Shadowrise

by Tad Williams

  The first skriker was completely engulfed in dark flames, not singing any more, its voice a discordant, almost inaudible shriek. The waves of cold that came from it were too painful for Barrick to approach so he turned to the second one and waded into the chill, slashing away with his sword over and over until he felt the cloth ripping beneath his blows, great shreds of it coming away and tangling his blade. Now his foe was covered in black flames as well, its wordless voice shrilling louder and louder in what sounded much like fear, until it abruptly lost shape and fell away before him. For a moment Barrick grasped at several dark tendrils of something as slick and runny as melting suet, then the blackness flowed away into the ground and was gone and he held only empty, rotting robes that fell apart and ran through his fingers as dust.

  He turned in time to see the other skriker thrashing for an instant in a haze of flickering, leaping darkness, then it fell in on itself with a huge pop and fizzle of ice-cold sparks and was gone, leaving nothing but a smoldering pile of clothes that dwindled away in a last flutter of shadow. But for the charred stump of its handle, the torch itself had entirely burned away.

  For long moments Barrick could only stare, unsure of what had happened, dazed and aching. Then Raemon Beck stepped toward him out of the shadows of the trees, looking almost shamefaced.

  “I . . . I went and got one of the darklights. I threw it.”

  Barrick let out his breath and sat down heavily. “You most certainly did.”

  He would have liked nothing better at that moment than to curl up and sleep, but it seemed unlikely they could burn away two of the city’s guardians without anyone noticing. In truth, he realized, they might only have moments before more of the hideous things came. Groaning, Barrick struggled back onto his feet and led the reluctant Beck toward the massive stone wall and whatever lay beyond it.

  They made their way cautiously through the wild tangle, following the wall until they found an arched gateway. The gate itself lay on the ground in lengths of rotted timber salted with bits of rusted metal: there was nothing to keep them out.

  To Barrick’s surprise, the courtyard beyond the gate was nothing but an overgrown field of grass like a sward around a manor house, although this greenery had not known the teeth of any grazing animals for some time—it was almost knee high, dotted with wild shrubs and netted with black creepers like veins beneath a man’s skin. At the far end of this courtyard stood a wall with another archway and another collapsed gate.

  “Let me go first and see what’s here,” Barrick said.

  He had taken a few steps across the greensward when something grabbed at his ankles. He cursed and yanked his boot free, but when he put it down something clutched him again. The grass itself was twining around him, its blades probing the air like the lightning tongues of serpents, wrapping him in long stalks that continued to twist and climb up his legs.

  “Stay back!” he called to Beck. “The grass—it lives!”

  He hacked desperately at the stems, but for all the damage Qu’arus’ sword did to them it might have been made of parchment. Some strands of grass now reached up to snatch at his hand as if it were trying to pull the weapon from his grasp. Behind him he could hear Beck shouting but could not make out what the man was saying.

  The grass blades that had curled around his legs began to tug him downward, contracting like strips of drying animal hide. Barrick knew that if they pulled him to the sward he would never get up again. He was still slashing but still accomplishing nothing—a few of the strands parted, but for every one he cut two more seized him.

  Then, just at his moment of greatest despair, an idea came to him.

  Barrick shucked off the gray cloak he had appropriated and threw it out full length on the grass before him, then fell onto it, twisting as he did so, to land on his back in the middle of the garment. He could feel the grass squirming like clutching fingers beneath the cloth but the strands could not reach him through the heavy wool, which was pressed down by the weight of his body. Momentarily protected, he began to saw away at the grass imprisoning his feet. Hard, breathless work finally released him. For several moments he could only lie panting like a shipwrecked sailor, his cloak a raft on an angry green sea; then, when he had a little of his strength back, Barrick began to crawl like a caterpillar across the length of the lawn. He moved the cloak with him, always keeping the heavy garment between him and the predatory grass. When he reached the far end and clambered off into the archway he took a swift look through it to make sure nothing else lay in wait for him there, then turned and threw the wadded cloak back to Beck. The cloak trick learned, Beck took less time to cross the greensward than Barrick had.

  At last they huddled side by side in the archway, looking into the next courtyard. It was full of low-lying mist, but when Barrick looked closer he saw that the mist floated above a shallow pool of water that filled the courtyard as the other had been filled by grass.

  “You will not try to walk through it, will you, my lord? ” asked Beck.

  Barrick shook his head. “I don’t know what else we can do. But you don’t have to come—I told you that.”

  The other man groaned. “What, turn back? After helping murder two of the Lonely Ones?”

  “Ah, yes. That was clever,” Barrick said as he threw his cloak back over his shoulders. “Burning them with their own darklight torch.”

  “No ‘clever’ about it, sire. I ran to grab something to fight with. The darklight was the first thing I saw.”

  For a moment Barrick almost felt warmth toward the man, even something like kinship, but that was a weakness he could no longer afford. He turned to examine the waiting pool.

  The mist curled lazily above the water, but now he could see that it hid a row of cracked, ancient stones that rose just above the surface and led toward yet another arched gate at the far end. It was plain that they were stepping stones, but just as plain to Barrick that even so, crossing would likely not be as easy as it looked. He stepped out onto the first stone and waited an anxious moment for something to happen. When nothing did, he stepped to the next, sword gripped tight in his hand, eyes roving across the water for whatever fearsome creature might strike at him from the deceptively placid shallows. Still no menace emerged, so Barrick stepped forward again and Raemon Beck slowly followed him.

  It was only as he reached the halfway point, beginning to hope that whatever might have once inhabited the pool was gone, that Barrick began to feel a weakness in his lower body, as though his legs were grain sacks and something had gnawed a hole in them. When he looked down he saw that the thin mist above the pool had thickened around his ankles and calves, foggy tendrils moving in a way that seemed to have little to do with any air currents he could feel. As he stared, and as the feeling of weakness began to spread, he thought he could see shapes in the mist, grotesquely deformed faces and clutching fingers. Everywhere the mists touched him he was getting cold. He took another step but his legs had grown so weak that he tottered and almost fell. He looked back helplessly at Beck, who was swaying under the same attack.

  “Hurts . . . !” Beck moaned. “Cold . . . !”

  “Don’t fall!” Barrick was fighting to keep his balance; if he went into the water he knew he would not come out again, that the mist-faces would bleed his strength away.

  That’s it—they are bleeding us empty, like leeches . . .

  The cold patches on his skin were spreading. His clothing did not seem to protect him from the heat-eaters at all, as if fever chills crawled through him—but these were on the outside, working their way in . . .

  Warmer on the inside, he thought blearily. We’re all warmer on the inside. They want warmth . . .

  The idea was a mad one, but he knew he had only moments to do something. He lifted his left hand and slashed at it with Qu’arus’ short sword. He barely felt the blade cut, as though he had plunged the arm in snow first, but blood welled in the crease of his palm and began to drip down his wrist. Barrick stretched out his
arm, struggling to stay upright, and let the blood drizzle into the water.

  Immediately the mists began to swirl faster, circling around the place where his blood was spreading pinkly through the water. The fog above the pool thickened, then it too began to turn a subtle rosy shade, like low clouds refracting the coming dawn.

  “Move!” Barrick cried, but his voice was so weak he found it hard to believe that Beck could even hear him. He let more blood drip, then took a staggering step to the next flat stone. The mists swirled for a moment around the blood before moving toward him again. Barrick shook out more blood, but already the flow from his palm was beginning to slow. He cut himself in a different spot and let it drip into the water. Even the mist clinging to Raemon Beck’s legs seemed to grow thinner as some of it wafted to the spot where Barrick’s blood stained the water. Beck’s first step was like a man waist-deep in mud, but the second came a little easier; after a few moments they were both lurching forward across the stepping stones toward the safety of the courtyard’s far end.

  By the time they collapsed into the archway, wheezing and shivering, Barrick had cut his arm in three more places. His entire arm and hand below his elbow were streaked and smeared with red, the few patches of clean skin as startling as eyes in a dark forest.

  When Beck had caught his breath he tore off the ends of his tattered sleeves and began to wrap them around Barrick’s wounds. The bandages he made were not the cleanest, but they stanched the blood well enough.

  Barrick peered unhappily across the next courtyard. This one seemed even more innocuous than the others, a featureless stone close with steps at the far end leading up to what looked like a simple, closed door—but he knew better. “What’s waiting for us this time, do you think,” he asked sourly, “—a nest of adders?”

  “You will defeat it, Highness, whatever it is.” Something in Raemon Beck’s tone made Barrick turn to look at him. Was that admiration he was seeing? Someone admiring the infamous cripple, Barrick Eddon? Or had the day’s terrors simply injured the man’s mind?

  “I don’t want to defeat it.” Barrick could see Skurn circling high above their heads, far away from bewitched grasses and blood-drinking mists. One of them had some sense, anyway. “I want someone to come with a battering ram and knock it all down. I’m weary of all this.”

  Raemon Beck shook his head. “We must go forward. More skrikers will come to avenge their sisters and we will not surprise them the same way again.”

  “Sisters?” It made him feel ill. “They truly are women?”

  “Not human women,” Beck said grimly. “She-demons, maybe.”

  “Forward, then, as you say.” Barrick knew there was a certain inevitability to what was happening: of course he couldn’t go backward, anymore than he could go backward through life to repair the mistakes already made. He got to his feet, groaning. The numbness of the biting mist had worn off and he ached all over. What would the people of Southmarch think of their wretch of a prince if they saw him now?

  Here I stand, he told himself, the Prince of Nothing. No subjects, no soldiers, no family, no friends.

  Skurn dropped from the sky and fluttered down onto the paving stones on the far side of the archway. As the raven strutted back and forth only a few paces away, Barrick half expected something to reach up from between the stones and throttle the black bird, but either the lurking danger did not care about ravens or it was something more subtle.

  “Happy now?” Skurn demanded. “Can’t help wondering, us.”

  “Shut your snailhole, bird. I had to come to this wretched city. Now I have to do this as well. Nobody forced you to come along.”

  “Oh, aye, cast us out, ’course. All us did was warn you. Fair payment.”

  “Look, instead of scolding me like an old woman, tell me if you’ve seen anything. What’s beyond this next courtyard?”

  The raven eyed him. “Naught.”

  “Truly? Then what’s on the other side of that door?”

  Skurn squinted across the courtyard toward the ancient wooden portal, which was unmarked except for a corroded metal boss in the middle—a handle, perhaps.

  “On other side? There be no other side.”

  “What are you talking about?” It was all Barrick could do to keep his temper. “Once we cross that courtyard and open that door, there has to be something on the other side—a building? Another courtyard? What?”

  “Naught—us told you!” The raven fluffed his feathers in irritation. “Not even door. On far side be the outside of yon big wall. Then trees and whatnot. Same as the front, like. Nothing else.”

  Repeated questioning finally established that what sounded like a misunderstanding was in fact the truth: according to Skurn, who had flown over the site several times, nothing stood on the other side of that final wall with the door in it, and on the outside there was no sign that the door even existed. It was all some elaborate trick. Barrick slumped down in the archway, defeated, but Raemon Beck tugged at his arm.

  “Come, Highness. Do not despair. We are nearly at the end.” The man’s patchwork clothing was now almost as badly torn and dirtied as Barrick’s own clothes, which he had been wearing for months. Barrick suddenly wondered what he must look like to someone else—what he must smell like.

  Prince of Nothing, he thought again, and began to laugh. It took him so hard that for long moments he could do nothing but sit, bent double, wheezing.

  “Highness, are you hurt?” Beck tugged again. “Are you ill?”

  Barrick shook his head. “Help me up,” he said at last, still struggling to catch his breath. He didn’t even know why he was laughing. “You’re right. We’re nearly at the end.” It was just that he had a different idea of what the end meant than Beck did.

  Once on his feet Barrick did not pause—what use in waiting any longer?—but walked out of the arch and began to make his way across the cracked and crumbling stone flags of the empty courtyard. He did his best to hold his head up and walk forward bravely, although he knew that at any moment something would reach up from below or drop on them from the sky. But to Barrick’s weary astonishment, no reaching hands clutched at him, no menaces leaped out of the shadows. He and Beck marched slowly but steadily across the stone courtyard until they stood on the steps looking up at the great gray door and its crude metal handle.

  Skurn dropped onto Barrick’s shoulder, clutching nervously with his claws so that Barrick squirmed in discomfort. He reached out toward the door, expecting that any moment something would happen to stop him—a noise, a sudden movement, an agonizing pain—but nothing like that occurred. His fingers closed on the rough, corroded metal of the handle, but when he pulled the door did not budge or even quiver. It might as well have been part of the wall.

  Barrick wrapped both hands around the handle and pulled harder, ignoring the pain from his bandaged palm, but the door seemed as immovable as a mountain. He put his foot against the topmost step and leaned back, using his legs as well as his arms, but he might as well have been trying to heave the entire green earth onto his shoulders. Raemon Beck then put his arms around Barrick’s waist and added his own weight and strength, but it still made no difference.

  “Didst think on pushing yon great door, ’stead of just pulling?” offered Skurn.

  Barrick stared at him balefully, then stepped onto the threshold and shoved as hard as he could. The door did not budge. “Happy now?” he asked the bird, then turned his back to the door and slid down until he was sitting on the threshold looking back across the gloomy, twilit courtyard, here in this place where no darklights burned.

  “Pushed hard, did you?” Skurn asked.

  Barrick scowled at him. “Try it yourself if you don’t think so.”

  Skurn made a throaty sound of disgust. “Got no hands, does us?”

  The raven’s words poked at his memory. No hands. Barrick let his head fall back against the door—it felt as solid as the side of a granite cliff—and closed his eyes, but the thought remained el
usive. He was so tired that the world seemed to tilt and pitch around him and he opened his eyes. Surely he had never been so tired in his life . . .

  “Hands,” he said abruptly. “It was something about hands.”

  “What?” Raemon Beck looked toward him, but the merchant’s gaze was dull and hopeless. Barrick felt sure he was seeing an army of skrikers making their way across the courtyard of grass, then the courtyard of water . . .

  “Listen,” Barrick said. “The Sleepers told me something about this place—Crooked’s Hall, if this is truly it. They said no mortal hand could open the door.”

  Beck barely seemed to have heard him. “We have to do something, my lord. More Lonely Ones will be coming soon!”

  Barrick laughed, harshly, bleakly. What use was the knowledge even if it was correct? They were all mortal here, even Skurn. If it had been “no man’s hand,” perhaps the raven could have tugged the door open with his beak. Barrick snorted at the thought. Perhaps they should ask the skrikers to help them . . .

  “Wait. No mortal hand, they said.” He reached into his shirt and took out Gyir’s mirror, then slipped its cord from around his neck. For a moment, feeling the mirror’s substantial weight in his hand he had the strange sensation that it was a living thing he held, but he had no time for such thoughts—the idea that had just come to him was little to do with the mirror, but everything to do with the slender piece of anchor cord on which it hung.

  Raemon Beck looked up from his exhausted slouch at the base of the steps. “What is that . . . ?”

  “Don’t say anything.” Barrick leaned closer and threw the cord over the door handle, grabbing it with his hands on either side of the pouch that held the mirror. Then he pulled. Nothing happened.

  Skurn flapped up into the air, circling once near Barrick’s head.

  “Them gray things. I see more by the river, coming this way,” the bird announced. “Fast, like . . . !”

  Barrick’s fingers began to tingle. A moment later, a flicker of light ran the length of the string, so faint that only the dark shadows in the doorway made it visible. Without thinking he twisted his hands, one over the other, and pulled. The door swung outward with a deep rumble and an almost inaudible screech, as if the hinges were breaking free from centuries of rust. Barrick had to step back as the heavy door slowly swung past him, and Raemon Beck half-tumbled down the steps to the courtyard stones to avoid it. Skurn flapped his wings, hovering before the opening, but then suddenly spun in the air and vanished into the blackness beyond the door-frame as abruptly as if a great wind had caught him and swept him in.