Shadowrise

by Tad Williams

  “Dreams . . . changed . . .” she rasped, thrusting her hand at Chert as though he had stolen something from her. “Hot. Hot sleep! Cold time. Angry!”

  He shrank back but Flint stepped forward and took her bony fingers in his own. The tiny old woman was shaking all over as though with a fever.

  Her sister hurried to comfort her. “Oh, there, my love, my sweet, there,” she said, kissing the sparse white hairs on her sister’s head. “Don’t fear. Gulda’s with you. I’m here.”

  “Fear,” said Meve in a rasping whisper. “Here.”

  “What’s here, my love? What’s here?”

  The little old woman spoke so softly Chert could barely hear her. “Angry . . .”

  Ena, Longfingers’ daughter, brought them back to the fifth lantern on the estuary path and let them take off their blindfolds again. Chert was glad to have his sight back, but he had been even happier just to escape the salty, smoky air of the drying shed.

  “So, did you find what you were looking for, little man?” the girl asked Flint.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I am touching unfamiliar things in the dark, trying to make out their shapes.”

  “A strange one, aren’t you, boy?” The Skimmer girl turned to Chert. “I remember now who you are—Chert of the Blue Quartz.”

  Chert, who had thought the long night of strange surprises was over, stared at her. “How do you know me?”

  “Never mind that. Better not saying. But you’re a friend of the Ulosian, Chaven, aren’t you?”

  Even if she had helped them in some way—and since Chert had no idea what Flint had been doing, he couldn’t even say that for certain—he was not such a fool as to tell a near stranger anything about the fugitive physician. “I used to visit him. That is common knowledge. Why?”

  “I have a message for him. We helped him and he promised us payment. Days of work we gave him and because he has not paid us our due it makes my father look foolish in front of the others. If you see him, tell him that—the Skimmers want their payment.”

  As Chert and Flint made their way through Chaven’s house toward the hidden door and the tunnel to Funderling Town, they heard noises—footsteps and what sounded like distant, ghostly voices. Chert’s superstitious fright quickly gave way to a more straightforward terror when he heard the voices more clearly and realized that some of Hendon Tolly’s guardsmen were in the house looking for them.

  They must have been watching the place, he thought, fighting down panic. But we stayed in the shadows—perhaps they are not sure we came in. Earth Elders, let it be so!

  Chert knew the place better than did any guards, at least the lower levels, and they managed to get out the door at the bottom of the house before any pursuers caught them. Once outside, Chert jammed the door closed with shards of rock and hoped that if the guards found the door behind the tapestry on the other side, they would think it had been sealed off long ago. But it meant that Chaven’s observatory was being watched carefully. The place was no longer safe.

  We are running out of ways to escape Funderling Town, he thought as he followed the boy back toward the temple. Or even just to see the sky. Soon we will be like those rabbits trapped in their run by hunters. Stormstone’s worst fears for our people are coming true.

  22

  The Patchwork Man

  “The Dreamless are another tribe of Qar, claimed by some to be related to the Cold Fairies. All that is known of them for certain is that in the days of the Theomachy or just after they left the other Qar and went to make a home for themselves called the City of Sleep.”

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

  THE MANY RIVULETS that Barrick had seen or even crossed as he made his way down from the heights around the Cursed Hill now began to join together, streaks of dull silver snaking through the gray-green moorlands in the perpetual twilight, one emptying into the next and then the next until they had swollen into a single cataract too wide to cross, whose thunder was always in his ears.

  “This must be the river Fade.” Barrick paused to rest a moment on a high, rocky part of the bank as the water foamed past beneath him. A cloud of mist wet his clothes but for once he did not mind being damp. “Does it stay like this all the way into Sleep?”

  “Not so much,” said Skurn as he fluttered from side to side, unwilling to land on the wet rocks. “At bottom of hills it goes a bit more calm, like, and a good bit wider—you’ll see it. But it follows all the way to that bad place, yes. Are you different minded now?” he asked hopefully.

  Barrick shook his head. “No, bird. I must go there.” The whole venture was foolish, of course, and almost certainly doomed to fail, but a curious, unfamiliar sort of bubbling in his blood was leading him on. He felt inexplicably certain he would find solutions to his problems when he needed them.

  Is this what it feels like to be well, he wondered, worrying about no one save myself, and not much about me?

  Part of it was having a healthy body: his arm, which for most of his life had felt like it was not part of him except for the pain it caused, no longer bothered him. More than that, it felt as strong as his other arm, although he could tell by some small experiments that it wasn’t. The muscles were shrunken from long disuse and he could not squeeze a stick as hard as he could with his healthy hand; still, the transformation was remarkable.

  “I am changed,” he said to the twilight sky. “I am saved.”

  “Pardon?” Skurn, who had been exploring ahead, flapped down to land on Barrick’s shoulder. His odor was worse than usual, if such a thing were possible.

  “Nothing. What have you been eating?”

  “Fish. Found it on the rocks down there. Leaped out, it did, missed the water coming down. Been softening in the air for days. Very beaksome indeed.”

  “Get away from me. You stink.”

  “Be no posy thyself,” said the bird in a hurt tone as he flapped away.

  The moorlands were covered with green but desolate meadows, empty lands that showed every sign of once being inhabited, although by whom Barrick could not have guessed: stone ruins overgrown by grass and brambles dotted the lonely fields, cottages of almost every size, from stony lean-tos built into the sides of the hills, some of which looked big enough to house fabled Brambinag and all his family, to delicate miniature villages whose tallest buildings barely reached Barrick’s waist, constructed of bark and grass and river-smoothed stones. Had he not already met the Tine Fay he would have thought these structures were like his sister’s doll house, built only to amuse children. But why would the little people leave a civilized existence to move into dangerous Silky Wood and live like savages such a short distance away? What had driven them out of this green place, along with all the others who had lived here, leaving behind only these quiet, sad remains?

  “How far?” he asked Skurn yet again. It was his third day in the meadow and his new sense of confidence was beginning to fade into the unrelenting sameness of following the river down from the moors and into these empty meadows. The wind blew almost continuously here, making Barrick feel as if he was trudging uphill even on the most level ground, and his tattered clothes did little to keep him warm.

  “To the Night Man city? The bad place?” Skurn shook his shiny head in weary disapproval. “Fearsome far, still. Days and days walking.”

  Barrick frowned. What had the blind king said in the dream the Sleepers had given him? “Come quickly, child. We are rushing toward darkness.” Time was growing short, that was clear . . . but what was the darkness the fairy-king feared?

  Not everything about the river meadows was bleak. Unlike the tangling forest, these lands were at least open to the gray sky of the shadowlands, so that for the first time in a while Barrick could watch it through the course of the day. It remained in perpetual twilight, but it was not as unchanging as he had thought: the clouds moved as the wind rose and fell, and the sky itself darkened and lightened from a pearly, pale fog-color to the harsh, bruised
hues of thunderstorms. Flights of birds winged overhead, too far away to see clearly, but apparently as natural as those he remembered from more wholesome lands. And the river, although slower here than in the heights behind him, was still lively enough that for nearly the first time since crossing the Shadowline Barrick could actually see himself moving forward, making progress.

  Sometimes it was almost like being back in the lands of sunlight. Despite the lack of full darkness or bright light, both banks of the Fade were full of life. In low spots the river spread out into the meadows, creating marshes full of pale nodding reeds like thin bones; in other places drooping willows dangled branches in the water like women washing their hair. Swollen black frogs full of high-pitched, questioning noises fell silent as he went by, then resumed their piping when he had passed. Occasionally something larger rattled invisibly in the reeds, and once he saw a huge stag look up from where it had been drinking at the river’s edge, dark but with a magnificent rack of silvery antlers, its silence and calm gaze making it hard for Barrick to believe it was only an animal, so impressive that despite his almost constant hunger it didn’t occur to him until the beast was long gone that he could have tried to kill it.

  There was also life in the river itself, from little shoals of glittering fishes that filled the backwaters to larger things he could not quite see, visible only as spiny backs breaking the surface or as long shadows slipping through the water.

  Still, all of this life did him little good as far as filling his stomach. He discovered after a cold, wet hour or two wading in the river that the shiny fish were too swift to catch, and the closest he came to any of the birds haunting the marsh was uncovering an occasional nest of small, oddly colored eggs. Those and the edible roots and reeds Skurn suggested were Barrick’s only fare. Although he now had fire, being able to cook food meant little when he had no food to cook. And after what must have been a week or so following the river through the apparently unending grass-lands, even Barrick’s healed arm began to seem unremarkable. It was hard to rejoice over being able to move an arm freely when his stomach always ached from hunger, and though the fingers that had once been crimped like a bird’s claw now miraculously moved, they were still red and raw from the endless cold wind.

  When the trees growing beside the river began to spread out into the surrounding land, first in small copses, then into larger stands of birch and beech interspersed with clumps of evergreens and other trees he did not recognize, Barrick at first found it a relief. It seemed a little warmer under the canopy of leaves, and it certainly held back the worst of the wind. But it also made it harder for him to make his way forward while staying next to the river, and it brought back uncomfortable memories of the silkins as well. Did the pale, hideously wet-eyed creatures live in this new forest as well? Or might something even worse make its home here—snakes or wolves or creatures no mortal had ever survived to give a name to?

  Skurn was even less help than usual. As the woods began to grow thicker he was often distracted by the prospect of new and interesting meals, and although some of these benefited Barrick as well, especially the greater abundance of bird’s nests, others—such as some spotted gray slugs the raven declared “sweetish and softly slurpsome”—were of no use to him at all. He was hungry enough to try one bite of the quivering thing, but nothing on earth could have induced him to take a second.

  So it was that after days of walking through the empty lands toward Sleep, it was a wet, weary, unhappy, and very hungry Barrick Eddon who met the patchwork man.

  Rain was pattering heavily on the leaves above his head, loud enough to be heard even over the rushing of the river. Barrick had struggled with damp kindling for a long time before finally getting it to light, and had just got the fire burning well enough to continue on its own when he heard a sound and saw an upright shape moving through the reeds near the river’s edge some distance away. The intruder was not making much attempt to conceal itself—in fact, it was making a rather considerable amount of noise—but the hairs lifted on the back of Barrick’s neck and he rose to a crouch, pulling the broken spear from his belt.

  He stayed in this position, silent and alert, as the thing stumbled nearer. It seemed oblivious to Barrick’s presence—unless, he reminded himself, it was trying to trick him. He held his breath and did not move as it emerged from the reeds and turned its grotesque head toward him. For a moment it seemed his worst fears had been made flesh—the thing was some sort of monster, a shambling heap of strange colors and waving fronds.

  Barrick had already scrambled onto his feet, uncertain whether to attack it or run away, when he realized that what he had supposed was its head was only the hood of a cloak pulled low against the rain. The fronds were its tattered clothes, the colors surprisingly gaudy and bright, so that the strange figure seemed more like something out of a religious procession than any forest wild man.

  Skurn dropped down onto his shoulder, startling Barrick badly. “Not right,” the bird said in a quiet, anxious rasp. “Seen naught like that before. Don’t go near. Us doesn’t like it.”

  The thing had spotted their fire and hurried toward them, arms waving, shouting meaningless words in a scratchy voice: “Gawai hu-ao! Gawai!”

  Barrick sprang back a step, brandishing his spearhead. “Stop!” he shouted. “Skurn, tell it some fairy-talk! Tell it to stay back!”

  The tatterdemalion figure stopped and pushed back its hood, revealing a pale, mud-streaked face that Barrick could not help thinking looked rather ordinary, not to mention as human as his own. “What . . . what did you say?” the newcomer asked. “Is that sunland speech?”

  It was a moment before Barrick remembered that was what the shadowland folk called the other side of the Shadowline. “Yes,” he said, but kept his weapon leveled toward the newcomer. “Yes—that’s where I’m from. You speak my tongue?”

  “I do! I remember it!” The stranger took a few more staggering steps toward him. “Oh, by the Black Hearth, and you have a fire—all blessings on you, sir!”

  Barrick waved him back with the spearhead. “Stop there. What do you want? And who are you?” He examined the odd figure. “You don’t look like a fairy. You look like a man.”

  This startled the stranger, who wrinkled his face into a comical squint as he considered. He certainly had none of the exaggerated boniness of the Qar. His face was straw-thin and dirty, with grime in every wrinkle, and his hair was a wet tangle festooned with twigs and leaves. Still, though he had more than the usual number of missing teeth, he didn’t look much older than the prince himself.

  “Man? A man?” The fellow nodded slowly, his multicolored rags swaying. “That’s a word. Yes, that’s a word.”

  “Where are you from?” Barrick looked around in case the grimy creature might have confederates standing by to jump out and rob him, but there was no sign of anyone else nearby.

  “From . . . yes, from the sunlands,” said the stranger at last—slowly drawing it out, as if he had come up with the answer to a nearly impossible puzzle. “But I don’t remember it well,” he added sadly. “It was so long ago.”

  “What is your name?”

  The patchwork man showed a sickly smile. “Master calls me ‘Pick.’ ”

  Barrick stepped back and let him approach the fire. Pick scuttled past him and squatted, holding his hands up to the low flames, his entire body wracked with shivers.

  “What do you want?” Barrick asked at last. “Are you lost? Or do you mean to try and rob me?”

  The one named Pick cowered as though he’d been slapped. “No! Please, do not hurt me, I beg you. I have been looking so long for someone who can help me. It is my master, my poor master!”

  Every nerve and muscle urged Barrick to walk away from this ragged madman—Skurn had already flapped into the air, as though the man’s folly might be infectious. “What are you talking about?”

  “One of the blemmies fell out of the boat. I tried to help, but I fell too. I nearly drowned! I have be
en trying to find help for hours. But my poor, sick master . . .”

  “Blemmies?”

  “Just come.” Although he was still dripping wet, the patchwork man now leaped up from the fire and began trotting back toward the river, turning every few steps like an eager dog to see if Barrick was following. “Come and you will see!”

  Skurn hovered over Barrick’s head making dire predictions as he made his way down to the wide bank of swaying reeds and the path Pick had already trampled through the weeds and mud. “Enough, bird,” Barrick said at last. “Do something useful. Fly ahead and see if the fellow’s waiting for me with a club or something.”

  The raven appeared a few moments later. “He’s standing looking out at the water, waiting, like. There’s a boat out there, but us don’t like it—there be somewhat fierce wrong with it.”

  When Barrick reached Pick’s side he saw that the smaller man was, as Skurn had said, standing on a patch of trampled weeds staring out at a place where the river widened into a calm backwater. At the center of it, a long stone’s throw away from the bank, a black boat was being rowed in slow circles by a strange, hunched figure.

  It took Barrick a moment to make sense of size and distance. “The one rowing is a big, big man. Is that your master?”

  Pick looked at him as though Barrick had said something utterly mad. “That’s the other blemmy. He’s only got one oar.”

  “Still, he could pole his way back to shore,” Barrick suggested, wondering what kind of half-wit rowers Pick’s master had hired. “Tell him that.”

  “He’s . . .” The patchwork man wiggled his hand beside his head. “Can’t hear,” he said at last.

  “Oh, for the love of . . .” Barrick looked out at the hunched figure and the long, circling black boat. “Then just swim out and show him.”