by Tad Williams
A day until what? Barrick asked. Why?
Until the ceremony of the Earthfather begins, Gyir said. The sacrifice days of the one you call Kernios. Surely you still mark them.
It took Barrick a moment, but then as it dawned on him he turned to Vansen, who had also understood. “The Kerneia,” he said aloud. “Of course. By all the gods, is it Dimene already? How long have we been locked in this stinking place?”
Long enough to see your world and mine end if I have the day wrong, said Gyir. They will come for us when the sacrifice days begin, and I am not yet ready.
He would not say any more, but fell back into silence, shutting his two fellow prisoners out as thoroughly as if he had slammed a heavy door.
It was bad enough to suppose that the Kerneia marked the day of your doom, Ferras Vansen kept thinking, but it was made far worse by being trapped deep beneath the earth with no certain way of knowing what day it was in the world outside. This must be what it had been like to be tied to a tree and left for the wolves, as he had heard some of the old tribes of the March Kingdoms had done to prisoners, stopping the condemned’s ears with mud and blindfolding their eyes so that they could only suffer in darkness, never knowing when the end would come.
Vansen slept only fitfully following Gyir’s announcement, startled out of his thin slumbers every time Prince Barrick twitched in his sleep or some other prisoner growled or whimpered in the crowded cell outside.
Kerneia. Even during his childhood in Daler’s Troth it had been a grim holiday. A small skull had to be carved for each family grave, where it would be set, nestled in flowers, on the first light of dawn as homage to the Earthfather who would take them all someday. Vansen’s own father had never stopped complaining about the laziness of his adopted folk in Daler’s Troth, who made their skull carvings out of soft wood. Back home in the Vuttish Isles, he would declare at least once each year, only stone was acceptable to the Lord of the Black Earth. Still, Ferras Vansen didn’t doubt that with three of his own children gone to their graves and also the resting places of his wife’s parents and grandparents to be adorned, Pedar Vansen must have secretly been grateful he could make his death-tokens in yielding pine instead of the hard granite of the dales.
Skulls, skulls. Vansen could not get them out of his thoughts. As he had discovered when he came to the city, people in Southmarch purchased their festival skulls in the Street of Carvers, replicated in either stone or wood, depending on how much they wanted to spend. In the weeks before Kerneia you could even buy skulls baked of special pale bread in Market Square, the eye-sockets glazed dark brown. Vansen had never known what to think of that: eating the offerings that should go to Kernios himself seemed to trifle with that which should be respected —no, feared.
But then, they always said I was a bumpkin. Collum used to make up stories to amuse the other men about me thinking thunder meant the world was ending. As if a country boy wouldn’t know about thunder!
Thinking about poor, dead Collum Dyer, remembering Kerneia and the black candles in the temple, the mantises in their owl masks and the crowds singing the story of the god of death and deep places, Vansen wandered in and out of something that was not quite sleep and that was certainly not restful, until at last he woke up to the tramp of many feet in the corridor outside.
The gray man Ueni’ssoh drifted across the floor as though he rode on a carpet of mist. His eyes smoldered in the dull, stony stillness of his face and even the prisoners in the large outer cell shrank back against the walls. Vansen could barely stand to look at him—he was a corpse-faced nightmare come to life.
“It is time,” he said, his words angular as a pile of sharp sticks. The brutish guards in their ill-fitting armor spread out on either side of Vansen and his two companions.
“For what, curse you?” Vansen raised himself to a crouch, although he knew that any move toward the gray man would earn him nothing except death at the ends of the guard’s sharp pikes.
“Your final hour belongs to Jikuyin—it is not for me to instruct you.” Ueni’ssoh nodded. Half a dozen guards sprang forward to shackle Gyir and loop a cord around his neck like a leash on a boarhound. When Barrick and Vansen had also been shackled the gray man looked at them all for a moment, then silently turned and walked out of the cell. As the guards prodded Vansen and the others after him, the prisoners in the outer cell turned their faces away, as if the three were already dead.
Do not despair—some hope still exists. Gyir’s thoughts seemed as faint to Ferras Vansen as a voice heard from the top of a windy hillside. Watch me. Do not let anything steal your wits or your heart. And if Ueni’ssoh speaks to you, do not listen!
Hope? Vansen knew where they were going and hope was not a very likely guest.
The brute guards drove them deep into the earth, through tunnels and down stairs. For much of the journey the slap of the guards’ leathery bare feet was the only sound, stark as drums beating a condemned man’s march to the gallows. Since Vansen had only seen these passages through the eyes of the creatures Gyir had bespelled, it was strangely dreamlike now to travel them in his own body. They were not the featureless stone burrows he had thought them, but carved with intricate patterns, swirls and concentric circles and shapes that might have represented people or animals. He could recognize some of the shapes on the tunnel walls, and some of them were hard to look at—great, lowering owls with eyes like stars, and manlike creatures with heads and limbs divided from their torsos and the body parts piled before the birds as though in tribute. Other ominous shapes and symbols lined the passages as well, skulls and eyeless tortoises, both symbols of the Earthfather that Vansen knew well, along with some he did not recognize, knotted ropes and a squat cup shape with stubby legs that he thought might be a bowl or cauldron. And of course there were images of pigs, the animal most sacred to Immon, Kernios’ grim servant.
“The Black Pig has taken him!” A despairing cry rang in his head, a childhood memory—an old woman of the Dales, cursing her son’s untimely death. “Curse the pig and curse his coldhearted master!” she had screeched. “Never will I light a candle for the Kerneia again!”
Kerneia. In a faraway land where the sun still rose and set, the crowds were likely gathering on the streets of Southmarch to watch the statue of the masked god go by, carried high on a litter. They would be drunk, even early in the morning—the litter-bearers, the crowds, even the Earthfather’s priests, a deep, laughing-sad drunkenness that Vansen remembered well, the entire city like a funeral feast that had gone on too long. But here he was instead in the heart of the Earthfather’s domain, being dragged to the god’s very door!
A fever-chill swept over him and Vansen had to fight to keep from stumbling. He wished he could reach out to the prince, remind Barrick Eddon that he was not alone in this terrible place, but his shackles prevented it.
The way into the cavern that held the god’s gate suddenly opened wide before them. The enormous chamber was lit by a mere dozen torches, its obsidian walls only delicately streaked with light and the ceiling altogether lost in darkness, but after the long trip through pitch-black tunnels Ferras Vansen found it as overwhelming as the great Trigon Temple in Southmarch on a bright afternoon, with color streaming down from its high windows. The gate itself was even more massive than it had seemed through the eyes of Gyir’s spies, a rectangular slab of darkness as tall as a cliff, resembling an ordinary portal only in the way that the famous bronze colossus of Perin was like a living mortal man.
The guards prodded Vansen and the others toward the open area near the base of the exposed rock face. The slaves already assembled there, a pathetic, hollow-eyed and listless crowd watched over by what seemed almost as many guards as prisoners, shuffled meekly out of the captives’ way, clearing an even larger space in front of the monstrous doorway.
The guards shoved the prisoners to their knees. Vansen wallowed in drifts of stone dust, sneezing as it billowed up around him like smoke and Barrick collapsed beside him as thou
gh arrow-shot, scarcely stirring. Vansen nudged the youth, trying to see if he had been injured somehow, but with the heavy wooden shackles around his wrists he could not move much without falling over.
Remember what I said... Even as Gyir’s words sounded in Ferras Vansen’s skull, guards and workers began to stir all over the room—for a moment he thought that they had also heard the fairy’s thoughts. Then he heard a thunderous, uneven rhythm like the pounding of a mighty drum. When he realized he was hearing footfalls, he knew why the guards, even those whom nature had made helplessly crooked, suddenly tried to straighten, and why all the kneeling slaves began to moan and shove their faces against the rough floor of the great cavern.
The demigod came through the door slowly, the chained heads that ornamented him swaying like seaweed in a tidal pool. As terrifying as Jikuyin was, for the first time Vansen could see something of his great age: the monster limped, leaning on a staff that was little more than a good-sized young tree stripped of its branches, and his great head lolled on his neck as though too heavy for him to hold completely upright. Still, as the ancient ogre looked around the chamber and bared his vast, broken teeth in a grin of ferocious satisfaction, Vansen felt his bladder loosen and his muscles go limp. The end had come, whatever Gyir might pretend. No one could fall into the hands of such a monstrous thing and live.
The other prisoners, many of them smeared with blood from their labors, struck their heads on the floor and wailed as the demigod approached. The awful, gigantic chamber, the hordes of shrieking creatures with bloody hands and filthy, despairing faces prostrating themselves before their giant lord—for a moment Vansen simply could not believe his eyes any longer: he had lost his wits, that was all it could be. His mind was regurgitating the worst tales the deacon in Little Stell had told to terrify Ferras Vansen and the other village children into serving the gods properly.
“Perin Skylord, clothed in light,” Vansen murmured to himself, “Guard us through the awesome night Erivor, in silver mail Smooth the seas on which we sail Kernios, of death’s dark lands Take us in your careful hands...”
But it was pointless trying to remember childhood prayers —what help could such things be now? What good would anything do? The huge shape that was Jikuyin, so massive that he crushed stones that a strong man couldn’t lift into powder beneath his feet, was limping toward them, each grating step like something as big as the world chewing, chewing, chewing... Do not despair! The words came sharp as a slap.
Vansen turned to see that Gyir was still upright, though his guards had prostrated themselves. Everything in the Storm Lantern’s featureless face showed in his eyes alone, wide with excitement and fear, but also hot with rage. Just beyond Gyir, Prince Barrick swayed as if in a high wind, scarcely able to balance even on his knees, his face a pale, sickly mask in the flickering light. For a moment Vansen could see the sister’s handsome features in the brother’s, and suddenly he felt his almost-forgotten promise stab at him like a dagger. He could not surrender while there was breath in him—he had an obligation. Despair was a luxury.
Prayers to the Trigon brothers seemed pointless on the very doorstep of the Earthfather’s house. Unbidden, another prayer wafted into his thoughts like a fleck of ash floating on an updraft, a gentler prayer to a gentler deity— an invocation of Zoria, Mistress of the Doves. But although his lips moved, he could not make his clenched throat pass the words. Zoria, virgin daughter, give me...give to me... A moment later the Zorian prayer, Zoria herself, even his own name, all blew out of Ferras Vansen’s mind like leaves in a freezing wind as Jikuyin stopped in front of them and leaned down. His face was so huge it seemed the cratered moon had dropped from the sky.
“A gift to you.” The demigod’s voice shook Vansen’s bones; his breath smelled like the fumes from a smelter’s furnace, hot and metallic. “You will witness my supreme moment—and even participate.” The curtain of dangling heads swayed stared sightlessly, shriveled lips helplessly grinning.
I’ll be joining them soon, Vansen thought. How would the gods judge him? He had done his best, but he had still failed.
Jikuyin’s great, bearded head swiveled to inspect Vansen and his companions, and Vansen had to look away—the god’s eye big as a cannonball, the power of that squinting, reddened stare, were simply too much to bear. “Your blood will unseal Immon’s Gate,” Jikuyin rumbled, “open the way to the throne room of the Dirtlord himself, that pissdrinking King of Worms who took my eye. And when Earthstar is mine, when his great throne is mine, when I wear his mask of yellowed bone, then even if the gods find their way back I will be the greatest of their number!”
You are mad, said Gyir wonderingly. Many in the room heard his silent words: a moan of fear rose up, as though the slaves who could understand him expected to share his punishment.
“There is no madness among gods!” Jikuyin laughed. “How will I be called mad when I can shape everything to my own thoughts? Soon the gate will open, the blood will flow, and then what I speak...will be.”
My blood will dry to powder, to choking dust, before I let you spill so much as a drop in pursuit of this madness.
Jikuyin reached out a giant hand, fingers spreading as though he would crush Gyir to jelly. Instead, he only flicked at him, knocking the Qar warrior into a mass of shrieking prisoners. After those who could escape had scrambled away, the Storm Lantern lay unmoving where he had fallen, his featureless face in the dust.
“Who said it was your blood I wanted, you little whelp of Breeze?” Jikuyin laughed again, a booming roar of satisfaction that threatened to bring down the cavern roof. His hand reached out again, knocking Vansen to the ground, then it folded around Barrick, who let out a thin shriek of surprise and terror before the breath was squeezed out of him. Jikuyin dropped the limp prince among the guards. “Him—the mortal child. I can smell the Fireflower in him. His blood will do nicely.”
Vansen struggled helplessly against the heavy shackles as the guards dragged Barrick toward the looming gate, but they were too tight to slip, too heavy to break. Ferras Vansen let out a howl of grief. Whatever happened, he would certainly die too, but the imminent death of the prince seemed a greater failure, a more horrifying finality.
Something grabbed at his arm. Vansen kicked out and one of the stinking, shaggy guards fell back, but got up immediately and came toward him again. Fighting the inevitable, Vansen managed to land another kick (to even less effect) before he saw that something was strange about the creature’s expression. The apelike face was slack, and the eyes wandered lazily, fixed on nothing, as though the guard were blind. It was also holding a key in its clumsy, clawed hand.
If they want me unshackled before they kill me then it only means I’ll take some of them with me. But why would they want to take that risk? As the creature fumbled roughly with the shackles, he suddenly realized he had seen that befuddled expression before on the creatures Gyir had controlled. Vansen looked to the fairy. The Storm Lantern was staring up into nothingness, squinting so hard in concerntration that his eyes were little more than creases. Another guard stood behind Gyir, doing something with his bonds as well, but even if the fairy was controlling them both, time was running out.
The guards had dragged Prince Barrick to a spot just before the mighty doors which stretched above them higher and wider than the front of the great temple in Southmarch. Ueni’ssoh, the terrible, cadaverous gray man, walked slowly up to stand beside them and raised his skeletal hands in the air.
“O Fire-Eyed, White-Winged, hear us through the empty places!” he intoned in his harsh, unfeeling voice, “O Pale Question, grant us audience!”
Vansen could understand every word, but the tongue was nothing he had ever heard before, as inhuman as the sawing of a cricket: the sound of the gray man’s fluid speech was in Vansen’s ears, all tick and slur, but the meaning was in his head.
“O Emperor of Worms, see us through all darknesses!” Ueni’ssoh sang, “O Empty Box, grant us audience!”
The gray man’s voice now rose, or gained some other power, because it seemed to fill Ferras Vansen’s head like water poured splashing into a bowl, louder and louder until he could scarcely think, although the actual tones seemed as measured and unhurried as before. This was no song of Kerneia that he had ever heard, but Vansen thought he recognized a few words here and there, the ancient words of mourning his grandfather had sung at his grandmother’s grave in the hills, but the gray man’s terrible, flat voice made Ferras Vansen see pictures in his head that had nothing to do with his long-dead grandmother or his father’s burial plot. A crimson-lit world of scuttling shadows filled his thoughts, an end to all things so final and so terrible that it lay on his heart like an immense weight.
The fairy-spelled guard still scrabbled at his shackles. Vansen was not free yet—he could not let the voice overwhelm him. He could not fail.
“See now where the darkness twists in us like a river
It is time to get up and go to the land of the Red Sunlight
The land where the sun sets and does not rise.
“O Burned Foot, let us shelter in your hard folds of shadow
Where we can still see the dying sun until the last day.
Crowfather
Wearer of the Iron Gloves
Husband to the Knot that cannot be Untied
We are frightened,
O King. Open the gate!”
