by Tad Williams
She tried to say something, but it felt as though her jaw had been broken and she could only murmur and spit blood again. She slid her hand down her leg and reached into her boot, but the sheath was empty—the other dagger had fallen out somewhere during the scuffle. Her gut went cold. She had no weapon.
“Shaso, your mighty Shaso, he is dead,” said Talibo. “I saw the soldiers kill him—surrounded him like a wild pig, spearing, spearing. I told them where to find him, of course.”
She coughed, rubbed at her broken mouth with the back of her hand. “Y–You…?”
“And my uncle, too. Him I did myself. He will never again call me names—spoiled, lazy. Ha! He will rot in the shadows of the land of the dead and I will be the master here. My ships, my merchants, my house…!”
“You betrayed…?” It hurt to speak, but the thought of Shaso murdered blazed in her like a fire, like one of the coals that had bounced across Effir dan-Mozan’s chamber floor only moments ago, lifetimes ago. It couldn’t be true—the gods could not be so cruel! “Betrayed us…all?”
“Not you, bitch, although now I wish I had. But I will keep you for my own and you will learn to treat me with respect.” Panting, he took a few steps toward her and leaned over, keeping well out of reach, even though she had lost the curved blade. Briony took a certain grim pleasure in that, anyway: he craved respect, but it was he, Talibo the traitor, who had learned to respect her. His face was ridiculously young for the emotions that played across it in the candlelight, greed and lust and exultation in his own cruelty. “And if you had been a proper woman you would have been safe here until it was all over. Now, I will have to break you like a horse. I will teach you to behave…!”
Briony hooked his ankle with her foot, sending him crashing to the ground. Instead of running away, she threw herself onto him even as he thrashed on the slippery ground, struggling to get his feet under him. She knocked him back but he curled his hands around her throat. Something hard was pressing painfully into her back, but she scarcely noticed it. The merchant’s nephew was slender but strong—stronger than she was—and within instants, as his fingers tightened, the light of the single candle began to waver, then to burst into flowers of radiance like the fireworks that had scorched the sky over Southmarch to celebrate her father’s marriage to Anissa. Her hand found the thing that was digging into her back.
Talibo’s grip was so powerful that it did not slacken immediately even after she had pulled the second, smaller Yisti dagger out from underneath her and rammed it up under his jaw with all her might. Talibo straightened, shuddering and wriggling like an eel in the bottom of a fisherman’s boat, so that for a moment it seemed his death throes might break her in half, then at last his hands fell away.
She lay where she was for a long time, fighting for breath, coughing and sputtering. When at last her throat seemed to be open again she stood up. Swaying, legs trembling, she bent over the merchant’s nephew cautiously, in case he might be shamming, but he was dead: he did not even twitch when she pulled the blade out of his throat, freeing a gush of dark blood. She spat on his handsome, youthful face—a gob that was red with her own blood—and then turned and went to look for her other knife.
When she emerged from the stable Effir dan-Mozan’s entire house was in flames. Briony stared for long empty moments, as if she had turned to stone, then she limped across the open yard into the shadows by the wall. She found a place she could mount and climbed with quivering, exhausted muscles over the top, then she let herself drop into the cool, stinking darkness of a refuse heap.
When morning came, Briony found a bucket of icy water and did her best to wash the blood from her throbbing, aching face, then pulled her robe tight around her boy’s clothes—the clothes of the boy whom she had killed, she reflected with little emotion. She dragged her hood down low and joined the crowd that had gathered outside the smoldering remains of Effir dan Mozan’s house. Some of the baron’s soldiers were still standing guard over the ruins, so she did not dare go too close, and many of the crowd spoke Xandian languages, since this was the poorest part of Landers Port, but she heard enough to learn that the women of the house, at least, had managed to escape, and were sheltering with one of the other well-known Tuani families. She thought briefly of going to Idite, but knew it was a foolish idea: they had lost everything because of her already—why put them in danger again? Nobody seemed to know for certain exactly what had happened, but many had heard that some important criminal had been captured or killed, that Dan-Mozan had been harboring him and had died trying to defend his secret.
Only one male member of the household had lived to escape. For a moment, hearing that, Briony felt a rush of hope, but then someone pointed out the survivor—a small, bowed old servant that she recognized but whose name she did not remember. He stood apart from the others, staring at the smoking, blackened timbers of what had been his home. Alone in the crowd, he looked the way Briony imagined she did beneath her hood, shocked, confused, empty.
There was nothing here for her anymore except danger and quite possibly death. The baron’s men did not seem to have tried very hard to take Shaso alive, and he had been nowhere near as dangerous to the Tollys as she was. Briony felt certain that Hendon Tolly’s hand was somewhere in all this—why else would Iomer, a man who cared little for politics, have struck in such a swift and deadly way?
She screwed up her courage and joined the crowd of people walking out the city gates for the day and stared at the ground as she walked, meeting no one’s eye. It seemed to work: she was not challenged, and within an hour she was alone on the cliff road below Landers Port. Briony walked until she reached a place where the woods were thick beside the road, then staggered off into the trees. She found a hidden spot surrounded by undergrowth and curled herself up in the wet leaves at the base of a mostly naked oak, well out of sight of the road, and then wept until she fell asleep.
17
Bastard Gods
Zmeos, brother of Khors, knew that Zoria’s father and her uncles would come against their clan, so he raised an army and lay in wait for them. But Zosim the Clever flew to Perin in the form of a starling and told the great god that Zmeos and Khors and Zuriyal had laid a trap, so Perin and his brothers called out the loyal gods of heaven. Together they descended upon the Moonlord’s castle in a mighty host.
—from The Beginnings of Things
The Book of the Trigon
FERRAS VANSEN AND HIS COMPANIONS were not the beak-faced Longskulls’ only prisoners, as they discovered when they reached the creatures’ camp after an exhausting trudge through the dark woods. The Longskulls seemed almost uninterested in them, despite the dozen or so of their number Vansen and the others had killed, most of them victims of the Storm Lantern’s blade. If a prisoner strayed out of the line one of the snouted warders honked at him or even jabbed at exposed skin with a sharpened stick, but otherwise left them alone.
Despite being our ally, Gyir has shown more hatred toward me and the other mortals than these things do toward us, Vansen thought. Why did they take us if they care so little about us?
He quietly asked Barrick about it. The prince asked Gyir and passed on his words: “The Longskulls are more like animals than people, as we would see it. They are doing what they are trained to do, no more. If we hurt one it may well hurt us in return, but otherwise they are taught only to bring us back to their master.” Their master was Jikuyin, the one the raven had called Jack Chain—a disturbing name then, even more ominous now.
“What does this Chain want with us?”
Barrick paused, listening again, then shrugged. Gyir’s eyes were red slits. “He says we will not know until they bring us to him,” Barrick said. “But we will not like it.”
The Longskulls’ hunting camp looked like something out of an ancient Hierosoline temple-carving—the antechamber of the underworld, perhaps, or the midden heap of the gods. Certainly there seemed to be at least one of every misshapen creature Ferras Vansen could have imag
ined in his wildest night-terrors—squint-eyed, sharp-toothed goblins; apish Followers; and even tiny, misshapen men called Drows that looked like ill-made Funderlings. There was also an entire menagerie of animal-headed creatures with disturbingly manlike bodies, things that crawled and things that stood upright, even some that crouched in the shadows singing sad songs and weeping what looked to be tears of blood. Vansen could not help shivering, as much to see the misery of his fellow prisoners as their strangeness. Many had their arms or legs shackled, some their wings cruelly tied, a few with no more restraint than a leather sack over their heads, as though nothing else was needed to keep them from escaping.
“Perin’s great hammer!” he whispered hoarsely. “What are all these horrors?”
“Shadlowlanders,” Barrick told him, then, after cocking his head toward Gyir for a moment, “Slaves.”
“Slaves to what? Who is this Jack Chain?”
Gyir, who could understand Vansen even though he could not speak to him directly, bleakly spread his long-fingered hands as if trying to demonstrate something of improbable size and power, but then shook his head and let his hands drop.
“A god, he calls him,” said the prince. “No, a god’s bastard. A bastard god.” Barrick let his head droop. “I do not know—I can’t remember everything he said. I’m tired.”
They were shoved off to a place in the center of the camp by themselves, for which Vansen was as grateful as he could be under the circumstances, and where they huddled under a sky the color of wet stone. Vansen and Barrick sat close to each other on the damp, leaf-carpeted ground, for the warmth and—at least in Vansen’s case—the human companionship. The weird army of prisoners that surrounded them, dozens and dozens all told, seemed strangely quiet: only an occasional bleating noise or a spatter of unfamiliar, clicking speech broke the silence. Vansen could not help noticing that they behaved like animals who sensed that the hour for slaughter had come round.
He leaned close to the prince’s ear. “We must escape, Highness. And when we do, we must try to make our way back to mortal men’s country again. If we stay any longer in this never-ending evening, surrounded by godless things like these, we shall go mad.”
Barrick sighed. “You shall, perhaps. I think I went mad a long time ago, Captain.”
“Don’t say such things, Highness…”
“Please!” The prince turned on him, his weariness forgotten for a moment. “Spare me these…pleasant little thoughts, Captain. ‘Should not…’—as though I might bring something bad down on myself. Look at me, Vansen! Why do you think I am here? Why do you think I came with the army in the first place? Because there is a canker in my brain and it is eating me alive!”
“What…what do you mean?”
“Never mind. It is not your fault. I could have wished you would have made a busybody of yourself somewhere else, though.” Barrick lifted his knees up to his chin and wrapped his arms around them.
“Do you know why I followed you, Highness?” The bleak surroundings seemed to be getting into Vansen’s blood and his thoughts like a cold fog. Soon I shall be as mournful and mad as this prince. “Because your sister asked me—no, begged me to do so. She begged me to keep you safe.”
Now Barrick showed fire again. “What, does she think I am helpless? A child?”
“No. She loves you, Prince Barrick, whether you love yourself or not.” He swallowed. “And you are all she has left, I suppose.”
“What do you know of it—a mere soldier?” Barrick looked as though he wanted to hit him, despite the shackles on his arms. Gyir, sitting a few paces away, turned to watch them.
“Nothing, Highness. I know nothing of what it is like to be a prince, or to suffer because of it. But I do know what it is like to lose a father and others of my blood. Of five other children in our family, I have only two sisters left now, and my mother and father both are years in the grave. I have lost friends among the guard as well, one of them swallowed by a demon-beast in these lands the first time I came here. I know enough about it to say that sometimes carelessness with your own life is selfishness.”
Barrick seemed startled now, both angry and darkly amused. “Are you calling me selfish?”
“At your age, Highness, you would be odd if you were not. But I saw your sister before we rode out, saw her face as she begged me to keep you safe and told me what it would mean to her if she lost you too. You call me ‘a mere soldier,’ Prince Barrick, but I would be the lowest sort of villain indeed if I did not urge you to take care of yourself, if only for her sake. That is no burden, from where I see it—it is a mighty and honorable charge.”
Barrick was silent for a long moment, anger and amusement both gone, absorbed into one of his inscrutable, cold-faced stares. “You care for her,” he said suddenly. “Don’t you, Vansen? Tell me the truth.”
Ferras realized that even here in the dark heart of the Twilight Lands, on the way to what was almost certain death, he was blushing. “Of course I do, Highness. She is…you are both my sovereigns.”
“Back home I could have you whipped for avoiding my question like that, Vansen. If I asked you whether we were being invaded, would you say, “Well, we’ll have more guests than we usually do at this time of the year?”
Vansen gaped, then laughed despite himself, something he had not done for so long that it was almost painful. Gyir twisted his featureless face in a way that might almost have been a frown, then turned away from them. “But, Highness, even…even if it were so, how could I speak of such a thing? Your sister!” He felt his own face grow stern. “But I can tell you this—I would give my life for her without hesitation.”
“Ah.” Barrick looked up. “They are going to feed us, it seems.”
“Pardon?”
The prince gestured with his good arm. “See, they are carrying around some kind of bucket. I’m sure it will be something rare and splendid.” He scowled and suddenly seemed little more than a youth of fourteen or fifteen summers again. “You realize, of course, that there isn’t a chance in the world it will ever come to anything?”
“What?”
“Stop pretending to be stupid, Captain. You know what I mean.”
Vansen took a breath. “Of course I do.”
“You like lost causes, don’t you? And thankless favors? I saw you help that disgusting bird to escape, as well.” Barrick smiled at him. It was quite nearly kind. “I see I’m not the only one who has learned to live with hopelessness. It makes an unsatisfying fare, doesn’t it? But after a while, you begin to take a sort of pride in it.” He looked up again. “And speaking of unsatisfying fare, here come our hosts.”
Two Longskulls stood over them, appearing to Vansen like nothing so much as gigantic grasshoppers, although there was something weirdly doglike about them, too. Their legs were similar to men’s, but the back of the foot and the heel were long and did not touch the ground, so that they perched on the front of their feet like upright rats. The eyes sunk deep in their loaf-shaped, bony heads did not exactly glisten with intelligence, but it was obvious they were not mere beasts, either. One made a little honking, gabbling noise and ladled something out of the bucket the other was holding. It pointed at Vansen’s hands, then honked again.
I am living in a world of firelight tales, Vansen thought suddenly, remembering his father’s old sea stories and his mother’s accounts of the fairies that lived in the hills. We are captives in some unhappy child’s dream.
He held out his arms, showing the guards his shackles. “I cannot hold anything,” he said. The Longskull merely turned the ladle upside down and let the mass of cold pottage drop into his hands. It did the same for Barrick, then moved on to the next group.
In the end, he found he could eat only by bracing the heavy shackles on the ground, then crouching over his own outstretched hands, lapping up the tasteless vegetable pulp like a dog eating from a bowl.
When all the prisoners had been fed the watery pottage, the Longskull guards returned to the fire to eat
their own food, which had been roasting on spits. Vansen could not see what they ate, but when the prisoners were hauled to their feet a short time later and set to marching again, he noticed the Longskulls hanging some empty shackles back on the massive wagon that held the slavers’ simple belongings, and where they swung, clinking, as the wagon began to roll.
If Barrick had thought the Twilight Lands oppressive before, every miserable step of the forced march now seemed to take him into deeper and deeper gloom. It wasn’t simply that the pall of smoke they thought they had escaped grew thicker above them with every step, turning the land dark as midnight and making breathing a misery, or even the dull horror of their predicament. No something even beyond these things was afflicting him, although Barrick could not say exactly what it was. Every step they took, even when they reached an old road and the going became easier, seemed to plunge them deeper into a queer malevolence he could feel in his very bones.
He asked Gyir about it. The fairy-warrior, who seemed almost as despondent as his companions, said, Yes, I feel it, even despite the blindness my wounds have caused, but I do not know what causes it. Jikuyin is the source of some of it—but not all.
Barrick was struck by a thought. Will this blindness of yours get better? Will the illness or whatever it is leave you?
I do not know. It has never before happened to me. Gyir made a sign with his long, graceful fingers that Barrick did not recognize. In any case, I truthfully do not think we will live long enough to find out.
Why are we prisoners? Is Jikuyin at war with your king?
Only in that he does not bow to him. Only in that Jikuyin is old and cruel and our king is less cruel. But we are prisoners, I think, only because we were captured. Look at those around us… He gestured to the slow-stepping band of prisoners on either side and stretching before and behind them farther than Barrick could throw a stone. We may be rare things here, Gyir told him in his wordless way, but these others are as common as the trees and stones. No, we are all being taken to the same place, but the more I consider, the less I think it is because we were singled out. He opened his eyes wide, something Barrick had come to recognize as a sign of determination. But I think these creatures’ master will take notice of us when he sees us. If nothing else, he will wonder what mortals are doing again in his lands.
