by Tad Williams
When the voice rolled over and through him again, the words and the mocking laugh were quieter—painful but not crippling. “Well, then, I will speak more softly, for the comfort of my guests. Sometimes I forget what the voice of a god can do...”
“Half a god,” said a voice Vansen had never heard before, but which seemed somehow weirdly familiar. It was vastly less intrusive than the one-eyed monster’s, but it sounded inside Ferras Vansen’s head in the same way. “Half a god, half a monster.”
“Is there a difference?”
“Why do you take us from our lawful business, Old One?”
“To help me inmy lawful business,” the rumbling voice said. “But what brings one of the Encauled so close to my adopted kingdom? What is this lawful business of which you speak?”
“We are riding home to the House of the People, but were driven out of our way. Why should you interfere?”
Now that Jack Chain’s voice no longer rattled his bones with each utterance, Vansen slowly began to lift himself from the ground. He ached as if he had been beaten, but if he was going to die he would do his best to meet that death standing, as a soldier of Southmarch. The dusty stone beneath him was splotched with red; he lifted his hands to his face and realized his nose was streaming blood.
“Interfere? You trespass on my land, little hobgoblin, and then claim I have interfered with you?” The monstrous, one-eyed creature lolled on his statue-throne, his splayed legs longer than Vansen was tall, the handsome, ruined head as big as a temple bell. Jikuyin was smiling down at a small figure standing before him—Gyir the Storm Lantern.
“I am on the king’s business,” said Gyir’s voice.
By the Three, Vansen thought, I can understand him! He was as astonished by this as everything else that had happened to them. I can hear him in my head now, just as the prince can!
He turned to tell Barrick, but was horrified to see the boy lying on his side with blood running from his nose and ears. Vansen threw himself down beside him and was only slightly relieved to feel the rise and fall of Barrick’s chest.
“He is hurt!” Vansen shouted. “Help him, you god or whatever you are—it was your great barking voice that did this to him!”
Jikuyin laughed long and hard; the sound rolled and crashed in Vansen’s skull like untethered barrels slamming in the hold of a storm-tossed ship. “Help him! I like you, little mortal—you are very amusing! But like the fly on the horse’s back who tells his host which way to go, you have a flawed notion of your own importance.” He turned his single eye on Gyir. “As for you, slave of the Fireflower, I do not know how one of the Encauled could let himself be taken unawares—and by Longskulls, no less...!” The godthing chortled, and several of the other prisoners in the great room laughed, too, if not with the same heartiness as their master. “But it signifies nothing, in any case. You will be part of my great work.” Jikuyin grinned, showing the true horror of his ruined mouth and shattered teeth. He stroked the chains across his chest, making the severed heads sway. “And even if you cannot help me in any profound way, you will at least, as I promised, prove ornamental.”
The giant stood then for the first time, and even though Ferras Vansen had thought himself full to sickening with strange miracles, it was a horrible, astonishing sight: Jikuyin was so tall that his great head seemed to rise into the heights of the chamber like the pockfaced mooon, beyond the reach of the torches and lanterns, until much of it had passed into shadow and only the lower, broken half could be seen.
“Take them away,” he rumbled. A host of shapes scurried forward from the dark edges of the massive room—the guard-Followers, man-sized and heavier than the Longskulls, with stubs of sharp bone poking through their matted pelts and small piggy eyes glinting like coals. “Give them to the gray one and tell him to keep them safe until I need them.”
Gyir stood firm as the red-eyed things began to surround him, and clearly would have fought, but one of the apelike creatures had already stolen up behind him unseen. It hit Gyir in the back of the head with its massive fist and the Storm Lantern was pulled down and dragged away.
Vansen was too weak to resist. All he could do was try to keep a hand on Barrick’s unmoving form as they were carried out of Jikuyin’s throne room by the bristly, foulsmelling creatures. As they were roughly hurried down what seemed an endless succession of lightless tunnels he struggled against his heavy shackles, doing his best to cling to the prince so that they would not be separated, as a mother who has fallen into a river with her child will still keep a hand clenched on the infant’s garment even after death has stolen away her breath.
Even in the center of his own great house, the fortress that had been given to his family from the gods’ own hands, the blind king Ynnir dina’at sen-Qin, Guardian of the Fireflower, Lord of Winds and Thought, could not simply walk to the Deathwatch Chamber. First the Guard of Elementals must be supplicated, allowed to perform their warlike rites in his honor, and in honor of the one they were protecting—the Salute of the Bone Knife, the Song of the Owl’s Eye (blessedly shorter in these latter days, thanks to an edict by Ynnir’s own grandfather: once the chant would have lasted an entire day), and the Arrow Count. When all these duties were finished and the Guard-Commander of the Elementals had removed his helmet in salute—even without sight, Ynnir always found that part difficult—the king moved on.
The Celebrants of Mother Night did not perform official duties, but they had been allowed to make their camp of suffering outside the Deathwatch Chamber. Merely to move among them, to hear their moaning and weeping and feel the naked misery of their grief, was like walking through biting winds and needle-sharp sleet. Pale Daughter herself, fleeing her lover’s house with an infant godling in her belly, could have felt nothing more chillingly painful.
It was a relief, after a time that felt like days, to pass out of the chambers where the Celebrants shrieked and tore at themselves and into the silence of the final antechamber, to face Zsan-san-sis, the ancient chieftain of the Children of the Emerald Fire. Zsan-san-sis had returned from the underground pools in which he had spent more and more time as he aged; it was a measure of the crisis that he should appoint himself the final guardian of the Deathwatch Chamber when it was only one of his young grandnephews who stood watch outside the Hall of Mirrors itself.
“Moonlight and Sunlight,” said the king.
“And thus roll the days of the Great Defeat unto Time’s sleep,” said the other, completing the ceremonial greeting. “I bid Your Majesty welcome.” His tone seemed even more curt than usual, the glow from inside his ceremonial robe dim and noncommittal, so that his mask was almost invisible in the shadowed hood. The king had always had trouble reading the moods of Zsan-san-sis, as if his own sightlessness and the Emerald Fire chieftain’s silver mask were impediments as real to him as they would be to a mortal. The Children had long favored the queen’s cause, although the old chieftain had been the most conciliatory of his clan. In days past Ynnir had often wondered what would happen when Zsan-san-sis eventually sank to the bottom of his pool and did not surface again, a day when someone less willing to compromise might rise to lead the Emerald Fire Children. Now it no longer seemed to matter. “How is she today?”
“I have not gone in to her, Majesty. I feel her, but barely—a breath faint as a whisper from Silent Hill.” His thoughts and words both—for they came to the king as a single thing— were clouded with regret and resignation. “Even were we to triumph, Majesty, she could never travel now. She would die before we left our own lands.”
Ynnir brought his open hand to his chest, then spread his fingers, a gesture called Significance Incomplete. “We can only wait and be patient, old one, hard as that is. Many threads still remain unbroken.”
“I would not have spent my last seasons this way,” said Zsan-san-sis. “Holding together what is broken, knowing that my daughter’s daughter’s daughters will bear their young in pools without light.”
Ynnir shook his head. “We
all do what we can. You have done more than most. This defeat was authored when Time began—all we do not know is the hour of its coming.” “Who could not say with certainty that it is upon us?”
“I could not.” Ynnir said it gently, letting it pass to the ancient guardian with an undertone of spring, of hope, of renewal even after death. “Neither should you. Do as you have always done—do as your broodsire raised you. We will face it bravely, and who knows? We may yet be surprised.”
Zsan-san-sis’ glow guttered for a moment, then burned more strongly. “You are more king than your father was, or his father before him,” he said.
“I am my father, and his father before him,” said the blind king. “But I thank you.”
He did not clasp the old chieftain’s hand—it would be unwise even for the king to touch one of the Children of the Emerald Fire—but he nodded his head so slowly it might almost have been a bow. He left the robed guardian in a posture of surprise as he walked into the Deathwatch Chamber.
The beetles on the walls shifted minutely as he entered and the movement of their iridescent wingcases sent a ripple of changing colors across the entire chamber. They settled again; the flickers of blue and pale green were replaced by an earthier tone that better reflected the gray and peach of the cloud-wreathed sunset outside the open window. Blind for centuries, Ynnir could smell the sea as powerfully as a drowning man could taste it, and he hoped that his sisterwife could smell it too, that it gave her a little relief in the growing dark.
He stood over the bed and looked at her, so wan, so still. It had been a full turning of the seasons since she could even bear to be sat up in Hall of Mirrors like some obscene, floppy icon. He was almost grateful that those humiliating days had passed, that she had slipped down into herself so far that she could not even be moved.
Even as he stared in silent contemplation he realized he saw no traces of life at all. Alarmed, he looked to her lips, the pink now paler than ever, almost white, and felt a moment of real fear. Always before, even on the worst days, she had greeted him before he spoke. So still...!
My queen, he called to her, shaping each word so clearly that he could imagine it as a stone dropped into a still pond, the ripples sending everything that swam beneath them scattering, until the stone itself struck into the softness at the bottom. Can you hear me? My twin?
Despite all that had gone between them, the fair and the foul, his heart leaped in his breast when he at last heard her words, as quiet as if they did indeed issue from beneath the mud at the bottom of a deep, deep pond.
Husband?
I am here, at your bedside. How are you today?
Weaker. I...I can barely hear you. I sent my words to Yasammez. She did not think the name, but rather a flutter of ideas—Grandmother’s Fierce Beautiful Sister of the Bloodletting Thorns and the Smoking Eye. I should not have done it, she told him, almost an apology. I did not have the...strength...but I was... Afraid she would use up what little of her music remained, he hastened to finish her thought. You were wondering if she had succeeded. And she told you she had.
Succeeded at your plan. Fulfilled the Pact. Not at what I wished... Which would have availed you nothing. Trust me, my sister, my wife. Many things have passed between us over all these years, but never lies. And it could yet be my own compromised plan, like the despised, bent tree in the corner of the orchard, that will bear fruit.
What would it matter? There is nothing that can be done now. All that we love will perish. Her thoughts were so full of blackness he could almost feel himself pulled down by them, like a man so fixed on the swirling clouds below his mountain path that he leans toward them and falls free... No. He pulled himself back, disentangling himself from her. Hope is the only strength left to us and I will not give it up.
What hope? For me? I...doubt it. And even if so, then what of you...? He sensed her amusement, that old, bitter mirth that sometimes over the long centuries had felt to him like a slow poison. What of you, Ynnirit-so?
I ask for nothing I cannot bear. And Yasammez has given the glass to her dearest, closest servitor, Gyir.
The Encauled One? But he is so young in years...!
He will bring it to us. He will stop for nothing—he knows its importance. Do not despair, my queen. Do not go down into the darkness yet. Things may change.
Things always change, she told him, that is the nature of things... but she was fading now, weary and in need of that deeper blackness that was her sleep, and which might last days. A last bubble of dark amusement drifted up to him.
Things always change, but never for the better. Are we not the People, and is that not the substance of all our story?
Then her thoughts were gone and he stood alone with her silent, coolly slumbering shell. The beetles shifted on the walls again, a quiet unfurling and resettling of wings that rippled sunset-colored lightning all around the chamber until they too settled down to sleep once more.
They were back.
The dark men, the faceless men, once more pursued him through burning halls, sliding in and out of the rippling shadows as though they were nothing but shadows themselves. Was it a nightmare? Another fever dream? Why couldn’t he wake up?
Where am I? The tapestries curled and smoked. Southmarch. He knew the look of its corridors as completely as he knew the sound and feel of his own blood rushing through his veins. So had all the rest been a dream? Those endless hours in the dripping forest behind the Shadowline? Gyir and Vansen, and that bellowing, oneeyed giant—had they all been fever-fancy?
He ran, gasping and clumsy, and the faceless men in black oozed behind him like something that had been melted and poured, losing bodily form as they flowed around corners and snaked along the walls in sideways drips and smears only to regain shape once more, a dozen shapes, and spring out after him, heads following his every movement, fingers spreading and reaching. But even as he ran for his life, even as the tapestries flamed and now even the roofbeams began to smolder, he felt his thoughts float free, light and insubstantial as the flakes of ash swirling around him on hot winds.
Who am I? What am I?
He was coming apart, fragmenting like a kori-doll on an Eril’s Night bonfire, his limbs flailing but useless, his head a thing of straw, dry tinder, full of sparks.
Who am I? What am I?
Something to hold—he needed something cool as a stone, thick and hard as bone, something real to keep himself from falling into flaming pieces. He ran and it was as though he grew smaller with every step. He was losing himself, all that made him up charring, disappearing. The rush and thump of the faceless men’s pursuit echoed in his head as if he were listening to his own blood coursing through the gutters of his body, his own filthy, corrupted blood.
I’m like Father—worse. It burns in me—it burns me up!
And it hurt like the most dreadful thing he could imagine, like needles under his skin, like white-hot metal in his marrow, and it shifted with every movement, driving bolts of pain from joint to joint, rushing up into his head like fire exploding from a cannon’s barrel. He wanted only to get away from it, but how? How could you run away from your own blood?
Briony. If Southmarch itself was no longer his home, if its passageways were full of fire and angry shadows and the galleries hung with leering, alien faces, his sister was something different. She would help him. She would hold him, remember him, know him. She would tell him his name —he missed it so much!—and put her cool hand on his head, and then he would sleep. If only he could find Briony the faceless men would not find him—they would give up and scuttle, slide, ooze back into the shadows, at least for a while. Briony. His twin. Where was she?
“Briony!” he shouted, then he screamed it: “Briony! Help me!”
Stumbling then, and falling; a bolt of pain shooting through him as he struck his injured arm—how could this be a dream when it felt so real? He scrabbled to lift himself from the hot stone, arm aching worse than even the burning of the skin on his hands. He coul
d not stop, could not rest, not until he found his sister. If he stopped he would die, he knew that beyond doubt. The shadow-men would eat him from within.
He stood, even in this dream world forced to cradle his throbbing, aching arm, that thing he carried through his life like a sickly child, loving it and hating it. He looked around. A vast, empty room stretched away on all sides, dark but for a few slanting columns of light falling down from the high windows—the Portrait Hall, and it was empty but for him, he could feel it. The faceless men had not caught him yet, but he could smell smoke and sense the growing murmur of their pursuit. He could not stop here.
A picture hung before him, one he had seen before but seldom paid much attention to—some ancient queen whose name he could not remember. Briony would know. She always knew things like that, his beloved show-off sister. But there was something about the woman’s eyes, her cloud of hair, that caught his attention... The sound of his pursuers rose until it seemed they were just beyond the Portrait Hall door, but he stood transfixed, because it was not the face of some ancient Eddon pictured there, some long-dead queen of Southmarch, but his own, his features haggard with fear and terror.
A mirror, he thought. It’s been a mirror all this time. How often had he passed through this place and its ranks of frowning dead without realizing that here, in the center of the hall, hung a mirror?
Or is it a portrait...of me...? He stared into the hunted, haunted eyes of the sweating red-haired boy. The boy gazed back. Then the mirror began to dim as if clouds were forming on its surface, as if even from this distance he fogged it with his own hot, fretful breath.
The clouds dimmed and then dissolved. Now it was Briony who looked back at him. She wore a strange hooded white dress he had never seen before, something a Zorian sister would likelier wear than would a princess, but he knew her face better than his own—much better. She was unhappy, quietly but deeply, a look he had never seen so much as he had since first they had word their father had been betrayed and made a prisoner.
