(Shadowmarch #2) Shadowplay

by Tad Williams

  Again? I have never heard of him.

  Jikuyin first made this place his own long, long before mortals roamed this country and built Northmarch, but he was injured in a great battle, and so after the Years of Blood he slept for a long time, healing his wounds. His name was lost to most memories, except for a few old stories. We drove the mortals out of Northmarch before he returned. That was only a very short time ago by our count. After they had fled we called down the Mantle to keep your kind away thereafter, banishing them from these lands for good and all.

  Why did you do that?

  Why? Because you would have come creeping back into our country from all sides as you did before, like maggots! Gyir narrowed his eyes, making crimson slits. You had already killed most of us and stolen our ancient lands!

  Not me, Barrick told him. My kind, yes. But not me.

  Gyir stared, then turned away. Your pardon. I forgot to whom I spoke.

  The procession was just emerging from between two hills and into a shallow valley and a great stony shadow across the road—an immense, ruined gate.

  “By The Holy Book of the Trigon!” Barrick breathed.

  No oaths like that—not here, Gyir warned him sharply.

  But…what is this?

  The column of prisoners had shuffled to a weary halt. Those who still had the strength stared up at two massive pillars which flanked the road, lumps of vine-netted gray stone that despite being broken still loomed taller than the trees. Even the smaller lintel that stretched above their heads was as long as a tithing barn. Huge, overgrown walls, half standing, half tumbled, hemmed the crumbling gate like the wings of some god’s headdress.

  It is worse than I feared. The fairy’s thoughts were suddenly faint as a superstitious whisper, hard for Barrick to grasp. Jikuyin has left his lair in Northmarch and made himself a new home…in Greatdeeps itself. This is its outer gate.

  “What is this new misery?” Ferras Vansen was clearly feeling the strangeness of the place too, not just its size and immense age but even the hidden something that pressed ever more intrusively into Barrick’s mind like cold, heavy fingers.

  “Gyir says it was something called Greatdeeps, or at least the first gate.”

  “Greatdeeps?” Vansen frowned. “I think I know that name. From when I was a child…”

  The Longskulls came hissing angrily down the line, poking and prodding, and at last even the most reluctant prisoners let themselves be driven under the massive lintel. It was carved with strange, inhuman faces that looked down on them as they passed—some with too few eyes, some with too many, none of them pleasant to see.

  What lay beyond was equally disturbing. The wide, broken-cobbled road dipped down into a valley that lay almost hidden beneath a thick cloud of smoky fog as it wound between two rows of huge stone sculptures. Some of the stonework portrayed ordinary things cast in giant size, like anvils big as houses or hammers and other tools that a dozen mortals together could never have lifted. Other shapes were not quite so recognizable, queer representations of machinery Barrick had never seen and the uses of which he could not even guess. All the statues were old, cracked by wind and rain and the work of creepers and other plants. Many had fallen and been partially buried by dirt and leaves, so that the impression was that monstrous citizens who had once dwelled here had simply packed up one night and left, allowing the mighty road to fall to ruin after they were gone.

  Despite the apparent emptiness, or perhaps because of it, Barrick’s sense of oppression grew as they trudged forward. Even the Longskull guards grew quiet, their gabbling little more than a murmur as they moved up and down the line of prisoners, goading them forward.

  What is this place? he asked Gyir. What is Greatdeeps?

  The place where the gods first broke the earth, searching…

  A tennight before this Barrick had not quite believed in the gods. Now, in a place like this, the mere word set his heart racing, brought clammy sweat to his skin. Searching for what?

  Gyir shook his head. The weight that Barrick felt, the despairing thickness that seemed to lie on him like a net made of lead, seemed to weigh on the fairy even more heavily. Gyir’s head was bowed, his back bent. He walked like a man approaching the gallows, struggling to get the smoky air in and out of his lungs. The fairy’s thoughts were heavy, too, like stones—it made Barrick weary just to receive them. I cannot…speak to you now, Gyir told him. I must understand what all this means, why…I must think…

  Barrick turned to Ferras Vansen. “You said you thought you remembered, Captain. Do you know anything of this Greatdeeps?”

  “A memory, and only a faint one. Something—a story we children told to frighten each other when I was young, I think…” He frowned miserably. “I cannot summon it. What does the fairy say?”

  Barrick glanced quickly at the fairy, then back to Vansen. “Something about the gods breaking the earth here, but I can make little sense of it and he won’t say more.” The prince rubbed at his face as if he could scour away the discomfort. “But it is a bad place. Can you feel it?”

  Vansen nodded. “A heaviness, as if the air was poisoned—and by more than smoke. No, not poisoned, but bad, somehow, as you say—thick and unpleasant. It makes my heart quail, Highness, to speak the truth.”

  “I’m glad it’s not just me,” Barrick said. “Or perhaps I’m not. What will happen to us? Where do you think we’re being taken?”

  “We shall find that out sooner than we want to, I think. What we should consider instead is how we might get away.”

  Barrick held up the shackles, which although not too large for an ordinary person his size, were cruelly heavy on his bad arm. “Do you have a chisel? If so, I think we’d have something to talk about.”

  “They haven’t tied our feet, Highness,” the soldier said. “We can run, and worry about freeing our arms later.”

  “Really? Just look at them.” Barrick gestured to the nearest pair of Longskulls pacing the line with their strange, springy gait. “I don’t think we’ll outrun those, even without our legs shackled.”

  “Still, The Book of the Trigon bids us to live in hope, Prince Barrick.” Vansen looked curiously solemn as he said it—or maybe it was not so curious, under the circumstances. “Pray to the blessed oniri to speak for us in heaven—the gods may yet find a way to save us.”

  “Speaking frankly,” Barrick said, “just at the moment, it is the gods themselves I fear most.”

  The prince seemed a little more like his ordinary self again, which was the only hopeful thing Vansen had seen all day. Perhaps it was because Gyir the Storm Lantern had almost stopped talking to him.

  Judging by the usual run of his luck and mine, he’ll come back to himself just in time to be executed by our captors, Vansen thought with bleak amusement. At least I’ll probably be killed, too. Anything would be better than to face Barrick’s sister with news of her brother’s death.

  Where is she? he suddenly wondered. In the castle, perhaps under siege? There’s no chance that Gyir’s people would have beaten us so badly and then just stopped in the fields outside the city… He felt a moment of terror, worse than anything he had felt for himself, at the idea of Princess Briony being threatened by monstrous creatures like these, perhaps a prisoner herself. He could not let the thought run free in his head—it was too horrible. Perhaps she fled, along with her advisers. Wherever she is, Perin grant she is safe. And who was it the princess herself had sworn by so often? Zoria—Perin’s merciful daughter. He had never thought to pray to the virgin deity before, but now he did his best to summon the memory of her kind, pale face. Yes, blessed Zoria, put your hand on her and keep her from harm.

  Does Briony ever think of us? Of course, she must think of her brother all the time—but does she think of me at all? Does she even remember my name?

  He forced such foolishness away. If there was anything more pitiable than mooning after an unobtainable princess, a young woman as high above him as the gods were above humanity, it wa
s mooning while they were captives in the Twilight Lands, being marched toward the Three Brothers only knew what doom.

  You think too much, Ferras Vansen. That’s what old Murroy told you, and he was right.

  The sprawling avenue of broken stones and gigantic leaning statues had become even more desolate as they marched on, most of the plinths empty, the stones themselves few and far between, as though scavengers had carried them away. Even the trees had been cleared here; the valley floor, sloping up on either side, seemed as stubbly as the face of an unshaved corpse.

  Vansen was also becoming more and more aware of a smell beyond that of the smoke, a strong, sulphurous odor that seemed to lie over the valley like a fog. The worst of it came from holes in the ground on either side of the road, and Vansen could not help wondering what could be under the ground that stank so badly.

  “Mines,” said Barrick when Vansen voiced his question out loud. “Gyir said these are the first mines his people built, a long time ago, although the digging here began even earlier. They go down into the ground for miles.”

  “What did they mine here?”

  “That’s all I know.” Barrick gestured with his good arm toward the faceless fairy. Gyir’s eyes were almost closed, as though he slept on his feet. “He’s still not talking.”

  The road, which Vansen thought must once have been the path of an ancient streambed, began to rise as the valley floor rose. Even as they climbed the smoke remained thick in the air, turning the cheerless vista of tree stumps and broken stones into something even more dispiriting, if such was possible. They were nearing the far end of the valley, and even though the road continued to mount upward, it became clear that unless it ended in a ladder half a mile tall it would never climb high enough to take them over the jagged face of rock that hemmed the valley.

  Barrick looked up at the looming peak in dismay. “There’s nowhere to go. Perhaps we’re not to be slaves after all. Perhaps they’re just going to kill us here.”

  “It seems a long way to march us simply to do that, Highness,” Vansen reassured him. “Likely there is some secret pass ahead—a path through the heights.” But he also wondered, and fear began to poison him again. Soon they would be pressed against the stony cliffs with nowhere to go, the Longskulls hemming them in with sharp spears…

  If others had not been trudging through the growing dark ahead of him, Vansen would have tripped on the first impossibly wide, high step. As the prisoners in front clambered up, Vansen followed, turning to help the prince climb despite Barrick’s fiercely resentful looks. One massive step ran into the next, one wearying climb after another.

  “It’s…a…cursed…staircase,” Barrick said, fighting for breath. They had been marching without a rest for hours, and each step was a formidable obstacle. “Like the one in front of the great temple back home—but monstrously big.” He fell silent except for his ragged breathing as he labored up two more steps behind Vansen. All around him the other prisoners were struggling at least as badly—some were simply too short to get up without help. The Longskulls clambered in and out of the procession, jabbing with their sticks and making irritated honking noises. “Gyir says that this is it,” Barrick reported at last.

  “This is what, exactly?”

  “Greatdeeps. The entrance to the ancient mine.” Barrick closed his eyes for a moment, listening to that silent voice. “He says we must hold hands, because to get separated here might be worse than death.”

  “A cheery thought,” said Vansen as lightly as he could, but his own heart was like a stone. They continued up the great staircase, which seemed wider than the Lantern Broad in Tessis. At the top yawned a great doorway, high as a many-storied house. Compared to the twilight in the valley and on the stairs, its interior was dark as night.

  “There will be a fight here, mark my words,” Vansen whispered to Barrick. It felt strangely natural to hold the boy’s hand, as though this topsy-turvy land had given him back one of his younger brothers. “No creature would let itself be driven into that without a struggle.”

  But there was no struggle, or at least not much of one. As the prisoners bunched in the doorway, some moaning and slumping to the ground, some actively trying to turn back, the Longskulls charged. They had been prepared, and now they leaped up the stairs and onto the landing as a unified force, shoving, kicking, poking, and even biting until all those who could do so clambered to their feet and staggered through the door. Many were trampled, and as Vansen let himself and Barrick be drawn into the darkness, he wondered if in the long run those lying bloody and crushed on the top step might not be the lucky ones.

  “Should we have tried to get away?” Barrick whispered. “Before they shoved us in here?”

  “No, not unless your Gyir says we must. We do not know what is inside, but we might find a better chance for escape later on.” Vansen wished he believed that himself.

  They allowed themselves to be dragged along in the river of captive creatures, out of the initial darkness into sloping, timbered tunnels lit with torches, then down, down into the heart of the mountain.

  He did not notice it at first, but after a short time of trudging through the dank, hot corridors Vansen began to realize that some of the other prisoners were disappearing. The group in which they traveled was perhaps half the size now that it had been when they had first been driven through the great doors, and as he watched he saw two of the Longskulls roughly separate a group of perhaps a dozen captives—it was hard to tell in the flickering shadows, because the prisoners were of so many odd sizes and shapes—and drive them away down a cross corridor. He whispered this to Barrick, and saw the prince’s eyes widen in alarm.

  “Is that because they mean something different for us? To kill us instead of making us slaves?”

  “I think it’s more likely that they haven’t seen many of our kind before,” Vansen reassured him. “These Longskull things don’t seem the types to act without orders. They may want someone to tell them where we should be put.” He didn’t really want to talk—it was hard enough trying to keep some idea in his mind of what turns they’d taken, where they might be in relation to the original doorway. If there was a chance later for escape, he did not want to run blindly.

  Soon there were only a few prisoners left beside themselves, a more or less manlike creature with wings like a dragonfly, taller than Vansen although much more slender, a pair of goblins with bright red skin, and one of the wizened mock-Funderlings—a Drow. This last walked just in front of Vansen, which gave him more chance to look at it the little manlike creature than he might have wanted: it had a huge, lopsided head, a stumpy body, and hands that were almost twice as big as Vansen’s, although the creature itself was far less than half his size.

  The remaining Longskulls hurried the last prisoners along. Vansen had to trot, no easy feat with heavy shackles on his wrists, and also to help the prince when the boy stumbled, which was often. The pain in the prince’s withered arm from the restraints must be great, Vansen knew, although Barrick refused to mention it: it took no physician’s eye to see the boy’s pale skin, his creased, wincing eyes, or to interpret the silence that had fallen over him in the last hour.

  They reached a wide place in the corridor where several other passages branched out. The guards forced them down one of those branches, and within just a few more paces they emerged into a large open space where they stopped before another massive doorway, this one guarded by lowering apelike things that might have been Followers, but grown to the size of men and dressed in dusty, mismatched bits of armor. The Longskulls gabbled at these sentries, then stepped forward and used their spears to tap on the door, which despite their deferential touch made a hollow, brazen clang with each knock. The door slowly swung open and the quietly honking guards shoved the prisoners inside.

  Behind the door lay the most demented place Vansen had ever seen, a cavern as large as the interior of the Trigon Temple in Southmarch, but furnished by a madman. Broken bits and pieces of the
statues that had once lined the valley stood all around the immense space—here half a warrior crouching in the middle of the cracked floor, there a single granite hand the size of a donkey-cart. Moss and little threadlike vines grew patchily on the sculptures, and in many places on the rough-hewn walls and floor as well, and the air was damp with mist from an actual waterfall that poured from a hole high on one side of the cavern and followed a splashing course downward over stone blocks to fill a great pool that took up half of the vast room.

  Across the pool from the doorway stood another huge statue of a headless, seated warrior, tall as a castle wall. Enthroned on this stone warrior’s lap, with various creatures kneeling or lying at his feet like a living carpet, sat the biggest man—the biggest living thing—Vansen had ever seen. Two, no, three times the height of a normal man he loomed, massive and muscular as a blacksmith, and if it had not been so absolutely clear that this monstrosity was alive, Vansen would never for an instant have believed him anything but a statue. His hair was curly and hung to his shoulders, his beard to his waist, and he was as beautiful as any of the stone gods’ statues, as if he too had been carved by some master sculptor, except that one side of his gigantic face was a crumpled ruin, one eye gone and the skin of cheek and forehead a puckered crater in which his disarranged teeth could be seen like loose pearls in a jewelry box.

  Somewhere deep beneath them, something boomed like a monstrous drumbeat, a concussion that punched at Vansen’s ears and made the entire rocky chamber shudder ever so briefly, but no one in the room even seemed to notice.