(Shadowmarch #2) Shadowplay

by Tad Williams

  After a while he stopped looking into the houses.

  As he came to the center of town the streets began to fill with people, although these too moved like weary swimmers, staring into the bruised gray sky with unseeing eyes. Blind sleepers drove carts piled with shrouded bundles, and even the horses that drew the wagons slept, long jaws grinding as they chewed at nothing. The crowds slowly drifted to and fro like fish at the bottom of a winter lake, standing rapt before spectacles they could not see, buying things they could not taste or use. Slumbering musicians played dust-caked instruments, making unheard melodies, while sleeping clowns danced slow as snowmelt and did halting somersaults in the dirt, coming up smeared and draggled.

  As he stared around him in fearful wonder, a young woman wandered toward him out of the crowd. She was pretty, or should have been. Her face was bloodlessly pale, with only the barest sliver of her eyes visible under her long lashes, but her mouth sagged like an idiot’s, though she tried to curl her lips in a fetching smile. She lifted her hand to him, offering him a withered flower, a reddish streak running the length of the white petals like a vein of blood. Asphodel, he remembered, the god’s flower, although he did not know what god he meant.

  Am I fair? she asked. Her lips did not seem to move enough for him to hear her voice so clearly.

  Yes, he said, trying to be kind. He could see that she had been fair once, and might be again, in some other place, under some bolder light.

  You are sweet. Here, have my flower. She squeezed her lips together as if to keep them from trembling. It is very long since I have spoken to someone like you. It is lonely here.

  Pitying her, he reached out his hand, but just before his fingers closed on the waxy stem he remembered another young woman, high and fair, to whom he owed something. His hand paused, and then he remembered what someone had told him so long ago: Accept no gift!

  I cannot, he said. I am sorry.

  Her face changed then, from that of a mortal woman into something older and much more hungry. Her body twisted and lengthened into a feral shape with achingly scrawny limbs and reaching claws. It snapped and fluttered before him like a scorched insect, writhed until his eyes blurred watching it, then smeared away into the twilight, leaving nothing behind but a thin shriek of misery and rage.

  Shaken and sad, he walked on.

  On the outskirts of the city, among the midden heaps and boneyards, where a few ragged sleepers huddled around flickering, smoky fires, he at last found the one he had glimpsed across the river, although that now seemed an entire lifetime ago. This sleeper was an old man, with hands that had been large and powerful now knotted with age, and shoulders that had been wide and a back that had been straight now coarsely bent, so that he had the shape of a bird huddling in its own feathers against the cold. Ferras Vansen could see the pale, slow shimmer of the fires through the man’s substance, as if the old fellow were no more tangible than mist.

  Father, he said, but he was suddenly unsure. Tati, he asked like a child, is it really you? Do you know me?

  The old man looked at him, or at least turned blind eyes in the direction of the questions. His face was not merely translucent, it shifted like oil on rippling water.

  I am no one. How could I know you?

  No. You are Pedar Vansen. I am your son, Ferras.

  The old man shook his head. No. I am Perinos Eio, the great planet. I died and lay four days in a stone casket surrounded by darkness and distant stars. Then I awoke again into the light of what is true. He sighed and a tear escaped his tight-shut eye. But I have forgotten it all again, and now I am lost…

  You died in your own bed, Tati. I didn’t have the chance to say farewell. For a moment Ferras Vansen could feel tears stinging painfully in his own eyes, as if in this place to cry was to pierce the flesh and let out blood, not water. There was no stone coffin. We were poor people, and I did not come back in time to pay for even a wooden box, although I would have done so gladly. You were buried in a winding sheet. He hung his head. I am sorry, Tati. I was far away…

  Help me. The old man reached out a hand, but where it touched him it was no more substantial than a tongue of fog, cool and slightly damp. Help me to find my way back, to learn the answers again so that I can pass on.

  Anything. And in that moment, he meant it. This was a man whose impossible needs had pressed down on Ferras Vansen’s childhood like the lid of the stone coffin he was prattling about, but the love was still stronger than any fear, any comfort. To do what his Tati asked he would break even those fading commandments, Eat no food, Accept no gifts, Remember your name! He would flaunt the gods themselves before their thrones.

  But the gods are asleep, too, he remembered, or thought he did. Who told me that?

  Come, he told the faded ghost of his father. Come. I’ll take you where you need to go.

  Beyond the city they passed into a shadowy wood and then walked down a hillside covered with black ivy and gray birches into a silent valley. They crossed a blood-colored river at the bottom of the valley on rocks that stood up through the flood like teeth. They walked on, the sky as bleak as stone, the light never brighter than a faint reddish glow in the far west, like a bloodstain that would not wash out of an old shirt.

  Time passed, or would have in a different place. Vansen’s father sang as he walked, senseless ritual ditties about dividing his body in pieces, endless loving verses that described the divestiture of flesh and memory, but otherwise the old man said little and seemed to recall nothing of his former life. There were moments Vansen thought he had been terribly wrong, that he had seized some old man who was not his father, but then an angle of his companion’s insubstantial face, an expression flitting across the thin mouth like a fish in a shallow pool, would convince him he had been right after all.

  They crossed four more streams, one of moving ice, one of water that boiled and bubbled with heat, one so full of green growing things that it seemed motionless, although the streambed squirmed between the roots with tiny, chittering, splashing shapes, and last a torrent of which they could see nothing but moving fog in a deep crevasse, although they heard sounds coming up from it that no fog ever made, and across which they had to leap, Vansen clutching at the misty shape that marked where the old man’s hand should have been.

  Eventually all distinctions became one, each step the same step, each song the old man sang the same song. Shadows approached them, some of them fearful to look at, but Vansen told them his name and the old man’s name and they retreated into the twilight once more. Other times the shadows came in fairer shapes with offers of hospitality—sumptuous meals, soft beds, or even more intimate comforts—but Vansen learned to refuse these just as firmly, and those shapes retreated, too.

  Finally they came to a wide, empty land where the dust blew always and the wind was fierce, a place where they could walk no faster than a dying man could crawl. At times in that place his father faltered and Vansen had to pull him along through the stinging, smothering dust. Once, when even the twilight was blotted out by thick clouds and they trudged forward in complete darkness, the old man fell and could not get up. As he lay, croaking a song about white bracelets and hearts of smoke, Ferras Vansen crouched beside him in despair. He knew that he could rise and walk away and the old man would not see him go, would never even realize he was gone. Instead he staggered to his feet, then bent and lifted the old man onto his back. Pedar Vansen’s body had no more substance than a woman’s veil, but somehow he was also heavier than a great stone, and Vansen could walk only a few steps each time before he had to stop to catch his breath.

  At last the dust storms subsided. They were still in the empty land, the gray expanses, but for the first time he saw something on the horizon other than more nothingness. It was a house—a hut, really, a crude thing made of sticks and unworked stones, its crevices mortared with what looked like centuries of dust, so it seemed the mound of some tremendous and slovenly insect. A man stood in front of it, leaning on his long staf
f like one of the Kertish herders who had sometimes come to live in Ferras Vansen’s dales when driven out by a tribal feud back home.

  There! It was a triumphant moment, overshadowing even the sight of another being in this endless, dust-choked void. He had remembered something new: I am Ferras Vansen—a man of the dales.

  The stranger wore the kind of ragged cloth around his belly that the ancients had worn, but was otherwise without ornament. His long beard was gray as cobweb beside his mouth, but dust had turned the rest of it yellow. He did not move but only watched them approach, and Vansen and his father’s ghost had almost reached him before Ferras Vansen realized this bearded apparition was the first being he had seen in these lands for as long as he could remember whose eyes were open—the first who was not asleep.

  Who are you? Vansen said to him. Or is it forbidden to ask?

  The man’s eyes seemed bright as stars beneath his bristling brows. He smiled, but there was no kindness in it, or malice either. You stand before the last river, but the place you wish to go does not exist in this Age of Sleep. You must cross instead to another side, one in which those great ones you wish to see are still in their houses to be seen.

  I don’t understand, Vansen told the bearded man. As they spoke, his father sat down in the dust and began singing to himself.

  You do not need to understand. You need only do what you must. Whether you come through again afterward is in the hands of greater powers than mine. The dusty old man shifted his bare feet, the spread, leathery toes of someone who had never worn shoes. Unlike Vansen’s father, he was as real as could be—Ferras Vansen could see every inch of his coppery skin with great clarity, every scar, every hair.

  You will not tell me who you are, Master?

  The bearded man shook his head. Not a master—certainly not yours. A shape, an idea, perhaps even a word. That is all. Now step through the door. You will find water there. Both of you must wash yourselves.

  And without knowing how it happened, Ferras Vansen found himself on the inside of the small wooden hut, but here for the first time they had left the twilight behind: what he could see through the cracks in the walls was velvet black sky and the gleam of stars. He stepped closer to the walls and peered through one of the openings. The entire hut was surrounded by stars, innumerable white sparks flickering like the candles of all the gods in heaven—stars above, beside, and even below them, as though the hut floated untethered through the night sky. Dizzied by the enthralling, terrifying view, he turned to see his father already washing himself with the water from a simple wooden tub as crude as the hut itself.

  Vansen joined him, and for long moments lost himself in the glory of water running down his skin. He had forgotten he even had a body, and this was a wonderful way to be reminded. Even his father’s phantom, no more substantial than if he were made of spiderwebs, seemed to have come close to something like happiness.

  I should have come home, Vansen said. I feared you, Tati. I feared your suffering. And I hated you, at least a little. Because you did not make it easy for me, when you could have.

  His father broke off his singing and for a long time did not say anything. He stood up straight and let the water slide off him like rain dripping down a window.

  I was a prisoner of my own understanding, Pedar Vansen said at last. At least that is what I imagine. In truth, I cannot remember—it is all gone, drifted away like smoke…

  And then, before Vansen could hear any more of these words that came to him like food to a starving man, they were out of the hut again, returned to the twilight and dust. The bearded man stood leaning on his long staff, a length of wood as gnarled and knobbed as the ancient man himself. There, the bearded man said, pointing at a pile of dull, red-orange stones lying in the dust. Crumble them and rub yourself with it so you may cross into the last sunset light and still retain something of yourself. Both of you. There is no difference now between living and dead in this house—all are subject to the same laws.

  Vansen rubbed the red rocks together, scraping them into blood-colored powder, rubbing that powder onto his clean skin. Instead of rubbing dirt onto himself, it seemed instead as though he rubbed himself with light. When he finished, he gleamed, and even his father’s phantom shimmered beneath its layer of dust and seemed more substantial.

  This ocher gives life to the unloving, said the old, bearded man. And it protects the living from the dead in the place you go to now, who would otherwise cover you like flies on honey. Go.

  What waits for us? Vansen called back to the ancient as he and his father walked forward.

  What has always waited for you. What always will wait for you and for me, and for everything. The end of all.

  And then the bearded man was gone, lost in the dust which had begun to swirl around them once more, billowing, choking. Vansen held in his breath, then a time came when he could not hold it any longer. He breathed and the river of dust entered him. He became the dust. He passed through.

  And now they entered the true city, the metropolis beside which the City of Sleepers was no more than a village.

  The oracles say that this greatest and most awful of habitations fills the earth from pole to pole, so that everywhere living men walk, beneath their feet lie the streets of the City of the Red Sun. Nobody laughs in that city, the oracles also claim, and nobody cries except in thin, almost silent sobs, or sings above a whisper.

  As Ferras Vansen and his father entered, a hush lay upon the place like dust lay in the streets. The sleepers all had open eyes, and every face stared hopelessly into eternity. Each step forward felt as though he lifted a hundredweight of stone. Each street seemed as bleak and empty and comfortless as the one before.

  Always, though, he and his father’s shade moved toward the great, dark lodestone at the heart of the city, the palace of the Earthlord himself. Thousands of other phantoms moved with them toward the mighty black gate, shadow-people of every kind and every shape. Few wore more than rags, and many were naked, but even in their nakedness some were clothed in feathers or dully gleaming scales, so that they did not look quite like people. Vansen and his father were swept along in this silent crowd like bits of bark on a slow-moving river, the gate and the wall and the palace growing always larger before them.

  Ferras Vansen looked at his father, who of all the dead throng still had closed eyes, and saw that although the old man’s features were still indistinct as smoke, his father had retained something of the glow of the ocher, a red gleam like fire reflected on silver. Then he saw that the other spirits had it too, and that the glow did not come from the dead themselves but from the great palace, whose every window spilled sunset-red light.

  The House of the Ultimate West, his father whispered, but as though he recited a prayer instead of explaining something. Raven’s Nest. The Castle of Everything-Falls-Apart. The Great Pine Tree…

  But first, someone whispered, we must pass the Gate of the Pig. These words traveled through the crowd like a fire through dry grass, the whisper becoming a hissing murmur. The Gate. The Gate. They were groaning the words, some of them, although one laughed uproariously as he said it over and over, as though it were the first jest ever to be told in the grim, blood-colored city. After a while his laugh turned to a choked sob. The Pig’s snout will sniff out every lie, every cheat, and then we will be swallowed down…

  As the voices rose around him the darkness rose too, like a pall of smoke, until Ferras Vansen could see nothing. Even his father’s shade was gone. He was lost in black emptiness, and the voices of the crowding dead had become animal noises, braying, snorting, barking, as if the ghosts of men had become the ghosts of beasts. It was a terrible din, harsh, desperate, and full of terror. He could not help thinking of the farm creatures he had driven to the slaughterer. The darkness seemed infinite, empty but for himself and a choir of horrifying echoes.

  But that is truly me, he thought suddenly. Herding the animals with a switch. Walking down the road to Little Stell. That is a mem
ory of me, of my life.

  I am Ferras Vansen, he told the void. I have a name. I am a living man.

  Something came nearer to him then—he could feel its approach, slow and ominous as a thundercloud. It seemed bigger than the darkness itself, and it stank. It also seemed…amused?

  Living man.

  They were not words, not even thoughts, really, but something larger, like shifts in the weather, but somehow he could understand them. He was in the grip of something so much larger than himself that he could scarcely think. He was beyond fear—he was not significant enough to be fearful.

  At last it spoke, or the weather changed, or the stars revolved in their black firmanent around Ferras Vansen.

  Pass. I will speak for you and He will decide. You will die, or you will live…at least for a little longer.

  And then he was in the midst of the strangest place yet—a festive hall that was also a monstrous pit, a solemnly beautiful throne room whose ceiling was the vault of black and endless night. It was the crumbling root-raddled ground, a silver fantasy of towers, the slow-beating heart of all sad music, it was all those things and none of those things. He was alone, his father’s phantom gone, but a million shadows swirled around the great throne at the center, on which sat the greatest shadow of all.

  The voice he had heard before spoke to him.

  The master of this place says you do not belong in his dream.

  I am Ferras Vansen, he said humbly. Of course he did not belong, here at the end of all things. I am a living man. I only wanted to help my father.