked hard in his little smithy and d
id not spend too much time at the tavern at the end of the drove road. He was not one of the wasters lolling on the bench beneath the eaves, shouting at the passersby. If he was not the most affectionate of men, he was at least a responsible father to their son and daughter, teaching them to love the gods and to honor their parents while hardly ever resorting to any punishment more painful than a cuff on the top of the head or the snap of his thick fingers against a child’s backside. A good thing, too, Finneth thought. He is strong enough to kill a grown man with those big hands. Thinking of his broad back and how the dark curly hair grew tight on his thick neck, the way he held up a bar that would be an ox shoe to show their son the color it should be when it was ready for shaping, she felt a little tickle of desire for him, snoring or no snoring. She rolled against his back and pressed her cheek against him His sleep-rumble changed—there was a note almost of question in it—but then subsided again. Their daughter Agnes stirred in her cot. To her mother’s immense terror, both children had caught the fever that had lately passed through Candlerstown and all the dales, but although little Agnes had taken it the worse, her breathing had been almost normal again for a week Zoria the Queen of Mercy, it seemed, had heard Finneth’s prayers.
She was floating toward sleep, thinking of the damp straw on the floor that would have to be replaced with dry now that wet weather had come, and of how she must also press Onsin to plaster up the cracks around the window of their little house, when she heard the first faint sounds— someone shouting. When she realized it was not the watchman calling out the hour, suddenly all her sleepiness was gone.
At first she thought it must be a fire. It was different living in a town than the village where Finneth had grown up. Here a fire could start so far away that you had never even seen the people whose houses it took first, but still come rushing down your own narrow street like an army of angry demons, jumping from roof to roof at horrifying speed. Was it a fire? Somewhere a bell was ringing, ringing, and more people were shouting. Someone was running through the streets calling for the reeves. It had to be a fire.
She was already shaking Onsin awake when she heard a voice louder than the others, perhaps at the bottom of their own road, screaming, “We are attacked! They are climbing the walls!” Finneth’s heart lurched. Attacked? Climbing the walls? Who? She was heaving at Onsin’s bulk now, but he was like a great tree, too much for her to move. At last he rolled over and sat up, shaking his head.
“War!” she said, tugging his beard until he knocked her hands away. “The reeves are out—everyone’s crying war!”
“What?” He slapped and pinched at his face as though it were not his own, then heaved himself up off their pallet. Agnes was awake and making questioning sounds, crying a little. Finneth pulled the child’s blanket around her and kissed her, but it didn’t soothe her, and Finneth had to see to Fergil as well. The boy was waking but still half in a dream, twitching and looking around as though he had never seen his own house before; for a moment the sight of her confused children brought tears to Finneth’s eyes.
Onsin had pulled on his heavy breeches and, strangely, his best boots, but had not bothered with a shirt. He had his hammer in one hand, the hammer that no one else in the drove road could even lift, and an ax he was straightening for Tully Joiner in the other. Even in this wild moment Finneth thought her husband looked like something out of an old story, a kindly giant, a bearded demigod like Hiliometes. He was listening to the shouting, which had moved down to the end of the street. Now Finneth heard another sound, a rising wail like the wind, and she was filled with a helpless, sickening terror unlike any she had known.
“I will be back,” Onsin said as he hurried out the door. He did not kiss his children or wait for her blessing, which only added to Finneth’s growing despair.
Attacked? Who could it be? We have been at peace with Settland since befort Grandmother’s time Bandit--? Why would bandits attack a town?
“Mama Where did Papa go?" asked little Fergil, and as she squatted to comfort him, she realized she was shivering, wearing nothing but the blanket she had wrapped around her. “Papa went out to help some other men,” she told the children, then began to pull on her clothes.
She couldn’t believe that it could still be the same night—that only just the other side of the midnight bell she had been lying in her bed thinking about Onsin’s snoring, worrying about the sound Agnes was making when she breathed. It was as though Perin himself had lifted a hammer large as a mountain and brought it down on all their lives, smashing everything into powder.
Candlerstown was aflame, but fire was the least of her worries now. The streets were full of shrieking figures, some bleeding, others only running aimlessly mad, eyes staring wide and dark out of pale faces, mouths open holes. It was as though the earth had vomited out all the unhappy dead. Finneth couldn’t think, didn’t want to think—such terror was too large to fit into one head, one heart, especially when she had to cling to a pair of frightened, weeping children and try to find a place where the flames were not burning, where people were not screaming. But there was no such place anywhere.
Worst of all were the glimpses of the invaders, impossible nightmare shapes clambering over walls and dashing across rooftops—some in animal shapes, others bent and twisted as no living thing that could wear armor and carry a weapon should be. As she dragged the children past a pubhc square she saw a tall figure on a rearing horse in the midst of a crowd of Candlerstown men, and that figure looked so much like a man that for an instant she was heartened—here was some noble lord, perhaps even Earl Rorick himself, a person Finneth had never seen despite his importance in her life. Yes, Rorick must have come down from his castle at Dale House to rally the frightened townfolk and lead them against these monstrous invaders. But then she saw that this shaggy-haired lord was taller than any man, that he had too many fingers on his long white hands, and that his eyes, like those of his rearing horse, were as flame-yellow as a cat’s. As for the men around him, the ones she had thought he might be rallying, they were crawhng and moaning beneath his horse’s hooves as he pricked at them with his long spear, driving them like a flock of sheep to slavery or death.
Agnes stumbled and fell and Fergil began to shriek. She caught them both up in her arms and limped away from the square. She was in a part of the town she hardly seemed to know at all, but everything had become something else on this ghastly night it might be her own street for all she could be certain, her own house that she staggered past as barking, whistling shapes came pouring out of the windows like beetles from a split log. Overhead, the stars had vanished Fmneth couldn’t understand that either. Why were there no stars, and why had the sky turned that dull, dark red? Was it blood—was the whole town bleeding up into the sky? Then she knew. It was the smoke of burning Candlerstown itself, hiding what was happening even from Heaven.
She found herself in a crowd of people, although it was more river than crowd, a heedless wash of screams and waving arms that flooded down the Marsh Road, past the Trigonate temple. The outer walls and roof of the temple were crawling with something that looked like moss but which glowed like sullen lightning. The priests had nearly all been slaughtered, although some of them were still crawling despite terrible, obviously mortal wounds In their haste to flee, the shrieking crowd was trampling the survivors, which might have been a mercy. Even Finneth stepped on a motionless human figure and did not care—it was all she could do to keep upright. She could not stop, could not turn, certainly could not waste pity on the dead and soon-dead. She was hemmed in on either side and all she could think of was holding Agnes and Fergil tight against her, so tightly that even the gods could not pull them from her.
All who fell now were crushed underfoot. The crowd moved like a single living thing, rushing to the open Eastside Gate and the darkness beyond, toward the blessed cold fields where no fires burned.
Finneth ran until she couldn’t run any farther, then shoved her way to the outskirts of the torrent of peo
ple, which was beginning to slow and scatter.
They were outside the walls, knee-deep in the stubble of a harvested field, when she fell to the ground at last, exhausted and helpless. She wondered if she, too, might be dying, she was not wounded, but it seemed impossible anyone could experience such a night and live. She clutched her son and daughter and wept, every sob clawing painfully at her smoke-scorched throat.
Gone, all gone —Onsin, her house, her few possessions. Only these two small, precious, panting creatures kept her from running back to throw herself into the flames of Candlerstown. Most dreadful of all, as she lay with her shivering children on the cold ground just outside the murdered town, she could hear the destroyers of everything she had, and they were singing. Their voices were painfully lovely.
Darkness claimed her then, but only for a while.
28. Evening Star
WHITE SANDS:
See the moon scatter diamonds
His work is bone and light and dry dust
In the garden where no one strays
—from The Bonefall Oracles
She had lost track of how many different Favored had taken her up as though she were an ill-wrapped package, walked her to the next way station, and then turned her over to another functionary, but at last she was led into the receiving room of the paramount wife Arimone looked up from her cushions and smiled indulgently as Qinnitan abased herself. “Oh, do get up, child,” she said, although she looked not much more than a girl herself. “Are we not all sisters here?"
If we were all sisters, Qinnitan could not help thinking, I wouldn’t have gone down on my knees in the first place. The invitation had arrived that morning and Qinnitan had spent hours under the expert ministration of a half dozen slaves, a mix of Favored and born-females, until her appearance had been polished to a blinding brilliance like a gemstone, after some consideration, she was then deconstructed and redressed in slightly less formal splendor.
