Shadowrise

by Tad Williams

  Ferras Vansen stood gasping, his eyes stinging not from the Qar’s poisons but from his own blood, which streamed from a cut on his forehead. Their enemies’ first rush had failed—the attackers had dislodged several rocks from the makeshift wall, but Vansen and the warders had killed several of them and their bloody corpses now fouled the Qar side of the barricade, making it harder for the attackers to keep their footing. However, when the bodies got high enough—if Vansen and his men lived long enough to pile more bodies—the invaders would simply climb over the stone wall on a ramp of their own dead.

  “They’re coming again, Captain.” Sledge Jasper’s face was covered with cuts and dirt, an ugly mask that made him look even more grotesque, like a wicked troll out of some old myth. “I can hear them getting nearer.”

  Vansen wiped his eyes and lifted his warding-ax again. He wished he had a short sword or a stabbing-spear. The ax was useful for keeping the enemy at arm’s length, but its weight was wearing him down. The Funderlings must be stronger than they looked: two of the warders were still using theirs, although Jasper was carrying a pair of sharp rock picks instead, one in each hand.

  “I’m ready.” Vansen wiped blood from his face and flicked it away. “Let them come.”

  “You’re a good man, Captain,” Jasper said abruptly, eyes on the darkness beyond the barrier. “I had you wrong, I confess. You’re nearly a Funderling yourself, if a scrape on the tall side. I don’t mind dying with you at all.”

  “Nor I you, Wardthane.” Vansen wished he had something to drink. They had finished the last of their water skins an hour before and his mouth was dry as the Xandian desert. “But first let’s take a few more of these unnatural things with us . . .”

  Jasper’s reply was lost in the roar of the attack. A small, dark shape leaped up onto the top of the barrier, then quickly fell away again, howling, guts spilling from a blow of one of the warders’ axes. Two or three more figures swarmed up to take its place, one of them thrusting a blazing torch into Sledge Jasper’s face so that he had to lean back to avoid being burned. Vansen slammed the blade of his weapon into the torch-bearer, piercing what felt like leather armor and skin, although it was impossible to tell if the blow was mortal or not. A moment later he and one of the other warders were wrestling with another of the shapes which had come scrambling over the top, a drow with a long, pointed knife that sliced Vansen’s forearm below his chain mail and almost reached his face before he tightened his hands on the attacker’s arm. He squeezed as hard as he could and heard a thin shriek above the tumult as the drow’s wrist broke in his grip. The creature dropped the knife, but before Vansen could pull it to him and snap its neck the drow fought its way free and fell to the ground on the defenders’ side of the barrier.

  Something large now loomed up before him, blocking the torchlight. Jasper bent and clubbed the drow beneath their feet with one of his picks. Vansen felt it go limp, but his attention was almost entirely taken by the thing before him, one of the huge ettins. The creature’s rumbling growl shook his bones. Vansen brought his ax down hard on its head even as it reached for Jasper, but the ax bounced off the plated skull without doing any discernible damage. Ignoring him, the ettin closed one of its huge, bearlike paws around Jasper, lifting the small man off the ground and bringing him toward its maw. Vansen grabbed at its heavy arms but it knocked him away, flinging him against the corridor wall like a child throwing a doll. He slid to the floor. He was struggling to get back onto his feet to help Jasper when a flash of lightning and booming crack of thunder turned the entire passage into skull-shattering day—a second of the brightest bright light and a piercing, painful thump of sound that felt like two giant hands clapped over his ears, and then Ferras Vansen knew no more.

  A thousand artists could never paint such horror, Matt Tinwright thought as he cowered in a doorway. A thousand poets, all of them a thousand times greater than himself, could never tell it all. Southmarch was under attack. Many of the buildings around Market Square were aflame, but no one was trying to put them out. At least a dozen bodies lay within Tinwright’s view, arrows jutting from their backs. The air was full of smoke but he could smell something else as well, an unfamiliar odor, sweet yet nauseating as decaying flesh. It made his eyes burn and his throat and chest ache.

  Dozens of strange armored shapes continued to fire arrows down into the square from atop the huge thorny black trunks that had grown across the water and over the wall. Other invaders had already clambered down on ropes and had slaughtered dozens of other hapless Southmarchers before Durstin Crowel and his guards had managed to push them back. Small knots of fighting had spread all over the square, men and monsters hacking each other in a strange near-silence: even the screams of the wounded and dying seemed muted, as though the smoke hanging in the air somehow muffled the cries.

  Hendon Tolly was here in Market Square, too, and fighting fiercely, his black surcoat with the red boar clearly visible across the square, the black plume in his helmet waving like another puff of smoke. The castle’s lord protector stood high in the stirrups of a great warhorse, swinging a sword and shouting to his companions as they milled around him in the chaos of the fight. They had driven most of the attackers back into the shadows of the giant thorns, shadows that grew larger as the sun dropped down behind the western walls, but they could not make the Qar retreat and more of the fairy-warriors were now swarming across from the mainland on the thorn bridges.

  Another thin shout went up from the castle folk who were struggling, like Tinwright, to get away from the fighting. A vast shape on a heavy battle charger had just come clanking into the square with another troop of soldiers, these armored and caparisoned in the crimson and gold of Landsend. It was Avin Brone, up and fighting despite his age and illness, looking a little like a teapot in his rounded cuirass, his beard halfway down his chest. The old man swung an ancient two-handed sword as he rode into the knot of fairies around Hendon Tolly with his men close behind, forcing the enemy to break and scatter. A few of the Southmarch folk cheered to see it.

  Still, it seemed all but hopeless. Tinwright knew he should be fighting, but he had no weapon and no knowledge of how to use one. In any case, he was terrified.

  I’m a poet! And a coward—I know nothing of war! I should never have come back! But Elan M’Cory and Tinwright’s mother had left everything behind here when they fled to the safety of the inner keep, including the money he had given them—money Matt Tinwright could not afford to lose. But now I shall be dead for the sake of a couple of starfish. Why wasn’t I born rich . . . ?

  More Twilight People were dropping from the huge black trunks like beetles tumbling out of a rotten log. For a moment it seemed the newcomers might overwhelm the couple of hundred Southmarch soldiers, but whatever else his faults, Hendon Tolly was no coward: he and several of his men held the attackers off as Berkan Hood, the lord constable, rounded the rest of the defenders into some kind of order and began to back them away across the square in slow retreat, shields raised so that the fairy arrows bounced harmlessly away.

  “Fall back!” came Brone’s muted voice. “Fall back to Raven’s Gate!”

  Some of the noncombatants had realized what was happening and were running along the arcades at the edge of Market Square, urging all who were hiding there to flee over Market Road Bridge to the inner keep before the guards closed and secured the gate.

  Can it be? Tinwright’s heart felt as heavy as lead. They are surrendering the outer keep entirely?

  A moment later he realized that if he didn’t move quickly he would be part of what was surrendered. The colonnade along his side of the square was blocked with abandoned carts and other rubbish left behind by the terrified residents when the attack began; Tinwright had no choice but to wrap his arms over his head and run across the open cobbles as fast as he could, positive that any moment he would feel the horrible pain of the arrow that would take his life.

  A few missed shots skittered across the stones beside him, but he
reached the crowd on the bridge and ducked past a wagon some fool was trying to bring across as soldiers screamed and tried to shove the creaking cart back off the bridge. Protected for a moment by the bulk of the thing, Matt Tinwright joined the panicky crowd as they struggled over Market Road Bridge and up the hill toward the gate to the inner keep, packed so close together that he could smell the sharp, ugly stink of other people’s fear.

  25

  Into Sleep

  “It is said that the fairies known as the Dreamless go abroad only at night, and that they steal the dreams of mortal men because they have none of their own. It is also said that the Dreamless make pets from the ghosts of mortals who have died without a Trigonate blessing and use them for a hunting pack.”

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

  THE CLOUD OF DARKNESS covered a sizeable portion of the sky above the river by the time Barrick began to see the first bridges across the Fade, signs of the approaching city. At first he didn’t even realize the asymmetrical shapes were bridges because they seemed to be jagged slabs of natural stone eroded by wind and water. As he saw more of Sleep he came to realize that this was the way of the Dreamless: their most careful constructions looked like preposterous accidents, with scarcely a straight line to be found anywhere.

  The Fade itself was becoming busier, too, although all the boats and ships they saw, small or large, rowed by gray-skinned Dreamless or headless blemmies like the one laboring in their own craft, seemed to pass in funereal silence. There was no question, however, that the occupants of the other boats noticed Barrick and Pick: even the humblest Dreamless fisherman stared at the Sunlanders as though they had never seen anything so odd and so unpleasant in their long lives.

  “Why do they look at us like that?” Barrick whispered. “Like they hate us?”

  Pick shrugged, then lifted his bowl over the side to get more water for his master. “They do not love our kind, of course.”

  “But you said there were many of us kept here as servants.”

  “Oh, yes, Master keeps many. Not all are wimmuai, either. Some came from the Sunlands like you and I.”

  “Then why are the Dreamless staring at us?

  Pick paused as he was crawling back under the tent on the deck. “I’m sure they are only staring at our boat because it belongs to Qu’arus. Perhaps they wonder why they do not see him—he is well known to many in Sleep.”

  After that the man in the patchwork clothes returned his attention to his dying lord and would not answer anymore questions.

  Soon they reached the first of the darklights, a beacon atop a high-backed bridge that appeared to be a cauldron steaming out pure blackness—not a cloud, like smoke, but something thinner and less tangible, a stain that spread across the gray day. It stretched across them like a shadow as they neared the bridge and then slid past it. Barrick felt a chill seize his heart.

  As the labyrinth of the city began to grow around them the gloom grew deeper. They passed more and more darklights, perched atop bridges or leaking from sconces on rough walls. The world became darker and darker, as though night had finally fallen over the shadowlands, but it was a curious sort of night that stretched in pools from the darklights instead of arising everywhere and equally: for a long time twilight still hung over their heads, gray sky glaring through the spaces between the somber darklights as distinctly as bright noon. Soon enough, though, there were no more spaces: the twilight had vanished altogether, hidden behind a curtain of inky darkness.

  And with full dark came the Dreamless themselves, spilling out like termites from a split log, although at first Barrick could barely make out anything more than dim shapes moving through the streets of Sleep on either side of the river and crossing the bridges overhead, figures gray and indistinct as ghosts. As his eyes became more used to the darklights he could see them better. The color of their skin seemed always the same, but the Dreamless themselves were as different as the Qar he had seen at Kalkan’s Field: some of them could have easily passed for human, but others were so disturbingly formed that Barrick could only thank the gods for the robes they wore. He also could not help but feel every single one of the Dreamless was watching him.

  The River Fade became a wide, stone-sided canal, its edges entirely covered with docks and buildings, some of them so tall that Barrick could not see their tops above the murk of the darklights. As they slid deeper into the city, the blemmy still tirelessly plying the oars, Barrick felt as though he was being swallowed by something.

  The Fade soon began to split into a series of lesser waterways. The blemmy steered down first one, then another, as if it knew exactly where it was going. The smaller the canals, the fewer passersby, until at last Barrick could see nothing else moving in this part of the bleak stone city except their own boat.

  They had reached an area of silent marble buildings that were almost impossible to see clearly through the darkness. Huge willows lined the canal bank, long limbs swaying in the breeze, but the entire neighborhood seemed otherwise as lifeless as a mausoleum. The blemmy slowed the boat and then brought it to a stop at an ornate dock jutting several yards out into the water. While Barrick crouched in the stern, surprised by the sudden end to their journey, a crowd of shadowy figures drifted toward them out of the darkness, filling the dock while making no more noise than cats—almost a dozen Dreamless men and women dressed in black. Then one last figure came down the dock and the others made room for her. When she reached the end of the pier she stopped, her hands extended before her as though she walked in her sleep. Pick had folded back the tent. She stared down at Qu’arus where he lay in the bottom of the boat. Barrick thought at first that the Dreamless woman wore some kind of cowl, but then realized that the top of her hairless head was covered in plate, like the shell of a beetle. Her features were slender and mobile—her face looked nearly human but for her corpselike pallor—but much of her exposed skin was covered in bony carapace. He could not be certain because of her strange, Dreamless eyes, but he thought she had been crying.

  When she spoke her voice was soft, though the language itself was harsh. The brief words could have been either a blessing or a curse for all that Barrick could understand them.

  Pick looked up at her with a strange sort of satisfaction on his face. “I have brought him home, Lady.”

  She stood silently for a moment, then turned and moved back up the dock, her filmy black garment billowing around her ankles like mist. Several of the others lifted Qu’arus from the boat with Pick’s help, then carried him along the dock after her, then up the steps toward what Barrick now saw was a great, dark house.

  “Come inside quickly,” Pick whispered. “It will be Repose soon—the skrikers will be out.” After this incomprehensible warning he hurried up the dock after his master’s body. Another servant, whose gray skin was as wrinkled as a wasp’s nest, had tied a rope around the blemmy’s waist and led it off through the willows and around the side of the squat, stony house. Barrick looked down at the place where Qu’arus had lain and saw for the first time that a gray wool cloak had been folded beneath him, no doubt by Pick to protect his master from the hard boards of the deck. Barrick lifted it and something fell out of the cloak and back into the boat with a clatter, making him look around in fear, but he was alone on the dock. The thing that had fallen was a short sword in an unadorned black scabbard. When he drew it Barrick saw with approval that its edges were sharp as a shaving razor, the kind of weapon he had not had since he had fought the Qar with Tyne Aldredge. He wrapped it back up in the cloak, then looked around for a place to hide them both. Something rustled beside him and he jumped, so startled that he almost dropped both objects into the river.

  “Not going in, us hopes,” croaked Skurn, tucking his wings. “Not into a Night Man house.”

  “What else am I going to do? At least I might learn something about where Crooked’s Hall might be. Maybe I’ll even get something to eat that won’t have too many legs.”


  “As you wishes, then.” The raven leaped up onto the rail of the slowly rocking boat and turned his back on Barrick. “Stay out here, us will. Not for us, a nasty mazy place like that.”

  Like much of what Barrick had seen of the city of Sleep, the house of Qu’arus was as intricate as the interior of a seashell, a succession of mostly windowless hallways, the stone walls sometimes rough, sometimes smooth, but always damp. Moss grew on the gray stone and in certain corners water dripped to the floor to be carried away down shallow sluices, but the moss also grew on white marble statues of incredible delicacy, and the water gurgled down hallways next to sumptuous carpets that bore tangled yet beautiful designs in stark black and white. He could see all of this only because of the small, pearlescent green hemispheres set low in the walls and along some of the passageway floors, which Barrick assumed at first were some kind of luminous stones, but soon realized were actually mushrooms.

  He caught up with the servants carrying Qu’arus’ body in the main hallway. The house was unpleasant, the near-silence disturbing, and the darkness oppressive. Had it not been for the changes the Sleepers had somehow made in him he would have been beside himself with unease—nothing could make him like this house: after only moments inside it he wanted badly to get out again. Still, he knew almost nothing of the city outside, let alone where he needed to go. What was it the Sleepers had told him?

  “There is only one way you can reach the House of the People and the blind king before it is too late—you must find Crooked’s roads, which will fold your path before you so that you may step between the world’s walls. You must find the hall in Sleep that bears his name.”

  Pick had not heard of a place called Crooked’s Hall, but perhaps some of the other servants might know of it. He hoped so—Barrick couldn’t imagine interrupting the mourning of the stony-faced lady of the house to ask directions.