by Tad Williams
From their mountaintops and hidden shadows
From their deep forests and ocean strongholds,
And blood that binds them, so they may be asked
To grant to a soliciting subject
Some gift, or ward ’gainst threatening evil . . .
The fear that had seized him when he bumped into Okros came back to him threefold, so that for a moment Matt Tinwright couldn’t walk straight and had to stop in the middle of the narrow street. People shoved past him with angry words, but he barely heard them.
So it was she spilled the cockerel’s blood
And prayed the ancient Earthlord give to her
Deathly power against her enemies . . .
Could that be the reason? Had Okros walked all the way down from the safety of the residence to the outer keep because he needed a rooster of just the right color for some kind of ritual? Did it have something to do with the mirror Brone wanted to know about?
Full of confused, fearful thoughts, but also afire with excitement that felt a bit like a fever, Matt Tinwright hurried back across the crowded, brawling inner keep.
His mother was predictably furious. “What do you mean you are going out again? I need wood for the fire! It is all well for you to come in here like some petty lordling, calling for eel stew, demanding that I break my back cooking. What devilry are you up to?”
“Thank you, Mother, and a good day to you, too. But I am not going out quite yet.” He bent his head so he could go up the narrow stairwell without dashing out his brains.
Elan was sitting up in the large bed she was sharing with Puzzle’s grand-nieces, working at a bit of embroidery. He was glad to see her stronger, but she still had the haunted look he had hoped to see banished from her face forever.
“My lady, are you alone?”
She smiled grimly. “As you see. The girls are visiting the neighbors’, trying to cozen an extra blanket—their mother and yours are now sleeping on the couch downstairs, if you remember.”
He did. The whispered struggles of the two older women crammed together on the narrow couch like two bad-tempered skeletons in a single coffin were the reason he was back sleeping with Puzzle in the crowded royal residence, unsatisfying as that was. “I saw Brother Okros in the market place. Do you know anything of him?”
Elan gave him a strange look. “What do you mean? I know he is Hendon’s physician. I know he is full of odd ideas ...”
“Like what?”
“About the gods, I think. I never paid much attention when he was at table with us. He would talk on and on about alchemy and the holy oracles. Some of it seemed blasphemous to me ...” She curled her lip. “But blasphemy never bothered Hendon.”
“Does he . . . have you ever heard that he is a magic-worker?”
Elan shook her head. “No, but as I said, I scarcely know him. He and Hendon would often talk late at night, at strange hours, as if Okros were working at some important task for him that could not wait. Hendon once had a man beaten almost to death for interrupting him during an afternoon nap but he never lost his temper with Okros.”
“What did they talk about?”
Elan’s expression had become something painful to see, and Tinwright suddenly realized he was making her think about things she did not wish to remember. “I . . . I cannot remember,” she said at last. “They never spoke for long in front of me. Hendon would take him to another part of the residence. But I heard the physician say once that . . . what was it, it was so strange! Oh, yes, he told Hendon, ‘The perfection has begun to change—it is telling a different truth now.’ I could make no sense of it.”
Tinwright frowned, thinking. “Could it have been ‘reflection,’ not ‘perfection’?”
Elan shrugged. He could see the darkness in her eyes and wished he could have spared her this. “Perhaps,” she said quietly. “I could not hear them well.”
The reflection has begun to change, he thought. It is telling a different truth now. It made a sort of disturbing sense if they had been talking about the mirror Brone had mentioned. And Elan had mentioned the gods. Meno’s poem spoke of a heartless queen sacrificing a black cockerel to Kernios so she could curse her enemies. Was that what Okros planned to do? That would be no ordinary sacrifice, but some kind of witchcraft instead.
He had to tell Avin Brone. Then, duty discharged, Matt Tinwright could return to the somewhat flea-ridden bosom of his family and enjoy a well-earned bowl of eel stew.
Brone motioned to a spotty young man who was leaning against a threadbare tapestry, cutting his nails with a gleaming knife—Tinwright thought he was probably one of the count’s relatives from Landsend. “Bring me some wine, boy.” He turned back to Tinwright. “Very well. Here are some coppers for your new information, poet. Now find Okros again—he is probably in the herb garden this time of day, especially with so many wounded in need of physic. Follow him wherever he goes, but do not give yourself away.”
Matt Tinwright could only sit and stare, open-mouthed. “What?” he said at last, barely able to get the word out of his mouth. “What?”
“Don’t gawp at me, you knock-kneed pillock,” Brone growled. “You heard me. Follow him! See what he’s up to! See if he leads you to the mirror!”
“Are you mad? He’s a witch! He’s going to cast a spell on someone, or . . . or try to raise demons! If you want him followed so much do it yourself, or send that pimpled lad.”
Brone leaned forward across the writing desk on his lap, his doubleted belly spreading until it almost knocked over the inkwell. “Have you forgotten that I have your tiny little poet’s jewels cupped in my hand? And that I can have them snipped off any time I wish?”
Tinwright did his best not to appear terrified. “I don’t care. What are you going to do, report me to Hendon Tolly? I’ll just tell him that you’re spying on him. Your jewels will end up on a knacker’s table next to mine, Lord Brone. Then he’ll kill us both—but at least I’ll still have my soul. I won’t be carried off by demons!”
Brone stared at him hard for a long time, his mouth working in his bushy beard, which was now mostly gray. At last, something like a smile appeared in the hairy depths. “You’ve found a bit of courage after all, Tinwright. That’s good, I suppose—no man should remain an unmitigated coward all his life, even a wastrel like you. So what are we to do?” Brone suddenly reached out, far faster than Tinwright would have guessed possible, and grabbed the collar of the poet’s cloak so tightly that it threatened to strangle him. “If I can’t report you to Tolly, I suppose the only thing I can do is throttle you myself.” The smile had become something much more menacing.
“Nnnh! Dnnn’t!” It was really quite painfully tight around Tinwright’s throat. The Landsend relative returned with the wine and stopped in the doorway, watching the spectacle with interest.
“If you are no use to me, poet—even worse, if you have become a threat to me—then I have little choice ...”
“Buh umm nuh uh thrt!”
“I’d like to believe that, boy. But even if you’re not a threat, you’re still no help to me, and in such hard times—such dangerous times—there’s no need for you. Now, if you were to help me by doing what I ask, well, the crabs and starfish would keep coming—you must enjoy having a little money, eh, especially these days, with everything so dear and food so rare?—and I wouldn’t need to rip your head off.”
“Ull hlp! Ull hlp!”
“Good.” Brone turned loose of his cloak and he fell backward. The Landsend youth stepped politely out of the way to allow Tinwright to collapse onto the floor where he lay gasping.
“But why me? ” he asked when he had finally struggled back onto his feet, rubbing his aching neck. “I’m a poet!”
“And not a particularly good one,” Brone said. “But what choice do I have? Limp around the residence myself? Send my idiot nephew?” He gestured at the youth, who was paring his dirty fingernails again, but lifted the knife toward Tinwright in a sort of salute. “No, I need s
omeone who is allowed and even expected to be in the residence—someone too foolish to be feared and too useless to be suspected. That’s you.”
Matt Tinwright rubbed his aching throat. “You do me too much honor, Count Avin.”
“There you go—a little spunk. That’s good. Now go find out what’s afoot and there’ll be more in it for you—perhaps even a jar of wine from my own store, eh? How would that be?”
The idea of being able to drink himself into oblivion for a day or two was the first real inducement he’d heard to keep serving Brone, although not dying was a close second. He made a cautious bow before leaving, half worrying that his head would fall off.
“Do you know what I think, Mother?” Kayyin spoke as if in continuation of a conversation briefly interrupted, instead of after an hour or more of silence.
Yasammez did not look at him and did not reply.
“I think you are beginning to feel something for these Sunlanders.”
“Other than to hasten your death,” she said, still not looking up, “why would you say such a preposterous thing?”
“Because I think it is true.”
“Have you any purpose other than irritating me? Remind me—why haven’t I killed you?”
“Perhaps you have discovered that you love your son after all.” He smiled, amused at this conceit. “That you have feelings as base and sentimental as the Sunlanders themselves. Perhaps after all these centuries of neglect and open scorn, you have found that you desire to make things right. Could that be, Mother?”
“No.”
“Ah. I thought not. But it was entertaining to consider.” He had been pacing; now he stopped. “Do you know what is truly strange? Having lived so long in the guise of a mortal—having lived as one—I find that in some ways I have become one. For instance, I am restless in a way none of our people ever has been. If I stay too long in one place it is as though I can feel myself dying the true death. I become impatient, discontented—as though the body itself commands my mind, instead of the other way around.”
“Perhaps that explains your foolish ideas,” Yasammez said. “It is not you, but this mortal guise you have taken on, that offers this nonsense. Interesting if so, but I would still rather have silence.”
He looked at her. She still did not look at him. “Why have you withdrawn from the Sunlander castle, my lady? It was all but yours, and you have also nearly conquered the tiny resistance in the caverns beneath it. Why pull back at such a time? Are you certain you have not begun to pity the mortals?”
For the first time her voice betrayed something, a descent into a deeper chill. “Do not speak foolishness. It offends me that a child of my loins should waste the air that way.”
“So you do not pity them at all. They mean less to you than the dirt beneath your feet.” He nodded. “Why, then, should you ask me to tell them the story of Janniya and his sister? What purpose could there have been for that, unless you wanted them to feel something of our pain . . . of your pain, to be more precise?”
“You tread on dangerous ground, Kayyin.”
“If I were a farmer pledged to destroy the rats that ate my crops, would I take the rats aside before passing sentence and explain to them what they had done?”
“Rats do not understand their crimes.” She turned her dark eyes on him then, at last. “If you say another word about the Sunlanders I will pull your living heart from your chest.”
He bowed. “As you wish, my lady. I will walk on the seashore instead and think about the enlightening conversation we have had today.” He rose, then moved toward the door. Yasammez could not help noticing that whatever was mortal in him now, or whatever feigned it, had not entirely diminished his grace. He still walked with the insolent silkiness of his younger days. She closed her eyes again.
Only moments after he had gone out she felt another presence—Aesi’uah, her chief eremite. Aesi’uah would stand silently for hours waiting for acknowledgment, Yasammez knew, but it was pointless to make her do so: the elusive point that Lady Porcupine had been chasing through the labyrinth of her own long memory was gone.
“Has the time come?” Yasammez asked.
Her adviser’s complexion, usually the soft, warm gray of a pigeon’s breast, was noticeably pale. “I fear it is so, my lady. Even with all the eremites mingling their thought and their song, he has withdrawn beyond our reach.” She hesitated. “We thought . . . I thought . . . perhaps if you ...”
“Of course I will come.” She rose from her chair, her thoughts heavier than her thick black armor. For the first time that she could remember she felt something of the vast weight of her age, the burden of her long-stretching life. “I must say farewell.”
The eremites had taken a cave for themselves high in the hills above an empty stretch of windswept beach a short distance east of the city. Quiet and solitude were the walls of their temple, and they had picked a good place for both things: as Yasammez followed Aesi’uah up the rocky trail she could hear only wind and the distant creaking of seabirds. For a moment she was almost at peace.
Aesi’uah’s sisters and brothers—it was not always easy to tell which was which—were all gathered in the dark cavern. Even Yasammez, who could stand on a hilltop on a moonless, starless night and see what a hunting owl could see, could make out no more than the dull glitter of eyes in their dark hoods. Some of Aesi’uah’s youngest comrades, born in the years of twilight, had never seen the full light of the sun and could not have survived its bright heat.
Yasammez joined the circle. Aesi’uah sat beside her. Nobody spoke. There was no need.
In the dreamlands, in the far places where only gods and adepts could travel, Yasammez felt herself take on a familiar shape. She wore it when she traveled outside herself, both in the waking world and here. In the waking world it was as insubstantial as air, but here it was something more—a fierce thing of claws and teeth, of bright eyes and silken fur. The eremites, given courage by her presence, streamed behind her in an immaterial host like a swarm of fireflies. The Firef lower did not burn inside them as it did in her; without protection, they could only travel so far.
Aesi’uah had spoken the truth, though—the god’s presence was weaker than it had ever been, faint as the sound of a mouse walking in new grass. Worse than that, she could feel the presence of others, not the other lost gods but the lesser things that had been driven out with their masters when her father had banished them all. These hungry things smelled change on the breeze of the dreamlands and sensed that the time might come when they could return to a world that had forgotten how to resist them.
Even now, one such thing sat in the middle of the path, waiting for them. The eremites flew up in distress, circling, but Yasammez paced forward until she stood before it. It was old, she could tell that by the way it shifted and changed, its form too alien to her understanding for her eyes and thoughts to order it properly.
“You are far from your home, child,” it said to one of the oldest creatures that still walked upon the earth. “What do you seek?”
“You know what I seek, old spider,” she told it. “And you know my time is short. Let me pass.”
“You are rude to a neighbor!” it said, chuckling.
“You are no neighbor of mine.”
“Ah, but soon I might be. He is dying, you know. When he is gone, who will hold me and my kind back?”
“Silence. I want no more of your poisonous words. Let me pass or I will destroy you.”
The thing shifted, bubbled, settled again. “You have not the strength. Only one of the old powers can do that.”
“Perhaps. But even if I cannot end you, it may be that I will hurt you so badly that you will be in no condition to cross over when the time comes.”
The thing stared at her, or seemed to, because in truth it had no eyes that Yasammez could see. At last it slithered aside. “I do not choose to contest with you today, child. But the day is coming. The Artificer will be gone. Who will protect you then?”
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br /> “I could ask you the same.” But she had wasted enough time already. She passed and the eremites followed her like a cloud of tiny flames.
Yasammez moved as swiftly as she could through places where the wind howled with the voices of lost children and through others where the sky itself did not seem to fit correctly, until she came at last to the hillside where the doorway stood, a solitary rectangle crowning the grassy peak like a book standing on its end. She climbed the slope and crouched before it, curling the tail of her dream-form around her, ears laid flat against her head. The eremites hovered, uncertain.
“He can no longer be heard on this side of the door, Lady,” they told her.
“I know. But he is not gone. I would know if he were.” She sent out a call but he did not answer. In the silence that followed she could feel the winds that blew through the icy, airless places beyond the door. “Help me,” she said to those who had followed her. “Lend me your voices.”
They were a long time then, singing into the endlessness. At last, when even the inhuman patience of Yasammez had nearly gone, she felt something stir on the edges of her understanding, a faint, small murmur like the dying breath of the Flower Maiden in the stream.
“ . . . Yessss ...”
“Is that you, Artificer? Is that you . . . still?”
“I am . . . but I am . . . becoming nothing . . .”
She wanted to say something soothing, or even to deny it altogether, but it was not the way of her blood to try to bend what was real into what was not. “Yes. You are dying.”
“It is . . . long awaited. But those who have waited almost . . . as long as I have . . . are readying themselves. They will . . . come through ...”
“We, your children, will not let them.”
“You have . . . you have not the power.” He grew fainter then, small and quiet as a drop of rain on a distant hilltop. “They have waited too long, the sleeping . . . and the unsleeping ...”