(Shadowmarch #2) Shadowplay

by Tad Williams

  Of course, just now, Barrick Eddon was clearly far from sane; the prince showed no inclination even to slow down, and was almost out of sight.

  “Highness!” Vansen called above the hiss of rain. “If we ride farther we’ll kill the horses, and we won’t survive without them.” Time was confusing behind the Shadowline, but it seemed they had been riding through this endless gloaming for at least a day. After a terrible battle and a sleepless night spent hiding in the rocks at the edge of the battlefield, Ferras Vansen was already so exhausted he feared he would lose his balance and fall out of his saddle. How could the prince be any less weary?

  “Please, Highness! I do not know where you are going but we will not reach it safely in this weather. Let us make some shelter and rest and wait for the storm to pass.”

  To his surprise, Barrick suddenly reined up and sat waiting in the harsh drizzle. The young man did not even resist when Vansen caught up and half yanked him, half helped him out of his saddle, then he sat quietly on a rock like an obedient child while the guard captain did his best, spluttering and cursing, to shape wet branches into some kind of shelter. It was as though only part of the prince were truly present, as though he were living deep inside his own body like an ailing man in a huge house. Barrick Eddon did not look up even when Vansen accidentally scratched his cheek with a pine bough, nor respond to the guardsman’s apologies with anything more than a slow eyeblink.

  During his life at the castle Vansen had often thought that the nobility lived in a different world than he and his kind, but never had it seemed more true than this moment.

  What kind of lackwit are you? Vansen’s tiny fire, only partly protected by the overhanging rock against which he’d set it, hissed and struggled against the horizontal rain. An animal—he prayed it was an animal—howled in the distance, a stuttering screech that made Vansen’s hair stand and prickle. Trigon guard us, will you truly give up your own life for a boy who scarcely knows you’re here?

  But he wasn’t doing it for Barrick, not really. He’d nothing against the youth, but it was the boy’s sister that Vansen feared, whose grief if her twin were lost would break Ferras Vansen’s own heart beyond repair. He had sworn to her he would treat Barrick as though he were his own family—an oath that was foolish in so many ways as to beggar the imagination.

  He watched the prince eating one of their last pieces of jerked meat, chewing and staring as absently as a cow in a meadow. Barrick was not merely distracted, he seemed lost in a way Vansen couldn’t quite understand. The boy could hear what Vansen said at least some of the time or he would not have stopped here, and he occasionally looked his companion in the eye as though actually seeing him. A few times he had even spoken, although saying nothing much that Vansen could understand, mostly what the guardsman had begun to think of as elf-talk, the same sort of babble Collum Dyer had spouted when the shadowlands had swallowed his sense. But even at his best moments, the prince was not completely there. It was as though Barrick Eddon were dying—but in the slowest, most peaceful way possible.

  With a shudder, Vansen remembered something told to him by one of his Southmarch guardsmen—Geral Kelty, who had been lost in these same lands on Vansen’s last, terrifying visit, vanished along with the merchant Raemon Beck and the others. Kelty had grown up a fisherman’s son on Landsend, and when he was still a boy, he and his father and younger brother had been caught in a sudden violent squall where the bay met the ocean. Their boat tipped over, then was pushed under by a wave and sank with horrifying swiftness, taking their father with it. Kelty and his younger brother had clung to each other, swimming slowly toward the land for a long time, fighting wind and high waves.

  Then, with the beach at Coiner’s Point just a short distance away, Kelty told Vansen, his young brother had simply let go and slipped beneath the water.

  “Tired, mayhap,” Kelty had said, shaking his head, eyes still haunted. “Cramped. But he just looked at me, peaceful-like, and then let himself slide away like he was getting under his blanket of a night. I think he even smiled.” Kelty had smiled too as he told this, as if to make up for the tears in his eyes. Vansen had been scarcely able to look at him. They had both been drinking, another payday spent in the Badger’s Boots or one of those other pestholes off Market Square, and it was the time of night when strange things were said, things that were sometimes difficult to forget, although most folk did their best.

  Wincing now at the rain that leaked through their pathetic shelter of woven branches and ran down the neck of his cloak, Ferras Vansen wondered if Kelty had seen the same thing in his younger brother’s eyes that Vansen was seeing in Prince Barrick’s, the same inexplicable remoteness. Was Briony’s brother about to die, too? Was he about to surrender himself and drown in the shadowlands?

  And if he does? What becomes of me? He had only barely made his way out of the shadowlands the first time, led by the touched girl, Willow. No one, he felt sure, least of all Ferras Vansen, could be that fortunate twice.

  They had found an open track through the forest, a bit of clear path. Vansen jogged out ahead of the prince, trying to spy out a place where they might stop and spend a few hours of rest in the endless gray twilight. After what must have been several days’ riding, the supplies in his pack had dwindled to almost nothing; if they had to hunt for food, he wanted to do it here, where the dim ghosts of the sun and moon still haunted the sky behind the mists. He could not be certain that whatever animal he caught here would be more ordinary than prey taken deeper behind the Shadowline, but it was one small thing he was determined to do.

  Vansen’s horse abruptly shrilled and reared, almost throwing him from the saddle. At first he thought they were being attacked, but the forest was still. His heart slowed a little. As he brought the horse under control he called back to the prince to hold up, then, as he leaned forward to stroke his mount’s neck, trying to soothe the still-frightened animal, he saw the dead thing on the ground.

  At first disgust and alarm were mingled with relief, because the creature was no bigger than a child of four or five years and was obviously in no state to do any harm: its head was mostly off, and black blood gleamed all over its chest and belly and on the wet grass where it lay, thinning and running away under the remorseless rain. The more Vansen looked at the corpse, though, the more disturbing he found it. It was like an ape, but with abnormally long fingers and skin like a lizard’s, rough and netted with scales. Knobs of gray bone stuck out through the scaly hide at the joints and along the spine, not injuries but as much a part of it as a cow’s horns or a man’s fingernails. As Vansen examined the dead thing further, he saw that its face was disturbingly manlike, as brown as the rest of its studded hide but covered with smooth, leathery skin. The dark eyes were wide open in a net of wrinkled flesh, and if he had seen only them he would have been sure it was some little old man lying here, though the fanged mouth gave things a different flavor.

  Vansen poked hard with his sword but the thing did not move. He guided his horse wide around the corpse, and watched as Barrick’s milky-eyed mount took the same roundabout path. The prince himself did not even look down.

  Within moments Vansen saw a second and a third creature, both as dead and bloodied as the first, slashed by a blade or long claws. He reined up, wondering what sort of beast had so easily bested these unpleasant creatures. Was it one of the terrible, sticklike giants that had taken Collum Dyer? Or something worse, something…unimaginable? Perhaps even now it watched them from the forest shadows, eyes gleaming….

  “Go slowly, Highness,” he told Barrick, but he might have spoken Xixian for all the notice the youth paid him.

  Only a few paces ahead lay another clot of small, knobby corpses in the middle of the trail. Vansen’s horse pulled up, snuffling anxiously. Clearly, it did not want to step over the things, although Barrick’s shadow-bred horse showed no such compunction as it passed him. Vansen groaned and climbed down to clear the trail. He was pushing one of the bodies with his sword, he
sitant to touch any of the creatures, when the thing abruptly came to life. Whistling in a horrid way that Vansen only realized later was the mortal slash across its chest sucking air, it managed to climb up his sword and sink its teeth into his arm before he could do more than grunt in shock. He had thought many times of removing his mail shirt—the damp cold had made it seem much more a burden than a benefit—but now he thanked the gods he had kept it. The creature’s teeth did not pierce the Funderling-forged rings, and he was able to smash its wizened face hard enough to dislodge it from his arm. It hit the ground but did not run away, scuttling toward him again, still whistling like a hillman’s pipes with the sack burst.

  “Barrick!” he shouted, wondering how many more of the creatures might be still alive and lurking, “Highness, help me!”—but the prince was already out of sight down the trail.

  Vansen backed away from his horse, not wanting to risk wounding it with a wild swing, and as the little monstrosity leaped up toward his throat he managed to strike it with the flat of his blade, knocking it aside. His heavy sword was not the best weapon, but he did not dare take the time to pull his dagger. Before the hissing thing could get up again he stepped forward and skewered it against the wet ground with his sword, pushing through muscle and gut and crunching bone until his hilt was almost in reach of the creature’s claws, which waved feebly a few times, then curled in death.

  Vansen took only a moment to catch his breath and wipe his blade on the wet grass before clambering back up into the saddle, worried about the prince but also irritated. Hadn’t the boy heard him call?

  He found Barrick just a short ride ahead, dismounted and staring down at a dozen or more of the hairy creatures, all apparently safely dead this time. In their midst lay a dead horse with its throat torn out and what Vansen at first thought was its equally dead rider lying facedown beside it. The black-haired body was human enough in shape, wrapped in a torn dark cloak and armor of some strange material with a blue-gray tortoiseshell-like finish. Vansen dismounted and cautiously put his hand on the back of the corpse’s neck, in a gap between helmet and armor. To his surprise he could feel movement under his fingers—a slow, labored rise: the rider was breathing. When he turned the victim over and pulled off the disturbing skull helm, he got his second shock. The man had no face.

  No, he realized after an instant, still sickened, it does—but that’s no human face. He made the sign of the Three as he fought against a sudden clutch of nausea. There were eyes in that pale, membrane of flesh that stretched between scalp and narrow chin, but because they were shut they had seemed no more than creases of flesh beneath the wide brow, obscured by smears of blood from what looked like a near-mortal gash in the thing’s forehead—the blood, at least, was as red as that which flowed in a godly man. But the rest of the face was as featureless as a drumskin, with no nose or mouth.

  The faceless man’s eyes flicked open, eyes red as his smeared blood. They struggled to fix on the guard captain and the prince, then rolled up and the waxy lids fell again.

  Vansen staggered to his feet in revulsion and fear. “It is one of them. One of the murdering Twilight People.”

  “He belongs to my mistress,” Barrick said calmly. “He wears her mark.”

  “What?”

  “He is injured. See to him. We will stop here.” Barrick climbed down from his horse and stood waiting, as though what he had said made perfect sense.

  “Forgive me, Highness, but what are you thinking? This is one of the demons who has tried to kill us—tried to kill you. They have destroyed our armies and our towns.” Vansen sheathed his sword and slipped his dagger from its battered sheath. “No, step back and I will slit his gorge. It is a more merciful death than many of our folk have received…”

  “Stop.” Prince Barrick moved forward as if to put his own body between the wounded creature and the killing stroke. Ferras Vansen could only stare in astonishment. Barrick’s eyes were calm and intent—in fact, he seemed closer to his old self than he had since they had crossed the Shadowline—but he was still acting like a madman.

  “Highness, please, I beg of you, stand away. This thing is a murderer of our people. I saw this very creature killing Aldritchmen and Kertewallers like a dog among rats. I cannot let him live.”

  “No, you must let him live,” Barrick declared. “He is on a grave errand.”

  “What? What errand?”

  “I do not know. But I know the signs upon him and I hear the voices they make in my head. If we do not help him, more of…our kind will die. Mortals.” The young prince regent’s hesitation was strange, as if for a moment he had forgotten to which side of the conflict he belonged.

  “But how can you know that? And who is this ‘mistress’ you speak of? Not your sister, surely. Princess Briony would not want you to do any of these things.”

  Barrick shook his head. “Not my sister, no. The great lady who found me and commanded me. She is one of the highest. She looked at me and…and knew me. Now help him, please.” For a moment the prince’s gaze became even clearer, but a hard look of pain and loss came too, like ice forming on a shallow pond. “I do not…do not know what to do. How to do it. You must.”

  Vansen stared at Barrick. Barrick stared back. The boy would not let him kill this monster without a fight, he’d made that clear. Vansen had already tried several times to sway Barrick from these strange, spellbound moods but had found no way to do it without harming him, so fierce was his resistance. It would be bad enough to face Briony Eddon if he allowed the boy to come to harm—how much worse if it was Vansen himself who hurt the prince?

  He cursed under his breath and sheathed his sword, then began to remove the creature’s strange shell-like armor, which, considering the cold, wet day, was warmer to the touch than if it had been metal or anything else decent. Cursed black magic—I should never have come here again. Every hour, it seemed, some new and unwholesome choice was put before him. Instead of a soldier, I should have been a king’s poison-taster, he thought bleakly. At least then I wouldn’t have survived to see the outcome of my failures.

  He had been adrift in the depths of his own being for so long that only now, as he was finally nearing the surface again, did Barrick Eddon begin to understand how completely he had been lost.

  From the moment that the fairy-woman’s eye had caught and held his own he had lost the sequence of everything. From that astounding instant when he had lain stunned and helpless as the giant’s club had swung up but death had not followed, all the moments of his life, strung in ordered sequence like Kanjja pearls on a necklace, had suddenly flown apart, as if someone had broken the string and dumped those precious pearls into swirling water. His childhood, his dreams, barely recognized faces and even all the moments of Briony and his father and family, the army of Shadowline demons, a million more glittering instants, had all become discontinuous and simultaneous, and Barrick had floated among them like a drowning man watching his own last bubbles.

  In fact, for a while the most clear-thinking part of him had been certain he was dead, that the giant’s club had fallen, that the spiky porcupine woman and her fierce, all-knowing gaze had been nothing but a last momentary glimpse of the living world before it was torn from him, a glimpse which had expanded into an entire, shadowy imitation of life, another bubble to observe, another loose pearl.

  Now he knew better—now he could think again. But even though he could feel the wind and rain on his face once more, even though he again had a sense of life unrolling moment by moment instead of surrounding him in a disordered whirl, it was all still very strange.

  For one thing, although he could no longer remember the important thing the fairy-woman had told him, he knew that he could no more go against her wishes than he could sprout wings and fly away, just as he had known that her servant, the faceless one they had discovered, must be saved.

  But how could it be that someone could command him and he could not say the reason or remember the command?

  E
ven the few things in his life that had once given Barrick comfort now seemed distant—his home, his family, his pastimes, the things he had clung to throughout his youth, when he had often feared he would go mad. But at this moment, of all of it, only Briony still seemed entirely real—she was in his heart and it seemed now that not even his own death would dislodge her. He felt he would carry her memory even into the darkest house, right to the foot of Kernios’ throne, but all, the other things that he had been taught were so important had been were revealed to be only beads on a fraying string.

  Ferras Vansen did not notice the wounded fairy wake. For hours the creature had lain deathlike and limp, eyes shut, then he suddenly discovered the red stare burning out at him from that awful, freakish face.

  Something pressed behind his eyes, a painful intrusion that buzzed in his head like a trapped hornet. He took a step back, wondering what magic this shadow-thing was using to attack him, but the scarlet eyes widened and the buzzing abruptly faded, leaving only a trace of confused inquiry like a voice heard in the last moments of sleep.

  “I cannot really tell him,” Prince Barrick said. “Can you?”

  “Tell…? What do you mean?” Vansen eyed the fairy, who still lay with his head propped on a saddlebag, looking weak and listless. If he was preparing to spring he was hiding it well.

  “Didn’t you hear him?” But now Barrick seemed confused, rubbing his head and grimacing as though it hurt. “He said he wants to know why we saved him, our enemy. But I don’t know why we did it—I can hardly remember.”

  “You told me we had to, Highness—don’t you remember?” Vansen paused. Somehow, he was being pulled into the madness as well, just when he could not afford to lose his grip on sanity—not here behind the Shadowline. “But what do you mean, ‘said’? He said nothing, Prince Barrick. He has only just woken and he said nothing.”

  “Ah, but he did, although I could not understand all of it.” Barrick leaned forward, watching the stranger intently. “Who are you? Why do I know you?”