Shadowrise

by Tad Williams

  But this northerner, Olin Eddon, was like no other ruler the paramount minister had ever met: in truth, his measured way of speaking and his quiet observation of what went on around him reminded Pinimmon Vash of his own father. Tibunis Vash had been chief steward of the Orchard Palace, a position from which he was the first ever to retire—all others before him had died in harness or been executed by dissatisfied autarchs. Even after Pinimmon had reached adulthood, and indeed even after he had been raised to the position of paramount minister, the highest position a nonroyal could reach, he had still felt intimidated in his father’s presence, as though the old man could see right through what impressed so many others, could see through the robes of office to the trembling boy beneath.

  “He has been dead ten years,” Vash’s younger brother had once said, “and yet we still look over our shoulder in case he is watching.”

  But Tibunis Vash had not been cruel or even particularly cold, just a reserved and careful man who always thought before he spoke and spoke before he acted. In that way this Olin Eddon was much like him. Neither of them ever rushed to speak and both of them seemed to hear and see things others missed. If there was a difference it was in the impression that each gave to an observer: Pinimmon Vash’s father had seemed to sit above the turmoil of the busy and treacherous Xixian court, serene as the statue of a god in a temple garden. King Olin seemed bowed down beneath a great but secret sorrow, so that nothing else in life, no matter how wonderful or dreadful, could ever seem more than trivial. Still, though, despite his aura of defeat, there was something about the northern king that made Pinimmon very, very uncomfortable. So it was that as Olin stood beside him now on the rocky beach of the small cove where the boats had set them down, Vash felt that it was he, not the prisoner, who was subtly in the wrong.

  “It will not be long,” Vash said. “We will be moving before the sun has finished tipping noon.”

  Olin did not seem to care much one way or the other: the northerner did not even look at him, but went on watching the troops preparing for the march, some carrying jars and chests off the ships, others assembling wagons that had been in pieces in the hold, or harnessing teams of horses and oxen to pull those wagons. “Did you wish to have that conversation now?”he asked at last, still looking anywhere other than at Vash himself.

  “What conversation?” Was the man truly so desperate, or just a fool? “Look, here comes the Golden One. Have your conversation with him, King Olin.”

  A hundred paces down the beach the autarch stepped from his gilded boat onto the backs of a dozen crouching body-slaves, and from there to the throne atop his litter, which the slaves then lifted and carried up the beach. The gold leaf that covered it glittered so brightly in the spring sun that it did in truth look like the sun’s own chariot.

  The commanders of the brigades now brought the soldiers, who had been waiting in the sun, back to attention. By the time they had marched out the supply train would be ready to move in behind them.

  Vash was still on his knees when the litter stopped beside him. “Ah, there you are,” the autarch called down to him. “I did not see you groveling in the sand. Stand up.”

  Vash quickly did what he was told, although he had to struggle not to groan out loud at the pain in his joints. It was mad that he should be here in the wilds of this uncivilized land, exposed to the gods alone knew what kind of chills and harmful vapors. He should be back in Xis overseeing the kingdom, dispensing wise justice from the Falcon Throne in the autarch’s absence, as befitted his age and years of service . . . “I live only to serve you, Golden One,” he said when he was on his feet at last.

  “Of course you do.” Sulepis, dressed in his full battle armor, looked up and down the beach at the waiting soldiers—several thousand fighting men and nearly an equal number of their supporters, with at least that many more remaining on the ships until they reached Olin’s Southmarch. Vash knew that the northerners could not even comprehend the autarch’s power, the size of his empire, let alone withstand it: the Golden One could easily summon an army ten times bigger than this if he needed it, while still leaving Hierosol under strong siege and his home in Xis impregnably guarded.

  The autarch himself knew all this, of course: he had the expansive, grinning face of a man who watched something dear to his heart finally taking shape. “And where is Olin?” he called. “Ah, there. We agreed you would travel with me, so come sit at my feet. This is your country—I am sure there are many local features and quaint customs you can describe for me.”

  Olin looked sourly up at Sulepis atop the litter. “Yes, we have many quaint customs here. Speaking of such, may I walk? I find the long weeks on the ship have left me in want of exercise.”

  “By all means, but you will have to speak loudly so I can hear you from up here—a metaphor of sorts, eh? A caution against becoming too removed from one’s subjects!” Sulepis laughed, a high-pitched giggle that made some of his bearers tremble, so that the litter actually rocked a little. Vash’s heart climbed into his mouth. The autarch seemed to grow wilder and less predictable by the hour.

  The drums thundered and the horns blew. The great army began to move out, armor gleaming in the afternoon sun so that the flashing wave caps seemed to have rolled across the beach and over the land for as far as the eye could see. Vash waited with Olin and his guards, Panhyssir and the other priests, and dozens of other courtiers and functionaries, all doing their best to crowd into the shadow of the autarch’s raised litter.

  “I don’t believe I finished talking with you about the fairies,” said the autarch as they reached the coast road and the ranks of men and animals turned and began to travel southwest toward Southmarch. “We were speaking of your unusual family heritage, Olin, weren’t we?”

  The northerner was breathing heavily after only a short climb up from the beach, and his face had gone from deathly pale to an angry red flush. He did not answer.

  “So, then,” Sulepis said. “The fairies—or the Pariki, as we call them in Xand—were driven out of most of our lands long ago, even the high mountaintops and deep jungles in the south. But when they had roamed our lands in the earliest days the fairy-people had sometimes coupled with the gods themselves. Sometimes fairies coupled with mortals as well, and sometimes those couplings made children. So even long after the gods were gone and the fairies driven out, the heavenly blood survived in certain mortal families, unseen and unsensed sometimes for many generations. But the blood of the gods is a strong, strong thing, and it will always make itself known again.

  “In my studies I learned that your northern Pariki, the Qar, had never been completely driven out, and in fact still held much of the northern-most part of the continent. More important, though, I learned that they had shared blood with one of the royal families of Eion, and that what was even more interesting was that the Qar who had done so also claimed direct descent from the god Habbili . . . the one you call Kupilas, I believe? Yes, Kupilas the Artificer. You can imagine my interest at learning there were mortals living in the north with the blood of Habbili himself flowing in their veins. You know the family I mean, Olin—don’tyou?”

  The northerner bunched his hands into fists. “Does it amuse you to mock the curse of the Eddons? The grim trick the gods played on us?”

  “Ah, but my dear Olin, that is where you are wrong!” chortled the autarch. Vash had never seen the god-king in such a strange mood, like a perverse child. “It is no curse at all, but the greatest gift imaginable!”

  “Still you mock me!” Just the tone of Olin’s voice made the autarch’s Leopards loosen their daggers in their sheaths. Vash was very glad to see they weren’t planning to use muskets in such close quarters. The loudness of guns made him nervous, and he had once seen an undervizier’s head blown off in an accident when the Leopards were trooping. “You have me prisoner, Sulepis—is that not enough? Must you taunt me, too? Just kill me and have done with it.”

  Vash had grown used to the way the autarch treate
d Olin as an amusement, how he took abuse and resistance from the northern king which would have had one of his own subjects tortured to death ages ago, but he was still surprised at the mildness of Sulepis’ reaction.

  “It is a gift, Olin, even if you do not know it.”

  “This gift, as you call it, likely killed my wife in childbirth. It made me throw my own infant son down a stairway, crippling him for life, and forced me many nights each year to hide myself away from my own family for fear I would hurt them again. In its grip I have even howled at the moon like your Xixian hyena-men! And that same curse that crawls through my veins, and in the veins of my children as well—and if the gods continue to hate us, will someday crawl like a poison through my grandchildren too—now grows stronger in me again with every hour as you drag me back to my home. Gods, it is like a fire inside me! I might have been Ludis Drakava’s captive as well, but at least in Hierosol I was free of it, may heaven curse you! Free of it! Now I can feel it again, burning in my heart and my limbs and my mind!”

  It was all Vash could do not to turn and run away. How could anyone speak to the Living God on Earth like that and survive? But again, the autarch seemed barely to hear what Olin had said.

  “Of course you can feel it,” Sulepis said. “That does not make it a curse. Your blood feels the call of destiny! You have the ichor of a god inside you but you have always tried to be nothing but an ordinary man, Olin Eddon. I, on the other hand, am not such a fool.”

  “What does that mean?”the northern king demanded. “You said there is no such curse in your family, that your ancestors and you are no different than other men.”

  “No different in blood, that is true. But there is a way in which I am nothing like any other man, Olin. I can see what none of the rest of you can see. And here is what I saw—your family’s blood gave you a way to bargain with the gods, but you didn’t understand that. You have never used this power . . . but I will.”

  “What nonsense is this? You said yourself you do not have the blood.”

  “Neither will you after it has leaked out of you on Midsummer’s Night,” the autarch said, grinning. “But it will help give me power over the gods themselves—in fact, your blood will make me into a god!”

  King Olin fell silent then, his footsteps slowing until one of his guards had to take his elbow to make him move faster. The autarch, on the other hand, appeared to be enjoying the conversation: his long-boned face was lively and his eyes flashed like the golden plating on his costly battle armor. Earlier that year Vash had almost lost his head when he had been forced to tell the autarch they could not make his armor suit entirely from gold, that such weight would cripple even a god-king. He had learned then what was now becoming obvious to Olin—you could not reason with Sulepis the Golden One, you could only pray each morning that he would spare you for one more day.

  “Come, Olin, do not look so offended!” the autarch said. “I told you long ago that I would regret ending our association—I truly have enjoyed our conversations—but that I needed you dead more than I needed you alive.”

  “If you think to hear me beg ...” Olin began quietly.

  “Not at all! I would be disappointed, to tell you the truth.” The autarch reached out his cup and a slave kneeling at his feet instantly filled it from a golden ewer. “Have some wine. You will not die today, so you might as well enjoy this fine afternoon. See, the sun is bright and strong!”

  Olin shook his head. “You will pardon me if I do not drink with you.”

  The autarch rolled his eyes. “As you wish. But if you change your mind do not hesitate to ask. I still have much of my story to tell you. Now, what was I saying . . . ?” He frowned, pretending to think, a playful gesture that made Vash feel ill in the pit of his stomach. Could it be true? Could the might of the heavenly gods really come to Sulepis—a madman who was already the greatest power on the earth?

  “Ah, yes,” the autarch said. “I was speaking of your gift.”

  Olin made a quiet sound, almost like a little sigh of pain.

  “You know, of course, how your gift comes to you—the Qar woman Sanasu captured by your ancestor Kellick Eddon, the children that he fathered on her who became your ancestors. Oh, I have studied your family, Olin. The gift is strongest in those who show the sign of the Fireflower, the flame-colored hair sometimes called ‘Crooked’s Red’—or ‘Habbili’s Mark’ as it is called in my tongue. I suspect the gift runs in the blood of all of Kellick’s descendants, even those who do not bear the outward signs....”

  “That is not so,” said Olin angrily. “My eldest son and my daughter have never been troubled by the curse.”

  The autarch smiled with childlike pleasure. “What of your grandfather, the third Anglin? Everybody knows he had strange fits, prescient dreams, and that he once almost killed two of his servants with his bare hands although he was considered a very gentle man.”

  “You truly have learned . . . a great deal about my family.”

  “Your family has attracted much attention in certain circles, Olin Eddon.” The autarch leaned toward him. “You must know that even though your grandfather Anglin showed every sign of this . . . tincture of the blood . . . he was not one of the red Eddons, was he? He had the pale yellow hair of your ancient northern forebears, just as your daughter and eldest son.”

  “You mock me. My daughter bears no taint,” Olin said tightly.

  “It matters not—she is of little interest to me,” the autarch told him. “I have what I need, thanks to Ludis, and that is you . . . or rather, that is your blood. The one thing on which the oldest and most trustworthy of tale-tellers on both continents agree, as well as those alchemists and thaumaturges of my own land who performed secret experiments and lived to describe them, is that only the blood of Habbili—your people’s Kupilas—can open a path to the sleeping gods. Why is that important? Because if the path can be opened, the sleeping gods that Habbili banished so long ago can be reawakened and released.”

  “You are mad,” Olin said. “And even if such madness were true, why would you do it? If we have lived so long without them, why would you let them walk the earth again? Do you think even with all your armies that you could stand up to them? By the Three Brothers, man, even the tiniest drop of their diluted blood in my veins has turned my life topsy-turvy! In their day they threw down mountains and dug oceans with their bare hands! Why would you, loving power as you do, free such dreadful rivals?”

  “Ah, so you are not entirely naïve,” said the autarch approvingly. “You at least ask, but if it were true, what next? Yes, of course, I would be a fool to let all the gods go free. But what if it were only one god? And more important, what if I had a way to rule over and command that god? Would that power not become mine? It would be like having mastery over one of the ancient shanni—but a thousand times greater! Anything within the god’s power would be mine.”

  “And this is what you plan to do? ” Olin stared. “Such hunger for more power and wealth in one who already has so much is ludicrous . . . sickening.”

  “No, it is so much more. It is why I am who I am while other men, even other kings like yourself, are merely . . . cattle. Because I, Sulepis, will not surrender what I have when Xergal the master of the dead comes with his cowardly hook to take me away. What point conquering the earth if the bite of an asp or a piece of stone fallen from a column can end it in an eyeblink?”

  “Everybody dies,” said Olin. There was contempt in his voice now. “Are you so frightened of that?”

  The autarch shook his head. “I feared you might not understand, Olin, but I hoped the magic in your own blood might make a difference. What is a man who settles for what he is given? No man at all, but only a brute beast. You ask what a man who already rules the world can possibly desire? The time to enjoy what he owns, and then, when he ceases to enjoy it, to tear it down and build something else.” Sulepis leaned so far that Vash was terrified he might topple from the litter. “Little northern king, I did not
kill twenty brothers, several sisters, and Nushash knows how many others to seize the throne, only to hand it to someone else in a few short years.”

  Somebody was shouting outside and the platform began to slow.

  “So, we near your old home, Olin. It is true, you do not look well—it seems you were right about being close making you ill.” The autarch laughed a little. “Still, that is another reason for you to be grateful to me. I shall make certain you do not suffer such unpleasantness for too much longer.”

  “Golden One, why have we stopped?” Vash asked. He had visions of some of Olin’s people springing out of the woods in ambush.

  “Because we are only a short distance away from the place where this coastal road comes out of the forest,” the autarch said. “We have sent scouts ahead to determine where we should make our camp. It is likely we will have to dislodge the Qar, who have been besieging our friend Olin’s castle for some months. Their army is small but they are full of tricks. However, Sulepis has some tricks of his own!” He laughed as gleefully as a young boy riding on a fast horse.

  “But why are we even here?”Olin asked. “If you believe you must kill me to pursue your mad ideas, why come all this way? Simply to punish those of my family and subjects who still care for me? To taunt them in their helplessness?”

  “Taunt them?”The autarch was enjoying this playacting. At the moment, he pretended to be insulted. “We have come to save them! And when the Qar are driven off and I am done here, your heirs may do what they please with this place.”

  “You came here to save my people? That is a lie.”

  Again the autarch refused to take offense. “It is not the whole truth, I admit. We are here because once this was the very place the gods were banished. Here, now buried beneath the buildings your kind made, lies the gate to the palace of Xergal—Kernios, as you northerners call him. And here Habbili fought him and defeated him, then pushed him out of the world forever. Here is where the ritual must take place.”