by Tad Williams
“It does not matter,” Chert moaned. “I have lost my family and I can’t find them. Soon the soldiers will be everywhere. There’s nothing we can do, Chaven.”
“Perhaps.” For the first time in a while, the physician seemed his old, confident self. “But that does not mean I will give in to that traitorous thief Okros without a fight.” Chaven turned to the other Funderlings who were beginning to gather around them. “Some of you men must have weapons, or at least picks and stone-axes. Go get them. We’ll capture the one lurking in the Council Chamber first, then make him tell us where his fellows are.”
So now the Funderlings were to follow a paunchy scholar into battle against Hendon Tolly and all the giant soldiers of Southmarch? If Chert had not been so close to weeping, he might even have enjoyed the bleak joke of it, but all he could think was that his people’s world was ending and it was mostly his fault.
“By all the oracles, it is bitter out here!” Merolanna said for perhaps the fifth or sixth time. “I should have brought more furs. Is there nothing in this boat to keep an old woman from freezing to death?”
The young Skimmer Rafe didn’t even look up from his oars. “It’s not a pleasure barge, is it? Fishing boat, that’s what it is. Might be a sealskin in that bag, still.”
The duchess waited for Sister Utta to volunteer her services; then, when Utta did no such thing, she began with evident reluctance to poke among the articles wedged under the bench, sighing loudly. Utta, who was determined not be moved, looked away.
She returned to her inspection of Rafe, their boatman and (at least as long as they were on the water) their guide in unfamiliar territory. It was not just the long Skimmer arms that marked him out, although those were very much in evidence as he plied the oars against the choppy swells of Brenn’s Bay. Some of the other differences were hidden now that he had put on a thin shirt, seemingly more as a sop to convention than as actual protection against the chill bay winds: like his arms, his neck seemed longer than with most folk, and it made a bit of a hump where it joined his back between the shoulder blades.
His head seemed canted forward, too, as if the point of connection was higher on the back of the skull, but most interesting and disturbing of all was the confirmation of what Utta had thought only a rumor, but now knew as truth: Rafe’s fingers and toes were webbed, although most of the time it did not show.
Could all the childhood stories be true, then? Were the Skimmers a different race entirely, like the Rooftoppers surely must be?
“What do your people say?” Utta asked him suddenly, then realized she was speaking thoughts aloud that he couldn’t possibly understand. “About where they came from, I mean?”
He looked up at her, wrinkling the skin of his brow in distrust. “Why do you ask?”
“I am curious, I suppose. I grew up in the Vuttish Isles, and none of your folk still live there, although there are stories that they did…”
“Stories?” he said bitterly. “I’ll trow there were.”
“What do you mean?”
“That were all ours once, your Vuttland.”
“It was?”
He snorted. “Wasn’t it? Didn’t our kings rule there, with the Great Moot? Didn’t the Golden Shoal come to rest there, at the rock of Egye-Var?”
She had no idea what he was talking about. “Then why did they leave?”
“Should ask T’chayan Redhand, shouldn’t you?”
“Who is that?”
His eyes widened. He was not pretending—he was truly astonished. “Don’t know T’chayan the Killer? The man who murdered most all my kind in the islands, women and spawn, too, drove our people out of our home and hunted us wherever we went with his dogs and his arrows?”
She blinked, surprised. “Do you mean King Tane the White?” Utta was better read than most of her fellow Vuttlanders, especially because she had gone away, first to the women’s remove at Connord, then to the Eastmarch convent to complete her Zorian novitiate. In fact, she knew more of history than most men, but what the Skimmer youth said was new to her. “Tane is not so well known to us now. I may have heard his name once or twice when I was a girl. When Connord conquered the isles and converted the Vuttish Isles to the Trigonate faith, much of our old history was lost.”
“Your people do not remember T’chayan Redhand?” The Skimmer youth shook his head in stunned horror. “Sure, you’re lying to tease me, then. Your people don’t repent his bloody deeds, or at least celebrate them?”
“What are the two of you going on about?” demanded Merolanna, poking her head out from the hood she had made of the sealskin.
Sister Utta shook her head. “I’m sorry,” she told Rafe. “Truly, I am. My people have forgotten, I suppose, but that doesn’t mean we should have.”
He shut his mouth with an almost audible snap and refused to talk anymore, or even look at Utta, as though she herself had just returned from the long task of eradicating all memory of the wrongs done to his forebears.
The day was cold and cloudy, with intermittent rain. The fog that lingered in the mainland city seemed weirdly heavy to Utta, like clouds that lay on the ocean instead of hanging in the sky. She could make out a few landmarks jutting through the murk, the market flagpoles and all the temple spires, but the mists made them seem something else, perhaps the skeletal ribs of ancient monsters.
Rafe moved the boat ably through the high waves as they got closer to land; Merolanna alternately clutched the side of the boat and Utta. At times they actually lifted off the benches, then slammed down hard in the next trough. For the first time, Utta wished she had changed back into women’s clothes, since they would have offered more protection for her rapidly bruising fundament.
At last they were through and into the shallows. Rafe grounded the boat on a sandbar. “If you walk up that way, won’t get your feet too wet,” he said.
“Aren’t you coming with us?”
“For one silver urchin? You’ll want a bodyguard or a troop of soldiers, and you won’t get them for one merely urchin, will you? I said I’d bring you here and take you back. Means I’ll sit and wait, not go in ’mongst the Old Ones. Their kind don’t like my kind.”
Utta helped Merolanna out, but despite the duchess’ best efforts, the hems of her long skirts still dragged in the water. “Why don’t they like you?”
“Us?” Rafe laughed. His face changed when he did it, looked both more and less like an ordinary man’s. “Because we stayed behind, didn’t we?”
Utta did not get to ask any more questions because just at that moment Merolanna slipped and fell. As the older woman floundered in the shallow water, Utta struggled to lift her until Rafe jumped lightly out of the boat to help. Together the two of them managed to get the dowager duchess upright again.
“Merciful Zoria, look at me!” Merolanna groaned. “I am soaking wet! I’ll catch my death of something, that’s sure.”
“Here, wait,” said the young Skimmer, then splashed back to the boat. He returned with the sealskin. “Wrap this around you.”
“Thank you,” said Merolanna with a certain amount of ceremony—certainly more than this isolated cove had seen in some time, Utta could not help thinking. “You are very kind.”
“Still not going with you, though.” Rafe waded back to the boat.
“Your Grace, I suspected this was not a good idea before. Now I am certain of it.” Sister Utta was trying her best not to peer at the empty houses on either side of the Port Road because they didn’t really seem empty: the black holes of their windows seemed something more sinister, the eye sockets of skulls or the mouths of dragon caves. Even here on the outskirts of town, where the houses were low and the winds brisk, the fog still hung in cobwebby tendrils and it was hard to see more than a few dozen paces ahead. “I think we should go back to the castle.”
“Do not try to change my mind, Sister. I have come all the way here and I will speak to the fairy folk. They can kill me if they want, but I will at least ask them what becam
e of my son.”
But if they kill you, why would they let me go? Utta did not speak this thought aloud, not out of any desire to spare Merolanna’s feelings, but because in her growing hopelessness, suspended in this foggy dreamworld as if they were ghosts roaming aimlessly in the realms of Kernios, she did not think it would make any difference. Utta knew she had cast her sticks, as the old gambler’s saying went, and now she must shake out her coppers.
They walked slowly up a steep road, Merolanna dripping with every step, into the open, rain-sprinkled cobbles of Blossom Market Square—not a place to buy flowers, but the venerable home of the mainland fish market, whose famous stink had been jestingly memorialized in its name. Other than the still-pungent memories of market days past, the square seemed empty now, the awnings and tents gone, the people all fled to the castle or to cities further south, but Utta could not rid herself of the sense of being watched. If anything, it grew stronger as she walked with the duchess across the open space, so that each step seemed slower and more difficult, as though the mist was getting into her very bones, making them sodden and heavy. It was almost a relief when a figure stepped out of a shadowed arch at the edge of the market and stood waiting for them.
Utta had prepared herself for virtually anything, her imagination fueled by the books in the castle library and the tales of her Vuttish grandmother. She was ready for giants, or monsters, or even beautiful, godlike creatures. She was not as well prepared for an ordinary mortal man in a simple, homespun robe.
“Good afternoon to you,” he said. Utta thought he must be one of the few who had stayed behind, although it seemed impossible he should have come unhurt and unchanged through the Twilight folk’s conquest of the city. She could see now that there was something strange about him, something not quite right, and as he approached she found herself shying back.
“No need to fear me.” He turned and bowed to Merolanna. “You are the duchess, are you not? I have seen you once or twice in the castle after I was released.”
“Released?” said Merolanna. Utta stared—there was something familiar about him, although by most standards he had one of the least noteworthy faces she had ever seen. “Who are you, sir?”
“I was known for many years by the name of Gil, and had no other. Now I am called Kayyin…again. My story might interest you—in fact, it might interest me, too, if I could remember it all—but for now I am only to be your escort. Please, let me take you to her.”
“To whom?” Merolanna asked. Utta was suddenly too fearful to speak. The sun was sinking behind the great seawall and the city was all shadows. “What are you talking about, man?”
“To the mistress of this city. You are commanded to come to her.”
“Commanded?” Merolanna bristled a little.
“Oh, yes, Your Grace. She can command anyone—she is greater than any mere queen.” He stepped nimbly between them and took each woman by an elbow. “Even the gods must fear her. You see, she is kinswoman to death itself.”
“You certainly are an impertinent man,” Merolanna said. “Why do you speak so strangely? How did you come to be here?”
“I speak strangely because I am no man,” he told her. “Nor am I one of the Qar—not anymore, not after I lived so long as one of your kind, forgetting I was anything else. I am unique, I think—no longer one or the other.”
Utta was uncomfortably aware of shapes appearing from the shadows and falling silently into place behind them like an army of cats. She looked back. There were at least three dozen of the tall, slender warriors, eyes gleaming in the depths of their hoods and helmets. Chilled, heart speeding, she said nothing. If Merolanna did not know, let her enjoy her last moments of security.
The duchess certainly seemed to be doing her best to remain ignorant. “Are you not shamed to speak so?” she asked their odd guide. “I must say I do not think very highly of someone who is such thin milk as to say, ‘I am not one or the other’—especially when our two peoples are at war!”
“If you cut out the gills of a fish, Duchess, would you then blame him when he said he did not belong in the water? And yet, he still would not be a man, either.” As they reached the far end of the foggy square their guide stopped and raised his hand. “We are here.”
Before them lay the bulky stone towers of the Council House where the city’s leaders had met, a second seat of power in Southmarch that had on occasion, during times of weak rulers and strong councils, set itself on a nearly equal footing with the throne itself. Its square central tower still loomed above the surrounding buildings, a blocky shape like the chimney of some immense, underground mansion, but the rest of the ancient Council House looked different. It took Utta a moment to realize that what had softened its contours and shadowed its façade was a lattice of woody, dark vines that shrouded most of the building. The vines had not been there the last time she had been in Blossom Market Square, she was certain, but they looked like the product of centuries.
The three dozen or so Qar walking silently behind them had now grown to hundreds, a true army, which filled the square on either side of them, a forest of dimly glittering eyes and pale, hostile faces. Some did not even come close to resembling mortal men. Utta made the sign of the Three and fought against an urge to pull away from their guide and run. She turned to whisper something to the duchess, but she could see by Merolanna’s face that the older woman already knew what was happening and had only been pretending she didn’t. It was not obliviousness, but a sort of bravery.
More Qar stepped out in front of them, leaving only a narrow aisle between their ranks, leading to the steps of the Council House.
Zoria, forgive me for my selfish thoughts and my pride. Utta put her head down, then lifted it as proudly as she could, like a prisoner going to the gallows. They climbed the wide stairs behind the man who did not know what he was.
It took a moment for her eyes to make sense of the gloom inside the main hall, and when she did she was surprised to see how many of the Twilight folk were here, too: they truly were quiet as cats, these Qar, as they seemed to call themselves. In fact, it was almost exactly like disturbing some congregation of alley-lurkers: the faces swung up, oddly shining eyes fixed on the newcomers, but the faces showed nothing. Some of them were so disturbing to look at that she could not bear to see them for more than an instant. When one of them curled a lip and snarled at her, showing teeth sharp as needles, Utta had to stop, unable to walk for fear she would stumble and fall.
“Just a little farther,” said Kayyin kindly, taking her arm again. “She waits right there—can you see her? She is beautiful, isn’t she?”
Utta let herself be led forward to the empty center of the room, which contained only one unprepossessing chair and two figures, one sitting, one standing. The one standing behind the chair was female, dressed in plain robes, but her eyes gleamed like fogged mirrors.
The woman in the chair was less obviously unusual, except for her size. She appeared to be as tall as a good-sized man, although achingly thin, but the spikiness of her dark, unreflecting armor made it hard to gauge anything to a certainty. She had the single most unfeeling face Utta had ever seen, one that made the famously stern statue of Kernios in Market Square seem like a child’s favorite uncle. Her high, slitted eyes and her wide, pale-lipped mouth might have been carved from stone. Utta felt her legs begin to tremble again. What had the odd man called her—Death’s kinswoman? Merciful Zoria and all the gods of heaven, she looks like Death iself!
Merolanna too seemed to have lost her courage: they both had to be urged forward by Kayyin, each step heavier than the last, until at last they both slumped to their knees a few paces from the foot of the throne.
“This is Duchess Merolanna Eddon, a member of the royal family of Southmarch,” Kayyin said as if he were the herald at a court ball. If he truly had lived in the castle once, Utta decided, it was not surprising that he knew Merolanna’s name. But then he added, “And this is Utta Fornsdodir, a Zorian sister. They wish a
n audience with you, Lady Yasammez.”
The woman in black armor looked slowly from Merolanna to Utta, her stare like the touch of an icy finger. A moment later she turned away as if the women were no more substantial than air. “Your japes bring me no pleasure, Kayyin.” Her voice was as chill as her gaze; she spoke with a strange, archaic lilt. “Take them away.” She spread her long white fingers, said something in a low mutter, then spoke aloud again in a language Utta and Merolanna could understand. “Kill them.”
“Hold a moment!” Merolanna’s voice trembled, but the duchess clambered up onto her feet even as Utta began to pray, certain that her last moments were upon her. “I have come to you not as an enemy, but as a mother—a mother wronged. I come to you seeking a boon and you would kill me?”
Yasammez stared at her, a black, unreadable stare. “But I am no mother,” the fairy woman said. “Not anymore. What seek you?”
“My child. My son. I am told he was taken by the Twilight…by the Qar. Your people. I wish to know what happened to him.” She gained strength as she spoke. Utta could not help admiring her: whatever her other foibles, Merolanna was no coward.
“Do you hear?” said Kayyin suddenly. “She is appealing to you as one woman to another. As one parent to another.” There was something oddly barbed in his tone. “Surely you will not harden your heart to her—will you, Mother?”
Yasammez shot him a look of venom unlike anything Utta had ever seen. If it had been directed at her, she felt sure she would have shriveled and burned like a dry leaf fallen into a fire. A stream of the sharp-edged yet strangely fluid speech rushed out of the woman in the black armor. Kayyin smiled, but it was the miserable smile of someone who had, with great effort, cut off his own nose to spite his face.
Death’s kinswoman swiveled around to stare at Utta and Merolanna—this time, Utta could not meet her fierce gaze. “You come to me on a day when I have learned of the death of my treasured Gyir, when I have felt him die—the one who should have been my son instead of this changeling traitor. And with Gyir the Storm Lantern dead, the Pact of the Glass must be ended, because the Glass itself will never reach the House of the People.” The armored woman slammed her hand down on the arm of the rough chair and the wood snapped into flinders, but she did not seem to notice. “I will now wage war again on your people until the place you call Southmarch is mine, and if I must kill every sunlander man, woman, and child within its walls, I will do so without a qualm.” She stared again. Her anger faded and her expression hardened as though ice covered it. “It could be, though, that you will be more use to me as messengers, so I will not kill you yet. But speak no more to me of your child, sunlander bitch. I could not care if my people stole an entire litter of human whelps from you.” She waved. Several guards stepped forward and took possession of Utta and Merolanna, although the duchess seemed to have fainted. Utta could make no sense out of what was happening, only that they had stumbled into something more dreadful than her worst fears.
