by Tad Williams
“But I cannot pray without sight of the sun. It is an offense against the god!” Now she said a real prayer, begging that he would think he had come up with the idea on his own. “I must have either a view of the all-conquering sun—or a fire. I have neither.”
“A fire? Ridiculous. I suppose you could have a lamp. Or a candle. Yes, that would be safer. Would a candle be enough to keep the god sweet?”
“You mock the gods at your own risk,” she said severely, but inside she was almost dizzy with relief. “A lamp would be sufficient.”
“No, a candle. That or nothing, and I will take my risks with the gods.”
Qinnitan did her best to look like a spoiled priestess used to getting her own way. “Oh, very well,” she said at last. “If that is the best you can do.”
“Tell the gods I did not hinder you,” he said. “Be honest! You must always tell the truth to heaven.”
After a feverish, frustrating wait, a sailor brought her a candle in a clay cup. It was a little thing, only slightly bigger than her thumb, its flame small as a fingernail. When they were alone again she set it on the floor and began to tear her blanket into long strips. Pigeon sat up, his eyes round, and made a questioning sign with his fingers. She smiled in what she hoped was a reassuring way. “I’ll show you. For now, just help me. In pieces this wide.”
When the blanket had been reduced to a couple of dozen strips, she pulled the water jug out from under the bed. She had been saving her water from last night, drinking only a few drops, and now she handed it to Pigeon. “Start pushing the pieces of blanket in this—like so.” She shoved one in the jug and pulled it out, then wrung the excess water back into the ewer. “Now you do it. Just a few, then save the rest of the dry pieces.”
While Pigeon, puzzled but willing, began to dip the scraps of wool, Qinnitan took a tiny perfume bottle she had been given by one of the other girls back in Hierosol. She pried out the stopper and poured it onto a piece of blanket she had saved for herself, then stood up to cram it into a crack between the planks of the ceiling. As the boy looked on in dawning terror, she lifted the candle up and held it to the perfume-soaked rag. A moment later a transparent blossom of blue flame sprang from it.
“Down,” she told Pigeon. “Down on the floor. Hold this over your mouth—like so.” She took one of the soaked strips of blanket and held it against his mouth. Like every other Hive priestess she had learned the story of the terrible fire some seventy years before, when the tapestries in the great hive rooms had caught fire and most of the bees—as well as many of the priestesses and acolytes—had been killed. Ancient Mother Mudry, a young woman then and the only person still alive in Qinnitan’s day from that time, had survived the horrible conflagration because she had just come from the bath with wet clothes and wet hair, which she had pulled over her mouth. This had kept her alive long enough in the choking, blinding smoke for her to find her way to freedom. But now Qinnitan and Pigeon had an even more difficult task.
“We must stay alive until someone breaks down the door,” she told the boy, speaking loudly so he could hear her through the muffling wet cloth. The flame was beginning to blacken the beams where the cloth was wedged and showed every sign of staying lit. When it got to the outer boards and the tar that made them waterproof she hoped the flames would be impossible to stop. “Stay down low, near the ground, and breathe only through the wet cloth. When it gets dry and you can taste the smoke, dip the cloth back in here.” She showed him the jug. “Now lie down!”
O brave Nushash, she whispered, then realized that even though she had just set the blaze herself, praying to the god of fire might not be the ideal choice. Was the autarch not the child of Nushash, after all? Qinnitan was thwarting his will—perhaps Nushash would not take kindly to that.
Suya the Dawnflower. Of course—Suya had been stolen from her husband’s side and forced to wander the world. She of all the gods would know and understand.
Please, O Dawnflower, Qinnitan prayed, clutching the shivering child beside her as smoke began to obscure the ceiling of the small cabin. Already she could smell it through the wet wool, but she wanted to save the water—only the gods knew how long they would have to wait. Give us your help at this hour. Show me your grace and your favor. Let me protect this child. Help us to escape the people who would harm us. Show us your well-known mercy . . .
Prayer finished, she closed her eyes tight against the stinging smoke and waited.
She shoved the scrap of blanket all the way down to the bottom of the jug, but it seemed to come out even more dry than it had gone in. The piece she clutched to her own face was bone-dry, too—all she could smell was smoke. Beside her, Pigeon was coughing hard, his tiny body shaking and straining in a way that made Qinnitan feel her heart would break. She could no longer see the door through the thick, coiling clouds of gray.
I don’t mind dying, she told Suya and any other kindly gods who might be listening, and I don’t care what happens to me. But please, if the boy must die too, take good care of him in heaven. He is innocent.
Poor Pigeon. What a dreadful life the gods had given him—his tongue taken, his manhood too, and then forced to run for his life simply for the crime of being in the wrong place when the autarch had one of his enemies murdered. It isn’t . . . isn’t . . . fair . . . Poor . . .
Qinnitan shook her head. She could see almost nothing now, and had to strain to get any breath into her burning lungs. Pigeon was barely moving. At the same time a booming pressure echoed through her, as if she were underwater and some ancient, sunken merchantman at the bottom of the ocean was tolling its ship’s bell.
Boooom. Boooom. Boooom.
Qinnitan thought it was strange to be under the water. It hurt to breathe, but not in the way she would have guessed—and the water was so murky. Sand. Someone or something had stirred up the sand along the ocean bottom until it swirled in clouds around her, flecked with gold, with light, with little bits of starshine like the sky at night the dark the beckoning darkness . . .
Booom! And then something splintered and the water . . . the air . . . smoke . . . swirled and flames leaped above her and shapes staggered into the murky cabin—dark, shouting shapes that flickered with red light like devils capering on the floors of hell. Qinnitan could only stare and wonder what was happening as strong hands grabbed her and pulled her away from Pigeon. She was carried up the stairs outside the shattered doorway, jouncing like a saddle with a broken strap.
She found a little voice, but it was faint as a whisper. “Get the boy! Get Pigeon! Don’t leave him behind!’
Before she could see whether the soldiers were bringing the mute child, she was dumped unceremoniously on the deck at the top of the stairs. Fire was everywhere, not just crackling in the deck but on the mast and even higher, flames capering in the sails and dancing across the rigging like wicked demon children. Some of the sailors were throwing buckets of water onto the blaze but it was like throwing pebbles at a sandstorm.
Another soldier dumped Pigeon beside her. The boy was alive, moving a little, but almost entirely insensible. She stared dully at the chaos for a moment, the men running, screaming, bits of flaming rope smacking down from above like the hell whip of Xergal, and then remembered what she had done. What horror her little candle had caused! Qinnitan struggled up onto her knees. No point trying to wake Pigeon: she would let the water do that job, or else finish the job the fire had just failed to do.
This time I’ll die for certain before I let anyone take him again . . .
She waited a few more stuttering heartbeats until the men nearest her had their backs turned, then she lifted the boy’s limp form as best she could and stumbled to the nearby rail. She leaned her back against it, heaved Pigeon up until his weight was across her shoulder and chest, then clung to him as his momentum carried them both over.
The fall took longer than she expected, time enough for her to wonder if dying in cold water would be better than dying in fire. Then they hit the water ha
rd and green darkness closed around them like a fist.
14
Three Scars
“Before the Vuts were driven out the lands now behind the Shadowline, the farthest northern outpost of men was the Vuttish city Jipmalshemm. In writings from that city there is much talk of a fearful place named ‘Ruohttashemm,’ the home of ‘Cold Fairies,’ which was also called ‘the End of the Earth.’
—from “A Treatise on the Fairy Peoples of Eion and Xand”
BARRICK EDDON FLOATED on the darkness like a leaf on a slow-moving river. The thoughts that made him took their direction from that flow: what they lost in complexity they gained in cohesion. It was peaceful, even pleasant, to be nothing, to want nothing, but the part of him that was still Barrick sensed that such peace could not last.
It didn’t. Voices rose from the nothing—three voices entwined, three voices speaking as one, surrounding him with a tangle of words that only gradually came to reveal their meaning.
. . . Long ago, when the Dreamless broke away from their kin, it was because their own eternal wakefulness had driven them mad. The sleep of the People has always dulled the pain of their long lives, and even those highest and most long-lived, the Fireflower’s children, can take a sort of rest and let their minds roam unfettered. But no such peace eased the pain of the Dreamless, trapped forever in the echoing cavern of their own thoughts.
So it came to pass that they turned against their fellows, turned against the rest of the People and went away into the wilderness to make new lives. In the forest beyond the Lost Lands they built a great city and named it Sleep, and even now no one can agree whether they named it in angry defiance of the People they had deserted or as the saddest of jests.
Nothing is more bitter than a family divided. As the years sped by the People and their unsleeping kin shed each other’s blood and opposed each other’s wills. Distance became enmity. The Dreamless ceased to venerate even those gods they had once loved, until the temples and sacred places of Sleep fell into ruin.
In all the rolling centuries since the sundering, out of all the Dreamless, the blood of the People has bred only we three who slumber as our ancestors slumbered. And in that slumber we dream far and clear.
Shunned by all, we were driven out of Sleep, but we were also unwanted in our ancestral halls, the House of the People. Thus we too went into the wilderness and have lived so long in the savage waste that we do not even remember the ways by which we came and could not find our way out again even if we chose.
Still we sleep, though, and when we sleep, we dream. In those dreams we see what is to be, or at least what might be—in any dream there are shadows and confusion, real foretellings mixed with false. But we know that we three were made different for a reason. We know that our dreams have meaning. And we know that no one else, mortal or immortal, has been given the visions that are vouchsafed to us.
We do not know who gives us the gift of these particular and heretical dreams, or why we were singled out and then doomed to wait so many centuries to use it. We do know that to ignore our gift would be to turn our backs on the one thing that holds all worlds and times together—the spirit of which the Book of the Fire in the Void is word and thought—which is also the one thing that lends any hope of meaning to our own existence . . .
These words, these thoughts, were Barrick’s only companions in the void. The three speaking as one gradually unraveled into three separate voices once more, each with its individual character, but darkness still surrounded him: only the voices of the Sleepers kept him close.
“What are we to do?” asked the first voice, the kindest of the three. “The story is unfolding but the characters have been misplaced or their entrances and exits mistimed.”
“It was all bound to go wrong. I have said so.” The sour one. Angry . . . or frightened?
“Did we see this before?” This one he remembered well, old and confused. The name . . . the name had been something like the wind blowing in a lonely place, a keening sigh. “I do not recall it. I am cold and frightened. When the great ones come back they will be so angry with us all.”
“It is not for ourselves we do this, but for the story. Even the gods cannot destroy the story that we all are . . .”
“Untrue,” said the sharp, angry voice. “They can suppress it for so long that its shape becomes meaningless—until the tale has waited so long to come true that it becomes unrecognizable. The ending can be held off so long that it outlasts the world itself.”
“Only if we surrender,” said the first Sleeper. “Only if we refute our own dreams.”
“I wish I did not dream,” said the old one. “It has brought only sorrow. We had a family once, you know . . .”
Hoorooen. That was the name of the ancient one with the querulous voice. Hoorooen. And the others had the same sound to them . . .
“Quiet. It is time we think of what we can do. You heard the blind king. This little one, this young creature of the sun, must reach him soon or all is lost.”
“You struggle uselessly. Can the little mongrel fly? No. It is done, I tell you.” Hikat, this one, Barrick remembered—a sound like an ax striking wood. Hikat. And the other was called . . .
. . . Hau. “It is not done. There is a way. He can go by Crooked’s road.”
“He does not know how—nor could he learn before years had passed.”
“I knew once,” piped old Hoorooen. “Did I not know? I think I did. I think I remember Crooked’s roads and they were cold and lonely.”
“Cold and lonely they are, but there are other ways he might travel them besides his own strength.” Hau spoke gently. “There is a door in Sleep.”
“Ah!” said Hoorooen. “The darklights. I would like to see them again.”
“You are both fools,” snapped Hikat. “The city of Sleep means death, both to us and this mortal cub. There is no chance he could reach the door, or walk through it even if he found it.”
“Unless we help.”
“Even so.” The one called Hikat seemed to take a certain joy in despair. “What we can give him will only help him if he reaches the door—but he will never do so with an entire city full of deadly hatred against him.”
“There is nothing else to do. We have only this one chance.”
“It will freeze up his blood,” Hoorooen said gloomily. “If he travels those roads the void will drink away his life. He will become old and lost . . . like us. Old and lost.”
“Nothing to be done—he must use Crooked’s roads. There is no other way. But we will gift him with something of ourselves. Those are dangerous paths and we must prepare and armor him to survive them. Bring him toward us.”
“It will diminish us—perhaps even destroy us. And he will only curse you for such a gift.” Hikat sounded almost amused.
“It will almost certainly destroy us.” Hau was sorrowful but resigned. “But the world and everything in it will curse us if we do it not . . .”
Barrick now found himself aware of his body again, then of the growing light of the fire and the dome-shaped room as well, and even the three Sleepers, but this perception did not bring freedom or even movement. The hooded Sleepers leaned over him as though they were mourners and he the corpse.
“We send him into dry lands,” Hau said.“We must do what we can. But where? In what part of him do we pour our waters—our essence?”
“His heart,” said Hikat. “It will make him strong.”
“But it will also make his heart like stone. Sometimes love is all we have.”
“So? It will give him the best chance to survive, you fool. Or would you betray the world you claim to hold so dear?”
“In his eyes,” said quavering old Hoorooen. “So he can see what he will see in the days ahead and not be afraid.”
“But fear is sometimes the first step toward wisdom,” Hau replied. “To be unafraid is to be unchanging and unready. No, we will simply give our waters to him and his own being shall decide what to do with them. He
is lame in one arm, out of balance—that is his weakest spot. We shall do it there, where he is already broken.”
A uniform pressure moved over Barrick then, holding him motionless like a blanket of heavy armor links, but he could still feel the cool air of the room on his skin, the patchy heat of the fire. One of the three figures lifted an object up into the red light of the f lames—a crude, ancient knife chipped from gray stone.
“Manchild,” said the one called Hau, “let what we give you now, the waters of our being, fill you and strengthen you.”
The pressure grew stronger on Barrick’s left arm, the wounded place he had hidden from people’s stares, had always tried to protect. Now he struggled again to protect it, but for all his desperate effort he could not move himself by so much as a finger’s breadth.
“Do it swiftly,” said Hikat. “He is weak.”
“Not so weak as you suppose,” Hau said, then something tore across the skin of Barrick’s arm—a horrible, searing slash of pain. He tried to scream, to struggle free, but his body was not his own.
“I give you my tears,” said Hau. “They will keep your eyes clear to see the road ahead.” Something burned once more in the wound on his arm, salty and terrible. Another scream rose and fell deep inside him without ever breaking the surface.
The second shadowy figure took the knife, which rose and then came down again as another fiery spurt of agony pierced his arm. “I give you the spittle of my mouth,” Hikat growled. “Because hatred will keep you strong. Remember this when you stand before the gods, and if you fail, spit in their faces for what they have taken from us all.” Again Barrick felt a drizzle of misery for which he was allowed no release of movement or sound.
The gods were punishing him, that was clear. He could take no more of such suffering. Even the smallest twinge of discomfort now and his head would flame and burst like a pine knot in a bonfire.