by Tad Williams
When Barrick was settled one of the Tine Fay stepped out from the crowd, his voice piping like a baby bird’s. Despite this fluting tone he had a very martial look about him, his shield made from a shimmering blue-green beetle’s shell, his little beard wound with ribbons, his head helmed in the skull of a toothy fish.
“He says that he respects the parley,” reported Skurn, “but if you come to plunder the sacred gold from the hives of his people he and his men must fight you to the death anyway. Such is their oath to their ancestors, to protect the hives and the honey-horses.”
“Hives?” Barrick shook his head. “Honey-horses? Is he talking about bees?” For a moment he could taste honey—nothing sweeter than sour berries had touched his tongue in months—and his mouth watered. “Tell him I mean them no harm,” he said. “I am trying to make my way to Qul-na-Qar .”
After a moment’s ticking discourse, Skurn turned back to Barrick. “He says that if you doesn’t mean to steal their treasure then they need to go back and keep an eye out for others who do.” Skurn picked with his beak at his chest feathers, worrying out a flea. “They never stay long in the open—already they feel fretsome about being so long out of the shadows.” Skurn cocked his head as the tiny chieftain spoke again. “But because you are honorable and they do not wish you to die horribly, they say go not near Cursed Hill.”
“Cursed Hill? What is that?”
“Us has heard of it,” the raven said gravely, “but heard nothing good. Us should be on our way.”
But the chief wasn’t done. He piped a few more times, pointing agitatedly at the bird.
“What’s he saying?”
“Naught.” Skurn was a study in disinterest. “Merest chitter-chat. Farewells and benedictions, like.”
The chief’s voice rose to a higher-pitched squeak. The Tine Fay seemed to have a very urgent way of saying farewell.
“Ah, well, tell them I say thank you, and . . .” Barrick’s eyes narrowed. “Skurn, what’s that under your claw?”
“What?” The bird looked into the air rather than down where Barrick was pointing. “Nothing. Nothing at all, Master.”
If he hadn’t already seen the minuscule man struggling weakly, the bird calling him “master” would have given it away. “It’s one of them, isn’t it? One of the wounded ones. Gods curse you, let that poor little fellow go or I truly will pluck out all your feathers—and have your beak off as well!”
The raven gave him a reproachful look as he lifted his scaly black foot. A half dozen Tine Fay hurried forward to carry their wounded comrade away. When they had him secure, the entire little tribe swiftly vanished back into the undergrowth.
“You are disgusting.”
“He were already bad hurt,” Skurn said sullenly. “Nothing much can they do for him—and see how plump he were!”
I withdraw my earlier prayers, Barrick silently told the gods. I had no right to ask your help for a winged wretch like that.
It was hard to make complete sense from the words of frightened imps as translated by a grumpy raven, but as best Barrick could discern he and Skurn were on a ridge that stretched a long way through the forest, but they needed to climb down it again to avoid the place called Cursed Hill. Why it bore such a name he couldn’t tell. Skurn was sulking, now; the most the bird would tell him was that “folk what stray there come back mad or changed.”
In any case, if he had understood the miniature folk correctly, once past the ill-omened spot they should only be a day or so away from safer lands beyond the silkins’ territory.
Barrick hadn’t relished the idea of being shot in the face by a hundred tiny arrows, but he was still sorry to see the Tine Fay go. As a child he had heard many stories of the little people, but had never thought to see them—it wasn’t as if they were running around in the halls of Southmarch. Yet here they were and he had met them. It was just one more way in which his life had turned out to be even stranger than he had ever suspected it would.
Of course, he thought, lately most of it has also been worse than I could have guessed.
They continued to the top of the ridge and eventually found a rock outcropping that jutted a few feet above the trees so Barrick could make out something of the surrounding country. As Barrick climbed wearily up the rock he reminded himself that this feeling of time slipping away, while perhaps true in some larger sense, was mostly an illusion: the sun would not go down soon, no matter how dark the sky looked. It was true he would have to stop for sleep before too long, but it would not be in the dark. He would rise after a few hours, but the sun would not. Things were not going to change here.
And perhaps now Southmarch and all the March Kingdoms are like this, too, he thought. Perhaps the Qar have dragged this blanket of shadow over all the lands of men. Perhaps this is all Briony and the others in Southmarch can see, too. It was a dreary, disheartening thought.
He looked out over the rumpled, misty sea of treetops. The small folk had been right: he was on top of a long ridge that ran through the forest like a raised dike. On the horizon ahead of him, just at the point where the mists were thickest, a single large hill rose above both forest and ridge, a huge and solitary lump of green shrouded in plumes of fog; an outcrop of tall rocks ringed the hilltop like broken teeth. Perhaps because of the way it loomed above the sea of mist and yet had its own cloud of fog, the hill looked old and secretive, like a beggar so wrapped in rags he could not be distinguished from his background until he moved.
Barrick found he had no quibble with the Tine Fay’s advice: he did not want to go anywhere near the spot called Cursed Hill.
He was exhausted but awake, staring up at nothing and wishing he could fall asleep. The old raven was huddled in his feathers close to Barrick’s side, his snore a thin whistle. A flutter of rain was making the leaves bob above the prince’s head, and beyond stretched the flat, gray blanket of twilight.
How long since I’ve seen the sun? he wondered. Or the moon, for that matter? By the Three, how can these shadowland creatures live this way? They can’t even see the stars!
The stories said that the Twilight People had created the pall two centuries ago, pulled it over themselves like a blanket when their second attack on the world of men had failed—but why? Were they so frightened of the vengeance of humankind that they had chosen to give up the sun and the open sky forever—to put aside even night and day? He had seen the fairy folk on the battlefield; even with much smaller numbers than Barrick’s people they had destroyed the human army. They certainly weren’t cowards, either. Had their numbers been so much less or their warcraft so much more clumsy two hundred years ago . . . ?
Barrick was distracted from this thought by a movement in the branches high overhead. He lay still and kept his eyes narrowed as though they were closed. There! Something was creeping through the uppermost canopy like a huge, white spider—a silkin.
A second pale shape clambered silently out beside the first and together they crouched, staring down. It was all he could do to stay quiet. At last he pretended to yawn and stretch, as though he were just now waking up. The silkins went utterly still for a moment, then retreated back into the shadowy upper branches, but Barrick’s heart did not slow down for a long time.
So they were still out there. What were the nasty things waiting for? Surely they could have no other reason to follow him than to seek a chance to attack, but he had already slept several times and they had done nothing. What were they waiting for?
Reinforcements, most likely.
A fine drizzle pattered on the leaves above him and occasionally drifted down to tickle his face, but it didn’t matter: he wasn’t going to sleep any time soon, anyway.
Barrick and Skurn had followed the bony ridgeline as long as they could, but now the hills were sloping downward, each a little smaller than the one before. The Cursed Hill loomed just ahead, blocking the sky like the dome of some great temple, silent and mysterious. Barrick did not much want to descend into the dark valleys where the
trees blocked out most of what little light there was, but if that was how best to avoid such an ill-favored place, he thought, then the valleys it would be.
Even Skurn seemed to have lost his courage. “Smells worse, that mountain, as us gets closer,” was the best he could explain. “Stinks of old days and dead gods—worse than Greatdeeps. Even the silkins don’t go there.”
Worse than Greatdeeps . . . Barrick shuddered and looked away. The horror of the tunnels and one-eyed Jikuyin, the dreadful king of those depths, would never leave him as long as he breathed.
So they started downhill under a damp drizzle, along wooded canyons that skirted the base of the high hill, the peak looming above them like a brooding giant. The darkness of the dells made Barrick feel much more vulnerable than he had on the heights of the ridge. Even Skurn, who ordinarily flew far ahead, disappearing sometimes for what seemed like an hour, now remained close to Barrick, moving forward only a few trees at a time and waiting for him to catch up. Thus, the raven was the first to notice they were being followed again.
“Three of them silkins,” he hissed in Barrick’s ear. “Just beyond trees there.” He indicated the direction with his beak. “Don’t look!”
“Curse them, they’ve found a friend.” But he did his best not to let it frighten him. Half a dozen or more had come at him the last time and he had beaten them away—three would never be enough to overcome Barrick Eddon, master of the silk-slitting spear! Still, where there were three there could soon be more . . .
When will we get out of this gods-cursed forest? I cannot stand another day of this. But the memory of the long stretch of treetops beyond the Cursed Hill was fresh: Barrick knew they would not be under open sky anytime soon.
Skurn had flown a little distance ahead to hunt for a relatively safe place to spend the night. Barrick was getting hungrier by the moment. He had eaten little in the past few days but berries and a few bird’s eggs drunk raw straight from the shell. Meat and a fire to cook it on seemed a fabulous luxury, something he could scarcely recall.
All princes should spend a year lost behind the Shadowline, he decided. It would teach them to value what they have. By the gods, would it teach them!
A movement in the near distance startled him. He looked up and saw something white vanish behind a tree, then glimpsed another pale smear moving a little deeper in the forest. Closer than they were before, he realized. Maybe they think we’ve stopped because I’m hurt. He picked up a rock and began to ostentatiously sharpen the point of his broken spear for the benef it of any observers. He had wrapped a piece of cloth torn from his sleeve around the handle to make it easier to hold, but he still wished mightily for a sword or at least a proper knife.
Skurn came fluttering down out of the trees, beating his wings as he settled to the ground near Barrick’s feet. “Four of them,” he gasped. “Oh, wings be smarting, us flew so fast to tell. Four, and carrying a net.”
“I saw them,” Barrick said quietly, gesturing with his thumb. “Over there.”
“Over there? No, these be yon, just ahead. If you see’d some too, they be others.”
Barrick made the sign of the Three as he sprang up. “Bastard things! They’re trying to surround us.” The helplessness he had felt in the woods at the edge of Kolkan’s Field came over him like a sudden chill, that moment when he and his companions realized that the fairies had tricked them—that the Twilight People were not on the run, but had doubled back and were coming in from every side. The shrieks of terror from the men around Barrick as they had gone from hunters to hunted in a single breath would never leave him so long as he lived. “Go!”
He ran forward, angling away from where the raven said the four silkins were waiting with a net, but also away from those he had seen. A moment later Skurn flapped past him. “Many behind us!” the bird shouted.
Barrick took a look back. Half a dozen of the silk-wrapped creatures were scuttling along branches or speeding along the forest floor with that weird, hopping gait of theirs, half-insect, half-ape.
He turned back just in time to see another pair loom up before him out of the shadows between two gnarled old trees, spinning something like a fishing net. Barrick only had a moment to throw himself to one side—he felt the sticky edge of one of the strands drag at his arm for a moment as it brushed his skin. Skurn had to bank up sharply to avoid the net and disappeared into the upper branches.
More pale shapes glided between the trees, circling toward him. The uneven ground was treacherous so Barrick had to keep an eye on where he was running, but he thought he could count a dozen or more in just his brief surveillance. The creatures were trying to form a moving wall in front of him, falling back more slowly at the sides than before him: within a few moments he would be surrounded.
“No!” he shouted, and skidded to a halt, grabbing at a tree branch to keep from tumbling. For a moment his feet actually left the ground and the weight on his bad arm sent a bolt of fire through his elbow and shoulder all the way to his neck. Four or five more silkins he hadn’t even spotted were clambering down from the trees—another dozen steps and he would have run right into them. “Go back, bird!” Barrick shouted, hoping Skurn could hear him, then he turned tail and ran back the way he had came, back up the slope. It was steeper than he remembered and he was running out of directions—time to start thinking about fighting. “If you can choose nothing else,” Shaso had always said, “pick the spot to make your stand. Do not let your enemy dictate it to you.”
Shaso. For a moment grief and loss and even terror swept through him, not just at the thought of dying in the forest, but at the realization of how many things he would never know, never resolve, never understand.
Maybe when you die, you learn everything. Or maybe you learn nothing.
“Not that way!” Skurn was flying beside him, doing his best not to run into anything as he followed Barrick through the trees. “That way be Cursed Hill! Mind what the Tine Fay said!”
Barrick stumbled on a root but caught himself, kept clambering uphill. Well, why not? Hadn’t the bird said that even the silkins did not go there? And if he had to make a stand, what better place could he find than in the open air, with one of those rock outcroppings at his back?
“Master!” called Skurn desperately as Barrick dug even harder up the slope. The raven fluttered down and crouched on a stone just ahead of him. “Master, it be death to climb that hill!”
“Do what you want,” he told the bird. “I’m going this way.”
“Don’t want to leave you, but us will die for certain there!”
A moment later the ground had angled up so steeply that Barrick almost had to go down on all fours. He snatched at low-lying branches to pull himself ahead. He could hear the silkins rattling through the branches behind him and the growing murmur of their strange hunting song. “Go on! Fly, you fool bird!” he gasped. “If it’s my time, I’m at least going to die in the open.”
“Krah!” the bird croaked in frustration. “Be all Sunlanders such . . . such stubborn, pisshead idiots?” But he didn’t wait for an answer. Instead Skurn unfolded his wings, flew up into the sky, and was gone.
7
The King’s Table
“Kyros the Soterian cites as further evidence of the sacrilegious nature of the fairies’ beliefs how closely their version of the Theomachy seems to follow the Xandian Heresy, portraying the Trigon as the enemies of mankind and the defeated gods Zmeos Whitefire and his siblings as mankind’s benefactors . . .”
—from “A Treatise on the Fairy Peoples of Eion and Xand”
“ I AM GRIEVED AND ANGRY to hear aboutthis terrible thing,
Highness,” said Finn Teodoros. “This murder of your servant!
Even in my captivity I have heard little else.”
“It is far worse for the family of Talia, the little girl who died.” Briony gave him a sad smile. “ ‘Highness’—it is strange to hear you call me that, Finn.”
“Well, it must have been stranger
for you during all that time you traveled with us, being called ‘Boy’ or ‘Tim.’ ” He laughed. “Zoria in hiding, indeed!”
She sighed. “To be honest, I miss it. Tim may not have eaten as well as royalty, but no one tried to poison him, either.”
“It truly is a shocking circumstance, Highness. Do you have any idea of who would do such a thing?”
She looked at the door of Teodoros’ room, which Erasmias Jino had deliberately left ajar. She could see the colors of one of the guards outside. It would be foolish to say anything she didn’t want overheard. “I know nothing except that a child died by poison meant for me. Lord Jino has promised he will find the culprit.”
“Lord Jino?” Finn Teodoros chuckled ruefully. “I know him—a persistent fellow. He can be rather frightening. I’m sure he will get some result.”
“Oh, Finn, have they treated you badly?” She had to fight the urge to put her arms around his rounded shoulders, but she was a princess again and it would not do. “I told them that you were a good man.”
“Then, your pardon, Highness, but perhaps they do not trust your word, either.”
She took a quick look at the door, then got up and quietly pushed it shut. Let them open it again if they want so badly to listen. “Tell me again,” she said quietly, “we may not have much time—what did Brone want you to do here in Tessis?”