by Tad Williams
Instead, the individual who entered the prison chamber was of ordinary man-size, wearing a hooded robe so black that the light of the torches seemed to fall into it and die, as if someone had taken a knife to the fabric of what was visible and simply cut out a piece. Hands so fleshless they seemed nothing but bone, sinew, and skin pulled back his hood, revealing a shaved head and a face as gaunt as a Xandian mummy, nearly every line of his skull visible beneath pearly gray skin that was thin as a lady’s fine silk stocking. He might have been a corpse just beginning to putrefy but for his eyes, which glistened silvery blue-green like twin moons in the depths of his dark sockets.
“My master told me to make sure you were comfortable.” The terrifying stranger’s voice was as expressionless as his face. He did not blink. As far as Barrick could tell, he did not even have eyelids, his gaze as fixed and unchanging as that of a fish. “Comfortable…and secure. But I think with such a one as the Storm Lantern in your company, you should have more private accommodations.” He raised his bony hand and beckoned them. “Follow.”
The brutish guards stepped forward, tiny eyes almost invisible beneath their thick brows, stone clubs lifted menacingly. Barrick tried to rise, but he was trembling uncontrollably and managed it only with Vansen’s help. He shook the soldier off and fell in behind Gyir, who was following the black-robed figure toward the back of the long, high-ceilinged chamber. The stranger moved in a disturbingly graceful glide, as though his feet did not quite touch the floor.
Who is this gray man? Barrick asked, fighting down terror. What is he going to do with us?
Gyir did not turn his head. Do not speak—aloud or otherwise—and do not resist. This is Ueni’ssoh of the Dreamless. He is not a god but he is very old and very powerful. Silence!
Barrick stumbled after Gyir, hemmed in by the shaggy giant Followers. Even with his stomach all but empty the sour stink of their fur made him feel ill. The three prisoners were forced into a narrow stone room that had been carved into the naked rock at the back of the vast prison chamber, closed off from the rest of the cavern by another heavy door with a barred window. This smaller cell was empty except for a single stinking hole in the floor for waste, dark except for the torchlight leaking in through the window in the door. Barrick had to breathe deeply simply to keep down the scream that was building in him.
The gray man appeared in the doorway. For long moments he stared at them in silence.
You have come down in the world, Ueni’ssoh, said Gyir. Once you were mighty among your own people. Now it seems you have become court conjurer for a bandit-lord.
If this was meant to goad or distract the gray man somehow, it failed. His voice remained as bloodless as before. “The master said you were a strange little company, and he spoke truly. Your presence here makes no sense to me. That is something I do not like. You—the young one. Come here. Storm Lantern, if you try to interfere these brutes will kill you.”
Tell him nothing! Gyir’s words flew into Barrick’s head like arrows. Think of other things. Tell nothing!
Ueni’ssoh’s unblinking stare was fixed on Barrick; there seemed nothing else in the narrow cell but those eyes shining like two blue flames. Before he knew it, Barrick had stumbled forward and stood helplessly in front of the gray creature, swaying in the icy heat of that mortal glare. He could feel the Dreamless plucking and prying at his deepest thoughts as if those long, cadaverous fingers had opened his skull like a jewel box.
No! He shut his eyes tight. Think of something else, he told himself desperately. Anything! He tried to imagine nothingness, true nothingness, but the featureless white that he summoned gradually took on shape, until it became snow in the garden outside his chamber in the residence at Southmarch—a view he had seen countless times. Barrick Eddon could feel the gray man’s interest like a moving ache. He tried desperately to turn his mind somewhere else, struggling to protect himself from this terrible, fearful prying, but the snow in his mind’s eye was all but real now—deep, new snow, mounded against the chimneys and on the skeletal branches of the trees. His own sitting room, chill on an Ondekamene morning despite the fire burning in the hearth behind him. Leaning on his good arm, staring out his window…alone? No, not alone…
“What are you looking at, redling?”
“Ravens. They’re comical. That one’s stolen something from the kitchen, see? And the other’s trying to get it from him.”
“They’re hungry. That’s not comical.” She stepped up beside him, then, her golden hair like a sudden appearance of the sun. “We should feed them.”
“Feed the ravens?” He laughed harshly. “You’re mad, strawhead. What should we do after that, go out into the hills and feed the wolves? Even if we took them the whole of Bronze’s litter, the wolves would be hungry again tomorrow.” He pretended to consider. “But perhaps there might be enough of those whelps to feed the ravens…”
Briony hit him—not hard—and scooped the puppy up off the bed. “Did you hear that, Nelli? Did you hear what he said about you and your brothers and sisters? Isn’t he a cruel monster?”
He turned and looked at her then, really looked at her. The light in her eyes was magical. Sometimes he felt as though she were the only person beside himself in the great castle that was truly alive. “Mad,” he said, and let himself smile. “See? Talking to dogs. Mad as can be.”
“It’s not me who’s mad, Barrick Eddon. It’s you. Now stop this nonsense about snow and ravens. Tell me what I want to know.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Look at me,” she said, but she didn’t sound quite like herself any more. “Tell me why you are here.”
“Why…? I don’t understand you.”
“You understand—you do. Don’t waste my time. Why are you here?”
He felt his breath catch in his chest. That’s not…Briony wouldn’t…!
A cold wave of surprise and fear suddenly washed over him and he found himself staring into the coldly gleaming eyes of Ueni’ssoh once more.
A tiny smile curled the slate-colored lips. “So. Stronger than I would have guessed, and with some…interesting flavors. What about the other sunlander? Might he prove a little less stubborn?”
The gray man abruptly swiveled to look at Gyir, as if he felt some movement from his direction. “No, I will not strive with you, Storm Lantern—not yet. I will enjoy that too much, and I like to anticipate my pleasures.” The cadaverous face turned to Ferras Vansen and Barrick felt himself abruptly released, as if a powerful hand had let go of the nape of his neck. He slumped helplessly to his knees as Vansen trudged past him and then stopped before the black-robed man like an obedient servant.
After staring at the guardsman for several heartbeats, Ueni’ssoh raised his hand. Vansen swayed and crumpled to the floor.
“Interesting,” Ueni’ssoh said, showing long, narrow teeth as gray as his skin. “You both shield yourself with the thought of the same female. I shall ponder on this.” He turned and glided out of the low-ceilinged chamber, followed by the bestial guards. The door slammed, plunging the room into almost complete darkness as the bolt rattled home.
What will they do with us? Barrick asked Gyir, but the faceless warrior did not answer him. “What’s going to happen?” Barrick finally said aloud. “Are…are they going to kill us?”
“Even if they keep us alive,” Vansen said grimly, “I doubt we’ll like it much.”
I said you two should be silent and I meant it. Gyir’s anger blew into Barrick’s head like a winter wind. We are in terrible danger and every word you speak aloud is a risk.
But you won’t talk to me! Barrick knew it sounded petty, but he didn’t care. What had happened to the Barrick Eddon of a few days ago, when he had not cared whether he was alive or dead? You just sit there.
I am not being silent out of some ill humor, Gyir told him. I am…testing myself. And thinking.
What does that mean?
Stop. Gyir closed his eyes. Let me be alone with my t
houghts, boy. Otherwise, the lives of far more than we three may be forfeit.
Miserable and terrified, with no room to pace, Barrick could only sit and breathe in the dreadful, stretching silence.
Prince Barrick had fallen asleep at last, for which Vansen was grateful. Gyir stirred and then, in one smoothly nimble motion, rose to his feet—impressive, considering he had been sitting on the hard stone for hours.
Are they just older than us, these fairies, and schooled in different ways? Vansen wondered. Is it all tricks of magic they’ve learned? Or are they truly stronger and better than we are in everything? He would never be able to forget the way the Twilight People had slashed through his men at Kolkan’s Field like wolves through pampered house dogs.
Gyir moved to the door of the cell and stood close to the grille, looking out into the larger prison room beyond.
Is someone coming? Vansen was beginning to feel disturbingly comfortable with this unspeaking speech.
The fairy lifted his pale hand. Quiet.
Rebuked, Vansen clambered to his feet to see for himself, but Gyir waved him back. The fairy was doing more than observing, Vansen realized: Gyir had an expression of fierce concentration in his narrowed eyes, and, as the torchlight from the door grille moved across the fairy’s face Vansen could even see veins bulging at the sides of the Storm Lantern’s ivory brow.
Ferras Vansen watched as the fairy looked from one side of the chamber to the other. Gyir’s gaze lit on one of the larger, more human-looking prisoners, manlike but shaggy and yellow as a buttercup, with long, splay-toed feet and a starry snout like a burrowing mole. The creature raised its head and looked around with nothing more than slow curiosity at first, but then began to twitch as though beset by flying insects. It grabbed at its ears as if to shut out some loud noise, then staggered upright and lurched toward Gyir and the bronze door.
The yellow fairy stopped, its flowerlike muzzle only inches from the grille, its eyes wide. Gyir lifted a hand and its eyes fell shut, then he extended his long fingers through the bars until he could touch the creature lightly on the forehead, then he closed his own eyes.
For long moments they stood that way, unmoving, as if sharing some ancient ritual. At last the yellow fairy took an awkward step backward, shook its head, then turned and walked away without a backward glance. Gyir stood watching it for a moment before he swayed and collapsed.
Ferras Vansen caught the fairy as he fell, grunting at the weight, although Gyir was lighter than his size would have suggested. As he lowered the Storm Lantern to the cell floor Vansen could not help noticing the fairy’s smell, an odd mixture of ocean tang, leather, and cloying, flowery scents.
Fear not—I will survive. There was a dry edge to Gyir’s thoughts which Vansen recognized as amusement. Just let me rest.
What did you do?
Must rest. The fairy did not even lay his head on his arm—the red eyes simply shut.
Prince Barrick had awakened by the time Gyir sat up again, rubbing his head as though it ached. “What have you two done?” the boy demanded of Vansen. “He won’t tell me.” Vansen had no doubt the prince was speaking aloud to irritate Gyir, and couldn’t help wondering if the boy’s father had ever simply taken Barrick over his knee and given him a good thrashing.
“I couldn’t tell you, Highness, because I didn’t understand it myself.”
I have asked several times for silence. I will not ask again. Gyir’s brow wrinkled, which was his way of frowning. Listen. Outside their tiny cell Vansen could hear the growling of the guards and the moans and shrills of protesting prisoners. They are harrying the next gang out to work and I must…narrow my thoughts. Deepen them. I am going to look through the eyes of one of them—the yellow one that Captain Vansen saw. I will see what he does, where he goes, and discover something of this place.
Vansen was puzzled. But I thought you were…crippled, you said. By what those Followers did to you.
I have recovered, somewhat. In fact, I think my recovery was caused, or at least hastened, by being in the presence of Jikuyin, battered by his voice. It would be nice to think that in capturing and imprisoning us, he has unwittingly given me back something of myself. He paused, clearly listening to something Barrick was saying.
I do not know if I have the strength, Gyir said at last. Then: Very well, you may be right. I will try. But if I grow too weak, I will cut the rope, as it were, and let the two of you fall away rather than give up my own connection.
What does that mean? Try what? Vansen asked, careful not to speak aloud again.
The young prince wants me to let you both see what I see through the eyes of the prisoner.
Can you really do that?
The fairy sat down with his back against the door, then beckoned Vansen and the prince toward him. Take my hands and close your eyes, shut out all distraction. He extended one long hand toward Vansen and the other toward Barrick, palms up, white fingers curled like the petals of water flowers. Go—take it.
Vansen did and was bemused to find nothing different, other than the obviously strange situation of holding the fairy’s chill, smooth hand.
No, you must shut out distraction. If you look around, if you squirm, if you even think too much, you make it more difficult for me to hold everything in my thoughts.
Vansen did his best to comply. At first he saw nothing except the floating sparks that usually populated the darkness behind closed lids. Then one of the sparks began to grow, its glow swelling, until it pushed out the blackness and filled his mind’s eye.
It was more than just sight, though, he realized as the great door swung open before him and he followed the small, hairy back of another prisoner out into the passageway. He thought he could even feel something of the yellow creature’s thoughts, although they were as strange to him as trying to hear meaning in birdsong. The thing he was inhabiting longed helplessly for home, an ache Vansen understood, but “home” to this creature seemed to mean deep woods and tangling leaves and the silver of snail-tracks undisturbed on a damp forest floor. The thing had a name, too—something like “Praise-Sweet-Lisiya’s-Grace,” as far as Vansen could tell. It was terribly frightened, but had dissolved its fear in a passivity he could not understand, a certainty that nothing would change or even could change, that it could only follow what was before it, from meal to miserable meal and from one command to the next, unless something came at last to change this nightmare, even if that something was death itself.
It was a chilling way to feel, worse still to experience such hopelessness as if it were his own. Vansen did not try to sample any of the river of memories that ran just beneath the slow, awkward thoughts. He wanted only to get out of the creature’s thoughts entirely, as quickly as he could—he hated being in this trapped, pathetic, doomed thing…!
Something wrapped around him, soothing him as a parent would a child. It was Gyir, acting not out of pity, but because Vansen’s discomfort was affecting the fairy’s own composure. Vansen felt a wash of shame and did his best to choke down his discomfort and fear. Just watch, he told himself. Be strong. It’s not me. This thing is not me. But it was more frightening than he would ever have guessed to be trapped in someone else’s body.
The line of prisoners trudged downward through several sloping corridors and once down a flight of spiral steps so long that Vansen feared he would soon be seeing the face of Immon the immortal gatekeeper. In these depths they could better hear the thunderous sounds that had rumbled up to the prisoner chamber. They were not constant, or even regular, but every hundred dragging steps or so a loud thump seemed to rattle the very stone around them.
They passed dozens of the hairy guards and hundreds of other prisoners returning from the depths, most of the groups as queerly mixed as their own, but some more obviously collected for a certain limited task, like the group of short, heavy-muscled creatures with heads sunk deep between their huge shoulders, each one carrying a bronze pick like a spearman marching to war. The most chilling thing
about these squat diggers was not their silence or their faintly luminous, mushroom-colored skin, but the absence of eyes in the crude faces nestling just above their breastbones.
When they reached the bottom of the stairs at last, the guards marched the yellow fairy and his companions through a few more corridors and down one last slope, then through a heavy wooden door. A wheeled cart the size of a large hay wain stood untended in a chamber slightly bigger than the one in which the prisoners were housed, its wheels sunk deep into tracks through what looked like centuries worth of dust. At the far end of the chamber was an open door large enough for the cart to pass through, with only darkness visible behind. At the near end of the room a shaft led straight down, with a system of large pulleys strung above it and ropes cobwebbing down into the measureless depths.
Vansen did his best to understand what he was seeing through the forest-fairy’s eyes, but could make little sense of it. Were they supposed to take something from the door at one end and then lower it down the shaft? Gold? Jewels? Or did the exchange more likely go the other way around, the dirt and rubble from the mine’s digging, source of all this dust, sent aboveground for disposal?
The brutish guards finished herding the rest of the prisoners into the room but did not stop to give directions, if they were even capable of such a thing. Instead, a few of the shaggy, club-wielding creatures stayed behind to guard the prisoners—it was hard to tell exactly how many, since the star-nosed yellow fairy was doing his best to avoid eye contact with any of them—while the rest trooped out of the chamber. Whatever their work might be, the prisoners did not immediately spring to it, and the remaining guards did not seem to expect them to do so. The yellow fairy and his companions waited in attitudes of dull patience, but they did not have to wait long.
