by Tad Williams
Who are you? Vansen said to him. Or is it forbidden to ask?
The man’s eyes seemed bright as stars beneath his bristling brows. He smiled, but there was no kindness in it, or malice either. You stand before the last river, but the place you wish to go does not exist in this Age of Sleep. You must cross instead to another side, one in which those great ones you wish to see are still in their houses to be seen.
I don’t understand, Vansen told the bearded man. As they spoke, his father sat down in the dust and began singing to himself.
You do not need to understand. You need only do what you must. Whether you come through again afterward is in the hands of greater powers than mine. The dusty old man shifted his bare feet, the spread, leathery toes of someone who had never worn shoes. Unlike Vansen’s father, he was as real as could be—Ferras Vansen could see every inch of his coppery skin with great clarity, every scar, every hair.
You will not tell me who you are, Master?
The bearded man shook his head. Not a master—certainly not yours. A shape, an idea, perhaps even a word. That is all. Now step through the door. You will find water there. Both of you must wash yourselves.
And without knowing how it happened, Ferras Vansen found himself on the inside of the small wooden hut, but here for the first time they had left the twilight behind: what he could see through the cracks in the walls was velvet black sky and the gleam of stars. He stepped closer to the walls and peered through one of the openings. The entire hut was surrounded by stars, innumerable white sparks flickering like the candles of all the gods in heaven—stars above, beside, and even below them, as though the hut floated untethered through the night sky. Dizzied by the enthralling, terrifying view, he turned to see his father already washing himself with the water from a simple wooden tub as crude as the hut itself.
Vansen joined him, and for long moments lost himself in the glory of water running down his skin. He had forgotten he even had a body, and this was a wonderful way to be reminded. Even his father’s phantom, no more substantial than if he were made of spiderwebs, seemed to have come close to something like happiness.
I should have come home, Vansen said. I feared you, Tati. I feared your suffering. And I hated you, at least a little. Because you did not make it easy for me, when you could have.
His father broke off his singing and for a long time did not say anything. He stood up straight and let the water slide off him like rain dripping down a window.
I was a prisoner of my own understanding, Pedar Vansen said at last. At least that is what I imagine. In truth, I cannot remember—it is all gone, drifted away like smoke... And then, before Vansen could hear any more of these words that came to him like food to a starving man, they were out of the hut again, returned to the twilight and dust. The bearded man stood leaning on his long staff, a length of wood as gnarled and knobbed as the ancient man himself. There, the bearded man said, pointing at a pile of dull, red-orange stones lying in the dust. Crumble them and rub yourself with it so you may cross into the last sunset light and still retain something of yourself. Both of you. There is no difference now between living and dead in this house—all are subject to the same laws.
Vansen rubbed the red rocks together, scraping them into blood-colored powder, rubbing that powder onto his clean skin. Instead of rubbing dirt onto himself, it seemed instead as though he rubbed himself with light. When he finished, he gleamed, and even his father’s phantom shimmered beneath its layer of dust and seemed more substantial.
This ocher gives life to the unloving, said the old, bearded man. And it protects the living from the dead in the place you go to now, who would otherwise cover you like flies on honey. Go.
What waits for us? Vansen called back to the ancient as he and his father walked forward.
What has always waited for you. What always will wait for you and for me, and for everything. The end of all.
And then the bearded man was gone, lost in the dust which had begun to swirl around them once more, billowing, choking. Vansen held in his breath, then a time came when he could not hold it any longer. He breathed and the river of dust entered him. He became the dust. He passed through.
And now they entered the true city, the metropolis beside which the City of Sleepers was no more than a village. The oracles say that this greatest and most awful of habitations fills the earth from pole to pole, so that everywhere living men walk, beneath their feet lie the streets of the City of the Red Sun. Nobody laughs in that city, the oracles also claim, and nobody cries except in thin, almost silent sobs, or sings above a whisper.
As Ferras Vansen and his father entered, a hush lay upon the place like dust lay in the streets. The sleepers all had open eyes, and every face stared hopelessly into eternity. Each step forward felt as though he lifted a hundredweight of stone. Each street seemed as bleak and empty and comfortless as the one before.
Always, though, he and his father’s shade moved toward the great, dark lodestone at the heart of the city, the palace of the Earthlord himself. Thousands of other phantoms moved with them toward the mighty black gate, shadowpeople of every kind and every shape. Few wore more than rags, and many were naked, but even in their nakedness some were clothed in feathers or dully gleaming scales, so that they did not look quite like people. Vansen and his father were swept along in this silent crowd like bits of bark on a slow-moving river, the gate and the wall and the palace growing always larger before them.
Ferras Vansen looked at his father, who of all the dead throng still had closed eyes, and saw that although the old man’s features were still indistinct as smoke, his father had retained something of the glow of the ocher, a red gleam like fire reflected on silver. Then he saw that the other spirits had it too, and that the glow did not come from the dead themselves but from the great palace, whose every window spilled sunset-red light.
The House of the Ultimate West, his father whispered, but as though he recited a prayer instead of explaining something. Raven’s Nest. The Castle of Everything-FallsApart. The Great Pine Tree... But first, someone whispered, we must pass the Gate of the Pig. These words traveled through the crowd like a fire through dry grass, the whisper becoming a hissing murmur. The Gate. The Gate. They were groaning the words, some of them, although one laughed uproariously as he said it over and over, as though it were the first jest ever to be told in the grim, blood-colored city. After a while his laugh turned to a choked sob. The Pig’s snout will sniff out every lie, every cheat, and then we will be swallowed down... As the voices rose around him the darkness rose too, like a pall of smoke, until Ferras Vansen could see nothing. Even his father’s shade was gone. He was lost in black emptiness, and the voices of the crowding dead had become animal noises, braying, snorting, barking, as if the ghosts of men had become the ghosts of beasts. It was a terrible din, harsh, desperate, and full of terror. He could not help thinking of the farm creatures he had driven to the slaughterer. The darkness seemed infinite, empty but for himself and a choir of horrifying echoes.
But that is truly me, he thought suddenly. Herding the animals with a switch. Walking down the road to Little Stell. That is a memory of me, of my life.
I am Ferras Vansen, he told the void. I have a name. I am a living man.
Something came nearer to him then—he could feel its approach, slow and ominous as a thundercloud. It seemed bigger than the darkness itself, and it stank. It also seemed...amused?
Living man.
They were not words, not even thoughts, really, but something larger, like shifts in the weather, but somehow he could understand them. He was in the grip of something so much larger than himself that he could scarcely think. He was beyond fear—he was not significant enough to be fearful.
At last it spoke, or the weather changed, or the stars revolved in their black firmanent around Ferras Vansen.
Pass. I will speak for you and He will decide. You will die, or you will live...at least for a little longer.
And then he was in
the midst of the strangest place yet—a festive hall that was also a monstrous pit, a solemnly beautiful throne room whose ceiling was the vault of black and endless night. It was the crumbling root-raddled ground, a silver fantasy of towers, the slow-beating heart of all sad music, it was all those things and none of those things. He was alone, his father’s phantom gone, but a million shadows swirled around the great throne at the center, on which sat the greatest shadow of all.
The voice he had heard before spoke to him.
The master of this place says you do not belong in his dream.
I am Ferras Vansen, he said humbly. Of course he did not belong, here at the end of all things. I am a living man. I only wanted to help my father.
The voice of the Gatekeeper spoke again, slow as the slide of glaciers and just as deadeningly chill.
You cannot. It is impertinence to try. His fate is between him and the gods—which is to say, between him and his own heart. And that is why you must go. You are a hindrance, however small, to What Should Be.
Vansen quailed at the anger in that titan voice. I meant no harm! But he felt ashamed of himself for his fear. Even if it meant he must live here forever, eating clay and drinking dust with these sad shadows, he still did not need to crawl. I tried to help. Surely even the gods themselves cannot condemn that?
There was a pause before the Gatekeeper spoke again. He did not seem to have heard what Vansen had said.
Be grateful you did not hear the Earthfather’s voice. Even the murmur of his sleeping thought would send you mad. Instead, he permits you to leave—if you can cross the rivers and come safe out of this land once more. If not, then you will become one of his subjects earlier than you might have otherwise—but it is only a short time to lose, after all, the butterfly-life of your kind.
But why can you speak to me? Why aren’t you asleep, like the Earthfather?
Make no mistake. I also sleep, said the Gatekeeper. In fact, it could be that you and all these dead, and even the Earthfather himself, are part of my dream.
The voice laughed then, and the world shook.
Go now—return to the land of the living, if you can. You will not receive such a gift a second time.
And then the great hall of madness, of sleep and earth and the deep song of the globe itself, was gone. The Gatekeeper was gone. Nothing remained in all the cosmos but Ferras Vansen, it seemed, standing in sudden alarm on an achingly narrow arc that stretched above a massive nothingness, a white stripe over an abyss. He could not see an end to the slender bridge in either direction, and the span was scarcely as wide as his own shoulders. There was nowhere to go but forward into the unknown or backward into quiet, undemanding death. His father’s shade was gone, left behind in the sunset city to face its own fate, and the living could mean nothing to Pedar Vansen anymore. His son had not been able either to save the old man or forgive him, but something had changed and his heart was lighter than it had been.
“I am Ferras Vansen,” he called as loudly as he could. There was no reply, not even an echo, but that did not matter: he was not speaking to anyone except himself. “I am a soldier. I love Briony Eddon, although she can never love me. I’m tired of being lost and I’m tired of dying, so I’m going to try something different this time.”
He began to walk.
40. Offered to Nushash
Crooked labored long for Moisture’s children, shaping their kingdom in all its greatest glory, making things of great craft for those who had destroyed his family—palaces and towers, Thunder’s irresistible hammer, Harvest’s basket that was always full, the deadly spear of Black Earth, and more.
But in his heart he had become as crooked as his name, his song not just somber but sour. He plotted and he dreamed, but could see no way he could equal the power of the brothers, whose songs were at their mightiest. Then one day he thought of his grandmother Void, the only creature whose emptiness was like his own, and he went to her and learned all her craft. He learned to walk her roads, which no one else could see but which stretched anywhere and everywhere. He learned many other things, too, but for long he kept them hidden, waiting for his moment.
—from One Hundred Considerations, out of the Qar’s Book of Regret
The stranger who had captured her was working very hard to open the rusted lock, his bland face intent as he probed the slot in the gate with the strip of metal he had produced from the sleeve of his shirt. A little sweat had beaded on his lip. Qinnitan turned away as casually as she could, trying not to look directly at the troop of guards moving rubble at the base of the wall a hundred yards away. She and Pigeon and the stranger were crouched in the shadows of an aqueduct near the base of Citadel Hill.
“You’re wondering whether you could call to those guards and get help,” said the stranger in his weirdly perfect Xixian, although he had not looked up from the lock. “Where I grew up in Sailmaker’s Row, near the docks, the fishermen could take an oyster out of its shell with their knives, flick it up in the air, then catch it on the blade, all with just one hand.” He opened the fingers of his free hand to slow her a small, curved blade nestled there. “If you move, I will show you the trick—but I will use the boy’s eye.”
Pigeon clutched Qinnitan’s hand even more tightly.
“You grew up in Xis?” If she could get the man talking some good might come of it. “How could that be? You look like a northerner.”
He still did not look up, and this time his only answer was the rasp and click of the metal strip as he at last defeated the lock. The gate swung open and they passed under the stone arch, then the stranger dragged them to their feet and hurried them down a ramshackle stone staircase which hugged the side of the steep Citadel Hill. Qinnitan was tripped several times by the cord around her ankles. The air on the seaward side of them was dark with what she thought at first was fog, but then realized was smoke. In the distance cannons rumbled, but it seemed like thunder from far away, the bad weather of another country.
The Harbor of Nektarios was in ruins, the water choked with floating wreckage from burned and shattered ships. Half the warehouse district was on fire and blazing uncontrollably, but just enough soldiers had been spared to fight the blaze to keep it from spreading upslope on either side to the temple complex atop Demian Grove or the wealthy houses on Sparrow Hill. Overwhelmed by their struggle with the flames, none of them paid much attention to the stranger and what doubtless seemed to be his two children. One smoke-stained guardsman hurrying past, the golden sea urchin on his tunic marking him part of the naval guard, shouted something to them Qinnitan couldn’t understand, but when their captor calmly waved his hand in acknowledgement the guard seemed satisfied and trotted on.
Cannonfire crashed out from the seawall and was returned from the ocean beyond. Qinnitan could actually see one of the autarch’s massive dromons sliding past the mouth of the harbor, kept out only by a hundred yards of massive chain thicker than Qinnitan’s body, sagging across the mouth of the harbor that Magnate Nektarios had so famously and expensively built.
They passed the entrance to Oniri Daneya Street, a wide thoroughfare lined with shops and markets and warehouses that led out from the harbor and ran east across the center of the old city. The famous street had been blocked off here at its harbor end with deserted wagons and the rubble of the bombardment, and seeing the usually thriving place so ruined and empty washed Qinnitan with a new wave of despair. No one would help them, she was increasingly certain—not with the city on fire and the autarch’s troops almost inside the walls. She reached down and took the boy’s hand. She had survived before, but this time she had Pigeon to care for, too.
“We will go fast now,” the man said. “No talking. Follow me.”
“Do you really have to bring the boy, too...?” Qinnitan began. A moment later she was on her knees, eyes full of tears, her face stinging. He had hit her so swiftly she had not even seen it.
“I said no talking. Next time, there will be blood—that is, more blood than this.�
�� The man’s hand shot out like a serpent’s strike. Pigeon shrieked in a way Qinnitan had never heard, a rasping yelp that made her want to vomit. The child grabbed at his face and his hands came away covered in blood. His ear had been sliced halfway through; part of it hung down like a rotting tapestry.
“Bandage him.” The man threw her a rag from his pocket— the remnants of the old woman’s scarf he had worn as part of his disguise. “And don’t think either of you are safe just because I have to deliver you to the autarch. There are ways I can hurt you that even the Golden One’s surgeons won’t discover. Play another trick on me and I will show you some of my own—tricks that you’ll remember even when the best torturers of the Orchard Palace are hard at work on you.” He gestured for them to move forward along the length of the harbor front.
Qinnitan held the bandage tight against Pigeon’s ear until he could hold it for himself. She walked when the man indicated, stopped when he stopped. Her heart, which had been beating so swiftly only a moment ago, now seemed as sluggish as a frog sitting in summer mud. There would be no escape for either of them.
Near to the end of the long row of boats lay a set of narrow slips where smaller craft were tied next to each other like leaves on a tree branch. Here their captor found what he was seeking, a small rowboat with a tiny awning just big enough to keep the sun off one large person or two small ones. He had her lie down next to Pigeon under the awning, then rowed them out between bits of charred wreckage, ignoring the cries of the harbor guards as they headed for the open sea, where cannons rumbled like thunder and smoke drifted like evening fog. She watched the man as he rowed, the only strain to be seen the tense and release of the muscles in his pale neck.
“What is the autarch giving you to do this?” she asked at last, risking another blow. “To kidnap two children who have never done you any harm?”
