by Tad Williams
Tinwright swayed a little and had to grab the doorframe. “I told you, don’t joke! Please, let me in—I don’t want anyone to see me.” He edged past her and stopped. “Brigid, love, really truly, I’m grateful. I treated you badly and you’ve been more kind than I had any right to hope.”
“If you think that you can honey-talk me instead of paying me...”
“No, no! Here it is.” He pulled out the coin and put it in her hand. “I’ll never be able to thank you properly...” “No, you won’t. Ah, well, the wee thing is all yours now, right and proper.” Brigid smirked. “I always knew you were a bit of an idiot, Matty, but this goes beyond anything I’d guessed.”
“Has she showed any signs of waking?”
“Some. A bit of moaning and tossing, like having a bad dream.” She threw her shawl over her shoulders. “Must go now. Conary will be furious, but maybe I can sweeten him up by working late. I’m never swiving with that old mackerel again if I can help it.”
“You are a true friend,” he said.
“And you’re an idiot, but I think I said that already.” She stepped out into the misty afternoon and pulled the door closed behind her.
The noise of Elan’s quiet breath did not change much, but somehow he knew that she was awake. He put down the book of sonnets and hurried to the side of the bed. Her eyes were moving, her face slackly puzzled.
“Where...where am I?” It was scarcely more than a whisper. “Is this some...some waiting-place?” She saw him moving and her eyes turned toward him, but for long moments they could not fix on him. “Who are you?”
He could only pray that the tanglewife’s potion had not injured her mind. “Matt Tinwright, my lady.”
For a moment she did not understand, perhaps did not even recognize the name, then her face twisted into anguish. “Oh, Matt. Did you take the poison, too? You sweet boy. You were meant to live.”
He took a breath, then another. “I...I did not take poison. You did not either, or at least not enough to die. You are alive.”
She shook her head and her eyes sagged closed again.
He had told her. She hadn’t heard him. Did that mean he was allowed to run away into the night and never look back? Not that he dared desert her, but the gods knew that almost anything would be preferable to standing before this woman and telling her he’d betrayed her trust... “What?” Her eyes opened again, far more alert this time, but wide and frightened like those of a trapped animal. “What did you say?”
The moment to escape, if there had ever truly been such a moment, was gone. Tinwright wondered if a real man should offer to take real poison to make up for his crime. Perhaps, he reminded himself, but he wasn’t a real man— not that kind, anyway. “I said you’re not dead, my lady. Elan. You’re alive.”
She tried to lift her head, but could not. Her gaze jumped fearfully from side to side. “What...? Where am I? Oh, no, surely you are lying. You are some demon of the lands before the gate, and this is a test.”
He was surprised to discover that he felt even lower than he had thought he would. “No, Lady Elan, no. You are alive. I could not bear to see you die.” He dropped to his knees and took her hand, still cold as death. “You are in a safe place. I had confederates.” He shook his head. “I make it too grand. A woman I know, one who has been kind enough to tend you, and to help especially with...with your privacies...” He felt himself blushing and was disgusted. Matt Tinwright, man of the world! But something about this woman reduced him to childish embarrassments. “She and I stole you out of the residence.” He could not quite bear to tell her yet that they had dragged her to this place in a laundry basket.
Her eyes were now shut again. “Hendon...”
“He thinks you have run away. He seemed amused, to be honest. He is a bad man, Lady Elan...”
“Oh, the gods have mercy, he will find me. Matt Tinwright, you are a fool!”
“So everyone tells me.”
She tried to rise again, but was far too weak. “I trusted you and you betrayed me.”
“No! I...I love you. I couldn’t bear to...to...”
“Then you are twice a fool. You loved a dead woman. If I could not let myself love you then, how could I now, when you’ve denied me the one release I could hope for?” Tears ran down her cheeks but she did not, or perhaps could not, lift her hands to dry them. Tinwright moved forward with his own kerchief, but as he began dabbing at her face she turned away. “Leave me alone.”
“But, my lady...!”
“I hate you, Tinwright. You are a boy, a foolish boy, and in your childishness you have doomed me to horror and misery. Now get out of my sight. Is there no chance the poison might yet kill me?”
He hung his head. “You have been asleep almost three days. You will regain your strength soon.”
“Good.” She opened her eyes as if to fix his face one last time in her memory, then squeezed them shut again. “At least then I’ll be able to take my own life and do it properly. All gods curse me for a coward, seeking to do the deed with womanish, weak poisons!”
“But...”
“Go! If you do not leave me alone, you craven, I shall scream until someone comes. I think I have the strength for that.”
He stood on the stairs for a long time, uncertain of where to go, let alone what to do. The rains had begun again, turning the muddy alley into a swamp and the Summer Tower into an unlit beacon on a storm-battered coast.
Can’t go back, can’t go forward. He hung his head, felt the cold rain dribble down the back of his neck. Zosim, you nasty godling, you have put me in another trap and I’m sure you’re laughing. Why did I ever think you and your heavenly kind might have changed their minds about me?
“Opal!” Chert shouted, then a fit of coughing snatched what little remained of his breath. He bent over in the doorway, gasping as if he had cut into a bed of dry gypsum. “Opal, get the boy,” he called when he had recovered a little. “We have to hide.” But it was strange she had not come to him already.
He staggered into the back room. It was empty, with no sign of his wife or Flint. His heart, already put to a cruel test with his dash across the Inner Keep and just beginning to slow, instead started to race once more. Where could she be? There were at least a dozen possible places, but Brother Okros and those soldiers could only be a short way behind him and he did not have time to rush around searching blindly.
He went out into Wedge Road and began beating on doors, but succeeded only in frightening their neighbor Agate Celadon half to death. She didn’t know where Opal had gone, nor did anyone else. Chert sent a desperate prayer to the Earth Elders as he sprinted toward the guildhall as fast as his weary legs could take him.
There seemed to be more people around the venerable building than usual, he saw as he hobbled up the front steps, important and unimportant folk milling about on the landing before the front door. The inner chamber was equally crowded. Several of the men called to him, but when he only demanded to know whether they’d seen Opal or the boy, they shrugged and shook their heads, surprised that he did not want to hear what they had to say.
Chert almost ran into Chaven in the anteroom of the Council Chamber. The physician caught him, then waited patiently while the exhausted Funderling slowly filled his lungs back up with air.
“I am longing to hear your news,” Chaven said, “but I have been called with some urgency by some of your friends on the Guild Council. It seems a stranger—one of the big folk as you call us, one of my kind—has stumbled into the Council room. Everyone is quite upset about it.”
“By the Lord of the Hot, Wet Stone, don’t go in there!” Chert reached up and grabbed Chaven’s sleeve as tightly as he could. “That’s what I’ve come...come to tell you about. It must be one of Brother Okros’ soldiers—maybe even Okros himself!”
“Okros? What are you talking about?” Now Chert had the physician’s full attention.
“I’ll tell you, but...but if they are already in the guildhall, I fear my new
s is too late.” Chert slumped to the floor, panting. “I’ll just c-catch my breath, then I ha-have to find Opal.”
“Tell me first,” Chaven said. “The keepers of this hall told me it is only one man. Perhaps we can take him prisoner before his fellows realize where he has gone.” He stood and waved some of the other Funderlings over, then squatted by Chert once more. “Tell me all.”
“It does not matter,” Chert moaned. “I have lost my family and I can’t find them. Soon the soldiers will be everywhere. There’s nothing we can do, Chaven.”
“Perhaps.” For the first time in a while, the physician seemed his old, confident self. “But that does not mean I will give in to that traitorous thief Okros without a fight.” Chaven turned to the other Funderlings who were beginning to gather around them. “Some of you men must have weapons, or at least picks and stone-axes. Go get them. We’ll capture the one lurking in the Council Chamber first, then make him tell us where his fellows are.”
So now the Funderlings were to follow a paunchy scholar into battle against Hendon Tolly and all the giant soldiers of Southmarch? If Chert had not been so close to weeping, he might even have enjoyed the bleak joke of it, but all he could think was that his people’s world was ending and it was mostly his fault.
“By all the oracles, it is bitter out here!” Merolanna said for perhaps the fifth or sixth time. “I should have brought more furs. Is there nothing in this boat to keep an old woman from freezing to death?”
The young Skimmer Rafe didn’t even look up from his oars. “It’s not a pleasure barge, is it? Fishing boat, that’s what it is. Might be a sealskin in that bag, still.”
The duchess waited for Sister Utta to volunteer her services; then, when Utta did no such thing, she began with evident reluctance to poke among the articles wedged under the bench, sighing loudly. Utta, who was determined not be moved, looked away.
She returned to her inspection of Rafe, their boatman and (at least as long as they were on the water) their guide in unfamiliar territory. It was not just the long Skimmer arms that marked him out, although those were very much in evidence as he plied the oars against the choppy swells of Brenn’s Bay. Some of the other differences were hidden now that he had put on a thin shirt, seemingly more as a sop to convention than as actual protection against the chill bay winds: like his arms, his neck seemed longer than with most folk, and it made a bit of a hump where it joined his back between the shoulder blades.
His head seemed canted forward, too, as if the point of connection was higher on the back of the skull, but most interesting and disturbing of all was the confirmation of what Utta had thought only a rumor, but now knew as truth: Rafe’s fingers and toes were webbed, although most of the time it did not show.
Could all the childhood stories be true, then? Were the Skimmers a different race entirely, like the Rooftoppers surely must be?
“What do your people say?” Utta asked him suddenly, then realized she was speaking thoughts aloud that he couldn’t possibly understand. “About where they came from, I mean?”
He looked up at her, wrinkling the skin of his brow in distrust. “Why do you ask?”
“I am curious, I suppose. I grew up in the Vuttish Isles, and none of your folk still live there, although there are stories that they did...”
“Stories?” he said bitterly. “I’ll trow there were.” “What do you mean?”
“That were all ours once, your Vuttland.” “It was?”
He snorted. “Wasn’t it? Didn’t our kings rule there, with the Great Moot? Didn’t the Golden Shoal come to rest there, at the rock of Egye-Var?”
She had no idea what he was talking about. “Then why did they leave?”
“Should ask T’chayan Redhand, shouldn’t you?” “Who is that?”
His eyes widened. He was not pretending—he was truly astonished. “Don’t know T’chayan the Killer? The man who murdered most all my kind in the islands, women and spawn, too, drove our people out of our home and hunted us wherever we went with his dogs and his arrows?”
She blinked, surprised. “Do you mean King Tane the White?” Utta was better read than most of her fellow Vuttlanders, especially because she had gone away, first to the women’s remove at Connord, then to the Eastmarch convent to complete her Zorian novitiate. In fact, she knew more of history than most men, but what the Skimmer youth said was new to her. “Tane is not so well known to us now. I may have heard his name once or twice when I was a girl. When Connord conquered the isles and converted the Vuttish Isles to the Trigonate faith, much of our old history was lost.”
“Your people do not remember T’chayan Redhand?” The Skimmer youth shook his head in stunned horror. “Sure, you’re lying to tease me, then. Your people don’t repent his bloody deeds, or at least celebrate them?”
“What are the two of you going on about?” demanded Merolanna, poking her head out from the hood she had made of the sealskin.
Sister Utta shook her head. “I’m sorry,” she told Rafe. “Truly, I am. My people have forgotten, I suppose, but that doesn’t mean we should have.”
He shut his mouth with an almost audible snap and refused to talk anymore, or even look at Utta, as though she herself had just returned from the long task of eradicating all memory of the wrongs done to his forebears.
The day was cold and cloudy, with intermittent rain. The fog that lingered in the mainland city seemed weirdly heavy to Utta, like clouds that lay on the ocean instead of hanging in the sky. She could make out a few landmarks jutting through the murk, the market flagpoles and all the temple spires, but the mists made them seem something else, perhaps the skeletal ribs of ancient monsters.
Rafe moved the boat ably through the high waves as they got closer to land; Merolanna alternately clutched the side of the boat and Utta. At times they actually lifted off the benches, then slammed down hard in the next trough. For the first time, Utta wished she had changed back into women’s clothes, since they would have offered more protection for her rapidly bruising fundament.
At last they were through and into the shallows. Rafe grounded the boat on a sandbar. “If you walk up that way, won’t get your feet too wet,” he said.
“Aren’t you coming with us?”
“For one silver urchin? You’ll want a bodyguard or a troop of soldiers, and you won’t get them for one merely urchin, will you? I said I’d bring you here and take you back. Means I’ll sit and wait, not go in ’mongst the Old Ones. Their kind don’t like my kind.”
Utta helped Merolanna out, but despite the duchess’ best efforts, the hems of her long skirts still dragged in the water. “Why don’t they like you?”
“Us?” Rafe laughed. His face changed when he did it, looked both more and less like an ordinary man’s. “Because we stayed behind, didn’t we?”
Utta did not get to ask any more questions because just at that moment Merolanna slipped and fell. As the older woman floundered in the shallow water, Utta struggled to lift her until Rafe jumped lightly out of the boat to help. Together the two of them managed to get the dowager duchess upright again.
“Merciful Zoria, look at me!” Merolanna groaned. “I am soaking wet! I’ll catch my death of something, that’s sure.”
“Here, wait,” said the young Skimmer, then splashed back to the boat. He returned with the sealskin. “Wrap this around you.”
“Thank you,” said Merolanna with a certain amount of ceremony—certainly more than this isolated cove had seen in some time, Utta could not help thinking. “You are very kind.”
“Still not going with you, though.” Rafe waded back to the boat.
“Your Grace, I suspected this was not a good idea before. Now I am certain of it.” Sister Utta was trying her best not to peer at the empty houses on either side of the Port Road because they didn’t really seem empty: the black holes of their windows seemed something more sinister, the eye sockets of skulls or the mouths of dragon caves. Even here on the outskirts of town, where the houses were low
and the winds brisk, the fog still hung in cobwebby tendrils and it was hard to see more than a few dozen paces ahead. “I think we should go back to the castle.”
“Do not try to change my mind, Sister. I have come all the way here and I will speak to the fairy folk. They can kill me if they want, but I will at least ask them what became of my son.”
But if they kill you, why would they let me go? Utta did not speak this thought aloud, not out of any desire to spare Merolanna’s feelings, but because in her growing hopelessness, suspended in this foggy dreamworld as if they were ghosts roaming aimlessly in the realms of Kernios, she did not think it would make any difference. Utta knew she had cast her sticks, as the old gambler’s saying went, and now she must shake out her coppers.
They walked slowly up a steep road, Merolanna dripping with every step, into the open, rain-sprinkled cobbles of Blossom Market Square—not a place to buy flowers, but the venerable home of the mainland fish market, whose famous stink had been jestingly memorialized in its name. Other than the still-pungent memories of market days past, the square seemed empty now, the awnings and tents gone, the people all fled to the castle or to cities further south, but Utta could not rid herself of the sense of being watched. If anything, it grew stronger as she walked with the duchess across the open space, so that each step seemed slower and more difficult, as though the mist was getting into her very bones, making them sodden and heavy. It was almost a relief when a figure stepped out of a shadowed arch at the edge of the market and stood waiting for them.
Utta had prepared herself for virtually anything, her imagination fueled by the books in the castle library and the tales of her Vuttish grandmother. She was ready for giants, or monsters, or even beautiful, godlike creatures. She was not as well prepared for an ordinary mortal man in a simple, homespun robe.
“Good afternoon to you,” he said. Utta thought he must be one of the few who had stayed behind, although it seemed impossible he should have come unhurt and unchanged through the Twilight folk’s conquest of the city. She could see now that there was something strange about him, something not quite right, and as he approached she found herself shying back.
