Shadowrise

by Tad Williams

  “You shall be a Royal Historian, Teodoros, that is certain.” She was satisfied to see him wince, not because she disliked the round man, but because she needed him to understand how things stood now. “Whether there are others will depend on how well you do your job.”

  The wagon rolled to a halt and Briony heard raised voices. Worried, she patted at her knives, which she had taken to carrying in a bundle in her sleeve. A fair amount of time passed and still they sat unmoving; at last, Estir Makewell stuck her head inside the wagon.

  “Why have we stopped?” Finn asked.

  “Pedder and Hewney are talking to a reeve and two or three bully-boys,” she said. “It seems the king’s guards have been here twice in the last tennight, asking questions about certain travelers ...” she cast a worried look at Briony, “ . . . and so the reeves are stopping all the strangers they meet and asking their business, where they have been, and suchlike.”

  “Shall I come out?” asked Finn.

  “You can, but I think my brother is managing fairly. Still, they may ask to look into the wagon. What will we say if they ask to see inside?”

  “Let them, of course,” Briony said. “Finn, give me your knife so I don’t have to unwrap mine.”

  Both Estir and the playwright goggled at her.

  “Oh, come! I’m not going to fight the reeves with it! I’m going to cut off my hair again.” She took a hank in her hand and sadly examined it. “Just when it was beginning to look as it used to. But such vanity is of no help. I played the boy before, I will do it again.”

  By the time a red-faced man stuck his head into the wagon, Briony was wearing one of Pilney’s old shepherd outfits, squatting on the floor at the feet of Finn Teodoros and mending the strap of one of the playwright’s shoes.

  “Who are you,” said the reeve to Finn, “and why do you ride when the owner walks?”

  “I might as well ask, who are you, sir?”

  “I am Puntar, the king’s reeve—you can ask any man hereabouts.” He squinted at Briony for a moment, then let his eyes rove around the crowded wagon stuffed with costumes, taking in the wooden props and hats hanging from every open place. “Players . . . ?”

  “Of a sort,” said Finn quickly. “But if my friend told you he was the owner, he was lying—drunk, most likely.” He gave Estir Makewell a stern glance before she could utter any outraged defense of her brother. “Poor man. He owned this enterprise once, but long ago gambled it away. Lucky for him that I kept him on when I bought it.”

  “And who are you?” the reeve demanded.

  “Why, Brother Doros of the Order of the Oracle Sembla, at your service.”

  “You are a priest? Traveling with women? ”

  For a moment Finn faltered, but then he saw that the reeve was pointing at Estir Makewell, not Briony. “Oh, her. She is a cook and seamstress. Don’t worry for her somewhat shopworn virtue, sir. The brothers are a pious, sympathetic lot—if you don’t believe me, ask the bearded one we call Nevin to tell you something about the dreadful martyrdom of Oni Pouta, raped over and over by Kracian barbarians. The man weeps as he describes it, so carefully has he studied this and other lessons the gods give us.”

  The reeve now looked thoroughly confused. “But what . . . what are all these costumes? How can you be priests and yet be players?”

  “We are not players, not truly,” Finn said. “We are in truth on a pilgrimage to Blueshore in the north, but it is the work of our order to put on shows for the unwashed, acting out pious lessons from the lives of the oracles and the Book of the Trigon so that the unlettered can understand what might otherwise be too subtle for them. Would you like to see us portray the flaying of Zakkas? He screams most beautifully, then is saved by a winged avatar of the gods ...”

  But the reeve was already making his excuses. Estir Makewell led him back out of the wagon, pausing to glare back at Finn before she went down the steep, tiny stairs.

  “Did you make all that up?” Briony asked quietly when he was gone. “I have never heard such nonsense!”

  “Then, like the oracles themselves, I was speaking with the tongues of the gods,” said Finn in a self-satisfied manner, “because as you can see, he is gone and we are safe. Now, let us find a place to stop tonight and discover what pleasure this city has to offer.”

  “They are in mourning for their baron here,” Briony pointed out.

  “All the more reason, you will discover as you grow older, to celebrate the fact that the rest of us are alive.”

  It was not always possible for the players to convince local authorities that they were pilgrims on their way to Blueshore. In the larger towns they sometimes got out the juggling tools and let Hewney and Finn deploy the troop’s collection of rings and clubs to earn a few coppers while the others gathered up local gossip and news of bigger events. Hewney was quite nimble when he was sober, but fat Finn was a revelation, able to juggle even torches and knives without harm.

  “Where did you learn to do that?” Briony asked him.

  “I was not always as you see me now, Highness,” her royal historian said with a sniff. “I have been on the road since I was small. I have made my living in ways honest and . . . not so much. Most of my juggling I had from my first master, Bingulou the Kracian—he was the best I have ever seen. Men used to go straight to church after watching him, certain that the gods had granted a miracle ...”

  Two things they heard again and again wherever they stopped, in every town or city of the Esterian Valley: that the Syannese soldiers had not given up looking for them, and that strange things were going on in the north. Many of those they questioned, especially the traders and religious mendicants who traveled there frequently, spoke of a sort of darkness that seemed to have settled over the March Kingdoms—not just the weather, although to all it seemed grayer and cloudier than the season warranted, but a darkness of the heart as well. The roads were empty, the travelers said, and the fairs and markets that were always such an important part of the year were poorly attended if they were held at all. City dwellers were reluctant to travel, and those country folk who could do so had moved into the cities for safety, or at least huddled now in the shadows of their walls.

  At the same time, though, not even those who had been there most recently, such as a tinker they met north of Doros Kallida, could describe exactly what was happening. Everyone agreed that the Twilight People had come down out of the mist-shrouded north, just as they had two centuries before, and had destroyed Candlerstown and several other cities as they moved on Southmarch. But the siege that had begun before Briony left home seemed to have been prosecuted for most of the time since in a most strangely offhand manner, with the fairies camped almost peaceably outside the walls for months, and no fighting at all between shadowlanders and men.

  But more recently that had changed, the tinker told them, or so he had heard from other travelers he had met farther north. Sometime in the last few tennights the siege had resumed, this time in earnest, and the reports were horrendous and frightening, almost impossible to credit—giant tree-creatures pulling down the walls of Southmarch, the outer keep in flames, demon-things slaughtering the defenders and raping and murdering helpless citizens.

  “By now it must surely be over, may the gods help them,” the man said piously, making the sign of the Three. “There can be nothing left.”

  Briony was so miserable after hearing the tinker’s words that she could scarcely speak for the rest of the day.

  “These are only traveler’s tales, Highness,” Finn told her. “Do not take them to heart. Listen to a historian, one who searches such tales for truth—the first reports, especially if they are passed by people who were not there, are always far more grisly and exaggerated than what has actually happened.”

  “So how should that soothe me?” she demanded. “Only half my subjects dead? Only half my home on fire?”

  Finn and the others did their best, but that night and for several days afterward, Briony could not be chee
red.

  And what if Barrick really did come back? she thought over and over. After all that, have I lost him now forever? Have the fairies killed him? She lay awake in the small hours, tormented. If they have, I will see every one of those godless creatures slaughtered.

  “We have a problem,” Finn announced as they sat eating their mutton stew. Estir had cooked it, making up for the paltry amount of meat with a generous helping of peppercorns they had bought in the last market, so although it was not as filling as it could be, it was at least warming.

  “Yes, we do,” said Pedder Makewell. “My sister spends all our money on spices and we are almost copperless again.”

  “You are a fool,” Estir said. “You spend far more of our money on drink than I do on pepper and cinnamon.”

  “Because drink is the food of the mind,” declared Nevin Hewney. “Starve the mind of an artist with sobriety and he will be too weak to ply his craft.”

  Finn waved his hands. “Enough, enough. If we are careful, Princess Briony’s money should last us all the way home, so enough of your carping, Pedder—and you too, Nevin.”

  “As long as careful does not mean drinking water,” Hewney said crossly.

  “The problem is what the farmers we met today said,” Finn continued, ignoring him. “You heard them. They claim that Syannese guardsmen are camped outside the walls of Layandros. Now, what do you think they are doing there?”

  “Making friends with the local sheep?” Hewney suggested.

  Finn gave him a look. “Your mouth is your greatest possession, old friend—even more valuable than your purse. I suggest you keep both tightly shut. Now, if you have all finished filling the air with the fumes of your ignorance, give some attention. The soldiers are looking for Princess Briony, of course—and for us. We have been fortunate enough to avoid capture so far, although we were nearly found out in Ugenion and one or two other places.” He shook his head. “We may not be so lucky this time, I fear. These are Enander’s trained soldiers, not the local boobs and strawheads we have cozened—I doubt I shall be able to convince them we are on pilgrimage.”

  Briony spoke up. “Then there is only one thing to do. I must leave you. It’s me they’re searching for.”

  “Spoken like the heroine of a tragic tale,” said Finn. “But with all respect to your station, Princess, if you believe that you are a fool.”

  For a moment she bristled—it was one thing to be talked to in a familiar way, another to be called a fool by a commoner!—but then she thought of how poorly she had been served by flatterers and thought better of it. I cannot have friends who will not tell me what they truly think. Otherwise they are not friends, only servants.

  “Why shouldn’t I leave you, Finn?” she said. “I broke the king’s law by running away—went against his express order. And I am certain the Lady Ananka has been poisoning his ear even more busily ever since. By now, I am probably guilty of the loss of the entire Syannese Empire . . .”

  “You are certainly the one they are most interested in, my lady,” said Finn. “But do not think for a second they are not searching for us, too. Why do you think we’ve so often made Dowan fold his long legs like a grasshopper and squeeze into the wagon with you? Because he is the easiest of us all for someone to recognize. Even if you were not with us, Princess Briony, they would not let us go. We would be taken, and then . . . persuaded . . . to tell all we know of your whereabouts. I doubt any of us would ever see freedom again.”

  A sudden misery washed through her, so strong that she could only put her face into her hands. “Merciful Zoria! I am so sorry—I had no right to do this to you all . . . !”

  “It is too late to change that,” said Hewney. “So waste no tears on us. Well, on Makewell, perhaps, who hoped for an easy life buggering orphan boys back in Tessis, but he was outvoted.”

  “I will not bother to answer such a ridiculous charge,” said Pedder Makewell. “Except to say that my interest in boys is purely defensive, since they are the one thing I can be sure you haven’t given the pox to ...”

  Finn rolled his eyes as the others laughed. “Gods, you are a crude lot. Have you forgotten that the mistress of all the March Kingdoms is traveling with us?”

  “Too late to worry about her, Finn my old blossom,” said Makewell. “She curses like one of us, now. Did you hear what she called Hewney the other night?”

  “And without cause,” the playwright said. “I simply stumbled against her in the dark ...”

  “Enough!” said Finn. “You all jest because you do not want to talk about what is before us. The Royal Highway is not safe. The king’s men are waiting for us outside Layandros, and even if we manage to sneak past them, it is still several days walk to the Syannese border.”

  “So what do you propose, Finn? ” Briony asked. “You sound as though you have a plan.”

  “Not only does she have better manners than the rest of you,” the large man said, “she has more wit as well. But I suppose it would be hard not to,” he added, glaring at Hewney and Makewell. “In any case, a few miles north of here is a small road which turns east off the highway. It looks like nothing much more than a farmer’s track—in fact that is what it is for the first few miles. But after a while it joins another, larger road—nothing as large as what we’ve been on, but still, a proper road, not just a track—and passes through the edge of the forest. On the far side is a Soterian abbey, so that we will probably only have to spend one night in the woods, then will be welcomed, warmed, and fed in the abbey the next day.”

  “Through the edge of the Black River Forest?” said Dowan Birch. It was the first time the giant had spoken.

  “Yes,” said the playwright. “Of course.”

  “I did not know it stretched so far west, that we could reach it in a day or less.” His long face was troubled. “It is not a good place, Finn. It is full of . . . of bad things.”

  “What is he talking about?” demanded Pedder Makewell. “What sort of bad things? Wolves? Bears?”

  But Dowan only shook his head and would not say more.

  “We will be in it scarely a night,” said Finn. “We are nearly a dozen and we have weapons and fire. We even have food, so we do not need to forage. We will stay together and all will be well—and more than well. Come, do you really want to chance our luck with the king’s soldiers?”

  Several of the others tried to get Birch to explain what he feared, but the big man would not be drawn. At last, for lack of a better plan, they all agreed.

  They reached the fork in the road before the next morning’s sun was high in the sky. A few other travelers shared the road with them, mostly local folk, and they all watched with surprised curiosity as the Makewell troop left the main road for the bumpy forest track.

  For several days they had been passing through wilder and wilder country, but now it was suddenly ten times as apparent. The great expanse of the Royal Highway had meant that it passed mostly through open areas, and even when it didn’t the very size of it meant the trees on either side were widely separated and offered little impediment to the sun. As soon as they turned east onto Finn’s track the oaks and hornbeams suddenly seemed to shoulder in on either side like curious folk coming to see what strangers had entered their lands. Suddenly the sun that had been their companion for most of the journey was absent for long stretches. Gone were the occasional sounds of farmers calling to other travelers on the road, or summoning their straying sheep or cows back from some high place. Other than the noise of the wagon’s wheels, the wind in the treetops, and the occasional muted trills of birdsong, the players’ new route was all but silent.

  Also, it turned out that Finn had not been entirely correct: the farmer’s track, which is what it had looked to be when they left the main road, in places came to seem something much more chancy, more like a track for animals than people, so that the wagon often became stuck and required much work before it could be shifted and set rolling again. They had barely reached the outskirts of the fo
rest when the hidden sun began to dip behind the western horizon and shadows stretched out across the world.

  “I don’t like it here,” Briony said to Dowan Birch, who walked beside her. Because of the bad road and the absence of other travelers she and the giant had left the wagon and were walking behind it like everyone else, ready to push it out of the next ditch.

  The place reminded her of something she could barely remember, her lost days after Shaso died and Effir dan-Mozan’s house burned down. Something about the way the shadows moved, the way the uneven light made the trees themselves seem to be turning slowly after she passed, felt secretive, even malicious. Because of it, she had pulled out the talisman Lisiya had given her and had been wearing it for hours.

  Dowan shrugged. He looked even more gloomy than Briony. “I do not like it myself, but Finn is right. What else can we do?”

  “Why did you say . . . that there were bad things here?” she asked.

  “I don’t know, Highness. Things I heard when I was small.” He looked hurt by her smothered laugh. “I was small once, you know.”

  “It wasn’t just that,” she said. “It was that, and . . . and . . . and you called me ‘Highness.’ I mean, look at you!”

  He frowned, but wasn’t entirely displeased. “I s’pose there’s different kinds of highness, then.”

  “Did you grow up somewhere near here? I thought you were born in Southmarch.”

  He shook his narrow head. “Closer to Silverside. But we had many travelers coming from the country to the market in Firstford, which was over the river. My father used to shoe their horses, if they had them.”

  “How did you come to Southmarch, then?”

  “Mar and Dar took the fever. They died. I went to my uncle, but he was a strange man. Heard voices. Said I was made wrong—I was getting big, then. That the gods took my parents because . . . I don’t remember, truly, but he said it was my fault.”