Shadowmarch s-1

by Tad Williams

  It only made sense. “But your captain,Vansen, he is not an Eddon vassal by birth.” “No, Highness. He’s a dalesman, is Captain Vansen . . but he’s steadfast loyal, Ma’am.” The sergeant stepped forward. “Is he troubling you, Highness?”

  “No, not at all. I asked him a question, he answered.” She looked at the rawboned sergeant, who seemed nervous and irritated. He does not like having a girl my age on the throne, she realized. He’d like to tell me to be quiet and hurry up —that I am keeping that wise old man Brone waiting, not to mention giving this guardsman thoughts above his station. For once she was more wearily amused by this sort of thing than angered. There were bigger foes and fears just now, after all. “Let us go, then.”

  The summons was no Tolly trickery. Avin Brone was waiting for her in the wide room on the third floor, a public room once when the Tower of Winter was a residence, although it was now largely given over to storage. “Highness,” he said, “thank you. Please come with me.”

  Masking her irritation, she directed her guards to wait and allowed him to lead her out to the chilly air of the balcony. She looked down and saw a handkerchief with a heel of bread and a few crumbs of cheese on it lying on the boards at her feet. At first she thought Brone himself had carelessly dropped it, but the bread was sodden and gray as though it had lain there a day or two.

  “Have you brought me to see where some spy has snuck into the Tower of Winter and dropped his midday meal?” Brone looked at her for a moment, uncomprehending, then glanced down at the bread on the kerchief and frowned. “That? I care not for that— some workman or guard shirking, nothing more. No, Highness, it is something more fearful I brought you here to see.” He pointed out across the rooftops of the castle, out to the narrow sleeve of Brenn’s Bay and the city beyond. The city was covered in mist, so that only the temple towers and the roofs of the tallest buildings were visible through the murk—a cloak of fog or low-lying cloud that extended out across the fields and downs beyond the city so that most of the land on this side of the hills was invisible. But as she stared at this gloomy though largely unsurprising sight, Briony saw a few bright spots deep in the fog, as though torches and even some bonfires burned there.

  “What is it, Lord Brone? I confess I can’t make out much.” “Do you see the fires, Highness?"

  “Yes, I think so What of it?”

  “The city is empty, Highness, the people gone.”

  “Not completely, as seems apparent. A few brave or foolish souls have stayed behind.” She should have been afraid for them, but she had come almost to the end of her ability to feel for others, the suffering of displaced and frightened people had now become so universal.

  “I might guess the same,” Brone said, “had not this message come this morning.” He pulled a tiny curl of parchment from his purse, held it out to her.

  Briony squinted at it for a moment. “It is from Tyne, it says, although I would never think him to write such a small and careful hand.”

  “Written by one of his servants, no doubt, but it is indeed from Tyne, Highness Read it, please.” Before she had digested more than a few lines she felt the hair on the back of her neck rise. “Merciful Zoria!” It was scarcely a whisper, although she felt like screaming it. “What is he saying? That they have been tricked? That the Twilight People have crept past them and are coming down on the castle even now?” She read on, felt a little relieved. “But he says they are going to catch them up—that we must be ready to ride out in support.” She fought down a rising wash of terror. “Oh, my poor Barrick. It says nothing of him!”

  “It says at the end to tell you he is safe—or was when this was written.” Brone looked very grim, bristle-bearded and lowering like one of the hoary old gods thrown down by Perin, Thane of Lightnings.

  “What do you mean— ‘when this was written’?”

  “He sent it yester-morning, Highness I have only just received it, although from what he says of the spot where they were deceived, it cannot be much more than a score of miles outside the city.”

  “Then how could they have not caught up to them yet… ?” But she was beginning to guess at the terrifying truth.

  “The sentries heard noises last evening and into the night, noises they thought came from madmen left behind in the town—clashes of weapons, groans, screams, strange singing and shouting—but faint, as though from behind the city’s closed doors . . or from far away, in the fields on the city’s far side.”

  “What does that mean? Do you think that Barrick and the others have already caught the Twilight People?" “I think perhaps they have caught up with them, Highness. Briony. And I think perhaps they have failed.” “Failed . . ?” She couldn’t make sense of the word. It was a common one, but suddenly it had become cryptic, meaningless.

  “Tyne writes of the fog of madness that surrounds the fairy folk. What is that covering the city below? Have you seen a mist like that before, even m winter, that was still forming at midday? And who is lighting fires there?"

  Briony wanted to argue with him, to come up with reasons the old man must be wrong, answers that would explain all he had said and more, but for some reason she could not. A cold horror had stolen over her and she could only stare out at the mostly invisible city—separated from the place where she stood by nothing except less than half a mile of water—and the fires that burned in that gray mist like the eyes of animals watching a forest camp.

  Barrick… she thought. But he must be… he cannot be…

  “Highness?” said Brone. “We should go down now. If the siege is about to begin in earnest, we must…” He stopped when he saw the tears on her cheek. “Highness?”

  She dabbed at her face with the back of her sleeve. The brocade was rough as lizard skin. “He will be well,” she said as though Brone had asked her. “We will send out our men. We will cut the fairies down like rats. We will kill them all and bring our brave soldiers back.”

  “Highness…”

  “Enough, Brone.” She tried to pull on the mask of stone—the queen’s face, as she thought of it, although she was only a princess still. Perhaps that’s why I can’t do it properly yet, she thought absently. Perhaps that’s why it hurts. Struggling, she spoke more coldly to Lord Brone than she had intended to. “Enough talking. Do what you must to make sure the walls and gates are secure, and prepare troops for a sortie if you are wrong and we do see Tyne come and engage with the enemy. You and I will talk after the banquet.”

  “Banquet?”

  “After all Nynor’s trouble, the people must eat and be merry.” Tears drying now, she did her best to smile, but it felt more like a snarl and she did not try too hard to amend it. “As he said, it may be the last joy for some time, so it would be a shame to waste all those puddings.”

  * * *

  The first gleam of dawn should have come as a relief, but it did not. They had held their ground and they were still alive, but there was no one else in sight or earshot with whom they could join forces. They were lost like shipwrecked mariners.

  Ferras Vansen and a few men—Gar Doiney and two other scouts, along with the knight Mayne Calough of Kertewall and his squire, had held this high place since middle-night, an outcrop of stone in the middle of the field, not much bigger than a small farmhouse—held it mostly, Vansen guessed, because it was on the fringes of the battle and of little strategic value. Not that strategic value meant much anymore. Vansen had known for hours with a certainty as straightforward as a mortal wound that the fight was over and they had lost.

  He was angry with himself, although he still believed he had been right to insist they catch the fairy folk outside the city. It had proved almost impossible to overcome the Twilight People without the superiority of numbers—or even apparent superiority, since everything to do with the fairy folk was slippery and hard to calculate. Already Vansen was plotting in the lulls between fighting what to do next time, how to take the advantage of surprise and concealment away from the shadow-people and their weird mag
icks, but all the time he had been doing it he knew that there might be no next time, that more than this battle might have been lost. With Tyne Aldritch dead, all was in disarray, and Tyne’s second-in-command, the stolid, unimaginative Droy of Eastlake would not have been able to salvage things even if he had lived. In fact, it had been Droy’s pig-headedness that had made the loss so desperate. By the time he had arrived with the weary foot troops, their torches making a fiery snake along the downs as they hurried to support the mounted knights, Vansen had sent one of the scouts to him to tell him that it was useless now, that Tyne had fallen and the best thing Droy’s foot soldiers could do was to try to flank the Twilight folk and beat them to the deserted city, or, failing that, to fall back into the hills so that his army might eventually be able to provide the other half of a pincer with Brone’s defensive force. Instead, the Count of Eastlake had ignored Vansen’s message as the cowardly advice of a commoner, a jumped-up sentry in Droy Nikomede’s estimation, and had plunged his weary soldiers into battle. Within moments, half of them had become completely disoriented by the mists and the strange noises and shadows—Lord Nikomede and the others had learned nothing from the first fight, it seemed—and had been cut down by archers they could not even see. Their own arrows seemed to do as much damage to the survivors among Tyne’s knights as to the enemy.

  A disaster. Worse, a mockery. This is how we defended Southmarch —with battle plans out of some player’s comedy, with bravery sacrificed by blockheaded generalship.

  Doiney tugged at the hem of Vansen’s surcoat, startling him out of his reverie. “Shadows, Captain. Over there. Coming near, I think.”

  Vansen squinted. It was a little easier to see now that the sun was coming back, but not much. The mists were thinner, little more than what would be expected on these meadows at this hour of the day, but they still made the world an eerie and untrustworthy place. Something was indeed moving up the small rise toward the pile of stone they defended, a moving clot of shadowy shapes.

  An arrow snapped past. Vansen jumped down from the prominence on which he had been crouching. The horses, herded together into a crack at the base of the outcrop because for the moment they were useless, whinnied in fear. No more arrows came. That was one small solace.

  “Up!” Vansen shouted as half a dozen strange figures came charging out of the mist, eyes bright and faces as pale as masks. One ran on all fours like a beast, although he seemed to have been arrested in the middle of some transformation, with stripes of bushy for sprouting unevenly down his back and sides and his face misshapen, as though someone had pushed a human face out from within, making half a muzzle out of nose and mouth Seven hours ago this sort of thing had sickened Ferras Vansen, made him feel lost, as though the world he knew had suddenly fallen away beneath his feet Now it was only another reason to want to kill them, kill them all, these horrid, unnatural creatures that had themselves destroyed so many of his fellows.

  “To me!” he shouted and helped Mayne Calough to his feet, the knight’s armor grating against stone as he dragged his aching body erect. “To me! Keep your backs together!”

  The bright-eyed things were almost on them now, teeth bared as though they would not waste such sweet work on their swords. As he had at least a dozen times already, Vansen let his deeper thoughts go away so he could concentrate on the business of staying alive a little while longer.

  Lord Calough and his squire were dead, or at least the knight was dead and the squire was clearly dying, with a great streaming gash beneath the point of his jaw. The hands with which the youth tried to hold in his own blood were all red, but his face had gone parchment-pale beneath the dirt and the blood was pumping more slowly now. The squire stared off into the misty morning sky, his bubbling prayers slipping down into silence though his lips still moved Vansen wished there was something he could do to help the boy Perhaps, though, this was the most merciful way Who knew what would happen to the rest of them when the shadow folk came again? Only Vansen knew even a little of the way a man’s own thoughts could betray him under the dark magicks of faerie.

  Calough lay on top of the milk-skinned warrior he had destroyed—a woman, although Vansen thought that meant no less honor, for the fairy women fought like demons, too—but the knight’s own breastplate had been torn open like a bite taken from an apple and his guts were out Three fairy corpses had rolled down the rock and lay tumbled together at its base in the meadow. The other attackers had retreated into the murk, but only to get reinforcements.Vansen felt sure. It had been hours since he had seen any other mortals Something was going on to the east of their outcrop, where the mist still lay thick on the ground, but the discord of music and screams didn’t sound like any kind of fighting he knew.

  It sounded like the fairies were singing sweetly-sour temple harmonies as they killed the wounded, that was what it sounded like.

  “Get down, Captain,” Doiney whispered from his perch behind some rocks at the crown of the outcrop. “They still have arrows left and they’re probably gathering up those they’ve already shot, too. You’ll get a shaft in the eye.”

  FerrasVansen was about to take this good advice when he saw something moving across the sloping meadow, not coming toward them but passing from left to right in front of them. It was a mounted man, or at least a mounted creature of some sort, a dark figure on a black horse. Vansen crouched, but despite the superstitious fear that surprised him into shivers—he had thought there was nothing left in him that was still alive enough to be frightened—he couldn’t take his eyes off the apparition that sailed past them through the swirling ground fog. Fear turned to astonishment as the figure moved into a shaft of weak sunlight and he could see it clearly.

  “By Perin Skyhammer, it is the prince himself Barrick! Prince Barrick, stop!” Too late Vansen realized that he had just directed the attention of any ransomers to the greatest prize on the field, but the shadow folk had not seemed very interested in keeping any of their mortal enemies alive, no matter their station.

  “Get down!” Doiney yanked at his leg, but Vansen paid no attention. The mysterious figure that looked so much like the prince sailed by on a black horse, passing scarcely a dozen yards from where Vansen watched, stunned. He shouted again, but Barrick Eddon or his supernatural double did not even turn to look at him. The familiar face was distant, distracted, eyes fixed firmly on the northwestern hills despite the intervening mists.

  “By all the gods and their mothers,” said Vansen, “he’s riding in the wrong direction—straight toward the Shadowline.” He remembered Briony and his promise to her, but Doiney was tugging at him again, reminding him that he had other duties as well. “It’s the prince,” he told the leader of the scouts. “He’s riding away to the west. He must be confused—he’s heading straight for the shadowlands. Come with me, we have to catch him.”

  “It’s just a will-o’-the-wisp,” said Doiney, mouth stretched in a panicky scowl. “A fairy trick. There are men here somewhere who need our help, and if there aren’t, we need to go east, try to get back to the keep.”

  “I can’t. I promised.” Vansen scrambled down the rock to where his horse was hidden. “Come with me, Gar I don’t want to leave you here.”

  Doiney and one of the other scouts, who had poked his head up now to see what was happening, both shook their heads, wide-eyed Doiney made the pass-evil. “No.You’ll be killed or worse. We need your sword, Captain. Stay with us.”

  He could only bear to look at their weary, frightened faces for a moment. “I can’t.” But which vow was more important, the one he had made to the princess, or the one he had made to old Donal Murroy when he had sworn to make the royal guard his own family and himself those guardsmen’s dutiful father? He had little hope that the scouts would find the other survivors, but at least they had a chance of making a run toward the east, although he knew their chances were considerably lessened without him: he was the best swordsman among them and the only one in full armor.

  He hesitated onc
e more, but Briony Eddon’s face was in his thoughts, shaming him, haunting him like a ghost. “I can’t,” he said at last, and led his horse out onto the foggy grass. He swung up into the saddle then spurred away. Barrick, or the thing that looked like him, had disappeared, but the marks of the horse’s hoofprints were still fresh.

  “Don’t leave us, Captain!” cried one of the scouts, but Vansen was headed northwest and couldn’t turn back. He wished he could put his hands over his ears.

  * * *

  “But why?” Opal could barely hold back the tears, but her anger made it a little easier. “Have you lost your wits? First you go off with that girl, then this? Why should you go outside the castle gates with a stranger? And now, of all times?” She gestured at Flint. The child was silent on the bed, only the faintest motion of his narrow chest showing that he lived. “He’s so ill!”

  “I do not think he is ill, my dear one, I think he is exhausted. He will be well again, I promise you.” But Chert didn’t know whether he actually believed that. He was tired himself, very tired, having snatched only a few hours’ sleep after returning from the keep above. “The boy is the reason I have to go—the boy and you. I wish you could see this Gil fellow. I don’t want to believe him, dear Opal, but I do.” He lifted the nnrror and examined it again. Hard to believe so much madness could surround such a small, unexceptional object. “Terrible things hang in the balance, he says. I wish you could see him, then you would understand why I believe him.”

  “But why can’t I see him? Why can’t he come here?”

  “I’m not sure,” he had to admit. “He said he couldn’t come too close to the Shining Man. That is why the boy went instead.”

  “But it’s all mad!” Opal’s anger seemed to have won. “Who is this person? How does he know Flint? Why would he send our son to do such a dangerous thing, and by what right? And what does one of the big folk know about the Mysteries, anyway?”