Empire of Grass

by Tad Williams

  “Foolishness. Murderous foolishness.” Countess Rhona’s tears had dried without trace, as if the anger and disgust that twisted her features had boiled them away. “The rumors were true after all. Inahwen said that Hugh and that witch, Lady Tylleth, have revived the secret worship of the Crow Mother—the Morriga. I daresay that has led them to the Norns.”

  “I wish I had known of this,” said Count Nial, his face grim. “Perhaps I could have done something. I heard rumors, but rumors—well, they are as common as flies.”

  “You could not have done anything,” Simon told him. “When a king goes mad, no one person can lead him back. I saw it happen with Miri’s father.” He stopped to think for a moment. “It was the Norns behind that too, or at least the Storm King.”

  “Was it not their queen?” Rhona asked. “That dreadful masked witch?”

  “Likely. I don’t know. It’s all going wrong.” He was feeling unutterably weary as well as fearful. For long moments he just stared into his wine cup.

  “Your Majesty?” said Nial at last.

  “I was just thinking. About when I was young. I lived here in the castle, you know. I was a servant, a scullion. Of course you know—that’s why they call me the Commoner King.”

  “It is one of the reasons the people love you and trust you, Majesty,” said Rhona.

  “But it’s not enough. It’s never enough.” He looked at them both and tried to summon another smile, but this time could not manage. “The thing is, when I was young I heard stories of the Norns and the Sithi, but they both seemed terribly far away, like dragons or witches—things I never expected to see in the world with my own eyes. If someone had told me all that would happen afterward, all the strange sights Miri and I would see, I would have thought myself ungodly lucky. Imagine, a common kitchen boy fighting a dragon—and surviving! And I met the Sithi and even lived with them. But none of it was like the stories. They never tell you that part, you know—the part where you’re afraid and you’re pissing your pants. They never tell you that these Norns and whatnot live forever and you’re never rid of them. That monster of a queen, sitting there in her mountain for centuries like a great spider, and all she ever thinks about is destroying us. And the only ones who could help us, the only other folk who truly understand them, have hidden themselves away. The Sithi are not going to be any help this time, that’s as clear as clear. We’ll have to face whatever Hugh has unleashed by ourselves.” He thought of all those he had learned from and trusted, Morgenes, Gelöe, Isgrimnur, Josua. All gone now. “I was lonely as a child, you know,” he said.

  “I beg your pardon, Majesty?” said Count Nial.

  “I had few friends here in the Hayholt. Only Jeremias the chandler’s boy, and that was later. When I was little I hardly mixed even with the other servants’ children. I lived with the scullions. Most of them were grown men. The chambermaids were my parents, more or less. But I was always lost in my own thoughts. I would be asked to play a game and something would catch my notice, and before I realized it I had wandered off to follow a bird or something. After a while they stopped asking me to play. They called me ‘mooncalf.’ I suppose I was.”

  After a stretching silence, he looked up at last to see Rhona and her husband staring at him in a worried way. How long had he been woolgathering? What had he been talking about?

  “I know you need rest, Count,” he said abruptly.

  “But what about my news, Your Majesty? What about the Norns?”

  “There is nothing to be done tonight, even if the White Foxes were camped just outside Erchester, pounding their war drums. I will call for Tiamak and Pasevalles and the rest in the morning.” He saw they were still regarding him with concern. “I am well, Countess Rhona—don’t stare at me that way, if you please. It is just that the late hour and the shock of your husband’s message has muddled me. In the meantime, let us say a prayer of thanks for Aelin and Earl Murdo—and you, too, Count Nial—true Hernystirmen all, brave friends who risked much to get us this news. And thanks to your good lady as well, of course.” Simon stood. The wine made him sway a little, so that he felt like a tall tree in the wind, roots beginning to work free of the earth. “To bed now, all. We will try to make sense of this bad news when God’s sun is back in the sky and the shadows are not so deep.”

  The count and countess were whispering to each other as they left, perhaps about him, but Simon didn’t care. He had never felt so tired and overwhelmed in all his life, and for once his dreamless bed seemed like a refuge.

  * * *

  The news about Hernystir’s King Hugh had come to Pasevalles early in the morning, and the king had called for a meeting with all his most important councilors at noon to decide what to do, which left him little time for his errand. But he was unsettled and could not wait.

  Pasevalles looked up and down the fourth-floor passage again, then paused to listen but heard nothing. He took a candle from the tray he carried and lit it from a hallway torch before going in.

  No footprints showed in the thin layer of dust on the floor, which eased his mind greatly. Hearing Tiamak talk about tunnels and secret entrances had raised his hackles—he had half-expected to find his private sanctum had been discovered. Still, like almost everyone else in the castle, Tiamak and King Simon were busy now considering the news from Hernystir, which meant that the subject of hidden passages beneath the castle would likely be forgotten, at least for a while.

  Pasevalles had discovered the hidden door while investigating the passages from John Josua’s old workrooms in the Granary Tower. When he realized that the maze of tunnels led not just down to all the mysteries below, but also up to one particular fourth-floor room, he had hastened to make that seldom-used chamber his own secret hideaway. It had been hard to visit the Granary Tower without someone noticing him, since its entrance was outside the residence, against the wall of the Inner Keep, so he welcomed a new entrance to the castle’s hidden deeps.

  To his relief, he found no signs that anyone had visited the room recently, and no evidence anyone had discovered the secret door or its mechanism. He listened one more time for approaching footsteps, then pulled down on the wall sconce. The secret door, weighted on a pivot at its center, swung wide enough to let him slide through. Just to make certain he would be undisturbed, he barred it from the inside. It was one of the few portals in the whole castle that could be sealed from both directions. Pasevalles suspected the hidden passage might have once allowed Aedonite priests in the time of Tethtain the Usurper to get in and out of the castle without Tethtain’s soldiers discovering them.

  It was a long way down the hidden stairs from the top of the residence to the bottom, but that was only the beginning of his journey. Holding his candle high and balancing the tray on one arm, he followed the twisting passages and crossings he had traveled so many times that he knew them like the halls of his childhood home, Chasu Metessa. But the corridors of Metessa had not been full of deadly traps like these were.

  Pasevalles moved slowly, eyes wide open in the shadowed depths. He came to the end of the last passage, another low corridor cut directly into crude stone that ended in a vertical shaft extending upward to somewhere he could not guess. He did what he always did and stood the candle in the alcove at the end of the passage: the thing that lived here below the castle did not like light. Then he stepped forward until he could sense nothing above his head but an almost palpable darkness and the faint harmonies of moving air.

  “I am here,” he called, but not too loudly, then listened to the forlorn sound of his voice echoing up the shaft. He waited but did not call again. He had learned that lesson the hard way, when his mysterious benefactor had ignored him for most of a month after he had made too much noise with his summons. Whoever—or whatever—lurked in this shadow-place seemed as averse to sound as to light, and Pasevalles did not wish to lose its favor.

  At last, without knowing how he knew it, he di
scovered that he was no longer alone. A single word floated down to him from some unknown place above, a single whispered syllable as bodiless and inhuman as the wind.

  “Speak.”

  “I need the Witness. I have brought you a tray.” He set it down on the uneven stone floor, careful not to knock anything over or raise too much dust.

  The voice did not speak again, but he heard stone scraping behind him and knew that the immense door had been lifted, though by what mechanism or magic he still couldn’t guess: he had felt the stone door and knew it was huge and heavy. He left his candle burning in the alcove—this was a dance he had performed many times and Pasevalles knew each step by heart—then made his way back down the corridor, trailing his fingers on the wall until he found the open doorway and stepped through. The massive door-stone slid back into place behind him, then another great stone slid upward and the light of the Witness spilled out as the door scraped shut behind him.

  For a long time he could only stand and look at the gleaming thing—and no wonder: Pasevalles had never seen anything else like it, and felt certain he never would. He had dreamed of it more nights than he could count. The Witness and the rocky plinth on which it sat were the only two things in the small chamber. The first time he had stood before it he had thought the Witness stone was shapeless, but now it was almost a familiar sight, and he could see that the purple-gray crystal had the form of a cloud scudding along the sky, flat on the bottom but with swirls and peaks like something a baker might whip into being with flour and sugar and eggs. In the center of the object a spherical glow, yellow-white and cold, turned the imperfections in the grayish crystal into dark lines that almost seemed to flow and billow, though he had watched them carefully many times and had never seen them truly move.

  Still, it was a beautiful thing, a wondrous thing, an object of astonishing power. Pasevalles moved closer and reached out to put his hands on it, amazed as always that his childhood certainties had proved true, that he truly was different than all other men—above them and above their mundane fates as well. What at first felt as cold as ice quickly warmed beneath his fingers until it was hard to tell where his own flesh ended and the Witness began. It seemed as though somehow Pasevalles flowed down into his own arms, and from there into the glowing stone itself. The shadows of the chamber vanished; he was swimming through very different shadows, through darknesses that had length and breadth, that he felt as if he could reach out and touch. But Pasevalles knew better than to try such foolishness, just as he knew better than to move incautiously in these dark subterranean spaces, or to offend the creature, person, or spirit who let him touch this incredible thing and bend it to his own uses.

  Did its mysterious guardian ever use the Witness? He doubted he would ever know.

  For a long time Pasevalles was oblivious to everything but the not-place in which he floated and the dangers that surrounded him, dangers he could scarcely understand but had to avoid to make the Witness do what he wished. Then, out of the surrounding darkness, he felt something reach out to him and enfold him, holding him as effortlessly as a gnat trapped in a man’s closed fist.

  Hail to the Lord of Song, Pasevalles said, or thought he said, since words and ideas were strangely interchangeable when he used the Witness.

  The presence might have been amused or annoyed. It was so much stronger than he, he would never fully understand it, and even his best guesses sometimes proved utterly mistaken. What do you want now, mortal? it asked.

  With respect, I wish to know why I was not told of King Hugh’s part in this. His soldiers met with the Hikeda’ya, and that meeting was seen by others—others who have spread the word to King Simon and his allies. It has made things much harder for me. He did his best to be measured, calm.

  Do you think we owe you something? The presence that held him did not sound amused now. Do you think all our thought should be shared with you?

  No, no, of course not. But if I am valuable to you, why do you make it difficult for me? Hugh is capricious, even for a mortal. You should not put such trust in him. He has made an arrogant mistake and given the game away.

  He could sense the displeasure on the other side of the Witness like a hand squeezing his heart, and for a moment Pasevalles felt himself swooning as the pain grew. Was that all he was to them, he wondered, even as he fought to hold onto himself—a pet? Something to be indulged and then kicked, reward and punishment almost interchangeable?

  You have worth to us, the voice on the other end of the Witness told him. But do not think that worth gives you the right to question the Queen of All and her closest servants.

  No, he said. Never. But now the people of the Hayholt know that the Hikeda’ya have crossed into mortal lands. They are preparing their defenses. Instead of surprising them, you will have to fight.

  This time the thought came to him with the cold amusement he remembered from previous conversations, an utter certainty of power. It was enough to raise gooseflesh, if he had been able at that moment to feel his own skin.

  Has it not occurred to you that we might want them to know? We have suffered long, and we hunger for vengeance. We do not want a bloodless victory. A moment or something like it passed in that timeless place, long enough for Pasevalles to feel a little of the other’s thoughts—a blurry, red-lit vision of flames and widespread murder, sudden as the things revealed in a lightning flash. It is late to be worrying about what will happen, mortal.

  But you will abide by your bargain with me? By the sacred names you swore upon, the Garden and Tzo and Hamakho?

  The amusement evaporated in an instant and the cold washed back over his thoughts. We can do no other. We will give you what we promised. You will stand upon the corpses of your fellow mortals to receive it, but we will give it to you. As to the preparations of those other mortals, they will come to naught. Now, have you any other reason to waste our time?

  Pasevalles, feeling as exhausted now as a bird caught in a gale wind, battered and confused simply by being so close to the voice that spoke for the Queen of Nakkiga, could only form a single negative. No.

  And then the dark, cold presence was gone, and Pasevalles was back in the chamber, pulling his hands away from the Witness. He was breathing very hard and his knees were weak, so he took a moment to steady himself.

  The first time he had been granted use of the Witness, it had been such a profound experience that he had not been able to imagine leaving such an astounding thing behind in the depths. He had even picked it up, heavy as it was, thinking he could carry it away to one of his hidden places in the Hayholt, but a few moments later he had almost fallen to his death down a shaft that opened in the floor of the Witness chamber.

  Lesson learned. Pasevalles had realized then that he would have to play by the rules of the stone’s mysterious guardian if he wanted to taste such power again.

  He moved to the door, empty-handed, as he had been each time since the first. The stone slab scraped quietly upward and he was released into the corridor. He took his candle from the alcove, saw the tray still waiting undisturbed where he had left it, then began his ascent back into the world of light and air and mortal men.

  29

  The Shore of Corpses

  When Tzoja had lived among the Astalines, an older Rimmersgard woman, a believer in the old religion, had told her of the experience of the departed after death, of their long journey across the fields of ice and stone, of the descent into the Mountain of Tears. There the newly dead had to pass the field of serpents, the giant hound named Hunger, and the River Roaring, which was full of swords and could only be crossed by the Knokkespan, a bone bridge that could not bear the weight of a living man or woman, until they reached the Shore of Corpses, the beginning of the lands of Morthginn, queen of the underworld.

  These memories haunted Tzoja like restless spirits as she was led deeper and deeper into Nakkiga by a pair of silent guards, through the
nearly lightless corridors of the royal Maze. The palace was an entire world of its own, intricate and insane, or so it seemed to Tzoja’s overwhelmed senses, with endless stairways and confusing passages that curved and re-curved like the nest of burrowing insects. She could hear noises, but so faintly she could not guess whether they were voices or just the whispering air of the deepest passages.

  It’s the Realm of the Dead, and I’m the dead one, she thought. The Queen of Darkness is alive and waiting for me and I can’t turn back.

  Her fear grew, coursing through her like a killing fever, so that it was hard to walk without stumbling. Once or twice her terror grew so great she thought her heart would stop. She prayed that it would, because death was surely better than what awaited her.

  She thought of her lover Viyeki, the only one in this great dark mountain who had been kind, and wondered if he would ever know what had happened to her. Would his wife Khimabu inform him out of sheer, hateful joy? Or would she keep it secret and tell him that Tzoja his mortal mistress had run away?

  And what of Nezeru? Tzoja could hardly bear to think of her daughter. As it was, her own child had hardly known her. Nezeru had been stolen from her arms at a young age and given over to that cursed box to be judged, then sent to the Order of Sacrifice to be raised as a loveless killer. What would Nezeru know of her mother’s end? And would she be sad, or feel only shame?

  The journey across the Realm of the Dead seemed as long as a lifetime, or even longer.

  * * *

  • • •

  It had always been hard for Tzoja to see well in Nakkiga’s deep places, where torches and lanterns were few, but her other senses were not diminished. As she was led through yet another empty, featureless corridor of echoing stone she began to sense a change. No longer could she hear the occasional sounds of muffled voices or smell the occasional scents of food or the scented oils that so many of the Hikeda’ya nobles wore. Her guards had not spoken a word, but now she could sense a change in them as well, a slowing of their step, a quickening of their nearly silent breathing.