Shadowrise

by Tad Williams

  “That’s a very small dream, Dowan.”

  “Oh, I have bigger ones than that. I dream of a day when I can have a farm of my own . . . settle down with a good woman ...” He blushed suddenly and looked away. “And children, of course ...”

  “Birch!” called Pedder Makewell. “Why are you idling when there is mending to do?”

  He rolled his eyes and Briony laughed. “Coming, Pedder.”

  “I meant to ask you,” she said, “how is it that you learned to sew so well?”

  “Before I became a player I studied to be a priest, and lived with other acolytes in the temple of Onir Iaris. There were no women, of course, and we all had tasks. Some discovered themselves to be cooks. Some didn’t, but thought they were,” he said, laughing a little. “Me, I found myself to be reasonably skilled with a needle and thread.”

  “I wish I could say the same. My father used to say that I stitched like a woman killing spiders with a broom—poke, poke, poke ...” Now Briony laughed, too, although it hurt to think of Olin. “Gods, how I miss him!”

  “He still lives, you said. You shall see each other again.” Birch slowly nodded. “Trust me. I often have such feelings and they are usually right ...”

  “You are going to have the feeling of losing your place in the world and having to beg for your meals,” called Pedder Makewell loudly. “Get on with your work, you great stilting stork!”

  “We had one like him in the temple, too,” Birch whispered to Briony as he stood. “We poured a bucket of water over him one night when he slept, then swore that he pissed his own bed.”

  As she laughed the tall man started to walk away, then turned. A strange, distracted look had come over his face.

  “Do not forget, Princess,” he told her. “You will see him again. Be ready to say what you need to say.”

  Qinnitan finally learned her captor’s first name, but largely by chance. She also learned something else that she hoped she could put to better use than any name.

  Half a tennight or more had passed since she had dreamed of Barrick turning his back to her on the hilltop, and although she had dreamed of the red-haired boy again he never responded and each time he seemed farther away. The helplessness of her situation had begun to wear away at her resolve. She sat for hours each day watching the distant coastline slide past, struggling to think of some plan for escape. Sometimes other boats passed nearby, but she knew that even if she called to them no one would try to help her, and that even if someone did they couldn’t outfight the demon Vo, so she kept her mouth shut. She had already cost poor Pigeon his fingers—why cause the death of an innocent fisherman?

  On the night she learned Vo’s first name she had lain brooding for a long time before falling asleep. Padding footfalls woke her in the thin, cold hours after midnight; she could tell by the step that it was Vo who paced the deck. She lay listening to him as he walked back and forth in a tight pattern of which her own position might have been the midway point. She wondered at the muttering that every now and then rose above the continuous slap and slosh of the waves against the boat until she realized it was her captor talking to himself in Xixian.

  The thought of such an iron-willed man talking to himself was frightening enough: it betokened madness and loss of control, and although Vo terrified her, Qinnitan knew that if he remained in his right mind she would at least live until he handed her to the autarch. But Sulepis had put something inside him, and if that were hurting him badly, or if the drops of poison he took each day were somehow sickening his mind, anything could happen. So Qinnitan lay trembling in the dark, listening as he paced around the deck.

  He seemed to be having a conversation with someone, or at least was speaking as though someone was listening. Much of his talk seemed a list of grievances, many of which meant nothing to Qinnitan—some woman who had looked at him mockingly, a man who had thought himself superior, another man who had fancied himself clever. All had been proved wrong, it seemed, at least in her captor’s fevered mind, and now he was explaining this to some imagined auditor.

  “Skinless, now, every one of them.” His hissing, triumphant voice was so chilling that it was all she could do not to cry out. “Skinless and eyeless and weeping blood in the dust of the afterlife. Because Daikonas Vo will not be mocked ...”

  A few moments later he stopped a little distance away. She risked opening her eyes a little, but could not quite make out what he was doing: Vo’s head was thrown back, as if he downed a cup of wine, but the movement lasted a moment only.

  The poison, she realized. Whatever was in the black bottle, he was taking it at night and not just in the morning as she’d thought. Did he always do that? Or was this something new?

  When Daikonas Vo had finished he staggered a little and almost fell, which was the strangest thing yet: she had never seen him anything less than dangerously graceful. He sat down on the deck with his back against the mast and let his chin sag to his chest, then fell silent, as though he had dropped into a deep slumber.

  Learning his first name brought Qinnitan nothing. Hearing him talking angrily to himself merely left her even more frightened than she had been—he truly did seem to be going mad. But what stuck in her thoughts was the way his body so quickly grew slack and heavy after he put the poison to his lips.

  That was indeed something worth thinking about.

  34

  Son of the First Stone

  “Eenur, the king of the fairies, is said to be blind. Some say he took this wound when he fought on the side of Zmeos Whitefire during the Theomachy and was struck by a fiery bolt from Perin’s hammer. Others say that he gave his eyes in return for being allowed to read the Book of Regret.”

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

  A FIGURE IN A PALE ROBE stepped forward out of the confusing shadows. The three beast-things retreated to swarm around it like a huntsman’s hounds, but these crouching, apish creatures were nothing like hounds.

  Barrick drew himself up so that he could defend himself but the stranger only stood looking down at him with an expression that might have been bemusement. At first glance Barrick had thought the newcomer a man, but now he was not so certain: the stranger’s ears were an odd shape and set too low on his hairless skull, and the shape of his face was also unusual, with very high cheekbones, a long jaw, and a nose that was little more than a low bump above two slits.

  “What are . . . ?” Barrick hesitated. “Who are you? Where am I?”

  “I am Harsar, a servant. You are in the House of the People, of course.” The stranger was speaking—his lips even moved—but Barrick heard the voice in the bones of his head. “Was that not your destination?”

  “I . . . I suppose it was. The king. The king told me to come here ...”

  “Just so.” The stranger reached out a hand as cold and dry as a lizard’s claw and helped Barrick to his feet. The three creatures capered around him for a moment and then went scampering out the door into the blue-lit hallway beyond where they stood, crouched and waiting. Barrick looked at his surroundings for the first time and saw that he was in a room decorated with intense but somber intricacy, surrounded by a forest of striped columns, far too many for any mere structural purpose. Set into the otherwise featureless black stone floor beneath him, a great disk of some glowing pearlescent material provided the only light in the large chamber.

  “Am I still . . . ?” Barrick shook his head. “I must be. Behind the Shadowline?”

  The hairless one cocked his head as if he had to consider the question. “You are still in the People’s lands, yes, of course—and this is the People’s greatest house.”

  “The king. Is the king here? I have to give him ...” He hesitated. Who knew what intrigues existed among the Twilight People? “I need to speak with him.”

  “Just so,” Harsar said again. He might have smiled—it passed like the flicking of a snake’s tongue. “But the king is resting. Come with me.”

  The strang
e little creatures gamboled around their feet as they left the room with the glowing floor and stepped out into a high hallway, dark but for shimmers of weak turquoise light. Barrick was exhausted, breathless. He had reached his destination at last, he realized—Qul-na-Qar, as Gyir the Storm Lantern had named it. Even the compulsion that the dark woman had put upon him, which had subsided over time into a sort of dull, constant ache, was now satisfied. He had done it!

  But what exactly have I done? With the need at last satisfied, uncertainty began to blossom. What will happen to me here?

  Everything about the place was strange to Barrick’s eyes. Its architecture seemed shapeless, every right angle subverted by another less explicable shape; even the dimensions of the passages shifted between one end and the other for no reason he could see.

  The light was odd as well. At times they stepped into utter darkness, but then flagstones down the center of the floor gleamed beneath their feet. Most other places were lit by candles, but the flames were not all the ordinary yellow-white: some burned pale blue or even green, which gave the long halls the watery appearance of submarine caverns.

  Barrick was also beginning to notice that everywhere he went he seemed to be surrounded by quiet noises—not just the breathy sounds of the little creatures scampering around Harsar’s legs, but sighs, whispers, voices quietly singing, even the gentle fluting or sounding of invisible instruments, as though a host of ghostly courtiers hung in the air above their heads and followed wherever they went. Barrick could not help remembering an old Orphan’s Day tale from his childhood, Sir Caylor with the bag of winds that had swallowed all the voices in the world, and how some of them leaked out as he rode and almost drove him mad.

  “And only he returned to tell the tale ...” Barrick thought. That’s how it ended.

  Remembering that famous tale of a lonely escape brought another thought. “Wait,” he said. “Where are they? The others who came with e . . . !”

  His slender guide stopped and gave him a mild but disapproving look. “No. You were alone.”

  “I mean they came through Crooked’s Gate with me. From the city of Sleep. A man named . . . named Beck—and a black bird.” For a moment he hadn’t been able to remember the merchant’s name: the last moments in Sleep seemed far away not just in distance but in time.

  “I’m afraid I cannot help you,” the hairless one said. “You must ask the Son of the First Stone.”

  “Who?”

  The disapproval became a shade less mild. “The king.”

  They continued through the empty halls. Barrick was finding it hard to keep up with his guide’s deceptively rapid pace, but was determined not to complain.

  It was perhaps the strangest hour of his life, he would think later—this first time in Qul-na-Qar, this last time of seeing it with his old eyes, his old way of looking and understanding. The shapes of the place were like nothing he had experienced: the building was clearly orderly and logical, but it was a logic he had never encountered before, with walls abruptly bending inward or ending in the middle of a room for no clear reason, and stairs that led up to the high ceilings and then back down again on the other side of the room, as though built solely on the chance that someone might wish to walk high above the room. Some doors opened onto apparent nothingness or flickering light, others stood in isolation with no wall on either side of them, disconnected portals in the middle of chambers. Even the building materials seemed bizarre to Barrick’s eyes: in many places dark, heavy stone was coupled with living wood that seemed to grow within the substance of the walls, complete with roots and branches. The builders also seemed to have exchanged random sections of wall for colorful streaks of gemlike, brilliantly glowing stuff as clear as glass but thick as slabs of granite, allowing views of what was outside but never clearly enough for him to make out more than a blur of shapes and shadows. And everywhere they went seemed deserted.

  “Why isn’t anyone here?” he asked Harsar.

  “This part of the People’s House belongs to the king and queen,” the servant answered, giving his little pack of straying followers a stern glance until they trotted back to him. “The king himself has few servitors and the queen is . . . elsewhere.”

  “Elsewhere? ”

  Harsar began walking again. “Come. We still have far to go.”

  The empty halls and the chambers they traversed to get from one hallway to another were furnished, some of it quite ordinary to his eyes, some almost incomprehensible, but Barrick could detect a similarity between every piece, from the simplest to the most complex, a unifying vision behind them all that he could not fail to notice because it was so different from anything he had known, as if cats had made clothes for themselves or snakes had choreographed an intricate dance. Chairs, tables, chests, reliquaries—no matter how simple or ornate the pieces, they all had an obvious similarity he could not quite grasp, a disturbing shared subtlety. From a distance the carpets on the dark, polished floors and the tapestries hung on the walls seemed familiar enough objects, but when he looked more closely their dense, complex designs made him dizzy and reminded him uncomfortably of the living lawn that had guarded Crooked’s Hall. And though some chambers had tall windows opening onto the twilight sky, and some were windowless, though some sparkled with a thousand candles and others had no candles or lamps at all, the light was much the same in all of them—that muted, watery, inconstant glow. Traveling through Qul-na-Qar was a little like swimming, Barrick thought.

  No, he decided a moment later, it was more like dreaming. Like dreaming with his eyes wide open.

  But of all the unusual feelings that swept through him as he walked this first time in the House of the People, the strangest was that Barrick Eddon felt as if he had at last, after a lifetime of exile, come home.

  At last, just when he was beginning to stumble from weariness, his guide showed him into a small, dark room that was built to a more human scale than many of the others, a sort of retiring chamber with polished wooden chairs of smooth and simple (but still undeniably alien) shape. Its walls were filled with niches like a beehive. Each of these small compartments held what looked like a single statue carved from shiny stone or cast in metal, but Barrick saw nothing familiar in any of their shapes; he thought they looked chance-made, like slops left over from the construction of more sensible objects, lovingly collected from the forge floor and displayed here.

  Harsar pointed to a bed, a simple thing in a simple wooden frame. “You may rest. The king will see you when he is ready. I will bring you food and drink.”

  Before Barrick could ask any questions, his guide had turned and walked out the door, his strange little troop leaping and capering around him.

  At another time he might have explored the room, so homey and yet so strange, but he did not have the strength to stay upright another moment. He stretched himself on the bed and sank into its welcome softness like a shivering man climbing into a hot bath. Within a few moments sleep came and claimed him.

  When he woke Barrick at first lay quietly, trying to remember where he was. His dreams had been subdued and sweetly peaceful, like distant music. He rolled over and sat up before he realized he was not alone in the room.

  A man sat in a tall-backed chair a short distance away—at least he looked like a man, but of course he was not, Barrick realized, not in this place. The stranger’s long, lank white hair was pulled close to his head by the blindfold over his eyes. He wore no other emblems, no crown or scepter or medallion of state on his breast—in fact his gray clothes were as tattered as Raemon Beck’s patchwork had been—but something in his posture and solemnity told Barrick who this was.

  Have you rested? The blind king’s words sounded in Barrick’s head, tuneful as water splashing in a pool. Here, Harsar has left food for you.

  Barrick had already smelled the enticing scent of the bread and was scrambling off the bed. A plate filled with many lovely things was waiting on a small table—a round loaf, a pot of honey, fat purple grapes an
d other small fruits he did not recognize, as well as a wedge of pale, creamy cheese. He had already begun stuffing himself—everything tasted glorious after a diet of mostly roots and sour berries—when he suddenly wondered if it had been meant to share.

  No, the king said when Barrick began to ask. I scarcely eat at all these days—it would be like throwing an entire pine trunk onto a few dying coals and expecting it to burn. The king let out a small laugh that Barrick actually heard with his ears, a gust wintery as snow tossed by a breeze, then did not speak again until Barrick had gobbled even the rind of the cheese and was wiping the plate with the last bit of bread.

  So, he said. I am Ynnir din’at sen-Qin. Welcome to the House of the People, Barrick Eddon.

  Barrick realized that he had never bowed or made any kind of obeisance to this strange, impressive figure, but instead had thought only of filling his stomach. Wiping his sticky fingers on his clothing, he lowered himself to his knees. “Thank you. I saw you in my dreams, your Majesty.”

  Such titles are not for me. And those my own people use would not be appropriate to you. Call me Ynnir.

  “I . . . I couldn’t.” And it was true. It would be like calling his own father by his first name, to his face.

  The king smiled again, a ghost of amusement. Then you may call me “Lord,” I suppose, as Harsar does. You have slept and eaten. One thing remains before our duties as hosts are complete.

  “What do you mean?”

  If you step into the next chamber, you will find hot water and a tub. It does not take any great power of observation to know you have not bathed in some time. The king lifted his slender fingers, gesturing. Go. I will wait here. I am still weary and we have far to walk.

  Barrick found the door set in the far wall and was just about to open it when he remembered something.

  “By the gods, I almost forgot!” He hesitated, wondering if he had blasphemed by mentioning the gods in this place, but the king seemed not to notice. “I have brought something for you, Lord, a gift from Gyir Storm Lantern—something very important . . . !”