Empire of Grass

by Tad Williams

  And worse, her grandfather had begun to notice her in other ways, ways Derra could not talk about with her mother, who hardly spoke to her at all, or even with Aunt Hyara. And when the old man’s furtive squeezing and pinching and poking began to keep her from sleeping at night because she was terrified he would come to her bed, she decided she would run away from the camp, from the wagons, from her monstrous grandfather and her silent, brooding mother, who acted as though she had lost both children and not just one . . .

  She stopped, startled by a noise from the underground lake. She had been walking nearly aimlessly, adrift in memories, but the sound reminded her that she was down in the underground depths beneath the city of Nakkiga, and discovery would likely mean death. Or worse.

  She folded the glowing sphere called a ni’yo deeper into her hand, until it showed as only a faint red glow in the web of her finger and thumb. Then she stood in silence, listening. She heard a splash. Perhaps only a fish, but it meant she had wandered too close to the shore of the underground lake. As far as she knew, there were no other people in any of the other lakefront dwellings, most of which belonged to rich nobles who only made the long journey out from the heart of the city during festivals. But back in the Enduya clan house, Khimabu, wife of her lover and master Viyeki, must have realized by now that Tzoja had fled. So she could not afford to be noticed even by some gardener or servant preparing for the arrival of a rich master—not by anyone who might mention to masters that he had seen a mortal woman near the lake.

  And what if the splash were something else entirely? Things moved down here in the dark tunnels that even Viyeki avoided talking about, and he was magister of the order that had excavated these deep places.

  She crouched unmoving. With her light-sphere hidden, the only glow came from the strange, shining worms that dangled above the lake on strands of luminous silk. Tzoja had been thinking of the old days, her old life when she had still been called Derra, and for a moment she could imagine the glowing creatures as something else, as stars in the broad sky over lands she had not seen in many years.

  The Thrithings, she thought, and Erkynland, and last in Rimmersgard, with Roskva and the Astalines. Sky as far as I could see in all directions, the mountains so distant they were only shadows . . .

  The splash came again, making her heart speed, but now she was almost certain a sound so small must come from a fish or a frog; she felt her fear ease. Tzoja knew she might have to start thinking about catching fish soon; the food she had brought from the clan-house pantry would not last too much longer. She had eked out her supplies as carefully as she could, though it was difficult to know how much time was passing in a dark house in a cavern far beneath the ground, a place where she dared not even light a fire for fear of someone seeing it.

  Living day after day alone in a pitch-black house in a pitch-black cavern, with only the ghost light of the worms for illumination, Tzoja had begun to feel as though she was trapped in some terrible dream from which she could not awake. So she had begun her daily walks around the lake to a rich manor house some distance away. By its outer decorations and the spiral on the door, the house seemed to belong to somebody well-placed in the Order of Song. She would never have dared to cross the threshold of such a place, but whoever owned the house had placed a very fine water clock in a grotto on the outer grounds of the property. The clock was a mysterious arrangement of gears and troughs and several stone jars of water, but she could mark by the movement of the decorated dial in the center of one of the largest gears how the face of the moon was changing in the sky above the mountain, on the far side of an incomprehensible weight of stone.

  Still, the noises had unnerved her, and she decided to give up this day’s visit to the water clock and turn back.

  It’s the darkness, she told herself as she retreated, shielding the sphere in her hand so that only the tiniest needles of light illuminated her track. She thought she had learned all its tricks and cruelties while living in Nakkiga, but as bad as things had been in the gloomy Hikeda’ya city, this was much worse.

  But I can survive. I must. She had to stay alive until Viyeki returned. If she was caught, Khimabu would see that she was killed. But even that meant nothing to Tzoja compared to the true horror: Khimabu would not be satisfied with destroying Tzoja alone, but would want herself rid of Nezeru as well, her husband’s half-mortal bastard.

  Nezeru, her daughter Nezeru, so strange and so beautiful, a fierce little animal from the very first moment she had emerged into the world. Tzoja had never pretended to understand her child, but that had never prevented her helpless love.

  I will not let that witch harm my daughter, she thought as she made her way quietly up from the main path and through the modest grounds of Viyeki’s house. For a moment a rush of anger dissolved all her fears. I will die with my fingernails in Khimabu’s eyes and my teeth in her throat if I have to.

  She was so caught up in imagining it that she did not stop to listen at the door she always used, which opened on the back gardens. Instead she was halfway down the hall before she heard noises coming from the kitchen.

  Whispers.

  Tzoja stopped so quickly she almost fell down. A thousand ideas rushed into her head at once—it was the Hamakha Guard, looking for her, or robbers who would kill her before despoiling Viyeki’s house, or even ghastly shades out of the depths. But was it really whispering she heard, or was it something else? She paused again, listening with fast-beating heart to the wordless sounds—squeaking, chittering, and the rattle of small things being pushed across the kitchen’s stony floors.

  Rats! Oh, Usires and all the other gods, what if they’ve found my food?

  Tzoja felt around just inside the door until she discovered one of Viyeki’s walking sticks, then edged down the corridor, sliding her feet across the polished floors to move as silently as possible. The closer she got to the kitchen, the more clearly she could hear the strange sounds; for a moment she almost thought she heard a cadence to them, like speech.

  She lifted the stick high, then pushed open the kitchen door and lifted the ni’yo. A slight pressure of her fingers made it flare into brightness and paint the entire scene in an instant.

  Eyes. Eyes and grotesque shapes, staring at her—a waking nightmare.

  Tzoja gasped and almost dropped the sphere. The figures in front of her suddenly burst into life, squealing and hissing as they scattered in all directions to escape the sudden glare. She saw eyes, hands, limbs, but all in a mere moment before their owners scuttled into the dark corners of the kitchen or past her into the hallway, so that she could not immediately make sense of what she had seen.

  They were not rats, that was dreadfully clear: she had seen faces. Mortals like herself? No. Hikeda’ya? No. In that panicky instant she could not even think of a prayer, though she sorely wished to make one.

  She had fallen backward at the first shock; with her fingers loosened, the light of the sphere began to die. All around her she could hear clatter and scratching as its glow faded, then she was surrounded by darkness again and in another moment, by silence as well.

  Monsters, was her first real thought, remembering the mad things the flare of light had revealed. Small monsters, perhaps, but what else could you call them? There was one like a naked child with one limb bizarrely long, others with no real limbs at all, as well as fat, toadlike creatures with human skin and bulging but still human eyes. Already the details were sliding from her memory—it had all been too swift, too violently strange, too unexpected.

  What could they be? Why did those horrors come here? I have lost my sanctuary. Her thoughts were like an avalanche of stones. Monsters, and they were still all around! She straightened up, half-certain she would feel hands grabbing at her ankles at any moment, then she squeezed and rubbed the sphere until its full radiance burst forth again, but in its yellowy light the kitchen was empty and silent.

  No, not sil
ent, she realized after a moment. Beside her own hitching, terrified breath, she could hear another noise, a soft, wordless moan from deeper in the large kitchen. What were those things? She was grateful that they seemed as startled and frightened as she was, but she did not trust it would last.

  I should leave this place this very moment, she told herself. Whatever they are, the house is no longer safe. It certainly isn’t secret. But she had spent days learning the house’s plan by darkness, had found hiding places for all her belongings so that nobody arriving suddenly would know she was here unless they actually caught her. Where would she go if she left? To another house beside the lake, probably just as full of hairless cavern rats or whatever those ghastly things had been? Another festival house that, unlike Viyeki’s, might become occupied at any time?

  She heard a noise coming from the brick oven, a strange, thin sound like an animal gasping for breath or a baby beginning to cry. It did not sound as if it came from anything large, so she felt around for the walking stick she had dropped, then slowly and quietly got to her feet. The kitchen was long—when the house had been occupied, people owning the place often brought large contingents of servants to stay as well as guests, and the kitchen had to provide for them all.

  Tzoja made her way across the polished flagstones in darkness, marveling at how long it took her to cross it. As she drew closer to the oven, her foot crunched down on something and the muffled whimpering abruptly stopped. After the initial shock and a stifled scream, she reached down hesitantly and discovered what she had trod on—a heel of bread. She squeezed hard on the light-sphere to increase the glow.

  Whatever was making the hitching sound went silent again. The heel of bread was the largest piece of food on the floor; the rest were little more than crumbs and a few gnawed ends. With a sudden upswelling of horror and despair, she ran back across the kitchen, heedless now of the light that would be visible to anyone outside the house nearby, and threw open the chest in which she had hidden her supply of bread, several large loaves, enough to last her for weeks.

  Gone. All gone. A few fragments of dried fruit and sausage scattered among the crumbs and gnawed crusts confirmed what she already feared, but she doggedly dragged out the covered basket where the food had been kept and discovered that all but a single waxwing sausage and a few tiny morsels of cheese were gone.

  It was all Tzoja could do not to let out a howl of rage and misery. All her stores, so carefully obtained and hidden, food that should have lasted her until Sky-Singer’s Moon, or even Tortoise, now gone.

  She would have to go back into Nakkiga or risk starvation.

  Her fury rose again. She swung the ni’iyo around the wide kitchen until its light fell on the round bread oven. Whatever hid inside began making soft, terrified noises again. Angry, frightened, gripped by feelings she couldn’t even name, she reached down and shoved the ball of light close to the oven door as she leaned forward, careful not to get too close in case whatever was hiding there had claws. Then she pulled the door open.

  An infant stared back at her from the oven’s depths, not human, not Hikeda’ya, but not impossibly far from either. A naked, big-eyed infant with a swollen belly, no mouth between its nose and receding chin, and a slit throat—a horrible slash of red across the center of its neck.

  Tzoja recoiled in horror and almost fell again. The thing in the oven gave a soft, startled shriek, but did not try to escape. She leaned toward the opening again. Huge eyes stared back at her, dark as lumps of coal.

  It wasn’t a wound across its neck at all, she saw now with a mixture of disgust and astonishment, but a mouth, which for some unfathomable reason opened in its neck instead of its face. For a moment, everything she had ever heard about demons and monsters came back to her, from her mother’s tales of unnatural grassland fiends to Valada Roskva, her friend and teacher, warning about restless things that watched the living from beyond the veil of death. But then the unnatural mouth of the thing in the oven pressed together in a wrinkled pucker before opening again to emit a wail of terror, and despite her fear, she became a mother again.

  “Here now,” she said, suddenly realizing that the noise might be a bigger danger to her than even the strange little creature itself. “Hush. Stop that.” Without noticing, she had slipped back into the tongue of her own childhood, her mother’s words straight from the grasslands. “Hush. The Night Eater will hear.”

  And then, as if to prove her words, Tzoja heard a strange, uneven noise in the great hallway beyond the kitchen—thump-drag, thump-drag, thump-drag. Whatever was making the footsteps was no tiny monstrosity like the oven-beast, but sounded larger than any mortal or Hikeda’ya.

  Gripped again by terror, Tzoja only remembered the other door to the kitchen when it swung open. She lifted her light even as she stumbled backward. A huge, two-headed shape that could only have leaped out of nightmare or madness swayed in the doorway. It threw its misshapen hands up before it and let out a rumbling noise of rage as it lurched toward her.

  The sphere dropped from her nerveless fingers. For a moment the falling light seemed to make everything leap into the air, then the ni’yo struck the ground and went out.

  Tzoja clambered after it, groping with both hands, and when she found it she lifted it and held it before her like a weapon as she squeezed it into shining life. A huge shape loomed above her, but fell back, groaning as though the light was painful as fire. The thing wiped frantically at its eyes with the back of a massive forearm as she pushed herself back out of reach. The creature’s vast face turned toward her, eyes tightly shut. It was as bizarre and misshapen as a grassland shaman’s demon mask, the mouth slack, the face hurt and angry but as incomprehending as the lowest animal.

  “Do not fear,” the monster said in oddly-accented Hikeda’yasao, but as if to prove that terrible face truly was a mask, the slack lips did not move in time with the words, or at all. “We do not harm you.”

  Now she finally saw the second head that she had glimpsed in the doorway, as large as the first but canted at a strange angle and thus slightly hidden from her at first. This head, despite being nearly as grotesque as the first, hairless and with round, slightly crooked eyes, seemed actually to be watching her with interest, and when the voice came again and the lips moved in time with it, she saw that this head was the speaker, not the first one. “Please do not make the light bright again,” it said. “It hurts the eyes, mine and Dasa’s both.”

  She had just been about to make the sphere glare as brightly as she could, but the speaker’s tone was reasonable, almost apologetic, and she hesitated. She pushed herself back a little farther, and only then did she see that what had come through the kitchen doorway was not one creature with two heads, but two creatures, one carried by the other. The head that spoke lolled atop a shrunken, almost infantile body whose legs ended in stumps just where the knees should have been. This nodding oddity was curled in the crook of a powerful arm that belonged to a carry-man, one of the nearly mindless Tinukeda’ya bred for servitude, but this carry-man had a badly withered leg, and she now understood the step-and-drag sound that had announced its arrival.

  But there was no such thing anywhere in Nakkiga as a crippled carry-man, let alone one of infant-sized with no legs—the Hikeda’ya would never allow such malformed creatures to live. Even Viyeki, the kindest she had met, would have had them dispatched in an instant.

  “Who are you? What are you?” she demanded, voice trembling.

  “Naya Nos am I,” said the malformed infant. “This is my brother-in-claim, Dasa. He does not speak.” The swollen baby face looked grave. “What we are is Hidden Ones—but that is not something to concern you. Our young ones stole from you. We are sorry, but they have gone long without food, and it has been a poor season for both gathering and gifting. We will do our best to make good what they took from you.”

  The day’s events had been so shocking that Tzoja could only watch i
n stunned silence as the infant-sized creature called to the remaining Hidden, who scuttled out of the oven and other hiding places, eyes wide with fear, then crawled past her as swiftly as they could, as though Tzoja were a sleeping predator instead of the victim of their raid. The small horrors followed their rescuers out of the festival house and in moments had vanished into the darkness. She pushed the door closed behind them, then stumbled back to the kitchen to pick up the few crumbs that remained, weeping silently as she pressed the salvaged remnants into a single lump that would be that night’s supper—perhaps her last meal for a long time.

  * * *

  Nonao, the secretary who had replaced poor Yemon after his execution, was unobtrusive even by the exacting standards of the Hikeda’ya, but Viyeki still noticed him as he stood just outside the simple, slanted wall of fabric that was the magister’s tent. Viyeki did not look up or acknowledge him in any way, but continued to read his much-handled copy of The Five Fingers of the Queen’s Hand with what must have looked like great concentration. At last even Nonao’s patience began to stretch beyond the fraying point: the secretary made a small movement, a silent shift of weight from one foot to the other.

  Viyeki looked at him just long enough to make certain Nonao saw him, then dropped his eyes to the book again. “What do you want?”

  “This worthless servant begs your pardon, High Magister, but the queen’s relative Prince-Templar Pratiki has arrived.”

  “Ah.” Viyeki kept his eyes on the words, though he was not truly very much interested in them. Like all in his caste, he had committed the famous tract to memory long before he reached adulthhood.

  “Do you not wish to greet him, High Magister?”

  “Of course! That is why I have returned to the words of venerated Xohabi. To remind myself of what is expected, what is right.” He held the book up as though Nonao might not have seen it before. “You have read The Five Fingers?”