Shadowrise

by Tad Williams

  “So I took it upon myself to learn more about it,” Sulepis continued, “both about the blood of the gods and the history of my own family.

  “At first I spent my days exhausting the great libraries of the Orchard Palace. I learned that before my ancestors swept out of the desert to take the throne of Xis the city had been ruled by other families who claimed kinship with other gods. The farther back I went, the more these ancestors were described as being close to godlike themselves. Was this because they were closer to their godly ancestors than we moderns are, so that the holy blood ran thicker in their veins? Or had the stories around them simply grown over the years? What if these ancient monarchs, self-proclaimed descendants of Argal or Xergal, had been no less mortal than the dull creatures being raised around me in the palace—no less mortal than my father? Parnad might be fierce and cunning, but I had long since learned that he had no wit for and no interest in matters of religion and philosophy.

  “Some of the priests recognized in me what they thought of as a kindred spirit. They were wrong, of course—I have never been interested in esoteric knowledge simply for its own sake. A single mortal lifetime is too short for such untrammeled, undisciplined study. I had only one thought in mind. Without the truth I had no tool, and without a tool I could not reshape the world into something I liked better.

  “In any case, the library priests began to tell me of books they had heard of but never read—for the first time I came to understand that there were writings that the libraries of the Orchard Palace did not possess, writings in languages other than our own, some of which had not even been translated into Xixian! Do you wonder why my Hierosoline is so good, King Olin? Now you know. I learned it so that I could read what the ancient scholars of the north had to say about the gods and their doings. Phayallos, Kofas of Mindan, Rhantys—especially Rhantys—I read them all, and searched for the forbidden books of the southern continent as well. I finally located a copy of Annals of the War in Heaven in a temple near Yist, where my several-times-great-grandfather had destroyed the last of the fairy cities in our land.”

  “There were Qar in your land?” It was the first time Olin had spoken for a while, and he sounded, Vash thought, as though he were interested despite himself.

  “Were, yes. My ancestors took care of that.” Sulepis laughed. “The Falcon Kings are not such sentimentalists as you northern rulers—we did not wait for a plague to destroy half our kingdoms before driving out the fairy vermin.

  “My search for truth took me to many strange places in my youth. I unearthed cylinder-books from the serpent tombs of the Hayyids that cover the plains like the castings of desert ground-cats. I bargained with the golya at their desert fires, eaters of man-flesh who are also said to be shape shifters—they become hyenas under the full moon’s light. They told me tales of the earliest days and showed me the stone carvings they had carried since the gods walked the earth. From them I learned the secret of the Curse of Zhafaris, the curse of mortality that the great god of all laid on humanity when his children turned against him.

  “I even plundered the resting place of my own kin, the Eyrie of the Bishakh, where my desert chieftain ancestors had been laid to rest atop high Mount Gowkha, their mummified bodies resting on nests made from the bones of slaves, their fleshless faces looking east to where the Sun of Resurrection will rise. As the moon climbed overhead and the howls of the golya rose from the desert canyons below, I pried stone tablets from my forefathers’ crabbed, dead hands in search of heaven’s secrets even as my guards fled in terror down the mountain.

  “But all I learned confirmed only what I already knew. The gods might be real, but their power was gone and no man had it, not even the autarchs of Xis. My line may have been fathered by holy Nushash, the lord of the sun himself, but I cannot make a light in a dark room without a lamp, nor light that lamp without a flint.

  “But as I followed the ancient scholars down paths so dark and forbidding that even the library priests finally began to shun me, I learned that what was true of my own ancestors was not necessarily true of all people. Some families, I learned, had been said since the eldest days to carry the blood of the gods in truth, often through the Pariki, the fairies—the ones you know as Qar.”

  “I do not wish to hear any more of this story,” Olin said abruptly. “I am weary and ill and I beg your leave to go back to my cabin.”

  “You may beg all you like,” said the autarch with a look of annoyance. “It will not do you any good. You will hear this story, even if I must bind and gag you to obtain your collaboration, because it amuses me to tell you and I am the autarch.” His expression changed into a smile. “No, I will make it simpler. If you do not agree to listen I will have one of our child captives brought to me and I will strangle it in front of you, Olin of Southmarch. What do you say to that?”

  “Curse you. I will hear you out.” The northern king’s voice was so quiet that Vash almost couldn’t hear him over the noise of the sea.

  “Oh, you will do more than that, Olin Eddon,” said the autarch. “You see, you have such blood in you—the blood that bestows the power of a god. To you it is worthless, a curse, but it means everything to me. And in only a few days now, when the final bell of Midsummer’s Day tolls, I will take it for my own.”

  The last few hours of darkness before the Tessis city gates opened were terrible. Briony huddled on the floor of the company’s wagon and tried to sleep, but despite her great weariness sleep would not come. Feival’s treachery, the cruelty of Lady Ananka, and the mistaken, unfair, and foolish judgment of King Enander would not leave her head, the words these enemies had spoken buzzing in her head like blackflies.

  And now I am a fugitive again, she thought. What have I accomplished here in all this time? Nothing—no, less than nothing. Another city is barred to me and I have lost all hope of bringing any help to Southmarch from Syan.

  Finn Teodoros came quietly into the wagon. “Your pardon,” he said when he saw she was awake, “just looking for my pens. Did Zakkas nip you, Princess? You look full of deep thoughts.”

  She frowned at the casual blasphemy. The oracle was the patron of both prophecy and madness and fits of either were sometimes called “Zakkas bites.” “I’m fretful and I can’t sleep. I’ve spoiled everything.”

  The playwright sat down beside her. “Ah, how many times have I said that myself ? ” He laughed. “Not as many times as I should have, I suppose—I seldom see what I’ve done wrong until much later. It’s good you see it immediately, but don’t let it carry you away.”

  “I wish I could sleep but I can’t keep my eyes closed. What if they’re waiting for us at the gate?”

  “Waiting for us? Not likely. For you . . . perhaps. Which is why you will stay in the wagon.”

  “But someone may have remembered you. That Lord Jino is a clever man. He said he was sorry for what happened to me, but that won’t keep him from doing his job. He’ll have noted the name of the troupe.”

  “Then we will call ourselves something else,” said Finn. “Now try to rest, Princess.”

  He went out, his weight on the small steps making the wagon bounce and sway, leaving her alone with the voices of her many failures.

  By the time they rolled up to the city gates, Makewell’s Men no longer looked much like a company of traveling players. The masks and ribbons and all other displays that had served as a flag of their profession had been hidden, and the players themselves were dressed in unexceptional traveling clothes. Still, for some reason they had attracted the attention of one of the guards and Briony was beginning to feel anxious. Had someone in the castle remembered the players after all?

  “Where did you say you were going?” the man asked Finn for what must have been the third or fourth time. “I’ve never heard of it.”

  “The well of Oracle Finneth, in Brenland.” Finn told him as calmly as he could.

  “And these are all pilgrims . . . ?”

  “By the Three!” Pedder Makewell had li
ttle patience at the best of times. “This is outrageous . . . !”

  “Shut your mouth, Pedder,” Teodoros warned him.

  “You don’t know of Finneth’s Well?” Nevin Hewney stepped in front of Makewell. “Ah, that’s a pity, a true pity.” Hewney was better known for his writing than his acting, but here he stepped smoothly into the scene and began to improvise. “Young Finneth was a miller’s daughter, you see, a chaste, pure girl. Her father was an unbeliever—this was back in the days when Brenland and Connord were mostly heathen, counting the Three Holy Brothers no different from the other gods.” Hewney put on the rapt look of a believer—for a moment, even Briony, peering through a crack in the boards of the wagon, found herself believing his fervor. “And her father was ashamed that she went around preaching the sacred word of the Trigon, and denouncing him because he was living with a lewd woman without marriage in the temple, as is proper,” Hewney went on, seizing the guard’s elbow and leaning so close that the man flinched back. “So he and his lewd woman seized Finneth in her sleep and threw her between the stones of the mill, but the stones would not turn, you see, would not harm her. Then they dragged her to the well at night and threw her in to drown, but in the morning ...”

  “What are you babbling about?” The guard pulled his arm away.

  “I am telling you of the Oracle Finneth,” said Hewney patiently. “And of how in the morning the women of the village came to the well to draw water, but Finneth rose up from the waters, shining like one of the gods themselves, and spoke to them of the truth of the Three Brothers, of the Sixfold Way and the Doctrine of Civility to Domesticated Animals ...”

  “Enough, man!” groaned the guard, but just as it seemed he was about to send them on their way Briony felt the wagon bounce and heard the wagon’s door rattle. She threw herself back on the ground and pulled the blanket up to her neck.

  “And who is this? ” It was one of the other gatehouse guards. He climbed into the wagon and stood over her. Briony moaned but did not open her eyes. “Why is this girl here?” he demanded. “Let me see you.”

  Briony felt his rough hand close on the blanket and pull it away. She brought her hands up to shield her belly and the bundle of rags stuffed under her threadbare dress.

  “Please, sir, please!” said Finn. “That is my wife. We are taking her to the oracle’s well to ask for a safe birth. None of our other children survived ...”

  “Yes,” said Hewney from behind him. “My brother-in-law has suffered terribly. There is something wrong with his wife, the poor, corrupted woman—we think she is diseased. The last birth, a noxious black discharge came out of her with a stink like rotting fish ...”

  Despite her fear, Briony almost laughed as the guard backed hurriedly out of the wagon.

  When the gates of the city were at last out of sight behind them, Briony emerged to sit on the steps of the wagon as it bumped down the Royal Highway, the broad river Ester shimmering beside it in the early morning sun.

  “Civility to Domestic Animals?” she asked. “And rotting fish ... ? ”

  Hewney gave her a superior look. “I knew a woman in Greater Stell who smelled like rotting fish all the time. She had her share of suitors, too, believe me.”

  “Not to mention a clutter of cats that followed her everywhere she went,” laughed Finn. “Well done, Princess. I see you have not forgotten what we taught you.” He clasped his ample stomach. “ ‘Oh, my poor baby! Oh, poor me!’ Most convincing.”

  Briony could not help laughing. It was the first time she had done so in a while. “Rogues, all of you.”

  “Which still makes players more honest than most noblemen,” said Hewney.

  Briony lost her smile. “Except for Feival.”

  Hewney’s face turned grim as well. “Yes, except for him.”

  They made it all the way to Doros Eco that night, a walled town nestled in the foothills above the river. It was a cool, windy evening. As Briony huddled in her cloak and watched Estir Makewell tending the cook pot, she realized that for the first time in months she felt . . . free. No, not precisely free, but the heaviness that had seemed to press down on her every day in Broadhall Palace, the weight of other people’s suspicions or expectations, was now gone. She was still worried, even terrified, by what had happened to her life and the people she loved, but here beneath the open sky, surrounded by people who didn’t want anything of her she wasn’t happy to give, she certainly felt a little more hopeful about things.

  “Can I help, Estir?” she asked.

  The woman looked at her with more than a little suspicion. “Why would you, Princess?”

  “Because I want to. Because I don’t want to sit and watch someone else do it. I’ve had that all my life.”

  Pedder Makewell’s sister snorted. “And that’s such a bad thing?” She pointed at a couple of carrots and a whiskery onion. “Make yourself happy, then. The other knife’s over there. Chop those for me.”

  Briony spread a kerchief in her lap and began to cut up the vegetables. “Why are you here, Estir?”

  The woman did not look at her. “What sort of question is that? Where else would I be?”

  “I mean why do you travel with the players? You are a comely woman. Surely there have been men who have . . . who have favored you. Did none of them ever ask you to marry?”

  The look of distrust returned. “As it happens, yes, though it’s no business of yours . . .” She suddenly went a little pale. “Forgive me, Highness, I forgot ...”

  “Please, Estir, forget all you want. We were . . . we were almost friends, once. Can’t we be that way again?”

  Estir Makewell sniffed. “Easy to say. You could have me killed, my lady. One word from you to the proper folks and I’d be bunged up in a tower, waiting for the headsman. Or whipped in the town square.” She shook her head, worried again. “Not that I think you’d do that, of course. You’re a kind girl . . . a proper princess, that’s what I mean ...”

  It was impossible to have an ordinary conversation with the woman. Briony gave up and concentrated on chopping carrots.

  As the days went by Briony began to fall back into the rhythms of life on the road. The players had the last of her money so they did not have to give performances, but they prepared sets and props and costumes for the plays Finn, Hewney, and Makewell intended to perform when they were back in the March Kingdoms again. To everyone’s astonishment young Pilney, Briony’s onetime stage husband, had fallen in love with the daughter of an innkeeper—not the treacherous Bedoyas, but the master of the Whale Horse—and had stayed behind in Tessis to marry and help his new father-in-law. Between this loss and the less charming defection of Feival Ulian, Briony found herself called on to stand in for most of the girls and youth parts. It was amusing and even enjoyable, but this time she could never quite rid herself of the knowledge that it was a temporary thing, that the world was much closer to her now than it had been on their trip into Tessis.

  One obvious proof of that was the news they got in towns and from other travelers. On the trip south people had been talking about the events in the March Kingdoms, rumors about the fairy-war and the change of regime in Southmarch and about the autarch’s siege of Hierosol. Now they still talked about the autarch, but the rumors were both more fearful and more confused. Some said he’d razed Hierosol to the ground and was marching north toward Syan. Others suggested that for some reason he’d gone to Jellon and attacked that nation. Still others had him sailing toward Southmarch, a tale that made no sense at all to Briony, but still filled her with dread. What would a monster like that want with her tiny little country? Could it be true? Was she hurrying toward an even worse situation than she already feared? Of course, the other rumors were just as troubling, if not more so: if Hierosol had truly fallen, where was her father? Was Olin even alive?

  It was not surprising that Briony couldn’t find as much joy in playing a part as she once had.

  Hewney and Pedder Makewell came back from the town looking very disc
ouraged.

  “The king’s soldiers have already been here as well,” Makewell said, washing the dust of the road from his mouth with a gulp of sour ale. “We dare not go into town except in ones and twos.”

  Briony felt her heart sink. It was not that she had particularly wanted to walk into the small town—what would there be for her, anyway, an inn’s common room where she would have to keep her face mostly hidden? A few market stalls where she might shop for some trinkets if she had any money to spare, which she did not?—but the knowledge that King Enander was hunting her so seriously, so soon, was disturbing. Worse still was the knowledge that if she were captured, Finn and the players would suffer badly for her sake.

  A long shadow fell over her. “You look sad, Princess.” It was Dowan Birch, the company’s tallest member, doomed to play every ogre and cannibal giant in defiance of his true, sweet nature. Briony did not want to trouble him or the others with her fears—they all knew well enough what was going on.

  “It is nothing. Why didn’t you go into town with Pedder and the others? ”

  He raised his thin shoulders in a shrug. “If somebody is looking for Makewell’s Men, they are more apt to remember me than any of the others.”

  She lifted her hand to her mouth in surprise. “Oh, Dowan, I am so sorry! I didn’t even think of that. I have trapped you here, skulking in camp, just like I have trapped myself.”

  He smiled sadly. “It’s just as well, truly. People always stare at me wherever I go and I am weary of it. I’m happy to sit here,” he gestured around their camp with his impossibly long arm, “where nobody notices me.”