Shadowrise

by Tad Williams

  “Never mind. These roots are fine.” He laid three more pieces of wood that had been drying on the flames, then began to sharpen the head of his broken spear with a round stone. He could not get over the strange pleasure of having two arms that did not hurt.

  “Tell me another tale,” Barrick said after a while. “What happened to Crooked after he threw the gods into his grandmother’s lands?”

  “Great-grandmother’s,” the raven said, looking around as though something else toothsome might be crawling by. “It were his great-grandmother, Emptiness. She taught Crooked all her tricks of coming and going.”

  Find Crooked’s Hall, the Sleepers had told him. Crooked’s Hall, Crooked’s roads, Crooked’s doorway—did they actually expect Barrick to travel as the gods traveled? “So what happened? Did he become the king of the gods?” But Crooked, who until now had always been Kupilas as far as Barrick knew, was just a minor god, wasn’t he? The Book of the Trigon talked of Kupilas only as the clever patron of blacksmiths and engineers. And physicians, he remembered. Chaven had a statue of him in his house. “What happened after he killed Kernios?”

  “Is us a Night Man, full of secrets?” the bird said with a touch of indignation. “Do us know all the Firstborn know? Anyroad, Crooked didn’t kill nobody—he threw the Earthlord and them others into the place where they sleeps forever.”

  “But what happened to Kupilas? To Crooked? What happened to him?”

  Skurn shrugged, a motion where he lifted his feathers in a ruff around his neck and wiggled his head. “Don’t know. Him were hurt bad by Earthlord’s spear. Dying, some say. Don’t know any more of the story, us. Mam never told it.”

  And Barrick had to be content with that.

  He was half asleep and drifting when he felt something poking at his hand, something sharp and hard. A beak.

  “Hist!” The raven crouched beside him, spotted feathers all a-prickle so that he looked more hedgehog than bird. “I hear somewhat . . .”

  Barrick sat up straight but stayed silent, listening. He gradually became aware that something sharp was poking into the back of his neck, and this time it wasn’t Skurn. He swatted at it but could not dislodge the painful thing from his skin. An instant later something else dropped down from the branches and caught the meat of his right arm—a thorny branch, bent like a hook, on the end of a strand of pale silk.

  Before he had time to think several more strands came whipping down from the shadows above him. A few only flailed past him and then snapped away, but two more caught in his ragged clothes and pulled tight, like the thorny barbs already snagged in his neck and arm. Small, sharp pains bloomed all over him.

  “They come, Master!” Skurn shrieked, flapping up into the air just as another barb shot out and swung through the spot where he had been. “Silkins!”

  Now Barrick could see them, thin gray-white shapes scuttling through the upper branches above his head, casting down their weighted, thorn-hooked barbs to entangle him. He tried to reach into his belt for his broken spear but one of the creatures yanked on a silk strand hooked in his arm to keep him from reaching the weapon. Barrick grabbed the silk and pulled back hard until it slackened and he could grab the spearhead. He leaned out with his left hand and swept it up to cut through the strand imprisoning his arm, saying a silent prayer of thanks he had sharpened the edge. It took longer to work loose the thorny branch in his neck, and when he brought his hand away his fingers were smeared with blood.

  Two of the maggoty things came tumbling out of the trees, silent as ghosts in the twilight, swinging their silks like horse-trappers as the dark wet spots of their eyes gleamed with reflected twilight. Barrick ducked under a flailing silk rope and felt the barbed hooks catch and tear at his scalp. He tore them loose from his head just as the creature leaped forward. Its strange, boneless limbs folded around him, and although it weighed little, the force was still enough to knock him off his feet. He fell and rolled, the silkin clinging to him until they both tumbled to a stop, Barrick’s right arm pinned beneath his own body. A strand whipped around his neck and pulled tight. For a moment, with only his useless left arm free, he knew he would die.

  But his left arm wasn’t useless any longer. He reached up and caught the strange, slippery-but-sticky thing on his back and dug in his fingers. The strand around his neck tightened for a moment, but then he had tugged the thing loose and dragged it down onto the muddy forest floor.

  I’m strong! He could have shouted it—he could feel it in him like a joyful flame. Strong!

  Barrick was not able to get a solid grip on his attacker but as it rose up into a crouch he lunged forward and shoved the creature backward into the campfire even as another pale, half-human figure leaped down onto his back.

  A horrible, whistling shriek went up from the one that had stumbled into the fire. The burning silkin staggered out of the firepit, pale yellow flames running up its legs and torso, the blackness beneath its mummifying threads beginning to ooze and bubble as the fire took it. Within a few heartbeats it was blazing like a torch, filling the twilight with shrilling screams so high in pitch that Barrick could hardly hear them.

  The way to survival suddenly seemed clear. He leaped toward the fire, dragging the second silkin with him, and grabbed a burning piece of wood. With the broken spear in one hand and the flaming brand in the other he turned on the silkin clinging to his ankles and shoved the fire into the creature’s featureless face until it sizzled and bubbled. Piping in agony, it pulled free of him and leaped away, blindly tearing at its own head before striking a tree trunk. It lay twitching for a moment, then crawled away into the undergrowth, rolling and lopsided as a drunkard.

  Barrick grabbed the spearhead tight and beat his hand upon his breast. “Come on, then!” he shouted at the ghostly shapes still swarming in the trees above. “Come and get me!”

  Two more jumped down, then a third. Skurn came out of nowhere and snatched with his talons at the one nearest Barrick, which gave him a moment to swipe the torch against it. He narrowly missed singeing the bird, who flapped up again, cawing in alarm. The silkin’s wrappings did not catch, but Barrick stabbed at it again with his blade and spilled its black ooze, then turned and shoved the flame up against the next one even as it lurched forward. For long moments he could not tell how many of the silkins surrounded him, or how he was faring, but he could smell the ghastly, salty stink of the things as they burned. He began to laugh as he slashed with spearhead and torch, striking at everything that moved. From the corner of his eye he saw Skurn beating his way up into the air, looking for safety. Barrick only laughed louder.

  An hour might have passed, or only moments—Barrick couldn’t tell. The last moving silkin was at his feet, trying to hold in its slow-dripping innards where Barrick had slashed its belly wide open. In a fever of gleeful rage Barrick dropped his spear and grabbed at the creature’s head, his fingers compressing the silk-wrapped ball as if it were a rotten melon. He pulled it upright, then shoved the torch into its gaping, sticky eye.

  “Die, you filthy thing!” He held it down with his foot until it was burning too hot to stand over it. Three more of the creatures lay motionless and oozing at his feet, and nothing else moved in the trees.

  Barrick lifted his hands before him, staring. He had known he would win—he had known it! What a marvel it was to have two strong arms, to be like anyone else! He kicked the smoldering corpse of the silkin and turned his back on it.

  I have been given a gift. And what have I paid for it? Nothing.

  He no longer felt any pain. Even the old miseries and the old losses—his sister, his stolen father, his murdered brother—troubled him no more; he had hardly thought of them in days. Just as the pain of his arm had gone, all his painful feelings had vanished, too.

  When Skurn at last found the courage to come down again from the trees, Barrick was still laughing quietly.

  Because I am whole for the first time, he thought. The real Barrick Eddon, at last.

  18 />
  King Hesper Is Unwell

  “Most ettins are scaled all over like a lizard or a tortoise, and are often called ‘Deep Ettins’ because of their constant delving, but it is said that some have a smooth furry pelt that allows them to travel swiftly through tunnels other ettins have already excavated. These ‘Tunnel Ettins’ are also said to be blind.”

  —from “A Treatise on the Fairy Peoples of Eion and Xand”

  “ I’MAFRAID I DON’T UNDERSTAND, Golden One.” Pinimmon Vash looked up. He had lowered himself onto his old, aching knees: when the autarch was in one of his unpredictable moods, he had found the conservative approach was safest. “I thought we were bound for . . . I have forgotten the name of the place. Your . . . guest’s little kingdom in the north.”

  “Southmarch. And so we are.” Sulepis stretched out a hand to admire the spread of his long fingers, each one tipped in gold as bright as the honey of Nushash’s bees. “But first we are paying a visit to another ruler. May I not pass the time as I wish, Paramount Minister Vash? Surely life is too beautiful to be always hurrying!” The autarch smiled his lazy, crocodilian smile.

  “May you . . . of course, Golden One! It goes without saying! Even the stars in the sky pause to know your plans.” Vash squeezed himself a little closer to the floor, despite the pains sparking in his shins and hips. “We all live only to serve you. I just wished to . . . to know more of what you planned . . . so that we might better accommodate your needs.” He tried to laugh, but instead of a knowing chuckle it came out as a shaky wheeze. “May you! You play a trick on your oldest and most dedicated servant, master! I would die to serve your smallest wish.”

  “I would like to see that.” Sulepis’ laugh was much more convincing than Vash’s had been. “But not this morning, I think. Arrange boats to go ashore and bearers for the tribute. And tell the antipolemarch he may stand his soldiers down—I will take only the bearers, my carpet servants, and you. Oh, and I think King Olin might find the visit amusing too. Four guards should be enough for him.”

  “No soldiers?” Vash realized he was questioning his monarch again, but surely even the autarch was not so mad as to enter a foreign court with only four guards. “I am old, Golden One. Did I mishear you?”

  “You did not. Tell Dumin Hauyuz that as long as his men remain on the ship and we remain ready to sail, he may otherwise do as he pleases.”

  “For which he will be profoundly grateful, Golden One, I have no doubt.” Vash tried to back out of the cabin without standing up, but he quickly realized he no longer had the flexibility for it. After he had slid himself far enough backward, he clambered slowly to his feet and backed out of the presence of the inscrutable, incomprehensible living god on earth.

  It seemed that the entire population of Gremos Pitra, capital city of Jellon and Jael, had lined up along the steeply rising road between the harbor and the palace to watch the strange procession. It was a small procession, as Sulepis had directed, with the autarch himself leading the way (except during the moments when the carpet slaves dashed in front of him to lay out the next section of cloth-of-gold carpet so that his sacred feet never touched the ground). Vash walked behind him, trying manfully to move onto the next piece of carpet each time before the sweating slaves snatched up the old one to carry it ahead of the god-king once more. The paramount minister was so terrified that one of the onlookers might do something untoward—what if one of them threw a rock at the autarch?—that his stomach ached.

  Olin and his guards came next, walking on ordinary earth as ordinary men should; they were followed by the silent priest Vash had seen on the ship but whose name he did not know. The man had the dark, weathered skin of the deep-desert tribes and was covered with flamelike tattoos, and though he was not old his eyes were gray with cataracts. He carried a staff that clicked and jingled with the dangling skeletons of a dozen serpents. Everything about the priest made Vash fretful; he had been grateful during the voyage that the man had largely stayed belowdecks.

  The snake-priest was followed by several dozen muscular slaves, each one carrying a huge tribute basket on his back—heavy baskets, too, from the frozen, uncomfortable grimaces of the men carrying them.

  The onlookers crowding along the road watched and whispered in dull astonishment, both at the appearance of the tall southern god-king in his gleaming, golden armor and the almost complete absence of soldiers guarding him. Vash clearly was not the only one to be surprised that the famous enemy of all Eion should walk unarmed through a hostile city.

  Pinimmon Vash did not find much chance to pray these days but he prayed now.

  Nushash, I follow your heir. All my life I have been told the autarch carries your blood. Now I follow him into terrible danger in a hostile country. I have waited upon three autarchs and have always done my best to serve the Falcon Throne. Please do not let me die here in this backward land! Please do not let the autarch die under my protection!

  He blinked dust from his eyes. At least the scotarch Prusus remained upon the ship, protected by Xixian soldiers. Even if the worst happened the ancient laws would be observed; the Falcon Throne would not go unfilled.

  But Prusus is a cripple, Vash thought. A drooling lackwit. Still, it was said that some of the previous autarchs, especially those who reigned before the Ninth Year War, had not been much better. Tradition was what mattered. The scotarch would only rule until the council of noble families met and a new autarch was approved. Sulepis had several sons by several mothers. The line would not die.

  The paramount minister was startled out of these gloomy thoughts by a stirring in the crowd. The Golden One’s procession had reached the outer gates of Gremos Pitra and a party of armed soldiers stood waiting for them. Vash hurried forward as fast as his aching legs would carry him. The autarch could not speak directly to underlings. Surely things were not as topsy-turvy as that—not yet, in any case.

  “I am Niccol Opanour, gate-herald of Gremos Pitra and of his majesty, Hesper, king of Jellon and Jael,” said the leader of the soldiers, a fox-faced man with a short beard and the look of a good gambler. “State your business with King Hesper and his court.”

  “Business?” Vash had been carefully schooled by the autarch in what to say. “Surely a great king like Sulepis needs no petty excuse to stop and greet a fellow monarch? We bring your master gifts from the south—a gesture of goodwill. You would not make my monarch stand in the road like a tradesman, would you? You can see we come with no soldiers. We are at Hesper’s mercy.”

  Which, as most of the other kings of this northern continent could attest, was as much as to say “hopeless.” Hesper was only merciful for gain, a friend to other rulers only when it suited him, and everyone knew it.

  Gate-herald Opanour frowned. “I mean your king no disrespect, but we were not told to expect this. We are not prepared. As it happens, King Hesper is . . . unwell.”

  “That is a pity,” said Vash. “However, I feel certain that the gifts we bring him will cheer him somewhat.” He hadn’t spoke the Hierosoline tongue of the north in a long time, and was pleased to discover its subtleties hadn’t entirely escaped him. He beckoned forward one of the sweating bearer slaves, then swept away the top of the man’s basket. “See the generosity of Xis.”

  The handful of soldiers leaned forward in their saddles and their eyes grew round as they saw the gold and gems that filled the basket.

  “That . . . this is most impressive,” the gate-herald said. “But we must still ask our king for his permission . . .”

  The autarch himself suddenly stepped forward, making the carpet slaves scurry to get another length of cloth-of-gold in front of him before his sandaled foot touched bare ground (which would reputedly cause the world itself to totter and collapse). The horses of the Jellonian soldiers shied away as though Sulepis was a kind of creature they had never seen before—as in fact he was, Vash thought: he was beginning to think the world had never seen anything quite like his master.

  “Please say one thin
g to these men of Jellon for us, Paramount Minister,” Sulepis said in Hierosoline. His voice seemed pitched softly, but it carried a long distance. “Remind them that even a benevolent king has limits. We have a warship full of long guns just outside the harbor, and several more will arrive by tonight.” Sulepis smiled at the Jellonians and folded his arms across his breast, his golden armor clinking gently. “We come in peace, yes, but we would hate to see the spark of suspicion start a fire that would be hard to put out.”

  It was quickly decided that one of the soldiers should ride back to the palace to inform Hesper and the court that the autarch was coming.

  The palace of Gremos Pitra was perched on a clifftop above the harbor, but in the years of peace the steep, narrow old path leading to it had been rebuilt into a series of wide, gentle switchbacks. Even Vash, old and sore as he was, did not find it too agonizing to climb from the harbor to the palace gates, but he still could not understand why so much time was being spent in such an odd exercise.

  The gates swung open as they approached and the full panoply of Hesper’s power appeared, guards on every parapet and a hundred more on either side of the entrance. The autarch walked serenely past them as though they were his own loyal subjects, looking neither to the left nor the right and walking in a measured but not overly slow pace so that the carpet slaves had to scurry to stay ahead of him. The procession crossed a formal courtyard rapidly filling with Jellonian courtiers and servants, those in back standing on tiptoe or trampling the hedges in their determination to get a view of the infamous Mad Autarch of Xis.

  Many of the Jellonian troops filed into the great hall behind the parade of basket-hauling slaves, so that the autarch’s party was hemmed in on all sides by armed soldiers wearing ceremonial green tabards bearing the blue rooster and golden rings of Hesper’s Jaelian clan. The king’s tall, canopied chair stood at the far end of the high-ceilinged room, surrounded by dozens of courtiers gaping at the new arrivals, too fascinated even to whisper among themselves. Vash squinted—it was a long room—trying to make out the small figure slumped in the huge covered chair, which looked more like a sack of clothes to be washed than a man. As the herald had suggested the king of Jellon looked old and ill, his skin pale, his eyes blue-ringed and sunken. He was dressed all in white, which had the unfortunate effect of making him appear to be a corpse wrapped in its burial shroud.