by Tad Williams
The boy shook his head, but whether because he didn’t like poetry or for some other reason wasn’t clear. “Big.”
“Hurry up, you two.” Opal had marched ahead. “She’s right—we have a long walk yet.”
The boy still hesitated. Chert laid his hand on the boy’s arm. The child seemed strangely reluctant, as though the distant towers themselves were something menacing, but at last he allowed himself to be urged forward. “There’s nothing to be afraid of, lad,” Chert told him. “Not as long as you’re with us. But don’t wander off.”
The boy shook his head again.
As they made their way down from the hilly farmlands into the mainland town, they found wide Market Road lined with people, almost entirely big folk. For a moment Chert wondered why so many people had come out of their houses and shops to stare curiously at two Funderlings and a ragged, white-haired boy, then realized that the royal family’s hunting party must have passed just ahead of them. The crowd was beginning to disperse now, the hawkers desperately reducing the prices of their chestnuts and fried breads, fighting over the few remaining customers. He heard murmurs about the size of something the hunters had caught and paraded past, and other descriptions—scales? Teeth?—that made little sense unless they had been hunting something other than deer. The people seemed a little dispirited, even unhappy. Chert hoped the princess and her sullen brother were safe—he had thought she had kind eyes. But if something had happened to them, he reasoned, surely folk would be talking about it.
It took the best part of the fading afternoon to make their way through the city to the shore, but they arrived at the near end of the causeway with a little time to spare before the rising tide would turn Midlan’s Mount back into an island.
The causeway between the shore and the castle on the Mount was little more than a broad road of piled stones, most of which would vanish under the high tide, but the place where it met the docks outside the castle gate had been built up by generations of fishermen and peddlers until what hung over the water there was nearly a small town in itself, a sort of permanent fairground on the wind-lashed doorstep of Midlan’s Mount. As the Funderling, his wife, and their new guest trudged across the piers and wooden platforms filled with flimsy, close-leaning buildings whose floors stood only a few cubits above the reach of high tide, dodging wagons and heavily laden foot-peddlers hurrying to cross back over the causeway before nightfall, Chert looked out through a crack between two rickety shops, across the mouth of Brenn’s Bay to the ocean. Despite the last of the bright afternoon sun there were clouds spread thick and dark along the horizon, and Chert suddenly remembered the shocking thing that the arrival of the riders and the mysterious boy had driven from his mind.
The Shadowline! Someone must be told that it’s moved. He would have liked to think that the king’s family up in the castle already knew, that they had taken all the facts into careful consideration and decided that it meant nothing, that all was still well, but he couldn’t quite make himself believe it.
Someone must be told. The thought of going up to the castle himself was daunting, although he had been inside the keep several times as part of Funderling work gangs, and had even led a few, working directly with Lord Nynor, the castellan—or with his factor, in any case. But to go by himself, as though he were a man of importance.
But if the big folk do not know, someone must tell them. And perhaps there will even be some reward in it—enough to buy Opal that new shawl, if nothing else. Or at least to pay for what this young creature will eat when Opal gets him home.
He regarded the boy for a moment, horrified by the sudden realization that Opal might very well intend to keep him. A childless woman, he thought, was as unpredictable as a loose seam in a bed of sandstone.
Hold now, one thing at a time. Chert watched the clouds hurrying across the ocean, their black expanse making the mighty towers suddenly seem fragile, delicate as pastry. Someone needed to tell the king’s people about the Shadowline, there was no arguing it. If I go to the Guild, there will be days of argument, then Cinnabar or puffed-up Young Pyrtte will be appointed messenger and I will get no reward.
Nor will you get the punishment if you’re wrong, he reminded himself.
For some reason he again saw before his mind’s eye the young princess and her brother, Briony’s frightened gaze when she thought she had run him down, the prince s face as troubled and impersonal as the sky out beyond the Mount, and he felt a sudden warmth that almost, if it had not been so ridiculous, felt like loyalty.
They need to know, he decided, and suddenly the idea of what might be coming closer behind that line of moving darkness pushed anything so abstract as the good graces of the royal family from his mind There was another way to pass the news, and he would use it Everyone needs to know.
*
Although his horse was dead, left behind for three servants to bury on the hillside where the wyvern had died, Prince Kendrick himself had suffered little more than bruises and a few burns from the creature’s venomous froth. Of all the company he was the only one who seemed in good cheer as they made their way back toward the castle, the huge corpse of the wyvern coiled on an open wagon for the amazement of the populace. Market Road was crowded with people, hundreds and hundreds waiting to see the prince regent and his hunting party. Hawkers, tumblers, musicians, and pickpockets had turned out too, hoping to earn a few small coins out of the spontaneous street fair, but Briony thought most of the people seemed glum and worried. Not much money was changing hands, and those nearest the road watched the nobles go by with hungry eyes, saying little, although a few called out cheers and blessings to the royal family, especially on behalf of the absent King Olin. Kendrick had been splashed in blood from head to foot; even after he had washed and then rubbed himself with rags and soothing leaves, much of him was still stained a deep red. Despite the itch where the wyvern s spittle burned him, he made it a point to wave and smile to the citizens crowded in the shadows of the tall houses along the Market Road, showing them that the blood was not his own.
Briony felt as though she, too, were covered with some painful substance she could not shake off. Her twin Barrick was so miserable about his clumsy failure even to raise his spear properly that he had not spoken a word to her or anyone else on the ride home. Earl Tyne and others were whispering among themselves, no doubt unhappy that the foreigner Shaso had stolen their sport by killing the wyvern with an arrow. Tyne Aldritch was one of that school of nobles who believed that archery was a practice fit only for peasants and poachers, an activity whose primary result was to steal the glory from mounted knights in war. Only because the master of arms might have saved the lives of the young prince and princess was the hunters’ unhappiness muttered instead of proclaimed aloud.
And more than a dozen of the dogs, including sweet Dado, a brachet who in her first months of life had slept in Briony s bed, lay cold and still on the leafy hillside beside Kendrick’s horse, waiting to be buried in the same pit.
I wish we’d never come. She looked up to the pall of clouds in the northeastern sky. It was as though some foreboding thing hung over the whole day, a crow’s wing, an owl’s shadow. She would go home and light a candle at Zona’s altar, ask the virgin goddess to send the Eddons her healing grace. I wish they’d just gone out and killed that creature with arrows in the first place. Then Dado would be alive. Then Barrick wouldn’t be trying so hard not to cry that his face has turned to stone.
“Why the grim look, little sister?” Kendrick demanded. “It is a beautiful day and summer has not entirely left us yet.” He laughed. “Look at the clothes I have ruined! My best riding jacket. Merolanna will skin me.”
Briony managed a tiny smile. It was true—she could already hear what their great-aunt would have to say, and not just about the jacket. Merolanna had a tongue that everyone in the castle, except perhaps Shaso, feared, and Briony would have given odds that the old Tuani only hid his terror better than others did. “I just . . . I don’t kn
ow.” She looked around to make sure that her black-clad twin was still a few dozen paces behind them. “I fear for Barrick,” she said quietly. “He is so angry of late. Today has only made it worse.”
Kendrick scratched his scalp, smearing himself anew with drying blood. “He needs toughening, little sister. People lose hands, legs, but they continue with their lives, thanking the gods they have not suffered worse. It does no good for him to be always brooding over his injuries. And he spends too much time with Shaso—the stiffest neck and coldest heart in all the marchlands.”
Briony shook her head. Kendrick had never understood Barrick, although that had not kept him from loving his younger brother. And he didn’t understand Shaso very well either, although the old man was indeed stiff and stubborn. “It’s more than that . . .”
She was interrupted by Gailon Tolly riding back down the road toward them, followed by his personal retinue, the Summerfield boar on their green-and-gold livery brighter than the dull sky. “Highness! A ship has come in from the south!”
Briony’s chest tightened. “Oh, Kendrick, do you think it’s something about Father?”
The Duke of Summerfield looked at her tolerantly, as though she might have been his own young and slightly sheltered sister. “It is a carrack—the Podensis out of Hierosol,” he told the prince regent, “and it is said there is an envoy on board sent from Ludis with news of King Olin.”
Without realizing it, Briony had reached out and grabbed at Kendrick’s red-smeared arm. Her horse bumped flanks with her brother’s mount. “Pray all heaven, he is not hurt, is he?” she asked Gailon, unable to keep the terror from her voice. The cold shadow she had felt all day seemed to draw closer. “The king is well?”
Summerfield nodded. “I am told the man says your father continues unharmed, and that he brings a letter from him, among other things.”
“Oh, the gods are good,” Briony murmured.
Kendrick frowned. “But why has Ludis sent this envoy? That bandit who calls himself Protector of Hierosol can’t think we have found all the ransom for the king yet. A hundred thousand gold dolphins! It will take us at least the rest of the year to raise it—we have dragged every last copper out of the temples and merchant houses, and the peasants are already groaning under the new taxes.”
“Peasants always groan, my lord,” said Gailon. “They are as lazy as old donkeys—they must be whipped to work.”
“Perhaps the envoy from Hierosol saw all these nobles in their fine clothes, out hunting,” Barrick suggested sourly. None of them had noticed him riding closer. “Perhaps he has decided that if we can afford such expensive amusements, we must have found the money.”
The Duke of Summerfield looked at Barrick with incomprehension Kendrick rolled his eyes, but otherwise ignored his younger brother’s gibe, saying, “It must be something important that brings him. Nobody sails all the way from Hierosol to carry a letter from a prisoner, even a royal prisoner.”
The duke shrugged. “The envoy asks for an audience tomorrow.” He looked around and spotted Shaso riding some distance back, but lowered his voice anyway. “And another thing. He is as black as a crow.”
“What has Shaso’s skin to do with anything?” Kendrick demanded, irritated.
“No, the envoy, Highness. The envoy from Hierosol.”
Kendrick frowned. “That is a strange thing.”
“The whole of it is strange,” said Gailon of Summerfield. “Or so I hear.”
*
If the nameless boy had seemed disturbed by his first glimpse of the castle, he appeared positively terrified by the Basilisk Gate in the castle’s massive outwall. Chert, who had been in and out of it so many times he had lost count, allowed himself to see it now with a stranger’s eyes. The granite facing four times a man’s height—and many more times Chert’s own small stature—was carved in the likeness of a glowering reptilian creature whose twining coils surmounted the top of the gate and looped down on either side. The monster’s head jutted out above the vast oak-and-iron doors, its staring eyes and toothy mouth dressed with thin slabs of gemstone and ivory, its scales edged with gold. In the Funderling guilds, if not among the big folk, it was common knowledge that the gate had been here far longer than the human inhabitants.
“That monster is not alive,” he told the child gently. “Not even real. It is only chiseled stone.”
The boy looked at him, and Chert thought that something in his expression seemed deeper and stranger than mere terror.
“I … I do not like to see it,” he said.
“Then close your eyes while we walk through, otherwise we will not be able to reach our house. That is where the food is.”
The boy squinted up at the lowering worm for a moment through his pale lashes, then shut his eyes tight.
“Come on, you two!” Opal called. “It will be dark soon.”
Chert led the boy under the gate. Guards in high-crested helmets and black tabards watched curiously, unused to the sight of a human child being led by Funderlings. But if these tall men wearing the Eddons’ silver wolf-and-stars emblem were concerned by the oddity, they were not concerned enough to lift their halberds and move out of the last warm rays of the sun.
The princess and her party had already reached their destination. As the Funderlings and their new ward reached arcade-fenced Market Square in front of the great Trigon temple, Chert could see all the way to the new wall at the base of the central hill, where the lights of the inner keep were as numerous as fireflies on a midsummer evening. The keep’s Raven’s Gate was open and dozens of servants with torches had come out from the residence to meet the returning hunters, to take the horses and equipment and guide the nobles to hot meals and warm beds.
“Who rules here?" asked the boy.
It seemed an odd sort of question, and now it was Chert who hesitated. “In this country? Do you mean in name? Or in truth?”
The boy frowned—the meaning was chopped too fine for him. “Who rules in that big house?”
It still seemed a strange thing for a child to ask, but Chert had experienced far stranger today. “King Olin, but he is not here. He is a prisoner in the south.” Almost half a year had passed since Olin had left on his journey to urge the small kingdoms and principalities across the heartland of Eion to make federation against Xis. He had hoped to unite them against the growing menace of the Autarch, the god-king who was reaching out from his empire on the southern continent of Xand to snap up territories along the lower coast of Eion like a spider snaring flies, but instead Olin had been delivered by the treachery of his rival Hesper, King of Jellon, into the hands of the Protector of Hierosol, an adventurer named Ludis Drakava who was now master of that ancient city. But Chert scarcely understood all the details himself. It was far too much to try to explain to a small, hungry child. “The king’s oldest son Kendrick is the prince regent. That means he is the ruler while his father is gone. The king has two younger children, too—a son and daughter.”
A gleam came to the boy’s eyes, a light behind a curtain. “Merolanna?"
“Merolanna?” Chert stared as if the child had slapped him. “You have heard of the duchess? You must be from somewhere near here. Where are you from, child? Can you remember now?”
But the small white-haired boy only looked back at him silently.
“Yes, there is a Merolanna, but she is the king’s aunt Kendrick’s younger brother and sister are named Barrick and Briony. Oh, and the king’s wife is carrying another child as well.” Chert reflexively made the sign of the Stone Bed, a Funderling charm for good luck in childbirth.
The strange gleam in the boy’s eyes faded.
“He’s heard of Duchess Merolanna,” Chert told Opal. “He must be from these parts.”
She rolled her eyes. “He’ll probably remember a lot more when he gets a meal and some sleep Or were you planning to stand in the street all night talking to him of things you know nothing about?"
Chert snorted but waved the boy forward.
More people were streaming out of the castle than were going in, mostly inhabitants of the mainland part of the city whose work brought them onto the Mount and who were now returning home at the end of the day Chert and Opal had a hard time forcing their way against a tide of much larger people Opal led them out of Market Square and through echoing covered walkways into the quieter, somewhat gloomy back streets behind the south waterway, called Skimmer’s Lagoon, and its docks, one of two large moorings inside the castle’s outwall. The Skimmers had carved the wooden dock pilings into weird shapes, animals and people bent and stretched until they were almost unrecognizable. The colorful paint was dulled by the dying light, but Chert thought the carved pilings still seemed as strange as ever, like trapped foreign gods staring out across the water, trying to get a glimpse of some lost homeland. The still shapes even seemed to mourn out loud as boats full of half-naked Skimmer fishermen unloaded the day’s catch on several of the smaller docks, the air of the lagoon was full of their groaning (and to Chert’s ear, almost completely tuneless) songs.