Shadowrise

by Tad Williams

  But now he had been wandering the residence halls for over an hour. He had been forced to tell several curious servants that he was lost, making up false errands to explain his presence, and each time his feeling of dread had increased. What if he was caught? What if they brought him to Hendon Tolly and he had to look into those horrible, piercing eyes and try to lie? He would never manage. Matthias Tinwright had learned long before that although he could write poems about heroes like Caylor, describe in stirring words how they stood before the direst foes with faith in their hearts and a smile on their lips, he was no hero himself.

  No, I will tell my captors everything, he promised himself, long before the first red-hot iron nears my skin. I will tell them Brone made me do it. I will beg for my life.

  Gods help me, how did I find myself in this evil trap?

  Tinwright walked beneath an arch and paused, staring up at the faces lining the walls. He was in the royal portrait gallery—but how had he strayed so far? The kings and queens looked down on him, some smiling but most dour and forbidding, as if disturbed to find this callow interloper in their midst. The earliest, brought from Connord with Anglin and painted in the crude style of the early Trigonate era, seemed no more human than the beasts from the tapestries, all staring eyes and stiff, mask-like features . . .

  Now, suddenly, he could hear voices in the passage outside the hall. Tinwright looked around in panic. He was caught in the middle of a large room—by the time he reached the far side and the door the speakers would see him. Did he dare hope it was only more servants and try to brazen out yet another encounter? The voices, getting nearer by the moment, sounded loud and authoritative. His heart raced even faster.

  There. The wall was open just across from him—a stairwell. He dashed across the stone flags and up onto the bottommost step just as the men he had heard swept into the room, their voices suddenly growing and echoing beneath the tall ceiling. Tinwright crouched, shrinking back against the stairs so that he could not be seen, although it meant he himself could not see who had entered.

  “ . . . Have found something in one of the old works—Phayallos, I believe—that refers to such things. He called them Greater Tiles because of their size, and believed that they were—how did he put it?—‘Windows and Doorways, although few can cross their thresholds.’ ” Tinwright could almost recognize the voice—he was certain he had heard it before, hoarse with age, breathy but sharp-edged.

  “Which tells us little we don’t already know,” said the other. Tinwright shrank even farther back into the shadows of the stairwell and held his breath in fear. The second voice belonged to Hendon Tolly. “Look at all these cow-eyed fools!” Tolly was obviously speaking of the Eddon portraits. “Generations of kings no better than shepherds, content to tend their little pasturage.”

  “They are your ancestors, too, Lord Tolly,” the other man observed respectfully.

  To Tinwright’s continuing horror, the pair had stopped in the middle of the great chamber, not far from where he crouched. Why did I hide? Idiot! There’s no way to pretend innocence now if they catch me!

  “Yes, but not my ideal,” said Tolly. “Great Syan to the south has been weak for a century, beautiful to see but rotten inside. Brenland and the rest are little more than peasant villages with walls around them. With only a little determination we could have ruled all of Eion.” Tinwright could hear him spit. “But things will change.” A deeper tone entered his voice—something cold and harsh. “You will not fail me, will you, Okros?”

  “No, Lord Tolly, fear not! We have solved most of the riddles already, except for the damnable Godstone. I begin to believe it doesn’t exist.”

  “Didn’t you say this Godstone was not absolutely necessary?”

  “Yes, my lord, as best I can tell, but I still would like to have it before we attempt . . .” The physician cleared his throat. “Please remember, these are very complicated matters, sire—not like readying a siege engine. Not a matter of simple engineering.”

  “I know that. Do not treat me like a fool.” The dangerous chill in Hendon Tolly’s voice deepened.

  “Never, my lord!” Tinwright had seen Okros Dioketian around the residence, a brisk, unsmiling man who seemed always a little contemptuous of those around him, though he masked it with etiquette. But he did not sound contemptuous now—he sounded terrified of his master. Tinwright could sympathize. “No, my lord, I say it only to remind you that there is much still to do. I am laboring all hours of the day and night to . . .”

  “You said we must employ the charm at Midsummer or miss our chance. Is that not right?”

  “Yes . . . yes, I did say . . .”

  “Then we cannot wait any longer. You must show me how it is all to be done, and soon. If you cannot . . . then I will find another scholar.”

  Okros did not speak for some time, moments in which he had clearly struggled to master his shaking voice. He had not been entirely successful. “Of course, Lord Tolly. I . . . I think I have pieced together most of the ritual now—yes, almost all! I merely have to deduce what some of the words mean, since Phayallos and the other ancient scholars are not always in agreement. For instance, there is one who says most emphatically that for the charm to be successful, ‘the Tile must be clouded with blood.’ ”

  Hendon Tolly laughed. “I do not think we should have any trouble with that—a few less mouths to feed in this gods-blasted anthill of a city would be welcome.” His voice grew fainter as he began walking again. Tinwright said a silent prayer of thanks to Zosim that he would not have to crouch in hiding much longer: his back and buttocks were beginning to ache.

  “But I cannot help wondering what that means—‘clouded’?” Okros sounded like he was following after. “I have checked three translations and they all say something like it. Clouded, fogged, never smeared or anointed. It is a mirror, lord. How do you cloud a mirror with blood?”

  “Oh, gods,” said Tolly in evident frustration, “slit a few virgin throats I suppose. Isn’t that what those ancients always want? Sacrifices? Surely even in this blighted city we can find a few virgins—there are always children, after all.”

  Even as the horror of what Tolly was saying sank in, it abruptly became clear to Tinwright that the voices were coming back toward him once more—that Hendon Tolly had reversed his direction and was approaching the staircase where Tinwright was hiding. Without even taking the time to stand up, he turned and began to scramble up the staircase on his hands and knees. When he got to the first turn he pulled himself upright and hurried on, trying to match speed to stealth. He could still dimly hear Tolly and the physician arguing below him, but only a word here and there: to his measureless relief, they did not seem to be following him up the stairs.

  “ . . . Phantoms . . . lands that do not . . .” Okros was faint as wind around the castle’s turrets. “ . . . we cannot chance the . . .”

  “ . . . Gods themselves . . .” Tolly was laughing again, his voice rising in glee. “The whole world will fall to its knees, shrieking . . . !”

  As he reached the top Tinwright tumbled out of the doorway and onto the landing above, his fear no longer just that of being caught. Something in Hendon Tolly’s voice had changed—those last words had sounded like the cry of something not quite human.

  For a long time he stood by the stairwell, trying to breathe silently as he listened for the sound of footsteps on the stairs, but he no longer heard even the voices. Still, Okros and the Lord Protector might only have moved to the next room. He would wait a long while to make sure it was safe to go down. Tolly terrified him at the best of times, but to hear the man talk so blithely of blood sacrif ice—and that laugh, that terrible laugh . . . ! No, he would stay until nightfall if necessary just to make sure he avoided the master of Southmarch Castle.

  At last, feeling the need to stretch his legs but not yet ready to venture downstairs, he took a quiet walk along the upstairs hall, past the open doors of storerooms now being cleared out to provide more acco
mmodations for highborn refugees. At the far end of the hall a window faced south across the garden toward the gate of the inner keep. In fact, from the small mullioned window Tinwright could see all the way to the stretch of bay where the causeway had once joined mainland Southmarch and the island castle. The far shore looked strange somehow. Tinwright stared at it for a long moment before he remembered the fearful conversations he had heard during the morning, courtiers whispering that after a long, quiet time the fairies were up to some devilry.

  “Strange noises,” some had said, saying they had been wakened in the dark of night. “Chanting, and singing.” “Fog,” others had claimed, “a great fog rising up everywhere. Not a natural one, either.”

  Tinwright saw that a vast cloud of mist did indeed lie along the bay front on the mainland side, and at first he thought the dark, slowly moving shapes in the murk were plumes of black smoke, that the fairy folk had lit huge bonfires on the beach, but though mist itself eddied in the wind, the dark tendrils did not. Something . . . something was growing out of the mist. But what? And why?

  Tinwright shook his head, unable to make sense of it. After several quiet months it had almost become possible to forget that the Qar were still there, malicious and secret as a fever. Was the long, fretful peace over?

  Trapped between the fairies and the Tollys, he thought. Might as well slit my throat now.

  Matt Tinwright decided he had hidden long enough—it was probably as safe to go down now as it would ever be. Avin Brone would want to know what he had heard here. Tinwright also had a responsibility to another, equally frightening authority.

  “She is most unsatisfactory, this girl,” his mother proclaimed. “I bring her good food from the marketplace and she turns up her nose at it. Does not the book say, “The poor must be sausaged?”

  Solaced, he almost told her—but what was the point? Trying to tell his mother anything was like talking to a statue of Queen Ealga in the castle gardens. A very loud statue. “Are you not eating?” he asked the patient.

  Elan M’Cory was propped up in the bed. Her color had come back but she still had the sagging look of a child’s rag doll. Tinwright did his best to ignore a flash of annoyance that the young noblewoman was still in bed. She wasn’t well. She had been poisoned—albeit lovingly. She would be well when she was well. “I eat what I can,” Elan said quietly. “It’s just . . . I don’t mean to be ungrateful, but some of the things she brings back . . .” She gave a limp shudder. “The bread has beetles in it.”

  “Not beetles, only ordinary wholesome weevils.” Anamesiya Tinwright clicked her tongue in disgust. “Not as though they were alive and walking around, either. Baked in—a bit crunchy, like a nice roasted pine nut.”

  Elan’s shoulders quivered and she brought her hand to her mouth. “Of course, Mother, I’m sure it’s perfectly good, but Lady M’Cory is used to a different sort of fare. Look, here is a Brenlandish two-crab piece—no, a pair of them.” He had been writing love notes for a court that, with summer approaching and the Qar still beyond the gates but quiet, had been full of a sort of fatal giddiness. Also, Brone had given him a silver starfish for his information about Okros and Hendon Tolly and had barely shouted at him at all, so Matt Tinwright was feeling unusually well-fixed. “Find Elan some nice bread made with good flour. No weevils. And a piece of fruit.”

  His mother snorted. “Good luck to you. Fruit? You’ve been living with the nobs too long, boy. Do you know how many people are sleeping in the streets? How hungry they all are? You’d be lucky to find a single wormy apple left in all Southmarch.”

  Elan looked beseechingly at him.

  “Well, just try to get her something nice to eat, Mother—the best you can come up with for those two coppers. I’ll sit with Lady M’Cory until you come back.”

  “Oh? What about me? What kind of son sends his mother off like a Kracian pilgrim without so much as a crab for herself ?”

  Tinwright did his best not to roll his eyes. He pulled another coin from his pocket. “Very well. Buy yourself a mug of beer, Mother. It will be good for your blood.”

  She looked hard at him. “Beer? Are you mad, boy? Zakkas’ Ale is good enough for me. I’ll put this in the gods’ offering bowl to take a little of the stink of your sinful life off my hands.” Then, before he could even try to snatch his copper back from its journey to oblivion, she was out the door and gone.

  He turned to the bed. Elan’s eyes were closed.

  “Do you sleep?”

  “No. I don’t know,” she said without opening them. “Sometimes I wonder if I did not truly die when I took the poison, and all this is but a phantom of my expiring thought. If it is the true world around me, why can’t I care? Why do I only want it all to go away and let me fall again into dreamless darkness?”

  He sat on the end of the bed and wished he dared to take her hand. Despite the fact that he had saved her from Hendon Tolly and that she belonged to no one now if not to him, Tinwright felt that in some way Elan had become more distant than ever. “If your expiring thought can manufacture a gargoyle like my mother out of pure imagination, then you are a more skilled poet than I will ever be.”

  She smiled a little and opened her eyes, but still would not look at him directly. Somewhere in the upper stories he could hear a baby crying. “You are droll, Master Tinwright, but you do your mother wrong. She is a good woman . . . in her way. She has done her best to keep me comfortable, although we do not always see eye to eye on what is best for me.” She made an unpleased face. “And she pinches pennies most severely. The dried fish she brings . . . I cannot even tell you what it smells like. It must be caught where the residence privies drain into the lagoons.”

  Tinwright could not help laughing. “You heard her. She saves money so that she can sneak her extra coins into the offering bowls whenever she gets the chance. For a woman so holy, she seems to feel the gods are as stupid as unruly children and must be reminded constantly of her devotion.”

  Elan’s face changed. “Maybe she is right and we are wrong—certainly the gods do not seem to be paying much attention to their mortal children. I would not dare to call the gods foolish or stupid, Master Tinwright, but I must say I have long wondered if they are too distracted to keep order here.”

  The idea was interesting. Tinwright felt a sudden urge to consider it—to think of what could take the gods’ attention away from their human creations, leaving men to suffer and wonder without guidance. He might even make a poem of it.

  Something like “The Wandering Gods,” he thought. No, perhaps “The Sleeping Gods” . . .

  The door banged open so suddenly that Tinwright jumped and Elan let out a cry of surprise. Anamesiya Tinwright pushed the door shut again behind her with an even louder thump, then fell to her knees on the board floor and began to pray loudly to the Trigon. The infant upstairs, startled by the loud noises, began to cry again.

  “What is it?” Tinwright knew, with a sinking heart, that it must be something bad: his mother usually spent more time preparing a clean place to kneel than she actually did praying. “Mother, talk to me!”

  She looked up; he was shocked to see her familiar, bony features so pale. “I had hoped you would find time to repent of all your wickedness before the end,” she said in a hoarse voice. “My poor, straying son!”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “The end, the end. I have seen it coming! Demons sent to destroy us because we’ve angered the gods.” She bowed her head once more in prayer and would not be interrupted no matter how many questions he asked.

  “I’ll go and see what this is about,” he told Elan.

  Tinwright made sure the door was locked behind him, then went out into the street. At first he followed the anxious throngs who seemed headed to the edge of the harbor, the nearest part of the city’s outer walls, but after a moment he turned against the flow and struck out toward Market Road Bridge, which crossed the canal between the lagoons. If it was something happening across t
he water in Southmarch Town, he would be able to see it just as well from the outwall behind The Badger’s Boots, a tavern near the end of North Lagoon where Tinwright had spent many a night with Hewney and the others. The alleyway that ran behind the place was not well known, which was why he and his drinking companions had found it a good place to take tavern whores.

  As he walked east he listened to fragments of conversation from the people who passed him. Most of them had only heard rumors and were on their way to see what was happening for themselves. Some were terrified, babbling prayers and shouting imprecations, but others seemed only slightly more concerned than if they had been on their way to the Zosimia festivities.

  “A sign!” many said. “The earth itself is against us!”

  “We’ll throw them back,” others cried. “They’ll learn what Southmarch men are like!” Some of the arguments became fistfights, especially if those who disagreed were drunk. The sun behind the high clouds had scarcely passed noon, but far more people than usual seemed to have started their drinking early.

  Was this what it was like when the gods fought their great war? Matt Tinwright wondered. Did some mortals go to the battlefield only to watch it happen, caring not that the world might end?

  It was another strange, interesting thought—the second in one day that might make a poem. For a moment he almost forgot that whatever he was on his way to look at had reduced his dragon of a mother to raw terror.

  But what could it be? All I saw was mist and smoke. And why should that frighten so many?

  He slipped past the Boots, which was even louder than normal with the sound of argument and lamentation. For a moment he strongly considered just going inside and drinking up the rest of the money Brone had given him—after all, if the world was ending, might it not be better to sleep through it all? As far as he knew, nothing in the Book of the Trigon actually forbade being drunk on the Day of Fate.