by Tad Williams
—from “A Treatise on the Fairy Peoples of Eion and Xand”
“I HAVE A PLAN, BIRD.” Barrick Eddon unwound another strand of prickly creeper from his arm, hook by barbed, painful hook. “A very clever plan. You find me a path that doesn’t take me through every single thornbush in Fairyland . . . and I won’t flatten your nasty little skull with a rock.”
Skurn hopped down to a lower branch, but prudently remained out of Barrick’s reach. He fluffed his blotched feathers. “It all do look different from up in sky, don’t it?” The raven’s tone was sullen. Neither of them had eaten since the middle of the day before. “Us can’t always tell.”
“Well, fly lower.” Barrick stood up and rubbed at the line of small, bleeding holes, then pulled his ragged shirtsleeve back down.
“ ‘Fly lower,’ says he,” Skurn grumbled. “Like he were the master and Skurn the servant, ’stead of equable partners as us’n be by agreement.” He flapped his wings. “By agreement!”
Barrick groaned. “Then why does my . . . partner keep leading me through all the pointiest bits of territory? It’s taken us a day to go a few hundred paces. At this pace, by the time we bring the . . .” It suddenly occurred to Barrick that perhaps a dark forest, filled with who knew how many or what kind of listening ears, might not the best place to talk about Lady Porcupine’s mirror, the object he was sworn to carry all the way to the throne of the Qar. “At this pace, by the time we find them even the immortals will have died.”
Skurn seemed to soften a bit. “Can’t see the ground from high because trees be too thick, ’special them hartstangle trees. But us daren’t fly no lower. Don’t you see? Silks be strung in the high branches and some even wave above the treetops, just to catch fine fellows like us.”
“Silks?” Barrick began to trudge forward again, using the ancient, corroded spearhead he had found beside the road out of Greatdeeps to clear his way when the undergrowth became too dense. This was not the thickest forest he’d seen since he’d been behind the Shadowline but it was full of stubborn, grasping creepers that made each step hard as wading through mud. Combined with the unchanging twilight of these lands it was enough to make even the boldest heart despair.
“Aye. This be Silky Wood, hereabouts,” the raven croaked. “Where them silkins live.”
“Silkins? What are those?” They didn’t sound particularly threatening, which would be a nice change after dealing with Jack Chain and his monstrous servants. “Are they fairies?”
“If you mean be they High Folk, nay.” Skurn fluttered ahead to another branch and waited for Barrick to make his monotonous, slow way after. “They speak not, nor do they go to market.”
“Go to market?”
“Not like proper fairy folk, no.” The bird lifted its head. “Hist,” he said sharply. “That sounds like somewhat small and stupid a-dyin’. Suppertime!” The raven sprang from the branch and flapped away through the trees, leaving Barrick alone and bewildered.
He cleared himself a place where the thorny branches seemed thinnest and sat down. His bad arm had been throbbing for hours so he was not entirely unhappy with the chance to rest, but for all the annoyance the bird caused him, Skurn was at least something to talk to in this place of endless shadows and gray skies and forbidding trees hung with black moss. With the bird gone, the silence seemed to close in like a fog.
He put his arms around his knees and squeezed hard to keep from shivering.
Barrick supposed that more than half a tennight had passed since Gyir and Vansen had fallen and he had escaped the demigod Jikuyin’s twisted underground kingdom. It was always hard to guess at time’s passage in the endless Shadowline twilight, but he knew he had slept more than half a dozen times—those long, heavy, but somehow enervating sleeps that were almost all he ever had here. Kerneia had come and gone in the outside world while they had been held underground—Barrick knew that because it had been the monstrous Jikuyin’s intention to celebrate the earth lord’s day by sacrificing Barrick and the others. Since he knew that he and the others had left Southmarch in Ondekamene to fight the fairy armies, that meant he had not seen his home in over a quarter of a year. What could have happened in so much time? Had the fairies reached it? Was his sister Briony under siege?
For perhaps the first time since that terrible day at Kolkan’s Field, Barrick Eddon could plainly see the divide in his own thoughts: he still felt a mysterious, almost slavish loyalty to the terrifying warrior woman who had plucked him from the field and sent him across the Shadowline (although he still could not remember why, or what she had charged him with) but at the same time he knew now that the dark lady was Yasammez the Porcupine, war-scourge of the Qar, single-minded in her hatred of all Sunlanders . . . Barrick’s own people. If the Qar were now laying siege to Southmarch, if his sister and the rest of the inhabitants were in danger, or even murdered, it was by that lady’s pale and deadly hand.
And now he had inherited a second mission for Yasammez and the Qar. He could not recall the first, which she had given him the day she spared him on the battlefield: it felt as though Yasammez had poured it into him like oil into a jug, then pushed the stopper in so tight that he himself could not take it out. The other mission he had accepted solely on the word of her chief servant Gyir, who had sworn it was for the good of humans as well as fairies, shortly before the faceless fairy had sacrificed his life for Barrick’s. So now that he was finally free, instead of doing what any sensible creature would do—which would be to make his way as swiftly as possible to the borders of the Shadowlands and back into the light of the sun—Barrick was instead plunging deeper and deeper into this land of mists and madness.
Mists, he could not help noticing, that appeared to be returning. The world had grown colder since the bird had flown away and curls of the stuff were now rising from the ground. Barrick seemed to be sitting in a field of swaying, ghostly grass; in a few moments the mist would be as high as his head. Barrick didn’t like that thought, so he scrambled to his feet.
The fog was thickening along the ground, swirling around the trunks of the gray trees like water—even climbing the trunks themselves. Soon the mist would be everywhere, below and above. Where was that cursed bird? How could he simply fly off and leave a companion this way—what kind of loyalty was that? When was he coming back?
Is he even going to come back?
The thought was a cold fist clutching his heart in midbeat. The old bird had not made a pledge to Gyir as Barrick had. Skurn cared little for the desires of either the Sunlanders or the Qar—little for anything, in fact, except cramming his belly with the disgusting things he liked to eat. Perhaps the raven had suddenly decided he was wasting his time here.
“Skurn!” His voice seemed weak, fluttering out like an arrow from a broken string and disappearing into the eternal, murky evening. “Curse you, you foul bird, where are you?” He heard the anger in his voice and thought better of it. “Come back, Skurn, please! I’ll . . . I’ll let you sleep under my shirt.” He had forbidden this before when the weather had turned cold: the thought of having that stinking old carrion bird and whatever lived in its feathers against his chest had been enough to make his skin crawl and he had told the raven so—told him very sternly.
Now, though, Barrick was beginning to regret his bad temper.
Alone. It was a thought he had not dwelled on, for fear of it overwhelming him. He had spent his entire childhood as half of “the twins,” an entity his father and older brother and the servants had spoken of as though they were not two children but one tremendously difficult, two-headed child. And the twins had also been surrounded at nearly all times by servants and courtiers, so much so that they had been desperate to escape and find time alone; much of Barrick Eddon’s childhood had been spent trying to find hiding places where he and Briony could escape and be alone. Just now, though, a crowded castle seemed like a beautiful dream.
“Skurn?” It suddenly occurred to him that perhaps shouting his solitude was not the b
est idea. They had met almost no other creatures in the past days of travel, but that had been largely because Jikuyin and his hungry army of servants had emptied the area of anything bigger than a field mouse for miles in all directions. But he was far from the demigod’s diggings now . . .
Barrick shivered again. He knew he should stay in one place, but the mist was rising and he kept thinking he saw signs of movement in the swirling distance, as though some of the pearly white strands moved not by the pressure of the wind but through some choice of their own.
The breeze quickened, chilled. A mournful whisper seemed to pass through the leaves above his head. Barrick clutched the spearhead by its broken haft and began to walk.
The mist limited his vision, but he was able to walk without too much stumbling, although from time to time he had to test with his spear to make sure a dark place in the undergrowth at his feet was not a hole into which he might step and wrench his ankle. But the path before him seemed surprisingly clear, easier to travel by far than the choked and tangled way of the past hours. It only occurred to him after he had traveled a few hundred paces that he was no longer choosing a path, he was following one: because the way was clear, he walked where he was led.
And what if someone . . . or something . . . wants me to do just that . . . ?
The question and its implication had only just sunk in when something darted past the edge of his sight. He whirled, but now the space between the trees was empty except for a tendril of mist swirling in the breeze of his own movement; as he turned back something the color of fog flitted across the path in the distance before him, but was gone too quickly for him to make out its shape.
He stopped. Hands trembling, he raised the pitted head of his spear. Things were definitely moving in the mist between the farthest trees, shapes tall as men but pale and maddeningly hard to see. The whisper passed over him again, sounding now less like the wordless voice of the wind and more like the hissing of some incomprehensible, breathy language.
A rustle behind him, the dimmest, softest pad of footfall on leaf—Barrick spun, and for a moment saw a thing that made no sense: the figure was nearly as tall as a man but crooked as a mandrake root, wrapped from head to foot like a royal corpse in threads and tatters white as the mist—perhaps it even was the mist, he thought in superstitious horror, taking on some vaguely human shape. In places the mist-wrappings did not quite cover, and what was beneath them bulged and oozed a shiny gray-black. Although it had no visible eyes the apparition seemed to see Barrick well enough; an instant after he saw it the pale thing vanished back into the mist beside the path. More whispers floated past and echoed above his head. Barrick wheeled toward the front again, fearing to be surrounded, but for the moment the creatures of tangled thread had dropped back into the shrouding fog.
Silkins. That was what the bird had called them, and he had named this poisonous place Silky Wood.
Something thin and clinging as a cobweb brushed his face. He clawed at it but it somehow snarled his arm. Instead of reaching up his other hand to be caught and bound the same way, Barrick ripped at the prisoning strands with the blade of his spear, sawing at them until they parted with a sharp yet silent snap. Another strand floated toward him as though drifting on the wind, but then curled around him with terrifying accuracy. He ripped at it with his spear, felt it snag and grow tense, and looked up to see one of the white-wrapped creatures crouching in the branches above him, dangling silk threads like a puppeteer. With a startled cry of disgust and fear he jabbed at the thing with his spearhead and felt the tip sink into something more solid than mist or even silk thread, but nonetheless not quite like any normal animal or man: it felt as though he had stabbed a bundle of sticks wrapped in wet pudding.
The silkin let out a strange, fluting sigh and scrambled up into the branches where it vanished behind swirls of fog and a pall of silky strands strung between limbs. Barrick risked a look ahead and saw that the path that had seemed so wide and inviting only moments before narrowed now into something scarcely wider than he was, a tunnel of white filaments like the den of a hunting spider. They were trying to force him into this trap, to drive him deeper and deeper until he could not turn back, until his limbs were ensnared and he would be as helpless as a trapped fly.
How had this all happened so fast? Blood pounded in his head. Only moments before he had been sitting, thinking of home—now he was going to die.
Something moved on his left. Barrick swung his spear in a wide arc, desperate to keep the creatures at a distance. He felt a gossamer touch on his neck as another one flung down waving strands from above. Barrick shouted in disgust, flapping his hand in an effort to dislodge the sticky tendrils.
Standing in the middle of the path like this, he knew, would mean his doom. “Get inside a wall or put your back against something,” Shaso had always told him. Barrick abruptly plunged off the path and began kicking his way through the undergrowth. He knew he couldn’t get clear of the trees entirely, but at least he could pick his own spot to make a stand. Dodging the wisps floating toward him, he fought his way through to a small clearing with a single massive tree with plate-shaped, reddish gold leaves and a broad gray trunk at the center of it; the tree’s bark was quirked and knotted as a lizard’s hide. Barrick put his back against it. Whatever he was fighting wouldn’t get up into those branches easily, since the tree did not seem to touch its neighbors on any side.
Mist eddied around his feet, reaching waist high in places as he peered out into the thickening murk. His crippled arm already burned like fire in the places it had been broken so long ago, but he held his broken spear tightly with both arms, terrified the weapon might be knocked from his grasp.
They were coming toward him out of the murk now, pale, ghostly shapes that seemed little more than mist themselves. These silkins were real enough, though: he had felt it when he pushed the tip of his spear into one. And if they were real enough to stab, they were real enough to kill.
Something tickled his face. Barrick, intent on the shapes moving toward him, unthinkingly reached up to brush it off before he realized what it was and jumped away. Another of the things had crept around behind him to fling its strands of silk, and as he stepped around the wide trunk and confronted it, the not-quite-human shape tipped its silk-wrapped, all-but-featureless knob of a head in almost comic surprise, like a dog startled in some forbidden behavior. Barrick thought he saw a hint of wet darkness that might have been eyes peering between swaths of its elaborate tangle of threads. He jabbed hard at the creature’s belly with his spear, shoving in most of the corroded metal of the spearhead. It squelched so deeply into the thing he felt sure he had killed it, but when he yanked the spear back he almost could not pull the broken haft free, and when it did come only a little viscous, dark gray fluid bubbled from the hole in the silk wrappings. Still, the silkin stumbled back in obvious pain before it turned and scuttled away into the mist.
Barrick turned just in time to find another of the things coming toward him across the clearing, tendrils of silk trailing from its fingers. Barrick ducked and the threads stuck to the bark beside his head, and for a moment the creature was trapped by its own weapon. It jerked back its crooked hand, snapping the silk, but even as it did so Barrick shoved his spear into its chest. He did not have a chance to put his strength into the stab, so the spearhead did not pierce very deeply, but he slid his hand up the handle for a better grip and then dragged the spear downward, tearing at the thing’s midsection and ripping a great, shallow gout from chest to waist. To his astonishment, this time the wound almost vomited gray ooze, and even as the silkin’s silent fellows slunk forward out of the mist, the wounded one slid to the ground and lay twitching like a beheaded snake, wheezing and bubbling.
The things were almost entirely wet inside, like the marrow of cooked bones. Perhaps the wrappings were not clothing, he thought, but more like a shell or hide—something that kept their soft bodies protected. If so, then a spear was almost the worst way to fight
them. He needed something with a long, sharp blade—a sword, or even a knife—but he had neither. If any of the half-dozen coming now caught hold of him, they would quickly drag him down. In only moments after that they would be wrapping him just like a captured insect in a spider’s web . . .
He thought of Briony, who doubtless believed him dead by now. He thought of the dark-haired girl of his dreams, a vision who might not even be alive herself. How few would miss him! Then he thought of Gyir and of the mirror the brave, faceless fairy had put into his hand, and even of Vansen, who had fallen down into darkness and death in an effort to save him. Would Barrick Eddon let himself be taken, then, like some stupid brute of an animal? Beaten by these . . . mindless things?
“I am a prince of the house of Eddon.” His voice was quiet and shaky at first but grew louder. He held his spear up so the things could see it. “The house of Eddon!” Then he set it down by the roots of the tree, digging the spearhead into the bark, and stepped down hard, breaking off most of the haft behind the pitted metal. He picked the spearhead up and held it in his good hand like a dagger. “And if you wretched ghosts think a pack of things like you can bring down the house of Eddon,” he cried, his voice rising to a shout, “then come to me!”
And come they did, silks waving. If they had moved on him together, attacking from above as well as the front, he would certainly have died: their movements were swift and silent and the mist made it hard to distinguish them. But they did not seem to have the minds of men and came at him instead like hungry beggars, first one and then another grabbing at him and trying to trap him in clinging silk. Barrick managed to use those sticky tendrils to pull one of the attackers toward him, and then ripped out the silkin’s middle with what remained of his spear. The hideous thing tumbled to the ground near the corpse of the first one he had killed, bubbling gray from its belly and moaning like a distant wind.