by Tad Williams
“Then let’s catch that rat. He might make us both happy.”
Beetledown was putting the last touches on a makeshift saddle—more of a harness, really—constructed from one strap of the coral lantern knotted with threads and fraying cloth from Chert’s shirt. The saddle’s eventual recipient was currently a prisoner in the bottom of Chert’s bag, happily scavenging up the crumbs left there from the meal Chert had purchased at the Salt Pool. And after he ate, Chert hoped, the beast might stop trying to bite. “But why will tha stay?”
“Because there has to be a way onto that island—the boy’s there, after all. And I’m going to find it.” “P’raps a boat there is, that un’s found and crossed with.”
Chert’s heart sank. He hadn’t thought of that. “Well, even so,” he said at last, “if he comes back across, I’ll be here to make certain he doesn’t get away again. And what if he needs help? How do you cross quicksilver with a boat, anyway? What if it… overturns or comes apart. They come apart sometimes, don’t they?”
“Never tha hast been on a boat, true?” said Beetledown with a little smile. “True,” Chert admitted.
“And I’m to ride away, then send ‘ee help. From where, good Master Funderling?”
“My wife Opal, if you can find her again. Otherwise, ask any of my folk to take you to her.”
Beetledown nodded. He pulled a knot tight on his rat-bridle, squinting at it with a sharp, experienced eye. “Un’ll do.” He stood. “Perchance ‘twould be better were I to send some of yon temple fellows—what did tha call uns? The Metal Marching Brothers, somewhat?”
“The Metamorphic… Oh, fissure and—I never thought of that! And they’ve already met you—they’ll know who you are. Of course.” He was angry with himself for not coming up with such an obvious idea, but events had overwhelmed him.
He helped Beetledown fasten the harness. The rat was calmer now but still not precisely docile and it took no little time. The Rooftopper was patient and skillful, however, and at last Chert was gingerly holding the rat in place while Beetledown climbed onto the creature’s back. As soon as Chert took his hand away, the rat tried to bolt, but the Rooftopper gave the creature a stinging slap on the muzzle with his bow; the rat squealed and tried to take off in another direction and was again punished. When all the cardinal points had proved equally dangerous, the rat crouched low and motionless except for huffing sides and anxiously blinking eyes.
“Un’s learning,” said Beetledown with satisfaction.
“Take a little of the coral light,” Chert told him, breaking off one of the brightest bits; the Rooftopper fastened it under one of the straps of the rat’s harness. “It’ll make it easier to see in some of the dark places Good journey, Beetledown. And thank you for your help and kindness.” He wanted to say something more—he had a sense that this exceptionally small man had become more than an odd acquaintance, that a friendship, however unlikely, had sprung up between them, but Chert was not a man comfortable with sentiment. In any case, he was tired and very frightened. “The Earth Elders protect you.”
“And the Lord of the Peaks watch over ‘ee in thy turn, Chert of Blue Quartz.” The Rooftopper kicked his booted heels against the rat’s sides, but the animal didn’t move. Beetledown smacked his bowstaff against the creature’s flank and it scuttled forward. He was still flicking its hindquarters with the bow, this time trying to get it to turn, as rider and mount vanished into the shadows of the path leading away uphill; all Chert could see of them in the last moments was a moving point of light, the piece of coral strapped to the rat’s back.
“That is, if un can find ‘ee again ‘neath all this mucky stone!” Beetledown called back to Chert, his small voice already sounding as though it came from miles away.
* * *
The straggling end of the army had finally disappeared around a bend in the coastal highway, heading toward the Settland Road and the hills, leaving behind only a few hundred watchers and a muddy, trampled field. It wasn’t right, Briony knew—this army should have marched out with trumpets, with a parade through the streets, but there hadn’t been time to arrange such a thing—nor, to be honest, would she have had the heart for it. But the people would be frightened because of this near-secrecy, a thousand men simply gone. In the past, wars had almost always begun with a brave show.
Perhaps the day is coming for a different kind of war, she considered, although she had no idea what such a thing might be. The world is changing swiftly, after all, and not entirely for the worse. Besides, the times are too grim for parades and trumpets.
But then again, she thought, perhaps that is when we need such things most.
She couldn’t eat her food and couldn’t stop weeping. Barrick went away like a man to the gallows, was all she could think. His jests, the cheerful farewell when he kissed her the last time, had not fooled her. Rose and Moina were desperate to get her to lie down, but sleep was the last thing Briony could do, and in any case it was only late afternoon.
Oh, Barrick! she thought. You should have stayed with me. You should have stayed. She sniffled angrily, ignored a maid’s offer of a kerchief and wiped her nose with her sleeve instead, getting a tiny bit of pleasure out of hearing her ladies-in-waiting moan their disapproval.
“I will go and talk to Lord Brone,” she announced to them. “He said there were things he needed to speak to me about—siege preparations, no doubt. And I will have to talk to Lord Nynor about feeding the new muster that just came in from Helmingsea.”
“But… but shouldn’t they come to you?” Rose asked.
“I will walk. I like to walk.” She immediately felt better. Having something to do was so much better than sitting helplessly, thinking about Barrick and the others riding off into… what?
Halfway across the inner keep, her ladies scuttling after her like baby quail, the women followed by a contingent of anxious guardsmen, Briony suddenly remembered what she had forgotten from yesterday—or had it been the day before that? That idiot poet’s message, the mysterious potboy asking to see her. She slowed and was almost knocked down by Rose and Moina in their blind hurry to keep up.
“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 Enlo 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 he
ar 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 he 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 un-tethered 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 gardener’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 att
acker 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.”
